I eat with the other wives in the kitchen. Borz will not be home tonight. I ask whether he has gone to the front and Hafa gives me a look that says I’m not to concern myself with such things. The Yazidi girl puts the food on the table and then disappears, and I don’t ask her her name because I know Hafa won’t think it’s important. She is young, I think maybe just thirteen. A little younger and she could be in my class. It’s strange having her around us, clean and dressed in a niqab, so unlike the ones I teach during the day. I don’t suppose she’s had any education, before or after she was brought here.
No one says a word. Hafa sits at the head of the table and Maysan opposite me. I watch them eat but they don’t see me because their eyes are just on their food. There are currents flowing about between us that I can’t begin to pick up. I think Hafa might hate me but anyway, I don’t much feel like speaking either.
I find it hard to sleep. I have work in the morning and no idea how I’m going to get there – I mentioned it to Hafa but she didn’t seem to register what I said, just waved me away with a hand and went to sit in the sitting room where I couldn’t follow, she doesn’t invite me in. I don’t want to be late tomorrow. I text Badra and tell her where I am and what I’m doing and ask for her advice. Funny, how I didn’t used to trust her. She doesn’t reply, at least not before I eventually drift off.
Khalil is in all my thoughts. I wish he wasn’t because now I’m married to someone else, it’s time to move on, but every time I close my eyes there he is, so young, so innocent. I can even feel him, the warm push of his skin on mine, his breath on the back of my neck, the curl of the hair on his chest. My legs round his. I feel close to him and so far away, warmed by him and yet so lonely, so cold, like a moon that’s lost its planet and is spinning out into space.
I’m woken by a hand on my wrist jerking me out of bed so hard I’m still asleep as my feet hit the floor. The hand is strong and rough and dry, and it holds me tighter than it needs to. I want to pull against it but I daren’t. If I’m his wife, I’ll come when he asks. He doesn’t need to drag me.
Borz is naked. Pale skin gathers at the base of his back, which is thick with pale hairs. The landing is lit by the light from his bedroom, where Hafa is wrapping a dressing gown around her, her face full of sleep and irritation, her cheeks and eyes puffy, and this unwanted image enters my head of me in her place some years from now, thrown out of my own bed by the new arrival – and it’s strange how the mind works, because in that instant I think two things that seem to mean very little, that I will never be the first wife, and that I have no idea where Hafa is going to sleep. Perhaps in my bed.
This is my husband. It’s natural, what’s about to happen. I concentrate on my breath, letting it out slowly. To be married to him is an honour, and I must honour him. I keep my eyes on the bed, because I don’t want to look and because it seems decent not to, but I’m conscious of his big white form in the room, all that skin and flesh, and I can feel a shaking in my legs that I can’t control, a quivering I don’t want to show through my pyjamas. He says something to Hafa in Russian, the first time I’ve heard him speak it, and whether it always sounds like that I don’t know but there’s something fearsome about it that fits with the rest of him. He has power, and power is everything.
Hafa says something back and Borz shouts at her, tells her to get out, I guess, and she goes, shutting the door.
How I want to follow her.
‘Your clothes.’
I hesitate, and he says it again, his eyes now hungry, lazy. The sight of him, he’s so big, his chest inflated, the full strong belly, his penis – even like this – looks small against it all. I cannot see us together. I try to tell my body to accept it but it won’t. My legs won’t stop shaking. We are like two different species, and somewhere between my mind and my senses I feel the fit Khalil and I had, the belonging, and with the same certainty I know that there will never be belonging with this man.
But that is the test. If it was easy, there would be no progress. And has not each test brought me closer to Him?
I unbutton my pyjama top, slip it off, step clumsily out of my bottoms, feel the cold blowing on my skin from the air conditioning. I try to stand straight, natural, but I’m aware of all my body’s weakness like I never have been before, and it makes me want to wrap my arms around myself. My want of power is complete. Maybe that is the balance. He could do anything with me, and all I could do with my feeble hands is flail and scratch.
His eyes go from my face to my breasts to my loins, until every familiar flaw on my body – every blemish, everything I have ever obsessed over – is like a new and shameful discovery. In front of him I am a child and an old woman at once, not ripe enough and yet beginning to rot. I don’t know what he wants, there is no communication between us. Just him deciding and directing.
He does that sniff he does and tells me to get on the bed. I am the other side of it from him, and I slide in on my back, pulling the duvet up over me as I lie back and try to look him full in the face, to encourage him to think of me as his wife. There must be a reason he took me. Perhaps it is my duty to discover it.
He yanks the covers off, and now it’s worse than when I was standing. An image comes into my head of me in the desert, at night, naked and curled up on the sand in the cold under the stars and waiting not for His love but for nameless jinns and demons, creatures of the devil who I know are there in the darkness, drawing closer, ready to tear my flesh apart. The demons are Borz, I think, but then I realize my mistake, and why this image has been given to me. I have this the wrong way round. The temptation is to refuse my husband. That is what the devils want. The path to God is to do my duty.
‘Over.’
Until now my husband has been standing by the bed but when I don’t understand him he kneels on it and turns me over by my shoulders onto my front, brings one leg over me and pushes my legs apart. He rests against me, leans against me on his hands, I hear his hoarse breath and feel it in my hair, smell the strong scent of sweat and force on him, and something else, something bitter, stale, and then he moves into me and we are joined. Joined, but not one. The Russian words he breathes into my ear are like insects finding their way into my brain, I close my eyes into the pillow and feel his weight push into me, his hand grips my neck and tightens, grows tighter with and against his weight until my breath thins and the red behind my eyes starts to go black and there’s nowhere left for me to go.
Only my faith remains. Strong, silent. Of everything unafraid.
Then he slows, and the weight lightens, and his grasp goes loose, and I wonder now what is in his eyes, whether now the hunt is over they show satisfaction or something more.
I understand his need. I understand my place. But I am glad he can’t see mine.
With one last word of Russian he rolls off me, and when I bring myself to look he is on his back, staring upwards, completely separate. The dark energy in him has not been spent. The muscles in his jaw are working, and when he closes his eyes for a moment it isn’t to rest but to gather strength, or to curse my image, I can feel it. I want to turn my head away from him but I don’t dare, because if I move he may remember I’m here, and right now he might be a thousand miles away. I want to turn on my side, wipe myself clean, be dressed again, search for sleep, but instead I lie as still as I can like a mouse pretending to be dead in the hope that the cat will move on. In the space I’ve made, ashamed by my tears, I try to remember the lesson. He is my husband now. A man of strength, a man who has killed a thousand times as many enemies as a boy like Khalil. And what, I want him to be gentle? I expected my innocence to end when I crossed the border but maybe this is the real border, right here, from being a girl to becoming a woman.
I lie in the dark for a long time and somehow I sleep. I wake to the sound of a child crying.
It’s definitely a child, not the baby. It sounds like a girl, yelping in pain. I still haven’t seen any of the children – their room is next to this, at the other end of the house from mine, and they seem to stay in there. For a while I lie in the dark and listen to it. A word comes to me, I don’t know where from. Keening. I think she must be ill, the crying has a weird inhuman quality to it, like she has a fever or something.
No one seems to be doing anything about it. As I get used to the darkness and being awake I realize that Borz has gone, there’s no one else in here. I have no way of telling the time but perhaps he’s already gone to work, or even to the front.
After some fumbling I switch on the bedside light and find my pyjamas. I have a headache, and my stomach churns a little when I stand, and it occurs to me that when the house is awake I might have a shower. I would like a shower. Maybe here it will be hot.
I stand in the doorway for a minute to listen as the crying stops briefly and then starts up again. Down the landing my bedroom door is shut. There are no lights on and no sounds of anyone moving about. I wonder if the brothers on guard outside can hear it and if they find it distracting. Poor child. It sounds horrible, whatever it is. She needs a doctor, or even to go to hospital. Suddenly I feel hugely protective towards her, and I wonder if that has to do with my own worries about being late, and I force that thought from my mind before it can take root.
If Borz isn’t here I’ll have to wake Hafa and hope that she knows what to do. Perhaps one of the brothers could drive us somewhere.
The children’s door is only a few feet from me, and I tiptoe to it. But as soon as I move that way I know that the noise is coming from somewhere else, and with my ear to the door I hear only silence inside.
It’s downstairs. It has to be. The stairs turn halfway down, and I stop there to listen. The crying is weaker now, but still distinct, and I’m caught about what to do. Maybe one of the children is sleeping downstairs. Maybe she left her room and is looking for help.
So I go down, slowly, listening on every step. I guess part of me thinks Borz may not be gone and while I have his children’s best interests at heart I don’t want him to get the wrong idea about what I’m doing. Like I’m trying to leave or something. The crying is definitely less intense, more tired, and it seems to be coming from the far end of the house, by the garage, underneath my room, and by the time I’m at the bottom of the stairs I’m sure of it. For a few seconds I stand there, and as I step off the last step I hear a whispered hiss from up above me that makes me stop. It comes again, and I can just make out a shape on the landing.
‘Up here,’ it says, in the same hiss. ‘Now.’
‘One of the children—’ I start to say, but it cuts me off.
‘Up. Quiet.’
As she says it I hear a door open downstairs and without really knowing why I zip back up the stairs as quickly as I can, two at a time. On the top step Hafa takes my arm and marches me in front of her into my bedroom and silently closes the door. There’s barely any light and I can’t see her face but the fear in her voice is as plain as day.
‘Do not move around this house at night. Ever. Now. Go to the bathroom. Quickly. Flush it and return to your bed. And pray he does not suspect. Go.’
She opens the door and pushes me out. The bathroom is in between my room and Borz’s, I find the toilet in the half-light, feel for the flush and leave, trying to look as if I’m not rushing.
I meet Borz as he climbs the last steps, and even in the near darkness there’s something so intimidating about his presence, the great mass of him, that no matter how hard I focus I shrink back. His breathing is thick and he’s sniffing, clearing his throat, so he doesn’t hear me and when he finally realizes I’m there he stops and swears in Russian, and then just stands over me, working out what to do, and even without really seeing him I have a sense of his hand closing into a fist. My heart is going so fast.
‘What you do.’
‘I needed the bathroom.’
There’s a tiredness about him now, a heaviness. I wonder what the options are that he’s considering. Part of me wants to run past him, down the stairs, past the guards and out to God knows where.
But in the end he turns, walks slowly away, and falls lifeless into bed. And I have no choice but to follow him.
The bed is full of snakes. My skin crawls with them and they wrap themselves round my brain.
I try to think about it, and I try not to think about it, and neither works because all there is in my head is the smell of him and the crying of that girl like a song that repeats and repeats no matter how much you want it to stop.
I don’t know her name. I don’t know if anybody does. Perhaps she’s forgotten herself. I think I would.
In my mind I am her, underneath that dark form, seeing and feeling that dark shape rolling and shifting, his smell working its way inside. I feel her pain, and it confuses me, because her pain should be different from mine.
Then a new thought comes to me, the worst I’ve had. What if this is a punishment, for all of us? What if this is what happens to unbelievers? All of a sudden my mind clears and a hundred memories rush in of mistakes and shortcomings and failures.
One begins to stand out from all the rest. I begin to realize with such great clarity what is happening to me.