Betrayed Page 7

  ‘Don’t ever answer back to your grandmother again,’ he snapped. ‘You will show her respect.’

  ‘She’s just like her mother,’ said my grandmother, standing behind him. ‘She will harm you unless you control her.’

  I was too shocked for tears. My face was burning from the blow. My voice trembled as I looked into his dark eyes.

  ‘You are not the father I knew. My father would never strike me. My father was a good man. You are the devil.’

  I braced myself for another fierce slap, but it didn’t come. He turned and walked away, his mother shuffling behind him.

  My father had seven sisters. One was in Germany, another was in Baghdad and the third was in the States. The remaining four were here in Dohuk. Unless I could escape, I feared that those women, under my grandmother’s archaic governance, would be the death of me.

  SIX

  I slipped into a boring routine, sleeping at every opportunity, escaping from my real, depressing world into a happier world of dreams. I saw myself in the fun times; going out with friends and hearing their laughter. I would not even step from my bedroom until midday when I would eat a little lunch, before returning to my bed. I had not been outdoors since I arrived. They were afraid of me being seen by the boys next door and as for strolling down the street just to stretch my legs, that was entirely out of the question.

  I begged my father to let me go shopping, even if it was just for household things but he said it was impossible for me to go alone. When I asked him to come with me he said a father and daughter never went shopping together.

  ‘But don’t you even remember how we used to do that in Australia?’

  He dismissed the memory, declaring: ‘And what a waste of time that was.’

  ‘Are you saying that our life in Sydney was one big lie? That you hated it all there? Is this why my mother decided to run away to Germany from you and why you’ve now split up?’

  This was a severe ‘answer back’. He slapped me across the face again and told me not to be so insolent. I was approaching my 21st birthday, virtually a legal adult and long past being a minor. But those were Western ideals. Nothing like that worked here. I was my father’s daughter and I was in his house and if he wanted to slap me he considered that his right.

  ‘Forget about Australia,’ he said. ‘You aren’t going back.’

  ‘How strange that you should have told me when I first came here to this house that it would be only for a while and then you and I would be returning to Sydney. My father has not only turned into a bully, he’s also a liar, a liar to his own daughter.’

  He struck me again

  ‘You can go on hitting me, Dad,’ I said. ‘You won’t change my attitude to anything. You raised me as an Aussie kid and a Western woman and now, in the bat of an eyelid, you are trying to make me like you.’

  ‘Don’t continue with this,’ he said and walked away.

  My defiance angered his mother even more. While my father’s sullen face turned to smiles whenever his sisters called by, his mother’s evil glances towards me were constant. ‘You’re behaving like a devil,’ she told me one day when I answered her back. ‘You are just like your mother.’

  ‘No,’ I retorted. ‘I am not just like my mother. I haven’t betrayed anyone, but I’ve seen how it’s done.’

  ‘This obstinate behaviour of yours will not be allowed to continue,’ she said, her voice harsh. ‘You will begin to say your daily prayers and you will respect your God.’

  ‘If it means finding someone to respect I will turn to God, because I can’t find any respect for you,’ I told her. She repeated my words to my father. He came at me in a rage and once again I felt his hand slash across my face.

  My bedroom became my only escape. A prison within a prison. My pillow was wet with my tears. My injured arm was still painful to the touch although the wound was closing with daily doses of ointment that one of my aunties brought around.

  The only relief through my despair was the thought that my estranged parents had not lined me up for marriage with anyone—yet. That was obviously the plan, for they had both threatened me with it. But I was determined I would not be forced into anything. Could I get out of this terrible place—such a beautiful country yet such a miserable existence for me within it—before I was dragged into a marriage that would almost certainly end, not in immediate divorce, but in my death? My thoughts went daily to Ojo back in Germany. I wondered what he must be thinking. The days had gone by and there had been no contact from me. Apart from there being no phone in the house I couldn’t even remember his phone number—it was in my contact book. I had no access to the internet to send him an email. There was an internet café in the town, I later learned, but it was full of men and I would never be able to go in there on my own.

  I considered making a break for it. Pleading with someone to take me to the border where I could beg lifts to Ankara or Instanbul in Turkey or Tehran in Iran and where I’d be able to reach an Australian embassy. What fanciful thinking that was. I didn’t even have a passport. And who was going to say, ‘Oh hello, young lady, you who are trying to tell me you are from Sydney and asking for a lift to the border. Yes, of course I’ll take you. Doesn’t matter if your father or his cousins find out and kill me. I’ll take you. No, it doesn’t matter that you don’t have any money. I’ll take you to the border for nothing.’

  Some hope. Yes, I had my passport details scribbled on a piece of paper and a scrawled note stating when I had arrived in Kurdistan but that was no ticket to freedom. Whichever way I looked, there was no way out. No contact with the outside world. Outside world? I didn’t even have any contact with the people in the street.

  What inspired me to write those passport details on a slip of paper? Perhaps I had subconsciously recalled my father’s story from years before of how he had written his personal details on a piece of paper and carried it in his shoe—a practice that had resulted in us fleeing from Kurdistan in the first place.

  The weeks rolled by and more grim news came from the lips of my father.

  ‘Do you know what that mother of yours, has done?’ He asked. How I could hear my hated grandmother in that tone of voice. ‘Not only has she filed for divorce, she has given all the money from the sale of our house in Sydney to her brothers, so they can buy land here in Kurdistan. That money was to be for you and your brother, for your education. It was to help your brother in Germany and it was to see you through university and beyond, here.’

  The only words that really sank in at that moment were ‘university and beyond, here.’ Again, an assumption that my future lay in Kurdistan.

  My father was speaking again. ‘This is the pay-off for her brothers to accept our divorce. The block of land will be divided into three and they will be building their houses on it. And from there they can sit back and laugh at me.’

  He explained that no-one in Kurdistan could seek a divorce unless the family approved for there was great shame in a couple separating. If adultery by the wife was concerned it could be quickly settled with a bullet in her head and if it was adultery by the husband and he wanted to start a new life with another woman, the deserted wife’s family would have to receive compensation. That way, any shame would be ‘bought off’. But it was my mother who had filed for divorce from far away. If she had tried it in Kurdistan, well, she was smart enough not to even mention it in Dohuk.

  ‘That’s your mother for you,’ my father continued. ‘She had this planned all along.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and that’s not all she had planned. She very carefully schemed for me to be dumped on you. If you are so much against her now, perhaps you will see my side of things.’

  ‘Her position and your position in my life are separate. The only link is that you are her daughter.’

  ‘And I’m your daughter, too.’

  But my argument was in vain. I had sensed my grandmother’s venom in his words. She was obviously a great influence over him and she had made it very clea
r so many times how much she despised my mother. People had remarked to me in the past that I had my mother’s walk, I was tall like her and I had her laugh, although I didn’t have her looks. That didn’t make any difference to my paternal grandmother. I was Baian’s off spring and that was enough.

  I had thought that if I could show to my aunties photos of me in Sydney and Germany they would understand something of the life they were pulling me away from and that Kurdistan was not the place for me to be. Such thoughts evaporated, though, as I realised that I really had no hope of influencing people who had never had a taste of the West, but I also remembered that my mother had not only stolen my passport and contact book but all my personal photos that I had planned to show to my relatives during my brief ‘holiday’ among them.

  My father’s sisters were still entering my room and looking through my belongings. I was being driven to despair by their rudeness and in a fit of anger I railed on my father. ‘Please tell your fat ugly sisters to stop invading my privacy.’

  I braced myself for another blow, but this time it didn’t come. He just walked away to his room to say his prayers.

  I was putting on weight. The food my grandmother and sometimes her daughters prepared was oily, heavy, lots of meat and bread. And I was getting no exercise, apart from walking from my room to the reception room, to the bathroom and back again, to sleep. Once or twice, when the coast was clear, I was allowed to step out into the garden, where there was a small lawn and the fig tree that I had first noticed when I arrived, but if any of the young men next door were sitting on their roof, which they often did, I had to go back inside immediately. Even if I covered my hair and wore a long neck-to-ankle dress, my grandmother and my aunties considered I would be flaunting myself.

  One grand and glorious day, one of my aunties said they were taking me into town to do some shopping. I couldn’t believe my ears. I was going to go shopping! Such an everyday event in Australia, but for me now it was a special treat. I put on another long gown, tucked my long dark hair under a scarf and climbed into one of two taxis with a couple of my aunts and their daughters. The town was bustling, but I saw mostly men. The narrow, crowded streets of the town twisted and turned in all directions, the roads pitted with potholes, the kerbsides shattered. Some places looked like they had been bombed, although they hadn’t been. It was simply neglect. I saw mostly men. I couldn’t help noticing when we left the taxi the way they stared at me, undressing me with their eyes, cigarettes hanging from their lips. I was soon to experience my first case of sexual harassment—as we moved though one of the narrow streets, filled with the redolence of perfumes and spices and alive with the blaring of car horns, I felt fingers pinch my bottom. I turned angrily, but it was impossible to identify the culprit in the crowd. I cried out to one of my cousins, when I felt the ‘nip’ but she urged me to lower my voice and not make a fuss.

  ‘Just pretend nothing happened,’ she said.

  What women I did see were in three classes—Muslims like my aunties, clothed from head to toe; Assyrians who were Catholics and not expected to wear the hijab, the headscarf; and finally the women who, while single and still virgins, wore Western-style clothes. Even those were in groups of two or three. No woman was alone.

  ‘Those,’ said my aunt ‘are the sluts of our city. We are going to make certain you never end up looking like them.’

  ‘What do you mean “looking like them”?’ I asked. ‘That’s what I’ve always looked like. Dear God, they’re not even wearing makeup, they’re not wearing high heels, they’re just wearing knee-length skirts. And you’re calling them sluts. Let me dress like I used to in Sydney and I’ll give you “slut”.’

  Another angry outburst that shocked them. But I had to fight this. In fact, I wasn’t fighting out of defiance. It was a natural reaction, a defence of me!

  ‘Do you know what my father—your dear, devoutly religious brother—did in Australia? He let me wear a bikini! Do you know what a bikini is? It shows my legs—all of my legs!—it shows my bare stomach and it shows my cleavage right down to my nipples!’

  We began shopping in a fabric store, bursting with fabulous silks of every colour under the rainbow. I felt like I was stepping through a Bollywood movie, such was the array of brilliant cloths. Among the items we bought, on instructions from my father, were more long dresses for me. In the house I was allowed to wear long pants but because I was putting on weight, my father told me that he would not allow the shape of my behind to show, so he now wanted me to wear a dress over the top of my pants. This was the father who had allowed me to wear skimpy swimming costumes in Australia. I suspected, again, that his mother was the cause of these strict house rules but then, he had changed so much that perhaps this was his idea anyway.

  How curious, I had begun to so often think, that mothers were so keen for their sons to marry, yet when they did there was a resentment towards the new wife because she was taking the son away. I certainly suspected that was the case with my father and his mother. And those poor girls who were married off may have hoped that they were going to have a life of freedom and love and wealth, but it lasts just a few days. At least, that is the case with 85 per cent of them: a deflowering on the wedding night and then it’s off to the husband’s family home and straight into a life of slavery, doing the cooking, the cleaning and caring for the husband’s parents.

  Escape was constantly on my mind. Getting across the frontier into either Turkey or Iran—the closest borders—were out of the question without a passport and, I decided after thinking about it more carefully, I would be risking my life to try anything like that alone, even if I did have a passport. No, the only obvious way out of there was to try to reach Baghdad, where I could tell the Australian Embassy about my plight. They would be under an obligation to help once I requested assistance. I knew that travelling there on my own would be impossible. For a start, I didn’t even have any money, to say nothing of the difficulties of a woman travelling on her own unless she was old. Then a glimmer of hope arose.

  One of my father’s sisters, Hadar, who lived in Baghdad, came to Dohuk for a visit with her tall, handsome husband Abdullah who worked as a driver for the UN World Food Programme. A part-time teacher, Hadar was the only one of Khalid’s sisters to whom I took a liking. She was polite to me and I suspected, coming as she did from a big city where she was used to seeing foreign women, she realised how trapped I felt. She would be unlikely, I rightly believed as it transpired, to raise the matter with my father. I could not tell her my secret, either. In this dangerous land, that secret really would remain with me.

  What I was correct in assessing about Hadar was that she saw my misery and felt for me. She suggested to her brother, my father, that I travel back to Baghdad with her and her husband for a short break of a week or so. To my astonishment, he agreed. I realised that he knew Hadar could not afford to let him down in any way. Before we left, the ground rules were laid down. As we would be travelling south out of Kurdistan and into Iraqi territory, where Arabic was spoken, I had to ensure I did not speak in public. Although I did not speak much Arabic in any case, any attempt would reveal my Kurdish accent, mixed perhaps with a slight Aussie twang, although no-one would really know what that was! What anyone overhearing me might assume, however, was that I was a spy, or certainly that there was something curious about me. There were big rewards on offer for the capture of spies acting against Saddam Hussein’s regime. I looked Arabic, yet I had a ‘strange’ accent, it might be said, and the authorities would be upon me in a flash. That might be a good thing, I thought, because I would be able to explain that I was an Australian woman. On the other hand, that could make it even worse, for what was an Australian doing speaking Kurdish? And where, they would ask, were my documents, my passport, to prove who I was? How suspicious it would look when I told them that I didn’t have a passport. They would ask for a home address and find out I was living with a father for whom there had been an execution warrant years before, a man who
was an enemy of Iraq. Now they had his daughter, who with her father, had fled the region, even though I was just a child of two. They could use my capture to get to my father. Even though he had turned so violently against me, I could not allow that to happen.

  Such thoughts raced through my mind as we made preparations to travel to Baghdad. I would have to remain as quiet as a mouse—unless I could somehow reach someone at the Australian Embassy.

  It was a hot summer day when we set off for the six-hour drive to Baghdad. I remained in the car when we stopped for fuel on the Arabic, Iraqi, side of the border. I didn’t even dare go to the toilet. I managed to avoid that until we at last reached the upper-class Monsour district of Baghdad, where Hadar and her family lived in a neat, white-painted house, again surrounded by a security wall.

  They settled me in to my room before I took myself off to the bathroom for a shower. As was the custom, I undressed in the bathroom—rather than throwing a towel around myself as I had always done in Australia and Germany—and let the water run down over my body. It was a proper shower, not like the plastic saucepan I had been using in Dohuk. I slipped back into a long kaftan and walked down the passageway to drop the damp towel in a laundry room. Suddenly I was aware of a movement behind me and then I felt hands reach around and brush against my breasts. I spun around. Abdullah was standing there, grinning.

  ‘Just checking if you enjoyed your shower,’ he said. ‘Did you rub yourself all over, like this’—and he then ran his hands up and down his own chest, around his legs and his crotch. I stared at him in horror. I wanted to scream out but somehow I retained my silence. The last thing I needed to do was bring Hadar running and cause conflict between her and her husband. No doubt she would have heard claims that I was a ‘troublemaker’ from that terrible mother of hers in Dohuk and my claims of assault—which Abdullah would undoubtedly deny—would turn her, my only friend, right against me. So I kept my mouth shut. I brushed past him, trying to convince myself that perhaps it had started out as a joke with him and he had gone a little further than he intended. In any case, I didn’t want to create a barrier between him and me. He had a car, he could drive me around Baghdad and perhaps he could get me close enough to the Australian Embassy for me to run out and ask for help. Wild thoughts, but I was desperate.