Home Fire(46)
He reached the kneeling man, bent down to place the cloth in his mouth. The man’s lips still moving, the words now discernible. He was praying. Ayat al-Kursi, the prayer Parvaiz’s grandmother had taught him to say in times of distress. The prayer he too had been whispering on the walk from the SUV to the kneeling man. The man looked up. Parvaiz wouldn’t remember anything of the man’s face afterward, only his expressive eyes.
“Come here, listen to this,” Abu Raees said, holding out his headphones. Parvaiz reached for them, dropped them. “What’s wrong with your hands?”
He shook his head, picked up the headphones again, and managed to fit them onto his head. Abu Raees, eyes narrowed, handed him a mic. What he heard through the headphones was the sound of the mic juddering in his hand. The tremors had moved all the way up to his elbow.
“I can’t stop it,” he said. And then, “I’m not feeling so well.”
“Go and lie down in the SUV,” Abu Raees said, turning away.
He did as commanded, lay sealed up in the back of the car, imagining it again and again: the blade cutting through air, cutting through flesh and bone, the body slumping, the head bouncing on the sand, rolling to a stop. The eyes still open, not afraid but accusing.
How long does it take to cut off a man’s head?
When Abu Raees finally returned to the car, Parvaiz said, “I don’t know why Allah made that happen. My will was in one direction, but my hands couldn’t follow. I must have failed Him in some way.”
Abu Raees gave him a long, considered look as he invoked the will of Allah as explanation for his failure. A lapse in loyalty could see a man stripped of his privileges and sent to dig trenches on the outskirts of town, where he would be an easy target for aerial bombing. “You should stay up all night praying for forgiveness,” Abu Raees said.
“I will,” he answered. It was unclear if the taciturn Iraqi believed him or just didn’t want to do without such an efficient worker. Impossible here to know who was a true believer and who was playing along for any of a host of reasons, from terror to avarice. The price of letting your mask slip was far too high for anyone to risk it.
For days and days after that, he worked in the studio on sound effects of beheadings, crucifixions, whipping. This was both a test and a punishment. In the studio, he had control of himself. Abstracting himself to that place where nothing but getting the sound right mattered. The fascination of discovering the different pitch and timbre of a nail through flesh, a blade through flesh. Some men were men in their dying screams, some were animals. He, Mohammad bin Bagram, now numbered himself among the animals.
And that’s why, although he’d been given his own phone since joining the studio and could finally speak to his sister without a minder standing within earshot, he hadn’t called her. Just daily chat messages to let her know he was alive, then he’d log off. Conversation had become unimaginable. What have you been up to? How was your day? How are you doing?
But then, in the early days of April, he logged onto Skype to quickly send his daily message and there was one from her: Call me. I’m working on a plan to get you home.
Home. A place from a past he’d turned his back on, and to which MI5 would make sure he never returned.
I’m fine here, he wrote back.
And she replied, Liar.
||||||||||||||||||
He left the café, head bent, walk altered. Keeping watch for Farooq’s white SUV, he shuffled past Galata Tower to the broad pedestrianized ?stiklal Caddesi, where the presence of a clothing shop he knew from London was a comfort. He entered, bought a pair of blue jeans, a gray T-shirt, a black baseball cap with the shop’s name stitched on it. Changed into the new set of clothes, left the ones he had bought just a couple of hours earlier in the changing room, and walked out.
The next shop he went into sold cell phones. He’d destroyed the SIM card from the brick handset in case it could be used to locate him, but buying a new SIM card required identification. Or, he discovered, part of the large wad of Turkish liras left over from his shopping spree in the electronics store. He fitted the SIM card into the brick and texted Aneeka to let her know how to contact him. Her flight would be leaving soon.
Doing something other than waiting for Farooq to walk into the café and find him made him feel briefly in control, and for a few minutes he walked unconcernedly among the camouflage of crowds of people, looking at the elegant facades of the buildings lining the street. The bookshop tempted him, as did the movie theater, but it felt safer to be in public, among people, with more than one direction in which he could run. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of white sleeve and his legs turned to water before his gaze traveled up the arm to an unfamiliar face.
He sat down on a step leading into a shop. Closed his eyes, forced himself to remember the song playing in the kitchen the day Aneeka joked with him about Asian wedding sites. Chimta and bass guitar, dholak and drums, a man’s voice carrying a song that arose from a place deeper than the currents of history. He drew his knees up to his chest. Just across the street was a narrow road. If he cut down it he would be at the British consulate. Perhaps he should just do it. Why wait for Aneeka, why embroil her in this? He could simply present himself there: I made a mistake. I’m prepared to face trial if I’ve broken laws. Just let me go to London. But he was the terrorist son of a terrorist father. He rested his head on his knees. He didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels.