Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

  “That was his doing, not mine. A girl that obsessed with her brother never said anything about him that should have raised suspicions? Or about her father?”

  She leaned back against the fridge, her elbow pressing a button on the LED panel that smoothly ejected two cubes of ice from the dispenser before she jerked away. The noiseless efficiency had always been a disappointment—in his childhood he coveted the rattling, groaning ice dispenser in the fridge door of one of the Wembley relatives. Isma Pasha of Preston Road, the upmarket end of Wembley, picked up one of the ice cubes from the grille onto which it had been deposited and briefly became the embodiment of all his childhood ambitions. Surely she was among those who could be saved, despite the wreckage of her family.

  “Eamonn knew about our father all along. I told him, before he even met Aneeka.”

  She was standing there with an ice cube melting between her fingers, not knowing what to do with it now that she’d picked it up. A picture of harmless awkwardness. A wolf in lamb’s clothing.

  “You’ve been sensible so far. Keep being sensible,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass, looking contemplatively into the miniature blood ocean.

  “What? No, I didn’t mean . . .” She placed the ice in the empty wineglass, where it soaked up the color of the remaining droplets of red. “Do you think I’d try to make it my word against the office of the home secretary? Or that I’d try to make things worse for Eamonn? I only meant to suggest your son has more character than you give him credit for. There’s strength where you think there’s weakness.”

  “You’re very impassioned on the subject of my son. Pity he didn’t end up with you instead of that sister of yours. You I’d accept.”

  “He didn’t want to end up with me,” she said, her tone flat.

  He raised his eyebrows at her over his wineglass. “Was that an option?”

  “No.”

  “There are interesting shades of ‘yes’ in that ‘no.’ We may have to return to it one day. But first let’s deal with the situation in which we find ourselves. You’re here to ask a favor. All right. Let’s see how sensible you are. Will you convince her to let the body be buried, in Karachi? No airline would carry it in the state it’s now in anyway.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the ice cube in the glass, now pinkly melting.

  “There’s no convincing her. I want to be with her, that’s all.”

  Those were almost exactly the words Eamonn had used. I only want to be with her. Meaningless words from a weak boy. He had been repeating that word to himself endlessly about his son: “weak.” He took hold of the almost-emptied glass on the chrome island, swallowed the numbingly cold water with its tinge of something else. A foreign body in ice.

  “Suarez, where is my son?”

  “Normandy, sir. On Miss Alice’s estate.”

  “Is someone watching him?”

  “Sir, no. I thought it would be enough to watch his . . . Aneeka Pasha . . . to ensure there was no further contact, as you asked. Would you like me to—”

  “No, no. You’ve done the right thing. Well, thank you, Suarez, for coming out so late. You can leave me here with her. I’m closer to the knife block than she is.”

  When the door closed behind Suarez, Isma Pasha said, “Eamonn has your sense of humor.”

  “He’s funnier.”

  “Yes.”

  He took his phone out of his pocket, texted James: Find out if my son’s used his passport in the last few days. Discreetly.

  He folded his arms, leaned back. He heard a tiny sigh from Isma Pasha and tilted his head forward to see her replicating his posture, the fridge her headrest. Curious woman. She was quite clearly besotted with Eamonn, but that seemed to make no difference to her devotion to her sister.

  “Why sociology?” he said. He shouldn’t have opened the wine—it would only make Terry angrier. There was never anything to be gained from pettiness.

  “I wanted to understand why the world is so unfair.”

  “Shouldn’t your God give you those answers?” he said, surprised by the slight teasing of his own tone.

  “Our God did, in a roundabout way.”

  “How’s that?” he said. She was pretty when her face was at rest, wiped clean of the encroachment of anxiety.

  “For starters, He created Marx.”

  “So you have a sense of humor too.”

  “Only assuming I meant that to be a joke.” She looked directly at him, and something passed between them—it wasn’t about sex, but something that felt more dangerous. She was familiar to him, a reminder of a world he’d lost.

  He flexed his shoulders, trying to loosen them, looked at the microwave clock, wondered how it was still today. “You must have seen what was happening to your brother. Why didn’t you say something? How do I get people like you to say something when it’s still early enough to act?”

  “We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks? Did you see what was happening with your son?”

  He could feel the muscles of his face contract. “Let me tell you this: If it turns out you’re right, and I’m wrong. If there is an Almighty and He sends His angel Jibreel to lift up your brother—and your sister—in his arms and fly them back to London on his wings of fire, I will not let him enter. Do you understand? Not Jibreel himself.”

  “A pair of nineteen-year-olds, one of them dead,” was all she said.

  The quietness of her tone made his rhetoric of angels and wings of fire—the language of his parents—sound exactly as hysterical as it had been. He touched his tongue to his incisor to help him formulate a response that would decimate both Isma Pasha and his own momentary lapse, but was distracted by James calling. He answered the call, said “Yes” and “Thank you.” Hanging up, he poured the contents of his wineglass back into the bottle without wasting a drop. He’d need a clear head in the morning.

  “Will you allow me to leave tomorrow?” she said.

  “You won’t matter tomorrow. Do what you want.”

  He left the kitchen, headed down to the basement. Along the way he passed a console table with a smiling picture of Eamonn. He picked it up and kissed his son’s cheek. My beautiful boy. One final lingering moment in which he allowed himself the luxury of being a father to a son—a son who was moving in the opposite direction of home, burning bridges in his wake, a trail of fire in the sky.

  9

  KARAMAT NEVER REMEMBERED the tiniest shred of his dreams, so when he was awakened in the middle of the night his first thought was that it must have been some unwanted presence making his heart race so fast it woke the rest of him up. But the silence of the spare bedroom in the basement was so complete it was obvious nothing had disturbed it. The sliding glass door with its rolled-up blinds looked onto a light well composed of a glass platform overhead and carefully angled mirrors that were reflecting a confusing, cold light into the bedroom. In his pajamas he walked out into the light well. The moon was full and low overhead. He lay down on the wooden bench built into the wall at the insistence of his heat-seeking boy, who used this space as a sunroom. But now it was cold—the light cold, his skin cold, the emptiness cold. He stood up on the bench, on the tips of his toes, pressed his palm flat against the glass platform. A subterranean creature reaching for the moon. He shuddered, felt a terrible loneliness. “Terry,” he said, in the way that as a child he had mouthed prayers to ward off the darkness of the world.

  A short while later he was climbing into bed with his wife, traversing the sheets to fit himself to her as she lay on her side. He hiked up her silk nightdress so he could rest his hand on the warmth of her inner thigh, a place he particularly loved, heard her breathing change to tell him she was near enough waking to know he was there. “Let me stay, jaa
n,” he whispered. She relented, as she almost always did when he used that tone of need, shifting against him, a minor adjustment that increased their points of contact. Her foot pressing against his. Tomorrow he would have to tell her that Eamonn had gone to Karachi to prove to his father he had a spine. He inhaled the scent of his wife, slid his hand up to the source of her heat. After tonight, who knew when she’d allow him to do this again? He touched his mouth to Terry’s bare shoulder, rolled away, and got out of bed, ignoring her muffled noise of protest. Too distracting. He needed to keep his mind clear.

  ||||||||||||||||||

  He went back to sleep in the basement, and when he woke there really was an unwanted presence in the room, and it was James, a mug of coffee in his hand. Karamat sat up. It wasn’t yet light outside.

  “Eamonn’s landed?” he said.

  “Just boarded the connecting flight,” James said, handing Karamat the coffee. “Someone recognized him at the boarding gate and tweeted a picture, so the media will probably get it soon. Have you spoken to the ambassador yet?”

  “About what?”

  “I thought you might have asked the Pakistanis to put him on a plane back home when he arrives.”

  “Would I do that if he weren’t my son?” He wondered if Eamonn was counting on this—the father watching over him, not allowing things to go too far.

  “With respect, sir, he is your son.”

  “With respect, James, he’s a British national who made a choice and has to face the consequences. As any other British national would.”

  “There’s something else the media will get soon. It went online just a few minutes ago.” The little folder James was carrying under his arm turned out to be his tablet. He proffered it to Karamat, who shook his head and got out of bed, reaching for his dressing gown. A man couldn’t be prone in his pajamas when something important happened. James followed him into his office, and although there was a desktop computer with a large monitor he set up his tablet on a stand on Karamat’s desk.

  “So bad I shouldn’t look at it in large scale?” Karamat said, and James didn’t meet his eye.

  In that way the mind has of focusing on trivial details to avoid the enormity of what it has to bear, Karamat spent the first seconds of the video feeling irritated that his son hadn’t sat down with a journalist but had decided instead to speak directly to a camera and upload the whole thing to a website. It was the kind of choice that wanted to come across as honest and direct but was really just controlling. Or lazy.

  “There’s been some speculation about my whereabouts these last few days,” Eamonn said, handsome and well rested. The close-up shot showed nothing of his surroundings, only a white wall behind him, his shoulders broad and trustworthy in a button-down navy blue shirt. His eyes moved—to whom?—then settled back on the camera lens. “I admit, I’ve been paralyzed by indecision”—he made it sound like an actual ailment—“caught between the two people I love most in the world: my father and my fiancée.”

  “Ah, no,” said James, moved beyond expletives by the damaging awfulness of the word “fiancée.”

  “I had hoped my father would change his thinking about this, but I understand now that won’t happen. Let me clear something up. Aneeka Pasha didn’t come looking for me. I went to her house looking for her. While carrying a gift of M&M’s from her sister, who I had had the privilege of spending some time with in America.”

  Nice touch there, the M&M’s. Who was it behind the camera whom Eamonn just looked at again?

  “It’s true I didn’t know right away about her brother, but I did know that her father had been a jihadi, that he’d gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, was held—and possibly tortured—at Bagram, and died on his way to Guantánamo. Like almost any other Brit, I despise the choices Adil Pasha made, and I despise the manner of his dying. But the indefensible facts of his life and death make Aneeka and her sister, Isma, extraordinary women. In the face of tremendous difficulties—including the death of their mother when they were very young . . .”

  How earnest he looked, how good, as he continued to speak of the trials and glories of the Pasha sisters. Faith in human nature positively rolling off him. Silly clot, as if this were a time in which anyone would trust the idealistic.

  “We fell in love. God, all my friends are going to have a go at me for that—we don’t just come out and say things like that in public, do we? But there we are. It’s my truth.”

  When had this phrase become so popular, “my truth”? Hateful expression, something so egocentric in it. And something so cynical, also, about all those absolute truths in the world.

  “I don’t know why I was lucky enough for her to feel that way about me—my father, who knows me well enough to know that I don’t deserve a woman that wonderful, tells me she must have been pretending—”

  “Ouch,” said James under his breath.

  “—but there was never any pretense between us. And that’s why she told me about her brother when she agreed to spend her life with me. I can’t tell you how hideous it’s been to see how that admission—which took so much courage for her to make, and showed such trust in me—has made people paint her as . . . as . . . I can’t really say the words.”

  Embarrassing. That’s all this was. “How much more of this is there, James?”

  “Don’t know, sir. Didn’t seem right to watch it before you did,” said James, furiously examining the pattern on the carpet.

  “It’s true that I went to my father, the home secretary, almost immediately to talk to him about Parvaiz Pasha. Not because my fiancée had asked for any favors but because, as a son, I felt honor-bound to tell my father that my personal life and his professional life were bound to collide. You see, I knew Parvaiz Pasha was trying to get to the British consulate in Istanbul—not for some act of terrorism, but because he wanted a new passport that would allow him to return home. I have shared this information with Counter Terrorism officials—I’m sure Aneeka has done the same—and it’s unclear to me why the British public has been allowed to continue thinking that terrorism was his motive for being where he was at the time of his murder—which I’m sure was carried out by those he almost succeeded in escaping.”

  Oh don’t, son, don’t make him out to be a hero. They’ll never forgive you that.

  “But Parvaiz Pasha is not my concern. I never met him and it’s true, I don’t know what he did, what crimes he might have committed while in Syria. I do, though, know his sister. The woman you’ve been watching on your TV screens is a woman who has endured terrible trials, whose country, whose government, and whose fiancée turned away from her at a moment of profound personal loss. She has been abused for the crime of daring to love while covering her head, vilified for believing that she had the right to want a life with someone whose history is at odds with hers, denounced for wanting to bury her brother beside her mother, reviled for her completely legal protests against a decision by the home secretary that suggests personal animus. Is Britain really a nation that turns people into figures of hate because they love unconditionally? Unconditionally but not uncritically. While her brother was alive that love was turned toward convincing him to return home; now he’s dead it’s turned to convincing the government to return his body home. Where is the crime in this? Dad, please tell me, where is the crime?”

  So this was what heartbreak felt like. Karamat acknowledged it, allowed it, arms dangling helplessly from his side. Personal animus. That was an arrow dipped in a poison only those closest to him could know to use. Whoever was standing behind the camera, whoever had honed Eamonn’s words, whoever had chosen that particular shade of blue that the color psychologists insisted instilled confidence and trust—it didn’t matter. It was Eamonn who mixed the poison, fired the arrow. He knew it to be a lie, he knew that of all lies it was the one that would hurt his father the most, he knew that once he’d said it he gave carte blanche
to every one of Karamat Lone’s political opponents to repeat the claim. If a son doesn’t recognize personal animus, who does? Fathers and sons, sons and fathers. An Asian family drama dragged into Parliament. He clenched his fists, pulled them up to rest on the arms of his chair, muscles taut along his back and shoulders. Where the body leads, the mind learns how to follow. He breathed in slowly, pacing his thoughts along with his breath, the chess player in him seeing the move just made then examining the whole board.

  James waited silently until the home secretary turned to look at him. “What do we do now, sir?”

  “We do nothing. He’s, excuse the expression, digging his own grave.” He looked at his watch. “Let’s go to the office and watch it unfold.”

  “Will you be wanting a few minutes with your wife before we leave?”

  “James, until this thing is over I don’t have a son and I don’t have a wife. I have a great office of state. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Karamat returned to his room, opened the cupboard, and looked at his tie rack. There were more blues than any other color, but today his hand reached for a matte red—strong but subtle, the tie of a man assured of his own power.

  ||||||||||||||||||

  He arrived at Marsham Street along with the first editions of the morning papers, which he still insisted on reading in print. His face, half in light, half in darkness, like some comic book villain, was above the fold of the newspaper most closely allied to his party. NATIONAL INTEREST OR PERSONAL ANIMUS? asked the headline.

  “Someone must have leaked the video to them ahead of time,” James said unnecessarily.

  “Stand outside the door and don’t let anyone in. I don’t care if it’s the Queen herself.” The building was empty, most of London asleep. He simply wanted to be left alone.

  The first paragraph gave him the phrase “anonymous cabinet member,” which, when put together with the name of the journalist, almost certainly meant the chancer. The anonymous cabinet member reflected on the irreversible damage to the home secretary if his son had been seen attending the funeral of a terrorist—“of course he’d do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.” Such a simple line of attack, as the most effective ones always were.