New York, 2002
At dawn, on the top floor of a creaking house in Greenwich Village, Joel and
Audrey lay in bed.
Through a gap in the curtains, a finger of light extended slowly across their
quilt. Audrey was still far out to sea in sleep. Joel was approaching shore
- splashing about in the turbulent shallows of a doze. He flailed and
crooned and slapped irritably at his sheets. Presently, when the rattling
couplets of his snores reached one of their periodic crescendos, he awoke
and grimaced in pain.
For two days now, he had been haunted by a headache: an icy clanking deep in
his skull as if some sharp-edged metal object had come loose and were
rolling about in there. Audrey had been dosing him with Tylenol and urging
him to drink more water. But it wasn’t liquids or pills he needed, he
thought: it was a mechanic. He lay for a few moments, holding the back of
his hand to his brow like a Victorian heroine with the vapours. Then he sat
up bravely and fumbled for his spectacles on the crowded bedside table. In a
matter of hours, he would be giving the defence’s opening argument in the
case of The United States of America v Mohammed Hassani. Last night, before
falling asleep, he had made some last-minute amendments to his prepared
address and he was anxious to look them over: Sometimes, in our earnest
desire to protect this great country of ours, we can and do make errors.
Errors that threaten to undermine the very liberties we are trying to
protect. I am here to tell you that the presence of Mohammed Hassani in this
courtroom today is one such error.
He squinted into the middle distance, trying to gauge the effectiveness of his
rhetoric. Hassani was one of the Schenectady Six - a group of Arab Americans
from upstate New York who had visited an Al-Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan during the spring of 1998. Over the last two months, the five
other members of the group had all made deals with the prosecutors. But Joel
hated to make deals: at his urging, Hassani had held out and pled innocent
to all charges.
You have been told that Mohammed Hassani is a supporter of terrorism. You have
been told that he hates America and wants to aid and abet those who would
destroy it. Allow me to tell you, now, who Mohammed Hassani really is. He is
an American citizen with three American children and an American wife to
whom he has been married for 15 years. He is a grocer, a small businessman,
the sponsor of a Little League team - a person who has lived and worked in
upstate New York all his life. Does he possess strong religious beliefs?
Yes. But remember, ladies and gentlemen, whatever the prosecution tries to
suggest, it is not Islam that is on trial in this courtroom. Has Mr Hassani
voiced criticisms of American foreign policy? Certainly. Does this fact make
him a traitor? No, it does honour to the constitutional freedoms upon which
our country was founded.
The basis of Joel’s argument was that his client had been taken to the
training camp under false pretences. One of his acquaintances at the mosque
he attended in Schenectady had deliberately misrepresented the camp as a
religious centre.
That’s right: Hassani travelled to Afghanistan on the understanding that he
was to take part in a spiritual retreat. In the coming days, you will hear
how he tried, on more than one occasion, to get out of participating in the
camp’s mandatory weapons training – purposefully injuring himself in one
instance so that he wouldn’t have to fire a rocket-propelled grenade
launcher. You will hear how he categorically refused invitations from the
camp leaders to become involved in violent actions back in the United
States. Ladies and gentlemen, you may take issue with Hassani’s political
and religious views. You may feel he is guilty of making an extremely poor
vacation choice. But you cannot, in good conscience, convict this man of
being a terrorist or even a terrorist sympathiser.
Joel glanced at his sleeping wife. Audrey disagreed with his strategy on this
case. She maintained that he ought to be defending Hassani on grounds of
legitimate Arab rage. Audrey took a much harder political line than he did
on most things these days. He didn’t mind. In fact, he rather enjoyed the
irony of being chastised for his insufficient radicalism by the woman to
whom he had once had to explain the Marxist concepts of “base” and
“superstructure”. When he complained that she had become an ultra-leftist in
her old age, he did so in the indulgent tones that another man might have
teased his wife for her excessive spending at the mall. It was a feminine
prerogative to hold unreasonable political views, he felt. And besides, he
liked having some old-fashioned extremism about the house: it made him feel
young.
Joel was still reading when, at six-thirty, the radio alarm on his bedside
table clicked into life. He peeled off his clammy pyjama bottoms, rolled
them into a ball and lobbed them elegantly into the laundry basket. He had
been a talented sportsman in his youth - the handball champion of
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - and he had never lost the jock’s habit of
improvising minor athletic challenges for himself. He stood up now and
stretched in front of the mirror on the closet door. At 72, his nakedness
was still formidable. His legs were strong. His chest, carpeted in whorls of
grey hair, was broad. His penis was thick and long enough to bump
companionably against his thigh as he strode out to the bathroom.
On the landing, he paused. Somewhere down below, he could hear the dim roar of
a vacuum cleaner and the tuneless whistling of Julie, his sister-in-law.
Ever since Julie had arrived from England two days ago, with her husband,
Colin, she had been flitting up and down the groaning Perry Street staircase
with buckets and dusters and antibacterial detergents in the saintly manner
of Florence Nightingale bringing succour to a Crimean field hospital. Audrey
was in a terrible snit about it. The implied insult to her own standards of
cleanliness did not bother her, she claimed. (This was plausible: Audrey had
always been rather proud of being a slob.) What bothered her was Julie’s
faith in the redemptive power of lemony freshness and her assumption that
others shared it. “If she wants to practise her neurotic hygiene back home,
that’s one thing,” she had hissed the night before, as she was getting into
bed. “But I don’t see why I have to put up with her powdered fucking carpet
fragrances in my house.”
After he had finished, up in the bathroom, Joel put on sweatpants and a shirt
and went downstairs to get the papers. He found Julie on the second-floor
landing, fitting the vacuum with a special nozzle for hard-to-reach corners.
“Good morning! Good morning!” he cried as he stepped around her. In order to
discourage prolonged interactions with his sister-in-law, he always
addressed her as if he were calling out from the window of a fast-moving
train.
Down on the first floor, Colin was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a New
York travel guide. “Good morning to you, kind sir!” he exclaimed when he saw
Joel flashing by. “Julie and I are off to Ground Zero in a bit. Is there
anywhere down there that you’d recommend for lunch?”
“Nope, sorry,” Joel said as he hurried down the hall. “Can’t help you there.”
“Might I offer you a cup of tea?” Colin called after him.
“No thanks. I’m going out to get the papers.”
Joel was just opening the front door when he felt an answering push from the
other side. “It’s me,” a voice said. “I forgot my keys.” The door swung open
to reveal Joel’s adopted son, Lenny, and Lenny’s girlfriend, Tanya, standing
limply on the doorstep, holding paper cups of Starbucks coffee. Tanya was
wearing a jacket of ragged rabbit fur over her minidress. Lenny was
shivering in a T-shirt. They both had the spectral look of people who had
not slept in some time.
“Ah, love’s young dream!” Joel cried with a facetious bow.
“Hey,” Lenny said. He was a tall man with a boyish, delicate face. Were it not
for the gap between his two front teeth and the slight droop in his left
eye, he would have been pretty. As it was, his raffish imperfections tipped
the scale and made him beautiful.
“To what do I owe this rare pleasure?” Joel asked. Lenny was officially living
back at home these days, but most nights he slept at Tanya’s apartment.
Lenny cast a pale hand through untidy hair. “Tanya had a party at her place,”
he said. “Somebody pissed on her bed, so - ”.
“Jesus!” The vehemence of Joel’s tone suggested that it was his own bed that
had been violated. “What kind of friends do you have?”
Lenny made a gesture with his hands as if he were pushing down on some
invisible volume control. “It’s no big deal, Dad. The guy didn’t mean to . .
. Can we come in? It’s freezing out here.”
“What do you mean, ‘didn’t mean to’?” Joel demanded. “He pissed on her bed by
accident?”
“Whatever. Just forget it.” Lenny squeezed past Joel and headed into the
kitchen. Tanya followed.
“Oh, sure, go ahead,” Joel shouted after them, “help yourselves to whatever
you want. Mi casa es su casa. . .” He stood for a moment, registering the
impotence of his sarcasm, and then went out, slamming the door behind him.
Walking up the street to the bodega, he twitched and muttered to himself in
disgust. Was it unreasonable for a man of his age and station to expect some
peace and solitude in the mornings? Was it too much to ask that he be
allowed a few hours of quiet reflection at the start of a demanding day in
court? He tried to calm himself down by thinking about his opening
statement, but it was no good: his composure had been lost. Joel was by and
large a sanguine man. He regarded his sunny outlook not as an accident of
temperament so much as a determined political stance. His favourite
quotation - the one that he said he wanted carved on his gravestone - was
Antonio Gramsci’s line about being “a pessimist because of intelligence and
an optimist by will”. Lenny, alas, had a rare ability to penetrate the force
field of his positive thinking. The very smell of the boy fucked with his
internal weather: made him prey to itchy glooms and irritable regrets.
Twenty-seven years ago, when Lenny first came to live at Perry Street, Joel
had been very high on the idea of subverting traditional models of family
life. Adopting seven-year-old Lenny was no mere act of bourgeois
philanthropy, he had maintained, but a subversive gesture - a vote for an
enlightened, “tribal” system of child-rearing that would one day supersede
the repressive nuclear unit altogether.
Lenny, however, had proved to be an uncooperative participant in the tribal
programme. As a child, he had tyrannised the household with violent
tantrums. As an adolescent, he had dealt pot from the Perry Street stoop and
repeatedly been caught shoplifting. At last, in adulthood, his petty
delinquencies had blossomed into a range of drearily predictable and
apparently irremediable dysfunctions. Joel would not have minded - or at
least not have minded so much - had Lenny ever put his rebellious impulses
to some principled use: run away to join the Sandinistas, say, or vandalised
US army recruiting offices.
But the boy’s waywardness had never served any cause other than his own
fleeting satisfactions. “Lenny’s not doing well,” was Audrey’s preferred
euphemism whenever he dropped out of some new, expensive college course, or
got fired from the job that she had hustled for him at Habitat for Humanity,
or set his hair alight while smoking crack, or was found having sex with one
of the other residents at his rehab clinic. She chose to attribute all such
mishaps to the traumas of Lenny’s infancy. But Joel had had it with all that
psychological crap. The boy was a mendacious, indolent fuck-up, that was all
- a mortifying reminder of a failed experiment.
© Zoë Heller 2008 This is an extract from The Believers by Zoë Heller, to be
published by Fig Tree on Sept 25 at £16.99. It is available at The Sunday
Times BooksFirst price of £15.29 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
