What Changes Everything Part 7

"What Dad would want," Ruby was almost yelling, "is to be safe. To be home."

"Of course. But what"s going to get him home? What"s going to keep him safer?

Negotiations, or guns?"

"That"s a major over-simplification." Ruby put her cup down on the cement step.

"Ruby. Your viewpoint is critical here. Whatever we call each other, we"re the family. Together. You and I."

"Okay. Well, okay." Ruby took a deep breath. "I"m glad to hear you say that. So: I want to allow them to attempt a rescue whenever they feel they should. I want to give them that trust."

Clarissa looked to the left, away from the water, further into the cemetery. Someone had attached yellow and orange helium-filled balloons to a bush near several tombstones, and they bobbed cheerfully in the breeze. "I"m afraid of the kind of action they"re talking about, Ruby. Can you understand that?"

"That"s just baseless, Clarissa. What do we know?" Ruby moved her arms in a circular gesture. "Look at us. We"re sitting in a Brooklyn cemetery, theorizing."

"I think Todd would want me to trust his colleagues. Both Amin, and Bill Snyder, who also trusts Amin."

"What about the people who are trained to look out for Americans in Afghanistan?"

"Looking out for American interests isn"t the same thing as looking out for Todd."

Ruby was quiet for a moment. "Angie thinks we should give them the okay," she said.

Clarissa stood. "You can see the water from here. Look."

Ruby watched Clarissa, but did not stand to look at the view. "You said my voice was equal to yours."

"It is."

"But you aren"t actually listening."

"I am listening. I just want to give Amin a few more days. Can you go with that?"

"Jack says everyone agrees to this. It"s pro-forma. The government doesn"t even ask when the kidnap victims are soldiers, but they have to if civilians are involved. Even so, everyone says okay."

"When did he say all that?"

"He called me."

"Doesn"t it seem to you that he"s spending an inordinate amount of energy trying to get an okay for a possible rescue attempt?"

"Clarissa, he must know something that makes it important."

"Then he needs to tell us."

"But it"s probably not definite, so he feels he can"t. Purposely murky." That"s the phrase he used with me."

"Well, I need a little more transparency here. That"s the phrase I"d use with him."

"And that"s it?"

Clarissa sighed. "For now. For now, that"s it."

Ruby stood up. "I"ve got to get to work."

"I was hoping we could... we could walk a little. Talk a little about something else."

"There is nothing else right now, Clarissa. And I"m running late."

Ruby left without looking back. Though they weren"t far from the entrance, it was easy to get lost in Green-Wood. Even Clarissa sometimes still did. "Stick to the right," Clarissa called after her.

Clarissa rose and headed deeper into the cemetery. Ruby seemed so certain-more certain, actually, than Clarissa-about the way forward. So why was Clarissa holding her ground so stubbornly? And what if her gut was wrong? What if Todd was killed while American troops were waiting for an okay from some clueless wife back in Brooklyn?

humans are delicate so keep it safe humans are impermanent so take the risks humans are transient so soak in the details She had wandered into a part of the cemetery she didn"t know well. She ran her fingers along the rough top of an old tombstone and then knelt before it to read the lines engraved. They were still barely legible. "But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us, As for an hour, carrying us diverse-yet cannot carry us diverse forever." She recognized the lines. Walt Whitman, claimed by Brooklyn, still memorized in its cla.s.srooms. "Yet cannot carry us diverse forever." She repeated the lines aloud. And marveled, again, at the perverse power of a cemetery to bring her comfort.

Danil, September 7th One foot jammed into the opening between the bars of the rusting gate, Danil shoved aside a vine to tighten his grip. He hoisted himself, hovered in midair for a tremulous inhale and pushed over, managing to clear the barbed wire as well as the pointed ends of the iron posts. An angel flight, he called it, both risky and exhilarating. He was not as agile as he"d been in his 20s, and he"d torn his shirt more than once doing this exact maneuver.

Landing on the ivy-coated ground, he moved quickly away from the street. If he were spotted in the wrecked grace of Admiral"s Row, once the jewel of Brooklyn Navy Yard housing, he could face a trespa.s.sing charge and a fine he couldn"t afford to pay. Yet there was something so symbolically right about what he did here that he continued to chance it. He wasn"t the only one: urban explorers, photographers and the occasional graffiti writer made their way in too. He"d never seen anyone, but sometimes spotted what they left behind: a discarded water bottle or film box, a tag.

Heading for the third house in the row, he climbed up decomposing steps covered with dried leaves and bark. He pa.s.sed through the vine-claimed front door and headed cautiously up to the second floor. Admiral"s Row, once an oasis of stately entryways and arched windows for high-ranking military officers, was built in the late 1800s complete with a skating rink, greenhouse, parade grounds and a sense of exclusivity. The homes were occupied up until the 1970s, but once they were abandoned, the environment immediately began its reclamation work, both destroying and, in Danil"s view, enhancing. He"d pa.s.sed the walled group of crumbling homes several times while biking into the City for work, and it aroused his curiosity. Finally, about a year and a half ago, he"d decided to check it out himself. Despite the no trespa.s.sing signs, he"d been visiting regularly ever since.

A hole in the roof of the second floor invited a single stream of light into the room. He reached behind a crumbled wall board and brought out a stack of envelopes. His mother"s letters, unopened, about 70 of them. A remarkable collection already. From his back pocket, he extracted the three more Joni had given him and added them to the pile. He"d stopped reading them a long while ago and didn"t want them in his apartment, but he felt it would be wrong to throw them away. He hadn"t known what to do with them until he saw the inside of Admiral"s Row. He"d returned a week after his initial visit with the first thick set of letters to deposit.

He also stored here a favorite picture of Piotr, sporting the beginnings of his first mustache. His hair straight and long, he leaned into the camera, his lips parted in what wasn"t exactly a smile, but a friendly look of acknowledgment. Danil had taken the photo himself, right before Piotr went to get his head shaved. "Dumba.s.s," he said aloud to his brother. "For f.u.c.k"s sake. Why?" He asked the same thing every time he looked at the photo, although sometimes the underlying question varied. He"d refused from the start to visit the lie of his brother"s grave, but he"d begun talking to Piotr here.

Danil propped up the photo and leaned back on the heels of his hands, rolling his neck to loosen the muscles. "Sometimes, you know, you s.h.i.t," he said aloud, "I feel like a war casualty myself. That"s why ..." He shook his head, squeezing his lips together as if to stop the words, stop the thoughts themselves. "Is it wrong if I end up benefiting from it somehow? I mean, maybe Joni"s right; I might as well meet the guy. But I also might have to say stuff that will make Mom sadder, or angry, or..." He rested his forehead in the palm of his hand a minute. "I really gotta get something together here, bro, or I might as well be buried next to you right now."

He paused, half expecting a sign, something he could interpret as a reply, but nothing came. He laughed, then, a little harshly. "Talking to a picture, yeah?" He lifted the photo and tucked it carefully behind the wallboard, next to the pile of letters. "Later," he said, rising.

He hesitated for a moment in front of a ragged opening where a window once had been, looking out into a ruined garden where nothing remained to recall more lively times. Maybe he should open one of his mother"s letters, just one. Maybe the most recent. But he hesitated. What could he hope to find there? Certainly not the permission he wanted. He missed his mom, and the way they used to be together. He figured part of her had died with Piotr, just like a version of him had died too, leaving in its place someone who hung out in deserted buildings listening for signs. "s.h.i.t," he said, and he turned and headed down the crumbling stairs.

Clarissa, September 8th "h.e.l.lo. Is this Mr. Todd"s wife?"

The voice sounded muted and distant; she wondered if a poor connection could be blamed, or if the speaker simply used a hushed tone. "Yes," she said, tightening her grip on the receiver, pressing it more closely to her ear. "It is."

"I am very sorry for what has happened," he said. His English was only slightly accented. And he did, in fact, sound crestfallen.

"Amin?" she said. "Is that you?"

"Yes."

"Oh. I"m so glad to hear from you."

"My people, they are good," he said. "They are generous and welcoming. They will offer a pa.s.sing stranger dinner and a bed. But Afghans have endured loss and violence and fear. The culture of war has corrupted souls."

"I understand, of course I do," she said. "My husband loved-he loves-your country. And also working with you."

"I was happy to hear Mr. Todd was marrying again, after so many years as a widower. He showed me your picture once," Amin said.

"And I"ve seen yours." Clarissa remembered Todd telling her that business in Afghanistan, even urgent business, had to be prefaced with a certain amount of complimentary small talk undertaken in an unconcerned tone, as though one had no worries at all. She had to manage, she told herself, to restrain a spill of questions and fears.

"I wish we could have met under better conditions."

"We will, one day," she said. "So. Amin. Bill Snyder says you know who to talk to in order to obtain Todd"s release."

"I am sorry it has taken me so long."

"So you know who is holding him?" She felt a surge of hope.

"Not specifically, no. But I believe I know where to go now, who to ask. I will try."

As suddenly as it had lightened, her heart sunk at his reply. He sounded so tentative. "Yes, thank you. But do you think...." She let her question trail off.

"We will be successful," he said after a moment. "Inshallah."

Todd had said that word always gave him the comforting sense that the best effort would be made. To Clarissa, if seemed a ready-made excuse: oh well, G.o.d didn"t will it. Just at the moment when she needed to concentrate on everything, on the tone and the words and the meaning beneath them, she felt dizzy. "Amin, what do you think about a rescue attempt?" she asked. "I mean, a military rescue. If they can figure out where Todd is."

He made a sound, something like "Oh."

"The Americans want permission from me and so far, I haven"t given it," she said. "Is it your sense that we should negotiate first? Or do you think Todd might be in such danger that ..."

The line was silent for a minute. "Are you there?" she asked at last.

"Mrs. Todd," he said, "I understand how worried you must be. I have a wife too. I imagine her in this situation. I imagine other wives of good and generous men who have been in your situation. History has shown some of my countrymen to have a cruel streak."

"So you think..."

"But Mrs. Todd, it is early." His voice sounded louder now.

"What do you mean?"

"With a rescue attempt, of course, people will die. Which people, we cannot be certain. I have not yet tried words like honor and justice, to see if they will work."

"So you think...?"

"I think, inshallah," he said, "that we will succeed with the jirga. We are a society of relationships, Mrs. Todd; our connections are more powerful than our laws. Inshallah, I will bring your husband back."

"Do you think we should offer money? I mean, we don"t have a lot but..."

"Let me see what can be done first by talking. Your husband should not have been kidnapped."

"But he"s American and I know-"

"Try not to worry too much, Mrs. Todd," Amin said.

His voice definitely sounded more solid now, though she couldn"t believe she was attempting to make decisions based on intonation carried over a long-distance line and from the lips of someone she"d never spoken to before. Gripping the receiver, she paced the room. "My husband told me once that he knew he could count on you," she said, reminding herself as much as telling him. "He said you were the man he would want beside him in a crisis."

"He said that?"

"He did."

The line went silent again. "I will very soon call you or Mr. Bill," Amin said after a moment.

"Yes, please. I hope to hear good news, but I will want to know even if the negotiations begin to look impossible."

"We will believe in success," he said.

"Yes. Todd"s daughter and I, we both appreciate..." she paused, suddenly overcome with a poorly timed rush of emotion. "We appreciate what you are doing. I know Todd would too. I do believe in you. I think you can get him home." She paused, but heard no response. "Are you still there?" she asked.

Then he spoke; now, again, his voice sounded far away, but she could make out the words. "I will do better than my best, Mrs. Todd," he said, repeating it: "better than my best."

And that, she told herself as she hung up, was the closest thing to a promise that she could hope for.

Todd, September 10th Awakening in the dark, he found his upper chest knotted like a storm cloud, his cheeks damp as if after rainfall. He touched to feel the moisture, then wept even more in disappointment. Not once so far had he cried, not once. But now his tears had tricked him; since he"d successfully held them at bay, they"d found a way out while he slept. It seemed, in fact, that he"d been crying for a while; the corner of the sheet he hugged also felt moist. And once begun, they showed no sign of abating, though from somewhere he found the self-discipline to weep silently.

Every inhale hurt, too; the tall guard who had vanished, the one full of rage, had returned the day before, and had kicked Todd in the right side when he"d been sitting down. Why was beyond Todd"s grasp; perhaps he hadn"t liked something about how Todd looked, or who Todd was. Another had pulled the hostile guard away, but no one had offered to help Todd. At first, he had been nauseous and dizzy; then he spit up blood, now he feared broken ribs. The pain felt sharpest about six inches below his underarm. He touched there gingerly and bit his lip to keep from crying out. The guards sleeping in the next room still breathed steadily; Todd hadn"t awakened anyone yet, and he didn"t want to. While they slept, he was free. Relatively speaking.

Because of that, nights were the best, but they were also the hardest. They were so black here that he felt plunged into nothingness. His sole companion was a ravenous one: guilt. Look what he"d done to his wife and his daughter. He could only imagine what Clarissa and Ruby were feeling; he knew neither one had truly healed from old wounds, Ruby the loss of her mother, Clari of her parents. He knew those wounds had to have reopened now. He hoped Ruby was supporting Clarissa; though younger, Ruby had more brash confidence than his wife. Clarissa hadn"t wanted to fall for him; she"d been clear about that. She had to be regretting it now.

He wept for them, and for himself: he didn"t want to die here. In the middle of the night, he had lost all possibility of magical thinking, all hope for escape or rescue or negotiation; he understood little by little the violence against him would increase and he"d never get out. Seen on the canvas of history, in light of karma, it made sense; it was even fair. How many noncombatants had been injured or died at the hands of American troops? The numbers would never be determined but they were large enough, he knew, to justify his own death in return, a small down-payment on eventual payback.

He cried, too, for Afghanistan. No one would ever believe that, if he could tell them. He loved this country"s people, whose faces were etched by want and loss and fear and who still opened their lips to laughter. But he wondered how they could have ceded so much power to young, ignorant men and their leaders, often from outside the country, most of them not simply uneducated but actively disavowing education as if they sensed-and they had to, didn"t they?- that knowing more would inevitably disrupt their perfectly constructed, largely false world views. It sounded esoteric next to his tears for his family, his freedom, his life, but still he felt it: the loss of this country.

He was fully awake now, and very aware of the pain in his side. After several minutes" focus, he managed to transport himself to Brooklyn, where he saw himself walking down the street with Clarissa, headed for the subway. They stopped at the place on the corner for coffee, and they split an Everything Bagel. He tried to bring specificity to the way the bagel tasted, the heat of the coffee on his tongue. In his mind, he took Clari"s hand and said, "Let"s skip work. Let"s be teenagers today." In his mind, she laughed and they turned back to home. Feeling all this almost as if it were truly happening, Todd, lying somewhere in Afghanistan not far from the Pakistan border, smiled.

There was still so much ahead. In some ways, it had all just begun. A new beginning, at his age: how had he failed to appreciate that? This constantly running after something new, it had become a trap. If he somehow could get home, he vowed, he would stay there. He would stop running. He would embellish the contours of his own life, instead of trying to color outside the lines. If he had the chance, he would remember something he"d forgotten after the death of his first wife. He would remember how to love what he had.

Stela, September 10th Dorogoi Mr. Chomsky, Greetings, or privyet, as I would like to be able to salute you; I know you must know your Russian given your parents" background. My name is Stela Sidorova, I am 56 years old and immigrated from the Soviet Union with my then-husband when I was only 20 years old. We moved to Ohio, where I now own and run a used bookstore. Alone, I might add. My husband, the chyort, deserted me nine years after our arrival here. I should have pounded his b.a.l.l.s, but he was not a real man as you are, a man who stayed with his wife and supported his offspring. Oh well, forgive my frankness as I have forgiven him. At least he contributed to the creation of two little boys who then became mine alone. And because of him, I learned I must pray to G.o.d, but keep rowing to sh.o.r.e-an important lesson.

I have many copies of books by you in my shop, more than I will ever be able to sell. But that does not mean you are unpopular with the Russian community here-just the opposite. Most part with your books only when they are dead. Perhaps if you are ever traveling in this area, you will stop in and sign some. It would be a great pleasure to meet you.

But I"d better get to my point, in case you think it is simply for this that I trouble you. I write for two other reasons. One is personal: I am preparing to compose a very important letter to my only surviving son, and so every correspondence is practice for that one. I hope you won"t be insulted by my confession. It is only in letters that I feel I can be fully honest, even with myself; perhaps, as a writer, you understand that.

The other reason is about the war. I know you are a member of the intelligentsia and a dissident, two groups which are much smaller in this country than in ours: the country of my birth, the one you must also partly claim. And I know that you are an expert on how governments behave. What do you think: is it possible that an American military officer would lie to a mother about the death of her son in war? Would the army tell a mother her son was a hero when he wasn"t? Would they bury him at Arlington if he didn"t deserve to be there?

I hope this question doesn"t strike you as naive. I know of course that governments lie; I was born a Soviet, after all. But the soldier who told me what happened to my son seemed so reliable to me, and I"m a good judge of character. I found myself wanting to comfort him, he seemed so sad.

I am not like you, a famous writer and thinker, but I am well-read and not an idiot-I have spent years surrounded by these books, so how else could I be? I know you have an excellent brain. I know you are a critic of my adopted government. I know you will tell me there is a possibility I was deceived. But what I am wondering is if you will tell me that it is really likely they would lie to someone as unimportant as me about something so important.

Finally, I must to tell you one thing, dear Mr. Chomsky-or Noam, as I hope I can call you, given our shared heritage and having revealed so much of myself. I say this as a sister from your parents" homeland. If you look like the most recent pictures I have seen of you, you need to trim your hair. It"s not that I object to wild hair-my boy Piotr had such hair. But if you are going to criticize the men who sit in boardrooms and government offices, you yourself must look like you"ve just walked out of one. Put this way, I imagine you see what I mean. So will the barber.

I await your reply. Thank you for your time, and remember the invitation to my store. It is called Bulgakov"s Bookshelf. I would be happy to see you any time, haircut or no.

Iskrenne vash, - Stela Sidorova Amin, September 11th Amin woke into silence. He opened his eyes and let them close again. A moment later came the first syllables of the call to prayer. A sign of the effectiveness of his body clock, which had been set in youth and now virtually never failed to try to raise him at this hour, even when he"d fallen ill or found himself in places where prayer calls would never be heard-although how people could live forever without the dawn call to prayer, without that mystery and meaning, bewildered him.

"Allah is great." The muezzin broke through the darkness, expanding each word into music, carrying the melody of a desert wind on a summer night. Amin rested a hand on his wife"s belly, feeling the movement of her breath meld with the praise of Allah. Lingering, he let the sound of the adhan soak into his body. He was reluctant often, but today in particular, to fully shed sleep. "Hurry to prayer. Hurry to prayer," came the last admonitions. "Prayer is better than rest." The fajr worship time was Allah"s favorite, it was said, since one must rise from slumber for it. He rolled from his bed, gave his eyes a moment to adjust, moved to the sink to wash, and then outside to pray.

When he returned inside after finishing, the scent of chai greeted him. His wife handed him a cup without speaking; he kissed her forehead. He drank, feeling the tea warm his throat, as she stood silently watching him. It was rare to see her both awake and unmoving. "Mahmoud and the girls are still sleeping?" he asked.