by John Wray
—Where is your passport.
—I don’t have a passport.
—You are khariji. You are Israeli or British or French. Of course you have a passport.
—I’m American.
He sucked in a deep breath and nodded.
—I’ll tell you what you want to know, she said. —I came to you, remember? All you have to do is ask.
—Where is your passport.
—I threw it away.
A single-piston scooter started up out in the street. Pok pok pok. The man eased himself forward. —But why did you do this?
—I don’t need it.
For the first time his face showed surprise. —You certainly need it. You need it for going away.
She said nothing to that.
—You are a fool, said the man. —Where is this place, where you have no need of your passport? Is it Sadda? Is it paradise? Is it prison?
Again she gave him no answer. He turned and spoke in Pashto to the taller man, who let out an unamused laugh.
—You won’t get to this place, the man said. —I am sorry.
—I’ll get there. If you won’t help me, sir, I’ll get there on my own.
He shook his head slowly and bent down and zipped up her duffel. His expression was solemn. He motioned to someone standing just outside the door.
—Ask Ziar Khan about me, she said quickly. —Just ask him.
—This person you mention is well-known to us, the man said as he watched her being hoisted to her feet. —You are very mistaken. He is famous in this country as a liar and a thief.
—I don’t believe you, she said, feeling her legs lock beneath her.
—You are too young a boy, said the man. —Young and beardless and stupid. Do you hear what I say? You are stupid to travel in a place for which you have no understanding. You will dishonor yourself. You will bring yourself shame.
—I’m not afraid of you, she shouted as she felt herself pulled backward. Tears were running down her cheeks.
—Why do you go to the Mountain, said the man. As he spoke the words a burlap hood was pulled over her head.
—I told you. To keep my promise—
—Why do you go to the Mountain.
She fought for air and felt the fabric work itself between her teeth.
—Please. If you don’t think I’m worthy—
—I’ll tell you the answer. You go there to die.
* * *
They kept the hood on for what seemed countless hours and when she asked for water they raised it just enough that she could drink. She couldn’t think what the hood was for unless they meant to kill her but she knew there was no glory in it for them. They were waiting for something.
When the reinforced door shuddered open and she felt them beside her she got to her feet at once and let them guide her forward by her sleeves. A second layer of cloth was pulled over the first, falling almost to the floor, and she guessed from the sound it made as she walked that it must be a burqa. The cloth was maddening against her eyelashes and her lips and the brick floor seemed to vibrate underneath her. The hand at her back was immense and impatient. There was no glory for them and no profit. She felt the coolness of the evening now and the cobbles of the street under her feet. Women’s voices in passing. An idling engine. A car door creaked open and small hands pulled her urgently inside. Women’s hands, she decided. Other doors were jerked open and slammed closed again and the engine was put into gear. The air stank of transmission fluid and tobacco. She wondered that she could smell or breathe at all through the spit-heavy cloth. People sat on either side of her, their elbows and shoulders wedged hard against hers, no differently than during recitation. She tried to keep calm by remembering her suras. The other passengers’ breathing was as shallow as her own and their bodies fidgeted beside her. They began whispering to one another in Pashto, almost too softly to hear, and she realized that they were only children.
After an hour of halting progress through the city and then over rough country roads and then over what must have been no road at all they came to a stop so abrupt that it lifted her out of her seat. She heard the sound of rapid conversation between men, slightly muffled by the glass, and a woman’s voice beside her hissing what could only be a warning. Once the car had started moving again she understood that they’d been at a checkpoint. She tried to picture what she must have looked like to the men who’d stopped the car, slumped forward in a burqa with burlap where her features should have been. Perhaps this was a common sight in this part of the country. Perhaps no one had bothered to look.
She was still trying to get the image into focus when the children left the car, suddenly and wordlessly, as though they had been abducted in their turn. The car was moving again but the children were gone and all at once the car had pulled up and its doors had come open and she was being told to get out with her hands at her sides. Her underclothes and shirt were soaked in sweat. The urge to vomit overcame her and she took the sodden cloth between her teeth and bit down hard. She wondered if there had ever been children beside her. She was out of the car now and being pushed forward. The image came to her unbidden of a figure in a cheap and rumpled burqa listing drunkenly over uneven ground in the dark and she felt a surge of pity at the sight. She fell and was dragged to her feet and pushed forward. Men were speaking in businesslike murmurs and she heard a sound as of a bullet being slid into a chamber. She could picture the pistol and the stone-faced man who held it and her own sad huddled body from the back. Then the sound came again and the smell of smoke reached her and a harsh voice said in Arabic to get the boy in off the street.
Some manner of gate swung open and she entered it and heard it latch behind her. One set of hands restrained her and another removed the burqa in a single practiced motion. She understood the voices but this brought her little comfort. Someone told her sharply to keep still: a foreign accent, Saudi or Yemeni. She was taking in air to say that she was standing still already when the hood was pulled away and she could see.
She found herself in starlit darkness with a group of men behind her. One demanded her name and she stammered an answer. They seemed to know that she spoke Arabic. She was led through a doorway and then through another and finally across a gravel courtyard. They left her in an L-shaped room with travel posters thumbtacked to the walls and a dozen men arrayed on threadbare kilims on the floor. No one seemed surprised to see her. She managed a greeting and they answered softly and in unison and made a place for her among their number.
She sank onto her knees and looked around her. Her body was still shaking. Most of the men were young, so young that their jawlines were plain to see beneath their downy beards, but their bearing was that of fatigued and worldly travelers. Some were dressed in jeans and T-shirts or in shoddy-looking tracksuits and as they spoke she thought of Decker and the joke he’d made about American Express. With the exception of a single Pashtun who said not a word they were Arabs who’d come from Yemen and Oman and the Saudi lands to train at the camps and fight across the border. They questioned her politely, almost never interrupting, and hid their curiosity as best they could. As she answered them her terror slowly faded. They told her nothing about themselves but the countries they came from and the names they’d chosen to be called by in the camps. The word jihad was often used but never in the sense of inner struggle. Jihad for these men had one meaning only.
At an hour so late that the sky had gone pale she was led across the courtyard to a narrow vaulted hall. A man with a beautiful white beard streaked with henna sat alone there, elegant and straight-backed, on a platform made of Nestlé packing crates. He asked her the same questions the Arabs had asked, and like them he showed no amazement at her story, or her nationality, or her presence in that starkly lit and air-conditioned room. He barely seemed to hear her answers but she knew that he was listening to them closely. He was listening for points of contradiction. He asked about the United States—about the living conditions of the poor, whether the people
there could be said to have a sense of right and wrong, whether any could be said to live by faith—and when she’d answered him he asked her to recite from the Qur’an. He seemed infinitely patient and to have no need of sleep. When she herself had grown so weary that her Arabic began to falter he asked her the names of the men she’d met at the madrasa.
—Altaf Rahimi and Yaqub Yesharraf, mu’allim, she said. —And Ziar Khan.
—I am not a mullah, the man said amiably, winding the red tip of his beard around his thumb. —I am not a wise man, sadly, nor am I a man of letters. There is no call to use that honorific.
—I beg your pardon.
—Not at all. I am pleased by your error. He brought his hands together. —Do you care for this country, Suleyman Al-Na’ama? Have you been treated well?
She glanced up at him. —Treated well?
—With the courtesy and indulgence due a traveler from the far side of the world.
—I’ve been treated so well. Better than I deserve. And I do care for this country.
—You do not know this country.
She bowed her head and said nothing.
—Your family are people of the Book, you have told me. And yet the book you refer to is not the Most Holy Qur’an.
—No, sir. It isn’t.
He appraised her a moment. —Tell me now. What was it that brought you to the Prophet? What was it that caused you to leave your place of birth?
—There is no god but God, she said. —And Mohammed is His messenger.
—That is a fact, said the man. —That is not a reason.
Suddenly she felt wide awake again. —I’ve been asked that same question for a year and a half now, she said. —Over and over. I was asked it at school and in my parents’ house and every other place I went. I was asked it before I’d ever even stepped inside a mosque. I never expected to be asked that question here.
—You are angry, the man said mildly. —And of course you are afraid.
—I’m just tired.
—Clear your head now, Suleyman Al-Na’ama. Think of those other questionings, each one of them, as rehearsals for your visit to this room.
She sat cross-legged on the polished floor and gave the man no answer. It was quieter than anywhere else she’d been in all that country. Its stillness reminded her of the courtyard in Sadda before first light. She thought she heard men somewhere arguing in Urdu but that might have been the radio and the language they were arguing in could have been any language on earth. She thought of Hayat Khan and of Ibrahim Shah and how different they were from the man who now watched her through attentive half-closed eyes. At that hour in their mud-walled madrasa she’d likely have been the only one awake. The only one not sleeping the sleep of the righteous. Soon it would be time for prayers in the yard with the low hills assembling themselves out of nothing and the night sky showing the first faint bruise of dawn along its rim.
—Things are beautiful in this world, she murmured. —Some things are. I don’t know why God makes some things perfect and some things just wrong. Why He makes some things empty and other things full. Full and perfect. Can you tell me why?
She waited for the man to speak but he said nothing. She looked above her at the vaulted whitewashed brick.
—I’ve felt like that most of my life. Not alone and not frightened. Just empty. She looked down at her hands. —Then I went to a mosque with my father. A little ugly mosque in a storefront. It wasn’t anything close to beautiful but it wasn’t empty either. It was the opposite of empty. It was filled with believers. There was hardly room to stand.
—Yes, said the man.
—I still don’t know why he took me. But I remember what he said after. He laughed at them. He told me that they barely knew their prayers.
—Yes, my child.
—I went again without telling my father. I knew what he’d say so I kept it a secret. I went every day for a month. Then I met my friend Decker. And then I felt full.
The man gave no reaction. He seemed to think that she had more to tell.
—I know it sounds stupid, she said. —Way too simple. Like eating dinner or something.
His eyes never wavered. Amber colored and deliberate as a cat’s.
—Full, he said, working his lips subtly after he’d spoken, as if the word or the idea were new to him. —No longer empty.
She nodded.
—And tired, he said.
She felt his eyes on her. The courtyard in Sadda. The gray before sunrise.
—Yes, she answered.
—Very tired. And also afraid.
She wanted to look past him then, at the windows set high in the chalk-white brickwork, but something about his hands held her attention. They were pale and liver-spotted and gracefully tapered. At last she told the old man he was right.
—Of course I am right. You think it was bravery that brought you to me, or high spirits, or the beauty and importance of our cause. But it is fear that moves men to take action. Particularly action that is foolish. It is fear.
She watched his hands and said nothing. They kept perfectly still.
—You have a quality about you, Suleyman. Some attribute I can’t yet put a name to. I regret you won’t be staying with us longer.
It took her a moment to answer. —Why not?
—I beg your pardon?
—Why won’t I be staying?
His eyes widened. —But of course you know why, little brother. You are going to the camps.
As if down an echoing corridor she heard herself laughing and stammering her thanks. The old man’s smile faded. Her gratitude was of no use to him.
—I’ll tell you one thing further, he said softly.
She assured him she would listen to whatever he might say. He bent forward and reached for her hand. His palm was loose-skinned and dry.
—In Kandahar, where I was born, there is a tradition. An ancient tradition and a hateful one. The shame of every Muslim. Boys are taken from their mothers, many among them less than ten years old, and kept and raised and trained to serve men’s pleasure. Dancing boys they are called, and in truth their dancing is a thing of wonder. But these are boys in name only. They are beautiful and skilled and greatly prized but they have forgotten their families and their boyhoods and the names their fathers gave them. They are lost to all virtue. They eat and sleep and die in Heaven’s shadow. Are you attending to me, Suleyman Al-Na’ama?
She fought the urge to pull her hand away. —I’m not sure what you mean. Are you saying—
—I say only this. His yellow cat’s eyes closed as he released her. —Do not, under any circumstances, go to Kandahar.
* * *
The camp called the Mountain was in fact a loose cluster of cinderblock buildings on the outskirts of the town of Mansehra, a stone’s throw from the border to Kashmir. She rode there in a flatbed with the Arabs she’d met in the night and she began to hear echoes of gunfire even before the truck had left the eastern suburbs. No one they passed on the street seemed to notice the shooting. If not for the shock and delight on the faces of her companions she’d have been tempted to doubt her own senses.
The youngest of the Arabs spent the last few kilometers with tears in his eyes, whether of joy or dread or carsickness it was difficult to tell. He was mumbling some kind of prayer, attempting to keep his thin voice manly, and she wondered as she watched him whether hers might sound the same. Her breasts were tender and her throat was raw and she felt close to tears herself. The gunfire grew louder, then dimmer, then all at once so loud that she could feel it in her teeth. Then the camp appeared before them with its white gate open wide.
The boy was called Abu Intiqam. He explained in faltering English, with a warrior’s dignity, that his name meant Father of Vengeance. In spite of the risk she felt a sudden urge to take him like a child into her arms. She told him that his name was very grand and asked if he’d chosen it himself and he assured her that he had. Then he hung his head and groaned into his shirtsleeves and s
aid nothing more until the truck had stopped.
They were led by men in skullcaps to a shack whose corrugated tin roof seemed to writhe and buckle in the midday heat. The grounds of the compound were rough and ungraded and its buildings rode the sloping hill like fishing buoys riding out a swell. Everything looked arrested in mid-motion. Men lay slackly in the shade, laid out seemingly at random, as though some act of violence had only just occurred. But their clothing was immaculate and bright.
She and the Arabs entered the shack one by one, for no reason she could determine, with their hands crossed before them like prisoners of war. The office they stepped into smelled of kerosene and sweat. She’d expected another round of questioning but was asked only her age and her fighting name and whether she was bringing any money. The man who asked these perfunctory questions was handsome but joyless and kept his sight fixed on his typewriter. It seemed to be giving him trouble. He looked up only once, when she told him that she hadn’t brought a bedroll, and asked her in a weary voice whether she had lice or complications of the skin.
—No English, the man said loudly, in English. —No American. Yes? We speak no English here.
—Yes, brother, she said in Arabic.
—Yes what?
She blinked at him uncertainly. —We speak no English here.
In fact she found over the following weeks that a good amount of her training was conducted in her native language, even in that place where English was synonymous with godlessness and greed. The photocopied manual on ballistics was in English and the mimeographed first-aid pamphlet was in English and the primer on techniques of urban warfare had been printed by the Langley Tactical Press in Alexandria, Virginia. There were no other Americans at the camp and no Europeans either and it seemed possible that there had never been. Once again she was set apart from the others and given privileged attention. At mealtimes she was often asked to interpret between the Pakistanis and the Arabs and a place was set for her at the instructors’ table. She would have preferred to sit with the Arabs she’d arrived with but she was careful to seem grateful for the honor. This much she’d learned since coming to the country.