John Updike - Terrorist

The electronic organist slips into a different rhythm, a hippity-hop studded with a knocking noise, a wooden percussion produced at the back of die choir, by an instrument, a set of sticks, that Ahmad cannot see. The congregation greets the shift of tempo with mutters of approval, and the choir begins to keep the rhythm with its feet, its hips. The organ makes a gulping, dipping sound. The song is shedding the clothing of its words, which become harder to understand-something about trials and temptations and trouble anywhere. The skinny dried-up woman next to Jory-leen steps forward and, in a voice that sounds like a man's, a mellow man's, asks the congregation, "Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share?" Behind her the chorus is chanting the one word, "Prayer, prayer, prayer." The organist is bouncing up and down, seemingly going his own way but keeping in touch. Ahmad hadn't known the organ had so many notes on the keyboard, high ones and low ones, all in clusters hurrying upward, upward. "Prayer, prayer, prayer," the chorus keeps chanting, letting that fat organist have his solo say.

Then comes Joryleen's turn; she steps forward into a spatter of clapping, and her eyes skim right across Ahmad's face before she turns the full-lipped oval of her own face toward the crowd beyond his pew and higher, in the balcony. She takes a breath; his heart stops, fearful for her. But her voice unspools a luminous thread: "Are we weak and heavy laden, cumbered with a load of care?" Her voice is young and frail and pure, with a little quaver to it before her nervousness settles. "Precious Savior, still our refuge," she sings. Her voice relaxes into a brassy color, with a rasping edge, then rises in sudden freedom to a shriek like that of a child pleading to be let into a locked door. The congregation murmurs approval of these liberties. Joryleen cries out, "Do-hoo thy friends despise, for-horsake thee?"

"Hey, well, do they?" the fat woman next to her calls out, chiming in as if Joryleen's solo is a warm bath become too inviting to stay out of. She jumps in not to jostle Joryleen but to join her; hearing this other voice beside her, Joryleen tries a few off notes, harmonizing, her young voice getting bolder, transported into self-forgetfulness. "In his arms," she sings, "in his arms, in his arms he'll take and shield thee; thou wilt find, oh mercy yes, a solace there."

"Yes, a solace; yes, a solace," the fat woman echoes, and steps out into a roar of recognition, of love from the crowd, for her voice takes them deep into and then right out of the bottom of their lives, Ahmad feels. Her voice has been seasoned in the suffering that for Joryleen is mainly ahead, a mere shadow on her young life. With that authority, the fat woman, her face as broad as a stone idol's, begins again, with "What a friend." Dimples appear not just below her cheeks but at the corners of her eyes, the sides of her broad flat nose, as her nostrils flare at a fierce slant. The hymn has by now been so pounded into the veins and nerves of those gathered here that it can be accessed at any point. "All our sins, I mean all our sins and griefs-hear that, Lord?" The choir, Joryleen among them, hang on undismayed while this fat ecstatic snaps her arms back and forth, swings them for a moment in the mock-comic jaunty triumph of someone striding down a gangplank after crossing a stormy sea, and shoots out a pointing hand to the writhing reaches of the balcony, shouting, "Hear that? Hear that?"

"We hearin' it, sister," comes back a man's voice.

"Hear what, brother?" She answers the question: "All our sins and griefs to bear. Think of those sins. Think of those griefs. They're our babies, isn't that right? Sins and griefs, our natural-born babies." The chorus keeps dragging the tune along, but faster now. The organ clambers and jounces, the percussion sticks keep knocking out of sight, the fat woman shuts her eyes and slaps the word "Jesus" across the blindly continuing beat, shortening it to "Jeez. Jeez. Jeez," and breaking into, as if another song is leaking in, "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for the love, all day, all night." As the choir sings, "O what needless pain we bear," she sobs, "Needless, needless. We need to take it to Jesus, we need to, need to!" When the choir, still under the control of the small man with the high puff of hair, arrives at the last line, she does too, singing it, "Everything, everything, every little old thing to God in prayer. Yeaahuyess."

The choir, Joryleen's the widest-open, freshest mouth in it, stops singing. Ahmad finds his eyes heated and his stomach in such a stir he fears he might vomit, here among these yelping devils. The false saints in the soot-darkened tall windows look down. The face of a scowling white-bearded one burns with a passing beam of sun. The little girl has snuggled into his side without his noticing; suddenly heavy, she has fallen asleep in the heart of the huge, belting music. The whole rest of the family, down the length of the pew, smiles at him, at her.

He doesn't know if he should wait for Joryleen outside the church, as the worshippers in their pastel spring outfits push out into the April air, which is turning watery and chill as clouds overhead tarnish darker. Ahmad's indecision is prolonged while, half hiding behind a curbside locust tree that survived the demolition that created the lake of rubble, he satisfies himself that Tylenol was not in the crowd. Then, just as he decides to sneak away, there she is, coming up to him, serving up all her roundnesses like fruit on a plate. She wears a silver bead, holding a tiny reflection of the sky, in one nostril-wing. Beneath the blue robe all along there were the same sort of clothes she wears to high school, not dress-up church clothes. He remembers her telling him she doesn't take religion all that seriously. "I saw you," she teases. "Sitting with the Johnsons, no less."

"The Johnsons?"

"That family you were with. They are big church people. They own do-it-yourself laundry places downtown and over in Passaic. You've heard of the black boor-shwa-zee} That's them. What you staring at, Ahmad?"

"That little thing in your nose. I didn't notice it before. Just those little rings on the edge of your ear."

"It's new. You don't like it? Tylenol likes it. He can hardly wait till I get a tongue stud."

"Piercing your tongue? That's horrible, Joryleen."

"Tylenol says the Lord loves a sporty woman. What does your Mr. Mohammed say?"

Ahmad hears the mockery but nevertheless feels tall standing next to this short, ripe girl; he looks down past her face, with its gleam of mischief, to the tops of her breasts, exposed by a loose-necked springtime blouse and still glazed with the excitement and exertion of her singing. "He advises women to cover their ornaments," he tells her. "He says good women are for good men, and unclean women for unclean men."

Joryleen's eyes widen and she blinks her lids, taking this unsmiling solemnity as part of him, which she might have to deal with. "Well, I don't know where that leaves me," she says cheerfully. "Their notion of unclean was pretty broad in those there days," she adds, and brushes back some moisture from her temple, where the hair is fine like a boy's mustache before he thinks to shave. "How'd you like my singing?"

He takes thought, while the chattering congregants stroll past, their duty done for the week, and the in-and-out sun makes feathery weak shadows beneath the emergent locust leaves. "You have a beautiful voice," Ahmad tells her. "It is very pure. The uses to which it is being put, however, are not pure. The singing, especially of the very fat woman-"

"Eva-Marie," Joryleen supplies. "She's the most. She never gives it less than her everything."

"Her singing seemed to me very sensual. And I did not understand many of the words. In what way is Jesus such a friend to all of you?"