Michael Gruber - The Good Son

Also by Michael Gruber

Tropic of Night
Valley of Bones
Night of the Jaguar
The Witchs Boy
The Book of Air and Shadows
Forgery of Venus

The

Good

Son

The

Good

Son

A NOVEL

Michael Gruber

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK

Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
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Copyright 2010 by Michael Gruber
All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Gruber, Michael, 1940

The good son : a novel / Michael Gruber.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-9128-1.

1. Political kidnappingFiction. 2. Pakistani AmericansPakistanFiction.

3. PakistanFiction. I. Title.

PS3607.R68G66 2010

813'.6dc22

2009036955

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First Edition 2010

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

For E.W.N.

The Prophet was asked:
Whom should you befriend most?
He replied:
Your mother. Then your mother.
Then your mother.
Then your father.

SAYINGS OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD

The

Good

Son

T he phone rang at a little before one in the morning and I knew it was my mother. I didnt even have to look at the number there on the little cell-phone screen, I just said, Mom.

Next to me, my not-really-girlfriend, Gloria, heaved over and jammed a pillow on her head and said nasty stuff about people calling in the middle of the night. I ignored this and added, Anything wrong?

My mother said, No, of course not. Why do you always ask that when I call you?

Because thats what people do when they get a call at one A.M. You forgot about the time zones again.

I didnt forget. I thought soldiers always rose at dawn.

When theyre on duty, I said, which Im not. Im at Glorias place. Whats up?

Im at Heathrow on a plane for Zurich. Ill be gone for a couple of weeks. Could you tell your father?

Why dont you tell him yourself? I think they still have phone service in the District of Columbia.

Please, Theo. If I call him well get into a big argument, and I dont need that just now.

Because youre going to Zurich for a few weeks? Why should he object to that?

Because Im not going to Zurich. Im just changing planes there. Im going to Lahore.

That stopped me; sweat popped on my arms where they stuck out of the quilt. I said, Lahore? Mom, you cant go to Lahore. Theres a fatwa out on you. You cant go to the Muslim world anymore.

Oh, dont be silly! In any case, Ill be traveling on my Pakistani passport; no one will bother S. B. Laghari, the Pakistani begum, the professors wife, in a proper head scarf. Besides, Im not going to Iran. It was a Shia fatwa anyway. No one is going to pay any attention to it in Pakistan.

You know, thats right, I said. Only thirty million Shia in Pakistan and the ayatollahs are right next door and Sunnis and Shias have been killing each other in Punjab for the last twenty years and theres a heavily armed Shia militant group based in Lahore.... Are you fucking out of your mind?

Please dont speak to me like that, Theo, she said, after a pause. Its unseemly. Im your mother.

I felt my face flush. She was right. The army messes with your manners. I said, Look, could you just, like, think about this like a rational person? Why dont I get on a plane, well sit down, well talk

Darling, theres nothing to talk about. Im going. Ill be back before you know it.

No, this is insane! I shouted into the tiny perforations. How can you do stuff like this to me? Youve always done it and youre still doing it. For Gods sake, Im wounded! Im your wounded son. Youre supposed to be here, taking care of me, not going to Lahore.

This was disgraceful, I knew, pathetic, but it was one of my buttons. Unfortunately, my mother has guilt handles the size of a little girls earrings. She said, Well, if youll recall, I did come to your side when you got back. But it was made perfectly clear that I was in the way.

Not true, although what she meant was that she was not up to much in the nurturing department. My father is the main nurturer in our family, and she knows it and it makes her feel bad.

I have to go, my mother said. Theyre closing up the plane. Ill call you from Lahore. Remember to call Farid.

I was still trying to talk her out of it when she said a firm good-bye and I was listening to the ether.

I cursed in a couple of languages, and this brought Gloria into full wakefulness. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and smoothed her long hair away from her face. She said, Thats the one problem with the cell phone, in my opinion. You bring some bozo home with you and he can talk to other women when hes actually lying in bed with you. Which one was that?

It was my mother, Gloria.

That might be even worse. Why does she call you in the middle of the night?

She was calling from London. My mother is a famous world traveler who doesnt get the whole time-zone thing.

And this is why you started screaming?

I told her why.

So what? Shes a grown-up. Why shouldnt she go to Lahore? Where is Lahore anyway?

Its in the Punjab. In Pakistan.

Thats where youre from.

Originally.

Shed propped herself up on one elbow and she had that look, her pumping-for-information look, on her smooth, tan, flat face, with that hair hanging loose and thick on either side. Maybe you have to grow up in a Muslim country to understand the erotic appeal of long black hair. It still knocked me out to see American women just walk through the streets with their hair hanging down for anybody to see, a little fossil of my upbringing. Especially this kind of hair, Asian hair, thick, glossy, blue-black, although Gloria is a Latina and not from where Im from.

I said to the look, Its a long story.

You say that a lot, she said. Mr. Mysterious. If you think that makes you more, like, attractive, youre wrong.

Youre delving, Gloria. I thought we were going to keep it simple and shallow.

Asking about your mom isnt delving. Delving is who did you go out with and what did you do with them? Or, you know, what you did in the war.

You want to know this? Its interesting to you?

Yeah. We have to talk about something. I told you about my folks, my brother, and all that shit, so you tell me about yours. Its what normal people do. We cant have sex all the time.

I snaked my hand under the quilt. We could try, I said.

She moved her legs to make a space for my hand. Yes, but tell me: Why cant she go back to Pakistan?

Okay, I said, and suppressed a sigh. My mother is Sonia Bailey.

Who?

She used to be pretty famous back in the seventies. When I was about three she left me in Lahore and traveled through what was then Soviet Central Asia, disguised as a Muslim boy. She wrote a book about it that got a lot of play, especially from the feminists. Then she hung around Lahore for a few more years, and when I was ten she went off again, but this time she went on the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.