The Caliphate

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I remember going to school with her. We used to ride the bus together before they blew it up. I think her name was Becky, before the Ghuraba made her change it to Rasha. All I know is she is three years younger than me, maybe thirteen? If not for Mama's insistence she needs an apprentice, this would be my fate.

"Get it out of me!" Rasha shrieks.

Mama peeks out from the sheet draped across Rasha's knees. Doctor Maryam McCarthy is no longer a physician, but she defiantly wears the same white doctor-coat as she did in the picture beside my bed. Only now it is old and stained. Just like our living room, which is now a makeshift emergency room.

"She's not dilating," Mama says in Arabic. "Eisa, check the baby's heartrate."

I shoo Rasha's sister-wives, two anxious, black-clad blobs, and press my stethoscope against the girl's swollen abdomen. It glistens, bright and hopeful, against my black abaya. If I get caught with it I'll be whipped, but nobody challenges me so long as I only use it in here.

In the baby room. The place where future martyrs are born.

"Thirty-seven beats per second," I say. "It's erratic, and way too slow."

"She's hemorrhaging." Mama holds up a hand, covered in blood. "What's your diagnosis?"

I glance longingly at the cabinet where we keep the ultrasound machine hidden. If we had power, I would recommend we use it, but all we have is the soft, yellow glow of oil lamps.

"Placenta previa?" I guess.

Mama nods, pleased.

"And your recommended treatment, tabib?"

I glance at the Commander's First Wife, Taqiyah al-Ghuraba, the Abu al-Ghuraba's sister and leader of the feared Al-Khansaa brigade. At nearly six feet tall, late-50's and well-fed, she carries a whip to force women to comply with the Ghuraba's strict purity laws. All who stand up to her find themselves publicly whipped. And that's if you're lucky. The unlucky ones find themselves hauled off into The Citadel.

My voice warbles.

"Cesarean section," I whisper.

Taqiyah's eyes grow wide and wild, if it's possible to appear even more fanatical than she already is.

"Surgery is an innovation!" she hisses in Arabic.

"If we don't perform the procedure," Mama says, "both Rasha, and her baby, will die."

"Only Allah can decide which women bear children for the Ghuraba!"

Mama's eyes burn amber like an eagle's. She recognizes Taqiyah's obstinacy for what it is; a dried-up First Wife's attempt to get rid of a younger womb.

"Eisa?" Mama points at the door. "Speak to the Commander."

"But he beat her!" I protest.

"Our husband caught her reading!" Taqiyah unwinds her whip and shakes the butt end at her sister-wife on the table. The two lesser wives skitter back.

"I meant no harm, Sayidati Ghuraba!" Rasha weeps. "It was just a book about an Indian princess! Please don't let me die!"

Mama points at the door.

"Eisa? The Commander."

Taqiyah blocks it.

"I said I forbid it!"

She presses the brown leather handle against my cheek, warm from her grip and smelling of other people's blood. I can almost feel it sting my back. I've endured it many times.

"Mama?"

I look between the two warring matriarchs. Taqiyah al-Ghuraba rules the women, but Mama births the babies.

Mama jabs an IV into Rasha's arm. Not a real IV. But one made with recycled glass jars and homemade saline. The room fills with the scent of opiates as Mama fills the jar with a dreamy pink liquid.

"Scream for him if you have to," she says in English. "If he wanted her to die, he would not have brought her to me."

I raise my eyes to meet the Al-Khansaa's furious gaze. I will pay for my boldness later. But for now, I have to be strong. I touch my prayer beads, now wrapped around my wrist.

"Sayidati?"

The Al-Khansaa steps aside, not because she gives consent, but because the Abu al-Ghuraba needs martyrs and she has always given them to him. With her brother's ear, she'll make sure it happens the moment the child turns five.

I slip my hijab across my face to make a veil before I step outside the door. We have no waiting room. Our front hallway serves as our reception.

Commander al-Amar paces back and forth in what was once a tasteful vestibule. He's a six-foot-four giant, Caliphate City's Commander, with short blonde hair, a long, bushy beard and black shemagh worn by the Ghuraba men. I think he might have been handsome once, before a piece of shrapnel took out one of his cool, blue eyes.

I lower my gaze to avoid making eye contact.

"How's my son?" he asks.

"Rasha is very sick," I say. "If she doesn't have help, both she, and your son, will die."

"What kind of help?"

"Surgery, Sir. She needs a Caesarean section."

A long, painful howl filters through the wall. He clenches his fist and whirls to face the boarded-up glass of the exterior door. I almost feel sorry for him, until I remember he beat her.

"Surgery is an innovation, yes?" he asks.

Yes. That is the literal interpretation…

"The Prophet commanded mercy," I say, "especially for a husband towards his wife."

The Commander stiffens.

"Maryam is a woman. The arts of medicine are reserved only unto a man."

"It's forbidden for an unrelated man to touch a woman," I remind him. "No doctor will risk it. The punishment is death, for both the doctor, and the patient."

His voice grows thick.

"So both must die?"

I chew my lip, praying for an answer other than 'Yes. That is what your brother-in-law has decreed…'

I touch my prayer beads.

Please, my Lord? Tell me what to say?

The answer comes to me. Scripture, taken out of context. Something the Commander can take back to his brother-in-law to justify his decision.

"The Prophet gave exceptions," I say.

"What kind of exceptions?"

"He said: 'no soul is ordained to be created, but Allah will create it.'"

I hold my breath. I could be whipped for reminding him he took Rasha against her will, though at least he married her. Usually, they just rape them, the women the Abu al-Ghuraba gives his men as rewards.

The Commander does not turn around.

"I have business with the General," he says at last. "When I return, Allah will surprise me? Whether or not I have a son?"

"God is great!" I say.

"Praise be upon his name."

I wait until he leaves, then slip back into the medical room.

*

I skip into the kitchen, humming the joyful birth adhan I just sang into the newborn's ears. Unlike the front of the house, our kitchen is still our own, except for the oil lamps, added to cope with the frequent blackouts. Our refrigerator is broken because the factories that made parts for it got destroyed years ago, but our stove still works. Natural gas. Which means we can cook even when the rebels blow up the power grid.

"What's cooking?" I ask Nasirah, even though I know the answer from the starchy scent.

"Beans." She gives me a happy smile.

I dump the bloody surgical instruments I just used to stitch up Rasha's womb into the sink and sniff the pot. Reconstituted dried beans, slightly burned.

At nine years old, Nasirah is a sweet-faced girl, almost as tall as I am, but thinner, like a leggy filly. We both inherited freckles from our father, enough to show off the Irish, but her skin is fair, unlike the olive complexion I inherited from Mama. It makes her a target, which is why we never let her leave the house.

It's one of the few things Adnan and I agree upon.

Our brother, Adnan, is the spitting image of our father. He sits at the table, arms crossed, wearing his usual dour expression. At not-quite-thirteen, he bears the gawky awkwardness of a boy caught in a growth spurt. He's a perfect Gharib with his long shirt, white prayer-cap, and perpetual spouting of the Quran.

"Why didn't you make me lunch?" he demands.

I hold out my hands, still covered with blood.

"You know I was helping Mama birth a baby!"

"You mean perform a surgery," he scowls. "The Ghuraba say it's heresy."

I rinse my hands, and then dry them on a clean towel before I answer:

"The Commander gave us a special dispensation."

I squeeze past him into the mud room where we keep our burqas hung on coat hooks. I wrap a black cloth on top of my hijab, little more than a square of gauze, and then pull on my gloves to hide my hands.

They get stuck on my prayer-beads, leaving exposed my wrist. I know I should take them off, especially with Taqiyah on the warpath, but I need to feel them against my skin. It's hard to explain, the way they make me feel invincible. As if Allah is looking out for me. As though he whispers which part of each scripture is the truth, and which part the Ghuraba twisted into lies.

I leave them on. It is only an inch of skin.

"Where are you going?" Adnan asks.

"Mama needs medicine for the baby."

"You know it's forbidden to go without an escort."

I take down his winter coat and toss it to him.

"Then hurry up. Because if the Commander's son dies, you will bear the consequences."

Adnan rises from his chair, furious, as though he wishes to strike me.

"You can't talk to me that way!" His voice gives a pubescent warble. "I'm the man of this house."

"Not for two more weeks," I retort. "You're still only twelve."

I pull the black gauze down to cover my face, and then take the black burqa from the hook. I drape it over my entire body.

"Are you coming?" I ask. "Or would you prefer I get caned again?"

Adnan crosses his arms and pouts.

"I should make you."

Just to infuriate him, I tousle his hair like I did when he was still a little boy. He swats at my hand. I unlock the deadbolts and step outside to our tiny backyard. Adnan scrambles after me, still pulling on his coat.

"One of these days, you'll get what's coming to you!" he says.

"But I have you to protect me," I say in my sweetest voice.

It mollifies him, this tyrant-in-the-making. He wasn't always this way. Mama has faith he remembers enough about our father to become a good man.

We unlock the back gate and slip out of the safety of the fence. Snow falls gently from the sky, or maybe it's nuclear ash? The air smells dirty, not clean like snow should, and sometimes it falls in the middle of summer. The Ghuraba swear the nukes only did minimal damage, but we see too many miscarried babies for that claim to be entirely truthful.

"You should wrap your shemagh around your face," I tell Adnan. "To keep the ash out."

"It's only snow!"

He leads me out of the alley, over the wreckage of a house gutted out by a mortar shell. It's hard to tell if it was our shell or the rebels who did it. In the early years it was us versus them, but then the rebels ran out of weapons, so now it's all just us. Anybody who was not-us was killed in the purges.

Out in the street our demeanors change. Adnan steps in front in a cocky swagger, while I follow behind, my head bowed, just far enough back to make it clear he is in the lead, but not so far anyone could mistake I have an escort.

The streets are empty except for the usual patrols: men on foot wielding automatic weapons and a Hummer which circles the neighborhood with a machine gun. A man stands in the back, next to the gunner with a megaphone, shouting: "If anybody sees a stranger, report it to the secret police.' A black flag flies mounted on the bumper with white Arabic letters, an ICBM missile and a scythe, the Ghuraba flag.

Adnan waves.

"Greetings, brothers!"

The Ghuraba men stare down at him with bored disdain. One of them stares at me. I can feel his hungry eyes, sizing up what's hidden beneath my burqa.

I finger my prayer beads.

"Our Lord, keep me safe from prying eyes."

The patrol car keeps moving. Only then do I dare breathe.

Adnan leads me through streets that used to be storefronts. Old, peeling signs proclaim there used to be shoes or clothing or sports equipment for sale. Everything smells of decay. Most of the buildings have plywood nailed across the windows to provide a place to paste the propaganda posters posted in Arabic and English.

"There is no god but Allah!"

It depicts a Gharib riding an ICBM missile as though he is riding a bull.

"Praise to our glorious Mahdi!"

These posters show General Muhammad bin-Rasulullah in a variety of heroic poses. His red beard flows from his face as though it is a river of fire, while behind him; ICBM missiles take off into the sky.

The last poster depicts a man in a U.S. Air Force uniform with five golden stars on his chest handing a key to the Abu al-Ghuraba. A penumbra of light radiates out of the key. Atop the poster, it proclaims "Praise the Gatekeeper for his conversion."

Behind him is an ICBM missile launching.

I kiss my gloved fingers and press it against the man.

"I miss you Daddy."

Adnan beckons. He leads me toward the bombed out U.S. Capitol building.