Betrayed Read online

  So it had come to this. Already. My loss of virginity was being used against me. My mind raced. How could I remove this threat? Then it came to me; such a simple response.

  ‘How do you think your family will react if they found out you had comitted a sin? And the police, how will they react when I tell them about your warehouse of stolen goods?’ I asked defiantly. ‘You’ve been stupid enough to tell me what you get up to, the drugs, the robberies, the guns. Are you going to risk a jail sentence just to get at me?’

  He had no answer to that. He spun on his heel and went inside. I knew my secret was safe with him, but only for as long as I could hold a threat against him.

  Before long I was hit with a new shock. But it was a pleasant one—and, most unexpectedly, from my mother. Before I settled down for good in Germany she had been thinking about taking me away for a holiday and now there was some urgency to do this because her father—my grandfather—had taken a turn for the worse. He was in his mid-70s, he was very sick and weak and there were fears he would die any day.

  ‘You know how much he loves you,’ she said, reminding me of our earlier visits when he had indeed doted over me. ‘He wants to see all his grandchildren before he dies. You need a holiday from all the drama you’ve been caught up in.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. A holiday. The break would put an even greater distance between me and Mikael and in that time my mother would perhaps come to accept that there was no way that she would become a grandmother to his and my children. To add to her good mood, I told her that when we returned to Germany I would make her proud of me and in between ‘everything’ I would continue my studies. I hoped that would be a hint that I was looking at a career and not settling down with Mikael. She smiled and nodded her head. It was the first time I’d seen her smile in weeks.

  I was so sad to hear that my grandfather was dying. It was he, as a schoolteacher, who had taught my mother her English, although I also remembered he had been partly responsible for keeping her at home and marrying her off at a young age. Even so, on those earlier visits, I had enjoyed being with him. He was a jolly man, with a twinkle in his eyes, who threw his big arms around all his grandchildren when they came to visit.

  My mother purchased the plane tickets for herself, me and my young sister Bojeen. My brother would not be joining us, she said, because he had to finish his exams. In any case, at the age of 19 he was old enough to look after himself. We would be away for two weeks, although she thought it might be a little longer if her father were to pass away in that time. I sat at the kitchen table looking at the return tickets. I would be free of Mikael’s expectations for our future and I knew that soon I would be able to tell him officially it was all over between us.

  Shortly before we were due to leave I met Ojo and told him about my grandfather’s illness and that I’d be away for a couple of weeks.

  ‘I’ll bring you back an abaia (a long Arab gown),’ I said with a giggle. ‘You’ll look good walking around Munster in one of those.’

  ‘After everyone’s been used to seeing me in jeans, sure,’ he said with equal humour. But I saw the tears welling up.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s only for a couple of weeks. Then I’ll be back with you again. I won’t be seeing Mikael, I can assure you of that. You know how I feel about you.’

  ‘I just don’t feel good about you going,’ he said. ‘It just seems so far away.’

  ‘But of course it’s not. It’s only a few hours. Across Germany to Turkey and then a short drive through the mountains to Kurdistan. I’ll call you when I get there.’

  It was on 5 June 2001, that my mother, my sister and I took off from Dusseldorf airport to fly to Instanbul. From there, we flew across southern Turkey to the ancient fortress city of Diyarbakir lying north of the mountain ranges separating Turkey from Iraqi Kurdistan. Everywhere I looked in this attractive city, sitting beside the upper reaches of the River Tigris I could see a mosque.

  ‘We’re now in Kurdistan,’ my mother told me.

  ‘How can we be?’ I asked. ‘We’re still in Turkey, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’re in Turkish Kurdistan. Our heritage spreads right through this region. The frontiers are drawn up by man. Our culture doesn’t recognise such things. Always remember that.’

  We remained for two nights in an apartment owned by my mother’s friend. She told me she liked to keep a low profile when she was in Turkey and wanted to avoid hotels, but she never explained why. On our last afternoon there she kept Bojeen and me waiting in a park while she went into a café to talk to a number of Turkish men. I could see them at the table talking animatedly but of course she didn’t tell me what it was all about.

  She woke my sister and me early the following morning, telling us a driver was outside ready to take us to the border, three hours away. Dust flew up behind us as we headed towards our birthplace, Iraqi Kurdistan. We passed through remote villages, heading towards the distant mountains. My mind was everywhere. I was thinking about Germany, Australia and our destination, my mother’s home town of Dohuk on the other side of that mountain range. To this day I don’t know what inspired me to do it but as we travelled, with my mother in the front of the car with the driver and Bojeen and me behind, I brought out my Australian passport and, using my sister’s pencil, wrote down all the details of the photo page on a piece of paper. Not just the passport number, date of issue and expiry, but all the security numbers running along the bottom. Then I tucked that piece of paper into the top of my bra.

  In years to come, in 2007, this whole region was to be a war zone, when Turkey launched a massive attack on Iraqi Kurds who were threatening Turkish territory, but now in 2001 the region was peaceful. A special taxi that carried people across ‘no man’s land’ on the frontier brought us to the Iraq border post, which comprised a cluster of buildings. When a guard approached us, my mother instructed him to tell someone inside that she had arrived. Shortly afterwards we were all being escorted into the building, where my mother was met by a large, moustachioed man in his 50s, dressed in a khaki uniform. He greeted her like a long-lost friend, wrapping his big arms around her and kissing her cheeks. I had the impression that he must have lived in the West at some time be cause no country-bound Kurd would greet a woman that way. How happy he was to see her again, he said in our Kurdish language. She explained that she was going home to see her father who was ill and then gave him my passport and hers, which also contained my sister’s name.

  When the documents were handed back, I went to take mine but my mother put it straight into her bag. It was the first time she had ever done this on our numerous holiday trips around Europe. When I gave her a questioning look she stared straight back at me, the look of defiance in her eyes worrying me.

  We picked up a taxi on the Iraqi side and drove the hour and a half to Dohuk. Why had my mother kept my passport? Did she think I was going to run away from her or something crazy like that? No chance of that—whichever way you looked as we headed towards Dohuk there were only mountains or desert. Why would I run away anyway when I was so anxious to see my grandfather before he died?

  The outskirts of the city were vaguely familiar to me, although I hadn’t been there for several years since my last holiday. There were still the same old beaten-up cars, the same boring clothing, the women in their headscarfs and long robes and the men in their baggy tracksuit-like pants. My mother did not seem to be interested in the surroundings. She had her head down as we wound through the narrow side streets, her hand pushed through her hair as though she were far away, thinking.

  We finally stopped outside a house that I remembered, a large building in the middle of town, very grey and square with a two-metre high brick fence around it, the entrance being a large solid metal door with a peacock emblem. My maternal grandfather’s house. The peacock was a symbol of royalty, which was fitting for the birthplace of my mother as she is a descendant of royalty in her tribe, the Sharafani. She was so proud of her heritage that at
the radio station in Sydney she would use that name when she introduced herself on air.

  I was expecting a sombre mood in the house, where four families, all related to my mother, lived, so I was surprised when the only sounds I heard were the laughter of children from the other side of the wall. We opened the gate and walked into the courtyard, but no-one ran to greet us. It was as though we weren’t expected. As it turned out, we weren’t.

  Then one of my little cousins, his hair red, saw us as we approached the door and ran inside shouting: ‘Aunty Baian is here! Aunty Baian is here!’ There was an outburst of shrieks. Women came to the door, arms wide to greet us. Followed by my grandfather, someone’s baby in his arms. He was the picture of health as he hurried to the door.

  Before I hugged him I turned quickly to my mother. ‘I thought you said he was very ill.’

  She didn’t reply and then they were all embracing me and calling my name. But my eyes went back to my 75-year-old grandfather as he clung with powerful arms to my mother. I was witnessing a lie.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?’ asked one of my aunties. ‘We would have prepared a sheep.’

  Another lie exposed. My mother had told me we were coming here so we could say goodbye to my grandfather and everyone was expecting us.

  ‘How are you, Granddad?’ I had finally found words through my increasing unease.

  ‘Fit as a youngster,’ he replied with a roar of laughter. ‘God has given me a good life and he hasn’t taken his eye off me yet!’

  We sat on cushions in a big circle in what I would call the welcoming room, a place set aside for visitors when both men and women of the house could sit in the same room. Later, the women would have to retire to their own room. Tea and pastries and some dips—homous, babaganou—were served but then my mother went out to the kitchen with her older and younger sisters and her sister-in-law. I could hear their voices but could not make out what they were saying. But I could guess what, or rather who, the topic was: me. My mother’s behaviour in recent weeks and particularly on this day had been of concern to me and perhaps now the explosion I feared was being suppressed was about to hit me. She had left her handbag in the room. I got up from the circle of children and adults and went over to it, pretending it was mine, and quickly removed my passport. I told everyone I was just popping out to the kitchen and on the way I slipped my passport into my own shoulder bag.

  Curiosity about the conversation that was taking place between the women in the kitchen driving me, I walked in on them and asked if there was somewhere I could freshen up. The conversation snapped shut, just like that. They stared at me. Then my mother said:

  ‘I wouldn’t bother about that. You’re going on to somewhere else.’

  ‘Where? Where am I going?’

  She didn’t answer but went to our shared luggage bag and started removing her clothes. My address book was in there with all the contact details for my friends in Germany and a few I was occasionally in touch with in Australia. Holding my address book must have triggered a chain reaction of thought for she quickly snatched up her handbag and saw that my passport was missing. She grabbed my shoulder bag and removed it. I tried to grab it back but I was too late.

  ‘Mum, what’s going on? What are you doing? Why are you separating our clothes? Why are you keeping my passport? Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me!’

  ‘You’re going to see your father,’ she said.

  A wave of relief swept over me. So that was what all the clothes thing was about. She was going to be staying here with her family and I would be staying with my father, now Baian’s estranged husband. But my passport and my address book…

  ‘Please give them back to me,’ I said. ‘I want to send postcards to my friends. There are some I might want to ring.’ I was, thinking of Ojo when I said that. I’d promised to call him as soon as I arrived in Kurdistan. But his number was in my address book and apart from needing it to call him, I didn’t want my mother snooping through my list of friends. I hadn’t written in his name in code or anything. She was bound to see it and although she wouldn’t know that he was the ‘black friend’ she had so venomously referred to, all she needed to do was call that number and she’d soon find out.

  ‘Please give me back my address book and passport,’ I implored her once again.

  Now she folded her arms and stared at me as everyone in the room watched me. ‘You’re not going to need your address book. You can forget about everybody who’s in it. And you’re not going to need your passport either. You’re going nowhere. You will now be staying with your father. This is now your home. You will stay here and you will be married here and you will bring up your children here.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was this my mother speaking to me? Was this another terrible dream, a nightmare like the one I had had with my father coming at me to cut off my fingers? My mouth and my throat were dry. I was being condemned to a life far from everyone I knew and loved. My mother, my very own mother, had tricked me. Betrayed me.

  And then, even as I stood there, I was stricken with a fear that I had never felt before. My mother’s words of moments ago rushed back at me. ‘You will stay here and you will be married here and you will bring up your children here.’

  Married here. Married here. That simple sentence and its implications terrorised me. I was not a virgin. No-one here knew it. Not even my mother. I wanted to scream it out. But I remembered what had happened to my cousin Etab, how she had been dragged off into the desert and killed. Who knew what would happen were I to cry out then in front of these relatives that I was not ‘pure’ in their eyes. Would they call for the men to carry me off and end my life, too?

  ‘Come on,’ said my mother. ‘It’s time for you to go to your father. There’s a car waiting.’

  But I was backing away from the front door, terror driving me towards the kitchen, as far away from this room as I could get. They came towards me, a group of women, hands reaching out for me, to grab me and pull me out of the house. I fell backwards and then I was in the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!’ I cried, but their eyes were on me, their hands were reaching out. My own hand brushed something. A knife. I snatched it up in my right hand and turned on them. They stopped dead in their tracks.

  And then, as their faces turned white with horror, I held out my left hand and plunged the blade right through my wrist and the blood spurted out at them.

  FIVE

  The hands that had been reaching for me to pull me into the street now held me as I dropped to my knees on the slate floor. My head was spinning. Someone found a towel and wrapped it around the wound. I saw the knife on the floor, smeared with blood.

  Now I was being guided to a room with a bed. The rag was removed and the wound was smeared with ointment. I had missed a vital vein, the blade striking bone and being deflected across the top of my wrist to come out the other side. Straight through.

  I wanted my mother to see my pain, feel my pain. Not just from the injury but my internal agony. She was among the group who stood around the bed looking down on me as the wound was wrapped in another piece of cloth, but she said nothing.

  ‘Let me see my grandfather,’ I said. He was already at the door, peering in.

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Grandfather,’ I implored, remembering that the eldest in the family had the final say. ‘They want to keep me here. They are not going to let me go back to Germany or home to Australia. Please help me. Please tell them they can’t do this. I’m almost 21. I’m a grown woman. I’m an Australian citizen. I’ve been tricked into coming here. My mother— ‘I turned my head towards her—‘told me you were sick, asking for me. And look at you. There’s nothing wrong with you. Doesn’t that tell you something?’

  He looked embarrassed, clearly unwilling to be drawn into this. Perhaps in his silence he was acknowledging the power my mother held in the family. A couple of hours earlier he had been playing with his young nie
ces and nephews and his great grandchildren and now he was being confronted with a Western girl who had stabbed herself in the arm and was crying out to be taken home.

  Tears poured down my face at his silence, for he knew he was clearly outnumbered. I had come all the way from Germany just to be with him in what I had been told was his hour of need, yet all he could do now was stand in silence when I needed him. Then I saw my little sister pushing her way through the women. She was crying too, confused by all the commotion, by my outburst.

  One of the women turned to my mother: ‘She can’t go when she’s like this. We should let her rest for a while.’

  An aunt sat in the room with me—a guard?—as the others left and I closed my eyes. I could feel the wound throbbing but it was nothing to the turmoil in my head. How could my mother have done this—lure me here on false pretences and then tell me that this country was to be my home for the rest of my life? While those thoughts sickened me, I wondered just how long the rest of my life would be. If they forced me into a marriage that really would be the end of me, if those honour-killing stories were true. Again, I thought of my cousin Etab, burned alive and shot. Was that to be my fate when any husband forced upon me found out that I was not a virgin? My mind went back to that ‘chicken and corn soup evening’ and I felt Mikael’s hand over my mouth as he clambered onto me, a naive woman who should have known what was happening—but didn’t until it was too late. Too late for ever.

  It must have been an hour before I felt strong enough to get up from the bed and make my way to the bathroom. My baby sister rushed towards me, wrapping her arms around my legs, too young to understand what was happening but knowing that something was terribly wrong.

  I threw water on my face, hoping it would wake me from a nightmare but when I opened my eyes I was still standing in the drab bathroom and my blood was seeping through the rag around my wrist.

  ‘This is not going to change anything.’