by Hilary Plum
When Saeed dismissed me I got another drink, hoping he would notice, abstemious as he famously was. As far as I could tell he said nothing worthwhile to anyone. His handclasp had been very gentle, though whether this was intentional or simply indolence I didn’t know. I had met no one remotely similar to compare him to, and couldn’t say if my disappointment in the evening, the dullness that had suffused the event, was of note or also to be expected.
I lingered late in my office, skimming Human Rights Watch reports about Saeed’s last year of governance. It was after midnight and the punch hadn’t worn off, had left me jittery alone in the darkened wing. The photograph of my grandmother lay in my lap, though I did not remember why I’d taken it out, and didn’t need to look down at the girl in it—gangly, holding hands with a sister who had died in her fourth childbirth, so I had been told—to know that it was only and subtly about the mouth that I resembled her.
There was a knock at my door; to my surprise it was Ivan. I knew that he often read late at night in his rooms, but I didn’t usually see him, not in the hallways or elevator and certainly not on the lower stories.
I forgot I had something for you, he said. From a pocket in his suit jacket he retrieved an envelope.
Through the white paper I saw clouds of deep pink: three of the entrail-like flowers, dried and pressed, an acrid note to their odor.
I didn’t know if you had seen them, he said. You should mail them to your grandmother in Montana, I promise you she will be delighted to see them.
Thank you, I said.
I kissed him on the cheek. One or both of us smelled of alcohol.
That is very kind, I said. He was smiling and stepping back, his hand on the doorknob.
How do you think the visit went? I said.
The visit?
Citizen Saeed’s visit.
Ah, he said, funny—most of the time I forget you are a foreigner, but sometimes your words, they betray you. Visits are for little things, you know, if I stop by your house and we drink something together, or even tonight, if I come by your office, that is a visit. For matters of government we would not use this word.
I’m sorry, I said, I guess I’m still learning, and I laughed, unnecessarily.
You had a chance to speak with him, did you not?
Yes, I said. But it is, you know, it is an impossible situation.
Ivan nodded, looking toward the window, where the siren lights from the street flashed through the gaps in my blinds. Yes, that is a good way to put it. Or perhaps it is not impossible enough.
Before I could reply, Ivan said: Now what inspired your grandmother to leave such a beautiful village?
My grandfather, I said. He was an American.
He came here for business?
Research, I said, he was an anthropologist.
Ah yes—Ivan smiled—of course. An intelligent, curious man, a beautiful girl. Well, she will be very pleased to hear of your visit—and he waved his hand at the envelope I now held—Good night.
My grandmother is dead, I should have said.
How absurd that would sound. I hoped I had thanked him sufficiently. The flowers were delicate and several petals had already detached. I put the envelope in my desk drawer, where I would see it often.
Alice
Out my window there’s only city and haze. No one I meet speaks of the sea. At night in my room the air conditioner is a whistling breath, an old man sucking in through his nose.
In bed I imagine myself on another coast, across the country, my back warm in sand and stone on a peninsula, sea to the east, bay to the west. Years ago I went to this place. The bay was quiet, waves high as a small dog, and not far from me two heavy women reprimanded a toddler that must have been the offspring of one. The trees were small, winter wind kept everything sparse. Not far from the beach—the sign for the turnoff just up the road—one could tour the remains of a Civil War prison, built on the sea for security and housing tens of thousands of Confederate POWs through the course of the war.
It’s been years but I can picture it. In a nearby inlet a reconstructed colonial ship marks the place in the harbor where Europeans first set foot. The ship is dainty, fine for the flat pond of the bay, but what about the months crossing? What a heaven this place must have seemed, look around at the green shores, the bay water golden with afternoon, fish plentiful in the light. Up the hill a colonial town, briny air and roses trained around trellises, trellises encircling a fountain, further on a few colonial buildings kept up with unflagging authenticity, placards detailing all.
In my mind this is the shore I’m upon, the sand I stretch out in. The low trees cast a scattered shade, which I shuffle toward as the sun travels and skin heats up. A lighthouse towers somewhere behind me. Now I lie naked upon the shore, mothers’ voices grown distant, far from me any thought of prison ruins, or the recurring image: in its revolutions the beam of the lighthouse illuminating my form. I am nothing, this peninsula a finger beckoning the sea toward the bay, the bay extending miles, on the horizon evergreen and rock in a code that discloses the distant shore and its islands. I close my eyes and I am inundated. Or my body extends and I touch both bodies of water, bridge the peninsula with the long yards of my spine. I run a hand over my hip, the air conditioner whistles keenly. I turn over, and upon the shore with me now, against my will, is Modigliani. Which ends every fantasy, every imagined rock I’d pressed a cheek to, the smell of kelp in the heat on the sand, all the nameless birds. I can’t ask him to go because I know what he’ll say, and say it mildly, not offended, not anything. And who am I to dissent, I who would abandon wherever I may be, this room, its damaged blinds, light striped across the sheets and me within them. Modigliani’s hand is under my neck, pressing the base of my skull. I will myself to sink back into dream, but the shore is gone.
Sam
The day they found Shahid’s body I wasn’t writing, not a word. I was babysitting, drinking too much tea and fielding unending questions about homework. My sister-in-law had needed to cross the city to see a doctor about her pregnancy. Bleeding, my wife had said, which her sister would not have disclosed. You can type, answer your phone, all that at their home, my wife had said. Usually I adored how her remnant unease with the language made her say things like type when she meant write, but today I was irritated, I who had worked so hard but unsuccessfully to rid myself in every dialect of an American accent.
When the phone call had come from Shahid’s editor, his own Italian accent so strong I had to ask him to repeat and repeat again, I cried out. The children must have looked up, seen me standing, my head against the door frame and the door open, I had meant to walk into the garden for better reception, but on hearing the news I was shrill as a hawk shrieking into a field. Afterward I was surprised both at the force of my reaction and the fact that the editor had called me at all, a choice I couldn’t quite justify. The police called you? I asked the Italian, who said no, it was only that he had been phoning Shahid at the very moment they pulled his body from the canal, and someone had answered. If he was in the canal, I said, how did his phone still work? I don’t know, the Italian said. But I remembered: Shahid kept his phone zipped up in a waterproof sleeve, I am tired of getting new ones, he’d said, I spill tea all over myself at least once a month.
Shahid did not drown; he was beaten to death.
The canal was far enough from the city, a full hundred kilometers, that they might have thought he wouldn’t be found.
But no—how then would his death have served as warning? Without a body the message, as they say, could not be received. They’d dumped him, checked the lock schedule, and known that before long his name would turn up in the news.
Once the Italian hung up I sat down in the garden with a cold tea and was still there when Fawzia returned from her appointment, her expression concerned as she came through the gate, or perhaps it was merely the fatigue
of the bus ride. When she saw me her face changed in a way I couldn’t describe, and I realized from her sharp question that she feared something had happened to her sister, my wife. No, no, I said, seeing the children now gathered to the door, no, a friend, a friend is dead.
But I blame myself for using this word—was he a friend? We would chat, sometimes among others we would have a meal, but Shahid was not what you’d call friendly, and though you’d nudge him to tell a story or watch him as a joke was told, he maintained his charming but—I said to others and even once to him—overplayed reserve. In his absence we discussed how his sources among the insurgents were almost too good, his coverage of them almost too intimate. This isn’t quite what we meant; rather, how in him pragmatism and zealotry were so potently allied. Will you come on for a segment about the murdered journalist? I got a call from the West Coast indie radio show I appeared on occasionally, and it was then that I skimmed the American press and saw Shahid’s death had been noted even there—briefly, but noted. Of course, I said, he was a friend, and again I hadn’t intended to use that word. Colleague would have been accurate, though comrade was what next occurred to me, despite its connotations, which were not what I meant and which would never have amused Shahid.
It seemed geography and profession had claimed us for the same side of whatever this was. For seven, eight years now US drones have bombarded the militant camps in the mountains, though protests grow more vehement and diplomatic relations more strained every year. Bombs land again on an impoverished village, or, in the brutal error the American military is almost laughably prone to, a wedding party. A boy escaping one strike runs up a mountain to be killed an hour later in another. Discovered among the dead in a camp of militants are a few members of the intelligence services. Allies, these nations, and yet. This spring the Americans dived out of the sky into an unassuming compound in the north, there to kill not any mere terrorist but the Director. Triumphantly they shot him in his bedroom, his children waiting on the balcony just outside. His body was thrown to the sea between the two nations. It was said he had lived here, allegedly undetected, for years. Such events can only remind one of the magnitude of their surveillance, my native country overseeing my present home, so that in moments of real emotion—vision misting in the garden, the Italian incomprehensible on the phone—I find myself subject to a humiliating self-consciousness, I look skyward and think I ought to go in. It’s said that they located the Director by the vibrations of his windows, which when surveyed by laser over time confirmed that there was one more man conversing within the building than ever came out. Soon enough he was dead.
And so, the story somehow continues, was Shahid.
Shahid who didn’t even trust waiters, met his sources amid the crowd on a bus or the thick of a market.
We should talk, I said to him, after he’d congratulated me on a piece in which I’d nearly proved that the intelligence services had interfered in a local election to the southeast, prevented a recount that had wide popular support. He looked more interested than I expected. Yes, let’s meet next week, he said, his eyes bright through dirty glasses. But time passes and six weeks later he was dead.
What could I say to the radio show, to the US press, to anyone? Shahid, I might begin, had shown great courage and had remarkable access to both military and insurgent sources. Which is how he could so condemningly detail the degree to which the former had been infiltrated by the latter. How often the military seemed in its so-called victories in the mountains to leave supply lines open; when they moved into villages somehow only a few token fighters remained. But just what could anyone prove? Few—really no one other than Shahid—ventured into that territory to see for themselves, since journalist after journalist had been kidnapped there.
A few months ago when the navy had quietly purged its ranks of suspected infiltrators, a vicious attack on one of its bases followed, thirteen dead. A base not far at all from a nuclear facility. This was the focus of Shahid’s latest stories, as fervent as always and as always with his beautiful sources—sources to die for, the now appalling phrase we’d used. These sources claimed that the insurgent infiltration of the military’s ranks was so profound that any attempt to resist would be cause for war, a war in which, given the speed and brutality of the retaliation, the thirteen dead sailors, it must be said that the insurgents were holding their own.
I could only recite Shahid’s achievements, with perhaps a critical gloss, and offer a few trite sentences on the man himself. What his murder might mean for journalism in this besieged nation. We all wanted to write his story, to do it justice. But despite all intentions and accusations, fingers pointed even by American generals, the sentence endured, implacable: The intelligence services deny any involvement in the journalist’s death.
I couldn’t say how much Shahid’s death might disturb the economies by which so many across factions survived. His sources among the militants would never talk to me—no one will talk to an American, the others assured me. We sat around at dinner again, late, very late, so that the heat had at last somewhat subsided, and insects gathered deafeningly to the lamps, cigarette after cigarette did not drive them off. It was the sort of gathering Shahid would rarely have attended and which since his death I had frequented. No one will talk to an American. But no one will torture and kill me, either, I said, then recalled that the facts did not back me up on this, and there was general laughter, though I wished for silence. Beyond the lamplight the sky was a deep haze and I was too drunk. Somewhere to the east a drone dipped into the mountains.
We went on with our work, the intelligence services went on with theirs. A week later one of Shahid’s sources turned up: killed in an American strike. He was high up in the chain, a prize for any reporter or soldier; his number, it was said, appeared every few days in Shahid’s phone. Of the two he got the better death—gone in the explosion, not for him broken ribs, ruptured organs, the numbered lacerations we read of in the autopsy report on our colleague. Well, I’d written nothing of Shahid’s murder, but at least—I might joke, on the right night, in the right company—at least my fellow countrymen had not been left empty-handed.
Unmanned is an interesting word, I said to my wife.
Why do you always use that word? she said.
It’s correct, I said, it’s what everyone says, the drones are—
No, she said, interesting, this is such an American word, to Americans everything is always interesting.
I was just making an observation, I said.
No, she said, I mean, yes, this is what I am saying, it’s only interesting when it happens to someone else.
Unmanned, I said, smiling, I am unmanned!
She nodded, then shook her head. I as a woman am always unmanned, she said, and what does that mean?
But I didn’t reply, thinking then of Shahid, whose habits—cell phone zipped up in its sheath, head near a stranger’s on a bus—in death became facts, stagnant and singular. Picture the Director, shrouded and sinking into the waves. His enemies wouldn’t permit him a body: a symbol the living could claim.
To claim a body, I said aloud once my wife had left, and I ran my fingers over the keyboard. Those who’d whispered their truths and half-truths to Shahid may now be silent, their souls still burdened. I would hear you, I said, but my words meant nothing to the night, through the smog the winking stars.
Alice
Modigliani came over, a bottle brown-bagged in his hand. I’d hoped for wine but it was gin. He poured for us both and produced a jar of olives from his jacket, with his fingers dropped three into each glass. Thank you, I’m sure, I said, eyeing the greasy floating pimentos. Your table sucks, he said, rocking it back and forth with his hand.
The death of Farzad Ahmad Muhammad, I said.
OK, Modigliani said.
You remember it, I insisted. He was murdered in US custody. A British journalist got interested, and so there was an a
ctual military follow-up. A few guys were held responsible, or kind of—I pushed photos toward him, tapped each face in turn—this one spent two months in jail, this one was demoted, this one not even discharged. These photos, I added, were Kareem’s. He was working on some kind of amateur investigation.
OK, Modigliani said.
Modigliani bent down and slid the lid of the olive jar under the short leg of the table. Now we have to finish these, he said. How did he die?
I said: He was hanging from the ceiling by his hands, which is common practice, but he was left there for days, and they beat his legs to interrogate him, the backs of his knees. Pulpified, is how the autopsy describes his legs—if he hadn’t died, they’d have had to amputate. They said the beatings were normal, but none of them realized how many teams were going at him, how many altogether, and blood pooled around the injuries until his heart stopped, with him just hanging there. They found him on the morning of the fifth day.
Modigliani nodded. And where does Kareem come in?
He knew one of the guys who was later held responsible, the guy who went to jail. They were based out of the same compound for a while, they met socially, if that’s the right word. I’m trying to see if maybe Kareem is the one who tipped off the journalist in the first place. Like, he gathered this evidence to give it to her.
And this works out to a motive for killing Kareem, what, seven or eight years later?
Fuck, I said, fuck.
Modigliani stacked the photos and pushed them back toward me, maneuvering around drinks and olives. He said: If the guy who killed the prisoner was Kareem’s friend, Kareem could have been looking to get him off, not get him punished. But you know that. Not to mention, he added, that we have four other victims.
I know, I said. The photo on top was of the bruised legs, and I covered it with both hands.