by John Updike
“‘What a friend we have in Jesus,’” she croons, quaveringly and without the jumping syncopation of the version he heard in church, “‘all our sins and griefs to bear…’” As she sings she reaches out a pale-palmed hand and touches his brow, an upright square brow bent on carrying more faith than most men can bear, and, her fingers with their two-toned nails straying, pinches the lobe of his ear in conclusion. “‘…take it to the Lord in prayer.’”
He watches her briskly put her clothes back on: bra first, then, with a comical wriggle, her skimpy underpants; next, her snug jersey, short enough to let a strip of belly show, and the scarlet miniskirt. She sits on the edge of the bed to put on her long-toed boots, over some thin white socks he hadn’t noticed her taking off. To protect the leather from her sweat, and her feet from the smell.
What time is it? The dark comes earlier every day. Not much past seven; he has been with her less than an hour. His mother might be home, waiting to feed him. She has more time for him, lately. Reality calls: he must get up and smooth any shadow of their shapes out of the plastic-wrapped mattress and restore the carpet and cushions to their places downstairs and lead Joryleen among the tables and armchairs, past the desks and the water cooler and the time clock, and let them both out the back door into the night, busy with headlights less now of workers coming home than of people out hunting for something, for dinner or for love. Her singing and his coming have left him so sleepy that the thought, as he walks the dozen blocks home, of going to bed and never waking up has no terror for him.
Shaikh Rashid greets him in the language of the Qur’an: “fa-inna ma‘a ‘l-‘usri yusr.” Ahmad, his classical Arabic rusty after three months of skipping his lessons at the mosque, deciphers the quote in his head and ponders it for hidden meanings. Every hardship is followed by ease. He recognizes it as from “Comfort,” one of the early Meccan suras placed late in the Book because of their shorter length but dear to his master because of their compressed, enigmatic nature. Sometimes called “The Opening,” it addresses, in God’s voice, the Prophet himself: Have We not lifted up your heart and relieved you of the burden which weighed down your back?
His encounter with Joryleen had been arranged for the Friday before Labor Day, so it was not until the next Tuesday that Charlie Chehab asked him at work, “How’d it go?”
“Fine” was Ahmad’s queasy reply. “It turns out I knew her, slightly, at Central High. She has been led sorely astray since.”
“She do the job?”
“Oh, yes. The job is done.”
“Good. Her thug promised she could do it nicely. What a relief. To me, I mean. It didn’t feel natural, you still having your cherry. Don’t know why I took it so personally, but I did. Feel like a new man?”
“Oh, yes. I see life through a new veil. A new lens, I should say.”
“Great. Great. Until your first piece of ass, you really haven’t lived. I got mine when I was sixteen. Two, actually—a pro with a Trojan, and a girl from the neighborhood bare-back. But that was when things were wilder, before AIDS. Your generation is smart to be cautious.”
“We were cautious.” Ahmad blushed at the secret he was hiding from Charlie, that he was still pure. But he had no wish to disappoint his mentor by sharing this truth. There had perhaps been too much sharing between them, in the closeness of the cab as Excellency processed New Jersey beneath its whirring wheels. Joryleen’s advice to get away from that truck rankles.
An air of apprehension, of nervous multi-tasking, clung to Charlie this morning. The quick creasing of his face, the flitting expressions of his mobile mouth, seemed excessive in his office behind the showroom, where morning coffee was consumed and the day’s plan was sketched. Unwashed olive coveralls waited here, and yellow slickers for days of delivering in the rain; they hung on their hooks like flayed skins. Charlie announced, “I ran into Shaikh Rashid over the long weekend.”
“Oh, yes?” Of course, Ahmad reflected, the Chehabs were significant members of the mosque; there was nothing strange in an encounter.
“He’d like to see you over at the Islamic Center.”
“To chastise me, I fear. Now that I work, I neglect the Qur’an, and my Friday attendance has fallen off, though I never fail, as you have noticed, to fulfill salat, wherever I can spend five minutes in an unpolluted place.”
Charlie frowned. “You can’t do just you and God, Madman. He sent His Prophet, and the Prophet created a community. Without the ummah, the knowledge and practice of belonging to a righteous group, faith is a seed that bears no fruit.”
“Is that what Shaikh Rashid told you to say to me?” It sounded more like Shaikh Rashid than Charlie.
The man grinned—that sudden, engaging exposure of his teeth, like a child caught out in a trick. “Shaikh Rashid can speak for himself. But he isn’t calling you to him to rebuke you—quite the contrary. He wants to offer you an opportunity. Shut my big mouth, I’m speaking out of turn. Let him tell you himself. We’ll end deliveries early today, and I’ll drop you at the mosque.”
Thus he has been delivered to his master, the imam from Yemen. The nail salon below the mosque, though well equipped with chairs, holds one bored Vietnamese manicurist reading a magazine, and the CHECKS CASHED window, through its long Venetian blinds, affords a narrow glimpse of a high counter, protected by a grille, behind which a heavyset white man yawns. Ahmad opens the door between these places of business, the scabby green door numbered 2781½, and climbs the narrow stairs to the foyer where once the customers of the departed dance studio would wait for their lessons. The bulletin board outside the imam’s office still holds the same computer-printed notices for classes in Arabic, for counseling in holy, proper, and seemly marriage in the modern age, and for lectures in Middle Eastern history by this or that visiting mullah. Shaikh Rashid, in his caftan embroidered with silver thread, comes forward and clasps his pupil’s hand with an unusual fervor and ceremoniousness; he seems unchanged by the summer past, though in his beard perhaps a few more gray hairs have appeared, to match his dove-gray eyes.
To his initial greeting, while Ahmad is still puzzling over its meaning, Shaikh Rashid adds, “wa la ‘l-khiratu khayrun laka mina ‘l-l. wa la-sawfa yu‘tka rabbuka fa-tar.” Ahmad dimly recognizes this as from one of the short Meccan suras of which his master was so fond, perhaps that one called “The Brightness,” to the effect that the future, the life to come, holds a richer prize for you than the past. You shall be gratified with what your Lord will give you. In English Shaikh Rashid says, “Dear boy, I have missed our hours studying Scripture together, and talking of great matters. I, too, learned. The simplicity and strength of your faith instructed and fortified my own. There are too few like you.”
He leads the young man into his office, and settles himself in the tall wing chair from which he does his teaching. “Well, now,” he addresses Ahmad, when both are seated in their accustomed positions around the desk, upon whose surface nothing rests but a well-worn, green-bound copy of the Qur’an. “You have travelled in the wider, infidel world—what our friends the Black Muslims call ‘the dead world.’ Has it modified your beliefs?”
“Sir, I am not aware that it has. I still feel God beside me, as close as the vein in my neck, cherishing me as only He can.”
“Did you not witness, in the cities you visited, poverty and misery that led you to question His mercy, and inequalities of wealth and power that cast doubt on His justice? Did you not discover that the world, in its American portion, emits a stench of waste and greed, of sensuality and futility, of the despair and lassitude that come with ignorance of the inspired wisdom of the Prophet?”
The dry flourishes of this imam’s rhetoric, delivered by a two-edged voice that seems to withdraw even as it proffers, afflict Ahmad with a familiar discomfort. He tries to answer honestly, somewhat in Charlie’s voice: “This isn’t the fanciest part of the planet, I guess, and it has its share of losers, but I enjoyed being out in it, really. People are pretty nice, mostly.
Of course, we were usually delivering something they wanted, and they thought would make their lives better. Charlie was good fun to be with. He knows a lot about state history.”
Shaikh Rashid leans forward, resting his shoes on the floor, and presses the fingertips of his fine small hands together, perhaps to suppress their tremor. Ahmad wonders why his teacher should be nervous. Perhaps he is jealous of another man’s influence upon his student. “Yes,” he says. “Charlie is ‘fun,’ but is possessed of serious purpose as well. He informs me that you have expressed a willingness to die for jihad.”
“I did?”
“In an interview in Liberty State Park, in view of lower Manhattan, where the twin towers of capitalist oppression were triumphantly brought down.”
“That was an interview?” How strange, Ahmad thinks, that the conversation, in the open air, has been reported here, in the closed space of this inner-city mosque, whose windows have a view of only brick walls and dark clouds. The sky today is close and gray in wispy layers that may produce rain. At that earlier interview, the day had been harshly bright, the cries of children in holiday packs ricocheting between the glitter of the Upper Bay and the glaring white dome of the Science Center. Balloons, gulls, sun. “I will die,” he confirms, after silence, “if it is the will of God.”
“There is a way,” his master cautiously begins, “in which a mighty blow can be delivered against His enemies.”
“A plot?” Ahmad asks.
“A way,” Shaikh Rashid repeats, fastidiously. “It would involve a shahd whose love of God is unqualified, and who impatiently thirsts for the glory of Paradise. Are you such a one, Ahmad?” The question is put almost lazily, while the master leans back and closes his eyes as if against too strong a light. “Be honest, please.”
Ahmad’s rickety feeling, of being supported over a gulf of bottomless space only by a scaffold of slender and tenuous supports, has returned. After a life of barely belonging, he is on the shaky verge of a radiant centrality. “I believe I am,” the boy tells his teacher. “But I have no warrior skills.”
“It has been seen to that you have all the skills you need. The task would involve driving a truck to a certain destination and making a certain simple mechanical connection. Exactly how would be explained to you by the experts that arrange these matters. We have, in our war for God,” the imam lightly explains, with an amused small smile, “technical experts equal to those of the enemy, and a will and spirit overwhelmingly greater than his. Do you recall the twenty-fourth sura, al-nr, ‘The Light’?”
His eyelids close, showing their tiny purple veins, in the effort of remembering and reciting. “wa ̉l-ladhna kafar a‘mluhum ka-sarbi biq‘atin yasabuhu ̉-am̉nu m̉an att idh j̉ahu lam yajidhu shaỷan wa wajada ‘llha ‘indahu fa-waffhu isbahu, wa ‘llhu sar‘u ̉l-isb.” Opening his eyes to see a guilty incomprehension on Ahmad’s face, the shaikh, with his thin off-center smile, translates: “‘As for the unbelievers, their works are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty traveller thinks it is water, but when he comes near he finds that it is nothing. He finds Allah there, who pays him back in full.’ A beautiful image, I have always thought—the traveller thinks it is water, but he finds only Allah there. It dumbfounds him. The enemy has only the mirage of selfishness, of many small selves and interests, to fight for: our side has a single sublime selflessness. We submit to God and become one with Him, and with one another.”
The imam shuts his eyes again as in a holy trance, his closed lids shuddering with the pulse of the capillaries within them. His voice emerges from his mouth cogently, however. “Your translation to Paradise would be instant,” he states. “Your family—your mother—would receive compensation, i‘la, for her loss, even though she is an unbeliever. The beauty of her son’s sacrifice may perhaps persuade her to convert. All things are possible with Allah.”
“My mother—she has always supported herself. Could I name another, a female friend my age, to receive the compensation? It might help her to achieve freedom.”
“What is freedom?” Shaikh Rashid asks, his eyes opening and breaking the skin of his trance. “As long as we are in our bodies, we are slaves to our bodies and their necessities. How I envy you, dear boy. Compared with you, I am old, and it is to the young that the greatest glory of battle belongs. To sacrifice one’s life,” he continues, as his eyelids half shut, so just a wet gray glitter shows, “before it becomes a tattered, exhausted thing. What an endless joy that would be.”
“When,” Ahmad asks after letting these words sink into a silence, “will my istishhd take place?” His self-sacrifice: it is becoming a part of him, a live, helpless thing like his heart, his stomach, his pancreas gnawing away with its chemicals and enzymes.
“Your heroic sacrifice,” his master quickly amplifies. “Within a week, I would say. The details are not mine to specify, but a week would approximate an anniversary and send an effective message to the global Satan. The message would be, ‘We strike when we please.’”
“The truck. Would it be the one I drive for Excellency?” Ahmad can grieve, if not for himself, for the truck—its cheerful pumpkin orange, its ornate script lettering, the vantage from its driver’s seat that puts the world of obstacles and dangers, of pedestrians and other vehicles, just on the other side of the tall windshield, so that clearances are easier to gauge than when driving an automobile, with its long and bloated hood.
“A truck like it, which should give you no trouble in driving a short distance. The Excellency truck itself would of course incriminate the Chehabs, if any identifiable fragments remain. The hope is that none will. In the first World Trade Center bombings, you may be too young to remember, the rented truck was traced with laughable ease. This time, the physical clues will be obliterated—sunk, as the great Shakespeare puts it, full fathom five.”
“Obliterated,” Ahmad repeats. The word is not one he often hears. A strange layer, as of a transparent, disagreeable-tasting wool, has come to enwrap him and act as an impediment to the interaction of his senses with the world.
In contrast, Shaikh Rashid has come sharply out of his trance, sensitive to the boy’s queasy mood, quickly insisting to him, “You will not be there to experience it. You will already be in Jannah, in Paradise, at that instant, confronting the delighted face of God. He will greet you as His son.” The shaikh bends forward earnestly, changing gears. “Ahmad, listen to me. You do not have to do this. Your avowal to Charlie does not obligate you, if your heart quails. There are many others eager for a glorious name and the assurance of eternal bliss. The jihad is overwhelmed by volunteers, even in this homeland of evil and irreligion.”
“No,” Ahmad protests, jealous of this alleged mob of others who would steal his glory. “My love of Allah is absolute. Your gift is one I cannot refuse.” Seeing a kind of flinch on his master’s face, a clash of relief and sorrow, a disconcerted gap, in his usual composed surface, through which his mere humanity flashes, Ahmad relents, joining him in humanity with the joke, “I would not have you think that our hours studying the Eternal Book were wasted.”
“Many study the Book; few die for it. Few are given your opportunity to prove its truth.” From this stern high plane Shaikh Rashid relents in turn: “If there is any uncertainty in your heart, dear boy, speak it now, without penalty. It will be as if this conversation has never taken place. I ask from you only silence, a silence in which someone with more courage and faith may carry out the mission.”
The boy knows he is being manipulated, yet accedes to the manipulation, since it draws from him a sacred potential. “No, the mission is mine, though I feel shrunk to the size of a worm within it.”
“Good, then,” the teacher concludes, leaning back, lifting up his little black shoes, and resting them in view on the silver-threaded footstool. “You and I will not speak of this again. Nor will you visit here again. Word has reached me that the Islamic Center may be under surveillance. Inform Charlie Chehab of your heroic resolve. He will arrange that you soon
receive detailed instruction. Give him the name of this sharmooa whom you value above your mother. I cannot say that I approve: women are our fields, but our mother is the Earth itself, from which we drew existence.”
“Master, I would rather entrust the name to you. Charlie has a connection with her that might lead him to disrespect my intent.”
Shaikh Rashid resents such a complication, which mars the purity of his pupil’s submission. “As you wish,” he says stiffly.
Ahmad prints JORYLEEN GRANT on a piece of notepaper, just as he saw it, not many months ago, inscribed in ballpoint on the edges of the pages of a thick high-school textbook. They were nearly equals then; now he is headed for Jannah and she for Jahannan, the pits of Hell. She is the only bride he will enjoy on Earth. Ahmad notices in writing that the trembling has passed out of his teacher’s hands into his own. His soul feels like one of those out-of-season flies that, trapped in winter in a warm room, buzz and insistently bump against the glass of a window saturated with the sunlight of an outdoors wherein they would quickly die.
The next day, a Wednesday, he wakes early, as if at a shout that quickly dies away. In the kitchen, in the dark before six o’clock, he encounters his mother, who is back on the morning shift at Saint Francis. She wears, chastely, a beige street dress and a blue cardigan thrown across her shoulders; her footsteps pad silently in the white Nikes she wears for the miles she traverses the hospital’s hard floors. He gratefully senses that her recent mood—the short temper and distraction caused by one of those obscure disappointments whose atmospheric repercussions have bothered him since early childhood—is lifting. She wears no makeup; the skin beneath her eyes is blanched, and her eyes are reddened by her swim in the waters of sleep. She greets him with surprise: “Well, you’re an early bird!”