The Company We Keep (12 page)

He doesn’t use my name or ask me where I am or what time it is. I’ve told him enough about the way we work that I can’t give up that kind of information on the phone.

We talk about the weather, friends, and golf, the same things we always talk about the few times I’ve ever called him. I wait for him to ask when I’m coming home, but he doesn’t. I promise to call again when I can and hang up.

A month later, the first night I’m home on leave, my husband tells me that his father died while I was away. I calculate the days in my mind. He died two days before I called him from Geneva.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, both shocked and hurt.

“You were busy.”

“But he was your father.”

“There was nothing you could do about it.”

Dushanbe, Tajikistan:
BOB

O
ne day my mother calls me in Dushanbe to tell me she’d like to see Tajikistan. When I don’t immediately warm to the idea, I feel her irritation barreling down the line like a freight train. When she senses I’m not softening, she goes to Plan B. “You know I’m getting old, and this may be my last trip. I so want to see Central Asia before I die.”

My mother coming here isn’t a good idea. As I’ve said, my wife and children aren’t allowed to even visit because it’s too dangerous. But oddly enough—or maybe not—the CIA doesn’t ban mothers.

I told her a long time ago about the travel ban, hoping it would be enough to dissuade her. But my mother, a stout, fearless woman, is determined to see the world. She gets off a plane in a strange place and immediately wants to start seeing things, no matter the hour or how long she’s been sitting. Invariably, she’s read up on the country and knows exactly what she wants to see.

I cast around in my mind for an unassailable reason she can’t visit. But other than the obvious—getting killed—I can’t think of one. “OK,” I finally say. “I’d love to see you.”

As soon as my mother sets foot inside the Oktyabrskaya, she sniffs in that peculiar way she has, letting me know the place isn’t up to her standards. We’re walking past the gloomy dining room where last night’s dirty dishes are still on the tables. “We’re not having dinner here, are we?” she asks. She ignores me when I tell her it’s military rations, as it will be every other night.

My mother comes to terms with Dushanbe when I take her to my room and open a bottle of wine. For an hour she fires off questions about my wife and children, how they’re doing in the new house in France, what I’m reading, what I think about one
political scandal or another, when I’m going to get serious about life. By the second bottle she’s ready to turn in and too tired to argue when I point to the bedroom. I tell her I prefer to sleep on the couch anyway.

The next morning I leave her reading a thick history of China, her half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose, one leg up under her. She looks content, but I know it won’t last. I picture her in midmorning, poking around my room, counting the number of shirts I own, looking for the suits she bought me, wondering what’s happened to the pair of silver-backed hairbrushes she once gave me as a Christmas present. Somewhere my mother read that a gentleman
absolutely must
have thirty-six collared shirts. She’ll be disappointed when she finds my dozen faded T-shirts, two frayed oxfords, and three pairs of Levi’s.

My mother comes from that old mind-set that believes in thank-you notes, jackets at dinner, straight white teeth, and an expensive education. When she visits, she always arrives with a bag of books meant to improve me. And when she returns home to Los Angeles, she writes asking what I think about them. If I answer (as I almost always do) that I’ve been busy, I get another letter about how hard she’s tried with me. You can almost hear the sigh of resignation in the pages. My mother is someone who pictures herself in the tumbrel reading Lucretius on the way to her beheading.

She’s definitely going to be irritated when she finds the Kalashnikov, the rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, and the hand grenades under the bed. I’ll tell the truth—that they’re gifts from Russian army friends that came at the end of long drinking sessions—but she won’t listen. Male bonding rituals don’t amuse her.

When I first joined the CIA in 1976, I told my mother, but at the same time I admonished her that I was undercover and she couldn’t tell a soul. It was a needless precaution because all of her friends were liberals, and she was too embarrassed to tell them
anyway. She herself doesn’t take espionage seriously. “Mickey Mouse” is the name she usually attaches to it.

When I get back from work at three, she’s through with her book and bored. She complains that I’ve left her all day, so I propose a beer at the Tajikistan Hotel, warning that it’s a worse dump than the Oktyabrskaya. “Of course it is,” she says. “But do you think I’m going to sit in this room all night doing nothing?”

An hour later she follows me across the Tajikistan’s dismal lobby at a half run and down a dark passageway that smells of urine and rotting carpet. When she says something I can’t understand, I slow down to let her catch up. “I said you should really get out more, meet people,” she says.

The hotel’s terrace is positioned so a breeze can’t get to it, and the sun this late afternoon is a hammer. There’s not a drop of water in the fountain—instead, hedgehog-like steel quills poke up silently out of the cracked cement. We’re the only customers, but it’s ten minutes before the waiter wanders out from the darkness of the dining room. He’s been sleeping, and rubs his eyes with the flat of his hands. Our choice is warm, canned Rasputin vodka or warm, canned Heineken.

We sip our warm beers and sweat in silence, watching the waiter fool with something behind the bar. A single stereo speaker crackles. It goes silent for a while, and then comes the wail of a woman who sounds as if she’s mourning her village bombed into rubble. Even my mother’s stubbornly chipper mood is dented. She lights a cigarette.

Three Russian girls walk in. I’ve seen them before. They’re professionals, camp followers of the 201st. They sweat too, beads of pure alcohol running down their faces, their makeup melting. Naturally, Mother smiles at them as if we were all at tea at New York’s St. Regis. They ignore her and turn away, but Mother gets up anyway, walks over to the girl who looks the friendliest, the
only one without a black eye or a broken nose, and grabs her hand, “So delighted to meet you. My name is Donna.”

These girls have seen a lot in their short lives, but now they’re at a complete loss for words. They know they’ve met their match, and further resistance isn’t worth it. They offer her a chair at their table, and my mother summons me to join them.

The afternoon turns decidedly merrier when we get into the Rasputin vodka. My mother wants to know all about the girls’ lives, what they studied in school, whether they intend to marry one day. A few Russian soldiers wander in and can’t help but notice our little
fête galante
. A couple of them pull up their chairs to practice English, and my mother orders rounds of vodka for everyone. Half a dozen times this happens, followed by half a dozen teary toasts to mothers and motherhood.

At around eight, even good old Mom has had it. She writes down her telephone number in Los Angeles, should any of them get that way, and then we have one last toast to eternal friendship between America and Russia.

I have to help her outside and into the car. I tell her a nice cold shower will make her feel better. She ignores me and asks me what we’re going to do tomorrow.

Before going to sleep that night, my mother snoring gently in the next room, I tell myself there has to be a silver lining to her visit. It’s a fact that anyone who makes friends in strange places with so little cause is by definition a good Trojan Horse. I stumbled across this piece of wisdom years back when I was in Damascus.

It was before I married, and my mother came to see me, but mainly to sightsee. Every morning at eight, she’d set out with a 1930s Baedeker guide and walk the streets of the old city, not returning until after dark. She’d demand a glass of wine, make me
listen to stories of all that she’d seen, all wound around some great historical event, and chide me for not coming with her.

After three days of this, she’d seen everything there was to see in Damascus. The next morning, without saying a word, she went out as usual, but came back in the afternoon with a bus ticket to Palmyra, an ancient city in the Syrian desert, about 130 miles from Damascus. “You’re not going alone, are you?” I asked. She rolled her eyes. “What could
possibly
happen to me?” I knew there was no use pointing out that the night before, the USS
New Jersey
had shelled Syrian army positions in Lebanon, or that the United States was all but at war with Syria.

Two days later the concierge came pounding at my apartment door. “Your mother is back,” he said with great excitement. “With people!” I followed him down to the street to find her talking with a Syrian man and woman in their mid-forties, both well dressed. They were standing next to a late-model Peugeot, my mother’s suitcase on the sidewalk. That was interesting, but what caught my eye was the
other
late-model Peugeot double-parked across the street. Three men in cheap Dacron suits and five-o’clock shadows were seated in it, staring at me—Mukhabarat, Syrian intelligence.

Unaware of the crowd she’d drawn, my mother introduced me to the Syrian man and his wife, and hugged them good-bye as if they were old friends.

“Who was that?” I asked, as soon as the couple drove away, the Peugeot with the three thugs pulling away after them.

“Such delightful people.”

“But who are they?”

“I met them in Palmyra.”

She told me how she’d run into the couple in the lobby of her hotel. They’d started chatting, which had led to dinner, which had led to an offer of a ride back to Damascus.

“But what do they do?” I asked. I was not going to let her off
the hook on this one. Not everyone in Damascus has his own security detail.

She told me the man was a poet, but didn’t really work.

I interrupted her. “And the wife?”

“Oh, she works for the president. She’s one of his secretaries.”

First, let me say that Syria’s president is as remote and mysterious as a Ming emperor. Second, the main reason the United States had an official mission in Damascus was to try to crawl into his head. Since I’d arrived in Damascus, the closest I’d come to the presidency was walking by the front gate of the palace’s compound.

I should have known that the moment I signed up for Tajikistan, my mother would show up. I’m her only child, and traveling is all that she has in life. I can even mark the day she became a traveler: the day my father left us. I was nine, she just short of thirty. She dropped out of graduate school, grabbed me, and the two of us headed to the airport to catch a flight to Europe—duration and final destination uncertain.

Years later, when I started to understand a little about marriage, I wondered whether my father, a Los Angeles businessman who’d never wanted to leave California, had held her back from the life she really wanted. Or maybe it was that his leaving had just snapped something inside my mother. I don’t know because we never talked about it.