Heritage of Smoke Read online

  “Tell you what, let’s meet at the Starbucks on the corner of Sixth and Forty-Second, the day after tomorrow, at four. I’d like to talk more.”

  “I don’t see why. OK, if you wish.” Esad walked into the subway entrance.

  Martin watched him; Esad’s walk was stiff, as though his spine had been broken, and his thick silvery hair shone, and even after he’d vanished down the stairs into the dark, Martin saw that silver light lingering in the entrance. He blinked, but it was still there.

  Martin walked to Eighth Avenue, to the A line. A man in rags slept upside down on the stairs. Huge rats were leaping over the tracks. So, this was New Amsterdam? Just to think of it, this used to be all Dutch. On the train, he fidgeted as the hard plastic seemed to shut off his blood circulation, sending his left leg into tingling sleep. What happened to our influence, thought Martin. We owned this place, the ground on which the UN building stands, and where are we now? Who listens to us? We try to listen to everybody, learn all these languages, and what good does it all do?

  He entered his apartment on the second floor above a dry cleaner’s shop, on 207th Street. There was a chemical smell, and he couldn’t isolate it with his nostrils—formaldehyde? Acetone? He was sure the fumes were coming from the shop, through the creaking floor. If mice could crawl through some spacing in the floor, then the fumes could too.

  He placed the tulips from the day before, which were still in their paper wrapping, into a blue vase and poured tap water into a pot. He waited for the chlorine haze in the water to clear and then filled up the vase. The tulips perked up and stood straight, like little kings.

  Two days later, while waiting for Esad, Martin drank two cappuccinos, enjoying the steam and foam. Esad didn’t show up. Martin went to the entrance of Grand Central, and there were no flowers being sold there anymore. No Esad. Never mind, maybe tomorrow. He went to the bar and looked around to see the waitress (maybe she’d be free for a drink?) but she wasn’t there.

  He checked his bank balance to see whether Esad had withdrawn the money. For no reason at all, he looked up at the surveillance camera in the high right corner of the room, with its red light blinking, recording, and that made him self-conscious. Is there someone watching me right now? His balance was still over twelve thousand. Apparently, Esad hadn’t cashed the check yet. Maybe two days wasn’t enough time to open an account and cash such a large amount.

  A week later, the check hadn’t gone through yet.

  Martin’s tulips were waning. Well, how long can you live on water alone? They lived anyway, like prisoners of Martin’s nostalgia. Their necks drooped more than ever, as though they were looking for something spilled and lost.

  Maybe they smelled the fumes from the ground floor as well, from the gas chamber that was used to keep people looking clean and sharp and starched.

  The noxious chemical smell kept Martin awake and burned his sinuses.

  In the morning, he staggered down to the shop under the pretext of having his blazer cleaned. The man behind the counter was small and thin and gray, his cheeks drawn. No doubt, that’s what happens when you are exposed to chemicals for a long time, thought Martin.

  “By the way,” Martin said, “What chemical process are you using here? I live right above you, and the fumes from here are terrible.”

  “What fumes? I can’t smell anything.”

  “You wouldn’t. You live with them.”

  “Can you smell anything here?”

  “Your machines are in the back.”

  “I have no machines. We actually have all our stuff dry cleaned in our twin store, two blocks down on Broadway.”

  “But all the chemicals stay in the clothes and they rise straight into my apartment.”

  “You are imagining things, my friend. Come back here and sniff if you want to.”

  Martin did, and he had to admit that there was not much chemical smell there.

  Later that day, he saw Esad coming out of an electronics store on Avenue of the Americas. There was a glow around him, as though he’d plugged into an electronic device. Martin followed him in the street, and when Esad turned around, Martin waved, but Esad apparently didn’t see him, or if he did, he pretended not to. He walked so fast that Martin thought of running to catch up, but it was a hot and humid summer day. Down the avenue, the hot air danced, refracting images and leaving illusory oil puddles on the pavement, which dissolved and evaporated when Martin approached them. Esad went into the subway, and Martin broke into a run after all, just managing to squeeze through the closing doors of the Q train. He wanted to go to the other car but the train door was locked. At the next stop, Martin went to the other coach where Esad had been but couldn’t spot him there. Did Esad change cars too? At every stop, Martin stepped out the doors to look down the platform, but he didn’t see Esad exit. Martin got off at the last stop in Astoria, and there was still no Esad on the platform. Martin was terribly thirsty, sweating, dizzy. Maybe there was no Esad? Maybe there was never an Esad, and I’ve imagined this whole thing all the way along? That would explain why the check never got cashed. Maybe I never wrote it.

  Am I losing my mind? This damned city, with all its chemical smells and noises and light. Oh no, it can’t be, nothing that convincing and vivid would have happened as a figment of my imagination. He still felt the limpid handshake in his fist, all too real, fleshly.

  For several days in a row, Martin took the Q train, hoping to run into Esad. He was mad at himself for having been so lackadaisical the day he saw Esad not to run after him at the first instance. It would have been nice to talk to Esad, to get an update, and to figure out in what other ways he could help. As long as Esad didn’t cash his check, Martin would be in suspense, like the families of the dead whose corpses are missing and can’t be buried. Now he understood the need for corporeal evidence and closure. If he ever saw Esad again, he’d have to give him a hug, squeeze him, make sure he was all there, not just a hallucination of an overproductive conscience.

  Almost every night, Martin had dreams about Esad. In one, they were playing soccer, using a severed head with a thin moustache as a ball. Esad kicked it and Martin flew to catch it, but couldn’t quite reach, and the head slid over the tips of his fingers and into the net. Martin woke up from that nightmare with a terrible headache. The fumes were on again in his apartment. He decided to sniff from one corner to the other on all fours, to see where the smell was coming from. It was most intense below the artificial Persian rug in the center of the room. Martin moved the rug to locate the leaking cracks better, but the smell diminished. He concluded that the smell must be coming out of the carpet itself, and so he folded the carpet and put it in the closet. Now that noxious smell no longer permeated the apartment. How simple! He was proud of himself for eliminating the problem. He changed the sheets and enjoyed their coolness.

  He fell asleep and dreamed that he and Esad were wrestling naked. When Martin gripped him, Esad slipped away. And when Esad gripped him by the neck, his oily hands couldn’t hold on, and Martin slipped out of the grip. Martin gripped him again, and found that instead of trying to knock each other to the ground, they held each other’s penises firmly. Esad’s hand on his was warm and rough; Martin could feel the calluses, some of them jagged and prickly like glass, maybe they were glass. Martin woke up. He was surprised that it was only a dream and noticed that he had a hard-on. He was disappointed that it was a dream—he would have loved to see Esad again, but probably not like that. He didn’t think he had any gay impulses.

  In the morning, a little embarrassed, he didn’t go out to look for Esad. He pondered whether he was actually attracted to Esad. Or was it all just historical, abstract, ethical, an attraction of his conscience to the wronged party? But what if it all was simple, obscenely physical, and all that history and theology just a smokescreen?

  A month later, the check went through. Esad Hajiabdic, the name said.

  There was no phone number on the check, but there was an address on Queens Bou
levard. Martin went there and rang the bell, but there was no answer. He waited for hours outside the house, all in vain.

  Two months after he saw Esad outside the electronics shop, the planes flew into the World Trade Center.

  Martin took a bus and walked to see the destructive miracle. Besides feeling horror, he adored the sight of all the smoke, as though witnessing the epiphany of an angry God. His throat went dry from excitement, or perhaps from the association of ideas, of smoke and thirst. He went to a deli to get some orange juice, and there he watched on TV as the second tower came crumbling down. The two Arabic-looking men who ran the shop didn’t want to charge him anything for the juice, and said, “That’s on us. How would a dollar make any difference on a day like this?” They smiled, their eyes glowing, barely containing their joy.

  Martin smiled too as he watched the tower go down, and when he saw how happy the men were, he laughed for a few seconds, but once he left the shop he felt queasy. The dark cloud was spreading. Past him walked men and women with ashes in their hair and on their clothes, their eyes large from fear. They looked like pilgrims on Ash Wednesday. Seeing their fear, Martin grew terrified, too.

  And when he saw the running electronic sign at Times Square post a figure, maybe ten thousand people dead, he felt no Schadenfreude, just sorrow. But he remembered that he had felt Schadenfreude in the shop and wondered about what he actually wanted, who he was, and what demons were inside him. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so desperate for forgiveness from Esad if he hadn’t imagined that there was evil in him.

  He had to wait for a few hours before the subway would run again. He didn’t know whether another plane would crash at Times Square, or whether there would be a nuclear bomb exploding, and in the subway he looked around at the bags, and there were many, maybe from Penn Central and Port Authority. What if a bomb went off? He was surprised—and obliquely almost let down—that no bombs went off.

  The following day he went to Queens again, rang the bell, but got no answer. On the way back, Martin wondered again about all the bags in the train. How come they go off in Jerusalem and Istanbul and many other cities and not in New York? Wasn’t that merely a matter of time?

  A huge man stood in front of him in the A train. He kept looking glassily at Martin. His gaze grew more and more annoying, and Martin walked to another car at 125th. He sat down, but as he looked up, he saw the same man staring at him. It was as though Martin hadn’t shifted from the first car. Martin stood up and walked back to the first car, but the giant followed him.

  Martin looked at him with animosity, trying to browbeat him, but the man smiled lovingly, revealing a whole row of gold teeth.

  Any other expression on the man’s face would have made sense to Martin, but this appearance of liquid love seemed cynical, creepy, invasive, threatening. Martin shuddered.

  Martin walked to the other end of the car, and the giant followed.

  Am I being stalked? thought Martin.

  Until now, he couldn’t understand why stalking was so highly rated as a threat in the States, why it was treated as a crime, and why so many women complained about it. When he was a boy and he liked a girl, he’d follow her, just to admire her for a few blocks. Even later he saw that as a normal kind of imprinting behavior, where you follow your infatuation impulses unabashedly like a helpless duckling.

  Martin jumped off the train at 175th even though it wasn’t his stop. He felt the big presence looming behind him and quickened his pace, but when he turned around, there was nobody there. With relief, he slowed his pace and walked up the stairs, and then back down to catch the next train.

  Now he wasn’t sure that there had been a man stalking him on the previous train. New York is merciless that way, it can give you illusions, he thought. He’d forgotten to eat all day, and with the coffee and beer he’d drunk, he’d reached a stage of weakness and dizziness.

  Three months after he saw Esad outside the electronics store, Martin was in the subway when it slowed down near Chambers Street. Nobody spoke in the train car. The doors didn’t open at Chambers Street, and the train inched along. There were many white tulips and white carnations laid out on the platform. Martin wished he could contribute. Maybe he’d have to find out how—he could buy tulips, ideally red ones from Esad, and then lay them down on the platform. He had a sensation of shuddering grief at the sight of his national flowers, little Dutch souls in New Amsterdam trying to do some good in their lame and lovable way.

  Even at home, he couldn’t get rid of the sensation of sadness. But worse than sadness was that terrible smell from the destroyed World Trade Center—a mix of concrete dust, burnt plastic, the suggestion of flesh, human flesh, and perhaps burnt hair wafting through the windows. For days he’d been encountering that smell everywhere, as the winds blew mostly from the south, along the island, and somehow it was similar to the old smell from his Persian carpet, which he’d taken out and left on the sidewalk next to an improvised shrine with pictures of people from the neighbourhood who’d perished in the towers, with flags everywhere, small ones glued to the shrine, large ones draping from the windows on the yellow-bricked building across the street.

  To wash away the tragic smell and the sweat of the city, Martin took a shower. He thought he heard some pounding on the door, but he ignored it because it could have been coming from somewhere else. But when he stepped out and wrapped a towel around his torso, he was startled by three cleanly dressed men in black shoes with thick rubber soles. “What are you doing here? Who the hell are you?”

  “Mr. Neeskens, you’re coming with us.”

  “What’s this all about?” Martin asked. “You broke into my apartment! You broke the law.”

  “We’ll see who broke the law. Come with us, calmly.”

  “Why would I?”

  “You’ll find out in due time. We need you to help us with some information gathering.”

  He was fingerprinted, all his papers were photocopied, scrutinized, and his body was searched a little more thoroughly than Martin found comfortable.

  “Just a routine procedure, sir.”

  “But why?”

  “You’ll find out when we gather enough evidence. Anyway, you know why. You tell me why.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s about your financing the terrorists.”

  “What an outrageous idea! I didn’t finance any terrorists. Where do you come up with such nonsense?”

  “Don’t pretend. We know more than you think we do, so you’re better off telling us the truth.”

  “This is all rather mysterious to me. You have confused me with someone else.”

  “Now, tell us what Muslims you know.”

  “Not many. There aren’t many in my field, Christian theology.”

  “You worked for the UN in Bosnia, and you made plenty of contacts with the local Muslims and quite possibly with the foreign fighters, the Mujahideen. We need to know how it all worked out.”

  “How what worked out? You know that Bosnian Muslims couldn’t possibly be involved in this American tragedy. Overall, they love America. America saved them. They see you as saviours.”

  “Maybe that’s not how everybody there saw us.”

  “From what I could tell…”

  “Let’s get straight to the point. You wrote a check for $9,500 to a certain Esad Hajiabdic, who wrote a check in the amount of $9,000 to Atta as soon as your check cleared. Atta cashed it in Germany, bought several airfares, and flew into a World Trade Center tower. Now, clearly Esad was merely a middleman you used to finance the terrorists.”

  “My God, what a strange story!”

  “Yes, it is, you have some explaining to do.”

  He retold them the story of his being a peacekeeper in Srebrenica who felt guilty for what had happened and wanted to make small amends, such as he could, by helping Esad. “And by the way, why are you sure Esad was involved? Maybe he merely bought a car from Atta, or something like that, and paid with a check.”
/>   One investigator laughed. “You want us to buy your sob story?”

  “That’s the simple truth.”

  “And the not-so-simple truth is that you’ve come to this country to subvert it, working for Al Qaeda.”

  “That’s outrageous!” exclaimed Martin. “I need a lawyer.”

  “Probably you were another middleman. Nothing will happen to you if you didn’t know what was going on. Maybe you were simply used, but we need to know by whom, and how. You want to save people? You can. Give us the information about how the network works. Who gave you the money?”

  For several days he was interrogated in a New Jersey prison, and he stayed there in a solitary cell for three months, with nothing to do, going out of his mind. The smell of cement and some unidentifiable gases irritated him, as did the absence of daylight and his not knowing what time of day or night it was. He was perpetually thirsty and hungry, and the cement dust hovering around him like a galaxy of sinking and remote stars, that had lost their light made his throat parched. Several times he was woken up out of deep sleep to be interrogated and, on one occasion, the principal investigator—a heavyset man with a bristly moustache who constantly sweated—said to him, “You know, we were thinking of letting you go. You’re an honorable UN soldier, and something like this could have happened without your actually being involved. I could buy your story, but look what we just saw on a surveillance camera tape, recorded on 9/11. Look at this. At the time the towers were collapsing, you were in a Palestinian grocery store, where a couple of hijackers had been videotaped several weeks before. See, there you are, looking happy, cheering as the towers go down! It’s too much of a coincidence for us to let it go unquestioned—way too many ‘coincidences.’”

  BE PATIENT

  In 1952, one midmorning in Daruvar, Croatia, Doctor Maric held up the injection with a thin needle, which gleamed in the beam of the morning sun. He held it up as though aiming for the sky and said, “This is a wonderful thing. It won’t hurt at all, and it will prevent your children from getting the measles.”