Betrayed Page 17

  It was one of the hardest things I had ever had to do—not just rise up, unassisted, from the couch but then approach the man who had inflicted these injuries upon me. I stood in front of him, then, with equal effort, lowered myself to my knees in front of him. I took each of his hands in mine, leaned forward and kissed them, then I brought them up to my forehead.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  He snatched his hands from mine. I lowered my face and kissed his bare foot and begged again for his forgiveness.

  He raised his foot and shoved me away. The vicious thrust sent me sprawling onto my back. I looked up to see the face of my aunt staring down at me as she shook her head. I saw in her expression that there was no hope of winning my father’s forgiveness, let alone his blessing.

  I pulled myself up and walked slowly to my room and now the tears were flowing. I heard my aunty say: ‘You must let her stay here until she’s ready to go home. I don’t think after any of this she’ll run away again.’

  ‘She will die, without question, if she does,’ I heard my father say deliberately. ‘One more event, no matter what it is, that brings shame to me or this family, and I will kill her.’

  The silence that followed in that room left me in no doubt that those relatives who heard the threat knew that he meant every word.

  Lying on the bed, my thoughts went back over the risks I had taken. Even turning down marriage proposals as they had come in was a risk, for I believed that my grandmother in particular was growing more and more suspicious each time I sent one of the calling mothers away. She had asked me more than once why I had refused handsome, wealthy suitors, men who other girls would have fallen over one another to have as a husband. I had always replied that until I knew someone well and fell in love with them—a word I dared to suggest meant nothing to her—I would continue to turn down the offers. She and my father, I knew, would not allow my attitude to continue and one day they would drag me off to the Imam.

  Such scenarios did exist. A woman I had met at a wedding, a very pleasant girl several years older than me, had been paired off with a cousin and although she liked him, she was terrified of the time when she would be married off and would have to have sex. The thought of it frightened her so much that after managing to keep her husband at bay on the wedding night, she ran away to the home of a compassionate relative. They tracked her down there, dragged her back to the husband’s home and literally bound her, spreadeagled to the bed. Her screams, I learned, echoed through the house and into the street, before the husband emerged, victorious. An inspection of the sheets told his relatives that he was indeed a man.

  Memories of the other risks I had taken swept over me. Aside from the actual act of having my virginity cruelly taken from me, there had been my affair with David, right under the noses of people who would have supported my father in whatever punishment he handed out to me. I shuddered at the narrow escape I’d had when his jeep and my taxi were stopped side by side at that traffic light.

  My father still did not know just how serious my escape attempt had been on that desperate flight to the border. All he knew was that I had ‘run away’ when I had gone missing. Would he have taken a gun or a knife to me if he’d known I had been ready to hand over all the gold jewellery and money I had to cross the frontier?

  It’s always the woman who is to blame for any ‘indiscretion’. One day, not long after I had arrived in Dohuk, I had needed some treatment for an aching tooth and my father arranged for me to see a dentist who was a relative. Like my aunty’s husband in Baghdad, the man was a letcher. As I was lying back in his chair, he thrust himself hard up against my thigh. Then he gripped me from behind, his hands part way on my breasts as he helped me into a sitting position. I knew exactly what he was up to but rather than confront him I asked my father if next time I could go to a different dentist because I was not happy with my ‘treatment’—in more ways than one. My father refused, saying: ‘Always support your relatives. Never give business to outsiders.’ I never went back and fortunately my toothache went away.

  My thoughts, as I lay in my aunty’s room, drifted to my cousin Etab, the victim of the honour killing. That poor girl had been forced into marriage at 14 and had her first child at 15. While my mother had told me the story when I was in my early teens in Australia, the terrible details were relayed to me in Dohuk by my Aunt Khalida, in whose house I now lay after the beating from my father. Etab’s husband, like my own father, had been a freedom fighter who was often away but because she was so often alone, rumours began to sweep the town that she was taking advantage of his absence to have affairs. Fearing for her life and that of her three children, she managed to escape into Iraq, but her husband—her first cousin and a relative of my father—was eventually able to contact her and persuade her to come back.

  That very first night of her return, she was woken by her father and father-in-law in the early hours of the morning. They wanted her to help them pick fruit and vegetables on land they owned. Etab knew this was the end. Because her own mother and grandmother had been slaughtered and she knew one day it would be her turn, no matter how innocent and worthy she was. She was her mother’s daughter. She gave her children a kiss and slipped her gold bracelet on her eldest daughter’s wrist. There were a group of men sitting in the back of the Toyota truck. As they sped past the vegetable garden and on into the desert, Etab prayed to Allah that it would be quick. But it wasn’t.

  Like a cave woman, she was dragged by her hair from the vehicle by her father and petrol was poured over her as she knelt in fear. Her father struck a match and threw it on her and as her screams rang out, he brought out a gun and fired a number of bullets into her body. The burned and bullet-riddled corpse was found later that day and although the police had by law to put an appeal in the local newspaper for any witnesses or anyone who could identify the victim, no-one came forward. It couldn’t have been Etab, everyone said, because surely, she was in Iran…? As for Etab’s children, the eldest now being 13, the next eight and the youngest five, the two oldest had been forced into early slavery by their father’s family.

  How do I know this? Because one of my aunties took me around to the house for a visit and I saw the pitiful sight of the youngest girl washing men’s trousers while the older one was scrubbing the kitchen floor. It was as though they were being punished for the ‘sins’ of their mother.

  I was so sorry for their plight that I was able to persuade my aunty to take me back there on a couple of occasions, when I took along candies, hairpins, books and pencils for the girls. My heart bled to see them in filthy dijashas as they went about their washing chores so the adults could wear nice clean clothes and live in a spotless house.

  One day I asked the girls’ grandmother: ‘Why do you make them work so hard when they are so young?’

  She snapped back at me. ‘Because that’s the way they are being trained.’

  Before I could stop myself, I said: ‘Why don’t you just kill them now, like their poor mother? Because you will eventually.’

  The grandmother later told my aunty what I had said and my aunty in turn told my father. He had slapped me across the face. ‘Don’t ever interfere in other people’s business,’ he ordered.

  The night of my punishment with the cable, I cried into my pillow not only for my own throbbing wounds, but for Etab and all the other women in this wretched place who had suffered so. This culture was so barbaric. But how was it ever to change when every time a woman dared to answer back or try to escape she was severely punished or killed?

  It had been arranged that I would stay with my Aunt Khalida for two or three days while I recovered and then my father would return for me. But he came back the following evening, ordering me to pack my clothes—the clothes I had hoped to be wearing by now as I travelled by bus towards Istanbul and freedom. My aunt Areeman, who had called by, was surprised at my father’s earlier-than-expected return. I feared the worst. He had come for me when it was dark
, just as they had once come for Etab.

  I wanted to turn to my cousins and tell them: ‘If anything happens to me, just remember these words—All I wanted to do was go home.’ But I stopped myself from saying it, even though I believed as I left with my stern-faced father that I was a dead woman walking.

  My aunties and a number of other cousins came to the door to watch me climb into my father’s jeep, as though it was a farewell forever. My father, who had suddenly taken up smoking, drew heavily on his Marlboro cigarette as he turned to look at them, but he said nothing. All I could think about as we headed home was the route he was taking. I knew the directions well and I feared that if he diverted, it could be a sign of impending doom. Although he said nothing, I could sense his rage. What had happened to him? Had the death of his brother in that car crash affected him? Or was it living with that mother of his? Perhaps, though, he had just sunk back into a culture that I never knew, having been carried through the mountains, away from it, when I was only two.

  My grandmother was in her room when we arrived back at the house and I went straight to my prison, my bedroom. Having eaten very little in the past two days, I rose for breakfast the following morning to join my father and his mother, slouched in her usual way, all in black, on a cushion on the floor. None of us spoke until, towards the end of the meal, my father’s harsh voice broke the silence as his mother turned her eyes towards me as though she wanted to add emphasis to his words.

  ‘From this moment on, you will not be permitted to set foot out of this house without my permission. You will wash the dishes, the morning dishes, the lunch dishes and the evening dishes. You will not allow your grandmother to present the food for any guests, you will not allow her to do any sweeping and you will obey her every command. You will keep this house in perfect order.’

  There was no point in fighting him. I turned my head towards him, making sure I ignored my grandmother who I knew in my heart had discussed all this with him. She had been engaged to my paternal grandfather when she was nine and had married him at the age of 13, entering a miserable life of slavery and childbirth. No wonder she wanted someone—me—to take over the household duties.

  ‘Basch,—okay—I will do as you wish,’ I told my father. I had spoken in Arabic, which I had quickly picked up, rather than the English I had occasionally used with my father or the local Baideeni dialect. My grandmother had grown up in Mosul, an Arab town, so she understood exactly when I had agreed to the humiliating rules my father had just imposed. There was a glint of satisfaction in her eyes.

  I immediately began picking up the breakfast dishes and taking them out into the kitchen. When I returned to the living room to pick up the remainder, my father said: ‘There is one other thing. You will start to pray. You will pray every day like me and your grandmother.’

  ‘I don’t even know how to pray. It’s not something I have grown up with.’ I wanted to add: ‘I grew up with you in Australia, remember—you who smoked and drank all day.’ But I kept my mouth shut.

  His intention to show me how to pray left me with a feeling of unease. It would be another victory over my perceived insolence. So when they were both out one day I put my life in my hands and hurried across the street to my friends. I asked the girls to teach me how to pray, telling myself that perhaps this might be to my advantage, that the God I had never learned to love might help me. They showed me in which direction I should stand and kneel, how to bow and they wrote everything down for me as they spoke, including the essential verses from the Koran.

  When my father returned from work that day I told him that I had recalled from my cousins in Germany how to pray and I was now ready to do it. A flicker of a smile crossed his face. He told me that it was already time to go to my room and start my mughrib (sunset prayers). He gave me a prayer mat and in my room I positioned it to face east, using the plan the girls had drawn for me, showing me how my bedroom was positioned in relation to Mecca. The evening prayer is shorter than those chanted during the day, but I made sure my father could hear me, having left the bedroom door slightly ajar.

  How strange, I told myself, that praying started to grow on me. I prayed in the morning and took time throughout the day to go into my room and repeat the verses from the Koran. I became interested in the stories of the prophets, as related in the Koran, the book my father had given me with its translations and pronounciations. What came to me was the knowledge that God was all knowing and as the weeks went by, with my routine of cleaning and praying, I began to feel more at peace. Not an entire peace, because I was aware that my father was watching my every move and that led me on to thinking about the plight of women generally in that country.

  When my aunt from Baghdad visited us, I enjoyed talking to her about some of the meanings in the Koran. She told me she hoped I understood that the Koran told of how important it was for a woman to dress modestly and that—despite my interjections—a man and a woman are equal in the eyes of God. In between these devout conversations, her lecherous husband was still taking every advantage to touch me. On one occasion, when I was sitting on the stool in the washroom, taking my ‘shower’, I caught him staring down at me over the top of a dividing wall, that did not quite reach the ceiling. He had snuck into a storage room next to the wash room and had clambered onto sacks of rice to look down on me.

  I quickly called out to my aunty, asking if she could come right away and help me wash my back. I heard a panicky scrambling in the store room as he sought out a hiding place before she arrived. I made sure that didn’t happen again—I secured a large piece of cardboard over the gap. My reasons for not revealing his perversions were simply that it would cause enormous trouble and I had no doubt my father would turn his wrath onto me yet again.

  Women were without doubt nothing but sex objects in the eyes of a Kurdish man. They were good only for making babies and working like slaves for the family. The Islamic Hadith (a book of teaching) states that a woman should satisfy a man’s every sexual need, which is very strong.

  I settled down into doing the housework. I was subtly, so subtly I didn’t realise it, turning from a free-spirited woman of the West to a ‘converted’ slave of the Middle East. Cleaning, praying, cleaning, praying. I would have been swallowed up in that daily routine and become deeply engulfed in a culture that had consumed every woman in the cities, the valley communities and the mountain villages for hundreds of kilometres around had my body not resisted.

  My hair began to fall out in handfuls.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Khoulisar—your hair!’ cried my cousin Areeman as she was plaiting my long black locks one morning. Khoulisar is a name my cousins sometimes used for me, for it literally means a person who has gone from one problem to another, like someone going from the frying pan to the fire. ‘You’ve got big bald patches here at the back.’

  I had noticed hair loss when I was showering, but thought nothing of it. Now as I reached around I felt my smooth scalp.

  ‘What does it mean?’ I cried. ‘Have I got cancer?’

  Areeman suggested consulting a relative, one of my father’s sisters, who had studied medicine, but who had given up because she couldn’t stand the sight of blood. When she called at the house she shook her head; my condition was a mystery to her. She told my father that I should see a doctor and after a hesitation—why he had to hestitate upset me—he agreed to drive me to a doctor, accompanied by Areeman and an aunt. The GP turned out to be a male, but as the consultation was about hair, rather than personal women’s business, there was no problem in allowing him to touch me. The waiting room was full of women sitting with their obviously sick children, who were coughing and wheezing. I felt so sorry for them.

  The doctor quickly picked that I was a ‘foreign Kurd’ and when I told him I was from Australia he smiled. ‘Ah, the land of kangaroos. And is it true you see them in the street?’

  ‘Some places,’ I said, thinking of outback towns where occasionally a stray animal will bound down the road.
He had relatives in Australia and his general conversation put me at ease. Finally, touching my bare scalp, he said: ‘This is nafcia—depression. Do you find you are sleeping a lot?’

  ‘When she’s not doing the housework she’s always sleeping,’ my aunt ventured.

  ‘And do you feel very tired all the time?’

  ‘All the time,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there’s no direct cure for this. But if it gives you any confidence we can take a blood test. The alternative is to pray to Allah.’

  ‘We’ll pray,’ said my aunt. ‘Allah gave her this pain and he will take it from her when the time is right.’

  Rather than suggest a cure or give me any hope, the doctor had only added to my depression. My father, who had been waiting outside, asked what the doctor had said and on hearing that I was ‘stressed and feeling down’ he retorted: ‘Why is she feeling stressed? She is fed well, she has her own room. She is better off than many people.’

  I sat in the rear seat for the drive home, staring out of the window, looking at nothing. My concerns about my hair appeared to add to the problem for I now noticed it coming out in handfuls in the bathroom. I began wearing the hijab in the house. Perhaps this was God’s way of forcing me to obey the life of a true Muslim woman, I told myself wryly.

  While it had become extremely risky to run across the road to my neighbours—which meant I couldn’t call David, whose voice would have cheered me and helped me get over my depression—the girls were allowed to come and see me. They tried to time it for occasions when my father was at work and my grandmother was at the shops or sleeping. They did not enjoy being in her company. Their visits were the only bright moments in my life. We would share photographs and clip our nails, although painting them was out. Deep down, though, my depression lingered—and was soon to manifest itself in another dramatic way.