5 |
January 1991 |
We wait forever for the van. We’re in this immense parking lot—the biggest parking lot I’ve ever seen—and the world is gray and cold, and there’s nothing to do, nothing to look at, nothing but a silver lunch truck surrounded by fog. My mother gives us kids five dollars, and we wander over to check it out. The truck is selling knishes, among other things. I’ve never heard of a knish—it sounds like something Dr. Seuss invented—but the spelling is so cool and weird that I buy one. It turns out to be a deep-fried something-or-other filled with potato. When I’m older, I’ll discover that knishes are Jewish pastries, and I will remember having slathered one with mustard and devoured it on the way to Rikers Island, where my father was awaiting trial for shooting one of the world’s most prominent, and divisive, rabbis in the neck.
When we arrive at Rikers, we join a long, snaking, boisterous line of visitors, most of them women and children. I can see how much it pains my mother to have to bring her children here. She keeps us pressed close. She has told us that Baba has been accused of killing a Jewish rabbi, but is quick to add that only Baba himself can tell us if that’s true.
We’re funneled through security. The checkpoints seem to be endless. At one of them, a guard puts on a rubber glove and fishes around inside my mother’s mouth. At another, we’re all searched and patted down—a simple matter for my brother and me but a complicated one for Islamic women and girls wearing hijab that they’re forbidden from taking off in public. My mother and sister are whisked off to private rooms by female officers. For half an hour, my brother and I sit alone, swinging our legs and doing a bad job of looking brave. Finally, we’re all reunited and ushered down a concrete hallway toward the visiting room. Then suddenly, for the first time in months, Baba is right in front of us.
He’s wearing an orange jumpsuit. He has a badly bloodshot eye. My father, now thirty-six, seems haggard, exhausted, and not entirely like himself. At the sight of us, though, his eyes get bright with love. We run to him.
After a melee of hugs and kisses—after he’s bound the four of us up in his arms like one giant bundle—my father assures us that he is innocent. He wanted to talk to Kahane, to tell him about Islam, to convince him that Muslims were not his enemies. He promises us that he did not have a gun, and that he is not a murderer. Even before he’s finished speaking, my mother is sobbing. “I knew it,” she says. “In my heart, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”
My father talks to my sister, my brother, and me one by one. He asks us the same two questions he will ask us for years whenever he sees us or writes to us: Are you making your prayers? Are you being good to your mother?
“We are still a family, Z,” he tells me. “And I am still your father. No matter where I am. No matter what people may say about me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Baba.”
“Yet you are not looking at me, Z. Let me see those eyes I gave you, please.”
“Yes, Baba.”
“Ah, but my eyes are green! Your eyes—they are green, then blue, then purple. You must decide what color your eyes are, Z!”
“I will, Baba.”
“Very good. Now play with your brother and sister because”—here my father turns to my mother, and smiles at her warmly—“I must talk to my queen.”
I flop onto the floor, and pull a few games from my backpack: Connect Four and Chutes and Ladders. My mother and father sit at the table, holding hands firmly and talking in low tones they think we can’t hear. My mother is pretending to be stronger than she is. She’s telling him she’s fine, she can handle the kids in his absence; she’s only worried about him. She has been holding her questions in so long that they all come out in a rush: Are you safe, Sayyid? Are you getting enough to eat? Are there other Muslims here? Do the guards let you pray? What can I bring you? What can I tell you, Sayyid, besides I love you, I love you, I love you?
• • •
We haven’t returned to our apartment in Cliffside Park since the shooting, just as my mother feared we wouldn’t when she laid the white sheet on my floor and told me to fill it. We’re living at Uncle Ibrahim’s place in Brooklyn temporarily—three adults and six children in a one-bedroom apartment—and trying to build a new normal, brick by brick.
The New York police raided our home just hours after we left it. It will be years before I’m old enough to read the details, and by then I’ll know that my father was lying when he told us he was not a murderer. The police carted away forty-seven boxes of suspicious materials suggesting an international conspiracy—bomb-making instructions, a hit list of potential Jewish targets, and references to an attack on “the world’s high buildings.” But most of the material is in Arabic, and authorities dismiss some of the notes as “Islamic poetry.” No one will bother translating the bulk of it until after the first World Trade Center attack less than three years later. (Around the same time, federal agents will arrest my Uncle Ibrahim and, while searching his apartment, find fake Nicaraguan passports in my family’s names. If my father’s plan to kill Kahane had gone off without a hitch, I’d apparently have grown up in Central America with a Spanish name.) The authorities aren’t just ignoring the forty-seven boxes from our apartment. The FBI also has surveillance footage of my father and others training at the Calverton Shooting Range—but nobody has connected the dots. The NYPD chief of detectives insists that my father was a lone gunman. The idea is absurd, as the investigative journalist Peter Lance and the U.S. government itself will prove long after the fact.
For years, theories will flourish that my father entered the Marriott with at least one, possibly two, other conspirators, though no one else will ever be charged. My father was wearing a yarmulke to blend in with the mostly Orthodox crowd. He approached the podium, where Kahane was declaiming with his signature fury about the Arab menace. My father paused, and then said aloud, “This is the moment!” Then he fired at the rabbi, and raced out of the ballroom. One of Kahane’s supporters, a seventy-three-year-old, tried to block him. My father shot the man in the leg, then continued out onto the street. According to reports, his friend Red, the taxi driver who would call my mother that night, was supposed to be waiting outside the Marriott in his cab. A doorman, however, had apparently told him to move along. So my father got into the wrong cab. After the cab had gone one block, another of Kahane’s supporters stepped in front of it to stop my father from getting away. My father put his gun to the driver’s head. The driver leaped out of the cab. Then my father leaped out, too. He ran down Lexington, exchanged fire with the postal officer, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, and fell to the street. According to some theories, my father’s accomplices escaped via the subway.
History will prove that my father did not act alone. But it’s 1990, and the NYPD can’t yet fathom the concept of a global terror cell—virtually no one can—and they have no interest in trying to prosecute one.
• • •
We haven’t returned to our old school in Cliffside Park, either. The media descended on it the morning after the assassination, and we no longer felt safe or welcome there. Knowing we have nowhere to go, Al-Ghazaly, the Islamic school in Jersey City, has offered us all scholarships. It turns out that the slogan on Ammu Ibrahim’s T-shirt—HELP EACH OTHER IN GOODNESS AND PIETY—can be a call to kindness, not just violence.
My mother gratefully accepts the scholarships and moves us back to Jersey City. All we can afford is a place on a derelict stretch of Reservoir Avenue. My mother asks the landlord to install bars on the windows, but that doesn’t stop drunks from harassing my sister, my brother, and me when we play in the street. We move again, this time to an equally sketchy spot on Saint Paul Avenue. One day, when my mother leaves to pick us up at school, someone breaks in, steals whatever he can carry, and leaves a knife on our computer keyboard. In the midst of all this, we return to school. I’m in the first grade. It’s the middle of the year, the worst possible time to transfer, even if I weren’t a shy kid and my family wasn’t infamous.
My first morning at Al-Ghazaly, I warily approach the doors to the classroom. They’re arched and enormous—it’s like I’m walking into the mouth of a whale. The room is abuzz with activity. The minute I step inside, though, all heads turn. Everything stops dead. There’s silence for two seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. And then the kids are leaping to their feet. They’re pushing back their chairs, which screech against the floor, and they’re rushing toward me. It happens so fast that I can’t decipher the energy. Is it hostile? Euphoric? Have I done something unforgivable, or hit a game-winning homerun? The kids are shouting now, one louder than the next. They’re all asking the same question: Did your father kill Rabbi Kahane? It seems like they want me to say yes, and that I’ll disappoint them if I say no. The teacher is trying to get to me. She’s peeling the kids away, telling them to sit down, sit down, sit down. In my awkwardness, all I can think to do—more than two decades later I still wince at the memory—is shrug my shoulders and smile.
• • •
In those first wintry months of 1991, the media and much of the world believe Baba to be a monster, and my mother hears rumors that the Jewish Defense League has declared a sort of fatwa of its own: “Kill the sons of Nosair.” Yet to many Muslims my father is a hero and a martyr. Kahane, the argument goes, was himself a bigot, a proponent of violence and vengeance, an extremist condemned even by many of his own faith. He referred to Arabs as dogs. He wanted Israel swept clean of them—by force if necessary. So while my father is demonized in many quarters, Muslim families thank us on the street and send donations from all over the world. The donations make it possible for my family to eat—and for me and my siblings to have the only extravagances of our childhoods. One night, my mother presents us with a Sears catalogue and tells us we can have anything we want. I pick every piece of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle merchandise I can find. Then, at Al-Ghazaly, I discover that one of my classmates’ fathers is so elated by Kahane’s murder that he’ll stop me every time he sees me and hand me a hundred-dollar bill. I try to run into him as much as possible. I buy my first Game Boy with his money. The world may be sending me mixed messages, but a Game Boy is a Game Boy.
An activist-lawyer named Michael Tarif Warren has been representing my father. When the legendary civil rights advocate and unabashed radical William Kunstler unexpectedly offers his services as well, Warren graciously accepts the help. Kunstler has a long, mournful face, glasses perched above his forehead, and wild gray hair. He is lively and warm with us, and he believes in my father’s right to a fair trial. Sometimes, Kunstler and his team camp out in our apartment and strategize with my mother until all hours. Other times, we visit him in his office in Greenwich Village. He has a statue of Michelangelo’s David on his desk. Whenever we stop by, out of respect for my sister and mother, he takes off his tie and drapes it around the little guy’s neck to cover his private parts.
Kunstler hopes to convince the jury that Kahane’s own people murdered him in an argument over money, then framed my father. My mother believes the story herself—her husband has assured her that he’s innocent, and there must be some explanation for the assassination—and we all get swept up in my father’s cause. $163,000 is reportedly donated for Baba’s defense. Ammu Ibrahim reaches out to Osama bin Laden, who contributes twenty thousand himself.
We visit my father at Rikers again and again. I see him in a prison uniform so many times that it will color my previous memories of him. Over two decades later, I will picture my family around the dinner table in Cliffside Park, a year or more before my father’s arrest. I’ll imagine him talking to us cheerfully, passing a platter of lamb—and wearing an orange jumpsuit.