The Good Son (40 page)

Alazakai has been brief because the assembly is anxious to attend the next item on the agenda. He gives orders; the guards heave Cosgrove to his feet and drag him out, followed by the men and the prisoners. In the courtyard the prisoners are lined up against the wall as before. Sonia supports Annette, who does not seem to need much supporting; her face bears the thousandyard stare of the combat veteran. The sky is overcast, as it often is this time of year, and a chill wind whips up small dust devils in the yard. Then, remarkably, the sun emerges from a small gap in the cloud cover, as if on order. A man holds what looks like a professional camcorder. One of the Arabs has a smaller camcorder and there are quite a number of cell-phone
cameras in use. Sonia reflects that neither these people nor the culture they represent could ever have even dreamed up such a thing as a camcorder or a cell phone, far less the Internet along which they will send the images, but they are perfectly comfortable using them, rather as worms infest a larder without any idea of where the food came from. She realizes this is an imperialist thought; perhaps these toys are only a fair recompense for the zero, paper, and algebra—gifts of the umma and vital to the rise of the West—but just then she is not ashamed of it; she wishes a CIA drone would fire a missile and burn all of them to a crisp.

The guards bind Cosgrove’s hands behind him and force him to his knees. There is no ceremony. A large man wearing a black ski mask comes forward carrying a
chora
, the thick-backed chopping knife of the Pashtuns, and strikes Porter Cosgrove’s head off with one blow. Sonia makes herself look, and like everyone who sees this phenomenon for the first time she is amazed at the height of the blood fountain that shoots from the severed neck and how much red liquid is contained in a human body. The sad corpse topples slowly over, and the dusty smeared head is held up by the executioner, to a great shout from the crowd attesting once again to the greatness of God.

Later, she is with Annette in the prison room, listening. The new widow is dry-eyed. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks, “I can’t feel anything. I mean, if we’d been
together
, if Porter hadn’t—you know—collapsed like that, like he decided to die, to dissolve, before they killed him, maybe that would’ve been different; we could’ve talked about our lives and I could’ve held on to something, I could’ve felt that our life together wasn’t meaningless. That pathetic thing they killed wasn’t him. What I said in that speech was real; that was the real Porter. I loved him. I thought I loved him, but who was he? Was he really that. . . sad thing? I can’t cry for that. Am I a monster? Why can’t I cry?”

“You’re in shock. Don’t be hard on yourself.”

“That’s your advice? Okay, I won’t be. I’ll watch a little TV and catch up on my e-mails. Is that
Islamic
, by the way? Is that what God says? I see you talking to Him all the time. Is it like He’s saying, Hey, when my servants cut off your husband’s head, kick back, take it easy! Only in more elevated language, of course.”

And more of this. Sonia endures it without demur, this outpouring of the poor woman’s rage against fate, against God; because fate and God have left the building and there is only Sonia, the closest thing to a responsible party. The mujahideen have done exactly the same thing in response to their injuries real and imagined, if more violently, and if Annette had been able to swing a chora, she might have chopped off Sonia’s head too.

“I know how you feel,” says Sonia, inserting this at a break in the tirade. A banality, but at certain times in life only banalities are appropriate. Annette makes the expected response; she sneers contemptuously and says, “Oh, do you? You saw your husband’s head get chopped off? Well, well, small world! Actually. . . actually, you have no
fucking idea
how I feel.”

“No, I’m serious,” says Sonia. “One day in Zurich, I received a telephone call telling me that my three children had been murdered in the assassination of their grandfather in Lahore. It was a bomb, and they were all burned beyond recognition. I didn’t go to the funeral, I didn’t even know about it until my niece thought to call me. I really was a monster at the time, certified monstrous by an Islamic court, exiled from my family and children. Would it have been worse if I actually saw them burn to death? I don’t know, but I do know that at the moment I got the call I would’ve given anything to have been there. If it doesn’t happen before your eyes, I think the human mind harbors the desperate illusion that maybe the loved ones survive; maybe they’ll show up someday; it was all a mistake. And in my case, it
was
a mistake. My boy survived and I was able to find him again. But my little girls are still dead. Aisha was eight, Jamila was four. So I
do
know how you feel.”

This revelation has the desired effect of snapping Annette—temporarily, at least—out of the downward spiral of self-pity and survivor’s guilt. She says, “I’m sorry. That’s awful.”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you the most awful thing about it. . . no, the second most awful thing. A little heads-up for you. Tomorrow morning the sun will rise despite the horrendous thing that it looked down on today. Almost all the rest of the people on the planet will go on with their lives in utter indifference to what has happened to you. The executioners will not be sorry, and it’s odds-on they won’t be punished for what they did. They’re probably in the tea shop right now, laughing and joking about
the day’s events. We will all be sorry and supportive, whatever that word means exactly, but we won’t be able to take any of your pain away, and everything we say to you will sound insincere. Because we didn’t love Porter and we won’t miss him, or at least not the way you do. And you’ll go on, too. You’ll fight it. You might not eat for a while, but sooner or later you’ll be hungry and you’ll eat, and the food will taste good, and in a shorter time than you imagine, someone will crack a joke and before you can recall that you’re a grieving widow, you’ll laugh. And assuming we survive this ordeal, you’ll have a life. You’ll drink cocktails and buy clothes and make love with a man. Yes, I can see the horror on your face, but you know I’m speaking the truth of my experience. From time to time, you’ll despise yourself, but you’ll have a life. What are you, thirty, thirty-two? You will not wear black until you fade away, mourning Porter Cosgrove. You will mourn for a time, and it’ll take different forms. For a week after I got the news about my children I was numb, a sleepwalker. I didn’t talk to anyone, wore the same soiled clothes. I ate from street vendors. One day I was on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, down the street from Globus on my way to buy a sausage bun, when it hit me in a different way and I started to scream and tear at my hair and face. I fell down on my knees and pounded my head on the pavement. This is not allowed on the Bahnhofstrasse. The police came and took me away and I ended up in the Burghölzli mental hospital. That was how I became a psychoanalyst.”

“I’ll have to avoid sausage buns. Good advice, Sonia.”

“See, you’re making jokes already,” Sonia says.

“Oh, shut up!” Annette replies and now it seems she does cry, not screaming or sobbing, but only a gentle liquid, snuffling sound, like a small defective pump. Sonia sacrifices the last of her precious tissue packs and waits.

“What’s the other thing?” Annette asked. “You said the world going on despite poor you was the second worst thing.”

“Yes. The worst thing is that at some level you welcome the loved one’s death. A child dies, the most horrible thing that can happen, right? And some part of you is thinking,
Well, no more dirty diapers
or
Now I’ll have more money
or
I can travel freely
. It’s part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can’t face. It’s the thing that, if we don’t deal with it, eventually poisons our lives. And no one is allowed to
talk about that part of death. It’s considered
insensitive
. But actually it’s the height of sensitivity; you’re sensing something even the bereaved is unconscious of feeling. So your husband is cruelly taken from you, and you’re a good-looking, competent, talented woman of thirty, suddenly free of a much older man that most people found a little boring, whom even you were starting to find a little boring—”

“Stop it! God, you’re horrible!” This in a voice loud enough to attract the attention of the others, Ashton in particular, who rises from his charpoy and seems about to come over to them.

“Yes, I am,” says Sonia, “I’m horrible and you’re horrible and the mujahideen are horrible; we’re all horrible together, the only difference being I’m awake and you’re all asleep in your various dreams of goodness, them as holy warriors and you as innocent victim. Ah, I see Mr. Ashton has decided to join his comforting to mine. He’ll be the first of a long line anxious to brighten your new life.”

“Maybe I won’t have a new life. I might pick the next low card.”

“You won’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Just the instincts of an old Jungian. Look, honestly, try not to worry. We’ll be all right, don’t ask me how, but we will. Now, here comes Harold with his consolations; take care. I’m going to check in with Schildkraut. I don’t like the sound of that cough.”

“It’s the dust, I’m afraid,” Schildkraut explains, when Sonia is by his side. “Where I come from, the mountain air is pure, but here not, it’s filled with fine particles and the wind never stops blowing it about. And there is this peculiar metallic powder over everything. What do you suppose they are doing to produce it?”

“It’s that grinding noise we hear all the time. Rashida says they’re making weapons in the village. She says it’s bombs that can blow up tanks, so I’m thinking some type of shaped penetrator. They use them in Iraq against American vehicles. Will you be all right? No, of course you won’t, but I meant as far as your next breath goes.”

“The next is fine,” he says, smiling. “The one after that, not as certain. I am so unfortunate as to have a slight bronchial problem and I am saving the last vapors of my inhaler for a true emergency. With any luck, I
swill draw the low card next time and bronchitis will be the least of my problems.” In a more serious tone, he adds, “I could not help but overhear your conversation with Annette. You took a hard line.”

“Because we’re in a hard place. We can’t have her dissolve into guilty tears.”

“Why guilty? Perhaps she loved the man sincerely.”

“Perhaps, but if so I would’ve said the same things. Doesn’t the American sentimentality about death’s tragedy and the cult of victim-hood appall you? The whole sacredness of 9/11 and all the teddy bears and impromptu shrines whenever some act of violence occurs? It drives me nuts, frankly. It’s the denial of death and the dark elements and it pollutes and trivializes the whole culture.”

“Well, I’m a European, so it doesn’t annoy me as much, and as an unbeliever I am not as bothered by these outbreaks of petty paganism. There is something of the ayatollah in you, Sonia, I believe.”

“Yes, but one who draws the line at coercion. I say preposterous things to shake people up and bully a young woman who’s just lost her surrogate daddy. Disgraceful, really, and worse to justify it under the name of group discipline. I should have let her cry on my shoulder as Harold is apparently doing right now.”

The pair look across at Annette’s charpoy, where the young woman is in close conversation with Ashton, their two pale heads separated by inches. “Speaking of group discipline,” observes Schildkraut, “I expect our Harold is not so much comforting the widow as discussing plans for his escape scheme.”

Sonia stared at him in surprise. “What escape scheme?”

“He brought it to me, strangely enough, the last person one would’ve thought interested, and I told him I would take my chances with the cards. I wondered why he would have thought that a coughing old man was the best escape companion, especially when he had a bull like Amin or an athlete like Shea to choose from, and then it came to me that I am the only other one among us who is not religious. Harold is outraged that we are being killed in the name of—what did he call it? The psychosis of an illiterate camel driver fifteen centuries ago. I think he would not mind so much if they were killing him in the name of moderate socialism.”