The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  ‘It’s a crazy idea. I never heard a crazier idea.’

  Vural rubbed his chin, apparently unconcerned, as if the choice was simple and balanced. An apple, or an orange. You pick.

  ‘This way, you can find your daughter from inside. How you will do this if not? Raqqa is big. And they, they are like fortress.’

  ‘I have some ideas.’

  ‘So you will go there? This is your plan?’

  ‘Until half an hour ago I didn’t need a plan.’

  Vural shifted in his seat and waited for Abraham to look at him.

  ‘You killed a Free Syrian. A kafir. You are already Daesh.’

  ‘My God. You mean it.’

  ‘Of course. Is easy. Fits like this.’ He laced his fingers together. ‘You go now, we report you escape, you go to Akçakale, cross border. Someone there take you, easy. I give you phone, we talk. Safe, no problem. Then maybe I help you back to Turkey when you or your daughter you have enough.’

  God, it made sense. Did it make sense? How was someone like him meant to judge something like this?

  ‘Give me a day. It’s too much.’

  Vural reached across and put his hand on Abraham’s shoulder.

  ‘Abraham. You go on bus this way or this way. You are problem or asset. Or, you want, I give you to polis. I do not mind.’

  ‘Till this evening.’

  Vural chose not to reply.

  Raqqa he had imagined. Getting there somehow, finding a room somehow, sneaking around, talking to Sofia through Irene, ready for the moment when it came. But not this. Not becoming one of them.

  Vural gripped his shoulder.

  ‘Is okay, Abraham. Now you know what you will do. Time for home.’

  29

  — Sorry I am slow to respond, sister. You must be very happy.

  — tell me. What man is he? Is he young, old, handsome?

  He is young and so handsome and we are so happy!

  — Where is he from sister? A foreign fighter or local?

  Syria! His father was a great man, a hero before the khilafa

  — I am sure he will treat you well sister, you deserve it.

  he is a good Muslim and a fearless fighter. Better to marry him than to fight him!

  — What is his name?

  Khalil. I looked it up. It means friend! We will be great friends.

  he understands me, my background, my family problems

  — be sure you look after yourself my sister

  he will do that for me now

  are you coming? when?

  — I am less sure sister. My faith is tested.

  30

  The haze that Abraham had taken for some welcome cloud burned away and heat began to build and press in the metal shell of the bus. A relief, no, to be back in London soon, with its low skies and the leaves turning and the mornings growing cool? Where nothing could be changed and nothing could be done? There was peace in that. He had mistaken himself for a man with passions, when they were only fears that he would never outrun. They were his lot, and to think he could finally be rid of them through what, some heroic rescue, that was vanity, a sin, a fond rejection of the role God had given him to play. You couldn’t buck that, any more than Sofia could avoid her destiny.

  She had her line, he had his, and they had diverged, that was all. No one could will them together again.

  The bus powered along through a rough cutting in the rising hills. Abraham let his eyes slip on the chalky rock and his mind empty of thought; the decision was made, and the tiredness that had been building over days began to catch up with him. But she was there as he closed his eyes. Newborn, scalp thick with fine, wayward hair, asleep on his chest or straddling Ester’s arm like a cat in a tree, the distinct weight of her. Dancing, with her hands in his hands and her feet on his. That erect, bobbing walk, on the brink of becoming a skip. The seriousness in her eyes as she drew.

  Strange, that as she had grown the physical memory of her should remain somehow the same. Her skin, her warmth a constant.

  About fifty miles outside Gaziantep, Abraham told the driver he wanted to get off, stepped down into the heat, and crossed the road to wait for the bus coming the other way. Vural was wrong. This wasn’t a test of his limits. It was a choice between two deaths: of one cut, or a thousand; with honour and love, or an eternal shame.

  And all this; all of it was on him. He was her father.

  For an hour he sat cross-legged on the verge, a handkerchief on his head in place of a hat, visions of sand and mirages and death from thirst playing across the sun-beaten yellow scrub that only ended at the sky. Unchecked miles of plain, and somewhere in them this fabled evil city that held his daughter, like a dark castle that only appeared to those who had the faith to seek it.

  Vural’s plan was insane. You could never leave ISIS – you could as easily tear up a contract with the devil. No. He would do it his way. Find someone to take him to Raqqa, God knows how; pose as a merchant, as Vural had, and live there in some quiet hole; keep talking to Sofia through Irene until an opportunity presented itself. He was insignificant. The city held hundreds of thousands and wouldn’t notice him. He would keep his head down and wait. If he had to, he would wait for a year.

  The bus came and took him east again. No one was waiting for him in the city; no police, no Vural. He passed through as invisibly as a single tiny fish crossing a great burning sea. In this vast land he was alone, making his way as she had, south to the border.

  PART TWO

  1

  Akçakale: gateway to the khilafa. Two hours south-east of Gaziantep, and popular, for a town no one wanted to go to. The final bus turned out to be a battered minibus, old and straining and so full that for the first twenty minutes Abraham stood in between the rows of seats, stooping and hot and feeling increasingly sick. His clothes smelled terrible on him. But for all that he felt a little more human, in amongst other humans again. The sweats were beginning to be just sweating, the headache just an ache.

  In time, the bus stopped to let a woman off at the side of the road. Abraham had to step down himself to allow her and her two swollen shopping bags to pass, and as he stood in the dust and the heat he scanned the landscape for some sign of where she might be heading; but he could see nothing, just gently rising and falling sandy scrub for mile after mile. Back on the bus he went to take the empty seat and remembered as he began to sit, prompted by a momentary stiffening of the people around, that he couldn’t be next to a woman he didn’t know. Without saying anything the woman opposite shifted across the aisle and sat in the empty spot, and Abraham, thanking her, conscious all the while of the smell coming off him, sat next to her husband, or her brother, or whoever he was, and as the bus drove off he watched the woman they had let off walking resolutely, a plastic bag in each hand, on a barely visible track towards the edge of the world.

  These were normal people. Poor people. Their clothes were well used, their shoes dusty and battered, the bags on their knees full and heavy. Each of them, Abraham thought, was there because they had to be; the mood was purposeful, but there was tension in it, and even his neighbours who had let him sit were wary of him. This was a new kind of conspicuousness, and it forced him to wonder how many strangers they had seen pass through their town on their way south, how many deluded people, how many fighters. How many killers. My mission is different, he wanted to say. I’m not like that. If I could explain to you, you would understand. As it was, he sat and watched the land roll by, trying to calm his nausea and the nerves building in him.

  Akçakale felt like the last town in Turkey, which Abraham supposed it was; low, built for purpose and without much evidence of love. Outskirts of simple white houses and dry walled-in yards, and in the centre boxy breeze-block shops and office buildings lining wide streets set out in a grid: a petrol station, a police station, a supermarket, an empty park dotted with trees beginning to yellow. Water towers and a pair of slender minarets rose up against the sky. But there was no doubting its pur
pose now: even from two miles outside, Abraham could see the wire fence that stretched across the whole landscape from east to west, barely separating the country from Syria, and as they drove into town he kept glimpsing it down side streets, in the gaps between buildings. A border town once, now a frontier town, which no one visited by accident any more, still less passed casually through. Seventy miles due north of Raqqa, the only reasons for being here to flee death or to run towards it.

  After Gaziantep, the streets were quiet, faded. A hot wind blew hard from the south and passed right through; with the sun, it seemed to bleach the place of colour and life. Groups of men sat outside cafes watching the world. Abraham sensed that the atmosphere outside was as it was in the bus: everyone had their heads down, in the hope that they might get through the day without being noticed or challenged. Fear had got into the place.

  Abraham waited for all the women to leave, thanked his neighbour and the driver, and stepped down into a central square by the mosque, bright and functional in the full morning light. He needed somewhere to buy a phone, and clothes. Feeling like a tramp, he approached two of his fellow passengers as they got their things together at the kerb, but each shook his head and slipped away.

  The driver of the bus got down from his cab and with a glance at Abraham walked slowly across the tarmac to a cafe in a row of shops. Outside were plastic tables and chairs, unoccupied, and in the doorway stood a man smoking. He asked the driver something as he approached. The driver glanced back over his shoulder at Abraham, met his eye, and turning back with a jerk of his head said something in reply. His friend looked hard at Abraham for a moment, flicked his cigarette away towards the gutter, and together they went inside.

  2

  Abraham started to walk. At a supermarket on what seemed to be the main street he bought water, and in bad Turkish asked the woman at the checkout where he might find a hotel. That was where to start. A base. And in a hotel, even a bad hotel, you paid money and could start a conversation on the basis of it. It was the only place a stranger could establish a claim on someone’s time. The woman pointed down the street and turned to the next customer.

  He kept walking, past an empty barber’s, nondescript offices, a mobile phone shop with six old phones in the window, and more functional cafes, white tables in white rooms. From a shop whose shelves were nearly bare he bought shirts, underwear, a pair of trousers that fit him well enough. Life was going on here, but only barely; what had to be done was getting done, and no more. Shopkeepers stood outside their shops, talking, smoking, accustomed to the new reality. On the other side of the road three bearded men were smoking silently, two of them leaning against the bonnet of a car, all in black: black jeans and T-shirts and zipped jackets. One of them pointed at Abraham with his cigarette and the other two turned to look, their faces young but hard, forever set in menace and cold calculation. Abraham felt himself being swiftly and efficiently assessed – friend, foe, civilian – and realized that he fit none of those categories. He walked on, eyes firmly on the ground.

  He saw no hotel anywhere, but his nerve had gone and he failed to ask new directions from each person he passed. Where the shops ran out and the pavement became a track he stopped, peered down the street at the more scattered buildings ahead of him and seeing nothing remotely promising turned and looked back the way he had come. The three men were still there, still watching him, and opposite them – of course, it would be – on the side of a building was the painted word ‘hotel’.

  Walking back, into the wind and the dust and the men’s stares, he passed a man whose face he knew he recognized from somewhere, Antep or the bus or maybe just now, he was so preoccupied he couldn’t remember. Without even a glance across the street he turned into the door of the hotel and went up a narrow flight of stairs into a dark room at the back of the building. Two of its walls were lined with low, battered, vinyl-covered chairs, and on them sat two young men in T-shirts and trainers, staring intently at their phones. One looked local, the other was white, with black hair closely cropped at the sides and razored with straight, stepped lines. At a desk opposite sat a squat, heavy-shouldered man in a white shirt that was too tight and showed between each pair of buttons a glimpse of string vest. All three looked up at Abraham as he entered, and their eyes stayed on him as he approached the desk and asked, in his guidebook Turkish, if there was a free room.

  The squat man sniffed, took a deep breath and let it slowly out, looked Abraham up and down.

  ‘No room. You go.’

  Abraham glanced round at the two men and found them staring up at him. Unblinking, like lizards.

  ‘Nice beard,’ said the one with the shaved head, in English. English English. He was young, maybe twenty, and clean-shaven. His accent sounded northern.

  Abraham had no response to that.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I want a room.’

  ‘No mate. In this shithole. Akçakale.’

  ‘I have family in Syria. I need to see them.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘My wife’s family.’

  The man nodded, emphatically, like he didn’t believe a word.

  ‘That be in Raqqa, by any chance?’

  He meant something by this but Abraham had no idea what. There was so much he didn’t know.

  ‘Not just Raqqa.’

  The young man looked at his friend, stood up and walked towards Abraham until he was only six inches from him, fresh garlic harsh on his breath. Abraham was the taller.

  ‘You don’t look like a fighter, mate.’

  ‘I’m not a fighter.’

  ‘Why else go to Raqqa?’

  ‘I don’t want to go. I have to go.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  That was a joke, it seemed. He turned round to grin at his friend. He was wearing a white T-shirt that showed every detail of his pumped-up chest, and combat trousers with bulging pockets.

  ‘Really. I’m not here for trouble.’

  ‘Only trouble here, mate. That’s all there is.’

  What should he say? I’m searching for someone. I’m here by mistake, more or less. I’m not even a Muslim.

  ‘How’d you feel about Assad, my friend?’

  Bad. He felt bad about Assad. Without him there would be none of this. Everyone hated Assad, didn’t they? Unless they were trying to trick you.

  ‘The sooner he goes, the better.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s good. You’re doing well. So that’s why you’re here, is it, to fight the good fight?’

  ‘I’m not here to fight.’

  The man pushed himself up on his toes until his face was an inch from Abraham’s.

  ‘If you’re not with us, my lanky fucking friend, you’re against us.’

  ‘I’m not here to fight anyone.’

  With another grin the young man grabbed Abraham’s upper arm and squeezed.

  ‘I believe you. I believe you. Fuck me, pal. You’d take a lot of training up.’

  He turned to his friend again and for the first time in a very long time Abraham wished he were stronger, and fitter, and capable of beating this character into being quiet. Shrugging his arm free he started to walk away.

  ‘Hey.’

  He kept walking.

  ‘I’ll catch up with you later.’ Then to his friend: ‘Fuck me. Scraping the fucking barrel now.’

  Back on the street, Abraham stood by the entrance to the hotel, his head empty of ideas. The three men had gone, and for now he was alone.

  3

  That afternoon we take a school and Umm Sharik has me administer forty lashes to a teacher for smoking. We don’t find any cigarettes on her but one of her colleagues tells Umm Sharik that she came in early three days ago and found her round the back in a storeroom, puffing away. I’m amazed that after over a year anybody can still be so stupid.

  Without evidence, I want to refer the matter to the court, and have a judge decide the punishment, but Umm Sharik insists that in ca
ses like this we must act quickly, stop the rot before it spreads, and I can see that. I’m prepared to bow to her experience, but as I take the lash from her I’m unsure whether this is truly the honour she says it is. At best it feels like a test.

  I don’t mind tests. I’m getting used to them. The lash is heavier in my hand than I thought it would be, and the weight is in the rubber, which is stiff and floppy at once. People don’t understand the lash. They imagine long whips, slicing through fabric and drawing lines of blood, but this is really quite a gentle punishment. I’ve seen it often enough to know how to do it – lift the lash up to shoulder height and bring it firmly down across the back, not that hard, letting the flex in the rubber do the work. One thing I’m not expecting is how solid the connection is. If you’re just watching, the clothes seem to take some of the impact, but as I deliver the first one I can feel the lash cracking into her bone. It will leave a bruise, for sure, but that’s the idea – for a week she’ll be thinking about what she did and chances are she won’t offend again. Most don’t.

  Forty is a lot. You have to find a quick rhythm and stick to it, not slow down when you see it taking effect, but I have the discipline. I am doing this for her. She starts to sob, but after half way it gets easier. When I’m done I feel the urge to help her to her feet and that surprises me. I resist it. Instead she pushes herself up and limps back into the classroom, an example to the girls and herself.

  The flat feels pretty empty that evening. It’s been a full day and I long to talk to somebody about it. I’ve sent a load of texts to Khalil, too many, but I guess the reception’s bad because he’s only sent me one back. Right now he’s with a platoon, at least that’s what he calls it, in a house outside Kobani. There’s a stand-off between our fighters and the Kurds, who we’ve pushed back to a group of buildings on the edge of the town. No one’s moved for three days, and he says he’s bored, but I can tell he’s frustrated really. A spirit like that won’t be contained for long, but in war as in everything we have to be clever. Take your time, I tell him. Trust your commanders, they are guided from above.