Michael Gruber - The Good Son

– When pain exceeds its own bounds, it becomes the cure, he says, as the vision fades.

The line is from Ghalib. Strangely, Jung says almost the same thing, and Sonia has never before quite grasped the meaning, but she knows she would have a hard time explaining it to a suffering one. The panic and guilt she felt have now passed away. She feels a warm energy passing through her body and puts her hands on Annette’s back; the woman stiffens, then relaxes. Something is going on, but Sonia does not understand what it is. She knows only that it is something beyond understanding and is as grateful as she has been at any other time of her life.

Now the door opens again, and they all flinch, but it is only Rashida with their meal. They are ashamed to eat after what has happened, but they are hungry. They pass the chapatis and tea. Only Annette does not eat; she takes a chapati from the tray, stares at it, leaking slow tears, and tears the bread into tiny pieces, small as confetti. After some silence, Amin says, “I am afraid the morning still has a store of unpleasantness for us. My sense was that the person chosen for death would be the one to speak at this so-called conference. My God! I cannot believe these words are issuing from my mouth.”

“Yes, our ordinary language is quite inadequate for the situation,” says Schildkraut, “but this does not produce in me a desire for silence. In fact, I find my thoughts are bursting out of me, so much I had not realized that I wanted to say. It is clear to me, and I speak as a psychiatrist here, that Porter has in a sense abandoned rational speech entirely and retreated to animal levels. It is impossible for him to speak, obviously, so I am prepared to go on in his place, if that is agreeable.”

They start to make group-agreement noises, when Annette clears her throat and says, “No, I’ll do it. I know what he has to say. I’ve written enough speeches for him, haven’t I? I’ll give this one.”

They all gaze at her in amazement. Her eyes are red but crying no longer. She seems to have become a different person.

Some hours later, the room is packed to overflowing with the men of the village and the mujahideen troop. Sonia and the others are made to sit against the wall at the opposite end, ostentatiously guarded by rather too many armed men, as if they were dangerous criminals poised to escape. Porter Cosgrove has been released from his bonds and sits slumped over between his wife and Father Shea. Annette has been given a dark blue burqa, as has Sonia. Father Shea is speaking quietly to Cosgrove, a low confessional drone that Sonia cannot make out. Sonia wonders if he is seeking a last-minute conversion but dismisses this thought as unworthy. She wonders also what one actually says to a man about to die in an unjust execution, and whether Shea has ever done it before. Surely there can be no rubric for this office, but maybe there is. The Church has strange hidden depths.

Ashton is sitting on one side of her, Amin on the other. Ashton whispers to her, “I hadn’t realized there were so many of the bastards. What do you think, over a hundred at least? We must be more important than I thought.”

“It’s not just us. There’s a bomb factory in the village. It may be a major resupply depot.”

“And those are quartermasters, I suppose. Those over on the left are Arabs.”

All the charpoys have been moved to one end of the room, and upon these sit the dignitaries: Alakazai in the center, Mullah Latif on his right, Idris Ghulam Khan on his left. In the same row, also seated, is a group of men the prisoners have never seen before. They are darker and smaller than the locals. Sonia agrees with Ashcroft that they are Arabs. Their apparent leader is a wonderfully handsome young man of about thirty, with pale hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed black beard. The body language of the Pashtuns is easy to read, and Sonia observes that even the older men pay elaborate deference to him.

“Pretty Boy up there is no Arab,” says Ashton. “That’s odd.”

“He’s a Pashtun,” says Sonia. “I think he’s the one they call the Engineer.”

Ashton says, “Who is he?” but Sonia doesn’t answer because Mullah Latif has risen and raised his hands for silence. He invokes the blessings of God on this jirga and says they are gathered to hear the lies of infidels and apostates. Why should good Muslims and mujahideen hear lies? So they can resist them in their hearts, even as the Prophet, peace be upon him, heard the lies of Jews and Christians and made certain that they had rejected the holy word of God before he slew them. Thus, after the infidel speaks, our distinguished emir, Haji Bahram Pason Alakazai, will answer their lies and provide right guidance. Riotous applause, shouts: Death to the infidels! Death to America, death to Israel! When this dies down, the mullah withdraws and Alakazai rises. He describes the murder of innocents in the recent American missile strike and says that one of the hostages will be executed that day in revenge. More applause, the screams echoing off the low ceiling. He says that the choice of who will die will fall to the infamous apostate and blasphemer Sonia Bailey; as a punishment for her evil deeds she will send each of her companions to death. The assemblage loves this; it is such a Pashtun solution, redolent of the savage old tales, a clever trick to catch the evildoer in her own tangle and make her destroy her allies.

Two guards grab Sonia from the wall and pull her out into the room. One is a large man with a shaved head and a beard like a black bib reaching to his chest. His Kalashnikov is slung across his back. The other is a much smaller man in a black-striped turban and a Russian camo jacket, who has a scarred hook-nosed face like a nasty Western cartoon of a terrorist. He carries the AKMS version of the Kalashnikov, with the stock folded, and he likes to use it as a cattle prod. Sonia feels the muzzle jammed painfully into her ribs.

Alakazai says, “Choose!” and Sonia says, “I choose Porter Cosgrove,” and points to the cringing man. The guards hustle him out to the center of the room, the little one grinning and poking the prisoner with his weapon. Cosgrove falls to his knees and starts crying again; urine darkens the front of his trousers and pools on the floor, to the vast amusement of the assembly. A few of the onlookers leap out balletically to deliver a kick, others beat him with their shoes. When this jolly uproar fades (and it takes a long time), Alakazai says, “Does this worm have anything to say?”

Sonia says, “Yes, but he has been driven mad by what has been done to him, just as Muslims in American prisons have been driven mad by what has been done to them. The shame is on you, as it is on the Americans. But his wife knows what he would say if he were able, and she will speak.”

A babble of voices at this, with the mullah calling out that it is haram for a woman to speak to a jirga, but Sonia says in reply that Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and his wife Aisha were both consulted after the Prophet’s death by the rightly guided caliphs and spoke to assemblies of Muslims. They knew that women can be heard when they speak the words given to them by men, and so it is here.

There is some grumbling but in the end Alakazai allows it.

Annette comes forward and begins to speak. As they have agreed beforehand, she pauses after every phrase, and Sonia translates it into Pashto. She sees Alakazai frown at this-he had assumed that only a few of the assembly would be able to understand the doomsday speeches-but he does nothing now.

Annette says that she and her husband came to this country to speak about making peace. He has devoted his whole life to peace, and now he will be a martyr to peace. Why did they come into this country? Because every day a billion Muslims wish one another peace, yet from one end of the umma to the other, with few exceptions, there is no peace-there is dissension and riot, war, and calls for the death of this group or that-and they wished to learn why and to see if they could do something about it. Because, she says, peace is possible. It is not an idle dream of unrealistic people. She speaks about successful peace projects of the recent past, some of which she and her husband had helped bring about: Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Ireland, Bosnia. In Bosnia, she says, the Americans and Europeans prevented the extermination of Muslims, and also in Kosovo. So peace is possible, even in places that have been fighting for years. Why then is there still so much war? There are two reasons, she says. First, many people find war beneficial. They are nobodies in peacetime and great men in wartime, admired, powerful, and rich. Naturally, they do not want to give that up, so nearly all successful peacemaking must address the ego needs of these warmongers. This can be done far more cheaply than most people realize, and she gives examples of warlords bought off or retired. The second reason is that war literally maddens. People do things to one another in wartime that they would never think of doing otherwise, psychopathic criminality becomes the norm, and people believe that only “victory” can make things right, can justify what they have done. So they fight on, even if-especially if-they have lost sight of the original purposes of the war. But this madness can be cured, and has been, in many places. She talks about how, even under the most oppressive regimes, peace movements can and have flourished and prevailed, and gives examples from different nations and periods of history.