The Beekeeper Read online

  The Beekeeper

  also by dunya mikhail

  * * *

  Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea

  The Iraqi Nights

  The War Works Hard

  Contents

  N

  The Bee Kingdom

  In the Sabaya Market

  Through the Eye of a Needle

  Five Tricks for Escaping Daesh

  In Daesh’s Camp

  The Exodus

  My Grandmother’s Grave

  The Chirp

  One Step Closer, Two Steps, Three

  Narjis, Narjis

  The Infidels

  Sinjar: The Beautiful Side

  The Spring

  Landmarks

  Cover

  N

  In America they say teachers have eyes in the backs of their heads. As I write on the blackboard I can see my students behind me writing Arabic letters from right to left, as they’re supposed to. Usually I introduce each new letter with a story, some pronunciation drills, and writing exercises, while using words that contain the letter as examples. But today it’s time for N (noon), and that letter is no longer neutral like all the others, nor is its story like any other. And so I find myself pausing today, uncharacteristically, standing there for a moment before introducing the letter, spending more time with N than with any other letter in my entire life.

  I didn’t ask my students if they knew that the letter was now being written in red on doors, notifying residents that they must leave their homes or else face death. Reduced to an N, those Nasara — “Christians” — were shaken out of sleep by megaphones blaring all over town that they had twenty-four hours to get out, and that they couldn’t take anything with them; and just like that, with the stroke of a red marker across their doors, they would have to abandon the houses they’d lived in for over 1,500 years. They’d leave their doors ajar and turn their backs on houses that would become Property of the Islamic State. But I didn’t explain any of this. My job is to teach Arabic, nothing more. The sentiments that letter was inspiring in me as I traced it out brought on a slightly exaggerated pause. “We write the letter like this . . . a semicircle . . . with a dot on top.” I write it again and again, all along the length of the blackboard: a chasm and a dot, a chasm and a dot. The students also write out the letter; in their notebooks it looks like a crescent moon with a tiny star. “A beautiful letter, with a certain ring to it,” I say, offering examples: person, nas; resonance, raniin; homeland, wattan.

  If I were to tell them what was on my mind, I’d speak of Nadia, the young Yazidi woman who’d told me how she’d escaped from Daesh. Maybe they don’t know anything about the Yazidis, who had been forced to flee their homes, who had taken shelter in a cave on the outskirts of Sinjar, the mountain that was less cruel to them than man.

  I felt my students were too delicate to hear how young ladies were sold in warehouses after being inspected like watermelons — buyers would select the ones they wanted after smelling the girls carefully.

  According to Daesh’s price list, Nadia was worth 100,000 dinars (about eighty-five American dollars), based on her age, twenty-eight years old. But she could also be “gifted” free of charge to one of their emirs, “in recognition of his jihad,” a gift made in hopes that he wouldn’t keep her very long. I came to know Nadia through a Yazidi journalist friend of mine. She spoke with me on the phone in Kurdish, a language I don’t speak, although I understood her pain fluently. Listening to her, I imagined a butterfly’s wings fluttering inside of her voice.

  * * *

  Her cousin Abdullah translated what Nadia said into Arabic for me:

  I was at home when my husband, moving the telephone away from his ear, told us, “We have to leave now, Daesh is nearby.” That was a Sunday morning, the first Sunday in August, when we fled our home in the village of Sawlakh, east of Sinjar, along with our neighbors and their families. I walked with my husband and our three children alongside a caravan of nearly two hundred people, which included breastfeeding children such as my own youngest son. It was very hot outside and we had departed without any water or food or diapers. We headed up into the mountains, stopping every hour so that we could rest a bit, especially for the sake of the exhausted children. We found a vegetable farm and stopped to pick tomatoes — we were so thirsty. That’s when we were surrounded by Daesh fighters.

  First they loaded the men, then the women and children, onto big trucks, taking us to Mosul.

  Nadia and her children

  The whole way there we were crying and screaming, even as they wrote down our names and ages. When they unloaded us in Mosul, they separated the virgins from the married women; they also set apart children over the age of twelve. Then they took us to a school in Talafar where we stayed for eighteen days, studying Quran. They forced us to recite verses in that filthy place, even as we were dying of hunger and thirst. They told us that we were infidels, that we must convert to Islam because it’s “the true faith,” and that we’d have to get married. Then they transferred us to another building near Raqqa, in Syria, where they put us up for auction. The men would sometimes bid one dollar more than the price we were announced for — we’d hear the auctioneer call out, “200 dollars, do I hear 201? Nobody? Anyone? Sold.” They handed me a slip of paper with the name of the buyer written on it, informing me that it was my marriage certificate. I had no idea what they’d done with my husband and his father and his brother and all the rest of our relatives who’d been with us in the convoy. The man who’d bought me told me I was now his wife. “Isn’t it forbidden to marry married women?” I asked him. “Not Yazidis,” he replied.

  He took me and my three children to a four-story building in the Tishreen Dam region. He was a Chechen man who spoke modern standard Arabic. I didn’t even know how to read Arabic but he forced me to recite the Quran after him. He would beat my children right in front of me: “They don’t know how to read as well as they ought to.” The worst thing was that he threatened to take my children away from me if I didn’t do what he told me. When he ordered me to bathe, I understood what this meant, and I obeyed him to protect my children, who were six, five, and one. He raped me right there in front of them. Sometimes his friends would pass us around for a day or two, like presents being borrowed, a practice they called “rent.” They spoke amongst themselves in languages I couldn’t understand, and talked to us in Arabic, but it wasn’t anything like the Arabic spoken by Arabs in our country. Daesh Arabic was much clearer, as if they were reading out of a book. We stayed there for three months, and during that time we made hundreds of rockets. My children and I worked twelve hours a day for them. They gave my five-year-old daughter the most dangerous job, tying together the detonation lines. At any moment a mistake could explode the bomb right in her face. Along with another female captive, I would load the rockets into a truck. She was a Yazidi from my village, and she had two children. We became so close that we conspired to escape together. Friendship was our only hope. At first the man who bought me would lock the door every day when he left, but after three months he began leaving the door unlocked, which made it seem that he had come to believe I was his devoted Muslim wife. One day he told me he was going off to fight, and that he’d be back in three days. My heart started pounding at the sight of the door, the door that would be open to me for three full days. I ran to my friend who was in another room with her two children, and whispered that we were getting out of there. “Don’t leave me here, please,” she said. “Like we promised,” I reminded her, “either we die or we get out of here together.”

  Her Daeshi owner wasn’t there, but he could be back at any moment
because he never told her he was going off to fight. I said I’d try to get ahold of my cousin in Dohuk to help us. Right away I went out into the street and walked to an Internet café I’d heard about. I mustered up the courage to ask the shopkeeper for help, telling him I needed to make a phone call even though I didn’t have any money. Thankfully he let me use the phone. I called my cousin Abdullah, and he immediately asked me, “Where are you?” I didn’t know exactly so I asked the shopkeeper: “Mosque Street,” he said, “it’s a little neighborhood with only one mosque, across from the bakery — everyone knows the bakery.”

  Abdullah’s voice was like a life raft: “I’ll send a driver tomorrow at 10 a.m. Wait at the bakery, and if he tells you Abdullah sent him, get in the car.”

  “But my friend and her two children are with me,” I told him, “and she might not be able to get away tomorrow. I’ll have to ask her and get back to you.” I thanked the shopkeeper and asked him if it would be possible to make another call a little while later. He nodded. I quickly returned to the house, and went back and forth between my children and my girlfriend until evening, when she found that her man wasn’t going off to fight the next day but the day after. As soon as I heard this, I returned to the café and the kind man handed me the phone before I could even ask to use it. “The day after tomorrow — will that work?” I asked Abdullah, gasping. “Of course,” he answered, “the day after tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

  The seven of us stood in front of the bakery with both anxiety and hope. Twenty minutes passed and none of us moved. There was someone at the entrance to the bakery who was glancing at us from time to time. I walked toward him and asked, “Are you with Abdullah?”

  “Yes,” he replied, and gestured for us to get into his car. He took us to Manbij province, northeast of Aleppo, then to the Euphrates. The plan was for us to cross over to Kobani in a skiff. But we saw dead people lying in the road, which sent our children into a panic, making them shake and cry. I felt like I was going to throw up and my friend covered her eyes.

  The driver had to take us back to Manbij, where we spent the night in a house whose inhabitants seemed to have fled. The smuggler explained to us that most of the homes there had been abandoned after Daesh’s assault. It was a very small house that still smelled of people, as if they had just left. We stayed the night there, but too nervous that the Daeshis would find us, we counted the minutes until morning, unable to sleep. After the smuggler picked us up, we headed for a rural area east of the Euphrates. There he instructed us to get out of the car and walk toward the river. We followed his instructions, continuing our journey on foot. After about half an hour of walking, we heard the sound of gunshots. We hid among the reeds in the marshes, huddled there for hours, afraid of what might happen at any moment. The smuggler was still with us but he had become extremely tense, especially when the children started crying. He ordered us to stay absolutely silent.

  Once the sound of gunfire had subsided, we continued walking to the edge of the river, crossing in a skiff over to Kobani, on the Turkish border. There we were greeted by a group of people, mostly women. They took us to a hotel where we were able to rest for a few days. They gave us fresh clothes and then drove us to Dohuk Province in Iraq, where Abdullah and my mother-in-law lived. Now I live with her. She prays every day for the return of her son, my husband, my real husband. I woke up from a nightmare that still wakes me up every night: the man who bought me comes to kidnap me while I’m picking tomatoes. I see myself naked and barefoot, like a newborn or the newly dead.

  I never told my students Nadia’s story. I simply wrote her name on the chalkboard as an example of a name that starts with the letter N. But the poem that I wrote far from their prying eyes remained wide awake in my room long after I had gone to sleep, like a light I had forgotten to switch off. It begins:

  The N on the doors,

  the exodus

  from houses:

  no keys,

  no compass,

  no words.

  The N on the doors

  The Bee Kingdom

  A week had passed since my conversation with Nadia. I was trying to resist my desire to call and ask about her. Her voice followed me everywhere I went. On the Internet I searched for “how to learn a foreign language in ten days,” but Kurdish wasn’t on the list. I scolded myself: if such a thing were possible, I could have sent my students home ten days later.

  Finally I called my friend Dakhil, a journalist who was in touch with several Yazidi families in the camps. I asked him if it would be possible to call Nadia again to make sure she was all right, but before I could, he told me that he’d just gotten off the phone with a mother and her children who had escaped from Daesh.

  “Is that right?” I asked. “What did they say?”

  “Listen. I’ll read you a translation of the transcript.”

  What’s your name?

  Hoshyar.

  How old are you, Hoshyar?

  Three.

  Where were you before you came to Baadhra?

  With Daesh.

  Where with Daesh?

  In Syria.

  Hoshyar, were you in a madrassa with Daesh?

  No, I was in one of their houses.

  What were you doing in the house?

  They were teaching me Quran.

  Who was teaching you Quran?

  Abu Jihad.

  Why were you there?

  They made me go with them.

  Where did they take you from?

  Raqqa.

  The man who was teaching you Quran, where was he from?

  Russia.

  And how did you know he was from Russia?

  He told me.

  Who else was there with you?

  My mom and my sister and three children with their mother.

  Did they teach all of you Quran?

  Yes. And we built rockets.

  What were you building?

  Rocket, rocket.

  And what do you remember from the Quran?

  I was in Syria with Daesh.

  I want to know what you can remember from the Quran.

  In the Name of God, most gracious, most compassionate, praise be to God, Lord of the two worlds, the gracious, the compassionate, master of the Day of Judgment . . .

  Do you know what that means?

  No, no I don’t.

  Hoshyar, what did they feed you?

  Bones. Abu Jihad would eat meat and then give me the bones. I couldn’t eat the bones but he used to make me stand on one leg for an hour.

  Were you afraid of them?

  He told me he could cut my head off if he wanted to.

  Why did he say that?

  He told me to pray, he said that when I grew up, God willing, I would go fight with Daesh.

  Hoshyar, where are you right now?

  In Baadhra.

  Is your situation okay right now? Better than being with Daesh?

  I’m at home. I’m good.

  Thank you, Hoshyar. Could you hand the phone to your sister?

  Hello.

  How are you, Rula?

  Fine.

  How old are you?

  Seven.

  Can you tell me what you did when you were with Daesh?

  They beat me while we made rockets for them.

  What kind? And how did you make them?

  TNT. From chemicals.

  Did you also study Quran and prayer?

  Yes.

  Did you understand the words you were memorizing?

  No.

  Who was your teacher?

  Daesh.

  What was the name of the person who taught you?

  Abu Jihad.

  Did you learn how to pray?

  Yes, but now I want to forget.


  All right, Rula, can you give the phone to your mother?

  Hello.

  Hello, Miss Raghda. Are you from Kocho?

  Yes.

  When did they take you?

  I don’t know when. It was when we fled from Sinjar. For two weeks we were surrounded by Daesh. They killed a lot of our people.

  After they kidnapped you from Kocho and killed a lot of your people, where did they take you?

  First they took the men and killed them. They held us in some building until one in the morning. Then they brought a bus and took all of the girls away, and separated the elderly.

  About how many of you were there?

  Sixty or seventy.

  Everyone was an adult?

  Mostly. Some weren’t even healthy adults, but disabled.

  They were from Kocho . . . ?

  No, they killed all the men from Kocho. They took us to Sinjar, where they’d also taken the rest. Then to Talafar. They kept us there for three months. We were thirsty and hungry the whole time. They would only give us one chunk of bread per day. Then they took us to Syria.

  And what happened in Syria?

  They sold us.

  Who did they sell you to?

  They sold us from one person to another, until Abu Jihad held onto us so that we could make rockets.

  Yes, the children told me. How did you make them?

  We boiled them on the stove.

  What were you boiling?

  Chemicals.

  What were they exactly?

  Refined sugar powder and chemicals they told us they got near the Turkish border.

  How much time did it take to make the rockets?

  I made ten or twelve rockets a day for five months.

  What kind of rockets? Did it have a shell or was it more like a grenade?

  It had a shell. They forced Rula and Hoshyar to make four rockets per day. If there was any defect in the rocket he’d beat them with electrical cables. That was the hardest thing for me. I wanted to kill myself. I pleaded with him not to beat them but he told me he didn’t care about anything but the rockets.