A Cave in the Clouds Read online

  After kissing the bride, I pinned a piece of gold to the groom’s jacket lapel, which was my gift to the couple. My sisters slipped off to find their friends. Adlan joined the older women, who had lots of gossiping to do. Hassan gathered with the older men to smoke pipes. The men tried to not talk about war and politics at weddings. But without war and politics, they had little to say to one another.

  My eyes searched the crowd, landing on some of the young men linking arms in the Dilan, our traditional Yazidi dance. I scanned their faces.

  Nafaa was not among them.

  My heart skipped when I finally spotted him kicking a football back and forth with Khudher. His wavy, chestnut hair had been brushed and oiled straight. He wore skinny, European-style brown suit pants and a tailored white button-down shirt open at the top. My heart started to beat fast. As if sensing me, he turned around, and our eyes locked.

  For most of the night, wherever I moved, I felt Nafaa’s gaze trailing me.

  Yazidi teenagers don’t date. Most brides and grooms meet at weddings or at Lalish, where many families visit several times a year, especially in the fall to celebrate our main festival, the Jazhna Jamaye.

  Adlan had told me when I was little that every child enters this world with special gifts. “It’s the mother’s job,” she said, “to help her children discover their gifts and cultivate them, the way we do our plants.” The last time I had been to Lalish, I discovered my treasured gift. When I walked through the temple carrying Chira, a burning wick that we call the sacred fire, which is made from Lalish olive oil, I could sometimes see the future, as if I were a seer. What made my gift so exciting was that Nafaa always appeared beside me in my premonitions.

  As night fell on Nazma and Benyan’s wedding party, music played from a stereo.

  The heavy bass made the ground vibrate. Men and women, girls and boys now linked arms, and the Dilan line wove its way around the street like a snake.

  My arm was linked through Nafaa’s.

  Overhead, the clear sky stretched on forever.

  I could see the Big Dipper and the Milky Way.

  Around and around and around I spun.

  Bang!

  My father’s fist slammed down hard on the tray in front of him, rattling the tea glasses. “Badeeah,” he shouted.

  I jumped down off the windowsill.

  “Come and take Eivan.”

  Eivan had round eyes, rosy cheeks, and a cowlick that hung low on his forehead like an upside-down question mark. His giggles filled a room. Eivan was kneeling in front of Fallah, trying to get his father’s attention. But all Fallah wanted was to talk about war.

  I swooped my nephew into my arms and flew him like an airplane into the kitchen, where Hadil and Majida were eating kubbeh.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked him as I landed him in between my sisters. He shook his head.

  “Tell me a story.” He reached up and twirled strands of my hair around his fingers.

  “In a bit,” I said, sitting down behind him. “I need to eat.”

  “The men scare me.”

  I felt his tiny body tensing and pulled him in close. “Don’t listen to the men’s talk. You’ll learn soon enough that they make mountains out of ant hills. They exaggerate everything. You’re safe here with me.”

  Eivan let me feed him some naan, a type of flatbread. As I watched him eat, a wave of sadness washed over me. I was suddenly no longer hungry myself.

  In the past, when the men talked of war, I hadn’t felt afraid. I had somehow known we would be spared.

  This time, war would come to Kocho. I was sure of it because where my visions of the future were supposed to be, I now saw only a hole.

  Chapter Three

  August 3, 2014

  The Stranger

  I woke to the clanging of pots and pans. My mother and my sisters flitted back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, talking in hushed voices.

  I pulled my arm, asleep and tingling, out from underneath Eivan. The night before, he had wanted to sleep with his father. But Fallah hadn’t gone to bed. For the past few nights, he’d joined Adil on night patrols of our village. So instead, I had stroked Eivan’s back as I told him the Yazidi creation story: For forty thousand years, there was great pain and suffering. God’s seven angels were lost in a raging sea, but finally, they saw land. Lalish. The angels got off the boat and went ashore. Thus, the earth was formed. Once Eivan’s eyes started to flutter, I sang him one of Adlan’s lullabies until he fell asleep beside me.

  Eivan’s hair was tousled. I watched now as his chest rose and fell to the rhythm of his dreams. His mouth was wide open. “These dark days will pass, the sun will shine again,” I sang softly the chorus of Adlan’s lullaby.

  I tiptoed to the kitchen, where my sisters were filling boxes with flour, cooking oils, nuts, rice, pears, apricots, and apples. Hassan and Fallah’s voices rose and fell in the guest room.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’re leaving,” Majida said, looking worried.

  “Khalil convinced Hassan to let us go to the moun­tains,” Hadil explained as she put some tomatoes in a box. “Hassan will remain in Kocho along with Fallah and Adil to fight Daesh if they invade.”

  “We’re like the Jews,” I heard Fallah shouting as I took over for Adlan, putting plates, cups, and cutlery in another basket. We were packing items the way we did when we went to Lalish or on a picnic. “They were butchered in Germany, kicked out of Iraq . . . maybe we should have learned from them that these bad times were coming. We should never have been silent when Saddam moved the Arabs off their land in the south and into our area. We stood by and let Saddam take over our lands and suppress our culture.”

  Hassan yelled back that Fallah was being melodra­matic. “Our Arab neighbors won’t let Daesh hurt us.”

  I wasn’t sure my father was right. I often read his newspapers when he was done with them and I knew that Daesh had grown out of al-Qaeda, the group that had attacked the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. After the Americans declared war on Iraq, many al-Qaeda militants, or jihadis, were killed or imprisoned. Some regrouped in Syria, though, and they received money from wealthy Middle Eastern investors who wanted to see the leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, removed. The new group, Daesh, released the terrorists the Americans had imprisoned in Iraq and broke ties with al-Qaeda. Daesh wanted to create an Islamic state, which they called a caliphate. I wasn’t sure what this Islamic state would mean for non-Muslims, like us, and it worried me.

  I crept up behind my mother. “Could we pray?”

  Adlan stopped what she was doing and stared at me in surprise. Usually, I prayed only when we were in Lalish. My mother seemed to have grown old since Daesh had taken over Mosul a few months earlier. Deep lines creased her eyes and mouth, making her look as if she were permanently frowning. The skin on her face drooped. Looking at her, I remembered something else she had told me. “Our fears are what age us,” she had said. “Sickness starts in the mind and soul. Love makes us whole. Be fearless, Badeeah, in your giving and receiving of love. Do not listen to a mind full of worry or hate. That kind of mind slowly kills you.”

  With her bony, arthritic hands, Adlan untied her apron. Just outside the living room hung a small package wrapped in white cloth made from trees found at Lalish. This package was what we called the Berat. Inside the cloth was soil that had been collected at the foot of the Shikefa Berata, or the Cave of Berat. The Shikefa Berata, we Yazidi believe, is from another planet. The cave is only opened once a year, when the energy inside has reached its peak. At this time, the earth in the cave is culled and placed in packages for each Yazidi family. The Berat is considered to have great healing properties.

  I watched as my mother softly kissed the Berat. She stepped back and urged me to do the same. We Yazidi say that our Berat lets the angels know where to
find us. My mother and I turned in the direction of the sun and said a prayer. “Amen. Amen. Amen,” she concluded. “Blessed be our faith. God will help our faith survive.”

  My father’s voice startled us. “I’m surprised to see you praying. Usually, it seems all you young people want to do is dance,” he teased.

  I pretended to glower at him. But what he said was in part true. Whenever there was dancing, I got to see Nafaa. I wanted so badly to tell Hassan and Adlan that the two of us were in love. Since I was the youngest girl in the family, my parents, I knew, would want me to hold off until I was in my mid-twenties before thinking about marriage since Adlan would need me around the home to help with the farming and the chores. But maybe if I told them about Nafaa, my visions of my future with him would appear again. I opened my mouth, then closed it quickly as Eivan cried out. Adlan turned back to the kitchen. I followed.

  Eivan was by now playing on the floor with his yellow-and-white toy taxi. “Naan,” he said when he saw me. I whisked him into my arms and then high into the air, spinning him around the room.

  He shouted, his laughter flying around him. Hassan started clapping out the beats to the old traditional Kurdish song “Shamame.” By the time he was done, both Eivan and I were panting. But Eivan didn’t want to stop.

  Adlan winked at me and handed me some flatbread. “We’ll leave for the mountains in an hour or so. Go outside and play until we’re ready.”

  Eivan and I made our way toward the primary school, kicking a worn football between us as we nibbled our breakfast. It was Fallah’s football from when he was a child. It had a tear, which make it slow and zigzaggy, and Eivan liked that part best of all. He ran after the ball, twisting along with it. His laugh bounced off the clay houses we passed. Most of them were similar to ours: rectangular, with a guest room in the front for men and male visitors, a living room where family hung out, a kitchen, and a bedroom in the back. There were separate buildings beside or behind the houses that we used as outhouses. Some of the homes had second stories. Pipes brought in water, which each household collected in buckets from the outside faucets. We had electricity, but it went off regularly. Each house had a generator for those days when the power was off for long periods of time. In our kitchen, we had a gas stove and a refrigerator. Our generator was never powerful enough to chill the freezer.

  Adlan said we shouldn’t complain that we didn’t have hot water or twenty-four-hour electricity. Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, had killed entire villages of Kurds during the al-Anfal campaign, a genocide from 1986 to 1989. Under Saddam’s rule, many Yazidi villages had been taken over by Arabs and the residents sent to displaced people’s camps. Adlan said Kocho was safe because of the Arab men in nearby villages who were Kirivs to Yazidi boys. When a Yazidi boy is circumcised, his Kiriv places him on his lap, indicating that he promises to watch over and guide him for his whole life. Yazidi families accepted their sons’ Kirivs as brothers. Because the Yazidi only marry other Yazidi, families often chose Muslim Kirivs to unite the religions.

  “The men talk too much,” Eivan said, as if reading my thoughts. Adlan said that Eivan was like Fallah when he was little: inquisitive, sharp, and hearing things when others thought he wasn’t listening. Eivan’s irises sparkled and his long lashes glistened, as if he had just passed through a cloud. Looking at him, warmth moved through me and I began to relax, telling myself that the anxiety I had felt the night before was just my mind playing a trick on me. Eivan and I kicked the ball back and forth some more.

  But on our way home, as we passed the Jevata Gundi, where the men held their political meetings, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. The street was usually full of women heading to the farms or the shops, men sitting outside talking politics, and children playing sneak-and-hide, along with pigeons, donkeys, dogs, baaing sheep, and squawking chickens. That day, though, Kocho was a ghost town.

  Eivan reached over and gripped my hand tight. I stopped cold, yanking him behind a house under construction. We hid underneath some wooden scaffolding draped with white plastic sheeting. My hand covered his mouth.

  “Be quiet,” I whispered into his ear.

  Ever so slowly, I poked my head out.

  A group of men had gathered outside the Jevata Gundi. Ahmed Jasso, our mukhtar, was among them. Beside him was a tall man I’d never seen before, wearing a caramel-colored dishdasha. My brothers Adil and Fallah were standing off to the side, fingering the leather straps on the rifles slung over their backs. They stood with their legs spread, their chests puffed out, their chins high.

  “You’ll be safe,” Ahmed Jasso assured the group of men. “We’ve come to an agreement with the Islamic State. They won’t attack our village. But you have to give up your weapons.” He gestured for the men of Kocho to follow him into the building, where he said they could talk some more.

  As the village men filed in, including my brothers, the man in the dishdasha hung back. “Hand over your weapons or the peace agreement with the Islamic State will be broken,” he shouted as he followed the last Kocho man into the building. “Kocho will be attacked in less than twenty-four hours if you don’t.”

  My stomach clenched. Eivan squirmed, and I realized my hand was still covering his mouth.

  I had just let go of Eivan when two men passed in front of our hiding place. I jumped instinctively, my back coming up flush against a newly built wall. The men were not from Kocho. They were dressed in black, with large belts of ammunition stretched across their stomachs. They were holding rifles, long semiautomatic weapons like Hassan’s.

  “These Yazidi are abadat shaytan,” I heard one say in Arabic. He was calling us devil worshippers. I was fluent in the language after six years of study.

  “These non-believers, if they don’t convert, they’re sabaya,” the other said. “War booty.” He laughed, revealing yellow teeth and black gums.

  Those words again: sabaya. War booty. I didn’t know quite what they meant, but I was sure it would not be a good thing for us Yazidi.

  Hearing the two men in black brought back a strong memory. On one of our family trips to Lalish, Hassan had driven a different way. Near Mosul, he slowed to show us the oil refineries: tall sticks blowing out thick smoke, mountain-sized buildings, masses of twinkling lights, and machines that sparkled in the sun.

  “It’s oil that causes war,” my father said in a barely audible voice. “You’ll hear that Saddam doesn’t like us because we’re ‘abadat shaytan’ and followers of Iblis, the devil. But greed is the root of his hatred.”

  At the mention of abadat shaytan, my mother gasped. I was sitting beside her in the back seat and she gripped my hand.

  “What is abadat shaytan?” I whispered.

  Adlan shook her head. “Don’t speak those words,” she scolded. “Zoroastrians said the devil made a peacock to show his powers. But we believe the peacock represents Tawsi Malak, the angel we look to as an example. Another reason the Yazidi have been persecuted is because our spirituality is so old. When conquerors came to our area and learned of our powers, they assumed we were playing with dark forces. That’s why we Yazidi don’t share our wisdom now with the rest of the world. And then there is the Quran,” she continued. “The devil is described in it as an angel who refused God’s order to bow down before Adam. Tawsi Malak didn’t pray to Adam, so some Muslims say that he is the devil.”

  “Is he?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Tawsi Malak was one of seven angels, or malayika. God gave each of them a special gift. On Tawsi Malak God bestowed light and inner sight. God then told the angels to make humankind. The angels made Adam. God asked the angels to bow to Adam and Tawsi Malak was the only angel who refused, saying that he had made a promise never to bow to anyone but God. We Yazidi revere Tawsi Malak for his faithfulness to the only source of power in this world, God.”

  Hassan turned to my brother Fallah and said, “They say we h
ave no religion because we have no book like the Jewish Torah, the Quran, the Hindu Vedas, or the Christian Bible. They say the Yazidi aren’t a real culture. But those are lies.” My father paused. “The real reason the Yazidi are not wanted here is power. Our land is rich in oil.”

  Adlan bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “Greed and anger,” she said in a shaky voice. “A door in our mind allows these monsters to enter. In this country, Badeeah, the door of greed is opened wide.”

  Eighteen of us squeezed ourselves into Khalil’s pickup truck.

  I sat in the corner of the cargo bed, right up close to the driver, with Eivan on my lap, surrounded by ten of my cousins.

  As Khalil drove, he talked loudly in the front seat about the tall man negotiating with Ahmed Jasso. Apparently, the man in the dishdasha was named Abu Hamza. He was Muslim but not a friend, Khalil said. Abu Hamza was a common thug. Hussain, a man from our village, had been in prison in Mosul with Abu Hamza before Daesh freed many of the prisoners, encouraging them to join Daesh’s ranks.

  Khalil said that Ahmed Jasso and some of the other Kocho elders trusted Abu Hamza, but he didn’t think they should. The Peshmerga, the Kurdish military force, had recently left Kocho, claiming they had to ward off Daesh advances in Tal Banat. But that was also gossip being taken as truth, he said. He was now shouting to be heard over the clanging of the truck on the bumpy road. “The Peshmerga in all the Yazidi towns and in Shingal have just retreated. It is like they were ordered to withdraw.” The other forces in the area, including the border guards and the Iraqi army, which had been patrolling the roads into Shingal, had also disappeared. “We don’t even have our weapons anymore to defend ourselves,” he cried.

  I’d brought along Eivan’s football, hoping we’d have some time to play in the countryside. Listening anxiously to Khalil, I began weaving the material that had come loose back into the seam of the football.