Into the Sun Page 6

  You had a good voyage?

  Long but good, Justin lied as they crossed the parking lot to a white Corolla. The car had mud all over it: on its panels, on the bottom of the trunk where he put his bags, on the floorboards. He’d expected dust, and the mud’s familiarity felt intrusive.

  Idris pulled onto the main thoroughfare, the lanes packed with jockeying Corollas, some of the drivers steering on the left, some on the right.

  Justin asked why there were so many similar cars — and why some of their steering wheels were on the left side and some on the right. Idris said that most of Kabul’s vehicles were shipped in from Japan, where people drove on the left. This made Afghanistan’s traffic treacherous, since most drivers couldn’t see oncoming traffic when they tried to pass.

  Idris asked about Justin’s education, where he grew up, where he’d studied.

  I’m from Louisiana. I did my undergraduate at Louisiana State in Baton Rouge.

  So you wanted to be a teacher?

  I wanted to be involved in education. Yes, I teach, but …

  There was no easy answer, so Justin explained he’d done two master’s degrees, in English and education, and had nearly finished his PhD dissertation. Idris asked about university programs and scholarships for foreign students, but Justin admitted he didn’t know much.

  Idris drove them past embassies with blast walls and guard posts. The main roads were sound, though the side streets were filled with mud and pond-size puddles whose ice had been smashed. As dusk claimed the unlit street, a convoy of dun armored vehicles passed — Justin recognized them as MRAPs — their headlights blazing over the traffic ahead. The thrill of being in a war zone arose in him, accompanied by a vague nostalgia for the days when he’d dreamed of being a soldier.

  There are so many ways to use words ending in ing, Idris said. Would you be so kind as to teach me this?

  Sure.

  Justin reluctantly looked away from the convoy. He was still giving examples when they came to a highway under construction. Idris jammed the accelerator, and they shot through a gap in the yellow taxis and cargo trucks with flat-faced cabs and flowery paint jobs.

  Justin put the tissue to his nose and blew. He’d been breathing through his mouth and could taste the dust, gritty on his tongue and between his teeth.

  Your explanations are very clear, Idris said. You will help many people here.

  That’s why I came, Justin replied.

  Three muddy unpaved roads later, Idris pulled up to a nondescript house with a low compound wall, a metal door, and a dented gate with a scrawl of rusted barbed wire above.

  May I give a suggestion? Idris asked.

  Of course.

  I am not bothered, but for many Afghans, this problem with your nose — this blowing of the nose — it can be insulting.

  Why? It’s a bodily function.

  Many bodily functions are not done in the company of others. Maybe it is like, for you, releasing wind.

  It’s that bad?

  Releasing wind for us is even worse than for you, so how can I know?

  Briefly, Justin relived everything that had happened on the plane.

  Frank is waiting, Idris told him, and pressed the horn twice.

  The gate shook, and a short, bulky man with olive skin and blond hair pulled it open.

  He is the guard, Idris said as he drove the car inside. His name is Shafiq. He does not speak English, but he is a very dedicated bodybuilder. Even though he is not so tall, his muscle is very good.

  Justin had expected talk of God or war, at the very least politics, but instead he’d already had two conversations about bodybuilding.

  Shafiq greeted Justin, squinting like a man reading a distant street sign. Weightlifting calluses scratched Justin’s palm as they shook hands. Shafiq’s forearms bulged, and swollen veins thinned at his wrists before spreading out again like roots.

  I know the place doesn’t seem like much, Frank said from the doorway, waving him in, but if you put away your preconceptions and remember this isn’t America, I’ll give you the tour.

  The school’s leanness — its sparse furnishings and undecorated spaces — seemed an expression of Frank: tall, even compared to Justin, but so fleshless he appeared a relic.

  On the first floor, the dining and living rooms doubled as classrooms. There were mismatched chairs, dry-erase boards on easels, a shelf of espionage best-sellers, and a few mauled classics, Twain and Defoe. The kitchen held a blackened gas stove and some upside-down pots and pans. A low basement had been turned into the girls’ dormitory, rickety bunk beds lining the walls, their tops only about a foot from the ceiling. The girls were out, but a woodstove was going strong, and the air retained a hint of perfume.

  You teach these kids, Frank told him, and they’ll make a difference. Today, we all read about changing our lives, but self-help doesn’t come close to what the military has been doing for years. You tell someone he’s a leader, he becomes a leader. You give him a role, that’s who he’ll be. I built this school because we need to empower young people to change their country.

  Frank’s smile was gone, replaced with a sudden theatrical earnestness, like that of a pastor who speaks cheerfully from the pulpit only to become stern and deliver a moral.

  I don’t need to be explaining this, do I? You’re the first volunteer who’s treated the job like a paid position. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Everyone’s heard that. Just working for a paycheck is biding time. The real pay is personal satisfaction.

  Justin’s department administrator had forwarded the email about the school and, even though the position was voluntary and applicants had to pay their own way, Justin had given the cover letter more care than his PhD applications. The school wasn’t what he’d expected, but he reminded himself that learning should take place in the most meager buildings.

  Frank showed him the top floor — a few couches in the wide hallway, two bedrooms, two offices, and a bathroom. The concrete walls exuded cold, the basement’s heat imperceptible.

  Your room has a view and lots of light. There’s not a day I’ve woken up wanting to be somewhere else. A few weeks getting used to this air, and you’ll be unstoppable.

  Before leaving him to unpack, Frank patted him on the back, his hand so bony Justin felt like he was being reassured with a cooking utensil.

  Justin’s bags were already near the bed, and he began to close the door. Idris was leaning against the wall near the stairs, his arms crossed. Justin nodded, and Idris tipped his head before walking away.

  Justin unzipped his roller bag. The narrow room held an electric heater, a closet with a shelf and row of hangers, a particleboard desk, two ladder-back chairs, and a narrow bed with a foam mattress whose center had been compressed to the plywood. Outside, the backyard was yellow. It contained a few brambly trees and leafless bushes, and Shafiq’s guardhouse.

  Justin sat at the desk and took a notepad from his pocket. It held a phone number he’d transferred from a gum wrapper. For a moment, he wished it were Alexandra’s. He pictured her haloed pupils and then deprived his desire of thought until it receded. He’d come here for the school and was impatient for his new life in Kabul to begin.

  And yet he’d brought this number. He studied the foreign assemblage of digits: three zeroes, a nine, a one … It had been written while he stood on a quiet Lake Charles street during his favorite season: when gulf winds blew the humidity away and pecans ripened and fell against rooftops, when the crisp shadows of branches draped the pavement and children rode bicycles from school, and a few lanes over black boys tossed footballs. A woman he hadn’t seen in a decade had given him the phone number. Elle was no longer pretty in the way she’d seemed when he was a teenager — but trashy, with her tattoos and jean shorts.

  Justin, she’d called out, recognizing him despite his beard. She ask
ed how he’d been, and he said he was finishing his PhD and leaving soon to be the academic director of a prep school in Kabul called the Academy of the Future. She’d written down Clay’s number and said, Make peace. It would be good for both of you. He never intended to hurt you.

  Encountering Clay’s mother after so many years had felt like a mistake, and yet the synchronicity, before his departure, now seemed fated. Clay was here, as if, all along, destiny had been carrying them in a similar direction. Justin had spent years with a sense that something had to be done, but now he wondered if there were things back then he hadn’t understood.

  He took his toiletry kit and opened it on the desk. He pressed his thumb beneath his right eye, against the ridge of bone, and pushed down his lower lid. With his index finger, he pinched the front of the eye and pulled it from the socket.

  美智子

  Three days after my first visit to the school, I returned. When I rang the bell, the muscular guard answered, and we exchanged a few easy words in Dari before he showed me inside.

  “I’m trying to learn more about Idris,” I told Frank. I had yet to call Steve. Once I contacted him and divulged that I knew four people had gone missing and left only three bodies, I’d enter an entirely new realm of ambition and danger.

  “Idris,” Frank said, holding his chin in a big hand webbed with sinew and veins. “He knew how to manipulate. Americans are innocent. The bell rings, and we salivate and run to the dish and eat to our satisfaction. The Afghans have never had that. They know the value of a meal. They hear the seconds ticking until the next war, the next foreign invasion. If America fell apart, we’d sit in our living rooms and wait for the lights to come back on.”

  He hesitated, and I did too, wanting to redirect the conversation but fascinated to see two impulses at odds in him: condemnation of Idris and proof of his empathy for the Afghans. Or maybe by establishing himself as an authority, he thought he had the right to judge.

  “Who was Idris manipulating?” I asked.

  “Idris?” he said, his voice trailing off. I nodded, no longer trying to act demure. His interest in strong women had made me rethink my initial ruse, although it had seemed to open him up. He moved his mouth a bit, appearing to feel the rhythm of what he wanted to say so he could convey it with his voice.

  “Everybody comes here with a mission, even if they aren’t aware of it, and Idris knew how to manipulate people to make them think he was the one they should save.”

  “What is your mission?”

  “What was my mission?” he replied, as if he’d already accomplished all he’d intended. He kept moving his jaw with that faint ruminating motion.

  “These young people come from America thinking they’re going to change everything. They complain about the food or the lack of heat or the power outages. When I came here ten years ago, this neighborhood was a wasteland. It had been shelled to rubble by the mujahedeen after the Soviets pulled out, and the Taliban hadn’t rebuilt it. The American invasion had left craters all over the city. Outside the window of my first house, a sewer had been blown open by a bomb and become a cesspool. The air tasted like shit. Pardon me for saying it. My food tasted like shit. I had the smell of shit in my nose all the time. I took antibiotics for months to keep myself together. I lost twenty pounds and began to bleed from the inside. I was finally looking my age. So I retreated to the US and got proper treatment, and as soon as I was better, I announced that I was going back to Kabul. My wife had put dinner on the table, mashed potatoes and pork chops — I’d told her I wanted to eat pork every day for a month — and she said, ‘I want a divorce.’ I asked if she was sure, and she was. ‘The girls will be upset,’ I told her, and she said, ‘They’ll get over it.’ Just like that. ‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘Sit down. Let’s eat. The food’s getting cold.’

  “We ate, and we slept in our bed that night. She’s the best woman I’ve ever known. I don’t expect to know another, but some things are more important. A man wasn’t made to stay home and find hobbies. It little profits that an idle king by this still hearth … matched with an aged wife. Ha! I never heard my father talk about retirement. We were farmers. The closest he came was when he was eighty-seven. He called my office and said, ‘I can’t do it no more. Maybe something’s wrong.’ Eight hours later my plane landed in Nebraska, and I rented a car and drove to his house. He was dead in his recliner. That was retirement.

  “I remember once asking him where our name came from. I’d gotten into Vanderbilt, and students talked about that stuff. ‘Alaric?’ he said. ‘It’s American.’ But everything comes from somewhere else, I told him. ‘Sometimes people’s heirlooms do,’ he said. The way he told it, when his people were asked to write their names at the courthouse, not one of them knew how. He said their accents were so thick they had to repeat their names a dozen times. ‘If an American farmer who can’t spell tells his name to an American clerk, and that clerk writes it down, I think that makes the name American.’

  “When he told me this, I wasn’t impressed, but years later, when a salesman came to my door selling genealogy, I repeated the story. I had my father to thank for not letting college turn me into someone else. By then I understood. Who we were wasn’t what we were called. It was what we did. That’s why I built businesses and sold them, and that’s why I came here. I don’t blame my wife for not waiting. I couldn’t even promise I’d come back.”

  As he spoke, I expected his tone to soften with regret or nostalgia for a marriage to which he’d given half his life. Instead, he sounded brash, prideful of his nature. His was the voice of a type of man I’d never known, who stated a truth and followed it, like a samurai submitting to his leader. I wanted to track this voice to its source — the duty and vision confounded, the Go West, young man — to stand by the broken-down cabin, ferns growing from its walls, or a crumbling sod house on the plains, and feel the wind, listen to the rarefied nature and amplify it in my mind and imagine the world that had woven this voice from the cultures crossing that vast America.

  “My first years,” Frank said, “the Afghans were eager for a new start. But then the US got tangled up in Iraq, and the support dried up. The Afghans kept building, but the momentum was slowing. The people here began going back to their old way of being, taking as much as they could before things got bad again. As far as changes go, it wasn’t good for human relations.

  “For a while, I developed programs at American University, but my students applied themselves less with the intent of helping their own people than with the goal of getting a visa out of here. And I didn’t hear my coworkers talking frankly enough about the real job at hand. They were more interested in generous overseas pay and vacations in Goa. So I came up with my plan. The school would be free. We wouldn’t give certificates, and we wouldn’t pick our students with tests. They’d have to have ambition, and if they showed drive, I’d do everything in my power to help them. But I wasn’t going to push anyone. Those who worked hard would move up. Those who didn’t would do what deadweight does.

  “Justin didn’t understand how this place works. He wanted to see change overnight, by holding people’s hands or bullying them into learning more than they were ready to. I would have kicked him out, but he had education and was willing to work for satisfaction instead of money. When another man gives you his time, you have to leave a little space for his ambition. So I told him to go ahead and save Idris.”

  Frank lowered his eyes to mine, perhaps wondering who he was revealing himself to. His voice — even if it was an affectation or an inheritance — got into my head: his purposed cadence, the conviction that allowed him to speak of personal goals and the future of a nation in the same breath.

  “I’m going to Louisiana in a few days,” I told him. “I’ve decided to visit Justin’s family. Have you sent back his belongings?”

  He gestured to two roller bags in the corner. “I had to clear out the room for a new volunteer
. If you don’t mind, I’d like to send Justin’s parents a letter.”

  “I’d be happy to deliver it.”

  “It’s not ready yet. Can you come back tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  JUSTIN

  The cold woke Justin. He had a sense not of a dream but its imprint, the phantom glow on the retina after glancing at the sun. He’d curled on his side under the old woolen army blanket, his mouth open and an acrid film on his tongue. He checked his watch: 10 p.m. He’d lain down to rest and must have drifted off.

  The air had a foreign taste: thin, singed — dirty and slightly metallic, like a tarnished penny. His lungs itched, and he suppressed a cough. Before his arrival, he’d run across a blog post that anatomized Kabul’s dust, claiming it to be sixty percent human fecal matter — from the contents of septic tanks dumped in nearby plains only to dry during the summer and blow back into the city; or simply from open sewers, the tires pummeling the filth in the unpaved streets, the movement of the millions Kabul hadn’t been built to accommodate.

  Since 2001, the city’s population had grown from half a million to more than four million as refugees returned from abroad or fled war-torn provinces. The mountains held in the emissions of traffic, generators, and construction, the demolition and mixing of concrete, as well as the smoke from wood, diesel, and kerosene. Also lacing the dust was the pulverized remains of the thousands of mortars that had rained down during the civil war, the depleted uranium bullets and armor-­piercing rounds, the streets and buildings incinerated by American bombs. Justin had prayed for the strength to live in such a place and bring healing to it.

  He laced his boots and went into the silent school. Frank’s door was dark around the edges. The first office held desks and a few old mainframe computers, though Frank had told him the girls now had laptops and took them downstairs at night. On a shelf, Justin sorted through sooty American textbooks with swollen pages. The other office had a cabinet of stationery.