It was as though fate was always one step ahead of him. Something or other with a fiendish temperament threw a monkey wrench in the works. Every time they were close to getting the girls out, something happened to thwart their plans. But if whatever it was, was of this world, he did not know.
“I’m in the hospital, in Dar al-Aisa, near Aleppo,” Osman wrote one day. “There was an air strike. I was almost killed. My back is full of shrapnel.”
Two MiG fighters had roared above him. As if the highways in heaven came crashing down, he described the noise. These were the aircraft, purchased by Assad from the Russians, that had wrought the most destruction on Syria.
“I thought my number was up.”
Sadiq stayed cool. “When are you going to get around to kidnapping those bloody girls?” he inquired.
Osman responded by sending him a picture from his hospital window of the Euphrates flowing gently past. “I’m still bedridden, surviving on painkillers. My neighbor committed suicide yesterday. Threw himself down his well.”
“My younger daughter is soon in her ninth month. The elder in her seventh.”
Sara had told him about Ayan also being pregnant.
“The lads hinted at it, that she was expecting. With regard to the younger one, her husband is around her the whole time. But I’ve got wind of plans to send the husbands to the front. They’ll be gone for a few weeks,” Osman wrote from his sickbed. “Rumor has it the Americans are planning to bomb Atmeh, everyone has evacuated their headquarters. My Facebook account has been shut down btw. I have lost all my contacts. According to the message from the Facebook administrator because of ‘support of a terror organization, incitement to violence, and posting pictures containing violent images.’”
On May 8, Sadiq wrote: “I’m forty today. I love my mother. She’s the one I’m thinking about today.”
“The IS men have still not left the house,” Osman wrote three days later. “My boys are bored of hanging around and waiting. The girls are lucky, their soldier husbands are always around. These guys never go anywhere, what is it they actually do? The latest from Raqqa is there’s a lot of internal squabbling in IS. Quite a few desertions. I think the situation will soon turn bloody, the tools are being put away and the weapons taken out.”
“Due date soon, this is our last chance!” Sadiq pestered.
Two nights later, Sadiq came home from the miserly spring, placed his phone on the living room table, sat down on the sofa, and stared at it. It was close to midnight. He picked it up and checked his messages and e-mail. Nothing new. He put it back down, took it up, and tapped on the messages from Leila. He wanted to write to her, even though she had stopped writing, stopped responding.
“It’s Dad. I’m worried about both of you.”
Not a peep, as usual.
The house, on the other hand, made sounds. The refrigerator hummed, the stovetop emitted clicks now and again, the washing machine could suddenly gurgle, and the dishwasher swished, sounds he had never thought about before, but now, on his own, it was as though the bare apartment was trying to say something.
He sent another text.
“Salam aleikum. Have you given birth?”
Secondary school students were out celebrating the approaching end of their final semester. Horns from the buses and vans they painted and partied in could be heard. Rain was forecast for later that night and heavy drops were already beating upon the windowpanes. Leila would be eighteen in October. Next year she was supposed to be one of those students out enjoying life. He sighed. He was getting to his feet to find something to drink when the screen of the mobile phone lit up.
“Aleikum salam.”
Followed by: “No, not yet.”
Then another peep: “She’s not due for a month.”
Then she logged off.
Sadiq sat stupefied on the sofa. Leila had replied as though they had seen each other just yesterday. She is not due. Did she know it would be a girl, or was she guessing?
Who is my daughter, actually?
This was a question he found himself asking more and more. Who was she? Did he ever really know her? And Ayan, people said they were birds of a feather, he thought he understood her so well. Did he actually know her at all?
He wrote a message to Osman: “My younger daughter, the tall one, called me tonight, in four weeks she is giving birth to a daughter. This is our last chance. We only have a month.”
* * *
Exhausted, Sadiq fell asleep on the sofa in the early hours of the morning. It had been a restless night, spent toing and froing, looking at the internet, and smoking. He did not stir until late in the day. When he woke up, he thought about the Somali twins he had read about online the night before. The girls had called their parents in Bristol to say they had fled from the Islamic State and were in hiding. Their parents had gone to the police, and the British prime minister had appeared on television to say that if they were penitent, they would receive a pardon and face no punishment. The seventeen-year-olds had, however, been tracked down by IS, taken prisoner, and beheaded. Killed because of what they had said to their parents, punished because their parents had gone to the media, slaughtered by IS because that kafir David Cameron had shown support for them. They had been beheaded in the center of Raqqa. In the photograph they had looked so much like his daughters. He could picture it all so clearly, their pleas for mercy, the knife cutting their throats, the screams, before it went quiet. The thought of the blade against a throat made
