The Good Sister

by Chris Morgan Jones

  ‘You. Now. Up.’

  Abraham blinked, rubbed his eyes, and before he could stand the soldier kicked him hard in the thigh.

  ‘Up.’

  Now they would give him his orange overalls. His death suit. Why were they orange? Was there some special significance or did they just like the way it looked against the sand and the sky? Or perhaps he was too lowly to merit publicity and could be dispatched in the clothes he stood in, without cameras, without ceremony.

  Up to the second floor, and back to the same interrogation room. One by one thoughts dropped from his head – half-baked plans, regrets, new sources of fury – until, by the time they arrived, only blankness and white noise remained. The soldier opened the door and pushed him through; there was the administrator, at his desk, and with their backs to Abraham a man he hadn’t seen before – small, white-robed, ratty – and beside him a woman, fully veiled. The little man looked up at Abraham as he entered and fixed him with an eye like a dagger. The woman glanced his way and then looked straight ahead. Even by that movement he knew her.

  2

  My thoughts aren’t thoughts. They’re noise, like ten songs playing at once. I see him, and I know it’s him, and even though I look away it doesn’t change the fact that he’s here, or that it’s impossible he’s here. If Khalil had walked in it would make more sense. It’s like seeing a dead man in this world. A kafir in Paradise. If I look out of the window will I see red buses everywhere and all the mosques turned to churches?

  He says my name and they tell him to shut up.

  The commander is talking, but I don’t hear him. If I was braver, stronger, I’d look up again, confront the reality, but I’m not, I’m weak, and I keep my eyes on the desk. I can’t. I can’t take it. I feel crazy, properly insane. The man I love is taken from me and this excuse for one is returned?

  The commander repeats what he said.

  ‘Umm Azwar. Do you know this man?’

  What is he doing here? What can he be doing here?

  I force myself to look. My heart is not closed to him, however hard I want it to be. One of his eyes is black and his clothes are dusty and his jacket is torn. He has suffered, and my first reaction is pity, it shouldn’t be, but then I’m off balance, staggering. In his eyes I see some of what I’m feeling and I’m so glad of my veil, I don’t want him to be able to look inside me. But no, his reaction is different. There’s that sentimental longing there, that attachment to the idea of me that blinds him to who I am.

  That’s why he’s come. For that version of me. He isn’t complete without it.

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘Do you know why he is here?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Imam Talib is looking at me with that way he has of searching right inside, but he doesn’t say anything, the commander does all the talking.

  ‘Did you know he was in the khilafa?’

  I shake my head. To say no but also in disbelief. He’s going to ruin this for me. The one thing I had that was finally mine and he’s found a way to destroy it. It’s like in order for him to exist, I can’t.

  The commander takes a piece of paper from his desk and holds it in front of him, taking his time to read it. They’ll think we’re here together. Of course they will, and when they find out he isn’t a Muslim they’ll kill us both, as they should.

  ‘What does your father do? What job does he have?’

  I can feel my father’s eyes on me.

  ‘He’s a pharmacist.’

  The commander takes his time, keeps his eyes on the paper, puts it back carefully on the pile on his desk, looks at my father and then at me.

  ‘He has told us he’s a doctor. That he wants to work for Islamic State. That your journey opened his eyes.’

  That can’t be true. Crazier than everything else. Can it be true? Have I led him here for the right reasons?

  The commander is staring at me. Everyone is concentrating on me alone.

  ‘But we don’t need pharmacists,’ he says. ‘We need doctors.’

  If I don’t lie for him – as he has lied to them – they’ll kill him. And if they find me out in my lie they’ll kill me.

  How can it be that we are still joined? I thought I was free.

  ‘He was a doctor. In Egypt. Then we moved to London and he worked as a pharmacist. Because my mother was ill and then he looked after me.’

  This barely makes sense. And I can’t believe I’m saying it, even though it’s close to the truth. I shouldn’t be saying it, but what if it’s true, that he’s here for the khilafa? Who am I to deny him what has been given to me?

  ‘You said you came from Egypt.’

  The commander says this to my father.

  ‘I do come from Egypt. It’s my home.’

  ‘But you travelled from London.’

  ‘I’m not proud of my time in that place.’

  His eyes are wide and terrified. The commander and Imam Talib exchange a look, and then the imam speaks to me.

  ‘You understand the khilafa, my child. You have shown yourself to be part of it, and you know that it must be pure to function. Are you close to this man?’

  ‘Once. We had grown apart.’

  ‘Can you vouch for him?’

  ‘He is a good doctor.’

  ‘He says he killed a man in Turkey. One of our enemies.’

  Now the world is upside down and inside out. I look at him again. My father. Dressed like a local, beaten, defeated. My father the convert, the jihadi, the killer in His name.

  I close my eyes and pray to Him to help me. This is the gravest test yet, it makes stoning Idara look easy. Then, I knew what to do but could not do it. Now I have no idea, and everything rests on what I say. My father’s life, and my soul.

  Holy words appear to me in the darkness. I don’t select them, they just make themselves known to me.

  God’s curse is on the wrongdoers who debar others from the path of God.

  Who am I to block my father’s path?

  Who is more wicked than he who invents a falsehood about God?

  Adjacent verses, and everything I need to know is in them. If my father wants to be saved, I would be the last person to stand in his way. And if he is lying, God will punish him. I do not need to protect either of them.

  ‘He has been a weak man, but it is within us all to change.’

  Imam Talib nods to me, and then he nods to the commander, and the man who was my father is taken from the room and out into my city.

  3

  It was easy to see what Raqqa had once been. Wide streets split down the middle by lines of plane trees, solid apartment blocks, the odd fine stuccoed building looking down on the quiet from its arcaded balconies. Grand municipal buildings in grand squares draped with black flag after black flag. Rows of jumbled shops painted green and pink and blue faded in the strong sun, their business hidden now behind grilles and shutters. Maybe one in three was open; shopkeepers stood in their doorways and watched the world like men who expected nothing good to happen. Once, there would have been shouting and car horns and the buzz of mopeds flashing through traffic, but now Raqqa was hushed, doing its best to do what it needed to do without being noticed.

  Black flags everywhere, on cars and lamp posts and draped across dead shopfronts. Abraham’s jeep drove past one building set back from the road that had been painted black all over, the finish so fresh it glinted in the sun like oil. Fighters in khakis and black kufiya, and women like black ghosts going silently about their day, each with a man to escort her – except the troop of black-clad vultures darting between them with machine guns slung awkwardly across their backs. Sofia had been one of those. Had she moved like they did, swooping from victim to victim with that erratic energy? Was that her under there, transformed into something less than human? From the back of the jeep Abraham watched them make their progress up the street as they checked every woman, looked them up and dow
n, challenged them, leaned in to their necks like vampires sniffing for blood. This was what the world looked like when everyone in it was consumed by power or fear.

  Why had she vouched for him? The safe thing would have been to expose him. It had taken courage, and she gained nothing by it.

  Children sat on the pavement in the shade begging and selling matches, shoelaces, string. Around one shop a crowd of men and children jostled for the attention of a man who stood above them, and it took a moment for Abraham to realize why he was so popular. He had bread, a pile of flatbreads balanced on one arm, and was passing them out to the hands outstretched in front of him. Everyone carried plastic buckets and when they took the bread they stayed in place, as if expecting more. A soup kitchen. He studied the faces and saw not fear but resignation, and tiredness, and repulsion. Raqqa had been occupied for nine months, and already its people had endured a lifetime of it.

  Along with his passport and a sheaf of Islamic State documents, they had given him his phone back, and as they drove he restored his Twitter app and sent Sofia a message. Simple and direct.

  — When can we meet? It would be good to talk.

  Nothing for Vural. Vural could assume he was dead. After all, it wasn’t so far from the truth.

  The jeep found a space in the traffic and lurched forward, sped round corners and down narrower streets, the jihadi at the wheel driving like the teenager he was, in unchecked spurts of speed, until he was forced to slow for a queue of cars. The driver leaned on the horn, but as Abraham looked ahead he could see they were going nowhere: half a building had come down in an airstrike, sheering into the street in a pile of grey rubble and leaving room for one car at a time to inch round. Fresh dust still blew in the wind. Panels of corrugated iron hung off what was left of a wall, and a length of carpet spilled from one of the first-floor rooms that had been destroyed, its floral pattern stained with blood that had not yet dried to brown. Men stood and talked and surveyed the damage; women threw their hands up and cried behind their veils. Here, in death, there was finally life.

  ‘Government scum always miss,’ said the fighter beside the driver, half turning to Abraham. His accent was odd, flat, European perhaps. ‘Hit everything but us.’

  What a shame that was. Why had God forsaken this place? As the jeep bullied and pushed its way through the gap, Abraham saw in the eyes that turned to him the strongest possible hatred, and felt for the first time a deep unease about his mission. He had rushed here without stopping to think, oblivious to all this suffering, and with no intention of helping these people, of doing anything but saving someone only he wanted to see saved. It was like heading into the sheepfold to rescue the wolf.

  Raqqa’s main hospital was half a hospital, maybe less than that, and what was left had been divided into two again. It had been bombed three weeks earlier, and the main entrance was now a precarious heap of concrete and rusted metal rods. One side had collapsed onto itself like a drift of grey snow, and inside the blasted facade gurneys and bedding and cabinets and bits of shattered equipment lay piled and smashed. The 4x4 drove round to the side of the building and Abraham was told to get out by the driver’s sidekick, who jumped down from the cab and with that lazy swagger that seemed to be common to them all headed down a long, shallow ramp that fell away into the basement. Abraham spent a moment in the sun before he followed, looking around him and wondering whether a better man would take this opportunity to run.

  Around the ramp, pressed into the patches of shade against the bruised buildings on either side, stood some local men, perhaps fifteen of them, waiting. Anywhere else they would have been smoking, and they watched Abraham with that same look of quiet resentment he had seen from the car. One day, they said, when this is all past, you or your soul will pay for your part in this.

  The fighter seemed to know where he was going. He led Abraham down dark, humid corridors whose blue-green paint was peeling, past makeshift wards in what appeared once to have been storerooms. Small windows set high in the wall and surrounded by sandbags gave the only light, enough for Abraham to see injured men lying on the beds inside, legs elevated, faces bandaged. Others that he assumed were fighters walked the halls in flip-flops and sweat pants, some on crutches. To his right he glimpsed an operating theatre, or what looked like one, with dead surgical lights ranged round an empty operating table. One was working, and he thought he could hear the generator responsible humming in the background. A doctor in scrubs looked up at him as he walked past.

  Then he was in another office, at the core of the building, almost dark but for a circle of light thrown on the desk by the single working lamp. At the desk sat two men, one senior and clearly in charge, the other as clearly in thrall. Beards, black tunics, taqiyah caps. The older had big, heavy eyes that he was working hard to make stern. Together they looked like a priggish father and the son he quietly despaired of.

  ‘General practice?’ said the older, reading the papers he had been handed. Without great confidence, the younger did his best to stare Abraham out.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No surgery?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you can assist?’

  Probably, yes. In fact, almost certainly. Three years of medical school and you could tell one end of a curette from another. And the drugs he knew, the anaesthetics, the antibiotics, the analgesics. Provided no one asked him to cut anyone open he could play his part. It was even possible, against all the odds, that he might do some good.

  ‘You chose not to fight?’

  ‘I thought I could be of more use here.’

  ‘Allah alone, the most glorified, the most high, will know if you are right. But even here you are at war. Disobey an order and it is treason. Fail, and it is treason. The punishment for treason is death.’

  Abraham managed to nod. How they loved to say that word.

  ‘You are under watch. Huq will work with you. Any signs that your behaviour or your performance are below par and you will answer for it.’

  Probably he had been a manager, this one; he had the delivery and the tics, the facile approach to complexity.

  ‘Huq will tell you what you need to know. And he will report to me every night.’

  With that, and a hard look at Abraham, he left. No shake of the hand, no welcome aboard, no looking forward to working together, but in other respects this wasn’t so different from the old job, Abraham thought. Maybe all organizations resemble each other.

  Huq was no fighter. He was even an unlikely doctor. Young, no older than twenty-five, chinless under the feeble beard, narrow-shouldered, pot-bellied, the head too small for his body, the eyes mean and uncertain. Abraham’s mother would have called him unfortunate. Through the adolescent whiskers peeped a tight red little mouth that was cruel and vicious and petty at once, and the voice that came from it sounded strangled, odd, as uncomfortable with itself as the rest of him was. Doing his best to establish some authority, he sat for a moment looking his new recruit up and down.

  ‘You’ve never worked in a hospital?’

  ‘As I said.’

  ‘You’ll never have worked in a hospital like this.’

  That didn’t make sense, but Abraham let it go, and turning his face away from the man’s meaty breath listened to the rules he was counting off on his fingers.

  One: men could not be treated by women. There were no female doctors left in the hospital, however, which was a solution sent by Allah himself. Nevertheless, men could not be washed or directly treated by any female nurse, who even then must of course be properly covered and accompanied by a male doctor at all times. Men could treat women but not for anything that involved the breasts, abdomen or reproductive areas. Most of the conditions the local women presented were false, hysterical, and the rest gynaecological. Allah, the most glorified, the most high, would in any case decide whether a child should live or die, and any that did not survive were not strong enough to serve the Islamic State. This was efficient.

  Two. Women must
not be given the opportunity to provoke the men. Doctors were responsible for ensuring that their female colleagues obeyed the rules on appearance. Gloves and the veil must be worn at all times. Breaches would result in the offender being punished together with any colleague who had failed to report the offence.

  Female patients must be accompanied to the hospital by their mahram, who must then wait outside the hospital. If any mahram was found inside the hospital he and his woman would be thrown out and punished. If the mahram was not a blood relative, the patient would be thrown out and both punished.

  The hospital was split into two. This floor, the basement, was for members of Islamic State: leaders, fighters, and their wives. Priority was of course given to them, and this was where those central to jihad were safest from government attacks. The American dogs did not bomb here but during the day Assad’s kafir army had tried, so inaccurately that the safest place to be was exactly where the bombs were meant to fall, but after the last successful attack it had made sense to come down here.

  Nevertheless, the dawla provided healthcare to all its people, and so the rest of the hospital was given over to their needs. A quarter of a million people in Raqqa and bar two surgeries this was the only place they could come. Their claim on drugs, equipment, procedures and beds was secondary. The civilian staff was liable to forget this, and any indication of false favouritism should be reported.

  Hours were not fixed. Abraham would work until there was no more work to do, within reason. Pay was four hundred dollars a month, payable at the end of the month. Once every four weeks he was entitled to one day off, unless the hospital was overwhelmed, which it usually was.

  All work except critical operations already underway stopped for salat five times a day. A room had been set aside for the purpose.

  ‘I say again. This is a field hospital in a Holy War. It is not a cosmetic surgery clinic. We have many good doctors here but there are never enough. Truly you have found an opportunity to be valuable in God’s eyes, the most high, the most glorified.’