The Company We Keep (24 page)

We chat for a while, and then, out of the blue, Bob invites me to dinner. He says we should catch up on Sarajevo, talk about how we were exonerated over the lieutenant, how Lara is doing. It’s as spontaneous as that. We agree to meet at an Italian restaurant near Tyson’s Corner that night.

Halfway through dinner, Bob tells me he’s going to Europe to work on his French house and afterward hike in the Alps. Do I want to go hiking with him? I laugh, certain he’s kidding. I tell him it’s a trip he’ll have to make on his own. But at the end of dinner he asks me again, saying he’s absolutely serious.

I accept, knowing just how wildly impulsive it is. But the truth is, I can be as spontaneous as anyone. If I wasn’t born that way,
then these last years I’d spent picking up and flying to the other side of the world at a phone call made me so. When we played hooky and went skiing in Switzerland, it didn’t take all that much convincing on Bob’s part.

And of course if I hadn’t been in some way attracted to Bob, I never would have said yes. And I guess deep inside I was hoping he felt the same way, or he never would have invited me. Would he?

Two weeks later, though, as I drive down from Paris, none of this stops me from wondering if I’m a complete idiot. The more I think about it, the more I realize I barely know the guy. What can you know about someone after spending two days in a car with him? It then occurs to me that Bob might just want a hiking companion, nothing more.

We spend the next four days in Zermatt, hiking from one mountain hut to another. It’s at the end of the season, and there are only a couple of other hikers on the trails. Those three days are like a forced march. My boots are too small and I lose a toenail. Dinners in the huts are basic: a bowl of soup and fresh brown bread. There are no showers or baths. The people who run the huts assume we’re a couple, and must think it strange when Bob asks for two rooms. Still, at night I lie in bed looking forward to the next day.

One night over dinner, Bob tells me a story about how a friend of his used to take a long, hard trip in a small car with a prospective girlfriend before deciding if they were compatible or not. He’d know before the first thousand miles. I don’t say anything, but I think he’s talking about us.

The last morning it’s drizzling, and we buy ponchos. The ground is slippery, but the Swiss, in their meticulousness, have spread sharp crushed rock on the trails. By midday the drizzle turns into a steady, icy black rain, and we turn back for Zermatt. I want to stay inside and get dry, but Bob talks me into a tram ride to the bottom of the Little Matterhorn.

We walk out of the tram station to be met by a driving blizzard. A few hardcore skiers ride up a little T-bar nearby. Bob says we should take a quick hike to the top of the Little Matterhorn. It isn’t all that far, he says, and he’s brought his ice ax. We start out, but when I look back and can’t see the station, I tell him he’s out of his mind. He cheerfully agrees, and we go back. As a compromise, we walk back to Zermatt and stop for beers at the first place on the way down.

As much as you can know about these things, I realize on that walk down that I’ve fallen in love. The two of us will never have much money or even a lot of stability, but right now neither seems to matter. All I can think of is that Bob has a way of throwing open the windows and doors of my life. With him, things will never be predictable or boring. And not being bored counts a lot with me.

When we come back to Washington, we move in together at the Wolf Trap Motel in Vienna, Virginia. We buy two bicycles, chaining them to the balcony outside our room. On dry days we ride them to work. Two months later we upgrade, renting a one-bedroom apartment a block off Connecticut Avenue in Washington. We take the Metro to work.

I beg my boss not to deploy me, and can’t thank him enough when he finds me a desk job. I laugh at myself, thinking how there was a time I kept a suitcase packed in my closet and would go anywhere at a moment’s notice. You need me in Kingston tomorrow? No problem. But now, for the first time in all these years, I no longer want to get on an airplane to go anywhere.

In the summer I’m offered a slot in the operations course at the Farm—the CIA’s secret training facility in rural Virginia. It’s the first step to becoming an operative, something I’ve dreamed about for a long time. Not only will a lot more jobs open up to me, but I’d be qualified to run informants, and even learn a hard language. I’d accept on the spot if it weren’t for Bob.

Normally the two of us could probably take a “tandem” assignment, a posting to the same place. But the reality is that finding two jobs in the same overseas station is nearly impossible. There’s the added complication that Bob eventually received a citation and a medal for his work in Iraq, and if he sticks to the straight and narrow, he’ll land another station where he’ll be chief. But the way the rules are written, a wife or husband can’t work for a spouse. We’d be lucky to work in adjoining countries. Meanwhile, the pressure would be on me to take an overseas assignment apart from Bob.

I know the way these things go. After the Farm I could drag my feet for a while, turning down one posting after another. Inevitably, though, the day would come when I’d have to say yes. At first it would be something like a three-month assignment, and then six months, and eventually a full two-year tour. Soon enough, Bob and I would be leading separate lives.

Also making me hesitate to go down that path is that I can’t see myself doing this forever and risk ending up like Cheri, my friend in the shooting course. I don’t want to become some Flying Dutchman, driven around the world by whatever random wind that comes along. And it pretty much would stay that way until I retired. I know that one day I’ll want to settle down, in a place where, I don’t know, a kitten can grow old. Maybe not right now, but one day.

For Bob, the solution is for the two of us to resign and make a life together on the outside. He wants to reboot in Beirut, a city he fell in love with when he worked there in the 1980s. I like the idea of Beirut too, but frankly I dread giving up something very important in my life. Bob’s had a full, fascinating career in the CIA, and he saw a lot more of the world than I did. I’ve only put a handful of years, and my star now is on the rise. So, in the end, I hedge my bets and take a leave of absence.

After he nails down a consulting contract with an Argentine oil
company through his friend Garth, Bob resigns from the Agency on December 4, 1997. Two days later we’re packed, everything not movable sold, and waiting in front of our apartment for a taxi to the airport. We have two small suitcases between us.

Somewhere I read that love is a push out from shore and a belief the ice will hold. Boarding the airplane to Beirut with Bob is certainly pushing away, but I’m still not certain the ice is thick enough to support us both.

Beirut, Lebanon:
DAYNA

I
spend my days walking around Beirut. Although it’s been six years since the end of the civil war, parts of the city look like the fighting was yesterday. The buildings along the Green Line—the battle front between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut—are in ruins, like sand castles hit by a wave. The Holiday Inn on the water is still charred on one side, all the windows blown out. The Lebanese government nominally runs the country, but in fact Hizballah, the radical Shia militia, is the strongest force in Lebanon. Syrian troops occupy half of the country.

I may be out of the CIA now, but it doesn’t really feel like it. I catch myself memorizing the location of pay phones that work, and being suspicious of cars and people I see more than once. In a café I always sit facing the entrance. I even catch myself looking for surveillance. I know it’s dumb instinct. Still, it’s going to be a while before it sinks in that no one is interested in following me anymore.

I eat lunch and dinner at the place we found when we first got
here, Abu Khudur’s. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall. But it’s on the same street as our hotel, and it’s open day and night. They know me here now.

“Chicken with no pickle, madam, yes?” Ahmed says in Arabic as he makes my
schwarma
—the Lebanese version of a wrap sandwich. Ahmed thinks it’s funny that I always order the same thing. He likes to tease me by offering me calf’s brains and intestines.

“When is
zowj
coming?” Ahmed asks, as he carves chicken off the spit.

Zowj
is “husband” in Arabic. Bob and I are not married, but it’s simpler to let people here think we are. Ahmed doesn’t wait for my answer. He’s warming pita bread on the grill. “
Za’tar?
” he asks. Thyme?

I’ve managed to learn a few words of Arabic and like to practice them when I can. “
Zowj fi Paris.
” My husband is in Paris. I take a Sprite out of the refrigerator. “
Bukra, inshallah.
” Tomorrow, God willing. I’m happy that next week I start studying Arabic with a tutor.

I stand at the window, watching the street. Almost none of Beirut’s streets are marked by signs. Even our hotel only lists its address as Hamra—Beirut’s old commercial center. Like the Lebanese, I’ve started to learn my way around by walking the streets, remembering landmarks and the bigger stores.

“Where’s Hasan?” I ask.

Ahmed hands me my
schwarma
wrapped in paper. “In the south.”

The first day we came here, we figured out that Ahmed and Hasan are Hizballah reservists. When the fighting against the Israelis in the south flares up, they’re called up to join their units. Ahmed still has a bandage on his arm from a wound he got in a fight a month ago.

Ahmed comes around and stands by my table, looking out the window at the stalled traffic. It sounds as if everyone is honking at the same time. Ahmed shakes his head.

The gridlock is worse today, but Hamra is always a circus. Old Mercedes taxis tap their horns to solicit fares. Hawkers and store owners stack their wares on the sidewalks. There’s nowhere to walk except in the street, dodging cars.

A boy on a motor scooter comes racing down the sidewalk, swerving to miss a lady with her shopping bags. “The idiot,” Ahmed says.

“Ahmed, we’re looking for an apartment.” I ask it on a whim, but who knows.

He motions for me to put down my sandwich. I follow him out into the street.

“See that?” he points up at a sagging banner in Arabic over Abu Khudur’s neon sign. “It says ‘apartment for rent.’ ” Ahmed points directly at the sixth floor above us. I can just see the wall of a tiny apartment on the roof.

As Ahmed writes down the telephone number from the banner, I bolt my sandwich, then run back to the hotel to call from our room, where it’s quieter.

The man who answers the phone speaks fluent English. He says he’s Dr. Hajj.

“It’s new and has a new couch and some other nice furniture,” Hajj says. “It’s perfect for an American.” It reassures me that he recognizes my accent. Alone in a strange place, the familiar feels good.

Hajj and I ride up together in the apartment’s elevator, a wobbly, rusted cage. The building’s electrical and telephone wires run down the elevator shaft, and as we pass the third floor, the cage snags a wire and makes it spark. Hajj pretends he doesn’t see.

I follow Hajj as he lets himself into the apartment with a key, through another door, and out onto the terrace. I know why he brings me here first—the view is breathtaking: the American University of Beirut framed by the Mediterranean. In the east there’s the snowcapped Shuf, the mountain range that separates the coast from the Biqa’ Valley.

I watch a man on a terrace across the street whistling to pigeons that wheel in the air above him, flying higher and higher until they’re just black specks against the sky. The man whistles three times. They pause. He whistles sharply, and they come back, putting down on the terrace around him. He speaks to them softly, enticing them back into their cages.

We go back inside. The living room is cramped and dark, but it’s freshly painted and clean. There’s a small cutout for a galley kitchen, a bedroom that just fits a queen-sized bed, and a bathroom with a drain in the corner for a shower. The floor is those hexagonal brick tiles you find in French provincial houses. The place is tiny, but who’s going to visit us? We’ll probably spend our time on the terrace anyway. Maybe I could find a kitten to sun itself here.

“Did you just come from the States?” Hajj asks as he follows me around the apartment.

Hajj must be in his early sixties. His tweed jacket and starched blue oxford shirt with button-down collar are distinctly American. He hands me his card. He’s an engineer and a professor at the American University of Beirut.