Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Read online

  Beside Hanif, a black-haired boy beats mounds of dough into flat circles before he slaps them against the flame-seared walls of a clay-brick oven. The boy looks to be about eight years old. A thin coat of flour covers his loose-fitting clothes. He works barefoot, the soles of his feet black. He sweats from the heat of the oven and wipes his forehead. The aroma of baking bread rises around him and us, competing with odors already circulating on the awakening street: dew-damp garbage piles, diesel exhaust, the squawking of panicked chickens being carried upside down by boys to the bazaar.

  I am pleased to see Hanif. For the past few days his shop has been closed. I’m returning to the States tomorrow, and while I don’t pretend to know Hanif, his bakery has been a steady part of my morning routine. I didn’t want to leave without dropping by one more time.

  Something is different today, however. Hanif does not greet us with his usual hearty Aslam alakum. Instead, after we shake hands, he settles into a quiet posture that seems to shrink him in size.

  Oh, well, I think, we all have bad days. I assume this is one of his. I am content to stand in silence and allow the morning to evolve around us.

  When Hanif does speak to us, Tahir translates. “The bread will be ready soon,” Hanif says in a voice barely above a whisper. He strokes his white beard, stained brown from tobacco. He turns to the boy and instructs him to take a sack of bread to a nearby Afghan restaurant.

  When we first stopped here, Tahir told me that most of the people who live in Aabpara are Afghans. They fled here when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Others arrived more recently, after 9/11. Today, however, with terrorist bombs exploding in their cities, Pakistanis have begun accusing their Afghan neighbors of bringing “their” war into Pakistan. The accusations have gone from finger-pointing to harassment.

  As we wait for bread, Tahir translates some of the comments he overhears from Hanif’s Afghan customers.

  “If a bomb happens, the police stop us and ask, ‘Who are you? Afghani? Yes?’ If we don’t hand over some money we are arrested,” one man says.

  “One day I was coming from Peshawar,” another man says, “and I was pulled off at a checkpoint and arrested. I had to give them five hundred rupees before they would let me go.”

  “One time, the police took two thousand rupees from me,” a third man says. “We can’t move. We can’t do anything.”

  Hanif nods, a sympathetic look creasing his face. He moved to Islamabad during “the Russian time” from his home in Wardak, not far from Kabul, he says. His vacant stare, though, tells me he is not really involved in the conversation. He wipes flour off his clothes and drags the back of a hand across his forehead. He yawns and I notice his missing teeth.

  The customers see that he is preoccupied and drift off. One man looks back at Hanif and shakes his head. It is too bad about his wife, Tahir hears him say. The other men nod. Hanif has two grown sons in Lahore, another man says, but that is a four-hour drive. The men frown. They continue talking, and I gather from what Tahir tells me that Hanif’s wife died of a heart attack a few days ago, which explains why the bakery was closed and why he is so subdued now.

  After the men leave, I ask Tahir to tell Hanif that I am sorry about his wife. Hanif nods his appreciation. He clasps his hands together and sighs.

  “He says, ‘She is with God,’” Tahir tells me.

  Hanif watches Tahir translate. Then he looks up like someone startled and shouts to the boy, who darts through a curtain in back, revealing a hall that seems to lead into a house. Within minutes he returns with glass cups, a pot of tea, and a plate of cookies on a warped plastic tray. He sets them down by Hanif. Hanif pours green tea into the cups and hands the cups to Yassin, Tahir, and me. Tea leaves float in the cups. Hanif motions to the cookies and sets the plate near us.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I watch the boy slide a wooden paddle into the oven and flip the bread like a pancake.

  “Who is he?” I ask.

  My grandson, Hanif says. He works in the bakery before and after school.

  I take a cookie and dunk it in my tea. I notice an elderly woman peering at me from behind a curtain. Gray hair falls to her shoulders. She stands stooped over a cane, and circles form hammocks beneath her eyes. Maybe Hanif’s sister? I wonder. She leans forward on her cane and I see a hump on her back and think of my mother, who also has a hump caused by curvature of the spine. It’s a cruel deformity for my mother, who always seemed taller than she was because of her erect posture.

  “Straighten up,” she’d say, poking Butch, Michael, and me in our backs when we were kids. “You’ll be all hunched when you’re older.” I’m fifty-two now, and her jabs made an impression. I carry myself as straight as she once did. Chest out, shoulders back. Odd, the impressions that stick with us from childhood. My mother will see soon enough how well I listened to her. When I leave Pakistan, I’ll pack up my Kansas City apartment and then drive to Winnetka to live with her.

  My father died last year, which precipitated my impending move. On a spring day, while shopping at a Mariano’s Supermarket, he slipped and fell in the parking lot and broke his hip. He was ninety-four. The surgery went well but a week later, at a rehabilitation center, problems developed. My father refused to eat hospital food. He didn’t like it and that was that. His blue polka-dot hospital smock began drooping off him like a coat too big for its hanger. Fluid started filling his lungs. His heart and kidneys stopped functioning properly. The antibiotics doctors gave him helped one organ but damaged others. I called him the night before he was put on a ventilator but did not recognize his voice. He sounded like someone talking underwater. I came home.

  My father remained on the ventilator for three days while doctors drained his lungs. He died May 31, 2009, four days after the ventilator was removed. My mother moved in with my brother Michael.

  Two months before my father died I had been laid off by the Kansas City Star, a casualty of the Great Recession. After a year of freelancing, I was barely covering my rent. I decided to return to Winnetka and care for my mother. She couldn’t stay with Michael forever, and a nursing home was out of the question. Pop is dead, Mom, and now we’re putting you in a home. Michael and I agreed we couldn’t do that. If I moved to Winnetka, she could return home. I assumed I’d stay a few months, arranging home health-care services for her while at the same time slashing my expenses and getting back on my feet. That was my plan.

  Before I flew to Pakistan I contacted elder-care agencies and explained that my mother would need someone to help with cooking and cleaning, plus a driver to take her to the supermarket and doctor appointments. Ideally, I said, she would form relationships with her caregivers, who in turn would provide companionship. Anything is possible, I was told. It just depends how much you’re willing to spend.

  Then I left for Pakistan.

  A burly man with a heavy beard stops by the bakery, his cracked, rubber sandals slapping loudly against the pavement.

  “Assalamu alaikum,” the man says in a loud voice.

  “Assalamu alaikum,” Hanif replies.

  I push the tray toward the man and he helps himself to a cookie. The boy fetches another cup and Hanif pours the man tea. The man begins talking. I pester Tahir about what he’s saying.

  “This is a nation of absconders, Hanif,” the man says. He pauses, sips his tea. “You can’t stop the police. When my family and I came here in 2003, it was not too bad. Now it is much worse. Everywhere there are the police. I don’t care about the Taliban. I am just worried about policemen.” He finishes his cookie, washing it down with another slurp of tea. Then he shakes Hanif’s hand and wanders over to the taxi drivers, who have moved from one shady spot to another.

  It strikes me that Hanif did not match the man’s story about the police with one of his own. I mention this to Tahir and Tahir asks Hanif about his experiences with the authorities. About a year and a half ago, Hanif says, a police officer stopped by the bakery. The oven was heating and Hanif
sent the boy to buy flour. He told the officer he would not have any bread until later. The officer said he did not want bread. He told Hanif that beginning that evening, Hanif would give him one thousand rupees—about eleven dollars—every night. If Hanif refused, the police officer could not guarantee protection from vandals. The officer said it was the least Hanif could do, since the war in Afghanistan was causing problems for all of Pakistan and the police in particular. Two of his fellow officers had been killed by suicide bombers at their checkpoint. “You endanger my life,” the police officer said. “I am newly married and want to have a family. If I am gone, what will my wife do?”

  Hanif knew he had no choice. God only knew what the police might do to his bakery if he resisted. That night and every night thereafter, at 8:30 p.m. Hanif met the police officer a block from the bakery with the thousand rupees in hand. Eventually their meetings became as much a part of Hanif’s life as awakening at sunrise when the mullahs called the faithful to prayer. Hanif was never late for their nightly rendezvous. He began to look forward to seeing the policeman in the same way he anticipated talking to his regular morning customers. They asked each other about their families and shared the latest gossip about politicians or Bollywood movie stars. They wondered how much longer winter would last and argued about their favorite cricket teams. Hanif considered himself a customer of the police officer. As his customers paid him daily for his bread, Hanif paid the police officer nightly for his protection.

  Hanif even went to meet the officer the evening his wife died. He did so out of a sense of obligation, but also perhaps to abandon for a few minutes the claustrophobic sadness that had descended on his home. When the policeman saw Hanif’s grief-stricken face, he asked what was wrong. Hanif explained that his wife had died. The officer said he was very sorry and offered his condolences. He was surprised that Hanif had kept their appointment. Of course, there would have been consequences had he not, he said. He could not have known the circumstances that had kept Hanif away; he would only have thought that Hanif no longer wanted his bakery protected.

  Hanif said he understood.

  The officer said again how very sorry he was for Hanif’s loss.

  Hanif thanked him, then leaned against the car and said nothing for a while.

  The officer smoked a cigarette and drummed his fingers against the dashboard. “I don’t want to keep you,” the officer said finally.

  Hanif gave him his money and watched the officer stuff it in his breast pocket. Then Hanif handed him a five-hundred-rupee bill and asked him to stay a little longer. Hanif enjoyed leaning against the car, the rumble of its engine vibrating the metal against his body, the smell of the officer’s cigarette, the quiet night around him in the glow of a streetlight.

  The officer took the money and gave Hanif a few more minutes of his time. They did not talk. Finally, the policeman said he had to leave. Hanif gave him another five-hundred-rupee bill. He ended up giving the man three thousand additional rupees, until he insisted he had to go home and refused to take any more of Hanif’s money. Hanif watched him drive away. Then he walked back to his home and to the sadness that awaited him there.

  The next night Hanif waited for the officer at the usual time, but he did not show up then, or thereafter.

  “We knew each other well,” Hanif tells Tahir. “I was his customer and we were friends. I always gave him his money, but he did not oppress me for being Afghan and causing problems for his country.”

  I look at my watch. I have work to do and a full day of travel tomorrow. Among other things, I need to check my email and confirm my flight. I will travel more than twenty-four hours before I land in Washington and catch a plane for Kansas City.

  I’ll stay in Kansas City about four weeks, wrapping up loose ends, before I return to Winnetka. Then I’ll interview people from various elder-care agencies. How much per hour? Do I pay for mileage if they take my mother to the doctor? Am I expected to provide them lunch and dinner? And on and on. I should write down my questions so I don’t forget anything. There’s so much, I realize, that I can’t anticipate. I rub my neck. I’m thinking too much.

  I finish my tea and push away the plate of cookies. The boy slings a sheet filled with fat pancake-shaped loaves of bread over a shoulder. He pauses on his way out to give me one. The warmth from the bread seeps into my fingers. I crack it open and close my eyes against the released heat. Hanif hands me newspaper to wrap it.

  Leaving the bakery, the boy walks toward the bazaar, kicking at stones. The bread-filled sheet bounces against his back as if nothing else matters. Watching him, I imagine that the policeman is now blackmailing someone else. I bet he works this new guy for just a few weeks, long enough to make some money, short enough so that he doesn’t get to know him. He doesn’t need complications. He will move on to someone else.

  But it shouldn’t be complicated once I have the people in place for my mother. Still, I worry that I’m getting pulled into something that won’t let me go; that I’ll be involved in a process that never ends. That something will always need my attention. I won’t be able to just up and leave one day.

  “Good-bye,” I tell Hanif as Tahir translates. “I return to the States tomorrow morning. I’ll miss our mornings together.”

  “When will you be back in Pakistan?” Hanif says.

  “I don’t know.”

  He starts pouring tea into my cup. I put out my hand to stop him and tea splashes my fingers. I shake it off before it burns.

  “No, no. Thank you,” I say. “I have to go.”

  Hanif stares past me toward where the boy has gone, but he is no longer in sight. The taxi drivers and the glut of loitering men have also left. He takes a rag and wipes the spilled tea, then returns to the corner where he has spent most of the morning.

  I start walking back to my guesthouse, the bread tucked under my arm. It has cooled quickly and lost its enticing aroma. I almost stop and look back to tell Hanif again that I’m sorry about his wife, but I decide against it. He will offer me more tea. I don’t need more tea.

  Before I Knew My Father

  (2010)

  I moved back home on March 1, 2010.

  A stale odor permeated the living room, an odor I associated with the old people I had worked with when I was in social services. Air no longer circulated. I opened windows. A few were swollen shut, and all of them were gray with dust.

  I began cleaning the house. I started by clearing months-old piles of papers off the breakfast nook table. It was here that my father had attempted to help me with the story problems I consistently failed in grammar-school math.

  “Sally has three apples, Jane has four,” my father read. “If Jane eats half of her apples and Sally eats one fourth of one of her apples, how many apples are left?”

  The answer lay before my father as distinct as a diamond, and he jabbed the math book with his pencil while I bungled one answer after another, until the point of his pencil broke off and he could no longer contain himself.

  “How many, how many, how many?” he would demand while I quivered beside him.

  Finally, he’d give me the answer just to be done with it and slammed the math book shut, disgusted with me and, I think now, his own thin patience. I retreated to my bedroom.

  My father listened to me go. He could not bring himself to apologize, especially when he thought I wasn’t trying. “That’s your problem,” he would say, “a lack of application.” Next time, I imagine him saying to himself, he would control his temper and Malcolm would show effort.

  I swept the papers off the table into a trash bag. “Sorry, Pop,” I said.

  I moved on to my father’s study, where stacks of unopened mail obscured his desk. Framed diplomas from the University of Wisconsin and the Harvard Business School hung on the wall. An adding machine still registered the last figures he had tapped in. The 1946 Remington typewriter he used sat on an end table. He had taken one computer lesson, as I recall, but the mouse and the dancing arrow it cont
rolled frustrated him, and he returned to his typewriter. He never changed the ribbon, just banged the keys harder as the type grew fainter and fainter.

  I opened a desk drawer and leafed through some envelopes. Bank statements. Canceled checks. Business letters. All arranged by date. All of them years old, predating the time when simple tasks became too much.

  In another drawer I found envelopes postmarked July and August 1948. They were addressed in my father’s strong, sprawling handwriting to my mother at a New Jersey address where she had stayed for a summer with her sister Elvira.

  Sunday—

  Dearest Letty—

  Hi darling—I love you more and more and miss you much more every day. It seems like you have been gone for months. Please write often and miss me a little too. I am lost without you here.

  Love letters.

  My parents met in Puerto Rico in 1945. My father, a first lieutenant in the navy, was stationed there. They first saw each other at a dance party. My father tapped her partner on the shoulder and cut in. He was wearing his white uniform with lieutenant’s bars. He had a slim, muscular build, dark hair slicked and parted to one side. He spoke and moved with confidence, holding my mother close, his dark eyes searching her face. They danced near the beach on a patio. A live band played above the soft sound of ocean waves rolling in and the rhythmic call of coquí frogs. My father put one hand on her waist and led her through a jazz tune. She had no other partners that night. They exchanged phone numbers, and my father called her the next day. By the time she left Puerto Rico three months later, they had, as my mother put it, “an understanding.”

  They married in New York City on a muggy June morning in 1947 in a chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and spent their honeymoon on Nantucket. They lived in Chicago until 1957, when they moved to Winnetka. My father administered the Midwest office of Perfecto Garcia Cigars, a business founded in 1905 by his father and his three uncles, the oldest of whom was named Perfecto. At its peak, Perfecto Garcia Cigars employed twelve hundred people. My uncle Manuel managed the Tampa factory. According to my mother, my father had wanted to start his own company, she had no idea what kind—it was more of a notion, she said, an undefined ambition—but his father told him to join the family business. “If my father said jump, I didn’t ask why, I asked how high,” my father used to say.