If he also forgot to lock the door, she could be in business. She gets up and goes to it. Shut tight. Which means she’d either have to attempt, with thirty rounds or less, to shoot through and disable the lock, or wait until one of the guards opened it and then ambush him. Would probably be Hafs. Would probably not be long before he discovered it missing and returned. If he was smart he wouldn’t come alone—he’d tell the others, unless he was too embarrassed, but what a risk to save face. Regardless, she might get off a few rounds. Take out one or two of them before they tossed in a grenade. Very little chance of exploiting this situation to escape. But it’s the best she’s been presented with. Won’t happen again. Not like this.
She picks up the rifle, eases back the bolt and sees the chamber unloaded but the magazine full. She does not immediately chamber a round. All the other times she handled weapons, whether as a girl back home or in the military, they exerted a kind of talismanic force that made her feel more powerful, more in control of her own fate, but this time, the gun does not work that way. Almost the opposite. Her cell has never felt so small. And the AK feels like just what it is: a crude object of steel and wood.
One other possibility occurs. A second way to leave this cell for good. Rack a round, seat the flash suppressor in the soft flesh between her lower jawbone, and pull the trigger. Skull in the ceiling. High-power rifle like this would be instantaneous.
Death is always right around the corner.
Not many people get to choose how.
Only two ways out.
There are quick footsteps in the hallway. They pause outside her door. Sounds like he’s alone. He hasn’t come back with five other guards and a grenade. Until this moment she’s had to put her life in his hands by necessity, but when she hears his lone footsteps she knows that he’s entrusted her with his life as well. The pact is unspoken but real. She doesn’t know whether it means he might simply warn her of what Walid is planning or, hope beyond hope, help her escape somehow, help her to survive if the army busts down the door one day, but whatever it signifies, the understanding between them shifts the odds a fraction in her favor. Maybe she won’t have to choose how to die, in a hail of bullets or with one unleashed by her own hand. Maybe Crump was wrong. She puts the gun down.
“Hafs?”
“Yes. It’s me.” He’s nervous. Very on edge.
“Okay,” she says. “I think you forgot something kind of important in here.”
The generator kicks on. She has light and shortly thereafter hears someone working the lock on her door; she assumes the worst every time. Expecting Annas, despite Hafs’s promise to intervene, but it’s Walid—a rare visit from the emir. He enters the cell smiling affably, eyes bright and intelligent; this is the same man who killed her friends in cold blood.
“How are you?” he asks in a tone of charming complicity, as though they might go for drinks and reminisce about the good old days.
She shrugs, looking away.
“The boy’s told me what you told him.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“It is… unfortunate.”
“Maybe you’d call it that. I’d call it evil.”
“No,” he says, paternally concerned. “Your government is evil. What Abu did to you is merely unfortunate. But there’s no need to worry about him bothering you anymore. He won’t be back on your cell.”
“How can you know that for sure?”
“Because I do. You won’t be seeing him anymore. You have my word.”
Silence follows. The drip of condensation from the fluorescent ballast. She has to ask.
“What happened to Sergeant McGinnis?”
“Who says anything did?”
“I know he was sick. I know you were helping him. I know he’s gone.”
“Did that boy tell you this?”
“No. It doesn’t matter how I know.”
“Yes, it does. It matters to me a great deal. Tell me, or I’ll have to assume it’s him and deal with him accordingly.”
“Annas was the one who told me. If you want to be angry at anyone, be angry at him, not Hafs. Hafs had nothing to do with it.”
Walid perceives her discomfiture and also an involuntary tic of her eyes because he motions for her to get up and jerks her pallet aside to see what she might be hiding. He notices the grated drain underneath and peers into it and speaks into it in Arabic, gauging the echo. He turns to her with a look of smug self-possession.
“Clever,” he says. “But that’s over. And now you want to know what happened to him.” It’s more a statement than a question.
“Yes.”
“Very well then. What you heard is true. He had an infection, gangrenous. But we didn’t have to go looking for a suitable antibiotic. We had one all along, you know. Only we wanted to test his faith, this so-called conversion of his.”
“He converted?”
“He kept that from you, did he? Ha. Yes, he’d said the Shahada. But that’s easy to do, especially with one’s life at stake. Don’t misunderstand me—we were pleased with it, but at the same time, we had to test him. We withheld the medicine, letting him believe we were searching for it. Then one day we came to him and said, ‘We found Keflex for you.’ You can imagine how overjoyed he was. But in order to receive it, he’d have to prove his faithfulness.”
“How?”
“By carrying out an execution.”
“Crump.”
“Correct. If he would’ve gone through with it, he’d be alive right now. Unfortunately he chose the path of unbelief and death. Do you see I’m telling you the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Think about what I’ve said. And prepare yourself; we’re leaving this place soon, all of us. I’ll send someone for you in about an hour. Tell me, Cassandra Wigheard. Are you ready to make the profession?”
16
ABU AL-HOOL: THE TIME OF SEPARATION
54 Days After
IRAQ (FALLUJAH)
It’s been twenty-four hours since I paid a visit to the Americans, and I am still here in Fallujah, brooding over these soot-smeared windows from which I regard the city: the room I rented last night reminds me of a place where I lived while a student in Cairo, the building’s fit and finish no better than a tenement’s—I could’ve afforded something nicer, even as a student, but preferred slumming it, using the money I saved from Father’s monthly checks to buy bottles of Johnnie Walker Red and as many grams of bango as I could get my hands on. My roommate named our flat the Fishbowl, a reference both to how much we drank and to the fact that at all hours of the day and night, a rotating cast of puffed-up young people congregated there to see and be seen.
Burned out, born-again, newly sober, I declared my intention to join the jihad. None of my friends could believe I’d go through with it. They thought I was being dramatic. They told me the journey to Afghanistan would be too hard.
Never was anyone more wrong. The getting in was easy. It’s the getting out that kills.
The electricity cycles off, and the fan I’ve placed near my bedding whirs to a stop. The air in the room grows still. I heave myself into a sitting position and push the window open wide, letting in a puff of night breeze but also the smell of the dump site below. The building’s superintendent apologized for the odor when he showed me the room, explaining that some of the mujahideen had taken to killing the trashmen. Just a few, but the rest quit in fear. It seems a dastardly tactic, though effective, making life as miserable as possible for the common people so they’ll view the occupation as a failure.
I look out the window over the low-slung roofs of this small, simple, rustic city. The chatter of conversation rises from the street: the café on the building’s first floor, one of the few businesses open on this block, is doing a brisk trade despite the dark times. The streetlights are in disrepair, and the café’s proprietor has strung Chinese lanterns over his section of the sidewalk. Their bulbs, screened by rice paper, cast an orange glow like candlelight on the wal
ls. A shepherd leads his flock down the alley. The lanterns, the livestock, the lack of cars on the road due to the American curfew, together recall olden times; the illusion is persistent but also transparent. We’re not in the caliphate but crumbling modernity. A generator chugs in the alley out back, adding hints of scorched oil to the cacophony of scent: roasted coffee, the tang of sewage, baking bread, chicken turning on a spit, fat dripped into the fire, the pleasant and noxious, unfiltered and honest stuff of human life.
In the morning I awake to the sounds of turbine engines and steel track running through the sprockets of American tanks. I bolt up and check the window but my view does not allow sight of them, though, judging by the noise, they’re heading west on the highway from the old cigarette factory, the base on the city’s outskirts. Moments later, two attack helicopters soar overhead, and these I can see, though briefly, and they too are westbound.
This could be it, I think, filled with both dread and excitement but with slim possibility of resolution. I expect there will be no way of knowing for certain if my plan has succeeded, not until days, perhaps weeks after. And I don’t wish to stay here that long.
The tanks rumble out of earshot—all these machines, a thousand tons of steel—simply to kill one man. Because, after all, there is only one of them I really want dead. The Americans have a sufficient euphemism for the rest: collateral damage. It’s not that one intends to kill innocents but that one is aware they may die and proceeds anyway. I reproach myself for the waste in that, the cold-bloodedness of it, and if I could turn back the clock, I might well have behaved differently in Dr. Walid’s room when, under the weight of the vest, I asked for my leave. Finger on the detonator, I might have gotten it over with then and there, but I was desperate and not yet ready to die. I was vain enough to want to taste the poison-green fruit, revenge.
I tell myself it was not all selfishness. Walid must be removed from power for other reasons. Over time a man like that will do the resistance more harm than good. But this is poor consolation: the truth is, he does not even compare with the worst of them. Even at the water plant, rumors reached us of torture houses springing up in the city, and they, we knew, were intended to accommodate Iraqi prisoners, not Americans. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that sheikh of the slaughterers, has wasted no time in his quest to consolidate power. His methods make Walid’s seem benign, if not quaint. Jihad has changed. None of us, even the doctor, realized how much. He wanted to create a spectacle and achieved one beyond what I imagine were his wildest dreams. But in the process, he ceded—I won’t call it the moral high ground, but a certain timeless astringency that’s essential to keeping a movement like ours from devouring itself.
I don’t know if it’s possible to stop that happening. I don’t know much, presently; I look in the mirror and see a stranger whose hands will soon be stained with his brothers’ blood. Many of them do not deserve this. I have agonized the most over Abu Hafs: it has been like failing my son all over again. With the Valium from the bazaar I have managed to keep myself numb enough to avoid thinking too much about Hassan or the Yemeni, but when they do intrude on my thoughts, I concentrate on the differences between their situations. I can’t bear to think I am repeating the same mistakes over and again, that the years have taught me nothing or, worse, that I have learned something vital but am unable to apply the lesson.
There are differences, I am sure. I gave my son no quarter, but to Abu Hafs I extended the olive branch. I offered the cub a way out. Only, he refused it, and for that he may perish; the girl, too—though it affords me no great pleasure, I prefer the irony of what she may receive by my doing over the straightforward horror Walid had in store for her.
But then, I may be wrong in all this. There is only one justice in this world, and it does not proceed from man. Of those who reckon lives against lives, who permit themselves to take life in the name of justice, only the fool believes he always decides rightly. I’m no fool. I’m more like the blind man who claims it’s impossible for anyone to see.
I’ve never spoken at length about what happened with Hassan. Never told the complete story, not to a soul, not even his mother. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Mariam exactly what her boy had done or why I hadn’t been with him when he passed. She and I had already started to grow apart before his death, but that tragedy, and my refusal to answer her questions about it, was the final wedge to cleave us.
I can’t know exactly how Hassan behaved in his last moments, but I was told he fought bravely. He was no ordinary boy, that’s for sure. The first quality many people noticed about him was his exceeding piety: he was much more pious at his age than I ever was. I’d been brought up in a household where we were permitted to watch American television shows; I loved the westerns, Bonanza being my favorite. Hassan, however, was raised very differently, and, unlike some of my children, he never seriously rebelled against our family’s strictures. As he came of age he immersed himself in studying the Recitation. His lips were constantly, almost imperceptibly, moving in silent prayer. It was the kind of thing you might not see at first, but spend any amount of time around him, and you’d pick up on it. A teenage boy, always praying. That was how pious he was.
He’d followed me to Chechnya against his mother’s wishes. There’s another story in that, but I won’t digress any further. Suffice to say, the campaign was his first. We were encamped within walking distance of an aul built on a forested hillside not far from the Georgian border. Down the road, barely visible on the rare day with no mist, was a Russian army position: a bunker, a few tanks, a platoon of infantry. They were regulars, not Spetsnaz, and their commander a bloated alcoholic whom I’d glassed several times.
On both national and local scales, the war was locked in an evil stasis. It’d been months since either side had engaged in a frontal assault. The odd skirmish, but no attempt to rout the other from his stronghold; a mutual, unspoken détente had set in. Several factors could explain why. The brothers were low on ammunition and men. It was nearing winter, the weather miserable for living in the field, and, more saliently, many of the Russian commanders shied away from prosecuting the war, preferring to remain in their bunkers where it was safer, and from that position of comfort to enrich themselves through extortion, wheedling, double-dealing, outright highway robbery, and all manner of schemes perpetrated on the Chechen people. It was not unheard of for Russian officers to sell the brothers arms and other military supplies on the black market, thus doing their part to prolong a war whose continuance was vital to their own economic self-interest.
Midway between our aul and their position was a small farming village of wattle huts still heated in the ancient way, by burning kizyak, a mixture of dried sheep dung and wheat chaff. The village was set off the road, down the side of a dell, and a traveler would always smell the kizyak smoke and hear the lowing of cattle before he actually saw it. Meager, pitiful, but somehow warm and homey, like something out of medieval Europe, how I imagine it must’ve looked—the brothers occasionally stopped there to buy fresh milk and other food. Prices were lower than in the towns. The people were honest and didn’t overcharge simply because we were foreigners, many of us Arabs and therefore assumed to be rich. Things went along that way; winter set in. During an expedition to the village we became snowbound and were hosted by Aquil, a man with whom we often bargained. That night my son set his heart on one of Aquil’s daughters, Ayeesha, middle child of three sisters.
From what I could tell, she lived a cloistered and virtuous life, which most likely endeared her to my son with his grave piety. The night we spent in her home, I noticed the way he admired her as she tended to the cooking while the men conducted business; that was all, just a passing moment, forgotten the next day, but some time later it came to mind, and I was only half surprised when Hassan mentioned her to me. He was tentative, stumbling in his request, but I put him at ease with my blessing.
On our next trip he worked up the courage to talk to Ayeesha’s father. The old man seemed a
greeable and introduced the two. Their courtship lasted several days, during which time they walked together in the afternoons, taking in the crisp mountain air under the supervision of her mother and aunts. In the end, the match was found suitable to all parties, and they were betrothed, a date set for the wedding a week later. As is the case with their burials, the marriages of mujahideen are often expedited affairs. If one should fall in battle, there’s no need to wash his body; in the case of his wedding, there’s no need for an overly long or formal engagement. It’s understood that time is of the essence. War foreshortens human affairs. Delays, even sacred ones, are best avoided.
Even though my son was quite young to take a wife, I’d advocated for the marriage in no small degree because I’d thought it would provide a pacifying influence. To my knowledge, his piety had extended to chastity, and secretly I hoped his burgeoning romantic interest might displace the jihad once and for all. Part of me was proud he’d insisted on coming, but another part would be glad to see him gone. It wasn’t that I believed the cause unworthy or martyrdom hollow and ignoble—very much the opposite—but there are human impulses more basic than the religious ones, the same self-serving impulses that martyrdom seeks to overcome, and the simple fact was that, as a father, I wanted to see Hassan choose life over death. The reverse would be mournful indeed.
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