Godsend

by John Wray

  —As-salaamu alaikum, said Decker.

  —Wa-alaikum as-salaam, they answered in chorus. —May the peace and the benedictions and the mercy of God be upon you.

  —Decker, she rasped. —Decker look here at me.

  But it was Abu Imam who turned to her and told her to be still. Abu Imam who was normally so gracious. Decker righted the hellbox and clapped back the handle and said there shouldn’t be a problem. He said it in English. The light had all but vanished and he seemed to stumble slightly as he stepped out of the circle. He followed the cable along the creekbed, keeping its coils to his right, crouching here and there to untangle a snarl. His lips were moving as he worked but she heard nothing but the booming of the blood behind her eyes. He seemed careworn and frail as he picked his way forward. He looked like a prematurely aged child.

  —Suleyman, came a voice. It meant nothing to her. She went to follow Decker and a dark hand took her roughly by the wrist. He was standing at the payload with his feet set wide apart now and she called him using every name she knew. She freed herself and lost her balance and looked up to see him grinning in the sunlight with the cable in his hands. Her sight retained that image even as she felt herself thrown backward and the shock and the aftershock lifting her body. A sound so swift as to be memory before the mind can frame it. Her eyes were shut against the shock wave and her ears seemed stuffed with linen and his silhouette persisted like an electric light extinguished in a place of perfect dark.

  Dear Teacher in this last lazy hour between fifth prayers and sleep someone said Why not write to your family. I said I’d tried twice and he just shook his head like No way. Unacceptable. Which I said to him I can’t think what to say and he said Suleyman (my name now) it’s best to start off with A Blessing on Your House. So this is it. A blessing on your house Professor Sawyer. End of blessing.

  Here’s something I could write about—you never asked me how it happened. In all the times you asked me Why you never asked me How. The light was on in your study so I just went in. I’d heard you take off in your busted-up Volvo. Very professorial. Very tweedy. Off to see your Esteemed Colleague. That’s what I used to call her. And other things ok but they were less polite.

  What was it you said that last day at your office? I was distracted Aden and I do regret that. That much my dear I truly do regret.

  You were cheating so I looked at your computer. You were off with the EC. Mom didn’t know about her yet but she was drinking like she did. I sat down at your desk. I felt like a detective. I sat in your six-hundred-dollar chair and frowned and touched my fingertips together. I got into your *worldview.* It wasn’t hard Teacher. I tried to hate my wife and daughter and it wasn’t hard at all.

  IT IS NOT FITTING FOR A PROPHET TO BETRAY HIS TRUST. WHOSO BETRAYS HIS TRUST SHALL COME FACE-TO-FACE WITH WHAT HE BETRAYED ON THE DAY OF RESURRECTION. —3:163

  You’d left Windows open. I just turned up the brightness. You were researching a lecture. Remember it Teacher? On sharia. Fundamentalist Islam. The rule of the faithful. Most of the pages were in Arabic but a couple were in English. I didn’t understand much to be honest but there were Links for Further Reading. I was trying to learn what was happening Teacher. That’s how it started. To figure out what you saw in her. Your exotic EC. I wanted to know if what you’d done to us made any kind of sense.

  I got onto a chatroom. Sheikh Azzam. Harkat al-Jibbah. Three or four in the morning. I thought I wouldn’t understand a word but everything was there. So simple and beautiful. The call. Good and evil. The six requirements. Fighting Has Been Prescribed. You’d have rolled your eyes at all of it and called it superstition. Magical thinking. You’d have laughed at it like you laughed at the mosque.

  GOOD AND EVIL DEEDS ARE NOT EQUAL. DRIVE BACK EVIL WITH WHAT IS BETTER. THEN YOU WILL SEE THAT ONE WHO ONCE WAS YOUR ENEMY HAS BECOME YOUR DEAREST FRIEND. —41:34

  People will show up one day and ask about me and I bet you’ll know exactly what to tell them. You’ll say Family troubles. You’ll say She was angry. You’ll say She was bored. And I was bored Professor Sawyer I was bored half to death. I was bored the way a cat gets bored that’s never let outside.

  I can’t explain Teacher. Not so you’d understand it. You probably never believed one single thing in your whole life.

  The mosque in the strip mall wasn’t working anymore. I needed something bigger. Something no one could laugh at. I’d only just met Decker but I wrote down all the names and sites and everything he mentioned. I even recognized some of them from the windows that you’d left open. I couldn’t help but take that as a sign.

  GOD STANDS WITH THE BELIEVERS. —8:19

  So here I am Teacher. No one lies to me now. When they come and ask you questions you can say you never knew me. I’m giving it to you in writing. You can tell them in all honesty you never had a child.

  Decker just came in to say first prayers are starting. He’s having fun here too you wouldn’t recognize him. Believe it or not. He says to tell you hi.

  3

  A fine dry snow was falling on the pass across the border. The guide told them that snow was a rare thing so late in the season, even high in the mountains, and a true and certain portent of God’s favor. He was white-haired and toothless but in spite of his age he was nimbler by far than the men he was guiding. Most of them wore sandals of leather or plastic, flimsy and ill-suited to the country, and they cursed him as they struggled through the drifts. Though he sang the Prophet’s praises without pause as he climbed, La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun rasul Allah, Ziar and the other Pashtuns kept their distance. When he announced for the fifth or sixth time that the snow was Heaven’s blessing Ziar told him through clenched teeth to save his preaching for the mosque. The old man laughed and said the nearest mosque was two days’ march away.

  They climbed all that morning through washes of traprock and ash-colored scree fields and gorges down which streams of runoff fell. No grass grew there and she saw no living creature. The guide wore crepe-soled boots made in India or China and answered every complaint with lines imperfectly remembered from the Recitation. His most cherished passage was from the third sura and he leered at them when he spoke it, disclosing his tobacco-colored gums. This present life is but the rapture of delusion.

  —Where are you taking us, father? one of the Pashtuns called out from the rear of the line. —Answer me if you can!

  —To God belongs the east and the west, said the guide. —Wheresoever you turn, there is the face of God.

  —What did the old babbler say?

  —Didn’t you hear? said another. —He has no idea.

  There was scarcely room for all of them on the saddle of the ridge and the guide seated himself on a boulder and beamed down at them as they took their midday meal. He smoked a porcelain pipe packed with sweet-smelling shag and declaimed in a high whistling voice between sucks:

  —We created man from thin clay, like earthenware, and We created djinn out of shimmering flame. We created man and We know what his soul murmurs to him. We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.

  —Lord, who created man from clay, make that jackass shut his mouth, muttered Abu Suhail.

  —Where did you learn your Qur’an, father? another called out. —In an opium house?

  The guide gummed his pipestem. —God guides many, he intoned. —But the dissolute alone he leads astray. They who violate God’s covenant, who sever what God commanded to be joined. They who sow discord on the earth. They are the losers.

  —Well may that old degenerate talk about dissolution, Ziar said to her. They were sitting a few paces up the ridge from the others with their backs against a sun-warmed shelf of granite. Since the explosion in the ravine she’d avoided his company but now she was too tired to resist.

  —What do you mean?

  —He lusted after his cousin’s firstborn. At an age when the girl still ran about bareheaded.

  —How do you know this?

  —He presented himself to the family
and confessed his intentions. Ziar drew his coat closer about him. —His cousin has often taken me over this pass.

  She said nothing for a moment. —What happened to her?

  —To the daughter? Nothing at all, at the time. He spat onto the ground between his boots. —Three years later she became his wife.

  She chewed her flatbread and stared up at the guide who sat serenely sucking on his pipe. When he had met them at the border south of Torkham two days earlier she’d taken comfort in his reedy old man’s chatter: of all that company he had seemed the most benign. He caught her eye now and she looked away.

  * * *

  —Suleyman, said Ziar once they were underway again. —Suleyman! Hang back a moment.

  —What is it, she said without slowing. They were descending the west-facing slope of the ridge and the scree lay slick and glittering in the sun. She heard Abu Suhail stumble behind her, then mutter a curse, then beg Ziar’s pardon for cursing. Ziar ignored him.

  —You’re wondering about us now, little brother. I can see that you are. About this company and the cause that you have joined.

  She pictured him a step or two behind her, moving loosely and surely, his handsome face chapped from the cold. She took her time answering.

  —I’ve been wondering that for a while.

  —Not at the Mountain. When I watched you there you showed no hesitation. You showed nothing but conviction and desire.

  —A lot has happened since then, she murmured.

  —What’s that, Suleyman? I didn’t hear.

  —A lot of things have happened since you found me at the Mountain, she said, turning toward him at last. Tears were running freely from his crow’s feet to his beard but she knew better than to think that he was weeping. It was only the wind. She bit back her grief and looked him in the eye.

  —How can I bring you comfort? he said. —I’ll do anything that lies within my power.

  —You can tell me why they killed him.

  —They did not kill him.

  —You’re lying.

  He passed a hand across his brow. —You test my patience with this question, Suleyman. You test it severely.

  —I’m going to keep on asking it. I’ll ask until I get an honest answer.

  —Do you think anyone at the Mountain would have hesitated to execute Ali, or even you yourself, had they been given cause? Do we seem wealthy, perhaps, to squander such a payload of explosives? Who would plan such a killing for so unimportant a boy?

  She swung at him then and he let the blow fall. She felt the sharpness of his rib cage through the lining of his coat. His slightness surprised her. She drew back again.

  —You are dear to me, Suleyman, he said as he restrained her. —Dear to us all. God has sent you to our mountains from the far side of the world. He held her tightly as the others shuffled past them. —I advise you now as your dear friend, as your brother, to recover your conviction. You will find your time here difficult without it.

  —You’ve advised me before, she shouted. —You advised me to trust you. You promised me no harm would come to him.

  —Attend to me closely, fool. Where we are going my good opinion counts for very little. This place is no madrasa. This place is the war. What marked you as special or exalted to your teachers and your mullah has no currency on this side of the border. Even Kashmiris are distrusted in this place.

  She watched the others lurching down the slope. No one looked back at them.

  —I understand you, she said finally. —You’re saying I’m going to get myself shot.

  —You’re going to get us all shot, he answered, his hoarse voice nearly swallowed by the wind. —The persons you are soon to meet are Pashtuns first and Muslims only second. They have been invaded and exploited and left to rot in mass graves too many times to feel indulgent toward outsiders. Even I was seen as foreign when I first returned from Yemen. I’d become intricate to them, ambiguous, two things at once. Only combat simplified me in their eyes. He drew her closer. —And your case, little brother, is more intricate by far. You must take pains to be one thing to them only. Your faith alone will give them faith in you. The faith that I myself have seen, in Sadda and in Mansehra. He took back his hand. —The alternative is a bullet in the skull.

  —I don’t care.

  —That may well be, he said. —But is it possible, Suleyman, that you don’t care for me?

  The others had reached the foot of the slope now and were looking back to see what was the matter. Even from that distance she could make out the guide’s arms fluttering as he recited scripture. Past and below him threads of snowmelt twined themselves into a creek and still farther down a wedge of turf glowed dimly. It was the first green she’d seen since they’d left for the border.

  —No, she said at last. —I care for you.

  * * *

  They walked all that night and the next day at noon they arrived at a mud-brick enclosure from which wooden stakes rose to three times the height of a man. Red and green and white banners hung slackly in the windless air, sun-bleached and tattered, and at the base of each stake lay a weathered slab of stone. The guide signaled a halt and drew himself upright, smoothing down his kameez, as dignified and stately as a mullah. The cemetery gate was made of raw oak posts with juniper branches threaded through them in a lattice, like the gate to a sheep pen, and he waited there until the stragglers reached him.

  —Every soul shall taste death, he announced. —You will all be paid your wages on the Day of Resurrection.

  A stoop-shouldered Pashtun whose name she could never remember made clear to the guide that the past days had done much to prepare him for death. He was willing to collect his wage in full.

  The old man made a chewing motion with his shriveled toothless mouth. —Do you imagine that you will enter the Garden without undergoing that which befell those who came before you? He brought his right hand elegantly to his heart. —O believers, bear in patience, be steadfast in the fight, keep to your battle stations and fear God. Perhaps you will prevail.

  With that he turned and marched off down the pitted valley road. A handful of the men began hobbling after him on their cracked and blistered feet but Ziar gave the order to remain. He slipped the pack from his shoulders and propped it against the cemetery wall and sat on it with his back to the crumbling sun-warmed brick and closed his eyes. She set her own pack down beside the gate and lifted its wooden handle and went in.

  Though the walls barely reached to her shoulders there was peace of a kind inside them, the hush of buried bodies, and she walked to the precise midpoint of that imagined peace and sank gratefully onto her knees. Whenever it was quiet now she sensed Decker behind her, breathing with her as she breathed, witness to each misstep, each falsehood, each fool’s bargain she struck. She knew better than to ask for his forgiveness. She bowed her head and listened to him in that otherworldly calm.

  Sometime later the air seemed to whisper and she glanced up to find a magpie perched above her on the cemetery wall. In the bright mountain mist the white of its belly was painful to see and its head was the blackest black there ever was. She’d studied its picture in a green clothbound book of her father’s and knew that its name in Pashto had once been Herald of Kings but none of this had prepared her for the creature sitting just beyond her reach. As she gazed up transfixed the mist seemed to part and the magpie’s blue and emerald highlights iridesced like Heaven’s mystery disclosed. She felt herself sobbing and took her shawl between her teeth to make no sound that might send that wondrous bird away from her. It let out a single disdainful cry and began to preen its flashing wings and there was nothing else of consequence on earth.

  By the time Ziar came for her the magpie had flown and her tears were long since dried and she felt purified and gutted. He asked how she was feeling and she told him she felt well. He nodded to himself, considering her answer. Then he asked if she remembered what he’d told her on the ridge.

  —Of course I remember.

  �
��Even holy war is war, Suleyman. Are you listening to me? Do you follow?

  —I’m not trying to follow.

  He glanced toward the gate. —I’ve known young men to come here, young Arabs especially, expecting to ride into battle on cloud-colored horses. But fighting always closes more doors than it opens, at least for the fighter. The first truth of jihad is disappointment. Accept that fact and you’ll fight long and well.

  —Why are you telling me this?

  —Take care not to judge us, little brother, by our sins and errors only. However debased your comrades may appear, I swear this: our enemy is more debased by far.

  She let her eyes close. —I’ve got no right to judge.

  —You have every right. You’re the best of us all, Suleyman, and the most radiant in God’s sight.

  She was taking in air to answer when a rumbling carried to them from the far side of the wall. Ziar stood up at once. She thought at first that a plane was approaching and had begun to look for cover when she saw him making calmly for the cemetery gate. By then the sound had divided into three competing phrases and she heard the bite of tire treads on gravel. She got to her feet and followed him outside.

  There were three trucks in all, each one crowded with men carrying Kalashnikovs and Makarovs and strange long-barreled rifles, and the brown and black streamers trailing wildly from their fenders caught the light just as the magpie’s tail had done. The streamers struck her as familiar and as the trucks came to a hard stop she saw why. They were made of tape torn out of videocassettes and unspooled reels of film.