“I told him to put the vests, the phone and the first-aid kit in your car. It’s been a while since I checked the kit, perhaps you should make sure it has all the stuff you need. People here borrow it all the time and never restock it. And the phone needs recharging. I never use it, so the battery’s flat.”
Imo nodded vaguely again, like she didn’t care to register.
Jeremy lit a cigarette and blew the smoke to the ceiling as he settled back in the chair, stretching his arms and legs as if he had just woken up.
“And what kind of story are you—”
“Forced marriages and suicides,” Imo preempted him.
“Ah, yes. Of course,” said Jeremy smoothly, yet somehow condescendingly, as though for a veteran like him this was too much of a hashed and rehashed topic to stir any particular excitement.
By now it was obvious that Imo and Jeremy were engaged in some sort of unspoken competition and Imo was losing it.
Jeremy scratched his head.
“The road to those villages has been closed for quite a while and I doubt you’ll be able to—”
“Yes, I know there’s still a crater, but Hanif says that—”
“Right, Hanif’s the man. He knows everything. You’ll be safe with him. He’s the best fixer in the whole country. He saved my bacon once.”
Jeremy turned to Hanif. “Remember, my friend?”
Hanif nodded and laughed. Jeremy took another voluptuous drag, then pointed to the photo Hanif had shown us.
“We were traveling to Bamyan, it was snowing quite hard and we were crawling along, do you remember? At one point Hanif noticed a dodgy car was following us.”
“Yes, a car I did not like, it would not leave us. I decided we must lose them,” Hanif said.
“So Hanif accelerated. We were in his beaten-up Ford, right? And I thought, oh, my God, one of the tires is going to burst any moment. We managed to outstrip them a bit and after a while we came across a truck loaded with people and goats and God knows what else; Hanif made me get out in a flash, barked orders to the chap at the wheel and shoved me up in the back. He drove off in the Ford, tootling along slowly, so the others could catch up and stop him.”
“Yes, yes, I was going too slowly on purpose so they would catch me.” Hanif was excited. It must have been a great adventure, told and retold many times.
“Then the guys who had been following us in the dodgy car stopped him, they made him get out and searched everywhere, even in the boot, but I was long gone and they had to go away empty-handed.”
Jeremy and Hanif laughed as if the whole thing had been a hoot.
“We’ll be off, then. I don’t want to take any more of your time,” Imo said, standing abruptly, avoiding to make a comment on the story.
Jeremy threw his arms wide.
“Well, please, if you need any help, information, I mean if there’s anything I can do for you…” He escorted us to the door. “Please drop in at our place anytime for a drink, a plate of pasta, whatever. We’re always home in the evening.”
I wondered what the plural implied. A wife? For some reason it seemed unlikely.
“Shall I give you my number?” he offered Imo.
“Yes, of course, but my cell’s turned off now. Could you save it on yours, Maria?”
I keyed in Jeremy’s number on my cell as Imo haughtily turned away.
“What a puffed-up jerk,” she hissed under her breath as soon as we were in the car.
“‘People like us…I’ve probably spent more time under fire than any of those guys’? Please. Who talks like that? No, I mean, I’m asking you, is he ridiculous or what?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head vigorously.
“And I’m not even beginning to tell you the way he behaved with my girlfriend two years ago!”
We moved through the city past collapsed walls riddled with holes, through gaping chasms, a sort of unending backdrop of skeletons and hollows. My heart sank. Although I had seen images of Kabul so many times on the news, I was shocked by the actual extent of the destruction. And yet everywhere, despite the devastation, I saw Afghans moving quickly, busily, skirting heaps of rubble and sagging buildings, like ants following an ordered and constant flow, heedless of the obstacles. Everywhere there were street stalls, kiosks selling detergent, condensed milk, mountains of almonds and raisins, donkey-drawn carts preposterously overloaded with goods.
Money changers fished rolls of soiled banknotes out of their cloaks, counting out blackened wads; children were begging and laughing—children with no trace of melancholy or piteous attitudes, but cheeky and dazzling, displaying that same comic talent of certain Neapolitan street urchins—and giving the impression they were asking for money more for a lark than out of necessity. The brown and dust-coated city revealed unexpected gashes of intense color, enhancing the contrast between the archaic and the industrial: made-in-China plastic thongs with the Nike swoosh next to handwoven rugs and blue Herat glass, piles of bootleg DVD copies of Titanic side by side with fighting cocks and caged falcons.
I pulled out my camera. Everywhere I looked, I saw a photo. I suddenly realized I hadn’t shot a single frame since we’d arrived and I needed to familiarize myself with the light.
“Hanif, can we stop, please? I want to take a couple of pictures.”
Hanif hesitated.
“Can you pull over? Just for a sec.”
“It’s better not in this area. Too many people.”
He looked at me through the rearview mirror with a contrite expression.
“I’m sorry. It’s not safe here,” he said. As if it was his fault.
“It’s embarrassing, how attractive these men are,” Imo blurted out as she stared out the car window, her nose practically pressed to the glass. “They’re the ones who should be veiled.”
She was right. Everywhere we looked I saw incredibly handsome men. Children, elders, younger men, the flat-nosed Hazaras with their almond-shaped eyes, round faces that had Tibet’s and China’s imprints in their features; the Pashtuns and Tajiks with stunning green or blue eyes that shone in the piercing light like lapis. The old turbaned men with thick white beards stained by orange streaks of henna, who walked behind their donkeys like biblical kings.
I asked if we could stop so that I could take some pictures. But, again, Hanif hesitated.
The men held hands as they talked, held them as they walked, held them as they greeted one another. Big, fiery warriorlike men, guns strapped around their shoulders, holding hands like young girls.
A light blue burqa knocked on our window in the traffic jam. It had no face. Just a dried hand, beating on the stomach, mimicking hunger. She knocked relentlessly, aggressively. Hanif gave her a coin before Imo and I could reach for our wallets, and told her—kindly—to let us pass.
Hanif stopped the car in front of a barely standing two-story building. He got out and we followed.
“This was once a famous cinema. We came to see movies here, when I was a boy,” he said, with the sweep of the arm that a Roman would use to show the ruins of the Forum or the Colosseum to a tourist.
“We can go up. The staircase is still holding but be careful. Please take the camera, here you can take photographs, no problem.”
I took the camera out of the canvas bag and followed Imo up the half-collapsed staircase. It looked as if it was resting only on a couple of steel rods sticking out from underneath it and it couldn’t possibly hold our weight. I went along holding my breath, but Imo looked bored.
“I’ve seen this place already in a documentary. This must be one of those sights where they take every Western journalist,” she hissed to me sotto voce.
On the second floor the facade of the building had giant holes from which twisted metal bars—what was left of the window frames after the blast—dangled in the air. They seemed like tendrils swaying in the breeze and about to fall off, but had probably been like that for years.
The city lay at our feet like a termite mound flatt
ened to the ground. Imo looked down at the destruction below, pointing in different directions.
“Soviet bombs or civil war?”
Each ruin had had its different killer. The destruction had come from outside first with the Russians and then from the opposing factions of mujahideen later. And then, when that was over, there had been American collateral damage and Taliban revenge.
While Imo and Hanif continued their conversation, I wiped the camera lens with chamois and walked out on what was left of the roof.
Short gusts of wind made my scarf flap, tufts of hair got into my eyes. This was the moment—I wanted to savor it. On top of that crumbling building I felt like a photographer again.
I shot the rubble, the gaps, a group of men below who were loading carts with wood and huge burlap sacks. Across the street I shot a sign displayed on a newly built housefront. It said “Aryana Billiard Club” in bright pink and green lettering. It seemed like the beginning of something new in this Hiroshima-like neighborhood.
Imo and I were quiet in the car on our way back to the hotel. An unexpected sadness had seeped into our pores with the dust. It was almost dark, people were still moving around, although there was a sense that everyone was heading back somewhere. To their shacks, half-destroyed houses, who knows where they were going. Everyone carried something, a bundle, a basket, wood, a sack filled with coal. There would be a fire and some food in every house tonight, and tomorrow they would start again.
On the landing on our floor at the guesthouse, there was a door to a third room. I strongly suspected it was occupied by the owner of the hairs caked in that bathroom soap.
We met him at the communal table where all the guests of Babur’s Lodge had breakfast every morning, like a family. Or not him—actually it was them—for there were two occupants to that room. They were both American, and after the third day at the lodge they had become a familiar sight. One was tall, blond, with Scandinavian skin, long hair and white albino eyelashes. He must have been twenty-five at the most and looked like a basketball player or a student; he seemed to lack the savagery of the others. He always wore the same faded T-shirt, a pair of cargo pants and a pakol on his head. At breakfast he never said a word, but kept his eyes glued to the paper, hiding behind the Kabul Daily as if it were a fence. His buddy was smaller, with a leaner, nervy physique, black hair and a goatee. He had a good-looking face, a bit too pointy for my taste, like the snout of a weasel. There was something darker, more menacing about this one.
Every morning the smaller one had ordered scrambled eggs and refried beans with onions and ketchup. A disproportionately large plate would arrive and he would attack it slowly, with method. I thought that this eggs-and-beans affair must have been some kind of ritual that held a special meaning for him, as if those eggs were an umbilical cord to some diner back home, in some forsaken town where he’d had breakfast every day. He must have spent a considerable amount of time instructing the kitchen on exactly how to prepare his plate. The young Afghan waiter who brought it to him did so with great pride, as if every morning a miracle had taken place in the kitchen. The waiter would place the eggs in front of him, each time seeking his approval, which the American accorded with a slight nod.
These two guests hadn’t introduced themselves, they had never even acknowledged our presence or spoken to us, but I thought of them as il Biondo e il Bruno. Whenever we passed each other on the landing on the way to and from the bathroom, I felt I’d intruded on their space, that our presence across from their room annoyed them. They were intimidating and always made me feel on edge.
Imo was oblivious to their existence. She had already invaded the bathroom, pushed their stuff into a corner of the windowsill, filled the edge of the tub with her bottles of sandalwood and tangerine shampoo, aromatherapy conditioner, jars of day cream, night cream, the whole female arsenal of cleansers, makeup pads, non-alcohol deodorant, brushes, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Although I had carefully avoided leaving any clue of my existence and kept all my stuff in the room, I felt responsible for this territorial invasion. After all, there wasn’t a tag with Imo’s name above this cosmetics store that was now on display in their bathroom and I knew they must resent me as well for it.
When they finished eating, il Biondo and il Bruno went off together without saying good-bye to anyone, pushing their chairs back and dropping their soiled napkins on the table. They went out the door, and a few seconds later a roaring engine carried them away.
“Security,” Imo whispered in my ear.
“Meaning?”
“They’re bodyguards.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. But they look like killers to me.”
“How do you know?”
“I just can tell, and then I asked the waiter, the older one. I sneaked a peek in their room when the cleaning woman was in there. They’ve got automatic weapons right on the bedside table next to their mineral water bottles.”
The other guests were equally graceless and made me feel uneasy. Another American—salt-and-pepper hair, chunky and compact like an action doll with pumped-up muscles—always sat at the head of the table in a crisp shirt and multipocketed vest. His breakfast seemed as if it were part of some weight-loss plan: a small glass of orange juice, oatmeal and fruit. He spoke in a steady rhythm without inflection. It wasn’t clear who exactly he was talking to; he seemed happy to keep talking indefinitely until the charge ran down. The others chewed on, nodding now and then, all except il Biondo, who kept his eyes steadfastly planted on the front page of the paper. The only one who actively paid any attention, commenting at intervals, was a mousy-looking little guy with a tiny moustache and a strong South African accent.
The second day, as we were all sitting at breakfast, the chunky American had been banging on at length about a specific type of tank that had been used in Korea. Imo looked up from her bowl of yogurt and interrupted him.
“I don’t understand this thing about frozen terrain.”
There was a moment of general ruffling of wings around the table.
The American looked at Imo as if he were noticing her for the first time. The others all moved their eyes from him to Imo, then back from Imo to him, as if they were following a tennis ball. The man considered the question and didn’t miss a beat. He kept talking in the same monochromatic tone, like those military spokespeople who brief journalists in the pressroom at the White House.
“These are tanks that we used in Korea, but the heat they produced during the day melted the frozen surface of the terrain, so they used to sink into the rice paddies at night. We’d have to keep moving them back and forth to prevent them from bogging down. But I think they could work over here, because Afghan terrain is pretty solid and stony. They wouldn’t sink here like they did over there.”
Imo held his gaze and popped a piece of buttered bread in her mouth, squinting slightly.
“What is it you do exactly?”
The question landed on the table with a clunk.
I cringed. I thought it was a given that one shouldn’t ask such direct questions to people like that. It was more than rude, it was against the rules.
“I’m General Dynamics,” he replied, as if he were stating, “I’m Mormon,” or “I’m Spanish,” or “I’m a vegetarian.”
“That is to say?” Imo countered.
“We supply war matériel, armaments, communications systems, to the Afghan government based on our acquisitions experience.”
“And what does that mean exactly?”
The man curled his lip in a patronizing smirk and translated.
“It means I go around the world shopping on behalf of the Afghan government, using my connections and my expertise to buy arms, munitions and vehicles suited to this terrain and climate.”
“Funny, isn’t it, that they should ask Americans to do this kind of shopping on their behalf,” Imo commented with her mouth full.
The man didn’t move a muscle.
“They don’t have a choice. They’re still fighting with guns from the eighteen hundreds; they have no idea how weapons have evolved, or where to buy them. If it were up to them they’d still be going to war with swords.”
The others gave a snicker to bolster him. Then General Dynamics wiped his napkin across his mouth, pushed his chair back and left.
He too, without bothering to utter a good-bye or a see-you-later.
In order to travel outside Kabul we needed a written permit from the Ministry of Information. Hanif explained it was necessary to have it with us at all times, in case we were stopped at any of the checkpoints outside the city. The ministry was an old building inside a beautiful shady garden, the only patch of green I had seen so far.
We walked up a creaky wooden staircase and sat in a spacious room furnished with office furniture from the thirties that my brother, Leo, would surely have appreciated. Two sleepy clerks gave us forms to fill out. I noticed there was a Bakelite telephone sitting on one of the desks; I saw no computers. I looked out the window at the view of the garden below and recalled how in The Road to Oxiana I had read about the lush gardens of Kabul, the sweet smell of oleaster, the shady arbors planted with Canterbury bells and columbines. And how once, after a reception for the king’s birthday at the British Legation, all the Afghan ministers—mad rose lovers—had sent their gardeners to request cuttings of the rosebushes they’d seen in full bloom. “British diplomacy now hangs on the Minister’s roses,” Byron laconically wrote.
While we waited for our permits to be issued, Hanif took us to see the Darulaman Palace. It was built for King Amanullah in the twenties, designed with an eye to European aristocracy, all cupolas, swirls and turrets. Sitting on a hilltop just outside the city, it was a solitary structure, imposing, neoclassical, overlooking a flat, dusty valley. You could see it standing out against the mountains on the horizon, commanding the landscape, but already at a distance you sensed that something wasn’t quite right. The palace had kept its shape, but it had been riddled by mortar fire everywhere and was slumping to the side, chipped and gaping. Not one single arch, capital, or column was intact. It might have been professional deformation, but it reminded me of a wedding cake that had been knocked around too much and the wisps and curlicues of the icing had gotten smashed. I took its picture from a distance; I liked its lopsided bearing against the deep blue of the windswept sky, the way it looked as if it would topple at any moment. A grandiose dessert, planned for a great event that didn’t turn out as it should have.
End of Manners Page 10