The winter guest at the Salvation Army

The profile of an African girl child dancing
Her pose bewilders and confuses me
Is she happy? Is she sad?
What if she was within reach?

- By Abigail George

From AfricanWriter.com

Photo Credit: Lomax, Alan. "African American Children Playing Singing Games, Eatonville, Florida." June 1935. Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip, Library of Congress.

In Memoriam: Dennis Brutus

I just learned that South African poet Dennis Brutus died last week, Saturday, December 26th. During his lifetime, Brutus made incredible contributions to the fight against apartheid, put his own freedom, health, and life at risk in doing so. The New York Times printed an article on Brutus here. NPR's program "Fresh Air" remembers the life and achievements of Brutus in this interview from 1986.

Here is one of Brutus's poem delivered while he was in Venezuela for the eighth meeting of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defence of Humanity and the World Forum for Alternatives, October 18, 2008.

There will come a time
There will come a time we believe
When the shape of the planet
and the divisions of the land
Will be less important;
We will be caught in a glow of friendship
a red star of hope
will illuminate our lives
A star of hope
A star of joy
A star of freedom

Life Imitating Art

A December 29, 2009, story published by NPR indicates that Iran is close to clinching a deal to clandestinely import 1,350 tons of purified uranium ore from Kazakhstan, according to an intelligence report obtained by The Associated Press. Diplomats said the assessment was heightening international concern about Tehran's nuclear activities.

My novel, The Lion and the Sun, includes a prologue that tells the story of an early attempt to determine whether Kazakhstan had stores of highly enriched uranium (HEU) at the time of the Soviet Union's fall. They did, and a secret project was executed to bring the HEU out of Kazakhstan and secure it in the US.

 

Prologue to "The Lion and the Sun"

Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, March 2, 1993

A heavy spring rain was slashing across the wide sidewalk as Conte ran from the protection of the hotel entryway to the idling taxi. He was clutching the hood of his jacket with one hand to keep the rain from running down his neck, and reaching out for the taxi door with the other hand, trying to keep his balance on the wet pavement. He could see the driver inside watching him while eating what looked like sunflower seeds from a paper cone.
Although Conte had prevailed upon the taciturn hotel receptionist to call the taxi and instruct the dispatcher where to take him, the driver, a man with pronounced Mongolian features and hair that appeared to have been trimmed around a bowl, turned in his seat and gave Conte a questioning look.
This guy looks like one of the Three Stooges, Conte thought. Who was it? Moe -- Moe with a nasty scar from the edge of his right eye to his earlobe.
“Embankment Street, 158,” Conte said in Russian.
The driver nodded, said “Da,” and shifted into gear. A pair of felt dice wobbled from the rearview mirror as the driver made a U-turn, bumped over a curbing, and headed down the street.
Conte stared ahead, trying to make out signs at cross streets, but the glare off the glistening roadway, the lack of street lights, and the speed at which the taxi was traveling, despite the darkness and wet road, made it nearly impossible. Conte just hoped the driver could see better than he could, but at the moment, it appeared that the driver was more interested in checking him out than in watching the road. Fortunately, traffic was light to nonexistent.
“You are not Russian,” the driver said in heavily accented English.
Conte looked up at the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “No.”
“American?”
“Canadian,” Conte said. That’s what his identity papers said, and he was sticking to it.
The driver made an abrupt turn heading south towards the river, his headlights illuminating a stand of ghostly silver birch. Conte braced himself against the door. “Get there alive, please,” he said.
The driver looked at him and smiled, revealing a mouth sorely in need of preventive dentistry. “Canadians are okay,” he said. “Australians are better. Big drinkers,” he said.
Conte managed a half-hearted smile.
“You are a tourist?”
“Visiting friends,” Conte said. More accurately, meeting a total stranger. In fact, Conte was meeting with a former Russian Navy sub commander who had information about weapons grade uranium allegedly stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, some 20 miles outside the city.
“You like Ust-Kamenogorsk -- is nice city, yes?”
Conte paused before answering. Was the driver serious in thinking that this grimy, polluted, industrial hellhole in northeastern Kazakhstan was beautiful?
The driver noticed Conte’s hesitation. “Was better before Russians come.”
The trees along the wide street thrashed about in the wind and rain and the taxi went into brief skids as the driver down shifted at stop signs and coasted through, rather than stopping.
The driver pointed to the left towards the end of the block, “Is here,” he said.
“Drive past,” Conte said. He saw the driver’s eyes looking at him in the rearview mirror.
Conte surveyed the dingy apartment building as they drove slowly past. His contact was reported to be living in a corner flat on the second floor. There was a light on in the flat.
“Go around the corner,” Conte ordered the driver. “Park here.”
The driver did was he was told, while constantly glancing up into his rearview mirror, clearly suspicious.
Conte reached over the seat and gave the driver one hundred dollars in twenty dollar bills. “Wait for me, and there’ll be another five bills for you,” he said.
The driver wet his fingers and rubbed the money between thumb and forefinger, counted it, and then nodded to Conte.
Conte had to hope that the small fortune he was offering as an incentive to wait would keep the driver there. If it didn’t, he could be in serious trouble.

#

The wide, windswept street was deserted except for the leaves that raced pell-mell along the curbing and flew up in desperate whirls, as if reaching for the branches from which they’d fallen. Conte turned his head away from the bite of the wind and made his way towards the apartment building on the corner of Embankment Street. Every once in a while he glanced up to see if the light in the second-floor flat was still on.
The door to the apartment complex was open and led into a dingy, dimly-lit stairwell to his left and a hallway ahead that seemed to lead to the back of the building. Garbage containers shoved into a niche in the hallway were full to overflowing.
As he started up the stairs, he heard men’s voices coming from the back of the hall. There was an urgency to their hushed exchange. He stopped and listened. They were speaking Russian. He caught parts of the exchange; just partial phrases, but it was enough for him to know that things had gone wrong – terribly wrong. He moved cautiously along the hall towards the sounds.
There, at the back of the building, in an alley bracketed by fallow garden plots, was a van, illuminated by a pale porch light, towards which a man was being pushed and dragged. A broad line of red ran from his forehead to his chin. There was duct tape over his mouth.
Conte could make out four men, two standing near the building smoking, and two dragging the man to the van. When they got to the van, the doors slid open and another man inside the van helped pull the man in. One of the men got in after him and the other got in the passenger seat. The two men, who had been watching, turned and started toward the stairwell.
Conte moved quickly back down the hall towards the front of the building. He brushed by the garbage containers and a can lid went clattering to the concrete. He heard the men shout and then heard their footsteps running his way.
Conte looked right and left. If he went straight out, they’d surely spot him and would not hesitate to shoot. If he went up the stairs, he might be trapped. He might have a chance if he surprised them. He squeezed into the garbage container niche and pressed against the abutment. As he did so, a ragged, but well-fed cat dashed from behind the containers and headed down the hall. He heard one of the men curse the cat and from the yowl the animal made, probably kick it. Then the men stood laughing and cursing some more and Conte moved to the door, left the building, and keeping to the shadows, moved quickly to the place where his taxi was supposed to be.
The taxi was there, but the driver wasn’t in it. Conte looked around desperately and spotted the driver bracing himself against a tree while he peed, trying to aim his stream in the flow of the wind. Conte hissed at him in crude Russian and the driver zipped his fly and sauntered over wiping his hands along the outsides of his pants.

#

Back at the hotel, Conte again told the taxi driver to wait. Inside, he told the receptionist that he’d be leaving early in the morning. He’d paid in advance, in cash, so she just shrugged.
“Leave key in room,” she instructed. And then, seemingly as an afterthought, “Maybe you leave something for maid?”
Conte resisted pointing out that there had been no maid. Instead, he asked where he might find a good nightclub.
The receptionist sighed, as if to say, ‘men,’ and then handed Conte a dog-eared brochure from the desk and pointing to a photo, said, “Aloha, on Solnechnaya Street.”
As he turned to leave, the receptionist thrust out her hand. Conte handed her back the brochure.
When he got to his room, Conte put on all the warm clothes he could get into. He left his suitcase on the chair next to the bed. He removed his multipurpose military pocket tool from his toiletries kit and shoved it in his boot. He left the kit on the grimy sink. He peed, then walked out of the bathroom and looked around. Satisfied that the room still looked lived in, he left.
Conte wasn’t sure how long his erstwhile contact could hold out against his captors’ interrogation techniques, but he gave himself three-to-four hours before they’d extract the information they needed and trace him to his hotel. Ust-Kamenogorsk wasn’t on anyone’s ‘hot travel spots,’ unless by hot, you meant radioactively.

#

It took Conte three days to get out of Kazakhstan and another day and half to get back to the US. Tony Scigliasi did the extraction -- somewhat unusual now that Scigliasi was a station chief. But Conte and Tony had been friends for a while, and it was Tony who planned the Ust mission.
Scigliasi seemed amused by Conte’s description of the ‘nightclub’ the hotel receptionist had recommended. The sad little bar the receptionist had termed a nightclub had no dance floor, no music, and a TV still showing last winter’s snow. Conte had made a local call from the bar phone, and then made his way past the restroom and out the back. He used the pocket map he’d been given in his mission kit to locate his pick-up point near the Irtysh bridge.
When Scigliasi and the two men with him had Conte in their vehicle, a late model Moskvich 412 of indeterminate color, and were barreling west across the bridge, Tony, in the back sat with Conte, asked what Conte had seen during his aborted rendezvous. He had him go over his story several times.
After Conte had described the scene at the apartment building for what seemed like the umpteenth time, Scigliasi asked about the hotel.
“Did you see any evidence that your room had been searched?” Scigliasi asked.
“No,” Conte answered. “It wasn’t even cleaned.”
“Didn’t you have a maid?”
“No maid, no room service, no TV, no seat on the commode,” Conte said.
“And you didn’t notice anyone hanging around the hotel who might’ve been watching you?”
“No. Why? Was my cover blown?”
Scigliasi sat back and stared out his side window momentarily. Then turning to Conte, he said, “Probably not, Dan.”
Conte stared at Scigliasi. “Probably not?”
Scigliasi shrugged. “Well, our man in Ust was outed, and he’s just one in a long line of our agents who’ve been betrayed. Our KGB friend Kryuchkov seems to be having a field day, and it’s no accident.”
“What’s that mean, Tony?”
“It means we have a Russian mole in the Company, and if our guess is right, you know the son of a bitch.”

Sans Pericardium

I was trying to give my heart to my cardiologist, let’s call him Dr. Sing.
“Why would I want your heart?” he asked in his soft, singsongy voice, a little smile on his round, brown face.
“For research,” I said, holding out my hands as if they were holding the very heart I was offering.
“I’m not doing any research,” Dr. Sing protested. “Besides, there are plenty of hearts to be had if one is to be looking.”
“But my heart has been without a pericardium for over forty years now,” I said. “Surely that means something to medical researchers.”
I had chronic pericarditis as a young man and my pericardium had to be removed. Without going into all the gory details, think of the pericardium as a partially inflated balloon into which the heart is shoved. The balloon, the pericardium, forms around the heart and acts (I’m guessing here) as a kind of shock absorber. Pericarditis is an inflammation of the pericardium. It can have a variety of causes. Mine was caused by an unknown and very persistent virus. After many episodes, my pericardium had begun to constrict the heart and so had to be removed. Think of peeling a peach; a peach that has a lot of arteries attached to it.
“Medical researchers are very much acquainted with pericarditis,” Dr. Sing said. “In fact, last week I had a man come in with chest pain and as soon as I listened to his chest I knew what it was.”
“You heard a rub?” I said, showing off my knowledge of the so-called pericardial friction rub caused by the outer and inner walls of the inflamed pericardium rubbing against each other.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Sing said, handing me a slip of paper. “This is an order for a chest X-Ray.”
I took the X-Ray order without looking at it. I’d derailed my argument by trying to show off. I tried to get back to it. “Yes, there’s a lot of information on pericarditis, but what about information on what happens to the heart when it has to get along without a pericardium?”
“Well, your heart seems to have done just fine,” Dr. Sing said. “Look at your stress test.”
The stress test involved hooking me up to an EKG and having me run on a treadmill, on which Dr. Sing kept increasing the incline until I was about to fall off the back. When I quit, breathing hard and drenched in sweat, Dr. Sing said, “I’m disappointed.”
“Why?” I asked. “I went longer than I did last year. What was it, eleven minutes? More?”
“Well, I had a man do almost twenty minutes,” Dr. Sing said. “Of course he was half your age and a tri-athlete,” he said, chuckling.
He was beginning to get on my nerves.
I was seeing Dr. Sing because I had been experiencing a recurrence of upper back pain, mostly under my left scapular. I have had chest and back pain on and off ever since my pericardiectomy in 1965. My doctors over the years had explained it as very probably inflammation of pericardial tissue remaining around major arteries.
“They can’t get everything,” one doctor told me, squeezing my shoulder reassuringly.
“Ouch!” I replied. When I asked about why I got back pain from inflamed tissue around heart arteries, I was told the pain was “referred.”
I learned that referred pain happens when nerve fibers from one region of the anatomy converge with nerve fibers from another region at the spinal cord. Nerve impulses apparently jump the track and cause, for example, that horrible, aching pain that runs down the arm during a heart attack.
But I digress. After all these years of living without a pericardium, I was wondering why we have it in the first place. Maybe, I thought, it’s vestigial, like the appendix. If so, removing it would probably have about as much impact as removing the appendix, although recently, medical researchers may have changed their mind about the usefulness of the appendix, describing it as a little factory that manufactures “good bacteria.” Surely the pericardium has a useful function, as well. Maybe it manufactures good acne. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what happens when a person has to get along for most of his or her life without one?
I started researching the question of what effect removal of the pericardium might have and came across an abstract in the International Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine that began, “The removal of the pericardium does not appear to have…” This could be what I was looking for. I brought up the article itself and read on. “The removal of the pericardium does not appear to have any deleterious effect in the normal dog.” Well, that was a start, wasn’t it? What about the bovine?

Earth

I have despaired of ever finding words
To describe my feelings about nature and the earth
About the beauty of waterfalls, trees, and birds
The wonder of a plant’s dying away and its rebirth
As the seasons ebb and flow

To hold a seed and see how it will grow
Into the towering cedar rising from the forest
Like a sentinel amid the lush ferns on forest floor
Oh miracle, that with such majesty have we been blessed
And miracles abound as we our earth explore

If only I could find the words these feelings to convey
But they elude me, leave me open-mouthed in wonder
Speechless in a quiet glade, or gazing rapt across a blue-green bay
As roiling clouds gather black against the sky and thunder
Reverberates against my chest like a beating heart

I am struck dumb, have not the art
Of expression, exposition, or refrain
How can I not love thee Earth, birth mother
Your rich womb my sole domain
Mother, sister, father, brother

All that I am and would be
Bound to you by all I cherish
I cannot speak, but you hear me
My beating heart sings my wish
Hold me, hold me, hold me

I try to think of something comforting to say

I know this will be a hard time for you
I wish I could think of something to say
I wish there were something I could do
Some small truth I could convey

That might provide some modest comfort
That might ease in some small way
The ache and emptiness in your heart
That might help you through this cold December day

Sadly, nothing comes to mind
I can only hope that altogether
You will be a family and will find
That in each other’s love there is a tether

That will bind you each to each
And whether in silence or in prayer
Your communal knowledge will surely teach
That whomsoever is not there is there

For Maureen