Promised Virgins

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “I suppose.”

  “Rolo might see him in the mountains.”

  “He might.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  The Jeep is cold. It cranks and whines before it starts. There is no snow in the air, but there should be; it is that kind of night. We head back to the city to retrieve Brian and pack supplies. The dateman. He is willowy. Some things are as we imagine. I am happy to know he is thin and bending. I am happy he is not myth. There is perspective now. The image will stay with me: a man in a too-big coat with a beard, black eyes, and a war manual. My story. I know the photograph Rolo showed me will be out someday. It will appear on CNN or the BBC. The TV camera will zoom in ever so slowly to the figure in the lantern light. A new demon will be born. He’ll be described as inscrutable, “a mystery to intelligence officials,” a man “waging a new kind of war,” a man “fighting what officials tell us is a holy war,” a man of “jihad born into a wealthy family whose fanaticism led him to the caves of Afghanistan and the deserts of Africa.” And from sparse facts folklore will grow, and what I’m sure of now I won’t be sure of then. The story will change. Hacks and pundits will become overnight experts. Everyone will presume to know the dateman. The photo will keep appearing. Islamists will emblazon it on T-shirts, Frontline will make it black and white and grainy, Larry King will opine ridiculously over it, and it will all get very breathless for a moment, but then, unless the dateman has new tricks, unless he gets warm and fuzzy with Oprah, he will get lost in the news cycle, a bit of packaged information competing for light against the newest liposuction horror story or the drama of a missing wife and a suspicious husband. He’ll be discarded like Monica Lewinsky, a minor titillation in what Rolo would call a larger tragedy. That’s why I have to get to the dateman soon. Windows are closing. In stories like this, there is only one interview with the subject in question. Don’t ask me why. That’s just how it works. That interview belongs to posterity. It is not all knowing and doesn’t pretend to be. It is a brief, true glimpse, a bit of grist for the history books. It is important because the story will be co-opted by other forces, and what is fact will blur with what is not. The dateman will slip away like a flash of mercury. I am not bitter, but we live in a media pantomime of mistaken assumptions and calculated illusions; reality is fiddled and fingered until it becomes cartoon. It is a world where a picture of a mass grave is more important than the why of a mass grave.

  “Sleep with me.”

  And so we do. Alija stretches her body against mine, beneath cool covers and darkness.

  “Jay, let me tell you the story.”

  “The same one?”

  “Yes, the same one,” she whispers.

  “Will you end it tonight?”

  “No.”

  I close my eyes, and she begins; her breath smells of gumdrops.

  “Remember, Jay, how I told you it began? They came that morning after the artillery. I still hear their boots on the dirt. I ran to the tree with my mother. We buried the money and silver, and, like I told you, we waited and we just kept hearing the scrape of boots and then we saw fire on the rooftops, and we knew, Jay, we knew . . .”

  Chapter 11

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Who else?

  “Morning, Brian.”

  “Lets boogie, Jay. Get your ass out of bed. Trip time. Morning, Alija.”

  “You’re a strange man.”

  “Look, I got Chariots of Fire. Went out with the Russians to the black market again last night. We shopped. I’m packed. Let’s go.”

  “You missed a spot shaving.”

  “Where?”

  “Left side. Below the ear.”

  “I’m going to the mountains, Jay. I don’t think it matters.”

  “Just making you aware.”

  The Jeep is gassed. We are moving. Brian insists on a last stop for bananas, crackers, water, and candy bars. The fog lifts and the city hardens, a sullen smudge of communist-socialist architecture whose defining features are thousands of windows with honeycombed steel inlays and podlike buildings resembling alien spaceships. This odd aesthetic is streaked by steam curling off a power plant and, farther out, the spackled mist and yellowish sulfur smoke hanging over the coal and iron mines. If you wrung the air out, you could make a small but impressive mountain with all the grit and chemical compositions that fluttered to the ground. Months ago, after a day spent walking hospital corridors with a doctor, a bird dog of a man with quick hands and indecipherable charts, I proposed a story on the region’s miasma of cancer, emphysema, infant mortality, and cleft palate. My editors didn’t want it. “It’s off point,” one of them said. “The story is the war.” “Not if you have cancer,” I said. “Jay, stick to the fighting. We don’t want to take the reader in too many directions.” I love the way he said we. This particular editor has never been overseas. I find it troubling that an assistant foreign editor has never been to Rome or Berlin, much less to Doha or Dubai. He bubbled up from the copydesk, which, depending on its veracity and temperament, can be a scary place or a well-designed bit of human machinery that can save you from making a fool of yourself. Peopled by the dictionary readers among us, the copydesk floats on the rim of news like a grammatical shark. It swims through stories, adding a comma here, putting a colon there, pondering the precise meaning of words such as slightly insane. What exactly does one mean by slightly insane? Isn’t insane a fullblown condition? Can insanity be slight? Can we be sued for putting slightly insane next to someone’s name? These are the conundrums of the copy-editor community. Thick books are consulted. Fellow copy editors are called upon to parse and ponder.

  “Brian. One-word answer. Copy editors?”

  I glance at him in the rearview as we race beyond the city’s outskirts.

  “Jay, why spoil this beautiful morning drive into the mountains? If I’m not talking directly to an editor, I’m not thinking about an editor. This philosophy works for me. But since you’ve mentioned copy editors, I dated one once. I wrote her a love poem. She corrected it. It made me queasy. You know what’d be a great porno movie plot: copy editor as dominatrix. She could spank reporters with rolled up atlases and make them utter past-perfect verb forms. She could whip them into licking the cover of Elements of Style and make them scream out things like, ‘No pun intended!’”

  “Her name would be?”

  “The Comma Bitch.”

  “Nominative Nanny.”

  “Present Tense Tina and the — “

  “You guys are sick.”

  A crowd gathers at the edge of a dirt road beneath a spiral of smoke. We stop. About twenty-five yards down the road a car is twisted and ripped in two, the metal beneath its paint exposed and shiny. A seat has been blown into a ditch. The steering wheel lies near a shallow gray-black crater, and dashboard wires hang in limp strands. Papers blow in the dirt and spin through thistle on the roadside; scents of gunpowder and sheep shit linger. A farmer tells Alija two Americans were in the car. He says he warned them not to go down the road. He is quite sure he cautioned them enough. He says someone mined it last night. Before he says more, I see her silhouette slumped on the driver’s side. Head down, her blond hair blushed with blood, her nose perfect, Ellen, the well-bred Philadelphia freelancer, is dead. Ted, like the car, lies in halves, his torso on one side of the road, his legs on the other. I could imagine him protesting when she swung a hard right and called him a pussy. A flash and a boom. Death immediate. Land mines lurk half-hidden in dirt. They are laid in grids, and there is never only one. No one runs to Ellen and Ted. I call the U.S. mission on the sat phone and give names and details. They say they’ll send someone. More farmers gather. Children peer from the grass and whisper their own curious assessments about bodies and bones and black spirits flying through the mountains. Alija gives them gumdrops. We wait. Clouds roll in, break, and roll away, and sunlight falls in unpredictable slants, on the car, the crater, the steering wheel, through the windshield and across Ellen’s face, and, at least o
nce, on Ted’s ripped pants and burned legs.

  A quiet ambulance arrives. Three locals get out — one with a minesweeper and two others with zipper bags. The minesweeper slips on headphones and leads the way, swirling his wand disk in front of him. The sweeper detects another mine about fifteen yards in. He marks it with a black flag; a murmur curls through the crowd. He sweeps around the car halves. Nothing. The two other men make notes. One of them snaps pictures, and when he is done he approaches Ellen, brushing back her hair, his translucent rubber gloves speckled with blood. He has never touched, nor will he again touch, a woman from Philadelphia. Not one like this one, anyway, a foolish girl with a sharp nose and notebooks full of scrawl. Her fair skin intrigues him. It is the fantasy of men here. Ellen’s whiteness is mixed with the childhood freckles that fade into her skin like distant stars. She is a map, a constellation chart, and I’m sure that’s why the man strokes her hair, to touch, even with rubber gloves, a patina so foreign and unattainable. I don’t blame him. I thought I might have touched Ellen one day too. I thought that from the first time I met her with Ted on another dirt road. I didn’t particularly like her. But where would we be if we touched only those we liked? We create imagined destinies for people, we hold a day or two, a gap here and there, for them to imprint something new upon our lives. They are brief; they are not the ones who remain. I had left a gap for Ellen, perhaps a night over whiskies after we had filed. Maybe we would have slept together. I don’t know. She was young and in a rush to accumulate, to be the first with some shred of news, but what did it matter without context? She lacked resonance, and this is what makes it such a waste. A few days from now in a Greater Philly graveyard, Ellen will be buried and praised as a courageous journalist who sought truth and some sense of justice, some notion of dignity and human rights in what a silver-haired banker uncle will call a harrowing war zone. Bullshit. She was an opportunist. She probably — and I don’t mean to be cruel — never wrote a compassionate paragraph unless it was calculated to enhance herself. Ego is no use here. It blocks necessary voices. The two men pull Ellen from the car. She’s intact, all her trauma disguised, except the blood around her face and hair. She is lovely, I have to say lovely, draped in foreign arms like a slumbering schoolgirl. They lay her on the ground and unfold a crinkly zipper bag. They lift Ellen; her legs slide in, then her arms, shoulders, and head. The zipper tugs, and the last of her I see is a flash of her nose. The men collect Ted quickly, scooping him up with a cinder shovel. An American in an SUV arrives. A nervous, aftershave-drenched State Department guy who I can tell is at the point in his career when he’s beginning to realize that you must trudge through shit like this before they give you London or Paris.

  “Did you know them?”

  “We met not long ago. They were freelancers.”

  “Any contactables?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get that. Shame, huh? Thanks for calling.”

  He snaps a few pictures and drives off. Dead bodies need files to accompany them on their journeys home. Ellen and Ted will be duly processed. A manila folder with an E PLURIBUS UNUM seal for each. If I die like them, I hope the natives, no matter where I am, burn my body and end it there. I don’t want to be bagged and processed.

  Alija, Brian, and I climb into the Jeep.

  “Not the best omen,” says Brian.

  “Should we call someone in the States?” Alija looks to me.

  “I wouldn’t know who.”

  “What papers did she string for?”

  “Pittsburgh and I think some small thing in New Hampshire.”

  “I don’t want to just send their bodies out there,” says Alija. “We should call, Jay.”

  “The guy from the mission has their passports. He’ll track down their families. I’ll phone my desk in a few hours and give them their names and ask them to make some calls.”

  We are quiet. News of Ellen and Ted will spread quickly. Hacks will take it as a lesson. Don’t go down dirt roads. It won’t deter, though. The rumblings in the fields and mountains will become more alluring. Death makes copy richer, paragraphs form more easily, and everything seems to quicken in an air of half-invented immediacy. We approach the final MUP checkpoint before the land wrinkles up into hills. Alija sits rigid with eyes straight ahead. Her MUP mask is on. Brian types notes into his laptop. I roll the window down and hand a MUP our identity cards and papers. He stares across me to Alija. He asks to see the registration for the Jeep. I hand it to him, and he disappears into a cinder-block shed. It’s gray out and the MUP are cold, milling around an APC and a strip of barbed wire. A young MUP blows the embers of a smoldering stick fire in the mud. Three young men are handcuffed and sitting on the roadside. Kalashnikovs and bullets are at their feet. They are poorly dressed in ripped sweaters and jeans and camouflage jackets. Captured guerrillas in sneakers and buckle loafers. One is bleeding from the nose; another’s eyes are puffy and nearly closed in yellow-blue tenderness. The MUP appears at my window.

  “Ahh, I see you’ve noticed our new friends,” he says in English.

  “Guerrillas?”

  “Bad men. Shits, really. They sneak around and try to kill us. We have to catch them. We collect them like insects. Some are hard to catch. They are like that bug in the summer that lights up. What’s the word in English?”

  “Fireflies, lightning bugs.”

  “Yes, they are firefly shits.”

  “Where do you take them?”

  “We have a place. But it is dangerous out here. I hope they make it to that place. I hope they don’t slip and fall. Look at that one. He slipped and fell, and now he bleeds.”

  He yells out something in MUP speak, and the other MUP laugh. He hands us back our papers. He stares at Alija. She glances sideways. There is an instant of recognition. He doesn’t taunt her, and I wonder why. I can see her waiting. I can see her forming MUP syllables in her closed mouth. She is ready for the attack of words, but it doesn’t come. The MUP slaps the door and waves us on.

  “Be careful,” he says. “I hear many bad things are happening.”

  I roll up the window

  “Drive slowly, Jay. I want to see the faces of those guerrillas.”

  They are not who she is looking for, but they are the same.

  “Did you know that MUP?”

  “They’re all pigs.”

  “It looked as if you knew him. He seemed to know you.”

  “I had seen him somewhere, probably another checkpoint.”

  “He didn’t badger you like usual. It was weird.”

  “Sometimes you’re lucky.”

  Alija’s village is folded between two hills. She hasn’t been back since the MUP attack months ago. The houses are flame-blackened and lifeless. The imprints of tank cleats mark fallen courtyard walls; glass is scattered in the road, and two mortar holes have turned the corner of the school into broken pottery. Rocket-propelled grenades made glancing blows to the mosque’s minaret, peeling off the alabaster coating but leaving the brick. Dogs root through shops. Water runs through the street. There is the scent of death, but old death, hidden under wooden beams and piles of bricks, death that has lost the sting of pungency. We get out of the Jeep in front of Alija’s home. It slants sideways like a Popsicle-stick house that was moved before the glue dried. The roof has collapsed. A bedspread and linens are woven through the branches of a burned tree, and the yard is littered with clothes, utensils, a smashed TV, a battered VCR, mattresses, and family pictures. Possessions have become garbage, and the garbage seeps into the earth, and the pictures have aged and dulled with the weather, and the faces in the pictures are happy, shy, and reticent, but they are slipping from the frames, vanishing.

  “Careful before you come inside,” says Alija. “It might be booby-trapped.”

  The hallway wall is leavened with smoke and soot. On this strange black canvas, it looks as if a MUP, using the tip of a knife, etched Saint George slaying the dragon. It’s a meticulous drawing; th
e artist must have had time. Alija stares at it. She spits on the picture and walks on, turning into her bedroom. Her underwear, books, tampons, drawers, rugs, and posters are half ash and half read; just enough to surmise what they are but not enough left to salvage. Her earrings and bracelets are bent and melted. She bends over and puts a ring in her pocket. She runs her hand over the windowsill. Bits of glass sparkle through the grit on her fingertips. She presses two fingers together, drawing blood and tasting it. I am in a girl’s room of singed perfumes. What’s left of a diary — the silver keyhole and lock shine dully through the ash — rests on a vanity. What boys and thoughts, what chores and duties, what scribbled drawings and secrets were on those pages, now lost? Was it read before it was destroyed? Have enemies with guns stolen her musings and carried them away, forever in their minds, so that one day when they think of all this as old men, the loopy penmanship of a village girl will be on their tongues? Will they speak of it at all, or will they have their own secrets and bury what they’ve done? Her father’s only daughter, Alija had lived in a sanctuary of prolonged childhood. To grow up too fast would have brought village men and dowries and an arranged marriage. She stayed frozen and kept away, for a time anyway, from the MUP at the village boundaries and the suitors in the alleys. This is what I think. I will never ask. We take away what we want from war; we come upon remnants and twist them into beliefs. This room is not Alija’s only loss. There is her brother and that other secret. The secret she conjures some nights in bed when she whispers, “Jay, let me tell you my story.” Each time there is an altered beginning and fresh nuance, as if cameras placed at different angles had filmed the entire secret and each vantage point is a narrative of its own. I have not heard the ending. I may never know it. My life is asking questions, but part of me desires vagueness, part of me wants comfort in mystery. Let some tales hide in the tall grass, and if they must be known, let them come to me without question. I have chosen people — Alija is one — who will have to close the loophole without my prodding. She turns from the window and looks at Brian and me. Her eyes don’t know what they want to say I think she might break. She doesn’t. She turns her back to us. Brian walks down the hall. I put a hand on her shoulder; she lifts a hand to mine, and I feel bits of glass and blood on her fingers. I begin to pull my hand away, but she clasps it hard. She turns and I smell her hair, combed apricot and smoke and well water and the metallic tinge of minerals and trace elements of what origin and purpose I know not, but they all mingle, a quiet metastasizing life in dense black softness. She pulls me to her burned bed, and I feel as if on a playground swing gliding slowly backward from heaven. We lie down and she kisses me. Just once. The bedspread crinkles and turns to ash. I want us to float out of the broken window to someplace else, but there’s no magic in me; one day there was, but not now, so we stay, bulky in our coats and half entwined. The sounds in a burned house are different from the sounds in an empty house; they are sharper, but they don’t linger as long, they seep into the charred wood and disappear the way the last ripple of an echo disappears in a canyon. I leave Alija on the bed and walk across the hall.