Her Own Devices

About Being in This Writer’s Book

This is Anna Burmeister, but some of you might know me by another name. We’ll get to that. And as much as I didn’t want to, here I am introducing a novel someone I don’t know wrote about me. In fact, it’s the second one he put me in, as I recently found out. Let me tell you, being fictionalized is strange. Just hope it never happens to you, because you’ll have a lot of explaining to do if anyone ever finds out.

I’ve never told anyone about the time when I could have prevented a foolish act that led to a tragedy, and I’m not about to spill those beans now. But after living with the consequences for five years I moved on so I thought until my Vati emailed me from Basel telling me about a novel he read, a political thriller, set right here in Piraeus back in 2015. He billed it as a bunch of young radicals carry out a harebrained plot to dispatch a head of state. It was pretty far-fetched, he said, but there was this Swiss expat anarchist character calling herself Katrina who really reminded him of me. Not that his public-spirited daughter would ever get involved in an international political conspiracy.

Not that he knew, but Katrina was my alias back then! I had to see what Daddy meant. So I bought the eBook and opened it after putting my son to bed. Good night! Right there in the first chapter, that woman in the middle of that big protest demo had to be me. The next one told how I met Mahmoud in the café. It prickled my flesh. Most everything I read was true, down to my neighborhood, flat, appearance, politics, and how I talked my way into those guys’ secret team.

I thumbed to the end to see if it told what happened in Turkey—and freaked. Put it down and never read the rest. Couldn’t bear to relive all that tension and grief. But I’d seen enough to kickstart Gizzard-Brain. That’s what I call the nagging voice in my head that pops up to tell me what a fool I am. Get a grip, I heard. It’s only a novel.

Only a novel? It’s my life, dammit! Give me a break! Were you on holiday when all that went down?

The ending drove home what I already knew—that most of my misery is due to a man, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. It isn’t what he did to me; it’s what I did to him that eats at me. That brave, kind, handsome father of our child who loved and protected me, the man who would be raising him with me if not for my stupidity. He would graciously call what befell him kismet. I call it criminal negligence, and the bitter finality of watching him die keeps me under his spell. How would you handle that, Mizz Gizzard-Brain?

But it boils my blood to think I was under surveillance the whole time. All my intimate secrets—even my freaking diary—are in there. Who could have come up with all that? I had to know, so I tracked down the book’s website. It’s full of intimate details about our ill-fated operation but doesn’t say how the author knew about them.

The site had a contact form. I had to know what was going on, so I wrote: This is your Katrina. Who are you and why did you invade my privacy?

Next day someone named Max responded. Said he worked for the publisher and had edited the book. He wrote: And who might you be? What’s your real name? Where did you grow up? How old are you?

So I told him I’m Anna Burmeister from Basel. I’ve lived in Piraeus for six or seven years and, if you must know, I’m more or less 29, so now you come clean.

And he did. We must have exchanged a dozen messages that got stranger and stranger. Max said the writer swore he’d made everything up, any resemblance is coincidental, etc. But this is too much coincidence, I insisted, and he had to agree. Thought the writer must have been channeling me somehow—remote viewing and all that. Said he never believed in clairvoyance but since the writer didn’t know me and had never visited Greece, what else could it have been?

Maybe a literary hit job that might blow up in my face. Given what we were up to at the time, that guy’s exposé could be a death warrant.

Not only that, Max said the writer now wants me to participate in another book. Forget it, I almost auto-replied before that voice in my head said: Think about it. Wouldn’t you like him to shadow you for a while and write it up? Wouldn’t cost anything and might enhance your brand.

Brand? No soap. Notoriety from some freaking tell-all is the last thing I want, even if I got paid for it.

Gizzard-Brain didn’t buy it. Suit yourself, but who wouldn’t like an unobtrusive, non-judgmental biographer to chronicle their life and times in a book of life lessons to pass on?

Sounds a lot like a memoir. Why would I want to outsource anything so intimate?

Like I said, you’ll get to know yourself from a fresh perspective. Free therapeutic insights.

Seemed like one of those offers you can’t refuse. Look, this writer shadowed me behind my back once and could channel me again whether I want it or not. So I told Max I’d do it as long as I had editorial control. He wrote back telling me it doesn’t work that way. As a character, I don’t get to edit text, but I can use what it says to edit my life.

He made it sound like self-help. Do I really want a life coach I’ll never meet? Even for free?

Max thought so: In my opinion, you’re good at hatching big plans but don’t always think through consequences and end up jumping to conclusions without a parachute.

Before I could ask what that’s supposed to mean, he wrote: Look. This project is the parachute. The writer said he feels bad about what he put you through. He guarantees you’ll come out better than when you started this time, and I won’t let him kick dirt in your face. Me and my red pencil.

I don’t know, I wrote. Swear to Dickens or whomever you believe in?

Swear, he said. Not only that, if you tell me at any point that it’s too much pressure, I’ll reject the manuscript. But that would be a shame, because you are an inspiring woman with greatness in you, and now’s your chance to shine your light.

Imagine my surprise that anyone could think that of me. Like he said, all my adult life I’ve been throwing myself into situations without thinking twice and coming out bitter and bruised from kicking myself. It’s time I ejected myself from all that and collect some back pay.

But it’s not as if I have a choice. Let’s see what happens. I gotta go.

PART ONE

Anxious Activist

As sure as my name was Mahmoud Al Ramadi, this cannot be Paradise, this shimmering haze lodged somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Is it from the mists of Heaven I hear a multitude of chanting voices blending together, droning on constantly, swelling at hours of devotion? I see Earth’s curve as if wrapped in gauze, as impenetrable as it is translucent.

For a long time I despaired of my wretched condition, but once I stopped pitying myself I found I could slip through the mists by focusing on places I knew in life. At first the haze disoriented me, but after many failed attempts I willed myself home to Mosul. Our street is almost unrecognizable after the battle to eject Daesh turned it into a wasteland. A strange family was squatting in the remains of our house. The garden where I buried my parents as gunfire echoed through the streets is overgrown. I had hoped to find my younger brother there, but no luck. So I visited the house in Ramadi where my mother’s sister Sheba lives along with daughter Jena. They seemed to be getting by but not very well. Sadly, Akhmed was not with them. I fear he was killed or conscripted to fight for Daesh.

If I fail to find him, I hope we’ll eventually meet in Paradise, Allah willing. Where I find myself now is very strange and lonely, a plane I have all to myself. Perhaps this is perdition and I am doomed to isolation for eternity.

How many other departed souls are sentenced to solitary confinement and for what reasons? Though I suffered in life, I must have transgressed somehow. Was it disobeying my father, Allah rest his soul? Or because I shot dead that Islamic State fighter in Tal Abyad? It was war, and I was defending our unit. Or, in Piraeus, when I used that blowgun disguised as a walking-stick to dispatch two hooligans who were attacking Katrina? Or in Turkey, when I used it against a despot who corrupted high office while claiming to do God’s work? Should that not count as defense of the faith? If those who have taken lives are barred from Paradise, there must be a multitude of very frustrated martyrs and many more relieved virgin angels.

I thought not of virgins as we slipped into Turkey to train for the mission or when we infiltrated the crowd gathering in the courtyard of the mosque to witness their leader pontificate. Nervously arming my weapon. Though I trusted the poison’s potency, what I couldn’t know was what type of protection my target wore under his suit. And so I aimed high to strike his neck. All the darts I’d fashioned arced a little differently. The one I loaded had flown most true but was among the heaviest, and I was positioned near the limit of its range.

A commotion in the crowd forced me to act. Knowing that I would have no second chance, I inhaled deeply, took aim, puffed out my dart, and lowered my tube as my target winced and reached for his shoulder. As murmurs surged through the crowd, I twisted my tube’s handgrip back on and sat in a cold sweat. In my peripheral vision, Katrina in her headscarf edged closer with a poison dart, under orders to permanently silence me before being captured and interrogated. How terrible for her that moment must have been.

Praise Allah, neither of these fates took us and we escaped in a panicked stampede for the exits. Unsatisfied, the angel of death followed us to arrange an accident for me that night, and the dart’s poison has no antidote. At least I passed in private, in bed with Katrina, and received a decent burial. The pain was terrible, but it was over in three days. Hers could last a lifetime. How fair is that?

I must know her fate. But now, the chanting rises, calling me to prayer.

Chapter One

You never know who your friends are until you need them, yet even then you still might not know. But that’s okay.

Picture yourself in not-so-picturesque Piraeus, Greece, Athens’ neglected port city. Follow your phone to the Keratsini district, brimming with civic-mindedness and civil unrest. Now, step up to the front door of a certain two-story stuccoed house on a side street there. Knock as long as you might, but no one would answer. A peek through the tattered shades of the front windows at the dusty detritus within would confirm that the building cowering between residences triple its size was sadly neglected. Despite its proximity to Dimokratias Boulevard, the commercial core of the district, nobody seemed to want to live there.

In fact, several persons of interest live here, in the rear units. One’s a kid who lives with his mom and never knew his father, who, it seems, is not out of the picture. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Originally, that little house had one spacious flat per floor, but somewhere along the way its rent-seeking owner had ineptly renovated, sealing doors to split each unit into two and jerry-rigging kitchens and bathrooms for the front ones. So lacking in charm and amenity were those slapdash digs that his anticipated rents never materialized, and for lack of resources he stopped trying.

Unaware of the owner’s financial bind, a nosey resident across the street became suspicious when she noticed people who did not seem to be tradesmen entering the alley to the left of the house with housewares and furniture.

Fearing the little tenement have been taken over by squatters, of which Greater Athens seemingly had an infinite supply, the neighbor complained to the police, who contacted the owner. Not true, he told them. Two women had taken up residence as legitimate lessees. Having researched the building and found it was slated to be confiscated for unpaid taxes, they had sought him out and proposed to improve the place in exchange for paying off his tax arrears. It was an offer the owner couldn’t refuse, especially after the women intimated that, if they couldn’t come to terms, word of the unoccupied building would soon reach homeless immigrants.

The women, Anna and Penelope, had met at a protest rally several months before and discovered both were in need of housing. Penelope settled in the upstairs unit. She was taller, with dark narrow-set eyes, an afro-bush of henna-hued hair, and an outgoing personality to match her full figure.

While Penelope was a native Athenian, her downstairs housemate was a Swiss implant who had lost her luggage in Athens en route from Lagos to Zürich seven years earlier, only to find her calling there as an activist opposing Greece’s financial austerity measures. After settling into a commune that she came to feel wasn’t for her, she chanced upon Penelope, who was looking for someone to share a house with.

Anna was slim and blue-eyed, with honey-blond hair that clung to her neck and inched down her brow to curl over wire-rim spectacles resting on cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. Someone had suggested that she looked like a younger, cuter version of the politician Elizabeth Warren, and upon looking up the American senator’s pictures and platforms Anna was sufficiently flattered to agree. Not bad for a liberal, she’d responded. Both were closely-cropped blonds with similar eyewear perched on short noses who doggedly took on the high and mighty with equivocal success.

Penelope, a graphics artist and teacher, garishly repainted every vertical surface in her two-room flat except for a side of the kitchen she called her doodle wall. Three meters below, Anna painted cabinets white and refinished floors and woodwork in austere Swiss style.

The two accessed their two-room flats, with their sunny kitchens and decent bathrooms, via the cramped alleyway. In the rear was a door with a stout latch opening into a cramped vestibule with two newly painted doors. The soothing saffron one straight ahead led to Anna’s kitchen, and the red, green, and purple one to the side secured a stairway to Penelope’s flat. It was within that gaudy entryway that they typically communicated face-to-face, frequently at first and then less so once they had established themselves and went about their respective lives that tended not to intersect.

The women christened their liberated lair the Winter Palace, commemorating the Bolshevik storming of the Czar’s in St. Petersburg in 1920. Truth be told, neither one was a Bolshevik and didn’t enjoy being politically pigeonholed. The more extroverted Penelope was of the socialist persuasion. She had worked to bring the leftist SYRIZA Coalition to power, which promptly disillusioned her by meekly succumbing to Eurocratic demands for economic austerity. Her party’s betrayal moved Penelope to undertake direct action. Confronting power sometimes requires putting one’s body where one’s mouth is, which she did. But her experience in detention after a short-lived occupation of the Finance Ministry dampened her militancy and eventually bred complications with her downstairs neighbor.

Anna self-identified as an anarchist of the communitarian sort who left bomb-throwing to others. A student of the theory and practice of collective self-reliance, she emulated the American refusenik Thoreau, the Russian anarchist Kropotkin, and Lithuanian-American firebrand Emma Goldman. She’d also studied the work of American philosopher Murray Bookchin and his more notorious disciple, imprisoned Kurdish separatist Abdullah Öcalan. All but one had done hard time for their beliefs, a badge of honor that Anna felt she could do without.

Anna’s revolutionary ambition was to some extent self-limiting, as she congenitally shunned notoriety, preferring to shine her light from the shadows. Texting and blogging from behind her saffron door, she called attention to threats to civil society and suggested participatory alternatives. And in real life, she pitched in to transform a defunded branch library in Keratsini into a community center and took part in street actions. The most eventful one was the anticlimactic siege of the Finance Ministry at which Penelope was busted. Anna eluded capture that day by occupying the backfield as a medic. Her turn at the barricades was yet to come, and when, in another country, it did, it upended her life.

But even before that, Anna’s activist lifestyle had begun to unravel. She’d been polishing her passable Greek online under the byline Katrina, on a blog she called Greece for All, dedicated to making peace between political tribes. Despite her sensible suggestions for how left and right might unite to confront their common oppressors, her posts came to be roundly trolled. Leftist support vaporized when rightists vilified her for pointing out that some of the same blood runs in nationalists’ veins as in those of the swarthy immigrants they despise for not being Greek. We’re all mongrels, she had written after looking up the noun’s Greek translation. Get over it. They didn’t take her advice, and the ensuing flames forced her to liquidate the post.

Life was never the same for her after that, especially when one of her critics upped the ante. Endearingly addressed to one Katrina Kunt, an anonymous poison pen letter arrived that threatened grave injury. Concerned that her identity and location might be compromised, Anna upgraded her door latch and carried a canister of pepper spray, which only made her feel she was under house arrest.

Fortuitously, her Austrian activist friend Andreas called to ask her to board his house guest, a young Iraqi code-named Peter, for a few days. Andreas didn’t explain beyond saying his house had become unsafe. Aware that Andreas had been keeping a low profile lately, Anna didn’t press for details. Happy enough to house a needy immigrant, if not a potential protector, she replied: Sure, how long?

Just for a few days, Andreas said. Until the weather clears up. He’s a recently-arrived refugee fleeing tragic circumstances. Very polite, no trouble at all, really, but being here illegally, he needs to avoid contact with authorities.

Andreas was right about Peter being polite, but had neglected to mention how fit and handsome he was—broad-shouldered and athletic, with a trim black beard and alert brown eyes. She was equally taken by his aura of calm determination. To do what, he didn’t say and she knew better than to ask. The same for his real name; like Andreas and herself, most of the radical expats she knew assumed some sort of nom de guerre. Nonetheless, Anna felt a need to know.

Peter bunked on her kitchen floor for just two nights before Andreas absconded with him to occupy a new flat, but by then Anna was captivated. Reaching out, she texted invitations to get together, fielding a campaign to capture his heart. And when at last he came to her, her expressed need, persistence, and possibly her cooking, overcame what little remained of his defenses, not to mention his virginity.

But the object of her affection was also in the embrace of Andreas’s secretive comrades, who were dubious of her agenda, unwilling to share theirs, and didn’t fancy having a girlfriend hanging around. Regardless, on the cheeky presumption that whatever they were up to should include her, she proceeded to demonstrate to them worthiness and warrior qualities that came to include some she didn’t know she possessed.

Impetuously, and over the objections of half its members, she wormed her way into a shadowy political conspiracy. It was a rash decision that would transport her and Mahmoud, the man formerly known as Peter, to foreign shores and then blow her back alone to radically rearrange her life’s furnishings. Among other life lessons, the experience taught her to consider unexpected consequences, the foremost of which was bearing a fatherless child.

#

Three of the conspirators slipped across the Aegean to topple a tyrant and nearly succeeded. After making their getaway, the Turkish one called George decided to remain in his homeland. Mahmoud, the Iraqi, made peace with Allah before succumbing to poison, for which the Swiss miss who loved him blamed herself and George. She returned to Greece alone to reassemble the shards of her life into a form that would include the one she soon learned she carried in her womb.

To come to terms with her bleak situation, she wrote home for money and volunteered her services at a street clinic that had a part-time obstetrician, booking appointments and filing paperwork. There she encountered other recent and prospective mothers whom she sought to befriend, vaguely hoping to establish a daycare collective. She especially liked Cassie, a practical woman with a decent husband living nearby, herself expecting twins, who taught Anna to make apple-rose-hip-ginger tea to allay morning sickness. But Anna still missed her wake-up shots of espresso.

Despite making new friends, Anna’s sense of isolation abided as her belly swelled. After marking time for two trimesters, she decided to retreat to her home country in pursuit of superior sanitation, community support, and a Swiss passport for her passenger.

The day before her departure she took a sentimental journey on three buses to the other end of Piraeus, a seaside neighborhood called Piraiki, to pay her respects to the father of her unborn child. Guided by the street map on her phone, Anna alighted from a 904 bus on a broad boulevard that circumscribed the coast. Across it, a phalanx of upscale apartment blocks reflected an unforgiving sun. She leaned upon a low wrought-iron fence running along the promenade, surveying a field of jagged limestone boulders sloping down to lapping seawater. Somewhere down there, drenched and queasy, Mahmoud had smuggled himself ashore to start a new life under a new name. She counted the months since; just half a life-changing year ago.

With a glance up and down the roadway, she boosted herself over the fence and scrabbled down to the water’s edge. She sat for a while on the smoothest boulder she could find and shut her eyes to the sun, trying to visualize Mahmoud emerging from the sea, disinherited, displaced, disoriented, just hours before they first encountered one another. Soon she slid from her perch to gather stones that she piled into a cairn that rose to her knees. Kissing her hand and laying it on its capstone, she murmured Rest in peace. Wish us luck before breathlessly clambering up to the promenade and boarding a bus back to the Winter Palace to pack up her worries and send herself on a journey to beget the rest of her life.

Chapter Two

Anna’s route to her fatherland and motherhood started with a bus and a ferryboat ride to Bari in Italy, where she boarded the first of three trains that would carry her to Basel after another sunrise. She’d intended to use the time meditating on life changes but spent most of it sleeping off her exertions.

She was shaken awake when her train lurched to a halt at the Swiss border. It stayed put for a long time for passport check, and when it finally started rolling her window displayed a panorama of a small group of travelers who had been ejected from the carriages, minded by fatigue-clad border guards sporting side arms. A young girl clung to the folds of a detainee’s dress, a pretty woman in a headscarf who was, like herself, obviously pregnant with no mate apparent. As the scene slid past, Anna turned from the window and blotted her eyes with her sleeve.

Clacking up the Alps, buffeted by up- and downdrafts, Anna ruminated on the stranded mother and child. Imagining that soon they would be forced into hiding or the confines of rude refugee camps, she drew no satisfaction at her own privilege to travel at will almost anywhere.

Three and a half hours later, her train squealed to a stop inside the cavernous Zürich Hauptbanhof. Pealing church bells from across the Limmat signaled she had barely enough time to satisfy her craving for an ice cream cone before boarding her train to Basel.

As Swiss timetables dictated, precisely one hour and twelve minutes hence, she staggered stiff and weary into the expectant arms of her Mutti und Vatter, who kissed her three times each and eyeballed her belly before escorting her to a tram. Home was a little yellow row house a catapult-toss across the Rhein to the University where her mother was an archivist. Anna arrived to find her father had commandeered her garret bedroom for his office equipment leasing business, forcing her to bunk in the guest room, which was fine by her.

I’m okay, she said through hooded eyes as Mutti bedded her down. It’s what I want. Please don’t judge me until you’ve heard the whole story.

But of course she couldn’t tell it whole. Most of what happened after meeting Mahmoud last fall would have to go; where they went, what they did, how he died. Yes, she’d tell her folks they went to Turkey, she thought before sleep claimed her. But on holiday, not to ambush its leader.

The late summer weather being splendid, she walked the quays along the Rhein and shopped with her mother at thrift shops for baby clothes and other paraphernalia of motherhood. During their time together Anna unwound the story she’d polished to elide everything her family didn’t need to know: How a couple of Turks they knew had invited her and her Iraqi boyfriend for a holiday excursion to Turkey. She and the refugee from Mosul had only been together for a couple of months when a wayward motorist struck him after stepping off a city bus in Izmir.

She described his dancing eyes and chiseled face, steadfast yet gentle demeanor, how he had lost his parents and brother to ISIS and had to flee his country, dashing his dream of becoming an environmental engineer. All true. But to tell the whole truth of their ill-fated clandestine exploit would both break her parents’ hearts and convince them she’d gone mad

Nor, to her relief, was that necessary. Beyond wanting to know more about the father, all that they seemed to care about was the health of their daughter and their unborn Enkelkind, and placed her under the care of an obstetrician. Freethinkers that they were and had raised her to be, her parents held no brief against Islam or premarital sex, but did ask about her Turkish comrades. Fairly truthfully, she spoke of the men as political dissidents holed up in Piraeus. Just how dissident and what they were doing in Turkey exceeded anyone’s need to know.

Basking in the garden and snuggling in bed, Anna abided cramps and cravings, such as for schnitzel and coffee and cigarettes, as her mom administered herbal compresses and teas. And so it went, until one night late in August when, as the clock in the parlor cuckooed eleven, her water broke. Rushed by anxious parents to the closest medical center, six hours later, pretty much on her own, Anna gave birth to a