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?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, eventually. When they trust you enough you can get a pass if you have a reason.”
“Find a reason. And then go to the British consulate and tell them to give you a passport.”
“Aneeka, I’m the enemy. You know what they do to the enemy. Do you? Do you know? You said you had a plan—please tell me you have a plan.”
“What happened to our father won’t happen to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’m making sure of things here.”
“What does that mean?”
“Explain when I see you. Some things need to be explained face-to-face. But trust me.”
“What are you up to?”
“It’s funny. I thought I was doing something for you. But it’s turned out nice for me. Remember that when I explain it to you, okay?”
“Oh god, what? You shagging the head of MI5?”
The joy of teasing her, of finding that voice still lived in his throat.
“Shut up. Come home.”
“Okay.”
||||||||||||||||||
People were beginning to look at the man with the trembling hands sitting on a step while everyone else on ?stiklal Caddesi was moving. He stood, walked a short distance, and crossed into a shop that had books and old maps in its windows. Inside, an old man behind the counter looked up, nodded, looked down again at his newspaper. There was a quiet inside here of the sort other people would call “atmosphere,” but he knew it was all about the way the carpet muffled footsteps, and the closed door blocked out noise from the outside, and the tiny hum of the air conditioner. He walked over to the wooden map display cabinet with four drawers, each containing dozens of old maps. The Ottoman Empire, Konstantinopel, La Turquie en Asie, Asia Minor, Egypt and Carthago, The Dardanelles, The Abbasid Caliphate in the Ninth Century.
He handled the maps with one hand, the other holding tightly to the brick handset. Aneeka should have texted back by now. Something was wrong at her end, he didn’t know what, but when he’d called as his cab sped away from the electronics shop and said he was in Istanbul she sounded first incredulous, then irate. Why didn’t you give me any advance warning? I didn’t want to get your hopes up in case something went wrong. Today of all days! Why, what’s so special about today? Nothing, never mind, it’ll be fine. Today is perfect. Just, it’s all being sorted out right now. It’ll be fine. Which one of us are you trying to convince? What’s going on? Look, I need to call someone, I’ll call you back.