Home Fire(47)

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The MiG dropped its payload close enough to rattle the windows and the plates in the studio’s communal lunch room.

“Go,” Abu Raees said. “Hurry. Take this.” He pulled the Zoom H2 out of his pocket, but Parvaiz was already on his feet, reaching into his own pocket to demonstrate he hadn’t forgotten the most basic lesson: always have a portable recorder on you. “Good! Now go.”

He drove in the direction of the plume of smoke, one hand pressing the horn to move other vehicles out of the way. Before he reached the place where the smoke was densest—a market—he slowed, switched off the air-conditioning, and rolled down the windows to let in the blast of hot May air and the sounds of the city. Across Raqqa, the roar of power generators provided an aural map of where the members of the State lived and worked, but he was too accustomed to the inequality between the locals and those who ruled over them to pay it much attention anymore. Before long he heard a loud, repeated cry that came from a street so narrow he had to park his SUV around the corner and enter on foot. There were men standing on the corner, facing away from the street. All locals, who knew him at a glance by his foreign features, his white robes, as a member of the State. They looked at him, a couple seemed about to speak, but he brushed past them. By now he could make out the word “help” in a woman’s voice.

The narrow street was deserted, even the shops along it empty. Parvaiz ran, able now to see the collapsed section of a wall even though he couldn’t see what was pinned beneath it.

A voice called out sharply. The door opened to a van he’d assumed empty, one he now identified by the writing on its side as belonging to the Hisba, the morality police. The man who emerged—only a little older than Parvaiz—spoke to him first in Arabic and then, seeing he didn’t understand, English.

“She has taken off her face veil. You can’t approach her. We’ve called the women’s brigade.” He was holding his hand against the side of his face so that no inadvertent movement of his eye muscle might cause him to look upon an unveiled woman.

“Please,” she called out. “Please, please help me.” Oh god, a Londoner’s voice. A young voice, maybe his age, Aneeka’s age.

“If we go to her to help, surely that isn’t a greater sin than leaving a sister to suffer?”

“She is being left to suffer because she removed her face veil.”

“She may have needed to do it to breathe properly.”

Could she hear him, he wondered, as he raised his voice? Could she hear the London in him? “Please,” she was still crying out, “please help, it hurts.” And then, jolting his heart, “Mum! Mum, I’m sorry.”

A memory then of arms lifting him up when he fell off the garden shed, a cheek pressed against his. His mother. Or Isma. There was a woman without a face veil just a few feet from him. A woman’s face, the softness of her cheek. She might have bad teeth, a crooked nose, chicken-pox scars, and she would still be the most remarkable, the most dangerous thing in the world.

“Brother, watch yourself.”

There were a great many things he could say right then, and all but one of them would get him killed. “Jazakallah khayr, brother. Thank you for correcting me. And for preserving our sister’s modesty from the gaze of strangers.”

The man took his hand, squeezed it. “Are you married? No? You should be. We will find you a wife. Alhamdullillah.”

“Alhamdulillah,” he replied, disengaging his hand as soon as, but not before, it seemed inoffensive to do so.

“Please don’t go,” she called after him. “Please, brother. Why won’t you help me?”

Oh, to be deaf. Allah, take away my hearing. Take away the memory of that voice.

What was in his face that made the men on the street corner back away, frightened? At nineteen he was terrifying to grown men. He was the State.

He strode onward to the SUV. Once inside he rolled up the windows he’d left open, knowing no one would dare touch what belonged to a man like him. These were the kinds of things he’d learned to take for granted, the small privileges he enjoyed. Whispering a prayer, he logged onto Skype. Her status was DO NOT DISTURB, but that was never meant for him. It would have to be a voice call rather than a video call so that no one might look in through the window and see him talking to an unveiled woman.

“P! Thank god. Oh, thank god.”

Her voice, so long unheard, broke him open. He leaned his forehead on the steering wheel so that no one could see the tears he thought he’d stopped being able to cry.

“What’s happened? Are you in trouble?”

The things you forget. How it feels to hear someone speak to you with love.

“No, I just. I can’t stay here. I can’t do it. They’re taken my passport so I have to but I can’t. I thought if I learned the rules . . . but I can’t. I can’t. I just want to come home.”

He could hear her exhale on the other end, understood that she had been waiting for this admission since he’d left, and that failing to make it had been just another way he’d caused her pain. He started to apologize but she cut him short, her voice taking on the brisk efficiency of the women of his family, which he loved, which he missed, which he should never have left.

“You have to get to Istanbul. Can you do that?”