The Good Son

13

A long with the rest of the village, Sonia awakens to the sound of the azan: make haste to worship, make haste to the real triumph, prayer is better than sleep! Agreeing, she shakes out of the really interesting dream she has been having, not even pausing to write it down, and goes to the prayer rug in the corner of the room marked with the qibla. She performs the ritual washing with the ewer and basin there and hears the sound of soft footsteps behind her. It is Amin. They wish each other peace, he washes, and they unroll the prayer rugs provided by the management and pray the Fajr, the dawn prayer.

Around them the infidels also arise, in their different ways. Father Shea kneels by his charpoy with his breviary, Manjit sits silently on his charpoy, perhaps in a meditative trance; Schildkraut sits slumped, coughing at intervals, staring at the ground; Ashton stomps heavily to the alcove where the slop pot is kept, trips over a blanket, curses vilely, and urinates with vigor, still cursing. Over this earthy noise they hear a sound that has become distressingly familiar: Porter Cosgrove has begun his groans and wails, and they can hear the soft strained murmur of his wife, trying to provide comfort.

“I thought Quakers were famous for being quiet,” says Amin. “Shame on me! That is uncharitable. See how quickly the peace of prayer evaporates under these conditions?”

“Yes,” says Sonia, “but isn’t it strange then that every religion looks back to its time of persecution as one where the faithful practiced the purest religion with the most fervor? Perhaps it’s different when one isn’t being persecuted for the religion per se.”

“No, I hardly think this captivity has to do with the religious beliefs of

our hosts. It is a tribal matter entirely, in my view. On the other hand, I confess I have become more punctilious in my observances since we were taken. Perhaps the mind is concentrated by the prospect of eternity, except in cases like poor Cosgrove there, when it is utterly destroyed.”

He cast a glance around the room, then stared for a moment at a particular vacant charpoy. He grabbed Sonia’s arm. “Good God! Where is Mr. Craig?”

Ashton emerged from behind the curtain. “What’s the matter?” he asked, when he saw Amin.

“Craig isn’t here. Is he behind the curtain?”

“No, nothing back there but the old piss pot. What, you mean he’s done a bunk?”

“I rather doubt that. They must have come in the night and taken him. My God, can they mean to kill him?”

“Why would they do that?” says Ashton. “He’s worth millions to them alive. Isn’t it obvious now why were were kidnapped? It’s a simple ransom scheme. All of us were what they call side catch in the fisheries game. Although I daresay they’ll find some propaganda use for us. Christ, I could kill for a drink! And I’d pick that weepy little bastard.” He gives the Cosgroves an angry stare. “What an absolute waste of a beautiful woman. Can you credit it? I wonder what she ever saw in him.”

“He did some heroic negotiations in Mozambique,” Sonia says. “Apparently saved countless lives. It’s an attractive trait, I suppose. Everyone responds to danger in a manner characteristic of their temperaments. Some grow stronger, like my friend Amin here, and some go to pieces.”

“Is that so? And what do you do? Seek the comfort of religion?”

“Yes, I do. And you get nasty.”

“Do I? Well, you can just kiss my arse, Miss Laghari, or Bailey, or whatever your name is. As I recall, it was you who concocted this brilliant idea of trekking through the most terrorist-strewn portion of the planet with a billionaire in tow. You might as well have taken out adverts-PARTY OF GORMLESS DO-GOODERS SEEKING YOUNG MEN WITH WEAPONS. MONEY NO OBJECT.”

Amin said, “Enough, Harold. Let us not make enemies among ourselves. We have enough in the vicinity.”

A short while later the point is proven, when the door flies open and a group of armed mujahideen storm into the room, Alakazai among them. The men herd the captives roughly into a group against one wall and Alakazai tells them that a missile strike in Badaur last night has killed fourteen people, four of them children, and that as a result, in accordance with his threat, one of the captives will be executed today after the noon prayer. To Sonia he adds, “Make your selection!”

“I haven’t decided yet,” answers Sonia.

“Then decide by noon, or by God I will take two at once. And before the execution you will have your conference. We shall all attend.”

With that, he leaves the room and his men follow after.

There is silence, except for Porter Cosgrove’s dripping sobs. Amin says, “Gather around this bed, my friends and we will do what must be done. Sonia, you have the cards?”

Sonia brings out her deck and places it on a blanket pulled tight across the string bed. She says, “Everyone cut the deck once, and then I’ll shuffle and deal out one card each. Low card loses, aces are high, repeat deal if there is a tie for lowest. Does everyone understand?”

Nods all around, and then, one by one, they cut the deck. Sonia gathers up the cards, gives them a thorough shuffle, and deals out one card to each. Ashton tosses his down first, turns and walks back to his bed. It is the ten of spades. Amin has the king of spades, Manjit the eight of hearts, Schildkraut the jack of clubs, Father Shea has the jack of diamonds, and Annette the six of clubs. Only Porter Cosgrove has not picked up his card. He is staring at it, like a bird at a cobra.

“Pick up your card, Porter,” says Amin.

“I won’t,” croaks Cosgrove. “I didn’t agree to this. This is not right. They have no right to do this to me.”

His wife reaches out a hand to touch him. Sonia notices that her face looks bleached, the freckles standing out starkly, like the onset of a disease. “Porter, please,” she says.

But he leaps to his feet and runs to the door, upsetting the blanket. The card flips and falls to the floor: the four of clubs. Instantly, Father Shea stands and runs after him, bringing him down with a football tackle. Annette lets out an un-Quakerish wail and moves toward her husband, but Sonia grabs her, folds her in a tight embrace. She resists, struggles a moment, then becomes soft, like a child, and from her throat comes the kind of hopeless keening that Sonia before this has heard only from Afghan women.

It takes the strength of Amin, Ashton, and the tiny contribution of Manjit to subdue Porter Cosgrove. He thrashes, he howls like an animal, he sprays thick saliva. At last, they use ropes torn from the charpoys to tie his hands and feet, and Ashton gags him with a strip of blanket, none too gently. But they can still hear him, cries like a distant bird and thumps as he strikes his head against the wall. In a civilized land he would, of course, be sedated, and his loved ones would not have to bear this, but here they must. Or she must.

Everyone goes to their own charpoy and lies down, exhausted, ashamed, except for Sonia, who sits with Annette and tries to comfort her. She is not good at it, she knows. Annette must sense this too, because she twitches her shoulders at the touch of Sonia’s hands, snarls, and tells Sonia to go away, to leave her alone.

Sonia does not. Instead, she reaches out toward the source of all compassion; she slides off the charpoy, kneels, and begins the zikr that will take her deep into contemplative prayer.

After an undefined period of this, she hears in her mind’s ear the laughter of her murshid. Of course she has time, all the time in the world. Through Ismail’s spirit, now burned into her heart, she has access to eternity. The answers will come.

– You begin to learn patience, I see, says the voice of her guide. She can just make him out, a figure glowing with wheaten light.

– Yes, and I recall you used to say it takes patience to learn patience, so how can anyone learn?

– It’s a mystery, he says, and laughs again.

– And is Paradise what you expected, my murshid? Is everything truly revealed?

– Indeed. Everything, including answers to questions we never thought to ask.

– And are there gardens and flowing streams and boys like strings of pearls?

– If I told you, you would not understand, but you would imagine that I described gardens and boys.

– Well, it won’t be too long before I will see for myself. I am going to die very soon, I think, and I’m afraid.

– Do you recall when I passed from the world, my murid?

– I do. It was in a filthy town outside Bukhara. You asked for wine and I gave you tea. Then you recited from Rahman Baba: If man’s purpose and destination is God, then all the dead are guides for the living; if travelers shout at the time of departure, all their shouts are bells for the sleepers. Oh, my murshid, I am awake now, be my guide! Help me to help this poor child!

– When pain exceeds its own bounds, it becomes the cure, he says, as the vision fades.

The line is from Ghalib. Strangely, Jung says almost the same thing, and Sonia has never before quite grasped the meaning, but she knows she would have a hard time explaining it to a suffering one. The panic and guilt she felt have now passed away. She feels a warm energy passing through her body and puts her hands on Annette’s back; the woman stiffens, then relaxes. Something is going on, but Sonia does not understand what it is. She knows only that it is something beyond understanding and is as grateful as she has been at any other time of her life.

Now the door opens again, and they all flinch, but it is only Rashida with their meal. They are ashamed to eat after what has happened, but they are hungry. They pass the chapatis and tea. Only Annette does not eat; she takes a chapati from the tray, stares at it, leaking slow tears, and tears the bread into tiny pieces, small as confetti. After some silence, Amin says, “I am afraid the morning still has a store of unpleasantness for us. My sense was that the person chosen for death would be the one to speak at this so-called conference. My God! I cannot believe these words are issuing from my mouth.”

“Yes, our ordinary language is quite inadequate for the situation,” says Schildkraut, “but this does not produce in me a desire for silence. In fact, I find my thoughts are bursting out of me, so much I had not realized that I wanted to say. It is clear to me, and I speak as a psychiatrist here, that Porter has in a sense abandoned rational speech entirely and retreated to animal levels. It is impossible for him to speak, obviously, so I am prepared to go on in his place, if that is agreeable.”

They start to make group-agreement noises, when Annette clears her throat and says, “No, I’ll do it. I know what he has to say. I’ve written enough speeches for him, haven’t I? I’ll give this one.”

They all gaze at her in amazement. Her eyes are red but crying no longer. She seems to have become a different person.

Some hours later, the room is packed to overflowing with the men of the village and the mujahideen troop. Sonia and the others are made to sit against the wall at the opposite end, ostentatiously guarded by rather too many armed men, as if they were dangerous criminals poised to escape. Porter Cosgrove has been released from his bonds and sits slumped over between his wife and Father Shea. Annette has been given a dark blue burqa, as has Sonia. Father Shea is speaking quietly to Cosgrove, a low confessional drone that Sonia cannot make out. Sonia wonders if he is seeking a last-minute conversion but dismisses this thought as unworthy. She wonders also what one actually says to a man about to die in an unjust execution, and whether Shea has ever done it before. Surely there can be no rubric for this office, but maybe there is. The Church has strange hidden depths.

Ashton is sitting on one side of her, Amin on the other. Ashton whispers to her, “I hadn’t realized there were so many of the bastards. What do you think, over a hundred at least? We must be more important than I thought.”

“It’s not just us. There’s a bomb factory in the village. It may be a major resupply depot.”

“And those are quartermasters, I suppose. Those over on the left are Arabs.”

All the charpoys have been moved to one end of the room, and upon these sit the dignitaries: Alakazai in the center, Mullah Latif on his right, Idris Ghulam Khan on his left. In the same row, also seated, is a group of men the prisoners have never seen before. They are darker and smaller than the locals. Sonia agrees with Ashcroft that they are Arabs. Their apparent leader is a wonderfully handsome young man of about thirty, with pale hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed black beard. The body language of the Pashtuns is easy to read, and Sonia observes that even the older men pay elaborate deference to him.

“Pretty Boy up there is no Arab,” says Ashton. “That’s odd.”

“He’s a Pashtun,” says Sonia. “I think he’s the one they call the Engineer.”

Ashton says, “Who is he?” but Sonia doesn’t answer because Mullah Latif has risen and raised his hands for silence. He invokes the blessings of God on this jirga and says they are gathered to hear the lies of infidels and apostates. Why should good Muslims and mujahideen hear lies? So they can resist them in their hearts, even as the Prophet, peace be upon him, heard the lies of Jews and Christians and made certain that they had rejected the holy word of God before he slew them. Thus, after the infidel speaks, our distinguished emir, Haji Bahram Pason Alakazai, will answer their lies and provide right guidance. Riotous applause, shouts: Death to the infidels! Death to America, death to Israel! When this dies down, the mullah withdraws and Alakazai rises. He describes the murder of innocents in the recent American missile strike and says that one of the hostages will be executed that day in revenge. More applause, the screams echoing off the low ceiling. He says that the choice of who will die will fall to the infamous apostate and blasphemer Sonia Bailey; as a punishment for her evil deeds she will send each of her companions to death. The assemblage loves this; it is such a Pashtun solution, redolent of the savage old tales, a clever trick to catch the evildoer in her own tangle and make her destroy her allies.

Two guards grab Sonia from the wall and pull her out into the room. One is a large man with a shaved head and a beard like a black bib reaching to his chest. His Kalashnikov is slung across his back. The other is a much smaller man in a black-striped turban and a Russian camo jacket, who has a scarred hook-nosed face like a nasty Western cartoon of a terrorist. He carries the AKMS version of the Kalashnikov, with the stock folded, and he likes to use it as a cattle prod. Sonia feels the muzzle jammed painfully into her ribs.

Alakazai says, “Choose!” and Sonia says, “I choose Porter Cosgrove,” and points to the cringing man. The guards hustle him out to the center of the room, the little one grinning and poking the prisoner with his weapon. Cosgrove falls to his knees and starts crying again; urine darkens the front of his trousers and pools on the floor, to the vast amusement of the assembly. A few of the onlookers leap out balletically to deliver a kick, others beat him with their shoes. When this jolly uproar fades (and it takes a long time), Alakazai says, “Does this worm have anything to say?”

Sonia says, “Yes, but he has been driven mad by what has been done to him, just as Muslims in American prisons have been driven mad by what has been done to them. The shame is on you, as it is on the Americans. But his wife knows what he would say if he were able, and she will speak.”

A babble of voices at this, with the mullah calling out that it is haram for a woman to speak to a jirga, but Sonia says in reply that Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and his wife Aisha were both consulted after the Prophet’s death by the rightly guided caliphs and spoke to assemblies of Muslims. They knew that women can be heard when they speak the words given to them by men, and so it is here.

There is some grumbling but in the end Alakazai allows it.

Annette comes forward and begins to speak. As they have agreed beforehand, she pauses after every phrase, and Sonia translates it into Pashto. She sees Alakazai frown at this-he had assumed that only a few of the assembly would be able to understand the doomsday speeches-but he does nothing now.

Annette says that she and her husband came to this country to speak about making peace. He has devoted his whole life to peace, and now he will be a martyr to peace. Why did they come into this country? Because every day a billion Muslims wish one another peace, yet from one end of the umma to the other, with few exceptions, there is no peace-there is dissension and riot, war, and calls for the death of this group or that-and they wished to learn why and to see if they could do something about it. Because, she says, peace is possible. It is not an idle dream of unrealistic people. She speaks about successful peace projects of the recent past, some of which she and her husband had helped bring about: Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Ireland, Bosnia. In Bosnia, she says, the Americans and Europeans prevented the extermination of Muslims, and also in Kosovo. So peace is possible, even in places that have been fighting for years. Why then is there still so much war? There are two reasons, she says. First, many people find war beneficial. They are nobodies in peacetime and great men in wartime, admired, powerful, and rich. Naturally, they do not want to give that up, so nearly all successful peacemaking must address the ego needs of these warmongers. This can be done far more cheaply than most people realize, and she gives examples of warlords bought off or retired. The second reason is that war literally maddens. People do things to one another in wartime that they would never think of doing otherwise, psychopathic criminality becomes the norm, and people believe that only “victory” can make things right, can justify what they have done. So they fight on, even if-especially if-they have lost sight of the original purposes of the war. But this madness can be cured, and has been, in many places. She talks about how, even under the most oppressive regimes, peace movements can and have flourished and prevailed, and gives examples from different nations and periods of history.

Sonia thinks it is a good speech, cogent and spoken from the heart. No one listens to it, of course, since here in the heartland of misogyny no man ever listens to what a woman has to say, especially about war. War is the life of men here; the Pashtuns have always had war: clan war, tribal war, the war of nations and empires when available; peace means poverty and boredom to them. If Sonia had translated into Estonian instead of Pashto they could not have been less interested. Nevertheless, Alakazai rises now and explains why the woman is in error. The wars of the infidels are of no concern to the faithful, they are a just punishment on a people who disdain God’s holy word and His prophet, peace be upon him. The jihad, on the other hand, is not war at all but a sacred duty and cannot and should not be stopped until the House of Peace, the umma, has won its final triumph over all unbelievers, which we rightly call the House of War. Everyone listens to this with respect and afterward they all shout the greatness of God and wave their weapons in the air.

Alazakai has been brief because the assembly is anxious to attend the next item on the agenda. He gives orders; the guards heave Cosgrove to his feet and drag him out, followed by the men and the prisoners. In the courtyard the prisoners are lined up against the wall as before. Sonia supports Annette, who does not seem to need much supporting; her face bears the thousandyard stare of the combat veteran. The sky is overcast, as it often is this time of year, and a chill wind whips up small dust devils in the yard. Then, remarkably, the sun emerges from a small gap in the cloud cover, as if on order. A man holds what looks like a professional camcorder. One of the Arabs has a smaller camcorder and there are quite a number of cell-phone cameras in use. Sonia reflects that neither these people nor the culture they represent could ever have even dreamed up such a thing as a camcorder or a cell phone, far less the Internet along which they will send the images, but they are perfectly comfortable using them, rather as worms infest a larder without any idea of where the food came from. She realizes this is an imperialist thought; perhaps these toys are only a fair recompense for the zero, paper, and algebra-gifts of the umma and vital to the rise of the West-but just then she is not ashamed of it; she wishes a CIA drone would fire a missile and burn all of them to a crisp.

The guards bind Cosgrove’s hands behind him and force him to his knees. There is no ceremony. A large man wearing a black ski mask comes forward carrying a chora, the thick-backed chopping knife of the Pashtuns, and strikes Porter Cosgrove’s head off with one blow. Sonia makes herself look, and like everyone who sees this phenomenon for the first time she is amazed at the height of the blood fountain that shoots from the severed neck and how much red liquid is contained in a human body. The sad corpse topples slowly over, and the dusty smeared head is held up by the executioner, to a great shout from the crowd attesting once again to the greatness of God.

Later, she is with Annette in the prison room, listening. The new widow is dry-eyed. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks, “I can’t feel anything. I mean, if we’d been together, if Porter hadn’t-you know-collapsed like that, like he decided to die, to dissolve, before they killed him, maybe that would’ve been different; we could’ve talked about our lives and I could’ve held on to something, I could’ve felt that our life together wasn’t meaningless. That pathetic thing they killed wasn’t him. What I said in that speech was real; that was the real Porter. I loved him. I thought I loved him, but who was he? Was he really that… sad thing? I can’t cry for that. Am I a monster? Why can’t I cry?”

“You’re in shock. Don’t be hard on yourself.”

“That’s your advice? Okay, I won’t be. I’ll watch a little TV and catch up on my e-mails. Is that Islamic, by the way? Is that what God says? I see you talking to Him all the time. Is it like He’s saying, Hey, when my servants cut off your husband’s head, kick back, take it easy! Only in more elevated language, of course.”

And more of this. Sonia endures it without demur, this outpouring of the poor woman’s rage against fate, against God; because fate and God have left the building and there is only Sonia, the closest thing to a responsible party. The mujahideen have done exactly the same thing in response to their injuries real and imagined, if more violently, and if Annette had been able to swing a chora, she might have chopped off Sonia’s head too.

“I know how you feel,” says Sonia, inserting this at a break in the tirade. A banality, but at certain times in life only banalities are appropriate. Annette makes the expected response; she sneers contemptuously and says, “Oh, do you? You saw your husband’s head get chopped off? Well, well, small world! Actually… actually, you have no fucking idea how I feel.”

“No, I’m serious,” says Sonia. “One day in Zurich, I received a telephone call telling me that my three children had been murdered in the assassination of their grandfather in Lahore. It was a bomb, and they were all burned beyond recognition. I didn’t go to the funeral, I didn’t even know about it until my niece thought to call me. I really was a monster at the time, certified monstrous by an Islamic court, exiled from my family and children. Would it have been worse if I actually saw them burn to death? I don’t know, but I do know that at the moment I got the call I would’ve given anything to have been there. If it doesn’t happen before your eyes, I think the human mind harbors the desperate illusion that maybe the loved ones survive; maybe they’ll show up someday; it was all a mistake. And in my case, it was a mistake. My boy survived and I was able to find him again. But my little girls are still dead. Aisha was eight, Jamila was four. So I do know how you feel.”

This revelation has the desired effect of snapping Annette-temporarily, at least-out of the downward spiral of self-pity and survivor’s guilt. She says, “I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you the most awful thing about it… no, the second most awful thing. A little heads-up for you. Tomorrow morning the sun will rise despite the horrendous thing that it looked down on today. Almost all the rest of the people on the planet will go on with their lives in utter indifference to what has happened to you. The executioners will not be sorry, and it’s odds-on they won’t be punished for what they did. They’re probably in the tea shop right now, laughing and joking about the day’s events. We will all be sorry and supportive, whatever that word means exactly, but we won’t be able to take any of your pain away, and everything we say to you will sound insincere. Because we didn’t love Porter and we won’t miss him, or at least not the way you do. And you’ll go on, too. You’ll fight it. You might not eat for a while, but sooner or later you’ll be hungry and you’ll eat, and the food will taste good, and in a shorter time than you imagine, someone will crack a joke and before you can recall that you’re a grieving widow, you’ll laugh. And assuming we survive this ordeal, you’ll have a life. You’ll drink cocktails and buy clothes and make love with a man. Yes, I can see the horror on your face, but you know I’m speaking the truth of my experience. From time to time, you’ll despise yourself, but you’ll have a life. What are you, thirty, thirty-two? You will not wear black until you fade away, mourning Porter Cosgrove. You will mourn for a time, and it’ll take different forms. For a week after I got the news about my children I was numb, a sleepwalker. I didn’t talk to anyone, wore the same soiled clothes. I ate from street vendors. One day I was on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, down the street from Globus on my way to buy a sausage bun, when it hit me in a different way and I started to scream and tear at my hair and face. I fell down on my knees and pounded my head on the pavement. This is not allowed on the Bahnhofstrasse. The police came and took me away and I ended up in the Burghölzli mental hospital. That was how I became a psychoanalyst.”

“I’ll have to avoid sausage buns. Good advice, Sonia.”

“See, you’re making jokes already,” Sonia says.

“Oh, shut up!” Annette replies and now it seems she does cry, not screaming or sobbing, but only a gentle liquid, snuffling sound, like a small defective pump. Sonia sacrifices the last of her precious tissue packs and waits.

“What’s the other thing?” Annette asked. “You said the world going on despite poor you was the second worst thing.”

“Yes. The worst thing is that at some level you welcome the loved one’s death. A child dies, the most horrible thing that can happen, right? And some part of you is thinking, Well, no more dirty diapers or Now I’ll have more money or I can travel freely. It’s part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can’t face. It’s the thing that, if we don’t deal with it, eventually poisons our lives. And no one is allowed to talk about that part of death. It’s considered insensitive. But actually it’s the height of sensitivity; you’re sensing something even the bereaved is unconscious of feeling. So your husband is cruelly taken from you, and you’re a good-looking, competent, talented woman of thirty, suddenly free of a much older man that most people found a little boring, whom even you were starting to find a little boring-”

“Stop it! God, you’re horrible!” This in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of the others, Ashton in particular, who rises from his charpoy and seems about to come over to them.

“Yes, I am,” says Sonia, “I’m horrible and you’re horrible and the mujahideen are horrible; we’re all horrible together, the only difference being I’m awake and you’re all asleep in your various dreams of goodness, them as holy warriors and you as innocent victim. Ah, I see Mr. Ashton has decided to join his comforting to mine. He’ll be the first of a long line anxious to brighten your new life.”

“Maybe I won’t have a new life. I might pick the next low card.”

“You won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Just the instincts of an old Jungian. Look, honestly, try not to worry. We’ll be all right, don’t ask me how, but we will. Now, here comes Harold with his consolations; take care. I’m going to check in with Schildkraut. I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

“It’s the dust, I’m afraid,” Schildkraut explains, when Sonia is by his side. “Where I come from, the mountain air is pure, but here not, it’s filled with fine particles and the wind never stops blowing it about. And there is this peculiar metallic powder over everything. What do you suppose they are doing to produce it?”

“It’s that grinding noise we hear all the time. Rashida says they’re making weapons in the village. She says it’s bombs that can blow up tanks, so I’m thinking some type of shaped penetrator. They use them in Iraq against American vehicles. Will you be all right? No, of course you won’t, but I meant as far as your next breath goes.”

“The next is fine,” he says, smiling. “The one after that, not as certain. I am so unfortunate as to have a slight bronchial problem and I am saving the last vapors of my inhaler for a true emergency. With any luck, I swill draw the low card next time and bronchitis will be the least of my problems.” In a more serious tone, he adds, “I could not help but overhear your conversation with Annette. You took a hard line.”

“Because we’re in a hard place. We can’t have her dissolve into guilty tears.”

“Why guilty? Perhaps she loved the man sincerely.”

“Perhaps, but if so I would’ve said the same things. Doesn’t the American sentimentality about death’s tragedy and the cult of victim-hood appall you? The whole sacredness of 9/11 and all the teddy bears and impromptu shrines whenever some act of violence occurs? It drives me nuts, frankly. It’s the denial of death and the dark elements and it pollutes and trivializes the whole culture.”

“Well, I’m a European, so it doesn’t annoy me as much, and as an unbeliever I am not as bothered by these outbreaks of petty paganism. There is something of the ayatollah in you, Sonia, I believe.”

“Yes, but one who draws the line at coercion. I say preposterous things to shake people up and bully a young woman who’s just lost her surrogate daddy. Disgraceful, really, and worse to justify it under the name of group discipline. I should have let her cry on my shoulder as Harold is apparently doing right now.”

The pair look across at Annette’s charpoy, where the young woman is in close conversation with Ashton, their two pale heads separated by inches. “Speaking of group discipline,” observes Schildkraut, “I expect our Harold is not so much comforting the widow as discussing plans for his escape scheme.”

Sonia stared at him in surprise. “What escape scheme?”

“He brought it to me, strangely enough, the last person one would’ve thought interested, and I told him I would take my chances with the cards. I wondered why he would have thought that a coughing old man was the best escape companion, especially when he had a bull like Amin or an athlete like Shea to choose from, and then it came to me that I am the only other one among us who is not religious. Harold is outraged that we are being killed in the name of-what did he call it? The psychosis of an illiterate camel driver fifteen centuries ago. I think he would not mind so much if they were killing him in the name of moderate socialism.”

“But Annette is a Christian.”

“Oh, I suppose her vague do-good Quakerism is acceptable.”

“Not to mention her more physical qualities. How does he intend to escape?”

“Well, he has noticed that Mahmoud comes to you in the night and takes you out for some hours to interpret dreams for people and then brings you back, escorting you into the room, when he checks to see everything is in order. Ashton has made a kind of cosh out of stones knotted into a sock, and with this he will lie in wait, and when you return he will lay out Mahmoud with a blow to the head, exchange clothes with him, and of course take his weapons. Annette will be in the burqa they gave her for the conference. They will slip out in the night, steal a vehicle, make their escape, and drive until they reach an army outpost or a patrol. He doesn’t think anyone will notice they are gone until dawn prayers the following day. The perpetual roar of the diesel will cover the sound of his stolen truck. He thinks.”

“Does he? Does he know that these people habitually disable their vehicles at night, just like they locked up their horses in the old days? Does he know that the area we’re in is completely controlled by Taliban and mujahideen groups? We haven’t even heard a helicopter since we’ve been here. And any military or police they may find might just as easily sell them back to the mujahideen. Does he have any idea what would happen to Annette, an unprotected woman and an American? They’d stake her down in a shed someplace and invite every man in the district to use her.”

The old man shrugged. “Apparently he has high-level contacts in the security services here. He hinted rather broadly that he was some kind of agent and that as soon as he got free and made contact, all would be well. Do you think he was fabricating?”

“I don’t know. Manjit thinks he’s a spook, and Manjit’s no fool.”

“What will you do, Sonia, now that you have this information?”

“I don’t know,” she answers. “But Annette can’t go with him.”

In the night, Sonia awakens to movement, the creak of a charpoy, a rustle of clothing. She does not sleep deeply now; sleep seems less necessary since Ismail came to her, there in the pit. She lies still and waits. Before long she hears the door open and feels moving air on her cheek, then a hand on her arm. It is Mahmoud. She rises, throws her dupatta over her head, and leaves with him. He takes her through the inn, but not to the same room. It is one closer to the sound of the diesel. There are rugs and cushions there and a dim oil lamp burning on a small table. He tells her to sit and wait, then leaves. He has an odd expression on his face, she thinks, frightened but also excited.

A few minutes pass, then Idris Ghulam enters. He sits on the cushions opposite her. His face, his black eyes, look fierce in the yellow lamplight. He says, “If you are a witch, then I am cursed. I gave orders that you should not interpret dreams, but everyone ignores this, and now even I am ignoring my own order. No one but Mahmoud knows I have come here, and he knows I will kill him if he tells, and to you I say the same thing. If I hear from anyone about this, on that day you die. Do you understand me?”

“You don’t have to threaten me, Idris. I am trained to keep secrets. It is my honor to keep secrets. And besides, Alakazai will kill me whatever you do. So you need have nothing to fear from me. But you have come here to tell me your dream. You have had a dream, not like the one you had before, but a good dream.”

He gasps and says, “How did you know?”

“Because I said it and it was so. I also say there was a woman in your dream.”

“Yes, there was! A beautiful woman in an abaya made of gold. She was gigantic, as tall as a house. I was like a child next to her. She said she would lead me to Paradise. How did you know?”

“You would not understand if I told you,” Sonia says. “Just tell me your dream, as much as you remember.” It was a reasonable guess, she thinks, with some satisfaction. Men in patriarchal cultures who are under extreme psychological stress often have anima dreams, as the suppressed female principle in them struggles to break out.

Idris says, “I was in a room, in a palace, everything marble and gold, and fine rugs on the floor. The woman came and told me this was the porch of Paradise, and I was welcome to come in, but God had something He wanted me to do. Of course, I agreed. So she said I should follow her, and she led me through a door and down a grand stairway, down and down, and as we went lower, the stairway became poorer and narrower and lower, and it stank. It was dark, I could no longer see the woman, but I could hear her voice. At the bottom of the stairs was a small stone room and on the floor were three pots, one filled with sand and the other two empty. The light was dim, like candlelight, but there was no candle. The voice said, Idris, here is sand: you must separate the black grains from the white, putting the white grains in the right-hand pot and the black grains in the left. And take care not to put a single grain wrong, or you will be condemned to eternal fire, for this room is the gateway to Hell. Then I was alone, and I thought, I am doomed, because no one can do this task, not in a thousand years. Then I prayed in my despair, but there was no answer from God. After a while I heard a tapping sound, and footsteps, and into the room came a little girl, a beautiful little girl, but she had a stick; she was blind. She asked what I was doing there and I told her and she said, Oh, that is an easy task if you know the way of it. I will teach you. I said, how can you separate the black grains from the white? You are blind. She said, I am not really blind. It is a pretense, because my father wishes me to marry a man I don’t like, so I pretend to be blind. Do you want me to help you or not?”

Here he pauses and passes a hand over his face. Sonia waits. A minute goes by and then he speaks again.

“Because I knew it was wrong to ask the help of a disobedient girl I said nothing. I thought, This is a test of God; this is the real test. But she seemed to know my thoughts; she said, Idris, don’t be foolish. God does not play tricks. Do you want help or not? So I said yes, please help me, although the words stuck in my throat. She took my right hand in hers and plunged it into the sand, and I found I could feel the difference between the grains. The black grains felt as big as peas. In a short time I had separated all the grains perfectly. And as soon as the last grain fell, the room and the little girl disappeared and I awoke.”

“This is a very good dream, Idris Ghulam. The great pir Najd ad-din Kubra writes of such a dream and calls it one of the greatest of dreams sent by God. Don’t you feel that it is?”

“Yes. I felt very peaceful after I awoke, but also confused. Can you tell me what it means?”

“I can. But you will not like to hear it. You will cry out at me that I am making a false interpretation, even though in your deepest heart you will know it is true. Are you willing to hear it?”

“Yes,” he says impatiently. “Get on with it!”

“Then listen, in the name of God the merciful, the compassionate! This is a dream about the greater jihad, the struggle within the human soul to reach God through right thinking and right actions. The woman is Wisdom, and she is an aspect of the divine presence. Wisdom is often a woman in dreams of men, because it comes through an inner part of them they do not listen to, in the way of men who think that women have nothing of importance to say. You are that kind of man. She says she can lead you to Paradise, which is true, but the way does not lead through fine furnishings and marble halls. These represent the goods of this world, gold and land and honor and reputation. Wisdom says you must turn your back on these and plunge downward into a filthy stairway. This represents evil, the dark things that you do and do not admit are wrong and against God’s law. But God sees everything. The bowl of sand means all the actions you do in religion with an impure heart, all the hypocrisies, the insincere prayers, the false teachings that have infected your mind. It is as impossible to arrive in Paradise through these as it is to separate the black grains from the white in a bushel of sand. Now a helper comes, and she is a little girl, a disobedient little girl, who pretends blindness. The meaning of this is that you yourself are pretending blindness, and that also you have given your obedience in error.”

Here he interrupts. “How? When did I ever pretend blindness?” But even in the dim lamplight she can see the worry in his eyes.

“You pretend not to see that Bahram Alakazai, whom you follow, is an unworthy leader. Where did he come from? What is his khel and tribe? When did the Pashtun ever follow such a man? Yet you follow him because he has money and weapons and promises you power, and at his command you make war on women and on the people of a Muslim nation.”

“You lie, woman!”

“See? I told you you would say that, but I am not lying. It is my honor to tell the truth about dreams, and you know I am honorable, for didn’t I endure the torture instead of falsely confessing to blasphemy? Now, do you want to hear the rest of the interpretation?”

He nods and makes a gesture with his hand and she continues. “A little girl shows you the secret of the sand, and this allows you to separate the black grains by touch. You could not have imagined such a thing, because no man can imagine God’s mercy. This dream also says you must use a different sense than you thought, not vision, but touch. This means that all you thought was true must be considered again, to tell the good from the bad. After you accomplished the task, you had a feeling of peace, which is but a pale ghost of the feeling you will have when God takes you to Him. It is a promise, but only if you turn from the path of murder and pride and do the work of the greater jihad. That is the end of the interpretation.”

He sits in silence, stroking his beard; she studies his face. For a moment the harsh Pashtun male mask he wears fades and a more contemplative person is revealed. They get that from the secret life they share with their mothers, she thinks. The poor women have only a single opportunity to acquire a fragment of power over their lives, and this is through their sons when they are small. But the women are stupid and beaten down, so they can rarely give their boys the spark of a strong opposite, the feminine introject that leads to individuation. And so the boys never grow up. They retain the brutality and carelessness of boys for their whole lives, living on boasts and the good opinion of their gang. And they have the short attention span of boys and the romantic wildness, building nothing, dumbfounded by the civilizations around them, knowing as little of how a political order or a modern economy is constructed as a six-year-old knows about what his father does at work. So they are doomed to poverty, the manipulations of others, and early death.

Idris utters something underneath his breath. She sees the mask drop into place and he rises with one swift motion. In a stiff, harsh voice he says, “But after all, it is only a dream and dreams are not real life. They are of no account in real life.”

“Nor is the world to come a part of real life, yet the Prophet, peace be with him, told us to value it above every other thing. You have been given a great gift, Idris Ghulam. God will not be pleased with you if you throw it away.”

The man’s fists clench and he seems about to say something, but instead he turns away and leaves the room. There are six more clients that night, including Rashida’s mother and several of the mujahideen. They relate the simple dreams of simple people, or so she decides to consider them. They want to know what will happen to them, should they sell a cow, will the child just started be a son? She answers as best she can in accordance with the ancient Sufi dream books. They seem satisfied and happy that there is no charge.

Mahmoud leads her back to prison. When they come to the door, Sonia turns and faces the guard. She says, “Mahmoud, wait! If I save your life now, will you promise me something?”

“What is it? And how will you save my life?”

“First swear by God and upon your head and the head of your son that you will do as I ask, if it does not soil your honor. I am an honest woman, as you know, and I swear by my honor that I am not trying to trick you. And recall your dream, that you would profit by helping a boy who was not a boy. This is the moment foretold, for that boy is me.”

He goggles at her. “How is this possible?”

“It is a long story, Mahmoud, well known to others, but I do not have time to recount it here. Swear now, in the name of God.”

The big man ruminates on this for some seconds and then nods. After the required oaths he asks, “So now, how will you save my life?”

She says, “Behind that door is a man with a club, and as soon as you step through it he will break your skull, take your clothes and weapons, and try to escape.”

Mahmoud growls and moves forward, but she stands in his way. “No, you will do nothing to this man; that is my request. Recall that you promised to obey! Don’t come through the door after me as you usually do. Let me slip in alone.”

He glares; she holds him with her eye and hopes he was frightened of his mother. He relents, opens the door, she slides in, and he locks it. The room is utterly dark except for the dim sliver of light from the guard’s lantern coming from under the door. She can see Ashton’s bare feet as he waits with his weighted sock. She ignores him and his muffled curse, and the black shape, crouching there, Annette in a burqa.