Annette was looking at her as at a video of a traffic accident. “I don’t understand how you can be you. I mean, one minute you’re kind and caring and say you want to help people and the next you’re like, I don’t know, some kind of calculating monster. We’ve just witnessed an unbelievable horror and we might die horribly at any minute and all you can think about is lunch?”
“One thing has nothing to do with the other,” says Sonia, with a dismissive air. “Compassion is an obligation of the faith and I’m a therapist by inclination and training, and my instinct is to help where I can. All that is perfectly sincere. The other is me in my Islamic mode. Fate is in the hands of God and it’s ignoble to worry about what might or might not happen. Also, I think existing in two cultures the way I do provides a different perspective on things. It inclines one to the long view.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, take yourself, for example. By your own admission you’re a corn-fed midwestern woman, and despite the fact that you’ve been around the world in some pretty rough places, you retain that basic American optimism: folks are the same all over, everyone wants the good things in life, and so on. Being American, and Protestant in the bargain, you’re all for individual responsibility and the individual conscience that goes with it. You’re basically in control. If you’re in a church that doesn’t suit you for some reason, you’re out the door into another or you start your own. And you believe in progress. We can help people to advance, to be like us: bill of rights, elections, clean water, flush toilets, antibiotics, refrigerators and cars, the works.”
“Don’t you?”
“Up to a point. But as I said, I have the long view ingrained, along with all my co-religionists. Look at us now, locked up in what we think of as the ass-end of nowhere, but this area was once connected to a universal empire that stretched from Spain to Indonesia. A thousand years ago, Baghdad was the capital of the world, the richest city since the fall of Rome. Basra was the intellectual center of that world. Ever been to Basra? Today it’s easily distinguishable from Silicon Valley, but back then they were inventing paper and mathematics based on Arabic numerals, and they had more books per capita than anywhere else. Hell, there were more books and scholars in Timbuktu than there were in Paris. Timbuktu! The metonym for isolation!
“I’ll tell you a story. I’m in the middle of Central Asia, following my pir from shrine to shrine, all these decrepit little hovels watched over by shriveled men with no teeth. A devastated country, full of nothing but bones and blowing yellow sands-even the Soviets couldn’t make much of it-and it looked like it had been that way forever. We’d had days of storms, the sand blowing so thick you couldn’t see your hand, so we stopped outside a miserable village and pitched camp in the lee of some mounds, just a low brown scarp growing up near the track we were following.
“But in the middle of the night the wind dropped, fell off entirely, and it woke me up, the silence after days of that continual maddening howl, and I saw the most wonderful buttery light coming down from the sky. We were under a kind of tent, really just a crude windbreak, and I threw off my blankets and walked out. The sky was perfectly clear, thick with stars, and the moon was full, which we hadn’t been able to see in days. And I walked away from our camp through those mounds, to take a pee, and suddenly I found myself walking on a solid floor, not crunching sand; I was walking on a mosaic. The wind had blown the sand away and I realized that the mounds I thought were some geological feature were actually ruins. The mosaic was exquisite, the work of real masters, I could see that even by the moon, and I took out my pocket flash and looked at it. It wasn’t a floor at all, I saw; it was gently curved and it had calligraphy on it, worked out in mosaic tiles, black letters against a ground of lapis blue and gold. It said believe in the Unseen; that’s from the Qur’an, the second sura: That is the Book, wherein is no doubt, a guidance to the God-fearing who believe in the Unseen and perform the prayer. It must have been part of the dome of an absolutely enormous mosque.”
“Like in that poem.”
“Yes, ‘Ozymandias.’ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! But the thing here was that no one cared. It wasn’t an archaeological dig. Central Asia is thick with the ruins of completely forgotten cities, and this was one of them. When the Mongols came through they just destroyed everything and killed everyone. They didn’t like cities, the Mongols. So once you’ve had an experience like that, the cities of the West can’t look the same, and by extension the whole culture seems almost provisional. There’s nothing immortal about us either. Or you, I should say, the culture you represent.”
“Yes, but what do you do with that? How can you keep that in your mind? I mean, you’d never bother to do laundry.”
Sonia laughs at that. “Laundry is indeed one of the eternal things. Of course I live a daily life like anyone else, but always sub specie aeternitatis, if that makes sense. I’m religious, for one thing, and that helps; I suppose that’s what attracted me to Jung, besides the fact that I went crazy in Zurich and needed help. Jung thought there was something real going on beyond the scrim of nature and that it was the most interesting thing in the universe; the playing out of consciousness, both divine consciousness and the little fragment that we’re given to fool around with. Ah, the door opens! That has to be either lunch or death.”
It is lunch. One of the Arabs leans in and, with a scowl but without a word, places a tray on the floor, on which sits a blackened metal pot, a steaming can of tea, and two chipped cups. When the door is closed behind him, Sonia washes her hands and kneels by the tray.
“What is it?” Annette asks, without interest.
Sonia reaches into the pot and tastes. “It’s rice and peas and… by God, it’s mutton! Actual meat! I think we’ve received an upgrade, probably because we’re such good customers. Come on, it’s wonderful!”
The two women dip their fingers in the mess and eat, although Annette eats gingerly.
Sonia leaves off sucking on a small bone and asks, “What’s the matter, no appetite?”
“Not really. All I can think about is poor Harold looking like something from a butcher shop. I might be off meat for a while.”
“Suit yourself, but I intend to eat as much as I can, including your share.” Which she does and leans back against the wall, nearly content, sipping tea.
“You’re amazing,” says Annette.
“Why? Because I eat after observing a massacre and the slaughter of a colleague? Consider this: it might well be my last meal, or someone else might get hold of us and not feed us for a week. Here’s a tip: anytime you’re cut loose from the groove of Western bourgeois life, eat anything you can until you can’t eat anymore, just like four-fifths of humanity does every day. Uh-oh, I hope that’s dessert.”
A key rattles in the lock and the same guard steps in, holding a rifle. Both women stand. He gestures to Sonia. He says, “You come,” and, to Annette, “You stay.”
The man takes Sonia to another room. It is furnished with a charpoy, a simple wooden table, and a straight chair. In one corner sits a boxy shape the size of a small chest covered by a canvas tarpaulin. Sonia sits on the charpoy, and the Arab shuts the door behind him without a word.
Sonia waits. She is filled with a strange exultant expectation; she thinks it must be like waiting for a blind date who could be the one and only, or opening a fat envelope from a college admissions office, although she has never had these experiences. She reckons that nearly an hour must have passed when she hears steps outside. The door opens, and in walks the Engineer, Abu Lais. He looks at her and smiles and says, in barely accented English, “Well, Sonia, what the hell am I supposed to do with you now?”