Betrayed Read online

  One morning, while Areeman was still staying in the house with her sisters and brother, and in my father’s absence, I decided I could stand the absence from David no longer. I told her I had to get out of the house for an hour or so—alone.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ she exclaimed.

  When I told her it was for strong personal reasons, she smiled. ‘You’re in love, aren’t you?’

  I asked her to swear to secrecy and, having got her word, told her that yes, I was going to see a foreigner I had fallen for although I did not tell her I had slept with him. But she understood my compelling reason to be with my un-named boyfriend because my situation reminded her of a Kurdish-European she had once been seeing covertly before he abandoned her; he could no longer live with the false accusations he had heard about her.

  At the end of my narrow street and around the corner, close to a row of small shops, was a taxi stand. I was going to risk taking a cab to David’s house, this being a Friday when I knew he would be at home. Areeman said I would be seen by neighbours and if my father found out, well, I could only guess the consequences. But I would only be half an hour—he wouldn’t find out.

  Even though it was raining and cold, I put on my sunglasses and dressed myself in a long gown over a skirt. My feet, in open-toed sandals, were freezing as I hurried up the street but I was in luck; all the women were indoors with their wood or gas stoves burning on this miserable day and the men were at the mosque. There was one orange and white taxi waiting in the rank. He couldn’t believe it when I jumped into the back seat. I had money with me that I had earned from the company. The set rate for anywhere around town was 10 dinars. I told him I would pay him 20 dinars to take me to the UN compound, another 20 for waiting for me, and a further 20 to bring me back.

  ‘Basha kheshqu (okay sister).’

  So we drove to to the Al-Jamiya district where the UN was located. As we approached the compound the driver told me he didn’t want to wait after all, which would be a major problem for me. I wouldn’t be able to call up a cab because telephone bookings didn’t work and David would not be able to use his driver with the big UN words on the side. I increased the waiting time price to 30 dinars, telling him that he was doing very well for himself and that he would have to make a lot of trips around town to make as much as he was getting from me. He finally agreed.

  David was stunned to see me when I walked in through the kitchen as usual. We hugged and kissed—and went straight to his bed. I had intended to give him a piece of my mind when I first arrived for keeping me on tenterhooks when he went to Jordan, but all such thoughts vanished when I looked into his face. He was remorseful, insisting that the Jordan job had even surprised him with its immediacy.

  But while I hoped he would lift my spirits about escaping from Kurdistan, there was no such news. He was still working on it. I wanted to ask working on what but let it go. He begged me to linger but I had to leave, assuring him I’d try to see him again the following Friday when, perhaps I added, he might have some good news for me.

  ‘Do you have to leave in such a hurry now? Don’t you have another hour before your father arrives home from the mosque?’

  ‘I can’t risk it, David.’

  The taxi driver had waited, much to my relief. He was staring at the big UN flag and must have been wondering what I was up to. The route to and from David’s house entailed driving onto the main highway that cut through the city. I was thinking about David, my thoughts drifting back to those precious minutes with him, as we pulled up at a red light on the highway. It was a notorious light, attracting complaints from drivers because it forced them to stop for a minor, virtually unused side road, and took a long time to change to green. Another vehicle stopped beside us as we sat there. My eyes idly settled on it—a big, black four-wheel drive, similar to many of the vehicles that could be seen around town. But the person behind the wheel was no non-descript driver.

  It was my father.

  THIRTEEN

  How many times had my heart come close to stopping since I’d been in Iraq? If never before, it was happening right then. I slowly positioned myself so most of my back was facing the vehicle beside us and drew my scarf further around my face. If my father were to glance into the cab, would he still recognise me? Would he ask himself where he had seen that scarf before? I would have no answers for him if he were to question me about where I had been. If I remained silent, he would easily get the information from the taxi driver.

  ‘I’ve just realised I’m running well behind time,’ I lied to the taxi driver. ‘Just go, please, just go.’

  ‘The light’s red.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, just go. I’ll pay you more’

  He shot forward as I leaned forward for the taxi’s behaviour was certain to attract my father’s attention and he would probably try to see who the passenger was. At my constant urging, we raced through the smaller streets until we arrived back at a house close to mine, a property with a high wall that prevented the occupants from looking out into the street. I gave the driver a handful of money, then, with my loose sandals off I ran for the life of me towards our home.

  ‘My God, Latifa, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Areeman said as I burst through the door.

  ‘I have,’ I said. ‘My father’s coming, he’s right behind. Please don’t say anything.’

  I hurried into the bathroom to wash. David had been wearing aftershave. I didn’t want my father to smell it.

  Khalid arrived home a few minutes after I had settled myself down. I was terrified to even look at him. Just two words repeated themselves in my mind: ya-Allah, ya-Allah—oh God, oh God. He called out my name, twice, loudly. My heart pounced with fear. He’d seen me!

  But my father suspected nothing. He had brought fruit, my favourite, green apricots that you eat with salt. Later, when I lay on my bed I thought ‘never again’. But how was I to see David? If he found a way out for me, how was he going to convey it?

  I tried to understand why he had failed to do such a simple thing as picking up the telephone and calling the Australian Embassy in Baghdad. We all knew war was coming and people were already talking about finding ways of getting out of Iraq beforehand. Perhaps David thought that going through official channels, which would have been flooded with desperate people seeking refugee status, would have been too difficult—that I would have been lost in the crowd. But then, I’d been asking him for months, well before a wave of panic had begun to spread through the country’s civilian population. He had told me he was working on projects worth many millions of dollars but that when it was all over, whatever fate lay ahead for Iraq, he could see us meeting up in London and always being together.

  David had never talked about his background and I didn’t really care to ask, although I did question him one day as to whether he was married. He had been, he told me, but it was a long time ago—his wife had not been able to cope with him being away all the time.

  My hoped-for escape that Zana had promised appeared to have evaporated. I had cut links with him. If I had continued with his second mission and completed that successfully, whatever it might have been, something told me he would have then asked me to become involved in another covert activity. So Zana’s offer of help had faded and David appeared to be dragging his heels. Why was it so difficult for an Australian girl to go home? Then I gave myself the answer: because I was ensnared in an ancient culture where women, generally, were good for only two things: housework and having babies.

  I had heard from a cousin, in a general conversation, how people had been able to escape over the border into Turkey with false passports. With a stolen passport, the photo would be replaced and a machine that someone had got hold of or made would then be used to put a plastic sheen over the picture.

  Then I heard that my mother was in town! She had turned up, with my young sister, at her family home, without any notice to me and only to my father, through a message. She made no effort to see me but after much persuasion thr
ough my aunties she agreed to meet me. We met in the home of her ‘dying’ father—who remained fit and well—and my emotions were all over the place. I wanted to both hug her and slap her. I wanted to ask her, over and over, ‘why?’ But I couldn’t ask the question. I could not get that word out. It was apparent from the way she looked at me and from her general conversation with me—‘How is your work? Are you studying here yet? If you need warmer clothes I can send you some?—that she had no intention of taking me back with her or of returning my passport. Yet I had clung to every word that she spoke, looking for the tiniest clue that she was pleased with the way I had been living in Dohuk and just might take me back.

  Her indifference dismayed me, but it was my father who was most affected. She had come to formalise her divorce from him and to inspect the land that she had arranged for her brothers to have, land bought with my father’s hard-earned money from Australia and from the sale of the Sydney house. Almost as soon as she had come, she left. My father allowed his emotions to show only once to me. ‘That bitch,’ he said.

  One day a young man aged in his 20s, who was a friend of a brother of the girls across the road, saw me in their house and said he’d heard I was Baian’s daughter. How helpful she had been to an uncle in Germany, he said. And how ironic, I thought, that my mother had a reputation for helping everyone, but she had abandoned her own daughter in Kurdistan, knowing how much I would suffer.

  This young man, Rujvan, had opened a fruit-juice shop in Dohuk and I promised to call in there when I was shopping with one of my aunties. On such expeditions I would buy shampoo and body lotions and even a new towel because I always threw out towels and toothbrushes after three or four weeks. I always hoped, too, that when I was in town I would see David walking or driving past. When we eventually called in at the fruit shop I managed, out of earshot of my aunties, to get a word with the man whose uncle had been helped by my mother when I returned our empty cups to him. I had decided to lay all my cards on the table.

  ‘I want to join my mother back in Germany, but I can’t get out. I’ve lost my passport,’ I fibbed. ‘I’ve heard it’s possible to get another passport. For my mother’s sake, do you know how I can get one? Of course, I will take with me any messages to give to your uncle over there in Germany.’

  He immediately understood my plight. Keeping his voice low, he said: ‘You can get one, but it will cost you $US6000. If war comes, it will be even more.’

  ‘There’s no way I can raise that kind of money,’ I said, my heart sinking. ‘I just need to get into Turkey and from there I could get to the Australian Consulate in Istanbul, or speak to a tourist who could help me through one of their consulates. I just need to get over the border.’

  One of my aunties approached from behind me and Rujvan immediately changed the subject to the impending war, an event that was on everyone’s lips. I ordered more drinks for us all and told my aunt I would bring them back to the table. That gave me another couple of minutes with Rujvan.

  ‘Do you have gold?’

  ‘Some.’ It was what David had given me on return from his overseas trips and the jewellery my mother had sent to me as part of her plan for me to sink into Kurdistan culture. She knew that I only liked silver, but in any case perhaps she had inadvertently provided me with a way out. Rujvan asked me to give him a few days and he’d get back to me, as long as I could get back to the juice shop. That I thought would be fairly easy—getting into a conversation with him again might be more difficult.

  My hopes now lay in this third possibility after Zana and David—so far—had failed to come up with any solution. What encouraged me was the knowledge that if one family helped another, the favour had to be returned in one way or another. I hoped that Rujvan, whose name means ‘sunlight for all’, and particularly for me, perhaps, would feel obliged to do all he could because of my mother’s assistance to his uncle. I found ways of calling him from either the house of the girls across the street or from another cousin’s home—which had a separate line upstairs—when I visited them with my aunties.

  A week of surreptitious phone calls later I could not believe my ears.

  ‘I have good news,’ said Rujvan. ‘I have found a way for you to not only get across the border into Turkey but all the way to Istanbul. But do you have $US6000 worth of gold? Without it being paid up front, they won’t take you.’

  ‘I don’t know the exact value, but at an estimate I would say that putting everything I have together, it would be worth much more than that.’

  I asked for more details. Although I was excited about escaping, I had heard of refugees, asylum seekers, whatever you cared to call them, suffocating to death in crowded trucks on the way to Germany. I asked him about the transport.

  ‘There’s just one other family involved. There will be a small bus on the Turkish side that will take you all the way to Istanbul. They’ll provide you with accommodation on the way because it’s going to take four or five days to get there from the border.’

  I pressed him for more details. If he had the answers, I would believe what he was telling me. If he ‘ummed’ and ‘ahhed’ I would have my doubts. He did not hesitate. I would be taken there at a time when the frontier was closed during the afternoon and the guards were ‘off duty’. Anything they collected, money-wise, during their official siesta period, would go straight into their pockets. I asked how he knew so much and he revealed that he had been involved in getting several other families out of Kurdistan. I did not even think what a curious thing it was that I should have found a possible way out during a conversation with a man who ran a juice bar.

  We planned my escape to coincide with a religious festival, when the city would be alive with people coming and going, calling at relatives’ homes. To make things even easier, I had managed to persuade my father to let me stay with one of his sisters, who was entertaining many of her other relatives. The house was crowded with a large number of adults and no less than 35 children. I had left my father’s house looking ‘normal’ with just a small overnight bag, but inside I had packed my gold jewellery, a skirt and black boots. Then, from my aunty’s house I was able to slip away on the pretext of calling on a mutual friend across the road. The festival gave me that small window of freedom and fortunately nobody took any notice of me leaving with the small bag.

  I hurried up a steep hill to where I saw the navy blue BMW that Rujvan said he would be driving. It was a 1997 model, he was to explain, relatively new for Iraq. My heart was pounding with excitement as I reached for the rear door handle. I just knew I could trust him. As I clambered into the back seat he turned back and grinned. ‘Within a few hours you’ll be free,’ he said. Rujvan was dressed in a black jeans jacket with a white shirt underneath, his hair neatly groomed as though this was a special occasion for him, too.

  I wanted to kiss the back of his neck, but held myself back. ‘You haven’t even left Dohuk yet, girl!’ I told myself.

  ‘We won’t even have to stop anywhere. We have a full tank of gas.’

  We headed north across the desert plains, parts of which were white with a blanket of snow. The roads were slippery so Rujvan kept his speed down. I wanted to urge him on, terrified that I was already being missed and people were out looking for me. But with each passing kilometre my confidence grew. I checked my watch. It was shortly after 11.15am. We’d been driving for more than an hour. Zakho, our frontier destination, would now be less than half an hour away. I reached down through my clothes, just to make sure the jewellery was there. That was all I needed. Just some spare clothes and the payment for my passage out of there. I was trying to imagine how it would be back at my crowded aunty’s house. Perhaps someone was already asking: ‘Where’s Latifa? I haven’t seen her for a while.’

  Then someone else would say: ‘She’s gone to see a friend. She should be back soon.’

  Well, I wouldn’t be. Not this time.

  I asked Rujvan about the other family he had mentioned, the one who also wanted to lea
ve. He said they had been moved a few days earlier because the authorities had heard whispers about their plans.

  ‘Did they get away?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘Well, they didn’t come back so they must have.’

  We did stop once, for a toilet break at a garage in a village, before pressing on to our destination.

  Zakho was a poor frontier town whose 350,000 inhabitants suffered from the winter snows. Everything was closed down. People shut their doors and tried to stay warm. We wound through the largely deserted streets until Rujvan began to slow as we approached a grey box-like house that stood apart from the cluster of other buildings. A smaller structure attached to the house appeared to be full of first-aid materials, with red crosses on the containers and rolls of bandages. Rujvan told me to wait in the car while he went inside.

  I had no idea what this building was, or who Rujvan was speaking to. I forced myself to have only positive thoughts. I was getting away! I didn’t even care how much hardship awaited me on the Turkish side of the border, just as long as I found myself on a bus heading for Istanbul.

  He was inside for 15 minutes before returning to the car. ‘Latifa, give me your jewellery,’ he said. ‘He wants to weigh it.’

  So I gave him a smaller bag containing my rings, necklaces and bracelets. I felt a tinge of sadness, for among the collection were pieces that David had given me. I’d also brought all the money I had, 3000 dinars, which was about $US250, but I wasn’t going to part with that, believing that I would need some cash for the journey across Turkey. I’d considered trying to exchange it for US dollars or Turkish money in the city before leaving but, aside from seizing the chance to break away from my aunties during a shopping expedition, I would have drawn very serious attention to myself—a single woman approaching a money changer and asking for American dollars.