“Because you didn’t grow up here—I mean, there? You said their city. You don’t think of it as yours, even after all this time?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.” Why does he keep saying this? “It’s my home, yes, my children’s home. What I meant is I don’t think of any home as a fortress. In London, when I was growing up, the idea of terrorism was very ingrained, part of the world around us. The IRA, bomb threats on the Underground, that kind of thing. It was something everyone knew could happen, really, part of our subconscious, just the way all living people know that someday we will die. You don’t think about it all the time, you don’t dwell on it, but the knowledge is always there.”
“But on this scale,” Rebecca protests. “Something this terrible in the United States!”
In his pockets, his hands folding and unfolding. “Yes,” he says. “This is a bad one. Very well organized. Usually people who hate, they are not this well organized. But then sometimes they are. Look at the Nazis. It seems preposterous now, to think they were so successful at their campaign of hate in our parents’ lifetimes—and yet they were. And if they had been even slightly more successful, you would not be here.”
She looks at him with something like alarm, but it may just be the wind in her eyes.
“You remember,” he continues quietly. “Lockerbie, the explosion, Pan Am Flight 103. December 1988—you remember that happening?”
With Americans he has found you can never assume. They are, many of them, a people without memory. But she nods, yes, yes, of course.
“My fiancée, she was on that plane. She and our unborn child. She was four months pregnant—only just beginning to show. We had told no one yet about the baby. No one knew, so when she died it was only she who was mourned.”
“My God!” Rebecca reaches out to grasp his arm the way she did in the basement, but without planning to—without fully knowing he has even done it—Hasnain steps just beyond her reach, so that her arms fall flat back to her sides. “Hasnain! That’s terrible! I’m so—so sorry.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”
“She was English?” Rebecca asks, no doubt to have something to say, because really, what does it matter if she was English, what she was, when she is gone?
“No. American. A student.”
“Oh God, right. So many students died on that plane. I went to Syracuse—well, I didn’t graduate, but I went there for a couple of years, and I remember how many Syracuse students were killed. There’s a memorial on campus, I think, and a scholarship or something now.”
“She was not a Syracuse student,” he says, though of course this, too, means nothing, reveals nothing, and as always he has told an incomplete story, to the extent that he ever tells this story at all.
Rebecca continues to nod, and the movement of her head makes Hasnain feel dizzy. He should have eaten his sandwich, that slippery ham and river of mayonnaise on sticky bread. It is permissible, he remembers, to eat pork during times of starvation if doing so is the only means of staying alive. But what has that to do with him?
“We are all vulnerable,” he mumbles. The words feel stuck in his throat. “After she died, I left the UK and went to New York for a fresh start. My parents had been furious at me for planning to marry an American girl, a non-Muslim, and after her death I couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore. I didn’t see them again for nearly ten years, until my father got ill a few years ago and my brother summoned me. By then I was married with children. By then, it was all from another life.”
“Another life.” The wind is at her face now, so that her hair blows straight back like a figure at the mast of a ship. “I understand. I lost a child once, too, Hasnain. There’s nothing, nothing that ever makes that go away, is there? I gave up my daughter, my baby girl, when she was only a week old, when I was too young and too messed up to take care of her. But I’ve never stopped thinking of her—never. When we adopted Susan from China, I was terrified—I was sure I’d be killed on the plane over, that God would never allow me to be a mother again. I thought I’d arrive to find Susan dead in her orphanage as some kind of penance for what I’d done. It took me years, years, to stop checking on her in the night to make sure she was still breathing, that she hadn’t simply disappeared. And then this—when I heard, when they made the announcement on our plane about what had happened, I thought, Surely my daughter has been killed. I don’t even know how to explain it. The entire thing—the entire scope of the horror—seemed singularly about me, to steal my daughter as punishment for what I’d done.”
He watches her eyes, so like Nicole’s: that demon guilt biting her heels. It was the way Nicole had felt about the rape in Greece—the way she had believed, almost until the end, that it was all her fault. And yet her story is nothing like Nicole’s. This woman walked away from her daughter, whereas he and Nicole had chosen to keep the baby she was growing—to love it regardless of its violent origin. The men were dark like me, Hasnain remembers telling her as they lay skin to skin under his piano only weeks after meeting, the fetus already sprouting inside her. The child will look as though she’s ours. It was pure madness. He had a fiancée; he had his studies. Nicole should have been finishing school, should have found a doctor to take care of the pregnancy and gone about her life. Yet from the moment she entered his parents’ flat and walked to his piano, sitting on the floor and waiting for him, there had never been any possibility again that they would be apart. The moment was larger than both of them in a way no moment has ever been for Hasnain since: their love immediate, chemical, irrevocable. There is no way to explain it other than madness, other than timing, other than destiny, other than what could have amounted to a terrible, ridiculous mistake that Nicole and the child died too soon ever to have realized they had made.
They spoke of the baby as if it were a girl, always. Still, he thinks of Nicole’s child as the daughter he never had, who would have altered the course of his life in ways he can scarcely imagine now.
“You don’t look well,” Rebecca says, and this time when she reaches out, her hand makes contact with his arm.
“I’m fine,” he promises. “I’m only hungry. Perhaps we should go back now.”
Like you, I am still alive despite everything. They say that love cannot save anybody, but it’s a lie, a specifically American lie, too, I’ve come to believe. If I hadn’t met Hasnain, I might still be lost, but even if someday he’s gone I can never go back to being what I was before I knew him. We are not islands, we are not meant to live in isolation, becoming whole only in some self-contained cocoon, but with others, in that kindness and that curiosity and that struggle. We have to stand on each other’s shoulders if we ever want to climb.
TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY people are not so many in the scheme of things. Not even equal to the number of New York City police officers whose lives were claimed yesterday at Ground Zero. And yet finally, just last year at the Lockerbie trial held at Camp Zeist, a former NATO air base in the Netherlands, it took the prosecuting lawyer an hour to read out the names and addresses of the dead.
HE GOES TO the men’s toilet in the church to make wudu. He has not done this, not once, in almost thirteen years. The last time he performed any ablution, it was a mockery because he was demonstrating to Nicole what you were supposed to do, the cleansing of every part of the body that was necessary after intercourse, he explained jokingly, or even after wet dreams. You see, he told her, making his face somber, this is why we managed to live side by side in these two flats and not even know it. After seeing you at the restaurant that first time, it was necessary for me to spend my every waking moment in the toilet.
And she laughed, then pulled her sweater over her head.
He has been waiting for a free moment in the toilet for hours. With so many people here, there has often been a line. But most people have finally retired, sprawled out now on pews cushioned by sleeping bags, or in the basement on cots, and Hasnain has escaped them, stands in the small, paint-and-piss-smelling room,
and says quietly to the empty walls, “Bismillah.”
Even this takes too long, so he shortcuts. Washes the hands and rinses the mouth once instead of three times, skips the water-sniffing part altogether, merely splashing water onto his face and arms. When he has finally finished, his heart is throbbing in his throat.
What is he doing here? What is he trying to say?
He expresses his intention—this Isha’a for Allah—only in his head before beginning Salat.
“Allahu Akbar.”
But is it true?
He puts his right hand atop his left. If there is nothing out there, if there is no God, then it is madness, all of it. Love and death and sex and war and terror. It is for nothing. If there are no absolutes, then the men who blew up Pan Am Flight 103 were wrong only according to the sentimental code of other men, and a mock trial in the Netherlands is the only trial there will ever be. Hasnain bows into ruku. If Allah is watching, perhaps he and Hasnain are not even friends. Hasnain has not followed Allah’s laws, has honored nothing he was taught, has not even raised his sons Muslim. Such crimes, were he to die at this instant, are unforgivable. Fine then, fine. Let there still be the trial, the judgment. Let him be cast into the pit, too, so long as those animals go with him.
He gets to his knees, touches his head to the jacket he has spread out over the floor to use in the absence of anything else. Even under his thin jacket the tiles feel cold, and for a moment Hasnain rests his pounding head against them. When he met her, Nicole claimed to be an atheist, said religion made no sense to her. But by the end of her time in London, with all the hours she had free since leaving school, she had started studying Buddhism, meditating—or what she called “sitting”—every day, and studying yoga with a guru, modifying the positions for pregnancy. When you are twenty, three months can change your entire worldview; three months can change everything. By the end, Nicole—like Leslie since—urged him not to make light of his heritage and expressed an interest in studying the Koran. I’ve been saved by British irreverence, he tells Leslie now whenever she brings this up. It all seems a load of rubbish to me. But what he really wants to ask is how she fails to understand that everything about them would be deemed unacceptable through the lens of the Koran—that Nicole naked under his piano with another man’s seed in her belly, and even Leslie, his wife and the mother of his sons, would be a whore through the eyes of Islam.
They were fanatics, those men. Religious and political fanatics. They do not represent truth, but their failure to do so does not mean—cannot mean—that Truth does not exist. Abandoning ritual, head still against the tile, Hasnain prays freestyle like a Christian, the insufferable type who act as though they maintain a standing golf date with Jesus and find him obsessed with all their petty trivialities: Please be something other than what they think you are, please give me a moment of clarity so that I can understand you, reveal yourself to me, please.
And then, in response, the squeak of the door.
Please don’t worry about me, please. I know what I’m telling you sounds crazy, like I’ve lost my mind, but I promise I have not. I don’t know how to explain why going back to Skidmore means nothing to me anymore, why it all just seems like part of something I was supposed to subscribe to, like worrying my thighs were too fat or picking up guys in bars. I know there’s something that finishing college has to offer, I do, but right now it feels constrictive, like I can pursue what I need better on my own, and it’s not a giving up or “dropping out” but exactly the opposite. I want to eat the world. In yoga they talk a lot about detachment and for a while I tried to learn that, I thought detachment was what could save me. But I don’t want to notice rather than feel. I don’t want to be equal to a tree or a blade of grass, impassive. I thought detachment would allow me to forgive them, but I don’t want to forgive them, they don’t matter anymore, there is too much else out there, too much to stay stuck in that day. I want to feel deeply, and if that means at times I have to feel that day, too, it’s a price I am willing to pay for everything else there is still in me to feel. Do you understand? I need you to understand not even because you were there with me in Greece but because of the limits your parents and doctors have set for you, that you’re allowing to be set and that I no longer believe in. You don’t have to stay there in fucking Kettering being who they think you are—who I thought you were. You are more than that, the world is more than that. I need you to believe me.
The body remembers violence. The shoe in his ribs is no different from the trainers that kicked him in primary school, only larger, as his body itself is larger to accommodate the greater violence now, the greater malice. There is no question of getting to his feet and fighting back the way he tried to as a boy; since he is already on his knees, face to the ground, his assailants do not need to topple him but only, quite literally, to kick him while he’s down. Hasnain’s arms have gone up round his head, though it takes all his will to keep them there—to shield his face, his skull, rather than allow his hands to fly to the areas being attacked. If he leaves his head unprotected, it could be the end of him: one sharp jab, even accidentally misplaced, could be all it takes. He hears grunting noises coming from his throat, feels the jacket under his shoulder sliding on the slippery tiles with each blow. His vision is blocked by his arms, so that he cannot see his attackers, caught only the briefest glimpse when he tried to rise at the door’s squeaking, before the first kick landed in his stomach and he doubled over, gone.
Camel-fucking murderer!
String you up and let the families cut off your dick and shove it down your throat!
Other voices, too. The din of a crowd forming: curious and unsure. If he were in Brooklyn he would say to Leslie, Well, of course they didn’t know what to think. A dark-skinned man performing a secret Islamic prayer in a toilet, versus two middle-aged white men in business suits—given the events of the day before, the crowd would not know whose defense to rush to, would they? Still, some are rushing to his—he hears them through the tinny tunnel that has become his consciousness, everything drifting from afar, flickering weakly like Morse code.
Get off him—stop it!
Somebody call security!
I know this man—I know him—leave him alone!
His assailants are being restrained now, restrained not by men who look anything like he does but by other white Americans, by a hefty African American man who, in Brooklyn, Hasnain would probably cross the street to avoid. A gaggle of women led by Rebecca have pushed their way into the bathroom and help him to his feet. The white tile beneath him is stained with splotches of blood that he realizes—to his horror and surprise—he has coughed up. One of the restrained men screams at the others, “Yeah, pat yourselves on the back for your liberal delusions when he slits your throat in your sleep or blows this place sky-high!” and another man shouts at him, “Shut up, asshole, you think this is any way to honor the dead?” Hasnain blinks rapidly at the blackness closing around him, coughs a mouthful of blood onto the floor.
He thinks, Are there even camels in Kashmir, or only nuclear weapons?
And then the blackness is everything.
THE DAY HE took Nicole to Heathrow, they had slept not at all. In his brand-new flat, the first he had ever paid for on his own in twenty-four years, they’d stayed up all night, talking, making love. It was a shabby place, cheap, all the way in North Islington, a mainly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood. Nicole had arrived with all her belongings, most of which she would now bring back to Ohio for two weeks before returning to him here, in London, where they would await the baby’s birth in early June. After that, who knew? They spoke sometimes of going to India or Morocco, where he had relatives, of finding some kind of humanitarian work, of taking the baby and just disappearing, but even such a plan took money they didn’t have.
He was waiting tables at another restaurant, the only work he knew. His parents had never paid him wages—there was no need, since they always bought him everything he needed. Now his mother w
as not speaking to him at all. His father expressed sympathy, but as in all things, he toed Hasnain’s mother’s line. She had come to London at sixteen to marry a friend of her uncle’s, nearly fifteen years her senior but an educated man of ambition. Though she herself had little formal education and had been brought up merely to serve her man, her upbringing, as is the case with certain irrevocably strong women, simply hadn’t taken—she had always ruled her husband, their restaurants, and their home with an iron fist wrapped in a silk glove. She was still lovely, often taken for his older sister. She had grown up persecuted among a Hindu majority, so London had paradoxically strengthened her Muslim pride. She had no use for Baba’s interest in Western pastimes and predilections—no use for an American girl or, it seemed, for Hasnain now. He had never mentioned Nicole’s pregnancy: not their fabricated tale much less the truth. He had been written off even without it, dismissed as a fool who was throwing his future away—and who could argue? Here they were in North Islington, among new immigrants, preparing to bring a child he could only barely support into the world. They would marry as soon as possible so that Nicole could work legally, but really, what could she do? And they would have to pay for the baby’s care. It was an insurmountable situation, one that he knew rarely ended well in practice.
He had never been happier in his entire life.
They had stayed up all night, talking, making plans, making love, which her doctor insisted was perfectly safe. Nicole was drowsy on the ride to Heathrow but fought to keep her eyes open, clutching his hand so that he drove with only one. “I feel,” she said softly, “like when I get home no one will recognize me. I feel like I’m another person now, like all those years I was there I was wearing a mask and it’s finally off, but they won’t understand that—they’ll think this is a mask, now.”
A Life in Men: A Novel Page 45
