Читать книгу Into the Sun - Deni Ellis Bechard - Страница 15

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.”