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Yannis was a non-believer. Doubting God and his own mission in the army must be awful in wartime. I hoped that at least he had friends among the lads. This is why I asked him to write about his comrades.
Before getting his message, which took two days to come, I received a funny call. A publicity agency asked me to pay them a visit, as they wanted me to play a part in a commercial. What kind of commercial? This was the problem: they had not yet decided if I was the appropriate image for a new car, a soap, a shampoo, the new autumn season at Reitman’s or Simons, a new recipe for lasagna with Emmenthal, the new bioactive yogurt, a washing machine, or a cold water detergent.
I felt overwhelmed by this demand, and I asked my mother for advice. Should I accept this offer? She answered serenely and with no hesitation: Why not? For her the reason was neither money nor celebrity status, but curiosity. I certainly should go: shooting in the desert, climbing a mountain in white running shoes, cooking in a new saucepan – my mother was burning with curiosity for me to tell her how it was. Hadn’t I asked myself what would happen afterwards? After what, Mom?
My mother was not so naive as not to understand that behind the magical world there was a crew of cameraman, wardrobe masters, and make-up people. Still! My mother was seduced by the gargantuan lies that she wished with all her heart to believe in.
Publicity standardizes beauty, and it is mostly addressed to a public of white people. The faces of the women who smile at the camera on behalf of goods ranging from beauty products to winter tires or stainless steel pots all look like one another, like so many drops of water. They are identical especially in the joy that comes of acquiring the product, whether skin moisturizer or long-life batteries, a new hat or a new kind of Campbell’s soup. Buying itself is the biggest delight, not the product.
My mother sent me to spy behind the scenes at the moment when the wizards of happiness start feeling the anxiety of falsity, the moment when they switch off the lights and the smile freezes. It was my job to shed some light on this transition – and on this heartless drama.
So here you are, a woman coming out of a sky blue lake with a foamy white waterfall in the background, and beside you there’s a huge bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo. Or another girl, spinning in what looks like the ocean in huge waves which, though threatening, look as though they are caressing her skin – and which get smaller and smaller until they go into a Whirlpool washing machine. Another gorgeous woman is running in her white shoes on a rainy day, jumping over muddy puddles on narrower and narrower paths until coming to a halt on the edge of a deep canyon on a sunny day, and this is when the camera pans up to the sky and over the bottomless ravine, which is like the one Thelma and Louise sailed into in their car.
My mother wanted me to tell her about this sensation of being small and insignificant, wearing the latest brand of athletic shoe, in this immense earthly loneliness. People are not that familiar with Earth, with its water, its winds, its mud: they are just fooling themselves about being friends with Mother Nature, about geography being their second home. My mother was seeking the precise moment when publicity unveils the prank. Advertising prefers to transform the inhabitable into a familiar space, but my mother had not lost hope that one day those ads would end up telling the truth about the wilderness and its implacable laws.
My mother let herself be charmed by these false images of peaceful cohabitation between people and nature. A woman spreads happiness around her even on a filthy pathway. She is Youth and Beauty.
Look at this ad for a new make of car, a red one – they are all red – leaving behind deep tracks and clouds of dust across a burning desert without a single soul around. What is a single woman doing in the desert? How did she get there, and where is she going with such a deep cleavage, dressed in a see-through skirt? Before getting the message about the hybrid car, my mother could hardly believe anyone could imagine an almost naked woman crossing the desert alone. What about the deadly rays burning her skin? The sweat that makes you as salty as a hot dog? The scorpions?
And how about driving a black jeep across the Great White North? Wrapped up in a coat with a fur-lined hood, this woman gets out of the car in the middle of the immaculate vastness to sip coffee from her thermos bottle. The sun is shining over the horizon and the snow is gleaming like a mirror. In her way, she also seems familiar with this empire of eternal coldness and polar bears. My mother is jealous of her for being able to drink coffee at the North Pole, next to an Inuit fishing in a hole cut in the ice – and for being able to eat dinner that evening in a chic restaurant on St. Catherine Street, say, in Montreal.
This is why my mother wanted me to take this opportunity to spy on the moment when publicity sweeps away the boundaries imposed by human imagination. She was sending me to experience those short moments of advertising which elude the laws of reality and credibility. A woman, always young and beautiful, can cross the desert in a miniskirt and pat a polar bear. Advertisements annihilate the time before and the time after – everything that leads up to the moment and ends up a real story. Isn’t it wonderful to live this everlasting present when a woman swims into the ocean of a washing machine?
Before I could make up my mind, Yannis’s message came in response to mine.
Re: Lads
My lads? They are good guys. Only…
Reduced to an oppressively long wait, my comrades take on some bad habits that everyone can see, they can see it themselves. But who cares to improve in circumstances like these? They become lazy and impulsive and their life is reduced to increasingly disgusting habits: they scratch their dandruff and rub their testicles in sight of everyone. They admit they’re weak, even if sometimes they’re eager to act heroically, to endure some memorable ordeal to show them they can do better than hanging around ruined villages and pacing quiet streets.
Fear reveals itself in us as aggression and scorn. You can’t imagine how other people’s vices make community life unbearable. We get used to everybody’s need to speak out, to tell stories, this human habit that puts you in contact not with people’s real thoughts, but with their own fantasies about imaginary selves. The smallness of the common room where we live obliges us to listen to unbelievable boasts of prowess and dirty stories about women and sex. Other times we deal with hypochondriacs who do everything to convince us how sick they are and how intense is the pain they are feeling. Nobody takes this tissue of lies seriously, but we cannot stand not talking and listening. We listen idly, unable to contradict, to deny, or even to ask for a better version. This life brings out our worst faults.
The longer we stay here, the less we take care of ourselves. Little by little, we stop bothering to shave and shower, as these habits are related to the desire to be liked, and who could like you in this desert? What you see every day are just gloomy faces, often dirty, for dust sticks to your skin like a mask. The energy that should shine out of a young face fades away. Nobody is interested in reading what is hidden behind this mask of wrinkles, hair, marks, and pimples. Inactivity annihilates the cooperation that should exist between body and spirit.
It is seldom that a mission that is more dangerous than usual can awaken courage, even heroism in us. The muggy atmosphere and the secrets of the uncertain day head cause everyone to let themselves go.
The most difficult thing is that we cannot isolate ourselves from the others. Life in a group can be oppressive. We hate the mass, while understanding we cannot survive without it. Loneliness is so dangerous here; a wounded animal taken away from the herd becomes vulnerable prey, easily hunted down by its natural enemies. The fact that in the army you don’t choose your own friends or decide your own actions is reassuring, but it also drives you crazy. Next to your comrade you know you are safe, even when you despise him. The only way people can protect their intimacy against the invasion of others, is to build an imaginary space with transparent, sturdy walls.
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My mother knew I was in love, and she was suffering. One day she told me: wait for him to return. It was already too late for this shy warning. I loved the soldier for reasons that she did not fail to understand. Not my mother.
The height of any love story is always the sexual act, but maybe there is something even more gripping when this cannot take place. My mother knew I lacked both humour and a spirit of adventure. She also knew very well that nothing would persuade me to renounce this correspondence which dug deep into the heart of the blue-eyed soldier. And how did it happen that a Greek had blue eyes?
Yannis was not really handsome, but he looked strong. And every woman is sensitive to this characteristic, as we are all searching instinctively for a good father for our children.
In a picture he sent me, taken in front of the Canadian flag on the day he left for Afghanistan, he is looking somewhere above the head of the photographer. You can only see his left hand, lying on the bag hanging from his neck. What touched me was his black watch, a very cheap black watch around his wrist. This single detail made me feel so close to him, and I thought that the day we met I would give him a nice watch.
Are there any other secrets this picture could reveal about the man talking to me from these messages, telling me about a war that kept us apart? Would he like to come back home soon? Had his future projects changed in any way since he had got to know me? I did not know how to talk to him about everything on my mind. Instead, I asked him why everybody complained about the war in Afghanistan despite the enthusiastic beginnings.
Re: War
Any history book tells us that people learn more from defeat than from victory. The worst thing for us is that we do not know if we have won or if what we are living here is a discouraging defeat. Have we lost this war? I think this is the general perception that people have of us and our mission, and it prevents them from seeing our small achievements here. We are trying hard to convince villagers to stay close and remain loyal to their government, dishonest as it is. Police fail in their duty to provide security and confidence. People don’t trust anyone except the army, but the villagers we care for today will be tomorrow’s victims.
What drives us crazy is the public hypocrisy in our own country, as at home even those who are generally opposed to war, or to this particular war, feel they have to support the troops in Afghanistan. But how do you support the troops and not the mission? What are we supporting if not the need for them to die? So why are there all those tears and accusations each time a soldier is killed? In the collective sub-consciousness, a soldier’s mission in Afghanistan is to stay alive no matter what, and the price is paid in other people’s lives – the casualties among villagers nobody is even counting any more.
As long as the general attitude remains half-hearted, and the government does not invest enough, we will not be able to win this war. It is enough to see that in any debate on this subject people try hard to avoid the word war. From a personal and immediate conflict, through to television, Afghanistan became a distant problem disconnected from the real life of the West; it is just a nasty place that produces caskets and pictures of national funerals. But we are at war, damn it, and to win the war they have to treat us as warriors, not social workers. We are not the local police, busy directing traffic and making the Taliban pay fines for drinking and driving or for parking infractions. All we can do is wait to return home, and try not to get killed in the meantime. Which is not a whole lot for a fighter, right?
Y
That day, I had to go to the head office of the advertising company for a photographic session. Behind the desk, a young woman and an old man examined me coldly. I was not really a star, as to get this status I should have achieved something more than smiling from a magazine cover. This meant I could not become the image of luxury goods like perfumes, cosmetics and cars. Those are fields reserved for real celebrities, who usually do more than pose for a ranking of the best universities.
The best things for people like me were food and detergents. I could play the role of an Italian cousin who brings over a new tomato sauce recipe to his overseas family; or I could be the upstairs neighbour complaining about stains on her white blouse or angrily rubbing soap scum off the shower stall. In her colourful apron, a stay-at-home mom always remains young and smiling. How could anyone trust products praised by a fat and wrinkled woman?
In the end, they decided the best I could do was to appear in a commercial about the new Campbell’s Mushroom Soup. I would be the ideal mom of the ideal family living in the ideal house. My husband, a little fleshy but not overly so, his curls showing his few grey hairs, is sitting around the table next to our two children: a boy and a girl. The perfect dining room is next to the perfect kitchen, which is shining with neatness, as its appliances are never used except to heat up canned food and defrost frozen meals.
Hardly surprising, then, that you see no crumbs, no dirty towels, no forgotten mugs or spoons, not even a dishwasher full of dishes waiting for somebody to put them back in the cupboard. In this kitchen you always see more and more absorbent ScotTowels, spotless kitchen gloves (since no one uses them), and an empty sink with gleaming faucets. The counters are free of tableware except for a crystal vase with freshly cut flowers, and the refrigerator is full of food stored in plastic or paper containers, never in saucepans. On the stovetop, there is nothing cooking on the burner.
So this family of four happily looks at one another while sipping microwaved Campbell’s soup. Through the big windows we see a lush garden on a wonderful summer day. The lawn is green, and flowers are in full bloom; after dinner the children rush outside to play in this earthly Eden. Behind them, the mother, wearing a well-ironed apron, and with not a hair out of place, smiles at the father, who gives her a look full of love.
I accepted this offer, even though I knew how my mother would react. You couldn’t pull the wool over her eyes when it came to the way a kitchen looks. She knew too well the odours produced when you cook a really good soup. She knew what a counter looks like after you have chopped onions, carrots, celery, and tomatoes on it. She could talk a lot about the smell of boiling meat drifting into all the corners of the house, reaching even the neighbours’ bedrooms. She could provide even more detail about the amount of dirty snow piling up under the window of our kitchen. And what about the ideal family? You would have to look hard to find such a pretty couple blessed with such nice, smiling children.
Once at home, I wrote Yannis a short message, without mentioning my publicity session. At the end of it, I asked him if he was scared of dying.
Re: Die
When you’re alone, you think a lot about death, and this is dangerous. Fear transforms us into odious people, badly behaved. I think we should live in sweet ignorance of death. The good part, though, is that faced with danger, people ask themselves more often if they are happy.
Y
I took advantage of Yannis being around to ask him about the ordinary people he met over there. Despite the gap between the two sides, they were leading a modern war where people were in close touch, able to look into one another’s eyes. What did the civilians think?
Re: Civilians
The civilians’ philosophy of life boils down to this: Let them kill each other! Their indifference towards us seems very reasonable to me, as we carry out justice in this place without involving ourselves either in their society or in their religious cause. Simply put, we find those causes futile if not barbaric. Our approach is blind, and because of this, treachery, duplicity and lies rule everywhere, at every level. We are losing the final battle as we steer clear of what motivates their hatred and their actions.
To avoid danger, we just treat them all as spies, as Taliban disguised as civilians. On their side, they consider us nothing more than smiling, naive guys with a lot of energy. Their eyes, however, warn us never to forget to be afraid. We are exhausted by ou
r own attempts to guess what is hidden behind the mask of their face. Their physiognomy is so treacherous: sometimes their sunburned faces emanate beauty and sweetness, but the next moment you are astonished by how they can reveal cruelty and ugliness. Their eyes stare at you with such intensity, ready to cut you into pieces, tear at your skin, scratch your cheeks. Their presence around us is overwhelming, hypnotic. The strangest thing is that they are cruel without selfishness. This disparity comes from the fact that we are so different from each other. Or it could be the fact that, armed as we are, from head to toe, we don’t give them any chance to approach our body, to touch even a small piece of our flesh. Our eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, and this gangster-like accessory warns them that contact with us is impossible, even as human contact here is as vital as the air we breathe.
At least we Canadians have a good reputation. We are different from the Europeans, they say. We believe everything they tell us, and we pay the price they ask for any service, without bargaining. By this I understand we are the most naive of all the Westerners they know. Young Afghans are eager to do business with us, as we know how to lose without making a fuss. Our Canadian identity is helpful and highly prized because they all know we are defending their country in other nations’ interest, and for this reason they pity us. Even enemies who attack us in the dark kill us without hate. They trap us in an explosive blast just because we are strangers, as in this country, from the dawn of time, strangers have been abhorred and hunted down.
On our side, we also kill them by tradition and because the British army did it a long time ago. In a way, Canada continues the British invasion of their territories. A few of my guys have learned enough history to know how subjects of the British Crown broke their necks in a narrow mountain pass, 200 years ago. We could break our necks in these places, too, and Her Majesty the Queen would not care much.
The Darling of Kandahar Page 9