by John Updike
Hermione is shocked. He has come closer to her but has fallen in her estimation. She tells him a shade tartly, trying to recall this beautiful, selfless public servant to himself, “Mr. Secretary, no man can serve two masters. Mammon is one; it would be presumptuous of me to name the other.”
The Secretary takes this in, blinks his surprisingly light blue eyes, and swears, “Thank God for you, Hermione. Of course. Forget Mammon.” He settles at his exiguous desk and vehemently punches beeping triplets of code numbers into the electric console, and leans back in his ergonomically correct chair to bark into the speaker-phone.
Hermione doesn’t usually phone on a Sunday. She prefers weekdays, when she knows Jack isn’t likely to be there. She has never had much to say to Jack, which used to slightly hurt Beth’s feelings; it was as if Herm were carrying on their parents’ ridiculous Lutheran anti-Semitic prejudices. Also, Beth has deduced, on a weekday her “big” sister has the excuse of her red light blinking on her other phone when she thinks Beth is rambling on too long. But today she calls while church bells are ringing, and Beth is glad to hear her voice. She wants to share her good news. “Herm, I’ve gone on this diet and in just five days I’ve lost twelve pounds!”
“The first pounds are the easiest,” Hermione says, always putting down anything Beth does or says. “At this point you’re just losing water, which will come right back. The real test comes when you can see the difference and decide to pig out to celebrate. Is this the Atkins diet, by the way? They say it’s dangerous. He was about to be sued by a thousand people, that’s why his sudden death seemed so fishy.”
“It’s just the carrot-and-celery diet,” Beth tells her. “Whenever I have the urge to nibble, I go for one of these baby carrots they sell everywhere now. Remember how carrots used to come into Philly from the Delaware truck farms, in a tied bunch with the dirt and sand still on them? Oh, how I used to hate that feeling of biting down on grains of sand—it sounded so loud in your head! No danger of that with these baby ones; they must come out of California and are all peeled down to exactly the same size. The only trouble is, if they sit too long in the sealed pack they come out slimy. The trouble with celery is, after a couple of stalks this ball of string collects in your mouth. But I’m determined to stick with it. It’s easier to nibble cookies, God knows, but every bite adds on calories. A hundred thirty each, I was shocked to read on the package! The print is so fine, it’s diabolical!”
That Hermione hasn’t yet cut her short seems odd; Beth knows she’s boring on the subject of doing without food, but it’s all she can think about, and talking about it out loud holds her to it, keeps her from backsliding, despite her faint spells and stomach cramps. Her stomach doesn’t understand what she’s doing to it, why it’s being punished, not knowing it’s been her worst enemy for years, lying there under her heart crying out to be filled. Carmela won’t lie on her lap any more, she’s become so jumpy and irritable.
“What does Jack make of all this?” Hermione asks. Her voice sounds level and grave, a little halting and solemn, weighing her words. This prospect of a new, slim, presentable sister is something they both could be giggling about, the way they used to when sharing their room in the Pleasant Street house, sharing the sheer joy of being alive. As she got more serious and studious, Hermione stopped knowing how to giggle; she found it hard to lighten up. Beth wonders if that is the reason she never found a husband—Herm didn’t know how to make men forget their troubles. She lacked ballon, as Miss Dimitrova had said.
Beth lowers her voice. Jack is in the bedroom reading and he may have read himself to sleep. Central High has started up again, and he has volunteered to teach a course on civics, saying he needs more exposure to these kids he is supposed to counsel. He claims they are getting away from him. He claims he is too old, but that’s his depression talking. “He doesn’t say much,” she tells Hermione in answer to her question. “I think he’s afraid to jinx it. But he has to be pleased; I’m doing it for him.”
Herm asks, shooting her down again, “Is that ever a good idea, to do something because you think your husband wants it? I’m just asking—I’ve never been married.”
Poor Herm, this has to be on her mind all the time. “Well, you’re”—Beth stops her tongue; she had been about to say that Hermione was as good as married, to that bull-headed linebacker of a boss of hers—“as wise as anybody else, any other woman. I’m doing it for myself, too. I feel so much better, with just the twelve pounds off. The girls at the library can see the difference—they’re very supportive, though at their age I couldn’t imagine my figure ever getting out of hand. I said I’d like to help with the shelving instead of just sitting on my fat ass behind the desk Googling for kids too lazy to learn to Google for themselves.”
“How does Jack like the change in his diet?”
“Well, I’ve tried not to change his, still giving him meat and potatoes. But he says he’d just as soon have simple salads with me. The older he gets, he says, the more eating anything disgusts him.”
“That’s the Jew in him,” Hermione cuts in.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Beth says, haughtily.
Hermione is then so silent Beth wonders if the connection has been broken off. Terrorists are blowing up oil pipes and power plants in Iraq, nothing is utterly secure any more. “How’s the weather down there?” Beth asks.
“Still hot, once you leave the building. September in the District can be still muggy. The trees don’t turn with all that color we used to get in the Arboretum. Spring is the season here, with the cherry blossoms.”
“Today,” Beth says, as her starved stomach gives a pang that makes her grip the back of the kitchen chair for support, “I felt fall in the air. The sky is so absolutely clear, like”—like the day of Nine-Eleven, she started to say, but stopped, thinking it might be tactless to mention that to an undersecretary of Homeland Security, the fabled blue sky that has become mythic, a Heavenly irony, part of American legend like the rockets’ red glare.
They must be thinking the same thoughts, for Hermione asks, “Do you remember you mentioned this young Arab-American Jack had taken such an interest in, who instead of taking Jack’s advice to go to college had gotten a license to drive a truck because the imam at his mosque had asked him to?”
“Vaguely. Jack hasn’t mentioned him for a while.”
“Is Jack there?” she asks. “Could I talk to him?”
“To Jack?” She has never wanted to talk to Jack before.
“Yes, to your husband. Please, Betty. It may be important.”
Betty, yet. “Like I was saying, he may be having a nap. We went out walking earlier, to give me exercise. The exercise is just as important as the dieting. It reshapes the body.”
“Could you please go see?”
“If he’s awake? Maybe it’s something I could pass on to him, if he is. Having a nap.”
“I don’t think so. I’d rather talk to him myself. You and I can have our chat this week, when you’re watching your serials.”
“I’ve given them up, too—I associate them too much with nibbling. And they were getting scrambled up in my mind, all these characters. I’ll go see if he’s awake.” She is mystified and cowed.
“Betty, even if he’s not—could you wake him up?”
“I’d hate to do that. He sleeps so poorly at night.”
“I need to ask him some things right now, honey. They can’t wait. I’m sorry. Just this once.” Ever the older sister, knowing more than she does, telling her what to do. Reading her mind again, over the telephone, Hermione fondly admonishes Beth, in a voice that sounds like their mother’s, “Now, no matter what happens, don’t you fall off your diet.”
On Sunday night, Ahmad fears he will not be able to sleep, on what is to be the last night of his life. The room around him is unfamiliar. It is one, Shaikh Rashid assured him, standing with him in the room earlier that evening, where no one can find him.
“Who would be looking for me?
” Ahmad asked. His small, slight mentor—it was strange for Ahmad, as the two of them stood close together in collusion, to feel how much taller he had become than his master, who during Qur’an lessons augmented his height with that of the high-backed chair with the silver threads—gave one of his quick, knifing shrugs. The man this evening wore not his usual shimmering embroidered caftan but a gray Western-style suit, as if dressed for a business trip among the infidels. How else explain his shaving off his beard, the precisely trimmed gray-flecked beard? It had concealed, Ahmad saw, a number of small scars, traces on his waxy white skin of some disease, eradicated in the West, contracted by a child in Yemen. With these roughnesses was revealed something disagreeable about his violet lips, a sulky masculine set to them that had lurked unemphasized when they moved so rapidly, so seductively, in a recess of facial hair. The shaikh was not wearing his turban or his lacy white ‘amma; a receding hairline was bared.
Shrunken in Ahmad’s eyes, he asked, “Your mother will not miss you and activate the police?”
“She has night duty this weekend. I left a note for her to see when she comes in, saying I am spending the night with a friend. She may suppose it is a girlfriend. She nags me on the subject, suggesting I should have one.”
“You will spend the night with a friend who will prove more true than any disgusting sharmooa. The eternal, inimitable Qur’an.”
A copy bound in limp rose-colored leather, with English and Arabic en face, rested on the bedside table in this narrow, barely furnished room. It was the only thing new and expensive in the room—a “safe” room close enough to the center of New Prospect for its one window to provide a glimpse of the City Hall’s mansard steeple. The building with its multicolored fish-scale shingles loomed above the lesser buildings like some fantastic sea-dragon frozen in the moment of breaching. The evening sky behind it was ribbed with rolls of cloud tinted a rosy pink by a sun setting out of sight. The solar image, its orange blare of reflection, was caught in the spire’s Victorian gills of glass—windows on an interior spiral stair closed decades ago to tourists. As Ahmad strained to see from his own window, the thin old panes dirty and wavy and bearing small bubbles of antique manufacture, he saw the dying sunlight seeming to melt the highest corner of one of the rectilinear glass-skinned civic additions. The City Hall’s mansard steeple holds a clock, and he feared its chiming would keep him awake all of the night, making him a less efficient shahd. But its mechanical music—a brief phrase tolling the quarter-hour, the last, upward note lingering like an inquisitively lifted eyebrow, and with every fourth quarter a fuller phrase preceding the doleful count of the hour—proves to be lulling, reassuring him, when the shaikh at last left him alone, that this room is indeed safe.
The previous residents of this little chamber have left few clues to their passage. Some scuff marks on the baseboards, two or three cigarette burns on the windowsills and bureau top, the shine left by repeated use of the doorknob and key-slot, a certain faint animal scent in the scratchy blue blanket. The room is religiously clean, more extremely so than Ahmad’s room in his mother’s apartment, which still holds unholy possessions—electronic toys with dead batteries, out-of-date sports and automotive magazines, clothes meant to express, in their severity and snug fit, his teen-age vanity. His eighteen years have accumulated historical evidence, which will become, he imagines, of great interest to the news media: cardboard-framed photos of children squinting in May sunshine on the brownstone steps of the Thomas Alva Edison Elementary School, Ahmad’s dark gaze and unsmiling mouth embedded in the ranks of other faces, most black and some white, all lumped in the child labor of becoming loyal and literate Americans; photos of the track team, in which Ahmad Mulloy is older and fractionally smiling; track-meet ribbons, their cheap dye rapidly faded; a felt Mets pennant from a ninth-grade bus trip to a game in Shea Stadium; a beautifully calligraphed roll of the names in his Qur’an class before it dwindled to just him; his Class C driver’s certificate; a photograph of his father, wearing a foreigner’s eager-to-please grin, a thin mustache that must have seemed quaint even in 1986, and shiny, centrally parted hair, obsequiously slicked down where Ahmad wore his own hair, identical in texture and thickness, brushed proudly upright, with a whiff of mousse. His father’s face, it will be broadcast, was more conventionally handsome than the son’s, though a shade darker. His mother, like televised victims of floods and tornadoes, will be much interviewed, at first incoherently, in shock and tears, and later more calmly, speaking in sorrowful retrospect. Her image will appear in the press; she will become momentarily famous. Perhaps there will be a spike in the sale of her paintings.
He is glad the safe room is clean of all clues to his person. This room is, he feels, his decompression chamber for the violent ascent before him, on an explosion as swift and strong as the muscular white horse Buraq.
Shaikh Rashid seemed reluctant to leave. He too, shaven and wearing a Western suit, was engaged in a departure. He fidgeted about the tiny room, tugging open reluctant bureau drawers, and making sure that the bathroom contained washcloths and towels for Ahmad’s ritual ablutions. Fussily, he pointed out the prayer rug on the floor, its woven-in mihrab giving the eastern direction of Mecca, and emphasized how he had placed in the miniature refrigerator an orange, and plain yogurt, and bread for the boy’s breakfast in the morning—very special bread, khibz el-‘Abbs, the bread of Abbas, made by the Shiites of Lebanon in honor of the religious celebration Ashoura. “It is made with honey,” he explained, “and sesame and anise seeds. It is important that you be strong tomorrow morning.”
“I may not be hungry.”
“Make yourself eat. Is your faith still strong?”
“I believe so, master.”
“With this glorious act, you will become my superior. You will leap ahead of me on the golden rolls kept in Heaven.” His fine gray eyes, with their long lashes, appeared to water and weaken as he looked down.
“You have a watch?”
“Yes.” A Timex he bought with his first paycheck, a clunky one like his mother’s. It has big numbers and phosphorescent hands to read at night, when the truck cab had been hard to see in, though easy to see out of.
“It is accurate?”
“I believe so.”
There is a plain chair in the room, its legs wired together since the rungs are no longer held by glue. Ahmad thought it would be discourteous to take the room’s one chair, and instead, allowing himself a foretaste of the exalted status he will earn, lay down on the bed, lacing his hands together behind his head to show that he had no intention of falling asleep, though in truth he did feel suddenly tired, as if the tawdry room had somewhere in it a leak of soporific gas. He was not comfortable under the shaikh’s concerned gaze, and wished now the man would go. He yearned to savor his solitary hours in this clean, safe room, alone with God. The curious way in which the imam looked down upon him reminded Ahmad of how he himself stood above the worm and the beetle. Shaikh Rashid was fascinated by him, as if by something repellent yet sacred.
“Dear boy, I have not coerced you, have I?”
“Why, no, master. How could you?”
“I mean, you have volunteered out of the fullness of your faith?”
“Yes, and out of hatred of those who mock and ignore God.”
“Excellent. You do not feel manipulated by your elders?”
It was a surprising idea, though Joryleen also had expressed it. “Of course not. I feel wisely guided by them.”
“And your path tomorrow is clear?”
“Yes. I am to meet Charlie at seven-thirty at Excellency Home Furnishings, and we are to drive together to the loaded truck. He will accompany me in it part of the way to the tunnel. Then I am on my own.”
Something ugly, a disfiguring little twist, crossed the shaikh’s clean-shaven face. Without his beard and richly embroidered caftan, he appeared disconcertingly ordinary—slight of frame, a bit tremulous in manner, a bit withered, and no longer young. Stretched out on t
he rough blue blanket, Ahmad was conscious of his superior youth, height, and strength, and of his teacher’s fear of him, as one is afraid of a corpse. Shaikh Rashid, hesitating, asked, “And if Charlie by some unforeseen mischance were not to be there, could you proceed with the plan? Could you find the white truck by yourself?”
“Yes. I know the alley. But why would Charlie not be there?”
“Ahmad, I am sure he will be. He is a brave soldier in our cause, the cause of the true God, and God never deserts those who wage war on His behalf. Allhu akbar!” His words mixed with the distant musical phrases of the City Hall clock. Everything had a distance to it by now, a receding vibration. The shaikh went on, “In a war, if the soldier beside you falls, even if he is your best friend, even if he has taught you all you know about soldiering, do you run and hide, or do you march on, into the guns of the enemy?”
“You march on.”
“Exactly. Good.” Shaikh Rashid lovingly yet warily gazed down upon the boy on the bed. “I must leave you now, my prize pupil Ahmad. You have studied well.”
“I thank you for saying so.”
“Nothing in our studies, I trust, has led you to doubt the perfect and eternal nature of the Book of Books.”
“No, indeed, sir. Nothing.” Though Ahmad had sometimes sensed that his teacher in his studies had been infected with such doubts, now was not the time to question him, it was too late; we must each meet death with what faith we have created within, and stored up against the Event. Was his own faith, he had asked himself at times, an adolescent vanity, a way of distinguishing himself from all those doomed others, Joryleen and Tylenol and the rest of the lost, the already dead, at Central High?
The shaikh was hurried and troubled, yet had difficulty in leaving his pupil, searching for the final word. “You have your printed instructions for the final cleansing, before…”