The Good Son (48 page)

“You mean will I cry and wet myself? What business is it of yours?”

“Because how you die is important. It’s important to this group, with respect to maintaining our spirits and our sanity and even more so with respect to how it’s regarded by the Pashtuns.”

“Oh, really? Is this a case for showing the flag in my last moments? The stiff upper lip? Bugger all that!”

“Yes, you’re in the period of self-pity.
Oh, why me?
It’s not attractive, Ashton, and unworthy of you. I’m prepared to wait until it dissipates.”

Ashton’s face reddens and he sits up and puts it close to hers. “You
know what my chief regret is? Well, my two chief regrets. One is I’ve never had a fuck in an airliner toilet, and the other is that I’m not going to see you hacked into pieces. Isn’t that what they do to blasphemers? A leg from one side and an arm from the other?”

“According to some interpretations of sharia. Other variants require crucifixion or stoning. And it’s good that you’re angry. Angry and brave is a good combination. I think you’re a brave man, Ashton. It was brave to try to escape, stupid but brave, as you must have known. You’re not a fool. You’ve been traveling in this area for years. Manjit thinks you’re a spook, in fact. Are you?”

“If I were, you would be absolutely the last one I’d tell.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. So, since you’re brave, I’m imagining that you’re not afraid of dying per se, but object to the manner in which your death is going to be carried out. Is that it?”

Ashton stares at her. She meets his gaze. The staring goes on for what feels like a long time, after which she sees something change in his eyes, not resignation but a different form of anger, no longer directed at her but focused properly, on the guilty.

“Since you ask,” he says, in an artificially perky tone, “I do object. I never thought I’d make old bones, and I have to say the thought of snuffing out now is preferable to the way my parents died, with the tubes and the stinks, but what I can’t bear is being slaughtered like a sheep while those fuckers cheer. Isn’t that odd? I mean, why should one care? But I do. It gripes me.”

“I thought as much. It would gripe me too. Tell me, can you handle a Kalashnikov?”

For the first time in many days, she saw a smile flicker onto his face. “If I were a spy, I could, couldn’t I? Do you have one tucked away?”

“No. But neither do you have to die like a sheep. Listen!”

They talk for some minutes and then Sonia goes back to the bridge players. The day wears on, but no one comes to the door to demand the next victim. Dhuhr and Ashr prayers are called, and the game pauses while Amin and Sonia pray. Schildkraut has a coughing fit that does not stop, and they make him lie down. Annette is roused from her lethargy by the call of her patient. She nurses him as best she can with the scant contents of her medical kit, but he is gray in the face, with blue lips. The bridge game resumes, with Sonia as a fourth. She is not a bridge player,
but she knows the rules and some of the simpler conventions. Manjit, who is the best player among them, takes her as his partner. After the Maghrib prayer they are fed their second meal of the day. They play cards for an hour or so after that, until it gets too dark. The Isha’a sounds. Those who pray, pray, and they all go to bed.

Some of them even sleep. Sonia, lying awake, continues to be surprised at the resilience of her fellow humans. In the house of death there is eating, sleeping, joking, and the playing of cards—with the same deck, as it happens, that condemns them one by one to death. She can identify the different sleep noises of her fellows by now. Amin, Manjit, and Shea are asleep, Annette and Ashton are not. She reflects on the wonderful differences in temperament among people, how these are often confused with the virtues and vices.

Schildkraut has a spasm of coughing. It ends and she hears him sigh and say something in German but she does not catch the meaning; her German is not as good as it was. She goes to his bed and kneels down.

“How are you, Karl-Heinz?”

“I have been better, thank you for asking. To be perfectly frank, I am dying. I cannot seem to get enough air.”

“Is your inhaler completely gone?”

“No, there remains another dose or two, but I am saving it for my presentation. I may be able to hang on until then.”

“You may outlive us all, given sufficient luck. What were you saying just now? It was in German.”

“Oh, nothing. A poem by Hölderlin that once meant much to Elsa and me.
Wohl geh’ ich täglich
. I seem to be reviewing my life, somewhat banal of course, but I am grateful that my brain is still capable of processing memory. That is the great fear, naturally, that we will fade away and never know it, but it is not my luck, so to speak, that I will exit with all my faculties intact. Do you know the poem?
Wie lang ist’s! O wie lange! Der Jüngling ist gealtert, selbst die Erde, die mir damals gelächelt, ist anders worden
. ‘How long ago it is, oh, how long! My youth has aged, and even the earth that once smiled upon me has changed.’ Or something like that. We used to sit and read poetry to each other, and I recall you saying you did the same with your husband. Elsa liked you very much.”

“I liked her. She was very kind to me.”

“To everyone. An actual Christian, one of the few I’ve met. I wish I could believe all of that, you know: some kind of life beyond the grave. It’s been twelve years since she died and not a day goes by that I do not miss her. I dream of her often, and in these dreams she seems wise in a way that she did not in life. So . . . projection, wishful thinking? Or does the psyche transform itself and survive, although in a way that’s not given to us to know? You’ve read Jung’s essay on the hereafter? Annoyingly vague in my view, but perhaps I didn’t understand him. Perhaps I should have stuck to psychotherapy and not wandered off into philosophy. And you, do you expect a place in heaven?”

“Hell, more than likely. But I’ve never been much for thinking about those things. The Prophet was always going into detail about Paradise, which was fine for him, but I think it’s not in general a good thing for believers. Saint Paul tells us not to bother. Jung says that the psyche is not merely what we think of as the self but a transcendent thing that does not strictly obey the ordinary material laws, and maybe that unknown part of us is what survives; maybe the rind of the ego shreds away and reveals something that will surprise and delight all of us. Or horrify us, in the case of our brothers of the jihad. I certainly hope so. And he says further that there’s a great deal of evidence for this belief, although our civilization has chosen quite arbitrarily to classify such evidence as
not
evidence—hallucination, wish fulfillment fantasy, and so on. As a matter of fact, while I was being tortured recently I had a visit from my old Sufi guide that saved my sanity. Perhaps a fantasy, but like Elsa in your dreams he told me things I didn’t know, and in fact my sanity was saved. It’s a free choice in the end, and I happen to have chosen faith.”

“Tell me more about the Sufi guide,” he says, and they speak of this and other things of the spirit until the old man drifts off into an exhausted sleep.

Sonia returns to her bed and waits. Without meaning to she falls asleep. She dreams, but remembers nothing when she is shaken awake. It is Mahmoud. Silently she slips into her sandals, pulls her dupatta over her head, and follows him out of the room.

He leads her through the inn and briefly outside, just long enough to feel the night wind on her face, and then past a group of silent men and through a door. He leaves her. The room is small and windowless and
smells of musty cloth and the crude oil lamp in a wall niche that provides its only light. There is a charpoy in it, on which is seated Idris Ghulam.

She wishes him peace; he makes the formal reply. She asks, “Have you had any more dreams?”

“Yes, but it was not as you promised. It was not a good dream, but a bad one. It was a dream sent by Satan, the worst possible dream.”

“Tell it.”

“I can’t. It’s too shameful.”

“Nothing of God’s is shameful.”

“Foolish woman! I told you this was given by Satan.”

“Listen to me. There are no dreams given by Satan. Only God sends dreams and only for our own good.”

“No, the Prophet, peace be upon him, says Satan sends bad dreams.”

“Then perhaps we now know things about dreams that were unrevealed to the Prophet, on whom be peace.”

“That is blasphemy.”

“It is
not
blasphemy. When God spoke through the Prophet, peace be on him, he spoke eternal truths: the law, and how men may please God, and the proper way to behave, and how we may win Paradise. But he was also a man of his own time with the knowledge of his own time. No one but a fool would look in the holy Qur’an or the Hadith for knowledge about how to fix a truck or shoot a rifle or fly a helicopter. Have some sense! And I tell you that the knowledge of dreams has also advanced since the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and I have that knowledge, as you have already seen. I have now told you something that you were not prepared to hear when you first came to me, but now you are. God sends all dreams, even the ones we think evil. You are a brave man, and I am only a woman, and besides I am soon to die. So have courage and speak!”

After a silence, he does. “I dreamed I was on haj. I walked in my white clothes with the other pilgrims to the Great Mosque in Mecca, and walked around the Ka’aba the required seven times, and shouted each time, and I felt a great peace; I felt one with God and with my fellow Muslims. And then . . . and then, as if I were at home in my village, and the Ka’aba were only a shed, I lifted my robe and urinated on the Ka’aba. And if you ever tell anyone I said this I will cut your nose and ears off and put out your eyes.”

“These threats are tedious and unnecessary, Idris. I have told you
before that my honor is to keep secret the dreams told to me. So then what?”

“In the dream?”

“Of course in the dream! After you had polluted the most sacred place in all Islam, what happened?”

“Nothing happened. No one noticed and I did not feel any shame, until I awakened. In the dream I left the mosque and then I was in a market where they sell souvenirs of the haj, and I bought some wooden beads. The man who sold them to me was wearing a black robe and there was something familiar about his face, but I couldn’t recall what it was. Then I was at a time later in the haj when the pilgrims go to Muzdalifa, where they gather pebbles to stone the Devil on the next day. There was a great crowd, and it was moving very slowly, and it was very hot. Then the man from the bead stall appeared by my side and he said, Why not walk by the side of the road as I am doing? It will be faster. And I did, but I found that my feet sank into the ground. It was quicksand and I couldn’t move, I was sinking down to my neck, and it became one of those dreams where you can’t move, and then I woke up shouting.”

“Yes, this is a famous dream. It is a Sufi dream and was first recorded by Bashir ad-din Khorezmi of Bukhara, in the sixth century after the Hijra, and many times after that, not the same in details, of course, but the theme of polluting a holy place. And be assured, if many holy men have had such a dream, it is not demonic but from God. You are blessed to have had it. Now I will tell you what it means.

“The first thing to understand is that God has given us the law, but God is
not
the law. God is not contained, not even in the holy Qur’an. He is endless and infinite and all-powerful. We say a hundred times a day,
God controls all things
, but we do not really believe it, and so we sin constantly. And because no one can bear this sin on their souls, we say to ourselves, I am a good Muslim, I pray the prayers, I fast, I go on haj, I give alms, I even make jihad; and therefore it does not matter that I am cruel and corrupt and murderous. What does Rahman Baba say?
Recall the piety of the Devil, when you grow arrogant about your abstinence and obedience
. This is what God tells you in this dream: that it does not matter how pious you are, how closely you observe the letter of the fiqh, if you are not compassionate and merciful you pollute Islam. You piss on the Ka’aba.”

Even in the dimness she can see Idris’s face working, frowning,
grimacing, as he struggles to absorb this. People locked into the heart of a religion often have difficulty thinking about God, and so it is with this man. He asks, “And what of the man in black and the quicksand on the way to Muzdalifa?”

“Oh, that. The man in black is death, of course. You said you could not recognize his face, although it seemed familiar. Well, you have faced death many times, but each time you forget what he looks like or you could not live for a minute. The beads represent the Sufi way, which calls to you. Give up violence, practice mercy, contemplate and love only God, and your life will be preserved. I see you don’t believe me. Well, believe this. Yesterday you had a quarrel with the emir, Alakazai. He hates you and is jealous of your fame and authority—”

“Wait! How do you come to know this?”

“Idris, do you think you are the only one to whom God sends dreams? And so I say to you that your death is already arranged and it will come sooner rather than later. Tell me, do you know a man, a small man in a black-striped turban and a Russian jacket, with a scar on his face, who carries a stockless AK? He will be close to the emir.”