Home Fire(14)

Every so often a card in his scribbly handwriting would arrive to say how invaluable he was to some fight or other against oppression, or a bearded man would appear at the doorstep with some small amount of money and the name of wherever Pash was fighting—Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo. In October 2001 he called. He was in Pakistan, en route to Afghanistan, and had heard of his father’s death. He wanted to speak to his mother, and also to hear his son’s voice. His wife hung up without waiting to find out if he might also want to hear Isma’s voice—the voice of the only one of his children he’d ever known.

Eamonn shifted, rested his ankle against hers, an act of sympathy just small enough for her to bear.

“A few months later MI5 and Special Branch officers came around, asking about him, though they wouldn’t say why. We knew something was wrong, and my grandmother said maybe we should try to contact someone—the Red Cross, the government, a lawyer—to find out where he was. If my grandfather had still been alive that might have happened, but he wasn’t, and my mother said if we tried looking for him we’d be harassed by Special Branch, and by people in the neighborhood, who would start to suspect our sympathies. My grandmother went to the mosque looking for support, but the Imam sided with my mother—he’d heard too many stories of abuse suffered by the families of British men who’d been arrested in Afghanistan. One of my grandmother’s friends had said the British government would withdraw all the benefits of the welfare state—including state school and the NHS—from any family it suspected of siding with the terrorists.”

Eamonn made a face of distaste, clearly offended in a way that told her he saw the state as part of himself, something that had never been possible for anyone in her family. She raised a hand to hold off his objections. “My mother knew that wasn’t true, but she allowed my grandmother to believe it. So that was that until 2004, when a Pakistani man released from Guantánamo contacted my father’s family in Pakistan to say he had been imprisoned at Bagram with my father from early 2002. In June that year both he and my father were among the men put on a plane for transport to Guantánamo. My father died during takeoff, some sort of seizure. He said other things also, about what happened to my father in Bagram, but the family in Pakistan said no one needed those images in their head, and didn’t tell us.”

“No one told you he was dead for two years?”

“Who was going to tell us? The Americans? British intelligence? We weren’t told anything. We still haven’t been told anything. They haven’t released records of Bagram from that time period. We don’t even know if anyone bothered to dig a grave.”

“I’m sure they dug a grave,” he said.

“Why? Because they’re so civilized?” She had promised herself she wouldn’t lie to him, and that included not curtailing her rage.

“I’m sorry. I was trying to . . . I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you, for your whole family.”

She made a helpless, hopeless gesture. “We didn’t talk about it. We were forbidden to talk about it. Only Aunty Naseem and her daughters who lived across the road knew because we were essentially one family divided into two households. Other than that there was only one other person who was told—a man who my grandparents had known since they first moved to Wembley and there were so few Asian families around that all of them knew each other. On my grandmother’s behalf, this man went to visit his cousin’s son, a first-term MP, and asked if the British government could find out any information about Adil Pasha, who died on his way to Guantánamo, and whose family deserved answers. ‘They’re better off without him,’ the MP said, and left the room.”

“That was my father?”

“Yes.”

He slumped forward, his face in his hands.

She wanted to run her fingers through his thick hair, stroke his arm. There was a lightness inside her, entirely new, that made the whole world rearrange itself into a place of undreamt-of possibilities. In this lightness Aneeka’s anger was short-lived, Parvaiz’s choices reversible.

He looked up, held her gaze. “Can I?” he said, pointing to a spot on the bed next to her. She nodded, not trusting her voice enough to use it.

The mattress dipped slightly beneath his weight. He took her hand, looked at her with deep feeling in those brown eyes of his. “I’m so sorry for everything you’ve suffered,” he said. “You’re a remarkable woman.” And then he patted her hand, once, twice, and let go of it. “You need to understand something about my father.”

She didn’t want to understand anything about his father. She wanted his hand back sending currents through her, including in the most intimate places. Almost as if he’d touched her there.

“It’s harder for him,” he said. “Because of his background. Early on, in particular, he had to be more careful than any other MP, and at times that meant doing things he regretted. But everything he did, even the wrong choices, were because he had a sense of purpose. Public service, national good, British values. He deeply believes in these things. All the wrong choices he made, they were necessary to get him to the right place, the place he is now.”

There he sat, his father’s son. It didn’t matter if they were on this or that side of the political spectrum, or whether the fathers were absent or present, or if someone else had loved them better, loved them more: in the end they were always their fathers’ sons.