by Alex Carr
Just inside the gate, Jamal was greeted by an old woman in a stained cotton djellaba. “Brother,” she rasped, holding out her withered hand and rocking forward on mere stumps of legs.
Not just lame but blind, he thought, watching the gray orbs of her eyes. He reached into his pocket, letting the coins he carried jangle against each other.
“Teta,” he crooned affectionately. Grandma. “What has happened here? Where have all these people come from?”
“Where else would you have us go?”
“But the director,” Jamal asked. “He allows you to stay?”
“Haven't you heard, brother? There is no director now.”
“And the boys?” In coming back to the orphanage, Jamal had foolishly assumed that he would take up the thread of his old life. He could see now that this would be impossible. And yet he knew that he would not survive on his own.
The woman shrugged. “Some are here still, but many have gone. Many are dead.”
“There was a widow who worked in the kitchen,” Jamal said, remembering the small kindnesses the cook had shown him. “Her name was Rachida.”
Another shrug, this gesture more final than the last. She had told him everything she knew.
Jamal took a euro coin from his pocket and slipped it into her outstretched palm. “As-salamu alaykum,” he told her. Peace be upon you.
She ran her weathered thumb across the strange money, then closed her fingers around it. “As-saluma alaykum, wa rahmatullahi.” And mercy as well.
“Wa rahmatullahi,” Jamal agreed, then started forward into the courtyard.
SHE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, Manar thought, looking at the faces on the wall in front of her, feeling the suffocating grip of her own failure. She should have been certain, should have been able to point to each photograph and say with confidence: mine, not mine. A real mother would have been able to do this, but she could not.
In each boy, in each set of features, Manar could see both her own child and the impossibility of such an idea. If only she could smell them, she told herself. If only she could push each brown lock of hair aside until she found the single blessed mark. Then she would know.
“Who are they?” she asked her young guide.
“The ones who have gone,” he said.
Manar was puzzled. “Gone where?”
The boy made a skyward gesture. For a moment Manar thought that this was his way of telling her they had died.
“To the North,” he said at last.
“To Europe, you mean?”
The boy nodded with enthusiasm. “In a year or so, I will go, too.”
“It's dangerous,” Manar warned him. “You know that, don't you?”
But the boy only shrugged.
Manar took a deep breath and let her eyes wander back over the faded photographs. Many had messages scrawled on them, parting words of encouragement for those left behind, or inside jokes—the bravado of children whose sense of humor appeared miraculously, unfathomably intact.
And how many of them, Manar wondered as she took in the lopsided grins and unnaturally old eyes, had made it? A few, if they were lucky. A number, out of the wall full of photographs, so small that Manar could no doubt count it on her fingers.
“Do any of them ever come back?” she asked.
The boy laughed at the absurdity of this idea. “Why, sister? Why would they come back?”
JAMAL STOPPED IN THE DOORWAY and peered into the building's dark interior, letting his eyes adjust to the sudden change in light. The stench from inside was worse than he remembered, the smell utterly human in its depravity. He could not bring himself to go inside.
Five years of degradations, he thought, suddenly exhausted, unable to go on. Five years of whoring himself in one way or another, of allowing himself to be swept across three continents. And now here he was, a stranger in the place that had once been his home.
He felt as he had that night in Tangier, caught between despair and self-preservation, only this time he feared he would not have the strength to act. He put his hand in his pocket and felt what remained of the money the American had given him, calculating just how long it would last, how many more days of food and shelter he could buy. Three, maybe four, he decided. And then what? He did not think he would be able to bring himself to do what was necessary.
“Jamal?”
The voice, almost familiar, came from behind him. Jamal turned to see two young men, one in a soccer jersey and track pants, the other in blue jeans and a worn leather jacket.
The man in the soccer jersey motioned to his chest. “It's Adil.”
“Adil?” Jamal squinted, trying to match the boyish features he remembered to the adult who now stood before him. “The professor!” he exclaimed. It was a nickname Adil had earned by being the smartest of the boys.
Adil came forward and put his arms around Jamal.
“What are you doing here?” Jamal asked after they had embraced.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“Yes,” Jamal conceded. “But I asked you first.”
Adil smiled warmly. “God willing, it is only temporary. I will finish university at the end of this year. But for now this place is cheaper than the dorms. And you? I thought we would not see you again.” And then, in an aside to his companion, “Jamal made the crossing to Spain several years ago.”
The young man in the leather jacket nodded. It was a gesture not of understanding but of scorn. “Did you get tired of the European women?” he sneered.
“Mahjoub is from Rabat,” Adil said, as if this explained everything, and in a way it did.
Jamal nodded. He had known more than his share of Mahjoubs in his life, and he understood everything he needed to about the young man: namely, that he was not to be trusted.
They stood there awkwardly for a moment, exchanging wary glances, then Adil clamped his arm around Jamal's shoulder once again. “But you must be hungry,” he said. “Come, we will find you something to eat.”
MANAR SLIPPED THE TWO PROMISED COINS into the boy's hand and watched him scamper away down the long corridor. Past his retreating figure, three sun-smeared shapes, like figures on an Impressionist's canvas, were visible in the bright rectangle of the doorway.
Breathing through her mouth, picking her way around the rafts of debris, Manar moved forward toward the promise of daylight. It is for the best, sister. She could hear the old woman again. If your son was at Ain Chock, it is better not to know.
The boy reached the doorway and stopped briefly to look back at Manar before disappearing into the glare of the courtyard. A survivor, she told herself, wondering if the same was true of her son. If he was, his instincts would have had to come from someone other than her. She had known strong people, and she knew with certainty that she was not one of them.
Her guide slipped away and Manar saw the three figures turn as if to go, one slightly apart from the others. For an instant, just an instant, it was as if Manar's heart had been yanked violently from her body. He turned and the gesture did not belong to the figure before her in the courtyard but to Yusuf. And in this single, ordinary movement Manar was momentarily reconciled with everything from which she had been separated.
In that instant it was Yusuf's torso in the doorway, his shoulders slumping slightly forward as if burdened by some unseen load. Yusuf as he had been so many times in their tiny borrowed flat near the university. As he had been that last time, when she had wished to tell him about the child but hadn't.
“Wait!” she called out, but the figures were already gone.
She stumbled forward, moving as quickly as possible. By the time she managed to reach the doorway, the three had disappeared altogether and she was no longer certain of what she had seen.
Perhaps there had been nothing, she told herself as she stood there blinking in the light, scanning the chaos of the courtyard, the collapsing façades and the alleys twisting back into darkness. Perhaps, in her desperation to find something, she had imagined it
all. In fact, she knew. There could be no other answer.
From his post in Xuan Loc, Harry had seen the end coming with a kind of absolute clarity he had never before imagined himself capable of. But then, by the autumn of 1974, only a fool, or the handful of lunatics in the ambassador's office, would have bargained otherwise. Even before December, when Congress took the final step of voting to cut off all military aid to South Vietnam, it was painfully obvious to Harry and his colleagues that the winter approaching would be their last in Vietnam.
Within the international community, those last few months there was an adrenaline- and alcohol-fueled frenzy that Harry would later come to recognize as typical of such times. It was an attitude possible only for those lucky few who knew they would be getting safely out and so could enjoy the thrills of war from a distance, knowing they would not have to cope with the aftermath. But for the Vietnamese, the end of the American presence in their country meant something else entirely.
He and An did not talk about what was happening. The Vietnamese were stoics to a degree that Harry had not yet encountered and never would again. But her fear was obvious. She was the only surviving child in her family, and her elderly parents relied on her for everything. Though An had taken her job not out of loyalty but out of necessity, they both knew that her motives would make no difference once the North Vietnamese arrived. Whether she would be allowed to live was not entirely clear; certainly the outcome would not be a happy one for her or for her parents.
In early March, several days after the People's Army launched its virtually unchallenged invasion of the Central Highlands, Harry went down to the kitchen to find An unmoving at the sink, staring out the window at the rain-drenched garden, her arms sunk to the elbows in cold dishwater.
“I can get you out, you know,” he'd told her then. It was a reckless thing to say, for he did not in fact know whether such a thing would be possible. There had been talk of getting everyone out, of course, but a reasonable person could see that there was only so much room, only so many who could be accommodated. But Harry had not been able to stop himself. “Your parents as well,” he continued rashly. “You'll all be taken care of.”
But she did not move. It was almost as if she didn't believe him, and so Harry added, without thinking, “I promise.”
She glanced up at him, not gratefully, but with a ferocious resignation, as if she already knew that he would betray her and could not stand the insult of his assurance.
And then, as if somehow able to sense the awkwardness of his predicament and the immediacy with which he needed rescuing, the phone rang, enabling Harry to turn away from her.
Even the staunchest optimists at the embassy were concerned by the situation in the North, and Harry's phone had been ringing regularly since the invasion as various reports made their way to Saigon and out into the wider world. So Harry was surprised when, instead of one of the Saigon regulars calling with an update, it was Susan on the other end of the line.
He could tell immediately that something was wrong. She had planned to come up over the weekend but was no doubt thinking better of it.
“Probably best if you stay put for now,” he offered hastily, trying to put her at ease. And then, when she didn't reply, “Maybe I can come down next week.” Come down for good, more likely, he thought.
“We're getting married, Harry.”
It took Harry a moment to hear what she had said, and even then he did not quite understand. “I'm sorry?”
“I wanted you to hear it from me.” Her tone was magnanimous, with just a hint of pity, as if she were sparing him something. “Dick's wife has agreed to a divorce.”
Harry said nothing.
“Don't be upset,” Susan continued. “We all knew this was coming.”
Her goddamned honesty, he thought. But she was right. She had told him herself that this was the way things would end, but he had not wanted to believe her.
“Dick says it's a matter of weeks before we all have to go. It would have been over between us in any case. You could see that much.”
But he hadn't. Somehow he'd imagined a future for the two of them—Susan at his side, the remote possibility of children, all of it occurring in a place other than this one. It was an unfinished idea, but one that existed nonetheless, and the thought of surrendering it hurt him deeply.
“I'm sure we'll see each other before it's all over,” Susan said then, as if it were the end of summer camp she was talking about and not the collapse of a nation.
“Yes,” Harry replied. “I'm sure we will.”
And, like that, it was over.
TRYING TO IGNORE the unforgiving pain in his back and knees, Harry lowered himself to the floor and reached under his bed, feeling for the safe he'd stowed there when he first moved in. There had been a time not long ago when such an action wouldn't have warranted so much as a second thought. But, now that he was already down, Harry realized too late that this time had passed, and that there was a very real possibility he might not be able to get back up again.
Here was the real misery of aging, he thought, the truth no one ever told you: when infirmity came, it did so with surprising speed. It was worse for men, he supposed. Women faced the disintegration of their bodies early on, beginning with the consequences of childbirth, while men were unmercifully allowed to continue believing in the fiction of their youthfulness.
Harry's right hand recognized the shape of the safe, pushed much farther under the box spring than he would have liked. What had he been thinking, he wondered, as he forced his belly onto the floor and twisted his torso, extending both arms beneath the bed. At the time, he knew that an arm's length wasn't far enough, but it was the best he'd been able to do. There were only so many places in a retirement condominium that a person could hide something.
Awkwardly, Harry pulled the safe toward him and out from under the bed frame. Then he rolled over onto his back and lay for a moment staring up at the ceiling before finally summoning the will to get up.
The safe itself was nondescript, a standard gray fireproof box Harry had bought for thirty dollars at the office-supply store in Kailua. It was a receptacle that even most burglars would have passed by—a place to keep birth certificates and living wills, items of limited value to anyone except the one or two persons to whom they were invaluable. Such was the case with most of the contents of Harry's safe.
The box, covered with a thick layer of dust, had obviously not been disturbed, but Harry could feel his heart leaping all the same as he dialed the combination and cracked the hinges. For most of his adult life Harry had had a contingency plan, an escape hatch through which he could disappear if things ever got too hairy. When he moved to the island he'd told himself he was through with such things, that to run at this point in his life would be the worst kind of capitulation. But he had not been able to let go of the idea entirely. Now he was grateful he hadn't.
Inside the safe were documents of various kinds: passports and driver's licenses, a handful of credit cards to match. And, at the bottom, a stack of hundred-dollar bills. A hundred in all. Ten thousand dollars for a rainy day.
Harry took out the money and fingered it, then set it aside and picked up one of the passports, a dark-blue booklet embossed with the elaborate Canadian seal. No one bothers a Canadian, Harry's old friend Eduardo Morais had remarked when Harry commissioned the document from him. That had been nearly five years ago. Now Morais, like so many of the others Harry had once called friends, no longer existed except in Harry's memory.
Harry opened the passport's front flap and looked down at his own face staring back at him, his old man's teeth and chin, the flesh gone soft from age and drink. It was a wonder Char would have him, a wonder any woman would.
As if on cue, Harry heard the sound of Char's key in the front lock. Hastily, he closed the passport and stuffed it and the money into the small overnight bag he'd packed for himself. Then he pushed the safe back under the bed.
“Hello, lover!” he h
eard Char call out, then two loud thumps as she kicked her clogs off.
Harry stepped out of the bedroom to meet her. “How was your class?”
She had come from a pottery class she was taking at the Kamuela community center, and her clothes were splattered and stained.
She stopped halfway across the living room. “What's wrong?”
“I'm going to have to go away for a while.”
She looked at him for a moment, then came forward and put her arms around him. Harry could smell the studio on her, the pleasant odors of dried clay and kiln fire.
“There are things you should know,” he began, “things I want you to understand.”
She shook her head, then reached up and touched her finger to his lips. “You're a good person, Harry Comfort.”
It was in no way a benediction. Her refusal to hear his confession made that clear. But there was a permission of sorts in what she said, an acknowledgment of the fact that he was capable, at least, of redemption. That they all were.
She rested her head on his chest and Harry was grateful, relieved not to have to look her in the eye.
After so much time spent living within the plodding works of military bureaucracy, Kat had assumed that whatever handover of Jamal was planned would take months to happen. At those not infrequent times when her guilt got the best of her, she took comfort in the myriad frustrations she'd dealt with since arriving in Afghanistan: the supply of tampons she'd requested dozens of times while at Kandahar that had never, to her knowledge, arrived; the space heaters they had so desperately needed for the booths that first winter which had sat in a warehouse in K-2 for six weeks, waiting for some supply sergeant's signature before they could make their way south.
Surely, she told herself, a living, breathing human being, with all the attendant complications, would require as much time and bureaucratic energy as a box of feminine-hygiene products or a piece of hardware. Surely something would happen in the meantime to change the boy's fate, some contingency for which they had not planned. They were in a war, after all, and there was no saying what might occur.
