A LIFE IN RAMALLAH
EYAD BIN BAGEN had been a Greek Orthodox Christian and a star physics student at Birzeit University near Ramallah until a chirpy classmate from Las Vegas asked him just exactly where the Virgin Mary had gone when she had ascended into heaven, bodily. Eyad had also studied English, so he tried as best he could to explain in her language that her question was irrelevant. Then she mocked him in competent Arabic and said heaven was someplace or it was no place and had no ontological status in reality. She had chosen to speak to him just while the muezzin intoned the Muslim call to prayer from his station high above the street. Eyad saw she was insolent, arrogant, blasphemous, and very pretty.
When he opened his mouth to rebuke her, to his own amazement, he, too, sang out the Muslim call to prayer, which he had heard and ignored all his Christian life. He could not have been more startled than if a dove had flown out of his lips. While his mouth hung open in an elongated O, she laughed in his face. In what language did she laugh? Filled with confusion and rage, Eyad could feel his hands tingle with the desire to strangle her, and he wished he were taller and stronger.
Instead, he turned away from her so quickly he spun out of one of his sandals. Where could he go but toward the mosque? While he crossed the pavement, he could feel her eyes scorning his straight back, his slight stature, and the limp in his gait caused by having to walk with one bare foot and one shod.
“Oedipus,” she shrieked after him, braying her knowledge like a donkey. So she had studied ancient Greek literature. So had he. The prophecy was that a man wearing only one sandal would kill his father and marry his mother. Let it be, Eyad bin Bagen thought in his fury: I will kill the religion of my father and mother, as though the idea were a translation of Sophocles’ Greek.
Eyad stalked onto the porch of the mosque, removed the remaining sandal, entered the holy place, and knelt toward Mecca, though he had no prayer rug. He banged his forehead directly against the floor until he began to leave a stamp on the stone with his blood.
“Comrade,” the very tall young man next to him whispered. He had risen and was holding out his own rug to Eyad bin Bagen. And he was smiling: no teeth showing, just a simple curve of lips below friendly dark eyes. To Eyad’s surprise, the towering young man turned and left.
For a few moments Eyad continued his devotion. Then he realized he wanted more than anything to see the softness in his brother comrade’s eyes. When he arose and returned to the porch, the other young man was waiting for him, holding both of Eyad’s sandals in his hand. “I have seen you at university,” he said. “You are the number one physics student.”
“I’m changing to mathematics,” Eyad answered.
“Why?”
“It’s a purer world. It has no reference to physical realities.”
“I think this is the first time you are coming to the mosque? You are an Arab, but you have worshipped with the Greeks.”
“The Muslims do not pretend that God is man, or that God was born of a human woman.”
“There is no God but God,” the student replied, and smiled. Eyad focused again on the sweet curve of his friend’s smile spreading across his face and recalled that the tall student was majoring in English. “Romi is my name,” he said.
The two remained friends for thirty years. While Eyad admired Romi’s forgiving nature and his goodwill toward all people, Eyad did not share his friend’s temperament. Romi married, and his wife bore seven children. He became a beloved teacher of high school English and a man with many friends, the second dearest of whom was Eyad.
In mid-September of 2001, Eyad made a pilgrimage to Mecca and took Romi’s next-to-oldest son with him during a time when checkpoints had made it so difficult for students and faculty to reach the university that many courses were suspended, including the course in nonlinear algebra that Eyad taught. Eyad had not married, but he had become a highly regarded professor in mathematics, though he was considering resigning so that he might spend all his time with the Holy Book. He told Romi that a renowned English mathematician, Isaac Newton, had regarded his greatest work to be a commentary on the book of Daniel.
One day, coming out of a date shop, Eyad saw the woman, his classmate, who had laughed at him for believing that the mother of Lord Jesus had ascended directly to heaven. Of course the scoffer had grown older, too; he had heard years ago that she had married a Persian and lived in Isfahan, but here she was, entering the date store in Ramallah, wearing loose slacks and a green tunic, her hair uncovered. Quickly Eyad drew out the blade he always kept at hand and cut a smile on her cheek.
“Now I have given you a second mouth,” he said quickly in a low voice. “Make it smile, if you can. Laugh long.”
Eyad ran without limping into the crowd, and no one knew him from any other man. No drop of blood had spotted his robe, and he had dropped the razor, its mission complete.
“Life is a closed circle,” he told his friend Romi that night at dinner. His friend said nothing, but nodded. Romi provided many sweet foods for his friend to enjoy—sugared almonds, honeyed dates, candied oranges—but he could not sweeten his friend’s bitter mood, and Romi remained ignorant of its cause. For his part, all that evening Eyad felt his eyes shifting from the upturned corners of Romi’s smile to the satisfyingly smooth cheek of Romi’s pleasant wife.
qAfter Eyad went home, full of bitter satisfaction, a knock came on his door. A holy man, an imam, stood there and said he was aware of Eyad’s devotion to the faith. “You are a man of action,” he said. “There is an American woman who wears an amulet. She is coming to Egypt; her husband was an astrophysicist. The amulet is a piece for a computer; it contains blasphemous information about life beyond the stars.”
“The Quran speaks of no such evidence,” Eyad answered.
“People are easily misled. It is never for us to know the mind of God, blessed be his holy name. The truth is everlasting. There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
To these statements, Eyad nodded assent.
“Our resources are immense,” the imam went on. “We watch many people who interest us. You are one of them. We have a mission for you.”
“In whose name do you speak?”
“Perpetuity.”
“Give me a sign,” Eyad asked, but joy coursed through his body like a river that knows its origin and its destination.
With the tip of his finger, the visitor traced a smile on his own cheek, but he did not smile.
Eyad could not resist telling his old friend Romi, the master of English, that he had been chosen as a protector of the faith, in perpetuity.
“I have no quarrel with the other religions,” Romi said.
“You don’t understand. It is in concert with the Jews and even the Christians that we will act.”
“Almost I wish that you had not told me,” Romi said, but he put his arm affectionately around the shoulder of his second-best friend.