We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (13 page)

Mohamed introduced Kellas to the generals, told him in secret which of them were illiterate, explained to him how he could tell the difference between a T-54 and a T-55 tank and sat with him on the roof of a forward outpost one night with the lights of the Taliban
pick-ups a mile away, the ripped-fabric sound of American fighters shooting across the sky and the occasional fireball on the horizon, and the shrieking of the jackals from the Shomali groves around them, like a mob of drunken teenagers. Once they drove up to the mouth of the Salang tunnel, at the top of the valley, on the road to Mazar. They passed Mohamed’s house along the way, embedded in an agglomeration of mud buildings behind grey stone dykes, and Mohamed went inside for half an hour and then came out. He didn’t invite Kellas in to meet his wife and children. He had two sons and three daughters. He was the same age as Kellas. Kellas knew enough now not to be surprised or offended. He was disappointed. Mohamed’s Kabul liberation elephant cords had seemed like a vote for modernity, a vote for the party of coming down from the hills and embracing the big post-Taliban city, electricity and yellow taxis and free women. From the roof of the farmhouse on the plain that night they’d seen the grey glow of Kabul’s streetlights, thirty miles to the south. The news of the fall of Mazar had come over the radio and the Alliance trenches had started singing, the soldiers’ voices merging with the shrieking of the jackals. The teeth of Mohamed’s grin had shown in the light from Kellas’s laptop and he had been hearty and happy and Kellas had believed he could ask him for help in a matter concerning Astrid. Kellas wanted Mohamed to arrange a place where he and Astrid could be alone together, undisturbed for a night, with a roof and something resembling a bed. Before the beginnings of the Taliban collapse the small-town morals of Parvan province had made it seem a hard thing to ask Mohamed for. When the sense of the imminent opening of Kabul gushed into the hearts of the Alliance and the foreign journalists quartered with them, it was as if the way lay open not only to the reunification of Afghanistan but the unblocking of channels that connected Afghanistan with the shining light-bubbles of Islamabad, Tehran, Beijing, and beyond to Paris, New York, London, LA. For a short while Kellas allowed himself to imagine that the true Mohamed was one who had tasted and enjoyed the liberal facet of communist Kabul and Soviet
Uzbekistan, where he’d once been stationed; more than the vodka and the miniskirts, that he’d seen a bigger, brighter world in the faces of the girl and boy students talking in the cafés, on street corners with bundles of books under their arms, unveiled and rebellious. When Kellas saw Mohamed strolling away from his Salang village that afternoon with a serene smile, looking sated and paternal, moving slowly towards the car as if Kellas and the driver were working for him, Kellas understood that the mountain road, with its guns and old feuds and sequestered women, was as much his home as the city, and that his awkward observance and shalwar kameez were more a sincere sign of wanting to belong in the village than the camouflage of a liberal yearning to escape it. The corduroy suits were sincere, too. Mohamed wanted to belong in Kabul. But of the two worlds, he was less himself in the metropolis, and he knew it.

Kellas hesitated to say or do anything which might turn on him the expression that must have passed across Mohamed’s face when he’d been present at the wicked deeds of his companions. Kellas hadn’t seen the expression, but it had to exist, and he didn’t want to witness it directed at him. Of course, Kellas wasn’t going to be responsible for a massacre. But there was a possibility that by asking Mohamed to help in the arrangement of an act of fornication -Kellas hoped, several acts of fornication – by two infidel foreigners in a Muslim country, in a war zone, Kellas would see that expression. If not when he first raised the subject, then when he raised it a second time, or when it was time for it to happen, or after it had happened. The jollier and kinder Mohamed was, the more Kellas dreaded the moment of his seriousness, when he would distance himself from the foreigner. In spite of this, Kellas had to bring it up. It was a commission of a sort. ‘Listen,’ said Astrid one night. She spoke with a gentleness, clarity and directness that made his hide tingle. ‘What you and I need is a place where we can sleep together. You arrange it, and I’ll come.’

The declaration hadn’t come out of nowhere. It came at the end
of days when Kellas was distracted by thoughts of Astrid. He never dreamed about her. Yet because he thought about her when he was awake, he twisted the interpretation of what dreams he had onto the Astrid path; it affirmed his care and deepened his fascination. In one dream, he was in a small café in a narrow street in an Italian city. He sat inside because the tables outside were covered with a seething mass of sparrows. A waitress came to him, a short, stocky, buxom, dark-haired girl who looked nothing like Astrid, and told him he would have to leave, because of the sparrows. Kellas said that he wasn’t afraid. The woman said: ‘The sparrows are just holding the tables till the eagles arrive.’ Kellas, who believed dreams to be the chaotic by-product of thoughts and impressions, leftovers passing out of the mind like other material surplus to life’s requirements, nonetheless put this down as a dream about Astrid. That he had been waiting for her without knowing it; that he’d patiently sit out the tiresome chatter and squirm of the world in the hope of the arrival of something dangerous but magnificent. In the dream, there were no eagles, and he turned into the waitress, but he ignored that part.

Kellas couldn’t remember when the sight of Astrid began to trigger such a strong reaction in him. He tried to think about chemicals and signals, to hide from himself his joy at the return of a state he’d believed he could no longer reach.

Even before the terrible question of what she felt for him, he tried the nature of his attraction to her. He had time while the war stuttered, and
The Citizen,
which had flooded south Asia with correspondents, spurned the nuanced inconclusiveness of his despatches in favour of the punchy certainties of unattributable sources in London and Washington. No matter who they sent to Jabal, the editors enjoyed the decisive reports of journalists who wanted to be there more than the uncertainties of the journalist who actually was. For weeks on end in the October and November of 2001 the marketable truth in Afghanistan lacked narrative or familiar reference points. Since Astrid refused to work alongside him, pointing
out that he had to file most days, whereas she was only there to write one or two long articles – ‘My drum beats once a quarter,’ she said – there was time for glimpsing, glancing, paths crossing first and last thing, awkward courtesies at the doors to the washrooms, and for Kellas to wonder what he was doing. He tried matching Astrid to the template of old attachments. None fitted, although he couldn’t be sure he was remembering them right. Love belonged to that class of experiences that couldn’t be remembered. Only its symptoms and proximate causes could.

He had found that it was hard to turn adoration into sex, but easy to turn sex into dangerous, short-lived adoration. This discovery was made early in the course of his premature marriage to Fiona. She had been so fascinatingly curly and petite and wide-eyed and had a way of blushing rapidly and deeply whenever she was in the grip of any strong emotion. One night when the two of them were in the company of another journalist in Edinburgh who was blind to any human relations outside the sphere of politics and who could talk for ever in a steady, insistent monotone, Kellas tuned out his words into an insect hum for half an hour while, first, he thought about how much he wanted to touch Fiona, and then looked at her, and knew she was thinking the same thing. Their soft, sweaty young palms and fingers locked and squeezed under the table. For a while, sensing that their heartbeats and desires were in synch, they sat watching the other journalist’s lips forming words, and remained aware of the undulating whine coming from his vocal chords. Then they made their excuses and ran into a taxi, out of the darkness of the pub, one of those places in the gullies of the old town where the smells of damp, old wood and stale alcohol merge and thicken, and into the warm pulses and scented skin of each other’s necks. Kellas had passed the subsequent few days in a state of such bliss, such delight in her endearing shrieks, in the freeness with which Fiona gave her body and the pleasure she seemed to take from him, that he forgot how much his happiness was sharpened by the period of sexual famine preceding it. The long silences that punctuated their
lovemaking, when they lay breathing, skin to skin, in each other’s beds, seemed at the time like evidence of telepathic understanding, rather than evidence that they had nothing to say to each other, which is what they turned out to be. Kellas noticed the fanatical neatness of Fiona’s flat. How could he not? All the surfaces shone, nothing old or worn survived, the furniture was arranged at Pythagorean angles. The flat was a declaration of the need for order made at well above conversational level. But he chose to believe that the quick, careless, eager way Fiona undressed, the way that to begin with there was no part of each other’s bodies they couldn’t touch, was likely to transmit itself to a more relaxed attitude to house-cleaning, instead of the other way round, which was what happened. A few months after they were married, Fiona began asking him to wear a second condom on top of the first.

Kellas hadn’t made that mistake again. He’d made different mistakes. He marvelled at the variety of his errors, which came disguised as success. Katerina in Prague had been so beautiful that it had seemed to compensate for her love of dancing to German techno music in the clubs four nights a week, and for her reluctance to take a paid job, and for the hours she spent sitting hunched on a hard chair on the balcony in a shawl, one knee up, smoking, watching the steeples and biting her nails. But it hadn’t compensated. She’d boarded the train to Beauty at thirteen and when a few years later she arrived, instead of getting off, she decided to stay on and see if there were more, better stops on that line. By the time Kellas met her, when she was twenty-six, she believed she was old. She confessed it to Kellas like a secret, weeping on his shoulder.

There was an area of ground in front of the Jabal house, inside the walls of the compound and partly overlooked by trees, where the Afghans had tried to make a lawn. The grass hadn’t taken and it grew in patches and single tough blades out of the dirt. In the mornings an ex-special forces reporter from Australia would do press-ups there, and talk to his wife in loud, fluent Thai on his satellite
phone, while correspondents wearing flip-flops walked across the grass to the outhouse in the far corner, trailing toilet paper, like disaffected campers. In the evenings, photographers would set up their transmitters on the failed lawn, spaced out and all aligned by compass towards the same artificial star in space above the Indian Ocean. They sat there with their backs to the house, silhouetted against the glow of their screens, watching the byte-count bars track from left to right, absorbed, cultic, elsewhere. One night Kellas was on the near-grass with Mark and Rafael from
The New York Times.
Rafael’s interpreter was dialling the satellite phone number of one of the generals in the north over and over again, to break through the busy signal. Rafael was in a hurry. He was one of those who believed the war was faltering, like a slow line of goods. It needed promotion. Mark, who usually worked at this time – at all times – was waiting for his editors in California to wake up. He’d brought his red plastic fly swatter out with him. His only recreation was to sit upright in his sleeping bag in the early morning and kill as many flies as were within reach.

‘Where do the flies go at night?’ he asked. ‘Do they go home to their fly-homes with their fly-wives and their 2.2 million fly-children?’

Kellas was watching Astrid, who he could see in the dimness at the far edge of the lawn, where the light from the house was faint. She was talking to the reporter from
The Guardian
, who lodged in another street. Astrid was half-smiling as she looked down, her hand stopped in the middle of a gesture while she thought about what she wanted to say.

‘Why’d you get your translator to ask me about my arm?’ asked Mark.

‘I didn’t,’ said Kellas.

‘I don’t mind. I just don’t understand why you couldn’t ask me yourself.’

‘He wanted to know. He was curious.’

‘You were too embarrassed to ask me yourself so you got your translator to do it.’

‘I didn’t!’ Kellas laughed. They wouldn’t see him go red in the dark.

‘My guys think you had it cut off for stealing,’ said Rafael. ‘Did you get through?’ His interpreter shook his head. ‘Keep trying.’

‘I’ve been dialling the same number for two hours. My finger is hurting.’

‘Keep trying. I pay you to get sore fingers.’

‘In Somalia,’ said Mark, ‘they said “He makes love to women using his stump.”’

‘So what happened?’ asked Rafael.

‘I was born with it.’

‘No shit. Did you get through?’ The interpreter began yelling into the phone. ‘Ask if he can get the American special forces guys on the phone. Ask if I can speak to an American!’

‘I suppose you’ll put me in some cheap British novel,’ said Mark to Kellas.

‘They’re not that cheap.’

‘I’ll sue, you know.’ Mark was speaking to the side of Kellas’s head. Rafael and his interpreter were shouting over each other in English and Dari. Mark said: ‘She’s like a cat.’

‘Who?’ said Kellas.

‘Astrid. The cat who walks by herself. She never travels with anyone.’

‘She’s trying to get an interview with Massoud’s widow.’

‘You never travel with anyone either,’ said Mark.

‘Mohamed. Drivers. People we pick up on the road.’

‘Anyone not Afghan.’

Kellas asked him if he knew anything about Astrid. Mark said he’d read a couple of her articles, one about Bosnia and one about Kosovo. They’d been good, unusually good, memorable. She’d got deep inside a Serb family getting ready to leave Pristina. They’d made space for her in the truck that took them to Serbia, with their family tombstones stacked in the back and their ancestors’ remains bagged up in builder’s sacks. Mark mentioned the name
of a famous photographer she’d been going out with in those days.