Beauty in the Night

There were no real schools, not any more. Aissha taught little Khalid herself, as best she could. She hadn’t had much schooling, but she could read and write, and showed him how, and begged or borrowed books for him wherever she might. She found a woman who understood arithmetic, and scrubbed her floors for her in return for Khalid’s lessons. There was an old man at the south end of town who knew the Koran by heart, and Aissha, though she was not a strongly religious woman herself, sent Khalid to him once a week for instruction in Islam. The boy was, after all, half Moslem. Aissha felt no responsibility for the Christian part of him, but she did not want to let him go into the world unaware that there was—somewhere, somewhere!— a god known as Allah, a god of justice and compassion and mercy, to whom obedience was owed, and that he would, like all people, ultimately come to stand before that god upon the Day of Judgment.

* * *

“And the Entities?” Khalid asked her. He was six, then. “Will they be judged by Allah too?”

“The Entities are not people. They are jinn.”

“Did Allah make them?”

“Allah made all things in Heaven and on Earth. He made us out of potter’s clay and the jinn out of smokeless fire.”

“But the Entities have brought evil upon us. Why would Allah make evil things, if He is a merciful god?”

“The Entities,” Aissha said uncomfortably, aware that wiser heads than hers had grappled in vain with that question, “do evil. But they are not evil themselves. They are merely the instruments of Allah.”

“Who has sent them to us to do evil,” said Khalid. “What kind of god is that, who sends evil among His own people, Aissha?”

She was getting beyond her depth in this conversation, but she was patient with him. “No one understands Allah’s ways, Khalid. He is the One God and we are nothing before him. If He had reason to send the Entities to us, they were good reasons, and we have no right to question them.” And also to send sickness, she thought, and hunger, and death, and the English boys who killed your uncle Khalid in the street, and even the English boy who put you into your mother’s belly and then ran away. Allah sent all of those into the world, too. But then she reminded herself that if Richie Burke had not crept secretly into this house to sleep with Yasmeena, this beautiful child would not be standing here before her at this moment. And so good sometimes could come forth from evil. Who were we to demand reasons from Allah? Perhaps even the Entities had been sent here, ultimately, for our own good.

Perhaps.

* * *

Of Khalid’s father, there was no news all this while. He was supposed to have run off to join the army that was fighting the Entities; but Aissha had never heard that there was any such army, anywhere in the world.

Then, not long after Khalid’s seventh birthday, when he returned in midafternoon from his Thursday Koran lesson at the house of old Iskander Mustafa Ali, he found an unknown white man sitting in the room with his grandmother, a man with a great untidy mass of light-colored curling hair and a lean, angular, almost fleshless face with two cold, harsh blue-green eyes looking out from it as though out of a mask. His skin was so white that Khalid wondered whether he had any blood in his body. It was almost like chalk. The strange white man was sitting in his grandmother’s own armchair, and his grandmother was looking very edgy and strange, a way Khalid had never seen her look before, with glistening beads of sweat along her forehead and her lips clamped together in a tight thin line.

The white man said, leaning back in the chair and crossing his legs, which were the longest legs Khalid had ever seen, “Do you know who I am, boy?”

“How would he know?” his grandmother said.

The white man looked toward Aissha and said, “Let me do this, if you don’t mind.” And then, to Khalid: “Come over here, boy. Stand in front of me. Well, now, aren’t we the little beauty? What’s your name, boy?”

“Khalid.”

“Khalid. Who named you that?”

“My mother. She’s dead now. It was my uncle’s name. He’s dead too.”

“Devil of a lot of people are dead who used to be alive, all right. Well, Khalid, my name is Richie.”

“Richie,” Khalid said, in a very small voice, because he had already begun to understand this conversation.

“Richie, yes. Have you ever heard of a person named Richie? Richie Burke.”

“My—father.” In an even smaller voice.

“Right you are! The grand prize for that lad! Not only handsome but smart, too! Well, what would one expect, eh? Here I be, boy, your long-lost father! Come here and give your long-lost father a kiss.”

Khalid glanced uncertainly toward Aissha. Her face was still shiny with sweat, and very pale. She looked sick. After a moment she nodded, a tiny nod.

He took half a step forward and the man who was his father caught him by the wrist and gathered him roughly in, pulling him inward and pressing him up against him, not for an actual kiss but for what was only a rubbing of cheeks. The grinding contact with that hard, stubbly cheek was painful for Khalid.

“There, boy. I’ve come back, do you see? I’ve been away seven worm-eaten miserable years, but now I’m back, and I’m going to live with you and be your father. You can call me ‘dad.’ ”

Khalid stared, stunned.

“Go on. Do it. Say, “I’m so very glad that you’ve come back, dad.’ ”

“Dad,” Khalid said uneasily.

“The rest of it too, if you please.”

“ I’m so very glad—” He halted.

“That I’ve come back.”

“That you’ve come back—”

“Dad.”

Khalid hesitated. “Dad,” he said.

“There’s a good boy! It’ll come easier to you after a while. Tell me, did you ever think about me while you were growing up, boy?”

Khalid glanced toward Aissha again. She nodded surreptitiously.

Huskily he said, “Now and then, yes.”

“Only now and then? That’s all?”

“Well, hardly anybody has a father. But sometimes I met someone who did, and then I thought of you. I wondered where you were. Aissha said you were off fighting the Entities. Is that where you were, dad? Did you fight them? Did you kill any of them?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions. Tell me, boy, do you go by the name of Burke or Khan?”

“Burke. Khalid Haleem Burke.”

“Call me ‘sir’ when you’re not calling me ‘dad.’ Say, “Khalid Haleem Burke, sir.’ ”

“Khalid Haleem Burke, sir. Dad.”

“One or the other. Not both.” Richie Burke rose from the chair, unfolding himself as though in sections, up and up and up. He was enormously tall, very thin. His slenderness accentuated his great height. Khalid, though tall for his age, felt dwarfed beside him. The thought came to him that this man was not his father at all, not even a man, but some sort of demon, rather, a jinni, a jinni that had been let out of its bottle, as in the story that Iskander Mustafa Ali had told him. He kept that thought to himself. “Good,” Richie Burke said. “Khalid Haleem Burke. I like that. Son should have his father’s name. But not the Khalid Haleem part. From now on your name is—ah— Kendall. Ken for short.”

“Khalid was my—”

“—uncle’s name, yes. Well, your uncle is dead. Practically everybody is dead, Kenny. Kendall Burke, good