Every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday she takes the subway into Manhattan and goes to her part-time job at the PEN American Center at 588 Broadway, just south of Houston Street. She started working there last summer, abandoning her post as an adjunct at Queens College because that job ate up too many hours and left her with no time for her dissertation. Remedial English and freshman English, just two classes, but fifty students writing one paper a week, and then the obligatory three private conferences with each student every semester, one hundred and fifty conferences in all, seven hundred papers to read and correct and grade, preparation for class, drawing up reading lists, inventing good assignments, the challenge of holding the students’ attention, the need to dress well, the long commute out to Flushing and back, and all for an insultingly low salary with no benefits, a salary that came out to less than the minimum wage (she did the math once and calculated how much she earned by the hour), which meant that the pay she received for doing work that prevented her from doing her own work was less than she would have made as a car-wash attendant or a flipper of hamburgers. PEN doesn’t pay much either, but she gives them only fifteen hours a week, her dissertation is advancing again, and she believes in the purpose of the organization, the only human rights group in the world devoted exclusively to defending writers—writers imprisoned by unjust governments, writers living under the threat of death, writers banned from publishing their work, writers in exile. P-E-N. Poets and publishers, essayists and editors, novelists. They can pay her only twelve thousand seven hundred dollars for her part-time position, but whenever she walks into the building at 588 Broadway and takes the elevator to the third floor, at least she knows she isn’t wasting her time.
She was ten years old when the fatwa was declared against Salman Rushdie. She was already a committed reader then, a girl who lived in the land of books, at that point immersed in the eight novels of the Anne of Green Gables series, dreaming of becoming a writer herself one day, and then came the news about a man living in England who had published a book that angered so many people in distant parts of the world that the bearded leader of one country actually stood up and declared that the man in England should be killed for what he had written. This was incomprehensible to her. Books weren’t dangerous, she said to herself, they brought only pleasure and happiness to the people who read them, they made people feel more alive and more connected to one another, and if the bearded leader of that country on the other side of the world was against the Englishman’s book, all he had to do was stop reading it, put it away somewhere, and forget about it. Threatening to kill someone for writing a novel, a make-believe story set in a make-believe world, was the stupidest thing she had ever heard of. Words were harmless, with no power to hurt anyone, and even if some words were offensive to some people, words weren’t knives or bullets, they were simply black marks on pieces of paper, and they couldn’t kill or wound or cause any real damage. That was her response to the fatwa at ten, her naïve but earnest reaction to the absurd injustice that had been committed, and her outrage was all the more intense because it was tinged with fear, for this was the first time she had been exposed to the ugliness of brute, irrational hatred, the first time her young eyes had looked into the darkness of the world. The affair continued, of course, it went on for many years after that denunciation on Valentine’s Day 1989, and she grew up with the story of Salman Rushdie—the bookstore bombings, the knife in the heart of his Japanese translator, the bullets in the back of his Norwegian publisher—the story was embedded inside her as she moved from childhood into adolescence, and the older she grew the more she understood about the danger of words, the threat to power words can represent, and in states ruled by tyrants and policemen, every writer who dares to express himself freely is at risk.
PEN’s Freedom to Write Program is run by a man named Paul Fowler, a poet in his spare time, a human rights activist by profession, and when he gave Alice her job last summer, he told her that the underlying philosophy of their work was quite simple: to make a lot of noise, as much noise as possible. Paul has a full-time deputy, Linda Nicholson, a woman born on the same day as Alice, and the three of them make up the staff of the small department dedicated to the production of noise. About half of what they do is focused on international issues, the campaign to reform Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, for example, the insult law that has threatened the lives and safety of scores of writers and journalists for making critical remarks about their country, as well as the attempts to win the release of writers imprisoned in various places around the world, the Burmese writers, the Chinese writers, the Cuban writers, many of them suffering from grave medical problems because of harsh treatment and/or neglect, and by putting pressure on the various governments responsible for these violations of international law, exposing these stories to the world press, circulating petitions signed by hundreds of celebrated writers, PEN has often succeeded in embarrassing these governments into letting prisoners go, not as often as they would like, but often enough to know that these methods can work, often enough to keep on trying, and in many cases to keep on trying for years. The other half of what they do is concerned with domestic issues: the banning of books by schools and libraries, for example, or the ongoing Campaign for Core Freedoms, initiated by PEN in 2004 in response to the Patriot Act passed by the Bush administration, which has given the U.S. government unprecedented authority to monitor the activities of American citizens and collect information about their personal associations, reading habits, and opinions. In the report Alice helped Paul compose not long after starting her job, PEN is now calling for the following actions: expanding safeguards for bookstore and library records weakened by the Patriot Act; reining in the use of the National Security Letters; limiting the scope of secret surveillance programs; closing Guantánamo and all remaining secret prisons; ending torture, arbitrary detentions, and extraordinary rendition; expanding refugee resettlement programs for endangered Iraqi writers. On the day she was hired, Paul and Linda told her not to be alarmed by the clicking sounds she would hear when she used the phone. The lines at PEN were tapped, and both the U.S. and Chinese governments had hacked into their computers.
It is the first Monday of the new year, January fifth, and she has just traveled into Manhattan to begin another five-hour stint at PEN headquarters. She will be working from nine in the morning until two o’clock today, at which point she will return to Sunset Park and put in another few hours on her dissertation, forcing herself to sit at her desk until six-thirty, trying to eke out another paragraph or two on The Best Years of Our Lives. Six-thirty is when she and Miles arranged to meet in the kitchen to start preparing dinner. They will be cooking together for the first time since Pilar went back to Florida, and she is looking forward to it, looking forward to being alone with Señor Heller again for a little while, for Señor Heller has proved to be every bit as interesting as Bing advertised, and she takes pleasure in being near him, in talking to him, in watching him move. She has not fallen for him in the way poor Ellen has, has not lost her head or cursed the innocent Pilar Sanchez for robbing his heart, but the soft-spoken, brooding, impenetrable Miles Heller has touched a nerve in her, and she finds it difficult to remember what things were like in the house before he moved in. For the fourth night in a row, Jake will not be coming, and it pains her to realize that she is glad.
She is still thinking about Jake as she steps out of the elevator on the third floor, wondering if the moment has finally come for a showdown with him or if she should put it off a little longer, wait until the four pounds she lost in December have become eight pounds, twelve pounds, however many pounds it will take before she stops counting. Paul is already sitting at his desk, talking to someone on the telephone, and he waves to her from the other side of the glass window that separates his office from the outer room, where her desk is located, her small, cluttered desk, where she now sits down and switches on her computer. Linda comes in a couple of minutes later, cheeks flushed from the cold morning air, and before she removes her coat and gets to work, she walks over to Alice, plants a big kiss on her left cheek, and wishes her a happy new year.
Paul makes a grunting sound from within his office, a sound that could signify surprise or disappointment or dismay, nothing is clear, Paul often emits confusing sounds after he hangs up the phone, and as Alice and Linda turn to look through the glass window, Paul is already on his feet and walking toward them. There has been a new development. On December thirty-first, the Chinese authorities allowed Liu Xiaobo to be visited by his wife.
This is their new case, the most pressing case on the current agenda, and ever since Liu Xiaobo was detained in early December, they have worked on little else. Paul and Linda are both pessimistic about the immediate future, both are certain that the Beijing Public Security Bureau will hold Liu until enough evidence has been gathered against him to make a formal arrest on the charge of inciting subversion of state power, which could land him in prison for fifteen years. His offense: cowriting a document called Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform, greater human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China.
Liu Xiaobo began as a literary critic and professor at Beijing Normal University, an important enough figure to have worked as a visiting scholar at a number of foreign institutions, notably the University of Oslo and Columbia University in New York, Alice’s Columbia University, the place where she is pushing toward her doctorate, and Liu’s activism dates all the way back to 1989, the year of years, the year the Berlin Wall came down, the year of the fatwa, the year of Tiananmen Square, and it was precisely then, in the spring of 1989, that Liu quit his post at Columbia and went back to Beijing, where he staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square in support of the students and advocated nonviolent methods of protest in order to prevent further bloodshed. He spent two years in prison for this, and then, in 1996, was sentenced to three years of reeducation through labor for suggesting that the Chinese government open discussions with the Dalai Lama of Tibet. More harassments have followed, and he has been living under police surveillance ever since. His latest arrest occurred on December 8, 2008, coincidentally or not coincidentally just one day before the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He is being held in an undisclosed location, with no access to a lawyer, no writing materials, no way to communicate with anyone. Does his wife’s visit on New Year’s Eve signify an important turn, or was it simply a small act of mercy that will have no bearing on the outcome of the case?
Alice spends the morning and early afternoon writing e-mails to PEN centers all around the world, enlisting support for the massive protest Paul wants to mount in Liu’s defense. She works with a kind of righteous fervor, knowing that men like Liu Xiaobo are the bedrock of humanity, that few men or women are brave enough to stand up and risk their lives for others, and beside him the rest of us are nothing, walking around in the chains of our weakness and indifference and dull conformity, and when a man like this is about to be sacrificed for his belief in others, the others must do everything they can to save him, and yet even if Alice is filled with anger as she works, she works in a kind of despair as well, feeling the hopelessness of the effort they are about to launch, sensing that no amount of indignation will alter the plans of the Chinese authorities, and even if PEN can roust a million people to pound on drums across the entire globe, there is little chance those drums will be heard.
She skips lunch and works straight through until it is time for her to leave, and when she walks out of the building and heads for the subway, she is still under the spell of the Liu Xiaobo case, still trying to figure out how to interpret the visit from his wife on New Year’s Eve, the same New Year’s Eve she spent with Jake and a group of their friends on the Upper West Side, everyone kissing everyone else at midnight, a silly custom, but she enjoyed it anyway, she liked being kissed by everyone, and she wonders now, as she descends the stairs into the subway, if the Chinese police allowed Liu’s wife to stay with him until midnight, and if they did, whether she and her husband kissed at the stroke of twelve, assuming they were allowed to kiss at all, and if they were, what it would be like to kiss your husband under those circumstances, with policemen watching you and no guarantee that you will ever see your husband again.
Normally, she carries along a book to read on the subway, but she overslept by half an hour this morning, and in the scramble to get out of the house in time for work, she forgot to take one with her, and because the train is nearly empty at two-fifteen in the afternoon, there aren’t enough people on board for her to use the forty-minute ride to study her fellow passengers, a cherished New York pastime, especially for a New York transplant who grew up in the Midwest, and with nothing to read and not enough faces to look at, she digs into her purse, pulls out a small notebook, and jots down some remarks about the passage she is planning to write when she gets home. Not only are the returning soldiers estranged from their wives, she will argue, but they no longer know how to talk to their sons. There is a scene early in the movie that sets the tone for this generational split, and that is what she will be tackling today, that one scene, in which Fredric March presents his high-school-age boy with his war trophies, a samurai sword and a Japanese flag, and she finds it unexpected but entirely appropriate that the boy shows no interest in these things, that he would rather talk about Hiroshima and the prospect of nuclear annihilation than the presents his father has given him. His mind is already fixed on the future, the next war, as if the war that has just been fought is already in the distant past, and consequently he asks his father no questions, is not curious enough to learn how these souvenirs were obtained, and a scene in which one would have imagined the boy wanting to hear his father talk about his adventures on the battlefield ends with the boy forgetting to take the sword and the flag with him when he walks out of the room. The father is not a hero in the eyes of his son—he is a superannuated figure from a bygone age. A bit later, when March and Myrna Loy are alone in the room, he turns to her and says: It’s terrifying. Loy: What is? March: Youth! Loy: Didn’t you run across any young people in the army? March: No. They were all old men—like me.
Miles Heller is old. The thought comes to her out of nowhere, but once it settles in her mind, she knows that she has discovered an essential truth, the thing that sets him apart from Jake Baum and Bing Nathan and all the other young men she knows, the generation of talking boys, the logorrhea class of 2009, whereas Señor Heller says next to nothing, is incapable of making small talk, and refuses to share his secrets with anyone. Miles has been in a war, and all soldiers are old men by the time they come home, shut-down men who never talk about the battles they have fought. What war did Miles Heller march off to, she wonders, what action has he seen, how long has he been away? It is impossible to know, but there is no question that he has been wounded, that he walks around with an inner wound that will never heal, and perhaps that is why she respects him so much—because he is in pain, and he never says anything about it. Bing rants and Jake whines, but Miles holds his tongue. It is not even clear to her what he is doing in Sunset Park. One day early last month, just after he moved in, she asked him why he had left Florida, but his answer was so vague—I have some unfinished business to take care of—it could have meant anything. What unfinished business? And why move away from Pilar? He is so obviously in love with the girl, why on earth would he have come to Brooklyn?
If not for Pilar, she would actively worry about Miles. Yes, it was a little disconcerting to be introduced to someone so young, a high school girl in her funny green parka and red woolen gloves, but that sensation quickly wore off when one understood how bright and pulled together she was, and the best thing about this girl is the simple fact that Miles is devoted to her, and from Alice’s observations during Pilar’s visit, she believes she was looking at what is probably an exceptional love, and if Miles can love someone in the way he loves this girl, it must mean the damage inside him is not systemic, that his wounds are specific wounds in specific areas of his soul and are not bleeding into other parts of him, and therefore the darkness in Miles does not prey on her mind as it did before Pilar lived among them for those ten or eleven days. It was difficult not to feel some envy, of course, watching Miles as he looked at his beloved, talked to his beloved, touched his beloved, not because she wants him to look at her in that way but because Jake doesn’t do it anymore, and foolish as it is to measure Jake against Señor Heller, there are times when she can’t stop herself. Jake has brains, talent, and ambition, whereas Miles, for all his mental and physical virtues, is completely lacking in ambition, seems content to drift through his days without passion or purpose, and yet Miles is a man and Jake is still a boy, because Miles has been to war and has grown old. Perhaps that explains why the two of them seem to dislike each other so much. Even at the first dinner, when Jake began talking about interviewing Renzo Michaelson, she felt that Miles was ready to punch him or pour a drink over his head. Who knows why Michaelson provoked that response, but the animosity has continued—to such a degree that Miles is rarely at home when Jake comes for dinner. Jake is continuing to pester Bing about helping him set up a meeting with Michaelson, but Bing keeps putting him off, saying that Michaelson is an ornery, reclusive sort of person, and the best way to handle it is to wait until he comes into the store again to have his typewriter cleaned. Alice could probably arrange it herself if she wanted to. Michaelson is a longtime member of PEN, a past vice president with a special attachment to the Freedom to Write Program, and she talked to him on the phone only last week about the Liu Xiaobo case. She could easily call him tomorrow and ask if he has any time to talk to her boyfriend, but she doesn’t want to do it. Jake has stuck a knife in her, and she isn’t in the mood to do him any favors.
She returns to the empty house just after three o’clock. By three-thirty, she is sitting at her desk, typing up her notes about the father-son conversation in The Best Years of Our Lives. At three-fifty, someone starts knocking on the front door. Alice stands up and goes downstairs to see who it is. When she opens the door, a tall, blubbery man in a strange khaki uniform grins at her and tips his hat. He has a splayed, multifaceted nose, pockmarked cheeks, and a large, full-lipped mouth, a curious assortment of facial characteristics that somehow reminds her of a platter of mashed potatoes. She also notes, with a certain sadness, that he is wearing a gun. When she asks him who he is, he says that he is Nestor Gonzalez, New York City marshal, and then he hands her a folded-up piece of paper, a document of some kind. What is this? Alice asks. A court order, Gonzalez says. For what? Alice asks, pretending that she doesn’t know. You’re breaking the law, ma’am, the marshal replies. You and your friends have to get out.