Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

The only thing that prevented me from fully engaging with Marie-Anne’s celebration were thoughts of Candace. I had to find out how she was doing. I had to find a way to talk to her. Four weeks was enough time to miss a period. A cross to appear on a white stripe. An appointment to be scheduled with a gynecologist. I imagined a life percolating inside Candace. Any iota of me, no matter how small, had to be cultivated, had to be allowed to prosper. It didn’t matter where or through whom my blood became a part of the land. There had to be someone in this vast country who could look back upon his generations and give me the pleasure of recognition. It didn’t have to be a shiny mirror as long as it had the power of reflection. To grow old in a country that reviled me was only acceptable if there was someone who came after and pitied me.

For the next two days I plugged away via text messages and voice mails. E-mail had long ago ceased to be a useful method of reaching a person; but I tried flooding that account as well. One-word messages.

Why .

Aren’t .

You .

Answering .

When personal contact became fruitless, I tried looking her up through the Al Jazeera website, but there was no record of her anywhere. I even tried the age-old trick of first-name-dot-last-name-at-domain-name. It came back Mailer Daemon.

In the middle of the Candace-induced mania I received a message from Mahmoud. He sent over the e-mail confirmations, another set of governmental direct-deposit forms, and the briefing for our time in Madrid. We were to leave in three days. I also received a separate message from Leila who said she had gotten herself teamed up with me on purpose.

The deadline torqued me into more fervent action. The only thing left to do was to drag myself over to Candace’s apartment and sit in wait. With Marie-Anne in town it wasn’t the easiest thing to get away, because she wanted to invite herself wherever I went. The only effective excuse involved making up an errand for Richard Konigsberg. He and I hadn’t been in touch since his departure; but Marie-Anne didn’t know that.

It seemed inappropriate to wander through North Philly. I decided to take a taxi directly to her apartment. Passing through like a tourist, I reminded myself that I was never meant to trapeze through the area like a native son. I had neither contributed to its character nor had a part to play in its resurrection. I had been foolish for glibly assuming it would impart enlightenment to me, infuse me with vitality. I was not meant to lead a small life, hunkered in the shadow of abandoned mansions, telling myself I was content between sky and cement. I was meant to ripple outward to the great centers of power, places like New York and Washington, and lay my hands upon the stones of strength. And I certainly would not leave any child of mine languishing in this district. I would not turn out like Richard Konigsberg, one day discovering that my child had existed without my knowledge.

I arrived at Candace’s apartment building early in the morning and banged at the door repeatedly, fruitlessly, throughout the day. No one came in or out. In the afternoon, her neighbor who used to blast music lowered the volume on the stereo and parted her door a little to yell at me, telling me not to ruin her high. “Besides,” she said, “you can’t get into an apartment no one lives at.” The neighbor’s disclosure was perplexing and shocking and immediately caused me to double back and conjure the directions from the night we’d spent together. Had I come to the wrong apartment? I ran down to the front door and carried out a hurried archaeology of memory. Here was the hole where Candace had said rats came from. Here was the handrail which she had taken for support and I had pressed up behind her to kiss her neck. Here was the elevator in which she had pushed the second-floor button with her buttocks. It had all been real. It had all happened. It wasn’t the hallucination of a drunk man. It wasn’t the yearning of a man who had failed at impregnating life so much that he had taken to impregnating fantasies. I searched for the picture of Candace I had saved. I found it. I scrolled back to the pictures we had taken with Ali Ansari the night we visited him. Those were still there as well. I was not a madman. I existed — if not wholly, then at least in close proximity to the real.

I returned to the apartment the next day and carried out a repeat performance. The same lady from next door cracked the door and gave me the same comment as the day before, except this time she threw a shoe at me. Since I was leaving the country in the very near future and didn’t have time to stalk around North Philly any longer, I texted Ali Ansari for help.

Need you to find a girl. She might be pregnant.

Farkhunda? came the reliably immediate answer.

No. The one you met at your apartment.

The mixed convert?

Yeah.

You knocked her up? Guess I don’t blame you. She had a nice ass.

Hope you remember it well enough to spot it in North Philly.

He asked for her number and place of work and told me he would get on it. What do you want me to do if I find her?

I don’t know, I said. Wait for further instructions.

I was grateful that he didn’t ask for any more details. He didn’t judge what I had done. He simply praised me when I did something great and extricated me when I fell into something reprehensible.

In short, a true friend.

Leila sat next to me on the flight and I was glad because she talked so much that it was hard to get lost thinking about the mystery of Candace.

Leila had been to Madrid before. It was the place where her transformative moment occurred, where she started thinking of herself as a moderate Muslim.

After the flight Leila and I settled into our hotel and met with the State Department liaison who Mahmoud had appointed for us. Our first meeting in Madrid was with a community centered around the Saudi mosque. Our liaison described it as Wahhabi, but emphasized that it was a gift given out of generosity. He insisted there was “no ulterior motivator.” He told us that the massive white walls of the mosque were meant to remind the Spaniards that though Islam had been driven out once, it had come back by the grace of God. He was accompanied by a slick and smiling Saudi cohort. They spoke flawless English and led us through a tour of the immense grounds, including the prayer halls, the cafés, the gym, and an amphitheater capable of holding more than a thousand people. “We just had Amr Khaled here,” the guide said proudly, referring to a famous evangelist. “Filled all of it.” After a short siesta in the café, where newly arrived Moroccans served us tea and biscuits, we walked through the well-endowed library full of texts in Spanish and Arabic. The standard collections of hadith —Bukhari and Muslim — were arranged neatly on the shelves and there were numerous manuals about prayer and ablution.

I picked up a copy of the Koran. The Saudi guide came over and told me the translation was by Muhammad Asad. He looked at me like I was expected to know the name. I told him I didn’t. He smiled and said that Asad was one of the most famous converts of the twentieth century. “Almost as important to us as Malcolm X.” Asad had been born Leopold Weiss in a Jewish family in Austria and had converted to Islam when he fell in love with the Saudi rulers and the freewheeling libertarian life they led in the desert. It baffled me to think that one of the inheritors of Austrian history — with its Bach, its Mozart, its Wittgenstein — would feel inclined to tie himself to the sands of Arabia, where even the greatest man of literature was one who was celebrated for his illiteracy.