They’re both right.
I sit down on the hard plastic bench in the empty departure lounge. It’s aggressively uncomfortable, an ode to a hasty departure.
I’m leaving behind a fairy tale—this land of plenty, so free with laughter and caresses. People like Emmy who give and give and give for no other reason than the pleasure of friendship. College loans and Happy Meals. Disneyland. Free refills. Boys like Ian, with dazzling eyes and kind, good hearts. Librarians with arms full of books for the taking, and shiny plastic jewels. Picnics in the park. Lucky Charms.
So much happy artifice. Such fanciful illusions.
For me, these things will never be real.
My old life, the one I fled, was real. It is real. It is real pain, and real war, and real deaths, and real guns. I can’t say that I’m excited, or happy to return. I’m not. What I am is ready.
I thought I was drowning here at times. But I wasn’t. I was changing. In the moment, they feel the same. Equally traumatic. Equally permanent. But these breathless, underwater months here have cleansed us, I think. Left us less singed than when we arrived. We are ready, the three of us—ready to go home. Ready to do whatever it takes to transform our Nowhere into something beautiful and peaceful.
Ready to make amends.
The edges of the folded picture dig into the skin near my heart. It’s my insurance policy. My weapon. My treasure. When the time comes, I will be happy to let it go. I have people and places I can hardly wait to visit. I’ll leave a bit of the treasure wherever I go—a merry trail of golden crumbs. Perhaps my homeland can produce a happy fairy tale yet.
Mother knows.
We don’t discuss it. We won’t discuss it. She looks at me differently now, with wary resignation on her face. She is at peace with my treachery. Or so she seems to be.
Really, only time will tell.
While we wait, I compose a farewell in my head. Dear Ian. Dear Emmy. Separate messages, of course, but both will contain the most important thing I have to say: Thank you. Thank you for giving me this in-between space in my life. The time and the place that rest between my Before and my After. It wasn’t meant to be forever, I know that now, but thank you for embracing me as if it were.
I stop when I notice the sound of music playing overhead. It’s Muzak—the watered-down version of a catchy song I heard Bastien singing along with just days ago. It will do. “Bastien,” I call out. “Listen!”
His face lights up, and I stand, hold out my hand. We used to do this back home, back before everything crumbled. He looks sheepish, since seven is so much more mature than six, but he humors me and takes my hand. We dance a foolish, spinning dance together, and I catch our reflection in the glass. There’s me, hair streaming, head unveiled, and there’s Bastien, a grinning, spinning, laughing child. I file the images away in my mind; they won’t be seen again.
“Okay, that’s enough, you two.” Mother is smiling as she claps her hands at us. “It’s time to go.”
I linger only slightly before I follow them to the boarding gate. I take one last breath, filling my lungs with the air of this place, and I make one more silent promise to myself. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s daughter. And I have learned from their mistakes.
I am the Invisible Queen.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The seed for this story was planted years before I started writing it.
I spent the summer of 2003 in Baghdad, Iraq. Saddam Hussein was on the run, leaving behind a jaw-dropping collection of opulent properties. My work at the time took me through some of his palaces—some intact, some heavily shelled, and all thoroughly looted.
One of the compounds had housed various relatives, including a number of young children. On the property was a kids’ playhouse built into the side of a hill, though “playhouse” doesn’t even come close to describing the elaborate faux-rock structure. It was as if the Flintstones had built a Stone Age palace—an enormous multilevel maze with built-in seats and tables, an intercom system, and stereo speakers installed in most rooms. There was even an elevator. It was pure excess and was no doubt thoroughly enjoyed by whoever had played there.
Who were these children? I wondered. Did they know the secrets of the man who had built this palace of a playhouse? Did they realize how different their lives were from those of other children in their country? Was Saddam Hussein just a friendly grandfather/uncle/godfather to them? When they came of age and learned more, were they shocked?
The idea behind the book didn’t crystallize for another seven years. I was a mother by then, and had just moved onto a military base with my family. Various loud military exercises were a part of life there, and it was months before I stopped jumping every time I heard an explosion. My young son adapted far more quickly, and one day, not long after we had arrived, I was taken aback when he responded to the sound of gunfire by asking me to turn up the volume so that he could hear his Nemo video over the noise. His reaction rattled me. What type of life leads a child to find the sound of gunfire nothing more than a distraction from a cartoon? I asked myself. And in that moment—in that question—Bastien’s character began to grow.
When I finally began to write the story, I did not want Laila and Bastien’s home country to be a thinly disguised version of any one particular place—Iraq, or elsewhere. To avoid this, and to avoid the trap of having to be too wed to actual events, I created a melting pot of details, current events, and personal experiences.
I started writing in 2011, a year or so into the Arab Spring movement that was bringing so many changes to the Middle East and North Africa. What began as a smattering of local disputes had spread like wildfire, crossing borders and tapping into deep veins of civil unrest. Before long it escalated into a wave of protests, uprisings, and civil wars. The whole region seemed to be rising up against the authority of repressive regimes, calling out human rights abuses and condemning the leaders who had allowed inequality to fester and grow. On top of that, the continued presence of the U.S. military in the region added yet another layer of turmoil. At times the sheer volume of pertinent material appearing in the media seemed eerie—almost as if the news was writing my story along with me:
• After being ousted from office and with his palace surrounded, the president of Tunisia fled the country with his wife and three children. He and his wife were both convicted in absentia of various crimes.
• Osama bin Laden was found living a cloistered existence in Pakistan; no one knew what to do with his wives and children after he was killed. Were they innocents? What did they know? Where should they go?
• Rulers were being forced from power in one country after another: Egypt. Libya. Mali.
As I wrote, the daily news brought me inspiration from other parts of the world as well —for example, when Kim Jong-un, still in his twenties and completely without leadership experience, was declared North Korea’s supreme leader after his father’s death. He wasn’t exactly a seven-year-old king, but I couldn’t ignore the parallels.
And then came Syria. Any time I began to worry that my plot was becoming melodramatic (Was a school bombing perhaps too much for this sort of a book? The memory of a body in the street too sensational?), painful images from Houla, Homs, Ghouta, and Aleppo told me that my plot didn’t even scratch the surface of the atrocities happening in the world every day.
Similarities between what my characters were going through and real-world current events sometimes chilled me. Days after I wrote the scene in which Laila watches the news of a bombing at a vacation locale, for example, twenty people died in Afghanistan when a lakeside resort was attacked. I grimly went back and changed my mountain retreat to a lakeside resort in the text.
But the overlaps between what I wrote on one day and then read in the news the next were not eerie coincidences. I was simply paying more attention to the terrible things that appear in the news every day, because my characters were making those tragedies more personal.
Ultimately, this book i
s pure fiction that is inspired by real events. It isn’t about a specific conflict any more than it is about any one particular country. Rather, it’s the personal story of someone living on the periphery of war. It’s the story of a girl grappling with questions about guilt, choice, blame, and identity under circumstances both extraordinary and mundane. It’s a big story told in small details, and I hope that my readers come away feeling as if faraway issues are now a little more personal.
TRUTH IN FICTION
A Commentary by Dr. Cheryl Benard
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to interview Benazir Bhutto. Benazir was more than just a newsworthy personality to me; I had followed her life and career with fascination for many years. Her father was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the heir to a powerful land-owning family and founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Zulfikar was British-educated, handsome, and stately, a glittering figure who rose swiftly to power as the head of his party and then president and prime minister of Pakistan. His fall from grace, however, had been even more dramatic; he was overthrown by a military coup and jailed on charges of ordering a political assassination. Even as the international community vociferously protested what it said were trumped-up charges, he was hanged without a proper trial.
J. C. Carleson’s book builds on the observation that political personalities of all stripes—dictators, megalomaniacs, patriotic heroes—have families and friends who, in turn, have hopes, dreams, fears, and ambitions that lead them to take actions, or to refrain from taking actions, with the potential to change the course of history. That may seem like a simple premise, but the path from premise to understanding is lengthy and, I submit to you, as yet unexplored in the study of politics. It’s like saying “germs cause disease.” Right, but that puts you at the beginning, not the end, of your medical quest.
Benazir was her father’s first and favorite child, and his anointed successor. She was just twenty-five when he was imprisoned and sentenced to death by a kangaroo court; she threw herself into the effort to save him, filing petitions with the courts, mobilizing international support and protests and requests for clemency by foreign heads of state. After his execution, the entire family, including Benazir’s brothers and her mother, was jailed by the military government; Benazir spent years locked up under harsh conditions, including solitary confinement in a cage-like prison in a remote desert province. Her brothers joined extremist groups. One became a terrorist; both ultimately died young—one of poisoning, the other in a shoot-out with police. Benazir, meticulously educated abroad like her father, a graduate of both Harvard and Oxford, took up her father’s mantle. At twenty-nine she was proclaimed the new head of the PPP. Six years later, she was elected prime minister of Pakistan, one of the world’s most turbulent, conservative, and patriarchal nations. Her election campaign produced electrifying images of a slender young woman, poised, confident, articulate, addressing crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands who cheered hysterically as she promised them that she would fight for them and for social justice and education and freedom. My feminist heart had been thrilled.
But it had all gone downhill from there, steeply. Instead of leading her nation to stability and prosperity, she had become embroiled in scandal. Both her terms of office had been cut short. She had married a man whose nickname was Mr. Ten Percent, because that was the cut he allegedly required before his wife would sign off on any major national business deals. He had been jailed for financial wrongdoing, corruption, and possible involvement in political murders. She had been forced to flee the country to avoid being put on trial herself, and all her energies now went into getting her husband out of prison and proving his innocence. It seemed like a tragic waste.
So when I met her in Washington, D.C., many years later, I threw all of this on the table. I figured I had nothing to lose; the worst she could do was get angry and order me to leave. Instead, she was silent for a few minutes. And then she agreed with me. Yes, she said, that was exactly how she felt about it, too. She hadn’t just failed the women of the world and the people of her country; she had disappointed herself. And she had thought long and hard about the reasons for her failure. “You know,” she said, “my father set me on the course of a political career. I was educated for it in some of the world’s top schools. I learned everything there was to know about international relations, economics, political science. And when I returned to Pakistan, it took me just a few days to realize that nothing I had been taught had the slightest application to the way politics actually worked in my country.” There, the only thing that counted was her father’s cronies pulling the strings, ensuring that this young woman remain a sentimental figurehead for the party and nothing more. The only way to get anything done was through the tangled network of relationships and bribes and threats and favors that was the actual motor of Pakistan’s political system.
She had been completely caught off guard by this, and by the time she had started to figure things out, she was already out of office. Her second term didn’t really count, she said; they had gotten rid of her after just a few months, before she could initiate any kind of action. But this time, she told me, the next time, the third time, she would be prepared. She was a mature woman now. She had spent decades forging her own networks and alliances, across the Middle East and in Europe and the United States. I was disarmed by her candor, taken aback by this glimpse behind the scenes. In the years that followed, we spent time together regularly, in small social settings where she could let her guard down and reveal her hopes and suspicions and her vision.
In 2007—we had become friends by then, and I was rooting for her—she returned to Pakistan once more to run for the office of prime minister in an election everyone agreed she was certain to win. And this time, she felt ready. She had survived jail, house arrest, and exile. She had the masses behind her. The young people loved her. She had powerful supporters in the West and in the Arab world. She had smart advisers. She wasn’t going to play the Pakistani establishment’s game this time around, and she wasn’t a young girl anymore, easy for them to control.
So they killed her.
And that’s not just my personal suspicion—it’s the finding of the official United Nations commission that was sent to look into her assassination. It was a few weeks before the election, which by all accounts she was a shoo-in to win. She gave a campaign speech, and at its conclusion, as she waved to the cheering crowd, an assassin fired two shots from his pistol and then detonated his suicide belt. The escape route previously prepared by her security team was unaccountably blocked by Pakistani police vehicles. The second car, the companion vehicle that is always supposed to remain directly in front of or behind the VIP vehicle for just such emergencies, sped away and left her. Her driver heroically tried to get her to a hospital, bumping along the public road in a vehicle with four blown-out tires. Halfway there, it broke down completely; Benazir was transferred to the private car of a friend who had sped after. At the hospital, she was pronounced dead. Since it was clearly an assassination and many questions were sure to be asked, the doctors urged an autopsy. Pakistani authorities forbade it, and instead whisked the body away to a military facility. Within hours, Pakistani police had hosed down the entire crime scene, making any collection of evidence impossible. But was it ineptitude or a cover-up? And her father, the great Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—was he a political visionary or a murderer, as his accusers alleged? What about Benazir herself? Was she an idealist or just trying to fatten up the family’s Swiss bank account with another round of ten percents? And her husband, who became prime minister in her stead—was he a grieving, loyal widower or an ambitious operator who may have been complicit in her murder? All of the above represent views strongly held by different factions. Which version is true? None of them. All of them.
Benazir had told me that her fancy Ivy League education didn’t help one whit in the real world of Islamabad intrigue. In the halls of academe, she had immersed herself in compelling, complex, logical schools of th
ought—but on the ground, what she encountered was messy, murky, cruel, dirty, and random. She is certainly not the first or the only one to take note of this. The Afghan political activist Meena, a charismatic woman who led a resistance movement during the 1980s and built a network of girls’ schools and orphanages along with her own political party, had a similar observation. “Politics,” she said, “is an animal, a wild, wild animal.” That came true for her; she was assassinated at the age of thirty. Like Benazir, I too studied political science and international relations, and my life has kept me close to the pulse of current events, though thankfully as an observer and not a participant. For me, the biggest surprise has been the role played in world affairs by personalities, relationships … and sheer random coincidence. In the textbooks, it all sounds so weighty and so rational, as though it were all about socioeconomic conditions, the spread of new ideologies, revolutionary eras, and waves of migration. But the realities of political life are chock-full of the human factor in all of its trivial, lowly messiness. Greed. Rivalries. Arrogance. People who keep critical information from each other, information that could save thousands of lives, just because they don’t like each other or don’t want someone else to get the credit. Betrayal committed just because someone felt slighted. Presidents who watch helplessly while their relatives rob the country blind, sabotaging the nation-building effort by diverting billions into their own pockets; presidents who can order an army into war but don’t feel able to stand up to their older brothers. Previously forceful leaders who suddenly panic and flee in the face of a manageable uprising, and later it is revealed that they were in the advanced stages of cancer and had lost their will and confidence.
I am not denying that history can change course because of informed decision making, but don’t underestimate the ability of a few greedy, jealous, ambitious individuals to give history’s course a twist as well. And it’s not just the bad motivations of selfish people or the misguided notions of fanatics that we have to worry about. Even where motives are pure—arguably a rarity when it comes to human beings—the results can be disastrous. Because the problem with good intentions is that, in the absence of perfect information, you cannot be sure of the consequences of your intervention. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, the saying goes, but I think that’s much too glib. Let’s amend it: The road to hell is paved with tiny, reasonable, apparently sensible compromises. It is paved with minuscule, forgivable human impulses and emotions that can cause utter havoc nonetheless. Read Montesquieu, read Etzioni, read Machiavelli, read Tocqueville. But you will learn more from the dramas of Shakespeare.
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