Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  After communicating for several weeks, he agreed to marry her. All of this unfolded, for his sister Sabira, as intimately as though it were happening on the next block. She and Soheil’s wife started speaking on the phone and exchanging messages. “It’s completely fine here. Don’t believe what you hear in the media,” Layla would tell her new sister-in-law.

  * * *

  —

  THE POLICE RAIDS HAPPENED EVERY couple of months. They would bang at the door and come rushing about, taking away anything digital: Sabira’s phone, her laptop, her tablet. They would return them a few months later and she would need to get rid of them, because of course they were bugged.

  * * *

  —

  THAT SUMMER, FOR THE FIRST time in her life since the sixth grade, sixteen-year-old Sabira took off the hijab. Soheil had always made her wear it; she’d had no choice in the matter. Now that he was gone, she just didn’t feel like wearing it anymore.

  And what a difference it made, walking through the Spitalfields Market with her hair out, the long, light brown wave of it down her back. It was like a different life, the way men responded to her, making comments, sometimes harassing her. The attention was distracting and seductive in its own way. Sabira encouraged it, dyeing her hair red, turning the mass of it into fairy-tale locks. What a sense of power it gave her, being able to provoke men’s reactions! And how satisfying to realize she could draw as much attention as the pretty white girls and Indian girls at school.

  The family was displeased with her unveiled appearance. “We’re all going to pray for you,” her aunt said gravely one Saturday at lunch, shaking her head. Sabira didn’t care. By this point, she was angry with them all: with her mother, for not having stopped Soheil; with her father, who had finally turned up, too late, in an attempt to persuade Soheil to return. It wasn’t that Sabira had no hope. As long as he was out there, alive, willing to speak to them, there was hope. But she doubted that Soheil would ever return. She was the one who saw his pictures, heard his voice all pumped up. He was a twenty-three-year-old man who had gotten used to war: the close scrapes and the intensity, the adrenaline and revulsion. Even if he didn’t agree with everything the war entailed, he seemed content to just get on with it, aware that all the doors that led back were closed forever. Sabira was closer to him than anyone else, and she knew, knew, that he was only being kind when he humored their dad by saying he would consider coming back. This awareness produced a misery so deep it felt settled into her very tissue; it made her nauseated, unable most of the time to eat anything but toast or half an apple. Her parents, now consumed with getting Soheil back, hardly seemed to notice that their daughter was getting thinner and thinner.

  It was around this time that Imran showed up, with his easy jokes and deep voice and broad shoulders, announcing to Sabira that he was Soheil’s friend and ready to “be there for her.” His eyes were a beautiful rich brown streaked with green. In the span of a few weeks, Imran and Sabira went from being strangers to being incredibly close. He texted her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. He picked her up in the afternoons and took her out. When they were together, he made her laugh. He would take her to the hospital for her blood tests, holding her hand as she was poked with needles, as the doctors struggled to figure out what was wrong with her, why her flesh was melting away. He was careful and tender with her. At cafés, he would buy three types of cake and arrange them across the table. “Which one do you like? Just have one bite of whichever one you like. Just one bite.”

  The not eating made her light-headed most of the time, and Sabira had some distant awareness that his attention was peculiar and perhaps not quite right (he was married!), but when you were used to love being swirled through with pain, it felt familiar and warm.

  And then, one afternoon, Imran announced it was time for them to go. They both knew exactly where he meant, though he always referred to Malta as their destination. Imran said she was lucky he had picked her, because his wife would have quite liked to go. It was one of tens of discrepancies Sabira noted but didn’t think too carefully about—because she felt reckless, because she felt like hurting everyone as much as possible.

  And Imran had deen, she thought, giving him the benefit of the doubt. A brother who had deen like that, who was even willing to pray in a public park or on the pavement if he didn’t have time to get to the mosque or back home, a brother like that simply wouldn’t mess with you, would he? Leaving this country didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Everyone in England had hurt her; it was a place that deserved to be left.

  * * *

  —

  IT RAINED INCESSANTLY THE NIGHT before their departure. She couldn’t sleep and lay flat on her back, her hand resting on her concave stomach, listening to splattering against the windows and her parents’ voices carrying from below. They were shouting at each other, something to do with a relative, a spurious story that had driven some wedge between them. Sabira couldn’t bring herself to pay attention.

  A police siren wailed in the distance, the second one that night, a sound that in their neighborhood was previously like white noise, but tonight was suddenly startling. In the morning, a ghostly mist hung over the streets. Imran picked her up after her parents had both left the house. “Let’s have a final lunch,” he suggested, and stopped at a curry shop on the corner. In their relationship she left all decisions to him, both small and monumental.

  Imran ate heartily, while she sipped a diet soda daintily through a straw. She thought of her mother and father finding out later, imagined the conversation and the scene in the house, and the angry words her frantic mother would lash her father with. “Both of them gone! You kuttha!” These musings gave her a small relief. Perhaps they should have noticed when an older man was showing their teenage daughter suspicious attention; perhaps they should have asked exactly what was going on. If they were so concerned about her uncovered hair, what about her going around with a man who wasn’t her immediate relative?

  At the airport, she and Imran sailed through the passport gates and the security check. They walked past sushi stands and a Pret, where Imran bought them popcorn. Sabira wandered into a Boots to get an extra lip balm. At the gate, they found seats together and she looked out at the clouds splayed against the moody sky, the airport trucks moving across the tarmac like little toys in a play set. Sabira and Imran were about to get on the plane when they were stopped. Two officers pulled them out of the queue and asked them to come away for questioning.

  Her mouth went dry. The flight was departing in under twenty minutes; there was no way they would make it. The police didn’t know exactly what to ask; they didn’t seem to have much to go on, apart from the fact that they were young British Muslims about to board a plane. For much of 2015 and 2016, security services closely monitored the airport movements of most British Muslims under the age of forty. They stopped thousands of travelers under Schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act, which allows police officers broad powers to stop anyone traveling through a port, airport, or international railway station, to question them for up to six hours and detain them for up to nine hours, to confiscate and download their private data from their phone or laptop, without any suspicion of involvement in terrorism.

  In some years, authorities stopped as many as eighty thousand people under Schedule 7, the majority of Asian or ethnic minority background, and prosecuted only a tiny fraction. It seemed both a bewilderingly crude and a very fine net. Critics called it a harassment and surveillance tool, one that allowed authorities to intimidate journalists or activists. It caught activists, honeymooners reading books about Syrian art, and young Cambridge University students traveling on genuine holidays, holding them up for hours with questions and calls to parents. And yet, at the same time, the net failed to catch those of high intelligence value, young people known to the police as targets of ISIS recruiting, or young people in regular contact with known ISIS mem
bers already in Syria, like the Bethnal Green schoolgirls.

  That night, the net had caught Sabira and Imran. The room was spare and smelled vaguely of disinfectant. “Who is this?” one of the officers kept asking Sabira, demanding to know her relationship to Imran, and where they were going together. She invented a story about going to visit a cousin and was relieved when they stopped asking. Imran was being questioned separately and she had no idea whether their stories even aligned. Eventually they were allowed to leave.

  “I just want to go home,” she said, as they walked through the passageway to the train station at the airport.

  Imran’s eyes were jumpy. It was like the adrenaline in his body needed them to just keep moving, moving. “Tomorrow afternoon,” he said, “be ready for me.”

  What could she say? She closed her eyes as he pulled out a laptop and started booking new tickets.

  Back at home, she told her mother she’d decided not to stay over at a cousin’s after all, and slipped upstairs to take a shower. She stepped in before the water had a chance to warm up, forcing herself to be still as the cold spray pricked her skin, unclenching slowly as the temperature shifted. Sabira was unable to sleep. She spent the short hours till dawn thinking about parents, how they had brought children into this world and forced them to endure all manner of hardship, in the name of obedience and duty.

  * * *

  —

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THIS TIME at Stansted Airport, they again sailed through passport control and security. They were sitting anonymously at the gate, amid the mostly Lebanese and Turkish passengers waiting to fly to Istanbul, when two officers approached them. This time, the police were more serious. One of the officers was kindly, but the other made Sabira feel humiliated. She thought they might charge her with something, although she had no idea what. They separated her from Imran and asked the same questions over and over again, tripping her up on small inconsistencies. Hours passed. She felt numb with exhaustion. Her story wasn’t adding up, and they came at her relentlessly.

  Finally, she just wanted it to stop. “I’m not going to lie to you anymore,” she said. “I know I have landed myself in so much crap.” She told them everything: about her health issues, about how difficult life had become at home, how one of her relatives was behaving abusively toward her and she could barely bring herself to speak about it, about how she had no idea where she was really going, that she just had to get away.

  “You silly girl, what were you thinking?” one of the officers barked at her.

  No adult had ever spoken to her like that. Her eyes filled with tears. But she asked herself a similar question: Sabira, what are you doing?

  It was near dawn when the officers drove her home. The M25, the motorway that ringed London to the north, was eerily empty. During the car ride, she felt the confusion and numbness that had webbed her mind for weeks finally clearing away. In its place, she felt just a hot fury. At Imran, whom she had allowed to have some trancelike hold on her. At the police, for taking away her fourth phone in a year. At the world, for having handed down the cruelty and circumstances that led her brother away.

  At her family’s home in Walthamstow, she unlocked the front door, crept upstairs, and crawled into bed.

  ASMA, AWS, AND DUA

  January 2014, Raqqa, Syria

  With ISIS now fully in command of Raqqa, Asma’s living room was perpetually dark and stifling, the curtains drawn so that no one outside could see the television, and the windows closed to keep the sound in. Television, music, the radio—everything was kept at the lowest volume that was still audible.

  By that time, electricity in Raqqa had dwindled down to two, sometimes four, hours a day. Asma had never realized before that winter how virtually everything in life required electricity: drying her hair, watching movies, listening to Lebanese and Iraqi pop music, reading in the evening. Now her life was filled with hours that could not be filled. There was no more going to the salon for a haircut or eyebrow threading. Traversing the city to visit a girlfriend required a chaperone. ISIS decreed that the internet should only be used for work—like the online wooing of new recruits—and not for entertainment. Asma found herself disconnected from the world.

  Her thoughts on a typical day before the war came to Raqqa: Should I do a master’s after finishing my degree, or get a job in Damascus working with foreigners so I can improve my English?…Is a keratin treatment going to damage my hair?…Is Amman so fun that my boyfriend will not want to ever come back?…Should I learn Excel or take a second economics course?…Will I ever fly business class like in the movies? Now that the war had come to Raqqa, the tenor of her thoughts had changed: How can I avoid the attention of ISIS fighters on the street?…How few of these black sackcloths can I get away with owning?…How can I read a book on my phone when I need my phone for everything else and the generator isn’t reliable?…How quickly life can swing to some previously unimaginable extreme!

  As a female civilian in Raqqa, Asma felt as though her life had been taken off the circuit of the world. Simply powered off. She could not attend her university, which was closed; she could not earn money, because public work for women, save a few specialized jobs, was forbidden; she couldn’t even go on a walk through the neighborhood and watch the finches dart from tree to tree. Her mother unhelpfully said things like “Try to keep yourself busy.” Doing what? The days advanced on her, one after the other. The worst time was just before midday, when the fact of it not even being lunchtime yet made time itself feel aggressive. All of it was stifling: the faint smell of vinegar that clung to their kitchen, the mottled skin of her mother’s hands as she wiped the counters too many times, the solitude a strange contrast to the rattling inside her.

  A number of relatives in Asma’s family had already started working for ISIS in various capacities, and she deliberated carefully before joining in January 2014. With her family so enmeshed with the militants, the step seemed shorter, less fraught, almost sensible. She belonged to a generation of Syrian women, born in the 1980s and 1990s, who were leading more independent lives than their mothers and indeed any women before them. They were a generation who studied at university before getting married, who got married later, who were more in control of their destinies. Asma had grown up thinking that as a woman she should be able to get an education, earn money, and have authority. The collapse of her country’s revolution now meant that she was putting that belief into practice by working for ISIS.

  Asma was unique in her new job for also being single. Most of the other women who formally went to work for the group had already married.

  There were girls like Dua, the girl with the rose tattoo, who lived with her sister, mother, and father in a spare, two-room house. Her father was a day laborer and cultivated the land around the house, but none of it was enough to support the family. Both Dua and her two brothers knew their future would be to work hard, from as early an age as possible. Her brothers moved to Lebanon to work in construction when she was in her early teens, and after Dua finished high school she stayed home, helping with the farming. It was difficult living like a villager in a fairly prosperous city. In Syria, being poor narrowed the world, especially for women. Dua never could have hoped to attend university, couldn’t even have explained, probably, what a marketing course would entail or set her up for.

  She still wanted the things most twenty-year-olds wanted: to look pretty, to have fun on Fridays, to please God and hope that He would find her a good husband. She would have liked to have a collection of stylish headscarves and shoes. For a year, she saved up to get something that would last, that everyone would always see: a rose tattoo on her creamy wrist. She had eyebrows shaved into thick, straight arrows, a round sloping frame, and a voice that was soft and poised. Her family was poor, but there was still enjoyment to be taken from life in Raqqa, and they were not poor, as her mother liked to say, in their ethics and in their faith. There was
enough to do in the city that cost nothing. Dua was content to be a good daughter, to be slightly in love with the Iraqi singer Kazem al-Saher, to spend evenings at home watching Bollywood films, ideally featuring Shah Rukh Khan.

  Dua had a first cousin on her mother’s side, Aws, to whom she was close. Aws’s mother had—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your calculus—married a liberal-minded engineer who provided her with a more padded and less religious life. Aws didn’t wear the hijab like Dua. She wore tight clothes and studied English literature at al-Hasakah University. She was a fizzy, slim girl with a gamine face and a mass of curly dark brown hair, with no time for the swooning, kohl-eyed heroines of Dua’s Bollywood movies, who were always peddling their virtue for love. Aws was into Hollywood, where women shouted at their husbands and romance came with adventure: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, even Tom Cruise—she watched all of their films. She felt a kinship with Julia Roberts; they both had big smiles and big hair.

  Aws enjoyed her English degree, but mostly she wanted to get married, hang out with her friends, and have babies. Ideally, to lead a life that involved spending lots of time at the beach and smoking nargileh, her favorite pastime. She had a photographic memory of all the nargileh cafés in Raqqa, and could tell you which ones had the rare fruit flavors, like kiwi or lychee.