by James Meek
Kellas heard a car pull up below, the doors open, the sound of a diesel engine running and voices. Astrid had come. The engine must have been a Uazik, but it sounded like a London cab. Kellas had a moment of vertigo. He told Mohamed to ask the commander to get his cook to kill and prepare the chickens, and said he hoped they could all eat together.
He looked down from the platform to see her smiling up at him and his voice shook a little when he said: ‘Apparently we’re married.’
They ate together, Kellas, Astrid, Mohamed, the commander and four of his men, in a room built into the side of one of the shelters. The mujahedin sleeping quarters were in a like space in another shelter. The eight of them sat around a cloth laid on a floor of worn linoleum, by the light of a kerosene lamp, and helped themselves to rice and bread and radishes and fresh green herbs and pieces of boiled chicken in broth. The commander sat at the head, to Kellas’s left. Astrid was opposite Kellas, with Mohamed next to her. Astrid hadn’t brought her interpreter. The Afghans talked among themselves in Dari. Once in a while Mohamed translated a fragment. The nights could be silent, or there could be bombing. There was no telling. It was like weather. Kellas and Astrid ate and watched each other. She had been careful to tuck her hair inside a headscarf which she wore tight against her forehead and round her neck in the Persian way, like a wimple, so that only her face was showing. She wore no make-up. A grain of rice stuck to the corner of her mouth, and she lifted it on the end of her forefinger and licked it off. She met Kellas’s eyes and they both smiled and he raised his tea glass to drink, thinking that if he didn’t, he would laugh out loud. He had it bad. Each time she blinked, moved her head or reached for another piece of food, his body quivered like a bell.
‘The commander is asking why you wear no rings,’ said Mohamed to Kellas.
‘It’s not our way,’ said Astrid.
The commander made a short speech and Mohamed said: ‘I don’t know how to translate his question. He asks what your way is. Your way…what your rules are.’
Kellas looked at the commander, who was watching him with his head held back a little and his eyes widened, the questioner. He had a curly grey beard and was short, broad, inquisitive and jolly. Kellas turned to Astrid.
‘You’re the husband,’ she said.
‘You’re the wife. What are our rules?’
‘Do we have any rules? Ask him what he means. Marriage customs?’
‘Not only that,’ said Mohammed. ‘The communists came and they had a way to do everything. A way of living, and death rules, marriage, business. They told us all the time what to do.’ The commander began speaking, and another man from the corner, a man in his thirties in a ragged grey shalwar kameez, talked at the same time. The Afghans laughed. Kellas asked Mohamed what the man had said and Mohamed said it was very rude and wouldn’t repeat it. Kellas told him he had to.
‘He said the Russians like Afghan girls, and the Taliban like Afghan boys, but the Americans and Europeans only like each other.’
Kellas’s eyes were on Astrid’s knees in her jeans. He wondered how smooth they were to the touch when she was naked and whether if he put his hand on them they would be warm, or cool. The commander spoke again. ‘The commander says the Americans are different from the other people who came here. They are here and they are not here. They watch from up there, and they bomb, but they’re not here. They are not like the communists or the Taliban. They do not visit the houses of the poor people. They do not have a way. The commander says he is waiting to hear the voice of the Americans.’
‘I’m American,’ said Astrid. ‘This is what it sounds like.’
Mohamed translated and the Afghans laughed and the commander spoke. ‘He says, he still wants to know, what is your way? When are you going to tell us what we should do to make everything all right?’
Astrid put down her bread, frowned, smiled, and held her right knee in her clasped hands. She looked at the commander. ‘Do you want to be told how to live by foreigners?’
Mohamed translated, and the commander replied. ‘He says of course not. He says we will kill any foreigner who tells us how to live.’
Astrid bent her head, then raised it. ‘That’s the American plan. If we don’t have a plan, you won’t kill us.’
‘He says they might kill you anyway.’
The ragged man in the corner spoke for a time. It was hard to see his face in the dimness, but his expression was so familiar that Kellas felt he knew him. It was the man in an audience whose question was never answered, and who did not expect it to be, but who asked it nonetheless; the man who had no trace of either deference or rebellion, and was condemned to neither accept the world as it was, nor act to change it. Mohamed translated. ‘Zulmai says how can we know the Americans if they do not visit the houses of the poor people and talk to us? We see them from a distance. We hear the planes and the explosions. They should come to the houses of poor people, on foot, and tell us who they are and what they want, and what they will give us.’
There was silence for a while. Then Astrid said: ‘Two chickens.’
Everybody laughed and the Afghans agreed that Astrid was cleverer than her husband. Sardar, the man in the boiler suit, began telling a story. Every time Kellas asked Mohamed to translate, Mohamed told him to wait until it was finished. When Sardar stopped speaking, Mohamed told them what he had said.
‘Sardar was talking about his uncle, who had a partridge. It was a very hard partridge, a strong fighter. The partridge was called Shahrukh Khan.’ When Mohamed said the words ‘Shahrukh Khan’ among his English words all the Afghans looked up and grinned, and some echoed the name. ‘Sardar’s uncle trained him for years, and when Shahrukh Khan began to fight, he beat all the other birds. So Sardar’s uncle won a lot of money in Kabul, in Jalalabad, and in Peshawar. And Shahrukh Khan could not be beaten. Sardar’s uncle kept him in a cage shaped like a bell and when the cage opened and Shahrukh Khan came out into the ring, he went to fight straight away, he used his beak, he used his feet, he used his wings for balancing. Shahrukh Khan could fight several times in one day and not get tired. His wing was broken and he even lost one eye and still he fought better than the other partridges. Once a dog got into the ring, and Shahrukh Khan attacked the dog, and hurt the dog on the nose with its beak, and the dog ran away. One day, Sardar’s uncle was trying to get to Kabul from Charikar with Shahrukh Khan. He was bargaining with a truck driver to take him and Shahrukh Khan there. The truck driver didn’t want to take him. He had a truck full of live chickens in the back. So Sardar’s uncle and the truck driver were arguing, and Sardar’s uncle got up on the step to shout at the driver, and put Shahrukh Khan, in his cage, on the roof of the truck. The driver got very angry and began to drive the truck. The truck moved forward like that! – and Sardar’s uncle let go of Shahrukh Khan’s cage to stop from falling. Shahrukh Khan’s cage fell back from the top of the truck into the chickens. The chickens were very close together. When they found Shahrukh Khan later, the cage was broken, and this hard, strong bird was dead.’
‘From the fall,’ said Kellas.
‘No! Not from the fall. Shahrukh Khan was still alive when he got out of the cage. The chickens. Sardar said his uncle found him covered in wounds from claws and beaks. There were so many of them. They made – panic. Shahrukh Khan was lost. He could have killed them all but he didn’t even fight them. He lived always only in the cage, and in the ring. That was where he was a fighter. Never in the world. He was lost there.’
Astrid asked Mohamed to tell Sardar that she liked his story, and Sardar grinned and a quieter laugh ran around the room.
Later Kellas set up his satellite phone in the space at the base of the tower and called London to say he might send a report the following day about spending twenty-four hours on the front line. Distracted, they thanked him. He called his parents in Duncairn. They were out. He left a message saying he would call tomorrow. One of the commander’s men asked if he could call his brother in Hamburg and Kellas
dialled the number for him and put him on. The man was excited to make the call, and shouted into the receiver, but he didn’t speak for long. It was practical stuff, plainly. Birth, marriages, deaths and the movement of money. The man thanked Kellas and moved away into the darkness. Mohamed stood at the edge of the patch of ground, watching the headlights of Taliban vehicles moving on the far side of their lines. Did it ever occur to them to switch the lights off, and be unseen? Mohamed had been lent a short, fat Kalashnikov which he held in his fist at his waist, casually, like an architect with a rolled-up plan. The stars were opulent and heavy. Kellas felt a touch on his shoulder and Astrid was beside him. ‘Shall we go up?’ she said.
‘Look at the stars,’ said Kellas.
‘I know what they look like,’ said Astrid. She took his hand and led him in the darkness to the foot of the ladder. She let go his hand and began climbing up. It was getting cold. The night was silent. He could hear every creak of the wood as Astrid’s boots stepped on the rungs, then the clunk of each boot on the floor of the platform as she discarded them.
Kellas glanced at the dark, still bulk of Mohamed. He asked if he would be warm and Mohamed told him not to worry. Kellas climbed up to the platform. He took off his boots, laid them carefully side by side close to the top of the ladder, and went over to where Astrid was standing, leaning over the parapet on her folded arms. He put his arm around her waist, and let his hand slip down. The feel of the soft curve under his fingers, ending in the blunt point of bone on her hip, made him glad. Astrid shivered. She’d taken off her coat and was wearing just a sweater and a T-shirt. He asked if she was cold and she said: ‘That’s not the only reason I’m shivering.’ She turned towards him and they kissed for a long time. He put his hand down the front of her jeans and his fingertips traced the line where her belly curved into hair. She gently pulled at his wrist till he took it out.
‘Wait a little,’ she said. ‘Not so eager. We’ve got time.’
‘I know,’ said Kellas, although he was eager. They leaned together on the parapet, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Kellas took Astrid’s hand and pressed it against the hard place in his jeans. She stroked it a few times and took her hand away and let her head rest on his shoulder.
‘Look at the headlights of those Taliban cars out there,’ said Astrid. ‘Can you figure out why these guys don’t just blast them?’
‘I know,’ said Kellas. One of the stars overhead moved away from its constellation and swept a slow arc across the sky, flashing as it went. The skies were crowded up there, and nobody in Afghanistan owned anything able to shoot so high.
‘What was all that about visiting the houses of the poor?’ said Kellas.
‘They wonder when our guys…’
‘Your guys.’
‘…my guys are going to go looking for converts. That’s all they reckon America can try to get worth having here, the inside of their heads.’
‘Christianity.’
‘I think they mean Americanity.’
‘I used to think there was that. That America had a way.’
‘Yeah, me too, but if there is one, you have to emigrate there to find it. You can’t convert to Americanity and not go to America. Maybe they won’t let you in. But you have to at least want to go.’
‘When did you last have sex?’
‘Too long ago,’ said Astrid, and she pushed her tongue into his mouth and started undoing his belt. They fell onto the bed, fighting with their clothes to put skin against skin. The smell of the bedding surrounded them, old and clean and musty, like the smell of the bedlinen in a country cottage that is seldom slept in. In the darkness where touch was vision Kellas beheld a kaleidoscope of hot skin, cold air and rough cotton. Astrid was slick and wet when he touched her there. They began to praise each other and named the particulars of what pleased them. They tasted each other and when he went into her he knew he’d always want to get back to what he felt when he heard the silly, forgettable utterances she made then. It was not the words but the shape of them, like a key of the cheapest metal that opened the heaviest, greatest lock. He or she, or both of them, it didn’t matter, grabbed the covers and made them fly up and open out like a parachute and settle down big, square and warm over their nakedness, keeping out the cold and the world while they made love.
When Kellas woke later it was still dark and he was comfortable and strange in a bed. He had been spending his nights in a sleeping bag for almost a month. He was alone. There wasn’t the bare hot body next to him he’d hoped for. He raised himself on two elbows and sought her out. Astrid was standing at the parapet, looking towards where the Taliban were. She had dressed and put her coat on over her shoulders. Kellas got out of bed and went naked over to her. The cold stung now. He took one side of the coat off her shoulder and squeezed inside it. He asked what time it was.
‘Not even midnight,’ she said.
‘Why did you get dressed?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Maybe I’ll go down and talk to Mohamed.’
‘Was there any bombing?’
‘No. Nothing. Just the headlights. And the mystery.’
‘The hell with the mystery. I went out on a limb to get this bed for us tonight and you and I are going to stay in it together till the sun comes up.’
Astrid took his face between her hands and shook his head gently. ‘I like you, with your eyes all full of the world and your dumb little rages,’ she said. She went to the hatch and began descending the ladder. Before he could ask her where she was going, she was gone. He heard her talking to Mohamed below and couldn’t make out what she said. It took Kellas minutes to put on his clothes and boots and when he tried to follow Astrid his first foot on the ladder skidded off into space. For a moment he was hanging by his hands. He recovered and shinned down. Mohamed came towards him, asking what the matter was. Kellas was looking round and he saw Astrid walking towards the runway. He went after her, with Mohamed telling him to be watchful. A stillness that could not be divined hung over the commander’s outpost; sleep or wakefulness, neither admitted the shouting of English words. In the starlight, reflected off the concrete panels of the runway and the taxiways, Kellas could see Astrid walking ahead of him. She reached the runway and began to walk along it, back the way they had arrived. She had a lead of about thirty yards. A man squatted at the edge of the runway, his Kalashnikov resting in the circle of his arms like a shepherd’s crook. His head followed Astrid past, then Kellas.
Kellas began to run. The concrete was pitted with the pox of time and Astrid heard the scratch of his boots on the grit that accumulated there. She turned round once, saw him, stretched her legs and ran forward with a good stride. They ran for two hundred yards in this way, keeping the same distance from each other, like competitors in a marathon, hanging off each other, waiting for their moment. The cold thinned the air. The stars brushed against Kellas’s skin and prickled. He thought that if he looked up he might see that they were crushing dark tracks through the stars, like children running through a cornfield. He could not think what he would say to Astrid now. He had stopped thinking. There was the rush of cold air, the beat of his feet on the ground, his heart, the stars, the darkness and the runner ahead of him. He did not know if he was pursuing or being led.
Astrid cut a turn off the runway towards where one of the ruined aircraft lay. Kellas put on a sprint. Astrid looked round again but did not, or could not, run faster, and he caught up with her. They stopped and stood face to face, a few feet apart. They were both breathing hard. Kellas’s whole being was violently flushed through with a desire to have Astrid, not merely to have her but to take her, and he would not know until he tried whether she wished to be taken. He could not stop this. He stepped towards her and she began to run again, with Kellas after her. She ran into a dead end, another one of the aircraft shelters, open to the sky, but this one empty. She backed up against the far wall. He could see in the faint light that she was watching his face as he approached her. Her face said to him: I want
to see what you will do with me. Kellas went up to her and took hold of the waistband of her jeans with both hands. He unfastened them and pulled them and her panties down a few inches and put his thumb inside her. The skin of her navel was cold as he brushed against it and the heat inside her spread to him through his skin. He felt her press her clitoris against the saddle of his hand and she pushed herself off the wall and began to ride his thumb. They kissed, more ravenous than before. Astrid was very wet and Kellas took his mouth away from hers and crouched down, holding his arm out stiff for Astrid to fuck his thumb, adding a finger as she twisted and her breathing grew louder, adding a second finger, before Astrid pulled him out and he bared his cock and they lay down on the bare concrete and fucked till they came.
‘That was new,’ he said later.
‘That was something new,’ said Astrid.
They walked back to the watchtower, climbed the ladder and went to sleep together, breast to breast, his knee between her thighs, his head muffled between the pillow and Astrid’s hair.
He woke suddenly, alone, not knowing if the gunshot receding in his head was dreamed or real. It was morning. He sat up. The light outside burned his retina. It was still cold in the shade of the platform. He heard the sound again, the dismal, consequential sound of a gunshot, and a wave of human voices, a moan, or a cheer. He pulled on his jeans and shirt and went to the parapet. He couldn’t see anyone. Mohamed was gone. He finished dressing. While he was descending the ladder he heard the gun being fired again.