The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  Yes, work and awakening. That was the hard part, and Sonia is not sure that even now she has achieved it. More than Annette, perhaps. She can handle the Jungian jargon, she can do the dream work, but there is a blockage, a drag, a secret standing in the way. Perhaps that dream with the horrible boy is a clue. She wonders if she will figure it all out before she dies.

  Annette has fallen asleep. Sonia feels a certain sympathy for the collapsed, naturally, but at the moment Annette’s collapse means there are more chapatis for her. She eats them all greedily and drinks the rest of the tea.

  She spends the next hours writing in her notebook with a tiny pen. She is writing to her son, an apology, not just in the commonplace sense of a petition for forgiveness but also, mainly, in the older definition, an apology for her life, an explanation of why she has lived it as she has. She hopes it will somehow survive her death and that he will read it. She is a fluent writer, but this is a hard thing to do. It is easier to tell the truth to the world than to people you love.

  There comes a point when she can’t write anymore. She puts the notebook and pen away in their small pocket and from another one takes a deck of cards. She shuffles, does fans-the peel-away, the reverse, the onehand-then fancy shuffles-the waterfall, the hindu-then deals out the four cards from the top of the deck, all aces: snap, snap, snap, snap. She wishes she had a mirror to check her passes and lifts, for she has not practiced in a while and feels rusty. On the other hand, now she has nothing but time.

  The hours pass; the light from the window becomes rosy, then white. She wonders about the others, especially Karl-Heinz, who is so frail. She knows him from the Zurich days, he and his wife, Elsa. She had met Elsa before she met Karl-Heinz; Elsa was an almoner at the Burghölzli. Fluss had sent her in because of the blood on Sonia’s clothes, and Elsa had taken the clothes away and brought fresh ones, a characteristic act of kindness. Afterward, when Sonia had become Fluss’s student, she had taken Sonia into her social circle along with Fluss, who was divorced, and a changing circus of other lost souls: the formerly mad and their keepers and a good portion of the psycho-industrial complex of Zurich. A salon, but cozy in the Swiss manner; it was probably this kindness more than the precepts of Jung that had saved Sonia in those first months. She had a cozy deficit of vast proportions and drank it in like water in the desert.

  Elsa was dead too. Karl-Heinz was the only one from those days with whom Sonia had retained contact, and she was determined that he would survive.

  Sonia is still practicing a changing-card trick, deceptively difficult because it has to be done very slowly to be convincing, when the door opens again and the bearded guard sticks his head in. Sonia wishes him peace in Pashtun, and he seems startled to hear his language on her tongue. She wonders what the troops have been told about their captives. He mumbles something and withdraws, allowing the girl Rashida to enter with another tray of chapatis, dal, and tea.

  “Peace be with you,” says Sonia, as the girl sets down the tin tray and picks up the old one.

  The girl responds, “May God be with you.”

  Sonia flicks the cards into a fancy double fan, catching the girl’s eye. “Would you like to see something magical?”

  Without waiting for a reply, Sonia performs a card change. She cuts the deck and holds it up, the long side parallel to the ground, exposing the queen of hearts. Slowly, she moves her free hand over the card face and away. Still the queen of hearts. Again she caresses the queen but when she draws her hand away again, the card showing is the ace of spades. Rashida gasps behind her veil.

  “Do it again!”

  Sonia does, and then asks casually, “We heard someone scream this morning. I hope no one has been hurt.”

  “Only Patang,” says Rashida. “The men were unloading from a truck, and a heavy box fell on his foot.” She hesitated. “He was crying out that this was foretold from a dream he had. And you foretold it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Can you really?”

  “I can. I am an interpreter of dreams, with God’s help.”

  “Ya-Allah! We had such a man here in Paidara once, but he died. I must leave, I am not supposed to talk to the foreigners.”

  She leaves. Sonia returns to her charpoy and plays solitaire for a while. She dozes, waiting for what will happen next. The azan sounds distantly, and she washes and prays the Ashr. The bars of light from the shutters glide across the floor and the walls, turn red, and fade. She has just lit the kerosene lamp when the door opens and the bearded guard comes in. She greets him politely but he does not answer her greeting. He says, “You come with me!”

  She is led through the courtyard of the hujra and out a wooden gate, then down a narrow street to a large house surrounded by a mud-brick wall. She is taken through a gate into a small courtyard, where armed men give her hostile looks and mutter as she passes. Inside the house, in a room at the back, she finds the man in the black turban, Idris Ghulam, reclining on cushions with three other men, all of them dressed in dusty shalwar kameez, Pashtun waistcoats, and green or black turbans. They all wear full beards, black on two of them and, on the other one, white, dyed orange with henna. Weapons lean against a wall. The room is lit with a single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling by a wire. Close by she can hear the diesel generator rumbling. There is a whiff of its exhaust in the air.

  Sonia looks the leader in the eye. He doesn’t like this, she can see, and also sees something else, a redness in the rims, bags beneath them, bloodshot, unhealthy-looking whites. She says, “May you not be weary, Idris Ghulam.”

  He scowls. “How do you know my name?”

  “All the world knows Idris Ghulam, and all believers praise his many feats of courage and daring.”

  He ignores this and demands, “Do you know why you are here?”

  “Yes. I was driving on the highway with a group of scholars who wished to find ways to peace, in accordance with the will of God, the compassionate One, when I was kidnapped by a group of armed men.”

  “No, I mean why you are here now, standing in this room.”

  “Because you wanted to talk with me,” she says. “It is one of the unpleasant things about being a prisoner, you can no longer choose with whom you must converse.”

  “You are here because you have bewitched one of my men.”

  “Witchcraft is forbidden to believers. I bewitched no one.”

  “You prophesied he would hurt his foot, and he hurt his foot today.”

  “I interpreted a dream and told him that, if he did not keep on the true path of Islam, his foot would be injured as a sign from God. And so it has happened.”

  “This is sorcery,” says Idris, “and the penalty for sorcery is death.”

  “The interpretation of dreams is not sorcery, as you must know. Yusuf, may he rest in peace, interpreted dreams for Pharaoh. The Prophet himself, peace be upon him, interpreted dreams for his Companions. And did he not say, as the Hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari reports, that true dreams are from God?”

  “But the Prophet, may he have peace, also said that bad dreams are from Shaitan.”

  “But this dream of Patang’s was not a bad dream. It was a warning from God, and the warning in the dream has come to pass. God controls all things.”

  At this, the three mujahideen at the side of the room murmur and pass looks.

  Sonia has considerable experience with the body language and facial expressions of such men. It seems to her now that Idris is unsure of his position. The three men are all older than he, and age counts for much among the Pashtuns. They talk among themselves. Idris darts quick glances at them after he speaks, as if to confirm that he has spoken properly. She concludes that he may be a tactical leader, in temporary command even, but he is not the sworn chieftain of these men.

  He returns to the attack. “But your interpretation was false. You told Patang that the path of jihad was a false path.”

  “Untrue. I said his dream told him the truth, that the path he was on was n
ot the true path of Islam. I said nothing about jihad.”

  “But Patang is a mujahid.”

  “Is he indeed? I wouldn’t know. I have not seen him fight those who seek to oppress the Muslims, but I was taught that such is the task of the mujahideen. I have not seen him shooting Indian soldiers in Kashmir. I have only seen him murder a family of drivers, all good Muslim men. I have only seen him making war on innocent people, guests of a Muslim land.”

  “This is not a true Muslim land,” Idris says. “Its leaders are kafiri and puppets of the Americans.”

  “How terrible for you, then, to be ruled by kafiri! The Pakistanis are kafiri, the Saudis are kafiri, the Syrians, the Pashtuns who rule Afghanistan are kafiri; undoubtedly the Persians are kafiri. Everyone is kafiri except you. How shrunken is the umma! You have pronouced takfir upon nearly all of it. How sad it must make God and His messenger, peace be upon him, to look down from Paradise and see that His only true believers now are small groups of murderers.”

  Idris shoots to his feet and punches Sonia in the face. She sees it coming and manages to turn her head, but the blow strikes the corner of her jaw and knocks her off her feet.

  “Blasphemer!” cries Idris. “Whore of a blasphemer! You will die. We will stone you tomorrow and send you to Hell.”

  Sonia shakes her head to clear it of ringing. From where she lies she says, “As I said, you are a mere murderer. I have not been convicted of blasphemy before a khazi on the testimony of two witnesses, and therefore you have no right to execute me. Besides, the punishment for blasphemy is not stoning, but the cutting off of a hand and a leg from opposite sides, or banishment. In any case, a woman cannot be executed for blasphemy, according to the Kitab al-Hudud. She must be imprisoned until she repents and shall be beaten at the times of prayer.”

  “Be silent, whore!” Idris shouts. “I will judge you.”

  “Yes, and if the scales of justice were in your hand, you would count your mule equal to another’s horse.”

  At this line from Rahman Baba, the great poet of the Pashtuns, laughter breaks out among the three older men, and now she knows that Idris is not their chief or they would never have laughed at the sally.

  She raises herself up and points a steady finger at Idris Ghulam. “You have forgotten the wisdom of Rahman, who says, ‘Do not be fooled by the outer appearance of a man; look at the inside of the nut to see whether it is soft or hard.’ I am not a man, but I am hard as steel inside. And I tell you that if you kill me except by the letter of the fiqh, my blood will be upon you, and my son will avenge that blood according to the law of the Pashtuns, upon you and your brothers and your father and your sons. Be warned, Idris Guhlam. This is not an idle threat, for I have no ordinary son.”

  She turns and stares at the man with the hennaed beard.

  “Sir, forgive me for addressing you, but I require your witness. You were in the real jihad against the Russians, were you not?”

  The man slowly nods his head.

  “And when you fought there, did you hear of a certain Kakay Ghazan?”

  Again he nods, and says, “Everyone has heard of Kakay Ghazan. He was a famous warrior, although a boy.”

  “He is still a famous warrior,” says Sonia, “but now he is a man, and I am his mother.”

  Consternation. The three men all begin talking at once, but Sonia’s voice rises above theirs; now she is on her feet, her head aching, but speaking directly to Idris. “And he is a Pashtun of the Barakzai, of the Taraghzai, of the tribe Kakar, and all these he will raise against you, if you kill me outside the law, so beware, Idris Ghulam! You thought you had a load of fat geese, ready for plucking, but one of them is a scorpion.”

  For a moment Idris seems mesmerized by her revelation, but then he comes to himself, resumes command, gestures to the guard, and says, “Take her away! Lock her in the stable! Now!”

  The guard grabs Sonia roughly. She points again at Idris and says, “Nor will you sleep easily, Idris Ghulam, until the day you repent.”

  Sonia is hustled out, but she can hear the sound of violent argument coming through the door. She shakes her head and works her swelling jaw. She thinks it has been a very successful interview and looks forward to one with the real leader of the group.

  8

  C ynthia often lost track of time when she worked with sound files, a habit that originated during her language studies in graduate school. In the language lab, eyes closed in concentration, in the little soundproofed cubicle with a big padded Bose headset on her ears, the uncomfortable syllables of a conversation in Arabic or in Dari filling her mind and her foot on the replay pedal so she could hear the same phrase over and over like some kind of rap sample, she would fall into a strangely delicious state, bordering on intoxication, although her auditory senses, at least, were strung to the last notch. She loved it, she supposed, because of the element of control. She had always been a good girl up until then, which is to say she fulfilled the expectations of others-her father, her teachers, her peers, society at large-but in the lab she was the queen of time; with the headset on, the various external pressures on her seemed to dissolve in that universe of perfect feedback, the voices starting, stopping, repeating at the tap of her foot. She spent more time in the lab than she had to-it was a kind of addiction, she supposed later, as was her pursuit of perfection in the shaping of sounds in her own throat. They had a machine that gave you a word or phrase and you had to repeat the phrase perfectly, if you could, and then the machine showed you a sonogram that told you how well you’d done and gave you a score. Cynthia had reached the maximum score in all her languages.

  Here was something.

  She played the sound file over again. Two men were speaking over cell phones in Urdu. She checked the source notation and found that one cell phone was in Kahuta and the other was in Lahore. They were young voices, and the one in Kahuta was obscured by what sounded like wind and motor traffic; the man was outside, at any rate.

  KAHUTA: Hello, is that you, Walid?

  LAHORE: Please! No names!

  KAHUTA: Sorry. I am told to tell you we have the shipment on board.

  LAHORE: Excellent. You can leave immediately?

  KAHUTA: Absolutely. I have the directions.

  LAHORE: No trouble at all? No alarms from the… the facility?

  KAHUTA: Nothing. It went as we planned.

  LAHORE: Thank God! Everything is ready at the destination; all the equipment arrived today. They should be setting it up now. How long do you think-

  KAHUTA: No more than three days, God willing. I will call in on the way.

  LAHORE: Then peace be with you, brother, in God’s name.

  KAHUTA: And peace unto you. God is great!

  Cynthia typed out the translation on her computer, removed her headset, and sat for several minutes in thought. There was something wrong with the colloquy. For one thing, the conversation was in Urdu, which was fine-Urdu was the official language of Pakistan-but in general, when Pakistanis conversed with people they knew they spoke in their cradle tongues, of which that land had hundreds: Panjabi, Lahnda, Pashto, Sindhi, and on and on. That these two were speaking Urdu to each other meant they were from different origins and the transaction was a commercial one, which didn’t seem right. Terrorist groups were famously tight, especially in that part of the world, with its endemic mistrust of the stranger, one reason why they were nearly impossible to infiltrate. And there was something else: the tone and rhythm of the talk were a little off; there were none of the minor hesitations and repetitions that appear in natural conversations, no ahs, no hmms. It was almost as if they were reading a script.

  Or maybe she was losing it. She attached the source header, the sound file, and her translation to an e-mail and zapped it off to Ernie Lotz: READ THIS AND LET’S TALK.

  She put the headphones back on and returned to the stolen etheric whispers. Even with the most sophisticated electronic filtering, there was still an enormous amount of dross to get past. A lot of p
eople in South Asia were talking about shipments, many of which were illegal but were of no interest to NSA or to her. The listening at this point was automatic, and her mind was free to drift above the chatter. As she often did, she thought about her career and where it was going. N Section was a fine place to learn the ropes, but it was a dead end. Vital, yes, because obviously terrorists could not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, but it was vital in the way that night watchmen were vital. You didn’t want the factory robbed or burned down, but you also were not going to offer the guy with the square badge a seat on the board. No, N was a springboard to something better, a wider scope…

  Something touched her shoulder and she yelped, tore the headset off, and spun around in her chair.

  “Jesus, Ernie! Don’t come in and touch me when I’m listening!”

  “Sorry,” he said, “but you have to see this.” He handed her a piece of paper.

  “Did you get my message?” she asked.

  “Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to this.”

  It was a few lines of typescript in English.

  “Who translated this?”

  “No one. It was English in the original. Read it!”

  She did.

  MAN: Hello, it’s me. Don’t be angry, my dear, but I have to tell you I will not be home to night.

  WOMAN: What? Are you mad? To night is the party for Shira and the Sajjids.

  MAN: I am sorry, my love, but it is quite impossible. We have an emergency at work.

  WOMAN: God help us! Not the reactor?

  MAN: No, thank God. But it is almost as bad.

  WOMAN: What then? What is more important than your daughter’s happiness?

  MAN: I can’t tell you. It is a security issue.

  WOMAN: Before God, if you do not give me a proper explanation I will never speak to you again. This is the most outrageous thing I ever heard of. The Sajjids will think it is an intentional insult.