Beneath the Same Heaven

by Anne Marie Ruff

  And finally the ceremony concludes, the newly ordained students—now doctors of justice—move en masse to the edge of an expansive lawn to greet their families in a frenzy of squeals and shoulder thumping.

  I find Michael, among a clutch of students, accepting their congratulations. He sees me and opens his arms, embracing me now as a man, not just my child. I can barely raise my arms to reciprocate.

  “Michael, the S, why the S in your name?”

  He inhales, the smile evaporating from his face. “It’s short for Siddique.”

  The blood drains from my face.

  “I wanted it as a reminder of the debt I owe.”

  I feel as though I am falling, an elevator suddenly dropping, dangerously free from its tethering cable.

  “How?” I try to form a question, “what do you know?”

  “Mom, I’ve known for years. It wasn’t difficult, the research, putting the story together, to realize we are the family of Rashid Siddique.”

  I feel my expression tremble. “Why…”

  He reaches for my hand, “It’s all right, Mom. You were trying to protect me.” He wraps his arms around me again, I feel his black graduation robe against my cheek. “I appreciate all you did. But you don’t have to protect me anymore.”

  I sob, find myself in unfamiliar territory. My son now shielding me.

  “Here you are,” Johannes emerges from the swirl of people around us. “I wondered where you had disappeared to,” he does not touch me, respectfully observes something private between my son and me. Ted and Andrew join us, congratulating Michael, hugging him.

  “Hey, good speech,” Andrew puts his arm over his brother’s shoulder, now exactly the same height as his own.

  “Did you know he was going to speak, Andrew?” I ask.

  “No,” Michael quickly responds. “He doesn’t know. He didn’t know.”

  I am grateful for Michael’s answer to my implied question.

  “I knew,” Ted volunteers, “We talked about it lots.” He looks at me directly, so I understand his larger meaning. “He didn’t tell you about the speech, because of Dad’s…hospitalization.” He reaches out for Michael’s hand, looks at me, “you’ve got one hell of a kid.” His usually cavalier tone quavers with emotion.

  “Perhaps we should all toast to Michael before we have to get you and Ted off to the airport,” Johannes suggests to me politely.

  “Yeah,” Ted recovers, “Let’s get ours now, you know free champagne never lasts long.”

  My mother looks tired. Without her delicate makeup, the lines in her face seem to stand out like a map of the emotions she has so carefully regulated over the decades. She holds my father’s hand. His body looks so thin, as if the hospital bed held not the steady, capable man of the world who was my father, but his shadow, or perhaps his shell—hollow evidence of his life.

  “I’m so glad you’re here. He’s been waiting for you,” our mother says to us.

  I kiss my father’s cheek, hear a slow shallow breath emerging from his mouth.

  I hug my mother, feeling strangely like the parent in this situation. “How is he?”

  “You know, your father’s always been very determined. The doctors say he’s lost almost all his lung capacity. He said he’d take antibiotics for the pneumonia, but made me promise I wouldn’t let them intubate him for oxygen.”

  She leans down and whispers in his ear. “Robert, the children are here.” He doesn’t respond. “Kathryn and Ted flew up from San Diego to see you. Do you want to open your eyes and see them?”

  His eyelids flutter and I see his hand move slightly in my mother’s. His watery eyes reveal a surprising clarity, a lucidity starkly contrasting his body, which is so obviously shutting down. He looks from my face to Ted’s, the tiny muscles around his eyes flexing to express a smile, an expression too taxing for his mouth. From deep in his throat, comes a reedy sound. I bend down as the sound comes again, a word, words. The air passes through his voice box and reaches my ear. “Michael…graduated…”

  “Yes, Dad.” I squeeze his hand. “He graduated today. He gave the speech for his class. We were all very proud.”

  His eyes shine from some mysterious source. Ted leans down next to me and the sounds come again. “I’m proud…of…” he inhales, “you…all.”

  “We love you, Dad,” Ted looks at him and then looks up at the wall, tears at the corners of his eyes.

  “You’ve been a wonderful father.” I stroke his hand, “I’m grateful for all…” I can’t finish the sentence as my throat constricts.

  He blinks, I imagine in acknowledgment, then closes his eyes. We are all silent for a moment, waiting for my father to breathe again. When we hear the inhale finally come, I turn to my mother. “Do you want to take a break, maybe get a cup of coffee?”

  She runs her hand over her silver hair. “Maybe I’ll just go to the bathroom.” She leans down and kisses my father’s forehead. “I’ll be right back, Kathryn and Ted are here with you.”

  Ted and I do not look at each other. The slight tension in my father’s hand dissipates, and minutes seem to pass since we last heard him inhale. Suddenly his eyes open, still clear. The inhale comes and his lips part, his lower lip sliding under his upper teeth. His faint exhale pushes against his lip, vibrating until we hear the first letter, and then a series of tiny changes take place in his mouth. His tongue and lips sculpt a word from his breath. “Forgive.” His eyes roll, taking in the whole room. I wait for the rest of the thought, the subject and the object. His eyes find mine and lock for a moment.

  “Yes, Dad? I’m listening.” His eyelids cover his eyes, like a curtain closing. The rest of his thought hangs, incomplete between us.

  My mother returns to the bedside. She looks so out of place here. Her ever-feminine blouse, her classic gold jewelry—a world apart from the plastic and chrome hospital bed, the sockets in the wall for electricity, computers, fluids, oxygen.

  I relinquish my father’s hand to my mother. I touch his feet, a little protrusion under the sheets at the end of the bed.

  My mother kisses his forehead, his cheeks, his eyes. She whispers in his ear. I feel both an intruder on this intimacy and a privileged witness to the end of a lifetime of love and respect. I hear my mother’s words. “You can go now, Robert. No need to hold on for us.”

  We all sit quietly, the air between us charged with expectation. I silently wish him Godspeed in whatever journey or transformation this end brings. I notice my own shallow breathing, the coldness in my body except for the place where I can feel my father. Then, despite the absence of an inhale, my father exhales, a rattle echoes up from deep in his lungs and for a moment I feel some movement in his feet before they are still.

  My handkerchief absorbs another wave of tears, red lipstick smeared across the corner of the cloth.

  “Robert Capen was the kind of man many of us wish we could be,” the minister says in his resonant voice. “Accomplished in the larger world, yet always devoted to the private world of his family. He was a man with a sharp understanding of what divides people, but an abiding faith in what connects us.” He goes on, describing my father, with stories of their interactions, inferences about his early life. The minister’s words conjure images of my father I haven’t considered for years. I look at Michael, did I give him enough opportunity to know his grandfather? Why didn’t we go to visit more often? Now we have one more absence in our lives.

  “Once when I asked him about his experience as a young man, living in the Middle East, surrounded by customs and faiths that are so foreign to us,” the minister continues, “people so seemingly different from our Presbyterian congregation, he told me, ‘We all live beneath the same heaven’.”

  I catch my breath as I remember when my father had repeated his quintessential phrase to me, see again when he said it to Rashid’s sister-in-law to translate to Rashid’s father just before our wedding. I used to believe him. But since everything changed I have built walls, divided us from
them, tried to keep them carefully separate in the columns of the newspaper.

  Will my father really join them in the same heaven? What would he say to the spirit of Rashid’s father? To Rashid? I think of the man who was my husband, the man who held me while I birthed my sons, the man who used to gather us all in his powerful arms. I see our wedding in Pakistan, the swirling colors. I remember the bride I was. She is gone too. I sob openly.

  Ted follows the minister, taking his place at the pulpit. He takes several moments to compose himself, carefully avoiding the coffin, or the eyes of the mourners in the pews. “The older I get, the more I realize a father’s job is never done. No matter how old a kid becomes, his dad is always older, more experienced, and if a kid is lucky, his father is always wiser.” He gasps with his inhale, continuing on quickly so as not to weep. “I was such a lucky kid. Even to his last day, my dad showed me how to think of others, how to express care. Some of his last words were about his grandchildren.”

  I close my eyes and hold my breath trying to suppress my grief. I tremble with the force of my losses. Even the opportunity to grieve for my husband as my mother now does, in the open, with her loved ones around her, was lost so long ago.

  Andrew surprises me by reaching his arm across my shoulders, and I rest my head against his strong shoulder, feeling a childlike need for comfort. My mother reaches across Michael’s lap from the other side to pat my hand. I raise my head to look at her. Her stoic smile seems neither forced nor fearful. She leans in and whispers to me, “We are lucky to have so many memories of such a wonderful man.”

  She has so many memories. She has a full married lifetime of memories with my father. I have only a pearl, a brief densely beautiful period from a different lifetime, the luster of happy memories forbidden beneath strata of little lies, omissions, denial.

  Ted returns to sit between my mother and Janet. The organist presses out the first line of a hymn I remember from childhood. The congregation stands, and I feel myself girded by my sons, the fruit of a union I have never told them about. I reach my hands into theirs and I tell one and then the other, “Your father loved you. He loved you the way my father loved his children. He would have been proud of you.”

  They squeeze my hands in acknowledgment. They stand mutely, listening as others sing a hymn they never learned.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  The waves push up on the sand, I am careful to walk just inland of their apex and watch the water retreat. Now that I have raised my sons, buried my father, I struggle with a ragged sense of incompleteness. How does the ocean never tire of its waves? From what endless source of energy does it draw? What does it hope to achieve? I walk past a tangled clump of seaweed, marooned on the sand. I note with some satisfaction that not a single piece of plastic has come ashore with it. Ted’s institute achieved some measure of success from its massive pollution prevention campaign on this stretch of beach. Ted must feel more fulfilled, must not experience this hollowness I feel.

  Am I just hungry? I walk as far as the next lifeguard tower and turn around. Or should I go shopping? Out to the library? I stop and watch two surfers paddle past the waves. Three young men wait in the calm waters beyond, alert for the next big wave that will challenge them, and if they are lucky, take them into shore with a satisfying thrill.

  I miss the times Andrew and I used to sit and talk, watching Michael surf. I squat down and run my fingers through the sand. Don’t hold to those memories. Doesn’t the future always generate itself? Don’t more experiences, more pleasures always come?

  I continue home, climbing the stairs of the pedestrian bridge that crosses the freeway, almost wishing I were rushing somewhere with purpose like the countless cars beneath me.

  I approach the building; a car pulls out of the parking garage, a child shouts from one of the balconies above, a man with a turban approaches the bank of mailboxes next to the stairwell. I am surprised to see the maroon turban, the full beard of a South Asian man, as my neighbors are exclusively white and Latino. I approach the stairwell and notice he doesn’t have a mailbox key. He is not retrieving his own mail, but holding an envelope in his hand, seeking out a mailbox.

  I slow down, waiting to see which box he chooses. He seems to hesitate in front of each one.

  I pause before I get to the stairs. “Can I help you?” I ask, wondering what business this stranger has being here.

  He turns, surprised, looks me in the eye and quickly looks to the ground. “Excuse me,” he says. “I am only looking for a certain mailbox.”

  “I can see that. Which one?”

  His beard is streaked with grey, and a few errant eyebrows have turned white above the eyes that I see for just a moment. I have avoided South Asians for two decades now, but I remember something of their hospitality.

  “I know almost everyone in the building,” I say more generously, “I can probably help you find the mailbox.”

  “In fact,” he pauses, “I am looking for Kathryn…Capen.”

  “I’m Kathryn,” I say, startled. He stands still, curiously unhurried. I look at his cheap shoes, his hands deeply soiled like a mechanic’s. I look past him, quickly scanning the driveway for his car, or some other person, some sign of danger. “Who are you?”

  He does not answer. I see the envelope in his hand, a few words on the front, no stamp in the corner.

  “Is it you?” I say quietly, almost a whisper. “Are you the one who brings these envelopes to me?” The hollowness of the morning fills; the future generating itself with shocking speed.

  He shakes his head, the bulk of the turban seems to make the gesture more emphatic. “This is the first time I have come in person.” He stands there in front of me, a tall man, shoulders rolling forward so he looks almost contrite as he holds out the envelope. I can read clearly, To the Family of Rashid Siddique.

  I take a step back, prepare to flee. He reaches out, offering the envelope. Then he looks up and I see his eyes again. I know them. His paralyzing gaze sets my heart racing. I can think only of the most irrational question. “Are you Rashid Siddique?”

  The man closes his eyes draws a deep inhalation and looks at me again. “I used to be.”

  Part Three

  The Book of Rashid

  Chapter 1

  Lahore, Pakistan.

  Months before the bombing

  * * *

  “I told him not to go,” my mother speaks to no one in particular. “I told him the frontier areas are too dangerous for a moderate modern man like him.”

  I sit in the middle of the train berth, between my mother and a young man from Karachi. His five relatives occupy the rest of the berth with their loud banter and piles of pre-packaged snacks.

  “He smiled and patted my hand and told me life is dangerous,” she continues. “‘Even in our home’ he said, ‘we keep men with rifles stationed at the perimeter of our lands, bring extra guards for our weddings. I shouldn’t let danger keep us from our ties of loyalty.’ You know,” she looks at my hands, “he felt he owed Shoukart his presence at his son’s wedding. After Shoukart’s father had provided refuge for your father and his brother during those mad days of Partition, he has felt bound to their family.”

  Her Punjabi sounds so formal, absolutely devoid of the English loan words and Urdu slang that pollutes the Punjabi I grew up speaking. She looks out the window, seeing something beyond the Lahore train station outside the window, past the mass of people on the platform.

  “Mummyji,” I say, calling her back into the train, back to the present, “you did the right thing. You tried to warn him.”

  She looks at me directly and I see the milky whites of her eyes, the graying edges of her irises focused with a steely intensity. “The people in the tribal areas have always been difficult to control. The British tried and failed to tame them, the Pakistanis have known enough not to try to occupy their valleys. Don’t the Americans know their war in Pakistan is pointless? Every person they kill just creates m
ore enemies, more people hungry for revenge.”

  I close my eyes. I used to love train rides, I remember befriending berth mates every time we traveled to Karachi for my father’s business, or to the mountains for a holiday. But this train ride will bring us only to the scene of a crime, not to a carnival or a market.

  I look out the window as we wait to leave the Lahore station which the British built more than a century ago. Men dressed in kurta pajamas carry satchels and balance boxes on their shoulders, tightly coiled Sikh turbans occasionally bob through the crowd, a few women with brightly colored headscarves drag children almost invisible among the legs of their elders. Amidst the swirl, a man stands still, like an island, in his military uniform, rifle slung over his shoulder, he watches for any unusual motion, any suspicious packages. A group of three tribesmen, their turbans wrapped like birds’ nests atop their short hair, the end of the cloth tailing over their shoulders alongside their long beards, garner the soldier’s attention. Even from a distance I can sense the energy between them as they pass, the soldier unyielding, slightly narrowing his eyes as he scans their bodies for evidence of malintent.

  The unspoken tension—not just the rush to find a seat, to adhere to the schedule, to pay the ticket taker the petty bribes he is due—but the uncertainty of the crowd, the potential for a backpack to blow up, for a scuffle to escalate into a riot, all of the simmering energy only accentuates my fatigue. I close my eyes and try to focus on the smells, the grilled meats and potato cutlets of the platform vendors, the diesel, my mother’s familiar rose fragrance.

  I never left, I lie to myself. I have always been here with my mother, my family, my clan. I never abandoned them for the clean surfaces and right angles of the West. London, Dubai, America, these places are all just dreams. This is where I belong. As the train engine heaves to pull us out of the station, I hear the call to prayer projected through some distant speaker, distorted at maximum volume over the din of the platform.