It was thanks to her eldest son that in America a new man came into Mrs. Selmonosky’s life. She still thought at times about her late husband and their life together in Moldavia, but those memories were growing vague. One evening, while she was cooking, the doorbell rang. She opened the door to find her son Rustam standing there, with a policeman.
The policeman didn’t have much hair, but he had lots of freckles, big bright-blue eyes and his face was friendly, especially for a policeman. He said her eldest son had been given a ticket for urinating in a public place and, because the boy had insulted the officer who was writing out the ticket, the policeman had decided to arrest him. Before taking him down to the stationhouse, however, he wanted to meet the boy’s family.
The mother understood only half of what the policeman said, but Rustam translated the most important bits for her.
“Perhaps I could come in,” the policeman said. “It’s easier to talk that way. By the way, my name’s Mike.”
She let the policeman in. Seated at the kitchen table, he told her he was of Irish descent and that the Irish were renowned for their hospitality and that he had the feeling that this was a very hospitable family as well.
Mrs. Selmonosky took the hint and offered the policeman a glass of vodka.
“I wouldn’t suppose you have gin?” the agent asked. “And no whisky either?” Mrs. Selmonosky shook her head.
The policeman settled for vodka. He told her he had been working for the Philadelphia Police Department for thirty years, and that he had seen the city go downhill.
“It’s not just the economy; there are simply too few cops out on the street,” he said.
Mrs. Selmonosky nodded and wondered when he was going to leave.
“This neighborhood is dangerous,” the policeman said. “Last week I arrested a drug dealer and a prostitute just down the street. Lots of black folks around here. Tenements. What do you expect? I don’t have anything against black folks, I’m no racist, but the fact is that the Negro male is a natural-born criminal. As a policeman, I can’t ignore the facts.”
He held up his glass to indicate that it was time for Mrs. Selmonosky to refill it.
“The prostitute was all ready to be taken to the car, handcuffs on,” the policeman said, “and she began to…”
He lowered his voice and whispered in Mrs. Selmonsky’s ear: “blow me.” It was a phrase she did not recognize, and she called in her eldest son from the living room, who reluctantly translated it for her.
“Listen, we Irish are a warmhearted people,” the policeman said. “When our sex organ has been in the mouth of a woman, then that woman is family of ours, then that woman is a little bit Irish as well. And when it comes to family, you go out of your way to help. You don’t leave your family out in the cold. So I told that girl: “You go on with your work this evening, sweetheart. We’ll forget all about this; you and I are family now.”
The policeman raised his glass, and Mrs. Selmonsky filled it for him.
“Yes,” he said, “and now about your son and that public urination.” He took Mrs. Selmonosky’s hand and caressed it tenderly. “You can be my family too,” he said softly. He looked almost shy.
Mrs. Selmonosky had not understood most of what he said, but she understood this. She closed the kitchen door and became a part of the policeman’s family and, according to him, of the Irish nation as a whole.
From that day on he came back, once or twice a week, depending on his duty roster. Sometimes he brought presents along for the boys or something nice for Mrs. Selmonosky herself. Often they were things he had confiscated elsewhere. The children were to call him Uncle Mike, which only the eldest boy did, for just like his mother he had a natural respect for authority.
Vodka and oral sex were all he wanted. That worried Mrs. Selmonosky. The fear of stinking, which she had suffered from for a long time in Moldavia, returned, and it was more powerful than her fear of the agent or the state he represented.
One afternoon she asked him straight out, in her broken English: “Don’t you want me, everything?” But he said: “No, oh no, I have a wife at home and she wouldn’t like that. She’s my second, she’s from the Philippines. She’s an excellent housekeeper, the way all Filipinos are.”
When the policeman was gone, Mrs. Selmonosky called her eldest son into the kitchen.
“Rustam,” she said. “Can you still remember your father?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did he ever say anything bad about me?”
The boy shook his head.
“Take your time, think about it,” Mrs. Selmonosky said.
“I don’t think so,” Rustam said. “At least, I can’t remember anything like that.”
“I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want you to answer me honestly,” she said. Her son sat down at the kitchen table, in the chair where the policeman usually sat.
“Do I stink?” she asked.
“No, mama,” her son said.
She stood up, walked over to Rustam and lifted her skirt. She pressed his face against her black panties, which she had bought for a couple of dollars at the market in Philadelphia.
“Do I stink?” she asked again.
“No,” said her son. His voice was muffled.
She pressed his head even more firmly to her crotch, her eyes grew moist, it seemed as though she was trying to push the boy’s head back into the same hole from which it had once appeared.
“Do I stink, Rustam?” she asked. “I want you to tell me honestly.” Her voice was shaking with emotion.
“No, mama,” her son said. She could barely hear him.
At last, she let him go.
“He doesn’t want me,” she said. “I disgust him. Only my mouth is good enough for him.”
As she spoke these words - she didn’t have the feeling she’d been speaking to her son, for she was speaking to no one in particular – it felt to her as though all the pain in the world had accumulated in her body. In her womb, from which two children had come.
“Mama,” Rustam said. “You shouldn’t say things like that. You don’t stink. I just smelled you. Nothing stinks at all.”
Now he was crying too. She couldn’t stand to see him cry. Sometimes she heard him in the middle of the night, crying in his little room. It cut her to the quick. Whenever she heard him crying, she would put her hands over her ears, and if he went on for a long time, she put in earplugs.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’ll be a credit to the name Selmonosky. I’m sure of that. All I have to do is wait, right here at this kitchen table, and someday people will say: ‘Are you Rustam Selmonosky’s mother?’ Then everything will be forgotten, all the things we’ve been through, all the stench. I’m sure of it, I don’t doubt it for a moment, and I’m not worried about a thing.”
Rustam looked at his mother in horror. The smell of her body, and particularly the more intimate parts of it, was still in his nostrils, and an overpowering rage took hold of him. Perhaps the rage was aimed at his mother initially, but quickly the rage turned against those others, the people at the boxing club, the pupils at the school he had attended, in Moldavia and the United States, the teachers he’d had, the friends he hadn’t had, the ones who had turned down his friendship as though it were a slice of pizza they’d didn’t want. The rage developed into the desire to make his mother’s dream come true. He would be a credit to the name Selmonosky. The rage became an ambition, perhaps the most gruesome ambition by which a person had ever been seized. The ambition was too big for Rustam’s not particularly stocky frame, and seemed out of synch with a sixteen-year-old. It burned in him like a fever that would have killed anyone else.
First he tried to realize his ambition through ice hockey, mostly because he already belonged to a hockey club, but when he discovered that that would not be the key to his success, he turned to history. A historian would be a credit to his mother and make her forget all the humiliations.
He changed his first name to Harry, after Truman, but also because Harry Selmonosky sounded better than Rustam Selmonosky. He entered a contest sponsored by a little university in the state of Missouri: “Write an essay about recent American history. Maximum number of words: 4,000.” Harry Selmonosky didn’t even make it to the finals. Then he entered another contest, sponsored this time by a not-so-little university in the state of North Carolina. “Write an essay about what historical awareness means to you. Maximum number of words: 6,000.” Many of the contestants received a prize or an honorable mention, but Selmonosky received neither a prize nor an honorable mention.
Unlike his father, who was not much in the way of looks, or his mother, who was definitely not ugly but who could never have become a fashion model, Harry Selmonosky grew to become a quite handsome young man.
And he began categorizing the people he met into those who could help him further his ambition and those who would only get in his way. There was no middle ground. Those who were not for him, were against him.
After none of his historical essays had received an honorable mention or even been published, he gave up history. History would have to get along without him.
After reading Herr’s Dispatches, he decided it was going to be journalism. He left Philadelphia, attended journalism school in another city and came home each weekend to see his mother and bring her up to date on his progress. She was still receiving visits from the policeman, who sometimes brought friends along these days as well.
Harry Selmonosky was a reasonably good student. Sometimes he slept with a woman, because she was lusted after by a student he considered to be his rival, or because she was on the editorial staff of a university newspaper.
He submitted stories, about car accidents, shoplifting, about abuse in an orphanage and an interview with a not particularly talented but certainly commercially successful artist, to various newspapers and magazines. His articles were never published. When he called to ask whether they’d read it yet, the most he received from the editor on desk duty was a reply along the lines of: “Oh yeah, but that’s not our kind of thing.” Sometimes the editors simply slammed the phone down on the hook.
Almost ten months after graduating, he succeeded in getting an article published in a small Pennsylvania newspaper. It was an article about a judge who’d been accused of taking bribes.
For the same paper he wrote another piece about a soldier who, after coming home from Iraq, developed a drinking problem and caused a fatal traffic accident. Selmonosky had talked to both the family of the drunken soldier and that of the victims of the accident, and the editor of the local paper praised him with the words: “This is what people want to read, Selmonosky.”
From that day on he told people he was a freelance journalist, and began saving for a trip to Iraq. Iraq had been the final resting place for many Americans; for him, it would be the start of his march to victory. His article about the drunken soldier had even resulted in a letter to the editor: “a fantastic article by Harry Salmonokowitz.” But because the editor of the letters column hadn’t even bother to correct his surname, which the writer had misspelled, after a few joyous hours Selmonosky began to fear that the letter was meant to be sarcastic. And he decided not to show it to his mother.
His mother mostly complained about Uncle Mike and his friends. “The only thing they’re interested in is vodka and my mouth. Is that the only thing about me that’s of any value?”
Harry couldn’t stand to listen anymore.
“Once I get to Iraq,” he told his mother, “the big papers will run my stories too.”
But his mother didn’t understand. “Isn’t this place bad enough for you?”
During a panel discussion on the future of journalism at Columbia University, he met a woman who worked for the foreign desk at the Washington Post. She had been on the panel, she hadn’t said much, but her words had made an impression on Selmonosky, not so much because of what she said but because of the resolute way she said it. Afterwards, he went up to talk to her. He introduced himself and said he’d like to ask her a few questions. She answered his questions and when he ran out of things to ask, his final question was: “Would you like to go out and get something to eat?”
Her name was Dorothy Pickering, she was in her late forties and had two daughters, both of whom were at college.
Dorothy Pickering’s smile was faint but friendly and, in some strange way, even a bit provocative. Harry Selmonosky felt encouraged by this and pressed the point.
“I don’t feel like eating,” she said. “But maybe later on we could meet up for a drink. Give me your number, I’ll text you.”
To Harry Selmonosky’s amazement, later that evening she sent him a text message. “A drink?” That was all it said. But Harry Selmonosky cheered inside, he felt like he had won a battle, perhaps even more than that. This was his way in to the Washington Post. This was his breakthrough. He would convince Pickering of his talents. She was already convinced of his talent, otherwise she wouldn’t have agreed to see him again.
They met at a hotel bar, where he asked her a thousand questions about the Washington Post and at an appropriate moment, for life had brought him a certain social facility, whether she would be interested in reading some of his articles.
“Of course,” she said. “I’d love to.”
When the bar closed, Dorothy Pickering asked whether he would like to have another drink; because most of the other bars in the neighborhood were already closed or getting ready to close, they ended up in her hotel room.
“The mini-bar is well-filled,” she said.
Sitting on her bed, Selmonosky told her about his plans to leave for Iraq soon and asked whether the Washington Post might be interested in publishing articles he wrote in Iraq. Of course, they had their own correspondents there, he knew that, but he was going to do something different. Something no one else had done before.
She ran her hand down his back and, instead of talking about Iraq, she said: “You’re so good-looking.”
Good-looking was one thing Dorothy Pickering was not. Her eyes were too far apart, she used too much makeup, and if you looked closely you could see little bald spots on her head, as though a bird had landed there and roughly plucked out whole patches to build its nest.
Dorothy Pickering didn’t wait to hear what else Selmonosky had to say. She pressed her lips to his. He opened his mouth and thought, this is for a good cause, this is for Iraq. I won’t regret this. She started unbuttoning his shirt and he thought about Iraq, and as he caressed her floppy breasts he was still thinking about Iraq, and when he penetrated her he saw his article printed big in the Washington Post.
When it was over, they lay there. She ran her hand over his chest and after a few minutes she said: “I hope you don’t mind, but I going to have to ask you to leave. I want to call my husband, and I’d prefer to be alone when I do that.”
He said he didn’t mind at all, in fact he understood completely. The next day he sent her all his published articles, and all his unpublished articles as well, and just to be sure the historical essays for which he had never won a prize or received an honorable mention.
One week later, when he still hadn’t heard anything, he called her. He had to repeat his name, but then she remembered. “Oh, of course, yes,” she said. And had she received his articles? “Yes,” she said. “It all looks very promising.” If he happened to be passing through town sometimes, he should give her a ring. They could go out for coffee.
He went on preparing for his trip to Iraq and even managed to get an article published in a little Florida newspaper. It was about a cab driver from Fort Lauderdale who had won the lottery and married a fashion model who was addicted to heroin and ran off with his money. Most memorable quote: “You know, heroin only makes her more beautiful. That’s why I didn’t see it coming.”
He sent that article to Dorothy Pickering too, and the week after that he took the train to Washington. At the station he called her, but got her voicemail. Trying to sound as casual as possible, he said: “Hi, this is Harry Selmonosky. I’m passing through town. Feel like going out for a drink tonight?”
She returned his call within half an hour. “I can’t make it tonight,” she said. “But we could catch a coffee after lunch.”
They agreed to meet at a café not far from Union Station. Concerning his articles she said: “Don’t give up, just keep at it.” And about his trip to Iraq she said: “If there’s something interesting in there, there’s a good chance we’ll publish it. We don’t work much with freelancers, but it’s been happening more frequently lately.” And then, right away, she asked: “Are you staying at a hotel here?”
“No,” Selmonosky said.
She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to be back at the office at four, but I know a hotel close by.”
They took a taxi to the Holiday Inn. She let him pay for the room.
Dorothy Pickering lay down on the bed. She took off her jewelry and said: “I want you to take my clothes off. At least, if you want to.”
After he had removed her clothes, she’d had to help him with that a few times, she said, running her fingers through his hair: “I’d really like it if you licked me.”
The first time he hadn’t take a particularly good look at her pudendum. There was almost no hair on it. She had a bad case of shaving rash and her labia were so big that they reminded him of the vacuum-packed chicken filets from the grocery where his mother worked, the ones she sometimes brought home because she got a fifteen percent discount. Sometimes even fifty percent, once the use-by date had expired.
Halfway through the licking he stopped and asked: “When I’m in Iraq, shall I send the articles directly to you? Or would it be better to send them to someone else?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “do that,” and pushed his head back into the midst of her almost hairless pudenda.
Whether Dorothy Pickering had an orgasm, Selmonosky wasn’t sure, but in any event she made a lot of noise. So much noise, in fact, that he almost wondered whether she was being sarcastic. As though she were making fun of him by producing so much noise, as though she didn’t really mean it.
Once she had come, he assumed, for asking about it seemed impolite to him, she remained lying on the bed for a few minutes, petting his stomach absentmindedly. “I have to get back to the office,” she said. “It would be better for us not to leave the hotel together. Will you stay here for a little bit?”
She dressed in the bathroom, with the door closed. Selmonosky remained lying on the bed, naked. He was thinking about Iraq.
When she came out of the bedroom she kissed him and said: “I hope I see you again soon.”
He remained lying on the bed for at least half an hour, unable to move. Then he got dressed. He walked down the street to an internet café and booked his flight to Iraq. Five days before departure, just to be sure, he traveled to Washington one more time. During the weeks before he had actually succeeded in getting an article published in an Arizona weekly. It was an interview with the spokesman for a minor Christian sect. The sect felt that the American military setbacks in Iraq could be blamed on the homosexuals in America. Most memorable quote: “Hitler was only out to liquidate the Jews, but the homosexuals are out to get all of mankind.”
He told Dorothy Pickering about this article when they met at the same café close to Union Station, but she didn’t seem particularly interested and even before he could finish his cappuccino she said: “Let’s go to the Holiday Inn.”
Once again she let him pay for the room, and in the room she forced him to lick her for a long time. The shaving rash seemed to have gotten worse. Between bouts of licking he told her about his plans: “I’m flying Royal Jordanian to Amman and then I’m heading to Baghdad from there.”
But she only tapped him playfully on the back of his head, as though it were a basketball she was trying to dribble, back in the direction of her crotch.
Five minutes later he resumed the conversation. His face was dripping with her juices and his own saliva. “I still don’t know where I’m going to stay in Baghdad, but I have contacts with a reliable interpreter who also works as a fixer.”
Once again, she playfully tapped the back of his head.
When they were finished, she took a box of Leonidas bonbons from her bag. “Here,” she said, “emergency rations, for if you get hungry in Baghdad.”
He beamed. This was a good sign. He kissed her on both cheeks and then gave her a long kiss on the lips as well, even though the odor coming from her mouth disgusted him.
“I think I’ll be able to send you my first article within a couple of days after I get there,” he said.
And she replied: “I’m looking forward to it, but now I’ve got to get back to the office fast.”
The evening before departure he said goodbye to his mother and brother. Uncle Mike was there as well. Uncle Mike said: “Take care of yourself.” His brother didn’t say a thing, and his mother only repeated what she had already said on a few occasions: “Isn’t this place bad enough for you?”
He flew by way of Amman to Baghdad. His bag, which contained a flak jacket, some clothes and books, never got to Baghdad. A taxi driver told him that a lot of baggage was stolen at Baghdad Airport; Iraqis, after all, were poor. He could forget about ever seeing the bag again. Fortunately he still had his computer and satellite phone.
Harry Selmonosky took a room at a hotel in the Red Zone where other journalists stayed as well. In the evenings they played poker, and he was invited to join them.
“What is it, don’t you guys go out after news?”
“There’s nothing happening around here anymore,” the journalists said. “Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, those are the place to be now.”
When he had gambled away half his funds, he stopped playing poker.
Through his interpreter he had come into contact with a local acrobat who had worked for the only Iraqi circus under Saddam Hussein. The acrobat was now trying to obtain grants and donations in order to revive the circus, which owed its demise to the international sanctions and the war. He had already requested a grant from the Iraqi government and from an emergency fund established by the American government, but all his applications had been turned down. Most memorable quote: “People think that as long as there’s not enough electricity and people are being blown up by bombs every day, a circus is not important. But they’re wrong: what Iraq needs is a well-run circus. Circus people never think along sectarian lines; the only thing they care about is the next performance.”
Despite the fact that no one had ever written about this acrobat or his circus, Dorothy Pickering told him in an email: “Very nice piece, but not what we’re looking for right now.” To which she added a P.S.: “Whenever I close my eyes, I see your head between my legs.”