The Sleeper (9 page)

On the edge of the camp was a small mosque built out of mud and a few stones with a big mud cone for a minaret and a piece of scrap metal cut into the shape of a crescent moon on top of that. It seemed to me to be, in its way, very beautiful. The imam was an old man whose hair was white against the tight black skin over his skull. His body was bent, but his voice was still strong when he sang out the call of the muezzin before dawn, wailing in Arabic to tell us that prayer is better than sleep. Then, a few minutes later, Cathleen's short-wave radio would click on, and we'd hear classical music telling us the BBC news was about to start.

According to the reports we heard, the war in Afghanistan was going pretty slowly for the Americans, at least at first. But it was going well, they said. The American bombers were doing their work day and night hitting “Al-Qaeda training camps” that Washington called “the terrorist infrastructure.”

It was hard for me to listen. I kept hearing about our surveillance satellites and planes, our U2s and B52s, our electronic intercepts and our Predator drones, which flew over the enemy's hideouts like huge dragonflies. Washington was real proud of those. But I knew the news didn't have anything to do with the war on the ground. All that Washington saw were buildings that exploded in gun-camera flashes, or tiny people-shapes wearing turbans who were carrying guns and grouping and regrouping. And all they heard were the voices that wanted to be listened to. You couldn't count on that to tell you, really, what was going on. This war had to be fought up close and personal.

 

Cathleen and I got into a routine pretty quickly. At night, when the place got quiet, she'd tell me everything she heard from the nomads and the refugees who came by that day. They always had bits and pieces of information, but what nobody ever told her, she said, was “I don't know.” So a lot of what she heard were lies made up to please her. We were trying to put together a picture of the farm outside Wolla Jora: who was there, what they were up to, and also how they were defended. But some folks told us there were hundreds of strangers at the farm, and some said there weren't any.

“I've got one man that I'll be talking to who goes back and forth quite a bit,” Cathleen told me one night. “A regular commuter he is to Wolla Jora, and he's got the brains to figure out what we need. Of course, it's been weeks since I saw him, but he should be coming around these parts again soon.”

“I'd like to meet him,” I said.

“Oh, he's my little secret,” she said.

That night we stayed up late, talking in the dark. I told her about Betsy and Miriam, and she just listened. Other nights we'd have a little of mother's milk, and go to bed early. And every few days, real late, I would ask Cathleen's permission to use the satellite phone and call Betsy at work.

I worried about her and about the loneliness that was eating away at her—at us. But I was also getting more and more worried about that package I'd left in the freezer at the Jump Start. Too much time was passing. Every day the odds got worse that someone would find it. And if they did, there was no telling what could happen. Maybe the virus wasn't dangerous anymore. But I didn't believe that. I figured it was probably just as dangerous, just as deadly as it always had been: the Sword of the Angel of Death.

When Betsy answered, we didn't talk for long, and mostly we said the same things, like we were reading from a script:

“Are you okay?”

“We're fine.”

“I'm making progress here.”

“That's good.”

“I love you. I miss you so much.”

“We love you, too, and we miss you.”

And that was all. It wasn't what I wanted or needed to hear. But it told me they were alive and well, and that none of the disasters that might have happened had happened. The calls kept me hoping that when I got home again, somehow we'd be able to pick up right where we left off. As long as Betsy and Miriam were living and safe, I thought, there would always be time for that.

Each night as I was falling asleep on a cot in that mud house in the middle of the wet African desert, I'd go dream-walking through my own place in Westfield. I'd go past the big sofa in the TV room that we bought in a discount mall outside of Wichita. It was big enough so all three of us could stretch out and share the popcorn. I'd look into Miriam's room, at the bunk bed I made for her out of two-by-fours and four-by-fours. It wasn't really a girl thing, but I thought she'd think it was fun to climb on, and she did. Now Barbie and her friends lived on the top bunk. A lot of times in my mind I saw Betsy sitting up reading in our bed. She kept the sheet pulled under her chin, but she was naked underneath it. She never did believe in sleeping with clothes on if she could help it. I saw Miriam in the kitchen. She had a milk mustache and her hair was hanging down around her face. She was studying her Fruit Loops as carefully as a code breaker, moving the pink ones to one side with her spoon, and the yellow ones to another.

I thought if I could make my home live in my head while I was still awake, it would stay with me into my dreams, and sometimes I think it did.

My day job was carpentry. The .50-caliber ammo boxes had the right basic shape and size for a beehive, but we had to make frames that hung inside them for the honeycombs. Before I came, Cathleen taught a Somali carpenter to do some of the work, but then he disappeared, nobody was sure where, so she taught me.

“You have to be very precise, you know,” said Cathleen, “because bees are very precise. So you'll be wanting to make the tops of the frames thirty-five millimeters wide so they hang just so, with about seven and a half millimeters of bee space between them. Are you writing this down? Any more than that, and the bees look for some place else to build their combs, or, they just get sloppy. And we wouldn't be wanting sloppy bees, would we? Any less, and they get too cramped. The little darlings are creatures of habit, you know. Like most of us.”

“I've been looking around for tools,” I said.

“Tools, eh? You think tools are a problem, do you? Well let me ask you this: Seen many bees around here?”

“Just the ones in back of the office.”

“And flowers?”

“No, now that you mention it. None.”

“Right,” said Cathleen. “There's some. But we're not building these hives for here. A lot of the people come from parts of Somalia where the earth really is green. Hard to believe, I know. But there are plenty of bees there. And there aren't plenty of precise tools. What we'll be doing is giving them hives, then teaching them the skills to take home to build their own, so that someday they
will
go home and use what they have, instead of waiting for the things that they don't have.” She pulled a rifle cartridge out of her pocket.

“Recognize this?”

“Kalashnikov.”

“Good for you, boyo. And the Kalashnikov cartridge casing is precisely thirty-five millimeters long at the top of that little shoulder where the cartridge tapers in,” she said. “And the bullet is 7.62 millimeters wide. Perfect measurements for bee space, don't you see?” She was pleased with herself. “We improvise with what we have,” she said.

And so we did. I worked under a piece of canvas spread over a couple of poles that kept off the sun and sometimes kept off the rain. Nothing could keep off the flies. Solid ammo boxes were fine for hives, but others were cracked or beat-up. I took them apart for the wood and the nails. Cathleen wanted me to train an assistant for after I left, but she couldn't seem to find the right prospect. It was slow work alone, but it was good work, and it cleared my head while I was doing it.

I knew I'd made mistakes in London and Spain, moved too fast, and still managed to keep going where I needed to be. But I was in the wilderness now, and no mistakes were allowed. I could wait a few more days until I really knew the lay of the land and the disposition of forces on the other side. Just a few more days. Then, we'd see.

 

About a week after I arrived, Cathleen came back from one of her visits to the KPF headquarters to see the local commander. She looked strange—excited, upset—I couldn't tell which.

“What did you find out?” I said.

“No rapes in the last couple of days,” she said. “But we knew that.”

“Good news.”

“But don't be thinking it's not dangerous out there. Seems they turned up two dead men about eight kilometers from the camp. Don't know who they were. The captain said they're shifta.”

“Near the border.”

“That's right.”

“Dead how?”

“Dead in pieces,” she said.

 

That Friday, just an hour or so after the midday call to prayer, I saw a man walking toward the workshop with a child in his arms. He was carrying her like he'd just lifted her out of bed, and at about fifty yards I recognized the little girl from the clinic and her father. He stood tall and the little girl hugged his neck to steady herself, but she was as light across his arms as a piece of cloth. He did not look left or right, but walked straight to the door of the foundation office, and then inside. I put down my hammer and followed.

“What have we here?” said Cathleen, running the back of her hand across the girl's face the way she had in the hospital. “We're looking much happier and healthier,” she said. The man spoke to Cathleen in his language, and she listened closely, then talked for a long time herself. The girl nuzzled her head into her father's shoulder. Finally, the man nodded and Cathleen turned to me.

“I think you've got a new assistant,” she said.

Faridoon came back the morning the mosque began to melt. The rains were driving down hard, and the mud walls just started to crack. The old imam kept trying to push stones and dirt back into place. But the crumbling wouldn't stop.

The rains cut all the roads to the west, and at the big camps north of us around Dadaab there were shortages of food already. It was almost impossible to fly in this weather, but somehow Faridoon waltzed his Cessna under the clouds and managed, once again, to land in the mud. “The boy's got a great touch,” Cathleen said as she watched him coming in, and there was no denying that. We hauled a couple of duffel bags out of the back of the plane, threw them into the Land Rover, and got drenched to the skin doing it. But we were glad to see him.

“Are you both all right?” he asked.

“We're good,” I told him.

“That's what Cathleen said on the phone. Glad to see it. I don't like the sound of all these killings in the bush.”

“Six dead now,” I said.

Cathleen was about to switch on the ignition, then stopped. “Is that why you decided to come out so sudden like?”

“That and some problems I wanted to talk to Kurt about.”

“So talk,” said Cathleen, before I could say anything.

Faridoon finished pulling supplies out of the back of the plane. Like he was waiting for his moment. Then he said, “There's a lot of ugliness with the Americans right now, especially down on the coast.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Your compatriots have been all over Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu.”

“Which compatriots?”

“FBI. CIA. Whoever they are, the KPF are following their orders. There are too many arrests. It's indiscriminate. It got so bad in Mombasa people rioted.”

I shook my head. “That's just like the Feds. Making friends wherever they go.”

“They came by our office in Nairobi. They asked me a lot of questions about our work,” said Faridoon. “Not just here. Everywhere. In Yemen, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bosnia. They asked me a lot about Bosnia.”

I didn't like the sound of that. They must have made the same connections I did: the Summit entry in Abu Seif's address book, and the Kenya tape I sent from Granada, which must have landed on Griffin's desk. “What sort of questions?”

“Questions about money, questions about people. I told them to go to hell. I also told them we'll be calling our friends in Washington.”

I thought about that magazine picture of the old President Bush and the Aga Khan. “So what are you worried about?” I said.

Cathleen answered. “Let's just say these are unpredictable times.”

Faridoon focused in on me. “I'd very much like to know what you've been telling your compatriots.”

“I don't talk to those guys. And they sure as hell haven't been around here.”

“I think you should come back to Nairobi with me this afternoon, then be on your way.”

“No!” said Cathleen. She looked like he'd slapped her in the face.

“I think it's necessary,” said Faridoon. “We can find out what we need to know about Abu Zubayr without your help. No hard feelings. My mistake. We don't need any Americans here.”

“Let's go back to the house,” said Cathleen and started the engine.

 

Nureddin didn't seem to notice us. Rain hammered down on the canvas roof of the shed and on the tin roof of the house so loudly you could barely hear, and he concentrated on the frame he was putting together. Inside the house, his little girl was at the stove making tea for him. Now that we were there, she put some more water on for us, too.

Her name was Waris and she'd gotten a lot stronger and healthier since she left the clinic. Whenever you smiled even the littlest bit in her direction, her face lit up so bright that everybody's mood seemed to change. She smiled now at Faridoon, and he just couldn't not smile back. But he had business on his mind, and the smile didn't last.

Cathleen looked at me. “Kurt, my boy,” she said, “I'd like to talk to Faridoon for a couple of minutes on my own if you wouldn't mind.”

A minute after I walked out the door, I heard Cathleen shouting. The noise of the rain made it hard to know just what she was saying, but the tone would have carried over Victoria Falls. Waris came out to join Nureddin and me. She was upset about the arguing, I guess, and she was just about to cry, but her father put his arm around her, and she put her head against his chest, and he just held her like that until she calmed down.

I looked away at the rain splattering in puddles and watched the puddles turning into ponds, and I watched the mosque. It was in terrible shape now. About a dozen men from the camp were trying to help the muezzin shore it up, but they were losing the battle. Nureddin watched the mosque, too. The north wall, the one that pointed toward Mecca, was starting to lean. He and I looked at each other. We had to do something. But there were no boards big enough to brace the walls. All we could do was join the muezzin and the men from the camp using our bodies to press against the building, hoping somehow that the clouds would part or the liquefying ground beneath the walls would steady, that if we could hold them long enough, some miracle of faith or luck would allow them to stand. The rain poured over us. I pushed my hands against the side of the mosque and felt the grit under my palms oozing away like the wet sand at the beach that slides under your feet with an outgoing wave. Nureddin was beside me, throwing his shoulder into it. There were about twenty of us now, pushing, holding, bracing, but it wasn't working. We were covered in mud and Nureddin and the other men wearing white robes looked like they'd been dragged from graves still wrapped in their shrouds.

I heard Waris's voice. She was shivering in the rain, shouting and pointing—pointing up—at the minaret. It was starting to lean. The sheet-metal crescent tumbled off the roof and into a deep puddle. The whole cone began to slope, melting, cracking, toppling off the collapsing roof. There was nothing left for us to brace and we stepped back. Little streams of water ran along the seams of the old muezzin's face as he watched his handmade house of God turn into a pile of mud and rock.

Faridoon stood in the door of the Summit building waiting for me to be done with the struggle against nature. “Two weeks,” he shouted.

“Thanks,” I said, still out in the open, stripping off my shirt and letting the rain shower me clean.

“Thank Cathleen,” said Faridoon. “She seems to have a lot of faith in you.”

“She's the best,” I shouted over the rain.

Faridoon tossed me a towel. While I dried off under the tarp, he looked at some of our handiwork: the hives, the frames. He didn't say anything, like he was waiting for the air to clear. Then he said, “I like you, Kurt. But those men in my office…” He shook his head. “There was a black American named Griffith, I think. He kept insinuating—well, that's just it. I don't know what he was insinuating.” Faridoon shook his head slowly back and forth. “I felt I was a fool to have an American mujahid working for me.”

“Ex-muj,” I shouted. “But, yeah, I see what you mean.”

“Better for you to stay out here for now.”

“Probably.”

“Do what you've got to do. In a couple of weeks I'll fly you back to Nairobi and we'll part ways.”

“I get it,” I said.

“I want a full report—the rapes, these murders in the bush. I want to know if we have to close this place down.”

“You'll get it,” I shouted.

“Good,” he shouted back, and the subject was over, but there was nowhere to go. Faridoon and I just stood under the tarp looking out at the ruined mosque while I tried to towel off the grit.

“Valiant effort,” he said, nodding toward the fallen minaret.

“We had to try.”

“God didn't want it to stand.”

A chill went through me. “Maybe they just didn't build it so good.”

“Sure,” said Faridoon, his voice getting hoarse from the half-screamed conversation. “But that's not the way they'll see it. They're going to see this as God's will. And they're going to be even more in awe of Him than when the mosque was standing.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, I most certainly do. What else is God but awe?”

The downpour was coming in huge bursts, thundering on the tarpaulin above us, sending a mist through it into the air around us, beating down the ruins in front of us. Faridoon stepped just inside the door of the house and I followed.

“You mean the fear of God,” I said.

He shook his head. “Awe is what you feel for something so magnificent, or so terrible, or so frightening or glorious that even to think about it overpowers you.” Faridoon smiled his easy smile. “Like the God in the rain who overpowered this mosque and defeated every man who tried to hold it together. You inspire awe by building or by destroying, you know. Destruction is easier, of course.” Faridoon nodded toward the ruined mosque. “Even a building like that, when it was put up, people wanted to show the awe they felt—to shape that feeling with their hands, to get a hold of it somehow. To communicate it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Think about the great god-awesome structures of this world. The pyramids in Egypt, those huge Gothic cathedrals in Europe, the enormous Buddhas at Bamiyan that the Taliban blew to bits. They were all designed to inspire that kind of awe.” He coughed and wiped some of the rain-mist off his face with the back of his hand. “They were built at the limits of the society's possibilities—and beyond. They took more than a man's lifetime. No one who saw them at the end saw them at the beginning. This mosque was not so grand, but it was”—he looked in the direction of the desolate camp—“it was at the limit of this society's accomplishments.”

“Yes,”
I said. “Wow.”

“Yes. ‘Wow.' Awe is worth pondering, you know. Isn't that what Bin Laden was after? I mean, think about it. He saw a world where it was not just Allah, it was
America
that created ‘awe.' ” Faridoon practically screamed the word America. “
America
had everything for everybody—money for nothing and chicks for free.” He laughed. “It was like a dream of evil and a nightmare for good. And what were the greatest symbols of that awe? No cathedral in America is as grand as the skyscrapers of New York. No symbol of American force is more obvious than the Pentagon. And they were so vulnerable! Hit them and the awe of America evaporates. It goes back to where it belongs—to God.” He took the gritty towel out of my hand and wiped his face. “You can see how Bin Laden would think that.”

“Yeah. I can see,” I said.

Faridoon grinned sadly. “If I were American,” he said, “I'd give a lot of thought to the nature of awe. Because in the end, you know, that's all that protects you.”