As soon as he was home, he went to the bedroom. He found the whiskey he kept in the wardrobe and filled his toothbrush glass twice. Then he attached his ring to a chain that he hung around his neck, out of sight underneath his shirt.
What about me? Telaya said. Daniel took her mirror from its black velvet box and slipped it into the pocket of his pants. Light and thin, the mirror carried an unexpected weight.
Laila came to the house that night. Her doctor’s coat was bloodstained, but her Communist Party ID was glossy and clean, and the guard let her in without question. Daniel found her in the living room. He had little to say to her. She wanted to check his body for breaks and sprains, but he refused. When he asked if she’d known about Sherzai’s plan, she shook her head. He told her he was going to bed and asked her to see herself out. As a doctor and party member, she had no curfew.
“Be careful,” she said before she left.
“I will.”
“I don’t mean with what’s happening outside.”
Walled In
They trek across the desert, pulling their children, camels, and mules, their carpets and tents from place to place as they go. When Boy was very small, he felt sorry for these people who had lost their homes. Then one day Nazook exploded into laughter and told him, “You are an idiot who would be lost without me. Those people are homeless because it is how they have always lived. They’re nomads.” He stretches out the word as if Boy might be too stupid to understand. How can there be such a thing, Boy wonders. Wall-less by choice?
He asks Socrates. Some nomads hate living inside, the teacher explains. The government tried to force them into high-rises, which the English and the Germans and Russians came with cameras to film. But everything inside the high-rises was wrong. How unnatural to live up so high, so dangerously close to where the spirits lived, with loved ones separated by walls, doors, locks. Within four weeks, three had already taken their own lives because they could not live this way. A woman and her twelve-year-old twin girls killed themselves days later because strange men could watch them from a building across the way, and the shame became unbearable. Soon, the Kochis all packed their belongings and moved back out. When Socrates said this, Boy felt sick. To be human was to want walls—wasn’t that what separated humans from animals?
Taj walks among the Kochis now; they are the best poppy workers around. But their very existence is an affront to him. They mock everything he has ever wanted, satisfied without possessions or dreams of a bigger life. When Taj built his house, he treasured his walls so much that he refused to hang carpets or photos or scarves on them. The walls had to be blank. It wasn’t fancy art that reminded him of his success. It was the walls.
33
The bedroom balcony was like an island, deserted and warm despite the falling temperatures of the post-storm night. Daniel tried to lose himself in a book, to no avail. He had to think about what he had said to Khaiyam. He had to decide if the seed in his mind was worth watering or a poisoned kernel to be destroyed. Over the wall to the east, the lights were bright in Keshmesh’s house.
Daniel watched the boy’s father come home, draping his car with a tarp as meticulously as a mother tucking in her child. More remarkable was the flag that hung from Keshmesh’s balcony. Its black, gold, and green stripes were already blocks of memory, and Daniel wished he could chase away the red that now flew over the city.
Keshmesh emerged onto his balcony. Daniel raised his hand in salute, but the boy didn’t respond. They’d met countless times like this, the boy putting on goofy shows. There were no antics tonight, because Keshmesh’s father walked onto the balcony and began quarreling with his son. It ended with a loud admonition: “You have no idea how lucky you are, you ungrateful child.” He pulled the old flag up and bundled it in his hands, storming back inside while his son sulked. Over the other wall, in the road, Daniel could see a guard asleep in his Jeep, already bored with his revolution.
Daniel went back inside, wondering if he would be able to sleep. He laid his pajamas on the bed and sat in front of the dresser, watching himself in the dimly lit mirror. The beard made him look older. His eyes were as they had always been, his pupils like two brown stones from his father’s mines.
His father’s mines. He had never felt they were his own, and fate had agreed. His flight was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Rebecca expected him. But he expected something else of himself now. He went downstairs to call her. He thought he would find Peter and Elias playing cards in the living room, lamenting their bad hands and applauding at trivial victories. Instead, he found Elias sitting there in the dark.
“Don’t,” Elias said when Daniel reached for the light switch.
They spoke for a while, the journalist rambling like a drunk man even though he was sober. He would not apologize for what he had believed in, he said, but he’d made one big mistake: assuming that men who had the same ideologies believed in the same things. But there was more to belief than ideology, wasn’t there, he wondered.
As Elias spoke, Daniel decided that tomorrow he would find Taj. It was the only thing that made sense.
Then, after Elias had gone to bed, he saw what Laila had done. She’d lined up empty bottles at the wet bar, with a handwritten note: We love you.
He picked up the receiver, relieved to finally hear a dial tone. Elizabeth Menlow answered on the first ring. She sounded strained, her voice thin and small, and once he had convinced her that he was all right and in no danger, she began to weep. “We’re all counting the hours until you arrive, dear,” she said.
He was going to tell her that he had to stay just one more week, but her next words weren’t what he expected. Rebecca was at St. Luke’s. Daniel jerked out of his chair. Elizabeth described the ambulance and the medics in detail. She talked about their accents and clothes, as if these things mattered. She said Walter was with Rebecca now, and that Elizabeth had come home only to pack some clothes and books for her. At least that was something, Daniel thought. Books. That meant Rebecca was alert and awake.
“Did she go into labor?” he asked. Laila had said three or four weeks ahead would be early but not catastrophic.
“No. At first they thought it was. Wait. There was something about early labor. But that’s not why she’s there.”
“Elizabeth, is Becca in labor or not?”
“Oh no, she’s not in labor, dear. They just need to keep her because of the complication.”
“What complication?”
“The one she had to go to the hospital for. She’s fine. I mean, there are no contractions, so don’t worry about that. That’s what the doctor said. He said don’t worry. About that . . .” She trailed off.
Daniel rubbed his eyes and began to pace, stretching the phone cord as far as it would allow. He asked for the number to St. Luke’s and Rebecca’s room. The phone rang twenty times. He tried the front desk and they connected him from there, but again, it only rang. He slammed down the receiver, then raised it back to his ear. Silence. The connection was down. He tried again and again to no avail.
He finally reached Rebecca at five the next morning after another fitful night. She sounded weak. She asked anxious questions, telling him how glad she was that he would be on a plane in a few hours. The revolution was on the news every night. CBS had interviewed Smythe, who assured everyone that things could proceed as usual for the time being. The new regime might not be impossible to work with, he said. Daniel had no interest in what Smythe thought. He wanted to know what was happening to Rebecca. When he thought about her, it made the regime change seem smaller.
“Remind me what time you’re landing,” she said.
There it was. “It’s actually going to be another week until I can come home. Just administrative things.” This was different from all the other things he’d kept from her. Everyone was careful with what they said over the phone now. But when he returned, he would tell her everything.
“It’s out of my hands,” he continued. It was true. He had two lives now, although he lived in a space in between them, a gray area that wasn’t gray at all, its spectrum made up instead of shades of red and green. “Becca, are you still there?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s just that I don’t believe you.”
“What do you mean?”
She hung up. When he tried to call back, the line was dead. Daniel tried again several times before lying down on the couch. For the next hour and a half, Elias silently read the Koran, absorbed like a student who had at last found a philosophy with the answers he’d been seeking, while Peter barricaded himself upstairs with his typewriter. Daniel was sure he would always associate these days with that clicking sound. Every time he thought about Khaiyam, he wanted to go back up the stairs of that crooked building and correct the mullah on one point. Daniel wasn’t worthless without his inherited wealth; he could still offer something.
As he waited for the clock to strike seven, he tried to distract himself with small pleasures and tasks. He ate an orange. He rearranged his LPs alphabetically. He picked up random books, thumbing through a few pages of Death in Venice, which he found boring and a little twisted. He drank, but only a little. It helped with the pain, especially when he mixed it with tiny bits of opium. Finally, he looked at his watch. It was time to go. He checked his beard, makeup, and turban, still unused to working its layers and folds, which only looked right with Firooz’s help. He hoped he would be able to find Taj. He wondered what the khan would say when he saw Daniel in his disguise. Walking through the living room, he was taken aback by his father’s glare. He seldom noticed the portrait. Today, the bespectacled eyes followed him even after he left the room. He slipped out of the house and mounted one of the bikes. He felt Telaya’s mirror shift in his pocket.
Daniel reached the Silk Road at eight thirty. Tucked away on the outskirts of town, it was a place he never thought he would visit. Like the Zoroaster, it could only be found by those who knew where to go. It stood alone on a concrete slab, surrounded by a patch of desert on a dusty road. He hesitated. If he was slipping into some kind of madness, so be it. He pushed open a ragged screen that led into a hallway without a ceiling. At the end was a heavy door. He tapped several times and waited for what seemed like an eternity before a gleaming eye appeared in the peephole. A sleepy voice asked what he wanted.
“I’m looking for a friend.”
More questions. The portal unlocked and the hinges creaked open. A young man led him inside. Organized in a tidy row were loafers, oxfords, sandals, and heels. Even a pair of cowboy boots. Two armed men searched him. They asked if he had come to smoke. No, he said. He just wanted to talk to a friend who might be here. He followed them through a restaurant, crossing the kitchen, and was ushered through another creaking metal door at the end of a hallway. They gave him five minutes.
The smell of bitter sweetness rushed toward him. The opium den looked nothing like the image painted on its ceiling, a gilded fresco depicting a harem where women drank from goblets, turbaned men enveloped in twirling smoke and lustful girls. The space was dimly lit by sconces, the flames making shadows jump on the walls. Plush cushions lined the edges of the room. Scattered around were ottomans and low tables. There was no music, only hushed whispers and peaceful breathing.
No one seemed to notice Daniel as he moved about the room, not even those who looked straight at him. The fevered ones were lost to warm dreams and each other. One of the paradoxes of opium was that people could feel deeply connected to others while enjoying a sense of sublime solitude. Or so he’d heard when he was a boy eavesdropping on his father’s servants. It wasn’t the kind of information you found in USADE handbooks. He felt like an intruder.
Taj Maleki was known to many in the room. Most had heard his name, and some had even seen him, but they all described him in different ways. Sometimes he was tall, other times short. So he had sent decoys. Ingenious. When Daniel asked where he lived or how often he came here, the Fevered Ones looked at him as if his questions had no answers. He approached a couple playing chess with marble pieces that were as green as the smoke, and they smiled like Daniel was the person they’d been waiting for. The woman told him no one saw Taj Maleki anywhere outside the Silk Road.
“Doesn’t he sometimes meet people at the Zoroaster?” Daniel said.
The couple smiled. “Nobody here goes to a place like that.” They went on to explain that other Manticores sometimes came here, too, but there was no agreement on the names of these men or their appearance. They came now and then to ask their customers if they liked the latest sample and wished to arrange a regular purchase. “There’s no predictability to their visits.” Manticores came and went in rhythms known only to them.
“How often do you come here?” Daniel said.
“How often . . .”
He scribbled his name and number on napkins, handing them to everyone. “If you see him,” he said, “tell him it’s important.”
The guards searched him again before he left. He was glad to walk out into the sunlight and leave the addicts to their fever dream where opium was the beginning, middle, and end. It was a place without time, a place without place. Daniel envied them.
Stars
Socrates is dead. He overdosed on the flower he loved, as Taj knew he would. Socrates made Taj into an educated man, and he’d been proud of his pupil. They had traveled together to the Gardens of Babur, to the Blue Mosque in Herat, to the Buddha statues in Bamyan, and the home of the great poet Rumi in Balkh, where the Mosque of Nine Cupolas stood. Before he died, Socrates taught Taj about great men. There were kings and poets and warriors like Mir Masjidi, who fought the English in the early 1800s. And Sayed Sajadi, beloved by the people for his fierce fight against the invaders when he was not yet twenty, using the wealth he received as the sole heir of a gemstone company to help build a resistance army unlike anything the English were prepared for. Once the English were expelled, the Russians were so scared they made peace two years later, and after that Sayed Sajadi rose to challenge the monarchy, criticizing it in public, becoming more popular than the king ever was. Socrates admired this man very much, and one day he told Taj a story.
When Socrates was a small boy, he lived with his family in Herat. One spring day, when the cherry blossoms filled the air with perfume, his parents dressed in fine clothes and young Socrates wore a silk outfit purchased for his grandmother's funeral the year before. With their neighbors, they lined the main boulevard in the city, It was the most exciting day of Socrates’s life. Sayed Sajadi arrived by car but stepped out so he could walk and greet the hundreds of people who had come. When Sayed Sajadi saw Socrates, he picked him up in his arms, and looking into his eyes, the hero said, “You will grow up to do great things, won’t you?”
Years later, Socrates was proud of his government job as a clerk. He never thought much about what Sayed Sajadi had said, until one day he noticed that his portrait was on one of the walls. How silly, he thought—Mr. Sajadi disliked the government, and everybody had heard he was locked up in prison for the things he’d said about the king. But when Socrates saw the photo, he felt a little ashamed of his job. Surely this was not what Mr. Sajadi had meant by “do great things.”
Socrates had grown up and done nothing great, and never would. It was opium that saved him from the shame, he said to Taj. Opium took away everything that caused him pain. God lived inside that sweet green smoke, and Socrates knew this because when he smoked, forgiveness came, too. To be with God all day, all night, to inhale the essence of the divine, this was a gift discovered by few men, and Socrates died grateful, so grateful that he was one of the chosen.
But Taj does not believe in God. Under the stars of a lonely night, he wipes his tears and gently closes his teacher’s eyes.
34
The next four mornings, Daniel returned to the Silk Road. Still no sign of Taj. On the r
adio, propaganda dominated the airwaves during the day, and at night the announcer read off the dreaded arrest report. Daniel stopped listening after it seemed like half the people he’d grown up with had been taken. Voice of America gave updates at random times, never announcing the next broadcast, forcing the Communists—and everyone else—to search for the right frequency. Daniel stopped listening to them, too. He had reached Rebecca twice since she’d hung up on him, and though she was still at St. Luke’s, she said she was fine. It was only a precaution, she said. She didn’t sound angry now, but there was fear and sadness when they spoke, which wasn’t as often as he wanted because the phones still worked sporadically.
He saw nothing of Ian, who was unhappily holed up at the US embassy with most of the Peace Corps staff. Daniel washed his clothes by hand, hanging them to dry on the balcony. He read and stayed inside, while Firooz ventured out for groceries and cooked elaborate meals that made for copious leftovers. Stuck in the house together, Peter, Elias, and Daniel spoke little, and he wondered if they had seen Laila’s note and the bottles she’d lined up at the wet bar. Daniel had removed them and stowed them in the kitchen. The next day, they were gone. He was grateful for the discretion of men like Firooz. The faithful housekeeper was like the servants he’d grown up with, a multitude of men who rushed silently from room to room, talked in code, and gave cryptic answers to Daniel’s little-boy questions. If he asked when the crates of Coca-Cola were coming, they would nod knowingly and say things like “When the mule is gone, a wise man puts away the saddle and stocks up on onions.”
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