by Asa Avdic
I DON’T KNOW what it was that caused her to become interested in me, but it happened almost overnight. She went from barely even saying hello to me to suddenly seeking out my company, initiating short conversations at the coffee machine, and choosing the seat next to mine in the lunchroom. Several times I discovered her looking at me from across the room with an expression of inscrutable concentration, as though she thought she could find some sort of answer just by staring at me for long enough. Soon after I noticed this change, we were placed on the same project. I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic; instead I imagined that she would poke holes in every idea with her endless, critical questions and we would never get anything done. But to my surprise I discovered that she was very easy to work with. The rumors of her extreme competence turned out to be accurate, and what’s more, she was humble and pretty funny. That nervous energy that seemed to crackle around her became much less bothersome when it was put to good use, and she became easier to be around. More and more often, the two of us were the only ones left at work. It was no trouble for me to work overtime, but it was surprising that Anna could do so evening after evening. I knew she was a single parent with a young daughter, but I never asked her who took care of the child in the evenings, and she never brought it up herself. As we sat together and worked, each absorbed in our own task, I often took the opportunity to observe her. Her angular shoulders, her short blond hair with the long bangs that cast her cheeks in shadow, pale and greenish and sharp in the unflattering fluorescent light. Most people can feel it when you look at them, but Anna was unusual in that way; you could stare at her as long as you wanted and she wouldn’t notice. Instead she allowed herself to be completely swallowed up by whatever was on the desk in front of her, and she seemed to be able to work indefinitely without losing concentration. But sometimes she would look up and fire off a smile that seemed to mean, Isn’t this nice, us sitting here and working? And when, for once, I was the one who ended up in conflict with our insipid boss, she took my side with no reservations and no fuss and defended me not only to him but also to our whole group. When I thanked her for having my back, she just shrugged, as if it was no big deal for her. I assumed I had done something to earn her loyalty, but it bothered me a little that I didn’t know exactly what.
ANOTHER THING THAT struck me after spending time with her was that she didn’t appear to be particularly happy. What I had first taken as discontentment seemed to be rather more like sadness. One time I asked about her daughter’s father, and something dark passed over her eyes; she grew evasive and responded curtly that he had never been in the picture. She also seemed to get a certain amount of help from her mom, who, as it happened, was a person most people talked about in whispers because she had been expelled from the party for disloyalty. Sometimes her mom called her at work, and you could tell straightaway from Anna’s voice when it was her on the phone. She would always take the call in another room. When she came back, her lips would be pressed together and it would seldom take more than five minutes before she had a fit and chewed someone out. She often got drunker than everyone else at staff parties, a little tiresome and needy. I wasn’t sure if she had a drinking problem or if she was just having a tough time.
WE STOPPED SPENDING time together after I left the unit. I would see her sometimes, waiting for a train into the city, always wearing jackets that didn’t look warm enough, with her large bags and her blond hair on end, with that whistling wind about her, as if it were always blustery where she stood. But I never announced my presence. Things were a little tense between us after I jumped ship from her planning project, which, to be honest, I never should have gotten involved in discussing from the start. That was a misjudgment on my part. When she took me aside in the corridor to tell me about the project for the first time, my initial thought was that our boss had concocted it to get rid of her. Because it was hopeless. A suicide mission with no budget or reasonable goals. Endless amounts of calculation and soul-crushing paperwork. Anyone who had any professional pride at all would have brushed it off as impossible. Except for one, it turned out, and she was the very person who found it on her plate. As she tried to go into detail about all the problems that might arise, over a cup of coffee down in the staff cafeteria, her hands simultaneously and methodically shredding a paper napkin until only a pile of snowflakes was left on the brown plastic tray before her, her eyes lit up like a five-year-old who has just seen her very first Christmas tree.
“You realize, don’t you, that this is presumably going to go straight to hell?” she said, flashing her broadest smile. Anna’s appearance was strange that way. Sometimes she could look a little rough and ugly, like an old statue of Birger Jarl, but when she was enthusiastic about something she became truly striking. Sitting with her and listening as she planned great exploits was a little like being a kid and playing pretend, when it felt like anything could happen and everything was possible. Her enthusiasm was irresistible, and I didn’t stop her, although I knew even as we sat there talking that the plans she was making for us would never become reality. Once we went our separate ways at the station, with warm farewells at our respective commuter trains, I began to feel uneasy, and later that evening I sent her an e-mail that said what I ought to have said from the start: that I had absolutely no intention of participating in an impossible project that had no resources. Of course, I didn’t word it that directly at all; instead I came up with a reasonable excuse about how I didn’t have enough experience in the matter, which wasn’t true, but of course she couldn’t know that. I assumed this was still less hurtful than telling the truth. In any case, the message must have been received, because she never brought it up with me again, but I noticed that it had still had an effect on her. She seemed to lose interest in me. She still engaged in friendly chatter at the coffee machine, but there were no more big smiles. She began to treat me with a polite distance. Presumably she was disappointed in me for not wanting to participate, and even though I knew I had made the right decision, her changed attitude made me feel uncomfortable. In some ways, it was a relief to get away from her when I was offered the job with the F Block, moved over there, and quit the old unit.
IT TURNED OUT, of course, that I had underestimated her. When she didn’t mention the project again, I assumed she had abandoned it, but that wasn’t the case. Not long after I left the unit, I learned that she had gone forward with it after all, and not only had she succeeded beyond expectations, she had also been given the go-ahead to travel to Kyzyl Kum herself. So just a few months after I settled into my new job, Anna and a small group of experts, clearly handpicked from other units, took off for the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. To the surprise of many, the project turned out to be a huge success. First there were rumblings about it internally, and then those started to trickle out. Suddenly, everyone knew who Anna Francis was and talked about her like they knew her personally, even people who I know had never met her. The more unrest there was in the region, the more Anna’s aid project was discussed, in increasingly admiring terms. A journalist from one of the state news bureaus traveled down to do a lengthy report from the large refugee camp at Kyzyl Kum, where Anna was stationed as a coordinator. They followed her around the camp: she rode in jeeps, helped children, told off the military, handed out medicine. She was filmed from a distance as she, a lone woman, negotiated with a heavily armed guerrilla and filmed close-up as she gave an apple to a poor man. And just as when she asked annoying questions at our meetings, it was hard to say whether she was aware or unaware, whether she was playing a role and giving the journalists what they wanted or if she truly didn’t know how perfectly she fit into their narrative. Her sharp features, blond hair, intense gaze, and peculiar, clueless earnestness made her look like an archangel, a wind-whipped tent city in the background, a scarf over her head so as not to provoke the local military. Half the documentary was made up of sequences in which Anna was staring out across a barren landscape with a grim little wrinkle between
her eyes, as her sloppily wound scarf fluttered in the breeze. A quiet, admiring narrator went on and on about how dangerous it was in Kyzyl Kum, about how splendid the project was, and about Anna. Mostly about Anna. It was a heroic epic, pure and simple. You knew that the party must have loved it.
Suddenly, after that report, Anna Francis was pretty much everywhere. An evening paper included her as a potential choice in a survey called “Women Who Bear Up the Union: Vote for the most inspiring woman of the year,” and quite a few people did vote for her. (Oddly enough, the winner was a princess who had inherited her meaningless title long ago.) I followed the coverage of Anna meticulously. I read everything that was written about her, watched every feature on TV, studied the angles of her face via all sorts of screens, searched her name far too many times. Certainly I was impressed with what she had accomplished, but there was more to it. I found myself hunting for flaws and shortcomings, searching for some sign that she had failed, angered someone, or at least taken a little heat in some opinion piece or editorial. I also discovered that I was spending a lot of time, mostly at night when I couldn’t sleep, on pondering whether it had been right or wrong for me to dismiss her offer to participate. And even though I always ended up deciding that I had made the only reasonable choice, it still didn’t feel great. I had made the right call and she had been wrong, based on all the known parameters, and yet in some strange way she was the one who won.
SOMETHING I’M SURE contributed to my interest in Anna Francis was that my own civil service career had come to a standstill since I left the unit. My new job did come with a more impressive title, a higher salary, and all of that, but my assignments turned out to be administrative, monotonous, rule-bound, and often flat-out boring. What had seemed like a step up, into a fancier room, had in fact been a horizontal move, a little farther down a long gray corridor. When I asked about the more stimulating assignments I had been promised, about increased responsibility and influence, my boss’s eyes slid to the side and she gave a small, neutral smile which I assumed meant she didn’t plan to do anything about it. The sense of having gotten stuck in life affected me to a surprising degree. In the past I had moved on up at a constant speed, receiving new opportunities and offers, within both military and civilian spheres. I had worked hard, and it had paid off. Suddenly this was no longer the case. Dissatisfaction spread through my body. First I started to gain weight, slowly, pound by pound, and in the mirror I could see the sharpness gradually vanishing from my facial features, which seemed to dissolve and become blurrier at the edges. My jawline began to melt into my neck; my neck softened into my shoulders. Without thinking about why this was actually happening, I began to take my car to work more and more often and stay home more often at night. This continued until I realized what was going on. Then I got ahold of myself and started running. Mile after mile, night after night, I wore holes in the pavement in ever greater circles radiating from my home. Lonely nights with loud music in my ears; dark, empty neighborhoods where you came across only the occasional dog owner, teenagers sneaking cigarettes in groups of three at the edge of the woods, and a car or two whose headlights shot a bolt of light into the darkness between the streetlights. The pounds melted away; my contours came back. I started watching what I ate, reading recipes and studying nutrition; I bought healthy food and made weekly menus. I weighed and measured myself in every imaginable way, got a scale that calculated body fat, measured my heart rate and the humidity, made diagrams until I could be confident that I was in better shape than ever, even better than during my years in the military, and it all felt great until I realized that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. No matter how much I ran, I was still stuck in the same spot in my office in my gray corridor. Ever since my military career ended, I had been completely focused on minimizing the risk of doing anything that might demand my personal engagement. I had avoided becoming too deeply involved with neighbors and people at work by keeping my distance; I had avoided having pets or a family or any other commitments that might require my attention when I didn’t feel like giving it. I earned enough money to be able to pay a little extra (under the table) for cleaning services and fresh fruit and ready-made food, my own generator that would kick in when the power went out, and, every now and then, liquor imported from the West. As comfortable as possible, as few potential areas of conflict as possible. I was independent, uncommitted; there were no connections or demands to keep me from anything. I could work as late and as much as I wanted to, or spend an entire weekend on my hobbies, and no one would complain. I had always thought this was an ideal way to live life, but suddenly it appeared that it wasn’t enough. It felt like someone had tricked me, but I didn’t know who it could be.
THAT WAS WHEN the RAN project came calling. Even during the first conversation (with a snippy secretary with an expensive-sounding voice) it seemed to be pressing. Like a call I had been waiting for without knowing it. When Anna offered me a spot on her team I had refused; now I was witnessing her triumph from the boring sidelines and I was bound and determined not to make the same mistake again, should a new team come recruiting. So we set a time, and a few days later I stepped into the foyer of one of the city’s few five-star restaurants. I was wearing my most expensive imported suit, which I hoped would make me look sufficiently respectable. The secretary received me in a private room at the restaurant, and he ordered for us both without even asking what I wanted to eat.
“Okay,” said the secretary, “so you’re interested.”
This statement confused me, since I hardly had any idea what it was all about.
“Oh, absolutely. But of course I’m hoping to learn a little more during this meeting.”
The secretary made a face that suggested he found this rather unnecessary, but then he took a breath and started talking.
“As I’m sure you understood on the phone, this is a one-time assignment. You will take part in a very sensitive recruitment process as an observer. I really can’t say much more than that until you’ve agreed. This assignment will take place under great secrecy, in a remote place, in a closed group. It will involve hidden agents, and in some circumstances the situation will be . . . shall we say, strained? We want you there as a stabilizing factor, someone who can be of aid and support during critical phases of the operation, but also as someone who can intervene should the situation change. I have read your documents and I have full insight into your background in the military. We value your competence. It will be of use to you, and you will be of use to us.”
I felt confused. I had expected an offer of a position in the Secretariat, maybe within the secret and operative arms of that enterprise. Instead, this vague one-time assignment was on the table. This was not at all what I had been hoping for.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand what it is I’m going to do. What is this all about?”
The secretary took out an envelope and handed it to me. I looked at him curiously, and he nodded at the envelope.
“Open it.”
I opened the envelope and removed a bundle of paper, by all appearances a personal dossier, and when I turned the bundle over, a familiar face stared back at me from a copy of a passport that was fastened at the top left-hand corner. It was Anna Francis.
ANNA
HENRY MUST HAVE read my expression of surprise there on the slope very rapidly, because when our eyes met he shook his head, the tiniest motion, yet still crystal clear. Don’t let on that you know me. And as if to forestall any misunderstanding on my part, he stepped right up to me and introduced himself using his first and last name, as if we had never met before. I followed his lead, slightly paralyzed. My first impulse was to feel grateful. For reasons I couldn’t put into words, it would have felt like exposing myself to the Chairman and the secretary if we’d made it clear that we already knew each other. But then I realized that, in all likelihood, they knew that we knew each other, since we had worked together in the past, and in their
eyes our current actions must seem extremely odd. And then an even more nerve-wracking thought struck me. If they know that we know each other, and asked him to hide that fact—then what is he doing here?
IN THE HALLWAY, the secretary handed out keys to our rooms. Mine was at the end of the second-floor hallway, and Katja’s was next door. In my room was the generic bag I had been asked to pack for the sake of appearances, so that the stuff I left behind wouldn’t arouse suspicion. My real bag, which mostly contained clothes and undergarments, was on the Strategic Level. I left my door cracked in case I might hear the others. The man who looked like a business executive had the room across from mine, and when the secretary entered his room to collect phones, computers, and anything else that could be used to make contact with the rest of the world, I heard him complaining loudly about the standard of his quarters. The secretary apologized meekly, in a tone completely different from the one he used to talk to me, for both the lacking standards and the inconvenience of being forced to give up one’s personal valuables, and then he came across to my room. I handed over my normal, private phone.