getting cold.’
“We ate, and we slept in our bed that night. She’s the best woman I’ve ever known. I don’t expect to know another, but some things are more important. A man wasn’t made to stay home and find hobbies. It little profits that an idle king by this still hearth . . . matched with an aged wife. Ha! I never heard my father talk about retirement. We were farmers. The closest he came was when he was eighty-seven. He called my office and said, ‘I can’t do it no more. Maybe something’s wrong.’ Eight hours later my plane landed in Nebraska, and I rented a car and drove to his house. He was dead in his recliner. That was retirement.
“I remember once asking him where our name came from. I’d gotten into Vanderbilt, and students talked about that stuff. ‘Alaric?’ he said. ‘It’s American.’ But everything comes from somewhere else, I told him. ‘Sometimes people’s heirlooms do,’ he said. The way he told it, when his people were asked to write their names at the courthouse, not one of them knew how. He said their accents were so thick they had to repeat their names a dozen times. ‘If an American farmer who can’t spell tells his name to an American clerk, and that clerk writes it down, I think that makes the name American.’
“When he told me this, I wasn’t impressed, but years later, when a salesman came to my door selling genealogy, I repeated the story. I had my father to thank for not letting college turn me into someone else. By then I understood. Who we were wasn’t what we were called. It was what we did. That’s why I built businesses and sold them, and that’s why I came here. I don’t blame my wife for not waiting. I couldn’t even promise I’d come back.”
As he spoke, I expected his tone to soften with regret or nostalgia for a marriage to which he’d given half his life. Instead, he sounded brash, prideful of his nature. His was the voice of a type of man I’d never known, who stated a truth and followed it, like a samurai submitting to his leader. I wanted to track this voice to its source — the duty and vision confounded, the Go West, young man — to stand by the broken-down cabin, ferns growing from its walls, or a crumbling sod house on the plains, and feel the wind, listen to the rarefied nature and amplify it in my mind and imagine the world that had woven this voice from the cultures crossing that vast America.
“My first years,” Frank said, “the Afghans were eager for a new start. But then the US got tangled up in Iraq, and the support dried up. The Afghans kept building, but the momentum was slowing. The people here began going back to their old way of being, taking as much as they could before things got bad again. As far as changes go, it wasn’t good for human relations.
“For a while, I developed programs at American University, but my students applied themselves less with the intent of helping their own people than with the goal of getting a visa out of here. And I didn’t hear my coworkers talking frankly enough about the real job at hand. They were more interested in generous overseas pay and vacations in Goa. So I came up with my plan. The school would be free. We wouldn’t give certificates, and we wouldn’t pick our students with tests. They’d have to have ambition, and if they showed drive, I’d do everything in my power to help them. But I wasn’t going to push anyone. Those who worked hard would move up. Those who didn’t would do what deadweight does.
“Justin didn’t understand how this place works. He wanted to see change overnight, by holding people’s hands or bullying them into learning more than they were ready to. I would have kicked him out, but he had education and was willing to work for satisfaction instead of money. When another man gives you his time, you have to leave a little space for his ambition. So I told him to go ahead and save Idris.”
Frank lowered his eyes to mine, perhaps wondering who he was revealing himself to. His voice — even if it was an affectation or an inheritance — got into my head: his purposed cadence, the conviction that allowed him to speak of personal goals and the future of a nation in the same breath.
“I’m going to Louisiana in a few days,” I told him. “I’ve decided to visit Justin’s family. Have you sent back his belongings?”
He gestured to two roller bags in the corner. “I had to clear out the room for a new volunteer. If you don’t mind, I’d like to send Justin’s parents a letter.”
“I’d be happy to deliver it.”
“It’s not ready yet. Can you come back tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
JUSTIN
THE COLD WOKE Justin. He had a sense not of a dream but its imprint, the phantom glow on the retina after glancing at the sun. He’d curled on his side under the old woolen army blanket, his mouth open and an acrid film on his tongue. He checked his watch: 10 p.m. He’d lain down to rest and must have drifted off.
The air had a foreign taste: thin, singed — dirty and slightly metallic, like a tarnished penny. His lungs itched, and he suppressed a cough. Before his arrival, he’d run across a blog post that anatomized Kabul’s dust, claiming it to be sixty percent human fecal matter — from the contents of septic tanks dumped in nearby plains only to dry during the summer and blow back into the city; or simply from open sewers, the tires pummeling the filth in the unpaved streets, the movement of the millions Kabul hadn’t been built to accommodate.
Since 2001, the city’s population had grown from half a million to more than four million as refugees returned from abroad or fled war-torn provinces. The mountains held in the emissions of traffic, generators, and construction, the demolition and mixing of concrete, as well as the smoke from wood, diesel, and kerosene. Also lacing the dust was the pulverized remains of the thousands of mortars that had rained down during the civil war, the depleted uranium bullets and armor-piercing rounds, the streets and buildings incinerated by American bombs. Justin had prayed for the strength to live in such a place and bring healing to it.
He laced his boots and went into the silent school. Frank’s door was dark around the edges. The first office held desks and a few old mainframe computers, though Frank had told him the girls now had laptops and took them downstairs at night. On a shelf, Justin sorted through sooty American textbooks with swollen pages. The other office had a cabinet of stationery.
In the bathroom, he rinsed the grime from his hands with rust-colored water that smelled faintly of sewage. The scum lines along the inside of the tub resembled the growth rings of trees.
He explored downstairs: kitchen cabinets with plates, cups, mugs, and utensils, all laminated with a mixture of dust and the grease deposited from cooking fumes. The labels of spices were yellow and peeling, a bag of brown flour disintegrating, bouillon cubes melting through their wrappers. He felt like someone searching through the debris of a shipwreck to build a life.
There was a door to what he thought must be a pantry, but it was locked. He went into the dining room. Idris was at the table with an open book, the room unlit but for a lamp.
What are you working on?
Idris touched the book as if he’d forgotten.
Grammar. Mr. Frank told me that when my English is perfect, he will help me get a scholarship in America. But I have been through this book many times, and through two others.
In the US, almost none of the foreign students speak as well as you do. You should read novels. Your ear will learn naturally.
My ear, Idris repeated, testing the phrase. You must understand that Mr. Frank finds the girls jobs in NGOs and in his friends’ businesses while I change lightbulbs. He does nothing for the boys. The girls here know they are safe, and they get what they want. Every day this week, I have driven them to the mall.
The mall?
Yes, Idris said, his expression hard to read — either anger or determination. It’s very Western, very fancy. One of my jobs is driver. Mr. Frank tells me not to disturb him. If a girl wants to be driven, I should take her. He tells me that if American girls can go to the mall, why can’t Afghan girls? But you cannot imagine the traffic. People drive badly. I must pay attention. Then I wait while the girls are inside. I am too tired to read. I do grammar exercises to stay awake. And driving