by Stephen Dau
“There is no god but…”
“Yes. But God, and…”
“But why must I say it?”
“Because this is how you become one of the people. A believer.”
“Oh. All right. There is no god but…”
“Yes.”
“But why must I become one of the people?”
“You must become a believer. We are all believers. Your mother, your father. You come from a long line of believers. Now say it, and when you do so, say it earnestly.”
“There is no god but…”
“Yes, Younis, you may continue. But God. Please.”
“But is it really necessary to say it? Can I not be a believer without doing so? Can I simply think it?”
“It is absolutely necessary. You cannot be a believer without reciting the Kalimah. Now please, Younis, continue.”
“There is no god but…”
“Yes, Younis, please continue.”
“But what if I were mute?”
6
He lives with a host family in a large subdivision outside the city. The Martins. Mr. and Mrs. Martin and their two children, whose names Jonas has trouble pronouncing. The girl is called Courtney, although much to her annoyance Jonas usually drops out the n and compresses the vowel sounds, pronouncing her name so that it sounds much like “Cutie.” The boy is Addison, which Jonas pronounces “Ad-son.”
The evening Jonas arrives in America, he and the Martins eat dinner together. Mrs. Martin has prepared a pair of large roast chickens, each bigger than any chicken Jonas has ever seen, with light brown gravy and golden roasted potatoes and green beans (which have been steamed, she explains, not boiled, because steaming keeps in more of the vitamins) and glazed carrots and warm bread. The five of them sit around the long table in the dining room stacked with crystal and china and silver on what Mrs. Martin calls a “propitious occasion.” Cutie and Ad-son sit across from Jonas, and Mr. and Mrs. Martin sit at either end of the table. Mr. Martin says grace.
“Bless this food to our use,” he says. While he continues with the prayer, Jonas glances up anxiously to see that Cutie, her head bowed, is snickering, and then Ad-son flinches as though he has been punched or kicked under the table. Mrs. Martin glares at her children, who hastily compose themselves into a picture of reverence.
“And us to thine service,” says Mr. Martin.
After grace, Mrs. Martin tells Jonas that they try to eat dinner as a family every night, but that it’s difficult, with the children’s after-school activities and other interests, and Mr. Martin’s frequent need to stay late at the office. She says that they are making a renewed effort to gather together at the end of each day. She says that this is one of the problems confronting American society, the breakdown of the family, the lack of time families spend together, and that they are trying to counter that trend, but that it’s difficult, because they are all so busy with other things. She tells Jonas that, aside from their meals in the evenings, the only thing they do consistently as a family is attend church on Sunday mornings, after which, during the season, they try to get back home in time to watch football on television.
“Do you like football?” asks Ad-son, trying to make eye contact with Jonas over the table.
But Jonas is barely aware of it. His mouth had begun watering almost as soon as he walked in the Martins’ front door, and the smell of the roasting meat has tortured him for hours, first as they showed him around the massive house, explaining where his bathroom was and how the taps in the shower worked, because they were new and a little bit tricky, and then when they left him alone in his room, a clean, spare room with a single bed, for nearly an hour, where he was supposed to, he didn’t know, unpack his meager duffel or make himself comfortable or something. But all he could think about was the food being prepared downstairs.
And so it is some time before he realizes that he has been asked a question.
Jonas becomes aware that the dining room is silent save for his own snuffles and grunts. He has ripped off a large chunk of bread and, together with a slab of chicken breast and half a potato, grasps it all together in his hand, the silver cutlery lying untouched on either side of his dinner plate. His mouth is stuffed full and he wipes a dribble of juice from his chin with the back of his hand. As he becomes aware of the silence, he glances up to see that the Martins have not yet begun eating, but that they are instead all looking at him, staring at him with expressions that range from fascination to pity to disgust, staring at him as though they have just discovered that they are sharing their table with some fierce and alien creature.
7
“Where do you go in your mind?” asks Paul.
Jonas watches his reflection in the silver statue on Paul’s desk, leans left and then right to watch his distorted image play in the light. Jonas feels uncomfortable, examined. In an effort to deflect the course of the conversation, he talks for ten minutes about football. American football, which he has found entirely inescapable on television, a weekly tyranny, he calls it. But despite his reservations, he has finally given in and started watching it. He draws contrasts with football as the rest of the world knows it, which, Jonas points out, is actually played with the feet.
“Unless you’re a goalie,” says Paul, to which Jonas halfheartedly agrees.
Paul has laid out some ground rules. He has given Jonas some forms to fill out, asked some general questions, some of which Jonas has answered, and some of which he has not. He has told Jonas that when they meet, they are in a safe space, that they can talk about anything he wants, that he may feel anger and rage and that that’s okay, that part of their purpose is to allow him to access those emotions. He has told Jonas that he is legally obligated to report certain crimes, murder, abuse, but that this is for his own protection.
And he has warned Jonas that any hint of physical violence will not be tolerated, that it will instantly end their meetings, and might even lead to jail.
Then he asks Jonas if he has any questions. Paul looks up from his desk to see that Jonas is staring out the window.
“Where do you go in your mind?” asks Paul.
For a time, Jonas says nothing. He looks around the room, back out the window, at the statue on the desk, at the floor. He avoids Paul’s gaze for as long as he is able, trying to think of something to say. Then he has a flash. He latches onto an image from his childhood, a glimpse of a thought which seems to him entirely innocuous, and which has suddenly caught in his mind like a shiny pebble.
“Very well,” he says at last, “if you really want to know.”
8
Another memory. Heat. Sunlight pours through the open windows and into the irregularly shaped schoolroom, where he is gathered with the other students around the long, thick-grained table set to one end. He draws a picture of a lion on the single sheet of lined paper lying before him on the table. The headmaster is speaking in English, but it is a halting, pidgin English, a distant cousin to the flowing, facile language he listens to on the radio, or practices with his father.
(“Where did you learn to speak it,” he had once asked after an impromptu lesson, out by the well in the courtyard.
“Bradford,” his father had said.)
By contrast, the headmaster’s only apparent exposure to a native speaker of English seemed to come from his witnessing, as a young man, a crown customs officer adjudicate an impromptu divorce, an anecdote he repeated often, using it to illustrate both his own superior linguistic abilities and the amorality of the colonialist crown. At some point during the divorce proceedings, one of the parties must have uttered the word “insolent,” because this is the headmaster’s favorite word to use when describing his pupils. As in, “I tolerate no insolence from any of you,” or, “Stop your insolent ways,” or occasionally, almost randomly, simply uttered to no one in particular, “Insolent.”
The headmaster paces the room, looking at each of them in turn, and then he notices that one pair of eyes is not turned to meet his.<
br />
“What is it upon which you work?” says the headmaster. But the words wash over Younis like a breeze. The lion’s mane is coming together on the page in front of him, and with only a few more strokes, a couple of precise pencil lines, he is convinced that he will have the perfect representation of—
Pain. His right ear is grabbed, yanked, twisted, a hard grip on his earlobe, and he suddenly understands that what the headmaster lacks in facility with the English language he more than makes up for in his willingness to swiftly issue corporal punishment.
“I said,” says the headmaster, “what is that upon which you work?”
“Ah,” says Younis, thinking as quickly as he is able while being lifted bodily from his chair by the ear. “Ah … but you did not speak to me!”
At this the headmaster pauses, ever so slightly, reducing incrementally the grip on his ear.
“What?” he says.
“You did not speak to me,” says Younis, squinting his eye and resisting the urge to slap at the headmaster’s hand, an act he knows will result only in the implementation of more brutal measures. “At least, you did not speak to me directly.”
“I did, you insolent boy,” says the headmaster, renewing his grip. “I ask you upon what it is you work, and now I see it is upon silly doodlings.”
“Yes,” says Younis, “but you used the collective ‘you.’”
“The what?”
“The collective ‘you.’ The ‘you’ you used was us. All of us.” Younis tries to motion, or nod, or make some kind of gesture that would indicate the inclusion of his classmates, now gaping at the proceedings at the far end of the table, but can only roll his eyes around the room. The vise on his ear relaxes slightly, but the grip is not completely released. He realizes he must keep talking. He takes a breath. “When in a group situation, as we have here, it is necessary for the speaker, that is you, if speaking to only one member of the group, to identify the individual to whom he speaks by name or other moniker, so as to avoid confusion.”
The headmaster’s eyebrows knit together, as though of their own will, making his face look, thinks Younis, not unlike that of a confused puppy. The grip on his ear relaxing still further, Younis keeps talking.
“It’s one of the basic grammatical rules of the English language,” he says.
Too late, he realizes that he has gone too far. A brief flash of pain shocks his head, this time on his left ear as the headmaster smacks his face. But then it is over.
“Insolent child,” says the headmaster as he paces to the front of the schoolroom. “Insolent, unruly boy.”
9
He knows little about his new home. The city’s name is abbreviated to PIT on the luggage tag that still hangs, six months after his arrival, from the strap on his duffel, and sounds German to his ear. He imagines it printed in the fractured typeface of old German newspapers. He has seen photos, read some literature. The city is silver, surrounded by water and traversed by bridges. It is home to industry and a sports team whose name sounds familiar, from newspaper articles or radio broadcasts. The society, which has placed him with the Martins, has also enrolled him in a high school, and in a few years can maybe even help him get into the university.
According to a teacher, he lives in the middle of the “rust belt.” When he hears the term (which he finds misleading), he pictures himself buckling a flaking iron hoop around his waist. But there is a lot of green space, especially in the suburbs, and the downtown is stainless and tall, but relatively clean, which he is told it did not used to be. Its three rivers, each of them larger than the river next to which he spent his childhood, both bisect and hem in the city. He imagines the boundaries formed by their junction forcing the village, then the town, then the city to grow up rather than out. Underneath the polish is the old city, stone and brick and corniced, pre-Depression confident. Clapboard houses, miners’ and steelworkers’ houses, lie as though tossed like so many dice onto the surrounding hills, and the university with its towering cathedral looks on from the east.
He strives to adapt to his new life, to understand his place in it. As a welcome present, Mrs. Martin gives him an ornate, leather-bound copy of the Bible, which he keeps on a shelf in his room. For a time, it is his only book.
At the high school, he tries to talk to other students, but they trick him into saying things.
“Hey, Apu,” says one of them, blond-haired and cold-eyed, “say, ‘Welcome to Quickie Mart.’ Say, ‘Thank you, come again.’”
He tries to rid himself of the accent, practicing for hours in front of a mirror, but it is hard-wearing, like stone, a singsong abomination.
He gets A’s in everything.
He wanders the halls like a ghost.
10
“Where do you go in your mind?” Paul asks. He wants to explore this. Jonas has told him that often he sees his body, his surroundings, and himself from the outside, objectively. This does not happen all the time, only when he is in a particularly high state of stress or concentration, but that when it does he knows what people are thinking, can feel the energy vibrations in a room, and understands hidden meanings. (Later, when Paul mentions that he is privately skeptical of the existence of God, Jonas says, as mysteriously as he can manage: “Yes. I know.”)
11
If he remembers anything, he remembers the book.
He remembers the scratching sound of pencil on paper. He remembers wondering, offhandedly at first, but with ever-increasing interest, what was being written. He remembers the compulsion, the care with which the book was usually guarded.
And he remembers spotting it almost by accident, unaccountably left lying on the ground next to the camouflage backpack, as though it had been casually tossed or dropped in the dust, the color of which nearly matched its worn leather cover, obscuring it to the point that he might easily have missed seeing it in the meek dawn.
Alone for the moment, he glances around, then stoops to pick it up. The leather is creased at the spine, bent and folded over at the corners, worn bare at the edges. It feels dense in his hands. A leather tie wraps the book at its middle, and he gently tugs open the precise knot that holds it closed.
The inside cover is inscribed with a compass rose, next to which is a brief, handwritten dedication in flowing script. The journal is filled with long stretches of text, each separated by half a blank page. Some sections take up multiple pages; some are only one or two paragraphs long. For the most part, the writing is a slanted, hasty scrawl, but occasionally it refracts into neat printing. Penciled-in scratch marks and corrections fill the margins.
He is able to read only the first page. Before he gets a chance to go any further, he hears rocks clattering outside the cave mouth, and realizes the soldier has returned. He quickly closes the book, hastily ties the leather strap with a knot that faintly imitates the original, and puts the book back on the ground next to the pack.
Eventually, he will read the whole thing. At first he will read with passing interest, and then with increasing fascination, and finally with dread. After he reads it, unsure what to do next, he will take the book to the back of the cave and wedge it underneath some rocks, confident that he is the only one who will ever be able to find it again.
But for now, the fear of being discovered forces him to be content with stolen glances and skimmed passages. He knows he is trespassing, that these words were not meant for him. But he is able to convince himself that if he proceeds carefully, respectfully, he will harm nothing, violate no sacred laws. He is allowed to read it, he reasons, because he needs to know whom he is dealing with.
12
You deserve an explanation.
I have had this book with me ever since you gave it to me on my eighteenth birthday. During all that time I have not scratched a hundred words into it. Countless times I have thought of packing it away, or misplacing it, or leaving it behind somewhere. But I kept it. Maybe this is why.
I won’t try to justify anything we did, but you should kn
ow what happened. Maybe you will read something in the paper. Or maybe you will see a reporter talking into a microphone in the dusty aftermath. Maybe you will think to yourself that the snowy mountains behind him would be beautiful in another context. By then, it will be done. It will feel historical, like a stock-market crash or an election. It will seem inevitable.
But this was not inevitable. We did exactly what we were supposed to do. Maybe that’s the horror of it. To call it an accident would be false. To call it a mistake implies that it was unintentional.
What we did stank of intention.
13
“Welcome to America,” they say.
It is said often during the two years he stays with the Martins at their large home in the suburbs. They first said it to him when he arrived at their house on a muggy summer afternoon, the duffel slung over his shoulder as he crossed the threshold into a cavernous foyer and a cold blast of conditioned air.
“Welcome to America,” they said.
But since then, he is welcomed to America regularly. It becomes a kind of joke.
They say, “Welcome to America,” when he expresses astonishment at how friendly everyone is, smiling at him every time he opens his mouth to say anything, smiling at his accent. He is welcomed to America when he comments on the number of church steeples visible in the city and the surrounding towns. He is welcomed to America when he mentions the number of hours the Martins spend sitting passively in front of their television set.
He is welcomed to America when he makes the mistake of saying that he does not like American football, which is all but a second religion in the Martin household. But Jonas says that it’s a jerky, start-stop kind of game that lacks rhythm and grace and beauty. He is welcomed to America when the family goes out for fast food one night (slumming it, they call it), and they laugh as Jonas wolfs down four double cheeseburgers in rapid succession, then express concern (“You really think he’s okay?”) as he spends half an hour vomiting audibly in the bathroom.
