Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [66]
A troupe of elderly women marched by singing an old protest song.
He said, “The Hajj.”
“Yes.”
He said, “The Shahadah.”
“Yes.”
“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.”
“Yes.”
He recited the line again, slowly, in a more concentrated manner, drawing it toward him in a way, trying to see into it. People stood nearby or shuffled past, marchers straying onto the sidewalk.
He recited the line in Arabic now. He recited the line, she told him it was Arabic, transliterated. But even this was too much, an isolated moment in the shade with her son, making her uneasy. He read the definition of another word that referred to the annual obligatory fast during the month of Ramadan. It made her think of something. He kept reading, mostly in silence and sometimes aloud, sticking the leaflet in the air and waiting for her to take it when he needed help pronouncing a word. This happened two or three times and when it didn’t happen she found herself thinking of Cairo, some twenty years earlier, the vaguest shapes in her mind, herself among them, stepping off a tour bus into a vast crowd.
The trip was a gift, graduation, and she and a former classmate were on the bus and then off the bus and in the middle of some kind of festival. The crowd was large enough to make any part of it seem the middle. The crowd was dense and streaming, sundown, taking them along past booths and food stalls, and the friends were separated within half a minute. What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain. The crowd was gifted at being a crowd. This was their truth. They were at home, she thought, in the wave of bodies, the compressed mass. Being a crowd, this was a religion in itself, apart from the occasion they were there to celebrate. She thought of crowds in panic, surging over riverbanks. These were a white person’s thoughts, the processing of white panic data. The others did not have these thoughts. Debra had these thoughts, her friend, her missing double, somewhere out there being white. She tried to look around for Debra but it was hard to do this, swing the shoulders free and turn. They were each in the middle of the crowd, they were the middle, each to herself. People talked to her. An old man offered her a sweet and told her the name of the festival, which marked the close of Ramadan. The memory ended here.
He recited the line in Arabic, by syllables, slowly, and she reached down for the leaflet and did her version, no less uncertain, only quicker. There were other words he handed up to her and she pronounced or mispronounced them and it made her uneasy, small as it was, reciting a line, explaining a ritual. It was part of the public discourse, the pouring forth, Islam with an 800 number. Even the old man’s face, in memory, in Cairo, brought her back in. She was in that memory and on this sidewalk simultaneously, the ghost of one city, the frontal thunder of the other, and she needed to flee both crowds.
They rejoined the downtown stage of the march and listened briefly to someone speaking on a makeshift platform in Union Square. Then they went into the bookstore nearby and wandered the long aisles, in the cool and calm. Thousands of books, gleaming, on tables and shelves, the place quiet, a summer