The Good Son

5

B ound together in a line, the Conference on Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach is herded through the night over rocky trails, across drifts of sand and shale that drag at their feet, through ankle-twisting boulder fields, across freezing streams. Sonia is tied behind Karl-Heinz Schildkraut and in front of Annette Cosgrove, who is the last of the coffle. Schildkraut is wearing European slip-on shoes and in the waning daylight Sonia can see they are coming to pieces. Sonia herself is wearing sandals made of buffalo hide, of local manufacture, and she has complete confidence in them, although her feet are now soaked and numb with cold. Schildkraut stumbles often and several times falls heavily. When this happens their silent captors jerk at his rope and prod him with the butts and barrels of their rifles until Sonia and Annette grab him by his arms and help him to his feet. He is ashen and wheezing, and Sonia tries to suppress useless feelings of guilt. She thinks he might not survive this travail.

A military helicopter flies low overhead, and at the first sound of its engine their captors shove and club them all into the convenient overhang of a rock wall until it has passed. Then they are on the move again, driven like animals. Sonia feels herself descending into animal mind: the future fades, the past fades, there is nothing but the next step, the pain from her many bruises, and the chafing cords. She is barely conscious of the passage of time, until she becomes aware that the sun has sunk below the mountain ridges and color has leached out of the surrounding landscape. Still they are pushed along relentlessly until it is hard to see their footing in the gloom, the captives are tripping at every other step, and at last someone at the head of the line falls off the trail into a shallow ravine and the whole group is yanked off their feet. The kidnappers call out to one another as they attempt to get their captives back on the trail. Sonia crawls forward from where she has fallen to where Schildkraut lies.

“Karl-Heinz, are you all right?” she whispers.

“I am alive, at least. I would have worn my hiking boots if I had known this was part of the conference program.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says and then one of the kidnappers comes along and tells her to be quiet and get to her feet. When she doesn’t move quickly enough to suit him, he jabs her in the ribs with the muzzle of his AK. She stands up and looks him in the face. There is still just enough light to see he is a young man, in his late teens at most.

She says, in Pashto, “How dare you strike me, you little pisser! I’m old enough to be your grandmother. Does your mother know you’re out in the night beating women?”

The boy’s eyes widen. He raises his weapon to firing position. “Move!” he says.

Sonia raises her voice. “How? I am tied to this man.”

The boy kicks at Schildkraut, producing pitiful groans. It is unbearable to watch and Sonia throws her own body over his, crying out for the abuse to stop. A moment later, Annette Cosgrove rushes forward and also flings herself down to protect the old man’s body. “Don’t hurt him,” she shouts, and she has a carrying voice. Sonia hears Annette’s husband call out her name from forward on the line. The other prisoners now also call out; there is a commotion, guards and prisoners shouting. Their cries echo from the now-invisible rock walls of the gully.

Sonia adds her voice, louder still: “Look, this is an old man. He must rest, or if you want him to move at this pace, someone must help him, and we can’t if we’re tied up like this. Do you think we’ll try to escape? How could we? From twenty armed men when we don’t know where we are? If you untie us, the stronger will be able to help the weaker ones and we won’t fall as much and you will go faster to wherever it is you’re taking us.”

Sonia hears a voice calling out in Pashto, “Patang! What’s going on back there? Shut that woman up!”

Sonia says, “Patang, talk to him! Tell him what I said! Believe me, you will move more quickly. Otherwise, you might as well shoot us all now.”

The boy hesitates, then leaves briefly and returns with a thin man in a large black turban and a sheepskin jacket. Sonia listens while the boy Patang explains the problem as she had expressed it, to which the other man replies, “Cut them loose and shoot the old man. We can’t afford to waste any more time.”

Sonia cries out, “Oh, I see I was mistaken-I thought you were mujahideen. I prayed you were mujahideen. But now I see you are only bandits, and accursed of God.”

With that, she drops down again on Schildkraut, covering his head and shoulders with her body while Annette Cosgrove lies across his legs and lower back.

“Now you will have to kill three of us,” Sonia says, in the same loud voice, “and then you will have to kill her husband too, and that will be four of nine hostages you won’t have, and who will make up the ransom for them? Think, man! Nine hostages delivered on time in reasonable condition against five, and maybe fewer than five, because no one can walk through this country tied together with their hands bound. What will you do if there are broken legs or broken necks?”

Sonia cannot see the man’s face, but she does not think he will shoot them, nor does she think he will order the boy to shoot them, or that the boy would obey such an order. She has spent a good deal of her life among violent men of this type and she is betting three lives that she has judged them correctly. A minute passes. She can hear Schildkraut’s heavy breathing and the lighter breaths of the other woman. She is deeply grateful that Annette backed her play. That was another quick assessment that worked out. She hears low voices and the sound of retreating footsteps and then shouts from the head of the column.

The boy bends over her and grabs her arm. She sees the flash of a knife and her hands are free. The boy says, “You women will support the old man. If he cannot keep up then we will shoot him.”

Now he stares at her, because she is not moving to help the other woman. Instead, she has broken a branch off a small bush and is sweeping the dust from a flat area to the side of the trail.

The boy looks baffled. “What are you doing?”

She says, “Since you have taken my prayer rug, I must clean a portion of the ground, as is permitted.”

“You’re going to pray?” the boy asks, staring.

“Yes. The sun has gone down and it’s time for the Maghrib prayer.” With that, she begins the ritual ablutions, using sand, as is allowed in the absence of clean water. Patang observes this in silence for a moment and then runs off. Sonia rubs the designated parts of her body with the flinty sand, reties her head scarf, and, facing east, prays the du’a.

She hears footsteps, whispered conversation, and then the murmur of two dozen men praying. Interesting, she thinks, when the prayer is done; they were going to skip it to save time, and wonders what fallacious reasoning had been put forward to allow that grave sin of omission.

Schildkraut is somewhat revived by the brief rest. Sonia and Annette throw his arms over their shoulders to support some of his weight, and with the rest of the party they move off down the narrow track. The kidnappers have taken all their watches, but the sky is clear and full of needle-sharp stars and by observing their motion Sonia can estimate the time elapsed after sunset. She thinks it is about four in the morning when they reach what appears to be an actual road, narrow and rocky. The mujahideen assemble their prisoners along the road, commanding them to be silent and once again binding their hands. They wait; the stars wheel overhead, the captives shiver where they sit. Sonia discovers that the man sitting next to her is William Craig. She can see his glasses glitter in the starlight as he shivers.

She asks him how he is.

“Terrific. I twisted my ankle and I’m freezing to death. Who the hell are these people?”

“They’re mujahideen. Self-proclaimed Islamic warriors.”

“What do they want with us? Is it ransom?” “I think they want to make a political point. We’re from the West, and the West is the enemy. So we’re fair game.”

“But who do they answer to? Surely they’re open to negotiation at higher levels.”

His voice has risen and this attracts the attention of one of the guards, who comes over and tells Craig to shut up, and although Craig does not speak the language and has not recently been told to shut up by anyone, the message is conveyed, and Craig falls silent. Sonia hadn’t a good answer to his question anyway.

After perhaps an hour, they hear the sound of an approaching engine. It is a five-ton truck with the high arched frame typical of the region standing above the truck bed. The mujahideen swarm around the truck, speaking softly and working at something Sonia can’t quite make out but which involves off-loading large bales and crates. Then the prisoners are made to stand, and they are gagged with rags and hustled into the empty bed of the truck. There they are arranged to lie supine in three rows, head to toe, like sardines. Ropes are passed over their bodies securing them to bolts in the truck frame so they can’t move at all and then a plank floor is laid over them, and on this floor the men reload the crates and bales.

The truck starts. After a few minutes, the discomfort of the prisoners becomes real pain, then what seems unbearable pain, as the motion of the truck on the rough road smashes them up against the false floor and then down on the unyielding ribbed steel of the truck bed, but as the hours pass they discover that more can be borne than they had imagined. Sonia hears muffled weeping, but she can’t tell who weeps.

It is like being in a coffin, without the peace of the grave. She fights the instinctive panic, controls her breathing, welcomes the pain, concentrates on freeing her hands; it takes what seems like hours to do this, and when they are free she pulls the gag from her mouth and reaches out. Annette Cosgrove is next to her and she pats the young woman’s thigh, which is all she can do for her; she is still lashed rigidly to the deck of the truck, and even if she were free there is not enough clearance above her face to enable her to move from her slot.

They roll on and, as night passes into day, tiny dots of light appear, cast through holes in the truck’s bed, but there is nothing to see except the planks lying inches above their faces. Sonia is thinking about entombment, the physical kind that she experiences now, and the other kind, the psychic kind, the closed hell of unhappy families, of addiction, with which she has had much to do in her work, in her own life.

She recalls reading that the pain of a toothache will drive all so-called psychological suffering out of your head, but now, suffering physically as much as she ever has, she thinks that is cynical and not true. The suffering, even the torture, imposed by one’s enemies can be borne because it is imposed, the sufferer is not responsible for it; the enemy acts through hate, and the answer is the same one Jesus gave from the cross: they don’t know what they are doing. Yes, they can break your body, but also aren’t they a little foolish? Aren’t they like little boys pulling the legs off insects?

And also one is inspired by the famous tortured ones who did not break-Saint Joan, Mandela, the survivors of the camps-so there is a model, and these examples shine light into the darkest cell.

But it is different, she thinks, when the suffering is imposed by those who are supposed to love you, whom you are supposed to love. Then there is no escape, then you must learn to love the lash, and then there are no noble examples to follow; there is no nobility at all. And the worst torturer is the most beloved of all, the self, for who knows better where the knife must twist to yield the most exquisite agony?

Tea with Farid’s mother, Noor, and her lady friends, and her three sisters: what could be more calm, civilized, elegant? Oh, Farid, my husband, she thinks, and laughs inwardly, would it surprise you to know that I would rather be captured by terrorists than sit through another one of those endless afternoons? Women like Noor, upper-class Lahori begums, had only two functions in life, keeping their husbands contented and marrying off their children in a satisfactory way. Sonia’s arrival, she gathered (and really gathered in hard-earned bits, since no one ever bothered to explain it to her) had presented Noor with an intolerable conflict: Baba wanted Sonia accepted into the family home, so of course she had to be accepted; but this meant that Noor would forever after be saddled with the most unsatisfactory daughter-in-law imaginable, a shame to her distinguished family and friends.

Until she met Noor and her circle, that house of staring women, the subtle, unchallengeable knives of their looks, Sonia had never been exposed to naked contempt. In the circus life the rubes admired the circus people, of course, and within the circus family a strict hierarchy ruled; everyone knew their place, and while there was certainly enough nastiness and petty intrigue, this did not break the essential solidarity of their lives, which was the show, their show, against the world.

But in her father-in-law’s house Sonia was all alone. She didn’t speak the languages, she didn’t know the rules, and she hardly knew her husband, who seemed like a different person in his father’s house from the one she had known in New York. The air in that house seemed to have shriveled him; he did nothing in her defense; he told her, Sonia, just be nice, they’ll get used to you and you’ll learn how we do things here.

So she learned. She was bright and observant and soon discovered she had an ear for languages, and when she could understand a little she was able to comprehend the full extent of the contempt in which she was held. She started to get the little asides at the tea parties now, the comments on her physical appearance (a corpse, a skeleton, a demon), on how she held a teacup, her utter lack of any family.

Her status rose considerably when she gave the Lagharis a grandson. Now she was tolerated by the women, although it was made clear to her that she knew nothing about rearing a child, that Noor would make the decisions about how to raise him, that the actual daily care would be provided by an ayah whom Noor would choose. The only fight she won in that period was choosing the child’s name: Theodore, after her own father; Laghari Sahib, from whom there was no appeal, agreed. He thought it distinguished to have a grandson named Theodore Abdul.

Gradually, she came to understand the power of the weak. She cultivated Baba, she flattered, she learned reams of poetry, both English and Urdu, for his delight, she became another prized exotic pet, like his parrots, his Yorkie. And she suborned the servants with bribes and gifts, she listened to their tales of woe and injustice and sympathized, she learned the various languages of that city. She sought allies and found one in Nasha, the wife of Gul Muhammed, Laghari Sahib’s Pashtun bodyguard. From her Sonia learned Pashto and something about the way of the Pashtuns. The women became friends of a sort. They were both isolated from their native cultures, lonely and vulnerable, so they had a basis for companionship. Here also she made her first connection with Nasha’s son, Wazir.

In fact, it was Wazir, more than anyone else, who taught her Pashto. He was three or so when she was pregnant with Theo and it was love at first sight, the way it sometimes happens between a child and a woman who is unsure about being a mother. After Theo was born, and it became clear to Sonia that raising him would be a perpetual battle for control against Noor and the dread weight of Punjabi culture, she found a kind of release in being a second mother to little Wazir. And this was possible because there was something wrong with the first mother. Nasha was sickly, she had endured a series of miscarriages, and the one baby she had produced besides Wazir had died in infancy. Her chief terror was that Gul Muhammed would divorce her and send her back in disgrace to her village in Afghanistan. Against this, there was only one possibility for survival-that her son would become a great and powerful man. It was Sonia who convinced her that the road to power for a man in the late twentieth century was through education, and Sonia had gone to Laghari Sahib and told him that Wazir was unusually bright and deserved an education equal to that which his own sons had received and which his grandson would receive. She used every circus wile she possessed to do this, to sell the proud old man on the idea that it was part of his own uniqueness, and part of the debt he owed his bodyguard, to send the young Pashtun to Aitchison College, the Eton of Pakistan.

So it was done, and Gul Muhammed agreed, for he was a sworn servant of Laghari Sahib. It was Sonia’s first real victory in the house of Laghari. Later, she continued her interest in Wazir’s education, making him into something neither Nasha nor her husband could ever have conceived, and whether it was a prize or a curse had still not been established.

With effort, Sonia turns her thoughts away from this line; she does not want to think about Wazir just now. Instead she thinks of how she managed her escape from the house of Laghari and its whispering women. From the bazaar, secretly, she had obtained the clothing of a Pashtun boy: worn and faded shalwar trousers, a kurta, a long Pashtun waistcoat, a turban wrapping her hair. At dawn one morning, dressed in these clothes, she slipped from the sleeping house, down the back alleys of Anarkali to the Urdu Bazaar and felt free for the first time in she could not recall how long it had been, since at least her girlhood in the circus, once again feeling the superiority of the show people over the rubes.

It was not invisibility. For a large part of any male Muslim population, a smooth-faced boy, especially one who appears poor and unattached, is as attractive as a woman, something Kipling didn’t bother to mention when he described Kim’s adventures, and as she strolled through the bazaar there were whispered invitations. But she found these easier to dismiss than the ones she got on these same streets as a woman.

She was just avoiding a particularly importunate bazaari when she turned a corner and saw Ismail Raza Ali on his mat. He was telling a story to a small group of men and boys sitting or standing around him. The public storyteller had almost disappeared from Lahore’s markets in those days, drowned out by recorded music, unmuffled scooters, motor tricycles and trucks and unable to compete with the attractions of film and TV. She was surprised to see even one survivor, so she stopped and listened.

He was telling the story of the fisherman and the demon, and the magical fish the demon taught him how to catch, in colors red, blue, green, and yellow, and what happened when these fish were brought to the king and fried: the mysterious woman who appeared though a wall in the palace kitchen and asked, “O fish, have you kept the pledge?”

Like all stories from the Thousand Nights and a Night, this one has no end but blends into another one, and another. The storyteller stopped his tale at the point when the king journeys from the enchanted lake where the colored fish are caught and finds the palace with the unfortunate prince inside it, half man and half black stone.

A sprinkle of small coins and crumpled rupee notes fell into the man’s profferred brass bowl and the little crowd dispersed. But Sonia stayed.

The storyteller placed his takings in a leather purse and, leaning on his staff, stood and wrapped a patched gray cloak over his shoulders. Sonia saw he was only as tall as she herself and just as wiry, his face the color of an old saddle and curiously saddle-tight and smooth over the high cheekbones. His eyes had the Asiatic fold in them, she noticed, when he turned them on her, and they had in them a look that combined amusement and penetration. He said to her, “That is thirsty work. How about a cup of tea down the road?”

She followed him to a tiny stall, where he was known and salaamed amid smiles by the host, who served them sweet milky tea and small cakes twice as sweet as the tea.

Sonia was a little shocked because the man had addressed her in English. In Pashto she asked him why he had spoken thus to a Pashtun boy. He said, laughing, “Because you are not a Pashtun boy but an English girl.”

“American,” she said. “How did you know?”

“Wrists. The line of your neck. The way you listened, which is the way a Westerner listens and not the way a Pashtun boy would listen.” Here he produced on his face an expression of dull amazement and laughed when she did. She introduced herself as Sonia Laghari, and he wished her peace and announced himself as Ismail Raza Ali.

She pointed to his cloak and asked, “And are you really a Sufi sage or are you as fraudulent as I?”

He answered, “Indeed I am fraudulent or I would long since have overcome my nafs, what you call the ego, and would be conversing with angels instead of fake Pashtun boys. But I am also a sincere Sufi, of the Sufi order Naqshbandiyya. I have been in the south, in Sindh, where the shrines of our saints are thick on the ground and where the Sufi pirs are even more fraudulent than I, being very rich and driving around in limousines while the peasants starve. So I am going north. There are shrines and tombs I must visit, and I especially want to visit the shrine of Hazrat Shah Azar Basmali again. It was there many years ago that God spoke to me and set me on this path I am now upon.”

“North,” she said. “As far as Pindi?”

“Farther.”

“Peshawar?”

“Farther.”

“Beyond the passes? Afghanistan?”

“Beyond Afghanistan.”

“But there is no going beyond Afghanistan,” she said. “It’s the Iron Curtain.”

He smiled. “It’s rusty nowadays. People do pass. The guards are ill-paid and lazy. They like tapes and tape players as much as anyone, you know, and the eyes of Moscow are far away. Also, I am a very obscure person, no one notices me. I leave one week from now.”

She said without thinking, reflexively, like a knee jerk, “Take me with you!”

Another, thinner smile. “And why would you want that, ‘boy’?”

She said, “Because the life of a little begum does not suit me. My husband is a fine man whom I do not love. My baby is cared for by many hands, all more skillful than my own. My mother was eaten by a lion. I wish to find God and ask him why. If I don’t get away, I will kill someone, or disgrace myself in some hideous way, which I don’t wish to do, for it would harm people who have been nothing but kind to me. Yet kindness is not enough.”

“No, it is not. But unfortunately, you would attract notice, even as a boy. Perhaps even more as a boy. You know the Pashtun song that goes, ‘I know a boy with a bottom like a fresh peach, but he is across the river’?”

“They would not notice me if I was your murid. I would wear my sleeves long and a Pashtun scarf around my neck. And I would make sores on my face with flour paste and rouge. Although I will be ugly and contemptible, I will still be of use, for you must have a disciple like other Sufis do. What if you got sick or hurt? Who would care for you?”

“And how would you care for me? How would you earn bread? Would you tell stories in languages you cannot speak?”

“No, I will be mute. But I can do this.” So saying, she tossed some small coins into her empty teacup, covered them with the saucer, shook them to a rattle, and then upended the cup on the saucer. She lifted the cup with a flourish. The coins were gone.

“A useful trick,” he said, after a short pause. “Although it is more useful to make money out of nothing than to make it vanish, which I can do all too well by myself. But you are right in that it is traditional for someone like me to have a disciple, and I have none. Regrettably, I do not attract the more devout youth, ah… what shall I call you? Not Sonia; but Sahar is a good Pashtun name; we met in the morning, after all, and that name means morning in Pashto. So, Sahar, I have no murid because I am not very holy. I drink, I run my fingers under the buttocks of devout youth, I eat the food of unbelievers-well, many Sufi do that-but I also say disturbing things about Islam.”

Ismail shoved his stick in the path of a genuine street boy.

“Ho, you, boy! Stop!”

The boy paused, wary as a fox.

“Here is ten rupees,” said Ismail. “Take a message for me to the house of Amu the goldsmith on the street of the jewelers, and you will get another ten. Here is the paper. Go!”

The boy ran off through the crowd.

“That is a messenger,” said Ismail. “He carries a message to my friend Amu; Amu reads it and carries out my instructions. What he does not do is to treat that ragged, ignorant boy as if he were me, filled with however little wisdom and sagacity I have been able to gather in a long life. Amu would be a fool to do that. Yet the Muslims treat God’s messenger as if he were God Himself; every remark someone heard fall from his lips is sacred, as if it were Qur’an itself. As for the noble Qur’an-I was not there when it was written down, nor was the Prophet, peace be upon him. Who can tell what was slipped in or revised or mistranslated? Arabic is in any case a slippery, allusive tongue. They say, you know, that any word in Arabic can be made to stand for camel. So I believe that God wants us to pray and fast and give to the poor and help those in need and be compassionate, yes? But what interest can the Lord of the Day of Judgment possibly have in eating pork or drinking wine? And did He who created women with the same hand really want their witness to be worth half that of a man? When anyone with eyes can see that the world is full of women more truthful and penetrating than the mass of men? But the Muslims don’t want to hear this, for they much prefer their religion to God. In this, all men are the same: Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian; they say, Lord, Lord, here is this little ritual, be content. O God, do not love me out of existence! God, however, is not religious. God is the flame of love. He desires us to love Him as He loves us, but all human things, including Islam itself, stand in the way of this love, for all human things strengthen the nafs. Even fighting to supress the nafs strengthens the nafs. And piety strengthens the nafs more than anything else. I am good, they cry, so God must love me. But there is no ‘because’ with God’s love.”

“Then why be a Sufi?” Sonia asked. “Why not sink into drunkenness and lechery and forget the whole thing?”

“I do sink into drunkenness and lechery,” cried Ismail. “I do. But that only makes me remember the more, not to forget.” He gave Sonia a grin that demonstrated the latter vice. “And as my murid will you warm my bedroll in the cold of the hills, as a good murid should? Perhaps you have a bottom like a ripe peach.”

“If you like,” replied Sonia, and he laughed in delight.

“But,” he said, “we must first supply you with a thing which, once seen, will establish your identity as a boy beyond question. All boys love to shoot their stream off bridges and down precipices, and so must you. Therefore we must visit the false-penis-wallah and have one made.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“In Lahore? City of utter depravity? Of course, and his name is Harun Elahi, and if you let him, he will tell you how his ancestors made such things for Babur Moghul at the beginning of history.”

“So I conclude that when I have been fitted with this item you will take me as your murid.”

“I will. It is our fate, just as it was my fate to be at the shrine of Hazrat Shah Azar Basmali with my heart twisted and full of poison, where God was waiting for me like a cobra on a rock and struck me in the heart and filled it with His love. All my life since then I have been trying to recover that moment. I think that at the next shrine He will be waiting again, or the next. In the meanwhile, I struggle to wear down the poisonous nafs with the exercises and devotions of my order. These I will teach you, Sahar, my murid, and, God willing, by the time we arrive at the sacred place, He will have mercy on both of us.”

“Where is the sacred place?”

“In Chechnya.”

“Wa-illa! That is a long way.”

“Longer than you think, murid, for we must retrace my journey in a great circle and pass through all the Muslim lands now under the Russian boot. Do you still want to go?”

She did; and she went.

Her reveries are interrupted by a change in the motion of the truck. They seem to have moved onto a smoother road, they are traveling faster, and there is a wonderful hot dusty breeze coming up through the holes in the truck’s floor.

The truck stops several times and they hear the voices of men and the sound of other motors and once the unmistakable clanking of an armored vehicle. They are passing through military checkpoints. It grows hot, then roasting, in the narrow space. The road grows rough again and the angle of the truck changes so that they slide against their restraints, first one way, then the other. The heat diminishes and then the light. It is nearly dark again when they stop at last, and they hear the sounds of male voices and movements of the truck’s load. The false floor is lifted and the prisoners are dragged off the truck. None of them can stand but all have survived the journey. They have all pissed themselves, and there is a distinct odor of human waste in the chill air. They are unbound, and armed men half-carry, half-drag them into a building.

But the two women are not touched at all; they are allowed to support each other and totter down a dark hallway and into a small room. The door is shut behind them and they hear the squeak of an antique lock turning. Sonia is shining a penlight around the room.

“Where are we?” Annette asks, and then, startled, “Where did you get that light?”

“I have pockets sewn into my clothing,” she says. “An old traveler’s trick.”

The thin beam shows them a room about eight feet by ten, with tile floors and roughly plastered stone walls. The ceilings are high and there is a tall window closed with thick wooden shutters. The only furnishings are two wooden rope beds-charpoys-with quilts and, in one corner, a galvanized bucket. On a shelf sit a brass kerosene lamp with no chimney and a brown earthenware basin. A large brass ewer with a long spout squats on the floor nearby.

Sonia turns off the penlight, retrieves a match case from a pocket, and lights the wick; the lamp yields a dim and smoky flame. Sonia says, “Well, that’s better. We can see where we are.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re in a hujra, a village inn, probably somewhere in the Northwest Frontier Province, up by the Afghan border. We certainly were on the road for long enough. My God, you look terrible; your face is all banged up. Come here by the light.”

Sonia uses a corner of her dupatta and water from the brass ewer to clean the livid bruises on Annette’s face. After this, Annette breaks down and Sonia holds her while she cries. It is a fairly short breakdown, given what has happened to her, and after she has recovered herself she asks, “How come you didn’t get banged up? Your face looks fine.”

“Because I wasn’t tied up. I could brace myself with my hands.”

“How did you do that?”

“My dad was a circus magician. He had an act where he’d get some guy in the crowd to tie him up and he’d get free. It’s not hard if you know how, and if the person who’s tying you up is in a hurry and working in the dark. Excuse me, I’m dying for a pee.”

Sonia uses the bucket and the ewer, washing in the manner prescribed for Muslims. Annette uses the bucket too, and afterward says, “I hope we don’t have to do everything in that.”

“No, there’s going to be an earth closet somewhere on the premises, and we’ll be taken to it. These people may kill us, but meanwhile you can expect them to obey all the traditional sanitary laws of Islam to the letter.”

There is a pause. Then Annette asks, “Do you think they will kill us?”

“They’re certainly prepared to. That’s why we’re in a hujra and not in someone’s house. The hospitality laws of the Pashtuns would make us guests, and guests are sacred to them.”

They both start as the lock squeals and the door swings open. They see a dark figure appear for a moment and lay a tin tray on the floor and then the door is shut and locked again.

“Speaking of which,” says Sonia, “there’s our dinner. By God, I’m starved!”

They eat ravenously, scooping up clots of dal with chunks ripped off book-sized loaves of naan, topped with yogurt and washed down with milky tea.

After they finish, Annette laughs and says, “What was that, a hearty meal for the condemned?”

“No, just what they usually eat in places like this. I don’t think they intend to starve us. We’re probably quite valuable to them in one piece. By the way, don’t eat with your left hand. It’s vile.”

“I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve never worked in a Muslim country before?”

“No, we’ve only been in Latin America and the Christian parts of Africa. Are you really a Muslim or is that an act?”

“No, it’s real, although I’m not a very good one, theologically. I try to make up for it by being scrupulous about prayer and the various prohibitions. The Prophet, may he have peace, was very big on prohibitions. It’s an interesting religion, very simple and pure. I enjoy it when I’m feeling that way. I assume you’re a Christian.”

“Yes, but not a very good one, theologically.” Here a nervous laugh. “I come from an evangelical background. I was saved when I was fourteen but I drifted away in college, not that I lost my faith, really, but I got turned off by the way the evangelical kids on campus behaved, a lot of looking for the mote in their brother’s eye, and of course politically they were all to the right of Attila the Hun. Then I went to South Africa with a do-good operation, teaching in these unbelievably poor townships, kids sharing pencils and so on, and that’s where I met Porter.”

“And fell in love.”

Annette bobbed her head and let out a surprised giggle. “Yes, you could say that, although he’s not very romantic and, you know, he’s quite a bit older. I was impressed by his devotion to helping all the suffering, trying to stop people fighting, and I guess I wanted to share that life. And also… well, he really needs my help. I mean he’s a wonderful speaker and much better with people than I am, you have no idea, he just looks for the best in people and most of the time they respond. But he can’t cross a street without getting lost and he forgets things and his papers would be a mare’s nest if someone didn’t keep them in order. He’s a Friend, you know, what you call Quakers, and I suppose I’m a Friend now too. Also a very simple religion, which consists mainly of being quiet a lot and working for peace.” She sighs and chews on her lip. “I’m so worried about him. He must be devastated that this happened, and those nice boys shot down in front of his eyes. Do you think they’ll let me see him?”

“Well, they’ll certainly assemble all of us for the video.”

“The what?”

“The video they’re going to make to show the world that they have us and to announce their demands. It’ll be all over the Internet by midday tomorrow.”

“Oh, God, I can’t believe this is happening. My mother will die!”

“I hope not,” says Sonia. “Mothers are often tougher than you think.”

“But what will they demand?”

“Hard to tell. Probably something like the release of prisoners held by the Pakistanis and Americans.”

“Will they do that? I mean, trade us for the prisoners?”

“They might get some of their people released by the Pakistanis, but meanwhile they have the whole world watching. Terror is essentially public relations. Also, they’ve got one of the richest men in America; that might be the reason we were lifted in the first place. Craig is worth a lot of money alive, so I suppose that’s a consideration.”

“If they just want him for ransom, why don’t they let the rest of us go?”

“Because we’re all useful as hostages. They can make a threat-we’ll kill one of the infidels every day until you do what we want-and they get to make videos of the executions. There’s a vast audience out there for videos of Muslims murdering Westerners; it’s a recruiting tool for them.”

“So they are going to kill us!”

“Possibly, but we’re not dead yet. A lot depends on who these people are. Islam is a very decentralized religion. Anyone can call himself a mujahid, a holy warrior. The movement attracts lots of people, from the sincerely religious to the insane or just bored kids looking for action. In the West they race cars drunk or knock off convenience stores. Here they become mujahideen. At the edges they blend into simple bandits, which this part of the world has always been famous for, but I don’t get the message that our guys are like that.”

“Why not? They certainly seemed brutal enough when they shot down Hamid and his boys.”

“Oh, well, brutal is the base coat in these parts. They kill very easily. What I meant was, are they sincerely religious? Are they moved by some kind of moral impulse?”

“I don’t see how you can put moral impulse together with murder.”

“That’s because you’re not from around here. The fact is that we’re being kept in what to them are quite comfortable quarters, we’ve been fed decent food, we haven’t been molested. I think they’re trying to make a point: Americans and Pakistanis torture people, but real Muslims don’t. That’s a hopeful sign. It means they may be looking forward to releasing us, so we can tell the world how well we’ve been treated, in contrast, for example, to Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. On the other hand, a prize like Craig is going to draw attention from every mujahideen group in the Northwest Frontier, from the Taliban, and from al-Qaeda itself. Our fate may not be in the hands of the group that captured us.”

“But what do we do?”

“We could wash your hair,” says Sonia with a grin. She reaches into her garments and flourishes a tiny tube of green gel.

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. We happen to have plenty of water and a basin and shampoo, which may not always be the case. And you want to be pretty for your close-up tomorrow. Seriously, take off your shirt.”

She does so and Sonia washes the filth, dried blood, and dust out of the long golden hair, and then uses a comb from another of the many pockets to pull the knots from its shining length. She dries it with her dupatta and then, to Annette’s surprise, cuts off a wide length of the material with the scissors of a Swiss Army knife (drawn from yet another pocket) and ties it around Annette’s hair.

“There!” she says, when she has it right, “you look like a good Muslim wife.” She pauses and cocks her head, thinking. “I don’t suppose you’d consider converting?”

“What, to Islam? Seriously?”

“Yes. It would give them an immense propaganda victory if the bunch of you did, I mean besides me and Amin, who are already believers, and it would almost guarantee your survival.”

Annette considers this proposition for a few moments and then says, “No, I couldn’t in good conscience, and I’m sure Porter would feel the same.” She laughed. “If they kill me I guess I’ll be a martyr to the faith. That will surprise them back in the Friends Meeting in Cannondale, Missouri. I don’t think they’ve had one recently.”

“Well, it was just a thought,” says Sonia. “By the way, speaking of martyrdom, I wanted to tell you how splendidly you behaved back on the trail, backing my play with Dr. Schildkraut.”

“Oh, that! I can barely recall why I did it. It was a sort of spasm of… I don’t know what. Toxic charity, maybe. I just couldn’t bear to see them shoot that nice old man, or stand by while you were being so brave. To be honest, it surprised the heck out of me. I mean, I’m used to what most people would call hardship, with our work and all, but as a matter of fact international peace work’s not really that dangerous. It’s not like we’re actually throwing our bodies between warring armies, although maybe that would work better.”

As she speaks she is taking off her shoes, high-topped sneakers, and her filthy socks. Her bare feet are dirt-stained and bleeding.

She says, “Do you think I could soak my feet in that basin?”

“Sure. That’s what it’s for, more or less.”

Annette does so and groans. After some silent minutes, she says, “This is so-well, strange. I mean, we’re chatting together like we’re in an airport, the words and the intonations… Why aren’t we gibbering or using some other kind of, I don’t know, more elevated language?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Sonia says, and then laughs. “Speaking of conventional phrases. But it turns out that people who are grounded and secure don’t change very much under stress. That’s what being grounded means. The frauds tend to fall apart and the tough guys, too. In the Korean War, they found it was the well-brought-up middle-class kids who resisted the communist torture best, not the ones from the slums, whom you’d have expected to be tougher.”

“Oh, in that case I’m going to be fine,” said Annette, and laughed too. “I assume you were nicely raised too-you’re unbelievably cool about all this.”

“As a matter of fact I had a terribly traumatic childhood. But afterward I sort of reraised myself.”

Annette seems about to ask for an expansion of this statement but checks herself. “So are we completely helpless at this point? Does it all depend on what kind of people are holding us?”

“No, not completely,” Sonia answers. “Do you know what Stockholm Syndrome is?”

“Where the prisoners start sympathizing with the captors. Patty Hearst.”

“Yes. Well, it works the other way around too. We’ll see if we can make that happen. With God’s help, of course.”

After that, they both take to their charpoys and fall into instant exhausted sleep.

Sonia, however, has always been an early riser, and the events of the past days have not changed that. Dawn is just dribbling through the slats of the shutters when she slides out from under the quilt, performs her ablutions, and, searching under her charpoy, finds what she expects, a worn but clean prayer rug. She prays the two raka’ah of the dawn prayer, the Fajr, and then goes to the door, intending to knock on it to summon the guards. But she hears voices in the hallway outside and instead places her ear against a crack in the rough boards. She recognizes one of the voices and listens with interest.

More footsteps outside and the door lock squeals open. A guard enters and looks around. Sonia sees it is the boy, Patang, from the incident on the trail. He backs out and an old woman in black enters. She deposits a tray with naan and tea on it, picks up last night’s tray, and leaves without a word.

Sonia awakens Annette and they eat and drink. They have barely finished when Patang returns with another guard, also masked, this one with a bushy dark beard sprouting out from under his ski mask. Both are armed with Kalashnikovs. Patang says, “Come,” and the two women leave the room.

They are taken to the courtyard of the hujra and made to stand against the wall. In a few minutes, the male captives enter, accompanied by guards. They are all bruised to varying extents and covered with dust. Schildkraut can barely stand and is supported by Porter Cosgrove and Father Shea. When Annette sees her husband, she calls out and tries to go to him, but the guards bar her way with pointed Kalashnikovs.

The captives are now lined up against the wall. Across the courtyard the mujahideen stand in small dark groups, hefting their rifles. It is the classic scene, familiar from the movies, the pathetic last moments of the hostages: up against the wall. Sonia starts to wonder if she has been mistaken, whether for some tactical reason or on orders from a higher level of the insurgency they are all to be executed now. She steps away from the wall and looks down the line of her fellow prisoners, to the left and the right. Next to her, Annette is rigid, her expression a startled one that says, This cannot be happening to me. Manjit stands on the other side and seems to be engaged in some kind of breathing exercise; his brown face is calm. William Craig has lost his glasses and peers out at the morning with the face of a terrified rabbit. Father Shea is moving his lips in obvious prayer. Amin next to him looks like he is waiting for a bus, as if the doings in the courtyard are of no concern to him. Ashton is paper pale but slouches against the wall, hands in his pockets, showing the natives class. Porter Cosgrove, last in the line, seems ready to break down in hysterics, his face contorted like a baby who’s about to bawl. Sonia is ordered back to the wall with shouts and hostile gestures,

Now a man comes out of the hujra carrying a tripod, but instead of a machine gun, the tripod mounts an expensive-looking video camera. Sonia releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The man sets his camera up some distance from the wall, peers into the finder, makes adjustments. Then the leader of the band appears, the man in the black turban, masked with a scarf wrapped around his face. He stands in front of the prisoners and reads from a paper. As Sonia expected, it is the usual terrorist want list: removal of infidel troops from Muslim lands, release of prisoners, and then the threat-the infidel spies will be executed if any more Muslims are killed by the crusaders. God is great. Fade to black.

After the video session, the prisoners are allowed to use the latrine behind the hujra and are then returned to where they came from. Patang escorts Annette and Sonia back to their room. Just as they are about to enter the doorway, Sonia stops short and turns to the boy, looking him in the eye. She says, “I can tell you what your dream means: the black horse, and the white, and the cliff.”

The gape of shock on his face as she closes the door on it gives her a good deal of satisfaction.