We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  It was from about this height that the F-18 pilots would have looked down on the Shomali plain, between Kabul and Jabal os Saraj at the mouth of the Panjshir. Ten thousand feet was as high as a Stinger could rise to shoot them down, and none ever had been shot down. The pilots had left the air-conditioned cabins of their aircraft carriers, flown over Pakistan into Afghanistan and tattooed the earth with bombs, then flown home for a meal and a shower. They were still doing it. Hitting was also a kind of touching. But if hitting was the only kind of touching you did, you would damage the one you touched so badly that, by the time you came to embrace them, they would recoil from you.

  The pilots had seen what they did from afar. They could not land. There had always been the distance. America reached out for thousands of miles and its sense of touch stopped three miles short. It threw the bombs, and pulled away again. It wasn’t entirely a matter of retribution, strong as the passion of vengeance was then. There was curiosity in that reach, and a kind of regret. In any act of hurting there remained the ghost of intimacy. Like the nineteen martyrs whose suicide had summoned them to Afghanistan, the American pilots showed that the power they represented was great and their cause irresistible. They were not afraid to kill or die. Yet no fulfilment lay in the destruction without a moment of understanding, an instant when all the bomber imagined about those he bombed, all his spite and defiance towards his imagined victims, converged with their forced embrace of death. When the bomber understood whom he was killing and the bombed understood whom they were being killed by, and they became one. In Afghanistan Kellas had wondered when this moment of union and consummation came. Was it the instant the hijackers saw the glass of the towers fill the cockpit windows, and the office workers saw a rush of darkness eat the light? The moment their bodies were vapourised together in an incandescent bloom of jet fuel, and their consciousnesses lingered just long enough to understand? When the Taliban tasted the dust kicked up by the American bombs falling around them, or when America and America’s pilots saw the explosions of those bombs on their screens?

  Kellas had watched the jets jinking over the mud walls, irrigation channels and mulberry groves at the northern end of the plain. Once he had almost trod on a mine, following the sharky twists of the plane against the blue and not looking where he was walking. The sound of the F-18’s engines had drowned out the shouts of his colleagues, warning him that he was straying from the marked path. The F-18s were pretty accurate, on the whole. They killed and maimed the Taliban, as they were intended to. Every so often, though, they fucked up.

  There’d been a night when they’d heard that the Americans had bombed an Alliance village by mistake. The reporters and photographers in Jabal were bored and tetchy because the war was everywhere and nowhere, like God; they were telling their editors that they believed in it but they seldom heard it, let alone saw it, apart from the sound of the planes and the columns of smoke on the horizon. It was late October. All of them expected a stalemate on through Ramadan, Hanukah and Christmas, to the very Year of the Horse. The rumour of deaths in a friendly village nearby, with the wounded taken to an Italian charity hospital in the Panjshir, gave them hope for a story.

  Kellas glanced at the seatbelt sign. It was still lit. They were climbing again, over the Irish Sea. If he couldn’t remember every word and look of Astrid’s, what value did this journey to Virginia have now? He’d written to her, but she had not written to him, or called. A year had passed. He knew that he wanted to see her but to know what it was in her he wanted to see he could only delve back into the weeks in Afghanistan and sort through the jumble of her humours. They had fucked together and they had killed together and he did not know her.

  On the night after the bombing he’d seen the sudden joy of leadership in her. The kind of leader that hopeless local rebellions threw up, or partisan bands, or complicated games of children, quick, eager and right. The journalists’ regular drivers had knocked off with the lateness of the hour and it was Astrid who organised a Toyota minibus to take them up to the hospital in the Panjshir before midnight. She’d turned to Kellas, who wasn’t sure where he stood, and said: ‘Want to come?’ She cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows and smiled and Kellas nodded. He remembered what she wore: the red woollen jumper, a little frayed at the hem, with the black scarf and too-big black anorak and jeans, and the black suede boots with toes that were almost pointed. When it was awkward for her to have her head uncovered she wore the scarf over it, or tucked her hair into a pakul hat. It flopped out.

  Kellas and Astrid sat at the back of the minibus. In front of them two photographers were talking in French. The moon was bright enough for the silhouette of the mountains to be clear against the sky. There were no artificial lights on the plain or in the streets of the town. The mud buildings reflected the moon. Their walls seemed to glow with a faint phosphorescence, as if they were made of lunar material, and their glassless windows were dark as cavemouths. The Toyota hammered past the silent unpowered houses like the eyes of an atheist skimming the Koran.

  ‘My newspaper doesn’t give me the space to write that it’s beautiful here,’ said Kellas.

  ‘The people who read it wouldn’t be happy if it did,’ said Astrid. ‘They’d think they were awful sinners if they went looking for the truth about war in one of your articles and they found you’d slipped some beauty into it.’

  ‘They ought to know war isn’t something that oozes out of the ground in this country. No more than it does in our own.’

  The four furrows appeared on Astrid’s forehead as she thought over each word she spoke. ‘You can write poetry another day,’ she said, leaning forward, talking into the seat in front of her. She turned and looked at him. ‘You can have the beauty, but that’s your prize, Adam Kellas, it’s what you see. What your paper needs is what the Afghans see. I don’t know that it looks so pretty to them. It just looks like being poor.’

  ‘I never wanted to come here,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Habit.’

  Astrid smiled. Her forehead smoothed over. Kellas wondered if she’d seen through him. She asked: ‘What made you think you ought to break the habit?’

  ‘A country sends its travellers abroad like words spoken from one person to another,’ said Kellas. ‘Like me talking to you now. The country sees its travellers leave and I hear the words as they leave my mouth and enter you. But the country doesn’t see what happens to its traveller when he arrives in that foreign place and I can’t know how you take the words I speak.’

  ‘I’ll tell you, if you want,’ said Astrid, smiling and fiddling with her ear.

  ‘I’ll never know what happened to the words,’ said Kellas. ‘And the traveller never comes back. He becomes another man, who belongs a little to the place he travels to. He belongs more to that place every day he stays there. And that’s the very part, the belonging, that I never find out how to pass to the people at home. Maybe because I can’t get it right. Maybe because they don’t want to know.’

  ‘You want too much,’ said Astrid. ‘The best of us is still a small messenger, with a short quiet message. One of us can’t make one country understand another. It takes the whole chorus and a million messages just to make a tiny connection.’

  ‘What do you see when you look out through that glass?’ said Kellas.

  ‘Oh, darkness is another country,’ said Astrid. ‘The night’s another world. Not so much the hider of secrets, more like the maker of mysteries. I can’t help believing there are things out there that don’t exist in the daylight. You can always set yourself up with something to chase when the moon’s out.’

  ‘So you’re here for you.’

  ‘I’ll write what I write. I send my messages back. But that’s duty. It’s not the reward. I figure you’d be a lot happier, too, if you kept your duty and your rewards separate.’ She stopped and bent her head forward and picked at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans. ‘When I was a teenager I had a thin
g about Artemis the hunter. I owned a picture book with stories about the old gods. There was this one page I kept on looking at, which was Artemis running through the forest at night with one hand carrying her bow and the other stretched out towards me, the girl looking at the picture. The deer’s point of view. But I didn’t feel like a deer. I felt like Artemis was chasing me because she wanted to be with me, and I wanted to be with her, but I wanted her to chase me first.’

  She told Kellas about the place she lived, on the island of Chincoteague at the southern, Virginian tip of the Delmarva peninsula. Her mother had been a history teacher who’d jumped to her death from the roof of the high school where she worked in Washington DC, just after setting her eighth-grade class an assignment on Manifest Destiny. On several occasions afterwards the principal told the family that he was sure the nature of the assignment had nothing to do with their mother’s suicidal intentions. Knowing her mother, from whom hope and peace drained each evening and each autumn with the certainty of tides, Astrid reckoned this was probably true, but it twisted her up inside that the principal said it not because he was trying to protect the family but because he was trying to protect History. They left Washington; Astrid’s brother Tom moved to Seattle and Astrid moved with her father, who’d retired from academia, to a house in the peninsular pinewoods. She still lived with him, and joked about being Daddy’s girl, but she wasn’t often there. After college, film school, a few years managing a band, a few years making short films and a few years running a gallery, she’d gone to Yugoslavia and Rwanda and made a name in magazine journalism.

  She told Kellas how once, one April night, kept awake by hay fever, she’d gone into the kitchen and looked out into the moonlit garden to see a doe, tearing at the young leaves of a pear tree. She watched the animal for a while in peace but there was some urge in her on the warm spring night, with the full moon on the deer’s white throat. She thought about her rifle, but she might bring out the neighbours, and anyway it was well past the end of the hunting season, and she’d already killed her quota. With her cheeks burning and her heart beating she went to her room, dressed and went back to the kitchen. The deer was still there. She left the house on the other side and began to move as slowly and as quietly as she could around the building. When she was just past the first corner, she could hear the branches of the pear tree shaking as the deer tore at the leaves with its lips and teeth. The sound stopped. Astrid guessed the deer had smelled her out. She took several deep breaths, then ran out in time to see the deer’s white rear end and her neat hooves flick powerfully into the bushes at the far side of the garden. Astrid chased after the beast, tripped on a root and fell onto the pine needles. She heard the doe crashing through the trees ahead of her, already hundreds of yards away.

  ‘I remember the smell of the resin from the needles,’ said Astrid. ‘I could smell everything. I even thought I could smell the deer, the heat of it and the musk. I was a wild human for a second. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d caught her. Rip her throat out with my teeth?’ She laughed. ‘Glad I didn’t have it in me. She might’ve been pregnant. I wanted to put my hand on her but I didn’t want to scare her.’

  The minibus jumped and shook on the bad road up the valley, at times a tight space, only the gorge and the river, at times opening out to green meadows, orchards and fields where in daytime peasants steered rough ploughs behind oxen, like European villeins in a book of hours. Some of the bumps were the remnant tracks of Soviet tanks, destroyed by Massoud’s men twenty years before and gradually digested into the tissue of the road. The river was good for trout. From the window of the Toyota, Kellas could see flickers of silver where the moon caught the rough fast water. He looked round. Astrid was watching him.

  ‘I’ve seen Afghans fishing down there,’ she said.

  ‘There’s a place further up the valley,’ said Kellas. ‘They sell fried fish and potatoes.’

  ‘Fish and chips,’ said Astrid. She leaned in against Kellas and lowered her voice. ‘I wonder if any Afghans are out in the dark now, here in the valley, fucking. What do you think?’

  ‘They could be, I know, in among the mulberry trees. The leaves and the darkness to hide them, and the sound of the river covering the noise.’

  ‘The houses are crowded, and all the prohibitions,’ said Astrid.

  ‘If you can be killed for doing it, and nobody does catch you, it must make it intense.’

  ‘You’d have to choose your time, and choose your place, and plan,’ said Astrid. ‘I guess all the lovers are like partisans here.’

  ‘Some of the lovers are married to each other,’ said Kellas.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Astrid. ‘But I was thinking of those that aren’t and can’t be.’

  ‘I asked Mohamed about it,’ said Kellas. ‘He was shy and he was giggly. A European man can’t know. They meet you at the edge of their villages and you can’t know what’s happening inside. You could, perhaps. Veil up and enter their houses.’ He took Astrid’s hand on her lap, so it couldn’t be seen, and she clasped it. He looked at Astrid and he could hardly see her in the darkness. He could see her eyes only when they moved.

  One of the French photographers turned round. His name was Louis-Bernard. He was growing a beard for the first time in his life and it was growing out in some places and not in others. Astrid and Kellas slipped their hands apart.

  ‘That’s why the Muslims get so angry,’ Louis-Bernard said. ‘They have nowhere to go to masturbate in peace.’

  The other photographer, Zac, turned and said: ‘He was brought up in a boarding school run by Jesuits, so he knows.’

  At the hospital, with its lights on generator power and the charity name painted in four-foot-high capital letters on the wall, they were turned away, although they were persistent in their questions. The English woman running the place lost her temper, and the journalists made the hour’s journey back to Jabal empty-handed. Kellas and Astrid went to their sleeping places alone. In the morning, Kellas went to see what had happened in the bombed village.

  The bomb site was on the plain between Jabal and Bagram airfield. It was several miles from the closest Taliban positions, among fussily divided portions of loamy fields that were themselves divided by duckponds, irrigation channels, clusters of poplar and willow and narrow mud dykes. The houses were big and roomy and solid, but humble between the trees, with their outlines made by the quick weathering of untreated mud-bricks. The journalists from Jabal had to park their cars half a mile from the place where the bomb had fallen and take a zigzag course on foot between the channels, with their interpreters stopping often to ask for fresh directions. The lines of cars badly parked and jammed together where the road ran out made Kellas think of a country wedding rather than a funeral. As Kellas and Mohamed walked between the trees, they could see other journalists and interpreters behind and in front of them, converging on the site along parallel dykes, carrying notebooks and cameras and bags like guests bearing gifts. The sky was the same rude clear blue as every morning, and it was the most comfortable hour, when the night chill had gone and the midday sun hadn’t begun to burn. The sound of water flowing from channel to channel and the touch of willow branches on Kellas’s shoulder took away his awareness of past and future and he felt contented. Crowns of sharp yellow mulberry leaves, cruel and fine like victory, bit the sky.

  A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in front of the bombed house. It was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and his brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin
, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

  Most of the reporters, including Kellas, asked him how he felt towards the Americans. Perhaps he’d say something unexpected. Come up with a theory that they had done it on purpose, or shrug and scratch his nose and say: ‘It’s better that the Taliban should be beaten than that my wife should live and my children not be hurt by shrapnel. I’m sorry about my family, but that’s war. It’s all for the greater good, in the end.’ But Jalaluddin didn’t say anything unexpected. Kellas could have written that the Afghans do quiet dignity awfully well but it would not have been true. They did not do it. It was what was there. All Jalaluddin said, as Mohamed translated it, was: ‘My wife is dead. The Americans destroyed our family. What should I do? They should bomb the enemy. Not us.’

  He’d been watching his sheep the previous afternoon when he heard the explosion. He ran back and with the other villagers began pulling his family out of the rubble with his bare hands. There was no doubt that it was an American bomb. Kellas could still see bits of it, jagged tearings of thin steel painted dark green, and the swivelling tail-fins that were supposed to steer it. It had numbers painted on it in white. You could see it had been a neat and well-made thing. The fragments were embedded in the rubble the bomb had made. Because of the nature of the material, it didn’t look like rubble, or ruins. It looked as if the ground had spontaneously shaped itself into lumps with some straight edges and belched into the air. A man from the BBC was standing halfway up the slope of fragmented clay, doing a piece to camera. Kellas climbed up to where one of the family rooms stood opened up to the world, cross-sectioned, half-intact. The inner walls of the surviving part were whitewashed. A narrow, lumpy bed was carefully made, with the edges of the counterpane quite straight and no wrinkles. Pink and green plastic vessels which had been used many times were still stacked on a dresser. The small wall clock with arrowhead hands had stopped at half past four. On the wall was a photograph of a young man wearing an American sports top and grinning, with modern Middle Eastern buildings in the background. Kellas found out from a neighbour that the picture was of a cousin of the dead wife’s in Iran, and from Mark that the cousin was wearing a San Francisco 49ers shirt. He wrote it down. Jalaluddin’s wife had already been buried in the overgrown village plot, under a short oblong of raised earth. Villagers had dragged thorny branches over the top to stop livestock walking on it or dogs and jackals digging the body out. Half an hour after Kellas arrived a memorial service began. One of the elders spoke a sermon. He stood just inside a circle the men formed. The women of the village stood further back, in a body, under the shade of the trees, and the foreigners formed a loose outer perimeter, the writers leaning in to listen to their interpreters, the photographers roaming to and fro for good shots. The one who preached had a white beard and a haj cap and a string of beads swinging from his hands clasped in front of him. He spoke with his eyes closed. His clothes weren’t ragged or dirty, but they weren’t expensive. He was older than many in the gathering, but he wasn’t old. Some of the elders there were bent and shaking. Surely he was the preacher, the one who led the prayers, the one who best knew the Book and the writings of the scholars who had subjected it to thirteen and a half centuries of exegesis. He was like the others; that was what gave him authority, not his learning. For a preacher, he lacked vanity. He stood there speaking like a man who didn’t believe he had a special self and it was his ordinariness that could give his words the tune of revelation, if his words were good enough. Kellas relied on Mohamed to tell him what the preacher was saying. It was hard for Mohamed to do that. He wasn’t up to simultaneous translation. He could manage just about every second sentence, or clumps of sentences. It was like looking at a flip-book cartoon of the sermon. It moved and jerked and the action became clear in fifty flickering stills. The preacher said: ‘A woman has been killed. She had wishes in life, but we must think of God, and how we are subordinate to his will.’ Later, he said: ‘The Americans come here, drop their bombs on Afghanistan and kill innocent people. We do not condone this. Still, is it not our fault? We invited them here. Nothing breathes without God. God is using America to hurt the guilty among us by punishing those of us who have done no wrong.’ The villagers stood and listened without words or expectations and then went back to work.