The Good Son (43 page)

So I accepted my fate like a man, and besides she was my mother. I asked her what I would do in America, since I understood there was no jihad there, and that was the only thing I knew. She said I would go to school, and, according to what I liked to study, such would be my life. I said I would not stand to be beaten anymore, because I was a man now, and only my father could beat me. At that she smiled and said, No one will beat you; they don’t beat children in American schools. This amazed me. I asked, How then do they learn anything? and she answered, They do not learn very much. She said Farid and she would teach me in our home, and when I had caught up they would put me in high school with others of my own age. I asked her what I would learn, and she said, to read and write English, and something about history and geography and also mathematics. She said, You have had an excellent fourth-grade education. It should not take more than six months to get you ready for your junior year in an American high school.

She had clothes for me. On the plane I pulled on my first ever pair of blue jeans. I had a Pearl Jam T-shirt, a quilted parka to go over it, and a pair of Nikes. The plane landed at a military airport in Germany, and we ate in a restaurant and took a commercial flight to Washington. So I entered my homeland through the various narrow gates, carrying a passport I’d never seen before. At the time I didn’t find this strange.

I was taken to their house on Tracy Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of D.C., a white colonial on a green street lined with old sycamores. Farid was welcoming and nice enough, maybe a little distant, as might be expected. I was respectful and formal with him in my turn. He was a good teacher, patient and energetic. He gave me poetry to read at first, and then fiction, and then the school subjects I would have to know. I picked up math too, with little trouble. The only thing I had problems with was writing; I couldn’t do an essay to save my ass. He worked hard, though, and so did I, and in the end he said that the inability to write was a characteristic of almost all American students, so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd.

My mother and I spent hours watching television together, so that I would learn how to be an American. All us immigrants watch as much TV as we can, it’s the best way to learn the language and customs of the Americans. We watched soap operas because they spoke very clearly in simple sentences, and this gave me a good introduction to American
idiom and sexual practices. We watched movies on the TV and game shows, to a background of my mother’s commentary. By this means I learned that the true American religion was the pursuit of pleasure and money, although they professed to worship God, and this made them cruel, although they professed to be kindly. The other part of the American creed was redemption through violence, and that made me feel right at home. The good guy and the bad guy always meet up at the end of the film, and the good guy kills the bad guy in an interesting way, and that’s the end of the movie: hug the girl and fade to black. My mother said that not all Americans were like the ones on TV, but it gave them pleasure to believe in what they saw.

There is a lot to learn in any culture, and I absorbed a good deal of this one, although, as it turned out, not quite enough. Maybe I saw the wrong movies. I liked being warm and well-fed, but there were still a few things that disturbed me about America. Cleaning your ass with dry paper instead of water, like we do in the part of the world I was from. And seeing people eating with their left hands; that still freaks me a little after all these years. And girls, the way they walked around with their sexual parts on display but weren’t whores. Very, very strange, especially to someone like me who had no real experience with women.

But the worst thing was that I was no longer armed. I would walk in the streets and imagine someone insulting me or my mother and I would have no way of obtaining satisfaction or revenge. This thought obsessed me, and when the time came for me to leave the house and go alone to school I took care to arm myself with the dagger I’d taken from my mother’s trunk. It seemed like a hundred years ago, but it was still very sharp.

Long story short, I got into a stupid argument with a football player in the cafeteria one day because he thought I was staring at his girlfriend, which I was. He pushed me and accused me of having sex with my mother, so I pulled out my knife and gutted him. A cultural misunderstanding, of the kind the U.S. government makes all the time, but that was not an excuse I could use.

I have to say Farid came through for me after I got arrested. He had a lot of contacts in the legal system, being a lawyer himself, and he got me charged as a juvenile, even though the commonwealth attorney wanted to charge me as an adult, because of the heinousness of the crime. My
victim didn’t die, although he had to quit football for the season, which I guess added to the heinous nature of my crime. So basically it was a year in Bon Aire Juvenile Corrections Facility, which would be a four-star hotel anywhere north of Peshawar, and where I was a model prisoner and completed my education in American culture and got a high school equivalency degree. I still couldn’t write very well, but the standards were not high. They had job counselors there, and they were always saying that in order to succeed in life you had to have a skill set; just having a strong back and a willingness to work wasn’t enough anymore. I took the message to heart. The week after my release I enlisted in the U.S. Army. I figured I had the necessary skill set for that already.

I said good-bye to Billy and told him I wouldn’t be seeing him for a while. He didn’t show he cared, or maybe I just couldn’t see it. I’m often like that myself, so I sort of understand.

It’s a long flight to Lahore from D.C. through London, and I never learned to sleep on airplanes so I had a lot of time to think. The TV screen in the airport lounge had shown a news lady doing a story about Craig and the kidnap, with a logo that had Craig’s face and the burnedout bus from the kidnap site on it. She said it had been a week since the event, and no word on what had happened to the hostages after the first video. So I thought about that and what I was going to do and what the army had to do with all of it. I figured my days as a soldier were coming to a close, even if I didn’t get busted for this particular caper. I’m working against the interests of the United States here, no question, and I’m starting to feel funny about taking my paycheck.

No hard feelings or anything, the army does what it does, and I was reasonably happy in it, probably happier and more successful than I would’ve been in any other occupation, given my history. But I never got to love it, just like I never learned to love my mother’s country. I know that’s unusual; most immigrants, especially immigrants from the impoverished lands, turn out more patriotic than the nativeborn, but not me. Maybe it’s because I never got to know America, only TV and a prison and the military, so you could say I did not see the best parts of it.

Also, because of my upbringing, I got along a lot better with the mujahideen than I did with the Americans. Most American troops are
jocky overgrown schoolboys, mainly white kids from small towns and a good chunk of minority types, and after their unit’s served together and been blooded there is unit cohesion, as they say, the men look after one another and sometimes they cry when one of their number gets blown up. But in most line units there are one or two who don’t necessarily cohere, and don’t cry at all, although otherwise they are excellent soldiers, efficient, self-sacrificing, and so on, but really they don’t give a damn. That would be me.

The plane landed in Heathrow and we went through passport control. I got the fish eye because I was traveling on my Pakistani passport and because I’d been letting my beard grow for the past week or so. My Pakistani passport says I am Abdul Ismail Laghari, although I don’t believe anyone ever called me Abdul. The name means “slave of God” and Theodore means “God-lover,” which probably amounts to the same thing, and even my Pakistani family calls me Theo. I was actually baptized Theodore at the cathedral in Lahore, privately so as not to cause scandal. So I have been a kind of undercover person from birth almost, and I am bound to offend those who like neat classifications. The passport guy (one of those) looked at his computer for a few minutes to see whether I was the terrorist I seemed to be, but then he gave the passport back to me and moved his eyes to the next in line. I suppose I will have to get used to that when I travel now.

I bought half a dozen bottles of good scotch at the duty-free shop. I have a license to possess and consume booze within the borders of Pakistan, a state that’s officially teetotal but whose citizens behave a lot like the Americans did when religious fanatics banned alcohol there some years back. My booze license is one advantage to having two identities, and bottles of scotch make a nice gift or bribe.

They called my flight and I got on with my yellow duty-free bag bulging and there was the usual boarding mess, because everyone else on the plane had been shopping too and the overheads were jammed tight. I had a seat in the next-to-last row in coach and there was a Pakistani family behind me with a five-year-old girl who insisted on sitting on her mother’s lap and shrieked when the flight attendant made her buckle in for takeoff. As soon as the flight attendant turned her back,
the dad took the belt off and put the kid back on the lap. This cycle went on several times until the flight attendant threatened to throw them off the plane, after which the kid howled and kicked the back of my chair until the plane was roaring down the runway and the flight attendants were belted in, at which point the dad blithely unstrapped the kid and returned her to the lap for good. I was back in Pakistan already, where no one pays attention to rules and family peace is the main goal of life. It felt just like home.

Customs in Lahore gave me some heat about the Scotch, but since I have a pale skin and spoke perfect Urdu (and had the booze license) the guy figured I was connected to the elite and let me through. My Auntie Rukhsana was waiting for me outside passport control, and I got a big hug from her, followed by a flood of tears—Oh, your poor mother, you poor boy—and so on, and I thought it was a little extreme, it’s not like either my mother and I were the center of family life among the Lagharis. She asked me with a kind of hungry desperation how our plan was going, and I said it was going as well as could be expected but the thing now was to find out where the hostages were being held and I had to be here to do that, and she asked me how I was going to proceed, all business now, the tears dried, and I said I still had some contacts and I’d ask around. She pumped me a little then, like the good journalist she is, but I put her off, like the good secret agent I am, and at last she quit and flashed me a smile. “Little Theo, all grown up!” she said. “We’re having a party for you tonight. I hope you are not too jet-lagged.”

“Not too,” I said. “I’m used to traveling. But I’m not exactly in the party mood.”

“Yes, I understand, and we all, or almost all, feel the same way. But here the family is the most important thing; whenever something happens in your life, good or bad, the family gathers and we all eat, eat. You don’t understand that maybe, but I think we must have such a gathering, because I think you will need our help in what you are going to do. So it is, in a sense, part of why you have come.”

“Okay, got it,” I said. I’m nothing if not culturally flexible. “Who all is going to be there?”

“Oh, just the immediate family, Jafar and our children and Nisar and his wife and children. They are dying to meet you.”

“And Seyd? He’s not coming?”

She made a face. “Oh, Seyd! That’s all we would need, an ISI-wallah and you in the same room.”

“Why not? I’m sort of an ISI-wallah myself. We could have an interesting conversation.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” said my aunt darkly, and then turned to snarl in Mahji dialect at the beggars and porters who had surrounded us as soon as we left the terminal building. Another sign I was back home, people willing to carry heavy loads for a few cents, and other people treating them like dogs, and me as one of the non-dog higher beings: the feelings connected with that, and the near-solidity of the humid air, a sticky sludge of diesel, sewage, and hot spicy oils.