An Accidental American: A Novel (5 page)

In the scrawled slope of my father’s name, she’d seen all of this. America, Americans, and what it meant to be one. And five months later, in a maternity hospital in Paris, still groggy from the drugs, my mother had fought for this one thing on my birth certificate.
Father’s nationality: American.

Not a choice, then, but a legacy, a truth from which I cannot ever fully escape. My name, my own blue passport in a drawer, the real one, the cover indelibly stamped with the seal of the United States of America.

So when Valsamis turned back to me, I stared up at him, trying at first to get the joke, then realizing he was serious.

“Which country is that?” I asked.

I waited until I was sure Valsamis was gone, then walked a sulking Lucifer down the road to his temporary exile at the neighbors’ house and headed back home to pack. I found a small shoulder bag in my closet and tossed a couple of changes of clothes inside, clean underwear and the essentials, toothbrush and soap. Traveling light, as I’d always liked it. Traveling optimistically as well. And why not? A week at most, I’d promised myself. A week at most, and I’d be back to Lucifer and the hens.

When I was done, I made my way to my office and sent a short e-mail to Solomon to let them know I’d be gone, then headed downstairs again. Valsamis’s uneaten croissant and cold coffee were still on the kitchen table. I cleared his place, washed the dishes, and took the full garbage bag from below the sink.

The photographs of Rahim and the embassy were on the counter where Valsamis had set them the night before. I picked them up, meaning to throw them away, then hesitated and, unable to stop myself, thumbed through them one last time. It was a narrative of violence, a reminder of what terror can do. On one end, Rahim. On the other, the child, the little girl. And on both their faces, the same expression of hopelessness, the same inward turning of self and soul.

And in one of the other pictures, something I hadn’t noticed before. At the outer edge of the rubble, half buried beneath the twisted frame of a bicycle, a dog, someone’s pet. Not a dog but part of one. Paw and leg and shoulder and half a face, the rest of the creature cleaved clean away.

“
Les brutes,
” I could hear my aunt Emilie saying after we’d buried my mother. Even then I’d thought, No, animals wouldn’t have done this.

A week, I told myself again, dropping the photographs into the trash bag, then opening the back door and setting the garbage on the steps. I would find him and I would come home. I would be back before the crocuses flowered.

Valsamis skirted Perpignan and nudged the Twingo onto the racetrack of the A9, forcing the gas pedal to the floor, trying for power that just wasn’t there. In his rearview mirror, he could see headlights fast approaching, then a brief blinked warning before one car after another flew by him. Valsamis downshifted and tried the accelerator again, coaxing another ten miles an hour out of the engine. Better, he told himself, but still, it was going to be a slow trip south. He’d have to make good time if he wanted to get to Lisbon before Nicole.

It was a clear day, the sky bright and cloudless, Mont Canigou visible through the sooty scrim of diesel haze, the city thinning to farmland and vineyards, the rocky fields still bare, scarred by the plow. Valsamis relaxed into his seat, slid from his pocket the disposable cell phone he’d bought at the airport, and checked for reception.

No such thing as a valueless contact,
Valsamis heard Andy Sproul say. A dead man’s counsel, the first thing Sproul had told him when he’d gotten to Beirut. Valsamis hated advice, should have hated Sproul for his presumption. Still green as the Iowa cornfields in which he’d been raised, and already Sproul had the world figured out. Yet Valsamis hadn’t been able to hate him. It just wasn’t possible.

And now, all these years later, it was Sproul’s advice that came back to Valsamis. Sproul’s ghost, smiling out from beneath his blond mop of hair, thumbing the deck of cards he always carried with him. Good for a game of 41 or Basra with the old men who inhabited the Hamra cafés, and Sproul holding his own like a native. He’d been right, of course: There was no such thing as a valueless contact. But then Valsamis had figured that out long before Beirut.

Valsamis pushed Sproul to the back of his mind and dialed the number in Peshawar, heard the phone ring on the other side of the world. Sproul’s wasn’t the only ghost that had come back to haunt him these last few days, though not all were as pleasant.

The line clicked open on the fifth ring, and Valsamis was relieved to hear Kamran Javed’s voice in his ear.

“It’s me again,” Valsamis told his old friend. “Any news on Kanj?”

“He was moved yesterday,” Javed said.

An Audi sped by on the Twingo’s left, and Valsamis’s grip on the steering wheel tightened suddenly. “Where to?”

“Officially, Amman. I told you before, it was only a matter of time. I kept him here for as long as I could.”

Valsamis looked down at his hand. His knuckles were white, his arm shaking. “Yes,” he told Javed. “I know.” But he was thinking: Not long enough.

T
HIS BEAUTIFUL TIME
,
my mother used to say, speaking of her country in the years after the Americans left and before the Six-Day War, before the flood of Palestinians from the south. The time in which she became a woman. In Beirut and along the coast, there was French champagne and American music. “Moon River” and the twist. And in Jounieh, at the Casino du Liban, women in Dior dresses clustered at the roulette tables, their wrists glittering with diamonds, their bare shoulders tanned by the Mediterranean sun.

For a few earnest students, the shadow of 1958 remained. In the Hamra coffee shops, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan warbled over fuzzy speakers. But for most of the country, there was hope, a peace that people convinced themselves might hold. More important, there was money. Money to fuel one long last blind hurrah before the looming specter of civil war.

It is difficult for me to imagine Lebanon as it was then, knowing it as I do, through the filters of childhood and war. Hard for me to imagine the things my mother and her sister so often described, the Eden of the American University, seen through the eyes of the two young students these women once were. Even as a child, I understood the power of nostalgia, time’s ripening of memory. Even then I had my suspicions.

“We were arm in arm,” my aunt Emilie would say, recounting the parties and concerts, the professors they had tormented, the boys with whom they had flirted. Muslim and Christian and Druze all united under the banner of youth and prosperity. “Arm in arm,” she would repeat, looking at my mother for confirmation in those rare times when I knew them to be together, and my mother would nod, though in a way that made me think she wasn’t quite so sure.

Of course, by the time my mother met my father, Lebanon had already begun to change. For the young and wealthy, there were still yacht parties in Byblos and winter weekends on the slopes at Faraya-Mzaar. But along the border, and in the refugee camps south of Beirut, the humiliations of the Six-Day War had erupted into rage. And in the mountains around the Qadisha Valley, young Phalangists trained for battle.

My father must have been one of the last of his kind to arrive before the war, drifting south along the Mediterranean, following the scents of Chanel and good Cuban cigars, the fading reek of other people’s money. Not a fighter but a two-bit hustler from Buffalo with an expensive tuxedo and a nice face. A man who hadn’t been born to privilege but who had studied it and knew how to work a room. A gigolo, my aunt Emilie had once called him.

My aunt had been there the day my parents met in the ski lodge at Faraya-Mzaar, and she had disliked my father from the start. Too loud and too flashy, she’d thought, but my mother had seen something else in the tall American. When they ran into each other again at the St. Georges yacht club, my mother suspected fate.

Three weeks later, the day after the Israelis bombed the Beirut airport in retaliation for an attack on one of their planes in Athens, my mother found out that she was pregnant. But by then my father was long gone, heading north across the Mediterranean with the son of a Texas oil tycoon. Cruising toward the Aegean and on to the French Riviera, riding the next wave of free hospitality. Not long after, my mother was on her way north herself, packed off to a convent in the Dordogne, the only respectable solution for a girl in her straits.

There was no view from my window at the Pensão Rosa, nothing to see except the dark rooms that looked back at me from across the hotel’s narrow air shaft, and the collection of items that had mysteriously found their way to its bottom. Among the thicket of weeds and garbage lay a stained T-shirt, a pair of red lace panties, an old pillow, and a single brown shoe. Overhead, there was just a cramped square of sky.

Watching, I told myself, scanning the blank windows. Here and there, where the curtains had been left open and a light was still on, I could see the dioramas inside, the furnishings identical in their shabbiness, yellow walls and sagging chairs, beds cupped by the cumulative weight of all the bodies they had borne. Valsamis would be out there somewhere, watching. And listening. This, the price of his hospitality, this room so conveniently waiting for me.

I hadn’t planned to go to our old apartment on the Travessa da Laranjeira that first night back, but the long drive had left me road-weary and restless, so I left my bag in the room and headed down again in the Rosa’s rickety elevator.

Just a short walk, I told myself as I left the hotel and started up the hill, to stretch my legs and clear my head. But I headed almost instinctively for the Largo do Calhariz, then plunged down into the warren of streets that lay to the west of the Bica funicular.

What I had come for, I wasn’t sure exactly. Certainly not Rahim, since the chances of his being here were slim to none, less than none if he didn’t want to be found. Still, I was relieved to discover our old building as it had been, the plaster facade the same sooty shade of pink, the gutters still shaggy with wild mint. At the end of the street, the flowering almond tree, bare now save for its spring stubble.