Godsend

by John Wray

—What? I just woke up. I don’t—

  —Tell me why you’re here.

  —I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  —On this bus. Heading north. Here with me.

  She willed herself to think clearly. —I’m sticking to the plan we made, that’s all. The one we made in Santa Rosa.

  —The hell you are.

  She kept quiet and watched him. He seemed to be smiling.

  —When you got your hair buzzed and started wearing those clothes I thought it was for both of us. For you to follow me. For us to keep together. He shook his head. —I was wrong about that. Or else you were lying.

  —I wasn’t lying. Not to you. I’ve never lied to you.

  He nodded to himself, considering her answer. —You like girls.

  —Come on, Decker. That’s not even a question.

  —What’s the answer?

  She looked past him out the window. His round head hung reflected there with her own head behind. In silhouette she saw no difference between them.

  —I don’t know.

  They were in high country now with the least curve of moon. She thought of her conversion and the vows that she had made. As always the fact of it calmed her. A fire smoldered in the courtyard of a newly finished mosque and she saw herself arriving for the first prayer of the morning, the dawn light behind her, all heads turning as she stepped across the threshold. She imagined their indignation, then their wonder, then the voice of the mullah calling their attention back to prayer. She saw herself taking her place among them, gracious in her modesty, sovereign in her devotion. She turned the image back and forth in her mind, letting each of its brilliant facets catch the light. Then she imagined herself in her little room in Santa Rosa, staring up at the ceiling, listening to her mother’s labored breathing through the wall.

  —I’m going to ask you a favor, she said. —No more questions.

  —You don’t have many favors left to ask.

  —You can go home any time you want. I told you that.

  He shook his head. —Bullshit. You don’t speak Urdu or Pashto, maybe two or three words, and that fancy Arabic of yours won’t cut it anywhere outside a mosque. If I go home you’re done.

  —You said yourself that I’d have made it—

  —I don’t see you fooling this country for six whole weeks, Sawyer. I’ll tell you that much for free. You’d better have a story ready for them when they catch you in your panties and your bra.

  She hesitated. —You said they have a custom here. Remember? Of girls being dressed up as boys. You said they even have a name for it.

  —That’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Nothing.

  —Tell me the name again, Decker.

  —You know it yourself, he said. —Bacha posh. But that’s something parents decide for their children. Fathers decide it. It won’t do a thing for you if you get caught. He gripped her arm. —Why the fuck are you smiling?

  —Just about what you said.

  —What I said?

  —The six weeks.

  —Listen to me, he hissed. —I plan to make it back to Santa Rosa with all my parts in mint condition. I plan to come home with my head on my neck and my dick in my shorts.

  She smiled in the dark. —I can’t blame you for that.

  —Then why are you so goddamn happy?

  —I’m not sure I’ll be going back at all.

  * * *

  The next time she awoke it was morning and the sun was high and pale above the Indus. She looked out at the water, faster and deeper and blacker. A true northern river. The road ran hard by the bank and followed every cut and furrow of the hillside. The tribal zone was perhaps fifty miles to the west and she told herself that she could feel its closeness. Then she told herself that she felt no such thing.

  Dust filled the air even at that early hour and wraithlike men and oxen staggered through it. The bus overtook flatbed trucks hauling propane and rock salt and chickens in blue wicker cages. Three boys on a moped passed them on an incline and threw fistfuls of sand at her window. They stuck out their tongues at her and she salaamed.

  —We’ll be there in an hour, said Decker.

  —Who says so?

  —My best buddy Khalid, he said, pointing across the aisle. He lowered his voice. —He’s been trying to sell me hashish.

  —An hour, she said, sitting forward. —That’s soon.

  She reached up sleepily to arrange her bangs and was surprised for a moment to find her head shorn. She turned back to the window to hide her confusion. The bedlam outside was so all-encompassing that it put her in mind of a mass exodus, or some great northward pilgrimage, or the aftermath of an enormous wedding.

  —This is what you wanted, Sawyer. Decker reached past her and rapped on the glass. —Seven thousand miles from where you’re from.

  She felt herself nodding. —This is what I wanted.

  A group of women stood balanced on the highway’s shoulder, indifferent to the chaos, holding firmly to each other through the rumpled blue silk of their burqas. She imagined their eyes staring out through the lacework. She imagined them sightless, then faceless. A tremor ran through her.

  —I’ve been picturing you in one of those things, said Decker. —With nothing on underneath. What do you think?

  —Shut up.

  —We could pick one up for you in Peshawar. It sure would make things simpler.

  —What the hell would it make simpler, Decker? What part of our plan? Our coming here? My studying with you at the madrasa? She waited for him to answer. —Or is there something you’re not telling me?

  He shrugged. —I was thinking you could hide me up in there sometimes when things got scary. Would you deny a brother in his time of need?

  She pushed his hand away and turned back to the window. An even gaudier bus was passing in a rippling haze of diesel.

  —When did you stop laughing at my jokes?

  —Just stop talking.

  —You didn’t use to be this pissed off, Sawyer.

  —You’re wrong. I always was. Just not at you.

  * * *

  Peshawar was no less abject than Karachi had been but this time she was not to be deceived. She saw through or past the stained concrete and armed checkpoints and sewage troughs and red-lipped unveiled women leering down at her from billboards. She saw it for the holy fortress it had been. The bus passed a mud lot so crowded with tents that there looked to be no open ground between them. Sun-bleached tarps and kilim scraps and siding weighted down with broken bricks. Limping mange-marked dogs and creeks of yellow filth and ravaged faces. The man across the aisle let out a sudden angry laugh.

  —Those were Afghans, she murmured to Decker.

  —Who was?

  —Back there in the tents. Those refugees.

  —That’s not what my boy here called them.

  —What did he call them?

  —You don’t want to know.

  At a bazaar near the station they bought water and biscuits and Decker grudgingly put on his shalwar kameez. The few women she saw were in burqas and the men wore brown homespun headcloths or pleated hats of heavy beaten felt. Here and there she saw young men in the pillbox-like skullcaps of students of scripture and she wondered whether any might be from the madrasa where she and Decker meant to study. So far away, she said under her breath, too quietly for anyone to hear. So far away. So far away. So far. Again a wave of triumph seemed to lift her off her feet. Decker whispered to her to stop laughing but no one in the jostling crowd around them seemed to notice. She wanted them to notice. All of them. She wanted everyone to see how far she’d come.

  The university was nearby and as they made their way there she tried to interpret the slogans spelled out in chalk or in housepaint wherever she looked. Some were obscene, at least in Decker’s rendering, and some were advertisements for auto parts or rice or gasoline, but most were exhortations to jihad. Many invoked the name of the Prophet himself or of those blessed enough to have fo
ught and died beside him. The letters were familiar but the words they formed meant nothing to her. Some were followed by quotes from the Recitation or by columns of precisely stenciled numbers.

  —What are those numerals for? Do they mark the citation?

  —Phone numbers, Decker said, making a dialing motion with his finger. —Join the caravan, pilgrims. One call does it all.

  They had arranged to meet Decker’s cousin Yaqub at the east gate to the university but though they waited there in plain view, standing on their duffels and scanning the crowd, by afternoon no one had come. In his downy beard and brown kameez Decker looked no different from the locals but the locals seemed to keep their distance from him. His hesitancy marked him as a stranger, she decided. His uncertainty made him someone to steer clear of.

  —Maybe we should change some more money. How much have you got left?

  —I gave you all my money, Decker. You know that.

  —All of it?

  He picked up his duffel without waiting for an answer and cut headlong into the crowd. Between a tobacconist’s and a bakery they found a window across whose shutters the symbols of various currencies had been neatly scrawled in pink and yellow chalk. A man with teeth stained red from betel nut took the money Decker handed him and passed back a fistful of tattered rupees. She’d never seen so fat a wad of bills. Decker counted the money, then counted it again, then said one word sharply in Urdu. The man broke into a wide grin, disclosing his blood-colored gums. He reached into his shirtfront and brought out a small stack of sweat-blackened coins.

  —Take them, Decker said, gesturing with the rupees. A group of boys had gathered while she stood at the window and now they closed ranks, pushing between the two of them, blessing her softly and begging for coins. Suffer the children, O believers, for theirs is the greater need. Their blessings grew shriller as the ring of bodies tightened.

  —What are you doing, Sawyer?

  —We don’t need all this money.

  —Like hell we don’t. What are you—

  —They’re little kids, Decker. We can’t just ignore them. What kind of Muslim are you?

  There were more of them now and they pulled at her outstretched arms and clung to her shirtsleeves. Decker’s panicked voice was swallowed by their flattery and pleading. Not all of them were children and they came from all directions and she felt herself pulled backward toward the window and the wall. The money she’d offered had long since been taken and still the crowd around her clutched and pressed and clamored. They hung from her shoulders and worked their fingertips into her belly and her armpits and the gaps between her ribs. They were pulling at her collar and her shalwar’s linen drawstring. She shouted at them in Arabic and they answered her in English. She seemed to hear the words bacha posh whispered behind her but she couldn’t be sure. They were laughing at her openly and parroting her speech. The voices grew dim and the light seemed to fade and she saw herself as they must surely see her. Blood rushed to her head and her body went light and she heard a small voice asking God’s forgiveness. She saw herself stripped naked. A shutter clattered open and she felt herself wrenched back into the dark.

  * * *

  The rupee merchant kept her in his shop until the mob dispersed and Decker came to claim her. The merchant seemed embarrassed by her gratitude, or by his broken English, or simply by her presence in those spare and unlit rooms. She sat with her arms around her knees in the corner, painfully aware of her girlish body in its sheath of rumpled linen. When Decker came she asked him to thank the man in Urdu and to offer him some form of payment and he shook his head and told her to shut up.

  She followed Decker mutely back to the university gate and made no objection when he left her there and wandered off alone. He came back with a packet of chips and two lukewarm cans of Farsee Kola and they took turns standing up so Decker’s cousin wouldn’t miss them. As the hours passed she felt her courage dwindling. She began to feel hollow. She took care to speak softly, to give no offense. She knew nothing and understood nothing. Even on that paved and cobbled street there was dust in the air and she found herself longing to shelter behind it. A woman in a burqa passed them, gliding measuredly across the pitted ground, and she watched her move with something close to envy.

  —I’m tempted to try one of those on myself, Decker said, watching her watch the woman. —If you won’t then I will.

  She drank the last of her cola. —I don’t see anybody stopping you.

  —Maybe my cousin got the date wrong. Maybe he thought we were on the Islamic calendar.

  —Very funny. She frowned at him. —That’s not possible, is it?

  —Everybody else’s damn number is tagged around here. I bet the madrasa doesn’t even have a phone. We should probably sign up with one of these militias.

  —I’m not ready to get blown up yet.

  —I was born ready, brother.

  —I’d like to take a shower first.

  —Martyrdom Is Your Desire and Ours, he said, squinting at a slogan on the wall across the street. —That’s a pretty good description of our day.

  —You don’t even have an address? Just the last name of the mullah?

  —I’ve got what town he’s in. He took out a folded scrap of yellow paper. —Half an hour’s drive west. That’s what Yaqub told me. Feeling up for a hike?

  They waited one more hour at the gate. She fell asleep for a time with her back to the wall and her legs gripping her duffel like a saddle. She had a dream that drops of blood were running down her calves into her shoes. There was no pain, only embarrassment. When she awoke Decker was holding the scrap of paper up to the light, like a shopkeeper checking a counterfeit bill.

  —Rise and shine, Sawyer.

  She blinked up at him. —How much money did you change back there?

  —Enough for a hotel room. The kind where you shit in a bucket.

  She nodded and got to her feet. —Let’s get going.

  —You have somewhere in mind?

  —If it’s enough for a room it’s enough for a car.

  The driver they hired had heard of the village but looked doubtful when they asked about the school. He seemed to speak neither English nor Urdu and shook his head regretfully when Decker showed him the name on the paper. They drove for an hour on a paved road and as long again on none at all and he deposited them at sundown at a cistern between crumbling sandstone bluffs. Not a house was in sight. He refused their rupees with a shake of his head, letting them fall through his hands to the ground. They offered him an American five-dollar bill and he bobbed his bald head and allowed them to take their duffels out of the trunk and drove slowly away after calling down God’s blessing on their studies.

  It was dark enough to make out a weak wash of light up the slope and they followed it stumbling and cursing to what looked like a child’s or an idiot’s rendering of a town: high mud-walled compounds, bowing outward and cracked at the corners, with pale blue gates of corrugated steel. A dog in the deserted square barked halfheartedly at them without getting to its feet. From somewhere nearby came the smell of boiling dhal. They went from building to building in search of a bell, too exhausted and timid to knock or call out. Eventually a gate swung inward and a man appeared and beckoned Decker closer.

  She watched the two of them converse in cautious murmurs, guarded and formal, keeping their arms at their sides. After what seemed a great while the man pulled the gate shut behind him and led Decker hastily around the corner. Instantly she felt as helpless as a toddler. She followed their voices to a stucco-walled compound abutting the first, lit at its entrance by the headlights of a truck. Only then did she notice how completely night had fallen. She had no option but to make her way across that floodlit ground.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and felt someone touch her. She was trembling and her steps were unsteady and her body felt outside of her control. A small hand found her arm and pulled her forward. A boy no more than six years old was leading her into the compound by the
wrist.

  * * *

  The man who shook her awake the next morning spoke both English and Arabic in a voice almost too decorous to hear. He carried a cup of green tea in one hand and a plate of flatbread in the other and he watched her raptly as she ate and drank. He did not ask why she had crossed half the world to study at his dirt-floored madrasa, or whether she had found the room comfortable, or why she had slept in her clothes.

  —The bread is to your liking? said the mullah in English.

  —Thank you, mu’allim. It’s wonderful.

  The room was bare and windowless and the sound of voices joined in recitation carried faintly through the wall. She had a memory of Decker sleeping beside her but Decker was nowhere in sight. The mullah wore bifocals and a yellow homespun shawl and a wine-colored birthmark ran from his left ear to the collar of his shirt. His lips moved as he watched her, as though in sympathy with the disembodied voices. A second pair of glasses hung from his neck by a loop of plastic fishing line. It occurred to her now that Decker had told her almost nothing about the man before her or about the school itself. She had trusted him blindly. She’d been told the mullah’s name and nothing more.

  —I’ve allowed you to sleep through the first prayer, said the mullah. —For travelers an exception can be made.

  She sipped her tea and gave a tight-lipped nod. Her voice seemed to have failed her.

  —My name is Mufti Khizar Hayat Khan. You and your friend are welcome to this house. While you remain I am father and mother to you. He pointed at her. —Now you tell me your name.

  She set her cup down circumspectly on the floor between her feet. —Aden Sawyer, she said.

  —Yes. This is what I have been told. Is it your full and only name?

  She shook her head. —My middle name is Grace.

  —Ah! said the mullah. —And what does it mean?

  Again her voice failed her. Her feet were bare and she was suddenly afraid that they might attract the mullah’s notice. They were slender and delicate, her most girlish feature, not yet ready to be seen. She felt herself flinch.

  —You needn’t be afraid of me, child. We have no cause for fear inside this house. He brought his heavy hands together. —Outside is another matter.