He nods and makes a gesture with his hand and she continues. “A little girl shows you the secret of the sand, and this allows you to separate the black grains by touch. You could not have imagined such a thing, because no man can imagine God’s mercy. This dream also says you must use a different sense than you thought, not vision, but touch. This means that all you thought was true must be considered again, to tell the good from the bad. After you accomplished the task, you had a feeling of peace, which is but a pale ghost of the feeling you will have when God takes you to Him. It is a promise, but only if you turn from the path of murder and pride and do the work of the greater jihad. That is the end of the interpretation.”
He sits in silence, stroking his beard; she studies his face. For a moment the harsh Pashtun male mask he wears fades and a more contemplative person is revealed. They get that from the secret life they share with their mothers, she thinks. The poor women have only a single opportunity to acquire a fragment of power over their lives, and this is through their sons when they are small. But the women are stupid and beaten down, so they can rarely give their boys the spark of a strong opposite, the feminine introject that leads to individuation. And so the boys never grow up. They retain the brutality and carelessness of boys for their whole lives, living on boasts and the good opinion of their gang. And they have the short attention span of boys and the romantic wildness, building nothing, dumbfounded by the civilizations around them, knowing as little of how a political order or a modern economy is constructed as a six-year-old knows about what his father does at work. So they are doomed to poverty, the manipulations of others, and early death.
Idris utters something underneath his breath. She sees the mask drop into place and he rises with one swift motion. In a stiff, harsh voice he says, “But after all, it is only a dream and dreams are not real life. They are of no account in real life.”
“Nor is the world to come a part of real life, yet the Prophet, peace be with him, told us to value it above every other thing. You have been given a great gift, Idris Ghulam. God will not be pleased with you if you throw it away.”
The man’s fists clench and he seems about to say something, but instead he turns away and leaves the room. There are six more clients that night, including Rashida’s mother and several of the mujahideen. They relate the simple dreams of simple people, or so she decides to consider them. They want to know what will happen to them, should they sell a cow, will the child just started be a son? She answers as best she can in accordance with the ancient Sufi dream books. They seem satisfied and happy that there is no charge.
Mahmoud leads her back to prison. When they come to the door, Sonia turns and faces the guard. She says, “Mahmoud, wait! If I save your life now, will you promise me something?”
“What is it? And how will you save my life?”
“First swear by God and upon your head and the head of your son that you will do as I ask, if it does not soil your honor. I am an honest woman, as you know, and I swear by my honor that I am not trying to trick you. And recall your dream, that you would profit by helping a boy who was not a boy. This is the moment foretold, for that boy is me.”
He goggles at her. “How is this possible?”
“It is a long story, Mahmoud, well known to others, but I do not have time to recount it here. Swear now, in the name of God.”
The big man ruminates on this for some seconds and then nods. After the required oaths he asks, “So now, how will you save my life?”
She says, “Behind that door is a man with a club, and as soon as you step through it he will break your skull, take your clothes and weapons, and try to escape.”
Mahmoud growls and moves forward, but she stands in his way. “No, you will do nothing to this man; that is my request. Recall that you promised to obey! Don’t come through the door after me as you usually do. Let me slip in alone.”
He glares; she holds him with her eye and hopes he was frightened of his mother. He relents, opens the door, she slides in, and he locks it. The room is utterly dark except for the dim sliver of light from the guard’s lantern coming from under the door. She can see Ashton’s bare feet as he waits with his weighted sock. She ignores him and his muffled curse, and the black shape, crouching there, Annette in a burqa.
14
H ow I got back to the States. That’s an interesting story and one I usually leave out of my biography, especially when talking to women. I don’t mind telling Billy Olin, though. I had a couple of hours to kill before my flight, so I dropped in to say good-bye on my way to the airport. He was the same. People change, they say, but not Rowboat Billy. He told me once, how he got the name-we were both of us drunk in an NCO club at Fort Bragg-and I assured him it was no big thing, as I’m sure he would have said about my little secrets. It was in the early weeks of the Iraq war and him and a bunch of Rangers were set up on the river near Tikrit, looking for insurgents running down the water from there, and one night Billy spotted a rowboat and challenged it and when they kept right on going he smoked it with his SAW. And wouldn’t you know? It was a family with eight little kids. It happens. Pretty much everybody who’s been downrange has a story like that.
Mine was a little different. After I’d got blown up in my final moment as a heroic mujahid, I woke up after maybe two weeks out of it, and there was Wazir again to praise me, eyes full of love, and tell me what happened. He didn’t say that everyone else had thought I was dead and he’d carried me on his back for ten kilometers to the best doctor we had with us, Dr. Spin, and he’d fixed me up okay. I got that later from Gul Muhammed, because he was there too; we were in his home village of Barak Sharh, in Kunar Province, up near the Pakistani border.
Gul Muhammed told me that when I was fit to travel he was going to send me south with Wazir and a truckload of loot, guns, and equipment that we would sell in the bazaars of Peshawar and distribute the money to the families of the mujahideen in the camps. This trade was what had kept the resistance going. The CIA and the Saudis sent money and the Pakistanis provided support and took their cut, but it was up to the mujahideen themselves to support their families in the refugee camps, and they did it with Russian loot sold in the bazaars.
Peshawar was a different city from the one I had known in childhood, huge now, even filthier, loud with motor scooters and cars, grown rich off the blood of Afghanistan. The nations that wanted Rus sia to lose up there had poured billions through Peshawar, and a lot of it had stuck. One of those it had stuck to was our cousin Bacha Khan, who was even fatter than before and now had a big house in the Khyber Colony and a Toyota pickup. He gave us good hospitality and said he’d help us sell our stuff; he knew all the merchants and their tricky ways.
I went with Bacha to the bazaar and was royally entertained by the various bazaaris. My reputation had preceded me, as they say. By that time I was known as Kakay Ghazan, which means little warrior of God. It’s a big deal for a teenager to be treated as a man by older Pashtuns, and it seemed to me that my life had reached some kind of peak. Except for the admiration of girls, and access to them, it was exactly like being the best high school quarterback in Alabama.
I said as much to Billy, because he’d played ball in Alabama, and I wanted him to understand the full impact of what happened next. But before I could go on, a guy came in and changed Billy’s piss bag and I thought of that scene in the movie Catch- 22, when the medic just switches the pee bag and the IV bag. The asshole gave me a look, like what was I doing talking to a broccoli? I gave him a look that sent him out of there in a hurry and picked up the story.
We sold the stuff and got shitloads of money and then went to the hugely swollen refugee camps and looked up the relatives of the men whose loot we’d just sold, and I watched as Bacha handed over the money to the right people, and after that we had a feast, two sheep, and I ate more meat than I had in years, and there was wine, too, because the Pashtuns hadn’t gone crazy yet over their religion like a lot of them did later. We both got drunk and W
azir recited some Sufi poetry I hadn’t known he knew, and we got to talking some deep stuff about Sufi and Islam and so on, the kind of conversation we hadn’t had before, and I asked him who he’d learned all that from and he smiled and said, “Your mother. Who else?”
I laughed because I thought it was a joke and I was drunk, so I just ruffled his hair and put my head on his shoulder, and fell asleep soon after that. In the middle of the night I got up with an urgent need to piss. I crawled over Wazir and walked out of the room Bacha had given us and went to the latrine, which was in an out house. I used it, and when I came out two guys, or maybe it was three, knocked me off my feet, taped my mouth, threw a bag on my head, tied my hands, rolled me into a tarp, and tossed me in the back of a van.
It was weird, because I honestly couldn’t understand who would want to snatch me. It wasn’t the Russians; by that point they were out of the picture. It could’ve been rival mujahideen, or some tribal beef, or just a kidnap for ransom. There was some of that starting to show up. And then I heard two of the guys say something in a foreign language, and then it hit me that I could understand what they were saying because it was English, and not Pakistani English. They were Americans. So then I was totally baffled.
We drove for maybe half an hour and I heard the sound of aircraft engines, a jet flying pretty low above, and the van stopped and the men dragged me out and put me on a stretcher, still wrapped in the tarp, and carried me up a ramp and set me down. Then there was a lot more airplane noise and I felt motion and knew I was in a plane, a big one, and I felt the floor tilt under me and heard the scream of engines on full power. Hands tugged at my tarp and I got unrolled from it and the bag came off my head and a hand ripped the tape off my mouth and I was looking up into a woman’s face. The light in the plane was red so it took me a little while to recognize my mother.
Billy’s eye was twitching and his mouth was opening and closing like a fish. His chalky tongue lolled out a little, so I picked up a squirt bottle that was there and squirted him a drink. I thought it would be interesting and maybe a good omen if he miraculously regained consciousness then, hearing the miraculous story of my reunion with Mom-but no.
As I recall it, the main feeling I had when I recognized her was a kind of babyish annoyance, as if I’d been a nine-year-old playing cowboys or superheroes in a vacant lot and my mom had just dragged me in for supper. I’d been wounded in my dignity and she was the only one around to take it out on. The strange thing was that the last time I’d seen her I really was nine, and my relationship with her was frozen, like those insects you see trapped in amber.
I shouted at her, “What did you do? Why am I on this plane?”
She said in a calming voice, “It’s okay, Theo, you’re safe now. We’re going home.”
And I said I didn’t want to go home to Lahore, I wanted to be with Wazir and Gul Muhammed and fight in the jihad. I said I was Kakay Ghazan and a famous fighter and what do I have to do with you, woman?
She switched her language to Urdu as well and told me that the jihad was over, the Russians were leaving, and now the mujahideen would turn on one another and there would be more war, but without the blessing of God, and she did not wish me to die in such a war. She said we were not going to Lahore at all; it was time for me to return to my real family in America. I went a little crazy then, screaming at her in three languages that I was a Pashtun and the son of Gul Muhammed and the brother of Wazir and I didn’t want to go to America. I went on for a while but it was a long flight, and she had wisely left my hands and feet tied. Even though I was yelling at her she kept calm and talked in a low voice, about how I had always had two families and was a man of two nations and that this was a good thing-she didn’t want me to lose that-and how proud she was of me that after I had lost my Pakistani family I had been so quick about finding a new one, because a man without his family is nothing. But now it was my fate to have a different life. God had willed that we be brought back together, she loved me, and I had to trust in God; the Prophet, peace be unto him, said that a man should trust his mother above all others.
And I recalled that and was calmer afterward. Then I asked her why she hadn’t come to get me before this and she said because she thought I was dead. It turned out that a street boy had jumped up on the bumper of Laghari Sahib’s Rolls-Royce just before the bomb exploded, and when they had found the charred and unrecognizable corpse of a boy among the wreckage, my grandmother Noor pronounced that it was me, a last little stab of revenge, and no one had the nerve to oppose her.
I told her that her daughters and my grandfather had been avenged because I had shot the man in the godown.
She touched my face lightly with her fingertips, just for an instant. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back, took in some breath, and made an ah sound. It was hard to read her face in the dim light. I thought then that she was expressing satisfaction, but looking back I think it was some kind of devastated grief.
Then I asked, “But how did you find me? How did you learn that I was alive?”
“Because I have friends in the jihad, and they told me of a boy there who was famous for his bravery, the younger of the two sons of Gul Muhammed, and my heart was lifted because I knew it was you and that you lived. So I planned with my friends to take you. I would have gone to Afghanistan but my friends learned you were to come to Peshawar, and so it was done.”
“Why didn’t you just ask me to come with you?”
“Would you have come?”
“No. But you should have asked, not tied me like an animal.”
“I will untie you now, if you give me your word you will not try to escape when this plane lands.”
“My word,” I said, and she took out a knife and cut the cable ties at my hands and feet. I stretched and rubbed my wrists and stood up. She stood too, and I saw that I was taller than she was. A moment passed when we just stared at each other, and then we embraced. I was flooded with feelings I could not express and I thought of a ghazal of Ghalib’s that goes, My heart burns in a temple full of mysteries that, alas, have no voice to speak.
I felt my eyes prickle with tears, but I did not cry. She cried. I asked her what she had done when she heard all three of her children were dead, and she asked me what Pashtun women do when their children die in the war and I said, They keen and tear their hair and clothes and fall on the ground and cast dust on their heads, and she said, That is what I did.
So I accepted my fate like a man, and besides she was my mother. I asked her what I would do in America, since I understood there was no jihad there, and that was the only thing I knew. She said I would go to school, and, according to what I liked to study, such would be my life. I said I would not stand to be beaten anymore, because I was a man now, and only my father could beat me. At that she smiled and said, No one will beat you; they don’t beat children in American schools. This amazed me. I asked, How then do they learn anything? and she answered, They do not learn very much. She said Farid and she would teach me in our home, and when I had caught up they would put me in high school with others of my own age. I asked her what I would learn, and she said, to read and write English, and something about history and geography and also mathematics. She said, You have had an excellent fourth-grade education. It should not take more than six months to get you ready for your junior year in an American high school.
She had clothes for me. On the plane I pulled on my first ever pair of blue jeans. I had a Pearl Jam T-shirt, a quilted parka to go over it, and a pair of Nikes. The plane landed at a military airport in Germany, and we ate in a restaurant and took a commercial flight to Washington. So I entered my homeland through the various narrow gates, carrying a passport I’d never seen before. At the time I didn’t find this strange.
I was taken to their house on Tracy Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of D.C., a white colonial on a green street lined with old sycamores. Farid was welcoming and nice enough, maybe a little distant, as might be expected. I was respectful and for
mal with him in my turn. He was a good teacher, patient and energetic. He gave me poetry to read at first, and then fiction, and then the school subjects I would have to know. I picked up math too, with little trouble. The only thing I had problems with was writing; I couldn’t do an essay to save my ass. He worked hard, though, and so did I, and in the end he said that the inability to write was a characteristic of almost all American students, so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd.
My mother and I spent hours watching television together, so that I would learn how to be an American. All us immigrants watch as much TV as we can, it’s the best way to learn the language and customs of the Americans. We watched soap operas because they spoke very clearly in simple sentences, and this gave me a good introduction to American idiom and sexual practices. We watched movies on the TV and game shows, to a background of my mother’s commentary. By this means I learned that the true American religion was the pursuit of pleasure and money, although they professed to worship God, and this made them cruel, although they professed to be kindly. The other part of the American creed was redemption through violence, and that made me feel right at home. The good guy and the bad guy always meet up at the end of the film, and the good guy kills the bad guy in an interesting way, and that’s the end of the movie: hug the girl and fade to black. My mother said that not all Americans were like the ones on TV, but it gave them pleasure to believe in what they saw.
There is a lot to learn in any culture, and I absorbed a good deal of this one, although, as it turned out, not quite enough. Maybe I saw the wrong movies. I liked being warm and well-fed, but there were still a few things that disturbed me about America. Cleaning your ass with dry paper instead of water, like we do in the part of the world I was from. And seeing people eating with their left hands; that still freaks me a little after all these years. And girls, the way they walked around with their sexual parts on display but weren’t whores. Very, very strange, especially to someone like me who had no real experience with women.
The Good Son Page 30