Arabia.’ It has a ring.”
“Fuck you.”
“No, seriously,” I said, laughing, raising up on my elbows. “Did you really believe in all that?”
“All what?”
“You know. Allah and Muhammad. ‘There is no God but God’—?”
“No,” he said, a bit angrily, “my Islam was a political thing.”
“What, you mean like the shoe bomber?”
He snorted with laughter. “Fuck, no. Besides, Islam doesn’t teach violence.”
“Then what?”
He came up off the merry-go-round, alert gaze: “What do you mean, what? What are you trying to say?”
“Back off! I’m asking a question.”
“Which is—?”
“If you converted to it and all, then what did you believe?”
He fell back and chortled as if I’d let him off the hook. “Believe? Ha! I don’t believe in anything.”
“What? You mean now?”
“I mean never. Well—the Virgin Mary, a little. But Allah and God…? not so much.”
“Then why the hell did you want to be Muslim?”
“Because—” he held out his hands, as he did sometimes when he was at a loss—“such wonderful people, they were all so friendly to me!”
“That’s a start.”
“Well, it was, really. They gave me an Arabic name—Badr al-Dine. Badr is moon, it means something like moon of faithfulness, but they said, ‘Boris, you are badr because you light everywhere, being Muslim now, lighting the world with your religion, you shine wherever you go.’ I loved it, being Badr. Also, the mosque was brilliant. Falling-down palace—stars shining through at night—birds in the roof. An old Javanese man taught us the Koran. And they fed me too, and were kind, and made sure I was clean and had clean clothes. Sometimes I fell asleep on my prayer rug. And at salah, near dawn, when the birds woke up, always the sound of wings beating!”
Though his Australo-Ukrainian accent was certainly very odd, he was almost as fluent in English as I was; and considering what a short time he’d lived in America he was reasonably conversant in amerikanskii ways. He was always poring through his torn-up pocket dictionary (his name scrawled in Cyrillic on the front, with the English carefully lettered beneath: BORYS VOLODYMYROVYCH PAVLIKOVSKY) and I was always finding old 7-Eleven napkins and bits of scratch paper with lists of words and terms he’d made:
bridle and domesticate
celerity
trattoria
wise guy = Kpymo aaH
propinquity
Dereliction of duty.
When his dictionary failed him, he consulted me. “What is Sophomore?” he asked me, scanning the bulletin board in the halls at school. “Home Ec? Poly Sci?” (pronounced, by him, as “politzei”). He had never heard of most of the food in the cafeteria lunch: fajitas, falafel, turkey tetrazzini. Though he knew a lot about movies and music, he was decades behind the times; he didn’t have a clue about sports or games or television, and—apart from a few big European brands like Mercedes and BMW—couldn’t tell one car from another. American money confused him, and sometimes too American geography: in what province was California located? Could I tell him which city was the capital of New England?
But he was used to being on his own. Cheerfully he got himself up for school, hitched his own rides, signed his own report cards, shoplifted his own food and school supplies. Once every week or so we walked miles out of our way in the suffocating heat, shaded beneath umbrellas like Indonesian tribesmen, to catch the poky local bus called the CAT, which as far as I could tell no one rode out our way except drunks, people too poor to have a car, and kids. It ran infrequently, and if we missed it we had to stand around for a while waiting for the next bus, but among its stops was a shopping plaza with a chilly, gleaming, understaffed supermarket where Boris stole steaks for us, butter, boxes of tea, cucumbers (a great delicacy for him), packages of bacon—even cough syrup once, when I had a cold—slipping them in the cutaway lining of his ugly gray raincoat (a man’s coat, much too big for him, with drooping shoulders and a grim Eastern Bloc look about it, a suggestion of food rationing and Soviet-era factories, industrial complexes in Lviv or Odessa). As he wandered around I stood lookout at the head of the aisle, so shaky with nerves I sometimes worried I would black out—but soon I was filling my own pockets with apples and chocolate (other favored food items of Boris’s) before walking up brazenly to the counter to buy bread and milk and other items too big to steal.
Back in New York, when I was eleven or so, my mother had