The Miracle of Yousef: Historical and political thriller

by Gonçalo Coelho

  The birth of this child brightened still further the pleasant life of his parents. These were times of great happiness that prompted Yousef to assume a certain distance from his intense political activism. He experienced an overflow of comfort accumulating in the routine of a perfectly engaging family life in harmony with the rest of the world he saw around him, even in the miniscule intervals that it could not seem to fill. This sentiment floods the soul in such a way as to relax it and soften it, so there is no longer any need to keep chasing after anything, allowing one simply to go on delighting in each of life’s eventualities without taking any notice of the years as they go by. And the fact is that, whether it was due solely to the birth of little Mohammed, or whether he wanted to ensure his disciple’s total tranquility so he could enjoy these special days of happiness, Sheik Omar did not show up in New York for a long time.

  Nadia then began to act in all the plays she could get parts in, while Yousef, for his part, concentrated mainly on family and academic life. He was delighted, however, at his wife’s stage acting, and soon thereafter she received a number of new proposals, some calling for her to accept less modest roles, where she was asked to be a temptress and kiss other actors on the lips. But this he would not allow, no, he could not stand for it! Nadia despaired. She felt that this was a huge barrier to her artistic progress, and there was the inevitable escalation into a long and unpleasant argument, in the aftermath of which Nadia accepted her husband’s argument, but wore a face of suffering, sad and subdued, for weeks on end until he could no longer endure seeing her blue eyes grown sad and losing their vitality, and he ended up softening still further his religious conservatism with respect to his wife. In a gesture of liberalism without parallel in all of his past, and placing him definitively in a sphere above any and all political or religious ideology inhabiting his mind, he said yes to kisses on stage, but never any tongue, and absolutely nothing beyond this. They made peace and loved each other again more than ever. Nadia became pregnant again. And then they had a daughter whom they called Fatima.

  By this time, Yousef had become accustomed to socializing with a variety of people in the artistic milieu – actors, directors, filmmakers, writers, and others – from whom he often heard extravagant praise of his wife. Deep inside, hearing such compliments warmed his ego and spirit tremendously, knowing that Nadia was his woman and it was only with him that she lay down every night. As time went on, her career became more and more promising, and the life of the couple increasingly filled with the advent of their daughter. It was around this time that Nadia received a proposal to act in a musical on Broadway, playing one of the leading roles. Full of joy, she accepted immediately. When she got home she smothered her husband and children with kisses. From that point up until opening night, she could often be seen wandering through their Brooklyn apartment with a pad of paper in her left hand, intensely gesticulating and rehearsing the lines and songs of her character. The event was widely publicized. As he could not fail to be, Yousef was present on opening night with his two children who watched the whole thing very quietly, his young daughter so little but ever so quiet, simply hearing the voices and speeches, opening and closing her tiny hands. At one point, Yousef heard her make a noise, and when he turned saw she was smiling and happy, her tiny mouth still without teeth. At the end of the show, his wife and the other actors received thunderous applause, but since he only had eyes for her, he only saw her being thunderously applauded as a full-blown star.

  By now, Yousef was living for his family and his academic work. He did not develop any true friendships, there was no one he trusted entirely, no one he could confide in, or anyone it occurred to him to seek out for any sort of undertaking outside the family sphere. He understood plainly that his political ideals were very radical and dangerous to divulge to anyone at all, and this kept him away from more intimate relationships. He devoted himself to his family and Islam, and this was enough for him. He would often go to a mosque in Brooklyn near their home to pray with Nadia and the children. Around this time he began to enjoy drawing. He sketched his young daughter, so tiny, sleeping her deep and innocent sleep and, seated at a table beside her full of books and school notebooks, he picked up a pencil, tore a sheet from a notebook, and set about drawing her. And for someone with no artistic training, the drawings turned out quite well. Even Nadia said so.

  Finally, 1995 arrived and Yousef finished his studies. He could easily have gotten a job, but Sheik Omar, in a brief, totally informal visit to New York that enabled him to meet little Mohammed and little Fatima, ordered him to continue with his studies and start graduate school. And so he did. As it happened, Sheik Omar ended up in New York that year at the height of the Christmas season with Yousef, Nadia and their two little children. He despised the Christian Christmas, often characterizing it as a festival of consumption and materialism.

  It happened that soccer did not stir up the same enthusiasm in New York and the United States as it did in England, which led Yousef to become interested in other sports, particularly boxing. With the Sheik in New York, he invited him to see a fight at Madison Square Garden, still in the month of December, 1995, where an Egyptian boxer would face an American (who as it happened ended up winning with a Knockout). Not long after that, in January of 1996, with Sheik Omar already back in Saudi Arabia, Yousef went with Nadia to see a fight at the same venue. On this occasion there was a young Colombian boxer in the ring whom the American press considered extremely promising, and who up that point had won every fight he had had in his class, which was middle-weight. In the fight that night, this boxer was facing the current champ in a title match. The Colombian was known as the Caribbean Hurricane. Seated in one of the front rows, Yousef was astonished not only at the power of the Colombian’s punches, but chiefly at his tenacity. He watched him endure countless heavy, accurate blows by his adversary, leaving the ring with a number of bruises, abrasions and cuts over his eyes, but despite this, winning the fight and seizing the world title. He spoke of him to Nadia on their way home that night.

  One fine spring day in 1996, Nadia was on her way home from the acting school she attended on the Upper West Side. As usual, she took the subway that usually took her to Brooklyn, but felt a sudden wish to get off early and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, above the waters, feeling the wind in her face, on a sudden impulse that drove her to try to get in touch with nature. She left the subway station, headed for the bridge, climbed the stairs and reached the upper platform. As she walked she felt the cars buzzing beneath her feet. She looked at the waters and out to the horizon, letting her eyelids close, the better to savor the moment. Off in one direction, the Statue of Liberty, in another the skyscrapers of Manhattan standing tall. She didn’t have to see them to know that they were there. She extended her arms, and anyone looking at her just then would imagine she was crazy, or perhaps about to commit suicide by throwing herself off the bridge. She felt a shiver, followed by dizziness, but did not open her eyes right away. When she finally did, she smiled a smile that was only for herself. Continuing on her way, she stopped more than once along the bridge and leaned on the railing to appreciate the view as far as she could see. Her soul was as light as a feather as she reached the other side. Immersing herself in the streets of Brooklyn Heights she strolled along the sidewalks enjoying the already mild temperature of the season. On this day she was wearing a skirt, a blazer and white blouse, and by now she was walking on air, her thoughts loosely roaming, veering back to the future of her artistic career, to her family, to the happiness that she had been given to savor since leaving Jeddah. Thinking of her days of suffering in Jeddah and the great joy she experienced in New York, she told herself it would not be fair to say that Saudi Arabia was the very source of all her unhappiness and New York the exact opposite. It was simply that her way of being evidently adapted better to New York. This was the drift of her thoughts as she made her way down the street step by step. Much though she missed her family, she could not imagi
ne one day having to return to Jeddah. It would automatically be the end of her career as an actress, the end of the dream she was living. Did that mean she was less Muslim? Of course not. She knew there were movies in a number of Muslim countries, she knew that there were Muslims with different ways of thinking and seeing life, and she came to the conclusion that she herself would discover her own way of being Muslim. Those who know themselves know God, this was one of her favorite Hadith.[9] She also believed that all the good she had experienced was the will of God, that there was only one God greater than all, and his messenger was Mohammed. She prayed diligently with her husband. But it was indisputably true that she was a happier Muslim in New York than in Jeddah, because, as she had discovered, the place where she was happy had nothing to do with the individual faith of each person. For her husband, on the other hand, she knew that this was not the case. Her husband put up with New York mainly because he had her and the children close at hand, and because he knew he was on the right path with his political cause. She knew that he had two passions: the cause and his family. Two hermetically sealed compartments in his heart. She considered Yousef. A man so radical, so extremist, so in love with his own interpretation of Islam, and at the same time in love with and devoted to his family, an excellent father and excellent husband. A man who was capable of sacrificing everything for his wife, and at the same time, everything for a political and religious vision which, if it prevailed in the country where he and Nadia currently lived, would make his wife deeply unhappy. Be that as it may, he had given her such great happiness that she was willing to sacrifice everything for him, even though she secretly asked God never again to take her from New York, and never again to take him away from her. The day when it was announced to her that she would have to leave New York would be the unhappiest day of her life, and she knew that for this to happen, all that it required was a simple request from Sheik Omar for them to move. All of this was mixed up in her mind as she walked towards home. Just then, she approached the corner of an intersection and stopped. The light said “Don’t Walk.” A soft wind blew, ruffling her hair. She felt it running across her face, prompting the sensation of shivers and dizziness she had felt a little while earlier on the Brooklyn Bridge. She let all the cars go by then crossed the street. What followed all happened very quickly, in a matter of seconds. A car appeared out of nowhere going very fast and ran straight into Nadia’s body with a hard muffled impact that raised her into the air and sent her flying and toppling onto the asphalt, ending at least her earthly life.

  11

  Nadia’s death caught Yousef completely by surprise, a ghastly and bitter surprise. His family life, the principal, hermetically sealed compartment of his soul at this stage in his life, was completely demolished at the base, as though it were one of those Manhattan skyscrapers surgically dynamited at the foundation, or an ancient chestnut tree whose roots had been severed. When at last, at the end of several weeks, he was able to face the reality, when he felt more capable of reason, he took a step that he had so far lacked the courage to take, and got in touch with Sheik Omar, who immediately perceived that it was urgent to make another trip to New York. At this point, Yousef didn’t care whether Agent Borelli might be watching him, though he wondered whether he might have caused Nadia’s accident, but he ended up abandoning the idea and ascribing it simply to fate. He had a long and serious conversation with Sheik Omar, this time as they walked along the paths of Central Park. He realized right away that he was incapable of taking care of his children from now on, so he asked the Sheik to take them with him and deliver them to his parents, the children’s grandparents, in Jeddah. The children were told that they were going to take a long journey, but the poor things were still so small that the most they could do to protest was to throw an intense bawling fit of tears on the day they departed for the Arabian Peninsula. Islam places great emphasis on the mother’s role in the education and raising of children, and despite the additional grief that this caused him, under the circumstances it seemed to Yousef absolutely correct that these children who would no longer have the care of their mother should live under the care and instruction of their grandmother in Jeddah. Certainly his parents would take good care of his two children, as they had done before with him. Deep down, for him, it was also a way of seeking to make amends to them without saying so, to expiate the guilt he felt for abandoning them by never even so much as telephoning them since he had gone off to war in Afghanistan years ago. To him, this settled things with his parents. In his conversation with Sheik Omar, beyond the matter of his children, Yousef stressed his great desire personally to undertake a more active jihad all over the world to carry forward his ideals and the cause of the Arab world. He could wait no longer, he wanted to act. Under pressure, the Sheik wound up giving him carte-blanche to start preparing new attacks with his financial support.

  So it was that in the latter half of the 1990’s after Nadia’s death, Yousef’s life became even more soaked in blood than before. Although the death of his beloved wife constituted a terrible blow, it would be utterly frivolous to assert that she alone was the primary motivator of his future bloody attacks, or of the blackness that engulfed his life from that point onwards. It would be far more accurate to state that it simply precipitated events, the same way that a very steep slope in a river bed speeds up a river’s flow, without being able to say that it was the primary factor causing the river to run in that direction or flow the way it did. Yousef’s destiny was mapped out when with blind passion, of his own free and spontaneous will he embraced first the reasons that led him to go to war in Afghanistan and then later on, those that made it imperative to sacrifice human life in the struggle against the western oppressors, namely, America and Israel, taking it as his duty never to yield until the final victory. After the death of his wife, the compartment of his soul where once sentiments such as love and compassion could be discerned had ceased to exist. With time, Nadia became increasingly tucked away at the bottom of his thoughts, and if she had any effect at all, beyond a certain point, it was only at a subconscious level. By a kind of superstition, and also because he had become accustomed to doing it since he had known Nasser, Nadia’s photo, the first image he ever saw of her, never ceased to travel in his pocket. It became a part of him, like an arm or a leg, although after her untimely death he couldn’t bring himself to look at it.

  After Nadia’s death, Yousef began gradually to turn into a black knight whose anthem and flag were those of a glorious united Islamic caliphate (which he aspired to see founded one day in the image of the historic caliphate that dated back to Mohammed), and the incessant struggle against American and Israeli influence and oppression in the Arab world, a jihad that merited sacrifice even unto death but also (and more often), a jihad that required the spilling of the blood of others in multiple attacks with car bombs, murders and abductions. As it would later be stated in the 180-page manual issued to recruits of Al-Qaeda[10] (which would be entered as evidence for the prosecution in the federal trial of the four men accused of involvement in the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, who ended up being sentenced to life imprisonment): “The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates … Platonic ideals… nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bomb attacks and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and the machine gun.” So it was that Yousef’s inner profile was engraved, chiefly in the latter half of the 1990’s. So it was that he delivered himself wholeheartedly to destiny and, embracing it, reaped the inevitable collateral victims, for whom he now felt nothing more than indifference, just as his enemies did (that is, the American and Israeli troops in Arab territory, as well as the respective governments behind them) who also, like him, made women and children into victims if need be, although the Koran underscores the sacred value of human life and above all, that of women and children.

  Yousef became more attuned a
s a killing machine than ever before. Although suicide attacks were an option for certain assaults planned by other cells that shared the Al-Qaeda ideology, with Yousef this never occurred for one simple reason: he believed he was worth more alive than dead, in other words, that he could do more damage to the West alive than dead. Let others kill him if they could manage it. He was not going to make things easy for them.

  Just after Nadia died he went to Sudan, where he sharpened his skills at a training camp financed by Bin Laden. He took part in a military operation planned and set in motion by Al-Qaeda from Sudan, which took place in Somalia. He planned and executed abductions and killings. Some people were eliminated because they agreed with a certain political view, others because they were in the right place at the wrong time. He blew up car bombs aimed at embassies and hotels full of tourists. It was no longer possible for any argument to overcome the ideology that had by now overthrown his reason. The line that separated innocent civilians from hardened oppressors was now practically indiscernible. As the 13th century papal legate, Arnaut Amalric, is supposed to have said at the siege of Béziers, faced with the difficulty of distinguishing Catholics from heretics so only the latter would be killed, “Kill them all, God will recognize his own.” Once someone’s vision has become altered in this way, once reason has been shunted aside completely in the name of the fever that clouds it, once the slightest vestige of humanity has been disregarded, the term collateral victim ceases to have any meaning. Someone who relentlessly promotes war doesn’t concern himself with collateral victims, he concerns himself, rather, with a goal that stifles reason and humanity. And can anyone say how far men will go without their ideals turning into savagery? Can it be that reason is an instrument too difficult to handle because it requires dialogue, because it requires Socratic debate, because it requires tolerance, because it requires compromise? When men turn away from Socrates, they turn away from themselves, they turn away from humanity and from what makes them men instead of animals. And then there’s no going back.