by Phil Klay
“That is the best that could have happened,” Jefferson told me. “Not quite death but almost death. It makes less news outside of Rioclaro, but inside Rioclaro he’ll be a constant reminder of what it means to stay.”
Villagers began leaving. To walk the streets of Rioclaro was to hardly breathe, to be choked by the fear in the air. It only needed one final push.
“That,” Jefferson said, “requires death.”
* * *
• • •
When we moved on Rioclaro, Jefferson had his men take the piano out of Sánchez’s house and bring it to the center of the town square. Luisa and the mayor followed us, filled with fear and sadness and rage. The edges of the square were slowly filling with scared people as Jefferson’s paras beat through the town, driving everyone to witness. We set the piano down at the south end of the square, by the church.
Jefferson pointed to the piano and said, “Who plays?” And the mayor, terrified, pointed his finger at Luisa, now crouched on the ground, face in her hands. And Jefferson stepped over and touched her arm gently. And he said, “Ma’am, I would like to hear you play.” And Luisa looked up at her father, the mayor. And the mayor nodded his pale, frightened face, and she let Jefferson lift her up and escort her to the piano as if onto a stage. The fire I had seen in her was gone.
“Play,” said Jefferson. And Luisa looked at her father, and her father looked at Jefferson, and Luisa shook her head angrily, some of her fire back, where she’d found it I do not know, and she said, “I’ll play the Appassionata.”
She lifted the seat of the piano bench and pulled out papers with notes on them that she put on the ledge above the keys. Then she sat at the piano, and she gathered stillness around her. The crowd at the edges of the square, whose eyes had all been on Jefferson or on the men with their guns who surrounded them, seemed to fix on her, and the strange thing Jefferson had her doing. She laid her hands gently on the keys. Her hands, which I had first thought too large, and ugly, like a man’s hands stitched onto a woman, now looked lovely, and right. And she started to play.
The opening notes were dark and slow. Then she fluttered her fingers, a quick moment of light before it returned to dark. And then more flutters, and more dark, and quick dark stabbing notes struck with fat heavy fingers.
Jefferson grinned and gave the mayor a thumbs-up. He liked a good show, and this was a good show.
To me, it was not a good show. I did not understand why. Perhaps because I was overexcited, or nervous about what was to come. Perhaps because somehow the music dragged emotions out of me. Little emotions I did not know I had, and did not want to have, started flowering. In the hollow core of me, dead feelings moved in the emptiness, stirring into something like life.
Then the music turned, or maybe Luisa was having trouble playing. There was a flurry of notes with a lot of noise but no emotion, and I could breathe.
“Pretty good,” Jefferson said. I almost agreed. Her fingers stumbled over each other, the notes clunky, and I could see the awkward girl trying to dance but trapped in her plainness, her powerlessness. And then, a pause, a breath, her fingers lifted off the keys, then back down with force, and the music caught me again. For the rest of the performance, this is how it went. She was not good enough to always play well, but at times she would get it right, and listening would hurt.
She played for a long, long time. When she finished, she looked thinner and frailer than when she sat down. There was a moment of silence. A moment of quiet in the terrified crowd, a moment that had nothing to do with us, with the guns we held, with the man we were about to kill, or even with Luisa, the woman who had played the music.
“Okay, okay,” Jefferson said. “Very fun. Now, up.”
His voice was strange in the silence her music had created, but he seemed oblivious. Had he heard something different from all of us? He dragged Luisa up off her chair, and our hands tightened around our rifles, we squared our shoulders, and the work began.
We tied Sánchez on top of the piano. A chainsaw appeared, and suddenly everyone who had watched, confused and amazed as Luisa played, knew what was about to happen. A certain degree of calm came to the plaza.
Here is what happens when a man is chainsawed in half in the public square of a small village. First, the noise of the chainsaw makes you realize how quiet everything has been. The kick-kick roar of it goes off. The man about to die cries out but his pleas drown in the violence of its sound. Then the sound shifts slightly. It becomes silkier, gentler, as it bites into the flesh and muscles and guts of the abdomen like butter. It sprays blood and flesh and, when it hits the intestines, shit, which is why we urged Javier to stop sawing them in half at the stomach, but he told us, “That’s the reason I do it, to fling the son of a bitch’s shit over everything.” Then the noise becomes grittier, jerkier, coarser, no silkiness now, as it bites through the spine. There’s no sound but the chainsaw by this point. The tip, at the far edge of the stomach, bites into the wood beneath the man and sawdust flies into the air, mixes with the blood, thickening it. The screaming has stopped, Javier is sweating, putting muscle into the work and then, grrrrrr . . . roar, the sound emerges clear, beautiful, unbroken. The spine is severed.
* * *
• • •
One death, dramatic and public, and Rioclaro became a ghost town. Uribe won the presidential election, and within a year there were talks with the government about the paramilitary groups disbanding. We were all offered a deal. We could leave the paramilitaries, or “demobilize,” and there would be benefits for us at a “reintegration agency,” and only the paramilitary leaders, like Jefferson, would have to face any jail time, and even that would be light.
Jefferson told me that while he was in jail I should work for him in Venezuela, where there were ways to make amazing amounts of money if you were smart. I told him that I had learned from him not to fight for money, but for God, and he laughed. He let me go. And I stayed in La Vigia, and tried to earn a living like a normal man. I still felt like a ghost, haunting my body rather than living my own life, but over time I decided there was one thing that anchored me to the world. I had saved Luisa.
8
LISETTE 2015
A Canadian photojournalist once told me that nobody should ever go straight to New York after spending time in a war zone. It’s too weird and the anger will just be too intense. He always made a point to go to New Orleans, which he considers a halfway house back to civilization. Me, I go home and then I go to New York to see my old friend Raul, who’s so goddamn New York fancy, and so unapologetic about it, that after enough time with him every ounce of self-righteous anger evaporates, and I move on to a much healthier sadness. But as he chatters, I wonder if something different is going on inside me, if the choice I made to leave Afghanistan and never go back has broken a part of the deal, because I can’t assuage myself with the promise to return to the place where life makes sense, and what I’m doing feels important.
“Big step you’re taking.” Raul grins at me impishly. “Proud of you.”
We’re sitting in the back garden of a little restaurant off the High Line where all the food is served on special little plates, practically miniature sculptures, teardrop-shaped soup bowls and oval dishes with holes in the center and a cheese platter on a tray where actual grass grows through artfully arranged pebbles and the cheese balances on top. I’m smiling at Raul and telling him everything is great—he’s paying—but I feel like a caged ferret. This is also part of the homecoming process—fuck this place, fuck these people, with their wealth and their careers and their comfortable lives—and I’ve gone through it enough times to know how to let it wash over me and then die off in time to enjoy dessert. Yes, indulging in anger feels cathartic. Who doesn’t like to think they’re special? That while everyone else is focusing on money and status you’re focusing on death and destruction and the terrible course of history, on the war. But R
aul has heard me give that speech before, and he doesn’t buy it.
“Yeah, I’m done with Afghanistan,” I say. And then I add, with regret, “And Iraq.” What I don’t mention is where I’m going next. That’s the real question. I owe Bob a response in two days. He wants me to relocate to New Delhi. Theoretically, I’m supposed to be thinking it over while I’m in New York.
“Too bad,” Raul says. “I like getting photos of you with your little helmet and flak jacket. It makes you look like Mrs. Potato Head.”
I let out a long breath and a look of concern comes across Raul’s face.
“You doing okay, Liz?” he says. “You gonna get the PTSD on me?”
“No, I’m fine.”
He stares into my eyes. Raul’s my dearest friend because underneath layers of cynicism is a remarkably sweet and loyal man, but I get nervous whenever that Raul comes to the surface.
“I’m tired of covering a failing war,” I say, looking away.
“So find another war,” he says. “One we’re winning. There’s probably some nice little war in Africa or someplace.”
“Africa?”
“Don’t they have pirates in Africa? That’d be cool.”
“We don’t have a pirates-specific beat.”
“That’s too bad,” he says. “Afghanistan is played out. But everybody always loves hearing about pirates.”
“You know,” I say, “you haven’t asked me, not even once in all the years I’ve been going overseas, how the war is going.”
“Let me guess,” he says. “It’s going bad.” He plucks a piece of cheese off the grass tray. “Did I get it right?”
I sigh. “Yeah. Pretty much.”
Raul smiles indulgently. “I read your stuff,” he says. “Some of it. You inspire me.”
“How?”
“Well . . . I started donating to the International Rescue Committee.”
“That’s nice.”
“I’m not completely worthless. Oh . . .” he says, pulling on the collar of his shirt, “and I’ve made a real lifestyle change. Can you tell what it is?”
He leans back in his chair with his arms wide, displaying himself to me.
“I changed my wardrobe,” he says. “Now I only wear clothing that saves lives.” And once more, he tugs at the collar of his shirt.
I lean forward. The shirt is light blue, with shiny white buttons. The last time I went shopping with Raul he bought a shirt that cost more than your average villager in Paktika makes in a year. I’m sure this one is no different.
“Impressive,” I say. “How does it do that?”
“Italian-made shirt, the components cut individually, with hand-sewn Australian mother-of-pearl buttons, and”—he grins widely—“a percentage of the profits goes to mosquito nets.”
“Mosquito nets.”
“Mosquito nets.” He smiles. “Did you know that the most efficient way to save a life is to donate money for mosquito nets to help stop malaria? Every thirty-five hundred dollars to send mosquito nets to Africa or wherever saves a life.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve heard that.”
“Ethical capitalism. Buy our fancy crap, save a life. If every company did this, we could solve all the world’s problems.”
“There’s issues with that,” I say.
“Oh, I know,” he says, “charity’s a Band-Aid, right?”
This is something I’ve told him. That charity’s nice but real problems require political solutions. And political solutions don’t happen without a free press bringing real problems to the public’s attention.
“And they probably use child labor or something,” Raul is saying.
“No,” I interrupt, “I know about this. I’ve read about this.”
“About my shirt?”
“About mosquito nets,” I say. “Mostly they’re great but in the Great Lakes region of Africa, they’ve been taking those nets and fishing with them. The chemicals on the nets pollute the water, and the holes in the nets are so small they don’t just catch fish, they catch fish eggs as well. So the lakes are all getting depopulated of fish. Which means, yeah, you’re going to have less people dying of malaria, but it’s fucking up their economy and all those people are going to be very hungry very soon.”
Raul stares at me.
“I read about it in the Journal,” I say.
He starts cracking up.
“The fucking fish!” he says. “Oh, that is why I shouldn’t even try. Oh man, that is a short history of humans trying to do good in the world.”
It takes him a moment to calm himself down, and then he says, “I’m sorry, but you are such a bummer.”
* * *
• • •
The next day I meet with Farah Al-Ani, a former interpreter I’d met years ago when I was covering her army unit in Basra. At the time I hadn’t paid her much mind, but then later I interviewed her over Skype so I could write a piece about her at the behest of her old platoon commander. She was trying to get a visa, there were proven threats to her life, and a cousin of hers had been murdered, possibly something to do with her work for the Americans, though nobody really knows. The platoon commander was also, it’s worth saying, completely in love with her. She hit every standard of American beauty—she was tall, thin, with curly but not too curly hair, and long eyelashes. Soon after the story went through, her visa application moved forward as well, and I like to tell myself that the piece I did played a role. Proof, I think, that stories matter.
I meet her at an Israeli coffee shop in Murray Hill, and it’s a little disturbing to see her in New York, dressed like a New Yorker. Skinny black jeans and combat boots, of all things. She’s still pretty, though in a way that seems so much more ordinary than it did in Basra, among the army.
We have coffee and she tells me about her life in New York, why she stays away from Little Iraq in Queens, how she likes the job an army contact had helped her get, and how she’s handling the schooling she’s trying to do on the side.
“I’m still very grateful to you,” she tells me in an almost shy way, and I want to hug her but don’t.
On a whim, I ask her if she’d ever let me do a follow-up article. Tell her story of coming to New York, settling in. Maybe react a bit to the rhetoric in the presidential campaign. She physically recoils.
“I’d . . . like to put that behind me.”
“Oh. Of course,” I say.
“I feel bad, though,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
“Sometimes . . . I do have that desire,” she says.
“The desire to tell people?”
“Yes,” she says. “But I’m done with that. I have a new life and I want to enjoy it. Some people, they look back too much. It eats them up, and does nobody any good. If God did not make us to enjoy our lives, why did he make us?”
I don’t know. This isn’t what I’d expected from Farah, and suddenly I feel terribly homesick. I miss Kabul, but more than that, I miss being out of Kabul, embedded with troops. I miss what my friend Kirstin calls the ISAF sound track: the rasp of the Velcro on magazine pouches opening, the crunch of dried mud yielding to the massive tires of heavy armored vehicles, the cough of a diesel engine, the roar of a passing Chinook, the excited shouts from a nearby soccer field, the chirping of birds.
If I take Bob’s advice and go to India, I won’t have that. A different adventure, I guess, though one disconnected from the type of reporting I’ve been doing. Working for a wire service is like being the boilerman for a steam-engine train—you never stop shoveling. In Afghanistan, every shovelful was composed of war. I wonder what stories I’d even cover in New Delhi. Last time I checked the news coming out of there, for some reason it was mostly legal stories—“INDIA BLOCKS 857 PORNOGRAPHY WEBSITES, DEFYING SUPREME COURT,” “INDIA INQUIRY INTO SCANDAL OVER TESTING SET TO EXPAND.�
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“You’re very American these days,” I tell Farah. “Forward thinking. With a touch of pragmatic amnesia.”
“Amnesia?”
“Forgetfulness.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t forget anything. But it’s not good to talk too much about the things that happen in war.” She laughs. “And I don’t want to burden people with my nightmares.”
I tell her that if she ever changes her mind, she might be surprised to find out how many people were willing to listen to her nightmares.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s true, I have met that sort of person before.” And then she makes a little dismissive hand wave.
And that ends things, more or less. What is there left to tell her?
* * *
• • •
The last thing I do in New York is meet up with an old on-again, off-again guy I know from when I was covering New York City politics for the Daily News. We have drinks. He rants about Bill de Blasio. I know what he’s expecting after the dinner, it’s why I called him up, and I wonder abstractly whether I really want to go through with it. He’s a perfectly acceptable candidate—decent looking, relatively skillful in bed, unattached, and generally not a creep. It’s not like I’m dying with desire, but I wouldn’t mind resetting the “last time I got laid” clock so that I can stop hearing it ticking me closer to my grave. Plus, at this point it’d be more awkward than it’s worth to bow out. We end up going to his apartment and having what I think of as an “empty-calories fuck,” enjoyable but not quite enjoyable enough to be worth it.
I head back to my sublet feeling even further outside myself, and though I know I need to respond to Bob, put my name in the hat for New Delhi or let the opportunity slip, instead of calling him on Skype I decide to email Diego. I’m not sure why, so I leave the subject blank. I type his name, and then I remember Raul telling me to find another war, one we’re winning. So I type one sentence, “Are there any wars right now where we’re not losing?” And within fifteen minutes he responds with one word.