But then Gabriel learned that it had been many months since Mohammad had seen his wife and children, who lived with his parents in Helmand province. Mohammad, who learned to speak English extremely well from a man who had worked with CIA advisers during the ten years of the futile Soviet invasion, had been recruited by the Army to train and work with American soldiers. He had been essentially unemployed since the 2001 invasion and the opportunity to work with the U.S. Army carried rich rewards. He was given a new skill, nursing, and a salary far richer than anything he had ever earned.
Gabriel lived in a building not far from the hospital. Constructed with cinder blocks in two months, the building was integrated, meaning that Army officers had most of the apartments, but Afghan civilians who worked for the Army as medical personnel, security guards, and translators also lived there. Gabriel’s place was neat and Spartan. He actually liked its feel of austerity and orderliness.
It took an enormous amount of planning and tension for Gabriel to pull together the nerve to invite Mohammad to the apartment for the first time. Once they were there, Gabriel served tea and cookies. He didn’t drink booze by choice and Mohammad didn’t drink it because of the rules of custom and religion. They faced each other over a glass coffee table, Gabriel on a hard white sofa and Mohammad in an ersatz Eames-style chair. In the background, the civilized voices of the NPR anchors spoke about the civil war in Syria and a new movie by Woody Allen.
Mohammad was a reader. Like almost every other Afghan associated with Americans, he owned a cell phone and an iPad. It often struck Gabriel as he walked in the streets of Kabul that people who had little or no food did have cell phones. Mohammad had a subscription to the New York Times and the Guardian on his iPad.
Their conversations were always easy, wide-ranging, and unrestrained except for one area, Gabriel’s love for men. Mohammad rarely mentioned his wife and never talked about sex. For his part, Gabriel found it difficult to shift his attention away from the slender man’s handsome face, the elegant gestures of his hands, and lucidity of his intelligent eyes. It didn’t escape Gabriel’s notice that in all the hours they spent together at the hospital, he never once saw Mohammad give even a furtive, much less leering, look at any of the female doctors and nurses.
On a hot Thursday night after Mohammad had left his apartment, Gabriel Hauser made a decision: the next evening when they were drinking tea in his apartment he would reach out for Mohammad’s slender, almost hairless hand and say simply, “I’m in love with you.” He was prepared to lose this alluring, gratifying friendship, and to risk a horrified reaction, or to provoke a beating, on the frail hope that this man might kiss him and slip out of his clothes to reveal a body that Gabriel was certain was sleek and sylph-like.
But that moment never came. It was on that Friday morning that the unctuous colonel asked, “Can I have a few words with you, Major Hauser?” and told him he was being removed from Afghanistan that night, sent to Germany, and dishonorably discharged from the Army. Three hours before reporting to Bagram Air Base for his flight out of the country, he met Mohammad in the shabby café that had become the place where they regularly took their breaks together. He told Mohammad he was being exiled from the country immediately. “Do you want to know why?” he asked Mohammad.
“I know why, Gabriel.”
Mohammad walked through the stifling, dusty Afghan evening to Gabriel’s apartment building. Gabriel’s duffel bag and soft suitcases were already in the lobby of the building, and the locks to the apartment door had already been changed. In the dark in the last twenty yards of their walk Mohammad’s soft right hand sought out and clasped Gabriel’s hand. Gabriel was overwhelmed by love for this man. And by hatred for the Army.
Cam was visibly distressed. When he was angry or disturbed, he repeatedly moved small objects from place to place. There were clean coffee mugs on the small dining table, and Cam was shifting them as if they were inverted cups in a shell game.
Even as he registered that Cam was upset and distracted, Gabriel kissed him on the shoulder as soon he entered the apartment. Cam had taken the responsibility for bringing the wounded Oliver to the office of their friend John Higgins, a gay veterinarian whose cozy animal hospital on East 84th Street was the most popular veterinary hospital on the East Side. John loved Oliver. The wonderful dog reciprocated that love. Even though Oliver knew that the brownstone where John lived and worked was the place where he was poked and pinched and sometimes put in the kennel for a weekend, he always bounded happily up the steps and barked joyously when he saw Dr. Higgins in his immaculate white coat.
“John almost vomited when I unwrapped Oliver’s blanket. He was upset; he asked what happened.”
“‘The fucking police,’ I told him. ‘Gabriel stitched up his wounds, but we need you to take a look at him and treat him here’. John said he would, and I left Oliver there.”
Always sensitive to Cam’s moods, Gabriel sensed that Cam’s obvious irritation was tied to something other than, or in addition to, the injuries to Oliver. “You’re upset, baby, aren’t you?”
Gabriel was right. Every muscle of Cam’s long and elegant body seemed to tense up. Cam began speaking rapidly, as if in the midstream of his thoughts. “After I left Oliver at John’s two men started walking beside me. They said they were agents from the NSA. They offered to show me their badges. I told them I didn’t have any spare change today.”
“I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
“No bother, Gabriel. I’m in it, hook, line, and sinker. I couldn’t shake them off. They were like seasoned panhandlers. They just continued walking with me, one to my left and the other to my right.”
Gabriel leaned against the refrigerator in the sleek, sun-filled kitchen. It pained him to see Cam’s nervous agitation and distress. Gabriel said again, “I’m sorry.”
“But listen, Gabriel. They told me things that truly scare me. About you.”
Internally Gabriel flushed. It was a powerful emotion of fear, concern, and inchoate shame. What now? he wondered.
“They handed me pages of e-mails between you and a man in Afghanistan named Mohammad Hussein. Lots of them read like love letters.”
“Cam, I told you I had a dear friend there. I even told you his name. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t intrude on your e-mails, Gabriel. I assumed you sent notes like postcards to him from time to time.”
“He was the only friend I had for two years.” Gabriel, still so physically anxious that he detected the quaver in his own voice, said, “He has a wife and kids.”
“Bullshit. You were betraying me, Gabriel. For six months you were telling him everything you were doing to get permission for him, not him and his family, to come here. You described your letters to the State Department, to the Secretary of the Army, telling them about all the heroic work Mohammad did for injured soldiers, the hours he spent just sitting with them. Christ, you even compared him to Walt Whitman spending two years in Union Army hospitals during the Civil War playing guardian angel to wounded soldiers. As if the people you sent these letters to even knew who Walt Whitman was. A gay poet trying to comfort wounded soldiers and falling in love with some of them.”
“I thought he was in danger in Afghanistan. I think he still is. After all, he’s devoted his life to working with Americans. He’s a marked man.”
“And what were you going to do if you got him here?”
“Set him up as an aide or a nurse in a hospital.”
“I don’t think so. I saw pictures of him. He is very attractive. Very. I read the e-mails. They weren’t about travel arrangements or finding work for him.”