Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

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  Six months earlier he had entered Raqqa in the late afternoon, his stomach contracting with excitement and terror. A motorcycle backfired as it drove past an antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck; the soldier swiveled the weapon in the motorcyclist’s direction. A joke, Farooq told him, relax! A row of palm trees slapped their fronds against one another in a breeze that wasn’t felt at street level. The driver of the car, one of the two men who had picked Farooq and Parvaiz up at Istanbul airport, insisted you could hear the palm fronds whisper Allah if your ear was good enough. His ear was better than anyone else’s in the car, Parvaiz said; he meant good as in “holy,” Farooq explained. The colors of the buildings were sun-bleached, but there was a brightness in the call of the birds. A polyethylene bag caught in the electric wires strung across the street made shivering sounds. A man juggled a flattened loaf of bread the size of his arm that made all the saliva rush to Parvaiz’s mouth; a fwump! sound as the oven-hot bread was dropped onto a table on the pavement. Bearded men stood around a cluster of motorcycles, two in long robes with bomber jackets, the others in jumpers and trousers, arguing in Arabic. Minarets reached high into the sky—at prayer time the azaan would bounce between one slim tower and the next. A tank rumbled past a monument with two headless statues. A very young girl in a green-and-yellow dress walked behind two women in black niqabs, even their eyes invisible beneath a face veil; Farooq hummed the music from a popular ninja video game until one of the men in the car warned him to stop disrespecting sisters or he’d have to report him to the Hisba—this was the first Parvaiz heard of the morality police, and he saw how mention of them strained Farooq’s expression.

  The soundscape changed around the central square, or perhaps Parvaiz stopped listening so acutely because of the distraction of heads of enemy soldiers mounted on spiked railings. It was curiously unmoving, something you might see in a TV show. One day, inshallah, there would be no enemy and children would play in the square, Farooq said. In the company of the other men his English conversation had become peppered with Arabic, and perhaps this was what made his words sound false. Then a different part of town, more affluent: villa-like houses, tall apartment blocks, the yellow and white paint on the facades brighter here. The car pulled up in front of one of the double-storied villas, and Farooq said, “This is our stop.”

  “Who lives here?” Parvaiz asked, stepping out of the car, taking in the sprawling luxury of the house, the size of three homes in his neighborhood put together.

  “One of the perks of the media arm,” Farooq said, nudging him, laughing at his disbelieving face.

  Two men only a few years older than Parvaiz appeared in the doorway of the villa. One Scottish, one American. They introduced themselves by their noms de guerre, embraced him formally, greeted Farooq in the manner of friends. Cameramen, both of them, and yes, those were their SUVs in the driveway—another perk of the media arm.

  Inside, the house had marble floors and faded places on the walls where once must have been photographs or artwork. There was a very large room with stiff-backed chairs and sofas with flower-patterned cushions, and beside it a formal dining room with a long table. Boxes lined the hallways—“our equipment,” said one of the men, whose names he had already forgotten, so that he referred to them mentally as Abu Two Names and Abu Three Names. It was like an icebox, the lowered blinds adding to the mortuary atmosphere. But then the two men led him upstairs, saying this was the part they actually lived in. Here it was light and airy, pleasingly informal.

  The American—Abu Two Names—ushered him onto a wraparound balcony that overlooked a garden dense with color. It was still afternoon, but he gratefully huddled into the shawl the Scotsman—Abu Three Names—offered him to counter the cold breeze, “from the Euphrates,” that reached him as he sank down into the surprising blue beanbag. A man appeared from somewhere—“This is Ismail, he came with the house”—and offered him tea and biscuits on a silver tray. From up here you could make out the sounds of motorcycles and cars, hammering, birdsong, the wind through the branches of trees, fallen bougainvillea flowers dancing in the breeze along the balustrade of the balcony. Despite his disquiet at the spiked heads and veiled women, the blue skies and camaraderie of the men slumped in beanbags promised the better world he’d come in search of.

  “One day you’ll tell us the story behind your name,” the American said. He was black, very tall, and had a wide smile. His friend was quieter, bespectacled, mixed-race Pakistani-Scottish. The name he meant was Parvaiz’s nom de guerre—Mohammad bin Bagram. Farooq had written it onto Parvaiz’s registration form at the first checkpoint with an air of pride at having chosen it for his friend. It was both a reminder of what his father had suffered and an acknowledgment that this new Parvaiz was born out of vengeance and justice, Farooq said—which made it impossible for him to say he hated it. And anyway he’d quickly been distracted from questions of naming when Farooq had reached into Parvaiz’s knapsack, taken out his passport, and handed it to the man at the registration desk, who had the soulless look of bureaucrats everywhere. Relax, Farooq said. If you ever need it back I’ll get it for you. But you won’t need it back. You’re now a citizen of al-Dawla—the State.

  Parvaiz tried not to think about the passport and asked the cameramen how long they’d been living here. They said they’d been sharing this house for over two months, though their friendship had assumed an instant depth that told them their souls must have met in Jannah well before the will of Allah brought them back together in Raqqa. They touched each other’s arms and shoulders, unself-consciously affectionate, which made the whole thing moving instead of absurd.

  “It was the same with this young warrior and me,” Farooq said, ruffling Parvaiz’s hair. “It’ll be strange not seeing him every day.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To the front. I’m a fighter, aren’t I?”

  “You won’t be living in Raqqa?” He saw the American shake his head in that schoolyard way boys signaled to each other that too much emotion was being revealed, usually around a girl, and Parvaiz attempted to undercut the pleading tone of his voice with a chin-jut that said Huh, interesting, why didn’t you say before?

  “I’m mostly away fighting the kafir bastards so you boys can be safe in your air-conditioned studios.”

  “Big-talking man. If you fighters are so important, why do we get paid more?” the American said.

  The Scotsman put up a hand to stop the conversation. “Alhamdulillah, we all play our part in the way of Allah. Who is better or worse is judged only by the quality of his faith.”

  “Brother, you can always be relied on to remind us what’s important, Ma’ashallah,” Farooq said, in a tone that managed to sound genuine. “No, man. I’ll mostly be gone. And when I’m here, I’ve got my wife and kid, haven’t I?”

  “You have?”

  “Of course. They gave me a wife almost right away—these two highly paid men are still waiting to be approved by the marriage bureau.”

  “You just got here earlier, that’s all,” the American said. “The waiting time is up to six months these days. Anyway, I’m talking to a girl in France. She’s almost ready to come over.”

  “No, but—” He heard his own voice coming out in a whine, but he couldn’t help it. “You said you’d help me find people who knew my father.”

  Farooq shrugged. “You’ll run into some of the old jihadis at the training camp. Tell them who you father was, and they’ll hook you up with people who knew him.”

  “What training camp?”

  “Didn’t you tell him anything?” the Scotsman said.

  What Farooq hadn’t told him was that all new arrivals were required to undergo ten days of Shariah camp (“It would have been longer, but I put down your level of Shariah knowledge as ‘intermediate’ when I filled out your form”), followed by six weeks of military training. A
fter that, assuming he was accepted into the media wing (“And of course you will be,” said Farooq, but the other two were quiet), there’d be another month of media training. It all sounded a little overwhelming, Farooq knew, but soon enough he’d be placed in a studio, earning a salary, and would have his own SUV and portion of a house—maybe he’d even have a share of this villa if the marriage bureau or the French girl saw fit to move either or both of its present occupants into married quarters by then.

  It would have been stupid to say he thought he’d been brought to this house because this was where he was going to live right away, un-Muslim to say he didn’t want to go to Shariah camp, unmanly to say he didn’t want military training, petulant to accuse Farooq of anything when he had been the one who hadn’t thought to ask the practical questions about the life he was entering. He shrugged and said that was fine by him, although no one had asked.

  “And once you’re settled in you can put in a request with the marriage bureau too,” the American said. “Though my advice is, try and find a European girl online. They know how to do more things than the Arabs, if you get my drift, though my bonnie friend here doesn’t like it when I speak that way.”

  “Speaking of talking to girls, should we tell your sisters where you are?” The cascading noise from the beanbag was Farooq shifting his weight, reaching for the phone in his back pocket.

  Parvaiz had sent Aneeka a series of texts since his arrival in Istanbul the previous afternoon. Cheerful lying messages about sightseeing during his daylong stopover en route to Karachi. Near the Syria–Turkey border he said his battery was dying, it hadn’t charged overnight, so she might not hear from him for a while. Then Farooq had taken the phone from him, jerked his wrist, and sent the phone flying out of the car window. He knew Farooq’s tests well enough by now to merely smile, shrug, and think of the new phone he’d buy in Raqqa with the income he’d receive for his work as a sound designer.

  He took the phone from Farooq, was surprised by the time on the home screen—later than he’d thought. The flight from Istanbul to Karachi would be en route; soon his cousin would call Aneeka to say he was at the airport, the passengers had exited, but there was no sign of Parvaiz.

  “Stay here while you speak to her,” Farooq said when Parvaiz started to get up.

  He logged on to Skype and called Aneeka, imagining the bubbling sound of an incoming call bouncing around the interior of her tan-colored handbag slung on the handle of the door leading into the living area. He wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers, waited.

  When Aneeka answered, his first thought was that her strange expression could be explained by the fact that she expected him to still be on a flight. “Where are you?” she said, voice catching.

  “Hey. Before I answer that, promise you’ll . . .”

  “Who’s Farooq?”

  He glanced at Farooq, who took hold of his wrist and seemed about to pivot the phone toward himself, but the Scotsman quickly caught his shoulder. “Not if she’s unveiled,” he said.

  “Who are you with? P, where are you?” she said.

  “Why are you asking about Farooq?”

  “You should be on a plane. The plane left on time. I checked. Why aren’t you on the plane?”

  “Calm down, it’s okay. Why are you asking about Farooq?”

  “Abdul told his mother you’ve gone with his friend’s cousin Farooq. To Raqqa. Where are you really?”

  “Can’t even trust your own family to keep secrets anymore,” Farooq said, but without looking unduly displeased.

  “I would never go to the place you think Raqqa is. But it’s not that place.”

  Something was squeezing his voice box, making the words come out funny. The American was giving him that look again, that shake of the head. Aneeka’s face was unfamiliar to him for the first time in his life—an expression there he hadn’t seen before and didn’t know how to interpret. Her mouth a strange shape, pursed, as though she were eating something awful that she could neither spit out nor swallow. Then she vanished, and Isma was there.

  “You selfish idiot,” she said. This was easier to contend with—he rolled his eyes at Farooq, placed two fingers against his temples to mime a gun firing into his brain. “Watch your manners, brother. We have company.” She swiveled the phone, and two men were standing in their living room, everything surrounding them as familiar as his own heartbeat. “Say hello to the men from the Met,” Isma’s voice continued, conversational. “They’re going to turn our house and our lives upside down. Again. Do you have anything you want to say to them?”

  He was conscious of the three men on the balcony watching him, waiting to see his response to the news that the police knew where he was and now there was no going back.

  “My sisters didn’t know anything,” he said to the men from the Met whose faces were made of stone.

  Farooq took the phone from him. “I will plant the flag of the caliphate on Buckingham Palace myself,” he said, and jabbed the phone to end the call. “What?” he said, in response to Parvaiz’s cry of outrage. “I should’ve said Downing Street instead?”

  The Scotsman leaned forward, touched Parvaiz’s knee sympathetically. “It’s all right. Allah will protect them while you’re here doing His work. Inshallah.”

  Parvaiz looked at the man’s shining eyes, his certainty, and lowered his head as if in prayer so that the others couldn’t see his panic.

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  Panic was a familiar companion, months later, of the man who sat at the back of the café, where the bright light of the June afternoon couldn’t reach. Every so often he reminded himself to look down at the tourist guidebook, sip the apple-flavored tea.

  The open-fronted café allowed him to observe life along the narrow Istanbul street that carried tourists and residents between Galata Tower and the Golden Horn. The tiniest things seemed exceptional: a silver bracelet catching the light on a woman’s wrist; a woman’s wrist itself. Voices speaking over the azaan from the city’s mosques, the sounds of trade continuing undisturbed, as though muezzins demanded as little attention as car horns.

  The tray on the table provided a reflective surface, allowing him to see the slight, unremarkable boy from Preston Road whom the barber a few streets away had sheared back into existence. His face was deceptive now with its promise of familiarity to those who had known him when he still was that boy. He ran his hand along the clean-shaven chin, its contrast to the rest of his skin tone worrying him, pulled the baseball cap lower over his close-cropped hair, hunched. Take me somewhere far from here where I can buy clothes, he’d said to the cabdriver he’d frantically hailed after running away from the electronics shop. Then he’d phoned Aneeka.

  A voice from the outdoor table, raised, spoke excitedly of “the meeting point of Asia and Europe.” Such outmoded concepts, why did people still think they meant anything? The language of violence, spoken by the powerful of all nations, erased the distinctions beneath the surface. Two girls walked past, laughing, uninhibited. The sound—continuing on, burrowing down from the girls’ throats to their bellies—was more remarkable than bracelets or wrists. Perhaps surface was all there was to fight for. He remembered how it felt to float on a surface of freedom and safety, to feel himself buoyed up by it, and longing tugged at his heart.

  He looked down at his book again. The words on the page, dimly lit by the overhead lamp, made no sense. Leave Nizam Caddesi to head down to the shore via Hamlacı Sokağı and eventually you will come to Leon Trotsky’s house, standing ruined in its wild garden. How was it possible, this invitation to a world in which you might spend an afternoon meandering toward a shore, stopping at a ruined house in which someone important once lived. No, not an invitation; the words assumed you already were of that world: you will come to Leon Trotsky’s house. That promise, that certainty. Had there ever been a time when he could have slipped into such a life—a cheap flig
ht, a youth hostel? Why not? In the company of Aneeka he could have left Nizam Caddesi to head down to the shore. But no, Isma would have stopped it. I gave up my life to work in a dry-cleaning store and put food on this table; now it’s your turn. If you can’t get yourself a scholarship, at least pay some bills. The depth of his homesickness announced itself with the realization that he was looking forward to sparring with Isma in the familiar, inconsequential way. If they allowed him back, that is, instead of handing him over to their allies in a prison somewhere outside the law. Perhaps they were better at keeping people alive now; or perhaps life and death weren’t outcomes of any interest. They cared only about information, of which he had too little for anyone to believe he didn’t have more. Or perhaps they cared only about inflicting pain. The one thing that the violent respect is more violence, Farooq had said last autumn, in those weeks when every word that tripped off his lips was wisdom and beauty. He pressed the soles of his feet into the carpet. Stillness—external stillness—was one of Farooq’s lessons too.

  Just when he felt he would have to scream to relieve the pressure in his chest, there was Aneeka, lighting up the screen of the phone:

  HAVE PASSPORT AND TICKET. FLIGHT IN THREE HOURS. RUSHING TO AIRPORT.

  Turn off your CAPS LOCK, Shouty.

  DON’T THINK YOU CAN START BOSSING ME AROUND, IDIOT.

  Love you too.

  Until soon, Senti.

  Until soon, Mental.

  He ordered a coffee, some bread. Perhaps when she arrived there’d be time to go look for the ruined house in the wild garden. A bearded, broad-shouldered man appeared in the doorway, his shadow extending deep into the café. Someone asking the waiter for directions. There were houses and gardens enough in London. The British consulate, the airport: that was all he wanted to see of Istanbul. Tomorrow at this time he’d be back in Preston Road. Inshallah.