An Accidental American Read online

  The dog had put a fair bit of distance between us by the time I emerged onto the road, but when he reached the driveway, he stopped, as he had the day before, feet frozen in the gravel.

  “Good dog,” I called, patting my thigh, urging him back to me, but he held his ground, his steely eyes shifting from me to the house and back again.

  I didn’t see Valsamis when I first stepped into the driveway. The little white Twingo was there, Valsamis’s briefcase and a white paper bag resting on the hood, but the car itself was empty. At first I thought he’d let himself inside, but then the door of the henhouse opened, and he stepped out and came toward me through the side garden. His hands were up in triumph, and in each palm were two eggs.

  “Breakfast!” he called out as I started forward, catching Lucifer by the collar, hooking in his leash.

  “I stopped at the bakery,” he said, nodding to the hood of the car, slipping the eggs into his pockets.

  I watched his hands disappear, his meaty fingers against the clean brown shells. Lucifer growled, tugging at his leash, and I pulled him back.

  Valsamis picked up his briefcase and the paper bag. “I was thinking you could make some coffee.”

  “You know, you’re a hard woman to find,” Valsamis remarked, settling himself at my kitchen table.

  I stripped off my coat and filled Lucifer’s bowl. The dog eyed Valsamis one last time, then warily began to eat.

  “Even your father doesn’t know where you are.” Valsamis slid the eggs from his pockets and set them in the center of the table. Not breakfast, I thought, but a reminder of what he could do to me and when. “What is it, fifty, sixty kilometers from here to Collioure? And you haven’t once paid him a visit.”

  I scooped some beans into the coffee grinder and turned on the little machine, then packed the espresso maker and set it on the stove alongside a saucepan of milk. “You didn’t come all this way to talk about my father,” I told him.

  “You’re right,” Valsamis agreed. “I assume you’ve given our conversation some thought.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “I mean, why do you need me to find Rahim? Isn’t that what people like you do? You found me.”

  “He knows we’re looking,” Valsamis said. “We need someone he trusts, someone who can ask around.”

  “And how do you know he’ll want to see me? It’s been a long time.”

  Valsamis opened the paper bag and surveyed the contents, then pulled out a pain au chocolat and offered it to me.

  I shook my head.

  “You were quite the couple once, as I understand it. Love of his life and all that,” Valsamis observed.

  “Well, things change, don’t they?” I turned off the heat under the milk and poured out two mugs, then topped them with espresso and handed one to Valsamis. “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s say he would want to see me. What makes you so sure he’s even in Lisbon?”

  Valsamis sipped at his coffee, then tore off a piece of his croissant and smiled slightly, clearly pleased at my capitulation, at himself for having known I’d eventually agree. “We have reason to believe it’s in his best interest.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  Valsamis ignored the remark. He opened his briefcase and produced a thick stack of euros. “Pour les frais,” he said. For expenses. “You’ll leave this morning.”

  “I’m to drive?” I asked, momentarily thrown off by the language leap before finding my footing in French.

  Valsamis nodded.

  “And once I get to Lisbon?”

  “There’s a room in your name at the Pensão Rosa. Do you know the place?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s in the Bairro Alto. On the rua da Rosa. You’ll find it easily. Someone will contact you when you get there.”

  His accent was immaculate, his French flawless, unquestionably better than my English, and this was a statement, I thought, as the eggs had been. A way of making me acknowledge the inherent inequality in our relationship.

  Valsamis shut his briefcase and stood up from the table, leaving his coffee and croissant nearly untouched.

  “And when I find him?” I asked.

  “We’ll worry about that.” He started to go, then turned back to me as if he’d forgotten some important piece of information. “Just think of it as giving back to your country, Nicole.”

  I once heard it said that there is no such thing as an accidental American. That we are, all of us, citizens by conscious choice. Of course, it was a Frenchman who posited this, some self-proclaimed modern philosopher on one of the political discussion shows on France 2, so I’ve always taken the theory with a grain of salt. After all, to be an American has never been my choice. I was raised in Lebanon and have lived most of the rest of my life in Europe. I’ve claimed France as my home and chosen the one profession in which these things can be changed. I’m my own universal consulate. I can whip out any decent passport in a matter of hours.

  If anything, I am a mongrel, the daughter of a father who was, himself, a drifter and a con man. My mother was a half-breed with French and Maronite parentage and an Arabic name. A woman whose own country had been stitched together by naive outsiders to form an optimistic whole.

  “Just this one thing,” she used to say, speaking of her last meeting with my father and what little she’d asked of him. She was proud of the fact, proud to have done for herself. Six months pregnant and on her own, her possessions only what she could carry in one small bag. Two loaves of bread and a spare change of clothes.

  And the one thing? Certainly not money. No, what my mother had wanted was merely a signature, an acknowledgment of paternity. The only thing of value she thought my father could give me.

  Not a name or even legitimacy but a life she imagined for her child, a certain freedom and power. The amphibious vehicles of the Sixth Fleet swarming in the Beirut harbor. An adolescent memory of the young marines with their GI haircuts and broad smiles. Rock and roll and Jackie Onassis. Places my mother and her sister had visited four years earlier on a trip to New York City. Greenwich Village jazz clubs. Hordes of overcoated diners at Schrafft’s. The crush of rush hour on the subway. Women in stockings and high heels. Women who worked.

  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.

  THIS 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.

  The old gas streetlamps were lit, and the firelight flickered off the shuttered windows and crumbling railings. Beyond them, I thought, a double bed with an iron frame, a single chair upholstered in faded green tapestry, and a dark mahogany dressing table. At least there had been.

  The windows that faced the street were dark, but back in the interior of the apartment, where the kitchen was, a light burned. Someone moved across the doorway; a head was all I could see from where I stood. Then, as if on cue, the bedroom light snapped on.

  I held my breath and waited, watching a woman’s silhouette skate into view, and behind her, the blurred shape of a man. The couple kissed briefly, their shadows merging, then the man stepped forward and brushed aside the curtains.

  I don’t do this, I could hear myself say as I watched the man lean out to pull the window closed. It was what I’d told Valsamis that first night in Paziols. And yet here I was.

  But then wasn’t this what anyone would have done? One life for how many others?

  Still, when the gaslight caught the man’s face, and I could see finally that it wasn’t Rahim, what I felt was only relief.

  Another March, the spring of 1990. After two years in America, I’d come home to a Europe transformed. On Karl-Marx-Allee, in the shadow of the deserted guard towers, East Berliners were hawking broken pieces of the wall. In the flea markets of Prague and Moscow, tourists could buy a Red Army uniform for the price of a bottle of cheap vodka. Communism was on sale, and no one wanted to miss out on a slice of the profits.