cant, white.
“Oh shit,” he said and laughed. It was snowing.
Snow is rare in this part of Virginia, and never before January. It was a
week and a half before Christmas. Snowfalls were still a treat for Zack, despite
his years in New York.
Daniel the Yankee enjoyed his pleasure. “I knew you’d love it. Isn’t it
beautiful?”
It fell out of the sky like feathers and silted up the backyard in soft, peace-
ful drifts. It was a silence made visible, a sweep of quiet, until the wind
changed and there was a sudden ticking like sand grains hitting the window-
pane.
Jocko sat on the floor, looking confused and excited, hearing and maybe
smelling the cold new element outside.
2 3 0
C h r i s t o p h e r B r a m
Daniel knelt beside Zack, parked one elbow on the windowsill, and leaned
into him. And Zack wrapped two arms around Daniel, one across his
sweatered chest, the other over his shoulder, holding him in a warm box of
arms.
“No day like a snow day,” said Daniel, gazing outside.
“And today’s Sunday,” said Zack, his eyes fixed on the backyard. “So we
don’t have to worry about canceling anything.”
Daniel settled more snugly against Zack. “Winter fucking wonderland.”
Daniel was back. He’d been gone for several weeks, maybe months. It was
good to have him back again, even if Zack wasn’t sure how much of him had
been missing. Did Daniel even know he’d been gone? The humiliation and
self-pity of a failed love affair had stood between the two men like a tall, un-
acknowledged elephant. But the elephant had moved on, and here was Daniel
again.
f 2
They ate a quick breakfast and took Jocko for a walk in Colonial Williams-
burg. The snowfall was already tapering off, but stray flakes still floated in the
gray air. The entire mile of Duke of Gloucester Street, from the Wren Build-
ing to the Capitol, was covered in white. New snow lined the bare trees and
quilted the rooftops. It crunched and squeaked underfoot, compacting like
Styrofoam. Jocko strained on his leash and pounced in the foot-deep powder,
high on the stuff, intoxicated. His black coat was beautiful against the white-
ness.
Everything looked new and interesting this morning. Threads of eighteenth-
century woodsmoke climbed from chimneys along the street. A man on horse-
back ambled by, lifting his tricornered hat at Zack and Daniel as his snorting
beast dropped several pounds of warm, wheaty dung into the fresh snow. There
were no cars except for a handful parked outside Bruton Parish Church, where
the early service was just beginning. An organ chord rolled from the high win-
dows over the village green, which was now white. Only a few people were
out walking around, residents and college students delicately stepping over
the silence.
“Beautiful. Just beautiful,” Daniel whispered.
E x i l e s i n A m e r i c a
2 3 1
“It’s like a time machine,” said Zack. “Only the snow doesn’t take us back
in time but outside it.”
“Everyone looks like Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow, ” said Daniel. “He
got that right, how figures turn dark against the white.”
And to illustrate his point, a family of five came up the street from the
Governor’s Palace around the corner. Three adults and two children, they
were dark silhouettes until the eye adjusted and added color and features. The
two men and the boy wore Russian fur hats. The mother and daughter had
identical burgundy red scarves looped around their faces. A severely cropped
row of pollarded trees stood along the snowy street like the columns of a ru-
ined temple.
But the woman was staring at Zack. And he realized: We know these peo-
ple. It was the Rohanis plus one, the Rohanis and a stranger.
And his first concern was for Daniel, wondering what he felt running into
Abbas and his family. But Zack couldn’t look at Daniel, only at Abbas.
Abbas gazed back at them with remarkable calm, a dry, evenhanded indif-
ference, his face darker than Zack remembered.
Elena suddenly broke into a grin. “Zachary! Daniel! And Jocko, too!
What a surprise. It is a most beautiful day, yes?”
Jocko leaped at Mina like an old friend, pulling Daniel forward on his
leash. Mina was promptly joined by Osh, the two kids petting the poodle,
who loved the attention. Mina’s scarf looked like a costume, as if she were in
a children’s production of Fiddler on the Roof.
The new figure, the stranger, stood by and watched, a stylish gentleman in
a camel hair coat and neatly trimmed silver beard.
“You must forgive me,” said Elena. “Hassan Rohani. Abbas’s brother.
From Tehran.”
The man smiled and bowed but did not offer his hand.