An Accidental American: A Novel (27 page)

Kanj took a deep breath and pulled the desert air into his lungs. At least he wouldn’t die in some concrete cell beneath the sand. The moon had not yet risen, and the sky was thick with stars, an endless field reaching back and back toward the moment of creation. It was a sight both beautiful and frightening, and it was all Kanj could do to keep himself from turning away.

And we have adorned the lower heaven with lamps; and set them to pelt the devils with; and we have prepared for them the torment of the blaze!
Kanj repeated the words from the Sixty-seventh Sura to himself in his dream.
Blessed be He in whose hand is the kingdom, for He is mighty over all!

In the distance he could hear the scrape of a key in a lock, the sound of a door clanging wide. When he opened his eyes, the face of his jailer hovered above him in the semidarkness. An Arab face, Kanj thought, so much like his own, his skin the color of goat hide, desert skin, tanned and beaten by centuries of sun. Abraham’s skin, and Isaac’s. The skin of the Prophet. The skin of Kanj’s mother, of his sister.

“It’s time,” the man said, and Kanj nodded.

I
T HAD SNOWED IN THE MOUNTAINS
,
a late-season storm, heavy and wet. The road to my house was still unplowed, the snow soft beneath the wheels of the Renault. I didn’t stop at my driveway but drove past it, turning off the road before I reached the Hernots’ driveway, pulling the Renault onto an overgrown fire road. Better, I reasoned, not to advertise our presence.

“We’ll walk from here,” I told Graça, cutting the engine, stepping out into the snow. It was deeper in the woods than it had been on the road, cold against my ankles.

We crossed the road on foot and skirted my yard, coming up through the back garden. The sun was out, and the sky was shockingly blue against the bleached valley below, the mountains etched in sharp relief, black crags against white slopes. The house itself was dark and still.

I unlocked the patio door and stepped inside, waiting for Graça to follow. It was only a matter of days that I’d been in Lisbon, and yet I felt like a traveler returning to a place from which I had been absent for a long time. It was cold in the house, frost on the windows, our breath frosty in the air. I made my way to the kitchen and piled some kindling in the old woodstove, then lit a fire.

“I’m going to get started on the passports,” I told Graça. I motioned to the wicker basket that hung on the back wall. “There should be eggs in the coop, if you’re hungry. And there’s a spare bedroom upstairs. Second door on the left.”

Graça nodded. She had asked thankfully little since our last night in Lisbon, and I was grateful for whatever held her back now. The less she knew, the better off she would be.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll wake you if I need you.”

“I told you they would come,” Andy Sproul said.

It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1982, the last one either of them would spend in Beirut. Sproul and Valsamis were standing on the roof of the embassy watching the Israeli jets pummeling the Palestinian camps. The entire south of the city seemed to be on fire. Black smoke choked the sky around the airport and the Sports City. The bombings had been going on for some time now, and Valsamis was surprised that there was still anything left to burn.

Sproul bent down and picked up one of the thousands of yellow leaflets that had descended on West Beirut that morning, a polite warning of annihilation to Colonel Halal and the Syrian forces on the ground from the advancing Israelis:
We shall capture the city in a short period…As an experienced general who lacks no wisdom, you surely know that any attempt to throw your forces against the Defense Force would be suicide.

From the beginning, Andy Sproul had predicted that the Israelis would not stop at the Litani River, as they had promised, but would push north into the heart of the country and on to Beirut. To everyone at the embassy, Valsamis included, Sproul’s prediction had seemed ill informed at best; such aggression on the part of the Israelis could only be construed as political suicide.

One of the jets dropped its payload, and the entire city shuddered. There was a sound like the violent ripping of fabric, then a giant ball of flame and smoke blossomed from what remained of the Sabra camp.

“Looks like you were right,” Valsamis said.

Sproul folded the leaflet into neat quarters and slipped it in his pocket. He didn’t look like a man who had just won an argument.

Valsamis nudged the dial on his car radio up the band, catching nothing but static. Behind him, the parched land rose and fell toward the horizon, the highway cutting a malignant swath through wheat fields and scrub. Like Montana driving, Valsamis thought. Numb hours along Highway 2, through the northern reservations and the mammoth dryland farms. Wrecked lives and radio silence, the occasional staticky interruption of some local Christian station broadcasting redemption.

A blast of pop music crackled through the Twingo’s tinny speakers, and Valsamis lingered on the station. Zaragoza coming in, he told himself, moving once more through the band, more slowly this time, hoping to catch a Spanish news station, maybe even the BBC. Hoping for any voice besides the one in his head.

There was more music, flamenco and bad European pop, and then, out of the broadcast haze, a man’s voice, the news from RNE1. Valsamis stopped to listen.

The station was broadcasting an excerpt from the secretary of state’s speech to the United Nations Security Council. Valsamis could hear Powell’s voice beneath that of the translator: “The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources.”

He sounds so sure of himself, Valsamis thought, so confident in his certainty. “…People who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to,” the secretary continued.

Powell was good, though Valsamis knew it was his naïveté that made him so, his ability to be duplicitous without knowing it, so that what he said was never actually a lie.

“I cannot tell you everything that we know,” Powell went on. “But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling.”

Valsamis moved to turn down the radio, then caught himself, his finger settling lightly on the knob. The piece on Powell’s speech had ended, and a Spanish commentator had broken in with a critique of American foreign policy.

“Take this incident in Jordan today,” the woman said, speaking in almost hysterical Spanish. She was making a point about secrecy, but it was her next question that caught Valsamis’s attention. “Are we to believe the official reports that Sabri Kanj was killed while trying to evade arrest?” Valsamis turned up the radio another notch, but the woman had already moved on to her next point.

So Kanj was dead, Valsamis thought, though he wasn’t quite sure what this meant. If Kanj had managed to find a sympathetic ear, then his death made little sense. The Jordanians certainly wouldn’t have killed him without an American okay. The Americans wouldn’t have killed him without first consulting the Israelis. That was the way things worked with men like Kanj. Beirut or no, Kanj was far more useful alive than he was dead.

Valsamis fed the Twingo more gas, then glanced quickly over his shoulder and swung out into the passing lane. No, he told himself, something didn’t make sense.

From our earliest days, we have lived in a world obsessed with identity. Think of Chronicles and the descendants of Israel, or Moses’ numbering of the tribes, our story written back through the blood of all those generations, all the way to the first womb. There were stories then to help us remember. Later, paper and wax, seals ripe for tampering. And the body’s proof, birthmarks and fingerprints and scars, signs of the indisputable, of name and class and country, and all those other immutable truths to which each of us is born.

Yet, from the beginning, there were also those who tried to invent themselves anew. Fugitives and con men and thieves. People seeking sanctuary from their own existence. And there were those, like me, who learned the alchemy of identity.

It is not an easy practice. There is so much attached to the individual today, an encumbrance of proof. Paper and ether, the delicate helices of the genome. Our entire being in a single strand of hair or a cluster of cells on a Q-Tip. So much that one can never change, and so I, at least, have learned to concentrate on the possible.

I had no intention of giving Graça or myself a whole new life. A project like that would have taken weeks, and not all of it would have been work I could do. What I wanted was a quick fix, traveling papers, a passport for each of us. After this, Graça would have to find her own way.

Graça’s passport would be easy. I’d done some work on the new Brazilian passport just a few months earlier, and I’d been given several documents to tamper with. Most of them were mangled beyond repair, but there was at least one I knew could be modified to work for Graça.

My own passport was a different matter. There were several possibilities in the collection of castoffs I kept in my filing cabinet. Belgian and Swiss and Canadian, all of which would have worked. But I could not pick any of them.

I stood there for a good twenty minutes, trying to reason with myself, knowing each moment was one I couldn’t afford to waste. I am a person who has lived my life with very little proof of self, without the comforts of inheritance or parentage, and I simply could not bring myself to forsake the one thing my mother had intended for me. Finally, it was the familiar blue cover that I chose. An American passport.

Just a document, I told myself, though even I could see this wasn’t true. I had chosen it this time, taken it for myself, not just a name and a place but citizenship and all that went with it.

The laminate facings on both of the passports were intact; my first priority was to peel them away without mangling the paper beneath. Everyone has his or her own style with laminates, and my preferred method has always been a combination of cold and adhesive remover. In this case, cold would mean an hour or two in my kitchen freezer.