The Good Son (47 page)

Rashida raises her arm, flashing a clutch of gold bangles, and, grinning, says, “I am betrothed to Batur. God willing, we will be married as soon as my father has sold three cows and can pay the
walwër
. Perhaps it will be one week from now.”

“God’s blessings be on you and him and may you have twenty sons,” says Sonia, embracing the girl.

“Thanks in the name of God,” says Rashida, “but it will be a poor wedding, without sweetmeats and wedding clothes, if the emir does not open the road to Mingaora before then. We hear there will be another chop soon,” she adds in a lowered voice.

“Why will there be another chop soon, Rashida?”

“Because the infidels have made an attack on a place where many of the leaders of the jihad are staying, I don’t know where, and some may
have been killed. Everyone is talking about this, and waiting to see if any were killed, God forbid. And if any were, one of you will be chopped. But it will not be you; you will be the last of all. Or that is what they say.”

“I see. Then I will tell my friends. Is this the reason the roads are closed?”

“No, the road is closed because of the bombs. We have many strangers coming in trucks to take the bombs away to Afghanistan to destroy the tanks of the crusaders there, which is a very good thing. Even in Iraq they will use our bombs, they say. They are in silver cases with the name of God marked on the outside. It is a great secret, so they close the roads against spies like you. We are not supposed to look, but no one notices a girl.”

She lets her dupatta slip away from her face, and Sonia can see that her perfect bisque forehead is knotted with worry.

“Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. The emir is very angry with you. He is angry with Idris, but it is about you. He says if you do not stop interpreting dreams falsely he will put you back in the goat pen and beat you. And Idris says he shall not and they fought, and only Abu Lais stood in their way or their men would have spilt blood. My cousin Amira was cleaning in the house, and she heard it all.”

“This Abu Lais must be a great man.”

“Yes, they say so. He is a real Pashtun from a good family, not like the emir, who is a mongrel dog, my father says, although he buys loyalty with his money. Abu Lais has made the bombs, which is a good thing, but he eats with Arabs, whom no one likes. They cannot speak properly and they smell wrong, although they say they are Muslims. But everyone must respect Abu Lais, because he is a brother of the sheikh Osama and Mullah Omar. So now you are warned. I hope they don’t whip you, because I don’t think that the women can save you again.”

Sonia thanks the girl, who gives a quick smile, veils herself, and leaves the room. Sonia goes back to the prisoners, who are still eating their breakfast. Manjit makes a place for her and shows that he has saved her four slabs of naan and a mound of dal. Her tea has cooled but she drinks it and eats the food gratefully, despite the tension she feels among her fellows. She tells Amin what she has learned from Rashida.

Amin waits until they have finished eating, then clears his throat and says, “Yesterday we lost our friend Porter Cosgrove. We now have
information that there is to be another victim, so we must have another drawing of the cards.”

“Sonderkommando.”
This from Ashton, half underneath his breath.

“Excuse me?” says Amin, but Ashton shakes his head and looks nastily at Sonia. Amin continues to stare at him, waiting.

Schildkraut says into this silence, “I believe Harold was referring to those Jews in the Nazi camps who, in order to live a few months longer, managed the actual execution of their fellow inmates. They were called
sonderkommando
.”

“Well,” says Amin. “Remarkable. I didn’t know that. And you believe, Harold, that our moral situation is the same?”

Ashton shrugs. “How is it different? We’re cooperating in our own destruction in order to live a little longer. We’re participating in this obscene lottery for just that reason.”

Manjit Nara says, “I thought we were turning cards to avoid an even more obscene situation, which is leaving Sonia with the task of choosing each of us for death. I thought it a gesture, you know, of human solidarity.”

“Is that what it is? It seems to me more like sheep milling about and baaing over who’s first for the chop.
Human
solidarity would be bending every nerve at a plan to get out of this fucking place. I was ready with such a plan, as some of you know, and had we been allowed to carry it out, Annette and I might have been miles away by now, armed and in a vehicle, quite possibly in contact with the authorities. A rescue mission might even now have been in the works. But
she
decided it would be preferable to curry favor with her co-religionists and betray us.”

They all look at Sonia for an instant, like a literal flock when a predator steps into the fold, and then drop their eyes. Amin says, with exhaustion now showing in his voice, “Harold, really, you can dismiss that idea from your mind. I have known Sonia for years. She is the last one to sympathize with the Taliban, and I cannot for a moment believe that she, as you say, betrayed you.”

“But I did,” says Sonia; all eyes are on her again, their expressions range from puzzlement, through shocked amazement, to hatred on the part of both Ashton and the widow Cosgrove. “And I must disagree with Harold. If I’d let you go on with your plan, you would not now be either safe or even approaching safety. Harold would be dead, and probably not in a
way anywhere near as quick as decapitation, Annette would be pegged out on the ground with her legs spread apart in a place with a very long line of men outside it, and the rest of us would have spent the remainder of our lives tied up with wires and lying in our own piss.”

“It was our risk!” cries Annette. “You had no right to make that decision for us.”

“I had every right, and a responsibility also, simply because I understand our situation and you don’t. This area is completely controlled by the Taliban. That’s why they brought us here, and that’s why there’s an important weapons factory next door. It obviously has reasonable cell-phone service, because as you might have seen during our last outing every third man is talking into a cell phone. As far as vehicles go, you must know that in this country they pull the distributor rotors at night the way they used to hobble their horses, so you would not have been able to steal a truck. And even if you had, the region for a hundred square miles would have been raised against you, every track would’ve been blocked and guarded, and as far as leaving the roads and going cross-country, do you honestly believe that a slightly pudgy English academic and an American woman could escape across these mountains from a thousand armed Pashtuns? A pair of SAS commandos in peak training might have a ghost of a chance, but not you.”

Ashton, red-faced, begins to object—he is making braying noises in the English manner—but Schildkraut places a restraining hand on his shoulder and says, “Enough, Harold! Sonia is perfectly correct. Her method stands a better chance of success than yours does.”

“What method?” Ashton demands. “What are you talking about?”

“I am talking about where Sonia goes every night and what she does there. Are none of you curious?”

Ashton says, “On present evidence, she’s telling tales about all our little doings—”

But Annette says, “She’s interpreting dreams. She must’ve done half the village by now.”

“Marvelous!” says Ashton. “Even more mumbo-jumbo. I don’t see where that’s to our advantage, unless you’re telling them that their dreams mean they should let us all go. Are you?”

“No,” says Sonia. “I give them as honest an interpretation as I can.”

“Then what good is it?” says Ashton.

“I don’t know,” says Sonia, “but I’m certainly not going to try to manipulate them. They’d sniff that out in a minute. They’re suspicious enough as it is.”

Shea asks, “Then what did Karl-Heinz mean by success? What
did
you mean?”

Schildkraut answers, “You know, I have asked myself the same question many times in these empty hours we all have. And being Germanic, of course I have arrived at a theory. Would you like to hear it? Very well.

“We all had a discussion some little time ago about the psychological state of the people in this part of the world, in which it was argued that therapy here must consist of adjustments in external relationships, since the psyche in traditional Muslims is not a struggle among interior drives, as it has long been held to be in the West, but something much simpler. Here an individual’s main drive is to fit in, to achieve harmony and satisfaction as a member of a family or larger group. True enough as far as it goes. But we must also remember that these people are believers. The unseen world is very real to them.” He picks up a fragment of chapati. “It is as real as bread. And that is something that is difficult if not impossible for us unbelievers to comprehend.”

“I beg your pardon,” says Father Shea. “I am certainly not an unbeliever, nor is Amin. Nor Sonia.”

“Ah, yes, but I meant we come from the unbelieving
world
. To be a believer in the West, one must continually swim upstream, as it were. The society around us has essentially returned to paganism, and we are quite content in it.”

“Surely not in America,” Shea objects. “It’s one of the most religious societies on earth.”

“Not at all. Sentimental churchgoing is not what I mean by belief. What America
believes
in is progress, money, sex, fame, and military strength, with a national philosophy based on pragmatism. This is a good thing, you know. You don’t want a nation as powerful as the U.S. to be actually religious. But here we are still in the original state of religious intoxication; here we are still literally in the fifteenth century, as they reckon time, and arguments based on rationality are of no use. Appeals to our liberal icons—democracy, the rule of law, the open society, civil liberties—fall on deaf ears. So Sonia works at the other end of things. She inserts herself into their consciousness, she accepts their religious beliefs,
their ideas about the nature of the world and their various roles in it, and so she exerts her influence. Am I correct in this, Sonia?”

All eyes turn now to Sonia. All the faces except Ashton’s wear a distressingly hopeful look. She says, “To an extent. It’s the case that our hosts are not susceptible to ordinary argument, and that they are in a psychic state where the unseen world is real, as Dr. Schildkraut pointed out. But I am not seeking to influence them. I’m trying to help them. It’s what I do. It may turn out that by helping them I help us, but that’s not my purpose. It’s also true that I have entered, to the extent I can, into their psychic space. All real therapists do that as a matter of course. And what is this psychic state?

“At some level they must be deeply conflicted, because they are making war and murdering innocents in the name of a merciful and compassionate God. At some level they know that they are not engaged in a real jihad. No one is preventing them from the full practice of their religion and they are fighting the forces of a Muslim nation. Besides that, they are Pashtuns, and the sort of religion practiced by the Taliban is not congenial to them and never has been; this region is thick with the shrines of Sufi saints. In Afghanistan the people only accepted Taliban rule because the alternative was a naked and brutal anarchy. And their dreams reflect this. This morning Rashida told me that they are already arguing about me, but what effect this will have on our situation I can’t say. It may get us killed faster, for all I know.”

“Then for God’s sake why don’t you stop it!” Ashton snaps.

“I told you already. It’s what I do. If these days are the final ones of my life, what else should I be doing? I’ve always tried to live my life so that if death arrived on a particular day it would find me doing nothing but what God had made me for. I sincerely hope all of you feel the same way.”

There is an embarrassed silence. Amin breaks it. “You are right, of course. As the head of a charitable trust I hereby pledge one of my chapatis to be distributed to the poor. Annette is a nurse, and she has already started to comfort Karl-Heinz, who is ill. I’m sure he is contemplating ethical issues all the while. Father Shea, I observe, prays often. Manjit, I insist that you dispense me a powerful tranquilizer.”

The Indian laughs. “If only I could! Although I would be happy to instruct you in yoga. A few exercises and I assure you that you will despise Haldol.”

“Excellent! Well, now we must return to the business of the day, which I have already outlined. How shall we proceed in the matter of the cards?”

After a short discussion they decide to draw immediately, the loser to be the next victim when and if one is needed, that person to have the next presentation. As before, they each cut the deck and Sonia deals one card to each. As before, Ashton turns his over first. It is the deuce of clubs.

He says, “Well, fuck!”

Amin breaks the somber silence. “I am sorry, Harold. Truly sorry. You will give your presentation, I trust?”

“Oh, I’ll give it. I’ll give them an earful. You’ll forgive me if I wait for the fatal day itself.” With that he walks off.

All the others have middling cards, except Annette, who has drawn the queen of hearts. She goes over to where Ashton lies on his charpoy and speaks softly to him. The others do not hear what she says, but they hear Ashton’s snarling, obscene reply. She walks to her own bed and lies on it, pulling a blanket over herself.

Amin gathers the cards from where they lie scattered, shuffles them idly, and then says, “Well, we must pass the time. Would anyone like to play bridge?”

It turns out that Shea, Nara, and Schildkraut are all bridge players. They push charpoys together, designate one as the table, and begin playing. Sonia walks to where Ashton is lying and stands over him.

“What in hell do you want?” he says.

“To talk to you.”

“Oh, fuck off !”

She sits on the edge of his charpoy. “No. One of the disadvantages of prison is you can no longer select your visitors. I want to ask whether you intend to come apart like Cosgrove.”