“Stay away then, you’ll probably do more harm than good,” his son said and hung up.
Furious, Abdullereda left the brothel and drove to town. It took two hours to get to the hospital through a driving rain. His way through the city of Kelang was slowed by flooded streets and snarled traffic, which only became worse when he entered Kuala Lumpur. When the wayward husband finally arrived at the maternity ward, angry at what was obviously an over-reaction by his family, he entered in a huff. His son and daughters, three of them, were waiting at the entrance to the ward.
“You’re too late,” his son informed Abdullereda. “The baby, our brother is dead.”
“What on earth do you mean?” he replied, angry and shocked.
“Mother had a miscarriage,” he told his father. “She’s lost a lot of blood. She may die. They won’t know more until tomorrow.”
As he told the news to his father a doctor stepped up, and asked, “You are Mr. Hussein, Safrina’s husband?”
“Yes, yes, what happened?” he stammered, still registering the fact that he’d lost a son and his wife was now battling for her life. “Is it her age? Did she over-exert herself, fall — what happened?”
“No, Safrina’s only thirty-two and she was doing everything right,” the doctor said, and then his eyes grew hard, accusatory. He clutched the pilot’s arm, and his voice dropped to a low, angry whisper. “It is for you that I have questions.”
“Me, what do you mean?” he retorted.
“I have been told by your family, not just your wife, that you have many relationships beyond you’re your marriage. Is that true?”
Abdullereda took the doctor aside, away from his son and daughters. “What of it? What has that to do with anything?”
“How long have you had Syphilis?” the doctor asked sternly.
“A few years — so what?” he sneered.
“You gave it to Safrina and that caused the miscarriage,” the doctor said harshly. “It may cost your wife her life. The miscarriage is a hard process for the body to go through to begin with, much like natural birth, but in this case she hemorrhaged severely. She’d lost a lot of blood by the time we got to her.” He sighed, and finished, “You will have to prepare yourself. Even if she survives she will never again be able to bear children.”
Abdullereda was too stunned to speak.
“So, it was you who did this to her!” Abdulla said from the door, furious, eyes glaring at his father.
“Shut up!” his father told him.
“You pig!” the boy said, using the most terrible way for a Muslim to describe another Muslim. “You pig. You’ve killed our mother!”
“Shut up boy!” the father shouted, but when Abdulla opened his mouth to speak again he struck him, knocking the teenager to the ground. “I said shut up! You will obey me!”
The doctor and the staff got between them and two attendants ushered him out of the ward. Abdulla shouted at his father, “We hate you! You pig! Go away, far away, and don’t you ever come back!”
That was the last time Abdullereda saw his son. When they discharged his wife from the hospital she returned to her parent’s home in Borneo. She took the children with her. As much as Abdullereda believed that this was wrong, that a Muslim woman had no right to take his children and leave, no right to make a decision on her own, he could not stop her. Safrina’s father came to collect the family personally and Abdullereda could not face his father-in-law.
It wasn’t only that. Abdullereda, even in his most angry moments, had no idea how he would face his son.
The next few months deteriorated into long bouts of drinking and angry rants at the world. Abdullereda blamed his debauchery on others, on the materialistic poison of the West. On the sluts in China. On the Jews. On everyone but himself.
The precipitous decline of his life crept into his performance at work. Hussein’s chief pilot summoned him to the office. It wasn’t the first time his supervisor had seen the effects of a broken marriage on his pilots. The men spent a great deal of time away from their families and there were always temptations, especially for the older men.
“Take a month off Hussein,” he told Abdullereda in a communicative but serious tone of voice. “You have vacation coming up; I’ll move it so that no one will ask any questions.” When Abdullereda began to protest the chief pilot held up his hand and stopped him. “Don’t start. Take some time off; solve this before it becomes a problem I can no longer deal with. You should know, that after the Asiana crash in San Francisco the company has made it clear that our pilots are to be held to higher standards.”
The supervisor sighed, looking at his desk as if troubled. He let Hussein know, “There is even talk of hiring Western pilots directly into the captain’s seats, outside our seniority list, right over you; over all of our senior captains. Don’t assume your job is safe. Take care of this now before it consumes you! Go to your mosque, Hussein. Talk to your imam. Put your life back together.”
In desperation, Hussein took his chief pilot’s advice. He drove straight to his mosque and saw one of the imams. The prospect of losing his job was terrifying. If he were fired from the country’s national airline no one would touch him; his piloting skills would be worth nothing. With such a black mark on his name he’d be finished.
That didn’t release the fury of his self-induced crisis. Hussein raged to his imam about the Western pilots who would be recruited to replace him. These wouldn’t be the best pilots in the West, but those who weren’t flying for the major airlines in the United States or Europe. Hussein knew Western pilots, even the castoffs, were considered superior to Hussein and his peers. It was humiliating!
The imam listened patiently, finally telling Abdullereda, “This is a sign of the times. It is the inevitable encroachment of the West on our civilization. This is just the beginning Abdullereda.”
“How do we stop it?” he asked automatically, even more furious.
The imam smiled and introduced him to other men, men with similar experiences. Men who were underappreciated, victims of forces they could not control, victims of the West and the decadence of the outside world. “You see how the West targets you first. You are the best and the brightest. If you fall what is to become of the rest?”
Other imams chimed in with variations of the same message: they were not recognized for the great people they were and it was not their fault. It was the West.
For weeks he went to his mosque and prayed, but even though Abdullereda made friends with these men all he wanted was to get his life back; especially his son. He never realized how important that world was until he lost it. He’d do anything to get it back.
When he found that Abdulla left Malaysia he was devastated. Safrina would not tell him where Abdulla was or how to get a hold of him. In one month Abdullereda lost his unborn son and his namesake. The prospect of dying and not having a son to speak well of his father, to carry on his line, was sobering; it put everything in perspective — but how to salvage his life and legacy?
“Perhaps we can help,” said his new friends at the mosque.
“Really?” pleaded Abdullereda. “What can you do?”
“We can find out where your son is and what may cajole him to reconcile with you as is proper,” they told him. He readily accepted any help they could give him.
A few days later Abdullereda’s friends brought a man with them to their daily gathering for talk and tea. The man was an Arab and horribly disfigured, but his friends treated him with great reverence.
“This is Khallida, he has sacrificed a great deal for the cause. He has been fighting America and the West since before Nine-Eleven.” Khallida held out his right hand. Abdullereda took it, shaking the cold, clammy, limp thing. It reminded him of a hand cut off by the Sharia swordsman and then sown back on for looks only; it was still dead. Yet Khallida’s eyes burned.