A military helicopter flies low overhead, and at the first sound of its engine their captors shove and club them all into the convenient overhang of a rock wall until it has passed. Then they are on the move again, driven like animals. Sonia feels herself descending into animal mind: the future fades, the past fades, there is nothing but the next step, the pain from her many bruises, and the chafing cords. She is barely conscious of the passage of time, until she becomes aware that the sun has sunk below the mountain ridges and color has leached out of the surrounding landscape. Still they are pushed along relentlessly until it is hard to see their footing in the gloom, the captives are tripping at every other step, and at last someone at the head of the line falls off the trail into a shallow ravine and the whole group is yanked off their feet. The kidnappers call out to one another as they attempt to get their captives back on the trail. Sonia crawls forward from where she has fallen to where Schildkraut lies.
“Karl-Heinz, are you all right?” she whispers.
“I am alive, at least. I would have worn my hiking boots if I had known this was part of the conference program.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says and then one of the kidnappers comes along and tells her to be quiet and get to her feet. When she doesn’t move quickly enough to suit him, he jabs her in the ribs with the muzzle of his AK. She stands up and looks him in the face. There is still just enough light to see he is a young man, in his late teens at most.
She says, in Pashto, “How dare you strike me, you little pisser! I’m old enough to be your grandmother. Does your mother know you’re out in the night beating women?”
The boy’s eyes widen. He raises his weapon to firing position. “Move!” he says.
Sonia raises her voice. “How? I am tied to this man.”
The boy kicks at Schildkraut, producing pitiful groans. It is unbearable to watch and Sonia throws her own body over his, crying out for the abuse to stop. A moment later, Annette Cosgrove rushes forward and also flings herself down to protect the old man’s body. “Don’t hurt him,” she shouts, and she has a carrying voice. Sonia hears Annette’s husband call out her name from forward on the line. The other prisoners now also call out; there is a commotion, guards and prisoners shouting. Their cries echo from the now-invisible rock walls of the gully.
Sonia adds her voice, louder still: “Look, this is an old man. He must rest, or if you want him to move at this pace, someone must help him, and we can’t if we’re tied up like this. Do you think we’ll try to escape? How could we? From twenty armed men when we don’t know where we are? If you untie us, the stronger will be able to help the weaker ones and we won’t fall as much and you will go faster to wherever it is you’re taking us.”
Sonia hears a voice calling out in Pashto, “Patang! What’s going on back there? Shut that woman up!”
Sonia says, “Patang, talk to him! Tell him what I said! Believe me, you will move more quickly. Otherwise, you might as well shoot us all now.”
The boy hesitates, then leaves briefly and returns with a thin man in a large black turban and a sheepskin jacket. Sonia listens while the boy Patang explains the problem as she had expressed it, to which the other man replies, “Cut them loose and shoot the old man. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”
Sonia cries out, “Oh, I see I was mistaken-I thought you were mujahideen. I prayed you were mujahideen. But now I see you are only bandits, and accursed of God.”
With that, she drops down again on Schildkraut, covering his head and shoulders with her body while Annette Cosgrove lies across his legs and lower back.
“Now you will have to kill three of us,” Sonia says, in the same loud voice, “and then you will have to kill her husband too, and that will be four of nine hostages you won’t have, and who will make up the ransom for them? Think, man! Nine hostages delivered on time in reasonable condition against five, and maybe fewer than five, because no one can walk through this country tied together with their hands bound. What will you do if there are broken legs or broken necks?”
Sonia cannot see the man’s face, but she does not think he will shoot them, nor does she think he will order the boy to shoot them, or that the boy would obey such an order. She has spent a good deal of her life among violent men of this type and she is betting three lives that she has judged them correctly. A minute passes. She can hear Schildkraut’s heavy breathing and the lighter breaths of the other woman. She is deeply grateful that Annette backed her play. That was another quick assessment that worked out. She hears low voices and the sound of retreating footsteps and then shouts from the head of the column.
The boy bends over her and grabs her arm. She sees the flash of a knife and her hands are free. The boy says, “You women will support the old man. If he cannot keep up then we will shoot him.”
Now he stares at her, because she is not moving to help the other woman. Instead, she has broken a branch off a small bush and is sweeping the dust from a flat area to the side of the trail.
The boy looks baffled. “What are you doing?”
She says, “Since you have taken my prayer rug, I must clean a portion of the ground, as is permitted.”
“You’re going to pray?” the boy asks, staring.
“Yes. The sun has gone down and it’s time for the Maghrib prayer.” With that, she begins the ritual ablutions, using sand, as is allowed in the absence of clean water. Patang observes this in silence for a moment and then runs off. Sonia rubs the designated parts of her body with the flinty sand, reties her head scarf, and, facing east, prays the du’a.
She hears footsteps, whispered conversation, and then the murmur of two dozen men praying. Interesting, she thinks, when the prayer is done; they were going to skip it to save time, and wonders what fallacious reasoning had been put forward to allow that grave sin of omission.
Schildkraut is somewhat revived by the brief rest. Sonia and Annette throw his arms over their shoulders to support some of his weight, and with the rest of the party they move off down the narrow track. The kidnappers have taken all their watches, but the sky is clear and full of needle-sharp stars and by observing their motion Sonia can estimate the time elapsed after sunset. She thinks it is about four in the morning when they reach what appears to be an actual road, narrow and rocky. The mujahideen assemble their prisoners along the road, commanding them to be silent and once again binding their hands. They wait; the stars wheel overhead, the captives shiver where they sit. Sonia discovers that the man sitting next to her is William Craig. She can see his glasses glitter in the starlight as he shivers.
She asks him how he is.
“Terrific. I twisted my ankle and I’m freezing to death. Who the hell are these people?”
“They’re mujahideen. Self-proclaimed Islamic warriors.”
“What do they want with us? Is it ransom?” “I think they want to make a political point. We’re from the West, and the West is the enemy. So we’re fair game.”
“But who do they answer to? Surely they’re open to negotiation at higher levels.”
His voice has risen and this attracts the attention of one of the guards, who comes over and tells Craig to shut up, and although Craig does not speak the language and has not recently been told to shut up by anyone, the message is conveyed, and Craig falls silent. Sonia hadn’t a good answer to his question anyway.
After perhaps an hour, they hear the sound of an approaching engine. It is a five-ton truck with the high arched frame typical of the region standing above the truck bed. The mujahideen swarm around the truck, speaking softly and working at something Sonia can’t quite make out but which involves off-loading large bales and crates. Then the prisoners are made to stand, and they are gagged with rags and hustled into the empty bed of the truck. There they are arranged to lie supine in three rows, head to toe, like sardines. Ropes are passed over their bodies securing them to bolts in the truck frame so they can’t move at all and then a plank floor is laid over them, and on this floor the men reload th
e crates and bales.
The truck starts. After a few minutes, the discomfort of the prisoners becomes real pain, then what seems unbearable pain, as the motion of the truck on the rough road smashes them up against the false floor and then down on the unyielding ribbed steel of the truck bed, but as the hours pass they discover that more can be borne than they had imagined. Sonia hears muffled weeping, but she can’t tell who weeps.
It is like being in a coffin, without the peace of the grave. She fights the instinctive panic, controls her breathing, welcomes the pain, concentrates on freeing her hands; it takes what seems like hours to do this, and when they are free she pulls the gag from her mouth and reaches out. Annette Cosgrove is next to her and she pats the young woman’s thigh, which is all she can do for her; she is still lashed rigidly to the deck of the truck, and even if she were free there is not enough clearance above her face to enable her to move from her slot.
They roll on and, as night passes into day, tiny dots of light appear, cast through holes in the truck’s bed, but there is nothing to see except the planks lying inches above their faces. Sonia is thinking about entombment, the physical kind that she experiences now, and the other kind, the psychic kind, the closed hell of unhappy families, of addiction, with which she has had much to do in her work, in her own life.
She recalls reading that the pain of a toothache will drive all so-called psychological suffering out of your head, but now, suffering physically as much as she ever has, she thinks that is cynical and not true. The suffering, even the torture, imposed by one’s enemies can be borne because it is imposed, the sufferer is not responsible for it; the enemy acts through hate, and the answer is the same one Jesus gave from the cross: they don’t know what they are doing. Yes, they can break your body, but also aren’t they a little foolish? Aren’t they like little boys pulling the legs off insects?
And also one is inspired by the famous tortured ones who did not break-Saint Joan, Mandela, the survivors of the camps-so there is a model, and these examples shine light into the darkest cell.
But it is different, she thinks, when the suffering is imposed by those who are supposed to love you, whom you are supposed to love. Then there is no escape, then you must learn to love the lash, and then there are no noble examples to follow; there is no nobility at all. And the worst torturer is the most beloved of all, the self, for who knows better where the knife must twist to yield the most exquisite agony?
Tea with Farid’s mother, Noor, and her lady friends, and her three sisters: what could be more calm, civilized, elegant? Oh, Farid, my husband, she thinks, and laughs inwardly, would it surprise you to know that I would rather be captured by terrorists than sit through another one of those endless afternoons? Women like Noor, upper-class Lahori begums, had only two functions in life, keeping their husbands contented and marrying off their children in a satisfactory way. Sonia’s arrival, she gathered (and really gathered in hard-earned bits, since no one ever bothered to explain it to her) had presented Noor with an intolerable conflict: Baba wanted Sonia accepted into the family home, so of course she had to be accepted; but this meant that Noor would forever after be saddled with the most unsatisfactory daughter-in-law imaginable, a shame to her distinguished family and friends.
Until she met Noor and her circle, that house of staring women, the subtle, unchallengeable knives of their looks, Sonia had never been exposed to naked contempt. In the circus life the rubes admired the circus people, of course, and within the circus family a strict hierarchy ruled; everyone knew their place, and while there was certainly enough nastiness and petty intrigue, this did not break the essential solidarity of their lives, which was the show, their show, against the world.
But in her father-in-law’s house Sonia was all alone. She didn’t speak the languages, she didn’t know the rules, and she hardly knew her husband, who seemed like a different person in his father’s house from the one she had known in New York. The air in that house seemed to have shriveled him; he did nothing in her defense; he told her, Sonia, just be nice, they’ll get used to you and you’ll learn how we do things here.
So she learned. She was bright and observant and soon discovered she had an ear for languages, and when she could understand a little she was able to comprehend the full extent of the contempt in which she was held. She started to get the little asides at the tea parties now, the comments on her physical appearance (a corpse, a skeleton, a demon), on how she held a teacup, her utter lack of any family.
Her status rose considerably when she gave the Lagharis a grandson. Now she was tolerated by the women, although it was made clear to her that she knew nothing about rearing a child, that Noor would make the decisions about how to raise him, that the actual daily care would be provided by an ayah whom Noor would choose. The only fight she won in that period was choosing the child’s name: Theodore, after her own father; Laghari Sahib, from whom there was no appeal, agreed. He thought it distinguished to have a grandson named Theodore Abdul.
Gradually, she came to understand the power of the weak. She cultivated Baba, she flattered, she learned reams of poetry, both English and Urdu, for his delight, she became another prized exotic pet, like his parrots, his Yorkie. And she suborned the servants with bribes and gifts, she listened to their tales of woe and injustice and sympathized, she learned the various languages of that city. She sought allies and found one in Nasha, the wife of Gul Muhammed, Laghari Sahib’s Pashtun bodyguard. From her Sonia learned Pashto and something about the way of the Pashtuns. The women became friends of a sort. They were both isolated from their native cultures, lonely and vulnerable, so they had a basis for companionship. Here also she made her first connection with Nasha’s son, Wazir.
In fact, it was Wazir, more than anyone else, who taught her Pashto. He was three or so when she was pregnant with Theo and it was love at first sight, the way it sometimes happens between a child and a woman who is unsure about being a mother. After Theo was born, and it became clear to Sonia that raising him would be a perpetual battle for control against Noor and the dread weight of Punjabi culture, she found a kind of release in being a second mother to little Wazir. And this was possible because there was something wrong with the first mother. Nasha was sickly, she had endured a series of miscarriages, and the one baby she had produced besides Wazir had died in infancy. Her chief terror was that Gul Muhammed would divorce her and send her back in disgrace to her village in Afghanistan. Against this, there was only one possibility for survival-that her son would become a great and powerful man. It was Sonia who convinced her that the road to power for a man in the late twentieth century was through education, and Sonia had gone to Laghari Sahib and told him that Wazir was unusually bright and deserved an education equal to that which his own sons had received and which his grandson would receive. She used every circus wile she possessed to do this, to sell the proud old man on the idea that it was part of his own uniqueness, and part of the debt he owed his bodyguard, to send the young Pashtun to Aitchison College, the Eton of Pakistan.
So it was done, and Gul Muhammed agreed, for he was a sworn servant of Laghari Sahib. It was Sonia’s first real victory in the house of Laghari. Later, she continued her interest in Wazir’s education, making him into something neither Nasha nor her husband could ever have conceived, and whether it was a prize or a curse had still not been established.
With effort, Sonia turns her thoughts away from this line; she does not want to think about Wazir just now. Instead she thinks of how she managed her escape from the house of Laghari and its whispering women. From the bazaar, secretly, she had obtained the clothing of a Pashtun boy: worn and faded shalwar trousers, a kurta, a long Pashtun waistcoat, a turban wrapping her hair. At dawn one morning, dressed in these clothes, she slipped from the sleeping house, down the back alleys of Anarkali to the Urdu Bazaar and felt free for the first time in she could not recall how long it had been, since at least her girlhood in the circus, once again feeling the superiority of the show peo
ple over the rubes.
It was not invisibility. For a large part of any male Muslim population, a smooth-faced boy, especially one who appears poor and unattached, is as attractive as a woman, something Kipling didn’t bother to mention when he described Kim’s adventures, and as she strolled through the bazaar there were whispered invitations. But she found these easier to dismiss than the ones she got on these same streets as a woman.
She was just avoiding a particularly importunate bazaari when she turned a corner and saw Ismail Raza Ali on his mat. He was telling a story to a small group of men and boys sitting or standing around him. The public storyteller had almost disappeared from Lahore’s markets in those days, drowned out by recorded music, unmuffled scooters, motor tricycles and trucks and unable to compete with the attractions of film and TV. She was surprised to see even one survivor, so she stopped and listened.
He was telling the story of the fisherman and the demon, and the magical fish the demon taught him how to catch, in colors red, blue, green, and yellow, and what happened when these fish were brought to the king and fried: the mysterious woman who appeared though a wall in the palace kitchen and asked, “O fish, have you kept the pledge?”
Like all stories from the Thousand Nights and a Night, this one has no end but blends into another one, and another. The storyteller stopped his tale at the point when the king journeys from the enchanted lake where the colored fish are caught and finds the palace with the unfortunate prince inside it, half man and half black stone.
A sprinkle of small coins and crumpled rupee notes fell into the man’s profferred brass bowl and the little crowd dispersed. But Sonia stayed.
The storyteller placed his takings in a leather purse and, leaning on his staff, stood and wrapped a patched gray cloak over his shoulders. Sonia saw he was only as tall as she herself and just as wiry, his face the color of an old saddle and curiously saddle-tight and smooth over the high cheekbones. His eyes had the Asiatic fold in them, she noticed, when he turned them on her, and they had in them a look that combined amusement and penetration. He said to her, “That is thirsty work. How about a cup of tea down the road?”
The Good Son Page 10