Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

It wasn’t until the fourth year, when we actually moved in together, that Frances found herself talking to Adinah on the phone. The women were entirely civil and friendly, two rational beings — what did they have to fight over? — as they discussed Becky’s plane reservations from California. Dogs were barking in the background, Frances told me later, yap yap yap. Adinah provided home boarding, for extra bucks, when she could.

“Doesn’t the Koran have something against dogs?” Frances said.

“Not the Koran itself. Not at all. And she says there are different traditions,” I said.

Frances did give me a look that said, She’s so odd , but it wasn’t a mean look.

As it happened, I was stuck way up in East Harlem, shooting some cop talking about retirement benefits, when the World Trade Center was smashed to rubble by two planes. Once I could get through to Frances to make sure she was okay, once I called my mother in Florida to tell her I was fine, once they started flashing pictures of Osama bin Laden on the TV monitors at work, I kept thinking I had to get to California to protect Adinah and Becky from anti-Muslim bigots. They were sitting ducks, my girls. Becky was out of school and living at home, back at the Door till she could find a job. When I finally got Adinah on the phone, she said, “Oh! We were so worried about you. It’s so great to hear you’re all right. You’re all right?”

“Please be careful,” I said. “Don’t parade around being a Muslim right now, okay?”

“Careful how?” she said. “Do you think there’s a lynch mob in the streets?”

“I don’t like to think of the two of you alone,” I said.

“Becky’s out with the dogs now. And the mosque is fine too. I was just there. No problems.”

“You were where?”

“Of course. Everyone came. It was very moving.”

“You took Becky with you?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

Adinah said Becky was twenty-three and could make her own decisions. “I’m not bringing her anyplace. I have to tell you, you’re thinking about this in entirely the wrong way. I know you want to guard us, but how? It’s kind of a grandiose idea about yourself. This is what happens to people’s egos without religion.”

“Oh, is it?”

“I’m sorry to say it is.”

“This isn’t such a great week for religion,” I said.

“In my house it is,” she said.

“You know how you sound?”

“I hate it when you’re an asshole,” she said.

One of the photos I took at that time won a prize (a cop in a paper air-filter mask reading a wall of those early, futile posters for the missing). It wasn’t hard to catch a long, sad story in an instant during those days, and I was, first and foremost, a street photographer. My mother was so pleased about my getting a prize she talked about it nonstop. There were a lot better photos than the one I took, and I envied the people who got to the scene fast enough. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this envy if I were you,” Frances said.

I always wanted to be out in the world, taking in as much as I could take, and was this now creepy of me? Should I be mourning and not staring? The newsroom lost its rowdy, smart-alecky din around this time — people were stricken, solemn, formal. Reverent without a focus. We really didn’t know how to act. We reached for what we could reach for.

In the middle of the next summer I got an email from Adinah. Hope you’re well and keeping out of trouble. I have a small request , she wrote. Like every Muslim who was able, she was called to make the hajj, the trip to Mecca. Some families from her mosque were going in February. Becky would take care of the dogs, the one thing she needed was permission. (She needed what?) I was still her legal husband. It was a simple consent form, I just had to sign, no big deal, she would send it to me. She was also short on money to pay for the trip, if I wanted to kick in, but that was up to me.

My first thought was: She’ll be killed . They would find out she was Jewish. She was out of her mind, this present-day Adinah, and the fact of that was extremely painful to me. A deluded fifty-two-year-old woman, walking right out into traffic, too helpless to live in this world.

“How would they know what she was born as?” Frances said. “Americans go on this thing all the time.”

Frances was just talking. I looked at my newspaper’s files online. I could find nothing at all about murders in Mecca. There hadn’t been any riots or bombs since the eighties, but the hajj did have a history of accidental stampedes. In 1990 there had been a rush inside a pedestrian tunnel between Mecca and Mina and 1,426 pilgrims had died. In some other years only a hundred or so were trampled. A few dozen had died this year from meningitis, and there were always deaths from heat prostration. And at the end of the hajj, there was a ritual sacrifice, a massive slaughter of sheep, goats, and cows, on behalf of the pilgrims. Most of the butchered flesh went to the poor, but how could a woman who hadn’t eaten meat since 1971 be up for this?

It gave me some degree of comfort that I could stop her. I could do that for her, at least, after all these years. Adinah, you don’t have a clue what you’re getting into, I wrote. Did you really think I or anyone with a brain would go along with this? It’s too insane. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that’s my opinion.

You think you’re saving me, don’t you? Adinah wrote back. What a full-of-yourself jerk you are. You have everything backward. This is why Muslims go around saying only God is God. Get over yourself, okay? Soon.

Frances said, “It’s bad enough she has to ask you — and you’re saying no? I don’t believe you.”

Frances was very chilly to me, and she meant it — I had appalled her — and work was no picnic that week either. I was with a reporter who was covering the case of a couple who’d beaten the woman’s four-year-old son to death. We interviewed the grandmother, the neighbors, the social worker, the usual, and I hated hearing the details. Some grisly bits were hard to forget. Even the reporter, a hard-boiled guy, was pretty quiet afterward. I was angry that these facts, true as they were, had entered me. The writer and I got drunk together standing at a bar, downing shots of whiskey, old-style city-desk guys.

That night I dreamed of Becky when she was maybe three, right after I first moved out, and she was pouncing on my back the way she used to when I read the paper at night. In my dream, I turned around and smacked her. As I once really had. In the dream, she was riding around on the back of a huge black dog, shrieking like a bird of prey in a horror movie, a vicious sound.

Frances was asleep next to me when I woke up, in murky terror. I thought, It’s too hard, I can’t stand it , though I couldn’t have said what that meant. What I really thought was, a person shouldn’t remember too much.

I stayed in the shower for a half hour the next morning, my version of all the ritual washing that religions go in for. I once saw a Muslim prayer room at an airport, where there was a spigot for ablutions. In the steam of the shower when I came out, I didn’t want to look in the mirror either. I hoped black coffee would help, and maybe it did.

I had a hangover all day, a bad one, and I kept thinking about Adinah, how she had every right to go to Mecca or wherever the hell she wanted, I’d known that all along. There wasn’t enough mercy in the world. Let her go, let her be one of those pilgrims in the baking sun. It was entirely like her to want such a thing. And millions of people went to Mecca every year and came home fine. Every year.