While his mouth hung open in an elongated O, she laughed in his face. In what language did she laugh? Filled with confusion and rage, Eyad could feel his hands tingle with the desire to strangle her, and he wished he were taller and stronger.
Instead, he turned away from her so quickly he spun out of one of his sandals. Where could he go but toward the mosque? While he crossed the pavement, he could feel her eyes scorning his straight back, his slight stature, and the limp in his gait caused by having to walk with one bare foot and one shod.
“Oedipus,” she shrieked after him, braying her knowledge like a donkey. So she had studied ancient Greek literature. So had he. The prophecy was that a man wearing only one sandal would kill his father and marry his mother. Let it be, Eyad bin Bagen thought in his fury: I will kill the religion of my father and mother, as though the idea were a translation of Sophocles’ Greek.
Eyad stalked onto the porch of the mosque, removed the remaining sandal, entered the holy place, and knelt toward Mecca, though he had no prayer rug. He banged his forehead directly against the floor until he began to leave a stamp on the stone with his blood.
“Comrade,” the very tall young man next to him whispered. He had risen and was holding out his own rug to Eyad bin Bagen. And he was smiling: no teeth showing, just a simple curve of lips below friendly dark eyes. To Eyad’s surprise, the towering young man turned and left.
For a few moments Eyad continued his devotion. Then he realized he wanted more than anything to see the softness in his brother comrade’s eyes. When he arose and returned to the porch, the other young man was waiting for him, holding both of Eyad’s sandals in his hand. “I have seen you at university,” he said. “You are the number one physics student.”
“I’m changing to mathematics,” Eyad answered.
“Why?”
“It’s a purer world. It has no reference to physical realities.”
“I think this is the first time you are coming to the mosque? You are an Arab, but you have worshipped with the Greeks.”
“The Muslims do not pretend that God is man, or that God was born of a human woman.”
“There is no God but God,” the student replied, and smiled. Eyad focused again on the sweet curve of his friend’s smile spreading across his face and recalled that the tall student was majoring in English. “Romi is my name,” he said.
The two remained friends for thirty years. While Eyad admired Romi’s forgiving nature and his goodwill toward all people, Eyad did not share his friend’s temperament. Romi married, and his wife bore seven children. He became a beloved teacher of high school English and a man with many friends, the second dearest of whom was Eyad.
In mid-September of 2001, Eyad made a pilgrimage to Mecca and took Romi’s next-to-oldest son with him during a time when checkpoints had made it so difficult for students and faculty to reach the university that many courses were suspended, including the course in nonlinear algebra that Eyad taught. Eyad had not married, but he had become a highly regarded professor in mathematics, though he was considering resigning so that he might spend all his time with the Holy Book. He told Romi that a renowned English mathematician, Isaac Newton, had regarded his greatest work to be a commentary on the book of Daniel.
One day, coming out of a date shop, Eyad saw the woman, his classmate, who had laughed at him for believing that the mother of Lord Jesus had ascended directly to heaven. Of course the scoffer had grown older, too; he had heard years ago that she had married a Persian and lived in Isfahan, but here she was, entering the date store in Ramallah, wearing loose slacks and a green tunic, her hair uncovered. Quickly Eyad drew out the blade he always kept at hand and cut a smile on her cheek.
“Now I have given you a second mouth,” he said quickly in a low voice. “Make it smile, if you can. Laugh long.”
Eyad ran without limping into the crowd, and no one knew him from any other man. No drop of blood had spotted his robe, and he had dropped the razor, its mission complete.
“Life is a closed circle,” he told his friend Romi that night at dinner. His friend said nothing, but nodded. Romi