Burned alive Read Online Free PDF Page A

so terrible that I have trouble believing them.
    When I’m alone, I sometimes ask myself if I really lived these things. I am still here, I survived them. Other women have lived through these things and they, too, are still living in the world. I would like to forget, but we survivors who can speak out are so few that it is my duty to bear witness and to do so I must relive these nightmares.
    As for the vision of Hanan, I am in the house and I hear shouting. Then I see my sister sitting on the ground, flailing her arms and legs, and my brother, Assad, leaning over her, his arms on either side of her. He is strangling her with the telephone cord. I remember this scene as if it took place yesterday. I was standing in front of my two little sisters to shield and protect them. We pressed ourselves against the wall to try to make ourselves disappear. I hold them by the hair so they won’t move. Assad must have seen us or heard me enter. He yells: “ Rouhi! Rouhi! Get out! Get out!”
    I run to the cement stairs that lead to the bedrooms dragging my two sisters. One of the little ones is so afraid that she stumbles and hurts her leg, but I make her keep going. My whole body is trembling as I lock us in the room and console the little one. I try to care for her knee and we stay there for a long time, all three of us, not making a sound. I can’t do anything, absolutely nothing but keep quiet, with this vision of horror in our heads, of my brother strangling our sister. She must have been using the telephone and he came up behind to strangle her. She is dead; I’m convinced she is dead. That day she was wearing white pants, with a shirt that went to the knees. She was barefoot. I saw her legs kick and I saw her arms strike my brother in the face as he shouted at us, “Get out!”
    The telephone was black, I think. How long had this telephone been in the house? There can’t have been many of them in the village at that time. My father had modernized the house. We now had a bathroom with hot water and a telephone. It was kept on the floor in the main room and it had a very long cord. She must have been trying to use it, but I don’t know whom she was calling or why. I don’t know what I was doing before that, or where I was, or what Hanan might have done for her part, but nothing in her behavior that I know of justifies my brother’s strangling her. I don’t know what is happening.
    I stayed in the bedroom with the little girls until my mother came back. She and my father had gone out, leaving us alone with Assad. For a long time I tried to understand why there was nobody else in the house but him and us. Then the memories become intertwined.
    That day, my parents went to see my brother’s wife at her parents’ house, where she had taken refuge because she was pregnant and he had beaten her. That’s why my brother was alone with us in our house. And he must have been furious, like all men, to be insulted like this. As usual, I had only snatches of information about what was happening. A girl is not present at family meetings when there are conflicts. She’s kept out of the way. I learned later that my sister-in-law had a miscarriage, and I suppose my parents accused my brother of being responsible. But that day there was no link between the two events. What was Hanan doing on the telephone? It was used very little. I myself used it only two or three times to speak with my older sister, my aunt, or my brother’s wife. If Hanan was calling someone, it had to be somebody in the family. When my parents came home, my mother spoke to Assad. I see her crying, but I know she is just pretending. I’ve become a realist and have come to understand how things happen in my land. I know why they kill girls and how that happens. It is decided at a family gathering and on the fatal day, the parents are never present. Only the one who has been picked to do the killing is with the girl who is the intended victim.
    My mother wasn’t