by Salar Abdoh
Malek dialed America.
James McGreivy spoke loudly into his phone, “Boyo, I’m in DC getting ready to talk the ears off a couple of congressmen later today. The bastards pretend they like to listen when it comes to veterans’ affairs. But I’ll get a million bucks out of them, or my name’s not my name.”
“How’s your family?”
James paused. “Fine. And you?”
Malek heard a car roll up beside him. It was Fani, with whom he locked eyes while the phone was still to his ear. He said to James, “Everything’s good with me. I’ll catch you in California. You’ll get to see my mother.” To Fani he said, “Where are your men?”
The other man stared, saying nothing.
“I need a bank check from you.”
“A check?” Fani stuck his head out the window. “Want to get in? Want to go for a ride?”
“No, I don’t need a ride.” They were parallel to the highway and the whoosh of cars and trucks gave a false sense that there might actually be a breeze in Tehran’s dead air. “What I need is a check. As in money. A check with Sina Vafa’s mother’s name written on it. I haven’t asked you for much. I’m asking you now.”
“Do you realize I have saved you from being killed, Mr. Malek?”
“Not really. You are protecting yourself. Keeping all your options open. Which is wise. You are a wise man, Fani. And soon to be a very rich wise man. So a nice sum on a check with a few zeros to the right of the first digit will not break you. I ask you this as a favor.”
“You are selling your friend for the sake of a check to his mother?”
“If you like to believe that, it’s all right with me.”
“Get inside the car.”
Malek did.
Fani turned to him. “How do you know my check will be good? Bad checks are as common as furniture in our country.”
It was remarkable. He could already tell that Fani was going to hand over the check he was asking for. In the cockamamie universe of Fani and others like him, a guy like Malek who had written a book about the Middle East had to have “deep” connections in America. This was how these people thought, Malek reflected, in terms of everything having some operational value, some sequence, some link between one man to another who could save the hide of a third man someday, somewhere. And this gave Malek the courage to sit in this car and say what he had to say.
“If your check is no good, Fani, I’ll know. And one day, when we Americans arrive, I will, well, forget to put in that good word for you.”
Fani smiled and looked away. He wasn’t angry. He was nothing. “Malek, you talk tough for a man who could have his testicles cut right here and now.”
“Come on, Fani. You can afford a few zeros on a check. It’s for a good cause.”
“You are far too dreamy, my brother.”
“Yes, lately I’ve come to believe that myself.”
“So why not try to save your friend also, instead of just asking for a little more money for his mother?”
“Because a smart man knows who he can push, and when, and how far. And I think I’ve pushed you as much as I can today.”
He saw Fani reaching into his inside coat pocket and for an instant fear gripped him. But the other man merely brought out a checkbook and asked, “Just how many zeros do you want?”
Malek exhaled deeply. “As many as you can spare today, brother Fani.”
OSTRÓW MAZOWIECKA
A couple of Polish truckers were watching winter sports on the television. Soaad had gone upstairs to their hotel room to lie down. Outside, another gorgeous late-spring twilight slowly fell over Central Europe.
They’d made a voyage of it. In Krakow he’d watched her stand in the middle of the town’s jaw-dropping central square one evening and stare like a little child. But the next day she had refused to go on a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp with him. It had irritated him. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted? Wasn’t that why they were here . . . for Anna? They’d been sitting for breakfast at an outdoor restaurant in the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. The restaurants all advertized klezmer music at night and on the sidewalk people sold magnets with Stars of David on them.
“So where are the Jews?” she’d asked.
“Not here.”
“This is all make-believe then? Like that place I saw once on TV, Madame Tussauds?”
“You could say that. The lucky ones like Anna, they got away. The others . . . well, you already know. Auschwitz is about an hour-and-a-half drive from here. You’ll see it tomorrow.”
She had looked him square in the eyes then. An expression of defiance clouding her face for the very first time. “I’m not coming.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to. I cannot.”
But Malek hadn’t insisted. It had been a good nine months. He might even say a great nine months. Soaad had taken to America right away. New York especially. As if she’d always belonged there and was just late arriving. Soon she was going on long walks in the city by herself and her already functional English gave her a measure of independence that he had not expected would arrive so soon. During winter break he had taken her to California. To Fresno, where they’d visited the old man’s grave. She’d done her usual thing, laid the flowers, didn’t cry, and scrubbed and cleaned the stone. She’d asked him if they had Muslim cemeteries in Fresno and he told her he didn’t know and didn’t care.
Throughout that year he’d return home at nights from teaching to find her watching the same Persian channels everyone watched in Tehran. She only watched news though. The demonstrations back home were over. A lot of people had been jailed or disappeared. And Clara Vikingstad’s man was appealing his high-profile case to no purpose. Soaad didn’t ask him about Sina. She didn’t ask him much of anything that had to do with Tehran. It was as if they had shed a skin together and she didn’t want them to revisit that certain geography unless it was through the television. Then, as soon as he got home, she would turn off the TV and make conversation about New York while preparing his dinner. She’d tell him about the places she’d gone that day, the people she’d seen. Sometimes she was breathless with her ideas. He had suggested to her she might study for a certificate to teach yoga here and she had beamed at the thought.
She was happy.
They were both happy.
Only two episodes had brought the two of them back to Tehran. One was that visit to his father’s grave in Fresno, which she had insisted on. The second was coming here, to Poland. To Poland so that she could see where Anna was born. It was an odd request. But he’d thought, why not? He’d show her the world. They’d start with Poland. It was as good a place to start as any. Maybe he’d show her Rome afterward, or Paris. All the places she’d dreamed about her whole life. He wanted to do things for her. He liked having a mother. He liked having her there when he returned from work at night. Was this strange? One evening he’d gone out for drinks with a woman who taught in the Spanish department. He came home at three in the morning feeling guilty, thinking she’d be waiting up for him and upset. But she’d been sleeping peacefully in her bed and the next morning she didn’t even bring up the subject.
So it was all really just in his own head. Everything. She had left the Islamic Republic, at last. She was grateful to him for that. And she didn’t ask too many questions.
And at the college, they left him in peace now. They too were grateful. Grateful that James McGreivy was gone. In truth, James was too far gone for Malek. The regular calls had stopped a few months back. In early January, when Malek had left a message saying they would be visiting California and wanted to see them in Oakland, there had been no response. It would have been a couple hours’ drive from Fresno, but James’s determined silence had kept Malek away and he’d said nothing to Soaad about it.
Which made it all the more odd that James would suddenly want to see him. They had been in Warsaw, with plans to travel in a couple of days to a small town neither of them could pronounce qu
ite right, Ostrów Mazowiecka, Anna’s birthplace.
“Where are you now?” James asked on the phone.
“With my mother. In Poland.”
“Poland?”
“At this very moment I’m showing her a monument to the battle of Monte Cassino. Why haven’t you answered my calls, James?”
“I’m calling you now. I want to see you.”
“I’ll be back in New York soon.”
“No. I want to see you now.”
“Then you’ll have to fly to Poland.”
“All right, I will.”
So Malek waited. James had already called to say he’d landed at the Warsaw airport and when Malek told him they were in Ostrów, he’d said he could be there by late afternoon.
But this was a day that finally exhausted Soaad. The guidebooks said nothing about this place. Ostrów was just another no-face town where almost every single Jew had been killed seventy years ago. Like a good son, Malek had diligently researched the place, so when Soaad asked to see the town’s Jewish cemetery he found himself guiding them and their hired driver to a place that was nothing more than a massive asphalted-over area where they held a livestock market on weekends. Malek had no idea what his mother had expected to find here. But after all the cemeteries they’d been to together, seeing something that was not even a ruin, not even a desecration, but a complete absence, a farce, a nonexistence—a livestock market, for the love of God—was a real punch to the gut. And Malek had seen his mother practically wilt under the knowledge of what this town had done to Anna’s people. He had never seen her like this. Even in their worst moments in Tehran she had always remained a trooper. But now something gave and Malek thought if he didn’t take her back to their hotel right away he’d have to find her a hospital.
The hotel waitress came around with four shots of vodka and two beers on a tray. She smiled questioningly at Malek and laid all the drinks on the table. Malek turned around to find James downing a shot at the bar before coming to the table.
He looked as healthy as ever and had shaved off his hair. He could have been a Polish policeman.
Malek downed two of the shots without getting up to say hi. James downed the other two and immediately started on his beer even before sitting down.
“What?” Malek asked.
James held four fingers to the waitress. Four more shots.
“Why the rush to come to . . . Ostrów Mazowiecka?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m giving my mother a tour of the places in Europe with blood on their hands.”
“Then it’s going to be a very long tour.”
Malek said nothing.
“Where’s your mother?”
“She’s upstairs. Resting. We didn’t have such a good day.”
“Blood on their hands . . .” McGreivy murmured.
“Why are you here, James? This is too odd.”
“Who was it we killed in Kirkuk?”
“What?”
“You know what.”
Malek allowed himself to drift. Darkness was taking a long time to come outside. And how inordinately beautiful it was just then. The curlicues of clouds and the lingering pink sky transported him back to that day he had stood with his mother in the south of Tehran laying flowers on Anna’s made-up grave. A year and a half later, here they were, in Anna’s town. And something about the quality of the two twilights, so far apart, was exactly the same. It was as if the hour was giving homage to their lost Anna one last time.
The Polish truckers paid their bill and retired upstairs. The waitress played with the remote until she found some live music on the TV. In a corner of the desolate restaurant an old couple were eating their dessert in silence. This hotel was like a monument to ordinariness. Except that a half-hour drive away at the Treblinka death camp the Nazis had murdered some 850,000 people. When Malek had asked their dapper driver, proud of his mint-condition BMW taxi, if he’d ever been to Treblinka, he’d said no. It had dawned on Malek that the guy didn’t even know what the place was. And didn’t care.
Who did we kill in Kirkuk? He’d asked the very same question of Sina.
Maybe he’d get up early in the morning and go to Treblinka by himself. He’d read in the guidebooks that it wasn’t anything like the awful tourist trap at Auschwitz that he’d ended up visiting alone. Yes, he’d do that. He’d go without Soaad again. His mother had had enough of this place. The Polish people had been gracious and polite and good to them. He wanted her to take that feeling away with her from this trip, and not the unrighteous parking lot where the townsfolk sold their livestock.
“What have you been up to this year?”
James went along with the change of subject. “I’m back and forth to Washington. I may have to move the family back to the East Coast.”
“The family is good?”
“Excellent. And you?”
“Teaching. The college administration is so happy you’re gone that I think I could walk naked to my classes and they wouldn’t care. You cemented my career for me, mate.”
“Then tell me who died instead of your friend in the Kirkuk operation. I’ve come a long way, Rez, to find out. I couldn’t sleep on it anymore.”
Malek now understood that it was a question James McGreivy had wrestled with for at least half a year. At some point the kernel of doubt had popped into his head and then his soldier’s soul wouldn’t leave him alone about it. Yet he had continued with his daily life and taken care of the kids and been good to Candace and hustled those politicians in Washington, and all the time this doubt had festered. Then one day, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he had called Malek and flown on a red-eye flight, all the way to this five-cent town in Central Europe, to confront Malek about it.
It was as good a place as any to do this.
Malek said, “The fellow who got killed in Kirkuk was, I’m told, some bad guy.”
“But it wasn’t your friend.”
“Right. Not him.”
“Why did you do it, Rez?” The voice asking was full of hurt; there was no anger in it though. It had distance from a deed that had been done and finished. It was almost wistful.
Malek looked outside where the lights at the gas station across the street had finally come on. He would have liked James to meet his mother. Maybe that would explain a few things; but maybe it wouldn’t.
“You got pulled into this, didn’t you?
“Yes,” Malek answered quietly. “How did you figure it out?”
“It took me awhile. Then I thought, Reza Malek is not the type of man to give someone away, especially not a friend, not even a friend gone nasty in Iraq. I recalled the number they tried to pull on you at the college. You took a hit for me.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“No one else will ever know. As you say, some other bad guy was taken out in your friend’s place. At the end of the day, the accounting is all the same. One bad guy here, one bad guy there. Who cares, right?”
“Sina Vafa, he wasn’t so bad.”
“You speak of him in past tense.”
“He’s dead.”
James smiled. “Are you sure?”
It had been a long time since Malek had thought about this. Was he sure? “I’m not sure of anything.” After a pause he asked, “Will you turn me in?”
“Turn you in to who? And for what? I got nothing.”
“Thanks.”
“I don’t turn in a friend.”
“Is that some Marine Corps thing?”
“No. It’s James McGreivy. I don’t betray a friend.”
“But I betrayed you.”
“You didn’t. You fell into something. And we were both played. And it’s okay. Worse things have happened in Kirkuk. I know this from first-hand experience.”
“Now what?”
“Maybe you find out if your friend is really dead.”
“Does it make a difference to you if he is?”
James motioned to stand u
p, but remained at the table.
Malek asked again, “Does it make a difference to you?”
“I don’t know. Depends if I know for sure that he’s neutralized now, or if he’s still doing what he was doing in Iraq before all this.”
Neutralized. What did that mean? This was a way of speaking that made everything seem like a diversion.
“I don’t know if he’s neutralized. My hunch is that he is.”
James started at him: “Tell me you’re sure.”
There was a long pause.
James now stood up and the waitress finally came with the stuffed cabbage plate Malek had ordered forty-five minutes ago. It looked homemade; Soaad and Anna would have approved. James waited for her to set the plate down and leave, and then he too began to slowly shuffle away.
Malek called out to James, “Will we be seeing each other again?”
There was that same wistful look from the former captain as he turned around. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s like the war. The balance sheets are in and everyone, more or less, has to feel satisfied about it. Except you and me, Rez. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about that.”
Malek watched James leave through the restaurant window. He’d had a car waiting this whole time to take him back to Warsaw.
* * *
When Malek finally went upstairs two hours later, Soaad was lying in her bed. There was only a dim reading light on the side table, but he could see that her eyes were wide open and she was awake.
She said, “Let’s leave this country first thing in the morning.”
“You think Anna is satisfied we came here?”
“This was never her place.”
“It wasn’t, was it?”
She flicked the light off. He heard her praying. Till now he had thought that besides the few light trappings of her yoga practice, there was not a whole lot of religion in her. Now he heard her quietly whispering the words for the dead. Her voice soft but resolute. Malek closed his eyes, listening in the darkness to the lilting Arabic of his mother, this onetime godless Communist. He noticed she was choosing and skipping from various verses of the second chapter of the holy book, al-Baqarah. It was like a lullaby to his ear and he began to feel heavy with sleep. “Our Lord, burden us not with that which we have no ability to bear. And pardon us; and forgive us; and have mercy upon us. You are our protector.”