Could a group of slazans have done something similar? Could these slazans on this secret, distant world be primal Utopians?
In the distance, bells sound from the University’s highest tower. Other bells and chimes sound, an undulating wave carried through the streets and parks. Everything is cast orange with the sun’s descent. Classes are ending, craftsmen are cleaning up, offices are closing. Soon Muslims will be called to prayer, Jews will head to temple, Christians will attend evensong, and nonbelievers in the University quarter will take advantage of the moment to beat the crowd to popular restaurants, bars, and cafés. There is meant to be relief or joy in the three distinct sabbaths, each respected in such different ways, but coming one right after the other that the entire end of the week is often called the sabbath.
I leave the park as the streets begin to fill with people. The number of flybys increase, advertising places to go after prayer, before curfew. I should feel a minor rush of excitement. There is the wealth of dress, the range of culture, the promise of the evening, but all I notice is the number of students who walk in public without veils, and the young, bare faces make me feel conservative, out of place.
The sun is setting when I make my way into the city’s Muslim quarter, and now my dress feels too bright, its close cut immodest. In the desert town of my family, my clothes would be worse than immodest, the visible calves and arms, the glimpse of skin between breasts, too much an enticement.
A muezzin calls out from a nearby minaret. God alone is great Not far away another man in another minaret calls out the same. Then farther away, the phrases repeating, the voices melding. I testify there is no god but God. All flybys have ceased. The moment has become sacred. I stop and look across the street at the tiny mosque. I consider crossing, I consider going in. I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. I like the muezzin’s voice, the way it draws me back to my youth, when belief came so easily. Come to prayer. Come to prayer. Come to success. Come to success. It’s been years since I answered that call. God alone is great. There is no god but God. But I am dirty and full of doubt and improperly dressed.
I walk on and look for public lavatories. All that tea and wine and no food. After relieving myself, I recognize my hunger. Flybys have resumed: this restaurant, that entertainment, the opportunity to help humanity. I walk through the heart of the city, past the closed gates of the market, past the giant mosque, past ornate fountains, where the sound of falling water eases something in me.
I should go home, to my solitary flat: the bright walls, the empty bed, the knickknacks I had accumulated while I lived in the desert reserve, the images of my departed son—and I remain in the Muslim quarter, forgetting every thought as soon as it’s finished traveling through my mind.
It’s past dark now. The calls from distant minarets sound again, until all sound is traffic and the call to prayer. I am light-headed from the walking, from the long afternoon’s hunger. I find a late-night shop that sells food and prayer rugs. The owner is old and thin. I look at prayer rugs rather than food, and the owner asks where I’m from. I tell him, and he tries to look politely in my general direction, avoiding my eyes, avoiding the faint curve of visible breast. He tells me I should buy a second veil. “You are too immodest with your beauty.” I feel ashamed for the way I dress, the way it must cause him such exaggerated thoughts about my chaste breasts.
The curfew is near. A former colleague lives in the Muslim quarter, so I go to see her. Judith greets me at the doorway, large and round, her smile as generous as her appetite until she gets a good look at me. “Pauline?”
“I can’t bear my flat tonight,” I say.
“Then you’ll have to bear mine. Come on in.”
She offers me food and wine, and I tell her I’m not hungry. We sit and Judith chats. She was the first to leave the Institute for Cultural Studies when the Kiplingers were formed, and since then she moved from her family’s home in the Jewish quarter to this flat and produced one monograph after another about cultural purity and cultural mixing in the neighborhood and workplaces of Wradi al-Uyoun. I came here often just after my husband had departed for parts unknown with our son, and in those visits I found it hard to stop eating, as if there were some buried energy in me that had to be fed. Judith took me in, without qualm, even though we had mutual friends who would not talk to me because I had remained at the Institute and rubbed shoulders with Kiplingers. Now, years later, I have returned to her flat. Finally, after numerous offers of food, after an hour of pleasant chatter, she has to know. “How are things with Fawiza?”
I consider telling her. She will know the right thing to do. She will tell me why it’s wrong of me to want to find answers to all my questions.
“Are things okay at the Institute?” she asks.
“They’ve been intense for the last few months. Ever since the slazan warrior destroyed that colony.”
Judith says nothing for a while. The peace movement suffered after that attack. Recruiting rates had shot up immediately. The war had become real again. “You read al-Kharrat’s piece, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
My lack of response bothers her, provokes her to comment, to summarize for me what I’ve already read. It’s the character flaw of those who teach: learning itself becomes its own religion, its own way to a better life. “Up until that point, the slazan strategy has been pure tit for tat. They have attacked only in response to our attacks. We must have successfully attacked a civilian population of theirs. Why else would they have destroyed a defenseless colony when there was a military target nearby?”
“Maybe the slazan warrior aimed for what was closest?” I say.
That only gets her going, and I regret having said anything at all. I’m tired of all the words. I wonder if there’s some way to have a strong sense of morality that doesn’t become encumbered by the accompanying rhetoric. And I realize that there’s no way I can ask her advice. I already know the ethics of the whole thing. I know what she will say, and I know she will be right. By going I have made myself complicit in any immorality that follows from this research. By remaining silent I lend support to whatever happens.
But that night, feigning sleep in her guest bedroom, I carry on the conversation with the Judith who lives in my mind, who has become part of my conscience. I tell her that I am not the executioner who ignores the blood on his hands while he claims that someone else would have done it. But the execution looks the same‚ no matter who lowers the blade. The research is shaped by the researcher. If I don’t go, someone else will go. What if it’s a person who sees the war the same way as my parents? Who sees it the same way as most people on this world see it? My own imaginary Judith is honest to the real one snoring loudly in her own bedroom: This thinking is the way of madness. It’s not the research‚ it’s who reads the research. Those who don’t want to see what’s good won’t see it. I tell her she’s wrong. I think of ibn Haj and tell Judith that there are people who want this war to end; they need to know how to negotiate its settlement. You’d be better off screwing this general of yours, and once that’s out of your system, you can think about history, about how these things really happen.
I want to talk with the real Judith. But I’ve thumbprinted away my voice. So I shift in bed, slip in and out of sleep, until I’m no longer sure if the dawn call to prayer is a dream or not. There is no god but God. Prayer is better than sleep.
I shower completely. For a while my hunger feels healthy, my body alive. I have freed myself of the city’s dirt. In the guest-room closet is the old black abaya I had left here after my husband had left me. I expect it to bring back memories, but the musty fabric is comforting in the way it covers everything between ankles, wrist, and neck.
Because this is a flat built in the Muslim quarter, each room has a tiny niche in the wall directing the devout toward Mecca. When E-donya was charted and mapped, they unraveled the prime meridian and wrapped its invisible thread around the world, tightening it along a line that would make
it possible for a spot in one of the world’s deserts to bear the same coordinates as Mecca on Earth. There they painstakingly built a facsimile of the city’s heart so pilgrims could walk seven times around the Ka’ba and traverse the distance between the sacred columns of Sfa and Marwa. That a desert existed at the right latitude for this to happen made it possible for the devout to transpose a religion and a people to this world with the geographic certainty that the move was part of God’s design.
It is this certainty I want to feel once again when I stand facing the niche, facing Mecca, facing the Ka’ba. I declare the greatness of God. I recite the first chapter of the Quran, the words coming readily to my lips. It’s as if time has been erased. I have returned to my devout adolescence, when fresh hormones opened my body to all the wonders and pains of the world, when the absence of righteousness and the presence of God were as self-evident as hunger and bread. I bow down, I declare there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, but in my submission, in my prostration before God, I feel nothing. There is no one listening, there are no answers.
All I know is the hunger in my belly. All I feel is a yearning for the bed I left too early. I write Judith a note of thanks and leave, wearing abaya and veil, the prayer rug hanging from a strap over my shoulder.
I walk from one end of the quarter to the other. I walk through the main market. I stare at food, and I listen to women hawk their wares. I try to envision the fine balances between religion, law, and custom that keep us connected to the men and women in markets since men built the first cities in lands like these light-years from here, that cluster of people digging in, refusing to move ever again with the seasons, marking a break in human affairs, a rift between when life was local history and a time when life was world history.
A man in Siberia could shape a necklace and give it to his lover, and perhaps his wife would recognize the style of his craft hanging from another woman’s body, and perhaps this might affect how her family and his family dealt with each other for years to come. But no one who lived along the Mediterranean would be touched by this event, have their lives and alliances altered, and the only trace of this distant history might be found around the neck of a woman who generations later is given an odd but sturdy necklace that has changed hands numerous times. Something well made, with luck, might travel across a continent, but human actions, long ago, never had equal force. Now they can ask a woman to travel many light-years to a distant planet where she will live among an alien people, and they tell her what she finds out could affect the lives of billions of people she’s never known. She tells herself that this war has little effect on our daily lives, that we sense it only in increased taxes, in news of faraway deaths. There are so many humans that it is possible to keep death a stranger, keep war at a distance so that everyone accepts its reasonable costs.
The midday call to prayer. I follow the muezzin’s voice to the nearest mosque. In the courtyard are two fountains. I join the women, splash water on feet, forearms and hands, face and head. Inside the mosque I stand with the women, who stand behind the men. We face the mihrab‚ we face Mecca. We bow down twice. An imam rises in front. He recites from the Quran. His voice carries through the mosque. It is a lovely voice. I find it hard to fix my attention to the words. I hear just the voice. My hunger betrays me. He then offers a sermon. I try hard to attend to what he says. Each of us, he says, takes part in an individual holy struggle, each wages jihad with the worst of ourselves, to make ourselves worthy of God. Each of us prays alone. But we pray together. We answer the call to prayer. We recite the same verses of the Quran in the same language. On Fridays we gather as Muslims to bow down to God together.
But has each of us taken an equal part in the holy struggle to make the universe safe for humanity? Has each of us done more than offer a prayer for the men and women who fight the enemy? A slazan is alone, too, just like a human. But a slazan will only touch another slazan when mating. (That’s wrong, I hear myself think.) A slazan will not stand with another in prayer. A slazan will not bow down to God. A slazan cannot be righteous. A slazan destroys without provocation. (Liar.) Each of us must do more than pray. Each of us must commit ourselves to the struggle, or God will allow the slazan to win, for humanity cannot win when it’s weak, when it avoids moral struggle.
He goes on and on, and the slazans he talks about are not the slazans in the images I saw yesterday afternoon, nor are they the slazans who shared a world with humans for six years. Liar, liar, is the banal refrain in my head, my own form of useless prayer. He recites with such beauty and knows nothing. How can that be?
He finishes, we bow twice to God, and on our knees wish peace to each other. The contradiction of the moment is appalling. I should stand up, shout something, demand that he retract such evil words. I file out with the rest, continue my walk. Judith is wrong, I think. I have to go.
So why do I keep walking? Why don’t I return to my flat to contact ibn Haj?
Because I know so much has been written about the slazan‚ and none of it has made its way to the imam’s lips.
I am in a park when I hear the afternoon call to prayer. Several mothers are showing their children how to perform the ritual ablutions from the separate fountain built here for that purpose. One points to me in my black abaya and says to her daughter, “Watch the married woman. See how properly she does it.”
Before the evening call to prayer, I make my way to the Jewish quarter. For a moment I am taken aback by how everything is the same, the same kinds of buildings, the same messages on the flybys, the same segregated sidewalks. Only the synagogues are built differently from the mosques: there is no courtyard, just a simple dome over a simple building, each one oriented toward the center of the quarter where flat, cleared space represents the space in Jerusalem where the holy Temple once stood.
I don’t go into one of the synagogues, but I stand outside and listen for the sound of prayer. Later I watch people leave and head to their homes, where women step up to windows and light candles. The women shut their eyes as they speak the blessing, and then they open their eyes to the sabbath light. Judith once told me each Jew receives two souls on the sabbath to hold all the joy. I want to keep this thought, but all I can think of is the family around the table, the ritual words, and the bread they share.
I find a bench on which to rest. Walking has become a chore. I am awakened by an elderly man. He has a long beard. I imagine it’s Abraham, but this Abraham speaks with a raspy voice. “Are you okay?”
I sit up. What does he think of this woman in her black abaya whom he found lying unconscious on a Jewish bench?
“It’s almost curfew. You will be arrested.”
Is this what I want? To be arrested? This way I won’t have to make a choice. Ibn Haj will have to find someone else.
Someone else says, “She’s a bum.”
I try to focus my eyes. There’s another man, about Abraham’s size, wearing the same kind of beard. He’s standing on the other side of the street.
Abraham says, “Ignore my brother. Do you have somewhere to stay? Where do you live?”
I tell him. I recite my address.
“You do not look well. Are you sick? Do you need help?”
“I’m fasting. For the sabbath.”
“Are you Jewish?” He sounds upset with himself, as if he had been wrong to think differently.
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I’m fasting for all three sabbaths.”
He stands there for a moment. I expect derision. Instead he takes my arm. “The police will not let you fast. My brother and I do not have much, but we do have a sofa. A pilgrim such as yourself should not have to sleep in a lockup.”
The couch is too short, but the morning shower is warm, cleansing. The light-headedness, the weariness, is a whole part of me. Abraham’s brother offers me food. He grins as if he expects me to bow into hunger. I shake my head. Abraham, whose real name is Judah, says, “There is enough temptation without our adding to her burden.”
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I thank them both and leave. I can’t stand for long. I walk and have to rest. I enter a synagogue, something I haven’t done since I entered the University, an uncertain young woman, who wandered from synagogue to church to mosque, translator in ear, to listen to priests and rabbis and imams speak with sonorous certainty. I am handed a disposable ear translator and a yarmulke. At the lectern stands an adolescent girl, a white cloak draped over her shoulders, and she reads from the prayer book. She tells me in Hebrew, while the translator whispers Arabic in my ear, that prayer will not bring rains to a dried-out field or rebuild a ruined city, but prayer can cure the thirst of a parched soul and heal the wounds of a broken heart.
I should have left then, but later, when it is time for her personal remarks, she says how still she mourns for the five hundred who died in the slazan attack. “I say this because my sister is not here now. She is in training. I am proud of her. I am proud that she is committed to peace and to justice. If we are still fighting this war when I am her age, I hope I also have the same courage and faith.”
I return to the street. All I can see is the bright face of that adolescent girl. If I stay here—if I don’t go on ibn Haj’s mission—I will have done nothing to change her view of justice, whereas now, because of her sister’s life, she can only rejoice at slazan death.
I’m listless. People stare at me. I wait for something to happen, for someone to come get me. Instead, I run into three former students. Two are wearing yarmulkes. These two are young female versions of Abraham. They look concerned. They want to know if I am sick, if I need help. The third, Maryam, looks uncomfortable. She never expected to see her professor in this state.
“I’m fasting,” I say.
“For how long?”
“Until the Christian sabbath is over.” I tell them how I will go to stay in the Christian quarter this evening. Maryam wants to know where I’ll stay. I shrug, shake my head, and she offers me her flat, which she is secretly sharing with a young man. The two other students giggle.
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