All That's Left to Tell
Daniel Lowe
For my children, for Erin
When I was alive
I was dust which was,
But now I am dust in dust
I am dust which never was.
—The Arabian Nights
1
Now the sunrise.
Now this plate of boiled grain, the spoon in my hand.
Now the walk around the perimeter of the building and the sunset call of the muezzin.
In the long hours between her visits, he used the other events of the day as a refuge.
Each time, before she came into the room, they bound his hands and blindfolded him. Often Azhar, whose few words of English he’d likely learned from the woman, smiled apologetically before he knotted the scarf, drawing it slowly tighter so as not to pull the hair on the back of his head, while Saabir, whose English was only slightly better, yanked the scarf so hard with his calloused fingers that he thought it would leave its bright pattern imprinted on his skull. The room was small, perhaps ten by fifteen feet, partially underground with a half-finished floor, the other half hard-packed dirt; there was a single high window through which, when she wasn’t there, he could occasionally see the feet of men walking by, and when she spoke to him, her voice—he thought she must be fairly young, despite its melodic depth—resonated slightly off the blank walls from where she sat on the other side of the room. Most times Azhar or Saabir seemed to remain in the room with her, but he couldn’t be certain. He had been here six days, and this was the fourth time she’d come.
“Good morning, Mr. Laurent,” she said. Her English was perfect, and if there was the slightest inflection of a Pakistani or Afghan dialect, it likely came from the time she’d spent in those countries. She could easily have been American, was likely American, because while he was no expert in local or regional culture, and had traveled here after absently reading a couple of books, it was unfathomable that a faction in this country that would kidnap him would use or train one of their own women for this purpose. He was stunned they were using a woman at all.
“Can you say good morning to me, Mr. Laurent?” she said, addressing him not as a child, but as someone from whom she expected a courteous response.
“Good morning,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry. I still don’t know your name.”
The blindfold was wide and thick, and even if the sun had been angling through the high window, which it never did, and he’d held his eyes fully opened, he would likely have been able to make out only her silhouette.
“You can call me Josephine these mornings I visit,” she said. “If I told you my real name, you would start to worry.”
The few times she’d spoken to him to this point, never for more than ten or fifteen minutes, she’d been similarly ambiguous in her choice of words, and he’d lacked the courage to ask what she’d meant. But this time, he said, “Worry about what?”
She let out a brief sigh, perhaps a quiet laugh.
“Maybe that you couldn’t pronounce it,” she said. “Or maybe, if I told you my real name, you would start to think that you would never be leaving here.”
He had come to the country for the wrong reasons and stayed for worse ones. He’d volunteered to open new opportunities for Pepsi while operating out of Karachi, a city he would have had trouble placing in Pakistan before he’d volunteered, or rather insisted that he go, using the relatively light weight of his executive position to make the move for no more than six months. Gregory, his boss, and younger than he was by ten years, but with more international experience, had said, “Six months will seem like an eternity. Pakistan’s a young country. But you’ll feel something ancient there, and every now and then it doesn’t feel good. Not saying you won’t meet some wonderful people, even walking around in the markets. Hell, you can buy a Big Mac if you’re homesick. I don’t mean to be unnecessarily grim, Marc, but you watch the news. Educate yourself and be careful.” He’d done neither adequately.
The first times she’d come in, she had mostly asked for names of people in the States who would ransom him. Though she loosely accused him of being a spy, he had been kidnapped in order to exact a sum of money that would either finance her cause or that of the people she represented. He had been wandering where he shouldn’t have, out toward the slums of what he was told was Lyari Town, hoping to soothe his heart with images of greater poverty, when a cabdriver who spoke some English warned him of the danger and offered a ride back to his hotel. Because it was toward evening, he’d accepted the ride, and two blocks later the driver had slammed to a stop, and a man toting a machine gun emerged from a small shack and aimed the gun at his head while the driver climbed into the backseat and blindfolded him. They’d driven for hours; whether it was in circles or all the way out to Waziristan he had no way of knowing, though they weren’t in the mountains. When Azhar or Saabir, each afternoon, walked him for exercise around the perimeter of a house near the one where he was held, the air still seemed damp with the occasional salt-scent of the sea.
“You look no worse for the wear,” she said to him. “I see you have a change of clothes. Eating well?” He’d been given simple but generous meals of grains and peas and bread. “It would be an affront for a Pakistani not to act hospitably,” she added without irony. She said something to Azhar in what he believed he recognized as Urdu, and he heard the door open and close. She pulled the chair across the floor to the point she was only a couple of feet away. When she sat down, some damp fragrance briefly invaded his nostrils.