Don Delillo - Falling Man

“Bill Lawton has a long beard. He wears a long robe,” he said. “He flies jet planes and speaks thirteen languages but not English except to his wives. What else? He has the power to poison what we eat but only certain foods. They’re working on the list.”

“This is what we get for putting a protective distance between children and news events.”

“Except we didn’t put a distance, not really,” he said.

“Between children and mass murderers.”

“The other thing he does, Bill Lawton, is go everywhere in his bare feet.”

“They killed your best friend. They’re fucking outright murderers. Two friends, two friends.”

“I talked to Demetrius a little while ago. I don’t think you met him. Worked in the other tower. They sent him to a burn unit in Baltimore. He has family there.”

She looked at him.

“Why are you still here?”

She said this in a tone of gentlest curiosity.

“Are you planning to stay? Because I think this is something we need to talk about,” she said. “I’ve forgotten how to talk to you. This is the longest talk we’ve had.”

“You did it better than anybody. Talk to me. Maybe that was the problem.”

“I guess I’ve unlearned it. Because I sit here thinking we have so much to say.”

“We don’t have so much to say. We used to say everything, all the time. We examined everything, all the questions, all the issues.”

“All right.”

“It practically killed us.”

“All right. But is it possible? Here’s my question,” she said. “Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word every-breath schedule we were on before we split. Is it possible this is over? We don’t need this anymore. We can live without it. Am I right?”

“We’re ready to sink into our little lives,” he said.

ON MARIENSTRASSE

They stood in the entranceway watching the cold rain fall, younger man and older, after evening prayer. The wind sent trash skidding along the sidewalk and Hammad cupped his hands to his mouth and exhaled six or seven times, slowly and deliberately, feeling a whisper of warm breath on his palms. A woman on a bike went past, pedaling hard. He crossed his arms on his chest now, hands buried in armpits, and he listened to the older man’s story.

He was a rifleman in the Shatt al Arab, fifteen years ago, watching them come across the mudflats, thousands of shouting boys. Some carried rifles, many did not, and the weapons nearly overwhelmed the smaller boys, Kalashnikovs, too heavy to be carried very far. He was a soldier in Saddam’s army and they were the martyrs of the Ayatollah, here to fall and die. They seemed to come up out of the wet earth, wave on wave, and he aimed and fired and watched them fall. He was flanked by machine-gun positions and the firing grew so intense he began to think he was breathing white-hot steel.

Hammad barely knew this man, a baker, here in Hamburg maybe ten years. They prayed in the same mosque, this is what he knew, on the second floor of this shabby building with graffiti smeared on the outer walls and a setting of local strolling whores. Now he knew this as well, the face of combat in the long war.

The boys kept coming and the machine guns cut them down. After a time the man understood there was no point shooting anymore, not for him. Even if they were the enemy, Iranians, Shiites, heretics, this was not for him, watching them vault the smoking bodies of their brothers, carrying their souls in their hands. The other thing he understood is that this was a military tactic, ten thousand boys enacting the glory of self-sacrifice to divert Iraqi troops and equipment from the real army massing behind front lines.

Most countries are run by madmen, he said.

Then he said he was twice regretful, first to see the boys die, sent out to explode land mines and to run under tanks and into walls of gunfire, and then to think they were winning, these children, defeating us in the manner of their dying.

Hammad listened without comment but was grateful to the man. He was the kind of man who is not old yet by strict count but who carries something heavier than hard years.

But the shouts of the boys, the high-pitched cry. The man said this is what he heard above the noise of battle. The boys were sounding the cry of history, the story of ancient Shia defeat and the allegiance of the living to those who were dead and defeated. That cry is still close to me, he said. Not like something happening yesterday but something always happening, over a thousand years happening, always in the air.

Hammad stood nodding. He felt the cold in his bones, the misery of wet winds and northern nights. They stood in silence for a time, waiting for the rain to stop, and he kept thinking that another woman would come by on a bike, someone to look at, hair wet, legs pumping.

They were all growing beards. One of them even told his father to grow a beard. Men came to the flat on Marienstrasse, some to visit, others to live, men in and out all the time, growing beards.

Hammad sat crouched, eating and listening. The talk was fire and light, the emotion contagious. They were in this country to pursue technical educations but in these rooms they spoke about the struggle. Everything here was twisted, hypocrite, the West corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds.

They studied architecture and engineering. They studied urban planning and one of them blamed the Jews for defects in construction. The Jews build walls too thin, aisles too narrow. The Jews built the toilet in this flat too close to the floor so a man’s stream of liquid leaves his body and travels so far it makes a noise and a splash, which people in the next room can sit and listen to. Thanks to the thin Jew walls.

Hammad wasn’t sure whether this was funny, true or stupid. He listened to everything they said, intently. He was a bulky man, clumsy, and thought all his life that some unnamed energy was sealed in his body, too tight to be released.

He didn’t know which one of them had told his father to grow a beard. Tell your father to grow a beard. This is not normally recommended.

The man who led discussions, this was Amir and he was intense, a small thin wiry man who spoke to Hammad in his face. He was very genius, others said, and he told them that a man can stay forever in a room, doing blueprints, eating and sleeping, even praying, even plotting, but at a certain point he has to get out. Even if the room is a place of prayer, he can’t stay there all his life. Islam is the world outside the prayer room as well as the sūrahs in the Koran. Islam is the struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans.

They needed space of their own, in the mosque, in the portable prayer room at the university, here in the apartment on Marienstrasse.

There were seven pairs of shoes set outside the door of the flat. Hammad went in and they were talking and arguing. One of the men had fought in Bosnia, another avoided contact with dogs and women.

They looked at videos of jihad in other countries and Hammad told them about the boy soldiers running in the mud, the mine jumpers, wearing keys to paradise around their necks. They stared him down, they talked him down. That was a long time ago and those were only boys, they said, not worth the time it would take to be sorry for a single one.

Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.

The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation.