A Good Country

by Laleh Khadivi

  I mean, you are a population under suspicion here, it’s not like we don’t have a right to take a look. For national security.

  The other two also stood up and Rez did not want to take the chance. There were four of them, enough to do whatever they wanted, and he couldn’t stop them. He felt them, behind him, next to him, around him, their thoughts thinking, and their bodies on the verge, and just like the times with his father, he felt his own body, already loose with fear and pain. He held the towel with one hand and grabbed his jeans and board with the other and walked down the beach, and when he was far enough, he turned back to them.

  Rez shouted. You deserve what’s coming. Fuckers.

  He had no idea what he meant, but it got them quiet. The four stood back and didn’t move and Rez stomped through the sand, each step sinking a little deeper than the last, until he was at the parking lot, fire in his belly, through his chest, up his neck and into his head. He put his pants on and checked for his wallet and his phone and pulled his shirt over his head and waited.

  Fatima asked him what was wrong and he said nothing. She asked again and he said, Nothing, just a wipeout. I wiped out, that’s all. And he knew she didn’t buy it, and she patted down her white silk scarf and drove with her eyes straight ahead.

  On the ride inland Rez said nothing, his body hot and his mind flashing. He thought about himself, his face and body and his features and how they said something that he never said. A few other guys with hair on their shoulders and hair on their backs didn’t swim at the pool parties and didn’t take off their shirts in front of girls. He wasn’t like that. Was it his face? What the fuck did those guys know about faces? He knew he had a strong nose, strong eyebrows, features that did not belong to the pale kids. Sophia looked at him after sex once and said, You’re no Ken doll, thank God. And didn’t understand what it meant.

  Can we turn the AC up?

  Fatima moved the buttons without saying anything and he knew that soon his silence would piss her off. He tried to calm down, to think of nothing, to breathe and watch the highway and then the streets and the strip malls and whatever else passed by.

  After an hour he was crazy with heat and got out and locked the car and went into the grocery store attached to the mosque. It was the middle of prayers and the store was empty; the only action came from the television screen hoisted onto the back wall that was playing the English league soccer play-offs, tiny specks running on an impossibly green pitch. Beneath the flatscreen four or five young men stood with their arms crossed and their necks craned upward in fixed ardor. They were a few years older than him and he liked that they chose English league finals over Friday prayers. One of them turned around and walked behind the glass deli cases.

  Welcome, my brother. What can I get for you today?

  My brother. The sound of it landed softly in Rez’s ear and he thought, Am I? How so? I can be your brother. Why not? This same face and body that marked him as unbrother at the beach, at the grocery store, with the assholes at the airport meant brother here. His face cooled first, and then his neck and shoulders and chest, and within seconds he was hungry and thirsty.

  What’s good?

  Our combo—kebab, lavash, hummus—can’t be beat. Lunch special includes a Coke. Or whatever soda you want.

  I’ll take it.

  A cheer came from the guys gathered at the television and Rez and the server both got distracted by the game.

  Unbelievable. We thought for sure they had no chance. Hot sauce?

  Sure.

  The server was tall and lean with cropped hair and a pencil-thin beard that lined his jaw and reminded Rez of the character from Aladdin. The server got to work with the plate as the guys at the end gave each other fist bumps and moved a little to get the blood flowing in their legs again.

  You a fan?

  Yeah. They’re good this year. It’s hard not to get behind them.

  Exactly.

  The server held the plate up and looked at Rez. Rez reached for his wallet and the guy shook his head.

  Not today, it’s on me. Come sit back here, you can see the TV better.

  No. Thanks, but I got it … Let me …

  You are our guest, next time you can pay.

  Rez followed him to the back and the circle of guys looked at Rez for a second and nodded quickly and went back to the game. They wore Adidas tracksuits and Ecko hoodies and flat-brimmed caps and Rez sat at the table off to the side and watched and ate the delicious food and felt his body relax for the first time since the sea. After a little while he started to cheer when they cheered and groan when they groaned and it seemed like he was back with Omid and Arash and everything was fine. When his plate was clean of kebab the server looked over and smiled.

  Good, right?

  Yeah. Good.

  Best in the OC.

  The game ended with Arsenal one, Birmingham zero and the guys seemed pleased and checked their phones and lingered around before disappearing through a doorway in the back of the grocery store. Rez checked his phone too. There was a message from Matthews: How’d it flow this morning. Incredible right? Don’t tell me, it was probably ridiculous … ok tell me. No don’t tell me … aaaaaaah. Matthews was a good guy, it was almost chemically impossible for him not to be a good guy.

  Rez walked around the clean well-stocked store and recognized a lot of the products from his mother’s kitchen and from Fatima’s kitchen. In the pastry section he saw the sweet chickpea cookies in the shape of clovers Fatima served him when she gave him tea. They were good cookies. Weird and crumbly and nutty, but just sweet enough, and he grabbed two boxes to surprise her with. The server was not behind the register and Rez looked to the back of the store at the doorway where the guys had disappeared and he walked toward the sound of their voices laughing and teasing and mixed with a new voice, a British voice young and digital as if from computer speakers.

  All right, lads, all right. I knew Birmingham wouldn’t take it. I knew tonight was not our night. But still, a lucky win by your dear Arsenal. Lucky is all I’ll say.

  The guys had gathered around a laptop that showed a young man in a white prayer cap as he grinned and shook his head.

  Now isn’t it a good thing we are not betting men? Thanks be to Allah for that.

  The guys in the grocery laughed and Rez took a step back from the doorway but kept his eyes on the screen. The face of the kid was not familiar to Rez’s world—dark skin, thick brows, handsome—but it was recognizable to Rez as likable, as a good guy.

  If you keep cheering Birmingham it’s always gonna be like this. And we will brag hard, bro. We will brag so hard, one of the guys told the screen, and the rest nodded their heads and snickered.

  Ok, ok, now, I didn’t call to let you gloat. Ok, sure, gloat, especially since you all look ridiculous, five grown men squeezed around Farouk’s dad’s laptop in that back room. I called because I feel bad for you blokes. It is hard over there right now, I know it. The massacre at the mall was bad business, but got me thinking.

  Don’t do that man. You could hurt yourself. The server joked.

  No seriously. If it’s anything like after the subway bombings here then you are in for it. Bad times to come. The other day I was talking to my imam, just chitchatting about this and that, and I am telling him how hard it is to be a good man in this country. To find a good home, a good wife, a good job. As a black Muslim, you know? Here is my father, in this country thirty years, still on the night shift for the school’s cleaning crew. Boss of the cleaning crew, yes, but still on the night shift. My mum same thing, at home, can’t get a job, and doesn’t complain, says this country has been good to us. Took us in when no one else would. And I am thinking, this is no good country. At best we’re third-class citizens. Every day I ride the Tube, people look at me scared, with fear leaking right out of their eyeballs, and I want to shout, What?!? What do you think I am going to do? So I tell the imam all this, and I tell him I am falling for this girl, good Muslim girl, also fro
m Nigeria, good family. But I don’t want to have a child here, who is going to grow up and be kept down at the same time. The imam is listening and nodding and then he just says this one word to me and my mind starts spinning.

  The guys in the grocery store lean forward and wait, and when the guy on-screen doesn’t say anything, the server eggs him on.

  Ok then, what was it? The word?

  Raqqah.

  What?

  That’s just what I said. But I think I said, Excuse me?—because you’ve got to be polite you know—but I was thinking, What is Raqqah? I thought it was some new kind of prayer, and the imam knows I have no idea and is looking at me like I am an idiot. Then I say ok and he tells me it is a city in Syria, and a civil war is coming and that Raqqah is going to be the new capital, of a new kind of state, a Muslim caliphate. And I am nodding because I kind of understand him and there are these words between us, like Muslim and capital and caliphate but I have no idea what he is talking about. And then the imam looks at me straight on. Yes, brother, Raqqah, the capital of a country with no borders, a country for the believers, for the devout, for the citizens of Allah. And they need men. Men to move there and start their lives. Men and their wives. There is an open invitation to join in. Simply pack your belief in Allah and show up. There will be jobs, a house for you and your family. Schools for your children, hospitals, Islamic law, a good life. And then he leans forward and his bushy eyebrows lift and he goes, You will know always where you stand because you will always stand in the eyes of God. He went on and on and, man, I thought I was gonna fall asleep but I kept listening, to be polite, you know, and then he gave me some sites to check out and some numbers to Skype if I wanted to know more and I did, so I called them and talked to one bloke in Raqqah and then that’s it. He showed me around his apartment, I met his baby, but mostly we talked. He came from Peckham and knew the same life I know and told me, Right away, man, right away you must come here. We are ready for you. The city is not ours yet, we need your help, so come. Come fight and live and thrive in a place where you can be a real man. This caliphate will be a good country, the best country. He was so relaxed. I can’t even explain it.

  A tall guy in an Adidas jacket spoke up.

  Let me get this straight. Syria is on the edge of civil war and you are going to move to a city you’ve never heard of to join an army that was just invented, to make a country that doesn’t exist?

  The face on the screen smiled.

  Tell me Hussein, what else is there? Night shift on team janitor?

  The guys in the room moved listlessly and the server spoke.

  There’s always a lifetime of watching your team have its ass handed to it on a plate.

  The laughs came slowly but with relief and good-byes and the connection was cut. Rez knocked on the door frame and held up the box of cookies and the server jumped quick and walked him up to the register, his movements nervous for the first time, his talk fast, his eyes down.

  Sorry, man, an old friend from London, Khalil. Came here for an exchange year at UCI, prayed here. Incredible footballer. Good guy. That’s going to be eight fifty.

  He sat in the car with windows down, radio off, the cookies on his lap, and listened to the noise of the street and thought about Khalil and Raqqah. Rez had heard the name of the city, and of the mess in Syria, some ugly civil war that no one in America paid attention to, but didn’t absorb it. If Arash were here, he’d know all about it. Rez wondered if Arash was over there, building. What if there really was such a place? A new place, where you could be a child of Muslims, in love with a Muslim girl, a place where he himself could become Muslim and so be accepted, taken in, left alone to live a life, among brothers, every day, every year. A place where he didn’t have to repeat his dad’s shuffle and silence and quiet anger.

  The possibility turned slowly in Rez’s brain. To be Muslim. Why not be Muslim? He already was, sort of. Even before the thoughts formed themselves completely, the idea of it came with a sudden relaxation. He slumped back in the seat and closed his eyes and felt the calm of the decision made ease into his blood. To pray. To believe. To be silent in the audience of an imam. To have rules and guidelines. To know God. He never had, and just the hint of it opened doors and windows in him such that he was no longer hot. To know God. He opened his eyes and watched the streets of Anaheim, the SUVs and nail shops and mothers pushing strollers with two or three kids inside. To know God. He saw the men cross the street, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground. To know God. The sky above blue with wisps of white clouds, an airplane, a faint moon. To know God. Rez felt his muscles let go their clench as he recognized everything before him as part of a larger picture in which he was inconsequential, as meek as the rest. To know God. He felt the power of the change in his limbs before he’d even given it a full thought in his mind. Conversion, the base of chemical sciences, the transformation from one state to another.

  When Fatima came back, her face flush from the devotions, Rez handed her the cookies and she squealed and opened the box and whispered, My favorite, and then took a bite of the crumbly clover-shaped chickpea treat and he watched the powdered sugar cover her lips and her tongue lick the same lips and he thought of other gifts he wanted to give her that might make her squeal and bite and lick her lips.

  30

  Fatima dropped him off. He told his mom he was tired and needed to skip dinner and tried to be tired and slow getting to his room when in truth excitement burned through him like a clean fuel and he wanted to explode through this life and these days with great velocity and get to what came next.

  He set up his computer and typed in the word Raqqah and in one instant images of a dusty city with traffic circles and spindly palm trees appeared. More photos: old yellow-white ruins, families picnicking beside a slow brown river, intersections full of motorcycles. He looked at a few maps and couldn’t decipher much beyond the river and the city center. The aerial shot reminded him of Sacramento or Stockton, brown land with buildings and a course of water running through it surrounded by a bit of green. Nothing new about it.

  He clicked on. The newer images came from news sites, photographs of war, buildings with huge holes through the side of them, ambulances surrounding the scene. There were men in green fatigues, men in street clothes with bandannas over their mouths and then a third kind of man, in black, with the longest beards and the heaviest guns. Islamist groups vie for the city. Assad and his forces fight on. He clicked and clicked, to find some definition, some explanation of who fought who and why, but all he saw were headlines that announced the growing strength of an Islamist movement, a residual or amalgam of various Al Qaeda affiliates, their men in black, marching in sparse parades with no crowds, moving down the streets of cities that didn’t seem to welcome them or turn them away, life carrying on as usual around them. Most of the rest of the images showed guys, young and masked, at dusty camps, training.

  Rez read articles in UK papers from just a few months ago—Raqqah was now a city under a more specific siege: harassment for smoking, a women stoned in public for adultery, the imposition of taxes on non-Shia families, impossible to pay. In one news clip a body swung from a lamppost. A city in chaos as state forces, rebel forces, and a new force calling themselves New Country scramble to take advantage of the instability.

  Fuck.

  He stared at the uniforms of the Islamist army, new fatigues with old boots, scarves for their faces and foreheads, only their eyeballs available to the camera. The ambitions of the New Country as outlined on their website are to spread a caliphate to the east and west and south and north …

  Fuck.

  This was not what he wanted. It was not the peaceful faces at the mosque in Indonesia, or the brotherhood inside the mosque in Anaheim, or Fatima’s sweet thoughts about right and wrong. It looked like a gang, no different from the gang at the beach, only more desperate, more violent: men in search of power. He thought of Khalil on Skype and of the guys at the grocery store, pictured them in the bl
ack fatigues, soldiers for this new army, and Rez stared at the silver square of his laptop and kept himself from crying but could not keep himself from feeling like an idiot, a fool’s fool.

  His parents slept, the whole neighborhood slept, and in the quiet after midnight Rez sat at the edge of the pool. The moon was new and sharp and its ivory reflection sliced across the flat navy water. He dipped a foot in to disturb it and watched the white light dance across the ruptured surface and flatten again. He must have typed in the wrong word. Done the wrong search. This could not be it, the land of the good Muslims, the city for the center of Islam, the religion Arash loved, Fatima adored, this could not be the religion of murders and massacres that the Americans said it was. He moved his foot around in the water and thought of earlier that day, at the gas station with Fatima and pumping her gas and feeling the stare of a grandmother outside her SUV, the stare that said Fuck you and Don’t kill me all at the same time.

  He went inside and opened his computer and sat before the empty search box and waited. He thought of nothing, and then when something came, he just typed it, How to be a Muslim. And there they were, instructions. Five steps, ten steps, twelve steps. Fourteen steps with pictures. Learn about the Five Pillars of Islam—Shahada, Salat, Sawm, Zakat, Hajj. Study the Quran. Align yourself with the one God and the path of your life will never be lonely and will never be dark. Brothers and sisters all over the world will welcome you when you arrive on their doorsteps.

  No corpses, no blades, and no guns. He read through a few quoted passages about generosity, about abstinence, about humility and virtue, and he felt Arash near, heard his voice the night they spent at the party in the Hollywood Hills, on the pool chairs after everyone else had passed out. It feels good to be good. He felt Fatima close too, her new calm and confidence, and he read on and followed the thread of sites until he got to YouTube videos where men and woman of all ages sat before cameras and told of their journey to Islam, to the caliphate, to be a part of the new country.