Terrorist by John Updike Page B

fall—indeed, I scored five goals this past season, one a penalty shot—and do track in the spring. For spending money, and to help out my mother—the freckle-faced mick, as you call her—"
    "As Tylenol called her."
    "As the two of you evidently call her—I clerk at the Shop-a-Sec from twelve to eighteen hours a week, and this can be 'fun,' observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest. Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed."
    "So strict nothing happens, right? Turn left here, if you're walking me home. You don't have to, you know. We're getting into worse neighborhoods. You don't want to be hassled."
    "I wish to see you home." He goes on, "They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value."
    "Oh, my," Joryleen says. "In whose eyes? I mean, who's doing this valuing?"
    She is leading him, he feels, close to the edge of betraying his beliefs, just in responding to her questions. In class, he observed at the high school, she talked well, so that the teachers became engaged with her, not realizing that she was leading them from the set lessons and wasting classroom time. She has a wicked streak. "In the eyes of God," he tells her, "as revealed by the Prophet: 'Enjoin believing women
    to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity.' That's from the same sura that advises women to cover their ornaments, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not even to stamp their feet so their hidden ankle bracelets can be heard."
    "You think I show too much tit—I can tell by where your eyes go."
    Just hearing the word "tit" from her lips stirs him indecently. He says, staring ahead, "Purity is its own end. As we were discussing, it is both being good and feeling good."
    "What about all them virgins on the other side? What happens to purity when those young-men martyrs get there, all full of spunk?"
    "Their virtue enjoys its reward, while remaining pure, in the context God has created. My teacher at the mosque thinks that the dark-eyed virgins are symbolic of a bliss one cannot imagine without concrete images. It is typical of the sex-obsessed West that it has seized upon that image, and ridicules Islam because of it."
    They continue in the direction she indicated. The neighborhood grows shaggier around them; bushes are untended, houses unpainted, sidewalk squares in places tilted and cracked by tree roots underneath; the little front yards are speckled with litter. The rows of houses lack a few, like teeth knocked out, the gaps fenced in but the thick chain-link fencing cut and twisted under the invisible pressure of people who hate fences, who want to get somewhere quick. The row houses in some blocks become a single long building with many peeling doors and four-step stairs, old and wooden or new and concrete. Overhead, high twigs interlace with electric wires carrying electricity across the city, a sagging harp that dips through gaps lopped by tree crews. Spat-
    ters of blossom and unfolding leaf, in color between yellow and green, appear luminous against the cloud-blotched sky.
    "Ahmad," Joryleen says with a sudden exasperation, "suppose none of it is true—suppose you die and there's nothing there, nothing at all? What's the point of all this purity then?"
    "If none of it is true," he tells her, his stomach clenching at the thought, "then the world is too terrible to cherish, and I would not regret leaving it."
    "Man! You are one in a million, no kidding. They must love you to death over at that mosque."
    "There are many like me," he tells her, both stiffly and gently, half rebuking. "Some are"—he does not want to say "black," since