“I also missed you very much, but stop crying. We must not attract attention. Let’s check-in as though we were just one more couple whose routine could not possibly be more banal. We have all the time in the world ahead of us.”
Nadia understands. It’s best not to attract attention. There is no shortage of video cameras inspecting every millimeter of space in the airport.
“Yes, you’re right. We have all the time in the world ahead of us.”
Hand in hand, the couple check-in with a debut of new documents, new identities for each of them. From the moment they meet until they take their seats aboard the plane, they do not let go of each other’s hands for an instant, unless absolutely necessary for the embarkation procedures. Only when the plane takes off do they sigh with relief and relax a bit. Nadia even chooses to take a sedative that puts her to sleep for most of the flight. Yousef looks at her countless times as she sleeps, with tenderness and delight. Despite the failure of the Bishopsgate attack, he is deeply comforted as he soars over the Atlantic.
The tension only resumes as the plane windows start to reveal the lights of greater New York. It is nighttime and the myriad skyscrapers are shining like a Christmas tree. Nadia wakes up just in time to catch the dazzling spectacle through the plane windows. The landing on the runway at JFK Airport is smooth. Yousef and Nadia emerge from the plane, setting foot on American soil for the first time in their lives. They retrieve their luggage and know that they will now have to face the U.S. customs and immigration authorities inside the airport. But they get through this process without incident.
Meanwhile, news of the failed attack at Bishopsgate in London does not even appear in the American newspapers or news shows. A failed attack is not newsworthy. But this is only Yousef’s first attempt.
8
New York
1991-92
Yousef was in a vast, empty desert. He sighed for water, for an oasis, and the more he walked on the sands, the more his thirst increased. Until he came to a small lake, and there he slaked his thirst but, strangely, the more he drank, the more his throat burned and the more he sweated. He tried to cry out in pain but his lips were completely sealed shut. Incredible as it seemed, the water tasted just like … sand! At a certain point the water of the lake disappeared right before his very eyes and actually did turn into sand. Yousef rubbed his eyes in disbelief and saw water again. Then he saw sand, and then water again, in an infernal alternation of mirages. Finally he managed to unseal his lips and spit out what was in his mouth. A sea of red butterflies then emerged out of nowhere and began to flutter around him. The butterflies had scarlet wings of extraordinary beauty! And his throat continued to burn terribly. Increasingly maddened by the burning and the tiny creatures fluttering around him like a swarm of bees, he began to swat at them, and it was then that he felt they were stinging him just like bees. He woke up shaking, the whole bed trembling, drenched in cold sweat. Nadia was there at his side, asking him what was wrong. The faint light of the lamp at the head of the bed illuminated his pinched, distraught, just-awakened face. He replied as though still caught in the dream.
“An awful nightmare! There was this swarm of red butterflies stinging like real bees, so insidious, and a desert where the sand was water and the water was sand …oh, and my throat was burning terribly, it was just awful!
“It was a nightmare. Come here.” Nadia reached out to caress and soothe him.
They had rented an apartment in Park Slope in Brooklyn, a quiet, mostly residential neighborhod with a population that was highly diverse in professional, cultural and ethnic terms, and generally peaceful. It was a clean neighborhood with broad sidewalks, occupied primarily by an upper class and upper middle class that actually featured a few celebrities. Yousef and Nadia lived in a second floor apartment on a long street filled with a series of low buildings in a continuous strip of Victorian architecture with which they had already become familiar in London.
This dream was just one of several always very similar nightmares that Yousef had in the period right after he moved to New York with his wife. Because of them, Nadia begged her husband to consult a psychologist but he always proved unwilling. His only psychologist was God, or as he thought and said in his own language, ‘Allah.’ Furthermore, he did not want to disclose any of his dreams or anything intimate whatsoever to an unknown foreigner. No. His thoughts, dreams and worries were for him and him alone, to be confided, if at all, only to someone like Sheik Omar and his wife, or, of course, to God in prayer. They were his only family, although since he only saw Sheik Omar about once a year, practically speaking, the concept of family was confined exclusively to Nadia. She was the only person to whom he revealed the upheavals of his inner life. In the beginning of their time in New York, he was also afflicted from time to time with a stab of melancholy when his parents or his brothers and sisters surfaced in his memory, but Nadia’s company and a cold rationality helped put a stop to this, allowing him to forget, banishing these disturbing recollections to the most secluded precincts of his mind.
With the passing months in New York, the nightmares came less often, and as the summer of 1991 arrived, they were only surfacing once a month. Around this time a difference began to accentuate itself in the way Yousef and Nadia responded to society. While he invariably hearkened to his political and religious ideals, closing himself into his world and seeing defects in everything new and American, she, on the contrary, adapted completely to the western way of life. She was increasingly taken not only with going to the movies, but also to the theater, concerts, bars, multicultural restaurants and even, occasionally, discotheques to dance (this began to happen in London but it was in New York that the practice intensified). It is true that she was always accompanied by Yousef, whom she managed to persuade and drag along, also managing, though he was full of disdain, to get him to have a wonderful time with her on these occasions. To him, it also ended up becoming a way to mingle socially in New York, which was highly convenient so no one would ever suspect his radical ideas or his active dedication to them. As for styles of music, Nadia came to appreciate rock, jazz and other western genres. In 1991 certain all-time classics were released, such as Losing My Religion from the album Out of Time by R.E.M. in March, and later that year, the memorable U2 album, Achtung Baby with songs such as One and She Moves in Mysterious Ways. One brief episode clearly illustrates their behavioral differences with respect to the culture surrounding them. Nadia loved to listen to Losing My Religion, which came onto the radio more or less when they arrived in New York. As with other songs, she liked to accompany the radio or television singing the refrain, and her voice was quite good for someone who had never had any formal training. One day, Yousef heard her singing:
That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no I've said too much
I haven't said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
Nadia let herself be carried along just by the rhythm of the music, as with many other songs. She didn’t feel she was imbuing the words with a meaning as serious as affirming that she was losing her religion, but Youssef vehemently rebuked her, and she stopped singing that song. It wasn’t a matter of absolute prohibition. Things didn’t work that way between them. But it was enough for him to demonstrate that something she did was deeply displeasing to him and collided head-on with his religious principles for her to reconsider right away and eliminate it from her behavior. In any case, she would argue discreetly when it suited her, and then could discern in his face whether or not it was something that he would easily tolerate, and that would determine her conduct in the future. The more time passed, the better she knew how to deal with him. Beyond this, she knew with secret pleasure how important she had become in his
life, and availed herself of this to get him to go along with most of her wishes. Nadia was turning into a grown-up girl, cheerful and happy, who radiated sincerity in her contact with strangers, a characteristic much appreciated by all the New Yorkers the couple was getting to know. She enjoyed singing as much as going out to places that were entertaining, smiling, dancing, having fun and gradually discovering the secrets of New York. She enjoyed conversing with Americans in that great metropolis, and the fact that, particularly in Brooklyn where she lived, there were people of practically all ethnicities and origins. They began to go out regularly with neighbors and have dinner with them as both guests and hosts. Whereas Yousef socialized unwillingly, Nadia did so with genuine pleasure. Her influence prompted him to lead a fairly active, full social life. In others’ eyes they were a perfect Saudi couple, both tolerant and moderate Muslims, respecting equality of gender and origin (they had their arguments and differences just like any other couple), and perfectly adapted to American culture. The perfect Muslim model that demonstrated how Muslims, and Saudis in particular, could be quite different from the way some of the more sensationalist media portrayed them. Meanwhile, New York’s vigorous cultural life continued to enchant Nadia, as she allowed herself to evolve in accordance with the dictates of her own nature. She began only to wear clothes bought in New York or, previously, in London, and left her tunics and veils to eternal oblivion in the back of the closet. Yousef reproved her one day, arguing that she was becoming excessively materialist and consumption-driven, after the fashion of westerners, but she retorted with a series of questions replete with her argumentative acumen.
“And if I were that way, would you stop loving me? Do you love what I am outwardly or what I am inside? Am I not the same woman with one set of clothes or another, and with all the desires I have inside me?”
Faced with this question Yousef found himself defenseless.
“Still, you didn’t have to become so westernized” – and less and less Muslim, he would think, but kept these last words to himself. He knew that his wife did not feel less Muslim because she wore this or that garment, and he chose not to insist on the matter. Although he did not like certain outward appearances that he observed in her apparel or in certain tastes of hers, the truth is the he no longer knew how to live without her, without her company, without the happiness and escape from the rest of reality that she afforded him. On these grounds, he avoided prolonging their arguments. In time, this gave Nadia a precious advantage over her husband. If any difference of opinion were extended, becoming an argument that was even slightly unpleasant, or if she simply turned her back, sad and hurt, he would end the argument right away, his initial vehemence softened, he would change the subject and, sooner or later, would be willing to accept her point of view even if he disagreed with it.
So it was that when summer was over, she began to want to register for a university program of study in Psychology, only to abandon it shortly thereafter for a course in dramatic arts at a school with an excellent reputation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her attending this class gave rise to opportunities for small roles in plays. Yousef watched her on stage portraying fictitious emotions such as terror, sadness, nervousness, enthusiasm, happiness, all so expressively, with such commitment and, when discussing it after her performances, with such brightness in her eyes, that it was once again impossible for him to reprove or go against her in whatever the matter might be. Seeing her happy, and seeing also that he was happy under these circumstances confounded his radical and ultra-conservative values. If the society they lived in were that of Jeddah or another even more conservative city in the Saudi kingdom, he would certainly have been more vehement, and she would have been easier to persuade not to let herself be carried away by these desires. In New York, however, he avoided trying to curtail the desires and longings of his wife. At all events, her life never had any influence on his views of Islam or Arab and world politics. His points of view on these matters were deeply rooted and distinctly compartmentalized in his mind. He was thoroughly entrenched in a highly critical view not just of western politics, but of western life in general, and certain ultra-materialist vices that seemed to him more glaring in New York than ever before, primarily on the streets of Manhattan packed with its giant skyscrapers and countless neon signs advertising all kinds of capitalist icons, culminating in the same materialism and spiritual void that he ascribed to all of western society. That his wife should adapt better to this society, that she should yield to certain of her impulses, this was a matter concerning an entirely different sphere. She was different. She was a starburst always giving forth great light and a vitality of her own, enabling her to illuminate the very depths of darkness. She was a special being belonging to another world, where East and West did not collide, where perhaps they did not even exist, and instead there was just one rich, diverse world with so much to offer the living. However, the fact that the U.S. kept troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and bombarded Iraq indiscriminately, getting mixed up once again in affairs that only concerned the Arab countries, that it constantly supported Israel and its attacks on Lebanon and Palestine, these were totally different matters that gravely wounded his Islamic identity. These notions, by themselves, would manage to keep alive his black vision of the United States, which he looked upon as a relentless machine oppressing the Arab world, a country devoid of spiritual values. For Nadia, these were her husband’s affairs on which she had no influence. If the subject came up, she listened gravely and never disagreed with him. She always expressed the utmost, unshakable confidence in him. Rarely did she express herself on political or religious matters. She always viewed them from his perspective, supporting and cherishing him.
And so the autumn passed and the leaves loose in the wind fallen from the trees gave way to the cold and white of snow in winter. The Christmas songs and decorations all over New York took hold of the young Saudi couple, and they found themselves playing in the snow in the streets, throwing snowballs at each other and, although to them Christmas did not merit any celebration because they were Muslim, they actually ended up agreeing to spend it at the home of a Christian family of their acquaintance, and even exchanged gifts as polite guests, before a crackling fire in the hearth and a lavishly decorated tree, as the snow swirled down heavily outside the window.
1992 arrived. It was understood that Sheik Omar would appear sooner or later, as he had done in London, instigating new attacks. Despite this, impatience and anxiety were things the young Saudi couple did not feel. It was the Sheik who continued to provide financially for both of them, so they were eternally grateful to him. As long as he did not appear in New York, the two of them enjoyed the marvels of the city together, always at Nadia’s insistence. Yousef felt himself more than ever shut in by capitalism and materialism. Ramadan fell that year at the end of the winter in the first days of March, and throughout this Islamic month the two of them abstained from eating, drinking and engaging in sexual relations as long as the daylight lasted.[7] It was already the second Ramadan they had spent in New York.
In the spring and summer of 1992 they traveled and discovered cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and also went down to torrid Florida, where Yousef felt a little closer to Jeddah because of the tropical weather and the style of the waterfront avenues in Miami lined with palm trees along the sea, which reminded him of the drive along the Red Sea shore. When they were married in London they had not even had a wedding or a proper wedding night, but now, each of these trips was a kind of second chance to make good this deficit. Each trip comprised a new honeymoon, each hotel room was a cozy nest made of sheets, amorous landscapes, bodies, sensations, ecstasy, love, pleasure... Until the end of July when Nadia discovered that she was pregnant.
9
It was only in the beginning of November 1992 that Sheik Omar turned up in New York. It was autumn, and the leaves from the trees flew in the wind along the sidewalks and backstreets of Brooklyn, and in parks all over the c
ity, from Manhattan’s vast Central Park, to all the smaller parks throughout the city, coloring the air with an endless swirl of yellow, red and orange. The Sheik came to the Big Apple in a good mood. He brought news from the Islamic world for Yousef and in particular, the latest from Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. As expected, he also brought a new mission for his disciple to carry out on western soil.
They met in a Moroccan restaurant in Manhattan. The space, well decorated and lit by traditional colored lamps that offered no more than a tenuous illumination had a cozy, almost intimate atmosphere that was, above all, prepossessing. It was divided into two levels, the upper one, available only by reservation, was more expensive and luxurious, as reflected both in the service and the dishes on the menu, gourmet specialties at high prices and all prepared fresh. It was on this level that Sheik Omar settled in with Yousef. From time to time a very pretty, dark-skinned girl with long, black hair appeared to offer dazzling performances of belly dancing on a tiny stage, meticulously dressed in a long skirt of fine fabric decorated with numerous medals and a short light blouse to the level of her belly that gave further evidence of her beauty, suppleness and dexterity in motion. On this floor, unlike the one below, the tables were spaced far apart and separated into spacious individual booths so as to ensure privacy for conversation, a privacy enhanced still further by the sound of music at one moment droning in the background, the next, rising in volume to accompany the girl in her enticing belly dance.
The Miracle of Yousef: Historical and political thriller Page 17