Matthew Palmer - Enemy of the Good

“I see that you’ve fallen under the spell of the Caribbean communists. Does diplomatic security know about this?”

“It comes from spending all my time there with the anti-regime activists. Many of them were artists of some sort. Painters. Writers. Musicians. Artists make the best dissidents.”

“Passion?” her uncle asked.

“Yes. But there’s something else about them. They speak a language those with power don’t fully understand. It’s made up of symbols and allusions and shared cultural touchstones. Authoritarians are literal thinkers, almost entirely concrete. They don’t understand art, and they often don’t know enough to be afraid of it. It’s like the sculptor in Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ mocking the Pharaoh by carving his face on a megalomaniacal statue with wrinkled lips and a sneer of cold command. Ozy just knows that the statue is big and imposing. He doesn’t have the sense or sensibility to know that he’s being ridiculed and that the sculptor’s mockery will outlast his empire by three thousand years. The autocrats can’t confront the artists on their terms, and in the end art wins. It has to.”

“That’s pretty profound, Kate. But I am also reminded of a little girl I knew who used to bring home stray kittens and baby birds with broken wings. The patron saint of the forlorn and abandoned.”

“What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic.”

“And a hungry one, I hope. I have a new chef. Belgian-trained. And I asked him to make your favorite. Uzgen paloo .”

“And he agreed?”

“Under protest. Said it was peasant food. I’m sure he’s finding some way to fancy it up. Deconstruct it, as they say. Maybe add sea foam or acacia berries or something or other that’s all the rage in Brooklyn. Whatever. To the table with us.”

Kate giggled. It was good to be with family. The Hollister clan was accomplished but not especially fecund. She did not have many close relatives on her father’s side. And her mother’s side of the family tree had had nearly all of its leaves stripped, first by the Soviets and then by the Eraliev regime.

The dining room was enormous, much of it taken up by a table large enough to seat at least twenty-four guests. Kate was pleased to see that the staff had set their plates at one corner of the table, so they would not have to talk across acres of walnut. Even so, certain formalities had to be observed and there was a hand-engraved name card at Kate’s place setting and a menu card propped up on the table.

The wines listed at the bottom of the menu were a pinot noir from Sonoma and a sauvignon blanc from the Rogue River Valley in Oregon. Kate recognized the vineyards. These wines were almost a hundred dollars a bottle. It was not the typical embassy function swill.

“You’re bringing out the good stuff, Uncle. I’m flattered.”

“Nothing’s too good for my brother’s little girl.”

“It’s nice to be with family. Speaking of which, how’s Beverly?”

“She’s well, thank you. You’ll see her soon enough. She’s in the States visiting the boys. But she’ll be back in a few weeks.”

Harry and Beverly had twin boys about six years older than Kate. One was an ophthalmologist in New Jersey and the other was a successful commodities trader in Chicago. Like Kate, they had grown up mostly abroad, but neither had been bitten by the foreign affairs bug. She knew little enough of them beyond the exchange of Christmas cards and carefully curated Facebook posts. They had grown up on different continents and they were not close.

A waiter that Kate did not know poured the sauvignon blanc.

Meryem appeared with the first course. It was delicious. The scallops were lightly seared and tender and the peppers sautéed just enough to bring out the flavor while still leaving them crispy.

They talked about family, but there were so few relatives to get caught up on that the conversation veered quickly to shop talk. Kate told her uncle, somewhat sheepishly, about disobeying direct instructions in Havana and warning Morales and the other dissidents about the raid.

“You did the right thing,” Harry said. “Although, had you done the opposite, I could have said the same. It’s easy enough to argue both sides.”

This, Kate thought, was the classic answer of the diplomat. Nothing was certain. Everything was open to debate, interpretation, and compromise. It could be maddening.

“I suppose so. But there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. And the Cuban government couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Thanks for giving me a soft place to land.”

“There are times when you gotta do what you believe needs to be done.”

“Thanks, Uncle.”

“But Kate…”

“Yeah.”

“You ever do that to me and you’re on the first plane out of here. Family or not. This is my mission and you’re under my orders. Do we still have a consulate in Greenland? ’Cause that’s where you’ll be, eating fried whale blubber and stamping visas for Inuit pipe welders.”

“Understood.”

As if to make up for the threat, he poured Kate a glass of the pinot noir.

“Time to switch to red.”

As her uncle had promised, the wine was excellent.

“I’m happy to have you here, Kate. You’re going to be an important part of this team. And I believe you can do great things here.”

“And I’m glad to be back here. Back home.”

“Kyrgyzstan has changed since your salad days. There are some things that you really need to know.”

Meryem removed the empty plates from the first course and set dishes of Uzgen paloo in front of Kate and the ambassador. Paloo was the unofficial national dish of Kyrgyzstan, rice mixed with mutton and shredded carrots that had been fried in a large cast-iron cauldron called a qazan . Traditionally, it was garnished with whole fried cloves of garlic and hot red peppers. The rice came from Kyrgyzstan’s Uzgen region and was brownish red with a slightly nutty flavor. As the ambassador had predicted, the chef had tried mightily to make the humble paloo sufficiently sophisticated for the diplomatic table. The rice was formed into a tall cylinder and topped by a three-dimensional lattice made of garlic cloves and hot peppers that looked like the steel frame of a skyscraper.

“See what I mean?” Harry said. “There was no way that Michel was going to do the paloo straight up.”

“I think it’s cute. Thanks for asking him to do this.”

Kate took a bite. It was perhaps the best paloo she had ever tried, rich and earthy and spicy. But even in the hands of a world-class chef it was never going to be more than the Kyrgyz version of comfort food. It was as if Le Cirque were serving meat loaf or mac and cheese.

The ambassador was less interested in the paloo than his exposition on the latest developments in Kyrgyz politics. Dinners with the Hollisters were always like that. Given the choice between talking and eating, talking always won. It was a wonder the Hollisters were not all as thin as sticks.

“When you were here before, our stated goal was regime change. It was the Bush years and that was all the rage. Axis of Evil. No negotiating with terrorists. No compromise. No prisoners… well, maybe one or two so we would have somebody to waterboard. It seems a little silly to talk about those days as naïve, but that’s what they were. The neocons were ascendant and our plan, such as it was, was to bomb and bully the Muslim world into embracing democracy and the free market and—god willing—start voting Republican. The world as they saw it was Manichaean. Everything in black and white. But the lines in the real world are never quite so crisp and defined. It’s all shades of gray bleeding into each other.