Thursday, August 21, 2014
To My Dearest,
I’ve been shaking and crying for the last few hours – lost, confused, and upset. I think writing to you is the only thing I can do to try to calm myself. Maybe by recounting the details of what just happened, they’ll become less potent and horrible than they seem to me right now.
At around 6:30 p.m., I finished my work for the day and exited the MCA office. Julien’s driver was pulled over by the curb, waiting for me. I entered the sedan with my bag packed for a long weekend in the Hamptons, in case everything went well with the long-awaited chat in which I expected Julien to open to me completely. Technically, according to the promise he had made to me in mid-June, he still had a few weeks to reveal his hidden past to me, but I felt more unfairly exposed than ever, after what I had told him about my family, two nights ago. So I decided that it was time to give him an ultimatum, because I could no longer live with the imbalance. To my surprise, when I arrived at his place, I would quickly learn that a final demand wasn’t even necessary, because he had already decided on his own that it was time for him to open up to me about his childhood trauma.
The summer air was heavy with humidity, so he suggested that we sit on the sofa in the living room by his sixty-fifth-floor bedroom, where we could still admire the splendid view with the comfort of air-conditioning around us. On the nearby coffee table, there were two tall glasses, sweating with condensation, each with a straw. He brought them over to us and handed me the cold beverage. “Here. These are freshly squeezed, organic strawberry and banana smoothies,” he noted, taking a sip of his.
“Thank you.” I took a sip of the sweet beverage. “It’s delicious.”
He looked away, and then back at me. “Anissa, before I tell you anything, do you remember what I said when I first told you about my decision to hire Craig Walkenford, even though he was a homeless man suffering from PTSD?”
I looked into the corner of my eyes, trying to recall the most interesting moments of that conversation. “You mean, when you said that there’s no such thing as trust without risk?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
“OK. And why do you mention that now?” I asked, before taking another sip.
“Well, because I’m about to trust you more than I’ve ever trusted anyone else,” he replied, resting his glass on the nearby coffee table. “And we saw how things worked out with Craig in the end, right?”
“I know, but his PTSD made him emotionally unstable – mine just gives me nightmares, like yours. But I’m totally in control when I’m awake, and you should know by now that I would never betray your trust.”
“Yes, I do know that. But I also know no one is perfect. Remember what happened when I trusted you not to go into my Facebook inbox?”
I looked down in shame and nodded my head a little. “That was different, I just – ”
“It’s OK, Querida. We don’t need to rehash that incident now. I’m just reminding us both that – even though you are the most angelic woman I’ve ever met – you’re still human,” he added with a gentle smile, as he lightly put his hand on mine. “So I’m still taking a risk by sharing this with you.”
“I understand that,” I conceded.
“Good. So before I take that risk, I need your most solemn oath that – whatever happens between us – you will never repeat what I’m about to uncover for the first time ever... ” His stare seemed to penetrate my eyes, probing deep into my interior. With so much solemnity surrounding his revelation, whatever it was, I almost didn’t want him to tell me anymore. “Because once I tell you this, there’s no going back.”
I took a hard swallow and braced myself to receive something that I could never share with anyone. “I swear to you, Querido, on the memory of my blessed parents, and on the future of my people, that I will never tell a soul.”
He nodded slightly, as if to acknowledge my vow, and took his hand back. He let out a deep breath, and his hands began to fidget a little, as if he was trying to decide where and how to begin. I put my glass down on the coffee table, wanting to concentrate as much as possible on whatever he was about to say. After a few moments of silence, he finally spoke. “Where do you think I was born?” he asked.
“Mexico?” I asked.
“And where do you think my father is from?”
“Also Mexico, like your mother?”
“No. Both of those notions are incorrect, even though everyone assumes them to be the truth – from every personal friend of mine to the wider media.”
“So where were you born?”
“In Kabul, Afghanistan, like my father.”
I felt stunned and confused for a moment, as if someone had just informed me that the Earth is actually a moon orbiting the planet Mars, and not the third planet from the sun. He seemed to expect this reaction in me, and waited a moment so that I could adjust to these startling new facts.
Still trying to cling to my earlier beliefs, I grasped onto whatever counter-evidence I had. “So why is your last name Morales?”
“My mother, Leticia Morales, reverted to her maiden name after she left my father and took me back to Mexico with her.”
“Why did she leave him?”
“It’ll be obvious to you by the time I finish telling you everything.”
I exhaled, a little nervous. “OK. So, what was her married surname? I mean, what was your father’s last name?”
“It was Omar. His full name was Abdul Sayyaf Omar.”
The room began to feel unsteady. Omar was also the last name of the doctor who had betrayed my father to the Sunni Islamists who murdered my family. I tried to control my shock, so that I could receive whatever other stunning facts had yet to be revealed. I cleared my throat to ask my next question, afraid of the answer, but pressing forward anyway. “So I assume that your first name wasn’t always Julien, right?”
“That’s right,” he replied looking down for a moment. “In Kabul, growing up, my name was Jihad Omar.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked around my surroundings for a moment. Was I in the right apartment? Was this a dream? I was totally dumbfounded. Trying to make sense out of what Julien, or Jihad, had just told me, I asked the next question that puzzled me: “And your mother was OK with the name Jihad? Was she Muslim too?”
“No, she was Catholic. But when my parents had me, my dad took that word to mean a kind of personal struggle for self-improvement, and, after he explained that to my mom, she was OK with it.”
“How did a Mexican, Catholic woman end up in Kabul?” I asked, more confused than ever.
He released a nervous chuckle. “It’s a fair question. She was actually Mexican-American – born and raised in Mexico, but she came to the United States on an academic scholarship, and eventually became a doctor. After she graduated from UCLA Medical School, she went to Afghanistan in 1972 as part of a special humanitarian mission to provide medical training to doctors and other medical staff in Kabul’s main hospital. The program was open to any M.D. with at least two years of residency, which my mother had completed. She had skipped a year of high school and graduated college in three years, so she was just twenty-six years old at the time, and was eager to combine her love of medicine and helping people with her passion for travel and discovering other cultures.”
The whole thing seemed surreal to me. I folded my arms and looked away, trying to gather my thoughts. “So how did Leticia Morales end up marrying Abdul Sayyaf Omar?” I finally asked, practically cringing as I said that name.
“He worked as a mid-level security guard at that same hospital where her humanitarian mission was based. He spoke English well, and was a charming, handsome man who was her age. She saw him quite often because he was assigned to guard her group of foreign doctors on the humanitarian aid mission. I guess it would have made more sense for her to become romantically involved with another Western doctor working with her, but there were a total of five doctors in the group and only two of them were men, one of whom was married. The other male doctor, from the U.K., quickly started dating, and ended up marrying, one of the other female doctors from the U.S. Apparently, my father was also relentless in pursuing his future wife, bringing her flowers to the hospital, helping her at every possible opportunity with translation or anything else she needed. In terms of his physique and charismatic presence, he was a really strong man who seemed to be a natural leader, and my mother assumed – like the many locals who admired him – that he was destined for things far greater than his security job at the hospital. After a few months of his persistent wooing, she finally agreed to go on a date with him, and three years later, on December 12th of 1975, I was born.”
I still didn’t know how all of this related to his trauma in a butcher shop, but I almost didn’t want to know any more. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I looked in the large mirror, as I held on to the edges of the stylishly designed and immaculately clean sink, feeling a bit nauseous. In the end, I didn’t need to throw up, and just used the private moment to try to calm down and compose myself.
I went back to the couch and sat down. “Are you OK?” he asked. “I realize that this is a lot to digest.”
My eyebrows rose and I nodded my head in agreement with his understatement. “Yes... It certainly is... So how did your father become a butcher?”
“According to my mother, soon after I was born, my father started talking about going to study in the university. She began to sense that his ambitions were frustrated by his hospital job and that he felt inferior because of her impressive education. He spoke with some friends who told him that he could earn a lot more money, and have more control over his hours and thereby study in the university, if he became a halal butcher with them. So he decided to leave his hospital job to partner up with them. He learned all of the Muslim rules and rituals of animal slaughter and shared the work duties with his friends. The first two years after I was born, he used his time off to help my mother take care of me and the house, but after I turned two, he enrolled part-time in the university, to study political science alongside his work as a butcher. My parents together made enough to pay for a full-time housekeeper who also looked after me, so that my mother could continue working in the hospital.”
Julien stopped for a moment to take a sip of his smoothie. He had spoken a lot without giving his throat much of a rest. I let him pause for a moment, but I had to hear the rest, so I goaded him on with a question. “So your dad began studying in 1977, at the age of twenty-eight. But wasn’t Afghanistan in a war with the Soviets around that time?”
He put his drink back down. “Yes, exactly. Afghanistan was going through a lot of internal turmoil, and in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded. And that’s when my father started to change.”
“What do you mean?”
“About three years after I was born, my mother noticed that her husband was becoming increasingly religious. She had converted to Islam only out of convenience – because of her marriage and her correct assumption that her life would be much easier in Afghanistan as a Muslim, for however long she planned to stay there. But my father knew that, deep down, she wasn’t a true believer and he had accepted this, as long as she let him raise me as a good Muslim. I think my mother accepted that compromise because my father still wanted me to get the best possible education, and my mother personally made sure that I was exposed to science from an early age.”
I couldn’t believe that Julien/Jihad had just admitted that he was born and raised as a Sunni Muslim in Afghanistan. I was almost in a daze, but trying to stay focused so that I could get through whatever else awaited me. “Why did your father become more religious?”
“My mother thought it was the influence of his two partners in the butcher shop, who had begun attending a Salafist mosque. But, by my fourth birthday, my father had also become involved with a radical Islamist organization at his university, so – after she eventually learned of his involvement in that group – she concluded that this might have been a big contributing factor as well.”
“And what did your mother say about this?”
“He apparently did a good job of hiding his evolving views about political Islam, until it was too late.”
I felt chills run down my spine, as I tried to suppress thoughts about where this story was going. To that end, I focused on the chronology. “So by then, it was 1979.”
“Yes. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began a few weeks after I turned four, and the country quickly became engulfed in a brutal and bitter war. I’m sure that also fueled the radicalization of my father... “
“And your mother didn’t want to leave Afghanistan at that point?”
“Yes, by the early eighties, she started to prepare me for the idea that we might leave the country at some point – especially after my father had beaten me a few times for being a bad Muslim. I was around seven or eight years old at the time.”
“So why didn’t she leave?”
“She almost did, a few times. But she felt a moral, humanitarian duty to stay and help, with so many war-related injuries flooding the hospital where she worked and so few qualified doctors there – especially after some of her colleagues had returned to the U.S. And, of course, my father refused to leave, and – despite the occasional problems they had, like any couple – they were still married and there was still some love there. But had my mom known just how radicalized my dad had become, I’m sure that she would have just put all of those considerations aside, and at the first opportunity, she would have left work early to pick me up when my father was at his work or university, and fled the country without even telling him. But she had no idea that he was a rising member of Hezbi Islami.”
I felt myself getting nauseous again. I could sense that the horrific part of his story was nearing. “What’s Hezbi Islami?” I asked.
Julien, or Jihad, closed his eyes and put his hands on his face, shaking his head a little. He exhaled. “It was an Afghani Islamist organization whose ideology came mainly from the Muslim Brotherhood. Their goal was to replace the various tribal factions of Afghanistan with one unified, Islamic state.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me, his eyes watering, and on the verge of tears. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
Julien took a deep breath. “Anissa, I’ve been struggling for weeks about how to disclose this to you. I almost decided to tell you what I told my therapist, when I had to reveal something to her about the traumatic event, for therapy to continue.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That one day, my father brought me to his butcher shop and made me do his job for him. I let her continue assuming that this was all happening in Mexico and that it wasn’t any worse than a son being forced to see a lot of blood at the age of nine.”
For a moment, I went from simmering at having been deceived (along with the rest of the world) about Julien’s past to empathizing with his need to distort his trauma when sharing it with others – something I had been doing for most of the last few years. But now I had to know the full truth, just as he had learned mine. “So it wasn’t in Mexico. And your father didn’t force you to slaughter an animal?”
He shook his head and wiped away a tear. “You have no idea how hard this is for me.”
I had to reassure him, or there was no way that he’d be able to continue. I put my hand on his and tried to summon all of the empathetic support I could find despite my inner revulsion at everything I had been hearing. “I know, Julien. I’ve been there too. Remember?”
He wiped away some more tears and nodded his head. “That’s why I’m doing this. For us,” he added.
“I know,” I replied gently. “It really means a lot to me.” Despite those words, I occasionally felt myself pulling back from a man I suddenly didn’t know at all. Every now and then, I looked around my surroundings, trying to remember how I ended up in the magnificent Manhattan penthouse of a complete stranger.
After regaining his composure a little, he continued. “Before I tell you what happened in the butcher shop, there’s a bit more background you need to know.”
I raised my eyebrow in dread, wondering what other disturbing facts were missing from my impression of this man and his childhood. As Julien noted my reaction, he himself became more uncomfortable, and got up to pace around the living room, to avoid facing me as he spoke and maybe to release some of his nervousness.
He finally resumed his narration. “By the early eighties, the Afghans really hated the Soviets for all of the atrocities they had committed during the course of their invasion,” he said, pacing about in front of me, as I leaned back against the sofa, trying to calm myself by imagining that this was some kind of college lecture on the history of Afghanistan. “The only possible exception to this rule was a Soviet Army deserter, to the extent that Afghanis understood that such a person was effectively rejecting the Soviet state and its military policies. Anyway, in Kabul, there was a Soviet man named Mikhail who had deserted the Soviet Army after seeing the crimes that his military had committed against Afghans. According to what my mother later told me, Mikhail had been a kind of ‘crypto-Christian’ – his family devoutly practiced and embraced Christianity in Russia, even though Communism made it difficult for any religion to be practiced. His deep Christian beliefs caused him not only to desert the Soviet Army, but also to do good works in Kabul, as he tried to make up for Soviet abuses during the war. He had become known in the community for his efforts to help Afghans wounded by the conflict, and he spent a lot of time volunteering in the hospital where my mother worked.”
Julien stopped pacing and just stood for a moment, with his back facing me, as he continued talking. “But his activities weren’t always limited to helping the wounded. On a few occasions, Mikhail apparently forgot what country he was in and started talking about his Christian faith to those he was helping. That in itself was already very risky, but when word got out that he was also seen a few times in the company of a local Afghan woman, his days were numbered. I think my father also viewed him as a potential rival, just because my mother had mentioned that she and Mikhail had spoken a few times at the hospital, when my father first asked if she had ever heard of him. She made it clear that their conversation was strictly about his volunteer work and the care of specific patients, but somehow my dad got the idea that he might be interested in my mom.”
Julien still wasn’t facing me. He leaned against a nearby set of drawers, on top of which sat a kinetic sculpture made of rotating geometric shapes. His finger pushed part of the sculpture, sending it into motion, as he contemplated its movements. As I waited for him to continue his story, I couldn’t tell if he was gathering his thoughts, recovering from being emotionally spent, or just waiting for me to react in some way so that he could see how I was handling everything.
“So what happened with Mikhail?” I finally asked.
He reluctantly continued, but he couldn’t seem to face me when talking, although I could see that he was wiping away some tears. “One afternoon in March or April of 1984, after I got home from school, my father came by earlier than usual, when my mother was still at the hospital and the housekeeper was watching over me. He took my hand and led me to his butcher shop. When we got there, the main entrance area had about twenty bearded men standing around a man who was seated in a chair with his hands tied together behind his back. They were all from my father’s organization, Hezbi Islami. The man in the chair was Mikhail. They had kidnapped him from his residence the night before.”
The room began to sway, as if the building had been erected on an oil rig. My head hurt and I decided to lie down on the sofa. I was dying to leave, but I was too deep into the story and had to hear whatever else Julien was going to share – if only out of respect for the enormous emotional effort he had invested in opening up as much as he had. But I was too psychologically spent to encourage him much, even though he was clearly waiting for some reaction from me. All I could bring myself to say was, “Go on.”
His voice sounded fainter and even more unsteady. “My father read out some judicial-type sentence about Mikhail committing blasphemy against Allah, and trying to rape Muslim women, and then took a foot-long butcher blade and put it in my hand, leading me to the back of the chair, so that I was looking down over Mikhail’s neck. He then ordered me to slit his throat, in front of all the men watching, so that they could all see that I was a brave and good Muslim.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. It was as if my consciousness of the present had suddenly transformed into a nightmare. Or a bad dream had abruptly morphed into reality. It was torture to listen but this was the man that I had fallen in love with, even if I no longer was sure that I knew him. I owed it to both of us to hear him out, as awful as listening any more felt. “Go on,” I said, as if I were some kind of masochistic co-conspirator in our collective torment.
“I tried to resist by looking confused, but all around me, I just saw these bearded men, looking at me – waiting expectantly for me to comply. I turned to my dad, and he sternly repeated his command. Then he impatiently came from behind me, held my wrist forcefully, and showed me how and where to move the blade, guiding my hand without actually cutting Mikhail. He forcefully repeated his command, and with tears streaming down my face as I trembled in horror, I slit Mikhail’s throat with the knife in my hand. Blood splattered everywhere as he screamed in agony, but he was still alive. I dropped the knife – I could hardly stand, my body was shaking so badly. My father picked up the knife, and, with a few powerful strokes, severed the man’s head off.”
I was definitely going to vomit soon. I could feel it. Julien and I were practically in two different worlds at that moment. He was bent over the dresser, staring at the kinetic sculpture, lost in the past but trying somehow to connect it to the present, while I was lying on his sofa, very much in the present and feeling nauseous as his voice mumbled on. To me, he sounded as if he had turned off all of his emotions and was just on autopilot.
“Back then I don’t think beheadings were so in vogue among Islamists, even if there was an ample basis for it in the Koran. But I think my father’s work as a butcher desensitized him, and made him comfortable putting a knife to living flesh. Beheading a man probably wasn’t all that different to him than slaughtering a cow or a chicken. And that was how he had learned to kill... He wanted to teach me how to be like him... ”
I gradually sat up, preparing myself to leave. Julien was still facing away from me, wiping away some more tears. I was waiting for the right moment to get up and head towards the elevator, but he was still talking, so I stayed put.
“Instead of becoming like him, I was just traumatized... That night, I told my mother what had happened, and the next day she fled the country with me. She was so horrified that she wanted to move back in with her mother, so we flew to Mexico, and we lived there from when I was nine until I turned twelve. That’s how I became a native Spanish speaker... She renounced Islam and made me do the same, changed my name to Julien and our surname to Morales, and enrolled me in a Catholic school. The summer after I turned twelve, my mother was able to get a hospital job in San Diego, California, so we moved to the United States, where I’ve lived ever since. The rest of my secondary school education was in private Catholic schools. And, as if I hadn’t already gone through enough trauma and change, six years later, just before I was supposed to start as a freshman at Yale, my mother died of cancer.”
He finally turned around, the streaks of wiped tears still visible on his face and parts of his dress shirt. “There you have it, Querida. My whole story.”