The other professors had been a little surprised at Harold’s orthodoxy of interpretation, but then again, he was always toughest on those he thought to have the most promise. There was no doubt that the student had veered off course, yet the work was powerful and moving. The other review members were somewhat taken aback that they should even consider rejecting the film outright on the basis of its failure to meet the project’s core criteria. Harold seemed inexplicably agitated by the work.
There wasn’t any question that, given the aftershocks of 9/11, the film could be considered, by some, potentially controversial. What the other members of the review committee weren’t aware of, however, was that in addition to expecting more from Amir than he did the average student, Harold had grown troubled by a greater concern than simply that of one of his prize students not following the rules. It had come in the form of a more rigorous, severe authority than even the most obdurate college review committee.
Special Agent Joseph H. Tillman of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation had paid an unannounced visit to the department chair only days before. Though Harold Irving had not expected the visit, it had not come as a total surprise. Zack Ashrawi’s troubles, which for a time had seemed to be settling down, had suddenly reignited a week prior, when the FBI, backed up by state and local police, swooped down on the professor’s home and office like a scene out of a cheap Hollywood thriller. Warrant in hand, they hauled off computers, boxes of papers, and records from both his domicile and his college office. Rumors of an imminent indictment spread quickly about the campus.
Harold’s first impulse had been to tell Special Agent Tillman that he was too busy to see him and that the agent should call to make an appointment. Afterward, the department chair wished he had, even if it wouldn’t have made the least little difference to anyone’s reality. But fear, like water, was ever resolute in finding gravity’s path, and sensing its current within him, the chairman of the film department, putting on his most professorial demeanor, told the agent he would be happy to talk with him.
“You are aware, aren’t you, that your department’s facilities have been used by Zakariyya Ashrawi?” Agent Tillman asked, after a brief, perfunctory introduction.
Harold Irving looked at the man without immediately responding. He met eyes that returned his gaze with the blank, unwavering expression of one secure in his identity as a representative of hegemonic power. The department chair, though, would not be intimidated; he would not be put on the defensive. Or so he told himself.
“Yes, I’m aware that Professor Ashrawi has made use of the film department’s facilities,” Harold responded evenly, “just as have many other professors and students at our school. That’s what the facilities are here for.”
“And are you also aware that the particular purposes for which Zakariyya Ashrawi has made use of your department’s equipment are alleged to be in support of known terrorist organizations?”
If the mask of cold calm could have been removed from Agent Tillman’s face, it would have revealed a sardonic smile at the reaction showing itself in the professor’s eyes and facial musculature, at his inability to respond other than in shocked silence. Tillman’s words, though grammatically constructed as a simple question, carried the tone of an accusation. Of course Harold knew, the agent’s expression said. Everyone on campus knew.
“We would like to have one of our agents take a look at your department’s computers, any that Professor Ashrawi, or anyone acting on his behalf, might have had access to,” the FBI agent added, allowing a small, polite smile. “There could be some retrievable files of interest. Your cooperation would be appreciated.”
Agent Tillman could see the department chair considering his response. After a second’s pause the agent continued, giving Harold little time to ponder.
“We have a list of names that might be helpful to you in determining which equipment would be pertinent for examination. We would like to look at anything that any of these people might have had access to, even if only occasionally.”
The federal law officer then began reading off a short list of Islamic-sounding names, ending with “Amir Beganović-Morgan.”
“The computers and equipment he’s had access to are of particular interest to us. He’s credited as Ashrawi’s director of communications on a number of the video clips that Ashrawi disseminated on the Internet in support of terrorist organizations.”
Harold was shocked. His first thought was to defend Amir, to tell Tillman how Zack Ashrawi used any number of naïve students for his purpose. But his shock quickly turned to anger. At Ashrawi, then at Amir as well. He had warned the student not to get involved with the man. The department head looked at the federal agent and sighed. He wondered then just how deeply Amir might have been pulled into Zack Ashrawi’s dealings.
“I’ll have to check with the college president,” Harold answered, trying to gain more time in which to think. “I’m sure she’ll have to check with the school’s legal counsel first.”
“By all means, feel free to give her a call. But we’ve already spoken with her. Actually, this conversation is simply a courtesy call to you as the department head. And frankly, it’s of no importance what the university’s attorneys might have to say. We have a federal warrant.”
Harold Irving’s body moved backward in the chair he sat upon, drawing inward on itself as if in attempt to find secure footing. Reading the professor’s reaction, the FBI agent’s expression held tight, maintaining the same dispassionate demeanor, the hubris of his barely perceptible smile belying his words. Fifteen minutes later, having finished the details of arranging the agency’s forensic search of the department’s computers, the federal agent thanked Harold Irving and left. The department chair sat alone, silent and confused, trying to come to grips with all that had just passed. What could Amir have been thinking to allow his name to be used on the credits of Ashrawi’s propaganda? Harold Irving felt a momentary rise of anger at his student’s naïveté. Or stupidity. Or perhaps it was neither of those. A thought ventured in Harold’s mind, the seed of doubt sprouting in soil made fertile by the agent’s visit. Maybe it hadn’t been such an unwitting act on Amir’s part. Maybe there was more going on with the boy than was readily apparent—his reticent demeanor a veil to more overt, angry emotion.
For the moment putting his questions aside, Harold Irving pondered how to proceed. The boy couldn’t have picked a worse time to make a movie portraying war in less-than-glorious light. Although Amir had declared that his film was in no way anti-American, there would be those who would immediately see it as such. The drums of war were sounding from the nation’s capital with such force and persistence that they had drowned out all other voices, hypnotizing almost an entire nation with the inevitability of their message. Anyone not dancing to the beat could only be seen as unpatriotic. Now, after the visit from the FBI, it seemed to the department chair that Amir was almost following Ashrawi’s lead and looking for trouble.
It didn’t take Harold Irving long to realize that denying Amir credit for his film was not going to remove him from the scrutiny of the federal authorities. Nor would it likely serve as a warning to him to keep a low profile at a time when even those who openly questioned the call for war had lowered their voices to a whisper. The professor decided that, given the circumstances, the best option was to request a number of revisions to the student’s work, hoping to at least buy time for things to settle down, for the FBI to finish their investigation and leave the campus. He also suggested to Amir that, because the film would be considered incomplete until the revisions were made, he not enter it in the school’s annual film festival. The degree of reaction expressed by his student at that suggestion caught the department chair off guard. After a momentary pause, the professor was met by Amir’s intent stare and a forceful “Why?”
Harold had expected Amir’s response to be vested in his usual quiet, unassuming manner. He was taken aback by the steely challenge of the boy’s eyes a
nd his defiant tone. The professor found himself responding with clichés about professionalism and the importance of completion. Not seeing any softening in his student’s demeanor, he mumbled something about the times and questioned whether audiences were ready to watch Amir’s film, given the tragedy of 9/11. Harold’s words sounded hollow and weak even to his own ears, and he quickly backed off, saying inwardly that there was nothing he could do for Amir if the boy didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason.
Putting off the revisions requested by his professor, Amir instead chose to submit his movie to the school’s film festival. A few days after he made the entry, rumors that Zack Ashrawi had been indicted and arrested by federal authorities quickly spread across the campus, sending shockwaves through the college community. The news was soon substantiated by local and national headlines reporting that the professor had been charged with raising funds and managing finances, through his foundation, for an international Palestinian terrorist organization that sought to destroy Israel. The college administration was quick to disavow any knowledge of Ashrawi’s alleged illegal activity and announced his immediate dismissal.
For several weeks after his arrest, the professor of Islamic studies became the main topic of conversation among faculty and students alike. The plight of Zack Ashrawi, however, soon faded from the news and slipped from the minds of all but his few supporters and those who used the professor’s arrest as a call for vigilance against enemies of the United States lurking within its very borders.
Harold Irving was relieved to see the Ashrawi controversy die down and things begin to return to normal. He had heard nothing from the FBI since their techs had gone through the film department’s computers. Assuming there would have been some continuing investigations or seizures of equipment had they found anything incriminating or illegal, Harold Irving now found himself breathing easier. His relations with Amir, though, remained strained. The professor had received no communications back from his student in response to the revisions he had requested him to make. In an attempt to regain a footing in their relationship, Harold made a point of attending the first showing of Amir’s work at the film festival. He hoped to see that it contained at least a few of the changes he’d asked for, some of which, he told himself, had been justly requested.
The movie’s opening scene began with the camera looking out upon a small-town park on a beautiful, sunny day, lingering for a few moments before the lens’s eye gently panned across trees and green grass against the backdrop of a brilliant, blue sky. A whispering lyric of wind, backed by a chorus of chirping birds, was slowly drowned out by voices of laughing children, nowhere to be seen. The camera gazed across a grassy field, to a playground of swings, seesaws, jungle gym, and merry-go-round, the young voices still singing out in disembodied, enigmatic voices. Then, all of a sudden, the camera caught its focus, zooming in on a group of children running across a schoolyard. Let loose from the confines of their classrooms, they were seen bursting out into the open, their energy exploding, to frolic with friends or chat away their lunch break on the school’s playground. The effect of the scene—the way the camera moved in a leisurely, almost mesmeric, gaze through the joyous pandemonium—lulled the viewer into the comfort of the known and sentimental.
The audience’s dream state, however, was interrupted by the appearance of a boy, with dirty face and beaming smile, who came running forward to fill the screen. Laughing and contorting his face into comic expressions, he stuck out his tongue in mischievous challenge to the camera’s presence. The audience laughed in unison, the scene tugging joyfully at the viewers’ hearts. The previous fall, when he had been filming, Amir had stopped at his former elementary school to shoot some footage, and the spirited ten-year-old had come charging at him like a young puppy ready for play.
After a time, the sound of the playing children slowly faded away, the soundtrack changing back to quiet songs of nature imbued with lonely and distant notes, as though composed in a minor key. As the music of the earth established itself fully within the viewers’ senses and settled them into a peaceful calm, the heartwarming scene of children on the schoolyard began to fade, along with the sounds of their play.
When the children’s faces had almost disappeared, their apparitions melded into the background of nature’s camouflage, their retreat to invisibility paused and then reversed itself. The diminished silhouettes of the young students’ visages now came forward again, growing larger, clearer, and more visible, the audience slowly becoming aware that the faces they now viewed were no longer the same as those they had just previously seen. The children who came into view now displayed no smile or expression of playful exuberance. There were no laughs, no bright-eyed looks emanating from the carefree countenance of youthful play. It could be said that their faces were, in fact, without expression at all.
The audio slowly increased in volume and the whispering of a gentle wind could be heard blowing through grassland and forest. There was a distant sound of rustling leaves upon the trees…shifting, touching one against the other, like dervishes moving in sacred, ritual dance. It took several seconds for the viewers to realize that the faces of the children they now saw on the screen were not simply resting in repose, but staring out in unmoving and lifeless mask. Against the backdrop of the soundtrack—the steady, rhythmic hum of nature’s impartial, ancient song—the viewers’ recognition journeyed from the familiar into the unfamiliar.
A silent, communal shock began to work its way through the audience. The smiles of sentimental delight that had spread across their faces in the movie’s opening scene had abruptly vanished. Gone were the images of children playfully frolicking about the schoolyard. In their stead were photos collected from news archives of children war victims from around the globe. Amir had made no easy transition, no smooth slide from one world to the other, from the civil to the barbarous. Because that was how it was: the violence of murder took no consideration of feelings, of proper timing, or gentle shift.
As the viewers’ breaths caught deep in their chests, the film shifted once again—this time seamlessly back into scenes of everyday life, of people living in complacent comfort. With the parade of deathly images gone, the camera moved with beguiling ease to gently usher the audience back to a sane, peaceful setting, allowing their minds a moment’s respite from the lifeless faces that had passed before their eyes only seconds prior.
With everything returned to peaceful order, the camera’s lens traveled back to the elementary school, the hour having changed from recess to day’s end. Buses and parents were seen parked outside, waiting for the bell to ring and the school doors to burst open with a flood of children. The camera watched the merging of the parents and children, their arms meeting in warm embrace and their faces smiling in greeting. This time, instead of the faces of the children being replaced by those of young war victims, it was the students’ parents, waiting patiently for their offspring to exit the school, who found substitute image on the screen. Their stand-ins were parents from distant lands, all of whom shared a common experience: the very worst any father or mother could ever imagine—the loss of their child. There were no children to be seen in these scenes. The grieving faces of parents alone told the story, without need of small, lifeless bodies by their side to explain the broken hearts standing bare and raw before the audience’s eyes.
At this point in his first attempt to make the film, Amir had succumbed to outrage and anger. He had sat in the dungeon of his editing room surrounded by still photos, film, and video footage garnered from war archives of image upon image of unspeakable sadness. Encircled by images of death, Amir began to fall into depression, and the depression, in turn, had become anger. Anger at all those who would use war to advance their own purpose, whether for power, for wealth, or to secure their identity in belonging to a cause or tribe. He had wanted to make a statement by including the faces of warmakers in his film. And it would not just be the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Idi Amins, and the Pol Pots. Those were
the easy ones to single out. There were others, too: men whose moral authority was thought to be above question yet whose decisions would ultimately be painted in blood.
By the time of his second attempt at making the film, however, Amir had sufficiently freed himself of his depression and anger to keep those emotions from intruding upon the story. If he were to fall prey to his anger, to his outrage at what had been done to him and his family, then Amir understood he would become trapped in the very thing he sought to end. Hate was a doorless wall. Anger was a windowless room. They were what allowed another’s humanity to disappear from view, leaving them as no more than cheap objects to be treated without conscience or care.
Without scenes of generals and politicians to bloat the movie’s storyline and distract the viewers from their own relationship with what they saw, the film continued on in quiet statement. A slow drift of lifeless faces floated across the screen, their silence saying what no words could. A child of about ten years looked out to the audience, the question in his unseeing, inanimate eyes at once both too distant to understand and simultaneously immediate and intimately close. It caused a great, painful rift to open in the viewers’ minds. The image of the boy was followed by that of an infant, then a boy and a girl lying next to each other, perhaps brother and sister—it was hard to say, for the rubble of the fallen building about them obscured the detail of their features.
Other faces painted in silent death mask, both the young and the old, journeyed across the screen in orderly progression, the audience left with the sense that an endless queue of victims waited patiently for their turn to look out onto the world of the living. As each lifeless face took its turn on the screen the viewers were pulled into sorrowful questions: “Who was this person?” “Who had they been?” and “Why? Why?”
The Solace of Trees Page 28