The Disappeared (5 page)

Memories assemble like children called out of hiding. A man, with Asian looks, standing in the car park under the window. He turns as you wave. The cloth pressed across your face. Justin Fellowes asking if you'll be OK as you jump from the car. You are panicking now. The room is shaking, and there is a distant rumbling, as of an engine. You are suffocating in a box that rocks and trembles. Suddenly it is clear: you are in a ship. You are being taken away from everything you know, locked in an airless cabin from which you will emerge into places where your past, your present, your achievements and identity will have no meaning, the bartered slave of people for whom you are nothing but female meat.

You search the walls for a place of escape. There is a small round porthole at one end of the berth and a door in the wall beside the other. The door is locked, the latch of the porthole screwed fast and painted over with thick white paint. On a hook beside the door your jacket is hanging, and you take it down. In one pocket is a handkerchief, in the other
The Wind in the Willows
. The mobile phone, the wallet and the keys have gone. Your shoes are on the floor beneath the jacket, and you stare at them. They are expensive Goodwear shoes in faun-coloured leather, and you spent half a morning choosing them in Edward Green. You are crying now, tears of frustration and fear. You rattle the handle of the door. You cry out, wordless cries of panic. And then you throw yourself face downwards and sobbing on the berth.

When you look up, your last sob dry and dying in your mouth, it is to see a man standing in the doorway. He is short, Asian, with dark eyes under matted eyelids and a growth of bluish beard around his cheeks. You start up and away from him and try to meet his stare from the end of the bed. He does not smile but stares as though assessing a piece of merchandise. Which is what you now are.

‘Where am I? What is this about?'

Your words are pointless. He mutters something in a language that sounds like Arabic. And then he turns away, shutting and locking the door.

Two minutes later he is back, accompanied now by a taller man, this one clean-shaven, with prominent cheek-bones, a mop of stringy black hair, and one dark eye that looks to the side of you, while the other tries to bore a hole in your skull. You recoil against the wall.

‘Keep away from me,' you say.

He turns to his companion and makes a brief guttural sound that may be a word. The small man comes quickly forward and takes hold of your ankles. You scream and lean forward, beating as hard as you can on his head, until your arms are seized by the taller man and your head is pushed back against the wall.

Then you imagine your mother. She is observing this scene from her place, there in the armchair where she sat when you came in during the school holidays to your little desk in the corner, with its cast iron frame and lid of pitted elm wood. Her look of resignation. Her guilty eyes. Always apologising that there was no father in the house. And now especially, now that you need him. Why did he have to die? ‘I am so sorry,' she says. ‘So sorry it has come to this.' You are spitting now, but the tall man averts his face. How horrible his skin appears, with its gritty streak of incipient beard. His smell is heavy, waxy, waterless, like engine oil. They have pulled you down flat on the bed, and a voice is screaming in you, not your voice, but the voice of your mother, of your mother's mother, of all the women whose flesh has been forcibly prised apart by men.

The tall man has one hand over your mouth, the other around your wrist. You push your head upwards and catch the palm of his hand between your teeth. The taste of his blood in your mouth fills you with disgust. He shouts in pain and anger. Then the palm of his hand comes down between your eyes and you fall back, stunned and helpless. You groan in pain as they undress you. The tall man has wrapped his injured hand in a handkerchief and is unbuttoning your shirt. His companion has removed your knickers and is gripping your ankles, ready to force them apart. Your tears mean nothing to them, they are the way this meat behaves, like the bloody drops on a side of beef. When the tall man releases your wrist you cover your face with both hands.

He pulls your hands away. You understand now. It's your face he wants. He has your arms pinned down, his weight on your stomach. You gather your strength, and with a push of the legs you have thrown the small one from the bed, freeing your ankles. But the tall one has unbuttoned himself, you feel the slime of his sex on your neck and cheek. Your stomach turns, and as the grip is fastened again on your ankles you vomit: a stream of sour liquid spilling over your neck and shirt. The tall man jumps away and runs to wash himself. You are coughing, gasping. The vomit sticks in your mouth, choking you. And the little man stares at your opened legs, his face distorted in a grin. Never before have you hated like this. Both these men must die. The tall one is standing above you, looking down in disgust. Without a sign he swings on his heels and goes out. The small man follows him like a dog.

When the first President Bush ordered the liberation of Kuwait, he halted troops at the Iraqi border, abandoning the city of Basra, which had risen against the tyrant Saddam Hussein, to its fate. The revenge was terrible. In 2003, following the defeat of Saddam, revenge began again. This time the victims were members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party, or of the militia, the Fedayin, through which he had terrorised the people. The forty-year-old Abdul Kassab, an English teacher at al-Mutamaizin High School, believed that it was his duty as a citizen and a Muslim to stay at his post, to teach the ways of enlightenment, and to work for reconciliation and forgiveness among the children of the warring factions. He experienced the shooting, torture and kidnap of friends and neighbours, and he saw the front part of his house smashed at the instigation of a local mullah, leader of a separatist movement among the Shi'ites who had branded Abdul as a traitor.

For Abdul, like the majority of Basrans, was a Shi'ite. But he believed that the Holy Koran was sent to open the path to illumination. It was a gift to all mankind, intended not to divide them but to unite them in the love of their Lord. From his teenage years he had dreamed of an urban oasis devoted to the life of the mind, where a team of devout and civilised scholars would study the works of philosophy, poetry and mysticism from all the great traditions, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, and teach their discoveries to the young in a spirit of reconciliation. They would form a society comparable to the Brethren of Purity, the
ikhwan as-Safa
, who had flourished in Basra ten centuries before. Like the Brethren they would devote themselves to the life of the mind, not surrendering to a specious clarity, but wrapping the deepest truths in the mystical language that turns prose to poetry and poetry to prayer.

Abdul imparted this vision to a small group of friends. Following the Battle of Basra in 2003, in which the British forces took control of the city, the friends met twice a month under Abdul's direction. They read the works of Ibn Sina, the writings of the Brethren, and the poetry of the Persian Sufis. They read popular scientific works in English, some obtained through a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army for whom Abdul worked as an interpreter in the evenings. For a while Abdul believed that he might be able to realise his dream. With the extra money earned from his work as an interpreter he envisaged establishing a private school in one of the older parts of town. He had already earmarked a derelict building by one of the canals. With the help of Colonel Matthews he could perhaps call on funds from a country anxious to appear as the liberator rather than, as it once had been, the imperial master of Iraq.

In Abdul's school the practical and the spiritual would be combined. The pupils would be educated in a spirit of enlightened forgiveness, and scholars would discover the language with which to bring young people back, despite all the horrible temptations that had flooded in – he did not deny it – with the Western freedoms previously reserved for Saddam and his cronies, to the true life of the mind. He looked forward to the day when his sons, Farid and Hazim, would study the Holy Koran, the Christian Gospels, the works of Plato and the poetry of Ferdowsi and Shakespeare, side by side with Sunnites, Christians – and yes, if any still remained in Basra, Jews too – in a school whose atmosphere, curriculum and calendar would be settled by Abdul and his brotherhood.

Of course, it was not to be. In the
Mathwani
Rumi tells us that true Sufism means sudden joy not only in the face of disappointment but in the very
fact
of it. A beautiful precept, but not one that Abdul could live up to when called out one evening by one of his brotherhood and warned that he was about to be shot as a collaborator. In the five available minutes he roused his sick wife Jamila and their sons, bustled them down the alleyway behind the house to the Shatt al-Arab, where the little ferryboats were tied to a jetty, paid the exorbitant fee that the ferryman demanded, and set off downstream towards the Royal Marines' base below the city. As the flames from their house lit the night sky above the Abu Al Khasib suburb the family wept and clung to each other, knowing that only a thin thread reached in their direction from the future, and that they must grasp that thread or die.

And by a miracle they grasped it. Thanks to his official pass Abdul was allowed to usher his family into the presence of Lieutenant-Colonel Matthews. And because the Colonel had been touched in a previously unacknowledged part of his being by Abdul's gentle nature, he used his influence to send the family to England, where they were granted asylum and given temporary housing in a Northern city.

By the time all this had been accomplished Jamila had succumbed to heart disease and Abdul was a widower, living with his two boys on the fifth floor of Block B, Angel Towers, and working as an usher in a city-centre car-park. He had not lost his faith in the betterment of mankind, and he communicated it to his two sons, who lived for their father and trusted his vision. The fifteen-year-old Farid was beginning to take an interest in the Sufi poets and the three would often sit together in the evenings, preferring to read aloud in Arabic or English, rather than to watch television, whose content Abdul by and large deplored.

Apart from his father there were two people whom Farid came to adore. On the eighth floor of Block A lived the members of an Afghan family, whom Abdul regarded with the deepest suspicion, forbidding his boys to have anything to do with them. For the motherless Farid, however, experiencing the first yearnings of puberty and caught in the web of poetry that his father spun each evening, the sight of Muhibbah Shahin was a shock that he felt in the very core of his being.

It was not the perfect beauty of her features only that impressed him; nor was it her way of carrying herself, aloof and untainted, like a visiting angel among the fallen hosts. Muhibbah Shahin was the image of purity – the lost and cherished purity extolled ten centuries ago by the Brethren, and available now only in these fleeting visions, miraculously incarnate in human form.

Of course it was impossible to speak to her. And it was absurd for a fifteen-year-old boy to linger in the foyer of Block A in order to raise his eyes to the passing form of a girl four years his senior, only to lower them instantly with a blush that set his whole body aflame. But that was what he did each morning before school and each evening on his return. And in his bedroom at home, shutting his ears to the thump of disco music from the flat next door, he would compose poems in Arabic and English, in which this girl shone a lamp in the surrounding darkness, turning her mystical beauty on her humble adorer, and permitting him to enter into the bower of her love, there to lie beside her on a bank of flowers. He lifted the intoxicating images from Hafiz and Khayyam, and cast them over her like confetti. And he felt that his poems went a small way towards uniting him with this girl who was, in ways that he could not quite define, to be his redeemer.

He discovered her name when one of her brothers called out to her. He learned from the sixth-formers that she had been at St Catherine's Academy but that her parents had taken her away. He learned from one of the Iraqi Sunnites who attended the Whinmoore mosque that her family had arranged for her to marry someone in Waziristan. And when she disappeared from the Angel Towers he learned from the same source that she had run away from home, that she had shamed the Afghan community and that she would have to be killed.

For a month he lived in confusion, oscillating between the delightful vision of himself coming to her rescue, fighting her captors, sustaining wounds to the healing of which she devoted the life of freedom that he had won for her, and the desolating vision of Muhibbah Shahin bound, gagged, dragged to a secret place, there to be humiliated, violated and stabbed. He was called back to the terrible early years in Basra, the cries and screams, the daily emergencies, from which they had miraculously escaped, but which were always there in his memories and nightmares, calling out to him that he could not ignore them for long.

Then, wandering sadly in the city centre one day, he caught sight of her behind the counter in Amanda's Fashion Boutique, and his heart was put at rest. She was safe, free, protected by this secure and easy-going society where after all nothing really bad could happen, and he could go back in peace to his unending dream of her. After this discovery he would take every opportunity to pass by the Boutique, and although he did not enter it – for it was an ostentatiously feminine shop, where a young Muslim boy could not be seen without shame – he took comfort to see that she looked askance at her customers with the same cold unconcern that had characterised her way of entering and leaving the Angel Towers. She was protected by English society, but also not a part of it – removed in a heavenly sphere of her own, and one that only he could approach, through the poetry that he devoted to her name.