City of Strangers by John Shannon Page A

mouth did not fit their idea of a holy man’s eating habits, but they had only Hollywood films and their own conjectures to match against this reality. And Arad was definitely real.
    “You want eat?” the sheik said. This time they could just make out the words in his guttural croak. The good eye came up to pierce their souls while the other one seemed to be contemplating infinity.
    “A little, thank you.”
    “Give them eat.” He waved a hand flamboyantly, his robe flapping like a bird’s limp wing. Hassan brought the boys plates. Actually, they wanted to ask him if they could leave Iman to recover at this small Mar Vista religious center while they went back to their own place, a furnished apartment rented under a false name in Burbank. Unfortunately, Fariborz was having trouble working up his courage to ask anything.
    The sheik said something else that failed to compute. Pejman reached out for a piece of the flatbread.
    “Other hand!” the sheik roared. “What wrong with you? Don’ your mothers teach you nothing here? That is the hand you use to clean up your ass!”
    Pejman snatched back his left hand, seeming suddenly to shrink into himself.
    Our mothers teach us to wash our hands, Fariborz thought—but it was not something he was going to say aloud.
    “This country is a despair. I lack the strength to confront it every time.” Then the sheik seemed to come to some more clement decision in himself. “I conclude you will become good students soon enough. As good as born Arabs.”
    Fariborz said nothing. Better than born Arabs, he thought. They knew that Persia had a rich civilization that went back thousands of years before Islam and had been the wellspring of a great deal of Islamic scholarship and culture for much of the last thousand. Islamic mysticism and Sufism had developed there, astronomy, Ibn Sina, the prince of physicians, and generations of great poets like Omar Khayyam and the greatest of all, Rumi. The men in the sheik’s entourage by and large represented the outposts and backwaters of Islam. But he tried not to hold it against them. He reminded himself that a fool could come from a big city, and a saint might be born in a village.
    As if reading their thoughts, the sheik used the flat of his hand, palm up, to indicate his guards. “They are from Afghanistan, the home of Tamerlane.” He poked the same hand at himself. “I am from Sudan, birthplace of the Mahdi.” Then he indicated Hassan. “He is from Morocco, the great west of Islam. Yet we are all one. The Umma reveals that the group bond does not depend upon blood, but upon faith in Him.”
    “May the blessing and peace of God be upon Him,” the boys said in unison.
    Fariborz tried the overcooked and smoky food, but did not like it very much. A voice kept speaking inside him. Time to reconsider, it said. But reconsider what? At every stage they had been driven by logic and devotion. They were young and inexperienced, dropped from somewhere far above into company they could not quite assimilate, and could not seem to assimilate them. He had been living with this heightened disquiet for quite some time now.
    For years Fariborz had felt out of place and alone. He was an impostor, constantly having to adjust his disguise amongst Americans so he wouldn’t be found out. But his disguise would no longer work here. He had built himself up as a devout Moslem among Christians and Jews, as a Persian among Americans, and these ploys had served as a cloak of protection for very personal fears he sensed within himself. But here they were all Moslems, and he no longer had a cloak against the deeper loneliness.
    The sheik chewed noisily, then extracted a chunk of gristle from his mouth and set it on a nearby plate. Fariborz took a deep breath. “We seek permission, sir, to leave our wounded friend with you and return to our own base.”
    He could feel the tension in Pejman. Sheik Arad brought his good eye around to them. The room was tense with