Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “We will speak in English. Don’t take notes. If you write, you think of the shape of words but not their meaning. It is better just to talk.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I won’t give my name, but you know I am not from here.”

  “Where?”

  “Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan. All the places where our brothers struggle.”

  “What struggle?” I ask.

  “Against you. The hand your government imposes through illegitimate regimes that rob our wealth and deny us honor and dignity. Why should a man hunger in the land of Allah? Why should God’s face not shine on everyone? Why should we be at your heel, or the heel of your servant? Even your Jesus says beware the beggar at your table.”

  “You didn’t mention Palestine.”

  “Palestine is the cause of all Muslims. It is understood.”

  “Why are you here? The U.S. is not helping the Serb government. It wants Milosevic out.”

  “The struggle is wide. We are against all the West. There is no difference between American and Serb. How naive of you to think the U.S. doesn’t have a secret hand in keeping these people oppressed.”

  “I don’t think Allah is on the minds of most men in these mountains.”

  “Allah’s in every man’s mind. We have come to show them.”

  “These men want only their lands.”

  “Some see larger things attached.”

  “Are you training suicide bombers?”

  “We have only martyrs.” He smiles. “Our languages are so different. They intrigue. Yours flows almost uninterrupted from chest to mouth. Ours is more complicated. It resides in many places, throat and nose and chest. We speak with our bodies. Do you understand? We will never be in harmony. Our words come from different places. I am speaking your language now, but you still cannot know my heart.”

  “Are you training martyrs in camps in the mountains?”

  “We instruct young men on how to see Allah’s face. What’s that line in your Bible? It’s a beautiful line: ‘And the Word was made flesh.’”

  “Why here?”

  “This is the edge of Europe. Why should we not be here? Your infidel army is in Mecca.”

  The dateman doesn’t raise his voice, wraps no wire around his words. Part of him sounds like a textbook fanatic, hitting all the familiar notes of radical Muslim rage and paranoia. But his flow is more natural, more controlled. One sentence glides into another and then another with no sting of emotion. He could be making a shopping list or instructing a child on the dangers of crossing a busy street. It is the timbre of the voice that evokes: it is smooth, not the quiet baritone I had expected; no, it is pitched more to the sound of wind through a bone, not a whistle but a long and resonating lilt. I’ve encountered only a few such voices. They invite you to crawl inside them, to be soothed.

  “What did you do before this?”

  “I’m an architect. I studied in London.”

  “What have you built?”

  “Nothing, yet. I study cities. Glass, steel, and mortar. They are the imges of what we are. Our outside selves. Allah, of course, dwells within us. When I was a boy, I used to think buildings were only storage places for people. Things stepped into for work or prayer. My father was an engineer. Once he took me on a trip with him to Europe. I saw then that buildings are the collective art of a nation. Armies defend what architecture inspires.”

  He grins.

  “You like precision and order.”

  “My father used to tease me that I had become a man of blueprints.”

  “Why is an architect in these mountains?”

  “It is cold, and we have little time.”

  “You’ve mentioned Allah,” says Brian. “The Koran is often ambiguous. You can twist it many ways.”

  “You Americans do the same with your Bible and Constitution. You want to build a shining city on a hill for the whole world. But it must be your city on your hill built by your architects.”

  “What happens now?”

  “You have big guns. We have the martyr’s will. We shall see.”

  “It looks like you’re leaving.”

  “We have come to do what we could. It is now up to them.”

  “Why take off just as things are getting interesting?” says Brian.

  “We have left instructions.”

  “Maybe you didn’t get enough converts.”

  “Armies have converted here for centuries. The Romans, the Ottomans. It goes on.”

  “NATO may be the next army.”

  “They will come, of course, but they are another army of the past.”

  “The battlefield is changing?”

  “It has changed.” A man whispers in his ear.

  “I must go.”

  “Can we ride with you a bit to talk?” “One day you’ll learn my language, and we will talk more.”

  “One more question,” says Brian. “Why did your men kill our friend Vijay? He was a Muslim.”

  The dateman doesn’t answer. He slips into the Land Cruiser and, without lights, vanishes down the mountain with his small caravan.

  “I’m gonna type this up before we forget,” says Brian. “‘Don’t write.’ I hate that. I hate that obscure, opaque bullshit. Changing battlefields. Cryptic one-sentence bullshit. He hasn’t got it, Jay. He didn’t ignite the fuse. That’s why he’s driving away.”

  “What’d you expect?”

  “Something I can build a goddamn lede around. Blueprints and architecture. What the hell were you driving at? We had a few minutes with this guy, and you want him to wax eloquent about him and his daddy roaming around Brussels looking at gargoyles and cathedrals.”

  “I was looking for a way in.”

  “There’s no way into that chamber except head on.”

  “You didn’t get too far with your ‘Koran is ambiguous’ bullshit.”

  “At least it was on point.”

  “C’mon, man, the guy told us he wants war with the West.”

  “You know how many bearded wackos out there want war with the West?”

  “Yeah, but how many are up here doing it? Of course he spoke in abstractions. That’s what they do. You were hoping for a sound bite? These guys aren’t about sound bites, Brian. You know that.”

  Brian storms off to the Jeep, unfolds his laptop, and slams the door, snow coiling in the whoosh of air.

  “He didn’t make it, did he?” I say to the Leopard.

  “He got many, Jay,” says the Leopard. “But not enough. A shallow root is maybe all he was after.”

  “How’s he getting out?”

  “Over the same mountain that brought him here.”

  “Did he come in with donkeys and dates?”

  “Donkeys, dates, and a few Land Cruisers, but mostly bullets and money and a box of Korans. He also had a copy of the American Special Forces Handbook on covert military operations. It had been translated into Arabic, but the cover was in English. Where is Carlisle, Pennsylvania?”

  Chapter 15

  We drive to the guerrilla camp. Brian and I file our stories on the day’s battle on what’s left of the sat-phone battery, and we sleep in the same sheep shed we slept in with Vijay. Morning mist forms a seam between earth and sky, clear above us and snowing below. The Leopard brings coffee and then leads us to the dateman’s compound near the mountaintop: three wood-and-stone houses and a small mosque spaced about thirty yards apart and hidden in trees form the points of a rectangle. Worn paths scraggle to each house, and bunkers, fortified with sandbags and booby-trapped with land mines, rim the perimeter. The Leopard nods toward the first house. He walks up the steps and opens the door. We enter a new world. A strange art faces us. Buildings are drawn on the walls as if someone, perhaps through a restless night but with tedious, cool efficiency, had dreamed up a city, an amalgam of architectural styles, and fused it into an intricate voice: the glass and angles of japanese design, touches of neoclassical, a bit of gothic, a coil of postmodern, and a to
wering reach of slender structures shaped like steel arrows and slicing into the sky. Koranic verse is inscribed on some buildings, but it looks odd, the curls and half strokes of a misplaced hymn.

  “No trees,” says Brian.

  “What?”

  “Not even a date palm. No green. Can’t live in a city with no green.”

  Through a door, a kitchen unfolds with kerosene stoves and posted lists of chores for cooks, dishwashers, servers, and “prayer sayers.” Dish towels are folded and plates stacked amid the grit and scent of cleanser. The windows are small and spotless, and the wood floors are fresh-cut and speckled with amber pearls of sap. Off to the left, the Leopard opens another door to a room with a mat on the floor and a crate in the corner. There’s a photo tacked on the wall of a boy with a man. Both are dressed in dark suits and glisten with the Vitalis haircuts of the late 1950s or early ‘60s. The man is tall and wears oversize black-rimmed sunglasses that seem to hover more than rest on his slender nose. He bends toward the boy, and his narrow tie hangs in permanent suspension, one of those odd images in a picture that reminds you photography is an eerie pause between two breaths, a kind of undetected death woven into what we like to think of as life’s uninterrupted motion. The boy, appearing to be about ten, holds a map and is at once studious and happy against the right angle of his father’s tie and what seems to be a blurred muddy river bending in the distance, or maybe it’s a burst of dust snaking through a desert like in those old pictures of the Pyramids. The boy is unmistakable. He is the dateman.

  “This was his room,” says the Leopard. “It’s empty except for this picture. Why would he leave this?”

  I put the picture in my pocket.

  “He was in a rush.”

  “He was too precise.”

  “You think he left it for a reason?”

  “A taunt.”

  “Mystery.”

  “A clue.”

  “There’s no TV.”

  Broken discs and smashed computers — their hard drives gone — are scattered over another room. A small pile of charred papers lies nearby. The second house is stacked with bullet crates and fuses and boxes that once held RPGs and mortars. A sign in Arabic and Albanian reads: “Keep your soul and your weapon clean.” The third house is a large room with a chalkboard and the scent of gunpowder. On the left wall hang two posters of teenage boys, their faces serene, kneeling in fire and looking to heaven. A wind seems to be blowing through them, riffling their clothes and hair and lifting the flames through lines of Arabic writing I cannot read. Alija tries to decipher. Two vests lie on a desk. The Leopard examines one. It is thin, refashioned with strips of Velcro, and six pouches, the width and length of a ruler, are sewn on each of the front flaps. A wire drops from one of the pouches and at its end dangles a silver cylinder the size of a roll of pennies, tipped with a red button. The chalkboard is half erased, a blur and swirl of white, the shade of a swan’s wing. Inside this blurry rage there is a bus full of stick people and a stick-person driver. Standing outside the bus is a figure more carefully drawn, wearing clothes and a button-up shirt. With two dots for eyes, a nose shaped like an upside-down 7, he is smiling. The Leopard lifts a notebook written in Albanian from the floor. He reads: “Act friendly, but not too friendly; act like you’re going to the market. Be calm. Breathe slowly. Don’t sweat. Sweat causes suspicion. Move to the middle. Feel the button on your thumb. The cause is just and blessed. Soon Paradise.”

  “Notes to live by,” says Brian. “Wonder where these guys went.”

  “Nobody’s here,” says the Leopard. “While you were interviewing the dateman last night, my men told me this compound emptied. A lot of the fighters, including about forty Arabs, joined our units. The others slipped through the forest and disappeared.”

  The Leopard steps closer to Brian and me. He flicks to the back of the notebook. He looks at us and begins to read: “To the Great One, peace be upon him, my last will and testament. My name is Sena. I have a wife and a son and a small home near my father’s house. The village elders should collect what they can of my body but leave it unwashed. I am a martyr, and the book says a martyr carries his blood and dust to paradise. He is purified in death. I did not know this. I did not know much before I came here. I lived in a world of my enemy’s creation. I saw through the eyes he gave me. But I have new eyes, and I will destroy his world and strike at his heart. I am happy to scatter my body like rain. God’s righteousness protects me. My brothers here know this too. Our army will flood the enemy. Be he Zionist or Christian Serb, they are all the same. They are sheep to be slaughtered. I am twenty-four. I finished secondary school. I have few worldly possessions. My family may divide them as they see fit. To my father, I say I am willing to die and have no fear. To my mother, I say do not weep. To my wife, I say after some time you may take another man from the village, but only with my fathers blessing. To my son I say the silver coin hidden in my shoe is yours.”

  The Leopard closes the notebook.

  I can’t wait any longer. It’s time. I tell Alija her brother was here among young men like Sena. She looks at me and then to the Leopard, who shakes his head yes. Her face hardens. Its imperceptible lines pull tight, its eyes narrow. She steps toward me but turns away, like a bird that sees a spot on a window and, in a space of time too short to measure, flits sideways to avoid collision. She stands in the middle of the room, and again, like that time we visited her burned house, I think she’ll break, but she doesn’t. She breathes in. You can sometimes detect the spirit of someone who’s been in a room, a lingering trace, a wisp, an odor, something. Alija searches the notebook the Leopard was holding, but the scrawled yearnings for eternity are from an unknown hand. She frisks the vests and their pouches; nothing of Ardian, only loose threads and gunpowder grains. She studies the squiggles and lines on the chalkboard, looking at each face on the bus and trying to look beneath the bus to what was written before. The room is sparse and stingy. It gives nothing, but she looks in the corners, on the walls, searching for initials, a strand of hair. She steps outside and walks toward the other houses. She doesn’t rush. One learns not to rush in this country. The Leopard follows to keep her away from the bunkers and land mines. Brian and I make notes and diagrams. The less there is, the more you catalogue. The sound of battle drifts through the clouds and up the mountain to the clear sky. It shimmies through me like familiar music, silences expanding and contracting between notes.

  “Jay.”

  Alija stands in the doorway.

  “Come.”

  She leads me through the trees to two dirt humps near a ridge. The Leopard stands with shovels.

  “Dig, Jay.”

  The Leopard and I find a rhythm. The graves are shallow. The bodies are poorly wrapped and their skin is the color of ink and milk. Alija gets on her knees and brushes dirt off the face of the first one. He is maybe fifty. There is no trace of blood or wound, and he seems oddly uncon-torted. She moves to the second body. She brushes the dirt again. The face is young. She stops. She wets her hands with saliva and brushes harder. She stares into the eyes and the mouth, half full of dirt. She reaches through the frozen hair and lifts the head the way a rich woman lifts a vase. It is not her brother. She moves her thumb over his lips and lowers his head. She stands and walks away, dirt and a bit of blood on her palms. It is not until we begin reburying the bodies that I see the boy has no hands; they have been blown off, and the bones at the wrists are splintered and sharp.

  The Leopard pulls a folded piece of paper from the boy’s pocket. Another note: “To my God, peace be upon him. I am Ahmed. This is not my land. These mountains I do not know. It is cold beyond what I have ever felt. I am from Saudi Arabia, from a village near Medina. It is a small village, and you would not know its name unless you were from there. I have come here to defeat the infidel. To die before him, so he can see the power of my sacrifice. I will turn to flame and smoke and blow through him. He is my enemy; for all time he is my enemy. The teacher here has tau
ght us much. New worlds, new knowledge are open to me. I have no wife. I have no children. All I have to leave is my name on the wind. If you read this, please, dear brother, know that I have sacrificed for you. I have happily gone to battle for you, my unknown brother. If innocents should die with me, there is no worry, for they are martyrs too. They are blessed. Whatever God takes in righteous battle is pulled to God forever. Read my name upon the wind. Ahmed.”

  The Leopard and I cover him with dirt and tamp and smooth the grave; I don’t know why. We search the compound again, looking for hidden storage bunkers, signs, scraps of some definition, a paper in the wind. We seek more writing, Arabic or not, some document of what happened here. A diary would be nice, something more precise than the notebook and fiery wills. Who are men like Sena? Like Ahmed? We have only bomb pouches and stick figures made of chalk. This is the sensation, but where is the gist? Where is the nut graph? Where is Ardian? Does he have his own note folded away in a pocket? His will and testament? What would he leave? His polished shoes, the ones I saw days ago in his burned bedroom? I walk back to the first house and stand before the city on the wall. It is finely sketched and seems to be floating, a mystical cobbling of lines and towers. The dateman’s vision of Jihad City? Who lives in such a place? Or, perhaps, here, on this wall in the mountains, it’s just a city of impermanence, a landscape to fade away or be painted over or destroyed by fire or a missile. I stare at it. I walk through its streets. Nobody is here. The steel and glass of a wild man’s dream. Is he wild? I met him. He does not seem wild. He is calm and thin like a clarinet. Willowy. Speaking in obscurities and allusions. Why are the words of fanatics so imprecise? It’s as if the pure definition of their cause eludes even them and they paper over the gaps with pretty things and fire. Alija comes in and stands beside me. We seem like two people in a museum who have wandered into a room others have just left, and for a moment we have the art to ourselves. She turns and stands before me. She says nothing but forces me to look away from the dateman’s perversion and into her eyes, to make sure I understand the sin, the betrayal, of keeping a secret from a girl haunted by what lives in hidden places. She is angry, but, more than that, she is desperate and wanting so much to pull her brother from the designs and air around us. Ardian must have stepped on these floors, touched the chalk, kept a notebook, seen some vision, sketched his own city, but he has left no inkling of a direction for her to follow.