A voice from the outdoor table, raised, spoke excitedly of “the meeting point of Asia and Europe.” Such outmoded concepts, why did people still think they meant anything? The language of violence, spoken by the powerful of all nations, erased the distinctions beneath the surface. Two girls walked past, laughing, uninhibited. The sound—continuing on, burrowing down from the girls’ throats to their bellies—was more remarkable than bracelets or wrists. Perhaps surface was all there was to fight for. He remembered how it felt to float on a surface of freedom and safety, to feel himself buoyed up by it, and longing tugged at his heart.
He looked down at his book again. The words on the page, dimly lit by the overhead lamp, made no sense. Leave Nizam Caddesi to head down to the shore via Hamlac? Soka?? and eventually you will come to Leon Trotsky’s house, standing ruined in its wild garden. How was it possible, this invitation to a world in which you might spend an afternoon meandering toward a shore, stopping at a ruined house in which someone important once lived. No, not an invitation; the words assumed you already were of that world: you will come to Leon Trotsky’s house. That promise, that certainty. Had there ever been a time when he could have slipped into such a life—a cheap flight, a youth hostel? Why not? In the company of Aneeka he could have left Nizam Caddesi to head down to the shore. But no, Isma would have stopped it. I gave up my life to work in a dry-cleaning store and put food on this table; now it’s your turn. If you can’t get yourself a scholarship, at least pay some bills. The depth of his homesickness announced itself with the realization that he was looking forward to sparring with Isma in the familiar, inconsequential way. If they allowed him back, that is, instead of handing him over to their allies in a prison somewhere outside the law. Perhaps they were better at keeping people alive now; or perhaps life and death weren’t outcomes of any interest. They cared only about information, of which he had too little for anyone to believe he didn’t have more. Or perhaps they cared only about inflicting pain. The one thing that the violent respect is more violence, Farooq had said last autumn, in those weeks when every word that tripped off his lips was wisdom and beauty. He pressed the soles of his feet into the carpet. Stillness—external stillness—was one of Farooq’s lessons too.
Just when he felt he would have to scream to relieve the pressure in his chest, there was Aneeka, lighting up the screen of the phone:
HAVE PASSPORT AND TICKET. FLIGHT IN THREE HOURS. RUSHING TO AIRPORT.
Turn off your CAPS LOCK, Shouty.
DON’T THINK YOU CAN START BOSSING ME AROUND, IDIOT.
Love you too.
Until soon, Senti.
Until soon, Mental.
He ordered a coffee, some bread. Perhaps when she arrived there’d be time to go look for the ruined house in the wild garden. A bearded, broad-shouldered man appeared in the doorway, his shadow extending deep into the café. Someone asking the waiter for directions. There were houses and gardens enough in London. The British consulate, the airport: that was all he wanted to see of Istanbul. Tomorrow at this time he’d be back in Preston Road. Inshallah.
His phone buzzed again, making him smile. Aneeka the Anxious. He raised himself off the seat, pulled the phone out of his back pocket, read:
You’re a dead man, my little warrior.
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The man knelt in the sand, motionless except for the movement of his lips.
“Find something to gag him with,” said Abu Raees, the head of the Raqqa sound studio. “We don’t want that interference.”
Parvaiz ran back to the SUV in which he and Abu Raees had only minutes ago driven up to this scene out of a movie. Blue winter sky, a day so still not a single speck of sand moved in the desert landscape, no sign of life other than the kneeling man and the executioner sitting a few feet away, turning his sword this way and that so it caught the sun and became a dancing beam of light. Parvaiz opened the passenger door of the SUV and ducked inside. Hidden from view, he rested his head against the leather interior, tried to stop the shaking of his hands that had started the moment they stepped out of the SUV and he understood what was going to happen.
It was late March. He had survived the tedium and affront of Shariah classes, in which he learned that everyone he loved was either an infidel or an apostate, and that both categories deserved to die, and that it was against Allah’s will to wear T-shirts with slogans on them, or to give anyone the wrong directions, or to allow your women to sit down in public. He had survived military training, during which he learned that fear can drive your body to impossible feats, and that the men of his father’s generation who fought jihad in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, all went home to their families for the winter months. That piece of information had made him blubber into his pillow at night, not because it made him understand that his father had never loved him (though he did understand that) but because he finally saw that he was his father’s son in his abandonment of a family who had always deserved better than him. He had survived all that, and even though he knew by then the nature of the joyless, heartless, unforgiving hellhole for which he’d left his life, he believed he had survived the worst. The media wing had accepted him, trained him (and he had found pleasure in the learning), and now he had a position at the Raqqa sound studio and had taken the Scotsman’s place in the villa (the marriage bureau had found him a wife, but the American’s French girl had backed out of coming—the only piece of news that had actually made Parvaiz feel happy in the last three months). In his two weeks at the sound studio he’d been assigned mainly low-level tasks—editing distortions out of speeches, cataloging Abu Raees’s haphazard sound files—but today Abu Raees, a man who was known to prefer working alone, had asked him to come along and help set up an important field recording. He had felt proud, even though after Farooq—whom he hadn’t seen since that first day in Raqqa—he’d learned to mistrust his need for an approving father figure.
He heard Abu Raees calling the name he’d learned to answer to, and pulled a cloth out of the glove compartment. The sand shifted beneath his feet as he trudged back, hands fisted in pockets. The executioner lifted his blade, brought it down onto the kneeling man’s neck. Parvaiz bent over, stomach emptying. When he straightened, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, the executioner was lifting the blade again, bringing it down to within a few inches of the man’s neck again. Abu Raees, headphones on, was checking the DAT levels. The executioner pointed off to the side and Abu Raees walked in the direction he was gesturing, just a few feet away. They were anticipating the trajectory of the man’s head when it left his shoulders. Working out where to place the mics.
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.