Michael Gruber - The Good Son

We drove for maybe half an hour and I heard the sound of aircraft engines, a jet flying pretty low above, and the van stopped and the men dragged me out and put me on a stretcher, still wrapped in the tarp, and carried me up a ramp and set me down. Then there was a lot more airplane noise and I felt motion and knew I was in a plane, a big one, and I felt the floor tilt under me and heard the scream of engines on full power. Hands tugged at my tarp and I got unrolled from it and the bag came off my head and a hand ripped the tape off my mouth and I was looking up into a woman’s face. The light in the plane was red so it took me a little while to recognize my mother.

Billy’s eye was twitching and his mouth was opening and closing like a fish. His chalky tongue lolled out a little, so I picked up a squirt bottle that was there and squirted him a drink. I thought it would be interesting and maybe a good omen if he miraculously regained consciousness then, hearing the miraculous story of my reunion with Mom-but no.

As I recall it, the main feeling I had when I recognized her was a kind of babyish annoyance, as if I’d been a nine-year-old playing cowboys or superheroes in a vacant lot and my mom had just dragged me in for supper. I’d been wounded in my dignity and she was the only one around to take it out on. The strange thing was that the last time I’d seen her I really was nine, and my relationship with her was frozen, like those insects you see trapped in amber.

I shouted at her, “What did you do? Why am I on this plane?”

She said in a calming voice, “It’s okay, Theo, you’re safe now. We’re going home.”

And I said I didn’t want to go home to Lahore, I wanted to be with Wazir and Gul Muhammed and fight in the jihad. I said I was Kakay Ghazan and a famous fighter and what do I have to do with you, woman?

She switched her language to Urdu as well and told me that the jihad was over, the Russians were leaving, and now the mujahideen would turn on one another and there would be more war, but without the blessing of God, and she did not wish me to die in such a war. She said we were not going to Lahore at all; it was time for me to return to my real family in America. I went a little crazy then, screaming at her in three languages that I was a Pashtun and the son of Gul Muhammed and the brother of Wazir and I didn’t want to go to America. I went on for a while but it was a long flight, and she had wisely left my hands and feet tied. Even though I was yelling at her she kept calm and talked in a low voice, about how I had always had two families and was a man of two nations and that this was a good thing-she didn’t want me to lose that-and how proud she was of me that after I had lost my Pakistani family I had been so quick about finding a new one, because a man without his family is nothing. But now it was my fate to have a different life. God had willed that we be brought back together, she loved me, and I had to trust in God; the Prophet, peace be unto him, said that a man should trust his mother above all others.

And I recalled that and was calmer afterward. Then I asked her why she hadn’t come to get me before this and she said because she thought I was dead. It turned out that a street boy had jumped up on the bumper of Laghari Sahib’s Rolls-Royce just before the bomb exploded, and when they had found the charred and unrecognizable corpse of a boy among the wreckage, my grandmother Noor pronounced that it was me, a last little stab of revenge, and no one had the nerve to oppose her.

I told her that her daughters and my grandfather had been avenged because I had shot the man in the godown.

She touched my face lightly with her fingertips, just for an instant. She closed her eyes, tilted her head back, took in some breath, and made an ah sound. It was hard to read her face in the dim light. I thought then that she was expressing satisfaction, but looking back I think it was some kind of devastated grief.

Then I asked, “But how did you find me? How did you learn that I was alive?”

“Because I have friends in the jihad, and they told me of a boy there who was famous for his bravery, the younger of the two sons of Gul Muhammed, and my heart was lifted because I knew it was you and that you lived. So I planned with my friends to take you. I would have gone to Afghanistan but my friends learned you were to come to Peshawar, and so it was done.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me to come with you?”

“Would you have come?”

“No. But you should have asked, not tied me like an animal.”

“I will untie you now, if you give me your word you will not try to escape when this plane lands.”

“My word,” I said, and she took out a knife and cut the cable ties at my hands and feet. I stretched and rubbed my wrists and stood up. She stood too, and I saw that I was taller than she was. A moment passed when we just stared at each other, and then we embraced. I was flooded with feelings I could not express and I thought of a ghazal of Ghalib’s that goes, My heart burns in a temple full of mysteries that, alas, have no voice to speak.

I felt my eyes prickle with tears, but I did not cry. She cried. I asked her what she had done when she heard all three of her children were dead, and she asked me what Pashtun women do when their children die in the war and I said, They keen and tear their hair and clothes and fall on the ground and cast dust on their heads, and she said, That is what I did.

So I accepted my fate like a man, and besides she was my mother. I asked her what I would do in America, since I understood there was no jihad there, and that was the only thing I knew. She said I would go to school, and, according to what I liked to study, such would be my life. I said I would not stand to be beaten anymore, because I was a man now, and only my father could beat me. At that she smiled and said, No one will beat you; they don’t beat children in American schools. This amazed me. I asked, How then do they learn anything? and she answered, They do not learn very much. She said Farid and she would teach me in our home, and when I had caught up they would put me in high school with others of my own age. I asked her what I would learn, and she said, to read and write English, and something about history and geography and also mathematics. She said, You have had an excellent fourth-grade education. It should not take more than six months to get you ready for your junior year in an American high school.

She had clothes for me. On the plane I pulled on my first ever pair of blue jeans. I had a Pearl Jam T-shirt, a quilted parka to go over it, and a pair of Nikes. The plane landed at a military airport in Germany, and we ate in a restaurant and took a commercial flight to Washington. So I entered my homeland through the various narrow gates, carrying a passport I’d never seen before. At the time I didn’t find this strange.

I was taken to their house on Tracy Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of D.C., a white colonial on a green street lined with old sycamores. Farid was welcoming and nice enough, maybe a little distant, as might be expected. I was respectful and formal with him in my turn. He was a good teacher, patient and energetic. He gave me poetry to read at first, and then fiction, and then the school subjects I would have to know. I picked up math too, with little trouble. The only thing I had problems with was writing; I couldn’t do an essay to save my ass. He worked hard, though, and so did I, and in the end he said that the inability to write was a characteristic of almost all American students, so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd.