Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  His phone buzzed again, making him smile. Aneeka the Anxious. He raised himself off the seat, pulled the phone out of his back pocket, read:

  You’re a dead man, my little warrior.

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  The man knelt in the sand, motionless except for the movement of his lips.

  “Find something to gag him with,” said Abu Raees, the head of the Raqqa sound studio. “We don’t want that interference.”

  Parvaiz ran back to the SUV in which he and Abu Raees had only minutes ago driven up to this scene out of a movie. Blue winter sky, a day so still not a single speck of sand moved in the desert landscape, no sign of life other than the kneeling man and the executioner sitting a few feet away, turning his sword this way and that so it caught the sun and became a dancing beam of light. Parvaiz opened the passenger door of the SUV and ducked inside. Hidden from view, he rested his head against the leather interior, tried to stop the shaking of his hands that had started the moment they stepped out of the SUV and he understood what was going to happen.

  It was late March. He had survived the tedium and affront of Shariah classes, in which he learned that everyone he loved was either an infidel or an apostate, and that both categories deserved to die, and that it was against Allah’s will to wear T-shirts with slogans on them, or to give anyone the wrong directions, or to allow your women to sit down in public. He had survived military training, during which he learned that fear can drive your body to impossible feats, and that the men of his father’s generation who fought jihad in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, all went home to their families for the winter months. That piece of information had made him blubber into his pillow at night, not because it made him understand that his father had never loved him (though he did understand that) but because he finally saw that he was his father’s son in his abandonment of a family who had always deserved better than him. He had survived all that, and even though he knew by then the nature of the joyless, heartless, unforgiving hellhole for which he’d left his life, he believed he had survived the worst. The media wing had accepted him, trained him (and he had found pleasure in the learning), and now he had a position at the Raqqa sound studio and had taken the Scotsman’s place in the villa (the marriage bureau had found him a wife, but the American’s French girl had backed out of coming—the only piece of news that had actually made Parvaiz feel happy in the last three months). In his two weeks at the sound studio he’d been assigned mainly low-level tasks—editing distortions out of speeches, cataloging Abu Raees’s haphazard sound files—but today Abu Raees, a man who was known to prefer working alone, had asked him to come along and help set up an important field recording. He had felt proud, even though after Farooq—whom he hadn’t seen since that first day in Raqqa—he’d learned to mistrust his need for an approving father figure.

  He heard Abu Raees calling the name he’d learned to answer to, and pulled a cloth out of the glove compartment. The sand shifted beneath his feet as he trudged back, hands fisted in pockets. The executioner lifted his blade, brought it down onto the kneeling man’s neck. Parvaiz bent over, stomach emptying. When he straightened, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, the executioner was lifting the blade again, bringing it down to within a few inches of the man’s neck again. Abu Raees, headphones on, was checking the DAT levels. The executioner pointed off to the side and Abu Raees walked in the direction he was gesturing, just a few feet away. They were anticipating the trajectory of the man’s head when it left his shoulders. Working out where to place the mics.

  He reached the kneeling man, bent down to place the cloth in his mouth. The man’s lips still moving, the words now discernible. He was praying. Ayat al-Kursi, the prayer Parvaiz’s grandmother had taught him to say in times of distress. The prayer he too had been whispering on the walk from the SUV to the kneeling man. The man looked up. Parvaiz wouldn’t remember anything of the man’s face afterward, only his expressive eyes.

  “Come here, listen to this,” Abu Raees said, holding out his headphones. Parvaiz reached for them, dropped them. “What’s wrong with your hands?”

  He shook his head, picked up the headphones again, and managed to fit them onto his head. Abu Raees, eyes narrowed, handed him a mic. What he heard through the headphones was the sound of the mic juddering in his hand. The tremors had moved all the way up to his elbow.

  “I can’t stop it,” he said. And then, “I’m not feeling so well.”

  “Go and lie down in the SUV,” Abu Raees said, turning away.

  He did as commanded, lay sealed up in the back of the car, imagining it again and again: the blade cutting through air, cutting through flesh and bone, the body slumping, the head bouncing on the sand, rolling to a stop. The eyes still open, not afraid but accusing.

  How long does it take to cut off a man’s head?

  When Abu Raees finally returned to the car, Parvaiz said, “I don’t know why Allah made that happen. My will was in one direction, but my hands couldn’t follow. I must have failed Him in some way.”

  Abu Raees gave him a long, considered look as he invoked the will of Allah as explanation for his failure. A lapse in loyalty could see a man stripped of his privileges and sent to dig trenches on the outskirts of town, where he would be an easy target for aerial bombing. “You should stay up all night praying for forgiveness,” Abu Raees said.

  “I will,” he answered. It was unclear if the taciturn Iraqi believed him or just didn’t want to do without such an efficient worker. Impossible here to know who was a true believer and who was playing along for any of a host of reasons, from terror to avarice. The price of letting your mask slip was far too high for anyone to risk it.

  For days and days after that, he worked in the studio on sound effects of beheadings, crucifixions, whipping. This was both a test and a punishment. In the studio, he had control of himself. Abstracting himself to that place where nothing but getting the sound right mattered. The fascination of discovering the different pitch and timbre of a nail through flesh, a blade through flesh. Some men were men in their dying screams, some were animals. He, Mohammad bin Bagram, now numbered himself among the animals.

  And that’s why, although he’d been given his own phone since joining the studio and could finally speak to his sister without a minder standing within earshot, he hadn’t called her. Just daily chat messages to let her know he was alive, then he’d log off. Conversation had become unimaginable. What have you been up to? How was your day? How are you doing?

  But then, in the early days of April, he logged onto Skype to quickly send his daily message and there was one from her: Call me. I’m working on a plan to get you home.

  Home. A place from a past he’d turned his back on, and to which MI5 would make sure he never returned.

  I’m fine here, he wrote back.

  And she replied, Liar.

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  He left the café, head bent, walk altered. Keeping watch for Farooq’s white SUV, he shuffled past Galata Tower to the broad pedestrianized İstiklal Caddesi, where the presence of a clothing shop he knew from London was a comfort. He entered, bought a pair of blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, a black baseball cap with the shop’s name stitched on it. Changed into the new set of clothes, left the ones he had bought just a couple of hours earlier in the changing room, and walked out.

  The next shop he went into sold cell phones. He’d destroyed the SIM card from the brick handset in case it could be used to locate him, but buying a new SIM card required identification. Or, he discovered, part of the large wad of Turkish liras left over from his shopping spree in the electronics store. He fitted the SIM card into the brick and texted Aneeka to let her know how to contact him. Her flight would be leaving soon.

  Doing something other than waiting for Farooq to walk into the café and find him made him feel briefly in control, and for a few minutes he walked unconcernedly among the camouflage of crowds of
people, looking at the elegant facades of the buildings lining the street. The bookshop tempted him, as did the movie theater, but it felt safer to be in public, among people, with more than one direction in which he could run. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of white sleeve and his legs turned to water before his gaze traveled up the arm to an unfamiliar face.

  He sat down on a step leading into a shop. Closed his eyes, forced himself to remember the song playing in the kitchen the day Aneeka joked with him about Asian wedding sites. Chimta and bass guitar, dholak and drums, a man’s voice carrying a song that arose from a place deeper than the currents of history. He drew his knees up to his chest. Just across the street was a narrow road. If he cut down it he would be at the British consulate. Perhaps he should just do it. Why wait for Aneeka, why embroil her in this? He could simply present himself there: I made a mistake. I’m prepared to face trial if I’ve broken laws. Just let me go to London. But he was the terrorist son of a terrorist father. He rested his head on his knees. He didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels.

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  The MiG dropped its payload close enough to rattle the windows and the plates in the studio’s communal lunch room.

  “Go,” Abu Raees said. “Hurry. Take this.” He pulled the Zoom H2 out of his pocket, but Parvaiz was already on his feet, reaching into his own pocket to demonstrate he hadn’t forgotten the most basic lesson: always have a portable recorder on you. “Good! Now go.”

  He drove in the direction of the plume of smoke, one hand pressing the horn to move other vehicles out of the way. Before he reached the place where the smoke was densest—a market—he slowed, switched off the air-conditioning, and rolled down the windows to let in the blast of hot May air and the sounds of the city. Across Raqqa, the roar of power generators provided an aural map of where the members of the State lived and worked, but he was too accustomed to the inequality between the locals and those who ruled over them to pay it much attention anymore. Before long he heard a loud, repeated cry that came from a street so narrow he had to park his SUV around the corner and enter on foot. There were men standing on the corner, facing away from the street. All locals, who knew him at a glance by his foreign features, his white robes, as a member of the State. They looked at him, a couple seemed about to speak, but he brushed past them. By now he could make out the word “help” in a woman’s voice.

  The narrow street was deserted, even the shops along it empty. Parvaiz ran, able now to see the collapsed section of a wall even though he couldn’t see what was pinned beneath it.

  A voice called out sharply. The door opened to a van he’d assumed empty, one he now identified by the writing on its side as belonging to the Hisba, the morality police. The man who emerged—only a little older than Parvaiz—spoke to him first in Arabic and then, seeing he didn’t understand, English.

  “She has taken off her face veil. You can’t approach her. We’ve called the women’s brigade.” He was holding his hand against the side of his face so that no inadvertent movement of his eye muscle might cause him to look upon an unveiled woman.

  “Please,” she called out. “Please, please help me.” Oh god, a Londoner’s voice. A young voice, maybe his age, Aneeka’s age.

  “If we go to her to help, surely that isn’t a greater sin than leaving a sister to suffer?”

  “She is being left to suffer because she removed her face veil.”

  “She may have needed to do it to breathe properly.”

  Could she hear him, he wondered, as he raised his voice? Could she hear the London in him? “Please,” she was still crying out, “please help, it hurts.” And then, jolting his heart, “Mum! Mum, I’m sorry.”

  A memory then of arms lifting him up when he fell off the garden shed, a cheek pressed against his. His mother. Or Isma. There was a woman without a face veil just a few feet from him. A woman’s face, the softness of her cheek. She might have bad teeth, a crooked nose, chicken-pox scars, and she would still be the most remarkable, the most dangerous thing in the world.

  “Brother, watch yourself.”

  There were a great many things he could say right then, and all but one of them would get him killed. “Jazakallah khayr, brother. Thank you for correcting me. And for preserving our sister’s modesty from the gaze of strangers.”

  The man took his hand, squeezed it. “Are you married? No? You should be. We will find you a wife. Alhamdullillah.”

  “Alhamdulillah,” he replied, disengaging his hand as soon as, but not before, it seemed inoffensive to do so.

  “Please don’t go,” she called after him. “Please, brother. Why won’t you help me?”

  Oh, to be deaf. Allah, take away my hearing. Take away the memory of that voice.

  What was in his face that made the men on the street corner back away, frightened? At nineteen he was terrifying to grown men. He was the State.

  He strode onward to the SUV. Once inside he rolled up the windows he’d left open, knowing no one would dare touch what belonged to a man like him. These were the kinds of things he’d learned to take for granted, the small privileges he enjoyed. Whispering a prayer, he logged onto Skype. Her status was DO NOT DISTURB, but that was never meant for him. It would have to be a voice call rather than a video call so that no one might look in through the window and see him talking to an unveiled woman.

  “P! Thank god. Oh, thank god.”

  Her voice, so long unheard, broke him open. He leaned his forehead on the steering wheel so that no one could see the tears he thought he’d stopped being able to cry.

  “What’s happened? Are you in trouble?”

  The things you forget. How it feels to hear someone speak to you with love.

  “No, I just. I can’t stay here. I can’t do it. They’re taken my passport so I have to but I can’t. I thought if I learned the rules . . . but I can’t. I can’t. I just want to come home.”

  He could hear her exhale on the other end, understood that she had been waiting for this admission since he’d left, and that failing to make it had been just another way he’d caused her pain. He started to apologize but she cut him short, her voice taking on the brisk efficiency of the women of his family, which he loved, which he missed, which he should never have left.

  “You have to get to Istanbul. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, eventually. When they trust you enough you can get a pass if you have a reason.”

  “Find a reason. And then go to the British consulate and tell them to give you a passport.”

  “Aneeka, I’m the enemy. You know what they do to the enemy. Do you? Do you know? You said you had a plan—please tell me you have a plan.”

  “What happened to our father won’t happen to you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m making sure of things here.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Explain when I see you. Some things need to be explained face-to-face. But trust me.”

  “What are you up to?”

  “It’s funny. I thought I was doing something for you. But it’s turned out nice for me. Remember that when I explain it to you, okay?”

  “Oh god, what? You shagging the head of MI5?”

  The joy of teasing her, of finding that voice still lived in his throat.

  “Shut up. Come home.”

  “Okay.”

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  People were beginning to look at the man with the trembling hands sitting on a step while everyone else on İstiklal Caddesi was moving. He stood, walked a short distance, and crossed into a shop that had books and old maps in its windows. Inside, an old man behind the counter looked up, nodded, looked down again at his newspaper. There was a quiet inside here of the sort other people would call “atmosp
here,” but he knew it was all about the way the carpet muffled footsteps, and the closed door blocked out noise from the outside, and the tiny hum of the air conditioner. He walked over to the wooden map display cabinet with four drawers, each containing dozens of old maps. The Ottoman Empire, Konstantinopel, La Turquie en Asie, Asia Minor, Egypt and Carthago, The Dardanelles, The Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century.

  He handled the maps with one hand, the other holding tightly to the brick handset. Aneeka should have texted back by now. Something was wrong at her end, he didn’t know what, but when he’d called as his cab sped away from the electronics shop and said he was in Istanbul she sounded first incredulous, then irate. Why didn’t you give me any advance warning? I didn’t want to get your hopes up in case something went wrong. Today of all days! Why, what’s so special about today? Nothing, never mind, it’ll be fine. Today is perfect. Just, it’s all being sorted out right now. It’ll be fine. Which one of us are you trying to convince? What’s going on? Look, I need to call someone, I’ll call you back.

  But when she called back a few minutes later she was anxious, didn’t directly answer his question about whether she’d arranged whatever she was trying to arrange. He’d said perhaps he’d be safest returning to Farooq, maybe trying this again some other time. No, just go to the consulate. I can’t. I’m scared of what they’ll do to me. No, wait, give me five minutes, I’ll call you back. No—if I’m going back I have to go back now, before he realizes I’ve run away. No, no, no. Don’t. I’ll come to you. I’ll get the next flight. Just find someplace he won’t find you, and stay there until I arrive. We’ll go to the consulate together. And all he could think was at least that way he’d see her. Whatever they did to him once he arrived at the consulate, at least he would see her first. He could bear anything else, as long as he saw her first.

  A little space of clarity opened up in his brain. Of course they wouldn’t allow her to board a flight to the very place from which her twin had disappeared into the world of the enemy. She was probably still arguing the point, refusing to leave the airport until they gave her a boarding pass. Isma’s voice in his head calling him selfish, irresponsible, and she was right.