We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (23 page)

Crowpucker was glad to read his work out loud. He explained first that the subject of his report was an actual country, and everything in it was based on actual, raw intelligence, but that, for Bastian’s sake, he would refer to the country as country A. The story, or report, as Crowpucker called it, described the life of a boy, Abdullah, living in town K in country A, whose father was a successful exporter of carpets, a devout Muslim, and a member of a group of businessmen trying to persuade the king to step down in favour of an elected parliament. The young boy loved his father and was full of hope for the future of his country. Then, one day, with the help of money and arms from Moscow, the riff-raff of the bazaar and a bunch of misguided liberal intellectuals, the communists staged a coup and took power. The boy’s parents were arrested, his carpet business was collectivised and the mosque placed under strict supervision by atheists. Instead of Koranic classes, the boy was forced to endure Marxist indoctrination. Years went past; repression increased, the boy’s parents were executed, any stirrings of democracy and entrepreneurship were crushed. Islam was treated as a vulgar superstition. At sixteen, the boy fled town K and joined a band of rebel
fighters in the mountains. Out-numbered and out-gunned, they fought for freedom. Their struggle hung in the balance. Moscow was helping the communists – but who was helping them? In their caves in the mountains, they dreamed of a powerful land on the other side of the world. Why did America not help them? They fought with their stolen rifles for freedom, democracy, capitalism and God. Where was the USA? The story ended with young Abdullah surrounded by communists, running out of ammunition, and dying with the word ‘Freedom’ on his lips.

With the applause came the end of the class. They were to reconvene in a week’s time and Bastian was working out the best way to bail when, a couple of days later, he was visited at home by three serious-looking men in suits and ties. They said they worked for the government, and said they’d like to have a talk. They sat down in Bastian’s living room, declining coffee. They were cold and angry. Later it occurred to Bastian that they wanted to frighten him.

They introduced themselves as Jim, Steve and Don.

‘Do you know what Congressional oversight is, Bastian?’ asked Jim. He took a copy of Bastian’s CIA contract out of his pocket and held it up in Bastian’s face. ‘This is your name here, and your signature, right? Have you any idea what kind of a shitstorm goes down now when it comes out that the CIA has been running a covert program without Congressional authorisation?’

‘A creative writing program,’ said Bastian.

‘Shut up, will you?’ said Jim. The conversation went on for several hours, and recurred for many hours more over the months that followed. The classes were terminated. From hints and asides Bastian deduced that Crowpucker and the other seven writers had been acting beyond their authority, competence or duties; that they were all junior intelligence analysts. They were suspended. Over time Bastian learned that he wasn’t in trouble, and that the severe demeanour of his interrogators was not to render him a pliable witness but to intimidate him into signing various waivers and confidentiality clauses.

‘They were afraid,’ Bastian told Kellas. ‘They despised Crowpucker and his friends, I think, but they were less interested in punishing them than – you know the routine. The cover-up. It was that interlude of administrative contrition, after Vietnam and Watergate but before Reagan. The eye of Scrutiny briefly opened. They wanted to take everything that had been talked about in the two hours of that class and bury it as if it had never happened. Including the novel.’

‘They wanted to buy your book?’

‘They wanted to take it. I had to make them pay for it. In the end, they did pay. They paid me a lot and I signed everything they wanted me to sign. I don’t imagine they could have forced me if I’d refused. I took legal advice. I could have brushed them aside. But I took their money because I’d already lost interest in the book. I didn’t believe in it. I wanted it to disappear. I wanted it to be unwritten. I wanted to take the words and turn them back into whatever they were before they were words. In that one way, Crowpucker was right. I wasn’t writing to entertain. I was trying to write something to live by. I thought: should I write words to live by if I do not live that life?’

‘What happened to Crowpucker and the rest?’ asked Kellas.

Bastian nodded slowly. ‘That was twenty-five years ago,’ he said. ‘They started too early and the CIA was the wrong environment for them. There was too much reality there. They’re in their fifties now, in their prime. They’re still around and from what I can see they’re in demand. They get a lot of patronage. In the last few months I’ve seen their names on the Op-Ed pages all the time. Writing their stories.’

Bastian took Kellas upstairs to a bedroom in the eaves, with a shower room off it. He gave him a towel and left him. The room was warm and full of light from the risen sun. The floor and slanted ceiling were of unpainted, thickly varnished wood that creaked when Kellas walked across it. Kellas took off his shoes and clothes and removed the bandage. A thin, fragile scab had formed over the cut. He showered and dried himself. The scab held. He took a small
package out of the pocket of his jacket, lay down on the sheet, pulled the quilt over his body and closed his eyes. He started to count the hours of sleep he’d had since leaving the Cunnerys’ house. As soon as he began to count, he fell asleep.

K
ellas woke up and opened his eyes. Astrid was sitting on the bed, looking at him.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ said Kellas. She had more blood and rawness in her than he remembered. ‘It’s strange to see you again.’

‘It’s more strange for me,’ said Astrid. ‘What are you doing here?’ Her voice was not as warm as Kellas wanted. She was sitting on the very edge of the bed, with her legs in jeans crossed away from him, her hands clasped on her lap, her shoulders turned slightly so that she could see his head on the pillow.

‘You sent me an email,’ said Kellas.

‘Come. On!’ said Astrid, gritting her teeth and marking each word with a hard poke of her middle finger onto Kellas’s thigh under the quilt. ‘You knew it was a fake. That virus sent the same email out to everyone in my address book, and they’re not here. Didn’t you get the message I sent telling everybody, as if it wasn’t obvious?’

‘I haven’t checked since I got the first message,’ said Kellas. He sat up and reached out his hand towards Astrid. She looked at it and kept her hands clasped together. She shook her head and bowed her shoulders. ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ she said. ‘I didn’t return your calls, your letters, your emails. Did you think “She’s crazy about me, that’s why she doesn’t ever reply”? Was that your logic?’

Kellas began to talk about thinking things are going to happen, and how foolish it was, when Astrid interrupted. ‘You can’t stay.
You mustn’t stay and you shouldn’t be here. You were out of your mind to think I’d want you to come, whatever it says in a dumb email. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not fair.’

‘I was out of my mind. But now I’m here.’

‘Bastian said he found you in the snow in just a suit and shirt, without even a bag?’ Astrid laughed. She stopped quickly, and became serious and worried, yet in the two seconds of her laughter Kellas’s spirit stretched. He realised he had gone to sleep with something clenched in his fist, and he remembered what it was. He handed it to Astrid.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I never gave you back those batteries.’

Astrid looked down at her hand as it closed around the batteries and she said: ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘There are things I need to talk to you about,’ said Kellas.

‘There’s no need here,’ said Astrid, getting up. ‘There’s no need between us. We did what we did and we went our separate ways. Don’t try to make some phoney bond because we slept together once, because you have whatever feelings you think you have for me, or because of anything else.’

‘I’ve been thinking about what happened at Bagram.’

‘You’re too conceited. You want to make somebody else’s tragedy your own because your own mistakes aren’t grand enough to be tragedies.’ She shrugged. ‘Did you think we were going to have a hug and a cry about it and release our suppressed emotions? I don’t do that. I don’t suppress and I don’t release. I do remember. If you think you helped get those men killed, well, you probably did. I probably did. I’m not going to let you use that as a reason to hang out in my house when you shouldn’t be here.’

‘Is it your house? Or Bastian’s?’

‘It’s not any of your business. Those were Taliban drivers, you know.’ She opened the door. ‘I have to clean a deer.’ She left and he heard her going downstairs.

Kellas got out of bed. One of the occupants of the house had put clean clothes on a rush-seated chair in the corner; a pair of
jeans, a yellow T-shirt and a thick, roll-necked oatmeal sweater. On top of them was a clear plastic bag containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, a disposable razor and a tube of shaving cream. Kellas’s own clothes lay where he’d left them, on an old chest of drawers made from slabs of pine an inch thick. Next to his clothes there was a wooden decoy, carved and painted to imitate a swimming teal. By the bed was a table with a lamp and two books. There was a picture on the wall above the bed. Kellas guessed it had been taken in the late 1960s. It was an over-exposed colour photograph in a plain black metal frame. Standing in the background, on a lawn close to a fruit tree, was a handsome woman in loose summer trousers and a short-sleeved white blouse, holding her head to one side and squinting a little into the light, smiling and sticking the end of her right hand into her pocket self-consciously, while her left hand hung awkwardly loose. She looked like Astrid; her jaw was wider. Halfway between the woman and the camera was a young girl with a ponytail, in a mauve polyester T-shirt with a flower motif, dark slacks and bare feet. Kellas recognised the girl as Astrid. Her image was slightly blurred because she was moving. She seemed to be running towards the camera, while her arm was stretched out behind her, her hand trailing towards the woman who must be her mother. There was an ambiguity to the motion implicit in the picture. It appeared that, just before the photographer pressed the shutter, Astrid had let go her mother’s hand and run towards the photographer, leaving all three of them isolated. Yet even though Astrid had run away from her mother, she had left her hand stretched out towards her, a gesture of empathy and invitation. It was as if she had been reluctant to be together with her mother at rest, yet would run with her. I shall not stand with you but I shall move with you, if you will move with me.

Kellas went to the window, which projected out from the roof. It looked down into the back garden. He could see the pale belly of a headless deer hanging from a metal frame by its two front legs. Next to the frame Astrid had set up a folding table. On it was a
saw, a cleaver, a butcher’s knife, a roll of kitchen paper, a small, steaming basin of water, and the deer’s head on a plate. It was not a large animal. There was a larger tub on the ground underneath the carcass. Astrid, wearing a stained white apron and holding a small knife between her teeth, was fiddling with a tube in a bloodstained opening she had cut around the deer’s anus. She was tying a knot in it.

Kellas quickly showered, shaved, cleaned his teeth and put on the borrowed clothes. He wore his own old socks and, after hesitating, put on the jeans over his bare skin, rinsed his underpants in the basin, wrung them out and hung them over the shower curtain rail. He went downstairs. There was a smell of frying meat and the sounds of Bastian talking to Naomi while he opened and closed doors and deployed utensils. In the hallway, between Bastian in the kitchen and Astrid in the garden, Kellas was superfluous. His only reason to be there was to disrupt something that was working beautifully. He put his head round the kitchen door. Bastian looked up from the stove and Kellas asked if he could help. Bastian said no, he was in good time for a late lunch or an early dinner.

‘If you’d like to join us,’ he said.

Kellas said he would like to. Bastian lifted Naomi out of her high chair, handed her to Kellas and told him to take her outside to see her mother. Kellas did as he was asked.

Astrid had cut the deer open and gutted it. The beast’s innards glistened in white membranes in the bucket under the carcass. She was halfway through skinning it. Kellas watched while she broke the delicate legs of the deer like sticks, cut between skin and bone around the joints with the small knife, and tugged the hide off. Naomi uttered a syllable and Astrid looked round. She greeted Kellas and her daughter. ‘Hi, honey!’ she said. She looped the deerskin over the corner of the metal frame. Her hands and wrists were bloody. She came over and rubbed her nose against Naomi’s, holding her arms away, then went into the house. The head of the deer had its
eyes open and they had a queer brightness to them still. Its tongue hung out of the side of its mouth. Astrid had placed it facing the frame so that it appeared to be regarding its own red, flayed body. Its eyes seemed to gaze on its corpse with the same lovely stupidity it had turned to the sun falling on the melting traces of snow in the woods not long before.

Kellas heard raised voices from the house. He couldn’t make out the words. He heard what sounded like Astrid interrupting Bastian. Bastian came out of the house, took Naomi from Kellas and returned inside. Astrid came back out a few minutes later and began fishing around in the bucket of guts.

‘Usually I’d clean the deer out there in the woods,’ she said. ‘Less weight to drag back and less chance of spoiling. Happened I made the kill close to the road, though. Bastian came up and gave me a hand. I thought, I can be home in half an hour, do it there. Now I’ve gone and got myself all mixed up. I got blood all over the hide, should have just left it on to hang.’ Astrid took two bloody dark lumps out of the bucket, trimmed them with the knife, and put them in a bowl. She moved them around with the blade, flipped them over, lifted the bowl to her nose, and sniffed.

‘Is that liver?’ said Kellas, going closer to look in the bowl.

‘The liver, and the heart,’ said Astrid. ‘You check on them to see they aren’t diseased. If it looks as though you’ve got a sick deer, you can send the organs off to the county veterinarian, and he’ll give you a new tag. Which means he’ll let you kill another one. They’re good to eat, too.’

Kellas offered to help and Astrid shook her head. She’d clean up and hang the deer in the larder. She rinsed her hands in the warm water and dried them off. ‘Naomi’s beautiful, don’t you think so?’ she said.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I love my girl very much. She’s all there is now. I don’t want you holding her. I don’t know you well enough to let you get to know her. So don’t pick her up again.’

‘I won’t,’ said Kellas. His voice wavered and he looked down at the ground.

Astrid began taking the deer carcass down and Kellas went back to the kitchen, where Bastian had laid the table. By the time Astrid came back indoors, Bastian had put Naomi to sleep in her nursery.

‘Did you feed her?’ asked Astrid.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Bastian.

‘I’ll go and check on her.’

‘You don’t need to.’

Astrid sat down. She and Bastian talked about Naomi’s next doctor’s appointment and the need to get the chimney cleaned. Bastian set a jug of water on the table, served the food and placed his hands palms down on the table on either side of his plate. Astrid did likewise and Kellas followed. Bastian said: ‘Adam, Astrid and I, Bastian, declare our humility and gratitude that we may eat and drink well, and in kind company, in the blind glory of the world, in the short space granted to us between the unknown before our beginnings, and the unknown beyond our ends. Please, eat.’ Bastian had made venison steaks with a juniper sauce, from the last deer Astrid had killed.

‘White tail, from Assateague,’ said Bastian. ‘You can only hunt white tail there two days a year.’

‘Tastes fantastic,’ said Kellas. ‘I had venison in London – what is today? Tuesday? – on Sunday night. There weren’t any hunters at that table, I don’t believe, I imagine the meat there came from Waitrose. That’s a fancy supermarket, grocery store, in England.’

‘Sunday night,’ said Bastian. ‘So you left when?’

‘Yesterday morning. A few hours after I got what I thought was the email from Astrid.’ Kellas looked down at the food on his plate. The words were less sticky today. He liked Bastian and the stillness of his brooding encouraged the notion that stories told to him were stories safely kept and wisely used. It did not seem to matter what Astrid heard him say. ‘It was a bad evening. I lost control.’

‘Sometimes when people say that, they mean that they lost control, and sometimes they mean that they decided to switch control off,’ said Bastian.

‘I lost it,’ said Kellas. ‘I saw my closest friend cheating on his wife in front of my eyes, and her not realising. An ex-girlfriend was abusing me. One of the guests was a sociopathic, misogynist, fascist photographer. And the host was a left-wing journalist who idealises any country which opposes your country without ever putting himself and his friends through the inconvenience of living there. It was all too much together. I smashed their crockery and glassware and turned the table over and threw a bust of Lenin through their front window.’

‘I always thought the best thing when you don’t like somebody is to avoid their hospitality,’ said Bastian.

‘Wait,’ said Astrid. ‘You threw a bust of Lenin through this guy’s front window? Then what did you do?’

‘I ran away. I went to a hotel. That was where I picked up your email. Bastian’s right. I wish I hadn’t gone. I accepted Liam’s invitation because I like his wife, because my friends were going to be there, because Liam published articles of mine and, I suppose, if it came to the barricades and hard times, we’d be on the same side. He lived in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas when Reagan was giving them gyp.’

‘So he did live in one of his idealised countries,’ said Bastian.

Astrid was looking at Kellas and smiling as she had when they talked on the scraggly lawn in front of the compound in Jabal os Saraj. ‘You just ran away from all the mayhem you’d caused, read an email and jumped on a plane,’ she said.

‘The message came at a particular time. I felt free. I felt untethered,’ said Kellas. It was as he’d hoped. While he told his story it was passing into history. Crazy old Kellas! Remember him? A character, a hellraiser. ‘I had the offer of a big advance from a publisher for my next book and I’d just given up my job. I flew to New York first class. When I got there yesterday I found out
that the publisher had been taken over and they weren’t going to publish it.’

Astrid laughed. ‘First class! So let me see: you’ve lost your friends, lost your job, you’ve got no money, and the love letter you were following turned out to be fake? It’s all going pretty well for you right now.’

Kellas laughed with her. Her eyes were focused on him again, with the intensity that required him to return her attention and to feel desired.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Astrid, ‘but I am going to have to take this man for a walk.’

‘You had the intention of minding Naomi while I went over to the Axiters’,’ said Bastian.

‘I’ve changed my intention.’

‘Seemed like a good intention to me.’

‘Are you counting the times I change my intention?’

‘You haven’t done it for a long time.’

‘It’s happening now.’