Chapter 20: Revelations
Jennifer Ebrahim arrived about six, and said she’d had no trouble finding the place. She was not wearing the hijab. After showing her around the store briefly, Clare closed up shop and steered her to the Greenline Café. She saw that the Rendezvous window was clean for a change, and Clench appeared to be seated close to the front. At least they sold hamburgers, she thought.
“I’m going to open up the downstairs space and sell old things, not the Sears stuff,” Clare said as they crossed the street, “and I intended to put the helmet in a showcase but now I won’t. It’s still locked in the bank vault.”
“Which bank?”
“The one over there.”
“Maybe you should put it in a bank someplace else.”
They ordered iced tea and the dinner special, stuffed green peppers, and Clare waited silently for the woman to begin. She was obviously tense, but determined.
“I wanted to explain more to you. To tell you some things I haven’t told anybody,” she began.
Clare nodded.
“I’m glad you didn’t give in to pressure to return that helmet to Ali. It would be a bad thing. I think it must be cursed.”
Clare raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, maybe not really. But it might as well be. It was handed down in my husband’s family, of course, from his father’s line, going back quite a while, I don’t know exactly. Some warrior in the family wore it. I don’t know where or what battles he fought in, but they said he was a great warrior. They like to think he was descended from Saladin, who lived almost a thousand years ago and fought the Crusaders. A lot of people like to associate themselves with Saladin. Saddam Hussein, for instance.” She took a sip of her tea.
Their food arrived and Jennifer Ebrahim dug into hers with surprising gusto.
“So,” she went on between bites, “the family tradition was that everyone who owned the helmet afterward, or at least every generation, ought to kill at least one person, one infidel. That’s just their family, you understand, but I always thought Mo and Ali picked up enough from the mosque to make them more comfortable with that notion. I tried to divert Mo from that way of thinking but he said I just didn’t understand. And after 9/11, he seemed to like the idea more, not less. Frankly, I thought he was going insane. He wasn’t the man I married, or so I thought. He’d say things like, ‘On a day like 9/11 the helmet could satisfy many generations of our family.’ But you know, I thought he was fantasizing. Even though that really happened in New York, and other places for that matter, it did not seem real to me. In Akron.”
Clare started to feel uneasy at the thought of that helmet being nearby. The helmet wasn’t responsible for anything, though. It couldn’t do anything. But maybe it had acted as a magnet for certain thoughts.
“Well, he calmed down and stopped talking about it. He had his business, importing carpets, beautiful things, and was doing well. The kids were growing up. We had some good times. But then when Adeleh entered her teens, he started cracking down. Didn’t want her to spend time with her friends from school, only girls from the mosque, but they didn’t live near us anyway. And as I said, by that time I’d lost touch with my old friends, and didn’t, well, have new ones.”
She sighed.
“This is a tiresome story, isn’t it? But I haven’t told it before. So, maybe once or twice a year he’d go back to Iran, and sometimes Turkey and Iraq, for a couple of weeks at a time, sometimes more, to buy carpets and other things and spend time with his family. I’d gone with him a couple of times, with the kids, earlier in our marriage, but later I refused to go, and I wouldn’t let the kids go with him if I didn’t go. Actually I was scared, but it was a relief to have him gone.”
“So I guess you couldn’t talk to him much about how you felt?” Clare asked.
“Are you kidding? Things went on this way for years, but when Ali turned 18, Mo wanted to take him along with him on his business trips, and I agreed. He was 18, after all, and wanted to go. Mo wanted to teach him the business. And it was a relief to have him gone too. I couldn’t relax in my own home, let alone have a life outside it. Except my job, but that was working for Mo in his office. So they were gone in April. Ali skipped classes. Adeleh and I could talk to each other.”
Clare was wondering where this was leading. So far there was nothing surprising. She ordered pie.
“Have some,” she urged. “It’s really good here.” Jennifer Ebrahim ordered pie. They were sitting at a table by the window, which provided a little more space between them and the other customers, and they were keeping their voices down. Clare looked across the street at the Rendezvous, and saw Clench still there. She gave a small nod in his direction and turned back to Jennifer.
“How about coffee? Are you driving back to Akron tonight?”
“Yes. I thought about visiting my daughter. I told you she’s in another state, but it’s — adjacent to Ohio. I could do it tonight. But Ali will be home later and I’ll just tell him I visited my parents. Or that I went with my mother to see my aunt across town. Something.”
“I suppose he’s not close to your parents?”
“Not really. We do the usual visits, but Mo was kind of hostile about holidays, like Christmas and Easter, and didn’t want their influence. They have become more religious over the years. Catholic. I guess I’m an extra lapsed Catholic.” She smiled wryly.
“But I used to sort of automatically mention some basic principles that I thought were universal. Individual freedom of conscience and so on. A lot of things that really are Judeo-Christian or American, not universal. They seemed self-evidently universal to me.”
“Well, the Declaration of Independence says ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’,” Clare said. “I guess they’re not.” Clare remembered wearing that flaming Persian helmet in the Fourth of July parade, celebrating the self-evident truths that people had to be reminded of at least once a year.
“No, they’re not. Not part of Iranian culture and history, although I do think a lot of people there feel it. I mean, they feel normal desires for autonomy. I think it’s built into human nature. But it’s not like the Koran expresses all the same ideas we have but in a different way. The ideas are actually different. Not only do they speak a different language, they think a different, uh, logos. See, there’s something I remember from Christianity.”
This was a little beyond Clare. She’d never paid too much attention to religion or philosophy. Maybe it was time.
The pie and coffee arrived. Clare was wishing she could just pop over to the Rendezvous and have a cold beer with Clench, but it wasn’t a place she wanted to hang out at. Maybe the diner could get a beer and wine license.
“So anyway, I encouraged Mo to go on this trip in April, and take Ali, but I knew it wasn’t just a business trip. I knew he was planning a suicide bombing. I killed Mo. I just wanted it to be there and not here.”