Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  In the photo Aylan rests cheek down in the sand, as if napping on his stomach. His shoes are still on, and he wears blue shorts and a red T-shirt. His family had left for Greece from Bodrum in Turkey, a peninsula crowded with resorts that cater to wealthy internationals. A suite with a seafront view goes for around a thousand euros a night. And each night, beneath the wrought iron balustrades of luxury hotel balconies, or just a bit further down the beach, smugglers land their rubber rafts in the soft sand. After paying the same price per head as a night’s stay in Bodrum, Aylan Kurdi and his father, mother, and five-year-old brother left a nearby beach at three a.m. As they rode the channel between Turkey and Greece, so too did the Meltemi winds, which heaved up overhead swells. When Kurdi’s raft threatened to capsize, their smuggler leaped overboard. Aylan’s father tried to pilot the raft. Then it flipped. By the next morning the entire family, except for the father, had drowned.

  Now finished with the smuggler, Abu Hassar pulls up a picture of Aylan on his phone. “This is all Assad’s doing,” he tells me.

  “The boy’s last name was Kurdi,” Abed says to Abu Hassar, as if scolding him. “He was from Kobane.”

  Assad’s forces haven’t been in Kobane in years. The fight there is between the Islamic State and the Kurdish YPG, not the regime. Still, Abu Hassar isn’t altogether wrong: the war would’ve been finished long ago if Assad had stepped down. But Abed isn’t wrong either: the Islamic State has hijacked the war for its own purposes. Then again, with its dreams of an independent Kurdistan, so has the YPG.

  Nobody says anything.

  Our waitress, a teenage Turkish girl, refreshes our glasses of tea. “Çok shukran,” says Abu Hassar, blending the Turkish word for “much” with the Arabic for “thank you.” The waitress nods her head, giving Abu Hassar a sympathetic grin. She heads back toward the kitchen.

  I ask Abu Hassar if he’ll join his brother and sister in Europe. He gingerly sips from his hot glass. “I don’t think so,” he says, and then pulls out his phone to show me a posting on Facebook. It is a photograph of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. Beneath it is a quote in Arabic: We will tell our children that Syrian migrants fled their country to come to Europe although Mecca and Muslim lands were closer to them.

  Since the beginning of the war, wealthy Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have taken zero Syrian refugees, yet the German government has suspended the 1990 Dublin Regulation, which once mandated that refugees seek asylum in the first European country they enter, thus making settlement in countries like Germany, France, or Britain virtually impossible for those heading overland from Syria. With the suspension of the regulation, Angela Merkel has effectively opened up much of Europe to Syria’s refugees, making her a hero among them. Abu Hassar shows me another photograph: it’s a shot of Merkel superimposed on a heart-shaped Syrian flag.

  “Will you go to Europe?” Abu Hassar asks Abed.

  “No,” he says, staring into his tea. His curt answer hides his uncertainty. Abed wants to remain engaged in Syria and what’s left of his revolution. He also wants to start a life, to marry Laetitia, to have children. None of this can happen in his current limbo.

  “Merkel is a start,” says Abu Hassar, “but ultimately justice only comes through Islam.” Then Abu Hassar reaches for my pen. He lays a napkin flat on the table. Like at our last meeting, he begins to draw a map. First, the long northeast-to-southwestern diagonal of the Syrian-Iraqi border, and then extending south to the desert kingdom of Jordan, and west to the Mediterranean coast. He fills in the names in Arabic. As he scrawls out Lebanon, I nod and point just to the south. “Yes, and Israel.”

  Abu Hassar fixes his eyes with mine.

  “Palestine,” he sternly replies, and inks the name onto his map.

  Abed laughs. “Must you always remind him that you’re half-Jewish?”

  Abu Hassar takes his pen and places a heavy dot on the part of the map that is northeastern Syria, not far from the Islamic State’s capital in Ar-Raqqah. He circles the dot and writes a name next to it. “Justice will come in Dabiq.”

  “Where?” I ask.

  “In Dabiq the armies of the West will fight the Islamic armies of the East in a great end-of-days battle. Our armies will be led by the Mahdi. And God will make his judgment.”

  I lean back in my booth. Outside, the cats continue to chase one another, fighting after scraps of food from our café. Some street kids have begun to play tag in an emptied public pool, trapping each other in its corners. When Abu Hassar had delivered his polemics before, about the end of days, about the Mahdi, about judgment, they’d been easier to hear. Perhaps this was because we were in Akçakale, just a few hundred yards from the war, and his appearance conformed to my expectations of a jihadist: his thick beard, his olive-green keffiyeh, his field jacket. Now we are in a modern Turkish city, a European city. His beard is trim. His hair well combed. Dressed as he is, I wouldn’t give him a second look on the street.

  “So Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the Mahdi?” Abed asks.

  “No,” he says. “I told you last time: the Mahdi has yet to come.”

  “When does he come?” I ask.

  “This is uncertain. There is a missing link in this chain of events, one I’m confused about.” Abu Hassar reaches into his pocket. He sets his phone between us on the table and opens up an app; it is some sort of e-Qur’an. After tapping out a quick search, Abu Hassar pulls up a verse from the Kitab al-Fitan, a holy text similar to the Christian Book of Revelations:

  The people of my Household will face calamity, expulsion and exile after I am gone, until some people will come from the east carrying black banners. They will ask for something good but will not be given it. Then they will fight and will be victorious, then they will be given what they wanted, but they will not accept it and will give leadership to a man from my family.

  “The men with the black banners are the Islamic State?” I ask. “And the ‘man from my family’ is the Mahdi?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Abu Hassar. Then he digs around in his phone some more, entering another search. “There is also this text from the Kitab al-Fitan.”

  When you see the black banners, remain where you are and do not move your hands or your feet. Thereafter there shall appear a feeble folk to whom no concern is given. Their hearts will be like fragments of iron. They are the representatives of the State. They will fulfill neither covenant nor agreement. They will invite to the Truth, though they are not from its people. Their names will be honorifics whose ascriptions will be to villages, or places. Their hair will be long like that of women. They shall remain so till they differ among themselves, and then God will bring forth the Truth from whomever He wills.

  “The second one sounds more like the Islamic State,” says Abed.

  Abu Hassar slides his phone back into his pocket. He looks out the café’s window. His westernized appearance seems a contradiction to his dogma. Contradiction is hardwired into the religious texts he quotes. It is hardwired into war too: feeling fear to express courage, forfeiting freedoms to protect them, and, of course, killing for peace.

  And I think Abed senses this too, when he asks, “What will you do?”

  “I am waiting,” he says. “This battle will come. The Islamic State is one link in the chain that will take us closer to the final judgment.”

  “So you would fight in the final judgment?” I ask.

  “If it happens in my lifetime, of course.”

  “Let’s have some food,” interrupts Abed. He waves down our waiter. Among the three of us, Abed speaks the best Turkish. He orders an eclectic mix: chicken schnitzel, a plate of kebab, two bowls of spaghetti. Abu Hassar asks for a Sprite. The two of us order Pepsi.

  “After the final judgment you won’t be able to find a Sprite,” I say.

  Abu Hassar laughs. “You are worried about Dabiq. Don’t worry. If I see you there, I’ll turn
the other way.”

  I fish my phone from my pocket. I do a quick Google search and find a photograph of myself online. It’s from my time in the Marines. I am in Afghanistan, with a thick beard. I am wearing a camouflage field jacket, not dissimilar in style to the one Abu Hassar wore at our last meeting. About twelve of us are in the photo, with rifles slung across our chests, our body armor laden with magazine and grenade pouches. Our helmets and radio microphones hide our faces.

  Abu Hassar tucks his chin as he ponders the photo, seemingly uncertain of what he’s looking at. “This is the army that will meet us?” he asks. I take the phone back and reverse-pinch my fingers across the screen so it zooms in on my face. He leans closer and points. “Oh, yes, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “Would you recognize me at Dabiq?” I ask. “Would I recognize you?”

  Abu Hassar then explains with great precision how one-third of the Christian armies of the West will convert to Islam before the battle and this is how the Eastern armies will triumph, so I shouldn’t worry about whether or not he can recognize me at Dabiq, because all I need to do is convert to Islam and I will be spared.

  “Like Peter Kassig,” I say, referring to the aid worker and former US Army Ranger whom the Islamic State kidnapped and later beheaded, even after he converted and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman.

  “You say Peter Kassig,” he answers. “I say Abu Ghraib. An eye for an eye.”

  Abed has begun to knead his hands together, becoming impatient with our circular arguments. “If you practice an eye for an eye,” he asks us, “do you know what you end up with?”

  Abu Hassar and I stop our debate.

  “You end up with a bunch of cut-out eyes.”

  A muezzin breaks into the first notes of the afternoon call to prayer, scuttling the pigeons that have flocked around a nearby minaret. The sound of flapping wings mingles with the wailing call, and the birds land around our café, mingling with the stray cats. Abu Hassar glances at his watch, leans toward me, and clasps my bicep. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says, and then looks at Abed, as if questioning whether he’ll join him in the mosque. Abed stays in his seat.

  The muezzin’s notes seem to stir some conciliatory impulse in Abu Hassar. They stir an opposite impulse in me. The call to prayer reminds me of foot patrols so numerous they blend into a loop. Dusty paths in Iraq or Afghanistan. High cement and mud walls. The perceived threat lurking behind each one. And our interpreter walking alongside me, his steady, whispered translation: “They are announcing our movements. They are calling to the fighters. They are predicting our death.” The wail that calls out to God becomes indistinguishable from the wail that calls out for violence. Both are in a language I can’t understand.

  A Turkish friend of mine, a columnist whose journalist father was assassinated by a car bomb when he was a teenager, recounted to me a recent trip to Serbia for the twenty-year commemoration of the Srebrenica Massacre, a genocide of eight thousand Bosniak Muslims at the hands of Christian paramilitaries. Despite the passage of time, the war’s tensions still simmered in this community. The authorities continued to exhume bodies from newly discovered mass graves—136 fresh corpses during my friend’s visit—while international war crimes tribunals created equal measures of reconciliation and resentment. When not covering the commemoration, he found himself lingering in any neighborhood with a mosque nearby. Although he’s not a particularly devout Muslim, upon returning to Istanbul he described the relief of driving home from the airport toward a horizon of minarets. When I told him how the sight of a minaret or the sound of a muezzin elicits in me a different response entirely, he shrugged. “I guess we would call this phenomena ‘the relativity of minarets.’”

  After just a few minutes, Abu Hassar slides back into the booth next to Abed. He begins to fiddle with his fork, refreshed by a new energy. I notice some markings on his forearm. Bundled against the cold at our last meeting, I hadn’t seen what seems to be a tattoo. When I ask him what it is, he turns his forearm toward me. The script is shamrock green, cut without curves, straight as the razor that likely incised these marks. There are three letters: N O R.

  Light.

  Abu Hassar lifts a sleeve, where the letters appear again on his bicep in Arabic: .

  “She is my beloved, though not my wife.”

  They met when he was seventeen and she was a bit younger. Her parents didn’t approve of him. When I ask why, he smiles. “Maybe it was because I got her name tattooed on my arm?” Her parents’ position forced them to meet secretly. If Abu Hassar wanted to speak to or see her, Nor’s best friend would call her and hand Abu Hassar the phone. Eventually Nor’s parents found their daughter a more suitable match. They had no future as a couple, so Abu Hassar told her to marry. Her new husband then moved them to Saudi Arabia, where Nor still lives.

  “It must have been difficult when her whole family rejected you,” I say.

  “Not her whole family,” Abu Hassar tells me. “Her brother and I fought alongside one another in Iraq. He was a great commander, but Assad’s regime arrested him at the same time they arrested me, and when I was released he wasn’t. No one has heard from him in eight years. I like to think that he’s alive.” Abu Hassar glances down, considering his arm and Nor’s name inked into it. “Fighting in Iraq was difficult. Prison was difficult. Nothing was as difficult as losing Nor. She is still my beloved.”

  I ask if he’s spoken with her since.

  “No,” he says, “it wouldn’t be appropriate. My wife wouldn’t approve. She knows about Nor and me.”

  “You told her?” I ask.

  “I didn’t have to. My wife was the one who used to call her on my behalf. She was Nor’s best friend.”

  Abu Hassar asks me if a Western woman would understand such a thing. Before I can answer, Abed does. “Western women are different,” he says. Then he points at me. “Last night, I saw him change his son’s diaper.” Abu Hassar begins laughing. Abed adds, “It was a disaster.” And I’m uncertain whether he is referring to my diaper-changing skills or to the Western societal conventions that have made me a diaper changer.

  “I don’t imagine I’ll see either of you in Europe then.”

  Abu Hassar stops laughing. “I want a future for my children,” he says, “but I worry about what is written in the book, about what is coming.” When I ask whether he can believe in the book without believing in the apocalypse, he says, “A Muslim must adhere to each of Islam’s Five Pillars: belief in Allah, in His Messenger, in His Book, the Day of Judgment, and your fate. I must surrender to my fate.”

  I stop asking about Europe.

  Abed snaps a remark in Arabic. Abu Hassar answers in a long stream, which is only interrupted when Abed raises his hand to still him. “I am arguing that a secular state does more to protect Islam than a religious one.” Before Abed can finish, Abu Hassar interrupts him again, as if concerned that he’ll get some upper hand in their debate by extolling his points to me in English. They continue, becoming a bit breathless. Abed throws a finger at Abu Hassar. “He thinks there has never been a truly Islamic state.”

  Their disagreement eases into a more sustainable rhythm. They lean toward one another, as close as a couple wrapped in the same blanket. Outside, the cats continue their hunt for too few scraps of food. The children have finished their game of tag, and my eyes search the corners of the park for them but find no one. In the café the backgammon counters smack against the boards and the day’s newspaper pages are spread across the tables. The old men play and argue with the brims of their hats pulled low, as if to hide their faces, leaning toward one another over their game boards. An old, tired calico with scars cut into his tufts of fur lopes across the park. Fearlessly, he leaps next to me in the booth. He stretches out, arching his back and extending his claws, which he then retracts as he tucks his paws under his soft belly. Shutting his eyes, he rests in a wide break of sunlight alon
gside my leg. I pet his back.

  Abed, Abu Hassar, the old men—from them a new sound arises. All of their political arguments, their arguments about war, about religion, slowly blend together. And then, like a thousand discords ascending into a single keynote, they merge. The effect is ventriloquism, one strange voice without a source.

  A SWISS WEDDING

  NEUCHTEL

  The snow from last winter still clings to certain peaks. Not necessarily the highest ones, but the cold peaks that face the wind and see less of the sun. The bare slate ridges below will remain exposed for a few weeks more. The valley is green, though autumn edges the leafed maples and oaks. Wired fences parcel neat geometries out of the farm country. Bovine herds chew their cud and drink from troughs of alpine melt drawn from Lake Neuchâtel. Everything slopes toward the lake: the peaks, the ridges, the fields, and the town of Bevaix, which clings to the banks. Tomorrow Abed and Laetitia will marry in its abbey, the Abbaye de Bevaix.

  I arrive late, at around eight p.m., though the sun is still up. I eat dinner in the inn where I am staying. There is no one to bump into at the restaurant, no out-of-town guests. Laetitia’s family and friends mostly live in the surrounding area—Lausanne and Geneva. The week before the wedding, Abed calls me to make sure I am still coming. When I assure him that I am, he asks if I will stand as his witness. Flattered, I accept, but then realize he has nobody else to ask. With his family trapped in Damascus, I represent the entirety of the groom’s party.