‘Hands on your head. You, now.’
I leave my gun in my pocket and raise my hands. Zarifa does the same.
‘Kick that to me. Easy.’
I slide the machine gun towards him. He takes it, slings it over his shoulder, steps back so we can get down.
‘There.’
This one isn’t a talker. With his gun he points the way, and we walk to the front of the ambulance. By its headlights I see a brother grinning and my father kneeling on the road with his hands on his head. He looks up at me with eyes that say I’m sorry and God I wish I could do something – and I want mine to show him that none of this is his fault, but the veil is between us. The checkpoint is just a 4x4 slung diagonally across the road. This new brother tells us to make a row, and as I kneel next to my father I’m trying to work out the odds. There are only two of them, I’m sure, but their guns are out and more powerful and I can’t move my hands. It’s so cold out here. Then he tells me to unveil.
‘Forget it.’ I shake my head. Even by his own rules it’s wrong.
He nods, and the second brother brings his gun up, I can sense it behind me, and brings it down hard on the back of my neck. I collapse onto my face. It’s like being hit by a car.
‘Get up.’
My cheek is on the tarmac. Pain splits my back. I can smell dust and oil and I’m looking at the brother’s boots.
‘Up, you cunt.’
I play dead. Not quite dead.
‘Get the fuck up.’
I see no reason to help him.
‘All right. You want it there, that’s fine.’
He kneels by me, turns me over and pulls my veil off, and I see his face properly, the desire in it, the yellow poison – then his hand is up my abaya and between my legs. I think he’s expecting me to struggle but I don’t, I let him do what he wants to do. He grins over me and when his hand opens the top button of my trousers I close mine round the grip of the gun, take it from my pocket and fire twice through the black cloth at what must be his heart. Like Borz when he was finished, he reels off me.
Spinning on my back, tangled clumsily in my abaya, I try to get the gun out into the air and in that single scrap of time I can see the second brother’s eyes freeze in a fear that has come on him so quickly. His gun lines up with mine, and my father sweeps it out of the way as both guns fire, mine a single dead crack and the other a burst of light. Zarifa screams. The fighter’s shoulder snaps back, and he brings his gun back round and again we fire in the same instant, and this time his whole body jolts backwards, and so does my father’s.
14
Abraham doesn’t feel it as pain but as a burning, a fire consuming the life from him, hot and cold at once; and the single thought in his head isn’t that he’s going to die but that he’s never loved his daughter so much. As life fades, his love seems to grow to fill the world.
Her face is over his, her hand on his cheek.
‘Dad. Don’t. God God God. Let me see.’
The wound is almost in the same place as the boy’s, the boy Saad saved that day. But higher, a crucial inch or two, the liver may have been hit and he won’t last long without that.
‘God, Dad, Dad. Stay with me. We’re so close. I can drive.’
Abraham shakes his head. When she was born she cried and cried, every night for weeks, a restless soul always, as if she arrived with some foreknowledge of the troubles that lay ahead. So sensitive to pain, and so hopeful about banishing it. He, he had accomplished so little. Her mother’s daughter, she might still do so much.
‘Zarifa, help me. His legs, take his legs.’
‘No.’ He smiles, and she’ll think he’s being brave, but he means it. ‘Leave me. You have to go.’
Sofia, Ester, Abraham. The three of them are together, he knows it as surely as he knows he’s going to die. One again, as they were when he and Ester lay either side of her in bed and watched her sleep. That instant of time is no different from this. There’s no line now. No direction, just love. She’s talking to him and he sees her words, they drop like water.
‘I can’t leave you.’
‘You haven’t. You’re here.’
Now she cries, and his hand goes to her face, and all its beauty is restored, her eyes are light and liquid, the light is the old light, it shines on him forever.
15
I don’t hear her at first because my ears are full of sound, gun-fire and the wind and his voice, the words repeating like a chant, like holy words, they wrap themselves round my soul. The night, Zarifa, the dead men, my dead father, the desert that can’t quite swallow us up, none of it exists. Just his voice and the tears that hold me. I’m helpless with them, rigid, they build and build like a flood trying to escape through a crack.
Why did I leave him? Why did he come here?
She’s rocking my shoulder and saying my name. Sofia. My real name. I don’t know how she knows, but of course she’s heard him say it.
‘Come, Sofia. Now.’
I wake into the darkness and I don’t think I can find the strength to go on. Three men dead in the blue light of the headlights, dawn coming, two teenage girls and some guns. It’s not enough. There’s an army ahead of us and an army behind and all I want to do is lie here until the sun scorches me into the road. But Zarifa’s veil is off and there’s hope in her eyes, and we may not be only two. I must remember.
‘We can. Come.’
She tugs at my sleeve, then stands and pulls off her abaya and lays it carefully on my father’s body. I look at her, nod, take my hand from his face so she can cover him for the last time. Then I take off mine and shiver in the dawn air.
‘Sofia.’
‘Zarifa.’
Together, by some instinct, we know what to do, and we do it quickly. We drag the fighters to the 4x4 and somehow wedge them into the boot. They weigh two tons each. Then I drive the ambulance forward and we lift my father into the back.
I don’t want to leave anything on the road so I drive the 4x4 a little way into the scrub first before I come back for the ambulance and drive it away from the sun, which is beginning to lighten the sky. We lurch and stumble over the rough earth but after half a mile the ground dips down and I leave the ambulance in the hollow where it can’t be seen before running back for the 4x4. By the time we’re done, a pale light has washed over the whole land and we’re alone in an empty world of vast dead plains.
I have to leave him here but I can’t leave him here. I know it doesn’t matter and I know it’s stupid and I know above everything else that it has to be done. Zarifa and I lift him from the ambulance and find a level spot and set him down. I feed a corner of my abaya into the fuel tank of the ambulance and leave it there for a minute for the fuel to soak in. Then I spread it over his body and with a final word to him and to my mother, and a final prayer to both our Gods, I light a match and touch it to the corner of the cloth.
*
After that we walk, a mile or more west of the road with the sun on our right, over the rocks and the stubby grass, across broken fences and crumbled walls, past the dead shells of buildings like animal skeletons in the heat, heading north to the border with the guns bouncing on our backs. I have no clue what we’ll do when we get there. Step through a hole in the fence, like I did last time, when I was a hundred years younger and everything I thought was so difficult was so easy.
We have water left, two small bottles, and some food, but I don’t want to eat and by the time the sun is fully up and on our backs I can feel my strength slipping and I know Zarifa is struggling too. Even the slightest hill is so hard, it’s like we’re carrying huge loads. The heat is like its own weight. I drape my sweatshirt around my neck to stop my skin from burning and it’s wet with sweat in minutes. For hours we walk without talking. Sometimes I reach over and touch her arm and make sure she’s okay and I wonder to myself how many journeys like this she has made before, less alone than she is now.
We will do something together or we will do something apa
rt, but we will do something. The women are the future of her people and mine.
Ten miles, I thought. It begins to seem like twenty. After four hours the plain looks exactly the same as it did after three, nothing seems to change and for a time I think maybe I’ve died, or gone crazy, and I’ll be stuck forever walking in this wilderness. But then at noon we come to the flat top of a long, low rise and there, a final hour’s walk away, is Tell Abyad, and the border, and Turkey beyond, and by the fence just west of the town like a black pool a huge crowd of people and cars, and flowing into them a queue that stretches back for miles along the road from the west and seems to shimmer and shuffle in the heat.
They’re coming from Kobani. From Kobani and from everywhere around, pushed out by the advancing brothers – by Daesh. There are thousands of them. Zarifa and I sit and share the last inch of warm water from the last bottle and I wonder how I’m going to get both of us through. I can see tanks on the Turkish side, patrol vehicles, soldiers everywhere. There won’t be any holes. And we don’t have any papers.
Ten thousand. As we get closer, I think ten thousand at least. There are so many, it’s like a new town. We ditch our guns and walk down to join them. No one notices. We’re two more drops in a sea of hungry and tired people. They think I’m the same as them. But every face I rest on makes me want to walk back to Raqqa in shame.
Fighters stand in groups a way off and watch like jackals. I don’t know why they’re here. I don’t know why they don’t stop us all. I don’t know why they do anything any more.
We settle at the back of the queue, where people are still arriving. A woman smiles at me and I’m amazed she finds the strength. She’s big, she rocks from side to side as she walks and her breath is short. Her headscarf is colourful with blue and purple flowers and it’s stained with sweat around the edge. On her hip she has one child, a girl, maybe four years old, who looks at me with tired eyes that don’t give anything away. Who is this person, she’s thinking. In what new way will she make things worse? Wearing a bright orange dress that’s so pretty, so wrong here, her sister holds her mother’s hand and squints ahead at the backs of the men in front. Together we all smell, of the journey, of fatigue, of fear.
I left my home by choice, but until I came here I don’t think I knew what home meant. Home is what every person here has lost. The children stab me, deeply, each one. Every girl, every boy, looking around them into the heat with no expectation of anything good, and something missing from them, there’s no shine, no spring, their spirits have been boxed away. But the mothers are worse. In the pain of the past they carry that tiny jewel of hope. They need to make things all right, and probably they won’t be all right. I can feel the soreness in their feet, the weight of their possessions, so little and so heavy, the greater weight of the responsibilities they can’t meet.
How Badra was wrong. This is where we must start.
Why didn’t I see these people before? When I drove through the city with her, how did my eyes see one thing and my brain register another? We’re by this one man, he has three bony cows and five children, and his back seems broken by the effort of carrying them all – there’s no wife in sight, he’s lost her somewhere, somehow – and he’s giving sips of water to his children and all the while glancing at his cows because he knows that unless he finds some for them they’ll die. A week ago I would have told him there was no progress without pain, that his sacrifice would lead to a golden future once the revolution was secure. And now? Now I can barely look at the lines in his face, the fear and the exhaustion there. It’s like my eyes had become filmed with some madness that turned white to black and finally they’ve cleared – like I’ve been living in a dark room for years and have come blinded into the light.
I want to tell them all that I’m sorry. If I could feed them, bring them water, house them, return their lives to them, I would. I pray for the opportunity to redeem myself and more clearly than He has ever told me anything He tells me to start right now.
That first day I do the little I can. I carry things for people whose strength is going. I try to occupy a child so his mother can comfort his crying sister. I walk the length of this new town, past family, after family, after family – so many – and I huddle with everyone else in the crazed crush at the border itself as we desperately stretch for some shred of news. They’re letting people through, but it takes time, each refugee has to be processed, no vehicles are allowed, livestock is doubtful. I find a Turkish soldier and tell him people need water, he has to do something, and he just shrugs.
When I’ve taken the news to the back of the queue – it isn’t the back now, hundreds more have come, are still coming, and it isn’t a queue, either, it’s a shifting press of people – I go to talk to the fighters.
There are five of them a few hundred yards off, standing with their guns, shifting on their feet, bored, fed, hungry. The usual look. Apart from the world. Black. Waiting for the moment they can feed on us again.
It’s a lonely walk with the sun burning down. They watch me come like big cats considering prey that isn’t worth the kill, and on my back I can feel the anxious eyes of the Syrians. Don’t make this worse for us.
You can always tell the leader. I don’t know how. Maybe because the others look to him and he only looks at me. When I’m six feet away I stop and I hold his black eyes which seem to boil with that blackness.
‘These people need water.’
I don’t know what they were expecting but it wasn’t this. Some of them seem to think it’s a joke but I ignore them.
‘They’ll die without it.’
The leader is the smallest of them, he isn’t much taller than me and his gun almost reaches the ground like a crutch.
‘There’s water in their homes,’ he says. One of the others laughs.
‘You drove them from their homes.’
He doesn’t reply to that. His face doesn’t move, doesn’t look like it’s ever moved.
‘You could bring water from the town,’ I tell him. ‘Allah would reward you, the most high, the most glorified.’
He takes his time. He knows all the tricks.
‘Who’s this “they”, sister? What are you?’
Until this moment I hadn’t even stopped to think how crazy it was to come up here. They could have pictures of my face. The truth is, Raqqa, my father, our journey, it all seems so far away and already I seem to have become part of something else.
‘I’m not from Kobani.’
‘You don’t sound like you’re from Syria, sister.’
One of the fighters brings his gun round onto his chest and the others begin to stiffen, wake up.
‘I was brought up in Sudan. Not that it’s any of your business.’
‘Why not, sister? You come up here and tell me mine.’
‘God’s people are all His business.’
‘Not when they’re dirty kafirs, sister. Not then. How is it my business these godless cunts didn’t bring enough water?’
I start to relax. He thinks this is about him.
‘Alms shall be for the poor and destitute, and for the traveller in need.’
I hope the Lord’s words will shame him. He’s silent for a long time and then he calmly takes his gun from his shoulder and points it at me.
‘We will put chains round the necks of the unbelievers. And they will be rewarded according to their deeds.’
The muzzle of the gun is an arm’s length from me. I look at it, and I look at him, and I wonder why I came to talk to these people who take light and make it black, who could turn the water of God’s love into a burning desert. I think I wanted them to see. But they will never see, and I walk away.
As the sun sets on the third day Zarifa and I are finally processed, funnelled into a tent where four Turkish army officers who look as exhausted as we do sit at tables. They try to separate us but I explain that Zarifa doesn’t speak Arabic or Turkish and, when I insist, they let us sit together. There’s a new calmness about her
now. I don’t know where it comes from.
Where are our papers? They were taken from us. Where have we come from? Raqqa, I tell them. We escaped from Raqqa and now we’re here and we need asylum. She is Yazidi. Her family is dead.
We need your papers. Otherwise you could be Daesh. Without papers you could be anybody, and you will stay in Syria.
My mouth is so dry I can hardly speak, and when they bring me water I can’t find the words. Instead I find the piece of paper my father gave me before we left the hospital and I give it to them. He smiled as he pressed it into my hand. How did he find the strength to smile?
‘Call him. Please. He will understand.’
When he comes at last, I think he must be the wrong man. I’m expecting someone clean and purposeful, slick, I suppose, not this shambling type in a dusty suit who reminds me of a supply teacher.
‘You are Sofia.’ He says it in English, and stoops to hold out his hand to me. It’s the middle of the night and Zarifa and I have been put out of the way in a little tent that’s thrashing in the wind like a sail in a storm. There’s a guard for us, but this man waves him away.
‘I am Vural.’
He offers his hand to Zarifa, who nods and stays silent, as wary of this new figure in her life as I should be. But his face is open and his eyes are human, and he sits cross-legged on the ground in front of us like our equal.
‘Your father?’
I can’t say the words. They harden in my throat.
‘Did he find you?’
I nod.
‘And they kill him?’
I force my eyes up to his and wonder if I’m the worst thing he’s ever seen.
‘They didn’t kill him.’
I think he understands enough not to make it easy for me, not to say the right thing. He looks at Zarifa and starts nodding slowly, like he’s understanding for the first time.
The Good Sister Page 33