"Step-daughter. Yes, isn‟t she?" Clarissa sat across from Danil and watched him eat. "Do you live in the neighborhood?" she asked him.
"Over on Bergen," he said.
"And what do you do? I mean, besides the street art?"
He laughed slightly. "Hardly seems enough, does it?"
"I didn‟t mean it that way," she said. "How do you take your coffee?"
"Black," he said, and watched as she rose and poured him a cup. "I got a BA from Ohio University. Then I moved to New York. I went to Pratt for a year. Wasn‟t for me. Now, I paint the interiors of people‟s homes, or the interiors of apartments or offices between occupants."
"Pays the rent, I‟d imagine."
He shrugged. "I suppose it does."
"Not easy making it as an artist."
Danil made a scoffing sound. "I hate that word."
"Why?"
"All I‟m doing out there is remembering my brother. I‟m just…" He shrugged. "You know, I saw you pass by earlier, and I thought you were crazy, or a crackhead, or something."
"Yeah? Why?"
"Out at that hour, muttering to yourself." He couldn‟t quite confess that he‟d considered, and rejected, the idea of asking if she needed help.
"That does sound a bit crazy." She softly drummed her fingers on top of the table for a moment. "I couldn‟t sleep," she said. "I can‟t sleep."
He studied her a moment. "Yes, now I get that."
"If you don‟t mind…What happened to your brother?"
Danil looked out the kitchen window. She was direct, this lady. But he couldn‟t go there. "You know, I‟m sorry, I really don‟t want to talk—"
"No, I understand," she said. "I don‟t want people asking me too many questions either. I‟m just—" She spread her hands. "I spent the last couple years trying to ignore Afghanistan, the whole region. We‟ve only been married three years and I wanted my husband to come home. He was supposed to, after this rotation. But even so, I—I was angry with him for staying over there. On some level, I didn‟t want to know anything about the place. But now?" She shook her head.
He studied her a minute. He knew this phase, this drive to make sense of chaos, to understand. He‟d felt it too, once. He ate another bite. "So how long has your husband worked over there?"
"In the region, off and on, for about five years."
"Long time."
"Long enough." Abruptly, she stood up. "I‟ll be right back."
She returned with a laptop. "I found this map online the other night." She clicked on a webpage. "Here‟s Ghazni. That‟s where they say my husband is being held. When they told me that, I thought:
good! Something definite. But
what does it actually mean? If you scroll in, look. Ghazni turns into all these little towns. He might be held in Ramak, or Lowy Shar or even closer to the Tribal Areas." She shook her head. "I‟m trying to imagine him. I‟m trying to feel what it must be like. But it‟s so remote, you know? And when I search for Ghazni, looking for images, the first thing that comes up are women in burqas who‟ve been killed."
She slid the laptop over to him. He repositioned the map on the screen and scrolled into the ranges of the Hindu Kush as they reached toward the border with Pakistan. "My brother was stationed in a place that doesn‟t have a name. It was in this area north of Jalalabad. Pech Valley."
"Yes, I‟ve heard of it," she said.
"There‟s a river, and a village called Nangalam."
"I‟ve seen it on the map," she said, and her voice sounded excited.
"It must have been a good map, because it‟s not on most. It‟s barely a town. Forty or fifty houses. A few restaurants—my brother called them „choke-and-pukes.‟ A couple shops for the locals. That‟s it. And once you put the town at your back, you‟re immediately in the mountains that press up against Nangalam. That‟s where my brother was based. It was his training. His unit specialized in mountain combat. But he said there was no way to understand how sheer the drops were unless you‟d seen them. It‟s ghost-land, he said—a man with a gun walking in those mountains disappears into the shadows. A few houses are scattered around on tiny rock outcroppings, lone rangers. They aren‟t part of any system at all. My brother told me in a letter once, „For all intents and purposes, this place does not exist.‟"
"The Badlands of Afghanistan."
"The people who live there," Danil agreed, "are tough, tougher than we can imagine. And they don‟t want to see outsiders. Not even Afghan outsiders, certainly not American outsiders." He leaned back in his chair. "My brother had a girlfriend and a job, but he thought leaving that behind to go to Afghanistan was important. He said he wanted to make the world safer for their kids. What a cliché—but he believed it. He even loved it, the training, at least. He‟d never been involved in anything like that before. I told him he was crazy. I told him that repeatedly. After he got there and wrote me letters describing what he was seeing, I began to think about the whole setup. It doesn‟t make any sense for us to be there. It‟s an impossible mission, even with special training. How, in this impenetrable place, can we hope to accomplish anything—except take life and give it up?"
"What was his name," she asked.
"Piotr."
Clarissa smiled at him, a little sadly. "My husband believes in connections between cultures, among strangers. He believes in progress and that he‟s accomplished things."
"No disrespect," he said. "My brother‟s perspective was a little off-kilter while he was over there too. What he told me is that being there gave his life „clarity.‟ Sure, I understand, you have someone giving you orders, you don‟t have to face the fear of figuring things out for yourself. But in terms of helping, in terms of solving anything—it‟s all too fucked up."
"My husband would say work like his helps make it better, and that we can‟t do what we‟ve done in that country and then simply turn our backs on them."
"We can if the alternative only makes it worse," Danil said, adding, "Sorry."
She shrugged. "I‟m not sure what I believe, and I‟m not sure what my husband would say now."
"I flew to Kabul after Piotr was killed," Danil said. "I wanted to talk to the military. I wanted to go directly to his FOB—Forward Operating Base—but they wouldn‟t let me. Instead, the commander of his unit flew in to see me. He came to Bagram and they took me there."
"What did he tell you?"
"Some shit," Danil said. He couldn‟t share that.
"Did it help?"
He half-laughed. "I‟m alone. My brother‟s not coming back. So, hell no." Then he stopped. He‟d said more than he‟d meant to already.
She waited for a moment. "There‟s nothing to fill that space, is there?"
"Nothing." Danil practically spit the word. "You get more used to it, but the gap doesn‟t disappear. What I really thought after talking to the commander was that all these words, a flood of them, misses the point. My brother died. For what? And now, the path of my life has been fucked up." His voice, he realized, had grown loud. He cleared his throat. "Sorry."
"No, this is how I feel too," she said. She hesitated a moment, then reached out and touched the back of his hand with her fingers. "I‟d like to see your work."
"Sure," he said. "Sometime…"
"No, I mean now." She withdrew her hand and brought it to her neck. "I can drive us around."
He studied her, trying to decide if she was serious.
"I‟d like to see," she hesitated, "what you‟ve done."
"Aren‟t you tired?"
"Not really. You?"
She wasn‟t high, she wasn‟t crazy. She was in trouble; he could feel that, see that. He pulled his hands onto his lap and looked down at them, then up at her. "Okay," he said. "Sure. We can do that."
She smiled and rose. "I‟ll be right back." He watched her leave the kitchen and heard her climb the stairs to the second floor.
The house felt quiet, unlike his apartment with its paper-thin walls. All the street noises seemed far away. He was, he realized, suddenly very tired of words. He wouldn‟t be able to talk much more. He‟d go get his camera, and he‟d give her directions and he‟d take the pictures of the work and she‟d have to be okay with that. It would have to be help enough.
He took one more sip of coffee. On the laptop, he zoomed in on the map and switched to satellite view. He watched as it turned the Pech River into an ugly scar tattooing the hostile terrain that had been home for the First Battalion, 32 Infantry, 10 Mountain Division, and the place his brother had died.
Clarissa, September 12th
"Pull over," Danil said, gesturing with his head. "I‟ll be a minute."
He hopped out and darted across the street to a narrow unnumbered building four stories high, crowded next to a tiny single-level shop as if it were a protective big brother. "Johnny‟s Variety Deli Convenience," read the sign above the store. "Sweat Suits Men‟s Shoes Cold Beer Cigarettes Snacks." A white T-shirt hung in front as if a signal of surrender. The building looked run-down from the outside; three separate locks defended the front door. Danil pulled out a set of keys, looked back at her and waved, and then shot through the door.
Clarissa was probably crazy—no, she was crazy, driving around to look at graffiti with someone she‟d met a few hours ago. Because, what? Because he, like her, had a troubled connection to Afghanistan? But everything felt out of control anyway; and she felt drawn to Danil, something about his face—his unusual green eyes. But more than that. To her he looked older than he said he was, closer to her own age with lines already etched on his forehead, maybe because he‟d already gone through the worst. She wanted to know him, to understand how he‟d come out on the other side. She wanted, too, someone she could talk to about this without all the emotional tension and history that came with every conversation with Ruby, with Mikey.
Danil emerged from the building, held his camera aloft and got into the passenger seat. "We‟ll stay around here," he said. "I‟ve done the odd piece in Manhattan or Queens but most of
the work is nearby."
He directed her a few streets away and then told her to pull over. She followed him on foot halfway up the block. On a second-story wall set back from the street, she saw it. A soldier‟s face, about five feet wide, his head tilted to one side and his eyes closed, sleeping or meditating or dead. His skin seemed almost to glow. IMOP, it said in a corner, along with Afgh.
"How do you do it?"
"Different ways." He snapped a few pictures as he spoke. "Sometimes I use photos, or compilations of photos. Sometimes I draw it. Then I use an old overhead projector to make it larger. I trace it and cut it out of a piece of paper or, when I can afford it, plastic acetate. After that, it‟s all the power of a can, or two or three, of spray paint. When I‟m finished, I hand it over to the wind, the rain, people on the street."
"And this one?"
"My brother‟s face," he said, and turned back toward the car, severing the conversation. She took one last look before following.
They had to park a couple of blocks from the next stencil. Standing six feet tall on a corner near the metal backdoor of a Mexican food restaurant, it showed a uniformed American soldier striding forward, trying to unfasten his fire-engulfed helmet. Flames also surged from his shoulders.
Danil took photos silently and they headed back to the car. She felt oddly gratified to see he was talented. She studied him a moment, imagining him working in front of this door in the middle of some night.
"Urban history," she said in the car. "This is part of it and it‟s the only history that still feels alive to me. I love it. When I started college, I thought I wanted to be an urban activist."
"A what?"
"Yeah." She laughed. "They didn‟t offer that major. But what I wanted was to bring communities together within the urban environment in unexpected ways. In the 1970s in Austria, people strapped on wood frames that took up the same amount of space as a car and then took to the streets. It was a protest against the alienation that cars encourage, and at the same time, it created new conversations, new alliances. Anyway, maybe that‟s kind of what street art is now."
"Urban activist."
"No money in it, of course." She laughed again.
"Never is, is there, in what we want to do most?"
"Sometimes there is," she said. "When we‟re very lucky. When things align perfectly." She felt him looking at her and turned toward him. "What?" she said.
He hesitated a moment. "Turn left up here," he said. And then after a minute: "two more blocks. Right-hand side. Over there."
The next piece, on a whitewashed wall, showed a soldier lying in a splotch of red, and another soldier walking away, through a door. It was dramatic, but hard. She found herself thinking of rescue attempts.
"Left, then right. One more block and on the left-hand side."
This one showed an Islamic woman wearing a headscarf and kneeling, an expression of anguish on her face, her arms spread open, one hand colored red. Someone had painted a tag, the letters KBZ, on her knee. She wanted to ask him about it, but he turned away before she could.
"Four blocks and then a right. Okay, left there. Park anywhere."
This one: a woman cradling a limp child, her mouth opened.
"Two blocks and then a right and then a left for three blocks."
She followed him to a brick wall covered with graffiti. In one corner stood a piece she, by now, recognized immediately as his. It showed a shadow of a male form, and where the figure casting the shadow would be standing, Danil had painted flames. The same insignia: IMOP and Afgh.