Michael Gruber - The Good Son

The next day she painted me a picture and slid it under my prison door. She was a wonderful artist, and the picture showed me and Wazir and her and Jamila playing in a green field under deodars. I tore it up and scattered the pieces out the window.

In the next few days I ate breakfast with the family in silence, went to school, ate again in silence, and stayed in my room. The servants had repaired the damage to my room, of course. One night, later in that awful week, I was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a repetitive clinking sound. I looked out my window-nothing. So I climbed out on the balcony and hitched myself up on an iron trellis full of bougainvillea, and from there I could just make out, through the peepul’s branches, a group of men at the end of our street, where you had to make a sharp turn to get onto Lahore Road, who seemed to be repairing the pavement. I wondered briefly why they were working at night and decided it was so they would not interfere with traffic. I went back to bed.

The next day was March 23, 1980, a date forever burned into memory. This is Pakistan Day and a public holiday. The courts were closed, and on such holidays Laghari Sahib liked to take us children in his Rolls-Royce to Gawal Mandi to stuff ourselves with sweets and then to Shalamar Garden to play and fly kites and later wander among the thousands of candles in the dusk. The Rolls was the old kind with a massive chrome bumper in the back, and the local street kids had learned that when Daud, the driver, slowed to turn the tight corner on the end of our street they could jump up on it and, crouching down, enjoy a ride to wherever we were going. I recall envying them their freedom and wanted to ride that way myself, instead of in the plush interior.

Of course, neither Wazir nor I was going this year. I was therefore able to watch as Baba and the two girls, my sisters, mounted the big Rolls along with Faiza and Daud and set off. I was at my desk, doing my homework, long division as I recall, when the house shook with the blast. I ran out on the balcony and saw the Rolls engulfed in black smoke and flames, right at the place where I’d watched the men the previous night.

I think of that every time I smell the blast stink of high explosive, which is a lot, considering what I do for a living. And that was the end of all those lives-I mean my multiple lives-and of my childhood.

Gloria had listened to all this without asking anything. By the time I was finished, the bottle was nearly empty.

“That’s quite a story,” she said. “And I thought I had a hard life.”

“What was your hard life?”

“Oh, you know, the barrio, the agony of poverty and prejudice, yadda yadda. My kid brother became a junkie and got shot in the street. The usual. So what happened next?”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

Her face closed down. This was delving, apparently. “Yeah, but I got over it. Anyway, the car blew up and your grandfather and your sisters got killed, and…?”

“I’ll tell you, but first.”

“Oh, I have to put out to get the story? Like what’s-her-name, Scheherazade?”

“The reverse,” I said. “It’s an Islamic thing. You probably wouldn’t understand.”

We took off each other’s clothes with our mouths locked together, like in the movies, and I found it was harder than it looks on the screen. She seemed to have been aroused by my story, and I felt myself riding on her excitement, drowning the guilt to an extent, which I figured out about then was the reason for the nice meal and this terrific dessert while my mother was tied up in some cellar. My excuse was that-honestly-I thought it might be the very last time.

S onia awakens to the sound of a heavy truck rolling past the inn and up the narrow village street. The room is perfectly dark; her eyes register nothing but their own energy, little points of shifting false light. She hears Annette’s soft sleep noises, snores, whimpers, the creak of charpoy ropes as her fellow captive turns. From the street comes a shout; other voices join-it’s amazing how sound travels on a still night in a village in the mountains-there is a scraping sound and more voices, rhythmic now, as if a group of men are carrying out some heavy task. A door closes, and then silence, except for the hiss of the night wind blowing sand against the walls.

Some time passes. Sonia wishes she still had her watch but laughs secretly to herself. She has no need anymore to tell time; captivity makes time irrelevant and so is curiously liberating for a denizen of the frenetic West. After an uncertain interval a new sound begins, a deep muffled growl, which she recognizes as a diesel engine, a big one. Sonia rises and walks carefully to the wall under one of the windows. There is an irregularity in the masonry there that enables her to boost herself up to look through the shutter slats. She can see the black bulk of an adjoining building and a thin triangle of sky, specked with small chilly stars. Then, for just a moment, she sees a flash of light from the direction of the diesel sound, unmistakable evidence that someone is generating electricity in the village.

She drops lightly from the wall, landing with a little bounce, the early training still in her nerves and muscles so she can never forget the circus, and lies on the charpoy again, waiting, thinking about the boy’s dream and what she will say to him, if he comes.

And about her own dream, the deformed child, the slaughtered little creatures. Is the boy Patang, are the creatures the hostages? It’s possible; she has had clairvoyant dreams before this, but at the same time she knows that everything in a dream relates both to her own personal history and also to the deeper history of her species. That’s the great problem with the Jungian approach: everything can mean anything. It requires colossal discernment to tease meaning out of the tangle of archetypes, memory, synchronicity. The psyche knows, but the psyche is not telling; the psyche is subtle and not entirely of this world.

She’d learned that from Joachim Fluss in Zurich, her therapist, teacher, friend, and tormentor, the last in a series of father figures in the skein that began with the horrible Guido and included B. B. Laghari and Ismail Raza Ali but not her poor actual father. Fluss was gone now; he was in late middle age when she met him, one of Jung’s original students, present at the creation of analytic psychology back in the teens and twenties of the last century, a stalwart of the Burghölzli and still serving there on the day she’d arrived, near catatonic with grief, strapped to a bed so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Her head was bandaged; she had tried unsuccessfully to bash her brains out against a curb on the Bahnhofstrasse.

They had sedated her, and she came up out of the welcome oblivion to find him staring down at her, his appearance so startling she let out a little cry of alarm. They had opened the blinds so the room was full of winter’s pure light, and he was sitting at such an angle that this light reflected off his round gold-rimmed spectacles, so she saw only two glittering disks and a halo of untidy, flossy, gray-tinged wheaten hair. Then he moved slightly and she saw his face: round, red-cheeked, knobby-featured, the brush mustache, modeled on the Master’s, still yellowish, and those deep-set, humorous, penetrating blue eyes.

He introduced himself and asked how she was feeling. She turned away from him, told him to leave her alone. But he did not. Instead he began to talk, in a pleasant baritone, slightly accented. He said she’d been unconscious for two days, during which time the authorities had determined her identity and gathered information on her recent catastrophe. He extended his condolences. He said further that inquiries had been made of her family in Lahore. There seemed to be much confusion in Lahore-understandable in the circumstances. He was obliged to inform her that, regrettably, her husband had also suffered a severe breakdown and was at present himself in hospital in Lahore. Whoever had spoken to the inquiring administrator had been quite adamant that the family wanted nothing whatever to do with Sonia Bailey.