The Swimmer

by Joakim Zander

  17

  December 19, 2013

  Brussels, Belgium

  There was something in the air. Something about the sound of the park. Something had changed, something wasn’t right. Mahmoud hunched over instinctively, making himself smaller, and turned around to face the park. His eyes were useless in the dark. A snowflake landed on Mahmoud’s cheek. The wind had subsided, and the temperature continued to fall. He strained to hear something. Sharpen his senses. All he heard was the wind rustling in the branches far above him, and the sound of traffic far away. But still. Something wasn’t right.

  When Mahmoud turned to Lindman again, he saw a red dot jump across his cheek, like a small insect, for only a fraction of a second. That was enough. He knew immediately what it was.

  ‘Duck!’ he shouted. ‘Fire!’

  Mahmoud flopped down onto his belly in the grass, still keeping his eyes on Lindman. He felt wetness against his fingers, cold against his cheek. Directly in front of him Lindman’s head was thrown back as he lifted an inch off the ground and spun a half turn in a clumsy imitation of a pirouette. A monster ballerina in a Pixar movie. Just a fraction of a second, then he collapsed into a sitting position on the park bench. A marionette with the strings cut.

  Mahmoud’s pulse was racing, but instinct and training took over. Without really knowing how, he’d assessed what angle the shot must have come from, where the shooter must be hiding. On his elbows and knees, he crawled around the shooter’s field of sight up to Lindman’s lifeless body. Now he could hear whispers in the distance, the rustling of feet over the grass in the park. Mahmoud’s hand bumped against something soft and thin in the grass. Lindman’s wallet. He must have dropped it as he collapsed on the bench. Without thinking, he slipped it in his pocket. His hands groped along Lindman’s legs. Grabbed hold of his military jacket, continued up along his arm. Time stood still. He tugged on Lindman’s arm, pulled him from the bench onto the ground. Struggled to get him to relative safety, even though he knew it was pointless.

  Before he succeeded, he saw the little dot again, for a moment, hopping across Lindman’s mangled face. And then Lindman’s body jerked once more, his head was thrown to the side. Something warm and wet splashed across Mahmoud’s cheeks. He immediately released Lindman’s arm and threw himself, in controlled panic, into the bushes that bordered the small grove.

  Blood, was his only thought. I have his blood on my face.

  But he never even heard the shot. Then he saw the little red dot again. For a moment it stopped on a tree just in front of him. As if in slow motion, the bark was silently pulverized, the ball drilling into the tree. They’re shooting at me, he thought, surprised, confused. They’re shooting at me with a silenced rifle. He crouched down and ran as fast as he could away from the park. The ground in the grove was soft and flat. Ahead of him he saw electric lights coming from a street that appeared to lead back to Tervuren. Lindman’s blood was dripping from his face onto his dark gray coat.

  Sitting in the taxi on the way back to Brussels, he could barely remember how he’d made it out of the park. He vaguely remembered hearing footsteps running behind him. Snapping branches and American voices. Steam from his mouth and dripping blood. He remembered reaching the road, crossing it, and continuing through backyards and small streets until he came to Tervuren’s small historic center. He had no idea how he’d found the taxi. Everything he’d done so far, he’d done automatically.

  Mahmoud leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. A wave of fatigue crashed over him. With his eyes closed, he saw the red dot dancing across Lindman’s unshaven cheek, then his face being torn to shreds again and again. How had they managed to follow him to the museum? He must not have been careful enough, somehow. He had led them to Lindman. He was responsible for Lindman’s death.

  Mahmoud hadn’t even noticed that the taxi’s radio was on until the screech of a pop song faded away and was replaced by a dark, solemn male voice. The news. Mahmoud turned his wrist to see what time it was. 20:51. His first thought was that two hours had passed since he met Lindman. Two hours since his life was turned upside down. Had he hid for that long in the backyards of Tervuren? His next thought was, what kind of newscast begins nine minutes before the hour? And then he began to listen closely. Snatches of words he recognized in the fast-flowing river of Belgian French. Assassins. Tervuren. Extrêmement dangereux.

  Words that could only mean one thing: he was wanted for Lindman’s murder. It was as if the taxi shrank around him, as if the roof started to sink. He saw the Arab taxi driver fiddle with the radio nobs in a panicked attempt to change the channel. He saw him throw terrified glances over his shoulder. He remembered every detail he had learned in Karlsborg and afterward. And the most important lesson of all: ‘Be creative, not reactive.’

  Before the driver knew what was happening, Mahmoud was sitting beside him in the front seat with a ballpoint pen pressed against his throbbing carotid artery. He felt strangely calm, disconnected.

  ‘Not a fucking sound, okay?’ Mahmoud said in hushed Arabic. ‘I swear I’ll cut your throat, okay? I swear.’

  The driver’s face was sweaty. His eyes were panicked. I got him, was Mahmoud’s only thought. I got him where I want him.

  ‘Drive toward Brussels,’ Mahmoud said. ‘Nice and easy. Don’t get any fucking ideas.’

  The driver’s eyes darted back and forth between the black asphalt in front of the car and Mahmoud’s face. He nodded almost imperceptibly.

  Mahmoud felt the rhythm of the traffic change just seconds before he saw police lights reflected in the windows of the car, in the rain-soaked asphalt. A roadblock. Of course. The taxi slowed down, behind the ever-slower traffic. Change of plans. Creative, not reactive.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Mahmoud said calmly to the driver. ‘I have a bomb strapped to my body. A real, fucking bomb, okay? Jihad style.’

  He grabbed the driver’s face with his free hand and forced it up against his own, blowing his acrid, adrenaline-fueled breath against the driver’s mouth and nose.

  ‘I will not hesitate to blow myself up. Allahu Akbar. And I’ll take those pigs up there with me. Do you understand?’

  The driver was hardly breathing. His pulse pounding against the pen Mahmoud was pushing ever harder against his neck. A tear slipped down his cheek.

  ‘You can save yourself,’ Mahmoud continued. ‘When I tell you to, you open the door and run as fast as you can away from here. As fast as you can. It doesn’t matter if someone’s chasing you. If you don’t get three hundred yards from here, you’ll be blasted to smithereens along with me and the rest of the heathens. Do you understand?’

  The driver nodded, sobbing.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Please, I have a family. I am a Muslim!’

  ‘It’s going to be fine, just do as I say. Take off your seat belt.’

  The driver obeyed eagerly. One click, and then the sound of the belt as it retracted into its holder. Mahmoud leaned forward, peering toward the flashing lights. He could make out a number of police officers farther up the road. Flashlights and automatic weapons. Three cruisers, from what he could see. Maybe ten cars between his car and them. Not yet. The timing had to be perfect.

  ‘Do you see that little street over there?’ he said.

  He pointed diagonally across the immobilized intersection, toward a narrow, poorly lit street running between small, gray row houses.

  ‘You’ll be safe over there. On the count of three, you open the door and run faster than you’ve ever run before, okay?’

  The driver’s eyes followed Mahmoud’s finger. He nodded and turned back toward him. His eyes filled with gratitude. As though Mahmoud really were about to save his life. Only five cars between them and the roadblock now.

  ‘Ready?’ Mahmoud said.

  His mouth tasted like steel and blood. The stress was suddenly real, palpable, almost overwhelming. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Yes!’ the driver almost shouted. ‘Yes! I’m ready!’ />
  ‘Good. On three. One. Two. Three.’

  Mahmoud had barely uttered the last number before the driver flung the door wide open and threw himself out. He stumbled at first, and for a second Mahmoud thought he might fall, but he regained his balance, got to his feet, and ran with a frenzy that belongs only to those who are hunted by death. Across the street, in between the cars, straight toward the small residential street Mahmoud had pointed to.

  It took less than a second for the police officers, twenty yards away, to understand what was happening. An Arab was running as fast as he could away from the roadblock. A moment of chaos and confusion, before someone shouted an order, flashlights were turned, rubber soles began to move across the pavement.

  Mahmoud didn’t wait any longer. As gently as he could, he slipped out of the passenger side door and disappeared in the opposite direction. Behind him he heard loud voices, the metallic rustle of weapons. Crouching, he disappeared behind a hedge, onto a smaller street behind the roadblock.

  Going to the police no longer seemed like a particularly good idea.

  18

  Spring 1988

  Afghanistan

  Finally, they sent me here. To beautiful, unyielding, horrible Afghanistan. Here, where time stood still, where time is standing still.

  ‘You know the region,’ my new bosses say.

  They know nothing but hallways and conference rooms.

  ‘You speak the language,’ they say, their thoughts already elsewhere, onto the next meeting, the next fawning conversation.

  I don’t have the energy to explain that I speak Arabic, not Farsi, not Pashtun. In my hands, I already have a plane ticket, a new identity, the promise of oblivion, the promise of a future.

  We drive a rusty old Toyota truck across the border from Pakistan, wearing head scarves and Kalashnikovs, indistinguishable from any other gangsters in these mountains. Just roads, potholes, gravel, and sand. In a market outside Jalalabad, I ask my interpreter to buy an English bayonet with the year 1842 stamped onto the steel. These mountains are the tombstones of the kingdoms who thought they could possess them. The English. Now the Russians. They retreat, confused, bruised. What is it about these mountains? I send reports back to my superiors about the mujahideen—they are indomitable, intractable. But also impossible to coordinate or control. One day we’ll have some inkling of what we have created. The layers are peeled back one by one. In Washington, they pay no attention to the fanaticism. Religion is not a factor in this crucible. But one day. After ideology comes religion. Those who were our friends will become our enemies.

  At last my crime has been atoned for, or perhaps just forgotten. Five years in Langley before they even let me serve as a courier. Endless days of paperwork and the freeway. The pool and TV. The endless, insurmountable boredom of daily life. It is my punishment for allowing the bonds to grow. It is my punishment for losing focus for a moment. As if I hadn’t been punished enough.

  I thought I’d be free from it someday. The thought of what I had given up, not once but twice. I told myself that I was free from it when I met Annie, when we got married after a year of fumbling but ever more convincing dinner dates, movies, evenings at home, and at last weekend trips to see her parents in Connecticut. But it was all just a facade. Putty and plaster. Colored lights and mirrors.

  At last there was Susan standing in the doorway. As I knew she would be eventually. In her well-pressed, dark blue suit, with her tired eyes, and her barely manageable, badly dyed hair. Oh, how my heart raced in that moment. How my hands started shaking when I opened the gray folder stamped with impressive secret seals. How the room disappeared around me, how reality shifted as I read page after page of circumstantial evidence and gossip, and agitated, misspelled field reports from Amman and Cairo, Beirut, Paris, London. How I closed my eyes before flipping to the photograph that my hand had already felt was there. I turned it over slowly. And looked your murderer straight in the eyes.

  Annie just stared at me when I told her about my new post, careful to hide both the details and my delight, my gaping hunger for escape and revenge. I knew she wouldn’t cry, it’s not how she works, it wasn’t how our relationship worked. She said nothing at all, just stood up and cleared what was left of our pitiful dinner from McDonald’s. Her footsteps were silent on the thick carpeting.

  And me, I wanted nothing more than to feel the adrenaline pump as I approached Beirut in a low-flying Blackhawk. Nothing more than to wake up every morning to the violence, the snipers, the explosions, instead of continuing this endless journey further into emptiness, further into regret. I wanted nothing more than to bide my time, waiting for the final piece of information that would open the window, the little rip in time. Dollar upon dollar. Threat upon threat. Flattery upon flattery, promise upon promise, drink upon endless drink. The registration number of the car, where it’s parked at night, when it’ll be driven the next time, by whom, where.

  And then the calculations and rough estimates. Risk minimization and assessments of explosive power. The patient, laborious work that results in a bomb for a bomb. An eye for an eye. A meaningless exchange of pawns.

  Up over the mountains. All we see are more mountains. I dream of mountains and open, snow-covered fields. Ice in pale sunshine. Winters that never end. I drink tea with the local warriors, who call themselves ‘students’, the Taliban. The interpreter tells me that they’ve been studying at the Islamic schools in Pakistan and are deeply religious. Wahhabis, as in Saudi Arabia.

  But here they’re rebels, not intellectuals. Their religion is simple and filled with rules. There is no authority beyond Allah. No writing beyond the Koran. And above all: no religion beyond Islam. They tolerate me because I give them the arms and ammunition to destroy the Soviet occupation. The war seems to allow them to compromise. Their faces are masks of hardened leather, their kaftans haven’t changed in a thousand years, and they’re about to defeat the world’s largest army with small arms and a few rocket launchers.

  And then? When the Russians have left, when the images of Lenin have been burned and only the ruins and the dead remain? Will these timeless men build a country in the name of Allah? Will we allow them to forbid music, theater, literature, and even ancient monuments? As they say they want to do? Do we prefer that to the ungodliness of communism? Into whose hands are we placing the fate of this world?

  It’s a powerful experience, to exact your revenge. Few are that privileged. So many wrongs for which no one is held accountable. There is so much we are forced to accept. And yet I only barely remember it. Just the feverish intensity of the day before. Just the instructions to the technician, an old, half-deaf veteran from some elite unit with lots of experience and a bag of tricks, flown in especially for this. Just his grumbling and fiddling with cables and gray plastic explosives in a bombed-out house in a deserted suburb. How we shook hands, and how, suddenly, I was lying on a roof, in stark sunlight with binoculars pressed so hard against my eye sockets that I had bruises for two weeks afterward.

  I remember a face in the binoculars. A face like any other. Eyes like any others. Anonymous features I had memorized from the last page of Susan’s report. I remember the resistance of the button on the remote switch. Remember how smooth it felt in my sweaty hands, in the scorching sun.

  Of the explosion, I remember nothing. Nothing at all. All I remember is smoke and sirens, distant screams. Everything was so impersonal, so completely a part of Beirut’s very essence. I remember that I closed my eyes. That I thought, it’s over. I have done what I could do. I remember the emptiness. Stone was placed on stone. Guilt on guilt.

  My next memory is clearer. Three sleepless nights later, I hear Annie’s crackling, alien voice coming through the strictly encrypted satellite phone into our little fort of an embassy in Beirut.

  ‘It’s still too early, we shouldn’t get our hopes up,’ she said.

  But her voice was so full of hope that I had to sit down and bury my face in my hands.

 
‘Are you still there?’ she asked, her voice filtered through stardust, metallic, static.

  ‘I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘Can you believe we’re going to be parents?’

  In the background I heard the evening open with shell bursts, the sky illuminated by traces of fire and searchlights.

  ‘The ground is shaking here,’ I said.

  ‘Here too, honey. Here too.’

  And then, if only for a moment, it actually let up. For a second I stopped punishing myself for your death, for my betrayal, for my revenge. Not because I deserved it, but because the unborn child deserved two parents. It was impossible to understand the enormity of a second chance, a second child. Maybe it was possible. Perhaps there was some compromise in me after all. Just Beirut, then I would never leave Washington’s Beltway again. We already had the house, loans, new cars every other year. All we needed was the baby and me.

  I came home from Beirut two weeks later, one evening in late August when the smell of freshly cut grass from the local soccer fields filled the air, when the hacking of sprinklers mingled with the hypnotic growl of the highway. I saw Annie sitting alone on the stairs to our bungalow, our suburban dream, as the real estate agent with bleached teeth and tragically provincial Wall Street dreams had called it. I saw Annie’s eyes in the twilight. And I knew. Like I always know.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ I said as I held her in that terribly inadequate way that is all I know.

  ‘The baby,’ Annie said. ‘I tried to reach you.’

  ‘Shh, don’t talk. I know, I know.’

  I held her on the stairs until the darkness was solid and the sprinklers had gone to sleep. Until the highway had diminished to a whisper.

  Later, at the kitchen table, with Annie finally asleep in our bed in the room facing the garden, I was back where I started. No sorrow. Nothing except the desire to move away, move out, move on. Nothing except the realization that a lie may be false, but truth is the real enemy.