Prologue
From his movements you would never know that anything was wrong. He doesn’t shake visibly as he walks up to the house, his footsteps crunching the frozen mud; the late January twilight has almost completely vanished into gray.
Once he reaches the unlit porch, only his shadowed silhouette remains visible from the road. The front door opens and a second figure greets him. The two men disappear inside.
Voices rise and fall from inside the house: the ebb and flow of laughter perhaps, or an argument; without language or context, the husky echoes sound so much the same.
Dogs bark in the distance.
A truck passes, then a car which pauses to idle beside the house. Tap-tap-tap.
The men’s voices grow louder; the dogs’ howls near: encircling.
A second car emerges from behind the building; its sole functioning headlight paints a yellow spot along the road. It drives away from the house into the ramshackle town and then beyond, rattling its way up into the mountains.
The peaks paint shadows across the night sky, their distant presence marked by only by a jagged absence of stars. On the other side, in a different country different people eat dinner in their different houses; separate, apart.
And yet not.
They’re waiting for him tonight, or for news of him and the resolution of the discussion that took place in the house. At the end of their vigil they will know which it was: misunderstanding, or outright betrayal. What he brings back with him across the border, the very route he chooses, will provide all the evidence they need to judge.
But as the freezing dark of night stretches into pallid dawn, no one ever arrives.
The narrow office smells of musky cologne. Thin rays of gray light filter through an off-center window but do little to diminish the dim. And the ceiling is unusually low.
“Spies,” Nora says as she taps the ceiling with her fingertips. “Notice the special design. Built for eavesdropping.”
“What book did you read that in?” I ask.
Nora shrugs and flops into the olive green guest chair. She continues to stare at the ceiling. “Anyway, I suspect it’s empty up there now. Between Solidarity and the end of the Cold War, the funding pools for covert activity are pretty dry. They can’t even seem to find enough batteries for the clocks around here.”
She’s right. All the clocks in
“Take this.” The officer reappears with two rusty metal chairs. He hands me one but there’s not enough space to unfold it inside; I end up angling it in the doorway.
“And Mr. Michaels?” the officer asks as he squeezes past.
“He’s late.” Nora peers through her tortoise-shell glasses and frowns. “Again.”
Ryan Michaels is the representative from the
“That’s normal.” The officer sighs. He leans the extra chair against the filing cabinet just underneath a five year-old pornographic calendar: December 1987, a redhead wearing only tassels and silver high heels, is still on display
The officer plops down behind the desk and starts to shuffle through papers.
“So,” Nora clears her throat. “Why don’t we just start?”
“But Mr. Michaels…”
“We’ll be sure to fill him in.” Nora smiles, tight and controlled; it’s quite a contrast with her frizzy red hair.
The officer glances down and starts to flip through a second stack of papers. “Well then,” his overly broad smile reveals two gold rimmed teeth, “what did Mr. Michaels tell you about me?”
“He said you were the Polish authority looking into the case,” I volunteer.
He frowns and pretends to study a piece of paper. “That’s all?”
“Isn’t that true?”
He shrugs and picks up the phone. He dials several times then hangs up.
“Tsk, tsk.” He shifts to the back of his chair. “The Peace Corps has a big problem with all of this. No one can see clearly what to do.” He takes a folder from the middle of the first stack, opens it, and reads the top sheet. He shakes his head. “So then, thank you. That’s all.” He closes the folder.
“You haven’t told us anything.”
He drops the folder behind his desk. “There’s nothing new.”
My chair squeaks loudly as I lean forward. I point to the frame on his desk. “Are those your children?”
He nods. “Anieszka and Roman.”
“So what would you do if one of them were to just disappear one day?”
The Peace Corps first alerted my aunt Nora to the possibility that my brother was missing ten days after he had last been seen. That was nearly two months ago. Late on a Friday afternoon, Ben had leaned over a fellow Peace Corp Volunteer’s desk and scribbled a postcard to me. He handed the woman that card along with enough zlotys for an international stamp. He smiled, wished her a good weekend, then walked out the door. He never returned.
Disappeared.
The postcard arrived just three days before the Peace Corps’ call. On the front is a photo of a young girl standing in a pale blue doorway with a yellow flower in her hand; there is no explanation or attribution on the back. Only a postmark, “26.01.1992 Warszawa,” and my brother’s tight print, “You can find almost anything here if you look hard enough.”
Nora maintains that the card was more likely an accident of timing than anything meaningful. “Even Ben wouldn’t orchestrate something like that,” she repeats each time I bring it up. And yet she agreed to come to
“After all, he did list me as his emergency contact,” she rationalized as she bought her ticket. “That’s one responsibility I take seriously, at least.” Later she added, “Anyway, it’s an interesting time to be going to
But there were the Polish and American bureaucracies to endure; Nora was never very good with that. My mother’s youngest sister claimed there was “too much hamstrung administration” in just about any organization larger than her local library in
Ben could relate to that. That’s why he never lost touch with her the way he did with everyone else.
The Peace Corps might have even been Nora’s idea: a way to keep him out of business school, perhaps. But he had never really been serious about that. The only thing he ever truly considered was going away; “the further the better,” he had said. And after having finally finished his long-stalled B.A. two semesters after the Berlin Wall fell, he was ready. In a bit of post-cold-war irony, he was assigned to the Peace Corps Small Business Program. Apparently his experience working in a local sporting good store to support himself through college qualified him to become a free-market advisor.
I never liked the idea. Not the Peace Corps or
But there were a lot of things I still couldn’t understand about Ben. For example, why he wouldn’t call Mom and Dad to tell them he was leaving the country at least. It had been eleven years already; that should have been long enough.
“There’s no news,” the Polish police officer tells us again. It’s all we’ve heard from the Peace Corps and the US Embassy, too. The same line they gave us first over the phone, then again in their respective offices when we first arrived here three days ago.
“You have a whole file there.” I point to the floor. “There can’t just be nothing.”
“We have many files.”
“So officer,” Nora says too loudly. She pushes her purse onto his desk. “Maybe you have a particular recommendation for how this might go faster.” She nudges the bag closer to him. “We’re prepared to help out, if you know what I mean.”
“Tsk, tsk.” He waves his finger sharply at the purse, at Nora, then me. “You know, growing up here in
Nora stares at him. “How much?”
He pushes her purse off the desk. “Get out.”
“Please,” I say. “We came all the way from
His brow creases as he leans back in the worn vinyl chair. “So you are from
Nora moans as she bends to pick her purse off the floor.
“You can get anything you want there,” he continues. “All kinds of sex, drugs.”
“What are you talking about?” Nora asks.
He stares at Nora, unblinking. “Perhaps you can tell me.”
“This has nothing to do with my nephew.”
“I thought you were his mother.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Tak. It does.” He nods. “Broken family. Even worse.”
Nora charges into the hallway, nearly crushing Ryan Michaels.
“Kafka,” she mutters as she barrels past.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ryan stutters slightly. “I got pulled into an emergency meeting with the ambassador this morning. I tried to call, several times even, but the phone lines are awful.”
“And to think, he wasn’t even a Pole.” Nora continues walking toward the exit.
Ryan turns to me. “What happened?”
“Nothing. He wouldn’t tell us anything.”
He sighs. “I was afraid that might happen.”
“And he was rude.”
He nods with an exaggerated blink. “We’re just doing what we have to.”
“Why did you even have us bother?”
He points to the lobby. “Please, just wait for me out there, just a minute. Let me try to talk to him. He told me there might have been some developments. Maybe he’ll be willing to share those with me. I know it might seem hard for you to believe now, but so far, the two of us have actually had a decent working relationship.”
At least Ryan doesn’t give up, at least not to our face. That’s more than the Peace Corps has been able to offer. They’ve only been overly defensive: first when we first asked for the keys to Ben’s apartment, or at least the landlord’s phone number, then later when we asked for help in locating a locksmith. We tried picking the lock ourselves, then prying the door open with a broken shovel we found in the courtyard; so far nothing had worked.
“Keep in mind,” Ryan repeats as he steps toward the office door, “of the thousands of Americans who are reported missing in foreign countries every year, most all of them do turn up somewhere. Eventually.”
But Ben would be offended to be considered just like everyone else. Even if the everyone elses were all people who had gone missing like him.
“Yes, I’m certain.” The British accent is the first thing I hear as I enter the large lobby and search for Nora.
“Rather near to Malenkaya.” A tall man with wavy brown hair is talking to a policeman with thick glasses. “It’s definitely in that region.”
“Impossible,” the officer looks up from his pad. “There’s nothing there.”
The British man smiles, so magnetic. “Perhaps you ought to check your records again. Just in case there was a typographical error of some sort. After all, there are so many tiny mistakes we all make every day and don’t even realize their magnitude.”
His voice is filled with confidence, even optimism. I try to catch another glimpse of his face, but he’s already walking in the opposite direction, leading the feeble policeman down the hall.
“A zoo. That’s where those bureaucrats belong. All of them.”
I slide onto the bench next to Nora. “What’d you think of his comment?”
“Meaningless syllables, nothing more.”
“But the fact that he brought up drugs at all…”
“Isabel, Ben’s clean. He has been for ten years. Ever since.”
She shakes her head. “Intimidation is the only thing that guy has going for him, so he might as well practice, I suppose.” She reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She takes one out, contemplates it, then slides it back inside. “And then there’s that hack our embassy stuck us with.”
“Ryan’s nice enough. He’s optimistic. He’s on our side at least.”
“Right. And so is the Pope.”
Ryan is halfway across the lobby when he sees us and starts to wave. But as he does, he bumps into a bald man in a shiny leather jacket. The man glares at Ryan for a long moment; Ryan simply shrugs, then continues toward us.
“Again, I’m so sorry about all the confusion,” Ryan says.
I study his face: his features are so medium-sized and bland. “So?”
“There really is no new information about Ben’s case. I’m sorry.”
“So much ignorance,” Nora grumbles. “You’d think it’s endemic.”
“There might be something by early next week.” Ryan struggles to hold his voice firm and calm. “Apparently one of Officer Turnaczenkowic’s leads might come through by then, or so he thinks.”
I nod. “So what’s our next step?”
“To sit tight and wait. Let’s see what he turns up.”
“Next week?” My voice echoes across the lobby.
“Is gullibility a required part of your training?” Nora asks.
“Nothing until next week?” My voice is louder still and people turn to stare.
“Please,” Ryan touches my wrist. “We’re doing the best we can under the circumstances.”
“What kind of circumstances take a whole week?”
“Pathetic,” Nora frowns, “Not to mention overwhelmingly incompetent. Or should I say impotent?”
Ryan cringes.
“She didn’t mean it,” I say quickly. “But Ryan, seriously. We didn’t come all the way to
“I know.” He turns to me. “But it’s just not that simple. There are a lot of factors here. I’m sorry, but really the best advice I can give you is to be patient and let us do our work.”
Nora reaches into her purse and pulls out a cigarette again, this time with a lighter. “So to summarize: of all the various agencies involved in this – including the esteemed officer Turna-something from the local Polish police – no one has managed to turn up anything in close to two months. At least nothing that anyone is willing to share with us. And all we – Ben’s family – are expected to do is just sit around and wait for further notice?” She flicks the lighter and eyes the tiny orange flame. “Why should we?”
Ryan’s jaw clenches. “Because things are changing very rapidly in this part of the world. Because it’s unstable.”
Nora lights the cigarette and inhales. “That’s lame.”
“We’re going through all the official channels.”
Nora exhales into Ryan’s face. “They’re not working.”
“Whatever you ladies decide to do from here, I can’t stop you.” He waves away the smoke. “But there’s little guarantee I’d be able to bail you out, either. Particularly if you break any of this country’s laws.”
Nora takes another puff. “I didn’t hear anyone ask you to.”
Ryan coughs and glances away. Behind us, the crowded lobby roars.
After a moment, he turns back and addresses me alone. “Seriously, all the official warnings aside, be careful.” His voice is low now, and I strain to hear the words. “I can’t stress that enough. You never know what might happen in this kind of environment, where you might end up yourselves, in what kind of circumstances. It’s almost like being an astronaut here, going into outer space if you know what I mean.”
“Not really.” Nora says on an exhale.
I ask, “What do you mean exactly by outer space?”
“Bad analogy.” He sighs. “But…well, here’s an example. Last week in
“I thought that was changing.” Nora stubs out her half-finished cigarette. “At least that’s the propaganda in the west these days.”
“It is why the Peace Corps is here in the first place, right?”
“It is changing, sort of. It will change. But it’s only just beginning. And it’s completely uncharted.” He shakes his head. “Reform creates voids. And it’s all still so unclear here, exactly who or what will ultimately move in to fill those new spaces. There are so many possibilities.”
“This is really the best place to be?” I was eleven and still in awe of my older brother, at least most of the time. “I mean, are you sure we can see comets from here?”
Ben looked up from where he was crouched beneath his telescope: shiny black and new, it pointed out his second floor bedroom window. “There’s nowhere else,” his thirteen year-old voice cracked.
“What about my room?”
“It’s probably no better. It’s almost the same.”
“You could at least try.”
He looked at the telescope, the prized possession for which he had been saving his paper route money for months. His finger lightly caressed the metal tube. “But we have to be really careful moving it.”
I cleared a path through all the clutter in his room, then mine; Ben followed behind with the telescope.
Once he had set it up in my room, he turned to me. “You want to try?”
I crouched down and peered through the eyepiece, careful; it was my first time even touching the instrument. “It’s cool.”
“It’s more than cool.”
“Yeah.”
Through the lens, the hazy twilight appeared as flat gray; across the street a solitary bird landed then flew off a telephone line. After it seemed like enough time had passed, I let go of the telescope. “Thanks.”
Ben nodded. He was staring out the window at the drooping eucalyptus tree. In his eyes, this seemingly monochrome sky was the backdrop for mystery and the extraordinary possibilities of other worlds. But as hard as I tried, I could never quite manage to see it that way. If only I could have then, or even now.
“Hey Ben, you know how yesterday you were telling me about how comets come and swoop by the earth?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was just wondering, then where do they go?”
He shrugged. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“Some of them orbit in ellipses, like this,” he traced an oval on the glass. “But if the sun is here,” he fingerprinted a dot toward the left, “at some point they get close on their path, and then the heat of the sun melts their ice.”
Ben didn’t just imagine these things; he read thoroughly, he knew. I envied that intensity, his passion. And I wondered if I could ever be like him.
“But others have wobbly orbits, like this.” He traced an irregular circle on the glass. “And those sometimes crash into a star, like our sun.
“But not all of them have orbits,” he continued. “Those other ones, they just come by once then go off to the other side of the universe and just keep going. And after that, they don’t ever turn back around.”
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