by John Wray
The young men inside had just risen for prayer. They greeted her shyly, still unsure of protocol. There was some confusion as to whether they should pray in the courtyard or in the mosque outside whose muezzin was calling and one of them asked her opinion. She took a prayer mat from a heap in the corner and looked down disdainfully at those few still reclining on cushions and announced that she was going to the mosque. Again the call sounded. Four men in shalwar kameez who were standing at the door with mats already in their hands nodded to her as she led the way out. By this time the others were crowding behind. They passed her in their eagerness and pounded on the gate. Most of them had at least the beginnings of beards and were embarrassed to be guided by a barefaced foreign boy.
A hatch of sorts was set into the gate and they opened it and went out in single file. The third call sounded. She kept to the back of the group but she could see the rutted yellow road and a row of parked trucks and the stucco mosque behind them like a dusty piece of cake. She stumbled over someone’s foot and in that same instant saw the men who had brought her wedding clothes standing squarely in the road. They were gesturing to the mujahideen to go back inside and the mujahideen were holding their mats raised like swords or like torches and pushing slowly forward to the entrance of the mosque. One of the two men met her eye for a long, vacant moment, then raised an arm and shouted to someone behind her. She was easing her feet out of her slippers and bracing to run when the man turned away with a look of disgust and shuffled slowly and flat-footedly back to the gate.
She let the group carry her now past the last of the trucks and when they came to the mosque she excused herself from her companions and asked God to bless them and continued very slowly down the middle of the road. A man’s voice called her name or seemed to but she didn’t turn her head. There was no living soul in all that country who knew by what name she was rightfully called. And as she made her way east and away from the mosque and the compound, from the resettlement camps and the blue border ranges, it occurred to her that she knew least of all.
* * *
She passed that night in a ditch by the Peshawar road, clutching her knees to her chest and staring wide-eyed and bewildered at the stars. The moon was a crescent, the moon of banners and of headstones, and she seemed to see it shiver as it rolled across the sky. The growling of her stomach was the only sound there was. The ditch was steep-banked and narrow, dry as the country it cut through, and she lay behind a screen of brush in case a car should pass. It was cold with no wind and the stars hung so low that she found herself reaching up to them for warmth. All her life lay behind her, every day, every hour, bright and irrevocable and fixed. She saw it so clearly. Ahead was starlit blackness. There was nothing there for her to know or see.
You were right about this place, she seemed to hear a voice repeating. You were right about this place but you were wrong about one thing.
In spite of her precautions someone found her in the night. An hour before daylight a girl half her age came walking up the ditch and sat down on its edge without the slightest sign of fear. Her dark hair fell past her shoulders and her pale face shone bluely and her running shoes knocked playfully against the crumbling bank. She frowned down at Aden. The sky turned behind her. There was a question on her lips and in her gray determined eyes but she said nothing. Perhaps she was afraid after all. Perhaps she was injured. Perhaps she was lost. She spoke not a word, made no gesture of greeting, and it took the last of Aden’s strength of mind to understand her question.
She took a breath and told the girl that she was still alive. She told her that she hadn’t died, not yet, and that she meant to keep on walking east as soon as it was light. Her life had been spared for reasons unknown to her, reasons hidden from her sight behind a great and shapeless veil, and she had no choice but to take this as a mercy. By no virtue of her own she had been guided to the straight path, the path of those upon whom grace abounds. Although she was a sinner and a murderer the love she harbored for the world was free of sin.
She wept for a time, rocking stiffly in place, and the girl sat on the ditch’s edge and watched her. The sky to the east gave off just enough light to disclose the girl’s frail body in its loose T-shirt and jeans. She knocked her heels against the clay and hummed a melody. The lettering on her shirt read SANTA ROSA ROUND-UP. Her humming brightened as the stars went dim.
Aden knelt and touched her forehead to the ground and felt herself summon the world into being. She kept her eyes closed and took in the noises around her. The wind off the foothills. The trucks on the roadway. The call of a magpie. The rustling of her garments and the creaking of her bones. She took them in and praised each one and asked the girl’s forgiveness. She asked her for patience. She asked her for courage. When at last her eyes came open it was well into the day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Jin Auh, Nooruddin Bakhshi, Francis Bickmore, Charles Buchan, Jamie Byng, Tyler Cabot, Andrew Chaikivsky, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Eric Chinski, Brooke Costello, Elizabeth Costello, Kathy Daneman, Kiran Desai, Matt Dojny, Nathan Englander, Isaac Fitzgerald, Jessica Friedman, Sheila Glaser, Bill Hall, Barbara Wuenschmann Henderson, Edward Henderson, Corin Hewitt, Kirk Wallace Johnson, Kirsten Kearse, Alice Sola Kim, Kathleen Alcott, Shamila Kohestani, Suketu Mehta, Tim Nelson, Sangar Rahimi, Jamal A. Rayyis, Sarah Rehmann, Julia Ringo, Bernhard Robben, Akhil Sharma, Adrian Tomine, Thomas Überhoff, Max D. Weiss, Brian Williams, Anni Wuenschmann, Peter Wuenschmann, Andrew Wylie, Sybil Young.
ALSO BY JOHN WRAY
The Right Hand of Sleep
Canaan’s Tongue
Lowboy
The Lost Time Accidents
A Note About the Author
John Wray is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, The Right Hand of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue. He was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he lives in Mexico City. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Acknowledgments
Also by John Wray
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by John Wray
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71609-7
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