The Good Son (35 page)

Sonia says, “God is sending you a warning. He is saying that you are not doing as you should, which is fighting the Indian soldiers. Instead, you are slaughtering Muslims, which is the same thing as murdering your family.”

“What must I do to make it stop, then?”

“Hold fast to God and the true faith! Reform your life! You have been led astray by hypocrites who pervert religion. As it is written in the sura
an-Nisa of the Holy Qu’ran:
And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell to abide therein, and the wrath and the curse of God are upon him and a great punishment is prepared for him
. Does God speak falsely? And have I not seen you kill believers intentionally with my own eyes? God has cast you out, you have such dreams as a foretaste of Hell.”

“That is a lie! I kill only those who oppose the jihad, and they cannot be true believers if they oppose the jihad.”

“
If
it is a
true
jihad,” she replies mildly.

“Of course it is a true jihad. All the mullahs have given their judgment.”

“Well, perhaps you are right, Idris. What do I know? I am only a woman, although I am the mother of a hero in a jihad that everyone in the entire umma recognizes as being virtuous, and whose dead are surely in Paradise. And my son has told me that in the Russian jihad they did not murder innocent Muslims nor send women with bombs to blow up children. Perhaps the martyrs of the true jihad will welcome you as comrades. Perhaps they will ignore the blood of innocent children on your hands, and perhaps God will allow you to refresh yourself by the lake of Kausar and consort with the
hura
promised to true martyrs. No man knows these things, least of all ignorant village mullahs. But I was also for years the murid of a holy man, a true Sufi pir—”

“Impossible! No murshid would have a woman as a murid.”

“True, but he prayed and God turned me into a boy for a space of time. Yes, even in the dark I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true. I traveled with him through all the Muslim lands that were in former years oppressed by the godless Russians, and no man bothered us. He could make us invisible. Once we slept in Tashkent and in the morning awoke in Osh, where we prayed at the tomb of Solomon there. He had summoned a djinn, who carried us in the night.”

Idris laughed. “You must think I am an ignorant peasant to believe such tales.”

“No, but you believe mullahs who are just as ignorant, and about matters that affect your fate in the next world. Do you imagine that Mullah Latif has ever read the Holy Qur’an with understanding? Yes, he can mumble through the suras, but do you imagine he can understand classical Arabic? No, and neither can you, for which reason you are far from God’s word and so do evil and dishonor the Pashtuns.”

“You are a woman and an apostate. What do you know of honor?”

“Women know everything about honor, since you men kill us if you even suspect we have harmed it. But we can argue about who is right until the sun rises and never agree. The only fact here is that because of your dream you cannot sleep. Now I will bless you and you will sleep. You want to kill me, but I bless you all the same, and tell you that tonight you will have a good dream. And you will come tomorrow and tell it to me, and then I will interpret, God willing. Now, go and sleep, and let the others come.”

For a moment the man is still, and then he says something she doesn’t hear and she feels the wind of his movement on her face. The door slams. She hears angry voices from the corridor outside.

The door opens. Mahmoud enters silently and sits by her side; she can hear his heavy nervous breathing. After a moment, he clears his throat and begins.

“Idris has ordered that you interpret no more, but I have had a dream and you will interpret it for me. I was in the hills and my water bottle was empty and I was thirsty. A boy came down the path and I asked him if he had any water, and he laughed and leaned against a rock wall and his body become a flowing spring, and I drank from it.”

She says, “The hills mean you will achieve the power you desire, for in the sura Saad we read,
Our servant David, that mighty man, was penitent. With him we subjected the mountain to give glory at dusk and at sunrise
. So you will have glory, but only if you reject your sins. A flowing spring means a reward for a good deed. So said God’s Apostle, peace be upon him, when interpreting a flowing spring in a dream about a good man who had died. This good deed will concern a boy who is not a boy, as in your dream.”

“I don’t understand. How can a boy not be a boy?”

“Don’t ask me that, Mahmoud. Only God sees the future, not God’s Messenger, peace be upon him, as he attested many times as recorded in the Sunna, and certainly not me. But the dream says it is connected with such a thing. God will reveal it in His own time.”

Rashida brings news of the village along with the noon meal. Her father has suspended the marriage negotiations with the one-eyed Khaliq, so
she regards Sonia with something close to worship. The following day is the seventh day of their captivity, and there is something even more astounding. Some Arab mujahideen are due to arrive that night, and they are bringing a very important person. He is the one they call the Engineer, who is in charge of building bombs for the jihad, but this is a great secret and musn’t be told to anyone. Idris is so excited he is yelling at everyone.

Sonia asks, “It that what they are building all night in the house with the generator? Bombs?”

“Yes, so I hear, but they don’t let any of us in there. That is what makes all this gray dust that falls everywhere. It gets in the food and the women complain. It is from the metal grinding, for the bombs.”

“Who is making them?”

“They are all men from Dara who were brought here, and some others, foreigners.”

“Not Pashtuns, you mean.”

“Yes, but Muslims. These are big bombs that can even blow up American tanks, so it is very important. And we hear there will be beheadings. I would like to see them behead an infidel. They say that women cannot see it, but we will watch from the houses anyway.”

“What if they behead me, Rashida? Will you still watch?”

Rashida laughed. “Oh, no, you they will not behead, only the infidel men. You they will only cut off one arm and one leg. They have talked to the Internet, and he has said you are guilty of great crimes against Islam so it will be done.”

“Do you know what the Internet is?”

“Of course!” says Rashida in an offended tone. “I am not an ignorant girl. I have been to Mingaora. It is like the television but it shows beheadings and messages from the jihad.”

“Yes, that is the Internet,” says Sonia. “Well, I am happy that you will not be given to Khaliq. But tell me, what has happened to Patang? I have not seen him among the men when they let us walk out.”

“Oh, that is a secret too, but everyone knows. He hurt his foot as you foretold, by dropping a heavy crate on it, so he can’t be a mujahid anymore. He has gone off to Afghanistan to be
shahid
. First he goes to training and then
boom
! among the crusaders.”

“I see. Well, God bless him. Did he desire this, do you know?”

“Yes, of course. It is an honor. And he did not want them to kill his mother. Instead she will get one hundred dollars. So of course he went.”

In the hujra the following day the mood of the group is subdued, their minds concentrated—perhaps one of them will not live out the next day—but almost all are preparing for the strange conference they expect will soon commence. They speak quietly in small groups. The priest and the Hindu each pray more often in their separate ways. Sonia and Amin pray the required five times.

William Craig asks to borrow Sonia’s deck of cards and with them he plays endless games of solitaire on his charpoy, not just the usual Klondike but a whole library of different games. Sonia thinks that this is as close as he can now get to having a computer. He seems perfectly calm, perhaps the calmest of all the prisoners, save Sonia herself. She tries to engage him in conversation, but he refuses to be drawn. He seems to have relapsed into a kind of nerd nirvana, re-creating the days of his youth, when he wrote the software that he would later turn into a business empire.

Porter Cosgrove neither plays nor prays, nor does he scribble notes. Instead, he suffers what appears to be a pronounced deterioration in his already shaky morale. He cries and moans almost continually. Sonia has heard the expression
shattered
used before this, most often ironically, but this is the thing itself. Annette tries her best but the man will not be comforted, nor have they calming drugs to give him, and it seems the therapeutic skills available to the group can not salve his terror.

That night Idris does not come. Perhaps he did not dream, or is afraid to come, or perhaps it was foolish to try to get inside his head in that way. God controls all things, she finds herself thinking, and laughs at herself. She has become acculturated again; the Sonia of Georgetown, of cocktails parties and seminars, the Sonia of the therapist’s office, has quite faded. Again she is a Sufi murid, although her teacher is not visible to anyone else at present.

She is sleeping after interpreting a dozen dreams, herself deep in a dream of Mecca, circling the holy place with a vast crowd in white garments, a dream that supposedly indicates security and peace, from which she awakens to find a face hovering over hers; perhaps the sound of weeping has penetrated her sleep.

“Please, I’m going crazy,” says Annette Cosgrove. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Your husband—”

“That’s not my husband,” says Annette, a fierce look appearing out of a face crumpled in misery. “I don’t know
who
that is.”

“Do you want me to try to talk to him?” Sonia asks.

“No, Father Shea is with him, although it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.” She shivers like a wet cat and, after a brief silence, says, “Did you ever read a book by Arthur Koestler,
The Call Girls
? It’s about the international do-good community, the title says it all. I thought Porter was different, he really got his hands dirty, I thought. But what did I know? I didn’t go to the important meetings, only the dinners and on the wives’ tours, and once in a while they let me hold the sick babies for the cameras. It was a dream or something. Why is he acting like this? Everyone else is being so brave. It’s killing me.”

“I don’t know, dear. Sometimes when a false self cracks, we find there’s nothing inside. One of the sad things you learn in therapy is that there are some people who are beyond help, I mean direct help. They’re like black holes. They can suck the life out of anyone who tries to help them. So you need to take care of yourself, yes?”

Annette cries some more and Sonia holds her and for a moment thinks of her dead daughters; Aisha would have been about Annette’s age now, and she cries as well, but inwardly.

Now they hear the noise of trucks arriving and, briefly, the sound of many voices outside the hujra.

“What’s that?” Annette whispers.

“Visitors,” Sonia answers. “It’s something to do with weapons. Maybe they’ll attend the conference. That will be a change.”

She hugs Annette and pats her back. “Sleep now, my dear. You know this can’t go on. It’ll be over in a few days.”

“You think we’ll be rescued?”

“Or dead. But in any case, over.”

Annette has no response to this; she slumps away to her bed of misery. Sonia is at that stage of exhaustion when sleep will not come. She lies on the charpoy and listens to the night. The trucks outside depart; the generator stops its roar. Cosgrove’s snuffling and weeping go on for
a longer time, but even this eventually fades, and there is silence but for the coughs and snores of sleeping humans and the eternal wind of the hills. Or no: her ears pick up another sound, a deep, almost rhythmic voice in low register. It is Father Shea, praying.

Sonia moves now without significant thought, onto her feet and silently across the dark hall, following the sound, drawn to it as if by a fiber woven long ago. She finds the priest on his knees and waits quietly until he is finished. She moves then, attracting his attention. He does not seem surprised to see her in this wolf hour; it must be close to three by now. They sit on his charpoy and speak briefly about Porter and Annette, comparing notes, finding that they agree about the origin of the man’s collapse, and then Sonia says abruptly, “I want to confess.”

She cannot see his face in the dark, but his tone is mildly surprised. “Yes? What do you want to confess? An extra chapati filched?”

“No, I mean I want to
confess
. The sacrament.”

“Oh, my, forgive me! I thought you were . . . and in any case I suppose I had forgotten you were so—what shall I say?—so
flexible
a worshipper. Okay, fine. I haven’t got a stole, but perhaps God won’t mind this once. Whenever you’re ready.”

Sonia kneels and composes her thoughts. She says, “The sin of pride. I get it from my mother, I think, the Polish aristocrat—I mean my special brand of it, not the kind from original sin. The idea that because I’m wonderful me I can get away with stuff, that I can manipulate the lives of people, that it won’t all come back to bite me on the butt. I think you know my story, the public part of it anyway. I wanted to go on haj in the traditional way, by dhow across the Arabian Sea and then by caravan to Mecca, and of course I couldn’t do that as an unaccompanied woman, so I went as a boy and wrote about it and the umma blew up in my face. I got kicked out of the family and the country, put on the first plane out of Lahore with the fanatics screaming for my blood. Farid—my sad, faithful man; oh, God, let me confess the misery I put him through, the uncharity of it!—Farid stayed with the children. I ended up in Zurich, but that’s not what I want to talk about—”