The Good Son

9

T he guard takes Sonia to a small outbuilding near the hujra. Inside, she smells the dense odors of animal waste and fermenting silage; they kept goats here. The man opens a trapdoor and points down into the darkness. She descends a rickety ladder and the trapdoor slams shut. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The blackness resolves itself into a room not quite high enough to allow her to stand upright and about the size of a decent bathroom in an average suburban American house. The only light comes from a narrow slit in the ceiling where the exterior wall does not quite meet the beams supporting the floor above. By leaning down she can see the dusty ground and the foot of the building across the street. The floor is mud, covered with rotting straw and archipelagoes of goat turds.

She clears a place on the floor with her foot and sits down with her back against the wall. Within a few minutes she feels the first hot prick of a fleabite. The place is infested with them, and they clearly have not fed in some time. She spends the next hours trying to catch and crush them. She waits for the sting, gives the beast time to become involved in its meal, and then places a finger over the point of pain. Then she rolls her finger carefully but firmly over her skin and onto the ball of her thumb. Then she holds her hand up to the dim light and slides her finger back, and if she has been successful she can see the black dot of the flea, which she then crushes with the index-finger nail of her other hand. It makes a satisfying pop. She supposes she gets in this way one out of fifty that bite her, but it serves to pass the time. She has done this before.

The light beams from the slit move across the floor and up the opposite wall; they fade to red, and then she hears the call to pray the Maghrib, the evening prayer. She cannot pray because there is nothing clean here to wash with, and in any case she knows she will be otherwise occupied. She hears footsteps above. The trapdoor opens and the guard, the same man, looks down and tells her to climb the ladder. She pulls her dupatta around her head and shoulders and goes up.

The guard has a length of rope, and with this he binds her hands in front of her and leads her out of the hujra and down a narrow street, and another, until they come to a wider road, the main street of the village. The mosque is there with a crowd of men just emerging from it. They stand in their dust-colored clothes and stare at her, a sea of black beards and eyes. Sonia sees Idris and the other men from her recent interview at the front of the crowd, which now stirs and makes way for the mullah. He is a thin, dark man in early middle age, dressed in a peach-colored shalwar kameez, a long black Pashtun waistcoat, and a black turban. Sonia’s guard presses down on her shoulder and kicks at the backs of her knees, until she kneels.

There is a farm cart there, with high solid wheels, painted with fanciful designs. The guard secures Sonia’s leading cord to one of the uprights at the tail of the cart. The mullah climbs on the cart and addresses the crowd. He says that this woman-pointing a finger at Sonia-has blasphemed before reliable male witnesses and shall now be punished according to the sharia. She will be confined and whipped at the times of prayer until she repents her blasphemy. He jumps down from the cart.

Sonia cries out, “I am no blasphemer, but a good Muslim wife. I have not been convicted of anything before a khazi.”

The guard now wields a bamboo stick about four feet long, split at the ends, and with this in hand he sets himself and strikes her across the back. The pain is colossal, like breaking bone. An involuntary scream issues from her mouth.

“I have not blasphemed. I have not been convicted,” she cries, and the next blow falls. She calls out this sentence after each of the next four blows and then the power of speech deserts her. She can only howl like a dog. She loses count of the blows after the tenth and something happens in her head and her vision narrows to a tiny reddish dot and then goes out.

When she returns to consciousness she is back in the cellar. The trapdoor is open and the guard is about to climb the ladder.

“Wait,” she calls out. “Give me water, for the love of God.”

He pauses, not looking at her. “There is water in the plastic.”

She looks around and sees a ten-liter plastic jerrican on the floor. There is a cloth nearby wrapped around some loaves of naan. He starts to climb.

“Wait,” she says again. “Tell me your name and lineage.”

“So you can curse me?” he says, climbing higher. “I can’t be caught that way, witch.”

“I am not a witch. Please, because if I am beaten like this five times a day I will be dead in two days, and when the Day of Judgment comes and you are being cast down to Hell, I want to say to God the merciful, the compassionate, ‘My Lord, You know all things and You know that this Yousef Muhammad, or whatever you are called, has murdered me against Your law, with his whip, but it was not his fault; he is ignorant and was betrayed by the wicked, who kill falsely in Your name, so in Your mercy let him inhabit the cooler parts of Hell and do not place his murderer’s hands forever in molten lead.’ ”

The man snarls a curse. Sonia says, “Very well. But I would rather have my back than your dreams to come. I wish you peace, man with no name, but I doubt you will have any. Beware the Day of Judgment.”

The man makes a gesture, an averting sign against the evil eye, and scrambles up the ladder with unusual speed. The trapdoor closes again.

Sonia drinks from the jerrican, groaning as she lifts it to her mouth. She carefully removes her tunic, an agonizing process, and pours water down her back, writhing as the cool liquid washes her cuts. She sees that the whip has sliced the back of the tunic into ribbons. She wraps her dupatta around her and collapses back onto the earth, lying on her right side. The fleas feast at will, but now she barely notices them against the wrenching agony of the wounds across her back.

She falls into a paradoxical state, not quite conscious yet too fitful to be called sleep. The pain is like a drug, squeezing her mind into unaccustomed hypnagogic regions. Is that her life passing before her eyes, is this death? No, or not yet, at any rate, but she experiences a series of intense sensory impressions. Her mother, the gleam of a gas lantern making a golden halo behind her head; the smells-gas; her mother’s smell: perfumed powder, the smell of greasepaint and cold cream; the stink of the great cats, of the grease from the concession stands, of cotton candy, the cigarette smell of her father-the woman in her dream, the spangled costume, a mother image? No, her mother had dark hair, Sonia sees the woman clearly now, a stranger yet familiar, maybe not a woman at all, some kind of androgyne, an angel or demon. It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative, the caricature of the gabbling woman that is the dead spirit of the father rising to hideous life in her. In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels.

Sonia hears herself laughing; the laughter rises to a hysterical pitch, breaks down into sobbing. Yes, part of her is saying, You are doing Jung -ian analysis in this stinking pit; what good has it ever done you? Are you cured? Are you happy?

This is the animus speaking; it has never been integrated. Fluss said it and it was true, and how she had fought him on the subject. Of course, she argued, that is what the disintegrated animus does, it bitches. But this dream is important, she knows that; and now in this fevered state she struggles to make sense of it. The awful boy-thing from that dream floats into her mind. The crusher of tiny helpless creatures. She thinks of Farid, her husband, whom she has tortured, whom she has crushed. The boy-thing cannot be Farid, who has never hurt anything in his life; that’s his problem: He has no edge, his anima is toxic, inert, Eros and its holy power does not flow from him, poor man. The Mother is too strong, Noor has done her work well, all unconscious, of course, all of them are asleep, and she thinks of the sons of Noor, classic examples of the three main types of animus-ridden men: Farid, the softy; Nisar, the voracious mogul and philanderer; Seyd, the fascist.

She holds the monstrous boy in her mind’s eye, he floats in the dark sparkles under her eyelids, and as she watches he changes; he grows tall, strong, beautiful: her son. She feels a pang of love. She calls out to him; he smiles at her and begins a careful kind of stepping, almost like a dance, and she sees that he is crushing under his feet the small helpless creatures from her dream, tiny birds or squirrels. She calls again, suddenly panicked; this is not right. She calls out, Theo, don’t! This is not how you were raised! And he smiles again, the flash of white teeth in a tanned face. It is not Theo at all but Wazir, and now she sees that the deformed boy is still there, crouching in the shadows; he has Theo’s face. Wazir speaks; he says, I’m just doing what you taught me. And she has taught him, nurturing him over the years; she’s spent more time with him as an adult than ever she spent with Theo after he was grown. As this thought enters her mind, and with it a profound sorrow and regret, her deformed son leaps at her, wraps his arms about her waist. She calls on him to stop, she says he’s hurting her, but he does not stop; he is climbing up her back, he is pinching her, he is clawing at her back with his nails. Wazir does nothing to stop this; he seems amused. The pain is horrendous, she writhes with it. At some level she understands this is a just punishment for what she has done.

Then she is out of the dreamlike state; she is back in the stable, and her back is covered with rats, their sharp teeth tearing at her open wounds.

She rises with a scream and the rats fall off her and vanish into the straw. She knows they will return, attracted by the smell of her blood. She wedges herself into a corner and sits trembling in terror, with her penlight in her hand. Its little beam wavers, grows yellow, fades to a tiny glow.

Sonia is still in this position when the trapdoor opens again, revealing a figure holding an oil lamp. She lets out a sob. It cannot be time for dawn prayer already, time for her next beating; it is still black outside. Then she sees it is not her guard but the girl, Rashida. She has not covered her face for once, and Sonia can see that she has a nose after all, and that she is a beauty.

The girls clucks when she sees that the naan has not been eaten, that it has been gnawed by the rats. She says, “I have brought you a new kameez. Here, let me help you put it on.”

“No, it is too painful to have anything next to my skin. And besides, they will only tear it again, and you are not rich enough to afford five new ones a day.”

“But they are saying you will not be beaten in this way anymore. The mullah says it is immodest for men to see your body through the rips in the cloth. So, God willing, they will beat you on your feet.”

“Thanks be to God,” says Sonia. “I will be a cripple, but not shamed.”

The girl does not detect any irony in this statement, and says, “Yes, thank God. I have some grease my mother gave me. We put it on burns. I will dress your back. I also have some cloths that my mother says will keep the cuts from turning bad.”

“Thank you. God will reward you for this mercy.”

Rashida rubs grease on Sonia’s back with a delicate hand and ties on the cloths. The pain seems to diminish a little. The girl helps her on with the new kameez and says, “Is it true that you cast the evil eye on Mahmoud Saiyed?”

“Is that his name?” says Sonia. Speaking to the girl seems to calm her. I’ve been hallucinating, she thinks, and shudders, but the details of the near-dream are starting to fade. She wills them out of her mind. “No, I cast no curse,” she says. “I’m not a witch. I asked him for his name so I could intercede for him on the Day of Judgment, since he is going to kill me unjustly in the name of God, which is a great sin.”

She sees the girl’s face twist in puzzlement. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I was taught to be merciful to my enemies and forgive them, as God forgives us.”

“Only a fool would forgive an enemy. That would just give him another chance to attack you.”

“And so? What if he attacks?”

“He might kill you.”

“And so? We are called to be mujahideen, we are called to struggle for the sake of God. In the lesser jihad we struggle against the enemies of Islam and for justice, and if we fall we are taken to Paradise. In the greater jihad we struggle against ourselves. We strive to become like God, and what is God if not compassionate and merciful? If we fall in that struggle, the Prophet, peace be upon him, has told us that we gain a higher rank in Paradise than those who fell by the sword.”

The girl looks down at her hands. She says, “I should not listen to you. You are a blasphemer. But look, I have had a dream.”

“Tell it,” says Sonia.

“I was on the bank of a river, a swift-flowing stream,” says the girl. “On the other side was… a boy. He was holding a gold ring and beckoning to me, but I couldn’t cross. Then I saw there were corpses in the water: oxen, horses, and some men, too. I was afraid, and I awakened.”

Sonia says, “The river is the future, which flows ever toward us and cannot be stopped. The gold is the prospect of a successful marriage. The corpses mean that the marriage cannot take place until someone, perhaps many, have died. And the boy is whom you love. What is his name?”

“Batur,” says the girl immediately, and then gasps and holds her hand up to her mouth.

Sonia says, “Yes, Batur. He is from a good family in another village. He loves you and would marry you, but your father has promised you to someone else, an older man.” It is only a guess, but Sonia knows such sorrows are the common lot of Pashtun village girls.

Rashida’s eyes grow wide, glistening, reflecting the small yellow flame of the lamp. “How did you know that?”

“I know many things,” says Sonia. “And this older man is…”

“Khaliq Sumro. He has one eye and he stinks like a goat. He is of the mujahideen and advises Idris Ghulam. He has one wife in Peshawar but he wants one here.”

“Never fear that you will marry him. His death is foretold and will come soon. Your father may have a dream. Tell your mother what I have told you, and she will use the ways of women to make him come and see me and I will interpret that dream as well.”

The girl nods and assures Sonia she will do this and pushes forward a closed basket. She says there is food in it, and she will leave the oil lamp there, to stave off the rats. Then she darts up the ladder and closes the trapdoor. Sonia hears the bolt shoot home.

What a precious thing a little light is! Sonia thinks, and a little kindness as well. She cradles the small lamp in her hands. By its glow she can make out the shapes of the rats moving and from time to time the glow of their tiny fierce eyes. She wonders if the oil will last until dawn. Probably not. Perhaps that is part of the torment. Hope and some slight relief from the worst are the best weapons of any tormentor; the torturer smiles and offers a cigarette.

This adds incalculably to the most dreadful element in her situation, the anticipation of pain to come; anyone with an interior life knows that psychic pain is what breaks you. Sonia knows she is breaking. She is brave enough when free, with room to maneuver. She has confidence in her own cleverness, but now it is entirely gone. Her plan was a stupid one, and now here she is. She has always been a little claustrophobic, she has always sought the open skies, avoided tight spaces both physical and social; her life has been based on this preference, and now she is in this tiny grave packed with rats.

She sobs, letting the misery flow without constraint. She cannot bear the prospect of more pain. Easy to talk of torture, to discuss it as a phenomenon in a living room where the torturer is far away; one thinks on those occasions, perhaps, Well, I could stand it, I’m no baby, and then one sees people who have been tortured and they look the same as us; they laugh, they joke. How bad could it be? Secret, shameful thoughts, but there they are. Sonia has known any number of the tortured-they are common enough in Pakistan-and she has had these thoughts.

But now she knows they will take her out in front of the mosque tomorrow and lay her on the ground and tie her feet up to a chair and whip the skin from their soles. And a few hours later again, cutting the intricate weave of muscles and tendons into red jam and bringing her back to lie in this filth. Infection will set in immediately, she will die of septic shock, delirious and alone. She knows, too, that even this is not the worst. She knows that what utterly shatters the soul is this: when the pain is applied, sooner or later the victim feels in her deepest core that she would yield her place to anyone; she would say in her heart, Torture my babies, torture my son, torture my husband, all my loved ones, but not me! Thus the victory of the torturer is the absolute victory of the self: Hell incarnate.

Yes, the self, the nafs, what the Sufis spend their lives trying to control. Sonia thinks this, the word nafs is present in her mind, and all at once, astonishingly, her weeping turns into a bubbling laugh. So this is what you meant, my murshid!

Now, in darkness, hungry for the brassy colossal skies of Asia, she thinks of her journey with Ismail, which she put into her first book and which made her enjoyably famous for a season, although Ismail had told her that fame was like wax dripping on the nafs from a great candle, thicken -ing it and making the soul more than ever its prisoner. She thinks about warming his bedroll, which she did not put into that book. And most of all she thinks of his lessons, the Sufi training he gave her, for despite his lighthearted manner he was a hard master in the ways that the murshids of his order had, over six centuries, devised to strip the self from the body and allow God to burn it away to nothing.

From a pocket of her ruined kameez she takes a Sufi rosary of thirty-three beads, a tasbi-e-Fatima, the kind given by the angel to Hazrat Bibi Fatima, daughter of the Prophet and mother of all Sufis. Sonia rolls the wooden beads through her hands as she begins the recitation, the zikr, at the heart of Sufi practice. The zikr she recites is the Name of God. As she does so she visualizes the calligraphic representation of the Name, in Arabic, in the approved golden-wheat color. Before, when she was with Ismail, she never quite achieved the reported glow, her visuali -zation flickered like the neon of a cheap motel sign. Somewhere after three hundred of the usual thousand repetitions, her concentration would flag and the self would issue forth like a fungus. She confessed this to her murshid. He told her not to worry. He told her to wait for God. He said God would find her when the conditions were right.

Now, obviously, the conditions are right, for the Name of God shines like the noon sun on a field of grain and she is also able to visualize her murshid. There he floats in the black cell, grinning, vastly amused, his face lit by the golden glow. The beads fly through her fingers; the Name echoes in her head like a gong. Apparently the right conditions for one such as her is the prospect of being tortured to death. Ismail thinks this is amusing and so does she, and all at once she understands that God is laughing too. Nothing is as she thought; everything familiar is now wonderful, and the esoteric is plain as bread. She understands that she is departing the alam-e-nasuf, the material world, and entering the alam-e-malakut, the realm of angels, the ground reality of the universe. In her ears, faint at first but growing louder, is a sound, indescribable, which is the sout-e-sarmadi, the eternal sound that permeates all the worlds, of which the most beautiful music is but a shadow.

Sonia chants without thinking, listening to the breath of God; the sound fills her, it removes the pain of her wounds, it banishes her fear-or not really, she thinks, looking back at herself as from a great distance, it’s more like the pain is still there, but the being, the poor nafs, that feels it, the horrible person who behaved so badly to Farid and Theo and Wazir, who suffered under the whip and the rats and merited that torture, is not the real person.

I will never be able to explain this to anyone, she thinks, as Ismail was never able to explain it to me. I thought it was a trick to be learned, like legerdemain, but it’s not. It’s a grace. How peculiar not to have known it all along, although, now that she thinks of it, she did know it all along, but the nafs cast a cloud between her soul and the knowing, for it did not want to die.

The sound is still in her ears when the trapdoor swings open, letting in a flood of light and the guard, Mahmoud. She continues with the beads and smiles at Mahmoud. She realizes she can see the real person in him too, the image of his Maker, and she can also see, like an encrusting leprosy, the structure of pride, greed, lust, and folly that controls the man Mahmoud in the alam-e-nasuf. She climbs the ladder effortlessly, or so it seems, she feels like she floats on the rungs. Mahmoud seems taken aback now; he was expecting a cowed and beaten woman-the only sort of woman he has ever known, in fact-and now he sees something quite different and he is frightened, Sonia can see his fear, like worms roiling the shadows behind his eyes.

It is the time of Fajr, the dawn prayer. She is brought to the same wide place before the mosque, the same crowd of turbaned men are there, having just finished praising the Compassionate One and looking forward to seeing a woman tortured. Above, the sky is still pink, shading to the palest possible blue. Sonia is still handling her beads. She notices that the men have seen this, and there are murmurs. The mullah stands out of the crowd and gives a speech, in which he again describes Sonia’s blasphemy and offers her a chance to confess. She answers in a loud but mild voice, as if explaining something to a child, that she has not been judged according to the sharia and therefore it is haram for her to be punished. She quotes the Qur’an on the wages of injustice.

The mullah shouts at her, although he does not quote from the Qur’an. Like most village mullahs he is an ignoramus on the subjects of sharia and Islamic theology, substituting a crude bullying style for both. Some men drag out a heavy wooden chair. Sonia is made to sit on the ground. Her legs are tied together and her ankles are lashed to the slats of the chair back. She is as modest now as could be wished. Mahmoud does this work and he is clumsy doing it, so she offers a word of encouragement.

“Mahmoud Saiyed, I forgive you your crime. In Hell you will be repaid for this, but although your feet will be lashed with red-hot wires forever, but I will look down from Paradise and beg the demon to temper the strokes.”

Mahmoud is not quite trembling now, but he looks ill at ease. He takes up his bamboo cane and whisks it back and forth a few times, perhaps to pump himself up.

Sonia fingers her beads and increases the volume of her chanting. The praise of God echoes from the low buildings. The lash descends.

Sonia feels the agony and her body records the damage but it does not reach who she is now. The nafs suffers but she is no longer it. She shouts “Haram!” and continues her chanting Sufi prayer.

Another stroke, although this one seems to spend much of its force on the seat of the chair.

“Haram!”

The mullah calls out for Sonia to be gagged. This is done, with rags. A new murmur floats through the crowd. It is a grave sin in Islam to silence prayer.

On the next stroke a voice floats out past the shutters of a house, a woman’s voice: “Haram!”

On the next stroke, there are more voices from the hidden, a chorus of voices, and the chilling ululation, a sound like the insanity of all the birds. Forbidden! Shame!

This is now the nightmare of the Pashtun male. The women are out of control and it is the women who have the honor of the men in their hands. The women know everything. They know who likes to fuck boys, and who is a drunk, and who can’t get it up in the marriage bed, and for this reason they can never be allowed to escape the iron grip of the men.

Now, almost as one, the men trot off to their homes, including the mullah, who has two wives and a boy. Sonia thinks they will beat all the women now, but not very hard. She is left alone on the dusty street with poor Mahmoud, who looks like he is going to cry.

“It is over, Mahmoud,” she says. “Untie me and carry me back to my room in the hujra. You have been saved from Hell today; God has been merciful to you. And when you have done that, I will interpret your dream for you.”

Mahmoud carries her toward the hujra, but on the way he is stopped by two armed men with the look of seasoned mujahideen. There is a brief argument. The men don’t want her returned to her prison; someone wants to see her. For the first time she hears the name Alakazai and it seems to be a significant one, for on hearing it Mahmoud stops arguing and follows the men. They go down several streets, the roar of the diesel generator grows louder as they walk. They go through a gate in a high mud wall and enter a house. Mahmoud is dismissed, protesting, at the door, and Sonia is forced to hobble on the edges of her feet, following the men, who make no effort to help her.

One of them grabs her arm and hustles her through an open door and into a small room with a high window. In it there are two charpoys and a low table, upon which is a tray with a tea service and a covered basket from which issues the smell of fresh naan. On one of the charpoys sits a man. Sonia collapses on the other. The guard goes to a corner and squats down with his rifle across his knees.

The man on the other charpoy indicates the tea with a flick of his hand.

“Would you like some tea, Mrs. Laghari?” he says in English.

“Yes, thank you,” Sonia answers, and pours. To her surprise it is not the strong milky tea of the region but some herbal brew, flowery, like chamomile or jasmine. But it is hot and she drinks a whole cup and eats a piece of bread. The man watches her and she returns the favor.

He is a comfortably padded man, broad-shouldered, with a tan face and a neatly trimmed dark beard. His ethnic origins are not at once clear, for he has the hawk nose and the hazel eyes common among the Pashtuns, but his air of comfortable self-assurance, relaxed, faintly amused, is one she associates with the plains to the south. And there is something wrong about him, a cast of ill health; the whites of his eyes are yellowish, and there is a faint unpleasant odor in the room. That’s why the herbal tea. The man’s innards are not right.

“How are your feet?” he asks, after she has drunk the tea.

“How do you think?”

He shrugs. “That was a clever ploy. You almost started a riot there, among the women. Idris is very angry with you.”

“It wasn’t a ploy. I was perfectly sincere.”

“Were you?” A look of amusement here. “You consider yourself a Muslim?”

“I am as much a Muslim as you are.”

“Even though you wander around without your husband, unveiled? Even though you are an infamous blasphemer and apostate?” He sips his tea, not taking his eyes off her. “You know, I saw you on television. It was quite a per for mance. I thought you seemed more an ally of our jihad than not.”

“Really. Then you couldn’t have been listening to what I said.”

“Oh, I listened. And I was intrigued. Who was this American who spoke perfect Urdu and had such interesting ideas? Why had I never heard of her before? So I made inquiries, and of course I quickly learned that I had heard of her before; the whole umma had heard of her. And I was amazed that this Sonia Bailey would have the arrogance to lead a party of spies into a Muslim country.”

Sonia surpasses a shudder of fear. She says, “We are not spies. We are scholars. And the Prophet, peace be upon him, says that the ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs.”

The man waves his hand as if shooing flies. “Yes, yes, anyone can quote from the Hadith when it suits them, but the fact remains that you have already been condemned by competent judicial authorities. I could have you executed this minute.”

“Yes, you could,” she says agreeably. “Or you could have me beaten five times a day and locked in a filthy stable. I’d be dead in a few days from septic shock, and you wouldn’t have to confront the women again.”

“I’m not afraid of a few women.”

“Nonsense, Mr…?”

“My name is Alakazai.”

“Really? Then we are clan cousins of a sort. My son is an adopted clansman of the Barakzai.”

A transient look of irritation passes over the man’s face; Sonia observes it with interest and switches to English. “Although you’re not a big one for clan connections, are you, Mr. Alakazai? You’re not a real Pashtun at all. I suspect your father or grandfather was a detribalized Pashtun living in the south, what they call a Pathan in that country, and one or more of them must have intermarried with the locals, Punjabi or Sindhi perhaps, even Bengali. There is something of the babu about you, I think. Idris and the others are true Pashtuns; their lives revolve around honor, loot, and beating up any women or foreigners that come their way. But not you, and so we have to ask why they follow you. And the answer must be that you’re the one with the connections. the paymaster, feeding money and arms from the Pakistanis. You might even be an actual ISI agent. On the other hand, I’m sure you have good connections with al-Qaeda as well. You’re just the sort of deracinated, half-educated, semi-Westernized misogynist they like to recruit.”

He regards her expressionlessly, tracing the line of his beard below his lip with a forefinger.

“And please don’t tell me you’re not afraid of women, Mr. Alakazai. Sexual terror is the motor of your entire movement. That’s why you blow up girls’ schools and toss acid in the faces of their students.”

“Is that what you really believe? Remarkable, when you have traveled so much in the umma. You must be willfully blind.”

“You don’t blow up girls’ schools?”

He made the fly-chasing motion again. “I have the greatest respect for women. A modest woman caring for her family is one of God’s greatest creations. But it is also obvious that when the head is full the womb is empty, as we observe throughout the West. In whatever nations that accept the curse of women’s education and freedom from the control of men, we see a rapid decline in population; we see pornography; we see sexual disease. Not a single one of the so-called advanced countries is reproducing its original population at replacement levels. In Europe, virtually all the population growth is Muslim, and it is clear now that in a certain number of years all these nations will have Muslim majorities. This is because we understand that the function of women is established by God and anything that seeks to destroy that function must be haram. Do you see? It’s really very simple. Islam is a simple religion, and therefore it is the truest and most beautiful of all religions. So tell me, who are you working for, the CIA?”

“That’s what everyone thinks, but I’m surprised you do too. I thought you would know that someone who speaks the local languages and is conversant with local culture couldn’t possibly work for the CIA. The CIA is a bunch of white men in suits having cocktails at the American embassy, when they’re not firing missiles into villages from drones, usually the wrong village.”

“Very amusing. But if you’re not a spy, what are you doing in the Northwest Frontier Province?”

“I was traveling to my brother-in-law’s house in the Leepa Valley to participate in a conference about how to bring peace to this region.”

“Oh? And how shall we bring peace to the region?”

“I have no idea. We didn’t get a chance to hold the conference.”

He makes a generous sweeping gesture. “Then by all means hold it. No one is stopping you.”

“You don’t mean that you’re setting us free.”

“Unfortunately not. But you can hold it here. The dining hall at the hujra will do very well. And I will attend. I too am a great lover of peace.”

“You’ll let me consult my colleagues.”

“You may inform them that such is my will. We will all attend, and we will provide burqas for you and the other female hostage. Perhaps you will learn something about modesty in your last days. You know, there is a long tradition in this region of kings bringing scholars before them to dispute philosophical matters. And I am, as you have perhaps observed, a quite traditional man. I believe I will find your conference entirely interesting.”

“In that case, I hope I can assure my colleagues that they will come to no harm while they are in your custody.”

“Well, yes, providing that our demands our met. I hope Idris was clear on that score. All of you are hostages for the good behavior of the crusaders. On any day that innocent Muslims are killed by their forces we will be forced to behead one hostage. Of course, I should not want to execute anyone whose presentation I had not heard, so I will trust you to arrange the speakers however you choose, and I would also insist that you personally select the hostages to be executed.”

Sonia stares at Alakazai and he returns her gaze blandly, as if he has just foretold the arrival of the next bus.

“Oh? Why me, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Because you are the enemy. In you is distilled in the purest form everything against which we fight. You are worse than a mere infidel. You are a Muslim who perverts and dirties everything that is most sacred in Islam. You are woman, who destroys modesty and encourages others to do so. I have read your books, you know, yes I have. I read them when I was a student, when you caused this great furor and you were condemned by the ulema. I wished to find you and kill you then, as did many others, but you know how it is with the enthusiasms of youth, one forgets, one gets involved in work and marriage, and so forth. But always in the back of my mind I thought I would do it. And now God has placed you in my hands, all unknowing, like a gift. Don’t you find that remarkable?”

“I do. And it is just as remarkable, don’t you think, that a conference devoted to exploring the mental pathology that underlies terrorism should itself fall victim to someone who exhibits just such pathology in the most extravagant detail? You really should let us live, sir, so that we can study and write about you and your organization. Like the patients of Jung and Freud, you would achieve immortality in the pages of psychiatric textbooks.”

He smiled. “You mean to provoke me, but I am not easily provoked, not like our Idris. I am a patient man and I will appear in books, but not because I am insane. You know, it is the victors who write the psychiatry books just as they write the history books. If the Germans had won the war, would the Nazi leaders be considered madmen? I don’t think so.”

“Perhaps, but moral relativism ill befits a supposed leader of mujahideen. If you really believe that, I would rather take my chances with Idris.”

“And be beaten to death?”

“Perhaps, and perhaps he will remember that God is merciful and compassionate. At least he is still a Muslim. What you are, I leave to God, who knows all the secrets of our hearts. Death comes to everyone, and whether it comes today or in a week or in twenty years is of little account.”

“You have no fear of the Hell that awaits you?”

“I do fear it. I have done wickedness and I will be punished for it. But I look forward to at least one pleasure in the next life, which will be to see you roasting below me in a far hotter fire.”

“You really are a ridiculous woman, you know that? I am a mujahid and a leader of jihad, and God’s word assures me a place in Paradise. I will be interested to see if you speak so brazenly after you have condemned your friends to death, when you are the last one and the knife comes for you.”

“Not the knife, Alakazai: even you would not be so foolish as to behead a woman. But, as Rahman Baba says, ‘All the world travels to the grave, as the caravan heads homeward; death reaps all souls, as the farmer cuts the ripened grain.’ None of us can say what God has in store. You may kill me or you may not. For all you know, at this very minute a drone missile is being targeted on this house, or perhaps, since I am an important CIA agent, they are waiting until I leave.”

She observes this last remark strike home: a little flicker of doubt, some fear in his eyes. She has spent much of her life reading the expressions on faces, in therapy and, before that, on her travels, when mistaking an expression, missing a lie, could be fatal. She is quite good at it, and even in this short interview she has learned more about her captor than he knows he has revealed.

He recovers his aplomb, makes a whisking gesture with his hand. “I assure you there is no chance of that; you will surely die, and your bones will be left to the dogs and birds. That will be your end. In the meantime, go and have your conference. There is little entertainment for a man such as myself in this place, and I look forward to seeing you perform.” He speaks an order to the guard, who walks over and pokes Sonia in the ribs with the barrel of his AK.

“Out,” he orders.

“I can’t walk. Look at my feet.”

“Crawl, then,” he says, and pokes her again, harder.

She slides from the charpoy and crawls. Behind her she hears Alakazai laughing.