The Way of the World Read online

  CANDACE GORMAN WONDERS WHY IT’S so hard to find an Internet café in Geneva. She figured there’d be one on every corner. This is Switzerland, after all, the snowcapped peak for all things discreet and civilized and high-tech, the neutral land of chocolate, numbered bank accounts, and sex therapy.

  The specific term that brought her here is haven. Or rather, that’s what she thought of when she was having dinner with the parents of her son’s best friend. They’re Swiss, and their buddy, a Swiss guy, is one of the world’s leading liver experts.

  Candace has been reading everything she can find about the liver since she saw Mr. al-Ghizzawi, Mr. G, in July. He was yellow. When do people get yellow? That’s easy—liver problems. Jaundice, hepatitis. In August, she told a hepatitis expert in Chicago what she’d observed, and he gave her an affidavit—a sort of long-distance, secondhand diagnosis—for the filing she was pulling together for the D.C. District Court. The idea was to get a court order forcing the doctors at Guantánamo at least to examine Mr. G. If a verifiable diagnosis showed he was seriously ill, she could use that to drive a habeas corpus petition. But after she saw the Chicago doctor, she was having dinner with Karen and telling her about the case—which is nothing special because it’s pretty much all Candace talks about—when her son’s friend’s parents mentioned this doctor friend, and as soon as she said, “Switzerland,” it clicked. If Candace could get the renowned Swiss liver specialist to champion Mr. G’s cause, maybe she could eventually leverage that into a meeting with Swiss government officials about the possibility of asylum for Mr. G. At least, that was the plan.

  And everything worked swimmingly at the start. The September filing to the district court, with affidavits from the Chicago doctor and the Swiss expert whom Candace interviewed long-distance, got results. The court ordered a doctor in Guantánamo to examine Mr. G and report back. Lo and behold, by late September there was an official medical report from Cuba. It said Mr. G had “a history of hepatitis B,” that he’d also picked up tuberculosis in Guantánamo Bay in 2004, and that “his condition had stabilized.”

  But around that time, Candace’s habeas corpus hopes vanished. On September 29, the House affirmed the Senate’s version of the Military Commissions Act, which nullified any potential habeas rights of the Guantánamo detainees and reaffirmed the authority of the military tribunals to decide who was or was not an enemy combatant—a designation that couldn’t be appealed in court.

  Meanwhile, letters from Mr. G about his worsening medical condition were piling up on Candace’s desk. Her Arabic translator, a grad student, was gone on a fellowship. But the thing is, people come through for you if you give them half a chance. That’s Candace’s philosophy. Because she was telling all this to Muhammad, her hairdresser at Kiza, a salon in downtown Chicago—not on Michigan Avenue, but very nice—and he said he’d translate the letters. Muhammad, who had come to America from Iraq when he was a kid and spoke perfect English, had, of course, been hearing about Mr. G since Candace took him on as a client. While he was dyeing Candace’s hair, he told her that he couldn’t “believe that America was treating this poor guy this way. This is not the America I came to when I was a boy, Candace, no, no.” So he was delighted to translate the letters, though his Arabic was only so-so after all his years in America. He had to work about ten hours on each letter. But that’s the thing about people. If you give them half a chance, they’ll come through.

  Which is what Candace is thinking as she searches for the Internet café—because she’s just finished meeting with the Swiss liver specialist, and he’s the nicest man, and brilliant. He’s been making calls to people in the government for a few weeks. And, sure enough, Candace has a meeting with an official in the Swiss foreign office in a few hours.

  But she’s just gotten an emergency text message from her paralegal. She’s received an electronic document with the military tribunal’s report on Mr. G. This was something else Candace had requested of the district court. She’d petitioned the court to at least see the unclassified version of the panel’s findings.

  Finally, she spots one: an inviting Internet café, with enticing pastries at the counter, which she walks right by because she can’t get to a computer fast enough. She’s been thinking about this document, after all, since last Thanksgiving, when she took on Mr. G. It’s the official record of the government’s case. After nearly a year, after all the letters and their hours together, she can now get the measure of her client.

  She calls it up: “The unclassified summary of evidence presented to the Tribunal by the Recorder indicated that the detainee is a Libyan citizen who has traveled extensively throughout North Africa and the Middle East and is a member of the Libyan Islamic Fight Group (LIFG), a designated foreign terrorist organization. He also possesses substantial historical and current knowledge, up to the time of his arrest, of LIFG membership and operations. The detainee visited the Khalden and Sada training camps. Afghan Intelligence Forces arrested the detainee in Konar, Afghanistan in January 2002.”

  Candace reads intently through the file. She knows that Sada was a camp affiliated with al Qaeda, though mostly for Afghan fighters. But Khalden had been a main training camp for al Qaeda. She isn’t sure what the status is of the Libyan group. That she’ll have to check. In any event, Mr. G never told her any of this, beyond his having traveled a great deal across North Africa and the Middle East. But that was when he was in his late teens or early twenties.

  Then she sees something odd. A three-judge tribunal that was convened on November 23, 2004, panel #23, unanimously determined that Ghizzawi was not an enemy combatant. She scrolls down a dozen pages. But, then, another panel, panel #32, which convened on January 21, 2005, reviewed his case and—based on new evidence—determined that he was, in fact, an enemy combatant. Candace reads it again and reduces the screen.

  After holding this man for nearly three years, what sort of evidence could they have come up with in less than two months to prompt a complete reversal? The second panel’s decision was unanimous as well. She decides to petition the district court to see this new classified evidence. She figures it must be some pretty dramatic stuff. But first, a Swiss diplomat awaits. Candace feels confident the meeting will go well. She certainly knows how to be diplomatic.

  She has a few minutes for one of those chocolates and a cup of very strong Swiss coffee. It’s a funny thing, she thinks a moment later, as she prepares a few notes on international law and grants of asylum. It seems that the only people who don’t come through these days—these days of suspicion and generalized fear—are government officials. Candace eats her chocolate and wonders why that is.

  AMERICA IS A LAND OF miracles. Ibrahim is certain of this. He has proof, there in his hand with his name printed on it—Ibrahim Frotan, Patron—denoting that he’s a member, with full privileges, of the Denver Colorado Public Library system.

  There is a library a few blocks from the house. Walking distance. And he goes many days after school. It’s not the books he’s after. It’s the DVDs. The library is filled with DVDs, and videos, too. And they’re all there, his favorites: action heroes such as Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and hits from the many studios called “Bollywood,” with their soft-sell romances of handsome Indian couples frolicking across sunset beaches and rolling fields. And all of them are free. Simply amazing.

  Images are the one lingua franca between the world he left and the one he now inhabits; and the action heroes are like friends, filling his imagination, egging him on.

  No one more than Stallone. He was the first, the one, Ibrahim says, who “begins many things for me.” The seminal event occurred in 2004, a time of modest renewal in Bamiyan, after the Taliban had been driven away by U.S. forces and the Northern Alliance. A modicum of stability was settling over the village; crops were planted that spring, and kids returned to a just-repaired school. One of Ibrahim’s cousins, a man in his late twenties, returned from Iran with a satchel of bootleg DVDs and a portable
player. A crowd gathered around him in the town square, where Bamiyan’s lone gas-powered generator rested on a tree stump. The man turned to his young cousin to make the selection, and Ibrahim chose Rambo: First Blood III—attracted, simply, by the word blood. Soon he and a hundred townsfolk were cheering. The 1988 Stallone vehicle has Rambo leaving retirement (in a Buddhist monastery, of all things) for a secret mission to Afghanistan to rescue his longtime mentor, Colonel Trautman, played by Richard Crenna. That means Rambo rides on horseback with mujahideen, scales cliffs with bare, bloody hands, and kills roughly a thousand Russians. The movie brings rapture to the town square audience. What divine magic guided Ibrahim’s hand to this selection, and what extraordinary people Americans are to have a champion like Rambo, an avenger of the Afghans. That’s what Ibrahim felt. He didn’t think about whether Stallone was an actor, or what was real or fake. All of that was immaterial. The sensation guiding him was a powerful emotional charge that Americans were good. And as people mentioned the film to him over the subsequent months, he’d say that someday he wanted to go to America. That was the starting point.

  In homage, First Blood III was his first rental at Denver Public in September. But there were more, selections that moved from retail versions of his old bootleg favorites to action hero classics he’d never seen—films with renderings of the America he now stood within.

  Soon the one-way transaction—of a boy sitting rapt in Afghanistan, inhaling images of distant worlds—became a kind of conversation. Now he was living inside the image.

  That’s when, rather suddenly, the clicking started. He got the digital camera from Ann around Labor Day. It was one of several the family had, a gift that Ibrahim, thanking her, said “will be very, very important to show my time in America.” He took pictures of everything he saw, images to study later, to keep forever.

  This became a fixture of the glorious autumn of Ibrahim Mohammad Frotan. Photos. Hundreds of photos each week, downloaded onto the computer in Ann’s basement, then burned onto disks for easy storage.

  There were photos of the September trip to Steamboat Springs. Ben couldn’t go—he had to judge a Magic competition in Phoenix—so it was just Mom, Dad, and Ibrahim, staying with two other couples and their teenage sons in a large rustic cabin nestled in the ranchlands along the base of the Colorado Rockies—a rugged area that prompted Ibrahim to ask, “Is this where the nomads live?” None of it made sense to him, such as why Ann and Michael would find pleasure being in a remote, rustic cabin with a wood-burning stove and no cell phone service. The house in Denver was so much nicer.

  Ann and Michael were similarly perplexed by what happened the next day on Steamboat Lake. The group decided to rent a pontoon boat, and a girl who worked for the rental company was making sure the boat had gas and that the driving instructions were clear, as well as the rules of the lake. She was racing around on the dock, passing out life preservers, when Ibrahim started taking pictures of her. About thirty of them, of her breasts, mostly. She didn’t seem to notice. But Ann did.

  “Ibrahim…” she said in a stage whisper. “Pullleeeze.”

  He turned quickly, startled and revealed. But then she laughed, with a kind of knowing affection. And what felt illicit to him became, well, acceptable. “I’m doing research,” he said, in what he instantly realized was the best joke he had ever made in English.

  Ann, that night in the cabin, zinged him back. “Don’t stay up too late, you know, studying your research.”

  Then they both were laughing, a moment when Ibrahim realized that he’d never had this sort of repartee with a woman—not even his mother or sisters—an exchange in which he acknowledged his own desires.

  In this wash of intimacy, he felt able to bring up something he’d been wanting to talk to her about, something that startled him. Along with the photo essay on the breasts of the boat girl, he had taken a picture of Ann with her arm around the shoulder of her old friend John. “John is not your husband, Mom. It’s wrong for you to touch him.”

  “Not here, Ibrahim,” Ann said, sighing. “It’s not wrong, here.”

  But as Ibrahim clicked madly to capture what his astonished eyes saw—to flatten everything into manageable two dimensions for study and review—Ann was learning, too, learning to see, as best she could, through Ibrahim’s eyes.

  His disdain for the rustic cabin, a favorite family spot for many vacations, was clarified a week later at the Colorado History Museum, where Ann, Ben, and he whiled away a Saturday afternoon. They stopped at a floor-to-ceiling diorama of the famous Mesa Verde caves, a labyrinth of early American cave dwellings at least eight hundred years old and dug into the side a southern Colorado mountain. Ibrahim looked at it impassively. “We have those. People live in them.” At a nearby diorama of the region’s eighteenth-century farming techniques, where oxen pulled plows, he said, “This is like our way of farming,” clearly wondering why such a thing would be in a museum.

  New things, she said to herself. Stick with new things.

  Of course, Ibrahim is already racing down that path by October, having downloaded nearly a thousand photos of new things, strangely new. In each picture, he holds the camera at arm’s length to frame his own face and whatever’s behind him: his hallway locker, each classroom, the cafeteria, the gym, the bus turnaround. It took nearly a month for him even to attach the concept of school to Denver’s venerable East High. It’s a maze of vast expanses, several times larger than something called “Bamiyan University,” a collection of low-slung buildings in the mountains near his home. The gymnasium is an interior space surpassed only by the airports he’s passed through. Mostly he just wanders from class to class and smiles. East High has a large International Club that he, two dozen other exchange students, kids from “host families,” and assorted local teenagers of foreign birth are members of. That provides some structure, with a teacher in charge, a weekly meeting, and some kids who know his name, and he theirs, for hallway hellos or cafeteria table refuge.

  But on a particular Monday in mid-October, Ibrahim is feeling a bit queasy, snapping, from his hip, a few passing photos from a place he hasn’t yet been: in front of a class. He has to make a presentation to fellow students about Afghanistan, one of the few requirements, along with taking English, for all American Councils students.

  Thank God he’s long been a whiz with Photoshop—having built his skills on it and countless other bootleg versions of expensive American software he downloaded back in Bamiyan. He starts to flash up a neat, photo-adorned PowerPoint, with short, flawlessly punctuated bullet points. These are his strong suits: computers and the rules of grammar. Years on the run, not attending school, left wide gaps. Though he was at the top of his class in Bamiyan, he struggles in every subject at East.

  But none of that seems to matter this morning as “My Life in Afghanistan” flashes up and, slide by slide, the kids grow quiet.

  They seem fascinated by everything he shares, from stories about how “the security situation is very bad” and how it has knocked out electricity and health care, “which we need more of,” to the photos of his family, which he quickly clicks through, self-conscious about how they’re dressed and their modest surroundings. The questions come from every direction—from “Do you have bicycles in Afghanistan?” (“Yes, of course”) to “Can you drink wine in Afghanistan?” (“No, no one can. All drinking is against Koran,” a response that elicits moans from around the room.)

  Afterward, a girl approaches him. She says hi in Farsi, that her name is Jasmine, and that her family is Iranian, though she was born here. Ibrahim is uncomfortable talking to girls, but when Jasmine addresses him in Farsi, he offers an enthusiastic hello back. She asks if she can tutor him in English; she, like every student, needs to complete a community service requirement to graduate. Sure, he says. He tells her in Farsi that he’s been wanting to improve his English, that it’s one of the main goals of his trip. Can they start today? And they do, at lunch. By then, Jasmine has checked with her father abo
ut whether Ibrahim can come to her house that weekend for dinner.

  That night, Ann is pleased. She’s been worrying that Ibrahim hasn’t made any friends; he and Ben are friendly, but the bond doesn’t seem to be deepening. She’s noticed they don’t talk at night while they lie in the basement in the dark, the way boys do when they’re close. Maybe this will be good for Ibrahim, a new friend.

  On Saturday afternoon, a black Mercedes sedan swings by to pick him up. Ibrahim is confused about the driver. His name is Reza, and he’s also a Farsi-speaking Iranian, but he’s not related to Jasmine. As they pull up to the house, a gleaming modern two-story mansion nearly the size of a city block, Ibrahim realizes that Reza is the chauffeur. He’s seen this—Van Damme posed as one in a movie to get close to a rich and powerful guy he had to kill.

  In the front hallway, he meets Jasmine’s father, Nima, a friendly, middle-aged man who was born in Tehran, came here as a teenager, and started a company that makes sunglasses. He’s divorced; Jasmine’s mother lives somewhere far off. Just Nima, his daughter, and Reza live in this marbled mansion. In the coming hours, they float, all of them, from one room to the next, sitting on white leather furniture, sipping soft drinks, and speaking easily, warmly, in Farsi.

  Ibrahim feels every muscle in his body loosen. It’s like he’s fallen through a trap door into something fantastic and almost familiar—a place that matches up nicely with the images of dizzying excess that so many movie-watching foreigners mistake for America, yet is warmed by the language and customs he’s missed. A man is the head of this house. A beautiful daughter. A servant. It’s like a Scheherazade tale, where a young man stumbles into the palace of a king and his only daughter, a princess whose affections are won by the pure-hearted wanderer. Ibrahim is so happy to express himself in Farsi that he can’t stop talking. He tells them stories of Afghanistan, of how his oldest brother died fighting against the Russians when Ibrahim was a baby, how another older brother died of a mysterious disease, and how his family fled when the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues. Ibrahim also tells of how the sun rises over the mountains to light his family’s fields, of the things he misses.