THE COAST (10)

7.

I arrived at the entry station to Point Lobos just after two, when the ceremonial gathering was supposed to begin. The ranger gave me a map and a receipt for the $10 vehicle entry fee. It was a weekday and there were still spaces in the area where I decided to park. I’d avoided the turnout where I’d once spent my solitary vigil waiting for Russell, the day she never arrived because Janos had recruited her to shoot the peace march, the day that changed things between us, the day that recast the course of her life and in the end mine too, leading us to this sad finality, here again at Point Lobos for a last goodbye. 

I was about to open the car door when my phone sounded. A text from Sofia: When are you coming home? 

Day after tomorrow, I wrote, then added: Shouldn’t you be asleep? It’s a school night. 

It would be past eleven on the island. Maybe she’s starting to miss me a little, I thought. Then I wished I’d deleted the last part of my message.

I stepped out of the car into a clear mid-May afternoon and the quickening sensorium of gulls’ cries, surging tides, salt and seaweed. A breeze fluttered my shirt but not the stiff cypresses along the path heading west, seaward. 

I hiked the marked trails towards the site on the map where the mourners, or celebrants, others who had known Russell, would be gathered. I was hoping to spot them before they saw me, as I didn’t know yet if I would, or could, join them. 

Shielding my eyes, I looked up into the unbroken blue of the sky, wondering if I’d missed the plane bearing her ashes to their sea burial. 

I looped further out along the high promontories to a headland where surf blasted the sheer cliffs far below. Seals barked along the south shore. The glittering expanse filled me with ecstasy and terror, intimate and familiar, the vertiginous dropoff at land’s edge. I was formed by this west-facing coast, I thought, the used-up world behind me. Strange that I’d end up on an island. As if the Baltic were any match for this thundering, epic Pacific strip. 

I gazed down the misted Big Sur coastline, filled with sense memories of Russell that day at Nepenthe, sex in the pine woods and on the hotel bed, ending up here at Point Lobos afterwards.

Turning back inland, I saw them, clustered around a bench at an overlook below me. I recognized Ginny, Miklos’s last wife, and her two daughters. There were a dozen or so others, younger. Oddly, I found myself looking for Russell among them, still ready to believe she was here, that she’d prevailed. 

I turned away, hoping they hadn’t seen me. What could I share with them? What consolations to give or take? My memories of Russell were mostly private, clandestine, classified even. These were people who had cared for her too. I supposed we had some claims upon each others’ company. I tried to banish my caustic, belittling thoughts of them. But being among them while Russell’s ashes were scattered wouldn’t bring me some finalizing “closure.” I hadn’t come to put anything to rest. I wanted to keep as much of Russell as I could. Still I was torn, for I hungered for answers some among them might have. 

A gust of wind rocked me. I reached for the rope bordering the trail. 

Then somebody was tapping my shoulder. 

“Paul.” 

I wheeled. For a moment I was at a loss, then she came into focus: Tanya, Russell’s lab assistant and protege. Like Russell, an emigre. From Estonia? She was often at Russell’s San Francisco studio south of Market. 

Dark, serious Tanya. She offered her hand. She was striking, like Russell. Russell had always described her as the gifted one among her Art Institute students, the one who would go on to do something. 

“I saw you up here,” she said. 

“Sorry. I just…”

“It’s okay. Join us only if you want to. You will be able to see the plane from here.”

She gestured towards a bench back along the path. We walked to it and sat. 

“How did she die?” I blurted. “When did it happen? Where? I know nothing.” 

Tanya reached into a bag and extracted a sandwich or some such food wrapped in tinfoil and handed it to me, along with a fruit drink in a biodegradable carton. “Before I forget,” she said. 

I thanked her and placed it on the bench beside me.

“She was injured in Syria. Last month, during the Russian aerial bombings of Aleppo.” 

“Was she there for a magazine?”

“No. We don’t know why or how she got there. She was flown out and died in a hospital in Lebanon.” 

Of course she was there on a mission, some fucking “special operation,” I thought, flushing with rage. How I despised them, the intelligence people, for recruiting her in youth then sending her to her destruction. It wasn’t the first time they had put her in harm’s way. They could have cared less. 

Tanya said, “I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of years. She was based somewhere in southern Europe, doing mostly combat photography, I think.” 

I realized that none among the people gathered for the farewell ceremony would likely have known of Russell’s other life. 

Tanya looked at me sadly. “They did recover her camera. It seems she had been shooting in an orphanage when a bomb hit.” 

A chorus of wheezing sea lion honks rose on the air as if in lament. 

“Once she had shown me photos from a trip here with you,” Tanya said. “Otters, cliffs. Some pictures of you. It seemed like a good place to say our goodbyes. She loved the wildness.” 

“Ginny and her daughters,” I said. “Who are the others?”

“Her former students, mostly. Russell meant a lot to us. We are curating a survey show of her work. It will tour the US, then Japan, Europe, and end up in Budapest. We were wondering if you might want to offer your comments.” 

“Of course.”

Tanya looked at her watch. “The plane will be coming.” 

She stood up and I stood with her. She turned to me hesitantly. Then we embraced. 

It took me apart. I heaved with sobs. I felt humiliated but couldn’t stop. Tanya held me until it abated. Then I apologized. 

“No, no,” she said. 

She quietly disengaged and left me there. 

Soon after, I heard the buzzing motor of the prop plane.

8.

The morning of the day I was to leave LA for the flight back to Europe, I drove to The Guitar Center in Hollywood. From among its towering aisles of gleaming instruments, I selected an acoustic Martin LX1 for Sofia. It seemed like a good instrument to get her started. I bought it, along with a gig bag for the trip.

On my way to the airport, Cheryl, my old composing partner, texted to confirm the film job we’d talked about over lunch. Knowing I had a project to take back to the island filled me with an inordinate sense of satisfaction; I was back, however temporarily, in the loop.

After dropping off the car at the rental agency and checking in for the flight, I ended up quite early at the departure gate. I opened my laptop and logged on. There was an email from Tanya, with an attached file containing Russell’s last work, the photos from Aleppo. 

I glanced around uncomfortably, reluctant to look at them in the cavernous, soulless corridors of LAX. But it would be at least a day before I would be alone in my studio on the island. 

I clicked on the file. 

The portfolio was titled August 2016. East Aleppo. Tanya had provided brief captions or notes. 

An orphanage in an underground bunker, two stories below ground. Children with broken or missing limbs. Children with wounds and scars. Children with large dark eyes staring out of bandaged or shaved heads. Children who had lost parents to Russian bombs or Syrian artillery or dementia.

Black and white, some in color.

Twins, one’s face half blown away.

A girl with a mangled doll.

A male teacher exercising with boys.

Balloons strung on the ceiling. 

A boy sitting expressionlessly on a bed.

Cartoon figures drawn on rolls of butcher paper affixed to walls.

A painting of a bright yellow sun. 

A makeshift tent, two heads peeking out.

Boys jumping on a mattress.

A girl reading to another girl.

The Syrian couple in charge of the orphanage.

A one-armed boy, smiling.

A handicraft area, a performance area.

Three kids staring up, as if listening for the Russian jets overhead, the thumps of barrel bombs.

Dozens of kids, living like moles underground. Intent, serious, or smiling kids, bearing unknowable sorrows and griefs. 

They can’t go out. Instead they have drawn gardens and suns they can’t see.

Strange subterranean light, some images almost dark. 

Russell had lived there for six days and nights. She had brought her watchfulness, her silent testimony, to shoot these sorrows of war. Grave, beautiful, monumental: consecrating and dignifying the children’s pain and loss. 

Then she had gone above ground for a final series of shots.

Homes, markets, schools obliterated by airstrikes and artillery.

A collapsed hospital. 

Slaughter and rubble. Dust and ruin. Cratered earth. 

A young man, his face twisted in a howl of grief, bears a wounded or dead child in his arms. 

This is what she was shooting when she was struck by the shrapnel that would kill her.

I closed the file and looked up into the high empty space of the air terminal, fighting for breath. 

Echo of loudspeakers. Passengers gathering to board. 

I packed my laptop and stood to join them.

A young woman I don’t know rides up in an elevator with me at Capitol Records, both of us looking down to avoid our eyes meeting… 

9.

The plane set down after eleven hours aloft. It was morning in Scandinavia though I hadn’t slept. I cleared passport control, bearing my scuffed carry-on and Sofia’s new guitar. Then I stood outside the terminal in the bright day, dead on my feet, waiting for the bus to the island ferry. 

I began to think about Sofia, and how Russell had all but willed her to life, pushing against my resistance to impregnate her cousin. She was to be the child Russell and I didn’t have. Sofia has no memory of meeting Russell; it’s unlikely Russell ever saw her. How fate plays its twists. I was not to be involved, and now I was Sofia’s family, a single father to her. It struck me that Sofia, in the remote, displaced sense that shadows all our lives these days, was in a sense Russell’s child too. 

I dozed through the ferry crossing, waking when we bumped against the pilings. I stepped off into sunlight and a mild breeze. In my week away, the island had turned greener, entering its brief Nordic summer. It would be peaceful in the village for a few more weeks until vacation season began. I would get on my bike, take some walks, work on the new composing project.

I’d decided to pop for a costly taxi to the farmhouse rather than have Margit pick me up, an extravagance I usually avoided; but with a new assignment in hand, it seemed tolerable. 

It was early evening and still light when I arrived at the farmhouse. There was a late model rental car parked beside my old Renault in the grassy driveway. Sofia appeared as the taxi retreated. 

“You got it!” she said, enfolding me in a hug.

I handed her the Martin. “I can teach you some chords to get you started.”

“That’s okay. There’s a guitar teacher at my school.”

“Well, okay.” My teenager bringing me down to earth. Welcome home. Was the guitar teacher the one she was sleeping with? I gestured towards the other car. “Did my Renault break down or what?” It wouldn’t have surprised me.

“No, there’s a man visiting. He’s talking with Aunt Margit.” 

I set my luggage down inside the entrance. I found Margit and an elderly man sitting at the kitchen table, conversing in Hungarian.

The man struggled to his feet with difficulty, using the table for support. 

“Janos,” he said, offering his hand.

I stared at him. I didn’t take the hand.

“Ah. I understand,” he said. He nodded and sat back down.

Margit looked up at me in surprise. 

“It turns out Margit and I know some people from the old days in Budapest,” Janos said. 

Bone-weary from the trip, I sat at the garden table outside my studio facing the sorghum field, the round white church in the distance. The evening air was mild, the sky still pale. Sofia was inside, noodling with her new guitar in the kitchen. Margit was packing for her return flight to Budapest. 

Janos, uninvited guest, emerged from the house, coughing and zipping his fly. 

He lowered himself heavily into the chair next to mine. 

“Summers are brief in this part of the world,” he said. “All the more welcome for that. And these long pleasant twilights.” 

He spoke with a faint residual accent familiar to me. 

“So this is your refuge,” he said. “Very nice.”

I bristled with fury. He had no right to be here. What hospitality did I owe Russell’s minder, handler, recruiter, whatever term they used, the man who had set in motion the deceptions that trailed her across her life and led finally to her death? 

“I was in the area,” Janos said. “I have a son in Germany who works for Google. My wife died last year. And then this terrible news about Jazmin.” 

“How did you know where I live?” 

“It’s in your file,” he said. “Like Ronald Reagan said once, you can run but you can’t hide. He was talking about Palestinian terrorists, but I think he borrowed that line from the great American boxer Joe Louis.” 

“So you still work for them.” 

“Retired, mostly. But I still have my clearances.” He gestured towards the house. “You don’t need to worry. Your file is classified. You can continue living here in peace.” 

Above us, starlings darted and wheeled. I could just hear Sofia strumming a few chords in the kitchen. 

“I have lost many people,” Janos said. “First in Hungary to the Soviets, then during the course of this work. Some loom large in life but quickly fade from memory when they are gone. It isn’t always the ones you would expect. Others who are no longer with us…resonate. Is that a good word? Jazmin was one of those. When we lost her, we lost a great deal.” Janos slumped disconsolately in his chair. “But you would know better than I.”

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

“You sent her to her death in Syria,” I said. 

“No. She had been relieved of service three years ago due to her injuries. She went to Aleppo on her own. In fact it was our people who flew her out, to the American University Medical Center in Beirut. But it was too late. She died of her head injury the next morning.” 

A brown hare appeared at the edge of the field, paused to take us in, then bounded off. 

“You should never have recruited her,” I said. “You presented it as a choice, but how could she have refused? Her father was in a delicate security situation. To shoot a peace march, for god’s sake.” 

“It was the Cold War. We played by different rules then. Stalinism, the Soviet system. You can’t begin to know how bad it was. Those of us who had lived under it would have done anything to bring it down. When I first arrived in the US, I was recruited using the same appeal. Guilt, obligation. And believe me, there were Soviet operatives at those peace marches. We wanted to try her out.”

“Then exposing her to risk in Yemen, Tehran, Santiago.” 

“She was a real find. And she had invisibility. But yes, mistakes were made. Sometimes there were zealots in charge. Her later work in Hungary was very important.” He put his fist to his mouth and coughed. “Of course I have had thoughts about this lately. It was not always an exercise in the freedom we fled the Soviet Union to find. We grew up with habits of deception, subterfuge. We had to learn what freedom was. Maybe we never really did.”

“Weren’t you some kind of writer in Hungary?”

“A journalist. And a samizdat poet. It got me in big trouble.”

He coughed again, then began to wheeze. It was a sound I knew from my childhood. My mother had succumbed to emphysema from a pack a day of unfiltered Chesterfields Kings. I recalled Russell describing Janos years ago as a heavy smoker.

“I retired when the Berlin Wall came down,” he said. “Jasmin was done with it too. Then after 9/11, it was everybody back in the pool. Something more ambiguous, dangerous, and troubling began.” He turned to me. “Even you became involved. A job for Homeland Security, was it?” 

“Once, briefly.”

“I saw it in your file. Whatever you did was connected to a significant national threat. It likely helped prevent a lot of deaths, if that means anything to you.”

Semper fi, I thought darkly, the terror of it still echoing in my bones.

Colors began to spread along the horizon. The guitar in the kitchen had gone silent. Janos pulled a packet of something from his coat pocket. 

“This island,” he said. “You must know the story, how the Nazis occupied it during the war. When the German general wouldn’t surrender, Russia bombed it. They occupied it for a while. Later, the prisoner exchange happened here that brought Miklos Kis and his daughter to the U.S.” 

“Russell.”

“Yes, Russell. She had other aliases later.” He handed me the packet he was holding. “Take a look.”

 I removed a few dozen black and white snapshots. These were the ones Miklos, her father, had spoken of so proudly at the millennial New Years Eve dinner in Berkeley: Russell’s first photos, taken here on the island when she was six years old, with a Kodak Brownie camera borrowed from a GI. 

A barracks. A seascape. A round church. Her father against a wall. American soldiers in uniform playing cards at an outdoor table, speaking a language she had yet to understand. Each shot was considered and staged, posed and composed, the way they did back then: mid-range pictures of people or objects set in landscapes, no closeups. There was a self-portrait of little Jasmin in a dress before a mirror, looking down at the box camera she held waist-high. A boy on a bicycle. Racks of smoked herring in our village smokehouse with its three tall chimneys, here where I lived now with Sofia.

A refugee girl, torn from mother and home, beginning a work that would take her across the earth to an underground Syrian orphanage filled with abandoned and displaced children, as she had once been. 

It was my turn to choke up, blindsided by emotion next to a man I wanted to hate. How deeply I missed her. Seeing these photos here, in my site of displacement, which had also been hers when she took them, I realized that much of what I had loved in Russell was that she taught me how to be a stranger in the world. 

 I looked up at Janos. “Where did you get these?”

“Ginny, Miklos’s wife. I went to Berkeley to tell her what had happened to Jasmin. She gave them to me.” 

I put the last one back in the packet and handed it to him. 

“No, keep them,” he said. “You or your daughter may find them of interest, or some sentimental value.”

I murmured my thanks. 

“I am staying the night at the hotel in your village,” he said. “I leave for Hamburg in the morning.” 

He placed his hands on the arms of the chair as if readying to stand. Then he turned and looked at me. 

“One last thing. What would you say if I asked if you would be available for another assignment? If the need arose, I mean.”

“I would say fuck you.” 

Janos winced, then he smiled. “Okay. Now I can deduct my visit to the island as a business expense. American intelligence is run like a business. You have an expense account, you have a boss, you have targets to meet.”

Sofia appeared at the door. “Paul, my fingers hurt.” 

“Give your new guitar a break,” I said. 

Janos said, “I won’t be troubling you any more. Good luck.” 

He rose unsteadily. Sofia, seeing him struggle, came and took his arm. 

As they moved slowly off towards Janos’s car, they became silhouettes in the glare of the setting sun, and for a minute I couldn’t tell if they were walking away from me or towards me. 

* FIN *