We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (14 page)

‘I say “going out”. They slept in the same hotel bed, I heard, the same cowshed or cave or whatever, when the things they wanted to do happened to take them to the same area. They were living in different cities at the time, one in Rome and one in Zagreb or Budapest, I don’t remember. It wasn’t like they ever really dated. They relied on coincidence to get together. But coincidence can be pretty reliable in this line of work, can’t it? There are only so many places giving off the smell of that sort of death at any one time.’

‘It doesn’t say much about what she’s like.’

‘You think? I heard “wild”.’

‘What the fuck’s “wild” supposed to mean?’

‘Steady. That’s all I remember, and I don’t know who said it. Wild, I don’t know. Party animal? Wild in bed? Feral, raised by wolves?’

Kellas’s eyes were red with early starts and the dust of the day. He pressed them tight shut and opened them. No moisture, like the tenth squeeze of a lemon. Mark was too kind a man to be anything but married and content and he’d forgotten how immense the gap was between two people who hadn’t decided to be together. He’d forgotten what a journey that was to make. How easy it was now to travel thousands of miles to be within touching distance of somebody, and how hard to travel those last few inches from their head to their heart. In the early Afghan mornings Mark would be on the phone to his desk in San Diego, where it was still the evening of the previous day. He’d be trying to sell his article to the front page, and he’d be selling Sheryl’s pictures. ‘Art,’ he always called them. ‘The art’s great.’ The art was always great. Sheryl wasn’t his wife, she was a colleague, but it must have made her feel good to overhear it. It was a kind thing. Mark was boosting his own chance of a front-page shot, and Sheryl was talented, but it was still kind, the way Kellas supposed a good married couple would be, supporting.

‘Would you go for Astrid?’ Kellas asked Mark.

‘No.’

‘Why not? Don’t you think she’s good-looking?’

‘Yeah, I guess she is.’

‘She’s clever.’

‘Yup, she’s smart. Good at what she does.’

‘So why wouldn’t you go for her?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘I don’t. Just tell me.’

‘I told you at the start. She’s a cat. She hunts by herself. She always goes after what she wants and you have to follow her or let her go and neither is what I’d like to be doing all the time.’

‘What if what she wants is you?’

‘I don’t want to be hunted.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘I never pretended to. I’m just telling you what I see.’

Kellas looked over at Astrid again. He felt the gut-bite of jealousy. Was Mark so virtuous, or was it that he was too busy to cheat? The man from
The Guardian
was getting up and leaving Astrid. He was a small pale man with delicate hands, gingerish hair, round glasses and a slightly lopsided smile. On his way across the lawn his foot caught in one of the photographer’s leads and he stumbled, shook the cable off, and walked on. Kellas wondered if Astrid was carrying the pistol. He wondered how many other people in the compound knew she was armed. It would hurt her if it came out. Still, knowing the gun was around was something they shared.

He got up and went over to where she was sitting. She’d opened her laptop and was typing. She looked up and moved her fringe to one side.

‘Hi,’ she said. She smiled.

‘You look busy.’

‘It’s OK. The guy from
The Guardian
was trying to get some contacts for Massoud’s widow off me. Sit down. We never get time to catch up, huh?’

Kellas sat cross-legged on the grass opposite her and Astrid closed
her laptop and laid it to one side. She clasped her hands in front of her and looked at him. Kellas had become so convinced of the disorder and carelessness of the universe that the possibility of harmony staggered him. He trembled. His desire was accompanied by a fear that she would lose interest in him quickly. It was the old, just, women’s suspicion about the wants of men, and now he faced it from Astrid. Her care for him had become precious and he did not want to lose it afterwards. His novelty could go stale in a night. One night! All this time he watched her, her eyes on him, and saw the freckles on the bridge of her nose and a single strand of one eyebrow making what little gold was to be gleaned in the dimness. Once, in London, he’d spent evening after evening listening, with real interest and partial concentration, to a woman whose account of her life was like Borges’s fabulous 1:1 map of a country. Every story she told lasted at least as long as the events she described, often longer. One night they did go to bed together and afterwards saw each other for exactly enough time for Kellas to understand how hurt she was that he no longer wanted to listen to her. What made it worse was that she tried to hide it. She was tough, laughing, making out that she was as bent on gratification as him. That this was what grown-up men and women did. She didn’t think it, and she was hurt. Kellas could see and he promised himself he would never do it again. Then he did it again.

He wanted Astrid, and some other state inside him was trying to stop it, hold it back, would rather be like the satellite to Astrid’s Indian Ocean world, eternally descending towards her at exactly the same speed as she was moving away, so they would always be face to face, but never collide, never merge, never know.

‘I don’t want to break the silence,’ said Kellas, ‘but I can’t deal with it.’

‘I’m just checking you out,’ said Astrid.

Kellas asked her where she’d gone that day.

‘I watched,’ said Astrid, starting slowly, then picking up speed, ‘I watched a bride being dressed for her wedding. One of Massoud’s
distant relatives. She was sixteen. She stood in the middle of the carpet and she didn’t know which part of her she should cover with her hands. Her nipples were the colour of rainclouds. The women from her family made her step into a tub and they washed her with water from jugs they brought from a room next door. They shaved her all over with an old cut-throat razor, and washed her again. After that they dried her, and sprinkled her body with cologne, and gave her a pair of silk bloomers to put on, and a white petticoat without sleeves. They put her in a red dress, a bright red, like poppy petals.’ Astrid stopped, smiled at Kellas, and went on. ‘It was tight over her arms and her waist and it had gold coins sewn to it that clinked together when she moved. I asked her if she’d met her husband and she shook her head. I asked her if she wanted to get married and she nodded and started to cry and turned around and I could see her shoulders shaking. She shook her arms a little to make the coins clink to hide the sound of her crying, but all the coins on her back were shaking anyway…Are you jealous of me, Adam, seeing that today?’

‘No.’

‘You’re lying! Did it turn you on?’

‘Yes.’

Astrid gave Kellas a light punch on the shoulder. ‘She was only sixteen!’

‘You titillated me! That’s entrapment.’

‘If that’s titillation for you, does that make you easy to please, or hard to please?’

‘I didn’t ask to be pleased.’

Astrid stopped smiling and widened her eyes. ‘That’s not you. Being tough and hardboiled.’

‘I’m tougher than you think.’

‘Out there, maybe.’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the wall of the compound. ‘Not with women. I can believe you being a bastard where women are concerned, but not being tough.’

‘I’m going to start being tough.’

‘No,’ said Astrid seriously, with certainty. ‘People can’t change. You do know that, don’t you? People can’t change, except by becoming more like they are.’

‘Do you know how you are?’

‘I’m the same woman I was in America. I haven’t changed. I’ve just put myself in a place here where some of the afflictions don’t flourish. I’m like one of those alien species which thrives in a strange climate. I’m like the rabbits in Australia, the kudzu in Mississippi. No natural enemies.’

‘Your afflictions don’t flourish here,’ said Kellas. ‘What about your desires?’

Astrid laughed, looked at him from under her fringe, then lowered her head and plucked grass stems from the soil, one by one. They broke with a snap. ‘A man is flirting with me in a war. Is this a good time, I wonder.’

‘It’s the best time. The worst thing is that the Taliban and the Alliance are such slackers that neither of us can pretend we might be killed tomorrow.’

Astrid laughed. ‘We can pretend.’

‘If I’m not tough, you’re not coy.’

Astrid looked at him, reached out her hand and placed her palm against the side of his face for a second. ‘No, I’m not coy,’ she said. ‘Tell me what it is that you want from me.’

Kellas thought, looking at her, that he would have to lie, or rather tell a part of a greater truth. He’d have to fool Astrid into thinking he was tougher. Part of that for sure was the thing he was going to ask her for, and not a minor part. He did want to make love to her. How many times with women had he half-deceptively, half-earnestly hidden that desire in promises of cohabitation and shared futures, felt the need to fog the lust in a spray of twitters about intimacy and friendship and taking time to get to know? And how often had he been seen through? Often. With Astrid he’d be going the other way, one hundred and eighty degrees. Concealing from her, so that not a flash of it showed, his wish to adore her and be adored by
her; and show her only the other thing, as if it was the main thing. The only way he could see to hide his real desire was to choose words rough and coarse enough that they’d have the appearance of truth by their directness. Astrid might be susceptible to the notion that lies do not sound naïve. Besides, what he was going to say was true; it was a lie only in that it was a false answer to her question.

‘What do I want from you?’ said Kellas. He swallowed. ‘I want to fuck you.’

He expected her to laugh, or raise her eyebrows, or turn cold, or, at best, reward his dishonesty with the words: ‘At least you’re honest.’ But Astrid’s expression didn’t change at all. She blinked a couple of times. Her smile didn’t harden or tighten. ‘What you and I need is a place where we can sleep together,’ she said. ‘You arrange it, and I’ll come.’

A
cabin attendant handed Kellas a visa waiver form. The American immigration authorities wanted to know the address of his first night’s stay. He wrote in the number of an apartment on Prince Street where he’d stayed sixteen years ago, on his first visit to America. Out of the window now, through gaps in shabby sheets of cloud, he could see the white and black of Canada cranking by. What still acres of larch down there, what pullings-up of pick-up trucks at crossroad coffee stops; and random points of snow darting against them, to roll and settle in the coat-folds of family men with necessary chores, and plain destinations? Kellas felt the winter wind blow through the holes in his ragged plans. His confidence astonished him. Perhaps he would really go to the apartment on Prince Street, find some lonely New Yorker in residence, charm them with his accent and his story of sleeping in the place during the San Gennaro Festival of 1986. Yes, he could do that. There was nothing wrong with his imagination. He could come up with stories and do more than write them down: he could put himself in them. He could turn up for real in any story. He’d drafted a story in the hotel room after the Cunnerys’. A man on the run from a fight gets a cry for help from an old lover on the far side of the ocean and straight away flies off to meet her. They embrace. No words. They know. The end. The beginning. That was his story. He didn’t know what story Astrid had written to meet it. The story he’d set in Bagram a year ago had been simpler. Man meets woman. They hit it off. They make love. The beginning. The end. It should have played out that way. Even if he’d written it as
tragedy, he wouldn’t have written it so that those who died were strangers.

The notion of Bagram as the trysting place had come to him almost at once, the morning after talking to Astrid on the lawn of the Jabal compound. Mohamed knew a small-time commander who ran a group of local Alliance mujahedin close to the runway, which at the time was about a mile from the nearest Taliban positions. Kellas had spent a few hours there one afternoon and had intended to ask Mohamed if he could stay for a whole night, to witness and describe for
Citizen
readers the American bombing of the Taliban at close range. The commander’s outpost was set among a group of high, roofless, horseshoe-shaped shelters built two decades earlier to protect Soviet aircraft from attack, the same aircraft whose wrecks now lay scattered across the airfield. Behind these walls the mujahedin and their old weapons, which included a single broken-down tank, were almost invulnerable to the Taliban, who anyway seldom shot at them once the US bombing began. The men slept and ate in safe buildings below the level of the fortifications’ parapet. They watched the opposing side from a wooden watchtower, a roofed-over platform on stilts, which rose, exposed, fifteen feet above the aircraft shelters. The platform was a pleasant, shady place in the heat of the afternoon, and the mujahedin would spread out a cloth on the wooden floor to eat lunch. Blankets could deal with the cold of the night. The commander would want to keep a man on sentry duty there during the hours of darkness. But the sentry could be Mohamed; and it wasn’t necessary for the sentry to be on the platform. He could keep watch almost as well from the foot of the ladder that gave access to it.

Kellas raised it with Mohamed the same day, in the late afternoon, after they’d failed to make it in time to a press conference being held by the Alliance foreign minister, high in the Panjshir. Instead, in Gulbahar, he and Mohamed found a table on the balcony of the teahouse on the river. They sat in the sun with glasses of cardamom-flavoured tea while the driver, by choice, sat at another
table inside. Two women in filthy white burqas came to stand under the balcony and raised their open hands. Kellas could hear them calling but their faces were invisible behind the mesh of the burqas’ face screens. Mohamed dropped into their hands some of the small-denomination notes he kept for mendicants. The women moved on and the narrow street brimmed with a clatter of old, well-tended engines. On the other side of the balcony, the gluey river ran shallow around flat stones and piles of rubbish which had been picked clean of anything recyclable. Mohamed began talking about one of his projects to become rich. He and some friends were going to rent a shipping container and stuff it full of raisins when the seasonal market was overflowing with raisins and the price was low. The following year, before the new season’s raisins were on sale and the price was high, Mohamed and his partners would open the doors of their shipping container and sell their raisins at a giddy profit. Kellas was sure there was something wrong with the idea, but he didn’t know anything about the raisin market. Perhaps Mohamed had hit on something. Perhaps Kellas could settle down in Gulbahar and open a raisin futures exchange. To sit in the sunshine, slowly drinking tea and discussing raisins for the next few hours would be easier than asking Mohamed to facilitate Kellas’s sexual liaison at the front. He would ask, though. The thought of the encounter had taken hold of him. It would be awkward if
The Citizen
found out, but the aim gave his being there a significance and sense of purpose that writing reports for readers in Britain didn’t. The very intention made him more in Afghanistan than he had been before. Fools and lunatics were exiles at home; they found it easier to be at home in exile. A little madness oiled the journey.

Neither man paid attention to the sound of a propeller-driven aircraft high overhead, until shouting began in the street, first children, then men, then the few women outdoors. For a minute it snowed paper. Boys and girls shot back and forward gathering the small squares up. The people of the alleyway snatched at them. There was jostling until they realised it wasn’t money. Kellas saw
the two beggar women fighting over them, holding them up to their faces and ripping them to pieces.

Mohamed picked up one of the squares that had landed on the balcony. It was an American propaganda leaflet, meant for the inhabitants of Taliban territory. It showed a fuzzy picture of a Taliban militiaman beating women with what looked like a piece of thick black electrical cable. The caption asked whether this was a just way to treat women.

‘What do you think?’ asked Mohamed.

‘I don’t think women should be beaten.’

‘No, but about women.’

‘Women should be free,’ said Kellas.

Mohamed laughed. ‘You always say that! But I don’t know what it means. In English, a “free woman” means a woman who is not in prison…yes?’

‘That’s one meaning.’

‘And a woman who is not claimed by a man.’

‘Unattached. Yes.’

‘And a woman who is not busy.’

‘OK.’

‘And a woman who does not cost any money to buy.’

‘No. It doesn’t mean that.’

‘You say, for example, “medicine should be free”. It’s the same. “Women should be free.”’

‘No, it’s not the same. That’s bad English. Don’t go on or I’ll have to pay you less.’

‘Pay me less? Why not pay me nothing? “Interpreters should be free.”’

‘You missed out the important meaning. Women should be free as in “not dependent”, able to choose how they want to live, where they want to live, who they want to live with.’

‘But, Adam, you cannot be changing your mind all the time, and once you make your choice, you are not free.’

‘You can choose again.’

‘Tell me, is it just women who should be free, or men too?’

‘Men, of course.’

‘Am I free?’

‘More free than the women.’

‘Can I move to America?’

‘No.’

‘Can I move to France?’

‘No.’

‘Can I move to London?’

‘No.’

‘Can I buy a new house?’

‘I don’t think so. Maybe, if your raisins pan out.’

‘Can I leave my wife and children?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. And will my children be free then? Free from me, yes? Freedom in English means loneliness, does it not? And to be free is to be…what is the word, the word is…greedy! Greedy and lonely.’

‘No, no, no.’

‘I must be a terrorist, Adam. I hate freedom. I like being married.’

Kellas laughed, and Mohamed with him, and Mohamed went on. ‘What about the woman in your house, the American, the blonde one? She has a black coat with zips.’

‘Astrid? What about her?’

‘Is she a free woman?’

Kellas hesitated. Although Mohamed had out-talked him, Astrid had entered the conversation. ‘She’s one of the freest,’ he said. ‘She does what she chooses.’

‘Freest! Hm! Free, freer, freest. You can say that? Free, freer, freest. Like cold, colder, coldest.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Dead, deader, deadest.’

‘No, you can’t say that. You can only be dead or alive. Everybody who’s dead has exactly the same amount of deadness.’

‘But everybody free is free in a different way.’

‘You’re beginning to talk like a Russian philosopher.’

‘The Russians came here.’

‘I know.’

‘We beat them.’

‘Listen, Mohamed, you talked about Astrid. She’s a friend of mine. A friend, a close friend. There’s something, a thing, I wanted to ask you. If you could help me, and her, with a private matter.’

‘Of course.’ Mohamed started to laugh, and the laugh turned into a giggle, and he carried on giggling and nodding, biting his tongue, while Kellas made his request. Kellas tried to find euphemisms Mohamed would understand. He talked about him and Astrid ‘wanting to spend the night alone together. Alone, not to be disturbed.’

‘Adam,’ said Mohamed, ‘as soon as you said “close friend”, I understood everything.’

‘And the tower’s a good place?’

‘I’ll ask the commander.’

Kellas sat back in his chair, put a sugar-lump in his mouth and looked down at the river. The sweetness fell to ruins on his tongue and he felt a whisper of sadness that Mohamed cared so little for his mortal soul. To be an unbeliever was to be outside the walls of Mohamed’s city of religious morality. Mohamed leaned down from the ramparts, watching the atheists and apostates yelp and burrow and mount each other in the dust. Pointing them out to his curious, well-behaved children. It wasn’t that Mohamed was to be assumed virtuous. He might be arranging such liaisons for himself. The city of religious morality was full of sinners. But Astrid and Kellas were outside the outer circle of sinners, freaks in search of a circus. In Kellas, Mohamed had a pet. Now he’d have a show.

‘Mohamed, nobody gets to watch,’ said Kellas.

Mohamed giggled.

‘I mean it. No spying.’

‘Of course. Of course.’ Mohamed cleared his throat and tried to swallow his fit. ‘Mm. Do you love Astrid?’

‘It’s not your business.’

‘Does she love you?’

‘She loves freedom.’ Kellas closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his left hand and marvelled at the idiotic phrases Mohamed trapped him into saying. Mohamed’s tactic was to lure Kellas’s vanity into the open and see it die in the light. Ask him naïve questions. Steer him into the role of teacher, knowing he had nothing to teach.

‘If she does not love you, why—’

‘Stop,’ said Kellas. ‘Stop. No more questions. This is your country. I ask you the questions.’

‘Ask me any question. Any question, Adam, and I will answer, even if it is the most secret thing in my heart.’

‘Why don’t you introduce me to your wife?’

Mohamed looked down and cocked his head to one side. ‘It’s not what we do,’ he said. He looked up and laughed. ‘If I introduce you, what then? Do you have something to say to her? To ask her to drink Scotch with you in Jabal in the evening?’

‘I don’t think you would translate that for me.’

‘No.’ Mohamed’s laugh eased slowly to a smile and that unstretched to small straight red lips in his beard. ‘No. Anyway, you eat too much.’ He began giggling again.

Kellas and Astrid arrived at Bagram a few days later in separate cars, an hour apart. It was before sunset when the driver dropped Kellas and Mohamed off at the aircraft shelters. To get there they drove through the villages on the edge of Bagram, down a pocked highway lined with stalls selling roughly cast, greaseproof paper-wrapped iron tools from factories in Pakistan, Chinese toys fey with flashing coloured lights, uncountable varieties of cheap contrivance to beat out the seconds of life with the businesses of fixing, hanging, cutting, binding and stowing, steel pots with the heft to boil a whole sheep, charcoal, cauliflowers, carrots the colour of beetroot, apples and flyblown lumps of mutton sagging on ropes of fat. Kellas got Mohamed to buy two live chickens and Mohamed sat with them in the back, holding them upside down by their feet, serene amid a
rage of beaks, wings and floating chickendown. There was a back road to the east side of the airfield, protected by three men and a length of string hung between two posts. They knew Mohamed and waved the car through onto the airfield taxiways. The car turned onto the runway and sped along it, as no aircraft had done for five years, past the bony struts of bombed-out fighter planes. The evening sun put a scarlet gleam on the tailless, wingless fuselages of broken Antonovs, a brilliance that mocked their own dead lights, like the ghost of a failed science. All that was left of the thundering airborne troop-carriers from Soviet Kiev were notched fingers pointed at the mountains from where their doom had walked in cheap, hard plastic shoes. Kellas and Mohamed left the car and cast the chickens onto the tarmac, where they righted themselves, shook off the indignity and sought pickings.

The local mujahedin fought in shifts, if waiting was fighting. This was the time when the night levies walked and cycled in. The commander had a dozen men at any one time. He, Mohamed, Kellas and a clean-shaven man in a boiler suit climbed to the platform. Kellas was the last to climb up. The three Afghans stood grinning at him like three good uncles. A double pallet had been laid out on the floor and covered with sheets, a blanket and an embroidered bedspread. The bedspread was cream-coloured, sewn with a pattern of green leaves and flowers like foxgloves and like bolls of ochre cotton. On a child’s classroom chair by the bed was a green plastic basin and in it a blue plastic jug of water. A small towel hung over the rim of the basin. Above the bed, from a nail projecting out of the chest-high wooden parapet of the platform, was a posy of plastic violets and red roses with a poem written in silver Roman letters, in a Turkic language, on a pink plastic heart. The whole arrangement had a strong whiff of betrothal. Kellas nodded his head slowly as he looked around, put his hands on his hips and made himself smile back at the Afghans. He knew Mohamed was the only one who spoke English.