by James Reston
“‘I’m pretty good with computers,’ I said.
“Again, Atef’s gaze drifted out the window to the comings and goings on the parade ground outside. After a long pause, he turned back to me.
“‘We have known about you for some time, Abu Tariq al Lubnani,’ he said at last.”
The Botanical Garden was Karima’s favorite place in all of Hamburg. She and Sami had strolled the grounds there together many times. It was a cold day, with the wind whipping up in the North Sea, cold enough to keep the crowds down. As she made her way down the path toward her meeting place with Recht, she suddenly had the feeling that she was being followed. She swirled around to see a slightly swarthy man abruptly turn down a separate path.
When she saw the kommissar ambling toward her far down the path, her anxiety dissipated. She decided that she had to get over her anger about the leak of her letter. Perhaps it was not his doing, as he professed. In any event, it had happened, and there was nothing to be done about it. More important problems faced her now. Even at a distance she could tell he was in good spirits. His happy moods were easy to identify, since his normal expression was almost always dour.
“Why are you feeling so good today, Kommissar Recht?” she said.
He looked at her appraisingly, uncertain how much he could share. “They have killed an important al-Qaeda figure,” he said at last.
She prayed silently that he would say the name Omar.
“Osama bin Laden’s military commander, Atef.”
“Oh yes, I heard about that on the radio. By one of those new weapons. I can see why that would make you happy.”
“Yes, and the Americans have offered $25 million for the head of bin Laden. The noose is tightening around him in the mountains of Afghanistan.”
“Who says?”
“My counterpart in the FBI.”
“Sehr gut. Bravo! I’m glad for you. I’m not really following it, you know.”
“You should, Karima. You should.”
It was the first time he had used the familiar form of you, and the second time she could remember he called her Karima instead of Dr. Ilgun.
When they found a bench near the crocuses, she changed the subject abruptly.
“That judge taunted me with personal questions,” she said. “I said more than I should have.”
“That is his job,” the kommissar replied stoically, lighting up the first of his cigarettes.
“He had no right to bring up my marriage or my abortion.”
“It is his courtroom. He does what he wants to.”
“Those things have nothing to do with 9/11. He was just taunting me, trying to make me angry.”
“And succeeded, it seems.”
“And to make me lose my composure.”
Recht frowned and said nothing.
“But our marriage was never registered with the state. Sami used it as a pretext to bully me and to force me into a display of piety. I never considered myself to be married. Neither did he … toward the end.”
“I suppose, in the wake of possibly the greatest crime in history, you expect to be treated like a lady?”
She turned on him angrily, started to say something, and then remembered herself.
“Look, Karima. It’s no good trying to underplay your attachment to that man. We have your emails.”
“What emails?”
He reached in his coat pocket and handed her a folded piece of paper. She read: “I just wanted to write you that I’ll always love you. Your Karima.”And: “I love you, your yearning wife, Karima Haddad.”
“There were other emails,” she said softly. “They were not all like that.”
“Yes, that’s true. There was this one as well.” And he pulled another paper from his pocket.
“I had to think about our baby today. I am sorry about everything I did to you.”
She started to speak, caught herself as words choked in her throat. She rummaged in her purse for a tissue. “I didn’t want to be left behind with a child of a husband gone off to a fanatic’s war.”
His expression became stern. “So, you were aware that he was going off to a fanatic’s war.”
“I didn’t mean that. You know what I mean.”
“Whatever your awareness was or is, the point is this, Karima: At the very least, you are suspected of giving substantial material support to a terrorist. Maybe it was innocent material support. I happen to believe it was. But it was support nonetheless. He needed it. He couldn’t do without it. He was needy, and he depended on you. You were the successful one, not him.”
“On the surface he was so confident.”
“But inside, I think he was timid and terrified. You were on your way to a fine career. He was struggling with his courses. He had always struggled, going back to his childhood. He was the kid who always needed extra help just to get by, while you just sailed through.”
“Sailed through?” she scoffed. “That’s not the phrase I would use.”
“Did he ever tell you that he needed an extra year to finish high school?”
“An extra year?”
“He never told you that?”
“No.”
“It’s true. His parents, with considerable difficulty, paid for a full year of private lessons in math and physics before he went to Germany.”
“They were so generous.”
“What was he going back to in Lebanon? A house in a dusty village in the Bekaa? A fancy car provided by his sugar daddy? The confinement of a family compound? The empty life on the family dole where everyone looked upon his wife as a dynamo and looked at him as a dunce?”
She was not listening. “I think he was blackmailed.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He was no fanatic. It was just words. He had nothing against America.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he told me.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When? Well, a bunch of times.”
“A bunch of times!”
“Well, yes,” she stammered.”Not in so many words.”
“When?”
“In Florida, I guess. Yes, that was it. When I visited him Florida. And when he came to see me here.”
“He told you that he had nothing against America? Only six weeks before 9/11?”
“I think so. I mean, I don’t remember exactly. He loved his time in Florida. But yes, in Florida, I suppose.”
He looked at her coldly. “I thought you never talked to him about the operation.”
“No. No, of course not. But what I wanted to say—”
“Wait a minute, Karima. Did you ever talk to Sami Haddad about the operation, yes or no?”
“No, I never did. I’ve told you that over and over.”
“Well, it sounded just then as if you had.”
“I’m just getting confused. I’ve heard so much in the press—and from you. I dream about him all the time. He lives in my head. I even see his face in my apartment sometimes. I can’t seem to get rid of him. If it sounds like I talked to him about his crime, I have, yes. I talk to him all the time in my thoughts. I imagine things I might have said, and things I might have done to turn him away from his course.”
“Okay,” he said, softening. “I get it.”
“I’m sorry. I get confused between what I know and what I imagine.”
He took a long drag on his cigarette. “It has also occurred to me that he might have been blackmailed.”
“You see!”
“But not in the normal way. I’m sure they threatened him with dire consequences if he faltered.”
“He was tormented by doubts; I’m sure of it.”
“You’re just hoping he was.”
“No, I know it.”
“How do you know
that?”
“I know it in my heart.”
“Oh, I see. In your heart. Well, in the end, he made up his mind.”
“Yes.”
“He made it up when he was with you.”
“Yes. Don’t you think I understand that? What do you think haunts me every minute of every day?”
He took another long draught on his cigarette. They sat without speaking for a while.
“Well, come on, then,” he said finally. “I’ll buy you an ice cream.”
She rose and looked at his lumpy face. “Kommissar Recht,” she said, “do you mind if I call you Günther?”
7
AS SHE HAD LISTENED TO HIS TAPES almost nightly, Karima thought she was beginning to understand Sami’s dilemma. He had been so vulnerable to it all: the spoiled kid from the well-off family, the below-average student who always needed extra help, the bumbler who could never seem to complete any large task, the charmer who covered up his deficiencies with his pretty smile, the dreamer who was always waiting for the chance to show everyone there was more to him than they had come to expect and who was so easily impressed by his betters. The only hitch was that he had to die, disgrace his family and his clan, and ruin the one person he truly loved. At last she was coming to realize what she had been up against in July 2001 when he faced his choice.
Was that the blackmail of an unusual sort that Recht was talking about? First comes the appeal to his manhood, then the overlay of noble religion and politics, next the promise of eternal bliss in Paradise (but never, ever a mention of hellfire if you’re wrong), then the excitement of being a player in history, next the flattery on how unique and vital you were to the success of the group, then the fear of Mohammad Atef’s retribution for any disobedience, and finally the solemn loyalty oath to the Sheikh.
Why did she still feel the instinct to protect him? He had betrayed and disgraced her, leaving her with a shattered life and an unbearable burden of guilt. She should hate him with a hatred so incandescent it would burn away that guilt with a molten, white-hot anger. If he was blackmailed, he had blackmailed her most of all. Perhaps that was why he had recorded these reminiscences. It was an act of contempt, not love. Had he just done his deed and left no explanation, it would have been easier. He was a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, purely, pristinely, a monster. So why was she feeling sorrow and pity instead of hate and need for some sort of revenge?
At last, she felt herself withdrawing from him emotionally. With her exacting scientist’s brain, she had known the importance of this for a long time. Now, her heart was finally following her brain. After the shock and the denial, the fear and the nightmares, the conflicts over her love, the anger at his betrayal, the faulting of herself, her brutal interrogations, she had opened herself up at last to the enormity of his crime.
Karima had taken to watching Al Jazeera at night. She felt compelled to get news “from the other side.” Despite professing to be apolitical, she found herself feeling more sympathetic to the victims in the Middle East, especially now that the television was carrying pictures of American B-52s pounding the outskirts of Kandahar. The media had exhausted nearly everything there was to say about New York and Washington and Mohamed Atta, and now they were moving to softer stories.
The phone rang.
“Karima darling. It’s Gretchen again. Please don’t hang up … Listen, you should turn on your TV right away. Al Jazeera is just starting a show called ‘The Reluctant Hijacker.’”
“The reluctant hijacker?”
“Yes. Brace yourself. It’s about Sami.”
“Okay,” Karima answered flatly. She was the reluctant one.
“And Karima, I read about your court appearance in the paper. Don’t forget about my brother. He’s there for you.”
“I won’t.”
When she switched on to a program series called Your Eyes Only, a shadowy, grainy, menacing image of Sami was background for the reporter’s intro. As the reporter droned on, the sequence morphed into a shot of the dark underbelly of a plane flying noiselessly overhead, then to a sequence of Sami gleefully dancing the dabke … with her! … at a wedding a year before. Hands held high, snapping his fingers to the rhythm and stamping his feet, he moved with such grace and joy.
She remembered that night vividly. It was a night of ecstasy, when lovers had called out to the darkness as their refuge, YaLayl, YaLayl, without fear that anyone would hear or see them. Full of life and longing and expectation, they had lost themselves in the music and in each other. If only in that moment of spiritual union, she had been able to see her lover’s agony. Through the night he had been tender and playful. And the sweetness and the gentleness afterward.
And then the program cut away to an interview with his parents.
“What is your strongest memory of Sami as a boy?” the reporter was asking.
His father sat rigid in his chair. Dressed elegantly in a light tan suit, he held himself with enormous dignity, his handsome, chiseled face ruddy and ravaged, his eyes hooded by grief and disgrace. Karima could almost hear him ask himself why he had agreed to do this. Sami’s mother, the French teacher, sat dutifully beside him, her hands demurely folded in her lap, perspiring under the hot light. Karima loved them. They had been so courteous and welcoming and generous to her. And they had loved their son—at least, the son they knew.
“He was our middle child, our only son,” he was having trouble using the past tense. “He was a lovely boy, very caring for his sisters and for us. He was quite normal, really. We sent him to the best schools in Lebanon. He was a happy boy.”
“Did politics interest him?”
“He never cared about politics.”
“Religion?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t interested in religion?” The reporter’s skepticism took on an edge.
“No, he was never religious. He liked to go out or play volleyball. He was a person who loved life.”
“He liked beer?
“Sometimes.”
Why, thought Karima, are these Westerners so fascinated in the drinking habits of Muslims? And then she answered her own question: because they want to believe all Muslims were hypocrites.
The reporter turned to his mother. “When was the last time you saw your son, madam?”
“It was in February last year. He came to be beside his father after his open-heart surgery. We told him that his father’s condition was quite critical. He stayed several weeks.”
“Was he different?”
“No.”
“Same old Sami?”
“Yes.”
The camera cut away to the dusty main street of the village of Al-Marj in the Bekaa Valley, where the Haddad family was local gentry. Slowly, the camera panned over the billboards of the main street: Haddad electronics, Haddad furniture, and Haddad bridal gowns with a huge poster of a radiant bride, holding a white dove aloft, about to release it. Peace, Karima thought, and then remembered that in an Arab wedding, the symbolism of the dove was the loss of virginity—the formal wedding she would never have. The camera followed a side street to a trendy neighborhood of graceful, granite houses with balustraded balconies and elegant, oriental windows. Then the video zoomed in on a vacant lot where a lone black Mercedes was parked and idling. The patriarch sat in the driver’s seat, the reporter next to him.
“And when did you hear from him last?”
“Two days before …,” and the next word choked in his throat.
“Before September 11?”
“Yes. He called as usual on that Sunday and confirmed that he was coming to Lebanon on September 22. He would stop in Hamburg and pick up Karima—”
“His girlfriend.”
“Yes, and then they would come with a big announcement. We knew it would be their formal engagement. And we were prepared for it. I had bought this lot where I planned to build a home for them after they were marr
ied. And I would give him this 300 series Mercedes.”
“Was he pleased with your offer?”
“Not entirely. He said, ‘No, give the car to my sister. I would prefer you to give me one from the 400 series.’”