A Life in Men: A Novel (54 page)

No, no, that is American nonsense: how has he become such an American? There was never a world of peace to begin with. It is just a rumor the old like to circulate because they’re jealous of the young.

Rebecca turns to face him. She has been staring at the water, hair whipping around her face like a tattered sail. Hasnain supposes she must be fifty or so, but in her he can still see the vestiges of an exceptionally beautiful youth: the bone structure, the eyes. If he is perfectly honest about it, Leslie is not beautiful in this powerful, primal way. His wife possesses an earthy prettiness, a strong, lanky body as tall as his, and smile lines around her eyes, which she makes no effort to cover with creams or makeup. Rebecca Fishman, on the other hand, is a woman whose face could have launched ships, though of course this world granted her no such fate—granted her a husband some ten years her senior, paunchy and with a gruff, condescending manner to servers in restaurants. Hasnain recalls this from the one time he went to lunch with the Fishman family after Susan’s piano lesson. He remembers, and is not proud of the memory, amusing himself during that lunch by imagining the beautiful Rebecca staring blankly up at the ceiling while her sweating bear of a husband grunted into her. He does not usually think of himself as that kind of man: the kind to imagine the copulations of other couples he barely knows. But Rebecca is a woman to inspire such musings, even at fiftysomething, even here in Gander amid a world of terror.

“I’ve lived in or near New York my entire life,” she tells him. She is crying a bit again, as everyone here seems to be doing sporadically, in random conversation so that the tears are barely noticeable, just a natural function like breathing and swallowing. “I grew up on Long Island and for a while I lived in Greenwich Village and then I was on Long Island again until I met Alan and we moved to the city. This whole thing feels unfathomable. New York always seemed like a fortress, full of everything exciting and everything ugly, but I thought the ugly things were our
own
—that they came from within and not from the outside. New York seemed totally self-contained. Does . . . does that make any sense?”

He notices his hands are as deep in his pockets as they will go. “I don’t know. It makes sense—I think many New Yorkers view their city this way. But to me, it’s different, of course.”

“Because you didn’t grow up here—I mean, there? You said
their
city. You don’t think of it as yours, even after all this time?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.” Why does he keep saying this? “It’s my home, yes, my children’s home. What I meant is I don’t think of any home as a fortress. In London, when I was growing up, the idea of terrorism was very ingrained, part of the world around us. The IRA, bomb threats on the Underground, that kind of thing. It was something everyone knew could happen, really, part of our subconscious, just the way all living people know that someday we will die. You don’t think about it all the time, you don’t dwell on it, but the knowledge is always there.”

“But on this
scale,
” Rebecca protests. “Something this terrible in the United States!”

In his pockets, his hands folding and unfolding. “Yes,” he says. “This is a bad one. Very well organized. Usually people who hate, they are not this well organized. But then sometimes they are. Look at the Nazis. It seems preposterous now, to think they were so successful at their campaign of hate in our parents’ lifetimes—and yet they were. And if they had been even
slightly
more successful, you would not be here.”

She looks at him with something like alarm, but it may just be the wind in her eyes.

“You remember,” he continues quietly. “Lockerbie, the explosion, Pan Am Flight 103. December 1988—you remember that happening?”

With Americans he has found you can never assume. They are, many of them, a people without memory. But she nods, yes, yes, of course.

“My fiancée, she was on that plane. She and our unborn child. She was four months pregnant—only just beginning to show. We had told no one yet about the baby. No one knew, so when she died it was only she who was mourned.”

“My God!” Rebecca reaches out to grasp his arm the way she did in the basement, but without planning to—without fully knowing he has even done it—Hasnain steps just beyond her reach, so that her arms fall flat back to her sides. “Hasnain! That’s terrible! I’m so—so sorry.”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

“She was English?” Rebecca asks, no doubt to have something to say, because really, what does it matter if she was English,
what
she was, when she is gone?

“No. American. A student.”

“Oh God, right. So many students died on that plane. I went to Syracuse—well, I didn’t graduate, but I went there for a couple of years, and I remember how many Syracuse students were killed. There’s a memorial on campus, I think, and a scholarship or something now.”

“She was not a Syracuse student,” he says, though of course this, too, means nothing, reveals nothing, and as always he has told an incomplete story, to the extent that he ever tells this story at all.

Rebecca continues to nod, and the movement of her head makes Hasnain feel dizzy. He should have eaten his sandwich, that slippery ham and river of mayonnaise on sticky bread. It is permissible, he remembers, to eat pork during times of starvation if doing so is the only means of staying alive. But what has that to do with him?

“We are all vulnerable,” he mumbles. The words feel stuck in his throat. “After she died, I left the UK and went to New York for a fresh start. My parents had been furious at me for planning to marry an American girl, a non-Muslim, and after her death I couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore. I didn’t see them again for nearly ten years, until my father got ill a few years ago and my brother summoned me. By then I was married with children. By then, it was all from another life.”

“Another life.” The wind is at her face now, so that her hair blows straight back like a figure at the mast of a ship. “I understand. I lost a child once, too, Hasnain. There’s nothing, nothing that ever makes that go away, is there? I gave up my daughter, my baby girl, when she was only a week old, when I was too young and too messed up to take care of her. But I’ve never stopped thinking of her—never. When we adopted Susan from China, I was terrified—I was sure I’d be killed on the plane over, that God would never allow me to be a mother again. I thought I’d arrive to find Susan dead in her orphanage as some kind of penance for what I’d done. It took me years,
years,
to stop checking on her in the night to make sure she was still breathing, that she hadn’t simply disappeared. And then this—when I heard, when they made the announcement on our plane about what had happened, I thought,
Surely my daughter has been killed
. I don’t even know how to explain it. The entire thing—the entire scope of the horror—seemed singularly about me, to steal my daughter as punishment for what I’d done.”

He watches her eyes, so like Nicole’s: that demon guilt biting her heels. It was the way Nicole had felt about the rape in Greece—the way she had believed, almost until the end, that it was all her fault. And yet her story is
nothing
like Nicole’s. This woman walked away from her daughter, whereas he and Nicole had chosen to keep the baby she was growing—to love it regardless of its violent origin.
The men were dark like me
, Hasnain remembers telling her as they lay skin to skin under his piano only weeks after meeting, the fetus already sprouting inside her.
The child will look as though she’s ours
. It was pure madness. He had a fiancée; he had his studies. Nicole should have been finishing school, should have found a doctor to take care of the pregnancy and gone about her life. Yet from the moment she entered his parents’ flat and walked to his piano, sitting on the floor and waiting for him, there had never been any possibility again that they would be apart. The moment was larger than both of them in a way no moment has ever been for Hasnain since: their love immediate, chemical, irrevocable. There is no way to explain it other than madness, other than timing, other than destiny, other than what could have amounted to a terrible, ridiculous mistake that Nicole and the child died too soon ever to have realized they had made.

They spoke of the baby as if it were a girl, always. Still, he thinks of Nicole’s child as the daughter he never had, who would have altered the course of his life in ways he can scarcely imagine now.

“You don’t look well,” Rebecca says, and this time when she reaches out, her hand makes contact with his arm.

“I’m fine,” he promises. “I’m only hungry. Perhaps we should go back now.”

Like you, I am still alive despite everything. They say that love cannot save anybody, but it’s a lie, a specifically American lie, too, I’ve come to believe. If I hadn’t met Hasnain, I might still be lost, but even if someday he’s gone I can never go back to being what I was before I knew him. We are not islands, we are not meant to live in isolation, becoming whole only in some self-contained cocoon, but
with
others, in that kindness and that curiosity and that struggle. We have to stand on each other’s shoulders if we ever want to climb.

T
WO HUNDRED SEVENTY
people are not so many in the scheme of things. Not even equal to the number of New York City police officers whose lives were claimed yesterday at Ground Zero. And yet finally, just last year at the Lockerbie trial held at Camp Zeist, a former NATO air base in the Netherlands, it took the prosecuting lawyer an hour to read out the names and addresses of the dead.

H
E GOES TO
the men’s toilet in the church to make
wudu.
He has not done this, not once, in almost thirteen years. The last time he performed any ablution, it was a mockery because he was demonstrating to Nicole what you were supposed to do, the cleansing of every part of the body that was necessary after intercourse, he explained jokingly, or even after wet dreams.
You see,
he told her, making his face somber,
this is why we managed to live side by side in these two flats and not even know it. After seeing you at the restaurant that first time, it was necessary for me to spend my every waking moment in the toilet
.

And she laughed, then pulled her sweater over her head.

He has been waiting for a free moment in the toilet for hours. With so many people here, there has often been a line. But most people have finally retired, sprawled out now on pews cushioned by sleeping bags, or in the basement on cots, and Hasnain has escaped them, stands in the small, paint-and-piss-smelling room, and says quietly to the empty walls, “Bismillah.”

Even this takes too long, so he shortcuts. Washes the hands and rinses the mouth once instead of three times, skips the water-sniffing part altogether, merely splashing water onto his face and arms. When he has finally finished, his heart is throbbing in his throat.

What is he doing here? What is he trying to say?

He expresses his intention—
this Isha’a for Allah
—only in his head before beginning Salat.

“Allahu Akbar.”

But is it true?

He puts his right hand atop his left. If there is nothing out there, if there is no God, then it is madness, all of it. Love and death and sex and war and terror. It is for nothing. If there are no absolutes, then the men who blew up Pan Am Flight 103 were wrong only according to the sentimental code of other
men,
and a mock trial in the Netherlands is the only trial there will ever be. Hasnain bows into
ruku
. If Allah is watching, perhaps he and Hasnain are not even friends. Hasnain has not followed Allah’s laws, has honored nothing he was taught, has not even raised his sons Muslim. Such crimes, were he to die at this instant, are unforgivable. Fine then, fine. Let there
still
be the trial, the judgment. Let him be cast into the pit, too, so long as those animals go with him.

He gets to his knees, touches his head to the jacket he has spread out over the floor to use in the absence of anything else. Even under his thin jacket the tiles feel cold, and for a moment Hasnain rests his pounding head against them. When he met her, Nicole claimed to be an atheist, said religion made no sense to her. But by the end of her time in London, with all the hours she had free since leaving school, she had started studying Buddhism, meditating—or what she called “sitting”—every day, and studying yoga with a guru, modifying the positions for pregnancy. When you are twenty, three months can change your entire worldview; three months can change everything. By the end, Nicole—like Leslie since—urged him not to make light of his heritage and expressed an interest in studying the Koran.
I’ve been saved by British irreverence,
he tells Leslie now whenever she brings this up.
It all seems a load of rubbish to me
. But what he really wants to ask is how she fails to understand that everything about them would be deemed unacceptable through the lens of the Koran—that Nicole naked under his piano with another man’s seed in her belly, and even Leslie, his wife and the mother of his sons, would be a whore through the eyes of Islam.

They were fanatics, those men. Religious and political fanatics. They do not represent truth, but their failure to do so does not mean—cannot mean—that Truth does not exist. Abandoning ritual, head still against the tile, Hasnain prays freestyle like a Christian, the insufferable type who act as though they maintain a standing golf date with Jesus and find him obsessed with all their petty trivialities:
Please be something other than what they think you are, please give me a moment of clarity so that I can understand you, reveal yourself to me, please
.

And then, in response, the squeak of the door.

Please don’t worry about me, please. I know what I’m telling you sounds crazy, like I’ve lost my mind, but I promise I have not. I don’t know how to explain why going back to Skidmore means nothing to me anymore, why it all just seems like part of something I was supposed to subscribe to, like worrying my thighs were too fat or picking up guys in bars. I know there’s something that finishing college has to offer, I do, but right now it feels constrictive, like I can pursue what I need better on my own, and it’s not a giving up or “dropping out” but exactly the opposite. I want to eat the world. In yoga they talk a lot about detachment and for a while I tried to learn that, I thought detachment was what could save me. But I don’t want to
notice
rather than feel. I don’t want to be equal to a tree or a blade of grass, impassive. I thought detachment would allow me to forgive them, but I don’t want to forgive them, they don’t matter anymore, there is too much else out there, too much to stay stuck in that day. I want to feel deeply, and if that means at times I have to feel
that
day, too, it’s a price I am willing to pay for everything else there is still in me to feel. Do you understand? I need you to understand not even because you were there with me in Greece but because of the limits your parents and doctors have set for you, that you’re allowing to be set and that I no longer believe in. You don’t have to stay there in fucking Kettering being who they think you are—who
I
thought you were. You are more than that, the world is more than that. I need you to believe me.