Beneath the Same Heaven Read online

  Rashid shifted his weight uncomfortably, stepped back on the carpeted floor.

  “I’m Ali,” the younger man finally smiled, offering his hand.

  Rashid heard Ali’s Palestinian accent, unusual among the south Asians who usually came to this mosque. “I’m Rashid.” He took Ali’s hand.

  “Yes,” Ali pumped his hand up and down. “Pakistani, yes?”

  Rashid nodded.

  “Good. And your father?”

  “He was killed by the Americans too.”

  Ali clenched his fist, inhaled deeply. “Come, let us have tea, we have many things in common.”

  Rashid looked up from the refrigerator drawer as Kathryn came in. “You let these vegetables rot while I was offshore?”

  She walked in with Michael clutching at her thigh. “Hello,” she reached out to kiss Rashid, determined to ignore his comment. Michael laughed and ran into the living room, jumping into a pile of laundry on the floor. “Michael,” she scolded.

  “I washed the fucking clothes.”

  “Rashid, we’re not rig workers, you don’t need to swear.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “they’re clean.” He threw the rotten vegetables in the trash with a disgusted snort.

  “Remember the ACLU guy I told you about?” she asked. “He’s got some ideas about organizations that are following the drone issue.”

  “So?” He brought a pan of scrambled eggs and store-bought rotis to the table. Michael came to his side, freshly laundered adult socks on his hands, each attempting to eat the other amidst a series of childish roars.

  “He wrote about Guantanamo Bay for the journal last year,” Kathryn said setting Michael in his chair, baby Andrew in his swing.

  “What’s Guantanamo?” Michael asked, holding his roti up with both hands, flapping it back and forth against his forehead.

  “Michael, don’t play with your food.” She poured herself a glass of water. “It’s a place in Cuba where the U.S. is holding people from other countries that our government thinks are dangerous.”

  “The guy from San Francisco?” Rashid asked, eating his dinner.

  “Yeah.” She took a big gulp of water.

  “So what?” Rashid said indifferently.

  Michael had set his roti on top of his eggs, obscuring them completely. “Why Cuba? Is Cuba far away from the U.S. so we’ll be safe?”

  “Michael, please. I’m trying to talk to your father, we’ll talk about Cuba later.”

  “Why can’t we talk about the ACLU later?” Rashid’s food was already half eaten, his father had always taught them to eat first, talk later.

  “I want to tell you before they call you for another job.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The ACLU’s director might bring a suit in the International Court of Justice in the Hague.”

  “So what?” he said again.

  “So what?” she said stunned. “Have you forgotten what we’ve been trying to do? Somebody has to take a stand against this undeclared war we’re waging along the border in Pakistan.”

  “Stop fucking saying ‘we’.”

  “Well it’s our country. Like during the Vietnam War, we were secretly bombing Cambodia. Students protested at universities across the U.S., Kent State in Ohio.”

  “And did the protests stop the war, or the secret bombing?” Rashid sounded almost belligerent.

  “Not immediately. But they were pivotal. If we could be named plaintiffs we could be involved in the suit.” She felt the burn of the green chilies in the eggs.

  Rashid inhaled, shook his head. “A waste of time, this will take years. Even if you can bring a suit, who says you’ll win?”

  “But the government needs to be held accountable for its actions. Thousands of predator drone attacks in Pakistan since 2001 have killed more than thirty-thousand people.” She looked away from Rashid, noticed Michael sitting still in his chair. “Michael, finish your dinner.”

  “Do as your mother says,” Rashid scolded.

  “If we’re involved in some kind of litigation, we can show that this military action isn’t just unconstitutional, without the approval of Congress, but effects U.S. citizens directly.”

  “Kathryn,” he sighed, “since when has the U.S. government cared about what the International Criminal Court says? It hasn’t changed the U.S. policy in Israel and Palestine.”

  “Why are you fighting me on this? I thought you agreed with me.”

  “Go ahead. Call those people if you want.” Rashid picked up his plate, set it on the counter with a bang, and walked out of the room.

  Kathryn exhaled, suddenly exhausted. “At least I am trying to do something,” she muttered to herself.

  “Mummy, can a language make you angry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean when I hear Daddy on the phone speaking that other language he sounds angry. Can it do that?”

  “When did he sound angry?”

  “Today.” Michael picked at his food.

  “Someone called him?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Who?”

  Michael shrugged.

  “Words can make you angry, not just a language, but words… for sure.”

  Once the children were asleep, Rashid surprised Kathryn with a bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a small glass of the golden liquid and slowly sipped. He motioned for her to sit next to him.

  “You want me to drink with you?” she asked.

  “Yes, please. You won’t nurse until morning. I need to relax, it’s all so serious.” He smiled, and for a moment she glimpsed the old Rashid of the discos.

  “OK, just a minute.” She pressed her hands into his shoulders, squeezing him into waiting. In the bathroom she combed her hair, removed the cloth diaper over her shoulder that had become a permanent fixture of her wardrobe and even sprayed perfume. She raised an eyebrow, smiled at herself in the mirror, and turned sideways trying to smooth her belly into pre-pregnancy form.

  She returned to him, he smiled at her fragrance. He pulled out a chair for her and offered her a drink.

  “Cheers,” she said as they toasted. Kathryn felt the Scotch burn, the gentle buzz strangely out of place without the thumping beats of their night-clubbing life. She reached out to him, running her hands up the length of his thighs. The same pleasure in his form, his strength, that she had initially felt, flickered back into flame in her body.

  He met her hands with his, interlacing their fingers. Silently confirming he loved her, he stopped her overture.

  She raised an eyebrow in question.

  “I just wish I wasn’t in this position,” he said, as if picking up the thread of some previous conversation.

  When he didn’t elaborate, she asked, “What position? Sitting in this chair?”

  “No, in this position of obligation.”

  “Obligation to who?”

  “To my family, actually, to my mother.”

  “We’re all obligated to our families. That’s the nature of the relationship.”

  “Yes, but this obligation feels so big, like it fills my whole sky, my whole future,” he looked directly into her eyes, trying to gauge her understanding, then consumed the rest of his glass in a single gulp, grimacing in pain.

  “What are you talking about?” Her voice trembled briefly.

  He stood up and walked to the window, looked out into the impotent darkness of the city with its perpetually bright streetlights. “What happens in this country to a man when he kills another man?”

  Caught off guard, she hesitated. “He’s put on trial. If the jury finds him guilty he goes to jail.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  He tapped on the window, as if punctuating some idea beyond the glass. “And then the state takes its revenge, by taking the life of the murderer.”

  “No, that’s not revenge, that’s a deterrent, a lesson to other would-be murderers not to do the same thing.”

  “OK, call it
a deterrent. But it’s a punishment, a price that the responsible party has to pay, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. What does this have to do with anything?”

  “It has to do with everything. Just listen.” He mapped out with his hands two different territories. “What happens in America when another country attacks and kills people, murders Americans?” With a fist, he smacked into the palm of the other territory.

  “Well, after Pearl Harbor, we joined the war against Japan and the Germans.”

  “And American soldiers did what?”

  “Went to war…”

  “And killed people, they took revenge for those murders, in other countries.”

  An unfamiliar defensiveness crept into her voice. “Why would you call that revenge? That’s war. We had to make them stop. You can’t just go into another country and attack their people.”

  “And how did the Americans eventually make it stop? How does a country take its revenge?”

  She paused, uncomfortable with the reality of the answer she had to acknowledge.

  He answered for her. “The Americans made it stop by attacking Japan, by killing millions of people in Japan, innocent people, dropping an atomic bomb.”

  She looked up, stricken.

  “I’m not saying it was wrong. The Americans had to do it, they were attacked, they had to take revenge. It’s human. Revenge satisfies the anger of grieving people, it’s inevitable.”

  Adrenaline shot through her body at some nebulous danger. “No.” She stood up, stepped unsteadily toward him. “Revenge just perpetuates a cycle of killing, we didn’t go to war for revenge. We’re not that kind of people. We went to war on principle, to stop a greater evil.”

  He inclined his head, as if to consider her position as he returned to his chair, sat down and poured himself another drink.

  “And tell me, Kathryn, tell me how much the killing has stopped because of the Americans’ actions? Because of wars of principle?”

  She felt a chill in her veins.

  “Vietnam. Cambodia. Iraq. Afghanistan.” He paused and said one more word with infinite tenderness. “Pakistan.”

  “We’re not at war with Pakistan, Rashid.”

  He looked up at her, raising an incredulous eyebrow. “Tell that to my mother, to my brothers.”

  She suddenly perceived a border between them, where before there had been none. “It’s not my fault. There was nothing I could’ve done to prevent your father’s death.” She tried to reach across the divide with some reason, some idea that would comfort them, unite them. “America’s trying to eliminate the camps that train terrorists.”

  “I never said it was your fault. This kind of killing, it is written,” he drew his index finger across his forehead in the habit of Muslims referring to fate. “It is written,” he said again drawing his finger across her forehead, causing a shiver along her spine.

  “Nothing is written, Rashid. Revenge wouldn’t make your father come back. Understand what happened…was an accident.”

  He pulled his hand away, his eyes grew wide with anger. “An accident!? Fucking hell.”

  She flinched, tears dropped on her cheeks.

  “In my culture, revenge is a personal thing,” he said, beginning to slur his words. “When a man kills, he knows that he may look the dead man’s family in the eye, just before they kill him. That’s a deterrent.”

  “What are you saying?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”

  “My family expects revenge.”

  “We,” she paused, flaring her nostrils, “we are your family.”

  He looked at her, his eyes roving over every point on her face. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “But how can I accept that this is my country?”

  In the morning he did not wake as the sun stretched across the bed. She turned to see him, both boys held fast in his embrace, one in each arm.

  She ran her fingers along the contours of his arms. She marveled at their mutual connection. Maybe everything would be fine. She willed herself not to replay their words from the previous night.

  She rose stiffly, went to the kitchen. Defiantly, she broke eggs into a bowl, chopped chilies and onions and tomatoes. She kneaded flour and water into dough, struggling to roll out round rotis, a skill she still had yet to master. She prepared his breakfast, Pakistani style.

  As she chopped the cilantro, Rashid emerged from the bedroom, groggy and grumpy, grey from the previous night’s alcohol.

  The chai. She had forgotten the chai. No Pakistani breakfast would be complete without the sweet milky tea. She poured him a big glass of water. “Sit, wait while I boil the milk for tea.” He did not speak, capitulated to her instructions.

  Just as the milk nearly boiled over the rim of the pot, Michael padded into the room, his hair tumbling over his forehead. “What’s that smell?”

  “Breakfast,” Kathryn said and kissed him on the forehead, a wooden spoon still in her hand.

  “What kind of breakfast?” He walked to Rashid, struggled to climb into his father’s lap.

  Rashid leaned back, allowed the boy up. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “Breakfast like I ate when I was a boy like you,” he said. But the aromas, incomplete without the smell of burning cow dung, exhaust from the generator down the street, the rose smell of his mother’s hair oil, only heightened his sense of dislocation. No matter how she tried, Kathryn could only produce a simulacrum of the land still embedded in his heart.

  The baby whimpered, then let out a full fledged cry. Rashid slid Michael off his lap and they walked hand-in-hand to the bedroom. They emerged a moment later, Rashid quieting the baby in his arms and Michael tickling his brother’s feet.

  They all sat down together before this unusually elaborate breakfast. Kathryn told Rashid and Michael to eat as she tucked the baby’s head under her shirt to suckle. For an instant all was right in her world, her entire family’s needs met. What more could be required of her? What more could she possibly do?

  Chapter 10

  * * *

  With no client jobs listed on the schedule board, Rashid’s day would be filled with routine maintenance around the base. He fished his phone out of the pocket of his coveralls, dialed Ali’s number. “Salaam aleikum,” he said perfunctorily. “Ali, did I see you at my house yesterday?” He looked around to be sure he was alone. “How do you know where I live?” He fiddled nervously with the spare rubber o-rings in his pocket as he listened. “My brother?... Look I don’t understand what you’re doing, but I don’t want you anywhere near my wife and children.” He listened for a long time and restlessly kicked his steel-toed boots against the floor. Finally he spoke again. “Whatever I decide to do, you don’t ever mention my family again…Yes, it is still my decision.”

  Kathryn returned to her desk, skimmed through the latest updates from Jane’s Defense Weekly, the Economist Intelligence Unit. These might have included a mention of a drone attack, but foreign names would be included only if they controlled ministries, wielded power with opposition forces or invested significantly in industry or technology. She discretely felt her breasts. Four hours had passed since she nursed Andrew. She would have to pump. She stood up and closed her door, turned off her computer screen, so she could ignore the news of distant conflicts. A quick swivel of her chair allowed her a view of the small courtyard where colleagues sometimes went to smoke amidst the giant planters of well-tended shrubs and flowers.

  She lifted her sweater and began the familiar process. Tiny jets of milk filled the baby bottle in her hand. She gazed out the window. No one had ever explained to her the slavish commitment required to feed a baby. Without fail, she had produced milk at regular intervals—never more than six hours apart—to a being who could not even form a single word to ask for it.

  The phone on her desk rang, and she paused for a minute, irritated at the disturbance. She hit the little orange button. “Hello, this is Kathryn Siddique,” she said mustering up her most professional demeanor.

 
“Kathryn, it’s me. Rashid,” his words sounded clipped, rushed.

  “Rashid,” she said relieved, “Where are you?”

  “Where are you?”

  “What do you mean? You called me at my office.” She screwed the top on the bottle of milk—still warm from her body—and pulled her sweater down. “What’s happening?

  “Are you pumping?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “In your office?”

  “Rashid,” her tone rose, “I always pump in my office.”

  “Why is your fucking shade open?” he sounded almost panicked.

  Kathryn looked at the blinds she never closed. Beyond the window a young man picked at leaves from the shrub next to him, seemed to look directly at her. She pulled the little metal chain to draw the blinds across the window. “Why are you asking me this Rashid?”

  “Goddammit, Kathryn, you don’t have to do everything out in the open.”

  “Don’t start,” she lowered her voice to an angry whisper, “don’t lecture me, I’m at the office, doing my job, and being a mother, and trying to handle what’s going on with you. What more do you want from me?”

  He exhaled, thinking angrily of the text Ali had just sent him. How dare he mention his son’s mother’s milk? “Just keep your blinds closed. Be careful Kathryn.”

  “Of what?” She pulled back the blinds, on the now empty courtyard.

  “Kathryn, I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said, puzzled. “That’s not the point here.”

  “I’ll see you at home.”

  With a jagged sense of incompleteness she zipped up the thermal lunch bag with the bottles of her milk inside.

  Rashid pressed the buzzer on the intercom outside Michael’s school, grateful for the locked door protecting his son. He looked into the security camera, heard the buzz as the door unlocked. He practically bolted inside the school.

  He looked anxiously around Michael’s classroom until he recognized his dark-haired son. “Michael,” he called out, oblivious about whether or not he was interrupting. Michael hesitated, surprised to see his father before the end of the school day. “Why are you here?” he asked.