Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  By the time Dad gets home, I’m bursting to hear tales about his heroic fight for freedom. He laughs. “The people are the heroes, my dear. I just sat in my Moscow hotel room. Only hardship I faced was the Soviet toilet paper. We’d better open up that market to Johnson & Johnson.” He smiles. “But seeing as you’re interested, why don’t you come with me sometime?”

  It’s an invitation into the pages of the newspaper. My heart is in my cheeks.

  “Could I?”

  “Why not?” he says. And a year later, when I am twelve, Ben and I set out as unaccompanied minors on Aeroflot, the old Soviet airline, with its winged hammer and sickle emblazoned on the carpeted bulkhead wall. It’s been a long time since we’ve shared an adventure, just the two of us.

  When we land in Moscow, it’s raining and gray. Our dad meets us at the gate and takes us through the VIP passport line.

  “What do you have to do to be a VIP?” I ask. Dad rubs his fingers together in the international sign for money. Ben’s explained the basics of the Soviet economy to me on the flight over, and bribes don’t seem very shared-hammer-and-sickle-ish, but the regular line snakes on for hours and I need the bathroom, so I don’t ask any more questions.

  It turns out that most of Russia operates the same way. If we want something that’s not available on the supermarket shelves, we head to an expensive hotel restaurant. When we want to be allowed to visit a church, we cough up a donation to the Communist Party. And when we want to skip the line to view Lenin’s body, we pay for the private tour guide.

  Lenin seems smaller than I’m expecting, petite and fragile. The opposite of all the giant buildings and heavy Soviet statues. He looks weak and human and beautiful.

  “Think he’d be surprised how things turned out?” I ask Ben as we emerge into the drizzly daylight of Red Square. Groups of women walk toward the market streets, hunched against the wet. They look older than they are.

  “Maybe it’s not the end yet,” Ben suggests. I think about that for a second, then nod. Can’t judge a book in the middle, Mom always says.

  We learn the ropes of this new world fast, gypsy children that we are, and before long we’re running feral around Moscow and St. Petersburg just as we did Washington, D.C., and London. We play tag inside GUM, the old Soviet department store, a giant skeleton of shuttered doors and crystal hallways, empty and echoing, like a dinosaur carcass in the wind. We fashion toy boats out of sticks and umbrella cloth and sail them in the fountains of the Summer Palace. We chase stray cats around the gardens of the Hermitage and learn which black-market money changers have the best rates.

  Dad comes with us on outings now and then, but mainly we see him back at home in his flat in the evenings. He moved into the place when he got tired of staying in a hotel, but he hasn’t done much with it except line every wall with books. At the little folding table, we drink tea and tell him about our adventures, and he shares stories about the things we’ve seen or the places we’ve been. He sounds different from when he talks back home, though. His words don’t have the same force. When I say something about helping the people to be free, he guides the conversation a different way. When I mention that I want to see the White House, where the people held off the tanks with their fruit carts, he stops me altogether. He glances around. “Narnia,” he says. And I know he means the part where Tumnus is worried about being overheard by the White Witch’s spies. “The trees are on her side,” I can hear Tumnus warning in my mother’s reading voice. I look at the leaves brushing against my dad’s window and stop talking.

  “Who wants ice cream?” he asks brightly. And we tumble off in search of sweets.

  4

  That fall, we return to Washington, D.C., as a home base while my dad commutes to Russia. We move into a brick house on the top of a hill near the National Cathedral, and I take the basement bedroom, with its built-in desk for my new computer and its dial-up access to America Online.

  I fall in love with the futuristic song of the dial-up modem, like a duet between C-3PO and the static on my grandfather’s ham radio. It becomes Pavlovian, that sound and that sequence, the prelude to chat rooms and newsboards from every corner of the globe. It’s like climbing out my bedroom window in Westminster, except instead of just Big Ben, I can see the world.

  There are stories from London and Moscow and Rome and Agadir. Places I’ve been and left no longer seem frozen in time but continue to live and breathe in parallel realities alongside my own. I stay up long after the house above me has fallen dark, dizzy at the number of different human experiences playing out in the exact moment that I sit there, peering into the green-tinted light of the screen.

  Daytime is less interesting. I’ve started eighth grade at the National Cathedral School for Girls, a bastion of social grace that seems unbearable after the wild world-wandering of my childhood. I feel like Mowgli stuffed into a whalebone corset. I take to hiding in the library during lunch or in the unmanicured back brush of the cathedral grounds.

  In that claustrophobic tightness, there are two bright spots. My English teacher, Ms. Buchanan, who introduces me to Anne Frank and Harriet Tubman and the role women play in combating tyranny. And my computer teacher, Ms. Schopenhuer, who teaches me to communicate with machines. The two weave together in my mind. A woman who can harness a computer, I reason, might be able to resist a tyrant who has harnessed a gun. I start writing my first attempt at a book. It’s about a band of female pirates who use computer code to coordinate their raids on evil warlords and free their child hostages.

  I’m telling my mother about this masterwork one night at dinner while we’re eating our spaghetti. She is listening and nodding. Then suddenly, her face goes distant. She stands up, walks into the kitchen, and picks up the phone.

  Something’s occurred to her about a call she received earlier from a utility company asking about a bill. My father’s away in London, so she’d consulted his checkbook and found a recurring entry for a safety-deposit box. Unaware we had such a thing, she’d phoned my dad to ask what it was, and he’d told her it was to keep the kids’ passports secure in case of fire. But she could see our passports, all there on the shelf.

  “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “I get home on Friday. If you’re so worried about it, you can pick me up at the airport and we’ll drive to the bank together. We’ll open the box. You’ll see it’s empty. And you’ll feel silly about making such a fuss.” She had let it go, made us dinner.

  Then all at once, in the middle of my chattering on about pirates and warlords and computer-coded rescues, she stands up and dials British Airways. I listen to her give her name in a blasé voice, as though she’s just confirming her husband’s travel. And in the pause that follows, I watch her universe crumble.

  Dad has booked new flights—London to Paris, the Concorde to New York, a shuttle to D.C., to empty whatever’s in the box and get back to London in time to catch his previously scheduled flight home to D.C.

  Some sixth sense had struck her at that dinner table. She is broken and vindicated all at once, fierce and suddenly fully grown. She takes us to a neighbor’s, then sets off for Dulles to intercept him in the act.

  None of us ever finds out what was in the box, not even my mother. My dad doesn’t deny that he flew across the world to empty it. Just refuses to share its contents. He asks my mom to forgive him. And having just discovered that she’s pregnant, she does.

  * * *

  —

  Doomed though they are, my parents press ahead, moving the three of us girls—Antonia, baby Catherine, and me—back to England. London is still a long flight from my father’s work in Moscow, and my mother spends most nights on my bedroom floor as I do my homework, playing R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” on repeat and crying. I find a string of pearls in my dad’s drawer and, knowing they aren’t my mom’s, flush them down the toilet. I surprise myself with how badly I want them to stay together. Af
ter all, my dad’s traveled for much of my childhood. He throws a whole pot of pasta at the wall one day, and the red splodge stays there, like a giant Rorschach test, the rest of the year. I want to protect my mom so much it aches.

  I throw myself into tenth grade at the American School and take refuge among my ragtag tribe of friends. We’re all the same brand of gypsy kid, offspring of diplomats and international businesspeople, moved every year from this country to that one, so accustomed to arriving and leaving that none of us is much good at staying still.

  I double up on after-school classes—Sanskrit and theoretical physics. I try my first cigarette and get to second base with Vandad Kashefi. He wears a guitar string around his neck and tells me he melted it playing “Stairway to Heaven.” I know he’s lying, but compared to the lies about bench-pressing I’ve heard from other boys, it seems like a respectable creative choice.

  I wake up one night to what sounds like wailing. It’s not my mother this time. It’s deeper, more desperate. I sit on the stairs, and for the first time in my life, I hear my father cry. My mom is comforting him.

  In the morning, I find out that his little sister had driven to a state park, stopping at a Wal-Mart on the way to buy an apple, a bottle of wine, and a garden hose. She’d parked at a national historical site and toured the grounds. Then driven up to a ridge at sunset, laid out a picnic, eaten the apple and sipped the wine, before fastening the hose to the exhaust, climbing back into her car, and gassing herself to death. She was my dad’s only sibling, his baby sister. “I was so busy pretending I was okay,” he says to no one in particular, “I forgot to check whether everyone else was.”

  * * *

  —

  Right after I turn fifteen, we leave London for Morocco and then D.C. Dad doesn’t come with us. It’s as if a curtain has fallen on the past, and his name is rarely mentioned. He leaves a message on the answering machine to say he’s marrying his translator. Mom licks her wounds, begins to date.

  I’m back at National Cathedral for my last two years of high school. My English classroom has a fireplace in it, across the top of which is engraved “Noblesse Oblige.” I remember my dad showing us the dairy farm where he worked as a kid—“good, hardworking Americans,” he’d said as he watched the farmhands wistfully, “as noble as they come.” I’d gotten goose bumps when he said that. But this new idea of nobility is different. There’s a darkness to it. As though this kind of nobility isn’t earned; it’s bought.

  The popular kids maintain power the way their political parents do, spending money and keeping up with the trends. One week they wear and think one thing. The next week they wear and think another. The product of constant informal polling. There’s no telling who they are deep down, beneath the shifting sands. No sense of what shape their actual bedrock might be.

  My history teacher, Mr. Woods, nods solemnly when I hint at how I’m feeling. “Try this,” he says, and hands me Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. I retreat to a far corner of the cathedral before skimming the first pages. It’s about the dignity of hard work and of following your conscience, even if society doesn’t agree. I inhale it like a struggling swimmer newly given air. In this world of lunchroom cliques and designer handbags, it feels seditious to even hold in my hands.

  When I close the back cover, I press the book between my palms for a minute. Try to feel it. Absorb it. Like it’s something sacred. Then I go to the library to see what else this man has written down on paper. I find “Civil Disobedience” and devour that, too. Paint quotes from its pages on my bedroom wall. The idea that our highest duty is not to follow the law but to do whatever we know to be right fills me with calm and hope and awe. This is the Berlin Wall rusher and the man from Tiananmen Square. This is the Russian fruit seller wheeling her cart into the grind of oncoming tanks.

  Something about the responsibility to do what is right lends the quiet moments I steal in the colored sun speckles of the cathedral nave a new urgency. I take a fresh interest in the comparative religion course required to graduate. I read Huston Smith’s description of each world tradition like an aspiring translator of the Rosetta stone, matching comparable ideas across the different languages in an attempt to divine some universal key.

  One day, I hear that Huston Smith is going to give a lecture at the Smithsonian. He has cancer, I know. This might be his last time speaking in D.C. I skip school and take the Metro to the Washington Mall. I stand at the back of the auditorium in my tennis shoes. We are all one, he says. That is the common thread. After a life of studying human religion in every corner of the globe. On the eve of his own death. That is the lesson his work has taught him. From Christianity to Buddhism to the shamanistic traditions of indigenous tribes, every faith deep down teaches that same truth. I can feel what he’s saying in my skin.

  When I get back to school, my name is on the Daily List. I trudge into the dean’s office to receive my Friday detention. But it’s worth a hundred detentions to have heard this man share his wisdom.

  The next day, my geography teacher tells me I missed the selection of topics for our end-of-year projects. In my absence, she’s assigned me the only one nobody else chose: Aung San Suu Kyi and the political situation in Burma.

  It takes me a while even to learn how to say her name. But my dad’s often warned us not to dismiss people because they have difficult names or unfamiliar clothes. It’s like a filter on a photograph, he told us. Doesn’t change the shape of what’s beneath.

  So I say her name until it’s familiar in my mouth: Aung-San-Sue-Chee. Daw Suu, her people call her. The lady Suu. Her father, Aung San, is considered the founder of the Burmese nation, uniting the land’s many ethnic minorities and negotiating independence from Britain, only to be assassinated in 1947, six months before colonial rule officially came to an end. Suu Kyi was two years old. Fifteen years later, the military staged a coup and took their decades-long vise grip on power. The generals refused to let Suu Kyi’s family come home from India, where Suu’s mother was serving as ambassador. There, exiled from her country in crisis, Suu pledged she’d return someday to fulfill her father’s legacy and free her people from the tanks on their streets. She went to Oxford, worked at the UN, and got married, warning her husband that she could stay with him only until the day the universe called her back to Rangoon. They had two sons, Alexander and Kim, by the time that happened. True to her word, she returned to Burma, amid the student uprising of 1988. She spoke to a crowd of a half million people at the city’s Shwedagon Pagoda, sending them out across the country to demand democracy. Within days, thousands of them were dead. The military opened fire into peaceful crowds in every major city. Storm drains clogged with bodies, and streets flooded with blood-tinged rainwater.

  The military arrested Daw Suu. Gave her the choice to go home to England and her family or face imprisonment for life. Surrounded by funeral pyres for murdered students, she chose to stay.

  She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. But as I get ready to finish high school in the spring of 1998, she sits in Rangoon, detained by the military under house arrest, these seven years later.

  I stick a picture of her on my wall and stare at it. There’s steel in her eyes, but she wears a flower in her hair. This feminine warrior for peace. I’ve never seen anything like her before. Softness and strength. One single conscience that’s brought an entire army to its knees. I want to hear my calling as clearly as she does hers. I go looking for the voice inside of me. In nature, along the canal, around Roosevelt Island. And at church, the great big yellow sanctuary at the corner of Potomac and O.

  Sunday Mass, a tradition in my family, seems less like perfunctory social ritual now and more like a treasure hunt—a jumble of clues that might unlock some inner vault of knowledge if only they’re decoded just right. I have the sense that they might arm me with the ability to follow my conscience one day. Or, at the very least, to hear what it has to say.

 
In immediate terms, the secret I’m most interested in decoding is where I should go to college. It’s the first big fork in my road, and it feels like an impossible leap of faith to bear left or right without any visibility of what lies beyond. I’ve been accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy to study aerospace engineering and Oxford University to study theology and law. One’s a life of service and adventure, maybe even a place in NASA’s space program. The other’s an endless supply of books and questions and ideas.

  I graduate high school in a crisp white dress on the lawn of the cathedral, beneath the gentle clink of the flagpole and a clear blue sky. I choose Oxford, but defer my studies for a year. Instead, I sign up for a volunteer trip to the Burmese border to work with the refugees fleeing Rangoon’s military machine. Then I take the cash my mom gives me for a prom dress and hand it to a travel agent in exchange for a ticket to Thailand.

  5

  Camp life is rich in ways rich people aren’t. The refugee families sleeping on mats beside me don’t object to the giant red millipedes that wriggle inside our clothing overnight. They’re too focused on the joy of waking to safety after a lifetime of fear. I never see them waste one ounce of the stale rations they’re issued. They outdo one another with creativity in crafting meals from nothing. Monsoon rains and moldy schoolbooks don’t dampen their hunger for education. Every adult in camp is determined to get their children into university, to transcend the cramped humidity of their one-room school on stilts.

  I start writing little pieces about refugee life and send them to newspapers for consideration. One or two are published in the local expat blogs, and I begin to feel like a journalist.