Michael Gruber - The Good Son

Nor does insight help much. Fluss was always calling insight “baby steps.” During her first year in therapy, she had balked; she was tired of going over the sad stories, she thought she was done, and he’d said, You aren’t even started, my dear. Yes, now we have the dynamics, the demanding mother, the ineffective father, the shattering accidents, the insecurity, the rejection of offered security, the purposeful disruptions, the running off, the guilt and what results-all fine. Write it on an index card and stick it in your wallet. But now we must start on the work. Now we must get you to awaken!

Yes, work and awakening. That was the hard part, and Sonia is not sure that even now she has achieved it. More than Annette, perhaps. She can handle the Jungian jargon, she can do the dream work, but there is a blockage, a drag, a secret standing in the way. Perhaps that dream with the horrible boy is a clue. She wonders if she will figure it all out before she dies.

Annette has fallen asleep. Sonia feels a certain sympathy for the collapsed, naturally, but at the moment Annette’s collapse means there are more chapatis for her. She eats them all greedily and drinks the rest of the tea.

She spends the next hours writing in her notebook with a tiny pen. She is writing to her son, an apology, not just in the commonplace sense of a petition for forgiveness but also, mainly, in the older definition, an apology for her life, an explanation of why she has lived it as she has. She hopes it will somehow survive her death and that he will read it. She is a fluent writer, but this is a hard thing to do. It is easier to tell the truth to the world than to people you love.

There comes a point when she can’t write anymore. She puts the notebook and pen away in their small pocket and from another one takes a deck of cards. She shuffles, does fans-the peel-away, the reverse, the onehand-then fancy shuffles-the waterfall, the hindu-then deals out the four cards from the top of the deck, all aces: snap, snap, snap, snap. She wishes she had a mirror to check her passes and lifts, for she has not practiced in a while and feels rusty. On the other hand, now she has nothing but time.

The hours pass; the light from the window becomes rosy, then white. She wonders about the others, especially Karl-Heinz, who is so frail. She knows him from the Zurich days, he and his wife, Elsa. She had met Elsa before she met Karl-Heinz; Elsa was an almoner at the Burghölzli. Fluss had sent her in because of the blood on Sonia’s clothes, and Elsa had taken the clothes away and brought fresh ones, a characteristic act of kindness. Afterward, when Sonia had become Fluss’s student, she had taken Sonia into her social circle along with Fluss, who was divorced, and a changing circus of other lost souls: the formerly mad and their keepers and a good portion of the psycho-industrial complex of Zurich. A salon, but cozy in the Swiss manner; it was probably this kindness more than the precepts of Jung that had saved Sonia in those first months. She had a cozy deficit of vast proportions and drank it in like water in the desert.

Elsa was dead too. Karl-Heinz was the only one from those days with whom Sonia had retained contact, and she was determined that he would survive.

Sonia is still practicing a changing-card trick, deceptively difficult because it has to be done very slowly to be convincing, when the door opens again and the bearded guard sticks his head in. Sonia wishes him peace in Pashtun, and he seems startled to hear his language on her tongue. She wonders what the troops have been told about their captives. He mumbles something and withdraws, allowing the girl Rashida to enter with another tray of chapatis, dal, and tea.

“Peace be with you,” says Sonia, as the girl sets down the tin tray and picks up the old one.

The girl responds, “May God be with you.”

Sonia flicks the cards into a fancy double fan, catching the girl’s eye. “Would you like to see something magical?”

Without waiting for a reply, Sonia performs a card change. She cuts the deck and holds it up, the long side parallel to the ground, exposing the queen of hearts. Slowly, she moves her free hand over the card face and away. Still the queen of hearts. Again she caresses the queen but when she draws her hand away again, the card showing is the ace of spades. Rashida gasps behind her veil.

“Do it again!”

Sonia does, and then asks casually, “We heard someone scream this morning. I hope no one has been hurt.”

“Only Patang,” says Rashida. “The men were unloading from a truck, and a heavy box fell on his foot.” She hesitated. “He was crying out that this was foretold from a dream he had. And you foretold it.”

“That’s true.”

“Can you really?”

“I can. I am an interpreter of dreams, with God’s help.”

“Ya-Allah! We had such a man here in Paidara once, but he died. I must leave, I am not supposed to talk to the foreigners.”

She leaves. Sonia returns to her charpoy and plays solitaire for a while. She dozes, waiting for what will happen next. The azan sounds distantly, and she washes and prays the Ashr. The bars of light from the shutters glide across the floor and the walls, turn red, and fade. She has just lit the kerosene lamp when the door opens and the bearded guard comes in. She greets him politely but he does not answer her greeting. He says, “You come with me!”

She is led through the courtyard of the hujra and out a wooden gate, then down a narrow street to a large house surrounded by a mud-brick wall. She is taken through a gate into a small courtyard, where armed men give her hostile looks and mutter as she passes. Inside the house, in a room at the back, she finds the man in the black turban, Idris Ghulam, reclining on cushions with three other men, all of them dressed in dusty shalwar kameez, Pashtun waistcoats, and green or black turbans. They all wear full beards, black on two of them and, on the other one, white, dyed orange with henna. Weapons lean against a wall. The room is lit with a single lightbulb suspended from the ceiling by a wire. Close by she can hear the diesel generator rumbling. There is a whiff of its exhaust in the air.

Sonia looks the leader in the eye. He doesn’t like this, she can see, and also sees something else, a redness in the rims, bags beneath them, bloodshot, unhealthy-looking whites. She says, “May you not be weary, Idris Ghulam.”

He scowls. “How do you know my name?”

“All the world knows Idris Ghulam, and all believers praise his many feats of courage and daring.”

He ignores this and demands, “Do you know why you are here?”

“Yes. I was driving on the highway with a group of scholars who wished to find ways to peace, in accordance with the will of God, the compassionate One, when I was kidnapped by a group of armed men.”

“No, I mean why you are here now, standing in this room.”

“Because you wanted to talk with me,” she says. “It is one of the unpleasant things about being a prisoner, you can no longer choose with whom you must converse.”

“You are here because you have bewitched one of my men.”

“Witchcraft is forbidden to believers. I bewitched no one.”

“You prophesied he would hurt his foot, and he hurt his foot today.”

“I interpreted a dream and told him that, if he did not keep on the true path of Islam, his foot would be injured as a sign from God. And so it has happened.”

“This is sorcery,” says Idris, “and the penalty for sorcery is death.”

“The interpretation of dreams is not sorcery, as you must know. Yusuf, may he rest in peace, interpreted dreams for Pharaoh. The Prophet himself, peace be upon him, interpreted dreams for his Companions. And did he not say, as the Hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari reports, that true dreams are from God?”