We lay in bed and talked, and only in the dark did we find the momentum that had carried us through social events beyond an incipient friendship to this.
“It’s true what I said,” she told me. “About your voice.”
“You haven’t known me that long.”
“But I hear it. Your voice gathers things, influences, stuff you pick up from your day.”
As if my voice could, like a bee, gather the pollen of other voices, written or spoken.
“I find myself wondering about your real voice,” she said, “and whether I actually know you.”
Variations on that conversation took place over the weeks before the deaths of Alexandra and Justin, as I became far more inaccessible, absorbed in the lives of the dead, wanting solitude so I could reconstruct their stories. I told myself that I would expose a murderer and establish myself as a journalist — or, more often, that I would write a novel like those I loved.
So long as I was asking questions and writing, I felt safe. But whenever my investigations slowed, my fear returned — a sense of dread that whatever had led to the attacks wasn’t over.
JUSTIN
In the bathroom, as he washed his face, the smell of sewage seemed a little stronger than usual. He went down to the kitchen, heated bottled water, and made mint tea. Holding the hot mug, he walked through the school and out the sliding glass door.
The bushes against the wall threw tangled shadows across the yard, their canes laden with thorns, like something to be harvested. His lungs drew more easily, and for once, the cold felt good.
In a sere blue sky, a small sun rose, its warmth barely perceptible on his skin: the same sun in every country, the same God present in everyone. He relaxed his eyelids, seeing a land of dim figures drifting from the looming dark of their inhospitable earth into the light.
Back at his desk, he held this feeling of promise as he developed grammar exercises that could edify by explaining democracy. Compound-complex sentence: As citizens saw the successes of their democracy, they invested more in society, and national pride became more important than tribal allegiances.
Someone knocked.
Come in, he called.
Sediqa let herself in and closed the door. Her headscarf hung back, her hair loose beneath, purple makeup heavy about her eyes.
I must speak with you, Mr. Justin.
Just Justin, please, he replied. Have a seat.
Sediqa took the wooden chair he’d brought in for meetings. She was one of the best students, writing concise sentences for each class exercise.
You’ve enrolled here to improve your English and you study Islamic law at Kabul University, is that right? Justin asked, holding his file on the students in a way that made him feel like a doctor glancing over a medical history before examining the patient.
I need a scholarship to America, she said.
But there are none, and Frank —
Mr. Frank said another one has just become available, but that you’re in charge of it.
They stared at each other until it felt intimate.
The heels of pumps clattered on the stairs. A group of girls who didn’t live in the basement was arriving; Idris had picked them up throughout the city.
Sediqa stood and, like a ballerina rising into a pirouette, opened the door in a single motion. She said something in Dari to the girls, smiled, closed it, and sat back down.
I need to discuss this with Frank, he told her.
Mr. Frank said you will be the one who chooses.
A lot of factors play into that —
I am going to be sold in marriage, she said quietly.
Oddly, she adjusted her chair so that it balanced on the rear legs, its back tapping the wall. She rocked it slightly, striking the wall more loudly, and then leaned forward so the front legs clacked against the tiles. There was a gap beneath the door, sounds passing easily, and the girls outside had hushed.
As Justin asked her to stop moving the chair, she put her hand to her mouth and made an odd sound somewhere between a sob and a gasp of pleasure. Holding her face, she brought the legs down. To anyone outside, it must sound as if they were having sex.
Whispering, she told him she gave her family what she earned typing for an NGO, how her father had died and her uncles were arranging to sell her for eight thousand dollars to a sixty-year-old farmer. She gasped as she described her future husband — ugly and uneducated — and convulsed, the chair legs tapping. She made breathy cries between her quiet words.
Please help me, she said, banging the chair forward and clutching his arm.
I have to talk to Frank, Justin repeated.
When she opened the door to leave, Sediqa adjusted her scarf and dress as the girls watched from the couches in the hallway. She smiled and shut the door behind her loudly, as if what was inside were her business alone.
All that day, students avoided speaking to Justin. Frank was either with the girls, on Skype, or sitting across from a student, having a conference. Each time Justin tried to talk to him, a sepulchral palm went up and Frank said, Later, Justin. Can’t you see I’m busy?
Justin hated the lack of regulation in the classes, Frank’s invitation being the only requirement for admission. Students attended one day, missed the next, or switched from morning Basic Grammar to afternoon Comp without knowing what had been done. He’d talked to Frank about how to chart their growth, and Frank had said, Discuss anything with them. Those who have ambition will make use of it. There’s nothing we can do about the rest.
Some days, five students showed, other days, two dozen. Justin gave the same lessons over and over.
In his final class of the day, a young man came in fifteen minutes late and took a seat. His oily hair was pushed to the side, and he wore a pilot’s jacket, the synthetic leather dull and rubbed through in places. He didn’t bring a notebook or pen.
Justin had a list of names, and after class he asked for his. The boy slouched, lowered his chin, mumbled something in a husky voice, and left. The gate banged shut outside.
What did he say? Justin asked one of the girls.
He said, she told him — he said I’m somebody’s cousin.
When Justin went upstairs, Frank had on a blazer and was leaving for dinner.
Why did you tell Sediqa about the scholarship?
I was in the office with the girls when I got the good news. Why wouldn’t I share it?
Because it’s going to create conflict.
They’d find out regardless. Look. This scholarship is yours. I told you that.
It’s for Idris.
No, it’s for you to decide. If you think Idris is most deserving, then choose him. Sediqa has been here as long — or almost as long. Her father’s dead, and she’s being sold.
Isn’t there something else we can do for her?
No. The only option is getting her out of the country. Can you imagine a woman like her as a poppy farmer’s third wife? Her father secretly educated her under the Taliban. After the US arrived, he sent her to the best schools. He was an interpreter for the voting commission, and during the last runoff he was at a polling station when a rocket hit. The shrapnel wounds in his abdomen got infected. He was the one who supported the whole family. So now they’re forced to sell Sediqa.
There’s always going to be a story like this, Justin said.
Doesn’t mean it’s not important. Frank neared his desk to see if he’d forgotten anything.
She came into my room and … and acted inappropriately.
Frank turned back, the lamp’s glow in his glasses.
Half the time you’re telling me what to do. The other half you’re asking me what to do.
I haven’t been here very long.
Then cool your heels. If someone’s making your life difficult, it’s usually because you like difficult situat
ions.
Frank left the room, the soles of his shoes loud and jaunty on the floor. It sounded like the walk of someone relishing a victory. Justin went to his room and lay down, considering that the title of academic director held clout only on a ghostly future résumé.
美智子
Three days before my flight to New Orleans, I took a taxi through the darkening city. Tam’s dogs greeted me and then lay on their bellies, forelegs parallel, like ancient Egyptian carvings. With their noses to the gap beneath the gate, they breathed the air outside the compound. Did they remember life as orphans, that early desperation, rooting through garbage, and still harbor loyalty to the street?
Tam had on a T-shirt, a bandana over her hair, and was packing away her room so she could sublet it. One housemate had moved in, a balding, handsomely bearded young man who visited incarcerated insurgents, recording their testimonies for evidence of torture. The other housemate would arrive in the morning, hours before she left: a photographer who’d been living near Fort Bragg in North Carolina and taking what she called “sexy pictures” of army wives to send to their husbands. “Service for my country, in my own way,” she’d told Tam and me over drinks. She began doing embeds to document the husbands for a dual narrative photo-essay and got addicted to Afghanistan — “to the feeling,” she’d said, “of being part of something bigger.”
Tam showed me Alexandra’s possessions boxed up in a closet and said she hadn’t been able to find an address for her family, so she’d reached out to the Canadian embassy. She’d decided to write about her death once she’d finished her embed with the Special Forces.
She glanced at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Can we talk?”
“Of course. Are you okay?”
I tried to find the words. My story was small, a few deaths in a vast universe, in a measureless war, but Justin, Clay, and Alexandra’s lives held something I wanted.
Her eyes began to tear up. “You’re breaking up with me, aren’t you?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Then what is it?” She put her arms around me, wanting all of me, all my mystery.
“I’m trying to write a novel about what happened,” I confessed. It became the night’s topic: I was going to take a much-needed break from Kabul and travel to America for research. I reassured her I would be gone only a few months. I didn’t mention my investigation here — not Steve, or Alexandra’s journal, my visits to the school, or Clay’s disappearance.
As we lay together, she told me that all the artists she knew withdrew into themselves. Her description hardly captured the greediness of my emotion, the compulsion to write the story, how language converged on me from a lifetime of reading. I’d grown up with American stories, their ideas of happiness and success eclipsing my own. Even as a foreigner, I believed in America’s hopes, that I was part of its project. Now I wanted some control over it. Maybe, in this way, I wasn’t so different from the photographer with her patriotic pornography.
The next morning, two dozen friends came by for breakfast, and Tam partook in a little de rigueur bragging, asking, “How many of us ever get out of Kabul?” She talked about the country, its codes and wildness, the warmth and brutality of its traditions, and then got on her motorcycle to go meet the American documentary crew that had hired her, her gear bungeed to the back. She accelerated, throwing up a small but victorious rooster tail of mud, and sped away, swerving around potholes.
I gave myself over to my research. Online, there were mentions of Justin and Alexandra’s deaths, and “a driver’s.” There was nothing about Clay, so I hired an Afghan fixer who charged a hundred and fifty a day and had a reputation for getting answers. He told me he’d have his contact in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pull up a list of registered security contractors.
Clay, he said in perfect English, must be short for something.
He took out his phone and found a website for baby names. He suggested we search for Clay, Clayton, and Clement. Four hundred dollars later, he had a match to a visa application with a photo that, though stippled in the cheap ink of the photocopied form, was unquestionably the man I’d seen in the safe room. Clement Hervey.
Googling Clement Hervey brought up articles about a young Iraqi who’d approached a US Army encampment near his village’s fields. Clay, startled and half-asleep and blinded by the rising sun, had shot him. It wasn’t an unusual civilian casualty, one journalist remarked, and it made the news only because the village elders were organized and had connections in Baghdad. Clay had been acquitted and then discharged, and his story ended there.
When I visited the school a third time, Frank smiled intensely, his skin puckering up around his small eyes: a look somewhere between that of a door-to-door salesman and an evangelical, a hint of fanaticism in how it lingered. My determination must have impressed him, and I was fairly certain that, before I left, he would invite me to be a mentor.
I asked him again about Idris. This time, Frank sounded angry, as if arguments had been building in his head.
“Idris was a stranger to Justin,” he told me. “He was the first person to ask for help and that got Justin excited. We hadn’t clearly defined his role as academic director yet, and I knew the subject would come up. He’d paid for a ticket here and felt this was sacrifice enough for him to be calling the shots. But I created this place. I know the Afghans. I never said I was abdicating my position at the school.”
Frank’s fingers interlaced, knotting and releasing, the big knucklebones rubbing against each other, but he was smiling.
“Sometimes, the only way to teach a man is to give him the freedom to fall. So I put the scholarship in his hands. I told Sediqa, who wanted the scholarship as much as Idris, that she’d have to convince him. ‘How badly do you want to go to America?’ I asked. ‘Badly,’ she kept telling me, ‘very, very badly.’ ‘Well, then you’re going to have to use everything at your disposal and not be shy about it.’ She blushed as bright as can be, but she understood, and I knew Justin was a goner. He’d be going home like the rest of them. My job is to teach these girls, and I’ll do that any way I can.”
“But did his death have anything to do with her?” I asked. “Or with the girls?”
Frank’s smile dropped. “Oh no. No. Not at all. What goes on here doesn’t leave these walls. I’m sure of that. It had something to do with Idris and Clay. They must have gotten themselves into trouble. Idris was working for Clay. I have no idea what he was doing.”
I asked if he had any other information about Clay and how well he’d known him.
“I liked Clay,” Frank said. “You could see he carried more than just the wars. It took me a long time to realize when I was younger that the worst thing for a person is too many choices. Choice fills the head with fantasies and unreal scenarios. But Clay had the stillness of someone who hadn’t had much choice. He’d run up against some hard circumstances and had adapted. He was the sort of man you’d have a whiskey with and talk about your past.
“But the truth is I wish I’d never met him. I wish Justin had done what he’d come here to do and never found Clay or gotten Idris involved. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have thrown the first scholarship I could find at that boy, just to get him out of here.”
“Do you know where Idris was taking Justin and Alexandra the day of the bomb?”
“I don’t. He left with Justin. I thought it was an errand. I didn’t even notice they were gone. I’m not sure why Alexandra was with them, or when Clay got in the car. Justin and Clay were at odds over Idris and over Alexandra too, I guess. It all makes no sense.”
“What did Idris leave behind?”
“Nothing much. A laptop. Some grammar books. He liked to read spy novels, political thrillers, that sort of thing.”
I asked if I could see what remained, and Frank told me he’d had the laptop reformatted since no one knew t
he password. Idris’s books and clothes had been put back into circulation.
“The need is great,” he added. “I’m not about to be sentimental over a kid who should have known better.”
“What about his family?”
“I think he lost everyone during the war. He was basically an orphan.”
He pointed to a sealed envelope on the edge of the desk.
“Anyway,” he said, “there’s the letter I wrote to Justin’s parents. I put all of his stuff into one suitcase. The rest was only books, and his father told me to use them here.”
He talked a bit more, not ready to give up his audience, circling back on the difference between himself and Justin, saying, “I’ve set the gold standard.” He referenced his passion for teaching by again quoting Tennyson — How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d — before naming the girls he’d sent to study in the US: Sediqa, Sharefa, Najma, and Hasiba. At least one of them, he believed, would acquire the tools to take over the school, so he could retire once and for all.
As he walked me out, trailing the roller bag, he gestured about like a guide in a museum as he led up to his request.
He was the first old man I’d met who spoke like a boy, with no trace of self-consciousness, as if nothing could be denied. America seemed to confer authority and conviction on its people. Maybe by writing the dead into history, I could find those qualities for myself.
Frank’s footsteps clapped along next to me, and at the gate, I turned to say goodbye. He was smiling, his face as raw and discolored as a skinned knee. He asked me to be a mentor.
CLAY
Clay stood on the third floor of the City Center Mall, at the railing above the food court, as women in headscarves walked past café tables below. Idris was supposed to meet him at Afghan Fried Chicken but had called to say he had to take a girl to the mall.
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