The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  After a minute she nods and says she’s pleased to see me looking better. She came yesterday but I was sleeping.

  ‘Thank you,’ I manage to say.

  ‘You have been through a great deal.’

  ‘And I disgraced my position. I failed the khilafa.’

  Umm Karam looks at me and her eyes are the most piercing I’ve ever seen. I feel like there’s nothing she doesn’t know about me.

  ‘You were weak, but your spirit was doing what it could.’

  I barely understand her. I don’t know where this is leading.

  ‘That was your first stoning.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Did your first stone hit?’

  Badra might have told her. And anyway, I cannot lie.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your second?’

  ‘My third. I’m not good . . . it’s not so easy to hit.’

  ‘If your arm is guided by Allah, the most glorified, the most high, it is easy. If you mean the stone to hit, it is easy.’

  Her eyes are so clear. She can see right inside me.

  She’s silent again, leaving me to consider the truth she has just shown me. Badra was right to test me that night. I wasn’t ready. Where there was justice I saw horror.

  ‘If I had the chance again I would not miss.’

  ‘You would not want to. But you would. You are not a punisher. Your intelligence is your strength and the source of your weakness. To destroy a person with stone after stone until the life leaks from them you must be fully righteous or part of your brain must be dead.’

  Now I feel like I’m in Badra territory. She’s right, but it leaves me nowhere. I long to know what she wants, where she’s going. Then she tells me.

  ‘You will no longer work for the brigade.’

  I close my eyes. How will I explain the disgrace to Khalil?

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘There is new work for you. A chance to redeem yourself.’

  I can’t believe it. Of all the blessings He could have given me, this is the greatest. An energy starts spreading through me that I thought had gone forever.

  ‘Thank you, Umm Karam.’

  ‘Think on your weakness. Try to understand it.’

  11

  ‘Murat Felek, this is him?’

  Mrs Demirsoy said the name like a schoolteacher remembering some errant child.

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘Murat Felek. It will be Murat. Tall boy, hair like this, thinks he is a little better than everyone else.’

  ‘That could be him.’

  ‘I know his grandmother. I know his mother. He should have gone away but I see him in his suits, he thinks he can make money in hell. Maybe he can. Maybe he is the clever one. But he will not take you?’

  ‘I can’t pay him enough.’

  ‘How much does he ask for?’

  ‘Hundred thousand lira.’

  Mrs Demirsoy had been topping and tailing long yellow beans but now she stopped with the blade of the small knife held at her thumb.

  ‘For this I would want Raqqa to come to me.’

  Shaking her head, she went back to her work.

  ‘I will talk to Beren.’

  After breakfast Mrs Demirsoy went out, and when she returned she found Abraham still in the kitchen where she had left him.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Thinking.’

  ‘Good. You should think. We should all think more.’

  She had bags of shopping, and Abraham got up to help her with them.

  ‘Thank you. He will do it. You must see him at one o’clock, at the cafe. He will charge you twenty thousand, which is expensive but fair. There is risk for him. Your papers will take time but he will arrange everything. In the meantime you will stay here.’

  She passed him a bag of coffee and pointed to a cupboard above the table.

  ‘There. Empty it into the tin.’

  How long will it take, Abraham wanted to ask.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, nodding to himself, tearing the top off the packet, trying to imagine this real future that was now upon him.

  ‘Your poor daughter,’ said Mrs Demirsoy, who was watching him tentatively begin to sift the coffee, ‘without a woman in her life. Here. Like this.’

  She took the packet from him and upended it in one swift action into the tin, shaking out the last of the grounds.

  ‘There. Useless. Don’t worry. Only a madman would want to go. My family is in Raqqa, my cousins, but I do not visit, and the devils are scared of me. They are scared of all women, but most of all they are scared of old women, and the older we are the less they like it. We have a power they do not understand. They do not kill old women, it is the last thing they will do, but still I will not go there.’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘You? You have to. Not for her but for yourself. What, you would go home and for all your life you wonder? Of course not.’

  12

  Mrs Demirsoy had Abraham under house arrest, and he didn’t mind in the least. What’s the point of going outside, she asked him; it’s hot and dry and there’s nothing to do except watch the devils strutting.

  ‘I loved my town. But now it is a waiting room for death. And I thank God I will not be in it for long.’

  So Abraham stayed at home. He helped prepare food, he washed up, he sat on his bed and looked for news of Sofia – and he talked to her, as Irene.

  Mrs Demirsoy continued to comfort and scold him. She wanted to know about Ester, what kind of a woman she’d been before, who had cared for her, who had been there to help. That was the problem with families now, they had shrunk. Mrs Demirsoy was one of seven, her mother had been the youngest of eight. When someone died or fell ill others would take their place. But here was this man and this girl, expected to make a family on their own? It was like a piano with two strings. No music could come from it.

  A great tragedy, all round. Not improved by you and your self-pity and your fear, though I understand both. The girl sounds as if she craves life, and yet she was shut in as surely as you are shut in here. When I was a girl we didn’t know life existed, and maybe that was better. A cage is not a cage if you cannot see beyond the bars.

  I had no idea I had gone so wrong, he told her, and with a look she let him know that she’d tolerate none of that – the self-pity – and besides, if God let us see our own mistakes we would have nothing to learn on the Day of Resurrection.

  Throughout these conversations, as Abraham sliced tomatoes or picked parsley leaves from their stems or spooned soup into his mouth, the more or less silent Mr Demirsoy would occasionally catch his eye and give him a rich look that said, My wife is an extraordinary woman, and I greatly respect what she says, but I am thankful that for once she isn’t saying it to me.

  After lunch on the second day, as Mrs Demirsoy was bringing coffee to the table, the doorbell rang, and so timeless was life in the house that to Abraham the noise was instantly jarring, wrong. Mr Demirsoy made to get up but his wife held up her hand to stop him.

  ‘I will go. It might be important.’

  As she turned, Mr Demirsoy smiled at Abraham fully for the first time.

  ‘If not important she also go.’

  Looking pleased with himself for making a joke in Arabic, he poured the coffee and they sat in silence, Mr Demirsoy contented, Abraham unsettled, for reasons he couldn’t grasp. From the hall he heard a man’s voice speaking Turkish, and Mrs Demirsoy replying, curtly at first and increasingly firmly as he seemed to persist.

  Mr Demirsoy reached across the table and put his hand on Abraham’s.

  ‘Polis,’ he whispered, and put a finger to his mouth.

  Carefully he half stood, lifted his chair back from the table so that it made no sound, and with a glance at the door Abraham followed him, dazed, like a man who’d just been abruptly woken. Beyond the kitchen, screened off by a curtain, was a storeroom, and set in the far wall a small wooden door, a go
od size for a child. Mr Demirsoy opened it and impatiently ushered Abraham inside. Wooden steps led down into darkness. Abraham did his best to take them quietly and surely, crouching lower as he went; behind him came Mr Demirsoy, who closed the door and for a moment left them with no light at all. Then a click, and by the thin beam of a torch Abraham saw he was in a narrow cellar, the height of his shoulders and maybe three feet wide. Buckets and paint pots were piled on the floor, lengths of pipe and timber. There was nowhere to go. If anyone bothered to shine a light in here they were found.

  ‘Here,’ said Mr Demirsoy, and steered him by the elbow to the far end of the cellar. To their left was an external wall, bricked and finished; to the right, boxes and bottles and what looked like old phone directories were piled up on a ledge. Mr Demirsoy took one of the boxes and placed it on the floor, then another, and shining the torch through the gap that he’d made revealed a shallow space, at most a foot deep, between wooden floorboards and compacted earth. It ran under the whole house, and the torch barely reached its furthest limit.

  ‘In here.’

  Abraham looked at him and realized he had no choice. Above their heads a door closed and footsteps sounded on wood. He crawled head first into the darkness, floorboards brushing against his back as he went further and further in, lips shut tight against the dust. Behind him Mr Demirsoy replaced the boxes and crept softly up the stairs; the door opened and closed and in the pure black Abraham kept going, as far in as he could, squeezing through the narrow points where the rough floor rose up. Now he was under the kitchen, most probably, now the sitting room, and as his eyes grew used to the darkness he saw pale shafts of light showing through the boards above. Finally he stopped, let his head drop down onto his forearms, and waited. The earth was cool on his skin, its heavy musty smell somehow comforting, and Abraham listened to his breath panting and his pulse racing and imagined them slowing, slowing, slowing to a stop. Not a bad place to be forgotten. Not a bad place to be buried. Somewhere nearby he thought he heard a scratching in the dust.

  Two men, at least two, their solid clumping sometimes obscuring Mrs Demirsoy’s tread altogether. They all seemed to go upstairs, and in two minutes they were back and in the room directly above, inches from Abraham’s ear. He heard Mrs Demirsoy say something and then they all left and he followed the footsteps as they made their way round the edge of the house, into the kitchen, into the storeroom. The cellar door opened, as he knew it would, and now there was quite a lot of talking, so much that he began to think that they’d decided to move on; but they hadn’t, they’d been waiting for a torch, and now one of them came down the steps, cursed in the near darkness as he hit his head on the low ceiling, and shone his torch round the cellar. Barely breathing, Abraham kept his head turned and watched the dim reflected light play on the earth below and the wood above. Something scratched in the dust again and he saw a grey mouse scuttle past, not a foot away from him. Don’t give me away, he thought, but the searcher had seen all he wanted to see and was on his way back up.

  ‘So you killed a devil?’

  Mrs Demirsoy had left Abraham in the cellar for half an hour after the men had left, and from his hole underground he had listened to her talking quietly and urgently to her husband. He knew he must go. When night came he’d leave. Murat had said his papers should be ready by tomorrow, and then he’d be gone anyway – or detained at the border, one or the other. Even a night on the streets of Akçakale was better than the thought of bringing more trouble into this house.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I never meant this. What did they say?’

  ‘The idea of you a murderer. Dogs, they are, they make me rage. Look at our town. A thousand killers on our streets and they treat them like they are pashas. Who are they here to protect? A thousand killers and they pick a man who can’t even control his own daughter.’

  Abraham felt like he’d been lanced by those crystal blue eyes. What had she told these people?

  ‘I wanted to say this but I did not. Before I give up a guest in my home I will decide if he is guilty.’

  So Abraham was on trial. The three of them were in the storeroom, where the windows were too small and high for anyone to see in. Mrs Demirsoy stood in the doorway with her arms crossed; Mr Demirsoy was beside her, looking down at the floor and not taking sides.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Abraham, covered in dust and standing stiffly so that he didn’t dirty the place any more than he already had.

  ‘You may not thank me yet. Now. What is all this?’

  ‘A man died in my hotel. In Antep. They pulled me from my bed and accused me.’ Despite his innocence he was finding it hard to hold her eye. ‘They need someone for the murder. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  Abraham hesitated.

  ‘I have seen more horror in my life than you, Abraham. I can look on horror.’

  ‘His throat was cut.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  He nodded. ‘I can see it now.’

  ‘And they have met you, these police?’

  ‘They questioned me, and put me in a cell.’

  ‘They said you attacked a guard.’

  Abraham shook his head and laughed at the banal horror of it.

  ‘Yes. That was me, too.’

  Mrs Demirsoy breathed deeply and nodded once, with emphasis, as if congratulating herself on her initial judgement.

  ‘If you have ever so much as slaughtered a chicken I would be very surprised.’

  He had no answer to that.

  Until nightfall Abraham stayed in the storeroom. Mr Demirsoy brought him a cushion, and his phone, and the two Arabic books they had: a Koran and a guidebook to Damascus. When the curtains were drawn throughout the house he was allowed out, but not upstairs, since there was a window on the landing that couldn’t be covered, and Mrs Demirsoy wasn’t the type to take chances. That there were any policemen left in Akçakale after dark was as likely as Murat Felek doing anything for free, but the impossible was only impossible until it happened. The three of them ate, and as they ate she told Abraham how everything was going to work.

  13

  I count them when I come in. Nine women and five children, all girls. I asked Umm Karam how many there would be but she didn’t know, and neither did the brother who drove me here.

  They look dirty, like they haven’t washed since they arrived, and tired. Every one of them has bags under her eyes, and none of them are veiled, though some of the women wear headscarves. Their clothes are garish and need a wash, you can smell the old sweat on them as soon as you come through the door, and worse, and they make me realize how ordered the khilafa is and how used to it I’ve become. The colours they wear look so cheap and unnecessary. Arrogant, even, as if the way they look is more important than what God wants.

  Most of the women must be in their fifties or sixties but through the dirt it’s hard to say. The girls are young, tiny, innocent, confused – they’ve been through so much. The oldest is maybe eight, and she’s the only one who’s with her mother, a big woman, younger, with fat arms that hold her child foolishly, like they can protect her from anything. The rest are grandmothers, I think. Probably their daughters and sons died in battle.

  We’re all lucky to be here. We all have a chance to save ourselves. But from how they’re looking at me they don’t see it that way – the children are sullen, the women full of a silent rage that they’re doing their best to drill right into me. I feel like every new teacher must have done when she came into our class for the first time and all the idiots who’d never amount to anything would stare her out. What did they think she was there for if not for them? It used to drive me crazy, but it taught me how not to respond at least, and not for the first time I’m full of a sort of wonder at how He has quietly prepared me for my life in this place.

  Yazidis. Pagans. Pagans! I almost shake my head. How can pagans still exist anywhere? Soon they will not, as we clear them from their lands.

  I asked Umm Karam why t
hey hadn’t been killed. She has a look when she’s thinking about the best response, it’s not like she thinks I’m stupid, it’s just that she’s so far ahead of me, so full of knowledge and grace.

  When we kill a sheep, she said, we do so knowing that it is one of God’s creatures and should not die in vain. So we take the meat and we eat it or salt it. We eat the kidneys and the liver and the heart and the sweetbreads, the eyes, anything that will not injure us. We use the wool for clothes and we tan the skin for leather. The bones we boil for stock. At the end, God can look at us and say you have not wasted My creation.

  It is the same with the Yazidis. We kill the men because that is war. The boys we teach the one true faith and train to fight. And the women, the strong and healthy ones, they meet our fighters’ needs when they return from battle, or they are taken into our homes to do honest work, and the rest we must make use of as we can. The ones you will be teaching are the guts and the bones. They will require preparation and patience to yield anything of value, but we would rather not throw them away. The girls especially, they can grow up to be good Muslims and the khilafa needs all the future mothers it can get.

  But they must be good Muslims. When we force them to convert at the edge of a sword their hearts remain unchanged and in a week they are wailing and disobeying and betraying us. So we are trying this new way.

  Very good. You have two weeks to decide the fate of these people. You are a convert yourself, and know what it is to be born into the wrong faith. Succeed, and the khilafa will be stronger. Fail, and you will have hurt only yourself.

  They’re all sitting against the far wall on a mess of grubby blankets and some of them look close to sleep, it’s so hot in here. The wind is up today and it’s blowing heat and sand in through the broken glass of the two small windows. I unhook my veil, and very deliberately inspect each of the women and children in turn, not saying anything.