“Oh, that is a secret too, but everyone knows. He hurt his foot as you foretold, by dropping a heavy crate on it, so he can’t be a mujahid anymore. He has gone off to Afghanistan to be shahid. First he goes to training and then boom! among the crusaders.”
“I see. Well, God bless him. Did he desire this, do you know?”
“Yes, of course. It is an honor. And he did not want them to kill his mother. Instead she will get one hundred dollars. So of course he went.”
In the hujra the following day the mood of the group is subdued, their minds concentrated-perhaps one of them will not live out the next day-but almost all are preparing for the strange conference they expect will soon commence. They speak quietly in small groups. The priest and the Hindu each pray more often in their separate ways. Sonia and Amin pray the required five times.
William Craig asks to borrow Sonia’s deck of cards and with them he plays endless games of solitaire on his charpoy, not just the usual Klondike but a whole library of different games. Sonia thinks that this is as close as he can now get to having a computer. He seems perfectly calm, perhaps the calmest of all the prisoners, save Sonia herself. She tries to engage him in conversation, but he refuses to be drawn. He seems to have relapsed into a kind of nerd nirvana, re-creating the days of his youth, when he wrote the software that he would later turn into a business empire.
Porter Cosgrove neither plays nor prays, nor does he scribble notes. Instead, he suffers what appears to be a pronounced deterioration in his already shaky morale. He cries and moans almost continually. Sonia has heard the expression shattered used before this, most often ironically, but this is the thing itself. Annette tries her best but the man will not be comforted, nor have they calming drugs to give him, and it seems the therapeutic skills available to the group can not salve his terror.
That night Idris does not come. Perhaps he did not dream, or is afraid to come, or perhaps it was foolish to try to get inside his head in that way. God controls all things, she finds herself thinking, and laughs at herself. She has become acculturated again; the Sonia of Georgetown, of cocktails parties and seminars, the Sonia of the therapist’s office, has quite faded. Again she is a Sufi murid, although her teacher is not visible to anyone else at present.
She is sleeping after interpreting a dozen dreams, herself deep in a dream of Mecca, circling the holy place with a vast crowd in white garments, a dream that supposedly indicates security and peace, from which she awakens to find a face hovering over hers; perhaps the sound of weeping has penetrated her sleep.
“Please, I’m going crazy,” says Annette Cosgrove. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Your husband-”
“That’s not my husband,” says Annette, a fierce look appearing out of a face crumpled in misery. “I don’t know who that is.”
“Do you want me to try to talk to him?” Sonia asks.
“No, Father Shea is with him, although it doesn’t seem to be doing any good.” She shivers like a wet cat and, after a brief silence, says, “Did you ever read a book by Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls? It’s about the international do-good community, the title says it all. I thought Porter was different, he really got his hands dirty, I thought. But what did I know? I didn’t go to the important meetings, only the dinners and on the wives’ tours, and once in a while they let me hold the sick babies for the cameras. It was a dream or something. Why is he acting like this? Everyone else is being so brave. It’s killing me.”
“I don’t know, dear. Sometimes when a false self cracks, we find there’s nothing inside. One of the sad things you learn in therapy is that there are some people who are beyond help, I mean direct help. They’re like black holes. They can suck the life out of anyone who tries to help them. So you need to take care of yourself, yes?”
Annette cries some more and Sonia holds her and for a moment thinks of her dead daughters; Aisha would have been about Annette’s age now, and she cries as well, but inwardly.
Now they hear the noise of trucks arriving and, briefly, the sound of many voices outside the hujra.
“What’s that?” Annette whispers.
“Visitors,” Sonia answers. “It’s something to do with weapons. Maybe they’ll attend the conference. That will be a change.”
She hugs Annette and pats her back. “Sleep now, my dear. You know this can’t go on. It’ll be over in a few days.”
“You think we’ll be rescued?”
“Or dead. But in any case, over.”
Annette has no response to this; she slumps away to her bed of misery. Sonia is at that stage of exhaustion when sleep will not come. She lies on the charpoy and listens to the night. The trucks outside depart; the generator stops its roar. Cosgrove’s snuffling and weeping go on for a longer time, but even this eventually fades, and there is silence but for the coughs and snores of sleeping humans and the eternal wind of the hills. Or no: her ears pick up another sound, a deep, almost rhythmic voice in low register. It is Father Shea, praying.
Sonia moves now without significant thought, onto her feet and silently across the dark hall, following the sound, drawn to it as if by a fiber woven long ago. She finds the priest on his knees and waits quietly until he is finished. She moves then, attracting his attention. He does not seem surprised to see her in this wolf hour; it must be close to three by now. They sit on his charpoy and speak briefly about Porter and Annette, comparing notes, finding that they agree about the origin of the man’s collapse, and then Sonia says abruptly, “I want to confess.”
She cannot see his face in the dark, but his tone is mildly surprised. “Yes? What do you want to confess? An extra chapati filched?”
“No, I mean I want to confess. The sacrament.”
“Oh, my, forgive me! I thought you were… and in any case I suppose I had forgotten you were so-what shall I say?-so flexible a worshipper. Okay, fine. I haven’t got a stole, but perhaps God won’t mind this once. Whenever you’re ready.”
Sonia kneels and composes her thoughts. She says, “The sin of pride. I get it from my mother, I think, the Polish aristocrat-I mean my special brand of it, not the kind from original sin. The idea that because I’m wonderful me I can get away with stuff, that I can manipulate the lives of people, that it won’t all come back to bite me on the butt. I think you know my story, the public part of it anyway. I wanted to go on haj in the traditional way, by dhow across the Arabian Sea and then by caravan to Mecca, and of course I couldn’t do that as an unaccompanied woman, so I went as a boy and wrote about it and the umma blew up in my face. I got kicked out of the family and the country, put on the first plane out of Lahore with the fanatics screaming for my blood. Farid-my sad, faithful man; oh, God, let me confess the misery I put him through, the uncharity of it!-Farid stayed with the children. I ended up in Zurich, but that’s not what I want to talk about-”
“Excuse me,” the priest said. “Why Zurich, of all places?”
“That’s where the first plane out of Lahore stopped: British Air to Zurich direct and then change planes for London, where Farid had arranged with some friends to put me up, but when I got to the airport I didn’t get on the connecting flight, I could not bear the thought of being with Pakistanis, however sympathetic, and I could not bear dealing with what I’d done, dealing with the press, with the publicity. I took a cab into the city and holed up. Zurich turned out to be a good place for someone like me to hide. The Swiss are incurious, and the umma was not well represented on its streets. And then my children were killed, my girls for real and my son as far as I knew, and I went crazy and that qualified me to be a shrink. No, I’m still avoiding.” After a moment, she resumes. “This was something that began in Lahore, when my son was a baby. I fell in love.”