Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  Or something to that effect.

  What was he thinking? Is it really surprising that, just as he exited the premises, two officers greeted him in the parking lot with the news that someone had called to report he was making threats against America? It may not be obvious from this tale, but Shafat is not a stupid man, so I find it difficult to account for the infelicitous response he gave to this admittedly absurd question: “If, Officer, you consider a basic history lesson a threat against America…”—which was all those cops needed to hear to hurl him to the ground, put a boot to his face, and twist his left arm so far behind his back that he’s since had to have the glenohumeral joint in his left shoulder replaced. Cuffed, taken in, thrown into a jail cell with a veteran who’d gone off his antipsychotics, Shafat had only just begun his journey into pain that night. For when that veteran heard the officers referring to Shafat as a member of the American Taliban, he started whaling on Shafat’s face. As he cowered in the corner of the cell, being kicked and punched, Shafat spied the officers popping open their cans of Coors Light and settling into their chairs. The troubled vet ended up breaking two of Shafat’s ribs and landed him in the hospital with internal bleeding. For a time, it looked like Shafat would be charged—not only with drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest but also with the attempted assault of a police officer. All the charges were dropped when it became clear that Shafat wouldn’t be filing a complaint.

  Shafat’s eventual divorce and remarriage are, I believe, inextricably linked to what happened that night. For it wasn’t long after that when he began his unlikely affair with a churchgoing Virginian woman named Christine. There’d been rumors he was going to church with her on Sundays and was thinking of converting to Christianity, rumors that would later be confirmed by the official change of his name to Luke. At that point, he and my mother were no longer speaking, but one of his sons would confide to me that “Luke” had tried to get him to convert as well and that one of his arguments for conversion—to his own son—was that he, “Luke,” finally felt safe in this country because he finally felt like he belonged. Much of this I learned long after the dream I had that night in Scranton—the marriage was still pending; the conversion and name change still not official—but the underlying conditions shaping my uncle’s life were part of a social logic that long predated it and that shaped my life, too. I believe my run-in with Trooper Matthew the previous afternoon activated the pertinent semantic nodes along my own associative lattice, to borrow Mary’s metaphor again, yielding a dream that drew on the abuse of my uncle as an echo of my own bodily fears of the law in a post-9/11 America. But the dream was more than just an echo. For in it, I saw suddenly revealed a wider perspective on the failure and threat of our lives as Muslims here in America, a failure and threat my uncle Shafat would eventually believe he could solve by adopting the Christian faith. You see, we—Muslims—lived in a Christian land. That’s how we saw it, at least in the families I knew. We lived in a Christian land, but we didn’t understand Christianity. We didn’t understand it; we didn’t respect it. We thought it a makeshift, misbegotten offspring of the Judaic creed, an aggrandized misinterpretation founded on an ontological absurdity: that God would need a son, and that that son—supposedly divine—could perish in the flesh at human hands. All this and its attendant obfuscations—the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the shell game of transubstantiation—we took for silliness. But here was the paradox: in order to flourish in this new land, we had to adopt its Christian ways, ways that befuddled us and that we disdained, ways we saw reflected in almost every aspect of American life. It might be hard for a non-Muslim American—an agnostic or atheist, or a secular humanist—to understand the perspective I’m describing, in which a sole signifier (“Christian”) is used to stand in for the totality of American life. For indeed, where some might see modernity or individualism or mercantile democracy or the heritage of the Enlightenment or an irreducibly complex and endlessly heterogeneous nation, we saw Christianity. To us, it was all Christian. Not just the churches and their ice cream socials and Friday fish fries; or the bacon at breakfast; or the wine with wafers on Sundays and with everything else all week long. Not just the place names and first names drawn from the Gospels and the roll of Catholic saints; or the painted eggs in April and pine wreaths and winter sleds in December. No, I mean also the department-store sales in January and the interest-charging credit cards used at them; and the vacations spent at the beach driven by the bizarre urge to darken one’s skin; and the shrill perfect fifths of a violin; and the notion that running a piece of toilet paper along your anus is enough to keep you clean; and the discomfort of working with a blade of cloth tied to your neck so tightly you can barely breathe; and the bikinis and knee-high skirts; and, of course, the needlessly happy ending to every story. I don’t think we were exactly wrong to see things as we did. After all, it was even in the language we spoke here, its plain, unadorned beauty, its range of short, percussive verbs, its oracular strength, a language of the sermon and of world making, in tone and lexicon not just borrowed from the King James Bible but also shot through and through—even today—with the simple, active robustness of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Lord. And yes, the founding fathers had sued for religious freedom, a value much vaunted and advertised—which should have put us at ease—but of course we would learn (at school, at citizenship training) that those white-wigged Protestant fathers had mostly been making room in a new republic for competing factions of their various protesting Christian persuasions. Even the Enlightenment itself, the alleged origin of this national experiment, even this could not be divorced from the European Christian culture to which it was a response. And the secular humanism that resulted? The evolved-to-some, mutated-to-others fruit picked from long-tended orchards of Christian learning. In my dream, I saw an encapsulating mise-en-scène of our kind’s failure to understand—let alone flourish in—this Christian land, an unwilling participation in its symbols, its rituals, and, as ever, our resulting disappointment. And though Father was depicted in my dream’s first part as open to the Christian experiment—supportive of the mixed marriage, if you will, happy to see it “stamped” with the faces of the Christian saints—I was angered by his willingness to play along. Like my mother, I was resistant. Then: we make our way along a hilltop path, gripping poorly built crosses, our ragtag pilgrimage ending on high ground bearing the trace of my father’s father’s Islam but where, now, there’s a Christian miracle we don’t understand. The empty grave is no proof to us of new life, only a reason to complain that one of ours has been lost to us. Like my uncle Shafat, the dead man has forgotten his native land.

  The dream appeared to sum up a dilemma not only of my childhood but also of my life even as I sat scribbling in that coffee shop in Scranton, no longer a practicing—let alone believing—Muslim and yet still entirely shaped by the Islam that had socially defined me since 9/11. But putting it like this only points to the partial truth. In my dream I saw a more integral one: that as much as I worried about my place in America as a Muslim—and, yes, I had good reason to; all American Muslims did; that terrible day in September foreclosed our futures in this country for at least another generation—as much as it bothered me, as much as I felt a victim of what this nation had become for us, I, too, had participated in my own exclusion, willingly, still choosing, half a lifetime into my American life, to see myself as other. I’d woken that morning into a lingering mood of failure that mirrored a sense of defeat I never didn’t feel, however subtly, and once I unlocked the connection between my uncle Shafat’s saga and the dream’s final mention of Kashmir—another land divided and at war with itself—this frame of failure made mournful sense. Wasn’t it the inheritance of my own unwillingness to find my place, my spiritual defiance repaid in rejection, in the rootless, haunted sense of having foundered in my life as an American? I don’t think it was just self-pity that caused me to shed a tear on that coffee-shop toilet seat. I was finally face-to-face with the d
eepest dimension not only of my own American dilemma but also that of all my kind.

  Larceny

  The repair shop called with an estimate. Replacing the gasket would cost $900. I didn’t have the money, but I had a card with just enough left on the credit line to cover it. For at least a half decade, I’d been transferring balances, applying for new lines of credit, cashing low-interest-loan checks I got in the mail to pay off higher-interest balances. I had a calendar on which all the payment due dates were listed, as some of the cards I carried didn’t offer an auto-pay function. Missing a single payment could mean an interest rate of 25 percent, which, on a balance of $10,000, meant another $200 a month of accumulating debt. In total, the debt I was carrying at that point was close to $50,000.

  I showed up at Marek Auto Repair in the late afternoon. A tall, skinny man in a tie with thin eyes and thinning hair—in his midfifties, I would have guessed—stood in the driveway, a cigar between his lips. He was staring at the trio of young white women in pajamas across the street, languidly pushing strollers along before them. “Fucking drug addicts,” he murmured as I approached. “Neighborhood’s crawling with them, like cockroaches.” He pulled the cigar out. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to pick up the Saab 900?”

  “Head gasket. Right. You’re the one my nephew called about. They’re finishing up.”

  “Your nephew?”

  “The state trooper who found you on the side of the road?”

  “Right, of course. Sorry, I didn’t know that.”

  That he’d had to explain this to me—I could tell—irked him. So had my apology. His reaction, in turn, irritated me. With a last angry look at the young women across the street, he shoved the cigar back into the corner of his mouth. “I’m John, the owner,” he said through his teeth. “I hear you’re from Egypt,” he said as he walked me up the driveway now toward the offices. I was perplexed. If anything had been made clear in my conversation with his nephew, it was that I wasn’t Egyptian.

  “No, I’m not. I’m from Milwaukee. Though my parents are from India.”

  “That right?”

  “The name’s Egyptian. But I’ve actually never been there in my life. And neither have my folks.”

  “So you’re a mutt,” he said with snigger, “like the rest of us.” Inside, the woman behind the reception desk—she looked Latina—was busy on the phone; John pointed at an open folder under her elbow. She moved, leaning to make room for him to reach in. “Got it,” he said, catching me notice his stolen glance at her cleavage.

  He led me back to his desk in a small office whose walls were almost entirely covered: ribbons from high school competitions; team pennants; newspaper clippings; a Biden ’08 poster; a centerfold of a woman’s sex, glistening labia parted, vagina exposed; and finally, a large reproduction of the World Trade Center as it had appeared from the ferry coming into the port before its destruction. At the heart of the still-standing towers, another image had been affixed, a portrait of a man with a narrow face and slim, slanted eyes. Floating above this picture was a crucifix, and, in the spot where Pilate’s nailed notice INRI usually figured, the words NEVER FORGET floated in a yellow banner.

  “So the gasket blew. We’re lucky—we’ve got a great parts store around the corner. They had the part for the 900 engine, which isn’t always the case. Sometimes a model like that can take a while. But anyway, good news is the engine didn’t need rebuilding. Bad news is the coolant got into the catalytic converter. We had to replace that, too.” He placed the bill before me. The price at the bottom read $2,500.

  My heart was suddenly racing.

  “The estimate was for nine hundred dollors. Nobody called me about a catalytic converter.”

  “No, we called. We must have called you.”

  “I’m sorry—uh, John. I got a call this morning about a blown gasket and that it would cost me nine hundred dollars.”

  “Do you remember who called you?”

  “It was a man. I don’t remember his name.”

  “I spoke to Jasmine about this. About following up to let you know.”

  “Well, she didn’t. And if she had, I would have told her: Don’t do the repair. I don’t have twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said as he turned to the door and shouted: “Jasmine! Jasmine!”

  “Well, the bottom of this is that I don’t have the money to pay you for this repair. So maybe just put the old converter back in, and—”

  “Oh, we’re not doing that. You’re not driving that baby out of here without a new converter. It’s not even legal with the emissions that’ll be putting out.”

  “It’s not due for inspection, so I don’t think that’s an issue—”

  “Doesn’t matter. That’s not how we do things around here,” he said smugly.

  “Yes, Mr. Marek?” The woman from the front desk was standing in the doorway now, one arm akimbo, the other leaned on the jamb. She was wearing a yellow miniskirt and white high-heeled clogs.

  “Jasmine, did we call this gentleman about his catalytic converter? You remember we talked about it just before lunchtime. We were supposed to call him back with the new estimate.” Hearing this, she let out a squeal, her hand finding her open mouth, her eyes suddenly wide with what looked to me like phony shame.

  “Oh, no…I’m so sorry, Mr. Marek, I forgot,” she pleaded.

  “Jasmine,” he said firmly.

  “So many things happening at lunchtime, Mr. Marek. We have that delivery and Martin go to the parts store—”

  “Jasmine, that’s not an excuse.”

  The exchange sounded canned, like a routine they both knew a little too well. She turned to me. “I’m so sorry, mister…I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” she said with the same pleading tone.

  I didn’t respond.

  “So I don’t know what we’re going to do about this,” John said as Jasmine walked out.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Marek. You charged me sixteen hundred dollars I don’t have. And you didn’t ask me—”

  “That was Jasmine’s mistake.”

  “Be that as it may. It wasn’t mine.”

  “You don’t need to get rude.”

  “Rude? Maybe what’s rude is that I still haven’t even gotten an apology from you.”

  John laid his cigar in an ashtray and sat back in his chair. He’d registered the thrust, and his parry was delivered with admirable aplomb. It made me think he was actually enjoying this: “I’m sorry Jasmine forgot to call you. That’s on us. But the truth is, if I’d known you weren’t going to want to have that converter replaced, we would have asked you to come pick up the vehicle. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I was letting my guys put a new gasket onto an engine with that converter. No, sir.” I didn’t know what to say. He had turned his evident racket into a story about the morality of driving with a defective catalytic converter—something my father had been doing for years. “Yes, sir. What’s right is right. I’m happy to hold on to the vehicle at this point while you figure out what you want us to do with it—”

  “What I want you to do is take out the new converter. I want you to give me my car back. I will pay you for the line item that I approved. Here,” I said pointing to the invoice. “That’s what I want.”

  He was entirely unperturbed. “Well, I already told you. We’re not doing that. I don’t even think we have that old converter. I usually have those sent to another shop where they strip them for the metals. Those can be valuable.”

  “You didn’t have my consent, John. You did the repair anyway. Now you’ve pilfered my converter and sent it off to be stripped. Maybe we should call somebody to help us figure out the legality of what you’ve really got going on here.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Maybe we have the authorities come by and sort this out. How does that sound?”

  “You mean the police? Sure. Sounds great.” He leaned forward an
d pushed the phone toward me. “The local precinct’s on speed dial. Second button. I use it a fair bit. My wife works there,” he said as he sat back again. Was he lying? Did he even have a wife? He wasn’t wearing a ring. His fingers were covered in grease, so maybe, I thought, he takes it off when he comes to work. I wondered what his wife thought of that lurid, fading snapshot of a woman’s wet sex hovering just behind him. Or the receptionist and self-styled resident piece of ass manning his phone—and likely more—all too happy to play accomplice in his larcenous repair racket. And who was that fellow lost in the towers? He had John’s eyes and, come to think of it, those of John’s nephew as well. Was that his brother? Had the state trooper lost his father in the attacks? Is that why he was reading Larry Wright’s book? What did any of it matter, anyway? The man had my car. I was a Muslim with a funny name. Whether he had a wife who was a cop or not, his nephew certainly was, and I’d lied to him the day before. Oh…and did I mention he had the local precinct on speed dial?