by C. E. Smith
‘Whoever killed him stole a ring from his finger.’
‘Probably what you’d call foot soldiers – men acting on their own, certainly not on orders from me or anyone else. But what do you expect? Your brother was spreading Christianity, trying to convert Muslims. To my mind that is worse even than castration or rape.’
‘I’d like to know the names of the foot soldiers. They stole his car and laptop as well.’
‘How should I know which man shot him, or which man searched his pockets or took his silver?’
‘How did you know the ring was silver?’
He shrugs, his irritation obvious. ‘Men make the mistake of killing an American rather than holding him for a ransom, but Allah provides financial rewards in the form of a ring, a computer, even a vehicle.’
‘Where is the ring now?’
‘Perhaps it was sold on the black market. Silver has great value these days.’
Sajiv holds his AK-47 by the barrel. It would take him precious seconds to aim and pull the trigger, by which time Burkett could have Tarik in a choke hold. Perhaps Sajiv would refrain from firing, for fear of hitting Tarik by accident. But how long would it take to kill a man by strangulation? Too long, Burkett thinks. Sajiv would have enough time to cross the room and shoot him point blank.
‘Dr Burkett,’ Tarik says, ‘I almost forgot.’
He lays a ziplock bag on the table and pushes it toward Burkett.
‘What’s this?’
‘I understand you were very sick on your arrival. You even had a seizure?’
Burkett steps closer. In the bag he counts twenty round pills.
‘Diazepam, ten milligram tablets,’ says Tarik. ‘Enough to last until your release. I’m happy to offer you this, one physician to another, as a gesture of hospitality.’
Burkett’s fingernails scrape the table as if he were sliding downward and searching for some purchase. The bag crumples in his fist. He glances at Tarik’s blank eyes and courteous smile, and suppresses an impulse to thank him.
Tarik has brought an elderly companion. Sajiv and Akbar call him Maalim, teacher. Their first lesson takes place in the courtyard, the very spot where most days at this hour they would probably be wrestling. Burkett and Nick go about their usual calisthenics, drawing harsh glances from Akbar and Sajiv, who seem to regard push-ups as the height of impropriety in the presence of such distinguished guests. Burkett and Nick have no qualms about causing offense, and the teacher even vindicates their exertions with a point on physical fitness in Islam.
‘A strong Muslim is a good Muslim,’ Nick interprets between isometric rows.
Just then Akbar answers a question incorrectly, and Maalim slaps him across the face for the third time in an hour. Sajiv, for his part, has yet to be slapped, but his kinship with the teacher – apparently they are cousins of some kind – would suggest an element of favoritism.
‘He’s quoting the Qu’ran,’ Nick says, releasing the broomstick. ‘Man was created weak and impotent.’
They rest their backs against the base of the wall, pretending not to realize they are the topic of discussion, but Tarik, who squats alone with a book, watches them with a knowing expression.
‘Without discipline and effort,’ Nick mumbles, ‘men are slaves to their desires.’
Akbar is obviously distracted, repeatedly glancing at the sky for fear of drones. Is Tarik aware of the danger implied by his visit? Perhaps he even takes pleasure in his status as a high value target. For the moment Burkett too finds himself searching for a black speck against the clouds.
‘We bear what he calls the seal of obstinacy,’ Nick says, still immersed in the words of Maalim. ‘Which essentially means we are incapable of righteousness.’
‘So there’s no point in even trying,’ Burkett says.
‘Wait, he’s quoting another verse: There is a veil over their ears and their eyes, and a painful torment awaits them.’
‘Another set?’ Burkett picks up the broomstick.
‘To them we have hardened hearts,’ Nick says, reaching for the stick, ‘like Pharaoh in Exodus.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, God demanded their freedom, but at the same time hardened Pharaoh against setting them free.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘There was a series of plagues, each worse than the last, and finally God killed the firstborn son in every Egyptian home.’
They face each other, with legs interlaced, and pull the broomstick in strained mimicry of rowing.
‘What kind of God would kill children?’ Burkett asks, his arms trembling from the effort.
‘You have to see it in context.’ Nick’s back tilts toward the ground as he pulls the broomstick against his chest.
‘Is there any context that makes it okay to kill children?’
‘The Egyptians,’ he says between breaths, ‘had a policy of killing every male baby born to the Jews.’
‘So this was a form of revenge?’
Nick doesn’t speak till they’ve completed the set. ‘The Egyptians were killing all male infants. God’s decision to kill only the firstborn could be seen as merciful.’
‘Merciful? To me it sounds completely insane. You’re telling me God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, kept him from freeing the Jews, just so he could avenge the Jews by killing untold numbers of Egyptian children?’
‘Not necessarily children – just the firstborn male in every household. Not all households had a firstborn male. There’s no way to know the exact number, but given the high infant mortality rates —’
‘Do the numbers even matter? One household or twenty, murder is murder.’
‘Before Christ, justice came only through revenge. God took on that burden by sending his destroying angel.’
‘Is revenge a burden when you’re all-powerful, or when you can’t be hurt in return?’
‘God could, and did, allow himself to be hurt in return – in the person of Jesus Christ.’
‘There’s an obvious difference between allowing your son to be killed for some greater good, and having your son murdered in his sleep.’
‘Do you think the creator of the universe is subject to the very laws of good and evil that he himself created? Or that he isn’t capable of ensuring perfect justice – in this life or the next – for every last human life? You see death as the greatest evil, which is perhaps natural for a physician, but the death of the body is inevitable.’
‘So what you’re saying is that God will murder each and every one of us.’
‘No,’ Nick says, ‘we are immortal, each and every one of us.’
‘That’s the sort of idea that makes it easy for people to kill and die in the name of religion,’ Burkett replies.
Brushing away sweat, Nick leaves a streak of mud on his forehead.
‘There is little so honorable as dying in God’s name, but nothing worse than taking others with you.’
Burkett glances at their captors, who seem to be eavesdropping. It is a kind of reversal: the speakers have become the listeners, with Tarik in the role of interpreter. How long has Nick been aware of it? Was he speaking to them all along? Perhaps he sees all of this, his abduction and imprisonment, as an opportunity to evangelize – a mission field all his own.
That night Burkett lies awake thinking how much easier he could sleep with the help of the diazepam. He begins to draw the bag from its cleft, but the sound of crumpling plastic stops him. He can’t bear the thought of waking Nick and having to explain himself.
He drapes his arm across his eyes, as if to block out the darkness. He summons the face of his father. What comes to him, from some deep recess of memory, is a face contorted by grief: his father kneeling before his mother. ‘I’m sorry,’ his father says. It is a scene from Burkett’s childhood, a mo
ment he never remembered till now. His father reaching for his mother’s hands and his mother snatching them away in disgust.
Why would this memory visit him now, uninvited, so many years later? Would a dose of Valium send it back where it belongs? Would Valium protect him as well from this new vision, an image of Tarik pointing a Kalashnikov down at Owen’s dying body, or the thought that at that very moment Burkett himself lay half drunk on a couch in Atlanta?
He remembers how he and his brother, in the wake of their mother’s death, were convinced of a supernatural connection unique to identical twins – that the ghost of the one who died first would have to linger till the other died as well. When he has an urge to reach for the pills, he can almost feel his brother’s hand gently restraining him.
19
After Tarik and the teacher leave, Sajiv affirms the promised ransom and release, scheduled for next Monday. Burkett can tell that Sajiv and Akbar also yearn for an ending. They too are captives in a way, no doubt bored out of their minds. As freedom nears, Akbar and Sajiv dispense with friendly banter, even during the nightly games of chaupar. It makes Burkett wonder if the two of them have anything in common beyond chaupar, wrestling, and radical Islam.
But the day of their promised release passes without any sign of action, as somehow they knew it would. Akbar and Sajiv receive no word to suggest any progress in the ransom negotiations, if any such negotiation has even occurred.
That night Burkett opens his stash of diazepam. He works carefully to keep Nick from hearing the crinkle of plastic. Two pills he swallows dry, but he feels nothing, so an hour later he takes two more. He begins to wonder about the expiration date, the efficacy of these unpackaged pills, but then it seems that his very blood has the lightness of a cloud. He closes his eyes and thinks: This should get me through the night.
In the morning he has to fight the urge to take another. Just at night, he tells himself, to help him sleep. Given the short supply, only twenty pills, he needs to pace himself. Four in one night was too many. The problem is resistance – he needs a relatively high dose to feel the effect. But the next night he fares better, managing to fall asleep after two pills, but now he has only fourteen left.
Seven nights, he tells himself. He sees in the pills a new countdown to freedom. It is simply unimaginable that his captivity would outlast his supply of drugs. One way or another he will leave this place before he runs out of diazepam.
He and Nick have long considered the possibility of escape, but now their speculation takes the form of planning. Nick is confident he can keep them alive for as long as it takes – the days or even weeks they’ll need to reach a friendly town or military outpost. They’ll head north, following the stream as long as possible and avoiding people at all costs. By language alone Nick might pass for a local, but his blue eyes and reddish-blond beard would betray him at any distance close enough for conversation.
How to break out of the compound? Akbar and Sajiv, their only guards, leave their weapons unattended while wrestling. The key to the front gate stays with Akbar, connected to his wrist by a lanyard, but when he wrestles he leaves it under one of his sandals. They could try to steal it, but the closer they come to Akbar, the greater the likelihood of physical conflict.
‘I’ve never killed a man,’ Burkett whispers as they walk down to the stream, ‘but how hard could it be? Collapse the airway, break the neck, pinch off the carotids.’
‘You won’t be killing anyone.’ Nick glances back at Sajiv, who has knelt to pet the mangy fur of a stray dog and feed it a scrap of flatbread.
‘You don’t think I’ve handled it very well,’ Burkett says.
‘Handled what?’
‘The loss of my brother.’
‘I can’t be a judge of something like that.’
In the short silence Burkett feels the weight of judgment. What Nick should have said was, There’s no right way to handle it.
‘I probably sound like I’m the first person who ever suffered,’ Burkett says, ‘but that’s the thing about pain: it makes you so self-centered.’
No, he thinks: what you sound like is a bad self-help book, some dime store guide to coping with grief. Why are you trying to impress Nick with your attempts at psychological insight?
Behind them the hungry dog shambles toward Akbar, who gives it a vicious kick and then shoots it in the flank. The gunshot still rings in Burkett’s ears as he and Nick, under Akbar’s watch, drag the carcass to the septic pit. Burkett wonders why they don’t skin the animal and cook it for dinner – the very idea, he realizes, being a gauge of his hunger – but it seems Akbar and Sajiv would rather starve than eat a dog.
Burkett and Nick return to the bank, take off their clothes, and step into the stream. During the monsoon it rose as high as Burkett’s waist but today it comes only to his ankles. The new package of soap left by Tarik contains only two small bars, so to conserve it Akbar has all but banned its use – at least for the Americans – and he refuses now to make an exception, even though Burkett has blood on his hands from the dead dog.
‘I won’t be a part of any plan that involves causing harm,’ Nick says.
‘What, are you a pacifist?’ Burkett asks.
When Nick doesn’t answer, he says, ‘You’re kidding me. I thought you were a Navy Seal. You killed people – presumably.’
‘My faith has evolved.’
His silence on past killing seems to confirm it.
‘How can you preach non-violence while paying off a warlord?’
‘Ex-warlord,’ Nick says, as he climbs out of the water and sits on a stone to dry. ‘And that was for the protection of others in the clinic – our employees and patients.’
‘But God himself caused harm,’ Burkett says, using mud from the creek bottom to scour his hands. ‘All those plagues in Egypt, the killing of the firstborn sons.’
‘You’re talking about another dispensation, human history before Christ.’
‘But how can such a violent God then turn around and command non-violence?’
There seems to be no point in discussing religion with Nick, and yet the following morning Burkett has a memory from his days of Catholic school. It feels like just the argument he needs to change Nick’s mind. ‘Didn’t Jesus say something about a sword?’ he asks. ‘A sword rather than peace?’
‘I bring not peace but a sword,’ Nick says. They are sitting in the shade of the courtyard, under a tarp meant to hide them from satellites and drones. Burkett’s eyes follow Akbar and Sajiv as they wrestle.
‘That verse is often taken out of context,’ Nick says. ‘Jesus was warning his apostles about the violence and hatred they would suffer for his sake.’
‘How do you know? You could just as easily see it as a command to take up your sword and fight.’
Nick shakes his head. ‘Read the chapter, Matthew 10. He’s telling them to walk away from persecution, shake the dust from their feet.’
‘My brother wasn’t a pacifist —’ Burkett stops himself from adding was he? He knows it for a fact: he has the evidence of bruised knuckles and a fractured metacarpal.
‘Owen believed in just war,’ Nick says. ‘The possibility of it, I mean.’
Burkett imagines the two of them, his brother and Nick, talking over these questions late into the night. At the moment Burkett can’t remember ever talking with his brother about anything other than wrestling.
‘Just war,’ he says. ‘That’s just what I’d like to give that guy Tarik.’
Only a few yards away, their captors roll in the dirt. They have worked themselves into a tangle, each gripping the other’s leg as their bodies writhe together like some deformed beast in the throes of death. Akbar is the better wrestler, even if their grappling has devolved into a kind of mechanical routine in which neither can gain an advantage. It is the very problem Burkett and his brother faced in college: havin
g wrestled each other so often they were essentially neutralized by familiarity.
All that day the question of escape lingers in Burkett’s mind. Even if he managed to get the key by stealth rather than force, Akbar would notice it gone before they had a chance to use it. Maybe the best option would be to take one of the rifles while the men wrestle and shoot them dead, both of them. A simple enough task for a Navy Seal, perhaps, but Burkett has never held a Kalashnikov, much less fired one. He has an image of himself fumbling for the safety catch while Akbar picks up the other rifle. Would Nick just stand by and watch while their chance slipped away?
So what is left but to wait out the ransom or make a non-violent escape? Rather than bother with the key they could climb to the roof of the cowshed and jump from the eastern wall – its lowest point but still as high as fifteen feet. They could make a rope from their blankets, but the only place to tie it would be the old antenna bolted to the northeast corner. To reach the antenna, they’d have to traverse the top of the wall, which is barnacled with shards of glass.
Another possibility: they could simply flee the next time they’re allowed outside the wall, whether to bathe or fill buckets or use the septic pit. That way they wouldn’t risk injury by jumping from the wall. But it’s during those forays outside that they’re under the closest scrutiny. If they slipped out during the night, whether by stealing the key or climbing the wall, they’d have a three- or four-hour head start, which could make all the difference.
Judging from the marmots he kills, Akbar is something of a marksman, or at least a reasonably accomplished hunter. As they discuss their options that night in their keep, it is Akbar’s cherished weapon that concerns Nick – an L96 sniper rifle favored by the British military, accurate at great distances even without the telescopic sight. Akbar knows the terrain – he’ll expect them to follow the stream north. All he has to do is get them within shooting range. Perhaps they could find a way to sabotage his rifle without his knowing.
