friends are all away on vacation too. It’s just a matter of two or three days. He keeps making collect calls and soon his parents will be home and wire him the money, but right now he’s starving, and he has been sleeping in the corner of the square for three days, trying to keep clean washing at the public fountains but that’s illegal and cops threatened to arrest him if he tries washing there again.
The two mothers stand up and push off with their strollers, the one armed man keeps smoking, uninterested in the babble of foreigners, and the man on the right begins to edge closer to me on the bench. I ignore the impulse to look his way, yet I can’t fail to hear his voice, a warm voice, say something about how the youngster wants to take advantage of me. I do remember the line: If his story is true, I’m the king of Spain. What nerve from a stranger on a bench, as if I don’t know my way around the world, as if I haven’t lived in fifteen different countries, some of them like Egypt and India where the beggars have their hands out everywhere you go. I pride myself on knowing when one of them is telling the truth.
The young man hears these words too and responds not with anger, which is what you would expect if his story weren’t true. You’re right, he says, and if I were you, I’d be suspicious too. You’ve never seen me before. I must look like a bum or a drug addict. It would be natural to think I’m going to take money and buy drugs and stick a needle in my arm. But look at my arm, and he rolls up his right sleeve and then his left. You can see there’s no needle marks. My family we are good middle class people and I’m a graduate of the University of Amsterdam in mathematics. I didn’t know this kind of thing could happen in Europe today. Give me your address. I swear I’ll pay you back. I have my pride. I hate the idea of asking strangers for something, but lady, your face is so kind that it gave me the courage to come up to you. I thought here is someone who will believe me. Honest. I swear on the Bible this is true.
Somewhere in the middle of this, his voice cracks with emotion and a tear trickles from his right eye. I fumble with my purse, pull out my wallet, which contains more dollars than pesetas. How much should I give him? Ten dollars? That doesn’t seem enough. Twenty? For all the honor of being at the festival, this trip is costing me out of pocket and I’m not exactly rolling in money.
The voice on my right speaks again, saying that if I’m going to give a donation to the cause that I should keep the amount small. I have never liked taking orders, so I hand over a twenty dollar bill, and while the boy is blubbering thank you, I turn towards the voice. The face doesn’t go with it. Not at all. I don’t expect such a substantial nose or such penetrating blue eyes. I don’t expect a face that has to be Jewish because the voice is so not quite American but different, somehow, yet not British either and certainly not full of the nasal tones that seem characteristic of so many of the Jews that I have met in America, and once you are in Los Angeles it seems that just about everyone you meet is Jewish.
You have made a mistake, the voice tells me, and I respond, politely as I can when I feel annoyed, that it’s none of his business, that the poor child looked so hungry and desperate, and when the voice agrees the young man is certainly both of those, the tone is slightly mocking and yet full of an invitation, and the question becomes whether I want to respond. Sound is important to me, often more important that what is being said, and despite the annoyance I like the sound of this voice, warm, soothing like an announcer on a classical music station, and yet with a certain sense of command. Okay, I’m not always the good girl that I seem to be. I have my own way of being provocative, so I respond that we call it baksheesh and we think it’s a duty for Muslims to help those who can’t help themselves. He takes that as an opening and introduces himself as Benjamin Redstone. What kind of a name is that for a Jew?
Alison, I say, trying out my new name for the first time. I’ve been thinking about this change long before arriving here. Say Aisha and people never get it. Not Americans and somehow Europeans are even worse. Asia? Asthma? Ashes? Ashi? They always look slightly puzzled, even more so if I explain, as I used to when I first arrived in Kansas, that it’s a historic name, a holy name, the name of the youngest and most favored wife of the Prophet, may peace be upon him. His fourteenth wife. His fourteenth wife? That was the usual reaction. He had fourteen wives? And then begin the smirks suggesting You guys are weirder than we thought, followed by the heavy handed jokes, which are even worse.
Alison? He says the word as if he doesn’t believe its my real name, as if he knows such a name does not go with this skin and these eyes and this hair. He asks if this is my first time in Madrid.
There are some people whose intonations and expressions, whose posture and body movement, whose very aura, which you can’t see but feel even if you can never put that feeling into images or words, people whose very presence gives you sense of comfort, a feeling of the familiar, as if you know them already, have met them before, shared secrets with them in another time and place or perhaps another life if you can believe all that stuff the Hindus believe, and even if you can’t believe it, and I certainly don’t, it doesn’t banish the truth that there are people who immediately put you at ease, make you trust them enough to say things you haven’t said to others unless you have known them for decades and maybe not even then. That sudden feeling, those certain people are among the many mysteries which only Khodajan can understand. How else could you explain that Benjamin is one of them?
Yes, I answer. It is my first time in Spain, first time in Europe other than a few hours at Charles De Gaulle airport though I don’t say that was years and years ago on my way to America, and for the first time but not the last, there will never be a last, will there? he gets clever and historical with me, and asks, But is Spain really Europe? When I don’t have an answer he explains that a French king once said that Europe ends at the Pyrenees and that Spain is different from everywhere else on the continent because of the legacy of Islam, seven hundred years as a Muslim society when Europeans were the foreigners here.
My response surprises me: I know all about that. I’m a Muslim. I will always be a Muslim.
What a thing to say! Am I afraid he is going to try to convert me, put on one of those little hats and start babbling things in Hebrew that will steal away my soul? Do Jews try to convert people? If they do they must get extra credit for a Muslim. I do know that Jews are clever and smart and always trying to trick Muslims. That’s what my grandmother said. Everyone says it. With Jews you have to be careful or they’ll steal the socks from inside the shoes on your feet.
I don’t remember his response, but I startle myself a second time by saying that I’m an Afghan. An Afghan? Since when did I begin to volunteer where I’m from to perfect strangers. When people ask I usually dodge the question or refuse to answer or make them guess, Where do you think I’m from? The responses are all over the map—Turkey, India, Iran, Lebanon, sometimes a Latin country, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil. No one ever says Afghanistan. Even before the war and the American invasion and Al Quaeda and all that, when they heard the name of my homeland their reactions were strange. Some would go sort of blank and not know what to say, as if I had just revealed that I was from Mars. Others would go on and on about women in veils as if veils were the central part of my existence, and they always seemed to resent it when I explained that I never wore one. When I first got to Kansas, the response was always Oh, you’re from Africa, that’s cool. During the Soviet period it became a badge of honor, even in wintry Lawrence, to know about the landscape and people of my homeland. At parties I was always drowned in shouts about your glorious Freedom Fighters. Great people, your people, giving hell to the Russians, way to go. Whenever I tried to explain that the translation for mujahaddin was not Freedom Fighter but Holy Warrior, they would back off, saying No reason a Freedom Fighter can’t be a Holy Warrior too. Nothing wrong with fighting for your faith.
America seems to love freedom fighters, even those who haven’t the slightest idea what freedom might be.
Benjamin’s reaction to the word, Afghanistan, is not at all what I expect though I can’t be certain what I did expect. He says that being Afghan sounds a lot like being Jewish. What an idea!
