City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  “Why? Is your mom sick, too?”

  “Never mind.” I quickly ended the conversation. “I don’t feel well, that’s all.”

  A few days later, my mother dropped me off at Lizzy’s house. I hadn’t wanted to go, but she had answered the telephone when Lizzy called to ask me over, and because I always wanted to go, she told Lizzy she would drive me. I couldn’t refuse the invitation and make my mother suspicious.

  I noticed things about Lizzy’s house that I hadn’t noticed before. It smelled like the plastic covering in the white Buick. It sounded like humming air conditioners permanently set on fan mode. Lizzy’s twin brothers’ finger paintings on the wall looked like posters that made the house seem less rather than more personal, and the newly framed black-and-white photographs of central New York might as well have been pulled from a calendar. When Anne Simon said, “Happy to see you, honey,” I felt as if we were trapped in a movie.

  Lizzy must have sensed I was distracted and immediately engaged me in her new crochet project.

  “I don’t want to knit like my mom.” She held up matching purple finger puppets and told me, “Crocheting isn’t so bad.”

  “Try it,” she said, almost stabbing herself with the curved end of the needle as she began her instructions. After an hour, our legs were tangled in unspooled wool, and I wasn’t quite as obsessed by the image of Anne Simon behind the wheel of the Buick.

  Soon Lizzy was telling me about great blizzards in her hometown of Cazenovia that left behind snowdrifts tall enough to bury stop signs. She pointed to a black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall and told me it was the old barn her grandparents had spent ten years renovating as their home. It sat on the banks of Cazenovia Lake, close to Lehla’s university, with farmland stretching over lazy slopes in all directions, as far as you could see. Lizzy described the barn’s rounded roof, ceiling beams in the kitchen and dining room, and the second-story walkway that circled the open space in the middle of the house.

  “There’s a hole in the middle of the house?” I asked, and Lizzy giggled, “Yup.”

  “Aren’t beams supposed to be hidden?” I said, without saying like houses here.

  “Grandpa says the exposed wood connects him to the land.”

  At first, I tried to picture the barn, but even if Sadiq’s settlement papers hadn’t been vying for my attention, I wouldn’t have been able to manage. In my mind, all grandparents’ houses looked like my grandfather’s Five Queen’s Road in Lahore. All I could do was apply my memory of his house to the image of a green meadow near a lake. The contrast of Five Queen’s Road, brimming with flying cockroaches, large black ants, and the noises of bicycle vendors, set against the placid background Lizzy described didn’t leave much room for comparison. As a rule, I tried not to be envious of all she had (prime rib, chocolate chip cookies, endless air-conditioning), but I wasn’t always successful. My grandfather had finally moved into a new, clean house my father had built for him in Lahore, and although I’d yet to see it finished, I knew I’d prefer Lizzy’s grandparents’ renovated barn to his nondescript box.

  It was a Friday afternoon, and like Sadiq, the Simons’ servants were off duty. We ventured into the kitchen, where Anne Simon opened a floor-to-ceiling cupboard lined with bags of Hershey’s Kisses, tubes of Pringles, boxes of leftover Valentine’s Day chocolates, canisters of what looked like liquid cheese, and many other items I did not recognize.

  “Help yourself, honey,” she said, inviting me to make a selection from shelves of goods never to be found in a Pakistani store.

  “What are these?” I asked, pointing to large, brightly colored plastic bottles on the floor.

  “Detergent,” she answered, and I pictured the white bags of powder my mother bought at the bazaar for our washing machine.

  I knew Anne Simon was just back from her daily walk, but I asked her, “Did you just get back from a drive?” The only reason I asked was out of loyalty to Sadiq. The question required me to picture her in the white Buick and forced me to remember Hanif. That way, the injustice of what she’d done stayed vivid.

  “Oh, no,” she answered. “I’m just back from my walk. The city really is beautiful.”

  She wore two sweaters underneath a pashmina shawl, which was casually draped around her shoulders. I wondered how the guilt over what she’d done hadn’t managed to affect her appearance. In fact, her face seemed fuller and her hair thicker. Regardless, Anne Simon was what she’d called Lizzy and me: gorgeous. But she was gorgeous in a blonde-and-blue-eyed-Glamour-magazine kind of way, which I could never be with my dark eyes and hair.

  “Aren’t you hot?” I couldn’t help asking. Lizzy and I were both wearing embroidered kurtas that Mr. Simon had brought us the last time he was in Kabul, and our sleeves were rolled up as far as they would go.

  “Honestly? I was never cold until I moved here,” Anne Simon answered.

  “That’s not true, Mom. Did you forget about the snow already?” Lizzy said. She was emptying a bag of pretzels into a large bowl.

  “My mother says the exact same thing! She says it’s the size of the houses and the large windows that make them so difficult to heat,” I said.

  It was early evening when my mother came to get me. The streetlights hadn’t yet been lit, but in the growing twilight, I could still make out the vague shape of a turbaned man crossing Anne Simon’s street. I studied him as my mother turned onto Embassy Road, and his face came into view: It was Sadiq. My skin tingled and my ears rang like they did when I was afraid, but my mother continued to drive calmly, either not having seen Sadiq or pretending not to.

  What was he doing there? I thought I knew his Friday routine. Shouldn’t he have been at the mosque or listening to a cricket match? Lying on his charpai thinking of his son? Expecting him to be at the mosque or holding a radio or lying on a charpai was easier than acknowledging what was happening. Sadiq had been plucking the hair from his face and maybe from his head, as well. He was gradually discarding parts of himself. Maybe one day we wouldn’t even recognize him.

  In my panic, I could only see one explanation for Sadiq’s presence. He, like me, knew Anne Simon had killed Hanif. That he might have known all along no longer seemed strange. He’d seen the white Buick swerve toward the edge of the road. Although it had been dark, Sadiq wouldn’t have required any details about Anne Simon’s appearance. Hair color, skin color, accent, clothing were all beside the point. The Simons drove the only white Buick in Islamabad, and disregarding the license plate, this fact alone would have made Anne Simon easy to identify. She had just finished her walk. She always went on her Friday walks at the same time. There could be no doubt. Sadiq had to have been waiting for her.

  A few minutes later, our car passed the intersection where Hanif had died, the identifying street name painted on the blue background of a typical Islamabad knee-high concrete street sign. Could Sadiq hurt Anne Simon? I tried to picture him approaching her with a cricket bat, calling her a murderer, wishing her dead, but I couldn’t imagine it. All I could imagine were his haunted eyes following her down the street. Suddenly the burden of knowing what I should not have became too much to bear.

  “You know what? There are rumors in school about Lizzy’s mother,” I said, although there weren’t.

  “Yes?” my mother asked blandly.

  “They say she was in a hit-and-run accident and killed someone. She was driving home late one night and went off the road and hit a child.”

  The driver racing toward us had his high beams on, and my mother flicked hers in response.

  “You think it could be true?” When she didn’t answer me, I leaped to the heart of the matter. “Do you think Anne Simon could have been the one to kill Hanif?”

  I could tell my mother was carefully weighing what to say, which was unusual because she generally said whatever thought came first.

  “I suppose . . . it could be true,” she finally replied and didn’t speak again until we were home.

  Later, as
she put the kettle on to boil and absentmindedly rinsed a teapot with hot water, my mother asked, “Did you girls have fun this afternoon?”

  “What?” I asked, even though my mother always objected to this American monosyllabic response.

  My mother pulled a chair from the table and faced me.

  “Yes. In answer to your earlier question, in fact, I do know. The driver was Lizzy’s mother.”

  Although I already knew this, spoken aloud the truth had terrifying substance.

  “Anne Simon,” I whispered.

  The teapot spout sent wisps of steam in vague curls above the table, and I put my hand over my mug so my mother couldn’t pour my tea. She said that when she discovered the driver was Anne Simon, she couldn’t tell me. “She’s the mother of your closest friend. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of you. It was her mother who was driving the car, not Lizzy. It was Sadiq’s son who was killed, not Amir. God forbid. What happened has nothing to do with you girls.”

  I had the impression that my mother was intent on trying to explain Anne Simon’s actions to herself as much as to me. “It was late. She was alone in the car. She was new to Islamabad.” As if she’d rehearsed an explanation, my mother speculated that Anne Simon had been afraid, as any woman would be at that time of night on a dark road, alone with two strange men, one who was the father of the child she’d just killed. My mother pointed out that Anne Simon’s blonde hair would always have drawn attention in Pakistan, even on a dark night. In a few months in Islamabad, Anne Simon’s brilliant blue eyes and blonde hair would have garnered the usual catcalls from men at the bazaars. “Don’t forget,” my mother added, “she’s never been outside America before.” In Pakistan, everything—the men, the food, the heat, the smells, the sounds—would all be new to her. Perhaps Sadiq and Yunis had screamed at her, pounded their fists on her car, or tried to open the door and drag her out. What had happened was an accident, my mother insisted. Anne Simon had not meant to kill Hanif. When she saw him lying crushed at the side of the road, it must have taken all her strength not to get out of the car and rush to help the boy any way she could. “Remember, she’s a nurse,” my mother pointed out and ended by saying that by the time it occurred to Anne Simon to get out of the car, Hanif was probably already dead.

  “What if he wasn’t?”

  “Well, we don’t know.” My mother paused. “Who knows? Maybe she wasn’t alone in the car. Lizzy or the twins could have been with her.”

  “What?!” I exclaimed.

  “Anne Simon is a mother,” my mother concluded. “Her first responsibility is to her children and then to herself. Even if Lizzy was not in the car, her children were her responsibility. If she got out of the car and put herself in the hands of two angry men, she might have been harmed, either beaten or killed.”

  “Sadiq would never have killed her! Yunis either!” I didn’t know if it was the absurdity of my mother’s suggestion or that it was a valid possibility that was making me nauseous.

  “Then what would her children do?” My mother continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “Her children are her primary responsibility.” She claimed that safety was the least that parental responsibility entailed and, in what must have been a moment of sheer terror, it was probably the most Anne Simon had to offer.

  “And then there’s the other issue.” My mother changed the subject a bit tentatively. “Who knows exactly what Anne Simon’s husband does for the Americans?”

  “He’s a malaria expert.”

  “No, what he really does.”

  “The CD64s and the CD62s, you mean?” It was much easier to announce license plate numbers than to ask the obvious question. What did all the Americans and Russians actually do in Islamabad? A moment later, I tired of codes and lies. “Is Mr. Simon CIA?” I demanded.

  “Oh, I’m not saying that. But if he has a sensitive job, more sensitive than being a malaria expert, let’s say, it would explain why Anne Simon left the scene as she did. Having a husband who’s CIA might make a wife worry more.”

  “He is a malaria expert, you know. He helped us with our science project on mosquitoes. He knows everything there is to know about them.”

  “Of course he’s a malaria expert. It’s just, well, he travels to Afghanistan quite often. Didn’t he go a few weeks ago after the American ambassador was assassinated?”

  Some weeks earlier on Valentine’s Day, after we’d heard on the BBC that the American ambassador in Kabul had been murdered, Mr. Simon traveled to Kabul. I now regretted sharing that information with my mother. “So what if he travels to Kabul for work?”

  “I’m just saying . . . You know, the Afghan government isn’t friendly toward Americans anymore. It is Communist now . . .”

  “And you?” I demanded. “Would you have driven away?” My mother concentrated as hard as she could, and I bit my lip while waiting for her answer.

  “I don’t know, darling. I can’t say. I’d like to think I would have stopped to help, driven them to the hospital, maybe. But who’s to say what might have happened?”

  When I went to my room, I lay fully dressed on the bed. Alongside the image of a dead Hanif wrapped in my mother’s best white sheets, I saw Anne Simon at the helm of a new Buick with a steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. Although I did not believe it myself, I pictured Lizzy next to her mother, both caught up in the horrible event. I wanted to believe that if Lizzy had been in the car, Anne Simon might not have fled. As for me, I resolved never to learn to drive.

  Sadiq knocked on my door a few mornings later and asked to dust the bookshelves. The Urdu dailies were spread out in front of me, and as I did each day, I forced myself to read one complete column. I read aloud with Sadiq in my room, and my parents at the other end of the house. Since I made more mistakes than usual, I expected Sadiq to correct my pronunciation. But when he allowed me to read uninterrupted from beginning to end, I asked him what was wrong. He told me he could no longer correct my Urdu while I read from newspapers because he’d forsaken them altogether.

  “Forsaken?” I repeated, unfamiliar with the Urdu word.

  “Given them up,” Sadiq explained.

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve stopped reading newspapers?”

  Sadiq said what was written about in newspapers had nothing to do with him.

  “Nothing?”

  “Not one thing,” Sadiq said slowly and emphatically.

  “Not even this?” I asked, pointing to the day’s headline: “The Supreme Court Upholds Bhutto’s Death Sentence.”

  “Not even that.”

  “Achha, achha,” I said, OK, OK, quickly ending the exchange. But strangely, our conversation was slightly comforting. Sadiq seemed almost normal, if you didn’t look at his missing eyebrows. He no longer seemed like a person who might attack Lizzy’s mother; he almost seemed like a father again.

  “Do you still miss Hanif?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Sadiq said, surprised at the mention of his son.

  “You didn’t see him very often because you lived in Islamabad and he lived in Lahore,” I remarked. “How old would he be now?”

  “Nine.”

  “We were three years apart—I’m older.”

  Sadiq pulled a few paperbacks from the shelves and slapped them together. With the way Sadiq and my mother constantly cleaned the house, I doubted there was any dust to remove.

  “The police never found the person who hit him?”

  Sadiq hesitated. “Not that I know,” he said. He sounded so sad, I didn’t even mind that he was lying.

  “It’s not fair, is it?” I said, but rather than engage me in the obvious, he directed my attention back to the newspaper I was reading.

  Our private lessons continued and I became fluent enough in Urdu to be able to admit to him that I’d seen him on the corner of Lizzy’s street, but I said nothing. Much, much later, I wondered what difference it would have made if I had.

  “Try
not to let the accident affect your friendship with Lizzy.” My mother continued our conversation the next time we were alone. “She’s always welcome here. Remember, she didn’t have . . .”

  “. . . anything to do with it?” I finished her sentence.

  “It wouldn’t be right to share this information with her.”

  “It’s not like she doesn’t already know.” I challenged her.

  “We don’t know. She might not. In any case, it isn’t your place to tell her.”

  “Of course not,” I answered, painfully aware of how difficult it was to keep the secret.

  “Do you think Sadiq knows who the driver was?” I asked. I’d read the settlement papers and seen his signature, so of course he knew. But I hadn’t told my mother I’d read the papers, and I wanted to hear how she would respond.

  “I doubt it,” my mother said.

  “Because I thought I saw him on Embassy Road yesterday when you picked me up.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t distinguish whether her surprise was real or concocted.

  “Wearing a pagri,” I said, using the Urdu word Sadiq had taught me.

  “Pagri?” my mother asked.

  “Turban.”

  “It’s odd how people wrap their heads here sometimes, you know, when they’re not feeling well,” my mother suggested. “Listen. I’ve given you a lot of information that must have come as a shock to you. It’s a lot to think about. Try not to worry so much or jump to conclusions. The person with the pagri? I’m sure it wasn’t Sadiq.”

  “It must have been someone else,” I said forcefully, hoping for the miracle that would make this true.

  “Must. Have. Been,” my mother agreed, pausing between each word as if she wanted it to be true even more than I did.

  ELEVEN

  Late March 1979

  No one stood a chance against my mother’s baking. She transformed Pakistan’s yellow-orange buffalo-milk butter and coarsely ground sugar into mouthwatering goodies. After Amir and Lehla went to college, my mother baked less often, so I was always thrilled when visitors provided a reason.