by Gwen Florio
“You. Help him. Quickly, quickly. Your father has found a new place to live.” She shifted her scowl to Khurshid. “There is no room for you in the taxi. You take the bus.”
Khurshid trembled anew. “But where am I going? Which bus shall I take?”
Maryam laughed. “You were smart enough to figure out how to catch my husband. Now figure out where we’re going. Maybe you’ll find us. Maybe you’ll get lost on the way.” She climbed into the taxi, gathering the little children to her. “Come. Quickly,” she said to Gul.
He ran into the building, where the driver lifted the last of their bundles. He pushed a handful of afghanis at the man and found out their new address. He gave him some more money, and the man called to a nearby boy and whispered in his ear. The boy left at a trot, and the man assured Gul that a taxi would come in a few moments for Khurshid.
By the way he looked at Khurshid, Gul knew he wished he were driving her himself. Gul chastised him with a curse, and the man recovered, hefting the bundles into the car. Gul squeezed onto the seat next to his mother and willed himself not to turn and look back at Khurshid standing alone in the courtyard, pulling her scarf across her face as Fahim appeared from behind one of the buildings and glided toward her, his gang of younger boys in tow. A cab passed them, heading toward the courtyard as they pulled away, and Gul let his breath out in relief. The driver caught his gaze in the mirror and nodded.
Neither of them looked at Maryam, who had regained her old, regal posture as they left her husband’s new wife behind.
Fourteen
ISLAMABAD, DECEMBER 2001
Martin awoke hungover. He inched one hand across the sheet—slowly, slowly, no sudden moves, and fumbled for the phone.
“Bring me my special breakfast.” He replaced the receiver with a groan of relief at the thought of the silver coffeepot, filled with real coffee. Shortly after his arrival in Islamabad, he’d gone into the kitchen to show Marriott staff how to make it to his specifications, despite their protests that they were quite accustomed to meeting the needs of foreigners. When his breakfast arrived, he dosed the coffee from the flask he kept in his nightstand, then lifted the dome from the plate, revealing not eggs but a stack of steaming towels that Martin draped over his chest and face, raising them occasionally to sip the coffee.
Eventually, he’d slip the aspirin, thoughtfully placed on the saucer, into his mouth and wait for the combination of caffeine and whiskey, steam and medication, to work their magic on his aching body. It was necessary after another round of the house parties that seemingly defined Islamabad’s expat community. In his time at the Marriott, Martin had become a generous tipper. Consequently, his mornings were far more bearable, allowing him to put off, at least until he ventured out, the creeping trepidation that had plagued him since his arrival in Pakistan.
He’d expected to meet with Clayton Williams in Islamabad. Instead, a rotating cast of brush-cut young Americans and Britons worked to get him up to speed on every aspect of the political and military situation in Afghanistan, a level of detail down to the satellite phone contacts of various warlords. “A consulting group” was the terse answer when he’d asked if they were military. “We prepare organizations like yours.” Their set faces, their clipped responses, warned him against asking exactly what they meant by like yours.
Afghanistan’s cities had fallen quickly to the Americans, but pockets of fierce resistance remained. The Taliban retreated, but not even the most clueless of the foreign aid workers pouring into the country would believe they’d surrendered, with near daily reports of skirmishes in the outlying regions.
These days, though, such information lived in the back pages of newspapers, tucked among paragraph-long reports of bus plunges and ferry sinkings. Front-page real estate was reserved for the stories that implied everything was better with the arrival of the Americans: photos of children flying kites, people watching television, and girls going back to school—many of them teenagers sitting shyly among girls half their age, catching up on the five years of ignorance mandated by the Taliban.
About the girls. Martin ventured a query. Because surely, they were his main focus?
“Mrs. Khan handles that aspect of things,” said Boy Wonder No. 1 (Martin had given up trying to keep track of his trainers’ names), a six-footer who stood eye to eye with Martin and outweighed him by a good forty pounds of muscle. The younger man jutted his rocklike jaw at the lone woman in the room. She appeared dumpy even in the generous drape of her silk tunic. “She’ll work mostly with your wife.”
Was Martin imagining the sneering tone? He could hear Liv, as clearly as though she stood at his elbow, supplying the same sort of sotto voce commentary she often employed at faculty events: “Never mind about that. It’s women’s work. Nothing important. Now let’s go back to comparing missile size.”
Indeed, Boy Wonder No. 1 tapped a key that brought images of a startling array of weaponry onto the screen. “You’ll need to be able to recognize these on sight. Don’t worry. After a while, it’s like knowing Fords from Chevys.”
Martin wrenched his attention away from Mrs. Khan and back to the implements of death, reminding himself that he’d known what he was getting into when he took the job. The trick would be reassuring Liv, once she figured out the extras involved. Which she would—she was quick like that. How many times had she worked Mandy’s name into “casual” conversation before he’d left?
Boy Wonder No. 1 placed a meaty forefinger to the touch pad, switching the screen to a display of sidearms. “The men yesterday. Were they carrying?”
Martin shrugged. Embarrassment flowed hot through his veins. Of course everyone would have heard about the incident yesterday. Just the sight of him—the raw scrape on his nose and chin, the swollen flesh shading from purple to yellow beneath his eyes—provoked whispers in his wake. He’d just hoped no one would mention it to his face.
* * *
His first trip to Pakistan, so very long ago, had been tightly controlled, with Martin and the other graduate students ushered into conference rooms to interview groups of carefully chosen Afghan refugees, their message artfully scripted to elicit more U.S. aid.
In this new venture, he hungered to strike out on his own, to slip away from the watchful eye of Pervaiz, the hovering functionary who headed Face the Future’s Islamabad operation and who daily, in a thousand small ways, let Martin know that the appreciation he’d expected in response to his familiarity with the region and its customs would never come.
The previous day, a Friday, confident in his workmanlike Urdu and eager for a respite from Pervaiz, Martin had ventured from Face the Future’s office during the languid hours after lunch and hailed a cab for Aabpara Market. He planned to shop away from the upscale stores in the Blue Zone, where too many of the offerings resembled the sorts of things he could buy back home.
But in his haste to flee before Pervaiz noticed his absence, he forgot to set a price with the cabbie ahead of time. When they arrived at the market and Martin held out a perfectly reasonable number of rupees, the driver pulled a wounded expression.
“Well, then, how much do you want?”
“As you wish.” The man gave the standard reply, except that in this case, Martin knew it to mean “more than what you’re holding in your hand.”
Martin doubled his original amount and flung it at the man. “Take this and buy your mother a new dupatta, to hide the face she’s been showing everyone on the street.” He slammed the cab’s door behind him and stalked toward the market, knowing Pervaiz would hear about this before his return. It had taken Martin about five minutes in Islamabad to realize that the gossip network linking the cabbies was nearly as fast as, and often more accurate than, the internet.
But his discomfort eased in the alleyways of Aabpara, as satisfyingly exotic as he’d hoped. He followed the smell of scorched fabric and found a man pressing clothing with a heavy iron containing glowing coals. He walked faster past a butcher’s stall, where blood
congealed on the skinny goat carcasses swaying from the rafters, flies beginning to collect on the meat in the day’s increasing heat. The goats’ severed heads sat on a waist-high counter, eyes open, their odd horizontal pupils still glistening.
A man in the shop called as Martin passed. He turned. The man held a cleaver high and let it fall. The two halves of a goat’s head stood upright a moment, then wobbled and fell away from the blade. The man smirked at Martin and wiped the cleaver on the front of his spattered apron.
Martin looked away. His gaze fell on a far more pleasurable sight: a pair of young wives, muslin bags looped over their arms, doing their daily marketing. At Face the Future, under the watchful eye of Pervaiz, he dared not give more than a cursory glance at the local women. But here he was free to take in their beauty in sidelong glimpses. So tiny and quick compared with Liv; modest, too, in contrast to the college students back home whose outspoken feminism kept him on edge, made him dread the unwary remark that had seen so many of his colleagues castigated.
He’d long ago trained himself to stare past a girl’s ear as she spoke, or maybe at the part in her hair, anything to avoid looking at her bare shoulders, the breasts outlined by a stretchy tube top. Now he saw only women’s faces, and barely those, but it was all so alluring. Gleaming bangles drew the eye to fragile wrists, rings to tiny hands and their balletic gestures. Dupattas invariably slipped just so, revealing heavy earrings swinging from shell-like lobes, brushing slender, graceful necks. Eyes flashed dark within their bold definitions of kohl, reddened lips pouted promisingly. And those layers and layers of fabric, practically demanding him to imagine the marvels beneath, making him wonder what he’d ever seen in poor Mandy, flushed and sweaty in her jogbra and shorts.
“Hssst!” A passing man scowled. He’d stared too long. Martin hurried around a corner, slowing when he came to a shop selling DVDs and Bollywood-style posters. The movies were bootleg, no doubt.
He shuffled through the wares, stepping deeper into the store, realizing only belatedly that the Bollywood images gave way to a reverential display of placards, postcards, and buttons emblazoned with images of Osama bin Laden. Martin stared at the aquiline, heavy-lidded visage, the aristocratic features so at odds with the utilitarian Kalashnikov balanced in the elegant, long-fingered hands. A shelf displayed magazines, one of them showing a giant black boot propelling a hapless, monkey-faced President Bush into oblivion. Martin heard a footfall and looked to see a man beside him.
The man tilted his chin toward the magazine. “George Boosh is dog.” He looked at Martin. “Amriki?”
“Canadian.”
Martin feared his expression revealed the lie. He backed away, forcing himself not to look over his shoulder as he left the store and turned yet another corner. By the time he realized he was off the main street and couldn’t easily find his way back, he’d attracted a crowd of children whose proximity made him anxious about his wallet, bulky and prominent in his hip pocket. But, surrounded as he was, there was no way to transfer it to his front pocket, where he could casually keep a hand on it. He finally resorted to slipping into a rare enclosed store and closing the door against the children. He found himself face-to-face with a merchant who, before Martin could protest, clapped his hands and ordered tea and bade Martin sit on a low stool, the better to view his wares.
All around Martin, wooden dowels held stacks of bangles. “These, I think, will be very beautiful for your wife.” The merchant lifted a stack of rose-hued glass bracelets and fanned them out, Slinky-style, on a bit of dark felt.
Martin quaffed his tea, thinking to leave, but at a gesture from the merchant, a boy slipped from behind a curtain and refilled his cup. Martin groaned. He shook his head at the display and tried to invest the Urdu word for thanks with a sense of finality.
“Shukriya.” He rose, still holding the teacup.
“But of course. These are for every day. You want to buy her something special.” He reached below a counter and came out with a handful of thin gold circles that seemed, to Martin’s eyes, too dainty to slide over Liv’s large American hands.
“I think that these will not fit.” Martin spoke in slow and careful Urdu, but the man professed not to understand. More bracelets of gold, heavier and correspondingly more expensive, appeared.
The merchant half rose from his stool and whispered a price to Martin. “Special for you. In dollars only.”
“Ah.” Martin sighed his regrets. He had very little American money with him, having already changed most of his into Pakistani rupees. He pulled out his wallet, now safely in his front pocket, and showed the man his only greenback, a five.
The man recoiled. His eyes blazed the insult back at Martin. He swept the bracelets back onto their dowels with a tinkling noise and slammed the cabinet shut. He stood and held the store door open. “In our country, we value our women. We show them the respect of the best jewelry we can afford.”
Martin had thought to offer the man the money for some of the cheaper bracelets, a present for Liv upon her arrival, but it seemed as though that wouldn’t do. He backed through the door, apologizing profusely in both Urdu and English, wondering exactly what he’d done wrong. The children clustered just outside the door seemed to have divined the shopkeeper’s attitude, because when Martin asked them how to get back to the main road where he could call a cab, they jeered at him and danced just out of his reach, loudly calling into question the honor of his mother, his sisters, his wife. They bent low and wiggled their asses at him, berating his own supposed penchant for buggery, attracting the attention of other merchants and their customers, who looked on the impudent boys with varying degrees of amusement and disapproval.
Martin walked faster and faster, but the boys drew close. Their fingers snatched at his sleeves, fumbled about his pockets. Martin pushed at them, glancing around for help, but the merchants and shoppers who only moments before had provided such an attentive audience had vanished, leaving him alone in a deserted alley with his pint-size assailants. When he swung at the boys before him, more moved in from behind. He whirled to face them, but still others swarmed close. Just as he reached for his wallet, thinking in his desperation to give it to them, anything to make them go away, the boys fell back.
Three men in business suits rounded the corner, grunting at the boys in Urdu too low and rapid for Martin to catch. The boys turned as one and fled, stumbling into one another in their haste.
One of the men bent his slender torso in a half bow toward Martin. “Please accept our apologies. These boys have no respect. They are not of good families.” He spoke in the crisp, British-accented English of the well educated. His tailored slacks broke just so over polished Italian loafers. The two men behind him were burlier, their suits rumpled, ill fitting, as if borrowed for the day. One moved to Martin’s side and took his elbow, his fingers mashing flesh against bone.
“Come,” said the first man, who appeared to be in charge. “We will take you to safety.”
Martin had no choice but to follow.
As they had at the sight of the boys, shoppers melted into stores as the quartet approached, glancing over their shoulders with wide eyes before doors and shutters closed with decisive clicks behind them, the humming alleyways falling eerily silent.
“Where are we going?” Because surely they were heading deeper into the market. Martin tried again. “I’m staying at the Marriott.”
The man in the lead lengthened his stride. “Thank you,” Martin called to him. “I very much appreciate your help. If you can take me to a street where I can hail a cab, I can get myself back.”
“Shut up, Amriki,” the one holding his elbow growled, jerking him nearly off his feet.
Martin felt a brief, desperate pang for the boys, who had wanted merely to rob him. In their weeks apart, he and Liv had exchanged emails about their various trainings. “Your beige man,” he’d signed off once, in reference to the instructions on how to behave if kidnapped. “Be beige. Call no attention to yourse
lf. No eye contact. No speaking unless spoken to.”
Now Martin desperately wanted to call attention to himself, to shout out to the people in the shops, to beg for mercy from his escorts. But speech was impossible, moving as they were at very nearly a run. Martin’s heart slammed his ribs, breath coming in gasps, and a singular vow roiled his brain: Get me out of this and I swear I will obey Pervaiz to the letter. They turned corner after corner after corner in that terrifying deserted maze, surely the only place in all of Islamabad devoid of people—until a final turn brought them face-to-face with Pervaiz and a phalanx of uniformed men.
Martin’s captors flung him to the ground and fled. No way to catch himself, to prevent his face from bashing concrete. He pushed himself up and tilted his head back. He put his hand to his nose. It came away coated with blood. The men with Pervaiz dropped their guns to their sides.
Martin’s Urdu fled. “Make them go after them! They’re getting away!”
“No,” Pervaiz corrected him. “You are getting away. And you are lucky to do so. Let us leave before you cause further trouble.” He handed Martin a handkerchief.
Martin held it to his nose, watching above its snowy folds as the trio strolled off, blending in with the shoppers emerging from the stores.
* * *
“Hey.” Boy Wonder No. 1 snapped his fingers in Martin’s face. “Where’d you go? You can’t afford not to know this stuff. Did they check you out for a concussion yesterday?”
“No. No need.” Other than the swollen nose and accompanying shiners, the worst injuries had been to his pride—and, he feared, his credibility. He’d known that Fridays could be tense—the mullahs saved their fieriest exhortations, increasingly anti-American these days, for the Friday midday prayers, and demonstrations frequently followed—but had chosen to ignore the fact that the Red Mosque, Islamabad’s most militant, was only a few hundred yards from Aabpara.