When Marc finished eating, Azhar took his plate and set it on the empty chair. “Walk,” he said. He readied his gun in an almost desultory way that had deepened with each passing day, and he opened the door for Marc and followed him out into the late-evening sun. Even its waning brightness was for a moment too much, and Marc shielded his eyes, the sky seemingly saturated with pigment. There was the same smell of dampness in the air mingled with the nearly constant odor of something burning, and more distantly something foul, perhaps sewage. Azhar never led him around the perimeter of the building where he was being kept, but rather the neighboring one that had two or three windows that were often covered, but today Marc could peer through a pane where there were chairs and a table with three cups. He stopped to look in, surprised that he found himself missing even the anonymous faces of others, but Azhar said no and pushed him along with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun.
Two times around the perimeter, after Marc felt the muscles in his legs start to stretch and warm with the movement, Azhar stopped him, put his hand on his shoulder, and turned him around. The gun was at his side, and he was reaching into his pocket. Azhar pulled from it a photograph and handed it to him. The picture was of a girl, maybe ten years old, in a plain dress and a bright blue scarf. She was smiling slightly, her mouth closed. Azhar said something in Urdu and then tapped his chest. “Daughter,” he said with difficulty. Marc handed the photograph back to him, but Azhar didn’t take it immediately, and when Marc looked at his face, Azhar’s eyes were narrowed slightly, the lines near them deepened with sadness. “I”—he struggled to find the word—“sorry.” Then something in Urdu again, and then he gestured with his gun and took Marc one more time around the perimeter.
The sun between the low buildings was nearly at the horizon, a red orb hung over collections of one-story buildings and the gently rolling hills. Marc could have been outside the Midwestern town where he grew up, as far as the sun and hills were concerned, but they were pretty nonetheless, the dusty deep and pale greens tinted orange before the coming twilight, and he felt his eyes fill. Remarkable that these glimpses of beauty under a darkening sky opened the gates of emotion more than the photograph of Azhar’s daughter.
When they walked back into the room, Azhar picked up the plate, lifted it toward him, and smiled.
“Thank you for the lamb,” Marc said, and Azhar nodded and then backed out of the door and was gone for half a minute before Saabir came in with the blindfold and, without speaking, wrapped it around Marc’s eyes and tied his hands. For the first time, he was to get an evening visit from the woman.
When she came in, he heard Saabir walk out and close the door, and the woman once again pulled her chair across the floor of the room so she could sit close to him.
“It’s a beautiful evening,” she said first. “Soon they’ll be calling for the sunset prayer.”
“I wouldn’t know what kind of evening it is,” he said.
“That’s not true, Marc. I saw Azhar walking you outside. I saw the way you looked at the sky.”
“You can’t be Muslim,” he said.
“The call to prayer is moving even if I’m not. The way its rhythms bring your attention in equal parts to your devotion and your mortality.”
“I would think it would get tedious after a while.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s like washing your face. Most days you do it without thinking, but now and then, as you’re patting your skin dry, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror that’s such a surprise that it affirms your faith in the familiar.”
Perhaps she was both a jihadist and a poet, he thought.
“That would depend on the face, I think.”
“Yes, I suppose. I saw Azhar show you the picture of his daughter.”
He tightened his eyes again beneath the blindfold. “Did you ask him to do that?”
“No. I did tell him that your daughter had been killed.” She left the words suspended in the air for several seconds. “He’s softhearted. He’s a butcher by trade, but, like any butcher I’ve known, gentle and funny away from his work.”
“Less gentle seeming when he’s carrying a gun.”
She shifted in her chair, and he heard her resettle her garments. Even with the blindfold, the room seemed to have darkened with nightfall.
“We reached your wife. You underestimated her, I think. She seemed very concerned about you. But perhaps that was just a manifestation of her grief.”
“Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. Like everything else, he’d held at bay what could have been easily imaginable images of Lynne getting the phone call about the murder, or answering the knock at the door, or receiving mourners alongside the coffin, near which photographs of their daughter at various ages—finger-painting in blues and yellows at age five, and water-skiing on a lake where one summer they rented when she was twelve, and laughing, arms linked, with girlfriends at age fifteen at a birthday party—told the half truths of a half-happy life.
“She wasn’t angry with you for not flying home, or for not answering her calls.”
“You must have had quite a chat.”
“Woman to woman. She used the words lost soul, and seemed to suggest that ransoming you wouldn’t change that.”
This he knew was false. “You didn’t talk to her at all, really, did you?”
“Does it make any difference?”
The peculiarity of the conversation struck him then, where the threat of her asking about his wife and daughter seemed more present than the blindfold, the rope around his wrists, or the man outside with the machine gun.
“What is this, exactly?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”