As instructed, I took a train from the airport to the Saint Michel station, and Paris was shocking even before I emerged from it. The walls of the underground station were plastered with posters hawking all manner of goods, many of them featuring giant photographs of lascivious women all but naked to the pubes.
I emerged from this Satanic grotto blinking in the bright sunlight to behold Notre Dame Cathedral. I had never seen a Christian church before. Images of them were forbidden in the Caliphate and the films I had seen hardly featured houses of infidel worship. I was unprepared for its grandeur and beauty. I was also unprepared for the blasphemous melee in the large plaza before it, thronged with people who seemed indifferent to their proximity to a house of worship; idling about, women and even young girls dressed for a harim, boorish tourists haggling at stands purveying worthless trinkets, couples embracing, kissing, fondling each other, drinking wine and beer, even unclean dogs running rampant and fouling the pavements and gardens, all directly before their most sacred temple.
I had been instructed to meet a man called Ali at the city’s Grand Mosque and provided with a French cellphone equipped with a GPS system programmed with the route to it. I followed the dotted line on the screen away from the bank of the river, up an avenue lined with shops and cafes, past an open air market not unlike a small souk, and through a little maze of side streets. It was like walking through a film of life in the West; people drinking wine at open air tables, dogs on leashes, exposed female flesh, children zipping around me on motorized scooters, but here and there was a smell alien to my nostrils, the smell of another world, causing me to experience the sort of deep disorientation caused by the tang of one’s first battlefield.
So I was greatly relieved when I turned a corner and beheld the green and white walls and minarets and dome of the Grand Mosque, the comfortingly familiar tile-work.
At first.
At one side of the archway leading into the tea garden was a restaurant. And through a window I could see people seated on cushions and eating off brass platters such as would be commonplace in a restaurant in the Caliphate. But most of them seemed French. And they were drinking wine with their meals! In a restaurant that was part of a mosque!
The tea garden was crowded with more people who seemed mostly French, scruffy students, modishly-dressed adults, some Arab boys in T-shirts and jeans chatting up French girls, but at least this sacrilege was conducted entirely over tea, coffee, juices, and sodas.
I had been told I would recognize Ali by his green beret. Since no one else wore a beret of any color, it was easy. In addition to the neon-green beret, he wore a stylish white linen western suit and a red silk T-shirt.
“Yes, I know, it looks ridiculous,” were his first words to me, “but you have to admit it does make me conspicuous. But if a man must appear conspicuous, better that he do it with a sense of humor, no?”
He seemed to expect me to laugh at this. “No Frenchman would be caught dead in a beret,” he explained when I didn’t, “and while green may be the Islamic color, a green beret is the headgear of a commando unit of the Great American Satan.”
He found this quite hilarious.
“What sort of mosque is this?” I demanded.
“A French mosque,” Ali told me. “You’ve got a lot to learn, my young friend, and so do our obdurate handlers back in the Caliphate, but fear not, you’ll enjoy it, even if they wouldn’t.”
There were millions of French Muslims, I was told, but by now most of them were third or fourth generation and as French as this mosque.
“They’d as soon have France a province of the Caliphate as the fifty-second state of America. Their struggle is to have France accept that Islam is as French as the Eiffel Tower or a nice mergeuz on a baguette. France has had Jewish premiers, why not a French Muslim? Why not a chic mosque with a decent Magrebian restaurant with at least a marginally acceptable wine list? After all, before it became a province of the Caliphate, Algeria produced an ocean of more or less drinkable vin du table.”
I was horrified. “Why was I not told this?” I demanded.
“Because they refuse to believe anything of the sort back in the Caliphate,” Ali told me. “Try as those of us here may, they cannot be made to understand that here the Caliphate is Islam’s worst enemy.”
“What?”
Ali continued his grim briefing with what I irefully began to recognize as his insouciant Frenchified attitude as he drove me to the apartment he had rented for me, pausing only to swear at taxis.
“The Caliphate would inflict itself on the entire world, but the face it puts on Islam is a devil mask of everything the French loathe and fear about Islam—a theocratic dictatorship throwing its petroleum weight around, brainwashing its citizens, forbidding all contact with the wider more sophisticated world beyond its borders, where women are treated like domestic animals and sex as a crime, and you can’t even get wine with your cous-cous.”
“That is a Satanic caricature of Islam!”
“From a certain perspective it is, but on the other hand, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t true. Which is why the Grand Mosque attempts to counteract it by means other than logic. Which is why most French Muslims would like to see the Caliphate on the dung heap of history. Which is why our efforts here have been futile.”
“If this is true, what are we to do?”
Ali shrugged. “Enjoy our futility.”
* * * *
The apartment Ali had rented for me was on a hill on the fringes of the northern district called Montmarte with a magnificent view of the city and a less soul-stirring view of the adjacent Christian cemetery. It had a living room filled with new furniture in the style of a grand French hotel, including a bar. The only concession to Caliphate style was the rug. The bedroom was furnished in the style of a cinematic bordello. An enormous bed filled half of it, there was a large mirror facing it, another on the ceiling, an elaborate sound system, and yet another bar beside it so that one might further pollute oneself with alcohol without the need for arising. Both bars were well-stocked with drink.
I was quite outraged. “This is what you imagine my taste to be? This is the seraglio of an apostate!”
“This is what I know the taste of your cover identity is supposed to be. Sacrifices must be made for the sake of the Caliphate. To be convincing, it would be better if you could learn to enjoy it.”
“Enjoy it! What makes you believe I won’t report you?”
“These,” said Ali, producing a pistol and pointing it between my eyes with one hand and handing me a little Koran with the other. “I only ask you to swear on the Koran that you will wait two weeks until you lose enough of your innocence to understand the situation, after which you may report anything you like to the deaf ears of our handlers. If you refuse, I too must make a sacrifice for the greater good right now, and that sacrifice will be you.”
* * * *
In those two weeks, I did lose enough of my innocence to understand that Ali was right, about the futility of the Caliphate’s spy network in France, about how little anyone back in the Caliphate knew about French Islam, if certainly not enough to enjoy it, then enough not to report him as an apostate, a traitor, and a swindler.
If it was my duty to report Ali, then it would have been my duty to report all of us, including myself. The sad truth was that none of us were quite apostates or traitors, but none of us were doing anything to serve the cause either, nor could we, for none of us could fathom what that might be, and two weeks was enough to convince me that neither did our handlers in the Caliphate.
“Let us say that what we are is what was once called a sleeper cell,” Ali told me. “We blend into the culture doing nothing, spying on each other and sending back innocuous reports while awaiting orders to do something that we hope will someday come.”
“Do we? It seems to me that the longer they’ve been here, the mor
e they hope it never will.”
Ali had introduced me to about a dozen of these clandestine Caliphate agents, all of them living in a modestly grand manner on their Swiss bank accounts, more of them than not given over to whoring, more of them than not imbibing wine or even distilled alcohol as if it were so much tea or coffee, and several of them chronic drunks. Though it was impossible to obtain a work permit, several worked “under the table,” as the French said, as underpaid corporate “advisors,” translators, even artisans’ assistants in the “gray economy,” to relieve the boredom if nothing else.
“We live a paradox, my young friend. It is our duty to appear to have ‘gone native,’ as the old colonialists used to say, for if we appear as anything else, we have failed it. But here, where life is so pleasant for those with the wealth to fully enjoy it, it is all too easy for the appearance to become the reality, for the hedonistic charade to become what we truly are and what we wish to remain to be.”
“Including you, Ali?”
He responded with what I had come to know as a “Gallic shrug.” “Believe me or not, I still yearn in my frustration to serve Islam after my fashion. But I have come to understand what the Caliphate does not, that it is not the only true face of Islam. I would serve Islam itself rather than what the Caliphate demands it be. As the French Muslims try to do, with their Islam with a French accent.”
“By whoring about?”
“Are not the righteous promised seventy-two virgins in paradise? Have you ever had even one? Believe the voice of experience, better the lowest professional in Paris than having to contend with that!”
I felt myself blushing at my own secret virginity. “And drinking alcohol?” I demanded righteously to cover it.
“The great Sufi poets have written praise of Islam in the form of paeans to drunkenness. Have you never read Rumi or Kayyam?”
“Sufis! Shiites! Persians! Apostates!”
“You have never been on hadj. It is not a question, for if you had, you would understand. Muslims from the Caliphate, from Iran, from Indonesia, from Africa, from Europe, yes even from America, Sunnis, Shiites, Wahahbis, Sufis, all circling round the Ka’aba as brothers in the Faith.That is what Allah intends. That is the Islam I would serve. That is the Islam that might convert the world and so become the world.”
CHAPTER 4
The weeks passed in idle boredom. I saw the sights. I wandered the city. I gorged myself on western films and television. Occasionally I dined in a restaurant with Ali or another member of our so-called “sleeper cell.” I attended a few dinners and “parties” put on by them for French acquaintances. I waited for orders that did not come.
Temptation was everywhere. Wine flowed. Infidel women paraded their bodies at the parties. Some even attempted to seduce me with chatter, while I stood there numbly tongue-tied and unable to take my gaze from their bodices.
My own apartment was stocked with drink. At length I became so fearful of its presence that I poured all of it down the commode. When Ali visited one evening a few days later and went to the living room bar to pour himself a drink, he was outraged.
“They have sent us an innocent young virgin in every sense of the word. I see you now have a need to know what you did not before. Which that I am the leader of this pathetic little cell, and this apartment will be restocked tomorrow and stay that way and that is an order. You are endangering the whole operation, assuming that some day there will be one. And we are going to do something about it right now.”
“Which is?”
“Get you stewed and screwed, if not tattooed, as the Americans used to say. And that too is an order.”
“And if I refuse?”
Ali withdrew his pistol from a pocket but did not point it. “That is an order you cannot refuse.”
* * * *
We descended from the heights of Montmarte to the lowlands of Pigalle, and low they truly were. A long wide boulevard extended eastward from the Place Pigalle, itself a ring of cafes, pornographic movie houses, shops purveying “sex toys,” virtual reality parlors displaying the obscenities offered within on giant exterior video screens, with two hotels facing off against each other across the central traffic circle. One, done up as a giant windmill in neon pink, called itself the “Moulin Rose.” The other, a small-scale replica vaguely reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower turned into a giant red penis, proclaimed itself the “French Kiss.”
The Place was thronged with gawking tourists from the four corners of the Earth; Americans in jeans or garishly colored shorts and T-shirts, Africans in brightly colored flowing native dashikis and matching pantaloons, Japanese in dark business suits and ties, Indians, suavely dressed Italians, even a few Arabs in expensive-looking robes.
Ali sighed. “Poor Pigalle has become a disney of itself,” he moaned. “Nevertheless, you might as well fortify yourself here for the journey inward.”
He seated us at an outdoor cafe table and ordered a large platter of oysters on ice and a bottle of white wine. “Pouille Fuisse,” he told me as he poured me a glass and forked an oyster onto my plate. “Muscadet is traditional with oysters, but this is a much better vintage.”
I regarded the glass with fear and the oyster with disgust and loathing. The former was forbidden by the Koran and induced madness and the latter, raw, slimy, and seeming to pulsate at least in my imagination, reminded me of nothing so much as the female vulvas I had seen in close-up in the crudest of pornographic videos.
Ali laughed. “Eat,” he ordered. “It’s done like this.” He lifted an oyster to his mouth with one hand, prised it free of its shell with the small fork provided for the purpose, slurped it whole into his mouth with his tongue, then drank the juices smacking his lips obscenely. I thought I might vomit.
“Eat,” he ordered much more harshly, drawing his pistol and palming it under the napkin he placed on the table. “Or have a drink to fortify your courage if you like. You are not the first to quail at his first oyster.”
I glared at him, but seeing nothing else for it, I picked up the oyster, pried the glistening formless gray flesh loose, forked it into my mouth whole, and attempted to quickly swallow it without biting into it. I failed, nearly choked, and was forced to chew it up. The texture was like biting into jellied mucus, the taste was like a drink of dirty seawater.
Without thought, I picked up the glass, washed the oyster and its taste from my mouth with a great gulp of the wine, and sat there aghast awaiting the dire consequences.
Nothing happened.
I experienced no dementia, and may Allah forgive my apostate palate, the taste was cool and pleasant, rather like apple juice watered to dilute its sweetness.
“That wasn’t so bad, now was it? You may not believe it now, but in time you’ll learn to enjoy it.”
The terror of the moment was that I already feared that he could be proven right.
* * * *
Ali did not force me to eat another oyster, but he commanded that I finish my glass of wine, and then poured me another, and, I believe, but I am not sure, a third, for by then my body was suffused with a pleasant warmth, my vision was slightly misted so that the bright lights were dreamy as if seen through a subtle fog, and nothing seemed particularly important. And if my thoughts were also a bit hazy, I sensed no onset of rage or madness.
“So this is what it is like to be drunk…” I mused, wondering why Allah had forbidden such mild pleasure to the faithful.
Ali laughed. “This is what it is like to feel like a civilized Frenchman,” he told me. “But come, stronger and less refined pleasures await you.”
With a shameful indifference, I allowed him to lead me eastward down the boulevard, and a downward journey it became, for the further eastward we went, the further apart the street lights became, the dingier the cafes and sexual emporiums, the dirtier and more flickering the neon, the deeper and more dominant the shadows, the scru
ffier and more ominous the street life.
The foreign tourists gave way to poorly-dressed Frenchmen furtively perusing lewdly dressed women lounging provocatively around the tables of grimy sidewalk cafes. These gave way to harder-looking Frenchmen openly shopping less appetizing-looking prostitutes lurking in doorways.
“Getting more authentic,” Ali told me. “Let us have a calvados or two with the working class. You’ll understand why a little farther on.”
He dragged me into a gloomy little cafe reeking of alcohol fumes, stale tobacco smoke, sweat, and what seemed to my nostrils to be urine. Two prostitutes stood at one end of the bar haggling with three potential customers. At the other end, three men supported themselves by leaning their elbows on the bar, one of them about to collapse onto it in a drunken stupor. Ali positioned us between them and ordered two “calvas.”
These were two meager glasses of what I took for tea. Ali downed his in one gulp, nodded to me, and I, in my befuddlement believing that was what they were, did likewise.
My mouth burned as if I had gulped too-hot coffee. Fire poured down my gullet and exploded in my stomach.
“That’s horrible!” I cried.
“Wait,” said Ali, “and while you wait, have another.”
The fire in my stomach spread upward and outward, softening to a gentle tide of warmth setting my body aglow, and then my mind with a generous spirit that turned the world golden, that found my lips creasing in a satisfied smile. I understood, or thought I did, what Ali’s apostate Sufi poets were about with their praise of wine, for this feeling must surely be a foretaste of paradise. What foolishness it was to deny oneself this glimpse of what it must be like to bask in the Eternal Beneficence of Allah!
I therefore gulped down the second. I would never like the taste of this stuff, I was sure, but ah, the bliss to the soul and senses!
Osama the Gun Page 2
