by Hilary Plum
And tonight, among the things spread over my bed: a photograph of Simone and the boy as a newborn. It could be that this was Kareem’s, stored for safekeeping with his amateur investigation; or Simone may have enclosed it, meaning it for me.
The next day when I saw Modigliani I said: Does the name Farzad Ahmad Muhammad mean anything to you?
He shook his head.
I’m sure he’d have asked me to elaborate, but at that moment our breakfasts arrived, Modigliani’s toast burned and mine nicely browned. I smiled at him. Can we get some more orange juice? Modigliani asked the waitress. When she returned with two glasses he didn’t thank her, and my mouth was full.
I had a dream last night, Modigliani said, slicing off a burned crust. About bison, tons of bison. Charging, not toward me, but past me, in a way. There was something ahead, something dangerous, that I wanted to warn them about. But how do you warn a pack of bison?
Herd, I said.
What?
A herd of bison.
He shook his head and in that common but embarrassing way we reached for our juice at the same time.
Do you think, I asked, that you actually even know what a charging bison looks like? In your conscious mind, you probably don’t, you can’t picture it, but maybe somewhere you’ve seen it, and when you dream you remember. That’s what I’ve always wondered about. With dreams, I mean.
I don’t know, he said.
You were probably still drunk, I said.
I woke up with a real headache, he said. He flicked his coffee cup with a fingernail, one exquisite chime.
Do you think it was a cliff? he asked. The thing in the distance?
Maybe, I said. Or just a ranch fence, that would be enough.
He paused and I thought that would be the end of it, but then he said: When I was a kid, I used to go for these walks along the riverbed of the Ohio. There’s the river and then this stretch between the water and the land, all rocks and muck and driftwood, which floods when they open the dam, or just in flood season. I collected driftwood. I think someone had told me that you could make furniture with it. There are all these fossils in the rocks there. You’re just walking over them the whole time. It’s not like other places, where you’ll be walking and see a fossil, great—it’s like whole rock faces are just fossil. I used to walk bending over to look at them.
He pushed his balled-up napkin beneath the edge of his plate: There were bison there back in the day, everywhere, that’s what they said. There was a big stuffed one in the visitor center by the river, where you could go get a soda or whatever. So when I walked along all bent over, I used to picture a bison watching me from the trees on the bank. Waiting to come down to the water. I wouldn’t turn around, that was the deal. If I turn around, you know, it’s not there.
Sure, I said.
Every time they opened the dam, there’d be a siren, then you had fifteen minutes to clear out, get to high ground. All the fisherman, kids like me, whoever was down by the water. We’d hear the siren but act real relaxed about it, I didn’t want to run for it in front of the fisherman or the guys who got drunk down there, so I’d just turn and walk fast but normal toward the bank. It didn’t take long to get high enough up, there was always plenty of time. But what I was thinking back then was, the bison don’t know what the siren means.
They’d hear the water, I said, and they’re fast.
Whatever, Modigliani said, I didn’t know that then.
We didn’t say anything for a bit, heaped up singles and coins on the bill, not really counting, or at least I wasn’t. Let God sort ’em out, I said, adding a last quarter.
We left, and as Modigliani held open the door he pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
I didn’t know you smoked, I said.
You’re better than I am, he said belatedly, with names.
Faces I remember a while, he added. But what really gets me—he tapped the pack on his forearm then opened it—is a good turn of phrase.
He lit my cigarette then his own. The day was warming and we slid off our jackets.
La Gringa
To think that Ivan had arranged a trip to my grandmother’s village just for me—I was touched. Ever since I had accepted a position on Ivan’s staff, I’d kept in my wallet a photograph of my grandmother, a girl in her village. Anyone could see it when I opened my wallet at a café, for example, or a newspaper stand. Behind my back they still called me La Gringa. So I had to remind them, my grandmother was a peasant from these mountains—the very mountains you can see from anywhere in this city, whenever it’s cool enough or bright enough that the haze and smog clear. I reminded them that one of the most insidious violations of colonialism was to force the poor to desert their own lands and flee into the arms of the colonizers. Beg for crumbs in an empire made rich off the spoils of their own lands. I’d have said this to anyone who challenged me. But my work speaks for itself and no one said a word, never to my face.
I met with Ivan almost daily, usually with his press secretary or foreign relations staff, though sometimes alone. Of course I disagreed with his restrictions on the press, and I did object, continually. His distrust, however, was only a further malignant consequence of neoimperialism. If he had not maintained rigorous defenses, foreign money would once again have flooded the newspapers until they printed libels about him, called for reelection, and when that did not suffice, fomented coup. Everyone remembered those years, me especially. I had been a complete novice—I’d come to this country only for work in medical translation, my first profession—but had I not traced this funding dollar by dollar back to the coffers of the CIA? From the bank accounts of three news services and a handful of think tanks and so-called charities? This must be remembered whenever people spoke of Ivan’s suppression of press freedom. The so-called ideals of the (need I say, white, slave-owning) American founders were pretty selectively applied in the postcolonial reality. A foreign power was working to undermine a sovereign nation’s government and civic society from within. The newspapers were not only not independent, but were corrupted to the core. I had seen the ledgers (in some cases, literally). When you are dealing with an opponent of endless wealth and minimal scruples, an opponent with a history of violently subjugating the people not only of this country but all over the world, the leashes of its attack dogs held by the cold hands of the oil corporations, you defend yourself by all means available. Ivan’s ideological compromises with regard to the press were unfortunate, regrettable, and even, and I would use this word, offensive; but—and this was not only my hope but my aim—they would prove temporary.
I—just an amateur then, a hobby journalist—had been the very first to present hard evidence of the CIA’s role in the coup attempt, the damning documents I had discovered and translated (translated literally and in the larger sense, so that everyone could read the writing on the wall). The money trail leading back to the steps of the White House, the umbilical cord of the most monstrous regimes of the South, of all the dictators who had handed over to American corporations the keys to the vaults of their countries—having horded away fortunes for themselves—and let the privatization begin. Not here. Ivan had defeated the coup and we would show the Americans that a country could thrive on their very doorstep not only resisting US influence but wielding no small influence of its own. A friend to every people’s republic in the South.
Ivan had turned to me after a meeting last week and said, You have grown up from your American roots, but let us now have a look at the rest of your family tree.
Yes? I said.
I am going up into the mountains for the opening of one of our new water treatment plants, he said, I would like you to join me. Don’t you carry with you a photograph of your grandmother? he gestured toward my purse. I have often noticed it, he said, it is very beautiful. What a beautiful woman, you can see everything in her face—he gestured again and I understood tha
t I should find him the photograph, which I did—yes. He smiled and handed it back to me. Of course you look very much like her. She has your determination—or rather the grandmother of your determination, yes? Yours is much more. But this region, that is where I am going, I know the villages there well. You will travel with me. For me it will all be ceremonies and meetings, but you can take a car into the mountains and get to know her people. It is extraordinary there, like no place else—I’m sure she has told you. The air has a very unusual smell, there is nothing like it. Like goats and this kind of bush that only grows that high, it has deep pink blossoms and is used to make tea which is said to be good for the blood.
He leaned back and, as was his habit, twice smoothed the lap of his suit.
We’ll go Thursday morning, he said, and return that night. And then on Saturday, you will attend the reception for Citizen Saeed. He is here for three days, and there will be meetings and a few things for show—he waved a hand in the air, which meant he had finished speaking. I rose, shook his hand, and kissed him on both cheeks, as he liked—the epicenter of the kiss, as it were, occurring not on his cheek proper but a few millimeters off, where his beard might have been after a few days’ growth. Though I have always known him to be clean-shaven.
We departed for the mountains early Thursday morning. Ivan did not accompany me all the way to my grandmother’s village, and I’d had no reason to think he would. He would meet with the administrators of the water treatment plant and hold the press conference, and I would be driven forty kilometers further into the mountains. Talk to the people there, he said, you will come to know your grandmother better, and he patted my hand.
The village was much as one would expect, though the background of mountains and sky more spectacular than I could have imagined. The children’s clothes were not traditional but dirtied American castoffs—Mickey Mouse, Adidas, mesh shorts. Their feet were bare. Women cooked and chatted, the kitchens were tables under trees, plastic bowls arranged and a fire a few yards away. The dogs were like the dogs that had figured in my grandmother’s stories, though the three-legged ringleader she had told us of was of course long dead. I had seen many such villages, the chickens, the dirt yards, dirty water, bad teeth—my grandmother had spoken often of her tooth pain as a child, and for this reason I was never to make fun of her poorly fitting bridge. The bush Ivan had described was everywhere, its blossoms a remarkable crimson, which as I bent to smell them seemed to throb with the headache I still always felt in the thin air.
I gave bread and sweets to the children, and would have played soccer with them, but they were shy. I talked to two of the old women, their speech thickly accented with the mountain tongue, which I did not speak. Could the driver translate, I wondered, but he was asleep, a newspaper laid over his face. The women did not seem to recognize the name of my grandmother, and there was no one else old enough to ask.
But the whole drive back—rubbing one of those flowers between my fingers, it looked somehow like brilliant miniature viscera—wasn’t it true that I didn’t think of my grandmother, not once, but of Citizen Saeed’s imminent visit? This is the blessing and curse of work like mine: the mind never rests. In the car (he had requested that I move vehicles to join him) Ivan had said, In time the water-treatment plants will bring running water to each of these villages. It will take a few more years. But soon, he said, soon the first members of our new corps of teachers and nurses will be trained, and we will expand the schools and medical centers to serve even the most isolated rural areas. Already we have changed forever the lives and opportunities of those in the foothills, whom every government before us abandoned.
I knew this, of course, and no doubt this was language from his speech, but I didn’t mind. He looked tired, the small pouch of skin beneath his chin jiggling as we descended the steep unpaved roads in the dark.
Soon, I said.
He opened his eyes at me, smiled. Try to sleep, he said, it is such a long drive to the airport.
I was prepared for Citizen Saeed to look small in person, which was usually the case when you met men you were used to seeing in the news—the greatest villains of our times, at least this was what the Western media bayed. Saeed, though, was quite tall. His dye job was as absurd as was reported.
It was strange to think that I had been a child when I first knew of him. A group unfortunately associated with his regime had perpetrated one of the world’s first passenger-plane bombings, and I still remembered the newspaper photos, pieces of airliner falling like feathers to the sea. The Indian Ocean, was it? I do not think my memory of the photographs is accurate, though I held this image in me for a time as a child, not wishing even to fly with my mother to visit her brother in Florida (though of course eventually I did go). Saeed had been young then, though we in the West would describe his hairstyle as a decade behind. Back then he mostly wore military uniforms and his epaulets were exaggerated, so that his waist seemed particularly slim, and you might, if you were as young as I was, have confused him with David Bowie. Not a mistake anyone would make now.
Saeed met with Ivan’s administration for a day that provided regular photo opportunities of them shaking hands and embracing in front of arrangements of the two flags. Ivan had been to visit Saeed six months before, this a follow-up to make further progress on their energy initiatives. As the US media was no doubt decrying even this minute, the two nations’ alliance on issues in the international oil market might have real effect. I attended the teatime reception on the second day, among other members of Ivan’s staff and a range of dignitaries and representatives of Ivan’s youth leadership and rural women’s education programs. Saeed rose to greet each of the women, though with decreasing effort, so that by the time I entered the room, he did little more than shift in his seat. Saeed and I had no language in common; Ivan had told me, he can speak English well, but do not try it, he will act as though he cannot. When someone addressed him he looked steadily at his interpreter. His eyes would flick back to the speaker only if he or she went on too long. One did not often witness such gracelessness in a head of state.
But of course, I thought, smiling over my cup of punch, he didn’t have to worry about reelection, did he? There was no one here to make this joke to. I shared few jokes with the rest of Ivan’s staff, which used to frustrate me, but I understood now that humor is one of the true cultural gaps, not easily bridged by mere linguistic proficiency, or even nearly four years’ residence, as in my case. I rarely laughed at what I knew were considered perfectly respectable jokes by Ivan’s cabinet, and similarly, whenever I said something quietly witty, I no longer expected acknowledgment of any kind. The source of the humor had to be extremely simple—a belch in a meeting, two whores in stilettos tripping on the sidewalk—for these men and I to have anything like a common response.
Dignitaries and the like approached Saeed one by one for more formal greetings; I would wait until the crowd had thinned, see if I could tease a bit more out of the interaction. So I stood in the corner chatting with Dr. Martinez, leader of one of the public health initiatives, to whom I often turned in these settings because he could be relied on to speak about only two subjects and with such enthusiasm that responses were hardly required: the health initiative and his very intelligent children. Then, one of the aides nodding to me, I crossed the room to meet Citizen Saeed.
I had expected Saeed might be displeased or confused by my appearance, but he did not seem to be in the business of having reactions. I presented him with a copy of my book, which he looked over for only a second before handing it to his aide, who placed it on a table among a range of gifts—local handicrafts, academic monographs on collective governance, biographies of the early revolutionaries.
He said something to his interpreter, who said: It is an American book.
I was born in Montana, I said, looking at him directly, though he looked only at the interpreter.
My research is an indictment
of the Americans for their covert involvement in the last two coup attempts perpetrated against Ivan, I said, and waited.
Watching the interpreter Saeed raised his eyebrows in what may or may not have been comprehension, even affirmation, then shook my hand again by clasping it in both of his own. I wished to know whether this was a gesture all women received, and hoped I’d remember to ask someone later.
But even as I am somewhere momentous—the long-imagined home of my ancestors, the presence of a man who could only be called infamous—I am somewhere else. This has always been my weakness. At just the wrong instant, when I might have said something more, I had paused in thought, and was shuffled away, opportunity lost. I had been distracted by my desire to ask the foreign relations council if they had discussed with Saeed his recent suppression of his nation’s indigenous pro-democracy movements, which I know had been of concern to Ivan, and in the US press was irrevocable confirmation of Saeed’s iniquity. There was no way around it: the situation was distressing. No one could say what went on in Saeed’s prisons. I might have said to him, as a journalist with a profound commitment to human rights, I am deeply concerned… Certainly opposition parties could never muster any presence within his borders; the regular sweeps kept everyone’s heads down, even the pro-Western businessmen, who could make their money but had to watch their mouths like everyone else. There was no point in even bringing up the treatment of the Jews, not in this climate. Even Ivan would not have ventured to, though religious tolerance was one of his central reforms (another thing that distinguished him from the Americans thirsting for his blood, it should be noted). And what could I have said that would have been appropriate or had any effect? In some impulsive confrontation I might have surprised myself and even Ivan, but Saeed?