by John Wray
The evening meal was the only occasion at which the whole of the camp ate together and that first night she barely touched her food. She sat mute and still with her eyes on the entrance and waited to catch sight of Ziar Khan. It was hard to imagine Decker in that place but she was sure that he was coming. The Arab boy, Abu Intiqam, asked why she wasn’t eating and she told him she was happy and he asked her nothing more. Her answer was appropriate and he was satisfied. The food was long-grained pilau with carrot shavings and yellow raisins and dark chunks of beef, far better food than she was used to, and she willed herself to force a mouthful down.
All that evening she felt girlish and exposed in her excitement. Her breasts still ached under the bandage and she longed to loosen it or better yet to take it off completely and she wondered for a moment if she could. A man across the table explained that the food they were eating was unusually lavish and that she and her Arab friends should take great care to fill their stomachs. Another man compared that evening’s feast to a pavilion in the orchard of paradise and the camp’s customary fare to the latrine of an animal hospital and everyone laughed. She bowed to the man and took a second helping of garlic flatbread and refilled her cup and turned back toward the door.
* * *
After what seemed an hour of sleep she awoke to the sound of bare feet shuffling past her in the dark. For the first time in a year she found it hard to rouse herself for morning prayer. She slapped her cheeks lightly and adjusted the bandage and took a pill from the crumpled package in her duffel. The others were already out and gone. She made her ablutions alone in the shallow creek that ran steeply behind the canteen, mindful that no one was watching, and reached the camp’s tar-roofed mosque just as prayer was beginning. The mosque was papered from floor to ceiling with posters for Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and lit only by whatever meager daylight crossed its threshold. Some of the men prayed ardently with their brows pressed to the floor while others yawned and scratched their heads and gossiped. The lack of discipline unnerved her. The memory returned of her father outside the little storefront mosque in Santa Rosa, fiddling idly with his cell phone, ignoring the imam and his modest congregation. Waiting on word from someone. From a woman. She heard her father’s condescending laugh.
When prayers were done a few of the men lit hand-rolled cigarettes and she went and stood unobtrusively among them, glad for the reprieve their smoke afforded her from the sour smell of sweat and unwashed clothes. A quarter of an hour later they waited assembled in loose columns on a square of hard-packed clay between the mosque and the canteen. A gray haze hung over the lowlands and she watched her breath combine with the breath of the others as day crept hesitantly up the slope. It put her in mind of dawn in the courtyard in Sadda but it wasn’t the same. Not at all. The man who had led them in prayer now called out numbers from a lectern and they stretched and pumped their fists and ran in place.
She was assigned with twelve other recruits, all but one of them Arab, to a trainer who called himself Abu Imam. He was slender and dark-skinned and every mistake his students made afforded him the same shy amusement. His English was excellent but he spoke English rarely. He was Eritrean and just shy of thirty and he’d learned his trade in the Rift Valley fighting the Ethiopian occupation. He had the carriage of the runner he’d once aspired to be and they spent their first morning running relay drills and sprinting up the sawgrass-covered bluff above the compound. The sky was dead white and the heat was terrific. Her only shoes were the sandals she’d bought in Peshawar and within hours both her feet were chapped and bleeding. Others were in worse shape, vomiting or soiling themselves, entreating the trainer for mercy, but this brought her precious little consolation. Her sight was darkening from exhaustion when they stopped for third prayers and hobbled to the canteen for dried flatbread and tea. She sat sprawled in the shade and mumbled a heartfelt thanks to God that it was over. Then Abu Imam issued each of them a Kalashnikov minus its magazine and they got to their feet and fell in line and ran the drills again.
Over the six weeks that followed she ran drills by daylight and by darkness and swam bearing loads in the river and learned to disassemble her rifle and clean it with motor oil and put it back together without opening her eyes. After the first week they ran barefoot and she learned to move over sand and scree and gravel with speed and with economy and to shape her heel and instep to the contours of each stone. She learned how to target instinctively, without using the Kalashnikov’s sight, and how to communicate by Morse and semaphore. She learned how to throttle a man using a wire, or a drawstring, or a strip of silk torn from a shawl.
In the evenings she lay on her bedroll faint from thirst and from exertion and before the light had faded she was lost to all the world. Her own body soon became as rank as the others’ and she prayed to God that her sweat would smell no different. Often now when she started awake in the icy predawn twilight she would struggle to remember where she was and for what reason. She awoke each day to pain and bafflement and wondered what catastrophe had found her. But she was the first to the tar-roofed mosque now, not the last.
* * *
She was squatting under cover of a line of oil barrels behind the munitions shed one afternoon when Abu Intiqam discovered her. He was too young for the Mountain, younger even than the boys who cleaned the instructors’ quarters and attended them at meals, and he’d taken to following her from place to place with anxious subservient eyes. But now his eyes were wide and hard and shining. She crouched contemptibly before him. He was staring at the gap between her lowered pants and her upraised kameez.
—As-salaamu alaikum, she willed herself to say.
—Wa-alaikum as-salaam, he murmured.
Her hunger and exhaustion were a blessing in that instant. She felt at a great distance from her body as it squatted there forlornly in the filth. The fourth call to prayer sounded as she pulled her pants up and got to her feet. Abu Intiqam stood staring with his hands bunched into fists. He was waiting for her to explain.
—I’m different from you, she said, smoothing down her kameez. —You can see that yourself.
He bobbed his head, still staring at her hips.
She compelled herself to wait, to move unhurriedly, to keep her expression composed. As if this moment were a solemn rite of passage for the boy. Her body felt as strange to her as it must have seemed to him: as alien, as bewildering, as defenseless.
—I’m different from you, she repeated.
When he gave no reply she took a step toward him and laid her right hand lightly on his shoulder. Her arm was shaking.
—Abu Intiqam, can you tell me why that is?
His color seemed to deepen. —I can’t.
—Because you’re afraid? she said gently. —Or because you don’t know?
To her great relief he confessed that both were true. She knelt down beside him. —Then I’ll tell you, little brother. You’re a warrior of the Mountain now. You’ve earned the right to hear.
—To hear what, Brother Suleyman?
—This is not my first jihad.
For a time he said nothing. —I don’t understand.
—I come from the other side of the world, she said, in a voice she barely recognized as hers. —A place where believers are hated. I lost my friends when I came to the faith, all of them, and my family decided that I’d gone insane. I was told I was too young to know my own mind, that I was a danger to myself. That bad things would happen and that I would deserve them. My mother and father turned their backs on me. And worst of all, little brother: what they told me turned out to be true. Bad things did happen. She tightened her hold on his shoulder. —I tell you this, Abu Intiqam, that you may learn from my example.
He nodded and started sucking on the knuckle of his thumb. The call to prayer sounded again. The temptation to abandon him to his confusion was enormous. If I go right now, she thought, then I’ll have told him nothing wrong.
—Forgive me, Brother Suleyman, he said. —I still don’t see—
—They cut me, she heard herself whisper. —They cut me, little brother. With a knife.
He let out a whimper at that and she knew he believed her. It was possible he’d never seen a woman naked, not even in a photograph. —Forgive me, Brother Suleyman, he said to her again.
She smiled at him and took his hand and walked him down the hill. It caused her pain to see him so bewildered. It was happening now, just as Decker had warned her: the lie she’d become had been spoken aloud. Some small frontier had shifted. Abu Intiqam was weeping and she kissed him on the forehead. The late sun was blinding. For the first time since she’d left her home she knew that she was lost.
* * *
That night the Prophet came to her and drew the bedding from her shoulders. He had her mother’s smoke-stained fingertips and her father’s graying stubble but his eyes and skin and voice were Ziar Khan’s. His body cast no shadow. Perhaps he was a demon sent to tempt her. He requested that she follow him and helped her to her feet.
They stepped over the sleeping bodies of her brothers and even over some who were awake and staring blankly at the ceiling. Even over some who were at prayer. The Prophet moved wearily, as if he’d come a great distance to find her, and he assured her that he had. She wanted to ask him why but lacked the courage. She wanted more than anything not to offend. His manner toward her was casual, even familiar. Though he was attentive he was strangely melancholy. Mankind had disappointed him, even the faithful. The faithful perhaps most of all. His disappointment had aged him and turned his hair gray but he was a young man still and beautiful and proud. His orange tracksuit was threadbare and discolored but he wore it like a robe of beaten silk.
As they climbed the escarpment in the cold and the starshine she explained to him what had brought her to the camp. She told the Prophet that she knew it must seem strange that a girl of barely eighteen should travel so far and take such risks but that there had been no other option. She told him that it was the believers who had drawn her to the One True Faith, the believers above all, and that if she had stayed in her mother’s ruined house with only God’s word and her own thoughts for company she would soon have lost her mind. She explained to him how her father had deceived her and betrayed her. She described her mother’s beatings. The Prophet walked close beside her, panting slightly from the climb, nodding thoughtfully as she spoke. He knew all that she was telling him but it felt glorious to tell it. She had never talked so much in all her life. The escarpment rose before her and her breath aspired toward Heaven and the world in all its failings lay behind her on the plain. She asked the Prophet if he would punish her and he raised his tired bloodshot eyes to Heaven. She asked if God would punish her and the night sky poured into her open mouth.
* * *
The next day the tactical training began. She learned how to stage an ambush in the mountains and the desert. She was taught how to use camouflage to draw near to a mark. A specialist instructed the group on how to improvise medical assistance to brothers in the field, and how to carry them to safety with a minimum of strain. She learned to stanch blood flow. She learned how to storm a house and how to hold it from counterattack. She learned how to sow cover for advancing infantry, how to coordinate a kidnapping, how to evaluate a building as a target for a bomb.
One afternoon Abu Imam led them to a newly built structure behind the admissions shed whose whitewashed walls were already beginning to flake. The day was dry and windless. The mood among the Arabs and a group of Chechens recently arrived from the north was restless and playful, the high spirits of schoolboys before a holiday assembly. An instructor fanned the room with a flattened cardboard box in an absurd attempt to cut the stifling heat. Folding chairs had been arranged in four precise rows and a television was wheeled with elaborate pomp out of an alcove. Abu Imam was uncharacteristically somber. He gave them to understand that what they would see over the next hour was more important even than their marksmanship or orienteering drills, and that he was grateful to count himself among their number. The video had been sent by a benefactor of the Mountain, a man of great learning and personal means. Those with Arabic were called upon to translate for their neighbors.
—What’s it saying, little brother? a red-haired Chechen asked in English as the tape began to play.
—Nothing yet, she said, straining to hear through the hiss.
He gripped her seatback with his sunburned fingers. —How nothing? I hear someone talking.
—O believers, she said quietly. —Retaliation for the slain is ordained upon you.
—Very good, little brother. But what does it mean?
—It’s a passage from the Book. From the second holy sura.
—Is that all? sighed the Chechen, sitting back in his seat.
The film that followed had been copied and recopied times without number and its color had been all but leached away. A silver veil of static billowed over the screen and the robed figures behind it appeared to be hemorrhaging light. An elderly man addressed the viewer from a divan set beneath a keyhole arch. His speech was barely audible. The veil shuddered, then lifted, then lowered again. Airplanes flew in tight formation over cities being rendered into ash. Palestine was mentioned, then Chechnya, then Bosnia, then Kashmir, then regions still unknown to her. The airplanes crossed from right to left and schools and housing grids and mosques were geometrically erased. Every soul shall taste death. The footage bled white. This present life is but the rapture of delusion. The camera tracked at shoulder height through trauma wards past mutilated children. Dates of air strikes were intoned in litany. A keening arose in the smothering dark. She felt her hands trembling. Every soul shall taste death. Behind her the Chechen was weeping into his shirtsleeves like a child.
O believers, bear in patience, be steadfast in the fight, keep to your battle stations and fear God. Perhaps you will prevail.
* * *
After the video had ended and the antediluvian TV had been returned to its alcove one of the brothers approached her. Of the camp’s many Pashtuns he alone spoke fluent English and possessed some hard-won knowledge of geography and world events but this fact had not inclined him in her favor. She had just left the shed when he fell in beside her, breathing heavily and mumbling to himself. The expression on his face was bemused, almost bashful, but she was careful to keep an arm’s length between them. She had seen that dazed look on his face before.
—What is it, brother? Did I make a mistake?
—You say the Qur’an perfect. Beautiful. His voice had gone thick. —I can hear that you went to madrasa.
She thanked him and kept moving. The others had branched off or fallen behind. She looked about her for Abu Imam.
—Those aeroplanes, brother.
Abu Suhail had stopped walking and she stopped now as well, careful not to let him get behind her. —What airplanes? The ones in the movie?
—I see those are your aeroplanes, he said. —Your bombers.
—America’s you mean. The United States.
—Yours, said Abu Suhail. He met someone’s eye behind her but she didn’t turn to look. She heard a muffled click, dull and metallic, as if a soda can were being opened.
—Abu Suhail, she said, facing him squarely, raising her voice so the others would hear. —The place where I was born is not my country. I don’t have a passport. I don’t have a family. We surrendered these things, all of us, when we came to this place. Am I right in saying so? We let them go to take up our jihad.
—I surrendered no family, he said tonelessly. —My family are murdered in the bombings.
—Brother, if you’ll only—
—Tell me again about these planes. About your planes.
—Not my planes, she stammered. —Not America’s either. You weren’t listening in our ballistics course. Those were Neshers, made in Israel. Those were Israeli Air Force fighters.
He blinked at her with great effort, as if he were drunk. —Planes from Israel.
—That’s right.
—But Israel, he said slowly. —Israel is yours.
He was almost touching her now and she could feel each word he spoke against her skin. Though he was no more than twenty his breath was an old man’s and it made her stomach clench to smell it. Perhaps her own breath smelled no better. She turned her head and saw the Chechens watching from the shade of the canteen.
—Tell me your name, said Abu Suhail. —Yours and that of your father.
—Have you forgotten where we are? This is the Mountain, brother. I have no name here but the one I chose.
—Tell me your name, he repeated, catching her by the arm. —Your American name.
As she started to answer a horn sounded behind her, once and then three times in swift succession, and she heard the metal pull-gates screeching open. She twisted out of Abu Suhail’s grip and turned in time to see a plume of dust unfurling in the slanting yellow light. Two pickups with flatbed trailers hitched to them clattered over the barrier and jackknifed to a stop between the mosque and the canteen. The trailers were stacked with Tyvek sacks of lentils and there were men in homespun coats and headscarves sprawled across the sacks. The driver of the first truck was the Talib who had questioned her in the pharmacy in Peshawar. The driver of the second truck was Ziar Khan.
She took a handful of steps toward the trucks and the men, feeling her way across the sloping ground without lowering her eyes. Abu Suhail and the others had forgotten her. The wind was rising and the cinched mouths of the sacks snapped and fluttered in the flatbeds and she stood with her arms held out to either side in case she lost her balance. The sky above the compound seemed to darken. She watched the men laughing and calling out greetings and tossing the sacks two at a time from the trailers. She felt dizzy with fear and had no idea why. It held her in place like a pole driven into the ground.
* * *
Someone must have mentioned her in passing, an American teen with antiquated Arabic and no passport, because when she came to Ziar’s table at the evening meal he showed not the slightest surprise. He set his teacup down unhurriedly and waited for her to speak. Her voice failed her when she tried to say his name.