The Mirage: A Novel (19 page)

“Not the marriage. The pregnancy.”

“Oh.” Amal reddened. “I don’t know. It’s been three or four months I guess.”

“Three, or four?”

“I don’t . . . Four. I think four.”

“Ah.” Tradition held that God gave a fetus its soul a hundred and twenty days after conception. In civil terms, this translated into abortion being legal during the first four months of pregnancy and expensive thereafter. “Does the boy know?”

“Anwar? Yes, he knows.” She almost laughed. “He thinks it’s great news.”

“And you?” said Aunt Nida. “Do you want to stay with this boy, Amal? Raise a family with him?”

“No.” No hesitation. “I want—” I want the last five months back. I want the future I had before I did this stupid, stupid thing. I wish, I wish. “No,” she repeated.

“All right then,” Nida said.

“All right?” Amal couldn’t imagine those words applying to her.

“I’ll talk to my friends in the capital, see who knows his family.” At the mention of family Amal flinched, which Nida acknowledged with a nod. “I will have to tell your mother, too, of course.”

It wasn’t her mother Amal was most concerned about. “And father?”

“Shamal has other matters to deal with, as you know. Perhaps we need not distract him with this just now. No promises,” Nida added. “We’ll see what your mother says.” Looking around the room: “OK, let’s get you packed.”

“Packed?”

“Of course. You can’t stay here, looking like that.”

“But . . . my studies . . .”

“Those will have to wait awhile.” Nida had on her game face now, the expression she wore when she plotted against the POGs. You could almost see the stratagems queuing up behind her eyes. “Don’t worry, we’ll work something out . . .”

Amal spent the next week at her aunt’s house, not going outside, not even looking out the windows. One day there was a loud banging at the front door; Amal hid upstairs and listened while Anwar argued furiously with Aunt Nida. He came back again the next day and that time Nida had her bodyguards deal with him.

A few days after that, she sat Amal down for a talk. “I’ve spoken to the boy’s family. The father is a reasonable sort. He agrees it’s best we pretend this whole thing never happened.” Then the bad news: “The boy is being much more difficult. He is afflicted with a combination of rebelliousness and romanticism. Too much time hanging around artists in Tehran I suppose.”

“Please,” Amal said, fearing the worst. “Tell me I don’t have to stay with him.”

“No. The marriage is finished. Well, soon enough. But there is something else the boy wants. Something he is willing to defy his own father to have.”

Amal, feeling a kick, dropped a hand to her stomach.

She couldn’t give birth in her aunt’s house. With Aunt Nida’s election campaign gathering steam, her opponents would be trying to dig up any dirt they could. But Nida was owed favors in some unlikely quarters; she made a call and arranged for Amal to complete her pregnancy in a place the Party of God would never look.

The convent was on the coast, an hour’s drive from Beirut. Amal never learned the name of the place or of most of the women who lived there. With the exception of a Sister Demiana who met her at the gate and showed her where she’d be sleeping, the nuns had all taken vows of silence.

Amal was given a room in the convent’s north tower that faced the sea. The view was nice, but she could have done without the icon of Saint Mary, the irony of which was not lost on her. Umm Isa, Amal prayed that first day, my request is simple: Please stop staring at me. Later, as her confinement dragged on, she asked a different favor: Can we speed this up somehow?

The baby did arrive early, though Amal’s labor lasted an entire night. Towards the end of it she grew delirious and imagined herself in two places at once: the clean bright hospital ward to which Sister Demiana had delivered her, and another, much dimmer and lonelier room, with not even a saint’s portrait for company, just a flickering bulb that transformed itself into a tall and smokeless flame. “Push,” said a voice—the midwife’s, her own—and Amal pushed.

By September she was back at Aunt Nida’s, filling out a stack of forms for her readmission to school. Anwar was gone. The baby, whose face Amal had never seen, was gone too. Amal had a strict curfew now and a paid chaperone to accompany her everywhere, but otherwise it really was as if the whole thing had never happened. Best of all, Amal’s father had still not been told, and it seemed more and more likely he never would be.

Amal knew she should be grateful and she was. She was also terrified. Good fortune doesn’t have to be matched by bad, but Amal very much feared this was one of those times when it would be. And it wasn’t hard to imagine how the scales might be balanced.

On the eve of Saddam Hussein’s trial, Hussein Kamel had disappeared. The rumor was that Kamel, faced with a lifetime in hiding, had decided at the last moment on an ill-advised attempt to reconcile with his father-in-law. He’d slipped the marshals assigned to protect him and gone to Saddam to beg forgiveness—with predictable results. Absent Kamel’s testimony, the case against Saddam collapsed; federal prosecutors threw up their hands and retreated to Riyadh, leaving the local cops who’d defied Saddam standing naked and exposed, like the vanguard of an army of liberation that had never arrived.

“Father?” Amal said, speaking to Shamal by phone the day after Hussein Kamel’s body was found. “Father, are you OK?”

“Yes, we are all fine here!” He had to shout over the background noise. He was calling from a pay phone, no longer trusting their home line. “It’s so good to hear your voice!”

“Father, are you coming to see me?”

“Your mother will be visiting you soon,” Shamal said. “Your brothers too. I don’t think I can get away right now . . .”

“No, father, you have to come too!”

“I have things I have to do here, Amal. I will see you when I can. I miss you.”

“I miss you too, father,” Amal said, and began to cry.

. . . and now she was crying again, in this other world, the city of the future where her father was no more.

Sunlight flashed off a passing car and she saw Anwar across the street. He hadn’t seen her yet, and as he made his way along the sidewalk checking signs for the restaurant, Amal hurried to compose herself. The man from my past, she thought, stepping out to call his name. Just not the right one.

“You’re looking well,” Anwar said.

They sat in a back corner of the restaurant, untouched menus and water glasses on the table between them. Already Amal regretted the choice of meeting place, with its implication of a long and leisurely conversation. She just wanted to find out what Anwar was after—what it was going to take to make him go away—and then get out of here.

Anwar for his part seemed equally uncomfortable. His smile was forced and there was a pained rigidity to his posture, as though a mild electrical current were passing through the chair in which he sat. But rather than hurry to come to the point, he insisted on making small talk.

“So,” he said, trying another gambit, “you actually did it. Became a federal agent, I mean.”

“Yes,” Amal said.

“That’s great!” A waiter passed by, carrying food to another table, and Anwar reached for his menu. “Are you hungry? Should we—”

“Anwar,” Amal said sharply.

“Right.” He dropped the menu and lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “OK.”

“Please tell me what this is about. You call my office, my
boss’s
office—”

“I’m sorry about that,” Anwar said. “That was stupid, I know. I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“So you decided to call my boss? Did you think embarrassing me would make me more willing to speak to you? Or was it supposed to be a threat?”

“No! No, I . . . I don’t know what I was thinking. But this is important, Amal. I needed to see you.”

“Well, here I am,” Amal said. “Now what is this about?”

“It’s about our son.” He looked at her in sudden defiance, daring her to challenge him on his choice of pronoun. “
Our
son . . . He’s done something very foolish, something I can’t undo on my own.”

“What has he done?”

“I think he’s trying to follow in your footsteps.”

“What does that . . . Anwar, you didn’t—”

“No.” Anwar shook his head. “He knows nothing about you. He thinks Nasrin is his mother, and she, she loves him very much. But there must be something of you in his blood. From the time he first learned to talk, he’s wanted to do something exciting with his life, something dangerous. As a boy he would go on about how he was going to be a test pilot, or a deep-sea diver, or a police detective. Then, after November 9, he came up with a new career goal: soldier. On his thirteenth birthday, he told Nasrin and me how he was going to go to America to fight for his country, bring democracy and Islam to the Christians. We tried to talk him out of it. We told him if he really wanted to make the world a safer place, he should become a diplomat like his grandfather.” He smiled ruefully. “A hopeless argument . . . Nasrin and I consoled ourselves with the thought that the war would be over by the time Salim was old enough to enlist, and anyway he’d probably grow out of the idea. And he seemed to, or at least he stopped talking about it.

“Then last year he turned eighteen and left for college. I was so proud when he chose U of L, it never occurred to me the real reason he wanted to go to Beirut was because the Marine training center is there. The friend who was supposed to be Salim’s roommate played along, taking phone messages and forwarding his emails, so we wouldn’t realize he was at boot camp. Nasrin did get suspicious when Salim came home for winter break—he’d lost weight, and his hair was very short—but he told her he’d joined the wrestling team. Then in May, after he’d finished his advanced training and was about to deploy, he sent us this letter . . .” He drew two wrinkled sheets of paper from his suit jacket. “You should read it,” he said, setting the letter on the table, but Amal made no move to take it. “Salim apologizes for misleading me and for not being the person I wanted him to be.” Anwar looked at her. “His choice of words is . . . very familiar.”

Amal closed her eyes. “Anwar,” she said, “I am sorry if my blood caused your son to act against your wishes. But I don’t see—”

“Salim is in Washington now. Posted to the Green Zone. They say it’s relatively safe there, but no place in America is truly safe. Not for a Muslim boy who craves excitement.”

“What is it you want from me, Anwar? What is it you think I can do?”

“Get Salim transferred back to Arabia, of course.”

“How?”

“Your mother is a senator.”

“My mother!” Amal laughed. “Do you know what my mother will say if I tell her you came to see me?”

“You don’t have to mention me at all. Ask her to do this as a favor to you. It’s a small thing.”

“Why don’t you ask your father, then? Surely an ex-diplomat has friends who can do such favors.”

“I did ask him,” Anwar told her. “And he is trying, but his friends all supported the invasion, and those who still have influence are worried about the appearance of hypocrisy . . .”

“Maybe they should be worried about that,” Amal said.

Anwar’s face reddened. “How can you be so selfish?”

“Selfish? Do not speak to me of selfishness!”

“I know what you think of me, Amal,” Anwar said. “You think that when I insisted you give birth to Salim, it was because I thought it would make you stay with me. Well, you are right: At the time, I did think that. But that wasn’t my only reason. I believed then, as I know now, that Salim was a human soul who deserved to be born for his own sake . . .”

“An easy thing for a man to say.”

“An easy thing for a father to say,” Anwar countered. “Salim is a good boy, Amal. I have tried to be a good father to him. You don’t know, I’ve made sacrifices . . . And I would do it all again, and more if I could . . .

“I don’t ask you to feel the same way,” he continued. “Regard Salim as the stranger he is to you. A stranger’s life is still worth protecting. Isn’t that what you do in Homeland Security, save the lives of people you don’t even know? Do that, then. Save one more.”

“And if I can’t?” Amal said. “Or won’t?”

“Then peace be unto you,” Anwar replied. “If your answer is no, I’ll go my way and trouble you no more. Perhaps my father can still do something . . . But please, Amal. In God’s name, I beg of you, don’t just say no. Look into your heart first. God willing, you’ll find some mercy there. A little mercy for our child, that’s all I ask.”

He stood abruptly, trembling on the verge of tears, and walked away, barreling past a waiter who was just then coming to check on them. The breeze of his sudden departure lifted the pages of the letter that he had left behind on the table. Seeing this, Amal started to call him back, but he was already at the door and anyway she thought better of it. She watched him go out, watched through the restaurant window as he marched off, head bowed, back the way he had come.

“Ma’am?” The waiter, a Pashtun, stood beside the table with his hands folded, looking embarrassed for her.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Can you get me some coffee?”

“Of course . . .” Amal watched him hurry away too.

Then she picked up Salim’s letter and began to read.

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T
he young woman sat before the imam with her head bowed. “My uncle is no longer my uncle,” she said. “He stays out all night at jazz clubs, gambling and drinking alcohol. He is cruel to my aunt—he won’t go to the mosque anymore, and mocks her when she does. He’s stopped praying . . .”