The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  “Yes, Ms. Lam?” said Spalling, but she shook her head and mumbled, and Bettleman nodded vaguely in her direction and began to sum up the meeting. He said the obvious: The White House would have to be informed and he would undertake to do that this afternoon. There would have to be a fuller analysis of the situation in the president’s daily intel brief tomorrow, and he would be sure to ask for options, so the Chiefs would have to get that rolling right away. Col o nel Brand could be trusted to do just that. Then he passed compliments all around, expressed optimism, and was about to close the meeting when Morgan spoke up.

  “What are we going to call this? I mean, the incident and the intel that comes in.”

  “Let’s stick with GEARSHIFT until further notice, shall we?” Bettleman said.

  The meeting broke up shortly afterward, the attendees assembled in transitory clots around the room, the principals and their aides mostly, speaking in confidential tones as they filed out. Cynthia was pulling up her cables when she heard, as if from someone standing right next to her, a fragment of a conversation. Startled she looked up and saw that the deputy director for operations of the Central Intelligence Agency was deep in conversation with another man, halfway across the room. That she could hear what they were saying was a trick of the safe room’s peculiar acoustics.

  She turned away, still coiling her cable, and listened. The DDO said, “Anything new on Ringmaster?”

  “Only that it’s confirmed; Ringmaster’s definitely a hostage. Do you think this business here is connected to Showboat?”

  “Has to be,” said the DDO, “but I’m goddamned if I know how. Look, when we get back to Langley…”

  But Cynthia couldn’t hear what was planned when they got back to Langley, because they had moved away from the acoustic pocket. She continued her packing up, keeping her inner excitement from showing in her expression only with difficulty. She had by accident snatched the gold ring of intelligence work: she had learned something she was not supposed to know, and from the highest levels of the CIA. This slip established that there was more to GEARSHIFT than the CIA was willing to share with the rest of the intelligence community: no one had mentioned anything called Ringmaster or Showboat at the meeting, so she assumed they were names of assets or operations so secret that not even the highly cleared people at this meeting were allowed to know about them. But now she knew, and it remained only to determine how she could use the knowledge to her best advantage. It never for a moment occurred to her to share this knowledge with Morgan or anyone else at NSA.

  9

  T he guard takes Sonia to a small outbuilding near the hujra. Inside, she smells the dense odors of animal waste and fermenting silage; they kept goats here. The man opens a trapdoor and points down into the darkness. She descends a rickety ladder and the trapdoor slams shut. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The blackness resolves itself into a room not quite high enough to allow her to stand upright and about the size of a decent bathroom in an average suburban American house. The only light comes from a narrow slit in the ceiling where the exterior wall does not quite meet the beams supporting the floor above. By leaning down she can see the dusty ground and the foot of the building across the street. The floor is mud, covered with rotting straw and archipelagoes of goat turds.

  She clears a place on the floor with her foot and sits down with her back against the wall. Within a few minutes she feels the first hot prick of a fleabite. The place is infested with them, and they clearly have not fed in some time. She spends the next hours trying to catch and crush them. She waits for the sting, gives the beast time to become involved in its meal, and then places a finger over the point of pain. Then she rolls her finger carefully but firmly over her skin and onto the ball of her thumb. Then she holds her hand up to the dim light and slides her finger back, and if she has been successful she can see the black dot of the flea, which she then crushes with the index-finger nail of her other hand. It makes a satisfying pop. She supposes she gets in this way one out of fifty that bite her, but it serves to pass the time. She has done this before.

  The light beams from the slit move across the floor and up the opposite wall; they fade to red, and then she hears the call to pray the Maghrib, the evening prayer. She cannot pray because there is nothing clean here to wash with, and in any case she knows she will be otherwise occupied. She hears footsteps above. The trapdoor opens and the guard, the same man, looks down and tells her to climb the ladder. She pulls her dupatta around her head and shoulders and goes up.

  The guard has a length of rope, and with this he binds her hands in front of her and leads her out of the hujra and down a narrow street, and another, until they come to a wider road, the main street of the village. The mosque is there with a crowd of men just emerging from it. They stand in their dust-colored clothes and stare at her, a sea of black beards and eyes. Sonia sees Idris and the other men from her recent interview at the front of the crowd, which now stirs and makes way for the mullah. He is a thin, dark man in early middle age, dressed in a peach-colored shalwar kameez, a long black Pashtun waistcoat, and a black turban. Sonia’s guard presses down on her shoulder and kicks at the backs of her knees, until she kneels.

  There is a farm cart there, with high solid wheels, painted with fanciful designs. The guard secures Sonia’s leading cord to one of the uprights at the tail of the cart. The mullah climbs on the cart and addresses the crowd. He says that this woman-pointing a finger at Sonia-has blasphemed before reliable male witnesses and shall now be punished according to the sharia. She will be confined and whipped at the times of prayer until she repents her blasphemy. He jumps down from the cart.

  Sonia cries out, “I am no blasphemer, but a good Muslim wife. I have not been convicted of anything before a khazi.”

  The guard now wields a bamboo stick about four feet long, split at the ends, and with this in hand he sets himself and strikes her across the back. The pain is colossal, like breaking bone. An involuntary scream issues from her mouth.

  “I have not blasphemed. I have not been convicted,” she cries, and the next blow falls. She calls out this sentence after each of the next four blows and then the power of speech deserts her. She can only howl like a dog. She loses count of the blows after the tenth and something happens in her head and her vision narrows to a tiny reddish dot and then goes out.

  When she returns to consciousness she is back in the cellar. The trapdoor is open and the guard is about to climb the ladder.

  “Wait,” she calls out. “Give me water, for the love of God.”

  He pauses, not looking at her. “There is water in the plastic.”

  She looks around and sees a ten-liter plastic jerrican on the floor. There is a cloth nearby wrapped around some loaves of naan. He starts to climb.

  “Wait,” she says again. “Tell me your name and lineage.”

  “So you can curse me?” he says, climbing higher. “I can’t be caught that way, witch.”

  “I am not a witch. Please, because if I am beaten like this five times a day I will be dead in two days, and when the Day of Judgment comes and you are being cast down to Hell, I want to say to God the merciful, the compassionate, ‘My Lord, You know all things and You know that this Yousef Muhammad, or whatever you are called, has murdered me against Your law, with his whip, but it was not his fault; he is ignorant and was betrayed by the wicked, who kill falsely in Your name, so in Your mercy let him inhabit the cooler parts of Hell and do not place his murderer’s hands forever in molten lead.’ ”

  The man snarls a curse. Sonia says, “Very well. But I would rather have my back than your dreams to come. I wish you peace, man with no name, but I doubt you will have any. Beware the Day of Judgment.”

  The man makes a gesture, an averting sign against the evil eye, and scrambles up the ladder with unusual speed. The trapdoor closes again.

  Sonia drinks from the jerrican, groaning as she lifts it to her mouth. She carefully removes her tunic, an agonizing process, and po
urs water down her back, writhing as the cool liquid washes her cuts. She sees that the whip has sliced the back of the tunic into ribbons. She wraps her dupatta around her and collapses back onto the earth, lying on her right side. The fleas feast at will, but now she barely notices them against the wrenching agony of the wounds across her back.

  She falls into a paradoxical state, not quite conscious yet too fitful to be called sleep. The pain is like a drug, squeezing her mind into unaccustomed hypnagogic regions. Is that her life passing before her eyes, is this death? No, or not yet, at any rate, but she experiences a series of intense sensory impressions. Her mother, the gleam of a gas lantern making a golden halo behind her head; the smells-gas; her mother’s smell: perfumed powder, the smell of greasepaint and cold cream; the stink of the great cats, of the grease from the concession stands, of cotton candy, the cigarette smell of her father-the woman in her dream, the spangled costume, a mother image? No, her mother had dark hair, Sonia sees the woman clearly now, a stranger yet familiar, maybe not a woman at all, some kind of androgyne, an angel or demon. It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative, the caricature of the gabbling woman that is the dead spirit of the father rising to hideous life in her. In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels.

  Sonia hears herself laughing; the laughter rises to a hysterical pitch, breaks down into sobbing. Yes, part of her is saying, You are doing Jung -ian analysis in this stinking pit; what good has it ever done you? Are you cured? Are you happy?

  This is the animus speaking; it has never been integrated. Fluss said it and it was true, and how she had fought him on the subject. Of course, she argued, that is what the disintegrated animus does, it bitches. But this dream is important, she knows that; and now in this fevered state she struggles to make sense of it. The awful boy-thing from that dream floats into her mind. The crusher of tiny helpless creatures. She thinks of Farid, her husband, whom she has tortured, whom she has crushed. The boy-thing cannot be Farid, who has never hurt anything in his life; that’s his problem: He has no edge, his anima is toxic, inert, Eros and its holy power does not flow from him, poor man. The Mother is too strong, Noor has done her work well, all unconscious, of course, all of them are asleep, and she thinks of the sons of Noor, classic examples of the three main types of animus-ridden men: Farid, the softy; Nisar, the voracious mogul and philanderer; Seyd, the fascist.

  She holds the monstrous boy in her mind’s eye, he floats in the dark sparkles under her eyelids, and as she watches he changes; he grows tall, strong, beautiful: her son. She feels a pang of love. She calls out to him; he smiles at her and begins a careful kind of stepping, almost like a dance, and she sees that he is crushing under his feet the small helpless creatures from her dream, tiny birds or squirrels. She calls again, suddenly panicked; this is not right. She calls out, Theo, don’t! This is not how you were raised! And he smiles again, the flash of white teeth in a tanned face. It is not Theo at all but Wazir, and now she sees that the deformed boy is still there, crouching in the shadows; he has Theo’s face. Wazir speaks; he says, I’m just doing what you taught me. And she has taught him, nurturing him over the years; she’s spent more time with him as an adult than ever she spent with Theo after he was grown. As this thought enters her mind, and with it a profound sorrow and regret, her deformed son leaps at her, wraps his arms about her waist. She calls on him to stop, she says he’s hurting her, but he does not stop; he is climbing up her back, he is pinching her, he is clawing at her back with his nails. Wazir does nothing to stop this; he seems amused. The pain is horrendous, she writhes with it. At some level she understands this is a just punishment for what she has done.

  Then she is out of the dreamlike state; she is back in the stable, and her back is covered with rats, their sharp teeth tearing at her open wounds.

  She rises with a scream and the rats fall off her and vanish into the straw. She knows they will return, attracted by the smell of her blood. She wedges herself into a corner and sits trembling in terror, with her penlight in her hand. Its little beam wavers, grows yellow, fades to a tiny glow.

  Sonia is still in this position when the trapdoor opens again, revealing a figure holding an oil lamp. She lets out a sob. It cannot be time for dawn prayer already, time for her next beating; it is still black outside. Then she sees it is not her guard but the girl, Rashida. She has not covered her face for once, and Sonia can see that she has a nose after all, and that she is a beauty.

  The girls clucks when she sees that the naan has not been eaten, that it has been gnawed by the rats. She says, “I have brought you a new kameez. Here, let me help you put it on.”

  “No, it is too painful to have anything next to my skin. And besides, they will only tear it again, and you are not rich enough to afford five new ones a day.”

  “But they are saying you will not be beaten in this way anymore. The mullah says it is immodest for men to see your body through the rips in the cloth. So, God willing, they will beat you on your feet.”

  “Thanks be to God,” says Sonia. “I will be a cripple, but not shamed.”

  The girl does not detect any irony in this statement, and says, “Yes, thank God. I have some grease my mother gave me. We put it on burns. I will dress your back. I also have some cloths that my mother says will keep the cuts from turning bad.”

  “Thank you. God will reward you for this mercy.”

  Rashida rubs grease on Sonia’s back with a delicate hand and ties on the cloths. The pain seems to diminish a little. The girl helps her on with the new kameez and says, “Is it true that you cast the evil eye on Mahmoud Saiyed?”

  “Is that his name?” says Sonia. Speaking to the girl seems to calm her. I’ve been hallucinating, she thinks, and shudders, but the details of the near-dream are starting to fade. She wills them out of her mind. “No, I cast no curse,” she says. “I’m not a witch. I asked him for his name so I could intercede for him on the Day of Judgment, since he is going to kill me unjustly in the name of God, which is a great sin.”

  She sees the girl’s face twist in puzzlement. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because I was taught to be merciful to my enemies and forgive them, as God forgives us.”

  “Only a fool would forgive an enemy. That would just give him another chance to attack you.”

  “And so? What if he attacks?”

  “He might kill you.”

  “And so? We are called to be mujahideen, we are called to struggle for the sake of God. In the lesser jihad we struggle against the enemies of Islam and for justice, and if we fall we are taken to Paradise. In the greater jihad we struggle against ourselves. We strive to become like God, and what is God if not compassionate and merciful? If we fall in that struggle, the Prophet, peace be upon him, has told us that we gain a higher rank in Paradise than those who fell by the sword.”

  The girl looks down at her hands. She says, “I should not listen to you. You are a blasphemer. But look, I have had a dream.”

  “Tell it,” says Sonia.

  “I was on the bank of a river, a swift-flowing stream,” says the girl. “On the other side was… a boy. He was holding a gold ring and beckoning to me, but I couldn’t cross. Then I saw there were corpses in the water: oxen, horses, and some men, too. I was afraid, and I awakened.”

  Sonia says, “The river is the future, which flows ever toward us and cannot be stopped. The gold is the prospect of a successful marriage. The corpses mean that the marriage cannot take place until someone, perhaps many, have died. And the boy is whom you love. What is his name?”

  “Batur,” says the girl immediately, and then gasps and holds her hand up to her mouth.

  Sonia says, “Yes, Batur. He is from a good family in a
nother village. He loves you and would marry you, but your father has promised you to someone else, an older man.” It is only a guess, but Sonia knows such sorrows are the common lot of Pashtun village girls.

  Rashida’s eyes grow wide, glistening, reflecting the small yellow flame of the lamp. “How did you know that?”

  “I know many things,” says Sonia. “And this older man is…”

  “Khaliq Sumro. He has one eye and he stinks like a goat. He is of the mujahideen and advises Idris Ghulam. He has one wife in Peshawar but he wants one here.”

  “Never fear that you will marry him. His death is foretold and will come soon. Your father may have a dream. Tell your mother what I have told you, and she will use the ways of women to make him come and see me and I will interpret that dream as well.”

  The girl nods and assures Sonia she will do this and pushes forward a closed basket. She says there is food in it, and she will leave the oil lamp there, to stave off the rats. Then she darts up the ladder and closes the trapdoor. Sonia hears the bolt shoot home.

  What a precious thing a little light is! Sonia thinks, and a little kindness as well. She cradles the small lamp in her hands. By its glow she can make out the shapes of the rats moving and from time to time the glow of their tiny fierce eyes. She wonders if the oil will last until dawn. Probably not. Perhaps that is part of the torment. Hope and some slight relief from the worst are the best weapons of any tormentor; the torturer smiles and offers a cigarette.

  This adds incalculably to the most dreadful element in her situation, the anticipation of pain to come; anyone with an interior life knows that psychic pain is what breaks you. Sonia knows she is breaking. She is brave enough when free, with room to maneuver. She has confidence in her own cleverness, but now it is entirely gone. Her plan was a stupid one, and now here she is. She has always been a little claustrophobic, she has always sought the open skies, avoided tight spaces both physical and social; her life has been based on this preference, and now she is in this tiny grave packed with rats.