Jihadi (18 page)

She assured the crowd she had many sources. This infidel, she predicted, would soon be returned to America. Heads in the crowd shook. Voices shrieked ‘No!’ Fists shook in time with her chants of
Allahu Akbar
.

Somewhere within the tightening knot of dissatisfied citizens, a man stumbled while attempting to extract himself from the centre of the throng. Word spread that he was a recently unmasked spy eager to return to his American handlers.

In fact, he was a tow-truck driver who had been summoned, via his cell phone, to retrieve a crashed vehicle.

Someone shouted that the spy must be stopped.

Someone else repeated the order.

Soon it rang out everywhere.

Before he was a block away from the embassy gate, some faithful citizen or other pulled the man to the ground, produced a box-cutter and slit his throat.

The crowd, dense and sweaty in the morning heat, withdrew on sudden instinct from the space surrounding the prone body, like the tentacles of a sea anemone retracting when touched by a foreign object. Whoever had severed the jugular withdrew too. The man bled to death in the street, but the heavyset woman kept shouting into her megaphone. Worshippers were advised to wear white when attending the New Imam’s sermon that afternoon. Brothers only, please.

The dimensions of that day’s crowd of worshippers at Abu Islam’s formal Friday sermon became difficult to calculate. All that could be said for certain was that people occupied all available space on all the sidewalks and all the streets for at least four square, downtrodden city blocks in the poorest, grimmest and oldest sector of the city. Maybe there were ten thousand of them – overwhelmingly male in proportion, whatever their number – waiting as the necessary acoustic adjustments were made. They remained in their ranks, rapt and silent, as Abu Islam finally gave his salaam and began outlining the moral obligation to obliterate soldiers and anyone else born in the United States, and not stop doing so until the American military presence in the Islamic Republic was broken.

A few police officers predicted an uprising that afternoon.

When the time came, eighty-five minutes later, the sea of white robes prayed toward Mecca without incident. The worshippers bowed and supplicated in straight lines that intersected disjointedly with the crooked, filthy and ancient streets they occupied. They shone in the harsh sun. They waited for instructions. They did not disperse.

Secular commentators began referring to the white-clad crowd that followed Abu Islam as ‘the great White Beast’.

‘Your Mr. Bush Two,’ the Raisin said, extending a long gaze out the tiny window and over the cityscape, ‘is a Bolshevik and nothing more.’

There was no smoke at the moment. They had reached a compromise: staring at the walls for what turned out to be the better part of a day. The Raisin’s sudden pronouncement suspended itself in midair. Outside, visible from the window, the gathered white crowds issued well-coordinated shouts.

‘How do you reckon that?’ leaning, yellow-smocked Thelonius asked at last, aslant the window. The Raisin looked satisfied, as though tired of the distant noise and glad to have a replacement for it.

‘Two and a half years ago,’ the Raisin answered, not looking at Thelonius, ‘your Mr. Bush Two ordered his armies and his bombers to dismantle this country and overthrow our leader. A bad man. A bloody man. A man to be despised. Many of us were in the streets, shouting for joy, after he was hanged. But the question remained: what, exactly, was to come next? Not the Islamists who had preceded him? Then what?’

Thelonius shrugged and looked away.

‘Your Mr. Bush Two said it was more satellite dishes and more computers and more music and more women naked on the billboards. The young men scale the billboards now and rip off the images, sheet by sheet. They destroy music where they find it. They chant in the streets for the death of your Mr. Bush One and Mr. Bush Two. And, the guard says, for your death.’

At these words, Thelonius felt his insides tighten and go cold. A drumbeat took over his head. The Raisin looked him over, as though assessing a captured insect. There was more noise from the late-afternoon street.

‘I still don’t see how that adds up to Bolshevism,’ Thelonius said, in a careful, even tone.

‘The earliest Bolsheviks comprised a loosely knit gang of thugs,’
the Raisin continued, more than prepared for the challenge. ‘They had convinced themselves the people of Russia would rise up in righteous rage and overthrow their oppressors if only Czar Alexander II were assassinated. One morning, they stationed three men with bombs to follow the Czar as he went to observe a military roll call.

‘As it started to snow, the Czar emerged from his carriage. The first thug threw his bomb. It misfired. The second thug threw his bomb. It blew the Czar’s legs off.

‘The Czar died that night. A third thug had been ready with a third bomb in case the first two failed.

‘But the people of Russia did not do as the thugs believed they would. Even though the serfs were oppressed. Even though there was poverty and abuse of human rights. Even though there was torture of political prisoners. Even though there was oppression and had been oppression for centuries, the people declined to play their role. They did not gather in the streets and demand the abolition of the Czars. They refused to follow the script the thugs had handed them.

‘The Bolsheviks served only their own theory. Not the people.

‘The assassination of the Czar did not ignite any progressive revolution. It left the nation numbed, confused, humiliated, paralyzed. It produced nothing.

‘If you had been there that morning, if you had looked through the falling snow at the carnage outside the Czar’s carriage, you would have seen that third bomber shivering in his boots, clutching his undischarged explosive, imagining himself the agent of history. There is always some idiot Bolshevik in the crowd.

‘Your Mr. Bush Two is such an idiot, such a Bolshevik. He imagines a new kind of society, or thinks he does. But he believes he can impose it by sheer force of will. He imagines history is a script he has written. And yes, there are Bolsheviks out there, in our streets, too, waiting with bombs in their hands.’

The Raisin took a pair of cigarettes from a box labelled Elite Tobacco, then stopped and put them back and said, ‘Sorry. In honour
of our agreement: not until sunset.’ And a smile Thelonius could not manage to return. His hands were trembling.

‘Are they really calling for my death?’

The Raisin listened, nodded, and waited for the sun to set.

The sound of the Raisin mustering the rough consonants of the Koran still set Thelonious’s teeth on edge. He shifted back and forth uneasily on his cot. A few minutes later, the two cigarettes glowed. Then, when they were extinguished on a rough palm, Thelonius heard the Raisin gasping and wrestling onto the bed, and then, finally, he heard the Raisin snoring.

Mike Mazzoni’s incident report noted that a local man, Jamal F–, also known as Jimmy F–, wandered into U.S. munitions storage facility DJL-66 late one night, presumably intoxicated. At the time of the incident, Staff Sergeant Mazzoni, the officer on duty, had issued a clear order for the individual to stop and raise his hands in the air and cease all movement. This order had been issued in the native language. The individual continued movement of a threatening nature. Staff Sergeant Mazzoni repeated his order. The individual made an approach toward Staff Sergeant Mazzoni and intimated in English that he had a firearm. The report stated that he then reached inside his clothing.

At that point, Sergeant Mazzoni discharged his weapon in self-defence.

The concealed firearm had been found in the individual’s clothing. The body had been returned to the family.

After this report was filed, the case was closed.

All of this grass had been soaked in blood.

Mother and Noura were shopping, which left Fatima to deal with the neglected lawn. No trace of the flechette attack was visible now, praise God, a circumstance probably due, at least in part, to the vigorous rainstorm that had cloaked the suburbs yesterday. She was glad it had rained, but the thought that the overgrown tangle beneath her feet had been fed with her sister’s wounds and the wounds of others still sickened her.

She called the number her mother had given her for a gardener, heard an old man answer the phone, introduced herself and asked if he could come in and mow the place immediately. Told that he would be at least three days in arriving (he was now the only landscape man in the district, and his list of outstanding obligations was long), she thanked him, confirmed him for the following weekend and went to the shack out back. There she rummaged around.

When she came out, she had a machete in her hand.

She set to work on the wet grass beneath the spot where she had been told that Wafa had fallen. She worked her way outward in concentric circles. Within forty minutes the portion of the home visible
to the winding road, at least, was presentable again. Not manicured, to be sure. But presentable. Even clean again. Her back ached and there were blisters on two of her fingers, and she had piled a great heap of grass in a corner.

She was glad to see it clean.