Soheil and their cousin Nadim were in the car together. The connection was unusually clear. It was the first time the three of them had been in one conversation together since the two young men had left, over a year and a half ago. Sabira wanted to be in the car with them so badly. She and Nadim had always been close. He always used to say she was the perfect model of ladylike deportment, and needled his sisters to behave more like her. “Ask Sabira whether she’s still going to the gym. Ask Sabira whether her uncle and nan are still feuding. Ask Sabira whether her mother still speaks in proverbs.” She updated the two men on everyone’s mood, weight, proverb proclivity, social lives.
Two days later, she was in the car with her mum, driving to visit her father in Birmingham, when she opened an unusually long text message from Soheil. She had to stop reading after the first line: “Nadim is dead.” He didn’t say how it had happened. If it had been excruciating or swift and painless. Sabira’s not-knowing changed quickly into a white-hot rage. She wanted to scream at him, No! He was just in the car with you. I just talked to him. He was just alive!
The memories flooded back. She thought of Nadim’s throaty laughter, his strange dislike of soda, the sweets he would pick up for her from East London, the goggle-eyed impressions he would do to make his little son crack up with laughter, his gentle insistence, when his sisters put on Bollywood movies, that such bright revealing clothes and dancing were, to his mind, just inviting temptation, the sad result of Indian Muslims mixing with too many elephant-god-worshipping, navel-revealing, white-people-ass-kissing Hindus. “It’s no use me just going on about it,” he would say to his sisters, sighing. “The modesty has to come from inside you. Like it’s inside Sabira.”
It was late morning; there was a milky sky and two hours of driving before them. Sabira grabbed at her mother’s sleeve, saying, “We have to turn back.” They pulled over at the next exit and her mother clasped the steering wheel and wept. Sabira’s eyes were dry. She had found out first; she had to be strong for everyone.
After driving back to London, they walked into her aunt’s living room without announcement. Sabira picked up the remote control and turned off the television. Her cousin, just back from the gym, wearing what passed for modest attire—tight leggings, a tunic that reached her mid-thighs but clung to everything along the way—looked up quizzically. Sabira found her aunt in the kitchen and led her into the living room and asked her to sit down. When she told them the news, she thought her aunt would collapse into bitter sobs and beat her chest. But her aunt’s eyes shrank a little and went pebble hard. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Tell Soheil to send a picture. I won’t believe it until I see it.”
It hadn’t occurred to Sabira to suspect it could be false news. But in the contrast between her aunt, resolutely refusing to cry, and her own mother and cousin, grasping each other and sobbing, she saw that it was a bid for time. Without proof, her aunt could sustain denial. On a certain level, it was simply inconceivable: to have ended up in Britain, the daughter of a Pakistani transplant whose family had abandoned its farm amid the violence of partition, to have done your best to raise a happy son over a difficult cultural divide, to watch him increasingly chafe at feeling British in a way you never did yourself, even though he blended in better than you ever had, to watch that son retrace half of your own family’s path eastward and end up fighting and dying in the Arab Levant in someone else’s civil-territorial war under the banner of jihad. Was he a martyr who died fighting for the idea of a caliphate, a kingdom of heaven where Muslims could live in dignity under Allah’s will? Was he a foot soldier in the Sunni Iraqi–Syrian jihadist insurgency that didn’t want to be part of either Iraq or Syria, and rebelled against those regimes? Was he both? Could he be both? What was the legacy of his death? Did it mean she had raised her son with a heart that burned against injustice, or that she had let him down, not noticing that he was being preyed upon? It was too much for her to bear. “I need a picture,” she repeated flatly.
“Really? Should I actually send u a pic?” Soheil asked, when she managed to message him later. Sabira replied, “Auntie needs an explanation. Just send.”
The picture. It was night when he sent it. She could see the moon from her bedroom window, bloated but not yet full, pouring light out onto the street. For a split second, she thought Soheil had sent the wrong picture. The image looked like the mangled Syrian bodies they had gathered around their phones to look at together over eighteen months ago, back when the Syrian war was beginning. But this wasn’t an anonymous victim. It was Nadim, with fragments of his face and left shoulder missing, bits of bone sticking out, ash caking his remains. She could not understand what had done this. Had bullets gone into him? The picture seemed to emit sound, an unbearable shrill screaming like a siren. Sabira felt disoriented, her hands acting of their own accord as they slammed the phone facedown against the bedside table.
* * *
—
IN OCTOBER 2016, SHORT MONTHS after his baby was born, eight months after Nadim’s death, Soheil was killed by a sniper shot to the head during an extended fighting campaign outside Manbij. An instant kill, apparently, his wife said later.
“Don’t you want to leave, now that he’s gone?” Sabira messaged her.
“No. I’m not getting married again. There’s no one for me after Soheil. But I don’t want to ever leave. I’m waiting for the afterlife, where we can be together.”
The family’s mourning for Nadim bled into their mourning for Soheil, a period of counting days: the seventh day, the fortieth day. They moved through these time markers physically, as though passing beads along a prayer rope. Sabira floated through many of those days barely alert, so often astonished that everything outside remained unaltered: the alleyway shortcut that led straight to the Victoria line station, the ivy that crawled from their neighbor’s trellis onto their fence, the bluebells that ringed the cricket ground.
Over a year earlier, before the travel disasters, Sabira had signed up for a professional course in play therapy. She was patient with children and loved being around them. She loved their quirkiness, their little vulnerabilities, their innocence. When the course began in late 2016, when she was stunned by grief, she went out of a feeling of mechanical obligation, but she was quickly engrossed in the coursework, the theories about family structures, the myriad ways something as simple as play could be used to help children deal with small fears and major damage. There was a clinical observation once a week that Sabira always looked forward to. She liked how present it required her to be, watching the children’s behavior for signs, anticipating the reactions of the trained therapist.
Most of all, she liked how productive it made her feel, being in that room, helping make a difference in those children’s lives. She liked walking in each week and having the children rush up to her. She liked being an example, with her hijab and abaya, of a strong Muslim woman. She had long since dropped the extremist al-Muhajiroun women, whose attitudes around “free mixing” would have made her work impossible. She wanted to be productive and contribute to society, like the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, who had been active as a businesswoman. That fact was part of a side of early Islam she’d certainly never heard about when she moved in the al-Muhajiroun circles. Islam was too big a religion for such constraints against women, and too noble a religion to countenance viewing non-Muslims with contempt, she thought.
She started listening to Islamic talks on YouTube again and reading the Quran before bed. It was strange thinking about the future, thinking about her iman and responsibilities to Allah. It was through all of this that she had decided to put the hijab back on. She listened to the various scholarly positions; she read and reread the sections of the Quran dealing with modesty. She decided that covering more fulsomely was what Allah asked for, and she felt a calm, satisfied peace for choosing this herself, in the path of pleasing Him.
She didn’t f
eel even a beat of resentment when pulling on the hijab in the mornings. Best of all, she no longer felt herself superior to Muslim women who didn’t wear it. Now she viewed it as her individual choice, and felt no disdain for girls who wore turban-style hijab or bandanna-style hijab or hijab over lacquered faces and blatantly sexy outfits. No one was perfect. Everyone sinned differently. For herself, she felt blessed from the very first day she put it back on. The massive drop in daily comments, come-ons, harassment, eyes perving their way up and down her body: it was just a fact. Thanks be to God that she had the choice, and had found her way back to the choice.
Sabira looked back on the summer of 2015 as a period of delirium, and felt acute shame for her recklessness and naïveté. It still hurt her when the newspapers mocked all the young men from Walthamstow who had gone, like her brother and Nadim. She would never denigrate them like that, because she knew why they had gone. The newspapers only cared about who had brainwashed them, never about what they had gone to fight for. In September 2016, Anjem Chaudry, the dark media narcissist whose group had led Soheil and Nadim to Syria, finally went to prison. The Daily Mail’s triumphant headline hinted at how the paper had enjoyed the chase while it ran: “Nailed at Last! For 20 years, hate preacher on benefits laughed at Britain as he spawned terror worldwide. Now, after vowing allegiance to ISIS, he faces 10 years behind bars.”
She found out later, through a friend, that a group of more than twenty British Sudanese medical students had traveled to join ISIS during the summer of 2015. Reading about these young people made her own mistake a little lighter to bear. They were respectable, educated, affluent children of consultants and doctors and diplomats; if young people like this could be drawn to the caliphate, was it any wonder Soheil had been drawn in? That she had allowed the idea to flicker in her mind?
Sometimes, in the evenings, Sabira scanned the news reports online. How easy it was to call these people “a waste of space” or call their religion demonic. But if someone were to create a memorial wall of all the hundreds and thousands of bright, educated, promising, bighearted young people who had gone to Syria, would it be possible to look into their faces and not see something to learn from? But it was a mirror that no one really wished to look into.
The only face Sabira wanted to see was her brother’s, staring back at her in the little frame of her nephew, who was his carbon copy. But she had resigned herself to missing even this.
EMMA/DUNYA
January 2017, a Village in Northern Syria
Today was her birthday and she was creeping toward thirty, penniless in a Syrian village. She put on Sting’s “Desert Rose,” the song that almost always made her feel better; she ate the chocolate brownies the family she was staying with had bought for her. The generator went off with a loud, sad clunk, taking the Wi-Fi and the small electric heater with it. She sighed and started pulling extra socks on. The cold made her digits numb and sapped her will to get out of bed, even for meals. Without the internet, she felt like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Unlike most nights, she had remembered to fill her hot-water bottle before the generator gave out, and she pressed her toes against its womb-like heat.
Sometimes it felt like she would be the last German woman left in all of Syria. She knew of many others who had managed to cross the border into Turkey, but while the German consulate in Ankara said repeatedly it was working on her case, no help ever materialized. The idea of winging it, just walking or driving up to the border and handing herself over to the Turkish authorities, this frightened her, even though it was probably what others had done. What if they threw her into a filthy detention center where she had to spend weeks sleeping on a dirt-encrusted floor and eating gruel, surrounded by drug addicts and prostitutes? What if they interrogated her for hours à la Midnight Express before turning her over to the German authorities?
Then there was the problem of her cats, only slightly less complicated than her own situation. The cats would have to stay in Turkey for a period of three months, receiving their shots and being cared for by a vet, before they could qualify for health checks and an official pet passport. Whom would they stay with? She didn’t speak any Turkish and didn’t know a soul in Turkey, apart from the Syrian FSA men who had helped her out, who traveled back and forth across the border.
There were people who wanted or needed information from her. Journalists who had her WhatsApp number and called with questions; intelligence agents who showed up at the house pretending to be local NGO workers or municipal police, as though she couldn’t figure out immediately who they were. Some of these people promised to help get the cats out and find them lodging. One texted to tell her there was a Facebook page popular among cat owners living in a smart neighborhood in Istanbul—Cihangir Cat Lovers, it was called—and suggested she post a request there. She balked: “I can’t tell anybody ‘please let us meet at the Syrian border because you have to take my cats from there.’ ” Even if someone could arrange to get the cats to Istanbul, she was still uneasy. “I don’t like to give them away to strangers from Facebook. But when I was thinking I have to leave them in turkey for three months I start crying like a baby .”
The family she was staying with were the most prominent clan in this small village in northern Syria. They lived together, three generations, in a communal home, and allowed Dunya to live with them out of kindness, though when she was able to offer them little payments, they gratefully accepted. They were firm supporters of the Free Syrian Army, and also deeply religious. There was no drinking. Dunya wore her hijab when the men were present. As far as she could tell, the men of this village had married their wives when they were young, arrangements that were deemed propitious to village relations. Everyone seemed tolerant of the fact that now, years and many children later, the men were looking for second wives.
The matriarch of the family was extremely kind, and treated Dunya as one of her own daughters. She poked her head inside the room if she didn’t emerge, tended to her when she got sick from bad kebab or had chronic chest colds. If Dunya felt too ill or too depressed to come out, the matriarch sent one of the children into her room with a plate of doughnuts or sweets. It was the first time a family had properly looked after her, and their care made Dunya feel both ashamed of being a burden and disinclined ever to leave.
She spent hours on her own. On any given evening these were the thoughts that might be flitting through her mind: how exciting it would be to go shopping in Manhattan and how utterly unlikely it was to ever happen, due to her stupidity and Trump’s election; how she had to be strong and not give in to desperation because she had made a bad decision and had to handle the consequences; why some women looked better than others in hijab; the wisdom of that Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, who realized that love could transform and that the key to happiness was allowing your heart to choose. Qabbani, she thought, understood desire as no one else did. He wrote that “the female doesn’t want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and says: ‘Here is your home country.’ ”
Like her mother before her, she hated men; she felt herself done with them. She contemplated baking a cake in the shape of a man and eating it slowly, limb by limb. She changed her WhatsApp profile picture obsessively. It was a better barometer of her moods, aspirations, desires, and regrets than any words she could articulate. In the span of one month, it featured her mother, herself as a baby, a BMW at sunset, the sloth from Ice Age, peach Nike sneakers, cuddling penguins, the Taj Mahal bathed in moonlight, Homer Simpson hoisting a “The End Is Near” sign, Syrian children in a field waving their national flag, a stark Arabic “I Hate You,” pouting selfies with flowing lustrous hair, pouting selfies with hijab, SnapChat selfies with mouse ears, a beach in the moonlight, “Whatever,” “Sometimes you have to forget what you want to remember what you deserve,” a fighter on a battlefield cradling a cat.
She mostly daydreamed
about what her life would be like back in Germany, once she served her time in prison, which would surely be required. She wanted to go off religion for a while, to take off her hijab and have a normal European life again. She would always be a Muslim, and eventually she would cover again. But you couldn’t walk into a bar or sit around smoking shisha with a headscarf, and she wanted to do those things. She wanted to take Arabic classes, because she remained in love with Arabic, the language of the Quran and Umm Kulthum.
* * *
—
ONE NIGHT THE NEARBY SHELLING by the YPG was so loud the windows rattled continuously. She wished they would just shatter and be done with.
The YPG was a Syrian Kurdish militia closely linked to a group that the United States considered a “terrorist entity,” but now, recently scrubbed and rebranded as the Syrian Democratic Forces, the militia was working together with the American and European militaries to dislodge the Islamic State from the areas around the east and northeast, now edging closer to Raqqa. Dunya jumped up to wash off her face mask, in case the generator went off. It was black, made of something tar-like, and she needed the light to get it off. Now that she had escaped from the caliphate, Dunya devoted herself to wellness. She made scrubs out of salt and honey, masks out of almonds and olive oil, and found that organic self-care could reliably fill a long stretch of the average day.
As for the war, it continued as the backdrop. Dunya now experienced the fighting primarily through sound, and had developed an aural catalogue of expertise: the Russians dropped what she called monster-bombs, relentless rounds of seven booms, always seven, flying away and swooping back after ten or fifteen minutes for another round; the Syrian regime bombers were erratic and bombed indiscriminately, often hitting civilian areas and shopping centers and hospitals; the American planes, at least at that time, came in for discrete strikes.
Guest House for Young Widows Page 29