The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  Ashton, red-faced, begins to object-he is making braying noises in the English manner-but Schildkraut places a restraining hand on his shoulder and says, “Enough, Harold! Sonia is perfectly correct. Her method stands a better chance of success than yours does.”

  “What method?” Ashton demands. “What are you talking about?”

  “I am talking about where Sonia goes every night and what she does there. Are none of you curious?”

  Ashton says, “On present evidence, she’s telling tales about all our little doings-”

  But Annette says, “She’s interpreting dreams. She must’ve done half the village by now.”

  “Marvelous!” says Ashton. “Even more mumbo-jumbo. I don’t see where that’s to our advantage, unless you’re telling them that their dreams mean they should let us all go. Are you?”

  “No,” says Sonia. “I give them as honest an interpretation as I can.”

  “Then what good is it?” says Ashton.

  “I don’t know,” says Sonia, “but I’m certainly not going to try to manipulate them. They’d sniff that out in a minute. They’re suspicious enough as it is.”

  Shea asks, “Then what did Karl-Heinz mean by success? What did you mean?”

  Schildkraut answers, “You know, I have asked myself the same question many times in these empty hours we all have. And being Germanic, of course I have arrived at a theory. Would you like to hear it? Very well.

  “We all had a discussion some little time ago about the psychological state of the people in this part of the world, in which it was argued that therapy here must consist of adjustments in external relationships, since the psyche in traditional Muslims is not a struggle among interior drives, as it has long been held to be in the West, but something much simpler. Here an individual’s main drive is to fit in, to achieve harmony and satisfaction as a member of a family or larger group. True enough as far as it goes. But we must also remember that these people are believers. The unseen world is very real to them.” He picks up a fragment of chapati. “It is as real as bread. And that is something that is difficult if not impossible for us unbelievers to comprehend.”

  “I beg your pardon,” says Father Shea. “I am certainly not an unbeliever, nor is Amin. Nor Sonia.”

  “Ah, yes, but I meant we come from the unbelieving world. To be a believer in the West, one must continually swim upstream, as it were. The society around us has essentially returned to paganism, and we are quite content in it.”

  “Surely not in America,” Shea objects. “It’s one of the most religious societies on earth.”

  “Not at all. Sentimental churchgoing is not what I mean by belief. What America believes in is progress, money, sex, fame, and military strength, with a national philosophy based on pragmatism. This is a good thing, you know. You don’t want a nation as powerful as the U.S. to be actually religious. But here we are still in the original state of religious intoxication; here we are still literally in the fifteenth century, as they reckon time, and arguments based on rationality are of no use. Appeals to our liberal icons-democracy, the rule of law, the open society, civil liberties-fall on deaf ears. So Sonia works at the other end of things. She inserts herself into their consciousness, she accepts their religious beliefs, their ideas about the nature of the world and their various roles in it, and so she exerts her influence. Am I correct in this, Sonia?”

  All eyes turn now to Sonia. All the faces except Ashton’s wear a distressingly hopeful look. She says, “To an extent. It’s the case that our hosts are not susceptible to ordinary argument, and that they are in a psychic state where the unseen world is real, as Dr. Schildkraut pointed out. But I am not seeking to influence them. I’m trying to help them. It’s what I do. It may turn out that by helping them I help us, but that’s not my purpose. It’s also true that I have entered, to the extent I can, into their psychic space. All real therapists do that as a matter of course. And what is this psychic state?

  “At some level they must be deeply conflicted, because they are making war and murdering innocents in the name of a merciful and compassionate God. At some level they know that they are not engaged in a real jihad. No one is preventing them from the full practice of their religion and they are fighting the forces of a Muslim nation. Besides that, they are Pashtuns, and the sort of religion practiced by the Taliban is not congenial to them and never has been; this region is thick with the shrines of Sufi saints. In Afghanistan the people only accepted Taliban rule because the alternative was a naked and brutal anarchy. And their dreams reflect this. This morning Rashida told me that they are already arguing about me, but what effect this will have on our situation I can’t say. It may get us killed faster, for all I know.”

  “Then for God’s sake why don’t you stop it!” Ashton snaps.

  “I told you already. It’s what I do. If these days are the final ones of my life, what else should I be doing? I’ve always tried to live my life so that if death arrived on a particular day it would find me doing nothing but what God had made me for. I sincerely hope all of you feel the same way.”

  There is an embarrassed silence. Amin breaks it. “You are right, of course. As the head of a charitable trust I hereby pledge one of my chapatis to be distributed to the poor. Annette is a nurse, and she has already started to comfort Karl-Heinz, who is ill. I’m sure he is contemplating ethical issues all the while. Father Shea, I observe, prays often. Manjit, I insist that you dispense me a powerful tranquilizer.”

  The Indian laughs. “If only I could! Although I would be happy to instruct you in yoga. A few exercises and I assure you that you will despise Haldol.”

  “Excellent! Well, now we must return to the business of the day, which I have already outlined. How shall we proceed in the matter of the cards?”

  After a short discussion they decide to draw immediately, the loser to be the next victim when and if one is needed, that person to have the next presentation. As before, they each cut the deck and Sonia deals one card to each. As before, Ashton turns his over first. It is the deuce of clubs.

  He says, “Well, fuck!”

  Amin breaks the somber silence. “I am sorry, Harold. Truly sorry. You will give your presentation, I trust?”

  “Oh, I’ll give it. I’ll give them an earful. You’ll forgive me if I wait for the fatal day itself.” With that he walks off.

  All the others have middling cards, except Annette, who has drawn the queen of hearts. She goes over to where Ashton lies on his charpoy and speaks softly to him. The others do not hear what she says, but they hear Ashton’s snarling, obscene reply. She walks to her own bed and lies on it, pulling a blanket over herself.

  Amin gathers the cards from where they lie scattered, shuffles them idly, and then says, “Well, we must pass the time. Would anyone like to play bridge?”

  It turns out that Shea, Nara, and Schildkraut are all bridge players. They push charpoys together, designate one as the table, and begin playing. Sonia walks to where Ashton is lying and stands over him.

  “What in hell do you want?” he says.

  “To talk to you.”

  “Oh, fuck off!”

  She sits on the edge of his charpoy. “No. One of the disadvantages of prison is you can no longer select your visitors. I want to ask whether you intend to come apart like Cosgrove.”

  “You mean will I cry and wet myself? What business is it of yours?”

  “Because how you die is important. It’s important to this group, with respect to maintaining our spirits and our sanity and even more so with respect to how it’s regarded by the Pashtuns.”

  “Oh, really? Is this a case for showing the flag in my last moments? The stiff upper lip? Bugger all that!”

  “Yes, you’re in the period of self-pity. Oh, why me? It’s not attractive, Ashton, and unworthy of you. I’m prepared to wait until it dissipates.”

  Ashton’s face reddens and he sits up and puts it close to hers. “You know what my chief regret is? Well, my two chief regr
ets. One is I’ve never had a fuck in an airliner toilet, and the other is that I’m not going to see you hacked into pieces. Isn’t that what they do to blasphemers? A leg from one side and an arm from the other?”

  “According to some interpretations of sharia. Other variants require crucifixion or stoning. And it’s good that you’re angry. Angry and brave is a good combination. I think you’re a brave man, Ashton. It was brave to try to escape, stupid but brave, as you must have known. You’re not a fool. You’ve been traveling in this area for years. Manjit thinks you’re a spook, in fact. Are you?”

  “If I were, you would be absolutely the last one I’d tell.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. So, since you’re brave, I’m imagining that you’re not afraid of dying per se, but object to the manner in which your death is going to be carried out. Is that it?”

  Ashton stares at her. She meets his gaze. The staring goes on for what feels like a long time, after which she sees something change in his eyes, not resignation but a different form of anger, no longer directed at her but focused properly, on the guilty.

  “Since you ask,” he says, in an artificially perky tone, “I do object. I never thought I’d make old bones, and I have to say the thought of snuffing out now is preferable to the way my parents died, with the tubes and the stinks, but what I can’t bear is being slaughtered like a sheep while those fuckers cheer. Isn’t that odd? I mean, why should one care? But I do. It gripes me.”

  “I thought as much. It would gripe me too. Tell me, can you handle a Kalashnikov?”

  For the first time in many days, she saw a smile flicker onto his face. “If I were a spy, I could, couldn’t I? Do you have one tucked away?”

  “No. But neither do you have to die like a sheep. Listen!”

  They talk for some minutes and then Sonia goes back to the bridge players. The day wears on, but no one comes to the door to demand the next victim. Dhuhr and Ashr prayers are called, and the game pauses while Amin and Sonia pray. Schildkraut has a coughing fit that does not stop, and they make him lie down. Annette is roused from her lethargy by the call of her patient. She nurses him as best she can with the scant contents of her medical kit, but he is gray in the face, with blue lips. The bridge game resumes, with Sonia as a fourth. She is not a bridge player, but she knows the rules and some of the simpler conventions. Manjit, who is the best player among them, takes her as his partner. After the Maghrib prayer they are fed their second meal of the day. They play cards for an hour or so after that, until it gets too dark. The Isha’a sounds. Those who pray, pray, and they all go to bed.

  Some of them even sleep. Sonia, lying awake, continues to be surprised at the resilience of her fellow humans. In the house of death there is eating, sleeping, joking, and the playing of cards-with the same deck, as it happens, that condemns them one by one to death. She can identify the different sleep noises of her fellows by now. Amin, Manjit, and Shea are asleep, Annette and Ashton are not. She reflects on the wonderful differences in temperament among people, how these are often confused with the virtues and vices.

  Schildkraut has a spasm of coughing. It ends and she hears him sigh and say something in German but she does not catch the meaning; her German is not as good as it was. She goes to his bed and kneels down.

  “How are you, Karl-Heinz?”

  “I have been better, thank you for asking. To be perfectly frank, I am dying. I cannot seem to get enough air.”

  “Is your inhaler completely gone?”

  “No, there remains another dose or two, but I am saving it for my presentation. I may be able to hang on until then.”

  “You may outlive us all, given sufficient luck. What were you saying just now? It was in German.”

  “Oh, nothing. A poem by Hölderlin that once meant much to Elsa and me. Wohl geh’ ich täglich. I seem to be reviewing my life, somewhat banal of course, but I am grateful that my brain is still capable of processing memory. That is the great fear, naturally, that we will fade away and never know it, but it is not my luck, so to speak, that I will exit with all my faculties intact. Do you know the poem? Wie lang ist’s! O wie lange! Der Jüngling ist gealtert, selbst die Erde, die mir damals gelächelt, ist anders worden. ‘How long ago it is, oh, how long! My youth has aged, and even the earth that once smiled upon me has changed.’ Or something like that. We used to sit and read poetry to each other, and I recall you saying you did the same with your husband. Elsa liked you very much.”

  “I liked her. She was very kind to me.”

  “To everyone. An actual Christian, one of the few I’ve met. I wish I could believe all of that, you know: some kind of life beyond the grave. It’s been twelve years since she died and not a day goes by that I do not miss her. I dream of her often, and in these dreams she seems wise in a way that she did not in life. So… projection, wishful thinking? Or does the psyche transform itself and survive, although in a way that’s not given to us to know? You’ve read Jung’s essay on the hereafter? Annoyingly vague in my view, but perhaps I didn’t understand him. Perhaps I should have stuck to psychotherapy and not wandered off into philosophy. And you, do you expect a place in heaven?”

  “Hell, more than likely. But I’ve never been much for thinking about those things. The Prophet was always going into detail about Paradise, which was fine for him, but I think it’s not in general a good thing for believers. Saint Paul tells us not to bother. Jung says that the psyche is not merely what we think of as the self but a transcendent thing that does not strictly obey the ordinary material laws, and maybe that unknown part of us is what survives; maybe the rind of the ego shreds away and reveals something that will surprise and delight all of us. Or horrify us, in the case of our brothers of the jihad. I certainly hope so. And he says further that there’s a great deal of evidence for this belief, although our civilization has chosen quite arbitrarily to classify such evidence as not evidence-hallucination, wish fulfillment fantasy, and so on. As a matter of fact, while I was being tortured recently I had a visit from my old Sufi guide that saved my sanity. Perhaps a fantasy, but like Elsa in your dreams he told me things I didn’t know, and in fact my sanity was saved. It’s a free choice in the end, and I happen to have chosen faith.”

  “Tell me more about the Sufi guide,” he says, and they speak of this and other things of the spirit until the old man drifts off into an exhausted sleep.

  Sonia returns to her bed and waits. Without meaning to she falls asleep. She dreams, but remembers nothing when she is shaken awake. It is Mahmoud. Silently she slips into her sandals, pulls her dupatta over her head, and follows him out of the room.

  He leads her through the inn and briefly outside, just long enough to feel the night wind on her face, and then past a group of silent men and through a door. He leaves her. The room is small and windowless and smells of musty cloth and the crude oil lamp in a wall niche that provides its only light. There is a charpoy in it, on which is seated Idris Ghulam.

  She wishes him peace; he makes the formal reply. She asks, “Have you had any more dreams?”

  “Yes, but it was not as you promised. It was not a good dream, but a bad one. It was a dream sent by Satan, the worst possible dream.”

  “Tell it.”

  “I can’t. It’s too shameful.”

  “Nothing of God’s is shameful.”

  “Foolish woman! I told you this was given by Satan.”

  “Listen to me. There are no dreams given by Satan. Only God sends dreams and only for our own good.”

  “No, the Prophet, peace be upon him, says Satan sends bad dreams.”

  “Then perhaps we now know things about dreams that were unrevealed to the Prophet, on whom be peace.”

  “That is blasphemy.”

  “It is not blasphemy. When God spoke through the Prophet, peace be on him, he spoke eternal truths: the law, and how men may please God, and the proper way to behave, and how we may win Paradise. But he was also a man of his own time with the knowledge of his own time. No
one but a fool would look in the holy Qur’an or the Hadith for knowledge about how to fix a truck or shoot a rifle or fly a helicopter. Have some sense! And I tell you that the knowledge of dreams has also advanced since the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and I have that knowledge, as you have already seen. I have now told you something that you were not prepared to hear when you first came to me, but now you are. God sends all dreams, even the ones we think evil. You are a brave man, and I am only a woman, and besides I am soon to die. So have courage and speak!”

  After a silence, he does. “I dreamed I was on haj. I walked in my white clothes with the other pilgrims to the Great Mosque in Mecca, and walked around the Ka’aba the required seven times, and shouted each time, and I felt a great peace; I felt one with God and with my fellow Muslims. And then… and then, as if I were at home in my village, and the Ka’aba were only a shed, I lifted my robe and urinated on the Ka’aba. And if you ever tell anyone I said this I will cut your nose and ears off and put out your eyes.”

  “These threats are tedious and unnecessary, Idris. I have told you before that my honor is to keep secret the dreams told to me. So then what?”

  “In the dream?”

  “Of course in the dream! After you had polluted the most sacred place in all Islam, what happened?”

  “Nothing happened. No one noticed and I did not feel any shame, until I awakened. In the dream I left the mosque and then I was in a market where they sell souvenirs of the haj, and I bought some wooden beads. The man who sold them to me was wearing a black robe and there was something familiar about his face, but I couldn’t recall what it was. Then I was at a time later in the haj when the pilgrims go to Muzdalifa, where they gather pebbles to stone the Devil on the next day. There was a great crowd, and it was moving very slowly, and it was very hot. Then the man from the bead stall appeared by my side and he said, Why not walk by the side of the road as I am doing? It will be faster. And I did, but I found that my feet sank into the ground. It was quicksand and I couldn’t move, I was sinking down to my neck, and it became one of those dreams where you can’t move, and then I woke up shouting.”