The Sweetness of Tears (14 page)

My eyes still closed, I whispered, “I’m scared to death, Mom. I don’t want him to go to war.”

“I know, baby,” she said, turning me around to face her, taking me in her arms, stroking my hair like I had so desperately needed her to do before I ran away all those years ago.

Part Two

Jo

I held my tongue, and spake nothing: I kept silence, yea,

even from good words; but it was pain and grief to me.

Psalm 39, v. 5

B
y the time I got home from Washington Dulles Airport, it was the middle of the night. I let myself into my condo, dumping my bag just barely inside the door before kicking it shut. I went straight to bed, like I always did, fooling myself into thinking I’d actually be able to sleep when I knew I wouldn’t. Not after the kind of assignment I’d just come home from. After a couple of restless hours, I gave up and made my way into the kitchen to make myself some tea. But I was hungry, too. And there wasn’t any food. I went back to the bag, abandoned at the entrance, and rummaged through it to find myself a granola bar.

While I waited for the kettle to whistle, I went to the dining table to sift through the mail that the woman next door had collected for me, neatly stacked, and looked around at the plants she’d watered while I was away, green and thriving. Colleen was a wonderful neighbor—a retired secretary who had worked for years for various congressmen, up on the Hill—quietly vigilant on my behalf. She spent more time in my apartment than I did.

The kettle whistled. I left the mail where it was, went back into the kitchen, dunked a tea bag into a mug of steaming water, and carried the mug and the granola bar into the living room. I clicked the television on. And swore. Nothing but snow. I must have missed the cable bill. I kept forgetting to set up the automatic payment online. This wasn’t the first time this had happened.

I leaned my head back on the couch and thought about the movie collection in the cabinet next to the TV. In my bag, there was an Urdu television drama I’d picked up at the Karachi airport. But that was work—more useful for keeping up my command of Urdu than anything I encountered on the assignments they sent me on. High-quality Urdu, no subtitles. And they were good, too. Hours and hours of drama, heavy on the dialogue and light on the action. One I had enjoyed in the past was an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
Fountainhead
. I had some Arabic TV shows on DVD, too. But I wasn’t in the mood for either.

I looked at the clock. It was 4:45 a.m., 1:45 on the West Coast. Dan would be fast asleep. Last time I’d called him in the middle of the night, he was mad. Not like when we’d first started dating, when he’d wake up to talk and listen, in love with the sound of my voice. After college, I’d come to Washington, D.C., and he’d gone back to California, to L.A., which made our relationship a long-distance one, still nice and chaste and Christian, with hardly any physical temptation to get in the way of our plan to really get to know each other. In the last year, he’d tried to make things more serious between us, even mentioning marriage a few times.

His timing was terrible, pushing for commitment right when work was causing me to lose all perspective. I didn’t know how I’d lasted as long as I had. I sighed with relief. At least it was over. I took a bite of the granola bar and a sip of my tea, my mind still floating around, landing on scenes from the assignment I’d just come home from.

When Artemis Intelligence Services, the private defense contractor I worked for, had recruited me through Professor Crawley, I thought I would be one of the good guys, helping to catch terrorists bent on killing Americans. I would aid and assist in the investigations and interrogations that would prevent those bad guys from ever hitting us again. I didn’t know what I knew now—that the line between good and bad would get so blurry. That other line—the one between
us
and
them
—getting more distinct. It had to be, for us to be able to do what had to be done. But there were visceral moments that stayed with me, fueling my imagination, disorienting me, making it hard sometimes to remember the role I was assigned to play, to stay detached from the things I had seen—the things I had been a part of.

In those moments, I saw men in hoods or goggles, the snip of the scissors sharp in their ears as they were shorn of their clothing, before their hearing was muffled. Deprived of sight and sound. Before that, beaten, bound in shackles and chains. Drugged with tranquilizers, administered roughly, through the rectum. Diapered.

I only really saw this a few times. The initial softening-up process, when I was an unnecessary appendage, there only in case I was needed. The loud noise and music, the orders to stand or squat or hang from the bars of a cell. Pain and humiliation need no translation. Sometimes, the team’s assignment was just to pluck men off the street and fling them into prisons in places they’d never been and would never see. Other times, our assignment was only a transfer. Picking up detainees from one level of hell and delivering them into another. Often, too often, the target was already broken before we got him, at the hands of those who had him before. Sometimes I witnessed the breaking myself. Once, we picked up a detainee from a place to which I had been a part of delivering him only months before. The man we’d handed over and the man they handed back were not the same. And the differences—mental and physical—were shocking. The team took pictures—they always took pictures. The marks on his body were in places that made me shudder. Cuts and burns.

This was not what I thought I had signed up for. Back when I was still in college, Professor Dunnett, my Urdu professor in Chicago, had asked me to see him at the beginning of my last semester there.

“That interview with those recruiters that Crawley set you up with? Have you accepted the offer, Jo?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised that he knew of it.

He had paused for a moment, resting his chin on a triangle made of hands and fingers. “I’m not sure this is the right thing for you to do, Jo.”

“But— I just want to help. To do my part.”

“Did they say what kind of work you’d be doing?” Professor Dunnett asked.

I nodded warily. “I’ll be working as an interpreter. Under contract to the government. They’re really short. In all areas. And— I know two languages they’ll be needing.”

“But what will you be interpreting? Will you be on the battlefield?”

I shook my head. “No. Intelligence work. They’re running background checks. To get me a security clearance. It’ll take about six months. So I’ll be able to start right after I graduate.” I was eager to start, was planning to cram all I could into those last months of study.

“Intelligence work? As in, paperwork? Correspondence? Or— in person?”

I’d shrugged.

“This isn’t what you planned to do, Jo. With what you’ve learned. I thought you wanted to be a missionary?”

“I do. But the mission, for now, has changed.”

In the process, so had I. In the grand scheme of things, I was nothing, I knew. Nothing but a translator. An interpreter. A human dictionary. That’s what I told myself in the beginning, trying to absolve myself of any of the responsibility of what I’d taken part in. But the trick was the human part. A
human
dictionary.

I didn’t work in any of the places that became famous. Guantánamo or Bagram or Abu Ghraib. I worked in the dark. Initially, in prison cells in Pakistan. Sometimes in hotel rooms. Other times, in other places—secret locations. Black sites, the newspapers started to call them. In Africa. In Asia. And Eastern Europe. A beautiful island in the Indian Ocean.

In the course of my work, I had been to Pakistan many times. Mostly to cities in the north, but to Karachi, too, a few times. Landing there, in the city that Sadiq came from, I couldn’t help but think of him. Looking down at the lights of Karachi from the window of the plane as we’d make our descent, I’d wonder if he was there. On the road, driving from the airport to secret locations in Karachi and other cities and back, I would look out from behind the tinted glass of SUV windows that no one on the streets could look into, like a woman from behind a veil. I only experienced the place in fleeting moments and snippets, always in a hurry, usually on the ground for merely a few hours and in the dead of night. I wondered sometimes if I’d ever go back and see those places in daylight.

My language skills narrowed—I knew how to ask questions—over and over again, the same ones. I knew how to translate the same repeated answers and assertions: “I am innocent. No! That’s not true. That’s a lie. Who told you that? I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I am
not
a terrorist. I am
not
a bad man. I am a good person.” I couldn’t translate the sobs and the screams. I didn’t have to.

How was I supposed to know? That these cries and pleas would all sound the same, whether or not the person who formed them was telling the truth. That the people I worked for couldn’t tell the difference either. They thought they could. They thought that pain and confusion could be a filter for lies and truth. So they were liberal in handing out both. Along with threats. Involving children and wives and families left behind.

Once, I’d been assigned to an interrogation of two little boys. Eight and six. Their father was a big catch. And the mission was to get intel from them that would help to convince their dad that we had them and that they were in danger. Their mother was in our custody, too. I did the best I could to make myself understood, to understand them, but I wasn’t used to talking with children. I’ll never forget how scared those little boys were.

When we were done with them, the guy in charge took one look at me and said, “Don’t let yourself get all dewy-eyed for those kids. Their father is a murdering monster. They’re murderers in training. They don’t deserve those tears threatening to fall out of your girly eyes.”

I put my hand up to my face in shock. I hadn’t noticed the wetness. That was how good I was at doing what had to be done. I was numb, totally cut off from the source of those tears.

On my very first assignment, the people I’d be working with—government interrogators, not military—had offered the old joke, “If we tell you who we work for, we’d have to kill you,” as if it wasn’t crystal-clear. The lead interrogator, the night before our first mission, had given me lots of advice at the bar in the hotel where we gathered, in Barcelona, getting ready to fly somewhere else the next morning.

“Don’t get caught up in any of the bullshit they’ll feed you. They’ll cry and talk about how innocent they are. I mean grown men. Weeping. Be ready for that. They’ll tell you their sob stories. About what a big mistake we’ve made. That’s not your problem. Your job is just to translate. To tell them what we tell you to tell them. To tell us what they tell you.”

The others had nodded, raising their glasses to their lips. Wide-eyed, I’d sipped my Coke and tried to prepare myself. In the morning, over breakfast, before our flight, I’d asked if I could say a prayer for our mission. The guys all nodded their agreement. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and said, “Lord, we ask You to be with us, to guide us in our mission, to let our hands be Your hands, our words be Your words, our works be according to Your will. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.”

“Amen,” everyone said; big, brawny guys who swore too much and drank too much, led in prayer by me, with my quaky, shaky, scared-of-what-was-next voice. After that first assignment, I couldn’t look at them anymore without flashes of what they’d done streaking through the air at odd moments. I regretted praying with them. But they asked me to, again, before the next assignment, and then, again, before the next. So, I did, always unsure about whether it was the right thing to do.

You’d think I wouldn’t fit in. I don’t know what it says about me that they accepted me as they did. I wasn’t even that good at my job, not as good as some of the native speakers who were also on contract, far better interpreters than I was. I think I was more trusted than they were. Simply because I
wasn’t
a native speaker.

Despite the pep talk and the prayer, that first time and all the others, it was impossible to ever really be ready for our assignments, even after dozens of missions. Each and every one of them was recorded. Sometimes literally, by one of the guys, in a mask, holding a camcorder, but always in my memory. There was a room in my head, where the scenes played repeatedly. I could be in my apartment. Could watch TV and laugh at a sitcom. Have dinner with friends. Or listen to Dan on the phone, telling me about his day. But the images were my constant companion.

It was strange, too, the tricks my memory played. That when I remembered, my perspective changed. The mask on my face, which we usually all wore on assignment, would fall off, leaving me exposed to the pain, sometimes the hatred, raw, of the people we questioned. But the masks on the faces of the people I worked with remained. So that my nightmares were filled with them, faces of violent people in ski masks, their eyes hard and cold, looking at me, at the detainees, utterly drained of anything recognizably human. That was a scary feeling, one I couldn’t escape at times—like now, just home, with fresh memories to assemble into line with all of the old ones.

F
our hours later, the phone rang.

It was my boss. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Your contract is officially up.”

“I know. Two years. Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He sighed heavily. “Come on, Jo. The offer for renewal? The one you said you’d think about?”

“
You
said I should think about it.
I
said I wasn’t interested.”

I heard him sigh again. “Is it the money? Because I’ve been authorized to up the offer.”

“No. It’s not about the money.”

“Come on, Jo. You know this is important. You know how much we need you.”

“I don’t want to do it anymore. I told you.”

“Look, I know it’s a crummy gig, but someone’s gotta do it. It’s a matter of national security.”

I decided that silence was the way to go. He argued some more, not noticing that he was only arguing with himself, trying to convince me to renew. Finally, he gave up, but not before telling me to call him if I ever changed my mind.