Kamila Shamsie - Home Fire

“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 İstiklal 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.

But when she called back a few minutes later she was anxious, didn’t directly answer his question about whether she’d arranged whatever she was trying to arrange. He’d said perhaps he’d be safest returning to Farooq, maybe trying this again some other time. No, just go to the consulate. I can’t. I’m scared of what they’ll do to me. No, wait, give me five minutes, I’ll call you back. No — if I’m going back I have to go back now, before he realizes I’ve run away. No, no, no. Don’t. I’ll come to you. I’ll get the next flight. Just find someplace he won’t find you, and stay there until I arrive. We’ll go to the consulate together. And all he could think was at least that way he’d see her. Whatever they did to him once he arrived at the consulate, at least he would see her first. He could bear anything else, as long as he saw her first.

A little space of clarity opened up in his brain. Of course they wouldn’t allow her to board a flight to the very place from which her twin had disappeared into the world of the enemy. She was probably still arguing the point, refusing to leave the airport until they gave her a boarding pass. Isma’s voice in his head calling him selfish, irresponsible, and she was right.

He wrote to her: You don’t need to come here and hold my hand. It’ll be ok. I’m going to the consulate now. Will be home soon — biryani when I get there? Page 131 of the recipe book.

He pressed send, his hands steady.

It was Farooq, in the end, who was his means of escape. He turned up at the villa-cum-studio one afternoon, catching Parvaiz in a headlock as he stepped off the prayer mat in the covered veranda at the end of Zuhr prayers, and kissing him hard on the temple.

“My little warrior’s grown up,” he said. “Do you get a lunch break?”

Abu Raees, who had been praying alongside Parvaiz, tapped Farooq on the arm. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a fighter,” Farooq said, moving his shoulders back, his chest forward in a way Parvaiz had once thought of as impressive and now saw as ridiculous. “And I’m his sponsor.”

Abu Raees looked as uninterested in this as he did in all conversations suggesting any of his employees had a life beyond the studio. “Early for lunch,” was all he said.

“I’m driving out soon,” Farooq said, with a tone of self-importance. “Picking up new recruits in Istanbul tomorrow.” Glancing at Parvaiz, he said, “The cousins are getting good at it.”

Parvaiz forced his face into a look of appreciation. A few weeks earlier, during a dinner of kababs at a restaurant overlooking the Euphrates, the Scotsman confirmed what Parvaiz already half knew: when they’d met, Farooq had been in London to train his cousins as recruiters. Parvaiz had appeared at just the right time to serve as guinea pig. The Scotsman hadn’t really said “guinea pig.” The word “pig” was too haram to pass his lips. Instead, he’d found some other way of expressing it that made Parvaiz out to be an instrument of Allah’s will. From Farooq’s manner now it seemed this was a line Parvaiz was expected to have taken too. Parvaiz imagined running a sword through Farooq’s throat, hearing the gurgle of blood.

“Take him with you,” Abu Raees said, jerking a thumb at Parvaiz. “I need some equipment for the studio.”

“If you can organize a pass before I leave,” Farooq said doubtfully, looking at his watch.

“Of course I can,” Abu Raees said.

That easy.

He stood on the pavement of Meşrutiyet Caddesi, looking at the brick wall with black spikes rising from it that allowed only a partial glimpse of the facade of the consulate. But the view of the red, white, and blue flag that fluttered from the roof, cheerful in all its colors, was uninterrupted. Mo Farah at the Olympics, Aunty Naseem’s commemorative cake tin from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

London. Home.

It was not a possibility her mind knew how to contain. Everyone else in the world, yes. Everyone else in the world, inescapably. Some in stages: their grandfather, for weeks half paralyzed, unable to speak, even his breath unfamiliar. Some in a thunderclap: their mother, dropping dead on the floor of the travel agency where she worked, leaving behind the morning’s teacup with her lipstick on the rim, treasured until the day one of the twins stood up in a rage and swung the cup by its handle, smashing their mother’s mouth (Aneeka thought it was her; Parvaiz insisted it was him). Some in a sleight of hand: their grandmother, awaiting the test results that they had already decided would be presented as a death sentence, crossing the road as a drunk driver took a turn too fast; the doctor called two weeks later with the good news that the tumor was benign. Some as abstraction: their father, never a living presence in their life, dead for years before they knew to attach that word to him. Everyone died, everyone but the twins, who looked at each other to understand their own grief.