The Miracle of Yousef: Historical and political thriller

by Gonçalo Coelho

  “And so now when you returned to Jeddah did you look for her?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Yes, and I discovered that it turned out that she isn’t Nasser’s sister.”

  “And was she really the same girl in the photograph? Are you certain of this?”

  “I am. This is what I found out: she and Nasser were in love; however, at that time she was betrothed to another man, and one day this other man caught them kissing.”

  “I see.”

  “I wasn’t able to abandon her to her fate. I very much wanted to help her in honor of Nasser, and when I saw her for the first time, I must confess she affected me in a way that no one else had ever done before. Furthermore, I found out that the boy she was going to marry had forgiven her. His parents and hers also managed to work out an agreement and the matter was dropped. He was indemnified and she was punished. It was after this that Nasser traveled to Afghanistan to fight by our side, to find martyrdom or redemption.”

  “I see. It’s a complicated story, but I think he ended up doing the right thing and now it is no longer up to us to judge him. Only God can do that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all you wanted to tell me, or is there more?”

  “There’s more. Even knowing this story, when I met this girl I was determined to help her. I had promised myself that I would do it for Nasser and I wanted to keep my promise. She, however, was completely unreceptive. She said there was only one thing that I could do for her: to take her away from Jeddah. She was a most unhappy girl, comely, but with eyes altogether bereft of joy or hope. I felt that I could really make a difference in her life. I thought that this was what the Prophet would have done. It was what Nasser would have done, all the more so if he felt guilty about her current circumstances. He would want to remedy the whole situation if he could, and now he was dead, she was punished, and the other boy she was going to marry and his family had already forgiven her. Initially, I abandoned her, but then I couldn’t get the matter out of my mind, in all the following days and nights in Jeddah. No matter how I tried I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And finally, I gave in. Using your money, I arranged a false identity for her and traveled with her here to London.” Yousef paused, as if to rest from the effort of so much talking. “That’s all. It was stuck in my throat, but now I’ve told you everything. I feel much better. I am entirely in your hands. My life is in your hands, as is hers. We will accept whatever you decide,” Yousef concluded, closing his eyes. Outside, the urban landscape was beginning to give way to a more rural landscape, with more natural greens and browns, more trees and greenery.

  “You took unnecessary risks.”

  “It’s true. I used your money for all this. I deserve whatever punishment you determine for me.”

  “The truth is that I can’t censure you.” The Sheik was now looking out the window of the limousine. “You acted from your heart. This is the Yousef I know. You are not a man of many emotions but when you feel them, you feel them truly, and are capable of giving everything for what you believe, for what you feel to be true. Such a man is powerful. Very powerful. You did well to tell me. You acted as I hoped you would act in a situation like this. Any cause or any person who enters into your heart will always have a mighty and indefatigable warrior on their side.” Yousef kept his head lowered and simply listened. “This is why I am willing to place a daughter of mine in your hands. I know that you would give everything for her. Now it seems to me there is only one thing to do: you must marry this girl. You must be fair to her, and if those who are supposed to forgive her have done so, justice has now been done as it should have been. Tell me only this: has she been a good companion to you? Do you think she can give you fine sons and treat them well?”

  “Yes, without a doubt. The truth is that I have been very taken with her from the first moment I saw her, and I think that if it were not for her, I would already be completely sick of this city, which could have led me to be more reckless. It would have been harder for me during these months. She helps me to be a better man.”

  “Very good.”

  “She knows that I will always be a warrior at heart, I’ll give everything for Islam and for the Islamic world to free itself of the yoke of the foreign colonialist presence in its lands, making a single nation, united and strong, built on the incorruptible foundations of Sharia. I will give everything for the word of God and for the example of the Prophet to be truly respected by everyone on the face of the Earth.”

  “Then all is well, and everything will be taken care of.”

  They left the matter there. The Sheik gave his disciple a warm embrace and the two of them wept.

  They watched the horse races at Ascot like father and son, delighted by the beauty of the animals and enthralled by the adrenaline of the betting. They lost a small fortune that afternoon, but it would be one of the happiest moments they ever spent together, and they would have it to remember for the rest of their lives. The sun and clear sky adorned these moments, as well as the wonderful sensation that everyone in the stands at Ascot felt from the starting shot until the animals and jockeys crossed the finish line, after giving everything they had. Another race and another followed, and both the Sheik and Yousef got to their feet to see the horse leave the gate and run at full tilt in the midst of the others. They shouted and cheered them on, while the jockeys, at high speed, whipped their mounts, constantly switching places along the oval track amid the wild cheers from the stands.

  At the end of the day when Yousef got home, he was happy, and Nadia watched him approach with a smile.

  “Did you speak to the Sheik?”

  “I did.”

  “And…?”

  “Soon you will be my wife.”

  They held each other tight, their bodies pressed hard against each other. They kissed passionately but he pushed her away as he felt a surge of lust.

  “It won’t be long until you are truly all mine. And if we have waited all this time, we can wait just a little longer until our wedding.”

  “Oh, how I long to be yours. I long for it more than anything else.”

  5

  London

  October, 1990

  When the alarm sounded, Nadia was fast asleep with one arm resting on Yousef’s chest. At the sound of the infernal beeping he stretched, turned towards the night table and reached out his arm to turn it off. Half-asleep, Nadia kissed her future husband and closed her eyes to go on sleeping. Soon she would be getting up. Yousef got up and went into the bathroom. He looked in the mirror drowsily, his eyes glassy, hair uncombed, beard short and well-trimmed as he had kept it since Jeddah. A shower helped him to wake up. He dried himself off, got dressed and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. He put some cereal in a bowl and poured in milk from the refrigerator. He placed the cereal bowl on a tray with an illustration on it of a black and white cat trying to catch a yellow bird, and went into the living room to eat. He always tried to walk on tiptoe because in the apartment, as in most of the English apartments he knew, the floor built on wooden beams was quite uneven under the carpet and creaked excessively whenever anyone walked across it. He walked down the hallway on tiptoe from the kitchen to the living room and sat down on the black leather sofa in front of the TV. Outside a very fine drizzle was spraying London abundantly. The weather was mean and gray. He turned on the TV and zapped through the channels while putting spoonfuls of cereal in his mouth. He despised most of the programs. He was already beginning to get used to these habits. The women in the ads invariably tried to seduce, provoke and ignite desire. The news, meanwhile, ignited other more negative kinds of desires and wishes through an endless succession of multiple disasters and tragedies, even if they had to go to the ends of the earth to find them. For some time he had had the impression that westerners lacked genuinely valid reasons of their own to fight for anything. There was always a series of demonstrations going on in London, it was true, but most of the cause
s that arose were trivial issues like the lack of ethics in the use of rats as lab animals, banning the hunting of certain animals or other similar issues that could never, as far as he was concerned, give rise to any real passion that one could advocate for a lifetime. They were not, in his view, fundamental ideals that could satisfy that part of the human being that yearns to have an active voice in the transformation of the world. They existed essentially to give this illusion. At the end of these demonstrations, Yousef would see people walking from the English Parliament, for example (where they often demonstrated in big crowds chanting their plaintive slogans and waving colored posters to match), to their homes, and many of the demonstrators didn’t even know the real causes motivating the organization of the demonstration, yet even so, they now felt a little more revolutionary and sated that part that is in all of us that yearns to be a revolutionary. Invariably at these demonstrations, the policy was, the more people, the better, so many people were drawn to the crowd just to add numbers. The end result was that the actual demonstration itself had been rendered banal, and thereby lost its importance. The growing trend was for governments and the general public to ascribe less and less value to these civic actions, even though governments, of course, always vehemently asserted the opposite. The demonstrations against ongoing wars were, for example, as a general rule, totally ignored by governments. That is to say, generally speaking, with the passing years, demonstrations as a civic action had radically weakened in the western world. They had become banal and succumbed to political interests, as well as journalistic or propagandistic interests. In Yousef’s eyes, the West had no strong values to fight for. It slid progressively towards a vacuum of values that then gave rise to a quest for pleasure and freedom from stress through consumerism, obsessive sex and unbridled capitalism. With money above all, reigning as the supreme value over the West’s complete desert of values. Little by little, science and capitalism were killing the spiritual side of human beings. In Yousef’s reasoning, this fit in perfectly with the fact that religion in England was so marginalized in comparison with the state of things in the Islamic world in general. The religious freedom that the English granted to all their citizens, including the freedom to not believe in anything, he looked upon as the complete indifference towards religion of this people and culture. He could not conceive that any Muslim country could one day be like this, totally indifferent and negligent with respect to the spiritual side of its people. Yousef extended this conception of the English world to all of the West, imagining the United States and England as the supreme source of the virus, but assuming all the other western countries were already too deeply infected themselves, and were seeking to infect the Muslim world as well.

  Yousef also felt that the struggle for personal improvement in the West had fallen by the wayside, since most people considered laziness, vice and lying to be pernicious, yet they would enthusiastically embrace them if it seemed expedient. And the ease with which the English said, “I’m bored,” as though they were saying the most normal thing in the world, and as though they were asking whoever was nearby to do something exciting just to liven things up for them. Yes, they longed to be enlivened by anything, for any reason at all. Life did not move them. What moved them, in a routine of constant boredom, in a system of one thousand and one unstoppable, pitiless gears, was nothing more than the habits that had been imposed on them by society or by their family, those customs that were merely materialist and entirely bereft of spiritual considerations. Within this working of gears, unquestionably the chief value was money. It was this that determined whether anyone was actually recognized in this society. Out there in the streets one need only look around at the countless advertising billboards to perceive how capitalism and materialism were encouraged and celebrated. And if there were stores and myriad ads for buying, selling or renting that sprang up like mushrooms in the commercial areas, in the residential areas there were conversations with the neighbors on the latest purchases. Finally, there was the TV multiplying these effects many times over. Freedom and democracy were widely preached, but the truth is that, without money, when the economic crisis hit, the world stopped, became deeply disoriented and freedom went slipping away like sand in an hourglass, in a society where freedom means money and vice-versa. Spiritual faith was something of practically insignificant value. Here you had to have results, you had to be pragmatic, efficient, and only accept what you could see with your own eyes. Feelings were an obstacle, especially feelings that reduced your possibilities of financial success. Except that, with happiness and personal fulfillment reduced to low priority for the sake of money, after a while, life was reduced to a barren materialist desert. Science itself seemed to exist only to deny the value of the spiritual side of human life and feelings such as love or faith. Everything could be reduced to a mere chemical reaction of the human body, as though it were nothing more than a factor that gave rise to disruptions in the efficiency of the human mechanism. This was how Yousef saw England and the western world in general, in contrast to his own, which he saw as moved by great causes, great feelings and great faith. He would always be willing to give everything for these things, and could not imagine living without them.

  As he ate his cereal, he watched Mikhail Gorbachev on a news channel receiving the Nobel Peace prize – the man who, as he saw things, retreated from Afghanistan forced by the heroic struggle of the mujaheddin. In Yousef’s eyes, the great Soviet Union was falling apart. The United States, on the other hand, was increasingly becoming the only, hegemonic global super-power, and the world was now giving the Nobel Peace prize to Mikhail Gorbachev for executing the inevitable retreat of the Soviet Union with the minimum loss of human life. Whereas the United States was not retreating from anywhere, quite the contrary, it was expanding its presence abroad and, with the advent of the Gulf War, it now had carte-blanche to occupy military bases in his own country, the land with Islam’s two most sacred sites, Mecca and Medina. This displeased Yousef immensely, as it did Bin Laden, a point that had been confirmed for him by Sheik Omar. According to the Sheik, Bin Laden was now increasingly present in Sudan, where he had more and more business, and gave himself over to a more settled and pleasant life. Why shouldn’t he do the same as well? At the moment life was treating him well, but no, he couldn’t give up so easily, and surely the rumors that Bin Laden was succumbing to a more peaceful life in Africa did not mean that Al-Qaeda had faded away forever. Moreover, the activities of Yousef and Sheik Omar were highly independent. There was no reason to ascribe too much importance to putative advances or retreats by Bin Laden. What bound them most strongly together – and this was the most important thing of all – was the cause and its underlying beliefs.

  Yousef finished his cereal and turned off the television. Then he went to the coat rack, grabbed a warm heavy coat and put it on. He picked up his backpack with the schoolwork due at the University that day, put it on his back, grabbed his wallet and keys and left the house. Outside, the constant drizzle never let up, making the day immensely unpleasant. He walked in the unending drizzle until he came to Finchley Road and continued to the Swiss Cottage station. For a moment he remembered the tropical heat of the Red Sea and felt a wave of homesickness.

  The day at the University passed quickly. He left around five in the afternoon, after a session at the laboratory. On the way out, some of his classmates were talking about going to a pub, others were discussing a party at the house of a certain Karen to happen that evening, which they spoke of as if it were the most promising event on the horizon.

  “There’ll be lots of drink and girls, especially because the party is at Karen’s house, and she has smashing friends! There’s sure to be lots of birds there!” one of his classmates was telling another, winking.

  Yousef was familiar with these parties. Drinks and birds, as the English referred to girls, as though they were birds being hunted by them, were matters that did not inspire him to go to any parties, but they were utterly compelling reasons
for most of the students he knew. Evidently, he had to give the impression of mingling as much as possible in the society currently surrounding him, and to be as tolerant as possible of any and all excess that he witnessed, so he did go along to these parties, even as he inwardly loathed all the excess going on at them. Fortunately, he had Nadia whom he dragged along on these occasions, thus freeing himself of the constant and irritating prodding of his classmates to imitate their excesses, and then, he did have religious obligations that he invoked, and which the others accepted as a perfectly valid argument, although they really didn’t see the point of sacrificing what they characterized as the good life for the sake of religious faith. Yousef confirmed to his classmates that he would go to the party of this Karen, an English girl he knew only by sight.

  In this circle of classmates haphazardly gathered at the University entrance he saw a man leaning against a wall a few meters away observing him. He was a mysterious figure, with dark features, short and distinctly above his normal weight. He was bald, and the black hair that remained to him only from his temples downwards extended into a well-trimmed beard that helped to accentuate the round aspect of his face. Yousef bid his classmates farewell and made ready to depart in a hurry. The fine rain was still falling. He zipped his coat up to his neck, and hadn’t taken more than two steps when the man accosted him. In perfect Arabic, he greeted him and asked right away if his name was Yousef.

  “No, my name is Fahrouk. You must be looking for someone else.”

  Yousef moved to take his leave and walk on, but the man kept pace with him.