Every morning I wept, begging my in-laws to send me to my parents. I had no way to contact Aba and Omma; there was no electricity in Khardji, so a telephone? Forget it. No planes passed over my village, no buses came, no cars. I could have sent my family a letter, but I didn’t know how to write much more than my first name and a few simple words. Still, I had to find some way back to Sana’a.

Escape? I thought about it a few times. But where to? Since I knew no one in the village, it would have been hard for me to seek refuge with a neighbor or beg a traveler on a donkey to save me. Khardji, my native village, had become my prison.

Then one morning, worn down by all my crying, he told me he would allow me to visit my parents. At last! He would go with me and stay with his brother in Sana’a, but afterward, he insisted, we had to return to the village. I rushed to gather my things before he changed his mind.

The trip home seemed quicker than our previous journey, but the same hideous images still disturbed my sleep whenever I nodded off: the bloodstained sheet, my mother-in-law’s face looming over me, the bucket of icy water. And suddenly, I would start awake. No! I would never go back, never. Khardji, the end of the earth: I never wanted to set foot there again.

“It is out of the question for you to leave your husband!”

I had not expected my father’s unyielding reaction, which quickly put an end to the joy of my return to Sana’a. As for my mother, she kept quiet, simply raising her arms to heaven and murmuring, “That’s how life is, Nujood: all women must endure this; we have all gone through the same thing.”

But why hadn’t she said anything to me? Why hadn’t she warned me? Now that the marriage vows had been said, I was trapped, unable to retreat. No matter what I told my parents about my nightly suffering-the beatings, the burning, and all those dreadful personal things I was ashamed to speak of-they still insisted that it was my duty to live with him.

“I don’t love him! He isn’t nice to me. He hurts me. He forces me to do nasty things that make me sick.”

“Nujood,” repeated my father, “you are a married woman now. You must stay with your husband.”

“No, I don’t want to! I want to come home!”

“Impossible.”

“Please, please!”

“It’s a matter of sharaf, you hear me?”

“But-”

“Listen to me!”

“Aba, I-”

“If you divorce your husband, my brothers and cousins will kill me! Sharaf, honor, comes first. Honor! Do you understand?”

No, I didn’t understand, and I couldn’t understand. Not only was he hurting me, but my family, my own family, was defending him. All that for a question of-what was it? Honor. But this word everyone kept using, exactly what did it mean? I was dumbfounded.

Haïfa watched with big eyes, understanding still less than I did about what was happening to me. Seeing me burst into tears, she slipped her hand into mine, her way of telling me she was on my side. And once more, horrified, I wondered: What if they were planning on marrying her off, too? Haïfa, my little sister, my pretty little sister… Let her at least have a chance to escape this nightmare.

Mona tried several times to defend me, but she was too timid, and anyway, who would have listened to her? Here it’s always the oldest, and the men, who have the last word. Poor Mona! I realized that if I wanted to break free, I could count on no one but myself.

And I was running out of time. I had to find a solution before he came back to get me. I had managed to wangle his permission to stay with my parents for a while, but I was going around in circles, with no escape in sight. “Nujood must remain by her husband’s side,” my father kept saying. Whenever he wasn’t there, I hurried to talk to my mother, who cried and told me she missed me, but could do nothing for me.

I was right to be afraid. He soon came visiting, to remind me of my duties as a wife. I tried to refuse, but it was no use. After some argument, he agreed to let me remain a few more weeks in Sana’a, but only if I stayed with him at his brother’s house. He didn’t trust me, suspecting that I would run away if I stayed too long with my parents. So for more than a month, I was plunged back into hell.

“When will you stop all your moaning? I’m fed up with it,” he complained one day, glaring and shaking his fist at me.

“When you let me go back to my parents’ house!” I buried my face in my hands.

Thanks to my stubbornness, I finally won a new reprieve.

“But this is the last time,” he warned me.

Back home, I realized I would have to act quickly if I wanted to get rid of that man and avoid being dragged back to Khardji. Five days passed, five difficult days during which I kept running into walls. My father, my brothers, my uncles-no one would listen to me.

Knocking on every possible door in search of someone who would, I went to see Dowla, my father’s second wife, who lived with her five children in a tiny first-floor apartment in an old building at the end of a blind alley, right across from our street. Driven by my anguish at the thought of returning to Khardji, I climbed the stairs, holding my nose to avoid the stench of garbage and communal toilets. Dowla opened her door wearing a long red and black dress and a huge smile.

“Ya, Nujood! What a surprise to see you again. Welcome!”

I liked Dowla. She had olive skin and long hair, which she kept braided. Tall, slender, she was prettier than Omma, and always endlessly patient-she never scolded me. The poor woman hadn’t had an easy time of it, though. Married late, at twenty, and to my father, who neglected her completely, she had learned to rely solely on herself. Her oldest boy, Yahya, eight, was born handicapped; still unable to walk, he required special attention, and his tantrums could last several hours. In spite of her poverty, which forced her to beg in the street to pay her paltry rent and buy bread for her children, Dowla was incredibly generous.

She invited me to sit on the big straw pallet that took up half the room, next to the tiny stove where water was boiling. She often had to fill her little ones’ bottles with tea instead of milk. Hanging from hooks on the wall, the plastic bags she used as her “pantry” looked far from full.

“Nujood,” she ventured, “you seem very worried.”

I knew that she was one of the few members of my family who had opposed my marriage, but no one had bothered to listen to her. She, on whom life had not smiled, had always shown compassion for those even less well off than she was. I felt I could trust her, and knew I need hide nothing from her.

“I’ve so much to tell you,” I replied, and then I poured out my heart.

Frowning, she listened to my story, which seemed to affect her deeply. She thought quietly for a moment, busying herself at the stove, then poured me some boiling tea in the only glass Yahya had not yet broken. Handing it to me, she leaned over and looked into my eyes.

“Nujood,” she whispered, “if no one will listen to you, you must just go straight to court.”

“To what?”

“To court!”

To court-but of course! In a flash, I saw images of judges in turbans, lawyers always in a hurry, men in white zannas and veiled women coming to complain about complicated family problems, thefts, squabbles over inheritances. Now I remembered what a courtroom was: I’d seen one on television, in a show Haïfa and I used to watch at the neighbors’ house. The actors spoke an Arabic different from ours here in Yemen, with a strange accent, and I thought I remembered that the program was from Kuwait. In the large room where the plaintiffs appeared one after another, the walls were white, and several rows of brown wooden benches faced the judge. We’d see the defendants arrive in a van with bars on the windows.

“Go to the courthouse,” Dowla continued. “As far as I know, that’s the only place where you’ll get a hearing. Ask to see the judge-after all, he’s the government’s representative. He’s very powerful, a godfather to all of us. His job is to help victims.”