Firefly

by Henry Porter

  ‘How much is that?’

  ‘It was like four or five euros – that was the profit on one pair of shoes! So I gave my family money, and my mother was pleased, but she said that my father would be angry if I wasted my life selling shoes and she told me to keep ­studying. One day I went to the school. It was strange, because no one was there. I found my father’s friend, the science teacher, and I told him that I could not come to classes because my mother was worried about me being arrested by the security forces because of my father. He had heard the same story many times, so he wasn’t surprised. He gave me loads of books, but made me swear to keep them secret because he didn’t want the police to know he’d helped the son of Faris Touma. This is how I continued my studies.’

  ‘Are you clever, Naji?’ asked Ifkar.

  ‘Maybe – I don’t know. I made money for my family so I guess that was pretty smart, and I felt proud about that. I didn’t always make money, though. Sometimes I lost money, like when I bought a pair of sunglasses and they never sold, so I wore them myself, but they were too big and they had stars on the frames and Munira said I looked like an idiot.

  ‘That was the day when she told me that my father was found on the road. They made it look like he’d been hit by a truck. It was four months after he was taken. My mother didn’t let us see him for a long time. His arms were broken and he was bruised all over; his front teeth were knocked out and he couldn’t see because they hit his head so hard at the back, and that is where your visual cortex is.’ Naji stopped to control his voice. ‘And they starved him. Those men from the government, they are devils. They starved my father. That’s why I . . .’ He stopped and fell silent.

  ‘Why you what?’

  Naji didn’t answer a few seconds. ‘It doesn’t matter. I wanted to take revenge on those people, that’s all.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Ifkar.

  ‘Anyway, my mother waited until night and then she took my father to the hospital, and she told them that he’d been in a traffic accident – she couldn’t say he’d been in a military prison, because the doctors wouldn’t have treated him. But they knew from the injuries what had happened to him because they’d seen the same wounds before. My grand­father gave her the money to pay the bribes to get my father out of prison, and then he paid for him to be treated. We were broke. When he came out of the hospital we went to live with my father’s family, in a village called Hajar Saqat. There’s a big Roman stone in the desert there, like part of an arch or something, but it fell down a long time ago. The village is called after the fallen stone. It’s the only interesting thing that’s happened there for centuries. Everyone is poor. They talk to their donkeys and sheep – that’s what they do for amusement. They don’t buy shoes and they have all the fruit and vegetables they need. Even though we were away from the war and didn’t hear any bombs, I didn’t like it. My father was very weak and we never talked like we did before, because he was sick in the head and all the time he shivered as though he was cold. It was the shock of what they did to him and what he saw them do to ordinary people who had done nothing wrong, like his two students he went looking for. They said to him, if you want to see your students, you must come with us, and he went with them and the next thing he knows he’s locked up with the two boys and is being beaten and starved like them!’

  ‘What happened to the two boys?’ Ifkar asked, moving to prod the fire with a long stick. Sparks flew into the night above them. Naji asked him to do it again and again. Eventually Ifkar prompted, ‘The boys, did they live?’

  ‘They were strangled in front of my father.’ He said it very quietly, as if it were his own shame. ‘My sister overheard my father tell my mother. It made them weep.’

  ‘I am sorry for you, Naji. Sorry for your father.’

  ‘I have to be positive,’ said Naji. ‘That is the only way. This was when I began to play the flute properly and I played for my father often. Then I got a new profession – I became a phone engineer. A man asked me to look at his phone to see if I could mend it. I found a site in English that tells you how to repair phones, and I made his work. Soon, I was mending maybe four phones a week, and that was because I could read the American site, and ask people all over the world for their solutions. It’s pretty cool asking people on the other side of the world for help. One of the village kids wanted me to erase all the anti-government songs on his phone. A song like that was enough to get you killed, if they found it on your phone at a checkpoint. So I cleaned up his phone and hid some other stuff so no one would ever find it.’ Ifkar had gone quiet and Naji sensed his interest in phones might not be great, since he didn’t even own one. ‘So, gradually my father became stronger and his sight began to return. I read to him in English and he liked this because he corrected my pronunciation and it made him realise that he would teach again some day. Things were getting a little better. I bought and sold phones and it was more profitable than buying and selling shoes or tomatoes.’

  ‘And your sisters. What did they do in the village?’

  ‘They helped my mother. They looked after my father. Munira learned to weave with two women in the village and she became their apprentice. But she is going to university to be a lawyer. She is smart, as well as very, very beautiful.’

  ‘Can I marry her?’

  ‘She says she will never marry anyone: she doesn’t want a man telling her what to do.’

  Ifkar muttered something under his breath.

  ‘She says all men are stupid because we invented war,’ said Naji.

  Ifkar poked the fire again and it flared up and the crackle reverberated around the trees. They saw an owl glide past about ten metres away. There was something about watching the flames that made Naji open up.

  ‘Then IS came to the village,’ continued Naji, ‘and we hoped they would protect us from the government. They were welcomed and we gave them food and the villagers opened their homes to the fighters because they needed to rest. And some of them were injured and the village made a little hospital, which was like two rooms, where they could be treated. But then we learned what they were really like. There were many foreign fighters and they were arrogant and they treated us like we were dirt. They had their own laws. Women had to go covered; no music; no smoking; and no phones were allowed. A young woman was given sixty lashes for using her phone! They came to our house and demanded to know why my father didn’t go to prayers, and my mother told them that he had been tortured by the government and he was too weak to leave his home, and they told her he must go to prayers or he would be beaten. And they executed people outside the village and everyone was forced to watch – even young people.’

  Ifkar was silent. Naji thought he might be asleep, but he let out a long sigh then said, ‘I’m sorry for the memories you carry in your head.’

  ‘I don’t think about them much,’ said Naji.

  ‘What happened then? How did your family get out?’

  Then Naji told him about the man who came to their home because he’d heard in the village that Naji was good at mending phones. Naji didn’t know then that this was Al-munajil, the one that executed people with a wide sword that resembled a machete, but he could see that the man was important, and he had a terrifying aura. Naji corrected a simple fault with the phone, though he made more of it because he wanted to impress the man, who was very stern and showed little respect to his family. Al-munajil spoke Arabic perfectly, because, as Naji later found out, he came from a city named Tikrit in Iraq, though he had spent many years in Germany. His name was Abu Wassim, but everyone called him Commander, or Al-munajil. No one knew his real name: Naji did because he later found it on one of the man’s devices.

  Naji’s mother brought Al-munajil tea, though he never let go of his gun and he kept speaking on the newly mended phone in a harsh voice that kept breaking, as though someone was throttling him. He showed an interest in Naji’s technical ability and when he
asked him what he thought of the government, Naji replied that he loathed the people who’d imprisoned his father. At this, his father, who had said nothing since the man had entered his home, muttered from where he was sitting in the breeze from the window, and Naji realised he’d said too much and immediately stopped talking. On the way out, Al-munajil put a hand on his shoulder said he might be able offer him a way of getting back at the government. ‘He said a boy like me with technical knowledge could do some real damage. Then he said he wanted to get to know me better.’

  ‘What did that mean?’ asked Ifkar.

  ‘I didn’t know then, but my father spoke to me and said he could smell the man’s evil. He had seen such men in the military prison where he was tortured. They were different to other men. He told me never to see Al-munajil again. But it was too late. Next day, Al-munajil’s men came early and they told me to get into the back of his pickup. I was with them many days. My father and mother thought I was dead.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Everywhere. Al-munajil was the commander. They drove hundreds of kilometres. He was checking on things. When Al-munajil and his men went to a house to sleep, I was left in the back of the pickup with a sheet. I didn’t know why he wanted me. Then Ibrahim, who was his right-hand man, said Al-munajil was considering me for a very holy mission against the enemy. Everyone did what Al-munajil wanted – he decided things.’

  ‘A suicide mission?’

  ‘They didn’t say that. They just told me I would avenge the crimes that were done to my father.’

  ‘With a vest?’

  ‘They had another idea – a vegetable cart, like the one I used in the town.’

  ‘He knew about that?’

  ‘Al-munajil knew everything about me. I’d told him how we made money when my father was in prison – that’s how he knew about the vegetable cart. They were going to put the bomb under the vegetables in the cart and then I would detonate it with a trigger in my hand.’

  ‘And you would kill yourself.’

  ‘They didn’t tell me that, though of course I knew. But they never said I would be killing myself, too. During those first days, he never spoke to me. The other men – Usaim and Ibrahim were the main ones – said he was testing me. Maybe I failed that test because when they showed me stuff . . . I didn’t react well. Maybe they thought I wasn’t strong enough, or I was too young – something like that.’

  ‘What did they show you?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ said Naji. ‘People were killed . . . women, girls . . . they put them in cages. Yazidi women.’

  ‘You were just a kid! How could they show you these things?’

  There was anger in his voice, which worried Naji. ‘I don’t remember a lot – it made me sad. Sometimes I cried.’ He had never told anyone that before.

  ‘Anyone would,’ said Ifkar. ‘All the women in my uncle’s village were taken. When I was in Turkey, I heard that many of them killed themselves rather than go with these men.’

  ‘They are all evil, but Al-munajil is worse because he makes people around him become evil.’

  Ifkar propped himself on one arm. ‘You too?’

  Naji didn’t reply.

  ‘You said they followed you,’ said Ifkar. ‘Why would they come all this way to kill you?’

  ‘I took something from them. I had it all on my phone. Then a Libyan arsehole stole the phone, but he will never find anything because it’s hidden too well.’

  ‘What kind of thing is on it?’

  ‘I copied stuff from one of Al-munajil’s phones, not the one I mended, but another one he used to keep records on. He asked me to encrypt it, so I copied that material and put it somewhere.’

  ‘On the phone?’

  ‘Yes . . . and no. I worked on his phone and the other devices for a long time. There were a lot of alterations he wanted on the actual phone. I took the microphones out, disabled the cameras and the geolocation. He never used it for communication – never ever. He knew he could be hacked. He had lots of phones, but he never spoke on this one.’

  ‘A kid like you can do all that?’ asked Iflkar, not bothering to hide his scepticism.

  ‘Yes, I learned a lot in the last year, because I was working for them all that time and travelling with them and I was allowed to use a laptop. I fixed a lot of phones. Al-munajil knew I would build something no one could get into. I put all the data I stole in a place they could never find.’

  ‘He’d have killed you if he found out.’

  ‘He did find out and that’s why he’s here.’

  Ifkar began stroking Moon, who stretched luxuriously in the glow of the fire. ‘Why did you take the risk?’ he asked.

  ‘As I told you, my sister Munira is very beautiful, and one time when they came to get me, Usaim saw her unveiled at the back of the house. A few days later Al-munajil started asking questions about her, like how old she was and whether she was obedient and a good cook. And the next week he asked more questions and said he would come to my home to see how my father was. Like he cared! I spoke of this to Munira, and she said she would rather kill herself than become Al-munajil’s wife. I knew what those men did, especially Al-munajil, who was very cruel to the women. I heard what they said to each other. They thought I didn’t understand, but I knew what they were talking about . . .’

  ‘There was a place they used to go in Iraq. I didn’t know exactly where it was because they never told me, but I knew we were in Iraq. It was an old building – a hospital or something – and that’s where they kept their women. I was left outside, but I saw women at the windows and at night I heard crying and sobbing and screaming and all that – and I knew this was where he would bring my sister. They hurt women when they refused to do what that they wanted. Once Al-munajil told Ibrahim how he was going to punish a woman who would not have sex with him and he would make it so that she would never refuse him again.’

  ‘They are beasts,’ said Ifkar.

  ‘I was frightened for Munira,’ continued Naji, ‘so I went to my father. At first he was very angry with me. He said everything was my fault because I had brought Al-munajil into our house and it was all due to my obsession with phones. I told him I was trying to make money for the family, but he replied that the money was less important than studying and reading. This was the only time he raised his voice to me in my life – the only time, I promise you that. He was very angry and even when he calmed down I could still feel it. He told me that he no longer recognised me – that I had lost all my values. The coarseness of the company I kept showed in my behaviour. He said I was arrogant and thought too much of myself.’

  ‘Did you explain to him that you had to go with Al-munajil?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything, because he was right. He accused me of talking about our family outside our home and revealing things that I knew were private, things that were only for him to speak of.’ Naji stopped for a few moments, again feeling the pain of that day. ‘He told me to go outside in the yard and to remain there until I recognised the trouble I had brought upon our family. I was there all night for I was too ashamed to face my mother and my sisters. But Munira came out to me and gave me bread and a can of pineapple juice, which she had saved because it is her favourite, and she looked at me and told me it wasn’t my fault – she asked me how I could be blamed for her beauty. Even then she could make a joke of it, which tells you something about her.

  ‘The next day, my father called me into the house and told me he was no longer angry with me. He and my mother had decided that we were going to Turkey, no matter how much it cost, and then we would find a new life in Europe. He wanted to go to England because he spoke good English. He told me to find the smugglers that would take us over the border because he knew I was in a better position than he was to make such contacts. He held my hand and gave me his forgiveness and said that the fortune of the family – all our l
ives – depended on me. It was the proudest moment of my life when he placed that faith in me.’

  ‘But you were just a boy – how could you find a people smuggler?’

  ‘I knew people. When my father was in prison I met a man who offered to take my family out. Everyone knew who he was. He went to Turkey and ran operations from Gaziantep, but he has agents in the city and they were looking for clients all the time. I had money of my own because I stole from Al-munajil. There were sacks of money, which they picked up from different places and took to a place in the city at night, and I knew they didn’t count it all until it got to the city. I stole a little each time and put it in my shoes. I stole a lot in that way.’

  ‘Why did they trust you?’

  Naji was slow to answer. ‘I never spoke out of turn. I spoke only if they asked me something. I did not complain. I asked for nothing, not even food. I hated Al-munajil, but I learned how to play him and I tried to please him and make him like me. I began to learn German because of him – he spoke fluently. He said I would soon be part of his family, meaning he was going to marry Munira, and I smiled to make him think that I was flattered that he was thinking about my sister. It was during those days that I copied everything from his phone and hacked computers in their buildings. Their security is shit! And I stole the most money from him then. I knew we were going soon.’

  ‘How did he know you did that? Who told him?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You did! Why?’

  ‘I’m really tired,’ said Naji. ‘I will tell you tomorrow. I must sleep now.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ifkar.

  ‘Thank you for the fish,’ said Naji. ‘And everything else, Ifkar. You are now my friend.’

  ‘There will be more fish,’ said Ifkar several seconds later. ‘And I will marry your sister instead of that bastard.’