The Warlord's Son

by Dan Fesperman

  Skelly raised his glass. “The future,” he replied weakly.

  AN HOUR LATER Skelly was in his room, seated on the edge of the bed with the lights out, reeling slightly from four beers. So many of his colleagues hated hotel living—the disorienting sameness of the rooms, the sad clutter of damp towels and room service trays, chrome lids crashing like cymbals. But Skelly found it liberating. You left your room a shambles every morning and returned to impeccable order. Your laundry went out in big plastic bags and returned pressed and stacked, tagged with those stickers that at first seemed annoying— clinging like leeches—but later were like badges of worldliness. He’d accumulated five on one set of briefs, and whenever he wore them at home they were like a reminder of his wanderings, little dueling scars of the initiated.

  Skelly leaned woozily toward the pillow, where the spread was turned back and a foil wafer of chocolate sat neatly on the starched sheets. He unwrapped it, popped it into his mouth, a minty chill oozing down the back of his throat. Tossing the foil to the floor, he picked up the phone and punched in the international access code, then the full number for a call to the States. He had to try six times before it went through, listening to all the clicking and whooshing on the line after fighting his way through a series of rapid busy signals. Was someone listening in? Doubtful, but you never knew in places like this, especially in a hack hotel. But who cared. He was just boozed enough to feel nostalgia at its keenest, a genuine stab of homesickness. But for where, exactly? His wives and children were strung out like a chain of islands, places that he usually visited on a single sweep, in the manner of an aging monarch touring former colonies.

  But his oldest daughter, Carol, had fought hardest to maintain the tie. She was the only one among them who made him feel that the connection still mattered.

  Her phone was ringing now, that stateside flutter that sounded like no other nation’s—Ma Bell welcoming him into her kitchen. Now if only Carol’s husband didn’t answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Carol? It’s me.”

  “Daddy? The line’s all funny.” Then, with suspicion, “Where are you calling from?”

  “Pakistan. Off near the Afghan border. Khyber Pass, gateway to the stars.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Just a few beers, nothing serious. But how can you always tell?”

  “When else do you call? From overseas, anyway.”

  “That’s hardly fair. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Well, you’re hearing it. But I thought you’d sworn off wars. Whatever happened to the great Liberian epiphany?”

  “Superseded by the great suburban epiphany. That and the editors don’t have anybody over twenty-one who can walk and chew gum at the same time. Or not in a place like this.”

  “Well, where are all the future Skellys? Weren’t you like that once?”

  “Doubtless. Especially when I was trying to do something like change a diaper. Which reminds me—how’s it coming along?”

  “Pretty well. No more morning sickness. All systems go.”

  He imagined her patting her tummy in response, gazing down at the big hump below the breastbone, another little Kelly on its way. Though of course this one would be a Lindeman. Terrible name to give a child.

  “The doctor says he’s going to be a big one.”

  “He?”

  “Yes. Minus his grandfather’s wandering gene, I hope.”

  “Hmph.”

  Only Carol could have said that and made it sound affectionate. Or was he imagining it? He waited for a second, listening to the static.

  “You always do this, Daddy. Run out of things to say about halfway in.”

  “I’m just enjoying the moment. With your brothers and sisters I always feel like I have to keep talking. With you I can actually enjoy the silence. Your pauses were the only ones I felt like I could translate.”

  “At ten dollars a minute I hope you’re getting something out of it.”

  “Not my dime. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re going to be careful this time, aren’t you?”

  She said it with such concern that the lid on Skelly’s tenderness opened like a trapdoor. His stomach plunged, and a sniffle bubbled up from deep in his chest.

  “See? That’s what I thought you were thinking.” He strained to keep his voice from breaking. “But it’s quite tame here, really.” No sense mentioning the Molotov cocktails, or the possibility of catching a convoy into Afghanistan. “Probably be here a few weeks, then they’ll get bored and bring me home.”

  “Well, as long as you’re back by January.”

  “For New Year’s?” Had she just invited him to a party?

  “My due date! Remember? The twelfth.”

  “Of course. I’ll be there. I won’t miss it.”

  “How many of ours did you miss?”

  She knew the answer, but he’d oblige her anyway.

  “Three. Made yours. Made Brian’s. Saw Brian’s, even.” Brian. A vision of a runny nose and blurred eyes, the boy years away from intelligent conversation. Tiny hands and knees scuffing across an old rug Skelly had bought in Damascus. He felt weary just thinking about it.

  “I’d almost forgotten Brian,” Carol said. “Hard to think of him as a half brother. Maybe he’ll be a playmate for Sidney.”

  “Sidney?”

  “It’s the name we’ve picked. Charlie’s favorite uncle. I won’t ask if you like it.”

  “Good. Then I won’t tell you I don’t.”

  She laughed, a piping, hollow sound, as if blown by a flute carved from the rarest tropical wood. For a few years of his life Skelly had lived for that laugh, and for his ability to conjure it out of tears when no one else could. He felt sated now, even if she suddenly were to hang up.

  “How is Janine, anyway?” Carol asked. “She taking this okay?”

  “Oh, you know Janine.”

  “Actually, I don’t. Except for a few minutes at the wedding.”

  “Well, at least you came.” Twenty guests beneath a leaky tent. Overcooked tenderloin and an embarrassing round of toasts from an old colleague he’d invited but had never expected to come. Carol had been the only sane guest, not to mention the only one of his four older children to respond to the invitation. Boycotts arranged by their moms, no doubt.

  “I should go now,” he said, weighted by regret. “Early day tomorrow.”

  “What time is it there now?”

  “A little after ten. I’m sorry! Did I wake you?” Jesus. Out of practice for sure, forgetting to check the time difference before calling.

  “No problem. It’s one in the afternoon. Charlie just went back to the office after stopping by for lunch. I had put on a pot of coffee and was lying on the daybed. It’s peaceful, really. Just me and Sidney, kicking around beneath a blanket.”

  “Sounds pleasant.”

  Skelly wished he could be there, could join her in time for the second cup of coffee. But he was sleepy, and she was a full day of airports away from here.

  “Well, say hello to Charlie for me.”

  “I will. He envies all your adventures.”

  “And take care of yourself. You and Sidney both.”

  “You’re the one who needs that advice. Be careful, Daddy.”

  “Don’t worry. Get some rest now.”

  He hung up, finding himself back in a darkened room with the humid night air creeping in between the curtains of the balcony window. He’d planned to shut the windows and switch on the air, but the evening had cooled, even though it still reeked of exhaust and smoke. Sputtering motors streamed past along the boulevard.

  He thought ahead to the morning. Prelude to a journey, perhaps. An adventure. What on earth would Carol think once she heard he had reached Afghanistan? He should have called Janine instead, but he was too tired now to do anything but crawl beneath the raspy sheets. Shut everything off and dream of redcoats and tribesmen, of brittle old empires shattering upon the stony floor of deep ravi
nes. Of anything except home and family.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DALIYA SAT in the darkness pressing a damp washcloth to her cheek as Najeeb hovered at her side. He lightly touched her shoulder, as if she might shatter, although she’d calmed since his arrival. How long ago had that been? Five minutes? Ten? Yet he’d been too preoccupied to even shut the door.

  “He attacked me on the stairs.” Daliya’s voice barely exceeded a whisper. “I didn’t see his face, but his hair was long. I heard a shout, then he was coming at me. I don’t know if he’d followed me or was already here, waiting. Maybe he was just a thief and I caught him in the act. He smelled like hash, I know that.”

  But they both knew thieves didn’t shout, “Cover yourself, infidel!” and disappear empty-handed. For Najeeb there was also the matter of the envelope, still unopened beside her on the cushions.

  Fortunately the cut wasn’t deep. Daliya had leaned away from the blow, and the attacker hadn’t stayed for a second try. Almost equally disturbing was that none of the neighbors had come to her aid. Maybe it happened too quickly to catch anyone’s attention. Or maybe they’d heard and approved, Najeeb thought, suddenly suspicious of everyone. He wondered why he hadn’t seen the attacker leaving the building. Unless, of course, the man was still inside, a thought that prompted Najeeb to go shut the door.

  He paused at the threshold, listening carefully. Nothing but the faint echo of a television downstairs, blaring a music video. They were beamed in from India via satellite dish, loud and rhythmic, with long, sinuous lines of dancing women, heads bare, hair lustrous, deep, meaningful gazes into the camera. So much for the piety and patriotism of his neighbors.

  “Good thing you had a key,” Najeeb said, remembering how he’d hesitated to give her one.

  Daliya shook her head. “I didn’t need it. The door was unlocked.”

  “Then I must have forgotten to lock it this morning,” he said weakly, glad it was too dark for her to see his surprise.

  He inspected the doorframe. No sign of a break-in. It could have been the work of professionals, although the knife attack seemed sloppy. He shut the door and threw the bolt, for whatever that was worth anymore.

  “Where was that envelope when you came in?” he asked, trying to keep his tone relaxed.

  Daliya shrugged, leaning back with a sigh of exhaustion.

  “I hadn’t noticed it until now.”

  “It was there when you got here? On the cushions?”

  She shrugged again, disinterested. Meaning the messenger must have entered the apartment. But for how long? And was he the attacker? Najeeb switched on a lamp, blinking against the glare.

  “Second one today,” he said, forcing a lighter tone as he picked up the envelope. “Got one this morning saying I was going to hell. Quoted the Koran. ‘Women should cover their adornments,’ that kind of thing.”

  He now had Daliya’s attention, and felt her shiver as he settled next to her.

  “Do you think it’s the same person who . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you surprised him.”

  Or maybe he’d been waiting for Najeeb, with a more decisive stroke in mind.

  Inside was the same neat but cramped handwriting, again in the language of the Prophet. The numbers “41:26-28” were at the top. Daliya knew only a few rote prayers in Arabic, so Najeeb translated for her:

  “The unbelievers say, ‘Pay no heed to this Koran. Cut short its recital with booing and laughter, so that you may gain the upper hand.’ We will sternly punish the unbelievers, and pay them back for the worst of their misdeeds. Thus shall the enemies of God be recompensed. The Fire shall forever be their home, because they have denied Our revelations.”

  “Very neighborly,” she said mirthlessly. “Very Peshawar.”

  “So was this,” he said, gently pulling back the washcloth. “The bleeding has stopped. We should wash it again. Make a bandage.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “And have them find you here? A single woman?” He shook his head. “Some of them would arrest you as a whore. This isn’t Islamabad.”

  “No kidding.”

  “For all we know it was the police, or somebody working for them. Or maybe I’m paranoid because of where I’ve come from.”

  He told her about being hauled in by the ISI, about Tariq and his offer of a visa in exchange for information, provided Najeeb managed to hook up with Razaq’s mission into Afghanistan, a long shot at best, not to mention dangerous. But Daliya, too, believed that a visa was worth a little danger these days. She sought escape almost as badly as he did, and she was also a self-made orphan of sorts, even if her estrangement from family was supposedly only temporary, an exile of one year. Mutual isolation had brought them together, you might say. They were like two castaways sharing a raft that suddenly seemed leaky and insubstantial.

  Daliya had hated Peshawar from the first day, despising its small-town strictness and frontier mentality, the dirtiness and the refugee chaos. “The ocean of beards,” she called it, feeling she’d been banished to the past, cast into a medieval sea of burqas and turbans and scowling holy men, a harsh colony of Pashtuns driven west by years of war. She was a Punjabi, a believer in the virtues of refinement, and for a week she’d been defiant, dressing as she pleased. But the leers and insults of the men in the streets soon wore her down, and she now kept a chador hanging next to her car keys, throwing it on to cover her head and most of her face whenever she went outdoors.

  She’d grown up in Islamabad, the child of a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. By Pakistani standards it was a privileged upbringing, rarely requiring her to venture beyond the asphalt belts that cordoned the city. It was an insular place, just as intended by the Greek architects who’d mapped it out forty years earlier. Each gridded sector had its own market, its own park, its own shops. There were no mule carts or rickshaws because the government had banned them, which was just as well, since only the poor needed them. In much of Islamabad, in fact, you could hardly tell you were in Pakistan at all. It was a freak appendage in the jarring tradition of Brasilia and Ankara, other instantaneous national capitals that tried to deny their nationality. Thus, the long-standing joke about Islamabad’s convenient location—“only ten miles from Pakistan.”

  At some of the city’s better mini-malls you could shop for a dress and buy a slice of pizza and almost pretend you were in London or New York, or so it had seemed to a sheltered young girl who’d seen just enough of the chaos of neighboring Rawalpindi to know that she deserved a better, calmer existence. And when she began her college years, just across town at Quaid-i-Azam University, she took her seat alongside like-minded young men and women, speaking up when she pleased, egged on at times by female professors. Looking back now, those moments seemed the best of all, the last rays of light before the gathering darkness of perdition.

  Then it came time to arrange her marriage. She knew the process had begun because she heard her parents on the telephone, fielding calls and asking questions when they thought she wasn’t listening, swapping vital statistics as if preparing for a corporate merger, a transaction of livestock—not that she would have considered such analogies fitting at the time. At the time, in fact, she’d been excited, even eager. She had always known it would be this way and had assumed the arrangement wouldn’t be so bad, if only because everyone else went along and seemed to survive, even prosper. Her parents had gotten married that way, and so had her older friends. Some had taken husbands in the States, or Great Britain, moving away and somehow making it work. It might not be love, but the lucky ones adjusted, and in any case you soon had children. Presumably it was the way things were meant to be, inshallah. Besides, she was twenty years old. It was time to face up to the sacrifices and responsibilities of adulthood. So, when her parents informed her one morning before classes that they had arranged a meeting with the first suitable candidate, she nodded and vowed to be on her best behavior.

  The boy’s mother arrived f
irst, like a scouting party, to make sure that Daliya’s bona fides matched the parental propaganda. Her name was Sultana, and she came knocking on a blistering Sunday afternoon in May, wrapped regally in a golden head scarf, somehow managing to look cool and composed in the heat. Daliya sat before a bountiful tea tray while her parents tiptoed out of the room. Then the conversation began—if one could call interrogation conversation.

  The woman’s tongue was sharp, and she wore an impatient frown that implied the clock was ticking and competition was stiff. She rattled off questions as if from a checklist: What kind of cook are you? Do you sew? Will you make your own clothes? Do you spend much money? How much? What kind of children do you want? How many? How should they be raised? Are you prepared to leave the university? Not a single query about what she was studying, what she’d learned, or her opinion on more worldly matters.

  The prospective groom arrived shortly afterward. His mother made introductions, then retreated to a roost in the corner with a final sharp glance, as if warning that so far Daliya’s answers had fallen short. But by then Daliya couldn’t have told you a single word that had left her mouth, feeling she’d been parroting phrases that had been programmed into some other mind altogether. Could this be what was meant by the power of tradition, she wondered? Did your voice simply begin speaking from some buried channel to your family’s past? But the young man himself was refreshing. His name was Pervez. A little plump, but he had a pleasant face and a gentle demeanor, especially in contrast to his mother, who glared from her corner like a caged owl, preening every few moments to remind them of her presence.

  At first he was as shy as Daliya. Then they warmed to the moment, his deep-set eyes unafraid to hold her gaze, his questions gaining in assurance yet never prying or presumptuous. There was no further mention of sewing, or cooking, or children, or of dropping out of school, and by the time he departed Daliya had convinced herself she could live with this, and with him. She even felt a flush of excitement, wondering where it all might lead, and when word came a few days later that the arrangement had been accepted by both families, she felt a genuine sense of triumph.