Betrayed Read online

  They were taking a long time. What were they doing in there?

  It was a good half an hour before Rujvan stepped out through the door. His expression alarmed me and I jumped from the vehicle.

  ‘What’s wrong, Rujvan?’

  He lowered his head. Then he raised his eyes to mine.

  ‘He says it’s not enough.’

  ‘But it’s worth more than $6000. I’ve already told you that.’

  ‘He says $6000 is for passports. This is a special job, getting you across the border without a passport.’

  No, no, no. I couldn’t believe this.

  A man had stepped out from the building and had propped himself against the doorway. In his 50s and balding, he wore a stained, white shirt and dusty black pants held up by a leather and chrome belt, a grey-black stubble around his chin and a thick moustache. He looked like the Turkmani that he was, but he could have stepped out of a B-grade Western movie, playing the bad guy. He had crossed one leg in front of the other and was drawing on a cigarette, puffing smoke into the air as he looked at a point beyond me. Strangely, I noticed that his boots were shiny black as though he had just polished them.

  ‘I’ve got an extra $US250,’ I cried. ‘Tell him I’ll give him that. It’s all I have. I’ll worry about any other needs when I get into Turkey.’

  Rujvan grimaced and went back to the man. I saw the stranger shaking his head.

  When Rujvan returned I started to head towards the doorway, but he stopped me.

  ‘Just let me talk to him,’ I said. ‘Let me explain my plight—that having come here I have left my home and I’ve put my life in great danger.’

  ‘He’s a Turkmani, don’t forget. He won’t understand your dialect. I can only just get by with him.’

  ‘Please, please, Rujvan, try again. There has to be a way.’

  The man was still smoking, still gazing nonchalantly into the distance. To think that my life probably hung on a decision that this ugly character would now make as Rujvan walked back to him.

  This time, as I paced up and down beside the BMW, watching the two men, I saw no shaking of heads. But Rujvan’s head was low once more as he returned to me.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, desperation in my voice.

  ‘Sister, I don’t know how I can tell you. May God forgive me.’

  ‘What are you saying, Rujvan? Tell me, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Sister, I am ashamed to say this. But there is another way as well as paying the gold.’

  ‘Yes, he wants all my money. He can have it.’

  Rujvan lowered his face from mine. ‘No, he wants you. He wants you to be his all the way through the journey. Staferlallah—God forgive me—for telling you this.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Are you saying—’

  ‘Yes, you have to give yourself to him.’

  ‘You mean sleep with him.’

  ‘He says you have not brought enough gold or money and this is the only way.’

  ‘Sleep with that man over there day and night, whenever he asks, all the way through to Istanbul?’

  Rujvan kept his head down. The man in the door continued smoking.

  ‘You have used me, Rujvan. You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?’

  My voice was trembling. I wanted to kill him. But perhaps he didn’t know. He seemed genuinely remorseful. I glared at the man in the doorway who had finally turned his eyes towards me, watching for my reaction.

  ‘Rujvan, go back to that man and tell him that if he wants to fuck someone, he can fuck himself. Then come back to me, start up your car and get me back to Dohuk as fast as you can. Every minute lost now is a minute closer to a punishment that I cannot imagine.’

  As Rujvan made to turn back towards the house I grabbed his arm. ‘Don’t bother—we have already lost precious time.’

  As we sped back along potholed roads, my gold and my money back in my bag, all I heard was Rujvan’s apologies and his pleas for forgiveness. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But one thing I was certain of—if I had set out on the road with that villainous character I had just come face to face with, I had no doubt that he would have had his way with me and dumped me at the roadside with a slit throat. I looked at my watch. By the time we got back to my aunty’s house, we would have been away for more than four hours. Dusk would be approaching. Too long to have been absent. Far too long.

  ‘Please drive faster,’ I told Rujvan, but he was already travelling at a frightening pace around bends.

  And then, in the middle of nowhere, the car broke down.

  FOURTEEN

  We drifted to the side of the road, the engine silent. Rujvan turned the key, time and again, but the car was dead. He tapped the fuel gauge, revealing to me that he didn’t know much about car engines, then got out and opened the bonnet. Wind swept through the valley but that was the only thing that moved. There wasn’t another car to be seen.

  I sat inside, numb.

  Rujvan came to the window. ‘I’ve checked the wires and they are all okay and there is water. I cannot understand what the problem is.’

  I didn’t care about his stupid car, although I should have, because it had to get me home. But I did not want to hear what was working and what wasn’t—I just wanted to hear it start.

  ‘Don’t you have a mobile phone?’ I said, getting out of the vehicle. ‘Can’t you call a village or somebody and get them to come and help us?’

  ‘Who should I call? I don’t know anybody who lives in these parts. Besides, look, there’s no signal out here.’ He held up the phone towards me. A broken down car and a useless phone. Worse, a failed attempt to escape and I didn’t know how I was going to explain my absence if I ever got out of this place.

  Fear was spreading through me like wildfire. For a terrible moment I wanted to throw myself off the edge of a cliff, just to escape this terrible predicament. But I suddenly remembered that suicide was a sin. Upset my family, perhaps, but do not upset God. To jump would condemn me to Hell.

  ‘We could try pushing to see if it will start,’ said Rujvan, his voice almost lost in the wind, but it was strong enough to bring me back to reality. So I got behind the car and Rujvan positioned himself beside it so he could steer and then jump in. But it was hopeless. I didn’t have the strength to push the car out of roadside rut it had stopped in. All seemed lost—when from around a bend behind us came a teenager on a donkey cart, laden down with scrap metal.

  Rujvan asked him to stop and help push and at first it looked like he was going to ignore us, but then he stopped the cart and came over to look at the engine. He told Rujvan that his father was a mechanic and he had learned a little bit from him.

  ‘Where is your father?’ I asked urgently. ‘Is he nearby? Can you ask him to come and help us?’

  ‘My father is dead. He died last year. But he told me things about cars.’

  He spent precious minutes—15 perhaps—doing something under the bonnet then he asked Rujvan to try starting the car. The engine coughed and burst into life. I almost burst into tears with happiness. I gave the boy a handful of dinars and asked him what he had done. He mentioned something about rotten wiring and he had put two parts together but we had to be careful not to hit any bumps because they would come apart. All the wiring, he said, looked very, very bad. So much for Rujvan’s ‘almost new’ BMW. He was a typical Kurdish spoiled ‘rich boy’, caring more for the appearance of the car than the condition of the engine. As is the norm, the look was more important than anything else.

  Each time we hit a pothole as we sped on towards Dohuk I prayed the engine would not cut out. Darkness was on us when I reached the street where my father’s house was located. I had decided to go straight there, rather than to the home of the aunty I had been at when I had broken away earlier that day. I asked Rujvan to drop me at the top of the hill. Hardly a word had passed between us since the breakdown apart from his occasional mutterings of sorrow about what had happened. I didn’t thank him. I
just got out.

  Down the hill, outside my father’s house, I could see a cluster of people—and as I approached them I could see they were my aunties and cousins along with my grandmother. Suddenly a little figure ran towards me—my five-year-old cousin, Yasmin. She knew I was in trouble and took my hand. I could not see my father’s car, which meant he wasn’t home. I prayed he wasn’t out looking for me. Before I reached the house, Shilan, from across the street, ran to me to warn me that everybody had been out looking for me.

  ‘Tell them you were visiting one of my friends,’ she said. ‘I’ll back you up.’

  I smiled at her. ‘I’ve been weak enough. I’m going to tough this one out.’

  I pushed my way determinedly through the crowd of relatives. If looks could kill, the scowl on my grandmother’s face would have sent me to an early grave. I entered the house and made straight for my bedroom. If I thought I would find peace and quiet there I was mistaken. The women burst in through the door and demanded to know where I had been.

  ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ came their voices, like a chorus of witches. One of them prodded me in the shoulder. ‘Tell us! Tell us!’

  That was it. I snapped. I leaped to my feet and screamed at them.

  ‘Get out of my room, you ugly bitches. I’ve had enough of all of you and your stupid evil ways. Leave me alone.’

  There was a tea cup and saucer in the room and I picked it up and hurled it against the wall. The shattered pieces dropped at their feet. One of them started crying, but I had lost it. ‘You are the devil’s children the way you have been treating me since I arrived. Do this, do that! Who the hell do you think you all are to boss me around? I can’t imagine how your husbands can even lie with you. You all have the devil’s horns beneath those veils. I’m an adult and I’m an Australian so piss off out of my room!’

  How do you silence a coven of witches? You give them a taste of their own medicine, that’s how. They were all silent.

  Then I went for them, pushing them back out through the door. ‘Get out of my bedroom, you ugly whores, you home wreckers.’

  I slammed the door on them. I could hear them talking about me on the other side, but I didn’t care. Shaking uncontrollably, I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep.

  A knocking on the bedroom door roused me the next morning. Then one of my aunties put her head around the door, and, as though nothing had happened the previous night, asked: ‘Aren’t you coming out to eat, to survive?’

  My mood had not changed. ‘The same old shit? I’ll get my own breakfast, thank you.’

  I made my way out to the kitchen and cut some fruit and ate it with bread and cheese. Then I defiantly went to the men’s room and sat down and watched TV. My grandmother just looked at me, her face a grey shade of white. My father had stayed away overnight visiting a relative out of town and when he arrived home he appeared perfectly normal. I knew then that he had heard nothing of the events of the day before. I couldn’t face being in that house with either him or particularly his mother, because I feared a storm was gathering over my head and I needed space to build up my inner resources. I asked if I could stay at the home of his elder sister, my Aunt Khalida for a day or two, seeing that I had no job to go to.

  When I arrived at her home, she also tried to pretend that nothing had happened the day before. But in the bedroom one of my female cousins, who had witnessed my performance, asked: ‘What happened to you, Latifa? It is like you were possessed by the devil.’

  I smiled at her, for being younger than me, she did not deserve my wrath. My father, who had brought me to the house, stayed there for dinner and then returned to his home. But when he got there, I was to learn later from a relative he repeated the events to, that my grandmother asked him: ‘Where is your daughter?’

  He told her he had left me at Khalida’s home, to which my grandmother replied: ‘You had better go straight back over there and get her or she will run away again, like she did yesterday.’

  I do not know whether Rujvan had told friends or relatives that he had taken me to the border—although I doubt it because he would have received a severe punishment—but just hearing that I had ‘run away’ was enough for my father.

  An hour after he had left Khalida’s home he was back again, banging on the door. I was at the bedroom door when I heard Khalida say:

  ‘Oh, you’re back—did you forget something?’

  ‘Did I forget something? Yes, I forgot something. I forgot to kill my daughter.’

  He stormed through the house, carrying a thick piece of electrical cable, 2.5 centimetres in diameter and 1 metre long. I retreated back into the bedroom and fell down on the bed and then he was on me. He raised his arm and brought the cable down hard and fast across my thigh. The burning hot pain was so intense I could not even find a voice to scream. Then the cable came down again, and again, across my legs and my arms that I had thrown up around my head for protection. In a momentary glance I saw the venom on his face, the utter hatred. It was only the intervention of Khalida’s husband, Abdul Salam, who had rushed out of the shower room on hearing his wife screaming with fear for me, that prevented my father continuing to beat the life out of me. With a monumental effort, Abdul Salam managed to pull my father, wild with uncontrolled rage, away from me and out of the room. Blood began to soak through my dijasha from the wounds that had been inflicted through the material. I felt as though my body was dangling in fire. Yet I had not uttered a word, not unleashed as much as a whimper. I knew I was in shock, for my body was trembling violently from head to toe. They say that your whole life passes before you when you are dying. I don’t really know how close I had come—for at what point does a heart stop when the body can take no more pain?—but what I do know is that as those vicious blows rained down on me I saw the faces of my little sister Bojeen and David, the man I loved so deeply. I even felt his warm kiss, but it was really only the blood on my lips.

  Khalid demanded that I return home with him that night but Abdul said I would be too weak to travel after the beating he had given me. What shocked me as much as the attack was the fact that he had not even asked me for an explanation for my absence. It was enough for him to hear from my grandmother that I had ‘run away’. What my father’s savagery had revealed to me was the fatal punishment I could expect should he ever discover that I was not a virgin. If he could do that to me for running away, I had no doubt what he would do were he to discover my ‘secret’.

  As a female cousin helped me towards the bathroom to bathe my wounds, I fell backwards in a faint. She had to guide me to the bed, but not before I heard my father, who had been made to sit on a sofa, tell AbdulSalam: ‘She is just like her mother. Deceitful and wicked.’ Then the curses, mixed with my name, fell from his lips. I had never heard him use such language. Oh, how he must have hated me. And there it was again—‘just like her mother’. His own mother used that comparison and he had learned her words well.

  My head was spinning as my cousin washed my wounds with a bucket of hot water she had brought in. Black bruises were appearing beside the red gashes where the skin had torn. Outside the door I could hear my father and AbdulSalam arguing. AbdulSalam was actually taking my side.

  ‘It’s all your fault, brother. If you had never taken your wife and your children to Australia none of this would have happened. You were all happy here. Your daughter would have grown up and married and by now you would be a grandfather. You’ve thrown your life away and the lives of your children.’

  I did not hear my father’s response for a wave of dizziness came over me. Now the pain from the wounds was unbearable, like someone was dragging red hot wires across my flesh. Of course, my father had had no choice but to flee Kurdistan 20 years earlier or we would have all been hunted down and killed anyway.

  ‘You must calm down, Khalid,’ said AbdulSalam. ‘There must have been a good reason why she wanted to run away.’

  Then I heard my father speak out. ‘I have done everything possible to teach the
values of Islam. I buy her favourite foods, she still refused to go to university and I still allow her to wear pants. And yes, I’m as angry with her mother as I am with her. What kind of family is this to have brought such wickedness upon me?’

  Aunty Khalida came into the room to check on me. When she saw the wounds, her jaw dropped in shock.

  ‘You know what you must do, to prevent him attacking you again—you must go out there and kiss his hands or his feet and beg for his forgiveness.’

  I couldn’t believe what she was saying. My father had beaten me within an inch of my life and now she wanted me to apologise to him?

  ‘I’m not going out there. I won’t say sorry. I’ve done nothing wrong. If I had committed a crime or a terrible sin, I would accept his beating. But simply wanting to get away from a prison that has been built around me, for no reason whatsoever, is not what I consider wrongdoing. No, Aunty Khalida, I won’t apologise.’

  ‘Come out with me,’ she said, making for the door. ‘It’s the only way.’

  I refused to follow her. So she came back in and begged me, for the sake of the whole family, to apologise and clear the air. To leave this rift between me and my father unsettled would leave me open to further attack and the family would rest uneasily in their beds, uncertain what he would do next.

  She spoke to me for a good 30 minutes, holding my hands, beseeching me to go out to my father. ‘Lose your pride, Latifa. If you do not say sorry to him, you’ll give him the impression that you believe you were in the right to run away. Apologise, please, for all of us, or he will carry his anger with him everywhere he goes.’

  She put up a convincing argument and finally I relented. She helped me to my feet, for the wounds on my legs stung so when I tried to move. Like a cripple, I limped out through the door. My father was sitting on a couch. I sat on the other end, my shaking hands in my lap, putting as much distance between him and me as I could. He would not even look at me. He sat very still, glaring at the carpet, his lips tight. For several minutes we remained like that. My aunt whispered something to her husband, then AbdulSalam walked over to me, knelt beside me and said softly: ‘Isn’t there something you are supposed to say now? Something you are supposed to do?’