by Ali Eteraz
With Candace’s cryptic confession rebounding around the room, I couldn’t go to sleep. Marie-Anne had her back to me on the bed. With my thoughts adrift, I took the State Department folder on my lap and flipped through the information, using the light over my right shoulder, trying to distract myself with the future after the past ceased to maintain consistency. The pages discussed the inception of the Muslim outreach; how we were a kind of civilian diplomatic corps intended to augment the work that the professional diplomats did; how there was a great deal of hunger in the world to hear from America’s minorities.
When I grew sleepy I closed the folder. I was about to put it away but I couldn’t help noticing the way the golden insignia shone in the light. This was what it meant to have charisma, I thought, when an inanimate thing had the ability to capture all the light in a room. At first I was struck by how compulsively I fixated upon the eagle. I tried to remind myself that it was just a bird on a cardboard folder. Then it occurred to me that I was being utterly unfair to this symbol, this icon, which gave an assurance and a warning that in this world, over which there was spread an eternal sky, there was a power that owned the entirety of the air. Not since God had there been an entity that had so completely owned the firmament.
The folder was pressed against my chest, the eagle close to my heart. I thought back to the early days with Ali Ansari, particularly after hearing him going on about foreign policy. I had been so indescribably afraid. It wasn’t a specific fear, of the sort that actual criminals might feel. It had been the fear of the unknown, the fear of the possible, which meant a fear of everything. Frequently I had thought: What if there was a recording device in the vicinity of Ali Ansari? What if there was an FBI informant in our midst? What if Ali Ansari was that informant? What if I got caught up in some investigation? I didn’t think that I would get taken to Guantanamo; but I also knew that merely being accused of a crime would be enough to destroy my life. Now I didn’t have a reason to be afraid. Now I had armor. Now I was under the shadow of the eagle. It was the feeling of safety, of having immunity, of being protected. I didn’t have to fear unseen authorities anymore. I was the authority. I could fly, free, anywhere. Armed with the most piercing gaze.
I went to sleep a little less troubled. Let Candace shroud herself with mystery; in time I would find a way to see into her as well.
* * *
The next day Mahmoud invited Marie-Anne and me for lunch at Pershing Square, a café located outside Grand Central, underneath Park Avenue. It was a hot and brilliant day and the restaurant had set tables out on the side street. Where we sat we were covered by a sliver of the shade from the cigarette box–shaped skyscraper of 120 Park Avenue (formerly Philip Morris International). In its lobby the Whitney Museum was having a traveling exhibition and there was a good deal of foot traffic on the pavement.
Marie-Anne looked beautiful in a white chiffon blouse with silver-belted black slacks that widened at the ankles and showed only the tips of her closed-toed heels. Her hair was pulled back in a hard ponytail, accentuating the line left in her jaw.
Conversation was as easy as the cool drinks. It was made even easier by the fact that all three of us had been at the same seminar in the morning, one focused on the liberation of Muslim women. The four American NGO workers had all presented different case studies about how to support Muslim women such that they weren’t reliant on patriarchal superstructures or held down by religious restrictions. Marie-Anne had been particularly interested in the idea of giving microloans to Muslim women.
“But my concern,” she said while forking her salad, “is that the women won’t pay back the loans and then the financial institutions that underwrite them will go bankrupt.”
Mahmoud dismissed the concern: “Repayment rates are very high.”
“But what exactly is the financial institution’s return?”
“The purpose of the loan isn’t to get a return. The purpose is to give a woman an opportunity to think highly of us.”
I sat up. “That seems kind of crass . . .”
Mahmoud wasn’t having it. “Look, we’re all friends here. Let’s appreciate that charity is just a pretext. We need the women on our side. It’s the only way to win hearts and minds. And giving loans is the most humane way of accomplishing this. Would you rather that we go the French way in Algeria? Go and rip off their veils and clothes and order them to become Western? Because that will just earn us enemies. That’s not the American way. Money talks better than force. It’s not bribery if you call it liberation.”
“Does this actually work?”
“You give people freedom and they come over to your side. Why do you think when the British were building their empire they went around the world and freed everyone’s slaves? It wasn’t because they cared about black people. It was because it reduced the number of people who might fight against them. When I give a microloan to a Muslim woman today, it’s no different than when some British admiral raised a flag in Western Asia and announced that any slave who touched the mast would become free, irrespective of whether his master allowed it or not. We are getting their weakest on our side.”
Marie-Anne turned to me with a smile on her lips; stone in her eyes. It was meant to convey that I was being too skeptical and should tone down my rhetoric. I shut up and looked in the direction of the exhibition.
She faced Mahmoud. “That’s how you know you’re on the right side,” she said. “If what you do is increasing the number of free people in the world. Why shouldn’t we give unto others what our founders gave to us?”
“To the pursuit of happiness.” Mahmoud raised his glass. “May every Muslim in the world have access to it.”
Marie-Anne clinked back. “And also, too, to the rule of law,” she added. “Which can only be brought about through effective law enforcement and surveillance.”
Mahmoud chuckled. He put an elbow in my side and pointed at Marie-Anne. “Please tell me that I didn’t just fall into a MimirCo commercial.”
We all laughed. Marie-Anne patted him on the thigh and straightened his skullcup. “You didn’t fall into a commercial, because when you watch a commercial you still have an option. Here you are bound to commit, like you got my husband to commit to your little venture.”
“Fair enough,” Mahmoud said. “But as an employee of the State Department, I can’t do anything that’s unsanctioned.”
“You’re just building bridges,” Marie-Anne replied. “The bridges will remember you when your government gig comes to an end.”
I observed her. Just a few years ago she had been an impatient novelist and short-story writer, desperate to be published, throwing herself at the mercies of tenured university professors and washed-up hacks who advertised their self-published books on social media. And the only opportunities that had presented themselves had been inseparable from her having to become some hack’s secretary and mistress. Yet here she was now, in a far more lucrative field, making deals happen without having to whore her body out. I felt proud of her. Who would have thought that the business of war would be more feminist than the business of art?
Marie-Anne and Mahmoud discussed how MimirCo ought to go about getting the Wazirati contract. Mahmoud was frank with her: The Wazirati royal in charge of the Ministry of the Interior was facing unrest in a number of his city-state’s coastal villages, where due to the tribal nature of the families it was impossible for him to send physical spies. He needed eyes there and it didn’t matter if they were mechanical.
This news was met with urgency on Marie-Anne’s part. She started shooting messages off to her superiors.
Finding the conversation progressing this quickly and smoothly allowed me to relax. I put my hands behind my head and sunned myself like a lion. In the wild Serengeti of the world my lioness was on the hunt.
* * *
Midnight train back to Philadelphia. We had gone up coach; came back first class. The little cities of New Jersey sliced past us, enclaves for close-knit communiti
es of immigrants to begin the slow and steady climb from anonymity to respectability. A teenager had been pushed onto the tracks near Edison and there was a four-hour wait. The EMT pulled up on a street not far from where we sat. I could see an old Indian woman in a sari trying to speak to the policemen. Marie-Anne called MimirCo during the delay, updating them further about the Wazirati connection. They were excited to send her to the Persian Gulf and asked how she had pulled off making the arrangement. She looked at me and smiled. She didn’t tell them the details. She just said she had been sitting on the jack of clubs.
The next few days Marie-Anne bubbled with a kind of lightness I hadn’t seen in a long time. She purchased a few bottles of Chianti Classico and we hung out on the rooftop of the building or went down to the river and secretly drank from a bottle in her purse.
The only thing that prevented me from fully engaging with Marie-Anne’s celebration were thoughts of Candace. I had to find out how she was doing. I had to find a way to talk to her. Four weeks was enough time to miss a period. A cross to appear on a white stripe. An appointment to be scheduled with a gynecologist. I imagined a life percolating inside Candace. Any iota of me, no matter how small, had to be cultivated, had to be allowed to prosper. It didn’t matter where or through whom my blood became a part of the land. There had to be someone in this vast country who could look back upon his generations and give me the pleasure of recognition. It didn’t have to be a shiny mirror as long as it had the power of reflection. To grow old in a country that reviled me was only acceptable if there was someone who came after and pitied me.
For the next two days I plugged away via text messages and voice mails. E-mail had long ago ceased to be a useful method of reaching a person; but I tried flooding that account as well. One-word messages.
Why.
Aren’t.
You.
Answering.
When personal contact became fruitless, I tried looking her up through the Al Jazeera website, but there was no record of her anywhere. I even tried the age-old trick of first-name-dot-last-name-at-domain-name. It came back Mailer Daemon.
In the middle of the Candace-induced mania I received a message from Mahmoud. He sent over the e-mail confirmations, another set of governmental direct-deposit forms, and the briefing for our time in Madrid. We were to leave in three days. I also received a separate message from Leila who said she had gotten herself teamed up with me on purpose.
The deadline torqued me into more fervent action. The only thing left to do was to drag myself over to Candace’s apartment and sit in wait. With Marie-Anne in town it wasn’t the easiest thing to get away, because she wanted to invite herself wherever I went. The only effective excuse involved making up an errand for Richard Konigsberg. He and I hadn’t been in touch since his departure; but Marie-Anne didn’t know that.
It seemed inappropriate to wander through North Philly. I decided to take a taxi directly to her apartment. Passing through like a tourist, I reminded myself that I was never meant to trapeze through the area like a native son. I had neither contributed to its character nor had a part to play in its resurrection. I had been foolish for glibly assuming it would impart enlightenment to me, infuse me with vitality. I was not meant to lead a small life, hunkered in the shadow of abandoned mansions, telling myself I was content between sky and cement. I was meant to ripple outward to the great centers of power, places like New York and Washington, and lay my hands upon the stones of strength. And I certainly would not leave any child of mine languishing in this district. I would not turn out like Richard Konigsberg, one day discovering that my child had existed without my knowledge.
I arrived at Candace’s apartment building early in the morning and banged at the door repeatedly, fruitlessly, throughout the day. No one came in or out. In the afternoon, her neighbor who used to blast music lowered the volume on the stereo and parted her door a little to yell at me, telling me not to ruin her high. “Besides,” she said, “you can’t get into an apartment no one lives at.” The neighbor’s disclosure was perplexing and shocking and immediately caused me to double back and conjure the directions from the night we’d spent together. Had I come to the wrong apartment? I ran down to the front door and carried out a hurried archaeology of memory. Here was the hole where Candace had said rats came from. Here was the handrail which she had taken for support and I had pressed up behind her to kiss her neck. Here was the elevator in which she had pushed the second-floor button with her buttocks. It had all been real. It had all happened. It wasn’t the hallucination of a drunk man. It wasn’t the yearning of a man who had failed at impregnating life so much that he had taken to impregnating fantasies. I searched for the picture of Candace I had saved. I found it. I scrolled back to the pictures we had taken with Ali Ansari the night we visited him. Those were still there as well. I was not a madman. I existed—if not wholly, then at least in close proximity to the real.
I returned to the apartment the next day and carried out a repeat performance. The same lady from next door cracked the door and gave me the same comment as the day before, except this time she threw a shoe at me. Since I was leaving the country in the very near future and didn’t have time to stalk around North Philly any longer, I texted Ali Ansari for help.
Need you to find a girl. She might be pregnant.
Farkhunda? came the reliably immediate answer.
No. The one you met at your apartment.
The mixed convert?
Yeah.
You knocked her up? Guess I don’t blame you. She had a nice ass.
Hope you remember it well enough to spot it in North Philly.
He asked for her number and place of work and told me he would get on it. What do you want me to do if I find her?
I don’t know, I said. Wait for further instructions.
I was grateful that he didn’t ask for any more details. He didn’t judge what I had done. He simply praised me when I did something great and extricated me when I fell into something reprehensible.
In short, a true friend.
Chapter Eight
Leila sat next to me on the flight and I was glad because she talked so much that it was hard to get lost thinking about the mystery of Candace.
Leila had been to Madrid before. It was the place where her transformative moment occurred, where she started thinking of herself as a moderate Muslim.
After the flight Leila and I settled into our hotel and met with the State Department liaison who Mahmoud had appointed for us. Our first meeting in Madrid was with a community centered around the Saudi mosque. Our liaison described it as Wahhabi, but emphasized that it was a gift given out of generosity. He insisted there was “no ulterior motivator.” He told us that the massive white walls of the mosque were meant to remind the Spaniards that though Islam had been driven out once, it had come back by the grace of God. He was accompanied by a slick and smiling Saudi cohort. They spoke flawless English and led us through a tour of the immense grounds, including the prayer halls, the cafés, the gym, and an amphitheater capable of holding more than a thousand people. “We just had Amr Khaled here,” the guide said proudly, referring to a famous evangelist. “Filled all of it.” After a short siesta in the café, where newly arrived Moroccans served us tea and biscuits, we walked through the well-endowed library full of texts in Spanish and Arabic. The standard collections of hadith—Bukhari and Muslim—were arranged neatly on the shelves and there were numerous manuals about prayer and ablution.
I picked up a copy of the Koran. The Saudi guide came over and told me the translation was by Muhammad Asad. He looked at me like I was expected to know the name. I told him I didn’t. He smiled and said that Asad was one of the most famous converts of the twentieth century. “Almost as important to us as Malcolm X.” Asad had been born Leopold Weiss in a Jewish family in Austria and had converted to Islam when he fell in love with the Saudi rulers and the freewheeling libertarian life they led in the desert. It baffled me to think that one of the inherito
rs of Austrian history—with its Bach, its Mozart, its Wittgenstein—would feel inclined to tie himself to the sands of Arabia, where even the greatest man of literature was one who was celebrated for his illiteracy.
We continued the tour. There was a religious high school in the mosque, catering to the children of Muslim diplomats. Girls, all with their heads covered in white hijabs, sat on one side, and the boys were on the other. Leila and I sat in between them, along with our liaison, and the students heard us talk about life as Muslims in America. Leila’s delivery was polished. She talked about Afghan food marts and Afghan weddings and how she had come to hear about the tragedy of the fallen towers and the fear and anxiety she felt “until I heard the President of the United States tell everyone that Islam was a religion of peace.”
My own delivery lacked much in the way of substance. It meandered through my childhood growing up in the South and my eventual life with Marie-Anne. I absolved my life of its warts and villainy. I didn’t mention the story about residual supremacism. I made no mention of the panic Brother Hatim felt regarding his fundamentalism. I said nothing about people like Ali Ansari. I hadn’t been brought here to give a bad impression.
One afternoon Leila and I wandered to the Prado. Guards, sentries, guides, clad in their dead-blue blazers and knee-length skirts, stalked the halls like silent wraiths. The majority of them were aged, infirm, with bloated ankles, using the numerous rocking chairs provided to them out of the kindness of the administration. I found myself transfixed in front of a painting called The Bearded Woman, by Ribera. It was a bearded man in a red robe, breast out, feeding a baby, with another man in black standing behind. But the man with the breast was not a man. The painting was of a woman called Magdalena Ventura, who had decided to grow a beard at the age of thirty-three. I noted that in a few days I would be turning the same age.
We came out into the afternoon. It was a surprisingly intense sun, with hammers for rays; but they fell upon me soft, like the keys of a piano in a light jazz piece. The drone of the people in the squares was like the hum of another instrument. Leila’s clicking heels provided the percussion. We headed toward the Atocha memorial, erected on the site of a train bombing.