The paramedics found that the patient had undergone cardiac arrest. The twenty-year-old woman was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.
Rumors began to circulate. Had she been beaten so hard that her heart had given out? Had he shaken her? Someone said he had held her down while she writhed like a snake. Violent spasms had given way to her suddenly going limp and her body landing with a thud on the floor, according to the rumors.
The exorcist, for his part, had little doubt about what had killed her. The demon had seeped into her heart and body, had become desperate upon hearing the words of the Koran, and in its final death throes had coiled itself around the girl’s heart and cut off her blood circulation. She would have died sooner or later anyway, he told a friend. Better for her to die here in the mosque, the man who cast out devils maintained, than face further torment.
The girl’s parents were devastated. Her father had been the one who engaged the exorcist and thought the fault lay in his inexperience. He claimed his daughter would still be alive and rid of demonic influence if only they had entrusted the task to someone who knew what he was doing.
Hisham received word of his wife’s death in Syria. Several members of the Prophet’s Ummah attended the funeral in his absence. Later, when a dispute arose between his Eritrean uncles and the parents of Hisham’s deceased wife about who should raise the six-month-old baby, his relatives appealed to him to return home. According to Muslim tradition, a child followed his father. With the mother now dead, it was in their opinion only right and proper that the uncles acting on his behalf took custody.
The jihadist asked a friend to investigate the possibility of flying back, but under what name would he travel? On what passport? He was wanted by the police in Norway and would have to travel incognito to be safe from PST.
There was no going back. Hisham had rejected a normal life, a wife, and his responsibilities as a father. He fought for Allah. Everything else paled in significance.
A plain gravestone stood in Oslo’s Høybråten cemetery.
A tiny infant would never know her mother. She had never had a father.
* * *
“Here,” Ubaydullah said to Dilal one day, returning her mobile phone.
It took her time to gather courage.
She mulled it over at length. Breaking out of the prison she was living in, a prison she herself had helped construct. She hadn’t dared to call either her brothers or her parents. But she could not go on living like this, she had to take her chances.
Early one morning at the end of May, Dilal lay in bed looking over at the man sleeping next to her.
I’m leaving you today, she said to herself. Just so you know, today’s the day. She waited until he left the apartment before calling her sister-in-law.
“Can I come home?” she asked meekly.
Her sister-in-law gasped, then began to cry.
“Please!” Dilal implored.
“Yes! Come, come now!”
Immediately afterward a text message ticked in from her brother: “The door is open.”
Dilal did not waste any time. She packed a little bag, put the cat in a cage, placed it under her arm, and left. The heavy front door banged shut behind her and she began to hurry down the street before realizing she needed to calm down, had to avoid attracting any attention. Just as she hailed a taxi, she remembered Ubaydullah had a large number of taxi drivers in his social circle. But by then it was too late.
The driver turned to her, and her heart pounded when she saw he was Pakistani.
“Oslo Central Station, the seafront entrance,” she said. That was where her brother and sister-in-law had arranged to pick her up.
The driver asked her questions along the way.
“Where are you from?”
“I’m Kurdish,” she replied. “And you?”
“Pakistani. I thought you were Pakistani too,” he said, turning his head slightly to look at her. “A foreigner in any case!” He chuckled.
They began talking about how it was to live as a foreigner in Norway. The taxi driver told her how much he liked it, how well his children were doing, how nice everything was.
“Norway offers us a lot of opportunities,” he said, turning off by the opera house and toward the station.
“Yes,” she mumbled.
Looking out the car window, she saw her brother already waiting. She gathered her bag and the cat and ran toward him.
They drove west. Ensconced in the backseat, Dilal dried her tears and opened her handbag. She held up a pocket mirror and did her makeup as they sped along the highway. She could not go home to her parents looking like she did, could not turn up looking the way she felt, so she put on concealer, rouge, powder, and eye shadow. Using a kohl pencil, she lined her eyes, then applied mascara and finished with lipstick. She brushed her hair and styled it with a thin layer of mousse. She turned to look out the window with her chin raised.
Soon they arrived at the family home in Bærum.
Her mother flung open the door. Then flung her arms wide.
Her father stood behind her. They pulled her in, held her close, swayed from side to side, not wanting to let go, tears running down their faces. Their only daughter was home again. The nightmare was over.
“Our princess,” her father sniffled.
“Our child,” her mother wept.
Before long her mobile phone buzzed with a text.
“Where are you???!”
“I’ve gone home. I’m never coming back.”
A half hour later, uniformed police arrived at the Kurdish family’s front door. Several patrol cars stood parked outside. They said they were acting on a tip-off they had received about a planned honor killing and were treating the information very seriously.
Her father was apoplectic. Her eldest brother felt so humiliated he began to cry. “How
