City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  “Kya haal hai?” I asked in Urdu, as this was the simple “How are you?”—impossible to bungle.

  My schoolmates didn’t mind my lack of Urdu facility, if they were even aware of it, but the reality was embarrassing in front of people like our servant’s son. As a result, I’d never spoken much to him at my grandfather’s house. If my Urdu were better, I might have ignored the fact that he was at least three years my junior and chatted with him. For fear of sounding like a fool, I didn’t even try.

  In the house, my mother was quizzing Sadiq about his day’s work, and I was grateful Hanif was out of earshot. Were the books dusted? Were they dusted well? The carpets vacuumed? Underneath the bed, too? Windows washed? Copper polished? Her enthusiasm made me wonder if we were expecting guests. Their voices echoed along the corridor of our big house, and I missed Lehla and Amir, whose mere presence prevented echoes. I recalled what I’d heard my mother say to my father shortly after Lehla’s departure.

  “This is what we had children for? To scatter them across the world?”

  My father was very sad. “In the end, it doesn’t make a difference . . . if they are an hour or one day away from us.”

  Hanif had only been in Islamabad a few hours, but his mother probably felt the same way.

  THREE

  November 1977

  School was its own planet. The yellow school bus shuttling me back and forth every day was a lumbering satellite. Home and school were both in Islamabad, but it was almost impossible to conceive of them as part of the same galaxy. It was easier to think of them as parallel universes and pray they stayed that way.

  The school’s red-brick buildings, one classroom deep and one story tall, were octagons, each built around a courtyard. In the middle of each courtyard was a sunken concrete star, perhaps once intended to house a serious fountain but now a place where some of us ate lunch. The only other brick compound in Islamabad was the American Embassy. It was located in the diplomatic enclave, a far corner of Islamabad reserved for foreign embassies. For people like me, it was a place you could enter only if you were the guest of an American and, when asked, didn’t admit to being Pakistani. No one told me this, but I somehow knew. Once when I’d been asked if I was a Pakistani by a marine manning the gate, I’d said, “Not really,” and he’d let me in.

  Any friends I made were from the parallel universe that was school. When we first moved to Islamabad, I made friends with a German girl whose father drove his family each summer in their green-and-white Volkswagen bus from Islamabad to Frankfurt, making detours through Afghanistan and Iran and whatever else he felt like seeing that year. But later his company transferred him to South Africa, and I never saw her again.

  Shortly after my sister left for Syracuse University, I met my new best friend, Lizzy. She was my age, blonde instead of brunette, the oldest instead of the youngest of three children. I never really understood why she wanted to be my friend, but she did, and so we were.

  I met Lizzy for the first time in Dr. Moody’s office. Dr. Moody was an orthodontist and the only dentist in all of Islamabad. None of his patients ever called him anything but Dr. Moody, a nickname he’d had for so long no one could remember him by any other name, so when the receptionist called with an appointment reminder, I was always confused why Dr. Mahmud was looking forward to seeing me for my next appointment. The dentist’s waiting room was known in Islamabad for being one of the few places where Pakistani and American children ran into each other.

  Dr. Moody’s office wasn’t far from my home. His street was lined with full-grown mango trees, and the one or two times my father accompanied me, he wondered aloud how mature trees had come to exist in such a young city. The office bungalow was wedged against the road, but there was an annex in the back where Dr. Moody lived with his family. The annex crawled upward from a shallow ravine. Once, when I sat there waiting for him for a long time, I thought the annex wound up the hill like the twisting staircases Amir used to build with his Legos.

  Lizzy arrived in the waiting room with her mother, and my mother greeted them in a ritual of friendliness she reserved for other foreigners.

  “How are you?” she asked, her Dutch accent as prominent as always.

  When Lizzy’s mother responded with an obvious American accent, I regretted wearing a shalwar kameez and tried to burrow deeper into the ample leather couch. The summer vacation had dragged by without my bothering to see my school friends or worrying about what I wore; now caught in the dentist’s office in clothes I would never wear to school, I scolded myself for my carelessness.

  Later, on the first day of school, Lizzy and I discovered we rode the same school bus, were in the same class, and had last names, Shah and Simon, that placed us in seats assigned next to each other. The first time she asked me where I was from, I told her Austria because I was born there. The second time, I told her Holland because that was where my mother was from. The last time, I confessed, “Pakistan, too.”

  “Which one is it?” she finally asked, clearly confused.

  “All of them, actually,” I replied, feeling caught in a lie, but now trying to tell the truth.

  “That’s so cool!” Lizzy said.

  “Not really.”

  “I’m just from central New York,” she said. “My dad is from Auburn, and my mom is from Skaneateles. My grandparents live in Cazenovia, and so do all my cousins.”

  “Are those cities close to each other?” All I knew of central New York was two facts: Lehla’s university was in Syracuse, and the city sat next to a lake with an unpronounceable name, a lake that, as Lehla once wrote in a letter, contained mercury.

  “Until I came to Islamabad, I’d never been out of New York state!”

  “Really?” I had no idea how large New York state was, but the very idea of Lizzy only living in one country, much less a state, for all of her eleven or twelve years, struck me as unusual.

  When she invited me home for dinner, her father, Mr. Simon, a big man who wore shorts at home and could balance his young twin sons on his shoulders, offered an emergency telephone number for Lehla in case she ever needed anything. “Maybe Lehla needs a place to stay for Thanksgiving? Or Christmas? Just let us know,” he said, as if our families had known each other for a long time. I liked him right away, not only because he was friendly, but also because he pronounced my sister’s name correctly, which was unusual for an American.

  I took home news of Lehla’s proximity to Lizzy’s extended family in New York and Mr. Simon’s offer.

  “I see,” my father said in a way that meant he would never think of it again.

  “How kind,” my mother said, because she worried about Lehla being so far away from home.

  But my mother never asked the Simons for the telephone number, and I wondered if it was because of what the Americans were doing in Pakistan. No one knew what they were really doing since most of them were assumed to be spies and, as a rule, didn’t advertise their work. But everyone knew they were everywhere. They drove cars with yellow CD64 license plates, announcing their American-ness, only to be outdone by the yellow CD62 license plates of the Russians, who all drove four-door tan sedans and therefore didn’t really need the license plates to be identified. The CD64s and CD62s were at war with each other, a Cold War, whatever that meant, and their playground seemed to be Islamabad. Whatever the mystery of the Cold War, the license plate codes were easy to break: CD64 1 announced the ambassador; CD64 2, the deputy chief of mission; CD64 3, the military attaché, who was most definitely a spy; and on and on. Lizzy’s parents’ car was different. It was an AD64 car, which indicated her father worked for the USAID mission.

  Lizzy’s house might as well have been a hotel. There was heavy furniture everywhere, thick velvet drapes on the windows, even the big ones that faced a miniature orange grove in their garden, and there were matching twin beds in the children’s rooms with identical sky-blue bedspreads and headboards holding rows of paperback books. Whenever I visited an American home, I wa
s struck by how families moved in and out of the ready-made houses every few years, different fathers assigned to the same job. I’d been in Lizzy’s house when Mr. Simon’s predecessor lived there and his family hosted our class graduation party. The houses never seemed to belong to the people who lived in them. Despite the stray photograph or a finger painting, they were bare and impersonal, and, like a hotel, appeared in a permanent state of recently being occupied or about to be vacated.

  After I’d been to Lizzy’s house several times, I invited her to mine. It was a few days after my grandfather had arrived for one of his visits and shortly after Hanif had joined his father at our home in Islamabad. When Lizzy got to my house, Hanif was helping Sadiq work in the lawn, using a kitchen brush and dustpan to collect scattered leaves. From afar, their work was almost a dance, the barefoot boy squatting near his father, sweeping a brush in tiny half circles across the lawn, rising to move a few steps before doing it all over again.

  Watching them unobserved from my bedroom window as I waited for Lizzy, I again tried to make sense of Hanif. In Lahore, he refused to go to school, spent all his time sitting on his janamaz and praying the prime minister would not be hanged by the general, who had decided robbers should have their hands chopped off. I, too, was worried about the prime minister, especially since I heard my parents claim that Dr. Moody had become his doctor and visited him in jail. Also, I had reason to worry about the general’s behavior. At any moment, my father could be stripped of his job, and maybe we would have to move again. But what did the prime minister mean to Hanif? Why did he care so much? My father suspected it had to do with “Roti, kapra, aur makan!” the slogan of the prime minister’s political party that convinced poor people, which meant almost everyone, to vote for him. Still, Hanif was only eight, or maybe nine, and my father’s explanation seemed far-fetched.

  After Lizzy arrived, she and I walked to the neighborhood park a few minutes away. We stopped at the unfinished house on the corner to skip up and down a concrete stairway that led nowhere. I shared what my father had told me, that the house was abandoned in midconstruction by a fleeing Bengali family during the 1971 war, but the possibility rattled us, so we hurried along. We were headed to the park to collect stones for a geology project in science class. The open space was dotted with cement benches and a playground structure with rust and red paint that made it look like it had never been used. It was almost dusk in November, and I was bitten by a mosquito.

  “Aren’t they all supposed to be dead by now?” I asked, annoyed, slapping at my shoulder where the mosquito was trapped in my shirt.

  “It’s not unusual for them to come out at dusk here,” Lizzy replied authoritatively. “At least that’s what Dad says.” She carried my mother’s vegetable basket, which was sagging with the weight of our stones. “My dad works with malaria.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s his job. What does your dad do?”

  “When we lived in Vienna, he worked for the UN.”

  “Not anymore?” Lizzy asked.

  UN employees weren’t quite like Americans in Islamabad, but they had air conditioners in most rooms in their houses, frequently went on home leaves and vacations, and, generally, weren’t Pakistanis. And they had yellow license plates on their cars that began with UN. I wondered how Lizzy could have missed all this. “Not anymore,” I said.

  “So what does he do now?” Lizzy said, kicking at the dry ground with her foot, trying to dislodge a small rock.

  “He works for WAPDA, the Water and Power Development Authority.” I didn’t mention he was in charge, because I didn’t want Lizzy to think that every time there was a problem with the electricity or water supply, it was his fault, even though maybe it was. I swatted at the mosquito now buzzing near my forehead. “Is there a lot of malaria here?” I asked, and the exaggerated wave of my hand could have been hinting at the whole country, almost a thousand miles south from the Margalla Hills to Karachi and the Arabian Sea.

  “I think so.”

  “You need lots of water for malaria, right?”

  “Standing water.”

  “Not much here, though,” I said, jumping in place, a cloud of dust rising from my sneakers.

  “Yup,” Lizzy said. “He travels a lot.”

  “Mine does, too,” I said and explained that my father commuted from Islamabad to Lahore for his job.

  Together, Lizzy and I carried the vegetable basket, too heavy for either of us, to my house, where my visiting grandfather was cleaning his ears with my mother’s cotton swabs in the mirror of the entryway.

  “Assalamualaikum,” I said. He kissed my forehead, his protruding front teeth leaving behind a dab of saliva, as usual. “This is my friend, Lizzy.”

  He smiled at her, and with the hand that wasn’t holding a cotton swab, he reached to touch her head, a gesture he reserved for children, but Lizzy pulled away, maybe because she was scared to be touched by an old Pakistani man.

  “This is my grandfather,” I said, and Lizzy, white like her hair in the bright light of the foyer, blushed a deep pink with embarrassment.

  The worst thing about school was the afternoon school bus rides. They were what I think made me most grateful for Lizzy. We sat next to each other every day, in the mornings and in the afternoons, our backpacks on the floor, where our feet kept them from sliding away. We always sat toward the middle of the bus. Lizzy could have sat anywhere, but she chose to sit with me, not in the front, where the youngest children sat, and not in the back, where the rowdiest boys planted themselves. They were relatively quiet in the mornings, but the bus could hardly contain their energy in the afternoons. By the time the bus neared the first turn in the dirt road that led from the school to Peshawar Road, the boys were at it. They cleared their throats, forced choppy coughs, and made unpleasant sucking noises. Eventually they puckered their lips and blew spit through the tight roll of their tongues and out the open windows. Hitting a pedestrian was worth one point, a bicyclist two points, and if the bicyclist lost his balance and fell, it was three points plus an extra turn. There was a lot of hooting and hollering and hand slapping, as if every afternoon the game and its rewards were being discovered anew. The bus driver, Pakistani like all our bus drivers, lacked the authority to put a stop to the games, and, anyway, he was no match for the boys.

  I tried not to watch. Before Lizzy, I concentrated on the front windshield or on the aisle, where soda cans, pencils, and cookie crumbs rolled back and forth at different speeds. When we’d first moved to Pakistan, I was only six and sat close to the driver, from where I observed the boys through his rearview mirror. The accuracy of their spitting was frightening. Their targets, sometimes children, would jerk their heads sideways, trying to shake the spit from their faces rather than wipe it with their bare hands or a kurta sleeve. One time, suddenly brave, I’d turned in my seat to stare at the boys, daring them to single me out, but when they did—“whatchoolookinat?”—I tried to make myself as small as I could and faced the front for the rest of the ride.

  I remembered the time Lehla asked my father if our driver, Mushtaq, could start picking us up from school. “What? You’re too good for the bus, my darling?” he demanded, without asking her to explain. Even though the three of us had never discussed what happened on the bus, we all knew why she’d asked. If we’d spoken about it, it would have been as if the yellow school buses had driven right through our gates and parked in my home universe. The rides, the boys, the spittle, all of it would have been real and true, and we would have had to face the facts: Not one of us, not even my big brother who smoked cigarettes, had the courage to shout, “Stop it!” We were all cowards.

  There were other reasons, far more difficult to admit, why I didn’t tell my parents. A small part of me believed that Pakistanis deserved to be spit upon. I wasn’t proud of this, of course, and I was horrified to imagine how my parents might react should they come to know. If my father had been told of the spitting boys, he would have taken us out of the schoo
l without another thought. The dreaded alternative, going to a Pakistani school, would have been worse. If I’d confided to my mother, she would have marched into the principal’s office and made demands, and from that day on, everyone would have known me as the tattletale I was. All in all, it was easier to leave my parents in the dark.

  During bus rides, Lizzy seemed as oblivious to the games as I pretended to be. We chatted about teachers and students, giggled about who wore what, and Lizzy, whose spot-on impersonations always had us in peals of laughter, mocked the boy in math class. “Why, the isosisillies triangle has two equal sides and two equal angles,” she lisped, perfectly capturing his mispronunciation and Southern drawl.

  Even with the distraction of Lizzy, though, it became harder to ignore the boys. At first, there had only been a few whispers about American involvement in the fate of the prime minister. But as the days passed and my parents and their friends talked about it more, the games in the back of the bus came into sharper focus.

  One afternoon, not long after the prime minister’s trial began and some time into Hanif’s stay, the girl sitting behind us declared that Boot-toe (she, like most American children, couldn’t pronounce Bhutto) deserved to be punished for rigging the elections. One of the boys gave up his turn in the spitting game to clarify. “What? You mean death?”

  “What does Boot-toe expect?” the girl responded, shrugging her shoulders.

  Lizzy rolled her eyes at the girl’s remarks, picked up my hand, and played with the last of the unbroken glass bangles my grandfather had brought me from Lahore the previous summer. The glitter made roving polka dots of light bounce off the bus’s ceiling.

  The prime minister was about to die, but Sadiq was my biggest worry during those bus rides. What if he were hit by a ball of spit? He routinely rode his heavy black bicycle from one part of Islamabad to the other, doing chores for my parents that took him along our bus route. Over and over again, I imagined Hanif falling from Sadiq’s handlebars, his slight shoulders hitting the road at the same time his father’s did. Sadiq would wipe the spit from Hanif’s cheek and from his own head with the back of his bare hand before picking up his bicycle and his son from the pavement of Embassy Road and heading home in the direction of the Margalla Hills.