On the other side of the bed was a table whose single drawer had been pulled out and emptied onto the mattress. Once it had been full of pens and postcards, plastic necklaces, a stopped watch with a rainbow face, a girl’s precious rubbish. None of that remained – cleaned out years before, he imagined. Some tissues, a box of ibuprofen and two new batteries in a pack of four were all that was left. If her old diary still existed, the one with the floral cover and the clasp that locked with a tiny brass key, it had been taken.
Abraham sat on the bare bed, stared at the wall and felt a physical rupture, as if all this time he had been conscious of the warmth and weight of her body and someone had finally torn her away. As Ester had been torn away. He lay down, on his side, one arm across the space his daughter had left, and let the tears come. They flowed from him like blood from a fresh wound, and he feared the moment they ran out.
Sofia had left long ago, of course, and he had already mourned it. But not to say goodbye – why wouldn’t she say goodbye in some way? Why deny every particle of the girl she had been? Like a man looking down from a high wire for the first time, he saw great depths appear beneath: was it him? Had she done all this just to get away?
The thought stopped his tears, shunted him from grief to a sort of horror. She must hate him. She must. She’d scrubbed herself clean of every association, as if the merest hint of him would cause her careful creation to collapse.
The tears had been warm. Now he felt cold, and wretched, and alone.
One thought remained. Since he had heard the word Syria it had been growing, first as nonsense and now as a certainty. He had to follow her.
7
When they get back in the evening, Idara invites me to eat with her and Badra. I think she asks me because we can talk to each other easily and the rest of the time in here communication is quite difficult. Last night we all spent an hour or two together in the sitting room, most of us anyway, crowded round a tablet watching videos and saying prayers and that was great, all bound together by the universal language of faith. That’s the magic of those videos, I realize, I hadn’t thought of it before. You don’t need to know Arabic to appreciate their power.
Anyway, most of the time there’s a lot of nodding and gesturing and as a result the women here haven’t bonded as they might, families eat separately and tend to keep to themselves.
Idara talks more than her friend. She’s telling a story about an Iraqi fighter who got scared and tried to leave when he saw how many brothers were being killed by the Peshmerga. He was found cowering in one of the tunnels we’ve dug round the edge of the city to hide from drones and spy planes when we need to – three brothers literally bumped into him during last night’s airstrikes. At first they thought he was a terrified local woman, but when they pushed her out into the night one of them saw her combat boots. A fighter in a niqab. We know what God says about that. They cut off his head and put it on a spike, says Idara, and she makes a spitting noise – if you hurry up and get married maybe you’ll be out of here in time to see it.
Sometimes I think she might be teasing me but I don’t mind – I’d rather we talked. She asks me about my childhood, and my father, and my mother, and I’m happy to tell her. I never used to talk about my life but now it seems so far away it might as well belong to someone else. Idara’s response is amazing. She says my mother’s illness released me to come here, to travel the path I was always meant to take – that if she had still been well I might have found it hard to break away. What a blessing it is to be with others who have been guided by the Prophet and can help me illuminate my journey. I don’t tell them about my father, and the type of man he is, but suddenly all that makes sense too. If he’d shown me more real love maybe I wouldn’t be here. Of course it happened this way! There could be no other.
Badra is pretty quiet still. She’s from Germany, and Idara told me she came here with her husband, a Turk who died during the battle for Sadad. They used to be al-Nusra, committed before the khilafa even existed. My respect for her grows.
Idara’s from Sudan, but she was living in Egypt before, and when we talk about Cairo I feel so close to her. Her husband is away in Libya training our people there. She laughs when she tells me that he has just taken another wife, a fifteen-year-old local girl. When I ask her how she feels about that she shrugs and tells me it’s the law, and the will of Allah, praise be upon Him, and who is she to question it? Besides, she’s here and he’s there and this is another fact of life. Do not trouble yourself with things that cannot be changed, she tells me. She is a wise woman, Idara. She has seen a lot, and she understands. Would it bother me? she asks. If I was worried about my emotions I wouldn’t be here, I tell her. She laughs again, and nods. She looks at Badra. You see? She will do well here.
Dinner is pasta in tomato sauce, Idara makes it and it’s good.
When we’re washing up I ask Badra and Idara about the cigarettes I saw the brother take at the checkpoint as we entered the city. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and wondering whether to keep quiet about it, and in the end decide to ask their advice. Apart from anything else I can’t be sure that I’m not meant to say something, that the whole thing wasn’t a test. I do my best to be subtle.
‘Are any of the laws of the khilafa relaxed for the mujahideen?’ I ask. ‘When they return from battle.’
‘The laws are laws for all,’ says Badra, but Idara is looking at me, just a little sideways.
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Just generally.’
‘A general question?’
I nod, and Idara half frowns, half smiles.
‘You have an example?’
I hesitate. ‘In the way they treat their wives. How they behave. Smoking, that kind of thing.’
‘There’s something on your mind?’
‘Seeing the brothers here. Wondering what it’s like for them, coming home when they’ve seen what they’ve seen.’
Maybe this is what I’m worried about. Maybe the cigarettes are a distraction. Idara breathes in deeply through her nose, nodding.
‘The brothers are men like any other. And they are at war.’
‘What you think of them is not important,’ says Badra, looking hard at me.
I don’t understand her hostility. Everything I say she twists.
‘I just want to understand.’
I think I flush as I say it but I can’t help that.
‘You are not here to understand,’ says Badra. Her face is so pale and hard. ‘You are here to serve. You will never marry if you do not change.’
All the things I wanted to say go out of my head. I’m confused, and I ask Him for clarity.
‘The khilafa can’t be built on hypocrisy. There are laws. There is sharia.’
Badra just stares at me. I muster the strength to meet her stare, to stand my ground, but there’s something else in her eyes. They look almost sad.
‘You have no idea what we’re building here.’
8
Abraham fell into an uneasy sleep on the sagging bed, sweating in his clothes in the heat of the evening.
He was woken from dreams of deserts by a persistent noise, separate from the cars and the mopeds and the call to prayer and the endless shouting. A knocking, not loud but insistent. With effort he swung himself from the bed and went to stand by the door, wishing there was a spyhole.
‘Yes?’
‘Please to open door.’
The voice was high, but a man’s, with an odd rasp to it.
Abraham wished he had said nothing. What should he do? This man could be here to help him or arrest him. Or to kill him. A Turkish policeman, or a Daesh recruiter come to stop him from meddling. For the first time he felt his own vulnerability in all this, like a physical thing, a shrinking of the muscles.
‘Who is it?’
‘I am next room.’
What did that mean?
‘What do you want?’
‘Please, to power phone.’
; ‘Reception. Reception will have one.’
‘They do not.’
This was crazy. No one knocked on hotel rooms and asked for things from strangers. But in this lonely place it seemed wrong to assume that anyone’s reason to be here was worse than his own. The Christian thing to do was to open the door. The human thing, regardless.
‘Wait please.’
Abraham took his pills and his laptop into the bathroom, stood on the toilet seat, popped open one of the cheap tiles that made up the false ceiling and balanced both inside. Before finally opening the door he straightened his shirt, closed his eyes for a moment and took two deep breaths.
If the man who stood there had come to kill him he was going to do it with a smile. He beamed all the way across his face, which was wide and pockmarked around the cheekbones. Behind fleshy lids his big eyes smiled, too. There was oil in the smile, and sweat on the hand that he offered Abraham to shake, and the threat Abraham had felt gave way to a faint revulsion, and that in turn to guilt. So the man was unfortunate. Shouldn’t two unfortunates feel a sort of kinship in a place like this?
‘I am Vural.’
At least that’s what it sounded like. Vyooral. He gave a deep nod as he shook, then a wet-sounding sniff. Abraham looked down on the thin hair that he had combed carefully across his bald skull, on the thick black moustache that hung over his top lip, on the cheap grey-green suit that needed a press, and had the strong instinctive sense that this man’s life had fallen apart – that he was only here because he had nowhere left to go.
That was kinship.
‘Sami.’
Sami was the name he had given to the receptionist. Sami Labib. A Cairo doctor who had treated his mother twenty years ago.
‘I am next room.’
Vural let go of Abraham’s hand and pointed to the room next door.
‘Ah.’
‘I have better hotels.’
He refreshed the smile, sniffed again. His eyes were sad and yellowish.
Abraham found himself smiling.
‘Me too.’
‘You stay long?’
‘One day. Maybe two.’
‘Ten. I do business –’ he pronounced the ‘i’, busyness – ‘in Antep. I sell – wait, I show.’
He was gone for a minute, during which Abraham could hear him rooting around in the cupboard that, if their rooms were laid out alike, backed on to their shared wall. When he returned, he had a book in one hand and in the other a ladle, which he held up like a baton.
‘Kitchen things. Look.’
He held the book towards Abraham and flicked through it, a thick brochure full of cookers, fridges, washing machines, knives, chopping boards, colanders, orange juicers, saucepans, every single thing anyone had ever needed to use in a kitchen.
‘For you. Please.’
Abraham took the ladle, inspected it with due gravity, and gave a deep nod of his own, more touched than he might have expected. To be given anything here felt extraordinary, and against the odds it seemed to have meaning: here is something for your home, if you ever return.
‘Thank you.’
Vural returned the nod.
‘My phone, the power, is kaput.’
He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a phone in amongst several used tissues, one of which fell to the floor. In the same movement he stooped to pick it up and with his other hand passed Abraham the phone, sniffing on his way down.
‘Dead. You have power?’
It was a Samsung, like his own. Abraham handed it back, from long professional habit imagining the viruses clinging to it.
‘Perhaps. Let me see.’
He squeezed past the bed and went to his bag, found his charger and turned to see Vural reaching for his bedside lamp.
‘It doesn’t work.’
Vural tried the switch anyway.
‘Kaput.’ He shook his head. ‘I have better hotels. You want my light? I do not read.’
He picked up the book from the table. A history of Istanbul, which Abraham had bought years ago and never found the right time to read. Vural seemed pleased.
‘Istanbul. Yes? You go to Istanbul?’
Maybe with her, when this was over. ‘I plan to.’
‘I go one time. My eyes cry with beauty.’
‘I’m sure.’
Abraham handed him the charger, and Vural tried the jack for size.
‘Is good!’ He beamed. ‘I can?’
‘Of course.’
‘I bring. Later.’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you. Teşekkür.’
Abraham wanted to repay Vural’s openness with conversation but could find nothing to say. His energy was low, most probably. Vural’s was not.
‘Small bag,’ he said, pointing at Abraham’s case. ‘Not much things. You do business?’
‘Not really. I’m just passing through.’
Vural frowned, not understanding.
‘I come and go. I travel.’
‘Aaah, traveller. I understand. Travel is best thing. For this.’ He tapped his temple three times with a fat finger. ‘You are writer?’ Replacing the history of Istanbul, he picked up the notebook that had been underneath and began to flick through the pages.
‘No. Not really. Please don’t.’
‘Is good, to write books. You must have big brain.’
Ridiculous though it was, Abraham was strangely flattered.
‘I’m not a writer. Really. I’m a chemist. A pharmacist.’
‘Aah, okay, is good, good job. Important. I have, how you say . . .’ he sniffed, and waved his hand under his nose.
‘A cold.’
Vural grinned.
‘Yes, cold. Funny to have cold when is so hot, no?’
‘Here. Wait a moment.’
Abraham went to his bag and from the small store of medicines he had brought took some aspirin and some vitamin C. Vural took them as if they were jewels of great value.
‘Sami. This is kind. This is good, thank you.’
But now he was shaking his head.
‘You, you are good man, I see, clear, clear. But Turkey, now, I am sorry, is bad men everywhere. And Gaziantep?’ He let out a low whistle. ‘Five years, beautiful city.’ Beeyootiful. ‘Now, everywhere bad men. You see?’ He gestured to the window. ‘With beards, and guns. You see?’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘Best thing, you go to Adana. Beautiful city. The most beautiful that is not Istanbul. Bridges, houses, old old. Beautiful. And no bad men. The Sabanci mosque, oh my goodness.’
Goodness. Abraham wondered where he had picked that up.
‘After here, Adana, do not stay in Antep. Is not safe for strangers.’
Vural was shaking his head and beaming at the same time.
‘Teşekkür ederim.’ He raised the charger and the aspirin. ‘You go today?’
A strange question to ask, at five in the afternoon.
‘I stay tonight.’
He beamed at Abraham a last time from the other side of the bed.
‘Tomorrow, Adana. No bad men there, yes?’
9
Two sisters came to teach us Arabic today. They stayed for the whole morning. I explained that I already spoke it, that I grew up speaking nothing else at home and spoke nothing else at my mosque – but they insisted I join their classes anyway.
I tell Badra that I don’t need to be taught a language I’ve spoken since I was two, but all I get in response is a silent stare and then a line about me not being in charge of the khilafa. That woman has a way of winding me up so tight with just a word or a look. I hate myself for letting her.
After class I go to bed in the afternoon and listen to the planes in the sky and the bombs falling all over the city with no pattern to them. I’m not afraid, but thoughts come that I don’t want. It’s like the bombs open them out. I didn’t tell my friends I was coming here and now I think I should have. I should have left some sort of a note or message. For Nana, too, her pain won�
��t matter but there was no need to cause it.
I can see my bedroom in Cairo, and the warm round arch of my mother’s back as I lie in bed and she sits by me reading. Why do I see that now? Why do scraps of her music come in?
I do my best to remember why I’m here: to serve Him, however He sees fit. I must think of these times as preparation, as making myself ready for the next stage, whatever it is and whenever it comes. There are tears in me, but that’s where they’ll stay.
We have a new arrival. Her name is Namaa, she’s from Iraq, and although she’s more like Badra’s age she sleeps in my room, on the last mattress in the corner. She doesn’t say much. I try to talk to her but she just smiles – not a real smile – and doesn’t talk back. Most of the time she spends lying on her side on her bed with her back to me.
Her husband was a deserter, and his head is now on a spike. I ask what will happen to her. Allah will provide for her, Badra tells me. She will mourn for the decreed period and then she will marry again.
Poor woman, to be married to such a man. I pray for her, and for me, that God the most high might find me someone whose faith is equal to mine.
10
Aziz phoned the next morning. At last, and just as Abraham had more or less given up on his three-hundred-dollar deposit. Meet me at the zoo, same bench, same time.
For the rest of the day, Abraham walked and searched, and stayed in his room and searched, and found nothing that might help. No news of English schoolgirls, no news of anything. No chance-in-a-million sightings. Just normal people going about their business, and dotted amongst them, like wolves mingling with the flock, the fighters, the hard men with the thick shells for faces and the eyes that followed every step you took. They huddled on street corners, sat on car bonnets, milled about. Gangs of them took over cafes, lolled around in the sun, smoking and talking, smoking and not talking, watching each other pass like predators taking time out from the fight.
Abraham learned to walk past and not catch anyone’s eye, and soon became as used to them as every other resident of Gaziantep. The men he worried about were the ones behind him, the ones he looked for but couldn’t see.
The Good Sister Page 3