was ice cream he was talking about— and joined the back of the line. He raised a hand to the two men dressed in long white overshirts and loose pants who dished the ice cream into cups on a table topped with a bright red, plastic sheet. By this time, the vendors knew Todd by sight and generally greeted him with big smiles. Sometimes he ate his ice cream right there in front of the stand, chatting with simple words, pretending for a moment he belonged and could linger casually. Now, though, they were too busy to acknowledge Todd, if they even saw him.
He turned his attention to the bakery next door. In a room not much larger than a closet, three men tossed and patted dough and then submerged it in an open fire-pit to make bolani and nani Afghani. Sweat beaded their temples. Their bodies moved as if in hypnotic dance.
Something about the scene, though exotic, evoked home. He thought, then, of Clarissa; her name came into his mind, and immediately he felt a tightening in his chest. He thought of her neck, and her long waist. He thought of her voice floating from the bathroom, the door open but she unseen, bent over the sink or patting dry her face, telling him a story from her day. He always found that to be the most intimate of moments— to be with a woman in early evening, lying on a bed, listening to her voice coming from within the bathroom as she brushed or washed away the soil of the hours before. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead and saw a fleeting image of his wife. Clari, Clari, Clari.
How had this amazing thing even happened to him, sharing a home again with a wife? He still wasn't sure. He'd been widowed twenty-two years ago, losing Mariana when Ruby was only six. He'd never planned to marry again, throwing all his energy first into being a single parent and then into his work. They'd met at a party. Clarissa was an urban historian teaching at Columbia. Whoever had casually introduced them— he couldn't remember that detail— had noted that she'd recently finished a paper on historic housing patterns in Manhattan. He hadn't been sure what that meant, but he'd immediately liked her smile, so he'd blundered forward, saying he'd noticed from his work with refugees how people arranged their living spaces even among war rubble, when you'd think shelter would be their only concern. A hierarchy developed, he'd gone on. Desirable housing locations arose in ways indiscernible to average outsiders, based on issues such as position relative to the main entrance and the water supply as well as proximity to certain families once considered more powerful. Some tents, he said, were erected a few inches further from their neighbors than others; this sign of status was noted— and accepted— by the camp inhabitants. It all happened without any apparent discussion, so that even when no one had any money worth mentioning, socio-economic groupings occurred.
As he was saying all this, talking almost without breathing just to keep her from walking away, he was really noticing her energy, her way of standing, the look in her eyes, her hair, and again, her smile.
Less than a year later, they married. It felt crazy, unexpected, and right. When they met, he was in the middle of the three-months-in, three-months-out rotations to Kabul and Islamabad. At first she'd been fine with it, but last year she'd offered— as if cupping her words in her hands and holding them out for him to see— that she wanted him to stop. She was careful, so he knew it was still his choice. But he also knew what she thought. It had become too dangerous. The separations were too long; he had a home to return to, and they had a life to build, and too little time.
So he'd agreed to the request she hadn't quite voiced; he was doing his last rotation. He would celebrate his fiftieth birthday at home in three months and then stay there through the next birthday, and the one after that.
And she seemed glad, but she was edgy still, maybe even more so when he'd agreed to quit, thus tacitly acknowledging the dangers. He'd detected it in her voice when they'd spoken a couple of hours ago by phone, as he began his morning, as she headed into sleep.
" There was a bombing in Islamabad a few hours ago," she'd said.
"Yes, I heard."
"Skip going there. Just come directly back."
"I'll be fine."
She made a sound that indicated skepticism. "I feel like a military bride, Todd. And what are we doing still there? Really, at this point?" "Helping people who need it." "That sounds so damned sanctimonious," she murmured.
"I'm sorry. But I have to finish up properly. For them. For me."
The line went silent for a moment. "Have they named your replacement yet?" she asked.
"Not yet."
"But they will, yes? You won't offer to stay on for one more rotation?"
"No, Clari. No."
She released a noisy sigh of air into the phone receiver. "Okay, then," she said. And she tried— they both did— to lighten the conversation, to talk about smaller things. But it didn't work; he felt the space gaping between them and knew she did too by her tone when she told him she loved him. He repeated it back, and they said good-bye.
Now he realized he wanted to meet Zarlasht's needs because he couldn't meet Clari's. Illogical, of course. But it was as if showing kindness to Zarlasht could make up for hurting his wife, one in exchange for the other. He needed to consider Zarlasht independently. He would try, on the walk back, with his ice cream.
But the line, Todd noticed, did not seem to be moving, though the vendors were bent over their sweet, cold tubs. "Ice cream is popular today," he said to the man in front of him, speaking in Pashto.
The man turned toward Todd. He was about twenty-five years old. He wore a blue-gray turban and a brown vest over his salwar kameez, and his eyebrows were unusually thick, like angry storm clouds hovering over his eyes. "It is the best ice cream in Kabul," he said in a way that seemed too serious, so weighted that Todd grinned, thinking for a second he must be kidding.
Then the man turned abruptly away, leaving Todd to stare up at the high, teasing blue of the sky and think about how Afghanistan, even after all these years, had remained just beyond his reach of comprehension. While this concerned him occasionally, it also inspired him and was, in fact, something he loved: the rich, unknowable quality of living here that made his own life feel so much more consequential. A rush of gratitude flooded him, warming his stomach, making him smile faintly. And this was exactly the expression on his face at the moment of the improbable crack of thunder that preceded the dropping of two glass ice-cream cups, and then the silence.
Danil
September 4th
High clouds, a distant rumble. A shout-out from a storm on the approach tonight, a summer storm pushing its way into the crowded Brooklyn streets from beyond some border, like an audacious illegal immigrant or a country girl thumbing her nose at the pretensions of civilization. Danil had maybe half an hour before it broke, and he planned to use the minutes well. His right arm blurred as he shook the can so energetically it made his whole body bounce. If some half sleeper a few stories above the street in the Albany House II projects were to pause on the way to the toilet, bladder full, eyes bleary, and glance out his apartment window to the empty lot below, Danil would seem an unlikely dancer responding to absent music, a drunk or whack job ripe for the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. The can's rattling seemed magnified in the night air, resounding off the concrete around him. The corner of Bergen and Albany remained sunk in postmidnight somnolence, the darkness gobbling up noise and movement and regurgitating them as indistinct fragments of dreams. In this space of relative obscurity, he began.
As if in a private ritual of nightly prayer, Danil's holy paint met the sanctified wall. He moved his arm in graceful waves. After several minutes, he lowered the spray can to his side and then touched a corner of the paint with the tip of his left baby finger to test for dryness. He pulled off the paper, refolded it quickly, and extracted the next layer of stencil from where he'd stashed it under a parked car. With painter's tape, he put the new cutout in place, holding his flashlight in his mouth so he could see to line it up properly.
As he worked, he sang "Mr. Tambourine Man," just loud enough to make the back of his mouth vibrate. Dylan had been Danil's quirky brother Piotr's favorite singer, and just a few weeks ago, Danil had heard that song covered by a gutter punk band whose name he couldn't