5 ‫فصل‬

CHAPTER 5

There is church in the morning.

“Paul,” Ali says, to wake me. “It’s time to get up for church.”
He has already showered and is waiting for me with a towel
wrapped around his waist.
“I know,” I say.
“What should I wear?” he asks.
I climb down and get a white shirt and my ugliest tie, a red tie
with gold squares, from my closet and lay them on the bed for
Ali before leaving the room, shutting the door behind me. In the
bathroom, I drop my clothes and look at myself in the mirror,
flex, shrug my shoulders, and get into the shower.
We do not eat breakfast this morning, because we are fasting.
Esther is slow getting ready. Everyone but Dad waits for her at
the base of the stairs. Dad is already at church; he is the bishop of
the congregation. Mom is impatient and does not want to walk
into church late because we sit near the front and will have to
walk past everyone to get there. Mom offers Ali some food while
we wait, but Ali shakes his head and says he will fast with us.
Esther looks beautiful when she finally comes down. Ali has
noticed, and then glances at me, and looks down, embarrassed I
had seen him.
In the car, Daniel tells Ali about the sacrament at church and
explains what it is and says, “Ali, you can’t take it.”
“Don’t say things like that,” Esther says.
“Only members are supposed to take it.”
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“That’s not true,” Esther says, appealing to our mother.

“Daniel’s right that it’s prepared for members,” Mom says.
“And Esther, you’re right that if Ali wants to take it, he’s more
than welcome.”
The church is a simple brick building with an elaborate stee-
ple added on. It was constructed after the building had been pur-
chased from a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, as an embel-
lishment to enhance feelings of reverence and significance.
When the meeting starts, there are several announcements,
then we all stand to sing a song. Ever since Sister Michaels was
called as the ward chorister, we have been standing as we sing
the opening and intermediate hymns. It is her way of stopping
people from sleeping through the meeting, particularly on fast
Sundays.
It is a slow song sung slowly. “Fast Sunday doesn’t mean it
goes by fast,” I tell Ali. I explain that after the sacrament, the lec-
tern will be made available to anyone who has something to say.
He nods seriously as I whisper the information into his ear,
and then he turns and with a look of reverence and understand-
ing he says, “Okey dokey.” The phrase he learned from Esther.
It annoys me, the minor infraction. To use a comical, even dorky,
rhymed phrase with such sobriety. It felt to me, for what primi-
tive reason I can’t explain, that the phrase had been stolen, taken
from Esther, without her consent or permission.
Before the testimonies start, Dad calls Brother Thatcher to
the front to pronounce a name and a blessing on his newborn
child. The man holds a small newborn wrapped in a white dress.
She begins to cry. Small tan hands and scrunched face are seen
radiant in white. A group of men circle around the child. The
father holds her in his hand and the others place their hands be-
low so that they all support the tiny weight of the baby girl. As
the circle closes the child stops crying and does not cry the entire
time the man speaks the child’s name and gives her a blessing.
The child’s name is Lily Thatcher. The prayer finishes, and at this
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exact moment, the child begins to cry again. Later, Sister Thatch-
er will call it a miracle, and everyone will agree.
Dad will explain this ceremony to me many times through-
out the years. He will say, “A name is not your own. Everyone
is given a name. There is no one who comes with one. You are
called by a name, and when you recognize your name, you are
free to respond when Christ calls unto you, ‘It is for you that I
have shed this drop of my blood!’ You are free to reply, ‘Yes, it
really is for me!’”
After the child is named, the sacrament is passed to the con-
gregation. When the tray arrives, I glance at Ali. “You want it?”
I shrug, meaning to pass the tray past Ali to Daniel, who sits at
the end of the row.
“I’ll take it,” he says, taking the tray from me, locating the
largest piece of broken bread, holding it between his fingers for
a second, before eating it and then passing the tray to Daniel
who seems upset, as if Ali taking the sacrament had made Esther
right.
After the sacrament is passed, the air conditioning units along
the floor on the side switch on, sending a small breeze across the
floor. Dad is first to stand and give what we call a testimony—
some trinket from our lives that reveals God to us. A beautiful
flower, a mountain sunset, the death of a family member, sick-
ness, sorrow, contemplations, awakenings, words, accidents,
mistakes. Practically anything can contain Glory. Anything can
disclose God as easily as it conceals him.
My father talks about prayer. After he sits, people begin to fill
the chairs in the front waiting for their turn to testify. There are
many testimonies given. “It is a long walk up,” I say into Ali’s
ear as Sister Smith walks past, and I grin. “For most people it’s
hard to get up and talk in front of so many people. But she gets
up every month. It’s probably easy for her because she always
says the same thing. But most people don’t go that often. I’ve
only gone up once.”
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Ali nods and then as if in defiance, rises. He walks as others

have done, following their path to the front. I cannot understand
it. Where did this confidence come from? He moves calmly past
one window and then another. For a moment as the sunshine
falls through the drapes and stacks onto the side of his face, he
remembers his city as though it were a distant memory—a time
when he had been unhappy. Dad smiles at him and I shake my
head in disbelief. Later, I will understand. Later, I will forgive
him. But now it feels like a blasphemy. Wearing my clothes. Lov-
ing my sister. Taking our sacrament. Testifying at our church.
Was it to provoke me? So that I finally tell him that these things
are mine? To uncover his disguise, to reveal his plan? To turn
him in so that he is forced home? But the anger only tunes my
ears to his words. And I am on the edge of my seat, never more
curious, never more enthralled by any testimony than his.
“I am a child of war,” Ali says to begin his story.

The sun is high, and the warm wind blows through the palms
making it hard to breathe. Ali is in his room watching Henry rub
his elbow after putting the ball in the back of the net. And then
the sound of gunfire echoes in the street. It is clear and harsh.
His mom screams and runs to Autba’s room. Then the quick
steps of his father toward the front door. Ali jumps to his feet
and follows, looking out of the door at a sedan parked in front
of the neighbor’s house. Two men hold guns to the air and fire
bullets into the sky.
“Stay here,” his father says to Ali as he turns and walks
through the door. “What are you doing?” he yells at the men
with guns.
“Stay inside,” they respond without interest.
“What are you doing?”
There is no answer. Two other men return from the house.
Between them they lead Ali’s neighbor, Muadh.
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“What are you doing with him?” Ali’s father yells as they put
the man in the car. With large strides Ali’s father approaches the
car, “What are you doing?” he says again and again.
Ali runs from behind the door and joins his father.
“Stop!” a man yells as he shuts the back door and opens the
passenger door.
Ali’s father stops for a moment and then continues forward
slowly.
The gunman lays his elbow against the car but it is too hot,
so he places the barrel of the gun across the door and points it at
Ali. “Stop,” he says again.
Ali’s father stops and says, “Ali, go to the house.”
Ali doesn’t move.
Ali’s father looks at the ground. “What are you going to do
with him?”
The man laughs and shoots the ground in front of Ali causing
them to jump back. The man laughs again and gets in the car as
it drives away.
Muadh is found dead a few blocks away the next morning.
His blood already dried in the grey dirt.

There had been no real testimony at all. Only a statement of his

life. That he had lived those things. That he was real. That life
can change in the blink of an eye. The testimony, if it was any-
thing, was that you believe in God when you must. It had made
Esther cry. And after Ali returns to our pew, she switches places
with me so that she can cry onto his shoulder.
The story is all anyone will talk about after.
At dinner, Dad tells us about Hugh Nibley who shows how
the authenticity of Ether can be seen in the way the story con-
forms with what modern scholarship is just now discovering
about early Asiatics.
“Nibley says the Book of Mormon is like a football, you can
kick it around all you like, and it will wear you out before you
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put a dent in it. He is a champion of our faith. He has made a

name for Mormon theology.”
Then Dad reads one of Hugh Nibley’s published letters that
he thinks will be of interest to us all.

Letter, 1948
I used to think it was an accident of geography that had en-
abled the Arab to maintain his ways unchanged thru the ages
and all that, yet apart from all physical considerations these peo-
ple have an honesty, simplicity, toughness, and good humor . . .
These wonderfully uncomplicated people are less like animals
than the most civilized westerners—vivid, nervous, imaginative,
generous, impulsive and extremely moral.

“But we have changed,” Ali says. “It’s a totally different country

than it was ten years ago.” He will prove it later by showing me
a picture of his mother standing with her classmates in matching,
white, short-sleeved dresses at the university of Baghdad.
After scripture study, Dad tells us about when he was a col-
lege student and had Hugh Nibley as a professor. “He would go
to the corner of the library and read every book there and when
he had finished, he would go to another corner and start again.
The library was full of corners.”
Mom tells about growing up in Provo and living by Hugh
Nibley’s family. She was friends with his daughters and would
always trick-or-treat at the Nibley’s on Halloween. “My father
worked with him at the university. They were busy men and
were not the fathers your father has been. But God had a special
task for them.”
Later I will ask Dad about Ali’s remarkable confidence to
stand in front of a congregation he had never seen to testify in
front of a faith he does not even know as if he were the perfect
believer. A man should harbor some doubts, I will tell him. He
should pay careful attention to not let them get out of hand, but
he ought to keep them. Like money, he should keep his doubts.
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He should not love them, that is evil, but he ought to have them.
And Dad will tell me a story of Muhammad. That after his first
revelation he was depressed and doubted that he was really a
prophet. Maybe the revelations were nothing more than the dev-
il whispering in his ear.
“Was Muhammad a prophet?” I will ask.
“If he was a prophet, he was a prophet like Jonah. But Joseph
Smith was like Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Jeremiah. They were messen-
gers of near certainty.”
“I like that Muhammad had doubts,” I say.
Dad is quiet, trying to read the moment before speaking.
“Some believe his doubts make him the superior prophet. I don’t
know about that, but it is more relatable.”

That night Ali watches curiously as I pray, like he is reading an

article from the paper. I shiver and feel his eyes like Satan’s whis-
pers, a darkness that comes into prayers’ hearts, grabs at their
ankles. “It’s not polite to watch people pray,” I tell him. He only
laughs, thinking it has been a joke.
“Why don’t you pray instead of watching me pray?” I ask.
“I could pray.”
“But you don’t. You prayed in Iraq, didn’t you?”
“It’s different here.”
“What’s different?
“I will pray,” he says and kneels beside me.
At first it is only strange to have him there in the attitude
of Mormon submission. And in the next moment my knees are
hurting. The floor cold, unyielding. The small brush of his elbow
against my side sends a shock, catches my soul on fire. I do not
want him there next to me. It was as though he was a ghost that
might step into my body, possess my life and memories, love my
sister, revere my parents, take my place. “No,” I say. “This is
not how you pray.”
“I want to try how you pray,” Ali says.
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I am quick to talk now, finding energy in his attenuation. I

have seen the traditions of Iraq strike like the swing of a bell
against the clapper. And I want him to return—to return home
to his family, his country, his faith.
“I think you’re a coward to not go back,” I tell him. “You’re
supposed to be a future leader in your country.”
Ali feels the pain of the reproach immediately and it intensi-
fies as he grows in uncertainty—dizzied, almost drunken.
But as soon as the words are spoken the emotion drains from
me.
“No,” I say. “It’s not true. I’m the coward. You should not
listen to me. You should do whatever you have to do.”
Ali climbs back into bed, and I follow, climbing over the top
of him. We stare silently, and Ali retrieves his necklace, and I
can hear the beads sliding. Sliding. Small, light clicks, almost
impossible to hear, like miniature raindrops before a storm. He
repositions himself. Yes, thank God, he is about to speak.
“What’s the difference between what you believe and what I
believe?” he asks.
I explain about Christ, His atonement, crucifixion, resurrec-
tion. I will talk about the condescension of God, discuss laws of
justice and mercy, and reconciliation. And after all this he will
only say, “Why can’t God just forgive?” And I will have no an-
swer. And then I will remember another story.

Dad sits on a couch and holds Mom in his arms, and they kiss be-
fore he gives us instruction. “There are two kinds of questions,”
he says. “Ones used to convince, and ones used to find out. As
a lawyer I use the first kind. You don’t want to find anything
out when your witness is on the stand. If you learn something
new then, you’re in trouble. No, your questions are to create a
way of thinking. These questions are placed in the judge’s head
as if they are his questions and then answered for him. It is the
question you want him to ask to frame the facts in a certain way.
What wins a case is not the facts but the questions. It is what is
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asked, not what is found out. The way you approach a problem
determines the outcome. My job is to put it into his head. A day
of this and I am worn out, you have seen me come home, how
tired I am; how sweat-dried my face is, and the red acne that still
comes. It is the stress of trial, of trying to think for someone—
possessing someone—the judge and the jury. It is a real battle.
Then do you know what happens? I come home, and your moth-
er asks me how my day was. What a question. You could just sit
and look at a question like that, like a painting. It could be hung
on a wall and never be answered and be just as beautiful. The
best question of the day. One I cannot answer. She will never
know what my day was like, but I also know she desires it. Every
question I had asked I planned each word days before trial. They
were written, like a page of Socrates. But this was taken from
your mother’s pocket and yet it was superior.

Ali’s question was asked like this. A simple, unremarkable

question that cut deep into my faith. He lays still and must feel
warm—too warm for the blanket. But if he moved, I would have
felt it and he has not moved. I hold my head over the edge of the
bed so I can look at him. His eyes are black in the dimness—his
blanket still pulled up to his neck.
“You’re Muslim,” I say.
“Yes.”
“That’s the difference.”
He laughs and I tell him that we have been Mormons as
far back as you can go. “Which isn’t all that far—about two
hundred years. But it already feels old.” I explain how my old-
er brother is on a mission for our church. He’s in Italy, which
means most people he talks to are God-ed out. But the food is
good and testaments are written in the architecture. Ali nods his
understanding.
“It’s like Dan Jones,” I say and explain how Dan Jones be-
came a legend. He was with Joseph Smith in Carthage before he
died. The last revelation Joseph ever gave was that Dan Jones
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would survive, which he did and became one of the greatest mis-
sionaries the church has ever seen—he baptized thousands of
people in Wales. They say he would stand atop a box on a street
corner, preach the kingdom of God, baptize converts, and then
bring them to America on his boat The Maid of Iowa. “David’s
doing something like that,” I say, “only he’s not baptizing any-
one, and he doesn’t have a boat.”
Ali tells me he remembers seeing Mormons on TV or some-
thing about Mormons.
“Don’t trust what you see on TV,” I say.
Ali laughs but does not say more. Still, I want him to speak.
But he rolls over onto his stomach and has nothing to say.
“Are there Christians in Iraq?” I ask.
“Most definitely,” Ali says. The first story is about Nobel, a
boy who had been on his soccer team. Ali is glad to have a story
to tell. He starts by explaining that on Ramadan it is against the
law to have food in the streets while the sun is out. But Nobel
was a Christian and so he didn’t follow Ramadan and had made
a cake for his aunt’s birthday. When he brought it to her that
afternoon, the police seized the cake. “We laughed so hard about
it,” Ali says, laughing now at the memory.
“What happened to the cake?”
“Nothing. The police didn’t want the cake sitting around all
day while they were fasting, so they let him free to go with it.”
“That’s really something,” I say.
Before we are ready to sleep, Ali tells another story about
his friend Adam who said he was a Christian while they were
attending kindergarten. Because while the Muslims had Islam
class, the Christians got to go to the playground. But soon Ali
became jealous and told the teacher that Adam was Muslim.
The teacher was embarrassed to not have known and sent some-
one immediately to retrieve Adam from the playground. When
Adam returned, he cried so hard and was such a disruption the
teacher let him go to the playground one last time.
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We are silent for a while. And Ali begins to move his beads.
Fast at first and then slowly. Slower. He is nearly asleep.
“I’ll help you run away,” I say. “Do you need help?”
“Let’s not talk about that,” Ali says.
“Then what? What should we talk about. I’m not tired. You
want another story? I’ll tell another story.”
Ali agrees and, and I am filled with a desire to provide him
with anything he might lack. To fill any need or want. A story,
yes how easy. A simple accommodation. It is another one of the
Old Nellie stories my father used to tell.
“First,” I explain, “You must understand something about
Indians. Not Native Americans. I don’t know hardly anything
about Native Americans. Just fake, fictional, offensive, political-
ly incorrect Indians. And the fake, fictional, offensive, politically
incorrect Indians in this story believed that if you eat something
you gain some of its power. For example, if you eat a mountain
lion, you might become a great hunter. If you eat buffalo, you
become big and stupid.”
Ali laughs and I will never love Ali as much as I do here, at
the moment of grace and forgiveness. Here, at the beginning of
a story.

Sometimes they talk about the horse at night around the fire.
They say it is magical. Some think it to be an evil spirit that pos-
sesses the horse. Others say the horse is where a king of spirits
lives, nobly and beautifully. Not as though the spirits have kings
or are separate from one another, but that an extra portion of
spirit lives in the horse. Or perhaps is trapped inside. It could be
a place where all spirit dwells. That the horse is more spirit than
anything—concentrated spirit that begins to appear as matter.
And if so, the white man is a lucky man to have such a horse. For
what is such a horse? What kind of messenger?
If it were possible to eat the horse, they would surely bring
the universe into them. They would not only know, but be all
things, feel the great unity that cannot be imagined without its
130    Joshua Sabey & Ali Alsamer

destruction. And so it is with these meanderings of speculation

that they decide to try and capture the horse, and eat it.
It is a blue-sky day that the Indians begin to track Uncle Jim
and Old Nellie who are hunting a mountain lion. Uncle Jim
got onto the tracks early in the morning before half the sun had
cleared the eastern horizon and continued to track the beast all
day clear into early evening. Uncle Jim is a magnificent track-
er, he can read the ground like he reads the Bible. Some who
tell the story say he could track a fish in water or an ant across
the desert. But mountain lions are large and fast and can move
through trees. He spots a footprint here, displaced bark there, a
broken twig, or the bent blade of grass. They are not far from the
mountain lion when they come to a rocky ledge that connects to
an outcropping on the other side. The lion has managed to crawl
across. Uncle Jim dismounts Old Nellie and ties her to a tree.
He slings his musket over his back and continues on foot to the
other side.
There on top of the outcropping, framed by the florid sky as
the sun sinks into oblivion, stands the mountain lion. After kill-
ing the animal Uncle Jim carries it back across on his shoulder to
the other side. Where, to his surprise, Old Nellie is gone.
He looks around and sees the tracks of many moccasins and
knows that two hundred Indians had been there and taken Old
Nellie. Uncle Jim sets the mountain lion down, already forgot-
ten, and begins to track the Indians back to their camp. When he
arrives, he sees Old Nellie tied to a tree. One of her legs is com-
pletely cut off and stuck on a spit that rotates slowly over the fire.
It is dark, but Uncle Jim moves silently around the teepees
until he can make eye contact with his horse and winks at her.
Indians are dressed like animals and sing strange incanta-
tions as they dance around fire and add spices to the horse meat.
They jump and pantomime stories of horses. It is done with large
movements, and exaggerated motions. It is not a silent story, but
a story without words. A story told without language and with-
out comprehension. The form allows the many stories that have
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been told about the horse to all come together into one story told
in a single movement.
When the leg is just about finished cooking, an argument be-
gins between two members of the tribe. They argue about who
will get the first bite. It is a stroke of luck for Uncle Jim. Soon
the whole tribe is on its feet. They retrieve the old chief from his
tent and bring him to the fire. His hair is silver. They bow to the
man and explain the question. “We will all eat together,” the
man says.
He explains that when he lifts his staff the whole tribe will
begin to chew and when he places it on the earth the whole tribe
will swallow together.
Obsidian blades cut through tough meat making small piec-
es. The pieces are distributed, and the chief raises his staff and
the entire tribe puts the flesh of Old Nellie into their mouths and
begin to chew. The chewing is long and difficult. After several
minutes the chief places his staff on the ground and the whole
tribe simultaneously swallows. Just then Uncle Jim yells, “Whoa
Nellie.” And all the masticated pieces of Old Nellie stop halfway
down their throats. The entire tribe begins to choke and faint in
front of Uncle Jim. In the pandemonium he runs and hops on
the back of Old Nellie, cuts her free and yells, “giddy up Old
Nellie,” relieving both the horse and the suffocating Indians. The
tribe pursue Uncle Jim and his magical horse, but it turns out
Old Nellie can run as fast on three legs as she could on four.

When the story is over, I adjust the covers. “Ali,” I say. “I still
think you should pray like a Muslim. Why don’t you pray like
that?”
Ali laughs “Muslims have many ways to pray,” he says. “I
am praying right now, with these beads.” Ali wonders at the
wooden board below my mattress. He sees in overlapping stands
the face of a muezzin calling Islam to prayer from the top of a
minaret. The customary call to prayer of the adhan is the layers
of wood coming from his mouth. One on one on another. He
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wonders how all the different layers of wood are flat. How they
make a song together: Allah is great, I bear witness that there is
no god except Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the mes-
senger of Allah. . . . This is the call to prayer that is still sung live
by muezzins on special days. But normally it is just a recording
that is broadcast into the city by large electric speakers.
“I thought Muslims had to pray five times a day,” I say.
“The prayers are five prayers each day; you can do it in three
times though.”
“Do you do three?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never seen you.”
“I don’t do them here.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs. “At home it wasn’t its own thing.”
“How are they done in Iraq?”
“The morning prayer, the Fajr, is alone. Then the noon prayer
and the Asr prayer are said together and then the Maghrib and
Isha are also combined in the evening. The first is said between
four-thirty and five-fifty in the morning. The second prayer is
normally at noon. But the only rule is that it must be done be-
fore the sun sets. For the last two, you have until around elev-
en-forty-five to do them. All of these prayers together may take
between ten to twenty minutes.”
“You should pray like that,” I say.
“You would like to see it?”
“Yes” I say, hanging my feet over the edge. Ali goes to the
bathroom to wash before retrieving a rug from his luggage. He
rolls it out on the thin adhesive tiles. It is green with yellow lines
that peak at the top becoming a rod toward Mecca. When he
asks which way is east, I point towards the window. The rug
looks soft, and I wonder if it is for comfort. It would be nice in
the winter to cover the cold tiles. But there is something more
than comfort in the design.
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Ali prays. He is there. I see him spreading a rug on the side-

walk. The red sun behind him. Music in the air. Cars moving
across the road. And over his shoulders, seven minarets and
three golden domes.
He has not prayed since the mosque. He is a Muslim without
prayer, I think. No, a Muslim is not a Muslim without prayer.
Years later my father will tell me that a prayer is for the religious
who, like a candle, carefully nurture a flame or like actors, put
on masks. They are the exoskeleton of what had once been the
real life. Before the molt it was skin, and when it was skin, there
was nothing that was not prayer. “But that’s just it,” he will tell
me. “We bring it to life that way, by putting it on, we animate it
with our own blood.”
Ali stands, folds over and then moves to his knees and buries
his forehead and nose into the rug. The whole time chanting old,
unintelligible words.
“This is Rakats.” He stands and explains that they do these
recitations a different number of times for different prayers. He
gets back into bed and pulls the blanket over himself. In bed I
call out his name and say, “That was a good prayer.”
“I stopped early,” he says.

After he is sleeping, I climb the stairs to see if my Dad is still

reading his scriptures. The light is on in his study, but I turn to
the bedroom where Mom is reading a book. She welcomes me
onto the bedside.
“I wanted to like him,” I tell her. “I thought I would like
him.”
She nods, concerned, looks at the clock and says, “You should
be sleeping.” She pulls the comforter around her and tells me to
try to be kinder. “He is a guest in our home.”
She holds my hand for a moment and lets go. I close the door
behind me.
Dad is in his study still reading. “Do you want to study?” he
says looking up at me.
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“Yes.”
“I’m glad.”
I tell him how I forbade Ali to pray with me, how he had tried
and how I had told him to stop. “I really want him to be Muslim;
what do you think about that?”
Dad takes off his glasses and folds them onto his scriptures,
runs his fingers through his hair, and finally clears his throat. “I
think you’re right to want that.”
“That can’t be,” I say. “What about David?”
Dad looks at me seriously and then laughs, “Give me a min-
ute. Then we will talk.”
I stand and look around while Dad writes. Some of the titles
of the books across his shelf, A Winter’s Tale, ‘Till We Have Fac-
es, Old Man and the Sea, The Brothers Karamazov, The Book
of Mormon, The Origin and History of the Mormons with Ex-
cursus on the Beginnings of Islam and Christianity and several
books from Hugh Nibley. I take out a book called The World
and the Prophets and flip through pages. I put it back and take
out another.
“It’s late, and you will be tired tomorrow,” Dad says.
“I don’t mind.”
“I’m sorry. I will be done soon.” He keeps writing and I flip
through another Nibley book, stopping on a dog-eared page.

Feb. 2, 1964
Dear Sarastro,
The first chance to write in a decade and this is the only pa-
per in the house. The winter so far has been one prolonged cold
snap with the result that we have all had perfect health—we have
learnt there is nothing healthier than zero weather . . .
I have been totally immersed in early Church records, mostly
the newly found Egyptian stuff; it is astonishing how familiar it
all sounds. The whole corpus of apocrypha is being re-evaluated
and strange stuff is coming out of the hopper.
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 135

I have been playing footsie with the Jews (they want me to be

editor of early Bible exegesis for a highfalutin encyclopedia), and
at the same time holding hands with the Moslems, WHO SEEM
TO LIKE my Old Testament approach (that was the machine
did that) . . .
Things are looking up here academically: little Earnie just
resigned to run for the Senate and we are getting five new first-
class men in the relig. dept.; also the library has come to life and
the stuff is rolling in—anything we ask for, but most of my work
is with photographs which I still have to pay for. Of course as we
grow opposition grows, but that is to be expected.
I still have my class of Moslems & plan to stick pretty closely
to the Koran next semester: that gets them both because it is
wonderful stuff and they are in no position to say no to it.
Spending all my time with the apocrypha—Jewish, Christian,
Muslim & Pagan—I am getting a feeling for the stuff: you can
always tell what rings true and what tank it came from. As you
may be aware, the present tendency is to see the whole vast lit-
erature fusing into a common matrix—you can no longer put
Greek philosophy, Hebrew prophets, Egyptian wisdom liter-
ature, Canaanite ritual texts, Babylonian mythology, etc. into
strictly isolated compartments—they must be studied together,
and that would be a job for computing machines if computing
machines didn’t necessarily miss the point altogether.
I have been sort of overseeing the translating of the B. of M.
into Greek (it is now finished), while at the same time working
on my Muslims and consorting with the Hasidic Jews, mean-
time faithfully plodding through the Coffin Texts and preparing
an article on the new Christian Coptic texts for a very serious
journal. Doing all this at once has addled the old brains more
than ever, but forced me to recognize the common pattern be-
hind things. I say recognize, not invent, because other people are
beginning to recognize it too.
This whole apocryphal world is brought together in the B. of
M., a veritable handbook of motifs and traditions. As a work of
136    Joshua Sabey & Ali Alsamer

fiction, as a mere intellectual tour de force, nothing could touch

it—but along with that it is full of old Jewish lore that very few
Jews have ever heard of, handles the desert situation in a way that
delights my Medcans, and gives a picture of primitive Christianity
that is right out of the Dead Sea Scrolls & the Nag Hamadi texts.
What a theme for a kid of 23 to attempt—it makes all the honors
papers I have ever read look painfully jejeune and unbeholfen: I’ve
never met or heard of anyone in college or out who could turn out
a piece of work of such boldness, sweep, variety, precision, com-
plexity, confidence, simplicity, etc. Put it beside any work in our
literature for sheer number of ideas, situations, propositions &
insights. . . . It makes me mad the way they act as if this was noth-
ing at all and turn out a million pages of pompous froth about a
literature that has hardly given the world a dozen interesting ideas
or characters in 200 years. Open the B. of M. every 10 or 20 pages
and see what it is talking about—a dizzying variety of stuff; open
any other big work—James Joyce or the 1001 Nights—and you
will find largely variations on a theme, a round of safely familiar
matter given largely stereotype treatment.
Shakespeare has that kind of variety but Shakespeare does
not have to be telling the truth, does not have to combine his
things in a single package, and can take 30 years to tell his story;
also he is free to borrow at will without apologies to anyone.
When you start listing the problems J. S. had to face just to get
his book down on paper you will see that writing about a bibli-
cal people does NOT automatically take care of everything—in
fact it raises more questions than it solves. You ask why I am
going on like this? Because Christina is making such a damnable
racket with the vacuum cleaner around my feet, cleaning up our
rumpus-room-salon-library-ante-room-dining-music-conserva-
tory-nursery-playschool-parlor for company, that I can’t think
which is fiercely apparent. . . .Well, registration at 7 a.m. tomor-
row & then back to the footnotes.
Grus daheim,
Hugh
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 137

“We are an American religion,” I say when I’ve completed the letter.
“No,” Dad replies.
I had not expected an answer and shut the book.
“That is not a religion,” he says. “Not a real religion. You are
right, a world religion is the only religion.” He puts the paper
down. “I wanted to take notes—to gather my ideas before I spoke.
It’s a habit now. It bothers your mother sometimes, I’m afraid.”
He opens the scriptures to Luke and has me read through the
story of the crucifixion. When I’ve finished, he begins to quiz me.
It is an old way we used to study together. He would read and then
ask me questions to see if I was listening and what I understood.
“Herod thinks Jesus is John the Baptist back from the dead.
He didn’t want to kill John, why did he do it?”
“To please Herodias’s daughter.”
“Who was Herodias?”
“She was his brother’s wife that left his brother to be with
him.”
“And what did Herod want at the trial?”
“To see a miracle.”
“Yes,” he nods with approval. “Why does Herod want to
see a miracle?” He is quiet to see if I have something to say but I
shrug so he continues. “If he had seen a miracle, it would mean
that he had killed a prophet. In wanting a miracle, Herod was
wanting to be wrong.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Do you agree?”
“I think so.”
“You do not need to agree.”
“I know. I think you’re right.”
He shrugs his shoulder and finishes the chapter. His voice is
beautiful when he reads scripture. A voice filled with emotion, a
voice in love with the words.
“Pilate didn’t see any crime. But the Jews saw a crime because
they were like children prodding a snake out of a hole. They
poke at it until it raises and opens its fangs. That’s what they
138    Joshua Sabey & Ali Alsamer

were doing. They were provoking a miracle. They wanted so

much to be wrong about Jesus. They only wanted to push him,
to force him to show his power. They wanted to see the salvation
of the Lord. They were like children prodding a snake. The irony
is that as they nailed him to a cross and lifted him on a hill, they
were themselves offering the sacrifice. They were Moses placing
the serpent on the rod. They were prophets, you see?”
He smiles, timidly unsure how clearly he had communicated,
and watches me closely. I nod, and when he can see that I com-
prehend him he continues, “You also want to be wrong because
you want to know that you believe. But don’t worry, you believe
alright, you were born believing. Your question is not such a
hard question when you know that.”
Dad looks at me, his eyes calm. I am weeping. He embraces
me and pulls me into him and holds me and runs his fingers
through my hair as if I am young again, as if I were a boy falling
asleep on his lap as he reads. He whispers the Articles of Faith
and then asks if I still remember them.
“Yes,” I say.
“See if you can still recite them.”
“You do not have to worry.”
“I know.”
“It’s just that it is late, that’s all,” I tell him. But Dad contin-
ues to hold me tight for another moment.
Later Dad will tell me why he believes it is right for Ali to
remain Muslim. He will invite me into his room and sit me on
the edge of the bed, his journal open on his lap, and read a line:

Ali has an old faith and an old country, and we

have a new faith and new country. If we were to
convert all the Muslims, that would be the end of
us. Their culture is too old, we would be the ones
that were assimilated. We might not even know it,
but we would become Islam like Christianity be-
came Rome.
Ali 
 139

He closes the journal and rubs his thumb along the spine.
“Most of our faith we do not choose. We mostly just decide
what to do with the pieces we have inherited. Pick them up, hang
them on the wall, repurpose, or throw away.” He sits still, look-
ing up now. “I hope you would not just throw away the pieces
you’ve been given.”
I look at my toes, running lines across the carpet. “Can it still
be true,” I ask. “In the way we mean when we say it is true?”
“True? Yes, it is true. You mean is it weltherrschaft. It is true.
Not now. But eventually, yes. I think so.”
When I fall asleep, I dream of Ali as if he had been a prophet.

A man stands between heaven and earth. There is no turning

from him. In all directions it is the same: the man, wreathed in
light, one leg on the eastern horizon and one on the western hori-
zon. That is what the boy remembers. It had been certain. But
the man is gone and the boy stands making images on the wall.
He paints one leg on one wall then walks across to the opposite
side of the cave and paints the other. Later, he will join them to-
gether and they meet in the middle. He feels that for a moment
he had seen everything, and that now he must capture as much
as possible before it escapes him. He hops, jumps, and scampers
around the cave as though he is capturing lightning bugs against
the wall. He writes incomplete sentences because whenever he
begins one, he suddenly remembers another and moves to a dif-
ferent wall to begin the new sentence. He figures if he starts the
sentence, he will be able to finish it later, even if the old memory
has disappeared, displaced by the new.
He knows it is always the beginning of the sentence that is
impossible—that requires inspiration. But the boy was able to fin-
ish well enough by himself. He is years this way. Writing images,
descriptions, and poetry. Until there is no room on the walls any-
more. And it is then, at the completion, that he is surprised to find
himself possessed by doubts. He has finished the sentences, but the
memory has now gone entirely. How was he to know if the end
140    Joshua Sabey & Ali Alsamer

was correct, or if it had all been made up: all the endings required
the truthfulness of the beginning, which now seems as suspect as
the correctness of the end. The boy weeps against the wall and his
tears run down the rock erasing a small line as it travels.

In the morning, Mom has pulled up a picture of Ali published

online by the Denver Post.
“Yes,” Esther says. “It’s definitely him.”
“It’s just the back of his head,” I say. “You couldn’t identify
him.”
“Of course it’s him,” Esther says. “Look,” and she points to
the curve of his head as it meets his nose, barely visible.
“I can see it’s him. But we were there,” I say.
“It’s obviously Ali,” Esther says. “Look.”
Mom calls the Denver Post and tells them to take the picture
down, but not before Esther prints the page.
“I want to keep it,” Esther says. “I won’t show anyone.”
“Print a copy for Ali,” I say.
“Here, you’re famous,” Esther says, handing Ali the warm
paper.
Ali takes the picture, folds it, puts it into his pocket.
He shows the picture to some of his friends during the day
and at night he looks at the image quietly in his bunk. The lamp
is still on, and I can hear the paper as it is pulled tight.
“Do you think someone would recognize me?” He asks.
“No,” I say.
“Impossible?”
“Yeah, impossible. No one could pick you out in a crowd.”
“The face isn’t everything,” he says, breathing out.
“It doesn’t matter anyways, does it? You’re not going back.”
“I can’t go back now. Not after this.”
“It’s not online anymore. They took it down.”
“Once it’s online, it’s always online.” He folds the paper up
and turns out the light.
“So, are you running away tonight?” I say.
“No,” he says quietly. “Not tonight.”