Because I Said So (13 page)

“You know your father . . .” our mother begins, sighing. I am tempted to say, “No,” but I don’t. “The doctor had told him to quit taking sleeping pills, but he took them anyway and his heart couldn’t stand it.”

She would like to protect us from everything, our mother, even from our own destiny. We never see a coffin or any clue to tell us where our father’s body is. We never go to the cemetery to visit his grave. We very rarely talk about him; he has disappeared in a fog, as in my dream. My father was here. He is here no longer. Life goes on, and imagination takes over. Over the years I piece him together like a human puzzle, tearing bits from my
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memory and pasting them on, piece by piece, to try to make the picture whole.

The father I create has curly hair. He often wears sandals and plays Cuban tunes on the guitar. He is a physicist, an engineer, Dutch, Jewish, a genius, a painter, a speaker of many languages, unfair with people weaker than he, a revolution’s lover, absent-minded, asocial, good at playing bridge. He is depressed, he is charming. He is a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes that I twist and turn against the light to make a coherent image.

As I grow older, I look for him in other men. I feel betrayed by his sudden departure and the mystery of how and why he died.

His memory is the source of a vague uneasiness built of guilt and distrust, an anxiety that I am learning to live with as I pursue the impossible quest of finding my father again in the men I meet. It is a painful process in which my childhood conflicts with the young woman I am trying to become.

Still, my mother doesn’t like to speak about him. “It’s behind,” she says.

Eight years after his death,
my dad will be the one to tell us the truth. It is fall, and our mother is out shopping. Satchi is sitting in the walk-in closet in our apartment, a small case full of documents open in front of him, going through some family archives. He opens a letter. Despite my mother’s willed forgetting, I immediately recognize my father’s scribbling; the memory of him consigning his nostalgia on torn-out pieces of paper comes back all at once. Satchi’s hand shakes as he reads the letter, and he turns pale. It is a suicide note from my father, addressed to a psy-chiatrist friend whom we don’t know.

My father wrote: “When one sees a mountain, one wants to climb to the top. But once you are there, it is only to discover that the mountain has disappeared, you don’t see it anymore.”

His words make as much sense to me as the subway art he took me to see long ago. What mountain? And what about us, his children?

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When my mother comes back, she finds us still sitting on the floor, reading the note over and over, trying to decipher from its spare words all that is unwritten. “You had to find out, I guess,”

she says, almost with anger. Finally, she tells us that our father died alone in his hideout in our flat. He swallowed barbiturates.

He knew our brief visits to him in his room that summer afternoon would be the last. My mother doesn’t offer any explanation for keeping the truth from us for so long. And we have learned not to ask her too many questions about our dad.

Although I am now a teenager, I suddenly see that something in me has remained stuck in the little girl who learned of her father’s death that day in Marseille. I feel pain but also a strange relief, as if I had known all along that he killed himself, an intuition never confirmed by words until then. After I’ve read his letter, at last I am able to start mourning him and accepting his death. Long overdue tears, unshed since the day I heard of his death, pour out of my eyes.

Until then my psychological survival had dictated that I remodel my father into an idealized, misunderstood, and romantic hero. Finding his letter allowed me to step into his reality, to begin scratching through the layers of silence for the truth.

From family friends, I learn that he had struggled with his identity all his life. He was born a Jew in Amsterdam, at the beginning of the Second World War. To escape the Nazis, he and his mother walked all the way to the south of France, where he was raised in a Jesuit college in Cassis. He did not know who his father was. It turned out that my dad’s dad had sex with my grandmother only once. In fact, my grandfather told us years after my father’s death: he had had sex with a woman only once in his life. He was homosexual and lived forty-five years with his male lover.

My grandfather pretended to be an uncle who showed up in my dad’s childhood once in a while, always leaving behind money for him. But my father didn’t like this man. He was forever hurt when he found out, at the age of fourteen, that this “uncle” was actually his biological father. Like Satchi and me, my father had
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been scarred by having the truth about his father hidden from him.

As my picture of my father fills in, my anger and incomprehension turn into understanding and even gratitude. I am able to give him back his humanity. I visit his solitudes, his anguishes. I learn how to love him and his existential doubts. My father becomes a real man, a man who knew great trauma and fear.

Although at first I mistook him for a coward for having taken his own life, I now sense that he had actually tried his best to live the longest time possible. And having prolonged his life, he made the lives of his children possible.

I wish I had known all this earlier, even if discussions of suicide don’t befit childhood. My mother thought secrecy would protect us from the shame of it. But when the memory of your father is erased, there is an impossible void to fill—it is as if half of you has been con-fiscated. Even a desperado father is still a father. With the truth, he became a person again, and I became an adult.

Twenty-three years
after my father’s death, the night before I am to be married, he appears to me for a second time in a dream.

This time he is coming out of an airplane. This time the weather is magnificent. He has come to attend my wedding. My father looks young, tanned, happy, and relaxed. He takes me in his arms and we dive together into a swimming pool filled with turquoise water.

Everyone in the dream is smiling and laughing. My future husband, Danny, is watching the scene with his quietly triumphant expression. It is the most beautiful dream I have ever had. And after I wake, I do not suffer from my father’s absence again.

May 2001.
It is the monsoon in Mumbai, India—the air so moist that my hand sticks to the leather arms of the chair where Danny is sitting next to me. My husband and I moved to India about a year before, when Danny became South Asia bureau chief for the
Wall Street Journal.
When I met Danny, I knew I was
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really in love for the first time. Danny didn’t resemble my dad in any way, and I liked that. By then, I wasn’t looking for a reflection of my pain or trying to fill a void. For the first time, I loved a man for who he was and not for what my father had failed to be.

Danny is crying over the novel he has been reading for a few days. A big tear drops on the page, distorting the printed letters in its tiny pond. The world outside is hushed; there is only the tap-ping of raindrops on the window and a few palm trees waving on the dirty playground across from our apartment. Inside our little shelter, I feel great tenderness for Danny and his capacity to lament over the misery of a fictional character.

We have been married for two years, and I know of Danny’s desire to become a father. Unlike him, I have never known for certain if I wanted to have a child. My father’s suicide has left me unsure: You couldn’t tell if a father would just disappear. But then again, I never knew that I was going to love as hard as I love my husband.

My father’s suicide note taught me that to live doesn’t mean only to be alive. You have to have a sense of purpose that is stronger than whatever obstacles you find in your way, strong enough to carry you on to the next mountain and the next. So, when your turn comes to give birth to a child, you must do more than exercise a biological privilege. If you are to give birth, you must also give hope.

This night, when I have never felt closer to my husband, I ask him for the first and the only time, “Why do you want to have a child?”

“To continue,” he answers without hesitation, “to perpetuate myself.” I look at him, sitting at his handmade desk surrounded by newspaper clippings, files, and notebooks. He is opening the first bureau of the
Journal
in Mumbai, a daunting task that he faces with optimism and courage. I realize there is no need for me to think twice; I know I will have no problem giving hope to the child of such a man. I start dreaming of a little Danny running around.

A few weeks later, I give myself a home pregnancy test. When I see the results, I scream and run out of the bathroom, forgetting
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to put my underwear back on. Danny is alarmed. I rush into his arms: There is the beginning of a little us growing inside of me.

I am six months pregnant
when my husband is kidnapped by Al Qaeda terrorists. We are living in Karachi. It is four months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and most journalists covering South Asia have followed the story here, to Pakistan. It is no mystery that the country has links to Muslim fundamentalists and those who harbor them.

Danny is writing a story about the “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, whose attempt to blow up a flight from France to the United States was thwarted when airport authorities in Paris found explosives hidden in his shoe. Danny discovered that Reid had been taking orders from someone based in Karachi, and he was investigating the kind of support Reid had received from Pakistan. Danny thought he was meeting someone who would introduce him to a Muslim leader he wished to interview, but he was lured into a trap by a British-born Al Qaeda terrorist, Omar Sheikh, who led him to his captors.

When Danny is abducted, I spend every minute of the next five weeks in Karachi fighting his captors. I fight like I have never fought anyone—with all my might, using everything I have learned about life and death, love and faith. I put together an investigative team that for the first time ever unites journalists with Pakistani police and FBI agents in a rescue effort. I spend a week without sleep, searching Danny’s computer for clues; I pour my emotional energy into supporting the task force, so no one will give up hope.

Inside myself, I go beyond fear to a place where the terrorists can’t reach me or even separate Danny from me. In my heart, I know my husband is defying them as much as I am. I don’t know whether we will both make it out alive, but I know our spiritual victory over those who have him is certain. Everywhere I go and in everything I do, our child is with me. It is already as if our three souls have merged into one.

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• • •

I am thirty-four years old
when I become a widow, two years younger than my mother was when my father took his own life. Danny’s captors killed him. First they accused him of being a CIA agent and then a spy from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. No one believed those claims—not even the terrorists, I learned later. But Danny didn’t need to be guilty of anything for them to kill him; he just needed to be American or Jewish or part of whatever group the terrorists want to target with their hatred.

They wanted to terrify Jews and Americans. So they took Danny’s life, decapitating him on camera, hoping that television channels around the world would broadcast the tape of the murder.

Two months later, I am alone in the delivery room at the Maternité des Lilas, in Paris, the clinic Danny and I had chosen. For me, this moment is an intense encounter between life and death, with me between them. I am lying on the delivery table, silently addressing my two men—one unborn, the other dead. In the days that preceded the first tidal waves of labor announcing the baby’s arrival, I stayed alone. I called it my “jihad.” In Islam, the most honorable holy fight is the one a person leads within his- or herself. I know that by killing my husband, the terrorists expect to break my life, too, and that of my son. But I am fighting the holiest of fights, and I win. Giving birth to our baby is my ultimate act of anti-terrorism. I am perpetuating Danny. This is what I tell Danny as our son, Adam, finds his way out into the world.

Through the pain of childbirth and the time preceding it, I know that there is only one answer to those who killed Danny: life. That gives me the courage to deny the terrorists their goal. I write my beliefs down for myself:

They want to silence me; therefore I will speak out.

They want to kill joy in me; therefore I will laugh.

They want to paralyze me; therefore I will take action.

They want war; therefore I will fight for peace.

Someday I will pass these words on to my son.

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Through this life-and-death struggle, Buddhism is my walking stick. Buddhism teaches that life is about climbing mountains, and that only by doing so can you embrace who you are. It also acknowledges the endless cycle of life and death, and the connection of individuals beyond life and death.

So Danny dies, and Adam is born. When I first see Adam, his eyes wide open, staring at me, I can immediately tell he has the same self-confidence as his dad. We look at each other for a few seconds and then we both cry. For me it is the cry of humanity triumphing over evil. Now I understand that there is something between people who love each other that even death can’t erase.

Maybe therein lies the definition of hope.

For the first time, I call our son by his name, Adam. “We should call him Adam, after the first man,” Danny had said. He wanted to celebrate the many bloodlines that would define our son. From his dad’s side, Adam is one-quarter Iraqi and one-quarter Polish. From me, he has Cuban and Dutch blood. He was born in France, conceived in India; his mother is French, and his dad was American.