Jihadi

by Yusuf Toropov

  The dead guy telling this story knew this trait of hers first hand. He had built his career on its back.

  There came a time when this non-negotiable thirst for primacy of hers was no longer necessarily operating in his favour – a time when, to the contrary, he was rather inclined to conclude that it meant he wasn’t getting out of here alive. Becky had refused to remain at a disadvantage in an important conversation. She had resumed control of that conversation by drawing a line, a line that excluded him forever.

  Once he knew for sure he was on the wrong side of that line, once he knew he was never, ever coming back again, he began to work on this book. He began to pray it might not be destroyed. Might repay a debt. Might get him out of here safely. Get him home.

  He owed Becky so much.

  cix. Becky

  I have had just about enough of this. Need more coffee.

  The blisters on her hand wept raw blood. She opened the door to the shed.

  You might wonder why someone like Fatima, who had been subjected to such degrading treatment, would agree so readily to work on behalf of the Islamic Republic’s security network. Why she would help to identify subversives plotting to overthrow a government that colluded in the death of her sister. Why she didn’t agitate online to dismantle certain native institutions she knew to be corrupt, or organize a group of protesters to gather in front of the BII building, where she had been attacked and verbally abused, or create a movement demanding, say, the suspension of the country’s constitution.

  The reason she did none of these things was this: She held firmly to the rope of the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions and the teachings, of the Prophet of Islam. These hold that even a tyrannical government is preferable to no government. And no government whatsoever – she had sensed during that protest – was what lay ahead.

  ‘The best scholarship,’ Fatima had once written in her diary, ‘has insisted for fourteen centuries that dismantling an established ruling governmental authority is a major sin unless certain clear conditions exist. These are: ejection of the Muslims from their homes; violation, destruction or shutting-down of the mosques; or a just ruling declaring a state of war from the legitimate leader of the Muslim community. These conditions do not obtain here.’

  Meaning: Fatima herself was safe in a new home.

  Meaning: The mosques were open to her.

  Meaning: There was no legitimate leader of the Muslim community. The prime minister, installed by the Americans and promptly ratified by a close but vaguely plausible popular vote, was an ancient secularist. He had not, so far as anyone could tell, mentioned the Koran in public at any point in his career. Neither, for that matter, had Ra’id, his son. Whether these were the men she would have first chosen to obey, whether they had been selected by a process she would have endorsed, was irrelevant. They were the country’s leaders and were accepted as such by a clear if distracted majority of its people.

  So: None of the three necessary preconditions for revolution now existed within the Islamic Republic. Even on those days when its leaders did the bidding of the Americans, even when it was feckless or corrupt, even when it imprisoned and abused its opponents, the government served a purpose. It registered vehicles, prevented looting and offered occasional imitations of pension management, road maintenance, criminal justice and garbage collection. It ensured a certain essential social order. It was regarded as the government. That was a blessing. If the present regime had accepted too many bales of hundred-dollar bills, bought off too many imams, promoted too many incompetents, well, these were points justifying discussion and reform, not points justifying anarchy. Anarchy was, quite literally, a sin.

  She had helped to organize the protest after Wafa’s death because she wanted to ensure that such an attack never happened again – not because she wanted the skullcap-clad freaks who shouted bilge in the streets running the country.

  And now it seemed there were dozens of them: self-proclaimed scholars with no credentials beyond their own grievances. They pronounced the necessity of the overthrow of the government and all manner of similar nonsense, as though compliance with their every shouted syllable were some religious duty.

  Duty could never be so wild-eyed, so desperate, but were there so many people who imagined obeying those rantings to be a duty? That would make the place unliveable. Those grave doubts of hers about the wisdom of living in the city had only deepened since the demonstration. Now she was free of it, praise God, and in no danger, Godwilling, of ever having to return.

  Barring brief trips for work, of course.

  Ra’id had promised to send her a driver.

  She would pass these so-called Islamic revolutionaries in the streets, then. In a limousine. Watch them through a window. Lock them out. Stay off their corners. That was where they issued their so-called rulings. In the street.

  The very sight of them made her livid. For years, whenever she had been obliged to walk near them, seen their long robes and their dead eyes, heard their shouting, she had always kept a wary distance and walked a little faster. Like that heavyset woman who had tried to make such a commotion in front of the embassy.

  Fatima never said so out loud, but she trusted these revolutionists even less than she trusted the fools who had launched the lethal attack on her sister’s village. The revolutionists who blew themselves up, who told others to do so, who called for the dismantling of the government in the name of Islam, had no excuse for their excesses. They knew, had to know, that Islam means knowing when to stop. Such knowledge carries responsibility. These people were accountable to God to identify, uphold and model civilized behaviour. Instead, they took Islam, turned it inside out and left it on the pavement like a dead glove with its seams showing. As though Islam meant never knowing when to stop, as though it were nothing but a groping backwards in the darkness, naked, forever. The revolutionists were the worst.

  They had a thousand schools, ten thousand grievances, a hundred thousand gory personal traumas. They claimed to pursue the same political goal – the Caliphate – but were famously incapable of finding common ground with each other. Their final, unifying theology was dispute. Beyond that, they agreed only on the perversions of the faith that the foreigners noticed: suicide, violence, intolerance, barbarity, hatred. They were spiritually dead. Worse than corpses in fact. Zombies.

  cx. Zombies

  Some marital trivia: to spite me, and to lend a note of authenticity to his mistress’s implausible political posturings, T here purloins a phrase (‘zombie’) that I coined during an intimate dispute. I used it to describe his periods of torpor following a completed mission. He needed me. Clive on the way.

  Fatima wanted the Americans out of her country, but she wanted the zombies out, too. She was more than content to identify troublemakers for the government, because a nation of zombies was too terrifying to consider.

  In the shed, with the door left open for light, Fatima replaced the machete, examined the gleaming, green-streaked blade as it hung on its nail on the wall. Such an edge should not be allowed to become dull.

  She resolved to sharpen it.

  Wafa must have left a whetstone around here somewhere.

  Jahannum: a busy place.

  The conflict consumed, as its primary fuel source, the innocence of young people. On any given day during the government’s ongoing campaign against the insurgents, Indelible treated between a hundred and a hundred and fifty children whose parents had been killed, maimed, imprisoned or driven insane by one side or the other. He had his own opinions as to which side bore the greatest responsibility for this sea of wounded bodies and wounded minds. Mostly, he kept those opinions to himself.

  The children Indelible treated at Jahannum presented with typhus, with malnutrition, with exposure, with shock, with anaemia, with various infectious skin diseases, with wounds accumulated in crossfire, with psychological disorders of unknown nature and indefinite duration. All but the most recently admitted of the children called him by the name
Doctor Indelible, which was a kind of pleasant tongue twister in the native language. It could be mastered after a few tries. Even the most dazed survivor, upon meeting him, could eventually be made to laugh while trying to pronounce it for the first time. Doctor Indelible was the only name he liked.

  Although he was not present for the fitting, the dead guy sharing this story insists that, on the day Doctor Indelible returned to work, a graduate of Jahannum – an eight-year-old with severe scarring on his arms, a boy with whom the Doctor had no relationship whatsoever – was two miles away. He was being measured for a suicide vest.

  cxi. measured for a suicide vest

  In a rare foray into factuality, T here alludes to an actual security incident.

  The next morning, Thelonius hobbled to the window hoping for a glimpse of the sun, but found only a throng of darkening clouds and an English translation of the Koran on the sill.

  cxii. English

  Paul McCartney’s English sheepdog inspired track nine, which I cue. Our song. Clive knocks: ‘Miss Becky?’ Pause it.

  ‘How the hell did this get here?’

  The Raisin did not look up from the prayer beads. Thelonius felt his teeth grinding, stopped them with an effort.

  ‘I will not open that book, you know. It’s an abomination. Good for crowd control, though. I will say that.’

  ‘As you say. You speak with the confidence of a scholar.’

  Thelonius heard chanting from the direction of the embassy.

  cxiii. track nine

  Clive points out the hour – eleven fifteen – and asks whether I am all right, then whether I am sure I am all right.

  I had not realized it was so late.

  Has he brought coffee? ‘Yes.’ Is it brewed strong, as I instructed? ‘Yes.’ Will he scrub out the tub? ‘Of course.’

  (He does so.) Has he withdrawn that nigger woman’s key, as we discussed? ‘Not yet.’ Leave us alone then. ‘Wait. Can I explain?’ No.

  On my own again. I usher him out, lock and bolt the door, return to my little desk and press ‘play’.

  Much has been made of track nine’s sheepdog: Martha. She served as a kind of muse for McCartney, a guardian, a conduit to greatness. With this in mind, we each took ‘Martha’ as a pet name, as it were, for the other. Each other’s muse. Each other’s protector. Track nine echoed repeatedly during certain important lovemaking sessions, and, years later, during an interrogation. I have pulled out some index cards inscribed in Bucharest and set this important track on Repeat.

  26 In Which Our Song Is Played Repeatedly, and T Spends His Days in Isolation

  Dayton just wanted to relax and not think about Jamal.

  ‘Up to this point, Bobbler,’ Mike Mazzoni said while losing at cribbage, ‘we’ve played a game with all the rules dictated by the fucking ragheads.’

  His brother played a card and said nothing.

  ‘And then,’ Mike continued, ‘we wonder why we keep losing out here. It’s because we are playing by raghead rules. We have to change the rules. Out here, if you play defence, you die. I don’t know about you, but I’m going on offence. You know what I’m saying?’

  Dayton nodded and said, ‘Offence.’ Mike played a card and pegged three points on a go for which he should only have received one point. Dayton considered pointing out this error but opted, as he usually did, not to risk an escalation.

  cxiv. escalation

  We will begin with a simple physical suspension of your arms. What happens from this point forward, T, is up to you.

  ‘Say it louder, dammit,’ said Mike Mazzoni.

  From her study, Wafa’s old bedroom, Fatima did her work with her head down that first week, in no mood for a vacation.

  Work consisted of logging on under a new username to message boards with which she was already familiar, asking questions whose answers she could usually predict, making compliments and combining a feigned ignorance of scholarship with a pronounced and quite authentic disinclination to flirt. All of that spoke powerfully, to some men, of her viability as a future Muslim wife. They opened up to her, dozens of them.

  In just three days she had identified and charmed contact information out of four likely troublemakers. She left the job of confirming their physical whereabouts to the BII. She had been right about them all, though. Each turned out to be a zombie.

  Fatima took pleasure in identifying zombies at a distance, and took pleasure in being paid for it, but there was something that made her uncomfortable about this job.

  It was the weekly ride into Islamic City. She had agreed to frequent three of Islamic City’s internet cafés on her ‘city day’, but she had regretted this promise on the very first day. Uneasy and skittish during this tour of spaces simultaneously public and private, she certainly hadn’t uncovered any offline behaviour likely to belong to a zombie. Men’s eyes were on her, veil or no veil. Her driver had been dour and morose throughout.

  cxv. Uneasy

  This lesson stops whenever we get the answers right. Up you go.

  She couldn’t imagine they weren’t attracting attention when he parked outside these places, waiting for her. The trip into the city felt unnecessary, ugly and dangerous. All the way there, all through each ride within the city, and all the way back, she pressed her knees together.

  The noun Murad Murad liked to read most was ‘insurgents’.

  ‘Insurgents based near Jahannum,’ Indelible typed in the latest of his dutiful, obsequious reports, ‘scuttle through mountainous and wooded areas near the border, areas that afford ample cover. The insurgents (my sources say) move in small bands and constantly shift position. The insurgents occasionally make appearances at the camp and leave stolen American supplies for the children, but I have been unable to engage them in discussion. The insurgents seem to avoid me now. The insurgents advocate (my staff members report) a return to the Khilafah system of government. The insurgents (they tell me) steadfastly refuse to disclaim that point of view. The insurgents never stay in camp long and never give me their names. They appear stealthy and resolute.’

  cxvi. never stay

  You thought you could leave everybody behind. Everybody but your Martha, motherfucker. Everybody but me. Now I need a name.

  All this was plausible enough. Indelible never identified an actual insurgent for Murad Murad, though. Not one.

  Damned if the Raisin wasn’t up and about in the middle of the night, certainly before dawn, bowing and scraping again. Thelonius, shivering in the dark, passed in and out of sleep as the prayers wove their way in whispers through the cell. Presumably he was within his blanket.

  He turned over in it, inside something, at any rate, trying his best to keep his back to the mutterings. Then he walked down a street, holding his father’s hand, and he saw a Lincoln Continental. Then he heard a murmur very close, right behind him, a voice raspy and hoarse with recent injury, a voice full of ashes and holes:

  ‘Run.’

  But his legs would not move. His blood ran cold. He looked behind him, saw nothing, clasped his father’s hand tighter. His father’s hand, made of metal now, tried to withdraw. Thelonius would not let it.

  Another voice, concerned, said: ‘Where, then, are you going?’

  His father’s hand had changed; in its place, Thelonius felt a revolver.

  The sound of the Raisin’s rasping breath roused him.

  Thelonius turned and looked. The Raisin’s bed had somehow shifted, and the glowing embers now occupied a different corner of the cell. Thelonius caught an image from that dark corner: the spur of a flame. An unseen hand shook its dark matchstick, and the flame disappeared.

  To get up now seemed unwise. He turned his back on the orange tip of the otherwise invisible cigarette.

  The cell wall was dark and cold against his face. Footsteps. From directly above, violating the safety of the blanket, or whatever it was that had cocooned him again, Thelonius felt the near presence of the Raisin whispering.

  ‘How you concealingly d
eny against One God, while you dead not existing, and This One aliving you? Then This One will give you death, then will bring you to aliving! Then unto This One your RETURN!’

  Get the hell back in your bed, Thelonius said, or perhaps thought.

  The desire to sleep. Then a long plain of green beneath him.

  After a tense breakfast the Raisin insisted that Thelonius had memorized a verse of the Koran. And recited it to himself. In his sleep.

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  ‘It is quite a famous verse,’ the Raisin insisted. ‘And may I point out: the cots are bolted to the floor. You said the bed had moved. Presumably you meant the cot. Do you mean to suggest that I unbolted it with my bare hands and moved it around the room without waking you? Or the whole cell block? Do you imagine I then moved it back? And rebolted it?’

  Thelonius cracked his knuckles. ‘Don’t get me after you, goddammit. I didn’t say anything from the Koran. And stop staring, will you?’

  ‘As you say.’ And the Raisin looked away.

  The Raisin was hardly a person anyway. The cell was basically empty. And cold despite the dawn. Counting those damn beads. Thelonius rubbed his hands together and hugged himself.

  The quiet got bad.

  ‘Suppose you cut me some slack. I don’t do well in enclosed spaces. That’s all. I just want to get the hell out of here. I just want to go home. You’re a lifer. Maybe you wouldn’t get that. You’re used to this now.’ The cell got quieter still and the grey walls lightened and Thelonius wondered whether he should have even tried.