Anissa's Redemption

by Zack Love

  Julien stopped for a moment to take a sip of his smoothie. He had spoken a lot without giving his throat much of a rest. I let him pause for a moment, but I had to hear the rest, so I goaded him on with a question. “So your dad began studying in 1977, at the age of twenty-eight. But wasn’t Afghanistan in a war with the Soviets around that time?”

  He put his drink back down. “Yes, exactly. Afghanistan was going through a lot of internal turmoil, and in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded. And that’s when my father started to change.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About three years after I was born, my mother noticed that her husband was becoming increasingly religious. She had converted to Islam only out of convenience – because of her marriage and her correct assumption that her life would be much easier in Afghanistan as a Muslim, for however long she planned to stay there. But my father knew that, deep down, she wasn’t a true believer and he had accepted this, as long as she let him raise me as a good Muslim. I think my mother accepted that compromise because my father still wanted me to get the best possible education, and my mother personally made sure that I was exposed to science from an early age.”

  I couldn’t believe that Julien/Jihad had just admitted that he was born and raised as a Sunni Muslim in Afghanistan. I was almost in a daze, but trying to stay focused so that I could get through whatever else awaited me. “Why did your father become more religious?”

  “My mother thought it was the influence of his two partners in the butcher shop, who had begun attending a Salafist mosque. But, by my fourth birthday, my father had also become involved with a radical Islamist organization at his university, so – after she eventually learned of his involvement in that group – she concluded that this might have been a big contributing factor as well.”

  “And what did your mother say about this?”

  “He apparently did a good job of hiding his evolving views about political Islam, until it was too late.”

  I felt chills run down my spine, as I tried to suppress thoughts about where this story was going. To that end, I focused on the chronology. “So by then, it was 1979.”

  “Yes. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began a few weeks after I turned four, and the country quickly became engulfed in a brutal and bitter war. I’m sure that also fueled the radicalization of my father... “

  “And your mother didn’t want to leave Afghanistan at that point?”

  “Yes, by the early eighties, she started to prepare me for the idea that we might leave the country at some point – especially after my father had beaten me a few times for being a bad Muslim. I was around seven or eight years old at the time.”

  “So why didn’t she leave?”

  “She almost did, a few times. But she felt a moral, humanitarian duty to stay and help, with so many war-related injuries flooding the hospital where she worked and so few qualified doctors there – especially after some of her colleagues had returned to the U.S. And, of course, my father refused to leave, and – despite the occasional problems they had, like any couple – they were still married and there was still some love there. But had my mom known just how radicalized my dad had become, I’m sure that she would have just put all of those considerations aside, and at the first opportunity, she would have left work early to pick me up when my father was at his work or university, and fled the country without even telling him. But she had no idea that he was a rising member of Hezbi Islami.”

  I felt myself getting nauseous again. I could sense that the horrific part of his story was nearing. “What’s Hezbi Islami?” I asked.

  Julien, or Jihad, closed his eyes and put his hands on his face, shaking his head a little. He exhaled. “It was an Afghani Islamist organization whose ideology came mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood. Their goal was to replace the various tribal factions of Afghanistan with one unified, Islamic state.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me, his eyes watering, and on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Julien took a deep breath. “Anissa, I’ve been struggling for weeks about how to disclose this to you. I almost decided to tell you what I told my therapist, when I had to reveal something to her about the traumatic event, for therapy to continue.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That one day, my father brought me to his butcher shop and made me do his job for him. I let her continue assuming that this was all happening in Mexico and that it wasn’t any worse than a son being forced to see a lot of blood at the age of nine.”

  For a moment, I went from simmering at having been deceived (along with the rest of the world) about Julien’s past to empathizing with his need to distort his trauma when sharing it with others – something I had been doing for most of the last few years. But now I had to know the full truth, just as he had learned mine. “So it wasn’t in Mexico. And your father didn’t force you to slaughter an animal?”

  He shook his head and wiped away a tear. “You have no idea how hard this is for me.”

  I had to reassure him, or there was no way that he’d be able to continue. I put my hand on his and tried to summon all of the empathetic support I could find despite my inner revulsion at everything I had been hearing. “I know, Julien. I’ve been there too. Remember?”

  He wiped away some more tears and nodded his head. “That’s why I’m doing this. For us,” he added.

  “I know,” I replied gently. “It really means a lot to me.” Despite those words, I occasionally felt myself pulling back from a man I suddenly didn’t know at all. Every now and then, I looked around my surroundings, trying to remember how I ended up in the magnificent Manhattan penthouse of a complete stranger.

  After regaining his composure a little, he continued. “Before I tell you what happened in the butcher shop, there’s a bit more background you need to know.”

  I raised my eyebrow in dread, wondering what other disturbing facts were missing from my impression of this man and his childhood. As Julien noted my reaction, he himself became more uncomfortable, and got up to pace around the living room, to avoid facing me as he spoke and maybe to release some of his nervousness.

  He finally resumed his narration. “By the early eighties, the Afghans really hated the Soviets for all of the atrocities they had committed during the course of their invasion,” he said, pacing about in front of me, as I leaned back against the sofa, trying to calm myself by imagining that this was some kind of college lecture on the history of Afghanistan. “The only possible exception to this rule was a Soviet Army deserter, to the extent that Afghanis understood that such a person was effectively rejecting the Soviet state and its military policies. Anyway, in Kabul, there was a Soviet man named Mikhail who had deserted the Soviet Army after seeing the crimes that his military had committed against Afghans. According to what my mother later told me, Mikhail had been a kind of ‘crypto-Christian’ – his family devoutly practiced and embraced Christianity in Russia, even though Communism made it difficult for any religion to be practiced. His deep Christian beliefs caused him not only to desert the Soviet Army, but also to do good works in Kabul, as he tried to make up for Soviet abuses during the war. He had become known in the community for his efforts to help Afghans wounded by the conflict, and he spent a lot of time volunteering in the hospital where my mother worked.”

  Julien stopped pacing and just stood for a moment, with his back facing me, as he continued talking. “But his activities weren’t always limited to helping the wounded. On a few occasions, Mikhail apparently forgot what country he was in and started talking about his Christian faith to those he was helping. That in itself was already very risky, but when word got out that he was also seen a few times in the company of a local Afghan woman, his days were numbered. I think my father also viewed him as a potential rival, just because my mother had mentioned that she and Mikhail had spoken a few times at the hospital, when my father first asked if she had ever heard of him. She made it clear that their conversation was stri
ctly about his volunteer work and the care of specific patients, but somehow my dad got the idea that he might be interested in my mom.”

  Julien still wasn’t facing me. He leaned against a nearby set of drawers, on top of which sat a kinetic sculpture made of rotating geometric shapes. His finger pushed part of the sculpture, sending it into motion, as he contemplated its movements. As I waited for him to continue his story, I couldn’t tell if he was gathering his thoughts, recovering from being emotionally spent, or just waiting for me to react in some way so that he could see how I was handling everything.

  “So what happened with Mikhail?” I finally asked.

  He reluctantly continued, but he couldn’t seem to face me when talking, although I could see that he was wiping away some tears. “One afternoon in March or April of 1984, after I got home from school, my father came by earlier than usual, when my mother was still at the hospital and the housekeeper was watching over me. He took my hand and led me to his butcher shop. When we got there, the main entrance area had about twenty bearded men standing around a man who was seated in a chair with his hands tied together behind his back. They were all from my father’s organization, Hezbi Islami. The man in the chair was Mikhail. They had kidnapped him from his residence the night before.”

  The room began to sway, as if the building had been erected on an oil rig. My head hurt and I decided to lie down on the sofa. I was dying to leave, but I was too deep into the story and had to hear whatever else Julien was going to share – if only out of respect for the enormous emotional effort he had invested in opening up as much as he had. But I was too psychologically spent to encourage him much, even though he was clearly waiting for some reaction from me. All I could bring myself to say was, “Go on.”

  His voice sounded fainter and even more unsteady. “My father read out some judicial-type sentence about Mikhail committing blasphemy against Allah, and trying to rape Muslim women, and then took a foot-long butcher blade and put it in my hand, leading me to the back of the chair, so that I was looking down over Mikhail’s neck. He then ordered me to slit his throat, in front of all the men watching, so that they could all see that I was a brave and good Muslim.”

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. It was as if my consciousness of the present had suddenly transformed into a nightmare. Or a bad dream had abruptly morphed into reality. It was torture to listen but this was the man that I had fallen in love with, even if I no longer was sure that I knew him. I owed it to both of us to hear him out, as awful as listening any more felt. “Go on,” I said, as if I were some kind of masochistic co-conspirator in our collective torment.

  “I tried to resist by looking confused, but all around me, I just saw these bearded men, looking at me – waiting expectantly for me to comply. I turned to my dad, and he sternly repeated his command. Then he impatiently came from behind me, held my wrist forcefully, and showed me how and where to move the blade, guiding my hand without actually cutting Mikhail. He forcefully repeated his command, and with tears streaming down my face as I trembled in horror, I slit Mikhail’s throat with the knife in my hand. Blood splattered everywhere as he screamed in agony, but he was still alive. I dropped the knife – I could hardly stand, my body was shaking so badly. My father picked up the knife, and, with a few powerful strokes, severed the man’s head off.”

  I was definitely going to vomit soon. I could feel it. Julien and I were practically in two different worlds at that moment. He was bent over the dresser, staring at the kinetic sculpture, lost in the past but trying somehow to connect it to the present, while I was lying on his sofa, very much in the present and feeling nauseous as his voice mumbled on. To me, he sounded as if he had turned off all of his emotions and was just on autopilot.

  “Back then I don’t think beheadings were so in vogue among Islamists, even if there was an ample basis for it in the Koran. But I think my father’s work as a butcher desensitized him, and made him comfortable putting a knife to living flesh. Beheading a man probably wasn’t all that different to him than slaughtering a cow or a chicken. And that was how he had learned to kill... He wanted to teach me how to be like him... ”

  I gradually sat up, preparing myself to leave. Julien was still facing away from me, wiping away some more tears. I was waiting for the right moment to get up and head towards the elevator, but he was still talking, so I stayed put.

  “Instead of becoming like him, I was just traumatized... That night, I told my mother what had happened, and the next day she fled the country with me. She was so horrified that she wanted to move back in with her mother, so we flew to Mexico, and we lived there from when I was nine until I turned twelve. That’s how I became a native Spanish speaker... She renounced Islam and made me do the same, changed my name to Julien and our surname to Morales, and enrolled me in a Catholic school. The summer after I turned twelve, my mother was able to get a hospital job in San Diego, California, so we moved to the United States, where I’ve lived ever since. The rest of my secondary school education was in private Catholic schools. And, as if I hadn’t already gone through enough trauma and change, six years later, just before I was supposed to start as a freshman at Yale, my mother died of cancer.”

  He finally turned around, the streaks of wiped tears still visible on his face and parts of his dress shirt. “There you have it, Querida. My whole story.”

  Chapter 33: Anissa

  Friday, August 22, 2014

  To My Dearest,

  I grew weary from writing to you last night; there was so much to tell, and summarizing it left me emotionally and physically exhausted – which is how I felt at the end of Julien’s story.

  By the time he had finished sharing his past, I was nauseous and faint, and paradoxically claustrophobic, despite the spacious penthouse in which I discordantly found myself. In the elevator, on the way down to the lobby, I ended up vomiting.

  The doorman, who must have noticed me throwing up in the security camera, came walking towards the elevator, just as I was getting out. I think he just wanted to see if I was OK, but I hurried past him, rushing to get some fresh air outside while looking for the nearest taxi.

  As I rode back to my dorm in a cab, a warm summer breeze blowing against my face through the open window, I realized that I had forgotten my stuff for the Hamptons at Julien’s place. The extent of my shock became even clearer when – at that moment – I didn’t care if I never saw that travel bag again.

  There was a jarringly surreal disconnect between the Julien Morales I had known in that luxurious apartment, and the horrific past that he had finally shared with me about an Afghani boy named Jihad Omar. How could they possibly be the same person? And how could the things that Jihad was raised to believe – the things that he had done and seen during the first nine years of his life – not have influenced the adult man, Julien, that he had become and to whom I had grown so close?

  And as I write all of this to you now, on some very basic level, it seems terribly embarrassing. I feel like a superficial idiot – easily deceived by his opulent wealth, academic credentials, charismatic power, and public fame. My parents had never given me any specific dating advice, but had often repeated a general warning; look at a man’s childhood and parents to understand him. And I have only now – after giving my heart and body to this man – discovered the most horrific childhood one can imagine. What a fool I am.

  I haven’t been able to think about anything else and had to call in sick to the MCA. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate anyway and I didn’t want to risk Michael or Maria asking why I seemed so down and disoriented. With so many shocking details dominating my mind, searching for a way to coexist with my earlier impressions and ideas of Julien, it seemed too easy for something secret to slip out. As angry as I felt at having been so deceived about who Julien was, I could never betray him like that, and had to avert a situation that might increase the chances of any compromising disclosure – whether because of an accidental slip or some conversational inquir
y that unexpectedly forced it out. In fact, I hesitated even to tell you, My Dearest, but my sanity requires that I share it with someone, and you are my closest confidante. And if I can trust you with my most private facts because I keep them all in a hidden, password-protected file, then I assume that this secret about Julien is also safe with you.

  But the divulgence of Julien’s hidden and grotesque past to anyone else could massively overshadow all of his previous scandals – especially with beheadings in the news now – and would irrevocably ruin him. Just mentioning the fact that he was actually born and raised as a Muslim in Afghanistan would expose him to accusations of living some kind of double life, making everyone wonder what else he might be hiding.

  When not busy gossiping about his scandals or spotlighting his wealth, the media have embraced Julien as a major Latino success story, and now I understood why he has so studiously helped to cultivate that image. He was genuinely proud of his Mexican heritage, but he was also understandably eager to encourage the assumption that there was nothing else in his ethnic background. I could discuss none of what he told me with anyone – not Michael or Maria or Uncle Tony or even my own therapist. It was all far too sensitive.

  Indeed, when I consider just how much power Julien gave me last night to destroy his entire empire, I am humbled by the amount of trust that he has finally placed in me. But I still shudder at the thought of speaking to Jihad Omar. My brain feels bruised from so much cognitive dissonance. I can think of no psychological term or condition that more aptly describes my present state of mind: the mental stress or discomfort experienced when someone is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values. Given the very human preference for internal consistency, I’ve been trying to reduce the Julien/Jihad dissonance by avoiding anything that highlights the cacophonous contradictions gawking at me.