Kamila Shamsie: Home Fire

When the door closed behind Suarez, Isma Pasha said, “Eamonn has your sense of humor.”

“He’s funnier.”

“Yes.”

He took his phone out of his pocket, texted James: Find out if my son’s used his passport in the last few days. Discreetly.

He folded his arms, leaned back. He heard a tiny sigh from Isma Pasha and tilted his head forward to see her replicating his posture, the fridge her headrest. Curious woman. She was quite clearly besotted with Eamonn, but that seemed to make no difference to her devotion to her sister.

“Why sociology?” he said. He shouldn’t have opened the wine — it would only make Terry angrier. There was never anything to be gained from pettiness.

“I wanted to understand why the world is so unfair.”

“Shouldn’t your God give you those answers?” he said, surprised by the slight teasing of his own tone.

“Our God did, in a roundabout way.”

“How’s that?” he said. She was pretty when her face was at rest, wiped clean of the encroachment of anxiety.

“For starters, He created Marx.”

“So you have a sense of humor too.”

“Only assuming I meant that to be a joke.” She looked directly at him, and something passed between them — it wasn’t about sex, but something that felt more dangerous. She was familiar to him, a reminder of a world he’d lost.

He flexed his shoulders, trying to loosen them, looked at the microwave clock, wondered how it was still today. “You must have seen what was happening to your brother. Why didn’t you say something? How do I get people like you to say something when it’s still early enough to act?”

“We saw something was happening, my sister and I. We thought it was some kind of secret affair, his first time in love. In a way, it was. What else explains a person being turned inside out in the space of just a few weeks? Did you see what was happening with your son?”

He could feel the muscles of his face contract. “Let me tell you this: If it turns out you’re right, and I’m wrong. If there is an Almighty and He sends His angel Jibreel to lift up your brother — and your sister — in his arms and fly them back to London on his wings of fire, I will not let him enter. Do you understand? Not Jibreel himself.”

“A pair of nineteen-year-olds, one of them dead,” was all she said.

The quietness of her tone made his rhetoric of angels and wings of fire — the language of his parents — sound exactly as hysterical as it had been. He touched his tongue to his incisor to help him formulate a response that would decimate both Isma Pasha and his own momentary lapse, but was distracted by James calling. He answered the call, said “Yes” and “Thank you.” Hanging up, he poured the contents of his wineglass back into the bottle without wasting a drop. He’d need a clear head in the morning.

“Will you allow me to leave tomorrow?” she said.

“You won’t matter tomorrow. Do what you want.”

He left the kitchen, headed down to the basement. Along the way he passed a console table with a smiling picture of Eamonn. He picked it up and kissed his son’s cheek. My beautiful boy. One final lingering moment in which he allowed himself the luxury of being a father to a son — a son who was moving in the opposite direction of home, burning bridges in his wake, a trail of fire in the sky.

KARAMAT NEVER REMEMBERED the tiniest shred of his dreams, so when he was awakened in the middle of the night his first thought was that it must have been some unwanted presence making his heart race so fast it woke the rest of him up. But the silence of the spare bedroom in the basement was so complete it was obvious nothing had disturbed it. The sliding glass door with its rolled-up blinds looked onto a light well composed of a glass platform overhead and carefully angled mirrors that were reflecting a confusing, cold light into the bedroom. In his pajamas he walked out into the light well. The moon was full and low overhead. He lay down on the wooden bench built into the wall at the insistence of his heat-seeking boy, who used this space as a sunroom. But now it was cold — the light cold, his skin cold, the emptiness cold. He stood up on the bench, on the tips of his toes, pressed his palm flat against the glass platform. A subterranean creature reaching for the moon. He shuddered, felt a terrible loneliness. “Terry,” he said, in the way that as a child he had mouthed prayers to ward off the darkness of the world.

A short while later he was climbing into bed with his wife, traversing the sheets to fit himself to her as she lay on her side. He hiked up her silk nightdress so he could rest his hand on the warmth of her inner thigh, a place he particularly loved, heard her breathing change to tell him she was near enough waking to know he was there. “Let me stay, jaan,” he whispered. She relented, as she almost always did when he used that tone of need, shifting against him, a minor adjustment that increased their points of contact. Her foot pressing against his. Tomorrow he would have to tell her that Eamonn had gone to Karachi to prove to his father he had a spine. He inhaled the scent of his wife, slid his hand up to the source of her heat. After tonight, who knew when she’d allow him to do this again? He touched his mouth to Terry’s bare shoulder, rolled away, and got out of bed, ignoring her muffled noise of protest. Too distracting. He needed to keep his mind clear.

He went back to sleep in the basement, and when he woke there really was an unwanted presence in the room, and it was James, a mug of coffee in his hand. Karamat sat up. It wasn’t yet light outside.

“Eamonn’s landed?” he said.

“Just boarded the connecting flight,” James said, handing Karamat the coffee. “Someone recognized him at the boarding gate and tweeted a picture, so the media will probably get it soon. Have you spoken to the ambassador yet?”

“About what?”

“I thought you might have asked the Pakistanis to put him on a plane back home when he arrives.”

“Would I do that if he weren’t my son?” He wondered if Eamonn was counting on this — the father watching over him, not allowing things to go too far.

“With respect, sir, he is your son.”

“With respect, James, he’s a British national who made a choice and has to face the consequences. As any other British national would.”

“There’s something else the media will get soon. It went online just a few minutes ago.” The little folder James was carrying under his arm turned out to be his tablet. He proffered it to Karamat, who shook his head and got out of bed, reaching for his dressing gown. A man couldn’t be prone in his pajamas when something important happened. James followed him into his office, and although there was a desktop computer with a large monitor he set up his tablet on a stand on Karamat’s desk.

“So bad I shouldn’t look at it in large scale?” Karamat said, and James didn’t meet his eye.

In that way the mind has of focusing on trivial details to avoid the enormity of what it has to bear, Karamat spent the first seconds of the video feeling irritated that his son hadn’t sat down with a journalist but had decided instead to speak directly to a camera and upload the whole thing to a website. It was the kind of choice that wanted to come across as honest and direct but was really just controlling. Or lazy.