Betrayed Read online

  It was my mother’s voice. She was at the bathroom door. ‘Your position remains the same. You can threaten to throw yourself from the roof or under a car, but I will not change my mind.’

  This wasn’t my mother. What had happened to her? I had nothing to say. If plunging the knife into my arm could not persuade her to let me go home, words would fail miserably. By now it was late in the afternoon. My luggage had been repacked and was by the door. One of my aunties offered me some food. Now I turned on her, for I saw everyone in this room, except my little sister, as the enemy.

  ‘Why should I eat with any of you? Don’t any of you realise what you are doing? You are holding me as a prisoner and that’s against the law.’

  They didn’t know what I was talking about. I swung around to my mother. I would embarrass her in front of this family of hers.

  ‘Not only have you betrayed me, you also betrayed my dad. Don’t think that I didn’t know you were seeing other men behind his back in Australia. You’re a wicked woman and these relatives of yours should know about it.’

  Their eyes darted from me to her. If looks could kill I would have dropped dead right then. It was obvious that none of them believed me, that this was an outpouring of rage from a daughter who could not be controlled. God only knows what she had told them, her sisters, about me as I lay in that bedroom.

  ‘Let’s go,’ one of them said now. ‘It will be better if you leave before darkness comes.’

  A male cousin, who had been waiting outside with the car and who, like my grandfather had not wanted to interfere, picked up my luggage and led me out. I begged my mother to let me take my sister Bojeen with me, just for an hour, and I would send her back. Amazingly, she agreed.

  Since my parents had fled from my father’s family home in Mosul 21 years earlier when he had learned our names were on an execution list, my father’s family had moved to Dohuk. So now my father was also living in Baian’s home town, following his arrival in Kurdistan with the body of his brother who had been killed in the autobahn accident. The split with my mother and the fact that his own children had been living with her in Germany had left him with only loneliness in Australia, so when he brought his brother’s body to Kurdistan he decided to stay, living with his grief-stricken mother. Our former home in Sydney’s west had been sold and the money had been transferred to Baian’s bank in Germany before my parents had agreed to go their separate ways. He was to learn later what a mistake that had been.

  It was just a 10-minute drive to my father’s house but I took no notice of the route. I clutched six-year-old Bojeen’s hand as the tears ran down my face. She was frightened.

  ‘What’s happening? Why are you crying? Why were you and Mummy shouting?’

  She fired her little girl’s questions at me but I had no easy answers that would console her. I tried to explain that I would be staying with our father while she enjoyed the two-week holiday with our mother. But I assured her, and I had no doubt about this, that I would be seeing a lot of her in coming days.

  We pulled up outside a one-storey house with a two-metre high fence around it, just like the home of my mother’s family and typical of so many of the houses in Dohuk. The leaves of a fig tree hung over into the street. I was filled with trepidation. I hadn’t seen my father since 1998—three years earlier, when we had moved to Germany. Then the big iron gate swung open to the toot of our car and there he was, my father Khalid with his familiar bushy, dark eyebrows. His once-iron-grey hair was heading towards white and it was a little thinner in front, but nothing else about him seemed to have changed at all. At least not in appearance. Oh, how appearances could deceive.

  ‘Welcome home, my first child,’ he said in the traditional greeting as he embraced me. He did not see the makeshift bandage around my wrist because I was wearing long sleeves. He had obviously been expecting me but I was to find out that there was no phone in the house so there would have been no opportunity for my mother to call him to tell him that I had stabbed myself. He smothered Bojeen in his arms while the cousin who had brought us watched without a smile. I was expecting him to say something about my injured arm, but he remained silent, and perhaps they hadn’t told him about the incident.

  ‘Have you brought enough clothes?’ Khalid asked as he ushered me and Bojeen inside. ‘I don’t know what your mother has said, but you’ll be staying here for a while and then, when I’ve saved enough money, we’ll be going back to Australia.’

  My heart leaped. ‘When? When will that be?’

  ‘I can’t say just yet. Just trust me.’

  It was then that I noticed his mother, my grandmother, Aisha, stepping towards us. Age was written in wrinkles across her face, although she was still only in her early 60s. You could see her Arab background in her charcoal hair and crossed eyebrows. Her palid skin gave the appearance of having never received the tiniest ray of sunlight. She shuffled towards me, grim-faced and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, more out of formality than affection, it seemed. But then, she had never liked me or my brother because we were our mother’s children and she hated Baian. Even worse, she detested my sister because she had my mother’s features. I had always thought it sad, hearing my mother talking about her husband’s mother over the years as she reflected on the hatred that Aisha held for her. I could not understand why Baian had given her son a child—me—at the earliest opportunity after her marriage to him, yet my birth had failed to win the approval, not to mention love, of Aisha.

  She was dressed in black, still grieving over the death of her younger son in the autobahn accident. But her sullen expression was how I always remembered her from our earlier visits to Kurdistan. Seeing her now added to my depression. It was just her and my father living in this house and I wondered how I would be able to face the days, weeks—not months, surely not, dear God—ahead. I wondered what Ojo would be thinking if he could see me now, preparing to settle in with this surly woman and my father when just a few days earlier I had set out happily from Germany, telling him I would call, that I would miss him, and that I’d be back in a couple of weeks. Even as they started showing me around the house, I recalled reservations Ojo had about me going to Kurdistan and unfairly felt a flash of anger. If he had believed something was wrong, why didn’t he try to stop me? Why didn’t he say something like: ‘If you go, I won’t be here for you when you come back.’ Such were the thoughts that struck me in those first minutes of being in my surly grandmother’s company but they were panic thoughts as I sought to cast blame on anyone I could think of for my predicament.

  My father talked playfully with Bojeen for a while, gave her a cold drink and then it was time for her to be taken back to the other house. I held her tight and the tears flowed down both our faces—hers because she was still confused and scared by all that had happened in the past hours; mine because I had no idea when I would see her again.

  The room they gave me was filled with bedroom furniture that my parents had when they were living in Mosul. The bed, the dressing table with the large round mirror above, the closet with the lace curtain across the front, had all belonged to them.

  The rest of the house comprised a men’s room, where there was a TV—the house had four TVs in fact, all connected to very parochial local channels—and a sofa and many cushions; a women’s room which was stark with a few mats and cushions scattered around; my grandmother’s room; and finally my father’s room. There was a kitchen and a bathroom where the ‘shower’ consisted of a stool on which the user sat and poured water over himself or herself with a plastic saucepan-like ladle. There was no window as such in my room, although there was a narrow glass opening on the top of one wall dividing my room from a small storage room and the kitchen beyond. All the main windows of the house were protected by vertical iron bars.

  Depression swept over me and I asked to be excused for the night, even though it was still early evening. My arm hurt. My head ached. Some holiday this had turned out to be, I told myself, trying to cheer myself u
p with black humour but it didn’t work. Finally I dropped off to sleep and did not wake until noon the following day. My grandmother and father offered me lunch of biryani—rice with nuts and currants—along with lamb stew and platefuls of meat; an important part of Kurdish culture. There was also the traditional round, flat, Middle Eastern bread; and a salad of cucumbers and onions mixed with lemon juice. Then I returned to my room and lay on the bed, my thoughts taking me back to Australia, to Germany, to the faces of my friends. My friends! My mother had even taken my contact book. I felt totally isolated and remembered little of that day until darkness came and sleep carried me away.

  The following day my mother’s sisters and numerous cousins stopped by to say hello and drop off some clothes I had left behind. I felt I had to put on the appearance of being in a happier mood and in fact I had hope in my heart that they had come to pick me up. But that was not to be. They would have known how miserable I was from my antics of two days earlier, but they said nothing about it. They didn’t even ask how my arm was, although the bandage around it was obvious to them. My face probably revealed how heavy my heart was. How could anyone expect me to be happy living in a shoebox of a house with my father who now seemed strangely different—and I was soon to find out why—along with a grandmother who clearly hated me, and a cluster of TVs.

  ‘I think I might go outside for a while,’ I told them.

  Heads shook. ‘You can’t go out,’ one of my aunties said. ‘The boys from next door are on their roof. They’ll be able to look down and see you.’

  ‘What do you mean, they’ll be able to see me? I’m not going out naked, you know.’

  My words shocked them. In time I found out why. Any unmarried woman—any teenager beyond puberty, in fact—who shows her face to a man when she is not accompanied by a married person is considered a whore. There would be no strolls down to the shops on my own for me. Gracious, I couldn’t even go out into the garden if those boys next door were out and about. I really was a prisoner of this cloistered culture and as time went by I was to find out just how torturous this life was for a girl who had grown up under the big blue skies of Australia.

  On the fourth day I asked my visiting aunties if I could go and visit my sister, or whether she could come to see me. What they said left me reeling.

  ‘You can’t see her. Bojeen and your mother left today.’

  ‘Left? Left for where?’

  ‘They’ve gone home. Back to Germany.’

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The betrayal was complete. I realised now that my mother had planned this all along. This was the real explosion, erupting right now with those words: ‘They’ve gone home.’

  It never was to be a holiday. It was a trip to dump me in northern Iraq, where the rebellion I had shown over settling down with a Kurdish man in Germany would be put down. This mother of mine, so fanatical about her people, had been determined that I would become one of them and my denial of Mikael had clearly angered her. I would become a good Muslim girl. A marriage would be arranged if I did not find a husband for myself.

  But my mother’s action was a double betrayal, although she was not to know that.

  For she had placed me under a death sentence. Any future husband would discover I was not a virgin and I had little doubt that my cries of ‘I’m an Aussie! We are free people!’ would be no defence against the fatal punishment that would be handed down to me.

  If I had any hope that there might be someone in the family who I could come to trust and reveal my secret, that was soon destroyed. Without so much as a ‘by your leave’ my grandmother and three of my aunties, my father’s sisters, came into my bedroom one afternoon while I was trying to sleep away my misery and threw back the lace curtain, beyond which my clothes were hanging. They began taking my low-cut tops off hangers and raising them aloft as they tutted at the ‘disgraceful’ styles. There was worse to come. They pulled back a small drawer and brought out my lacy bras and my brief underwear.

  ‘Just look at this!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘These are the garments of a slut.’ Their mocking laughter filled the room.

  They turned to me. ‘These will be destroyed. You will be given more appropriate clothing.’

  As they pulled more of my clothes out my grandmother, who had slipped away, returned with a pair of scissors and I watched in disbelief as she began cutting everything to ribbons. As the pieces fell to the floor and one of my aunties kicked them towards the door I felt too numb to react.

  ‘And look at these,’ said an aunt, holding up a pair of my black pants. ‘They are so ridiculously tight I might have trouble fitting just one leg into them!’

  ‘Disgraceful. Is this what she wears all the time?’

  ‘What about this brassiere. Just look at how low cut it is.’ ‘

  If she wore that with this top, people would see everything.’ ‘

  She’s a disgrace. We’ll have to change her attitude.’

  I could take the insults no longer. I jumped up from the bed. ‘

  Leave my things alone,’ I cried. ‘You have no right. Have you no respect for other people’s property?’

  ‘Not this stuff. Is this what you’ve been wearing?’

  ‘All of you can talk. Just look at the drabby old things you’ve got on. And when did you last wash it? It’s covered in dust.’

  My father stepped into the room. Thank God. He would take my side now because he knew how much I loved shopping for nice things when we were living in Sydney. But he was looking at me darkly.

  ‘Don’t answer back. Don’t turn into your mother.’

  His words frightened me. Not just the fact that he was supporting these crones who were tearing my clothes to pieces but because, for the first time, he was exposing his true feelings about my mother. They had decided to go their separate ways, that was true, but I had never heard him criticise her in that way.

  Even as he stood in the doorway witnessing the desecration of my property I saw one of my aunties pull a German teenage girls’ magazine from my bag. It had photographs of young women of my age modelling the latest fashions. It was flung out through the door, just missing my father. Amazingly, though, they did not touch my Walkman and a couple of my CDs featuring my favourite singer, Tracy Chapman, whose music had been a part of my life since I was eight. In the days to come, her songs were to help me keep my sanity.

  It was obvious my father had become very much a part of his family—the way he sided with my aunties against me was evidence of that—but there was something else about him that was staring me in the face, yet it hadn’t sunk in. Then as the end of that first depressing week approached he came into my room early in the morning and woke me.

  ‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ he asked as I wiped the sleep from my eyes.

  ‘Pray? We never prayed in Australia.’

  ‘We’re not in Australia. I thought you might have realised that by now.’

  ‘Oh, I realise that all right.’

  ‘And don’t answer back. You’re always answering back. I’ve asked you a question. You should now start praying like every true Muslim.’ He left, leaving me to lie there, staring at the ceiling.

  Of course, that was it. The hard-drinking, chain-smoking father I’d known in Sydney had been ‘converted’ back to his true faith. I don’t know whether he prayed five times a day when he was brought up here in Kurdistan and was living in the mountains as a freedom fighter before I was born because the subject never arose as I was growing up in Australia. But the strange difference I had noticed in my father when I first arrived had suddenly become obvious to me. He had stopped drinking, although he was still smoking. And he was often absent from the main living room, retiring, I now realised, to his own bedroom to pray. Well, I had never been brought up to pray five times a day and I certainly had no intention to start now. They wouldn’t force their religion onto me. No-one had the right to do that.

  Later that day, with several of my aunties present, he once again raised
the topic of my having to pray, telling me that there was only one God and that I should live a life of purety and forsake all the wickedness that had previously surrounded me. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this because my father had loved his lifestyle in Australia. I wondered how a man could change so quickly. It was as though he had been struck by a blinding light and his eyes had been opened to a different world. I later learned the reason for his change—the death of his brother. He had suddenly been confronted by his own mortality. He had seen plenty of death in his younger days as he had fought for Kurdistan’s freedom, but with his arrival in Australia with us, his young family, he had left it all behind. His brother’s death, however, had hit him hard. Returning to Kurdistan with the body and participating in the funeral and the accompanying prayers had opened the door again to his devotion to God.

  Now he was trying to convert me. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. I was determined to get out of this place as soon as possible. Not only because of the religious pressures that my father and his female relatives were putting on me, but principally because of the terrible secret of my lost virginity. If those women ever found out about ‘my condition’ I had no doubt they would hurl me out into the street, while the men in the family would ensure that I ‘disappeared’ before the shame I had brought to their doorstep spread around the neighbourhood and the city.

  ‘You are letting your father down with your attitude,’ my grandmother told me one morning as I washed the breakfast plates in the kitchen. This was a task I didn’t mind. It gave me something to do.

  ‘What attitude?’ I asked. ‘You’re the one with attitude. You’ve ripped up my clothes and you’ve made it perfectly clear that you hate the sight of me. Well, if you hate me so much, why don’t you let me go home?’

  Her lips tightened and she turned and shuffled out into the living room. I heard her talking to my father, her only remaining son.

  Then I felt his presence behind me—and the next moment my hair was in his fist, my head was yanked back, I was spun around and he slapped me hard across the face.