The Beekeeper

by Dunya Mikhail

  “After another two days of walking we came upon a farm with cucumbers and tomatoes, which seemed like a luxury, so we rested there for a little while. We heard rumors that Sinjar was now secure, that Daesh had been defeated, so some families in our convoy decided to turn around and go home, but I was among those who decided not to return. After hours of walking we reached the Karsi region, an area known for its tobacco farming, which was the source of its people’s income: it was the reaping season but this year the fields had been left to rot. The familiar sight of goats and small farms in the mountains was calming, but it was the calm before the storm because we later heard that those who had tried to go home were captured by Daesh after the withdrawal of Peshmerga forces. My mother started pounding on her heart, which had not yet fully healed from the operation, because my sister, my brother, my cousins, and all of their families were among those who had gone back and fallen into the trap. The worst thing I heard was that Daesh had separated the elderly from everyone else and had buried them all alive in a large pit; the little children who refused to be separated from their families were also buried along with them. The Daeshis told the girls that they were taking the elderly folk to a cooler place because it was so hot. I don’t understand how we were able to keep moving in such a state of sorrow — our steps weighed down and our cheeks wet with tears. We managed to reach the Syrian border on a road that was being protected by the People’s Defense Brigades. To tell you the truth, it was an unusual protection force, as it was mostly made up of women. Throughout that harsh and difficult journey we’d hoped an American or European plane would come to airlift us all to safety, but that never happened. Our convoy had about three hundred and fifty people, including women on the verge of giving birth, disabled people who were barely able to walk, and children who were crying from fear of the unknown. We had lost our sense of humanity but the members of these brigades restored this feeling to us. Their assistance wasn’t limited to water, food, and medical attention. They also carried the disabled and the exhausted on their backs. They delivered us to camps in the Zakho region, where they asked us to choose between going to Turkey or remaining in Iraq. Most of us decided to stay in Iraq. We reached Dohuk Province because someone named Shammo al-Howayri had volunteered to host us (more than one hundred people) in a large building next to his house. The building was empty but because of the crisis he furnished it with cots and fans. He brought cow’s milk for the children and food from his farm. I’m sorry I can’t do more, he said, as he fed everyone. There was no toilet in that building so he invited everyone to use the washroom in his own home. Just imagine, all those people using his bathroom and washing their clothes in his machine.

  “Eight months later I was able to rent my own place, but life had lost its flavor. There was a bitterness in my mouth that not even the taste of honey could get rid of. I’m still waiting to hear from my sister so I can rescue her as well. Nevertheless, every day that I save a captive woman I save her, too; every day I greet a survivor I welcome her home, too.”

  “My brother-in-law’s daughter was kidnapped seven years ago, before the age of Daesh,” I said. “She was coming home from the market in Baghdad with her mother when she was assaulted by masked men who forced her into their car, leaving her mother’s hand still reaching for her. The family had been making preparations to leave Iraq because of the endless violence, but after the kidnapping they decided to stay in the country until they managed to find her. They still haven’t lost hope.”

  “Hope is our daily bread.”

  “I must apologize. I have to go now. Can I call you again sometime?”

  “Of course. Call anytime.”

  Our girls, our girls, confined in chains, dragging the world along behind them.

  Some of them fall to the ground in the water in the dirt in the air on the ground,

  leaving the world without meaning, like a clock with only a long hand.

  Who’s left in the village?

  In the Sabaya Market

  When Abdullah told me that he was at the sabaya market last night, I didn’t understand what he meant exactly. I wondered if he had really gone there, until he sent me some photos.

  “This is a contract from a guy in Daesh advertising a ‘girl’ for sale in what they call the ‘sabaya market,’” he said. “It opens every day at specific times on Telegram, an encrypted messenger. Sometimes a family will find pictures of their daughter on there. Just imagine how that would feel. There might be an announcement for a Quran recitation competition, for example, in which the prize is a young girl. I visit the market once in a while on the chance that I’ll recognize somebody.”

  Abdullah fell silent for a moment. I wondered if he was hoping to find his sister in there?

  Then he added, “Just today I was texting with someone from Daesh about the market, and he sent me this photo. He asked for ten thousand dollars.”

  “I didn’t know you were directly in contact with Daeshi.”

  “I’m not exactly. I’m in touch with the middlemen who buy women from Daesh — not with the intention of marrying them, but to sell them back to their families at inflated prices. Those dealers only pretend to buy the sabaya for themselves. The truth is that they secretly sell them to us. Real Daeshis wouldn’t allow those girls to be sold outside the country. Anyway, it’s less risky for us this way, even if it costs more.”

  “So who pays for it?”

  “We work together to raise the money. The immediate family, relatives, and friends all come together — everyone has a part to play, and needs the others to do the same. You won’t find a single family here who hasn’t had someone disappear. Everybody’s just watching and waiting. Our mountain has melted from the tears and pleas of the families.”

  “The woman in this photo is wearing modern clothing, not Daesh’s Islamic dress,” I said.

  “Daesh only forces women to wear the hijab when they’re outside the house or when an unrelated man comes to visit. But they dress them up in modern clothes, as you can see here, when they’re put up for sale or when they’re forced into sex. One merchant went into the market and announced that he wanted to see some pictures of girls, and he received dozens of photos of Yazidis. Each woman was posing in front of the camera with a sad expression on her face. The captions underneath read ‘Girl #1,’ ‘Girl #2,’ and so on. There’s another problem with the clothes, too. Daesh keeps the women and children in the same clothes for the entire duration of their captivity, so that sometimes, if they do make it home, they’re still wearing the clothes they had on when they were first kidnapped. Just imagine wearing the same clothes for a whole year, without even having pajamas to change into. A while back, an old woman who escaped all by herself returned to our town, but her entire family had disappeared except for one of her sons. I heard from a relative of mine who went to visit her that apparently she was wearing a dress made out of couch upholstery. And when she was asked about it, the woman explained that she’d worn the same dress the whole time she’d been with Daesh, for more than a year. In fact it was the only thing she wore other than a black hijab that she had to put on whenever a visitor came into her room. She had once been a seamstress — she had other clothes, extra fabric, and a sewing machine — but then she lost everything. She hadn’t been able to bring so much as a single needle with her when she was taken. Now that she was back, she couldn’t wait any longer. As soon as her son was able to get her a sewing kit she cut a piece of fabric out of the couch and turned it into a new dress. She didn’t even wait for the proper fabric to arrive!”

  “My God. What about the food? What do Daesh men eat? What about the captives? They have to do all the cooking, right?” I asked.

  “According to the accounts of survivors, the Daesh eat rice and soup and meat, while the women eat only rice. Rice every day! The children aren’t allowed to eat anything but rice. They’re not even given milk, so the captive women grind up the rice and fe
ed it to the children — even those who are still breastfeeding. The strange thing is that a Daeshi believes that any woman he ‘buys’ actually becomes his wife: a woman who will cook for him and satisfy his sexual needs, both before and after prayer.”

  “I wonder if the captives who escaped are disgusted by rice now.”

  “I’d think so. There’s an old Yazidi joke about a man who eats eggplant every day — we eat a lot of eggplant, you know. One day his doctor prescribes him some medicine and the patient asks: ‘So, do I take it before or after the eggplant?’”

  “Eggplant’s delicious,” I replied, “I love it, but not every day, of course . . . Now, here’s another picture I got from you, with women dressed in black Daeshi garb.”

  “That’s Parveen, a deaf woman who’s here with other captives in a Daesh house. By the way, I just saw Parveen three days ago. I had to work particularly hard to rescue her.”

  “How did you manage to find her?”

  “Do you remember my cousin Nadia?”

  “Of course. She’s the reason I met you in the first place. When I was trying to get in touch with her you answered the phone instead, and then you helped to translate. That was a stroke of luck.”

  “I’m also really glad to have gotten to know you — it’s really important to me that your book see the light of day so that the whole world will know what’s going on here.”

  “So Nadia was the reason you were able to find Parveen?”

  “When Nadia made it out of captivity, she mentioned that there was another woman who couldn’t hear or speak who was being held in the same building. Word spread quickly. As I told you, this is a very small town. One day, about three months ago, someone called and told me that the deaf girl sounded like his sister. Nadia’s description confirmed it for him. He asked me to do something — to rescue her. That was tough because we didn’t expect to be able to get in touch with her over the phone the way we could with the others. Her sister also got in touch. Parveen doesn’t have anyone except for us. Please help us, she said. I promised to do what I could. The only information I had, which I learned from Nadia, was that she was somewhere near the Tishreen Dam. I sat down to study the map of the region, scrutinizing it building by building: bakery, clinic, grocery store, and so on. My eldest son, Mehdi — he’s an engineering student — helped me create a simple spatial plan of the buildings in the area. I let him get involved because I could tell how excited he was to help, and I wanted him to feel this sense of pride, which is unlike anything else in the world. I sent the design to a smuggler whose job was to wander around those buildings, hoping he would see or hear something about a sex slave, a sabya, for sale who fit her description, and then buy her. He learned that she had just been sold for fifty bucks to someone from the Hayy al-Jabal neighborhood in Aleppo. She was cheap because of her disability. My hopes were starting to grow. I’d been planning a trip to Syria anyway, to meet up with another smuggler who had helped me out tremendously in setting up a network for rescuing girls. That trip had been postponed for quite a while, but when I heard that Parveen might be in Hayy al-Jabal, I decided to go right away, especially because my friend knew the neighborhood so well. During our conversation about Parveen and the other women — I’ll tell you more about them in a bit — my friend mentioned that he knew a widow who sold boiled broad beans, baqila, on the street in that neighborhood. She’s a poor widow with three children. She’s clever and resourceful. What do you say we put her on this? my friend asked. I liked the idea, so we set it up. My friend broached the subject with her, telling her that we were searching for a relative who couldn’t speak or hear. We didn’t mention that Parveen was a Daesh captive, just that she had amnesia and that we needed to find out where she was. In exchange for walking around with the food cart in Hayy al-Jabal and letting us know if she came across a woman who couldn’t hear or speak, we offered to give her a cart filled with a thousand dollars’ worth of children’s clothing, which was about how much she could make in a year selling baqila. The woman accepted our offer, delighted at the prospect of a new cart. Two weeks passed with no information, with no trace of Parveen, but the woman told us that she hadn’t visited all the homes in the neighborhood yet, and that she would keep going house to house selling her wares. Two weeks later, the woman had good news for us: I found her, she announced. I called Parveen’s brother and asked him to provide me with a picture of him with his sister, and another of him opening the door to his car, motioning toward the camera to get in. We made a deal with the baqila seller that she would go over to the house where Parveen was being held, and when she found an appropriate moment — that is, as soon as her ‘man’ wasn’t around — she’d show her the photo, and then lead her a hundred yards away from the house, where one of our drivers would be waiting. We paid the woman another installment equivalent to one year’s worth of baqila sales. She smiled and said, I know how to get to her. Don’t worry. The woman continued to visit the house where Parveen was being held; finally, when the man was out, the baqila seller pulled the photo out from under her clothes and showed it to Parveen. Parveen burst out crying at the sight of her brother and sister. It had been over a year since the Daesh assault on their area in Kocho, when she had been taken away from them. She’d been at her grandmother’s house that day to help with housework. Daesh dragged her away from her grandmother and shoved her into a car with other women who were crying. Parveen was silent, as usual, though she wept in her heart. She hadn’t seen her grandmother since that day: the last thing she remembered was her melancholy face turning toward her. She had no idea what had happened to her family or to the four chickens she used to take care of. Her life had been so simple, so carefree. She had been able to communicate with other people by signing. On holidays she would dance along with everyone to a beat that she couldn’t actually hear; she was moved by the festive clothing and the natural beauty that surrounded their village. But in that Daesh house she could only wear black clothes, just like all the other women who were there with her. The men dressed in all black as well. She had never seen such a colorless world, a world filled with such violence. The man who bought her would beat her whenever she failed to comprehend what he was saying — he didn’t use signs the way everyone in her village had. One day he arrived with another man who had just bought her from him. This was how it’d happened every time. By that point she had already been bought and sold ten times, as she explained to us using her fingers. She still had marks all over her body from being beaten by the man who’d bought her most recently. It was his custom, whenever he wanted to have sex with her, to throw some thin cushions on the ground: she learned that this meant she had to take off her clothes and lie down. She would obey in order to avoid his wrath — he would beat her if she even hesitated. But one day when a guest came over, he threw the same cushions down on the ground so that his guest could have a seat. Parveen didn’t notice this guest in the room, so she lay down as quickly as she always did. But this time, instead of raping her, he grabbed a wooden cane and beat her until it broke. But finally, one day when he left the house, some woman she didn’t know showed up, a woman who was always trying to sell her children’s clothes even though she didn’t have any children — yet here she was showing her a picture of her brother and sister! Where did she get that photo? And who was this woman gesturing for her to follow her outside? As if in a trance, Parveen followed the woman holding the photograph. At the end of the street she handed her off to a man standing beside his car waving at her. Parveen was confused but the man quickly showed her a picture of her brother pointing inside the car, and she understood that he wanted her to get in. She obeyed him, obeyed her brother.

  “The driver dropped her off at my friend’s house, where her brother was able to speak with her through a video app. According to my friend, she seemed to be very happy. She stayed there for three days.

  Parveen (right) in the Daesh house with other captives

  Then we mov
ed her to a Yazidi center, where she was received by a woman who took care of her for five days, until they could make it to the Aintab region of Turkey, which is where another friend and I work together to temporarily shelter women before they set out for the outskirts of Zakho in northern Iraq. That friend told me that Parveen was one of the kindest people he ever hosted.”

  “Amazing work, Abdullah! Thank you so much for calling me back. I have to go meet with students now. Can we talk again on Thursday? I don’t have class that day.”

  “Sure, let’s talk then.”

  Sometimes I get bored of my curriculum so I stop teaching the alphabet and just read the students a poem instead. My students have gotten used to that, which is why, sometimes, if I don’t do it on my own, they ask me to read a poem. It’s possible they’re just being nice. Or maybe they get bored of the lessons. Should I tell them about Parveen, who never spoke with Daesh or heard anything they said, but who learned so much from everything she witnessed?

  In a place like that, it must be a great blessing to lose one of your senses, your hearing, for example — just one sense would still be enough to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe, though. After all, violence can hurt without making a sound.

  On Thursday, I texted Abdullah to ask if he was available. He told me he was in the car and that he was free.

  “But you’re driving. Can you talk right now?”

  “The best time to talk is when I’m driving.”

  “I got your message about the little girl who managed to escape all by herself.”

  “Nazik. She’s nine years old. She got away on her own. She didn’t call anybody. I’ll tell you what happened: She was captured with her mother, her brother, and her sister. Her father was thrown into a giant pit with all those other men who were shot. After nine months of captivity in the town of Naimi, Abu Sayyaf showed up with another Daeshi and told her mother that he’d sold them all except Nazik — she and the two little kids would go with that man from Saudi Arabia, and her eldest daughter Nazik would go with Abu Sayyaf. Her mother lost it when she heard this. She picked up one of her shoes that she’d just taken off by the door and smacked him with it. Abu Sayyaf grabbed his stick and beat her until she collapsed. In the end Abu Sayyaf got rid of the mother and her two children, sending them away with Abu Ammar, who had recently joined Daesh. Like all members of the organization, he soon received proof of ownership of his wife and her property. It doesn’t really matter whether or not he manages to claim all of her possessions; the contract between him and the seller applies to whatever he manages to get his hands on. Nazik was left alone with Abu Sayyaf, who claimed that he was going to treat her like his own daughter — but he must have been lying because Daesh marries little girls as young as nine years old. Did you know that?”