To get passports, Mustafa invented a story involving a pilgrimage to Zeinab’s shrine in Damascus. Zeinab was the granddaughter of the prophet Muhammad. According to the Shia Muslims she was buried in Damascus, while the Sunnis claimed she was laid to rest in Cairo. Three summers after the fatal rocket hit their neighbours’ house and burnt the eldest daughter to death, the local authorities approved their application to make the pilgrimage.
The parents didn’t tell the girls they would not be coming back. Their daughters could give the game away, as zealous intelligence officers at the border could be expected to question the children. They would only take a small amount of luggage with them, so as not to give away their plan to escape.
On the Thursday before their departure, Bano was chosen as pupil of the week at school. She received a little plaque, which she put up on the wall above her bed, and couldn’t make out why her grandmother was in such floods of tears. She was delighted with the award and hung her school uniform neatly in the wardrobe, ready for when they got back from the pilgrimage.
The morning they were due to leave, there was a total solar eclipse. They had heard you could go blind if you looked at the sun before it disappeared, so the family stayed inside all day.
The following night, Mustafa could not sleep. For decades, the nights had been the worst. Nights were the time when the Ba’ath party militias came for people, consigning them to torture and never-ending darkness in the dungeons of Saddam Hussein. The soldiers would turn the house upside down in their search for weapons or banned manifestos and writings. They would smash down doors or sneak in over the flat roofs where families dried clothes, stored junk or kept hens. No windows were secure, no doors, reinforcements or locks could keep out the forces of the state. The neighbourhood was sometimes awoken by the sound of men howling. They knew it was all over when the Ba’ath Party arrived.
During the worst spells of political terror – the bomb attacks and street fighting – Mustafa would toss and turn, waiting for dawn. The days were safer than the nights. He lay there listening in the darkness. You didn’t need to open your eyes to know daylight was on its way. Daylight, even before the sun had risen, meant the sound of Primus stoves being lit, the smell of fresh bread, the first shuffle of footsteps down below, the click of the door handle as someone went out to get some flatbread before it ran out. Daylight meant the first call to prayer, while it was still dark. Only when the muezzin’s holy words had died away, when the real morning arrived with farmers offering freshly strained yogurt, white cheese with salt, tea and bread, only then could he relax and sleep.
If you didn’t hear the lighting of the stoves or smell the fresh bread it was a signal that the city was under attack, or that there had been warning of an attack, and there was a state of Maneh al-Tajawel – a curfew.
That August morning they got up before daylight, before the heat arrived. They all squashed into a car, so tightly packed that none of them could turn and look back at the house with the flat roof where the line of clothes would soon dry in the sun.
They drove out into the desert. Out here on the sandy plains, Abbasid, Moguls, Turkmens, Mongols, Persians and Ottomans had built their civilisations. They had all fought fiercely for Erbil – the four gods – as the city’s name means. Here Alexander did battle with the Persian king Darius, here the first soldiers of Islam fought for their faith, and this land was the original home of the Kurdish warrior hero Saladin, who captured Jerusalem from the Crusaders.
Over the centuries, the city had become increasingly difficult to seize, situated as it was behind high walls on a flat-topped mountain reaching ever closer to the sky. It was a man-made mountain, created by people rebuilding on the ruins of those they had conquered. Now only the old town still lay behind the walls; the settlement had overflowed onto the plain, where it lay unprotected from desert storms and militia feuds alike.
Bayan was already regretting it all. There was no way it could end well. This was where they belonged. This was where they ought to live and die.
Mustafa gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Everything will be all right in the end,’ he said.
Though they had an exit permit from Iraq, they took a smuggling route as they approached the border because they had no Syrian entry permit. Half the money had already been handed over and a relation would pay the rest once Mustafa rang to say they were there. They had no idea where ‘there’ was. Nor did the smugglers, yet.
The family of five was crammed into a little boat with many other refugees. The boat set off to cross the Khabur River, a tributary of the Tigris. The banks were patrolled by Iraqi and Syrian troops on their respective sides.
Bayan cried throughout the crossing. ‘Imagine, I’m leaving my country! How can I leave my country?’
Lara, now five, regarded her parents in bafflement. It was strange to see them unhappy. They were the ones who looked after her, Bano and Ali. Now she had her turn to comfort them. Why did they have to go on this journey if it made everyone so sad?
Bano was uneasy too. Mustafa tried to hold her attention with a story about a girl who fell out of a boat into the water. That little girl fell over the side because she couldn’t sit still, and was eaten up by a big fish, a huge fish. Mustafa was groping for words, an enormous fish, and then she lived there, in the belly of the fish, with all the other children the fish gradually gobbled up. Mustafa was just talking away because he was afraid the soldiers on the bank would notice the boat and start firing. ‘And then the fish spat out all the children onto the shore,’ he improvised.
Bano suddenly interrupted his story. ‘Daddy, we’re going to die now,’ she said.
Her mother flinched.
‘I feel so close to God,’ Bano said to no one in particular. ‘It’s as if I’m in the clouds, looking down on you. The clouds are under me. I can see you in the boat, down below. I can see you all together.’
Mustafa started to pray.
God, There is no god but He, Living and Everlasting. Neither slumber overtakes Him nor sleep. To Him belongs what is in the heavens and what is on earth.
The others sat motionless in the boat while Mustafa quoted from the prayer Ayat al-Kursi. This was the prayer he always turned to when he was lying awake at nights feeling frightened.
He knows their present affairs and their past. And they do not grasp of His knowledge except what He wills. His throne encompasses the heavens and the earth; Preserving them is no burden to him. He is the Exalted, the Majestic.
After this prayer he asked God to protect Bayan and the children, and, as is the Muslim way, he put his hands in front of his face, then held them out and blew, as if to blow the prayer up to God. Finally he turned his face out to the waves and blew for as long as his breath would allow him.
The engine stopped. They slid in towards a sandbank and the boat made gentle contact with the Syrian shore. A waiting car took them to the Kurdish town of Qamishli, where they spent the night before travelling on to Damascus. In the Syrian capital, with its carved façades, beautiful palaces and spies on every corner, they stayed in a small room.
Nobody bothered them, and they bothered nobody. Bayan felt as if the heat and dust were settling on her in a layer. She missed her kitchen, her cool living room, her sisters.
After a month in Damascus, they were issued with Iraqi passports and plane tickets to Moscow.