The Way of the World Page 7

  The crowds flow by and Ben looks intently at everyone with a complexion that matches his estimation of someone from South Asia. He’s seen the photo of Mohammad, but as it is with unfamiliar features, the face is hard to conjure beyond skin color.

  Ben seeks out a gate agent and then runs toward the baggage claim, vanishing into the crowd. “Ben!” Ann yells, and a minute later, he reappears, walking alongside a tall, lithe boy with very large eyes—my, what a handsome boy—in a YES T-shirt. The boy walks purposefully toward Ann and hugs her. “Hi, Mom,” he says in a soft voice, and Ann feels like she might start to cry.

  “Well, hello to you, Mohammad.”

  He laughs. They call him Mohammad. He’s always used Ibrahim. So maybe in America he will be Mohammad, he thinks, a new person.

  So an experiment of sorts begins—an experiment in cultural fusion, or collision—as the trio makes its way across an ocean of airport carpeting, across more pavement than Ibrahim has ever seen and into a rusty white car, a ’96 Honda Civic.

  It’s as though Ibrahim has new eyes. Everything is strange, imprinting itself on him. The lady who takes their money as they leave the parking garage is black. He’s seen photos of them, black people, but here she’s talking, exchanging pleasantries with Ann. And there are bushes outside shaped like giant teardrops—a bush sculpture?—and then a highway overpass, with one highway going over another. He sees downtown Denver in the distance. What sort of people could build such a city? He’s seen images of America, of its tall buildings, but the towers seem to rise impossibly, holding up the sky.

  Ann is making conversation. How was his flight? Did he eat? She’s very nice, and so is Ben, and Ibrahim—sitting in the front seat—is cheery, grinning so wide it hurts, giving short answers in his best grammatical English. They stop at a traffic light and he sees, across the intersection, a pickup truck with a young woman in the front seat sitting between two young men. He can’t take his eyes off of them.

  “They’re everywhere,” he says, under his breath. Ann turns, concerned. “What?”

  “Men and women, together,” he says, grimly, averting his eyes from the truck. Ben laughs from the backseat and Ann waves him off, but can’t help smiling. She knows this will be an issue—she’s been reading materials from the American Councils and trolling the Internet. Ibrahim, as well, has been warned. During the monthlong orientation that Naeem Muhsiny and others led in Kyrgyzstan, the students did skits to prepare for the mixing of the sexes. Ibrahim was an unenthusiastic participant, especially compared with the more sophisticated kids from Kabul or Kandahar, who make up most of the selectees. Bamiyan, after all, is a remote, rural area and home of the Hazara—descendants, it is believed, of peoples from Persia and Mongolia. Though the country’s third largest ethnic group, the Hazara are second-class citizens in Afghanistan. But they pride themselves on being clear and pure in their Shiite faith. Though they were persecuted by the Taliban’s religious radicals, Bamiyan’s Hazara embrace a simple, traditional flavor of Muslim practice, as does Ibrahim and his family. And that practice says, quite clearly, that it is wrong for a woman to consort with men who are not members of her family.

  “That’s not right,” he says to Ann, “that they’re all so close.” The girl in the truck is laughing, touching one man and then the other. And Ibrahim finds bits of Koranic passages coming into his head: the one about women “lowering their gaze and being mindful of their chastity,” and another, that he thinks starts with “O Prophet! Tell thy wives and daughters that they should draw over themselves some of their outer garments” to be recognized as decent.

  “You’re going to be seeing a lot of that here,” Ann says. “Men and women in America are together, all the time. It’s just different.”

  He knows that, yes, and they are difficult to look at. But maybe he needs to look, he thinks. This is part of why he’s here, to see things that you don’t see in Afghanistan. Does it hurt him to see it if he doesn’t do it? And why does the trio in the pickup truck seem so happy? The questions start coming fast, piling up unanswered. Ann drives them to and fro, showing Ibrahim the town and the high school—Denver’s huge East High—where he will enroll in a week. She hears him whispering next to her. “Listen to what people say. Let them talk first.”

  It’s that whisper, sotto voce, beneath wary eyes and a tight smile—cautious, reaching forward, pulling back, reaching again—that will guide the boy on this journey from the hills of Afghanistan to the heartland of America, from one end of the earth to the other. And it is by the distance traveled in the coming year that hope, in a fearful world, might well be measured. Are the divides, so clear and troubling, surmountable? Maybe, maybe not.

  But first, there are gifts to give, a ceremony that occurs in the finished basement of a house in this Colorado suburb. Ibrahim begins unpacking. Michael has just arrived and Ibrahim hands him, the father of this house, a gift from his father in Bamiyan: a long black vest with stones and shiny embroidery. He hands Ann a jacket, ornate black, with gold threads woven into it, made by his mother. And for Ben, a kofi—with beads of many colors—which he puts on, jauntily. Ibrahim has only a small fabric bag and a backpack, so there are not many garments—a few formal shirts and slacks, four T-shirts, a salwar kameez (the traditional South Asian long shirt and baggy trousers), and a formal pin-striped suit, black with white stripes, which his uncle, a tailor, made for his trip to America. It’s a zoot suit, patterned after something Ibrahim saw in a video.

  They watch as he begins to hang his clothes. When Ibrahim turns and sees Ann and Ben, side by side, looking at him, mother and son, it makes him think of his mother—how she told him to be so careful, and to always think of her—but now he can’t seem to summon her. Too much happening, too fast. Suddenly he’s digging through his bag—it’s in here, he knows it—and pulls out a tape, a cassette, and hands it to Ben. “Can you play this?”

  Ben looks down at the cassette, back at Ibrahim, and plunges into a closet across the room, digging out shoes, winter hats, gardening gloves. He pulls himself upright with a dusty cassette player and hands it, smiling and urgent, to Ibrahim, who shoves in the tape while Ann and Ben sit awkwardly on the bed, an audience in their own home.

  There’s a moment of quiet crackling as the thread turns, and then the song—an ancient song about the wind crossing mountains—fills the room and wraps itself around the boy, who can’t help closing his eyes and racing backward, retracing his long path, lifting his hands as his body moves. And suddenly he’s back there, and here, and nowhere, dancing, in this windowless basement, the dance of Afghanistan.

  CHAPTER 3

  American Dilemmas

  CONSIDER IBRAHIM’S SHOES. THEY’RE A rubbery synthetic. He bought them in Bamiyan. You have to look carefully to see that they cover only the tops of his feet. In the holes that have formed in their soles—and there are several in each shoe—he has packed stones. It’s a trick he learned during difficult days in Afghanistan, when he had to live by himself. That was three years ago. His family had already spent three years on the run, after the Taliban slaughtered many of Bamiyan’s elders, including Ibrahim’s grandfather, a village leader. His mother, father, and three younger siblings—two sisters, one brother—were living hand to mouth in a nearby province. Come spring, food was scarce, the winter stores having long ago vanished. One morning, when the family awoke hungry, Ibrahim told his parents that he was returning to Bamiyan. They all knew that the Taliban spared children, meaning he might be able to get back to the family’s land to plant crops. He would stay until fall and return, carrying with him the fruits of harvest. His father and mother were against it. They argued for hours, until the boy’s obstinacy prevailed, and he jumped on the back of a passing truck. When he arrived home, he found that other families had had the same idea. Bamiyan was slowly filling up with teenagers. A kid town. One of Ibrahim’s friends tried to run his family’s bakery. Another friend sold herbal medicines. And one boy, a clever kid, taught Ibrahim how to fix
his shoes. That’s where he learned the trick. Come autumn, Ibrahim paid a driver to drive him and his produce—potatoes, corn, radishes, peppers—to his family. That winter, they ate.

  He thinks of all this at the Major League Soccer matchup between the Colorado Rapids and Los Angeles Galaxy. Going to the game is the first thing Ibrahim does after sleeping through jetlag for a day and a half. Thirty hours of restorative sleep, then seventeen thousand screaming Coloradans in Denver’s new Mile High Stadium. The place is huge, mostly empty, and vast beyond measure to Ibrahim, like a mountain range or sweeping plain. He is happy to visit it, to be on the move, with his family—with Ben and Mom and Dad. America feels enormous, and he’s moving inside its valley. They all seem to be soccer fans, and they have good seats about ten rows up. In the form he filled out last year in Afghanistan, he listed soccer as one of his interests.

  The teams come out and begin kicking warm-ups—a beautiful mild Saturday night. Then, as the game is about to start, a row of nearly naked women run along the side of the field. Ibrahim turns to Ann, his mouth dry.

  “Cheerleaders, Ibrahim!” she shouts over the din. “They dance, and lead cheers. I know. It’s a little much.”

  The woman—a dozen of them—almost all have yellow hair. The game starts, but he can’t take his eyes off of them. They’re dancing, shaking their bodies in every way imaginable. Only their breasts and behinds are covered with tiny strips of sequined cloth, and they’re jumping, bouncing. There are four men with them who are clearly not their husbands or brothers, and each man lifts a woman up by putting his hand up between the girl’s legs. Ibrahim wonders if he might faint. He looks down at his hands, counting fingers, and then at Ben, who has noticed—as has Mom—that he’s slowly being driven to distraction.

  “This is a good game,” Ibrahim yells to Ben, turning away from the girls. “Yes?”

  “And those cheerleaders are nice, too,” Ben shouts back. “Aren’t they?”

  Ibrahim just nods, weakly, as he tries to control his raging, tidal reactions, and that’s when he focuses on his shoes. He presses his feet against the stones, and remembers when he was alone in Bamiyan, trying to remember how his father taught him to plant seeds in rows. Then he thinks of the other children. And he gets through the quarter and then to the halftime. They go get pizza during the break at a concession stand. The pizza’s tasty, and Coke is his favorite drink. As they walk back to their seats, down the long sloping aisle, he is talking to Ben about drinking Coke at the Frankfurt Airport. Then he looks up.

  Dogs? Dogs are running across the field! He turns to Ben. “There are dogs!” Anything but dogs.

  Like many Muslims, Ibrahim believes that the Prophet viewed dogs as vermin, believed that black dogs were the seed of Satan, and even called for dogs to be exterminated. Not surprisingly, there is nothing in the Koran’s six thousand verses that frames human-canine interactions. Several pointed passages, however, appear in the Hadith, vast commentaries of Islamic interpretation that over a thousand years have hardened into cultural assessments and choices. That’s why you won’t find dogs as pets anywhere, for the most part, in the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, Indonesia, or other Muslim lands. Of course, in America they are man’s best friend, with 70 million as pets in the United States alone.

  Right now, ten of those best friends are crisscrossing the field at Mile High and catching…what? They are Frisbee-catching dogs! People are cheering madly. The cheerleaders are now getting into the act. Ibrahim has come across the world to a place where naked woman dance with Frisbee-catching dogs. He must never tell his mother, his real mother, about this.

  Driving back, Ann, trying to lighten things up, tells Ibrahim about the family dog, an old dog they got at the kennel, a mutt, which died on the Fourth of July. He was in a picture of the family that Ann sent to the American Councils’ office in June to pass along to Ibrahim. He never got it.

  “If I had seen a picture of your family with a dog, Mom,” Ibrahim says, reluctantly, still reeling from images in his head of the leaping, jaw-snapping beasts, “I don’t think I would have come.”

  THAT NIGHT, ANN THINKS THROUGH the collisions of the day. She’s always felt like the leader of her household, but now she also feels she’s a representative of American motherhood—an American Mother bringing her Afghan “son” into the fold of humanitarian understanding. No doubt, she’s got added advantages: a master’s degree in social work. Her job is, after all, bridging divides. Michael, her husband, is home a bit less than usual; his work seems to increasingly dominate his time. But as the experiment called Ibrahim unfolds, she can focus her attentions on the unique conundrums at hand. Let’s see what she can muster. Sitting at the computer, she trolls Islamic websites and, that night, decides to keep a journal in her night table drawer. Then she sees it. An open house tomorrow at the Abu-Bakr Mosque of the Colorado Muslim Society, advertised online for “people of all faiths.”

  As she stands in the beautiful ornate mosque the next day, her affection for Islam is warmed and nourished. An Imam stands and speaks to the assembled, an audience of four hundred or so—half white, she estimates, half assorted non-Caucasians. The event, planned long in advance, is now ideally timed. The crowd is large, and cameras from Denver’s local affiliates are there, doing a story about Muslim outreach after the foiled British plot. Imam Ammar Amonette calls Islam “a moderate religion that has always accepted people of all faiths.” It has “been around for fourteen centuries,” he says, and the extremism of the past few years is “something real” but aberrant, and part of a larger fundamentalist trend in religion today. There’s a break, and a buffet table of delicious fare. Ben and Ann eat chicken and lamb dishes from Afghanistan and Pakistan, hearty and spicy food accompanied by small vats of tabouleh and fresh pitas—and Ann looks over admiringly at Ibrahim, trolling the line with them, filling his plate. They are part of the solution, she feels, and getting an A for effort. And that will be an inescapable conclusion that Ben, her slightly eccentric and sensitive high-school-senior son—into Magic the Gathering, a popular fantasy card game, rather than, say, rap music and college football—will carry with him. And Ibrahim has got to be liking all this—hundreds of people celebrating Islam on a sunny Sunday. Once the plates are cleaned, they gravitate toward the mosque’s president, Mohammad Noorzai, a man in his sixties, originally from Afghanistan, who is greeting visitors. He and Ibrahim are introduced and begin to speak what Ann figures is Farsi. Actually, it’s Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, and then Ibrahim—switching to English so others might hear—proudly tells Noorzai that he reads Arabic. The man is impressed. He gives Ibrahim a copy of the Koran. Ann is aware from her late-night trolling that most people in South Asia don’t read Arabic and therefore can’t read the Koran in the original. And she finds her faith in Ibrahim’s abilities, and his innate strength to manage the cultural collisions and intellectual challenges ahead, rising. Noorzai talks about how Ibrahim might regularly visit the mosque, and he details upcoming events the boy might enjoy. The young man, bowing gently, holding his gift of the Koran, thanks him.

  Then they are in the Honda, driving back. Ibrahim, next to Ann in the front seat, is unsettled. “I won’t be going back there,” he says. Ann’s confused; she mentions how nice Mr. Noorzai seemed. “He’s Sunni,” Ibrahim says, grimly. “He’s not like me. We will not speak again.”

  Ann exhales, silent, reassessing. Sunni. There you have it; an ancient blood feud inside of Islam, and the day’s a total loss. She looks down at Ibrahim’s shoes; he seems to be pressing his feet hard against the floor of the car. Yesterday she noticed the shoes and was appalled. Tomorrow they have to register Ibrahim for classes at East High. She turns the car toward a massive suburban mall. Today Ann Petrila is damn well buying him some American shoes.

  ON SEPTEMBER 10, VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY strolls into the Washington studios of NBC. He doesn’t appear on the signature public affairs show Meet the Press unless there’s a special need or occasion. He was on with
Tim Russert a few days after 9/11, saying that the United States would have to fight this new enemy on “the dark side.” He was on in 2003, talking about the successes of the early days of the Iraq war, and then again six months later, to challenge critics who were beginning to say the Iraq campaign might turn out to be lengthier and more costly than expected. That was his last appearance.

  This morning, he needs to forcefully remind America that the nation is at war—a new kind of war, the war against terrorism—and that only he, and Bush, and their party can keep the country safe.

  “Let’s, let’s go back to the beginning here,” he tells Russert, after they exchange cordialities. “Five years ago, Tim, you and I did this show, the Sunday after 9/11. And we learned a lot from 9/11. We saw, in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’d spent on national security in the years up to 9/11, on that morning, 19 men with box cutters and airline tickets came into the country and killed 3,000 people. We had to take that and, and also the fact of their interest of weapons of mass destruction and recognize, at that time, it was the threat then and it’s the threat today that drives much of our thinking, that the real threat is the possibility of a cell of al-Qaeda in the midst of one of our own cities with a nuclear weapon, or a biological agent. In that case, you’d be dealing—for example, if on 9/11 they’d had a nuke instead of an airplane, you’d have been looking at a casualty toll that would rival all the deaths in all the wars fought by Americans in 230 years. That’s the threat we have to deal with, and that drove our thinking in the aftermath of 9/11 and does today.”

  After a few minutes of this, Russert picks up Cheney’s then-versus-now thread: “When you were on this program, you did talk about being on the dark side, that we’re going to have to get involved in intelligence and do some things with shady characters and so forth. Is that what we’ve done the last five years?”