What Changes Everything Part 5

"I heard what happened. I am sorry. I meant to come by and say-"

"But whether or not he is good," Amin interrupted, "that is not relevant to you. What is relevant, what you should know, is that aid workers are not soldiers."

"Of course I know."

"They are not politicians and they are not ousted leaders."

"I realize-"

"And if all the aid workers are driven out of Afghanistan-"

"But why are you telling me-"

"Todd Barbery," Amin spoke over her, "would never abandon this country, no matter what. But his big boss, his emir back in America, and the other emirs, they will finally say no. Do you understand that? And if all the aid workers are driven out, this will not be a good thing. Not for this hospital-how much foreign money have you received here? Not for the women. Not even, ultimately, for you."

"Of course I know this," she said, rising from her seat as she spoke. "You think this is something I can control? Have you forgotten the country from which you come? Have you forgotten how little we women mean here? How quickly they m.u.f.fle our voices, if they let us speak at all?"

"You have ears, at the very least."

"Which do me no good now."

"And you also face threats," Amin went on as if she hadn"t spoken, "because this country is not ready to smile and bow to a progressive woman, is it? In Afghanistan, progressive women must also be wise, playing one side against another so they can stay safe. Pa.s.sing on information if needed. That could be motivation, I guess."

She glared at him. "Your implications insult me."

"Really? I was trying hard to be polite."

"I have no connection to criminal elements."

"In our country, politics and crime are wedded."

"Who took him? And why? Those are the questions you should be trying to answer if you hope to win his release."

"Those are the questions I"m trying to answer, Zarlasht."

Zarlasht gestured to the door. "I request that you leave."

Amin studied her face silently, trying to a.s.sess if he could extract any information at all from her, or if he was, for the moment, forced to count a delivered warning as enough.

A young female medical student opened the door. "Zarlasht jan, an ambulance has just arrived. A boy stepped on a mine and-" Her words were drowned out by a mother"s wailing. The nurse left the office, leaving the door ajar.

"Stay, then," Zarlasht said coldly. "Sit here alone, if you wish. I must admit the patient."

"Of course. But first." Amin leaned forward so he could speak softly and Zarlasht could hear him above the cries of anguish, which would not abate, he suspected, for some time. "Once before I let someone down."

"I know. We all know." She turned her head and murmured under her breath, "He who has been bitten by a snake now fears a piece of string."

"This time, I won"t let a good man be sacrificed to wrong-headed beliefs."

"It is not my business," Zarlasht said, "but you know you put yourself at risk in this alliance."

"That is my worry. Here is yours: if you had anything to do with it, you better make sure Mr. Todd is released safely, and soon. If he is not, and if it links back to your family in any way, I will find out. And you will discover you made a mistake."

She narrowed her eyes. "I must go now," she said.

"Of course." He straightened. "I speak out of respect, Zarlasht," he said, allowing his voice to turn conversational again. "I wouldn"t bother giving this warning to a man." He inhaled deeply. "Go with Allah," he said as he turned to leave.

Clarissa, September 5th Clarissa dimly realized, as she reached for it, that the phone had been ringing for some time. Out of a desire for silence, not conversation, she groggily lifted the receiver. She put it to her ear but did not speak.

"Clari." It was her brother"s voice, and he sounded stern. "Clari," he said again.

"Mmmm." She was aware that the scratchiness in her throat betrayed this as her first attempted word of the day.

"Are you okay?"

"What time," she managed, "is it?"

"Almost noon. I"m downstairs. Let me in."

She replaced the receiver and sank back into bed. How nice it would be simply to close her eyes, go back to sleep and wake up when she wanted to-that shouldn"t be too much to ask, should it? But then she heard the bell again, insistent as a crying baby. She swung her legs to the floor. "Patience," she murmured. Still barefoot, she went downstairs and opened the door. Mikey swept her face with his eyes. "I"m fine, only I couldn"t fall sleep until about 6 in the morning," she said, adding unnecessarily, "Come in," as he moved past her into the kitchen. "Want some coffee?" she asked his back.

"I"m already making it." He went to the cabinet and poured beans into the grinder on the counter. She watched him a moment, then slipped into the bathroom off the kitchen.

When she emerged a moment later, she saw that Mikey was trying to carry out an un.o.btrusive inspection. What worried him? That he would find pills or empty wine bottles? She smiled a little at the thought. In fact, the kitchen looked clean; she"d shoved most of the food Ruby had prepared into the refrigerator, leaving the rest stacked on the counter, one container atop another.

"Ruby"s gone mad," she said. "She dropped all this off last night. I know she feels helpless and wants to be doing something, but-what am I going to do with all this? Will you take some?"

He glanced sideways at her as he bent over something on the kitchen table; she saw it was the dead insect she"d left there, centered on a paper napkin. She"d forgotten about that. Mikey straightened, raising his eyebrows in a question she ignored.

"How about some of the salads?" she asked. "It"s too much and it really isn"t for me. It"s food for Todd, even if she doesn"t realize that, and I don"t want it to spoil."

"What can I do to help?" he asked.

"I"m telling you, Mikey. Take the food. It feels to me like an offering left at a grave."

"Clari," he said. "I know this is hard-"

"Listen," she interrupted. "I really appreciate your coming and all, but I don"t want to-I can"t do a conversation right now. I haven"t even had coffee."

"Let"s remedy that." He poured two cups full, brought them to the kitchen table and sat. "You heard from the FBI again?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. You"re my wake-up call."

He gestured with his chin to the center of the table. "What"s this?"

"A bug," she said flatly.

"I meant, what"s it doing on your table?"

She looked down, took a deep breath, and then raised her eyes to his. His expression-so serious, as though he were waiting for her to explain a concept like G.o.d or soul or ident.i.ty- made her think of when they were children and the evenings when they would slip away from the grownups and he would ask her to tell him a story and then tuck his legs beneath him in patient preparation. This triggered an irresponsible and irrepressible desire to laugh, which quickly morphed into a need to cry. The strangled sound that came out instead startled both of them. She took a sip of coffee, waiting to speak until she"d swallowed and taken a breath. "Look at the wings," she said then, sliding the napkin toward him. "Look how delicate they are. They"re small as a baby"s finger, but veined, and they have this orange tinge."

He didn"t glance at the insect. Instead he looked at her, full in the face.

"Oh G.o.d, Mikey. I killed it last night," she confessed. "I didn"t intend to. It was buzzing around near my neck, and I sort of reflexively flicked it away and then it was half dead, so I took a magazine and kind of gently squished the middle and then..." With Mikey, she always talked more than she"d planned. But she didn"t want to share everything that the dragonfly had touched off in her.

He sipped his coffee and didn"t say anything for a minute. "You know, Todd is still alive," he said.

"Of course."

"This isn"t Mom and Dad."

"Jesus, Mikey." She waved her hand, brushing his words away, but also surprised, once again, by how quickly he was able to identify her fears.

"I mean it. You need to trust a little more. They would know if anything... We would all know. So he"s alive. And he"s probably mainly worried about you."

"And Ruby," she said.

"It"s always been hard for you to think of the future, Clari. I"ve watched that immobilize you for a long time. In some ways, I think you were frozen right up until the moment you met Todd. I don"t want to see you go back there."

"I am back there," she said, and then she stopped, knowing if she tried to go on, what would come out would be her anger. She was mad at Todd-for putting everything at risk, insisting on continuing his distant, dangerous work, not letting the two of them together be enough, and now, for rewriting her own life so drastically.

These weren"t the only things she felt, of course. She felt the weight of responsibility, and she felt frightened for him, and heartbroken for what must be his own fear and sense of fragility. The anger was the selfish feeling, the inappropriate one, so naturally it was also the one that forced its way closest to the surface.

Mikey stood watching her. "You have to be careful, Clari, pushing everyone away at moments like this. We"re no good isolated, none of us. It"s not useful and we aren"t built for it. We have to let light in little by little."

"You"re talking about my sending everyone home yesterday?"

"Well, it was awkward, yes." A smile hinted at his lips for a second. "Look, you can treat people any way you want to right now, you"ve got lots of lat.i.tude. But this isn"t Lone Ranger time. It"s going to go on for a while, and you need support to face it and figure out how to handle it. There"s probably going to be a ransom demand. Then what do you do? Do you want to negotiate yourself or leave it in the hands of their so-called professionals? And then this rescue attempt thing." He paused. "Maybe we should go to Kabul."

She stood. "How do you expect me to figure out how to deal with kidnappers in Afghanistan, Mike? It"s so beyond...anything I know. And the stakes are so...."

"We need to figure out a regular time to talk with the FBI. We don"t know how long this is going to last; we have to have a system in place," he said. "We need to ask more questions. You, Ruby, Todd"s boss, and me too because you"ll need support."

"Okay."

"We need to confer with them every day."

She nodded.

"We"re going to feel better once we"re being proactive. Not so unmoored."

"Okay. Okay."

"So you"ll call? And let me know? Let us all know?"

Suddenly unable to speak, both grateful for and resentful of Mikey"s presence, Clarissa stood and, once standing, didn"t know what to do with herself. Impulsively, she lifted the napkin and held the insect up to the window.

He joined her. "Looks like a flying red ant to me," he said.

"I"m thinking some kind of tiny dragonfly," she said. "I didn"t know we even had dragonflies in Brooklyn."

He heaved an audible breath. "It"s a bug, Clari. Throw it out."

She smiled at his vehemence. "Don"t worry. I"m not going to give it a funeral," she said.

"So you"ll talk to the FBI and give me a call this afternoon?" he asked. She nodded. "All right then. My work here is done. Now my actual job beckons. And urgently."

"Thanks, Mikey. Really. You"ve been there for every rough edge I"ve ever faced."

"And you for me. But..." He made a growling sound. "Next time, Clari, open the door? I was ringing that bell for 10 minutes."

He leaned toward her and hugged her a little tighter and a little longer than had been their habit in adulthood. Even that gesture, as warm as it was, felt like admonishment, an urging to pay close attention to every one of these critical days.

Part Two.

At least, it is green here, Although between my body and the elder trees A savage hornet strains at the wire screen.

He can"t get in yet.

-James Wright.

Reality is a very effective teacher.

-Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Najibullah: Letter to My Daughters II.

September 6th, 1996.

One final roadblock, one ragtag roadblock more.

The four years, five months and three weeks that have pa.s.sed since then have not dulled the memories of that barricade and that night and the near-miss of my efforts, dear daughters, to reach you and your wonderful mother.

The weather was clear, leaving stars visible. It was nearly 2 a.m. I sat in the middle of a three-vehicle convoy. We"d pa.s.sed safely through four previous checkpoints with the use of a UNdevised code phrase. (My sense of humor still intact, I suggested "Release the Bull," but the sober UN representatives rejected that.) We were down to a few hundred yards and one last scraggly bunch of fighters separating me from my family, and then I would be in the air, long before dawn left its first morning kiss on Kabul soil.

I"d chosen a pinstriped suit for the journey, a serious tie, carefully polished shoes, black socks. I wanted to look like what I felt myself to be: the head of a modern state, still proud, thoroughly disdainful of the quarreling mujahideen who knew nothing about how to rule a nation as complicated as ours, and the fundamentalists who would drag Afghanistan back a century or more.

Most of all, I wanted to look magnificent for my family when I walked in the door of our new home in Delhi. I"d been exiled before; I knew it would not be forever. I believed we would all return, and in under five years. But I wanted to rea.s.sure my three daughters, and especially your mother-flower. I knew she felt as sad and angry as I did to leave Afghanistan. I wanted to drop to my knees and apologize to her for my failure to hold on longer; I wanted to comfort her, and to embrace her and you, my daughters. The image of our imminent reunion brought me solace as we drove away from Kabul in the dark.

I had to leave behind much, but I carried in my briefcase a few presents for you. The stuffed bear wearing a hat with a red star that Muski once liked to sleep with; it was among the gifts President Gorbachev had given me for my daughters when we met in the Kremlin. I know you are not a baby anymore, my green-eyed Muski, but you are still my youngest. Also a large jar of dirt scooped from the Kabul ground, smelling of lemon and a lick of Afghan wind. A few photographs of you girls and your mother standing in the Hindu Kush range. I am glad I brought them because I was never able to return to our home, so now, sequestered as I am, I can look each day on your sweet faces. I can look, too, at the mountains of Afghanistan that I fear I may never see again outside a photograph.

But of course, I will see them. My spirits flag a little when I hear the progress the fundamentalists have made in the countryside. Nonetheless, I will not give up. Shoes are tested on the feet, dear daughters; a man is tested in the fight.

On that night, just beyond that final checkpoint, Benon Sevan sat waiting for me on the airfield, his plane having touched down from Pakistan, full of fuel and ready for departure. At first, the delay at the roadblock seemed nothing more than a momentary snag, a piece of disorganization. But when I realized that the round-faced devil Dostum was trying to block my safe pa.s.sage, I became furious. I climbed from the car and yelled. There was a time when I would not have been affronted in this way, but on this night, I could not change their minds. A mere suggestion of a lieutenant cowered before my voice until he found the courage to speak; he insisted that even if he allowed us to pa.s.s, we would all be slaughtered at the airport. Begging my forgiveness, he urged me to return to the official residence. Did Dostum truly think I would simply, stupidly acquiesce to such a proposal? The goat, fleeing from the wolf, may spend the night in the butcher"s house, but not me, dear daughters. I have grown to manhood in Afghanistan; I have survived. I am not a fool.