Chapter Three

Abigail was never, never going to get used to the burqa.

She was wedged into a backseat of a Toyota that looked like it could pop open from a number of different angles, but the women on either side of her seemed to trust the door latches with almost a religious faith, or perhaps a fatalistic indifference.

There was the look to one side you made without moving your head, trying to see along the edge of the netted opening, and then there was the full-body swivel it took to open up your field of vision; the heavy cloth of the burqa still tried to stay in place given that you were sitting on the bulk of it, so your swivel would go largely unnoticed, nor would it actually shift the eye-slot very much for all your trouble.

So she tried to satisfy herself with the view straight ahead, in between the two young men driving and looking stolidly straight ahead. Their Urdu was fluid and idiomatic and incomprehensible; Abigail's was serviceable, and put her in a unique position among Americans, but here in Pakistan it left her as ignorant as a State Department ambassador.

Three years she had spent mostly in these mountains, where she felt, quite frankly, safer than she did in the sprawling low-slung cities of the northwest, Kohat, Dir, Peshawar. The local government and Bhutto Women University had given her opportunities to meet with people her male counterparts never could have, and a perspective that, while limited to a burqa's eye-slot at times, often unveiled views that looked out across a landscape as big as the nearby Himalayas, let alone the Hindu Kush.

What had led her here was a quixotic quest that she still wondered at to this day. She was looking for an old high school classmate. She was still working on what she wanted to ask him if they were to meet, and it was not to accuse or defend or blame, but to understand. Why it was so important for her to understand what Kyle had done was something Abigail was still working on, even as it had become in a public way a path to awards and honors and respect, even if the respect was somewhat in question where she was spending her time these days. She might feel a little more respect for her accomplishments if she was "back home," but she would also be farther away from the answer to her question, a question which her own self-respect drove her to keep asking.

It was in turning the page of a magazine, and seeing a face, bearded, smiling, wearing a pakol hat, a leathery tan, and a pullover v-neck sweater that she distinctly remembered from a drama club party their senior year, now worn and dusty but the dark green knit and white and black trim stained, yet distinctly the same as that memory. Kyle Foster had become Sulaiman al-Idris, and perhaps more importantly, although a mere picture can be deceiving: he had become happy. His face was filled with joy and delight and was lifted to the light of the sun. The article was about the darkness and doubt surrounding the story of Sulainman al-Idris, but what Abigail could not get out of her head, even ten or twelve years later, was how sad and angry and bitter Kyle Foster had been, brilliant but deeply unhappy, and how happy he appeared to be now.

Now, of course, was more than three years ago. Today, Kyle or Sulaiman might be dead, some said so. And even Abigail's quest for the photographer from Reuters who took the picture had still not borne fruit, the location where the picture was taken still unknown to her other than "Pakistan" in a caption, which meant it could well have been just inside Afghanistan, Kashmir, even Tajikistan. Somewhere in these mountains, there was a story about how Kyle had not just become Sulaiman, but how he had found happiness, or at least that was the story she was already writing in her mind.

In pursuit of that story, still unfinished, she had written dozens of others, garnered a pakol hatful of awards, and found a career and focus in learning the language and the folkways and some of the personages of this strange yet altogether too well known land for Americans. We understand it about as well as New Yorkers understand Iowa, she thought. But her motivation underneath it all was still her desire to find Kyle Foster and ask him, "How did you become that smiling face in the photo?" What the CIA or the Army wanted to ask him was probably a bit different than that.

She tugged hard at the burqa as the vehicle lifted up in a bounce over yet another deep rut in the road, giving her some freedom to at least turn in one direction and pull the eye-slot with her. Sometimes, you had to settle for small increases in what you could see, and not worry about what you couldn't quite reach. Sometimes.