The Way of the World Read online

  “Pair off in twos!” he shouts above the airport din. “This is a buddy system. STAY WITH YOUR BUDDY!”

  He glares as they hustle into a double helix, then two neat columns.

  “Fine,” he grumbles. “Now follow Mary.”

  Mary is a tiny gray-haired Indian lady, Bombay-born but now a German citizen, whose main job is to guide confused exchange students across the airport on behalf of several German travel agencies. She raises a minuscule fist and begins marching as, two by two, the train of dizzy, half-smiling teens lurches forward.

  They are the cream of the select. Twenty-five hundred Afghan youngsters between ages fourteen and seventeen applied eight months ago to something called the American Councils for International Education and took a test. Seven hundred of the top scorers then took another test and wrote an essay. Three hundred of those were asked to complete a long array of essays and sit for an interview. Forty made it, winning a trip to the United States care of American Councils, a three-decades-old organization, funded by everything from the State Department to the World Bank to George Soros.

  Naeem, hardened and pragmatic at thirty-two, winnowed through all the applications with his boss in America. That’s where Naeem lives with his wife, deep in the Virginia hills, about two hours from D.C. in a barely affordable house that expands “exurb” to its theoretical limit. He knew these kids first through their photos and the reports from colleagues who interviewed them in Afghanistan, and then got to know them better during a month at an abandoned ski resort in Kyrgyzstan, where he assisted with their orientation and taught them the strange customs of America.

  Today’s group of twenty is the first shift—kids whose first days at their American high schools come later this month: August 2006. In a few weeks, when the September group will cross over, the twenty kids now snaking through Frankfurt will already be wandering across a landscape they have dreamed mightily about—dreams jammed with harebrained assumptions, ferocious yearning, and plenty of global economy product placement.

  Mary halts the train in an airport lounge as Naeem, bringing up the rear, circles around to huddle with her. “So how’ve you been…how’s your wife…where’d you get that lovely leather jacket?” Mary is chatty, a busybody. This is a lark for her, a part-time job. Naeem can’t believe she’s making small talk at a time like this—a moment he’s worked nearly a year to create. He reminds himself to breathe. “Yes, great, Mary. Wonderful. How about food?” The travel agency that three months ago booked the twenty-one low-cost tickets—twenty students plus Naeem—in a block purchase includes one lunch per student in its package.

  “Everyone gets Filet-O-Fish sandwiches!” Naeem barks, unable to suppress a smile, as titters run through the group. “Any problem with that!” Silence. The fish sandwiches, launched by McDonald’s in 1962 to meet the Catholic prohibition against eating meat on Fridays, are the only fast-food choice.

  The lunch order, like so much that transpires, is the result of fastidious cross-cultural planning, mostly by Naeem. The students, who must have a workable grasp of English, are instructed to speak neither Farsi nor its Afghan cousin, Dari, which might attract unwanted attention in the post-9/11 era. All commands from Naeem are in the language they’ll be using in America. As for comestibles, only the meat of animals slaughtered in accordance with Koranic principles is halal, a designation almost identical to that of kosher. So the holy twenty—future leaders of global harmony—eat fish, and French fries, and suck down Cokes, ending this small s sacrament with the gentle folding of licked-clean McDonald’s wrappers for storage in their travel bags. One dream met, and conquered.

  Greasy and full-bellied, they file wide-eyed past airport shops and across concourses that gleam with shaped metals and glossy polymers that are as foreign to their eyes as the Mars surface would be to a Chicago bus driver.

  Naeem checks his watch. An hour until the departure of the Lufthansa-United flight to America.

  “Boarding passes and visas ready. Hold them high!” he shouts, “Now, single file.” Naeem counts about thirty passengers ahead of his group in the queue to pass through the security checkpoint. He does a head count as his kids, all in sky blue T-shirts emblazoned with YES, for the program’s official name, Youth Exchange and Study, line up straight and solemn—twenty strong. He checks his watch again. Almost there.

  He hears something to his left. The line stretches alongside a bar, a casino bar, with slot machines and a sixty-inch flat-screen TV.

  Naeem motions to Mary—he points to his left—and begins to drift over.

  The bar is crowded at 10:03 a.m., with people milling about. Naeem looks up at the big screen, at the blue studio backdrops of CNN International.

  BREAKING NEWS…“The most significant plot since the 9/11 attacks was foiled this morning by British police…bombs on multiple aircraft due to explode over the continental United States…arrests early this morning in and around London…all liquids and gels are banned on flights in Europe and America…”

  A tiny hand grabs his sleeve. It’s Mary, and with her is a tall, sandy-haired man north of six feet, in a snappy United Airlines uniform.

  “I think we’re going to have to pull your group from the line for a special security screening,” he says in German-accented English. Naeem, a wide-shouldered five-foot-six, looks up at the man’s gleaming teeth.

  He can’t feel his feet, but they’re moving. “Okay, everyone out of line, follow me,” he says to his twenty charges, trying to make it seem like no big deal. And then they’re walking down a corridor toward descending steps, led, now, by the man in uniform.

  Mary’s panicking. “Oh God, there’s no chance we’re making this flight,” she says in a stage whisper, skipping to match Naeem’s stride. “I mean, we’ll have to get a hotel. Okay. Or send them home. How will we buy twenty tickets? They can’t go on three different flights!”

  “Just keep cool, Mary. You know what the word cool means?”

  Of course not. “No one’s going to America today, or tomorrow,” she says to herself. “No, no, no, no.”

  Ten minutes later, they’re in a netherworld of small gates for small flights going to nameless European cities, and then they’re herded into an empty gate area with a private screening room for bag searches and pat-downs.

  Two large uniformed men arrive to start the checks; Naeem’s bearings return. “You can’t have men pat down the girls,” he says, putting on his angry mullah look. “You’ll need a woman.”

  The toothy, sandy-haired official seems to sigh, Muslims. “Fine. I’ll return.”

  He doesn’t. Five minutes later he’s replaced by a petite blond woman, late twenties, upturned nose, blue eyes, hair pulled back, a United uniform fitting snugly. Naeem finds himself resenting Western ideals of beauty. Maybe he’ll never see another Caucasian. That could work.

  “Listen to me,” he bears down on the woman, grateful that she’s short. “Our plane leaves in forty-six minutes. There are twenty of them. This has to happen very quickly.”

  Blue eyes meet brown. “We’ll do what we can, sir.”

  After twenty minutes, four kids are through. They have to answer twenty questions, unpack everything, and dump precious pastes and fluids, colognes and toothpastes and shampoos they’ve bought with scarce “travel money” during orientation—a month when they were told repeatedly how crazy clean Americans are.

  Naeem, pacing outside the private screening room, looks over at Mary, who’s talking to herself. The cleared students sit quietly, afraid to speak, holding their bags with blue Lufthansa-United stickers, denoting a properly checked carry-on. Naeem ducks his head into the screening room.

  “We’re going as fast as we can,” the blonde says, all business. “I have no control over procedures.”

  Twelve minutes pass. The plane leaves in fourteen minutes. Ten kids have made it through. A United agent bounds down the stairwell and is running toward them. “Look,” she stops, panting. “The children who have passed the security
check have to get on the plane. The plane is leaving.”

  She meets Moses. “Don’t moooove,” Naeem rumbles. He marches to the screening room, throws open the door.

  The blonde snaps around. “Your friend out here says that the plane is leaving only for my kids who’ve been cleared. Let me explain, THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WE GO TOGETHER OR NOT AT ALL.”

  This man from Afghanistan and this woman from Germany are now standing, alone, in a place beyond procedures and supposed-tos, beyond race and suspicion, and there are children involved.

  She looks around his shoulder, out at the kids still lined up for pat-downs, clutching their bags. Blue eyes meet brown.

  “Okay, let’s get them all through, quickly.” She motions to her assistant. The kids crowd in, as the magic blue “United” stickers are slapped on their bags.

  “Thank you,” Naeem whispers.

  “Run,” she says.

  And on a day the world awakens to news of narrowly averted disaster, twenty Muslim teenagers in their blue shirts—short sleeves for the boys, long for the girls, whose arms and heads are covered—run for their lives.

  NAEEM AWAKES TO AN ANNOUNCEMENT—“Prepare for landing in Washington”—and leans forward to hear two students, girls, talking in the seat in front of him.

  “I don’t see it,” one says to the other, as she looks out at the gentle Virginia hills surrounding Dulles Airport.

  “What?”

  “You know, the building. The place where Bush lives.”

  She searches for the words in English, then slips in forbidden Farsi.

  “Qasre Safid.” The White Palace.

  The occupant of Qasre Safid is, at this moment, preparing to land halfway across the continent, feeling a satisfying swell of anticipation. Air Force One touches down at Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and a wartime leader, Bush’s favorite self-designation, purposefully disembarks to a tarmac podium with remarks he’s been wanting to make since late July.

  “The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation,” he says. He is alone at the podium—the Republican candidates he’s here to visit are invisible, pushed away to his far left. The line of sight from the press riser to the podium places the word UNITED, painted on the side of Air Force One, directly above Bush’s head. Nearby, a satellite truck hums. “I want to thank the government of Tony Blair and officials in the United Kingdom for their good work in busting this plot…. Cooperation between U.K. and U.S. authorities and officials was solid…. The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers. Thank you.”

  It is his first public comment since the news of the foiled attacks broke. As those words circle the globe, leading every news report on the planet, Bush stops by a sheet metal plant to mug with the workers, put on the hardhat, and offer a short factory-floor economic speech, “to remind the American people that by cutting taxes on small businesses, it encourages small businesses to grow.” Then he and five hundred supporters lunch at a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Wisconsin State Assembly speaker John Gard, a Republican running for an open congressional seat.

  In all, a perfect day—a day to amplify, as part of his official duties, that Americans should be very afraid but also very grateful that his government is doing everything possible to avert catastrophe, and, in passing, to mention what he, and tax cuts, have done for the economy.

  The kind of day to lift a president’s spirits—a day when he can briefly own both fear and hope. Mission accomplished.

  ANN PETRILA WATCHES BUSH ON television in her Denver home. Hates the man with a profound, volcanic, and deeply satisfying rage. The tarmac statement from Green Bay is replayed endlessly among bits of evolving news about the thwarted attacks. Saturation coverage, round-the-clock. The phone rings in the kitchen.

  “The kids have been held up at security in Washington and missed their connecting flights,” the caller—someone from the American Councils—tells her. “At least, that’s the report we’ve received. We’ll call as soon as we get any more information.”

  She hangs up and heads for the basement, a wood-paneled cave that her son, Ben, will be sharing with their Afghani exchange student.

  He’s pushing thumbtacks through a small poster with red, white, and blue stripes drawn around the words WELCOME TO AMERICA, MOHAMMAD.

  “I can’t believe I’m putting a sign like this up in my room,” he tells her. “I think I’ve lost my mind.”

  She laughs. This three-bedroom house—a classic, lovingly preserved Sears Craftsman, circa 1911, with a sun porch on the front and oak beams—is the progressive home of Ann; her husband, Michael; and their son, Ben—a fallen Catholic, a Buddhist (by choice), and an atheist, respectively.

  Ann goes out the screen door to the garden, plops down alongside a row of tomatoes, and starts weeding. She is a professor of social work at the University of Denver’s Graduate School. Michael is a psychologist at an academy for troubled youth. By training and inclination, Ann is sensitive and, when need be, quite candid. Like many Americans, she believes in getting everything on the table and talking it out. As she tears at the dandelions, she thinks of this poor child, a seventeen-year-old boy named Mohammad, and what it must be like to come from Afghanistan to America and end up in some interrogation room in an airport.

  This was a lark, this idea of having an exchange student, which took on a life of its own and, as she digs deep for the dandelion roots, she thinks of sitting with Ben and Michael at the dining room table back in May with folders of possible students. She remembers there was a boy from Serbia, a religious Christian.

  “Yuck,” Ben said. “A fundamentalist Christian, no way.”

  Ann laughed. “Well, a Muslim from the bowels of Afghanistan. He’s going to be religious, too, Ben.”

  “I know—but at least he’s not some Holy Roller.”

  That’s when she first saw the photograph of Mohammad, stapled to his application. She turned to her friend Rayjean—a grad student at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Affairs and the American Councils’ coordinator for the area—and said, “It makes me uncomfortable to mention this, but he looks…well, he looks like one of the 9/11 hijackers.”

  “I know,” Rayjean replied, sympathetically. “That’s why these kids are so hard to place.” And that made Ann want to host one even more.

  She pulls another dandelion and straightens a tomato vine on its stake. The phone is ringing again.

  “Ben, can you get that!” she yells toward the house.

  Before the second ring ends, she’s up, brushing off dirt as she runs for the kitchen door.

  MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM FROTAN TAPS HIS long fingers on the round window of the Boeing 727. How strange, he thinks—not glass, but as clear as glass. He presses his fingers against the plastic to leave a smudge, his print, and then looks out at the Colorado Rockies off in the distance.

  They are tall mountains, as tall as the mountains of his homeland, with snow on the peaks, even in summer.

  His eyes move from one mountain to the next, the bare rugged slopes and the brilliantly white snow, and he thinks about how cold that snow is. He knows exactly. He knows in ways he wishes he didn’t just what it feels like at night, when you have to lie on the icy white surface because you’re so tired you have to sleep and there’s nowhere to escape from the chill and freezing wind, which blows right through the sunrise.

  It’s terrible to carry memories with you, he thinks. And the memory of snow has been with him since the day his family fled in the winter of 2002 from Bamiyan, a mountain province in Central Afghanistan. A year before, the famous giant Buddha statues that stood over his village were destroyed by Taliban explosives. He knew the giant Buddhas well, like good friends. As a boy, he and h
is buddies would climb a long path to the top of one of them and crawl out onto the crest of its head, nearly two hundred feet above the lush valley. When the Taliban’s tanks lined up in front of the statutes and began firing, he and his dad were farming their plot around the far side of the mountain, the Mountain of Cries, and all he could hear were the blasts, one after another. It wasn’t long before the Taliban turned its guns on the people of Bamiyan, and his family was forced to flee to the snowy mountains, carrying mattresses that they would roll themselves inside at night. A whole family rolled inside a mattress.

  That place, the place of those moments, is so very far away now that he feels he can try to leave the memories behind. This is what he will do on this adventure. He will forget.

  THE MAN NEXT TO ANN AND BEN at the receiving area at the Denver Airport can’t be ignored. He clearly doesn’t want to be. Ann looks over. He looks like blue-collar, gritty Colorado to her—black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, unshaven, three-days’ growth. She thinks trailer park. He’s talking a racist line to the girl next to him, about some issue with African Americans, a jag filled with the usual array of epithets.

  Jerk. She leans over to Ben. “Can you believe that guy?” Ben doesn’t want to acknowledge any of it. “Yeah, Mom, of course.”

  But Ann doesn’t let it lie. “Watch,” she tells Ben, and turns the sign she’s holding so the jerk can see it. An instant later, his eyes wander to the poster board with the large black block letters: WELCOME MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM ISHMAEL FROTAN.

  The man’s eyes meet Ann’s. She smiles sweetly. Ann Petrila, smalltime crusader, in your face. Ben rolls his eyes; his patience has all but run out. It’s not just that his mom is holding a sign in an airport. She’s been holding it for nearly an hour. No sighting of Mohammad. His dad—who met them here—just left to go back to work.