Home Fire(42)
“Jazakallah khayr,” Parvaiz said, scooping up the pile of boxed equipment for which he’d just paid a small fortune. “Do you have a back door? My car’s parked behind your shop.”
“Can you carry all that? Do you want to call your friend to help you? I would, but my back . . .”
“This is nothing after what they made us do in military training,” he said.
“You’re a fighter? I thought you were with Abu Raees in the studio.”
“I am. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t teach me how to fight in the way of Allah in preparation for a time when I can be more useful that way. Why is it, my friend, that you’re still living in Turkey?”
The man blanched. “I do my part from here. The back door—through there. I’ll open it for you.”
Parvaiz stepped out into the sunlight and started to walk toward the row of parked cars until he heard the door close. He turned, made sure the man had gone back inside, then set the pile of boxes down on the side of the road, placed his traceable smartphone on top of the pile, and began to run.
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Six months earlier he had entered Raqqa in the late afternoon, his stomach contracting with excitement and terror. A motorcycle backfired as it drove past an antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck; the soldier swiveled the weapon in the motorcyclist’s direction. A joke, Farooq told him, relax! A row of palm trees slapped their fronds against one another in a breeze that wasn’t felt at street level. The driver of the car, one of the two men who had picked Farooq and Parvaiz up at Istanbul airport, insisted you could hear the palm fronds whisper Allah if your ear was good enough. His ear was better than anyone else’s in the car, Parvaiz said; he meant good as in “holy,” Farooq explained. The colors of the buildings were sun-bleached, but there was a brightness in the call of the birds. A polyethylene bag caught in the electric wires strung across the street made shivering sounds. A man juggled a flattened loaf of bread the size of his arm that made all the saliva rush to Parvaiz’s mouth; a fwump! sound as the oven-hot bread was dropped onto a table on the pavement. Bearded men stood around a cluster of motorcycles, two in long robes with bomber jackets, the others in jumpers and trousers, arguing in Arabic. Minarets reached high into the sky—at prayer time the azaan would bounce between one slim tower and the next. A tank rumbled past a monument with two headless statues. A very young girl in a green-and-yellow dress walked behind two women in black niqabs, even their eyes invisible beneath a face veil; Farooq hummed the music from a popular ninja video game until one of the men in the car warned him to stop disrespecting sisters or he’d have to report him to the Hisba—this was the first Parvaiz heard of the morality police, and he saw how mention of them strained Farooq’s expression.
The soundscape changed around the central square, or perhaps Parvaiz stopped listening so acutely because of the distraction of heads of enemy soldiers mounted on spiked railings. It was curiously unmoving, something you might see in a TV show. One day, inshallah, there would be no enemy and children would play in the square, Farooq said. In the company of the other men his English conversation had become peppered with Arabic, and perhaps this was what made his words sound false. Then a different part of town, more affluent: villa-like houses, tall apartment blocks, the yellow and white paint on the facades brighter here. The car pulled up in front of one of the double-storied villas, and Farooq said, “This is our stop.”
“Who lives here?” Parvaiz asked, stepping out of the car, taking in the sprawling luxury of the house, the size of three homes in his neighborhood put together.
“One of the perks of the media arm,” Farooq said, nudging him, laughing at his disbelieving face.
Two men only a few years older than Parvaiz appeared in the doorway of the villa. One Scottish, one American. They introduced themselves by their noms de guerre, embraced him formally, greeted Farooq in the manner of friends. Cameramen, both of them, and yes, those were their SUVs in the driveway—another perk of the media arm.
Inside, the house had marble floors and faded places on the walls where once must have been photographs or artwork. There was a very large room with stiff-backed chairs and sofas with flower-patterned cushions, and beside it a formal dining room with a long table. Boxes lined the hallways—“our equipment,” said one of the men, whose names he had already forgotten, so that he referred to them mentally as Abu Two Names and Abu Three Names. It was like an icebox, the lowered blinds adding to the mortuary atmosphere. But then the two men led him upstairs, saying this was the part they actually lived in. Here it was light and airy, pleasingly informal.
The American—Abu Two Names—ushered him onto a wraparound balcony that overlooked a garden dense with color. It was still afternoon, but he gratefully huddled into the shawl the Scotsman—Abu Three Names—offered him to counter the cold breeze, “from the Euphrates,” that reached him as he sank down into the surprising blue beanbag. A man appeared from somewhere—“This is Ismail, he came with the house”—and offered him tea and biscuits on a silver tray. From up here you could make out the sounds of motorcycles and cars, hammering, birdsong, the wind through the branches of trees, fallen bougainvillea flowers dancing in the breeze along the balustrade of the balcony. Despite his disquiet at the spiked heads and veiled women, the blue skies and camaraderie of the men slumped in beanbags promised the better world he’d come in search of.