Home Fire(40)
“And the men about to be executed in the other picture?”
“The men who did that to her, or those just like them.”
“These other images, are they real?”
“Of course they’re real. Look!” He cycled back to the fishing image, and Parvaiz saw that one of the men—the one whose large muscles were straining with the weight of the catch he was trying to reel in—was Farooq.
“Okay, there’s a little bit of a lie in there. That giant fish you think I’ve hooked—it was a waterlogged jacket. This is the Euphrates we’re fishing in. You want to come and fish in the Euphrates with me? And with your other brothers? That’s Abu Omar, that’s Ilyas al-Russ, and this one is my sweet Abu Bakr, who was martyred by the FSA.”
“So it’s not true then? About all the violence? Only if they’re enemy soldiers, is that what you’re saying?”
Farooq sighed heavily and sat down beside him, hooking his arm around Parvaiz’s neck. “What do they teach you in history?”
The French Revolution. That was Farooq’s lesson of the day. The cradle, the bedrock, the foundation of enlightenment and liberalism and democracy and all the things that make the West so smugly superior to the rest of the world. Let us agree to accept for a moment that the ideals that came from it were good. Liberty, equality, fraternity—who could argue against that? Well, Farooq could, but that was another day’s lesson. For the moment, accept those ideals as ideal. But where would those ideals be without the Reign of Terror that nurtured and protected them with blood, eliminating all enemies, internal and external, that threatened the new utopia, and did so in full view of the public? It might have been regrettable—a man would rather fish with his friends than cut off the heads of his enemies—but it was necessary. Eventually the terror ends, having served its purpose of protecting a new—revolutionary—state of affairs that is besieged by enemies who are terrified of its moral power.
“So the question for you is this: Will you protect the new revolution? Will you do the work your father would have done if he’d lived?”
Parvaiz looked from Farooq back to the screen, flicking through the remaining images. A land of order and beauty and life and youth. A Kalashnikov resting on one shoulder, a brother’s arm around the other. It was another planet, one on which he’d always be the boy from Earth whose lungs don’t know how to breathe this wondrous, terrifying atmosphere.
||||||||||||||||||
But increasingly, his lungs didn’t know how to breathe the air of London. MI5 officers were present at Bagram, Farooq told him, and showed him evidence to corroborate that. Your government, the one that took taxes from your family and claimed to represent the people, knew what was going on. How can you live in this place, accepting, after all that you now know? How can you live in this mirage of democracy and freedom? What kind of man are you, what kind of son are you?
The questions followed him through his days now. Everywhere he saw evidence of rot and corruption, lies and cover-ups. His two sisters had allowed themselves to become part of it too: one preparing to go to America, the nation that had killed their father and hundreds of thousands of other Muslim fathers; the other propping up the lie that theirs was a country where citizens had rights and courts of appeal.
At night, via the proxy servers Farooq said he could rely on, he went deeper and deeper into the Web, to stories of dogs raping prisoners at Bagram, pictures of tortured bodies, medical accounts of what the different forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques” could do to a body and mind. One night he lay in bed with his desk lamp directed straight at his eyes, his most powerful headphones blasting heavy metal into his ears—he managed for no more than twenty minutes before, whimpering, pathetic, he had to restore his room to darkness and silence. Increasingly, during the day he would stop in the middle of the smallest action—handing a bag of celery to a customer, waiting for a bus, raising a cup of tea to his mouth—and feel the wrongness of it all, the falseness of his life.
“You need to break up with her, she’s no good for you,” Aneeka kept saying, unable to imagine any pain in the world larger than a bad love affair. More than once he found her trying out different password combinations on his phone—he’d changed it from their joint birthday to the day he first met Farooq.
One day Farooq showed him a photograph that he recognized. A white man kneeling in the sand just prior to his execution, an image that encapsulated for the world the barbarity of the caliphate. When he’d first seen it he’d felt sorrow for the man with the courage to try to look brave with a blade at his throat, whose only crime was the nation he’d been born into. But this time what struck him most powerfully were the man’s clothes, the same shade of orange as the prison jumpsuit in which his father had died. His vision expanded; he saw beyond the expression of the individual kneeling in the desert to the message the caliphate sent with his death: What you do to ours we will do to yours.
So this was how it felt to have a nation that wielded its sword on your behalf and told you acquiescence wasn’t the only option. Dear God, the vein-flooding pleasure of it.
||||||||||||||||||
And then he found himself preparing to leave.
How exactly it happened he couldn’t have said. He had been too busy changing to stop and chart the change. It had been a long time since he and Farooq had discussed football, reality shows, life at the greengrocer’s. There was only one subject, and eventually he understood that the subject was a destination.