End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  He smiled and spoke softly so he couldn’t be heard.

  “You can go back inside with the others and have some tea. I’ll see you in class when we’re finished with this.”

  I nodded. He handed me a plastic bag containing my ring, wallet, chain and the rest of my things. “Thank you,” I said.

  Before I left, I saw Keith shoving a hooded Jonathan Kirk towards us. I watched him get down on his knees in front of Tim and the camera.

  I saw the way Keith forced him to cross his arms behind his head.

  I turned back towards the hotel. I didn’t want to stand there. I didn’t want to see his face when they took the sack off and uncovered his eyes.

  “First of all, take a good look at yourselves,” said Tim, as the video started on the screen behind him. “Then we’ll go through what happened and analyze it.”

  The sequence was identical for each of us. There we were, trotting along, dark bags over our heads. Stumbling, laden with fear, a bunch of grotesque hooded figures no longer recognizable, no longer human. The image of our bluish, grainy silhouettes lurching from the woods towards the camera was straight out of some sinister news footage.

  We now slump to our knees, crossing arms behind heads. A hand pulls the sack off. The terrified, contracted expressions, disheveled hair, wide, staring eyes. A dress rehearsal for horror.

  No one laughed when we saw our faces slip out of the bags. In fact, the room was mute, cold. It was like looking at yourself from the hereafter, staring into your pupils the moment before the trigger was pulled. There was our last glance, immortalized.

  There is no dignity in terror; if that was to be our last image, then none of us looked the way we wished we had.

  “Secondly, please forgive us for playing this—let’s call it trick—on you without any warning,” Tim continued, throwing his arms out, a faint note of embarrassment, “but the whole point of this exercise is that it has to be totally unexpected. In a hostage-taking scenario, the surprise factor is crucial.”

  Just then the door opened and Liz Reading came in. She must have gone to wash her face and touch up her makeup; her eyes were still puffy and red from crying. She sat next to me, swathed in a hooded sweatshirt. We half nodded at one another as if we wanted to acknowledge a shift in our relationship. I felt like patting her on the shoulder but I restrained myself.

  “Let’s go through the various phases together, now. The first is called ‘initial takeover.’ It’s the phase when kidnappers use lots of shouting and gunfire to induce shock and subdue the hostages. This is the most dangerous phase of the abduction; adrenaline is sky-high and a wrong move could cost you your life.”

  That was exactly what was shameful. To be sitting there, cup of tea in hand, watching ourselves on the screen and analyzing what had happened as if it were an incident that could be split into phases, that had variables, unknown quantities of danger; an event that presented a problem but possibly had a solution.

  The shame lay in the astronomical sum—didn’t Pierre say just that?—we had paid to experience our own execution, to then be able to play it back in the warmth of the classroom and go over the behaviors that would save our hide. “The search,” Tim continued, “is the next phase, where the hostage is stripped of his identity. Its purpose is mainly to create a sense of disorientation. Who among you tried to react?”

  Hands slowly raised, the others were starting to come back from the daze and take part again. Gradually the atmosphere thawed, everyone relieved to have to answer questions. After all, it was just an exercise, a reenactment, wasn’t it? That way what had just happened would slip away faster.

  Tim went on, explaining that—once the initial violence had subsided—that would have been the moment to establish the beginning of communication with your captors through small, tentative gestures. He instructed how this new phase—number four, I believe—was crucial because it enabled the hostages to negotiate for water, food or blankets. My companions took notes. By now they had turned back into the diligent students they had been all week. Only Liz Reading, the enterprising top of the class ready to flirt with danger, seemed incapable of getting hold of herself. She kept blowing her nose and dabbing her eyes with tissues, to stop the tears that slid down slowly, like a dripping tap.

  Tim droned on.

  “It can be very long. Months, sometimes even years. If the negotiations aren’t successful straightaway, you have to resort to some tricks to stop yourself from going insane. An American soldier was taken hostage by the Vietcong for five years. They kept him locked in a bamboo cage and every day they lowered him waist-deep into a rat-infested river and left him there to rot until nightfall. Well, I’ll tell you how he succeeded in not losing his mind. He found a method, a kind of mental discipline. For five years he worked every day at building a five-star hotel in his mind. He began with the foundation, then he put in the pillars, the reinforced-concrete structure, the plumbing, wiring, fixtures, and so on. Every day he added a piece until he had done all the floors, the windows, right down to the beds, the table lamps and the towel racks. In a situation like that, you’ve got to find a way out, and if there isn’t a way out, then you have to find an escape into your own head.”

  Liz Reading choked back a sob. I gave her a gentle smile. She tried to respond with a grimace. Her face was all red and blotchy. I laid a hand on her shoulder. She clutched it and didn’t let go.

  The dress rehearsal for horror had changed everything. We bonded.

  Now, as we came together once again for dinner, lined up in front of another roast leg of lamb and mint sauce, we looked at each other with a sort of gratitude, a newfound complicity. Not only were we now a group of survivors, but another bonding factor was the shared knowledge that we had all behaved the same way. The film had given us unblinking proof of this: we had watched the grim parade of our close-ups. Trembling, frightened and, worst of all, passive, reduced to silence immediately, without exception. There hadn’t been any heroes in the group, we had all been incapable of even attempting to save ourselves, let alone the others; nobody had reacted, not even when we had been robbed of our most precious and sacred belongings. All of us had felt an identical terror, as the succession of stares striking Alan’s camera lens had testified.

  This was no time to brag about bullets, car bombs, minefields or thugs at borders. No previous real-life experience had outdone the event, simulated though it was, that we had just experienced together. Because through that cold rain, alone in our burlap sacks, each one of us had just had a close encounter with that cowardly self we didn’t know we harbored—that rather contemptible being we would have felt sorry for, been irritated or embarrassed by, had it manifested itself in someone else. But now, to have discovered it in ourselves, to have been forced to recognize it and accept it, had made us more open, humbler, lighter.

  We piled into a car after dinner, riding the crest of this new camaraderie. Someone had suggested it; after all, we needed to celebrate.

  The pub reeked of beer and smoke, damp shoes and rancid breath. There were six or seven Defenders sitting at the bar in front of a row of empty bottles. They were kidding around with each other, flirting with the barmaid, who looked like she’d known them for ages. She wasn’t young—hair dyed shoe-polish black, puffy eyelids, smoker’s wrinkles around her lips—and was leaning on her elbows on the bar in a pose that showed her generous cleavage. She had that slightly wayward, coarse look that sensible women who live in small places often have, who wear stay-up stockings under their aprons and know how to comfort a tired man.

  The Defenders had given us a weak sign of recognition—a half smile, a nod, the slightest raising of a bottle—to confirm that the unwritten rule was that you weren’t supposed to fraternize. This was their pub where they let off steam at the end of the day. The last thing they wanted was to listen to us rambling about our trauma as pseudo-hostages. The implicit message was to leave them in peace. So, disheartened by this cool reception but still flush with the event
of the day, we headed for a shabby couch at the back and ordered our drinks.

  The simultaneous presence of pseudo-hostages and pseudo-kidnappers in the same place put something of a damper on our mission, which was to throw ourselves into a postmortem of the day’s events with alcohol-fueled ardor. This was the payoff we had been craving: to be by ourselves at last, free to repeat, compare, elaborate details and dramatize.

  Obelix turned slightly, without a flicker, let alone a smile, of recognition. I passed by him, hoping he would send a signal at least to me, if for no other reason than because of the extremely personal contact there had been between us. After all, my hands, soaked in fake blood, had felt his skin under his shirt. But he only darted a glance and turned back to the barmaid, who was laughing, slowly stroking her bare forearms.

  Maybe those two had something going on. Having to bear this desolate countryside for months on end, the Defenders had to find some distractions. Maybe they each had a lady friend in town they could spend the night with, some hot divorcée they’d met at the café, or the supermarket.

  The sight of Obelix’s mighty back turned to me, the breasts spilling from the barmaid’s low-cut top, the proximity of their bodies and the perfect intimacy between them vexed me.

  By the end of the week, I had gotten used to the military routine of our days, to the exhaustion that fell upon me around five, to the cold during exercises in the fields, to living in a group, to eating together and to collapsing into bed at ten.

  We had learned how to get out of minefields in one piece by prodding the ground section by section with the same metal skewer one uses for kebabs. We put together makeshift stretchers with blankets folded a certain way, we practiced mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR, we were told how to dig a shelter in the snow if caught in a blizzard, we gained some notion of navigating by the stars, we learned to give our position by the compass, to recognize a package full of explosives and to check that the ignition wasn’t connected to an explosive device. I had filled pad after pad with notes, watched an infinite series of videos and slides; my head was full of rules, warnings, procedures.

  I’d gotten used to waking before dawn every morning and going straight to the hotel gym, a small, sour-smelling room. I would usually find Monika Schluss already there, working out on the machines with methodical slowness, listening to her iPod. We’d give each other a quick smile, then I’d get on the treadmill and run for twenty minutes. I’d stare straight in front of me and think about my life and how unadventurous it had been in the last few years, until the sun would start to come in through the window and the silhouettes of the fir trees formed outside; that was the signal that it was time to take a shower and start another day of war.

  The last day of the course I woke up earlier than usual. I didn’t feel like going to run on the treadmill and so I started zapping between TV channels while it was still pitch-dark outside.

  The hostages in Iraq were still wearing their Day-Glo orange jackets and their faces looked grainy in the livid light. I watched the mute images as the newscaster gave an account of the latest, slim developments. Nothing had happened, it was just a matter of waiting, he said. Almost two months had gone by since they had been abducted. Who knows how they had been spending the time, who knows if they’d found a technique, a mental escape route, to avoid insanity while they kept on waiting.

  Although the footage was always the same—the video the kidnappers had sent to Al Jazeera had been played over and over again in the last few weeks—it looked different to me now. It was as if their ghostly pallor, the tufts of dirty hair plastered to their foreheads, their empty gazes now appeared to me like the foreshadowing of their certain death. It was as if their destiny lay hidden in those details, and with each rerun it was beginning to come to the surface.

  I had to switch channels. A documentary about the aftermath of the tsunami showed archival footage shot immediately following the catastrophe. An arm sticking out of the rubble, a mother beating her fists in the sand beside the body of her child, tourists’ bodies washing ashore like dead fish, a redheaded woman in a floral swimsuit bobbing facedown in the water like a puppet. I switched channels again. A bombing in Tel Aviv. Police sirens, blood-spattered kids fleeing a discotheque, stretchers, dogs, rubble, dust, people screaming, bodies under plastic sheets. I heard the muffled sound of an alarm going off in the next room. It was time to get up. I turned the TV off with a snap of the grimy remote.

  The final scenario the Defenders had conceived was like a Fourth of July fireworks display where the bangs go on forever. It was the summa of all catastrophes, Armageddon, the Atomic Mushroom.

  We heard screams somewhere in the distance and headed in that direction. When we reached the clearing by the artificial lake, we stumbled upon a massacre.

  It wasn’t clear what exactly had happened, but maybe that wasn’t even the point; it looked as if every accident, attack, explosion, fire, shooting that one could conceive of had taken place at the very same moment.

  Our casualties lay in pools of blood, hair matted, clothes soaked with blood. They had shards of glass rammed into their flesh, gunshot wounds, hands lopped off, bellies hacked open. Some were screaming, some gasping for breath, some looked dead or unconscious.

  I grabbed a body by the shoulders, the first that came to hand. I struggled to turn him over, I could hear him wheezing. It was him again—my casualty of choice, the man I had lent more assistance to than any other in the history of my life.

  I pulled my hands away; they felt sticky and wet and, in fact, were already covered with blood. Under his shirt, which I had promptly cut open with my scissors, I felt something soft and warm. His intestines, the famous latex intestines, spilling out of the gash in his belly. I dragged Obelix by the shoulders towards a tree and I leaned him against it, bending his legs to prevent the intestines from slipping all the way out. There was blood everywhere; he was missing a hand too.

  All at once, something came undone in me. The tension, the anxiety that until that moment had kept me going, responding and acting promptly, drooped like a parachute touching the ground.

  By now Obelix was barely breathing. The wheeze he emitted and the bloodstain that was rapidly spreading around his lungs told me I had to act fast, that I had only a few minutes before the lungs would collapse and he would bleed out from his wounds.

  But I didn’t even attempt to pull out bandages or tape from my backpack. I kneeled down next to him and took his hand. He let me hold it without resisting. I stroked it. I just sat there, still, looking at him as the rain pummeled my face and my boots slowly sank into the mud. I waited until Obelix’s wheeze turned into a hollow rattle. I didn’t move until he stopped breathing altogether. Only then did I let go of his hand and close his eyelids with my thumbs. I gently laid him on the ground and covered his face with a blanket.

  I left him there and slowly started walking away down the path.

  Behind me I could hear the shouts and moans of the injured grow fainter, as did the orders my companions were calling to one another—what a perfectly synchronized rescue team they had become—as they stanched, bandaged, sewed, revived and evacuated the casualties of this mise-en-scène.

  Only then did I start to sob uncontrollably.

  Because I knew there was nothing to be done. At least nothing I could have done, whether in a scenario or in real life. Because I knew perfectly well I would’ve never been able to fix something so tragic as Obelix’s mangled body; there was nothing anyone could do to prevent life from slipping away from him. Because watching a man die is an unbearable sight no matter what, much more than I could bear.

  And because that gesture—walking away from Obelix and leaving him in the mud—had triggered something deeper than just fear.

  It was like a crack beginning to run along steep walls. They were my walls, and they were crumbling.

  I saw it now: death facedown on the side of the street, death in a war, was a different death than the one I had experienced i
n the whiteness of the hospital ward when my mother died.

  Yes, I saw it now. One could actually walk away from a body, leaving him or her in the mud, like an animal rotting in the rain. Swollen, bloody, half naked because his clothes had been ripped. One could—or had to—walk away from it in order to move on, because the dead bodies were too many, or simply because there was nothing one could do. Death in the dust, on the ground, was about the dead body; it asked us to close its eyes, wash its dirt, wipe its blood, using our hands, hoisting its weight on our shoulders.

  And this is what death looks like every day in so many parts of the world.

  As sanitized as my mother’s death had been in her hospital bed, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch her either. There had been other people in charge of washing, dressing her body, maneuvering it from the bed to the morgue to the coffin. People whose job was to perform this procedure every day on the dead bodies of strangers. Instead I had done everything I could to avoid looking at her afterwards, when she had become just this frightening thing and not my mother anymore. I had desperately wanted to run away from it.

  I was crying out of rage, for the sinister game I had been forced to play all week had left me weaker than before. What was I thinking, that some tailor’s or butcher’s trick would suffice to patch up a body riddled with holes? That it would be enough to stop me from fainting at the sight of blood? My father was right—we had only been playing danger, playing death. But on Monday I was going to a place where nothing sounded like a game.

  My final surrender hadn’t surprised the Defenders. It’s true that I had let Obelix die on me without even attempting to save his life, but I doubt I was the first one ever to have hoisted the white flag. Nor the first to have had a breakdown that required chamomile tea and a tranquilizer.

  My buddies had all succeeded, without exception, in completing the last exercise seamlessly. Even Liz Reading, in spite of the initial crisis after the abduction, had fully recovered and had finished with flying colors. During the final evaluation, Keith, her victim of the day, had complimented her. Liz had blushed, still breathless from the effort, her face spattered with blood, her helmet crooked on her head, her hair caked with mud, incredulous and radiant, like a teenager taking a bow at the high school play. Even Mike, the rebellious accountant, had thrown himself headfirst into treating the wounded from the War of the Worlds and had amazed everyone with his presence of mind and his quick responses, issuing orders left and right, revealing unexpected leadership qualities.