“Nujood! Nujood!”

I turned around, wondering who could be calling me in that unfamiliar voice, so strange to my ears. Not like Jad’s, a voice I could always recognize with my eyes closed. Looking up, I realized that it was him, my unknown husband, speaking to me for the first time since we’d left Sana’a. With barely a glance at me, he announced that it was time to leave again. Nodding, I headed toward our new “carriage”: a rusted-out red and white Toyota pickup. I was put in the front seat with the veiled sister-in-law, sitting on the new driver’s right. The men clambered into the open truck bed in the back, with other passengers who were catching a ride.

“Hang on tight,” warned the driver. “The pickup will rock back and forth.”

Before setting out, he turned on his tape deck at top volume, and folk music began crackling out of loudspeakers as rusty as the pickup. The vibrations of the oud, a kind of Oriental lute, accompanied the voice of a very well-known local singer, Hussein Moheb, and soon they were joined by the jolting of the pickup doing battle with the big stones in the road. We weren’t rocking back and forth, though; we were flying in all directions! Several times, stones crashed into our windshield, and I hung on for dear life, praying to arrive at the village in one piece.

“Listen to the music, it will make you forget your fear!” shouted the driver.

If he had only known what other fears tormented me.

Hour after hour we drove, to the sound of Hussein Moheb’s wailing; I should have counted the number of times the driver rewound the cassette. He seemed intoxicated by the music, which surely gave him the courage to forge ahead. Hanging on to his steering wheel like a rider clinging to his horse, he tackled even the slightest turn with his eyes riveted on the winding road, as if he knew all its pitfalls by heart.

“God made nature tough, but luckily he made men even tougher!”

Well, I thought, if the driver is right, then God must have forgotten to include me.

The deeper into the valley we went, the worse I felt. I was tired. I felt sick to my stomach. I was hungry and thirsty. But most of all, I was afraid. The closer we came to Wadi La’a, the more uncertain my fate seemed. And my hopes for escape? Dashed.

Khardji hadn’t changed; it still felt like the end of the earth. As soon as we arrived, aching from the bone-jarring ride, I recognized the five stone houses, the modest river flowing through the village, the bees humming from flower to flower, the endless trees, and the village children going to the well to fill their little yellow jerry cans. A woman was waiting for us on the threshold of one of the houses. I felt immediately that she didn’t like me. She didn’t embrace me-not even a tiny kiss, not even a gentle pat. His mother. My new mother-in-law. She was old and ugly, with skin as wrinkled as a lizard’s. She was missing two of her front teeth, while the others were rotten from cavities and blackened by tobacco. She wore a black and gray head scarf. She gestured for me to enter. The inside of the house was spare, with hardly any furnishings: four bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen. The toilet was out under the stars, behind some bushes.

I hadn’t eaten anything since we’d left Sana’a; I was famished and fairly fell upon the rice and meat that his sisters had prepared. Joined after our meal by some guests from the village, the grown-ups gathered to chew khat. Again! Huddled in a corner, I watched them in silence. To my astonishment, no one seemed surprised by my tender age. Later I learned that marriages to little girls are not unusual in the countryside, so for these people, I didn’t seem like an exception. There is even a tribal proverb that says, “To guarantee a happy marriage, marry a nine-year-old girl.”

The grown-ups were chatting up a storm.

“Life in Sana’a has become so expensive,” my sister-in-law was complaining.

“As of tomorrow, I’m going to teach the child to work like the rest of us,” announced my mother-in-law, without saying my name. “And I certainly hope she brought some money with her.”

“No more time for girlish fancies. We’ll show her how to be a woman, a real one.”

I remember how relieved I felt when they led me to my room, after the guests had gone at sunset. That brown tunic I’d been wearing since the day before was starting to smell really foul, and now I could finally take it off. Once the door had shut behind me, I sighed deeply and quickly slipped into a little red cotton shirt I’d brought from Sana’a. It smelled like home, a musty smell with a hint of resinous incense, a familiar and comforting scent. A long woven mat was lying on the floor: my bed. Beside it was an old oil lamp that cast the shadow of its flame on the wall. I didn’t even need to put out the light to fall asleep.

I would rather have never awakened. When the door crashed open, I was startled awake, and thought that the night wind must have come up unusually strong. I’d barely opened my eyes when I felt a damp, hairy body pressing against me. Someone had blown out the lamp, leaving the room pitch dark. I shivered. It was him! I recognized him right away from that overpowering odor of cigarettes and khat. He stank! Like an animal! Without a word, he began to rub himself against me.

“Please, I’m begging you, leave me alone,” I gasped. I was shaking.

“You are my wife! From now on, I decide everything. We must sleep in the same bed.”

I leapt to my feet, ready to run away. Where? What did it matter-I had to escape from this trap. Then he stood up, too. The door was not completely closed, and spying a glimmer of light from the moon and stars, I dashed immediately toward the courtyard.

He ran after me.

“Help! Help!” I shrieked, sobbing.

My voice rang in the night, but it was as if I were shouting into a void. I ran everywhere, anywhere, panting for breath. I went into one room but ducked out again when he followed me there. I ran without looking back. I stumbled over something, maybe a piece of glass, and scrambled to my feet to take off again, but arms caught me, held me tightly, wrestled me back into the bedroom, pushed me down on the mat. I felt paralyzed, as if I had been tied down.

Hoping to find a female ally, I called out to my mother-in-law.

“Amma! Auntie!”

There was no reply. I screamed again.

“Somebody help me!”

When he took off his white tunic, I rolled into a ball to protect myself, but he began pulling at my nightshirt, wanting me to undress. Then he ran his rough hands over my body and pressed his lips against mine. He smelled so awful, a mixture of tobacco and onion.

I tried to get away again, moaning, “Get away from me! I’ll tell my father!”

“You can tell your father whatever you like. He signed the marriage contract. He gave me permission to marry you.”

“You have no right!”

“Nujood, you are my wife!”

“Help! Help!”

He started to laugh, nastily.

“I repeat: you are my wife. Now you must do what I want! Got that?”

Suddenly it was as if I’d been snatched up by a hurricane, flung around, struck by lightning, and I had no more strength to fight back. There was a peal of thunder, and another, and another-the sky was falling down on me, and it was then that something burning, a burning I had never felt before, invaded the deepest part of me. No matter how I screamed, no one came to help me. It hurt, awfully, and I was all alone to face the pain.

With what felt like my last breath, I shrieked one more time, I think, and then lost consciousness.