The Language of Secrets (12 page)

Misbah checked a line in her textbook before answering him. It wasn't a delaying tactic. She was preoccupied by her upcoming exams.

“No, Ruksh has never invited me. And Unionville is so far from here. Plus, when I'm at school, I never leave the campus.” She grinned at her brother. “Just the way you like it.”

“Am I so overprotective, then?”

Misbah squeezed his hand. “Don't worry about it. One of my friends has four older brothers, so I count myself lucky.”

Perhaps not lucky enough. For Misbah's sake, he needed to make his position clear. There was a reasonable chance that unlike Ruksh, Misbah would listen to him.

“If you haven't been to the mosque, and you haven't met Hassan yet, will you hold off for the next little while? You must have heard about Mohsin Dar. I've been asked to investigate his death. Until I can get a handle on what happened to him at Algonquin, it would be better if you stayed away. Safer for you in general—and best if you're not associated with me.”

But Misbah was looking over his shoulder. She squeezed his hand again, but it was too late. Ruksh had followed him to the kitchen. And heard every last word.

“So you've already decided that Hassan is a murderer. That should make for a wonderful introduction. Just stay out of it, Esa. And stay out of my life.”

Khattak found himself out of patience.

“Don't talk nonsense, Ruksh. I can't stay out of it—it's my job. Someone who was at that camp with Mohsin killed him. And whoever that person is, I don't want Misbah in his sights. End of discussion.”

Ruksh brushed past him into the kitchen.

“Your roots are showing,” she said coldly. “Your chauvinist blood is up. If I choose to introduce Misbah to the man I'm planning to marry, that's no concern of yours.”

She was pushing him. And Esa didn't know why.

He stood up, pushed his stool aside with slow, deliberate gestures.

And came to stand within an inch of Ruksh, his green eyes locked on hers.

“This isn't a game, Ruksh, and I don't have time for a power play. Until I know who killed Mohsin Dar—who shot him in the dark, and left him to bleed to death in the woods—I don't want Misbah anywhere near your boyfriend. Or near anyone else at that mosque. Is that clear?”

He took a step back, glad to see that the details of Mohsin's death had shaken Ruksh out of her complacency.

Misbah tugged at his elbow, her face ashen.

“I won't,
bhaiya
, don't worry. I promise you that I won't.”

Ruksh blinked back tears.

“You don't scare me, Esa. No matter what you say.”

He'd had enough. He stooped to kiss Misbah on the forehead.

To Ruksh he said only, “When I'm trying to scare you, you'll know.”

 

11

Rachel slipped in to the small sunroom that led off the mosque's kitchen, another space where the windows were screened instead of open to a commentary of stars and blue sky.

She was beginning to discover that she liked old Unionville. She'd eaten a late lunch at one of the restaurants that crowded Main Street, and found her way to the Old Firehall for a mousse tart. As a gesture of reciprocity, she had brought a box of assorted desserts to the halaqa.

The idea was to make herself as unobtrusive as possible, while discovering any clues that opportunity might present. Despite these silent precautions, she couldn't stop herself from suggesting that the blinds in the sunroom be raised.

Hassan Ashkouri glanced in Rachel's direction. Then he nodded at the older man with the melancholy face and portentous brow—Jamshed Ali, a combination of caretaker and father figure, according to the INSET file.

Eight or nine young men were part of the group, including Dinaase Abdi, Zakaria Aboud, and Sami Dardas. Rachel had been appalled when Khattak had told her that the name “Zakaria” was the Arabic equivalent of Zachary. Her brother had been a lost boy once, just as she imagined these young men to be—lost boys with Jamshed Ali standing in as a father.

They had arranged themselves in a circle on a threadbare Persian carpet, its blue-and-white motifs reminding Rachel of nothing so much as a cabin in winter at Algonquin Park, a silence heavy with starlight and snow.

A wintry light saturated the room, the moon hanging like an earring upon the sky. Hassan Ashkouri seated himself in the center of the moonlight, its cool paleness gilding his features, lending him an aura of mystery.

He followed Rachel's gaze.

“The moon is my beloved.”

And when Rachel looked surprised, he added, “The vanishing moon, the crescent moon, the sheltered moon—the enduring symbol of our poets. A ripple across the twilight.”

Rachel ducked her head. “I don't know a lot about poetry,” she mumbled.

It was a lie. She'd done her undergraduate degree in English literature, and was unfashionably taken up with Tennyson, rather than Ginsberg or Sylvia Plath.

Tennyson had written the line that spoke more to Rachel of her own life than any other.

The tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.

And like the waves of the sea in Tennyson's poem, Rachel had broken against the oncoming tide of grief, believing Zachary lost forever.

But it was true that she knew nothing about Arabic poetry, hadn't read so much as a verse. She didn't think she'd ever seen a translation in a library or bookstore.

Ashkouri held up a brown leather book, its cover tooled in gold.

“Who can tell me what the moon represents?”

Paula, seated beside Rachel on the floor, reached out her arm, bringing it as close to Hassan Ashkouri as possible. Grace shifted away from Paula, a sneer on her face. The movement brought her closer to Dinaase Abdi, who looked away.

Ashkouri placed the book in the center of the circle.

Fazail-e-Amaal,
Rachel read. And the subtitle,
On the Worthiness of Righteous Deeds.

Which sounded nothing like poetry to her.

The vanished moon, the ripple of twilight.

The book was more in the vein of a Sunday school lesson.

Ashkouri tapped the book with his fingers.

“The crescent moon—the red crescent, the green crescent—of course, that's a shorthand any of us would recognize from places as distinct as Somalia or Turkey. But do we understand it as a metaphor for our Prophet and the purity of his message?”

Rachel examined the faces of the others. “Purity” wasn't a word she enjoyed. It was a short stretch from there to “puritanical,” which might have described the glow she saw in Paula Kyriakou's eyes.

How had Paula ended up here? Was she drawn by the message or the man?

Paula had pulsated at the mention of Turkey. But why? According to her INSET file, Paula was a Greek Cypriot; Rachel could hear traces of her accent when she spoke. And if she remembered her geography, the Turkish and Greek peoples of Cyprus were on uneasy terms at best, burdened by the dismal escalations of history.

She must have missed something in Paula's file.

She tried to pay attention, but the halaqa had fallen into more muted channels, the leather book passed around to anyone who was willing to read aloud one of its passages, simple pieties that no one could fault on principle. Rachel wondered if there wasn't almost a socialist element to them—the emphasis on the poor, the notions of individual responsibility.

Rachel listened with her head down, attuned to every nuance of the group: Grace's outright boredom. Paula's hunger for attention. Dinaase Abdi not quite at ease, whispering to Zakaria and Sami. And Hassan and Jamshed, watchful over them all.

What was Ashkouri getting out of this? Why was Grace here? Could Din's unease be attributed to Grace? Paula's infatuation with Ashkouri explained her presence, but Din wasn't singled out by Ashkouri any more than any of the other young men in the group.

And what were they communicating beyond these modest pieties?

When she raised her head again, Ashkouri was staring straight at her.

“You don't find this interesting, Rachel? You're not engaged?”

He was wondering why she had come. A glance at the moon gave her a passable answer.

“I like what you said about the moon as a metaphor. Even if I don't quite understand.” She patted Paula's shoulder. “I guess I'm not that different from Paula or Grace.”

Paula glared at her, shrugging off Rachel's touch. “I'm hardly a novice. And I didn't think the halaqa was open to newcomers.”

Ashkouri ignored her. He pointed at the brown leather book.

“You found that difficult to follow? You must have some schooling in the basics—from Middlefield, if nowhere else.”

When Rachel didn't answer, he adopted a more grandiloquent style.

“Do you know what it is you came here to seek?”

She made a point of looking away. Let him think his bottomless eyes were the source of her discomfiture.

“Friends. Peace. But I thought more—one-on-one, like with the imam.”

“Peace has to come from within,” Ashkouri said.

“Isn't everyone here looking for peace? Especially—you know. You said someone at the mosque had died, one of your friends. I thought we were here to give each other comfort. Isn't that the point of community?”

It was a risk, but something in Rachel's bones told her it was the right risk to take. It was something someone stumbling toward faith might say. She was startled by his reply.

“Do you come from mud and crime, Rachel?”

It was a strange thing for Ashkouri to say. And it made no sense to her. Did it mean anything to the others? She began to wonder if he might be a little unhinged.

Then again, wouldn't he have to be, to be plotting such a catastrophic event?

“One of the great poets to break with the inherited poetical traditions of the past was a man named Adonis. His poetry runs like fire through the veins of the Arab people, a fire that cannot be quenched. When he speaks of mud and crime, he is speaking of our origins. Do we come from mud and crime? Or have mud and crime been inflicted upon us?”

She mentioned Mohsin Dar, he spoke of mud and crime.

“Think of what we have come to as a community, as a nation—this low tide, this farthest point from the sun. And ask yourself, should we not find our way back to the center? Ask what a righteous person would do watching the pain of his people? Ask yourself if you have ever felt the fire of a poet like Adonis.”

He examined his circle of listeners, reading each one of their faces.

“When we try to crawl out from their mud and their crimes, we find ourselves called terrorists.” Hassan shook his head, his dark eyes doleful. “But isn't the murder of Rohingya in Burma terrorism? The Indian army's atrocities in Kashmir—isn't that terrorism? The destruction of Chechnya, the obliteration of Baghdad, the bombardment of Gaza, the murder of children at play on a beach—are these things not terrorism?”

His voice fell into a rhythm, an enchantment in it to beguile the unschooled and the susceptible. Rachel was neither, but there was still something about Ashkouri she found compelling.

“What of the torture and degradation of Muslims in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria? Everywhere, prisons are filled with our captives, our chaste women are raped, while a war is waged against their modesty in France and Belgium and Holland. But that is not terrorism. The mockery of our Prophet, the cursing of our religion, the defaming of our Holy Book—these things are not terrorism. When we rise up in Tunis or Libya or Egypt, when we rose up in Iraq to defend ourselves from their wars, we were the terrorists. How strange are their notions of freedom and democracy.”

He spared a smile for Paula.

“As the citizen of a devastated nation, I can tell you I have felt terrorized. Bombs destroyed my family, my house, my neighborhood, and my city. Bombs from so far away that we couldn't see the enemy, we couldn't imagine his reasons to hate us—we couldn't imagine anything that would justify so much destruction.”

He looked out at the moon.

“The tyrants, the dictators, the allies of the West—aren't these men terrorists? Those of us who aren't taken away to be tortured or killed are refugees in our own countries. Is it wrong to ask who keeps these tyrants in power? Whose governments buy their oil when they cease invading our lands? Whose weapons they use against us? Whose drone strikes kill our children as they make their way to school?” Ashkouri drew a shuddering breath. “Ask yourself these questions. Ask if you would feel terrorized in turn. Then ask if you came from mud and crime, or if mud and crime were inflicted upon you.”

He took a moment to take stock of the impact of his words on his listeners. And then he added a little more, dropping the words into the strained silence.

“The worldly life is temporary, the Hereafter exists for eternity. So ask if you should seek death where you expect to find it.”

With a creeping sense of horror, Rachel realized that she recognized the words. They had been part of the dossier from INSET. A frequent tag on jihadist websites:
Seek death where you expect to find it.
An exhortation from a speech delivered by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, spiritual leader of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, delivered during the month of Ramadan.

“Well? Do you agree or disagree? Do you have anything to share?”

Rachel was surprised when Grace Kaspernak spoke up.

“It was not a crime to love you,” she said, “though they will hang me for it.”

Her heavily painted eyes sought out Dinaase's dark face. He was hunched over his knees, avoiding a connection with Grace. Zakaria looked over at Sami and snickered.

Grace unearthed a crumpled piece of paper from the back pocket of her leggings. She smoothed it out with nervous fingers. Rachel craned her neck to read the words over Grace's shoulder. The poetry described a romance that ended in tragedy. It was signed, “The Rose of Damascus.”