End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  He walked right into me; I pushed him away with my hands. I touched, inadvertently, his hip with my fingertips. The skin felt warm and smooth. It was true: he was naked.

  I saw it. The erection.

  It looked enormous, perfectly horizontal, tinged with the greenish glow of my display. Something rigid brushed my hand. It couldn’t have been anything else.

  “What the fuck…” I heard him growl.

  And he gave me a shove, angrily pushing me out of the way.

  Of course, Imo refused to take medication—antibiotics? no way, she was homeopathic—and claimed she preferred to fight the virus with “hand-to-hand combat like they taught me in Sudan.” I begged her, but she wouldn’t listen to me. She said all she needed to do was drink lots of water and that she was genetically equipped to deal with weird bugs.

  “Don’t forget, I have Colombian blood,” she grumbled under the duvet. She begged me to leave and let her fight in peace.

  The next morning my door flew open. Imo appeared, smiling, freshly showered, with a breakfast tray. She put a thermometer in my mouth and opened the window.

  “Look how much weight I’ve lost,” she said. “My pants are falling off me.”

  She slid the thermometer out of my mouth. I felt like crap, all sticky, sweaty and dirty.

  “Wow, still thirty-eight point five. You better get some rest. I’ll tell the guys downstairs to bring you tea and toast. I’m going into town with Hanif to pick up the permits from the ministry and then I’m going to interview the deputy minister who handles women’s affairs and see what she has to say. You stay in bed and drink lots of fluids. We’re leaving for the village tomorrow and it’s going to be a long trip.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “What about the crater?”

  “All sorted, we can get through. The main thing is to get out of this latrine of a city. You’ll see, once we’re out of here everything will change. Hanif has found a woman interpreter who will help us with the women in the village, so we’re all set. I can’t wait. It’ll be fantastic.”

  She grinned. “Blue skies, open spaces and kind, traditional people at last who don’t read international newspapers.”

  I had no idea what Imo had in mind, what she was expecting to find once we got out of Kabul. All I could think of was land mines, dangerous checkpoints, kidnappers on the warlords’ payroll, anarchy. But what actually worried me the most was the idea of a journey through such a vast territory without a single toilet.

  Imo sat on the edge of my bed, flipping through her notes. She could hardly contain her enthusiasm.

  “And the best news is that, hang on…where did I put it?”

  She pulled out a piece of paper with something scribbled on it.

  “Ah! Here it is. This German NGO has given me the name of a woman who might be willing to talk to us. She tried to kill herself about a week ago and is recovering in some kind of tiny clinic outside her village, about two hundred kilometers out of Kabul.”

  “Fantastic,” I said faintly. Then I had to close my eyes again.

  Beep. Beep.

  WELL? TELL ME HOW U R. IF U LIKE I’LL CALL.

  I was still weak, but I could tell the monster had been dealt a lethal blow during the night. It’d been knocked to the mat and was all punched out. The bout was over.

  AM MUCH BETTER. THANK U 4 TREATMENT.

  I considered the possibility of adding HUGS & XX but I didn’t mean it. Besides, I feared any mention of physical contact could prove incendiary. With each beep-beep I could feel the tension rising. Although he had been only a consultant over a clash between viruses and antibodies, the object of his attention had been my body. A body he knew rather well, and whose shape and outlines he now was certainly remembering. By allowing him to examine it again, I had also allowed him to regain some control over it and, in a certain sense, he was now claiming his rights of ownership.

  Beep. Beep.

  MARIA. DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT U R DOING IN AFGHANISTAN. WANT TO HEAR YOUR VOICE. MISS U.

  I stared at this message at length, studying the syntax, interrogating the letters the way a graphologist would examine an anonymous letter to decipher the personality of the murderer.

  The period after MARIA was an important clue, I felt, a sort of invocation. That period stood for a theatrical pause. Had he been standing in front of me, he would have paused after pronouncing my name, with studied slowness. He would have touched me too, I knew it. Probably he would have taken my hand, or perhaps stroked my hair. MISS U stood for the final capitulation. It all felt very dangerous.

  I turned the phone off.

  By the evening I woke up from another bout of sweaty unconsciousness. I felt drained, inert like still water on a lake, but the fever was gone and I was hungry. I walked downstairs to the bar in search of something to eat.

  Imo was having a gin and tonic by herself in a corner, intent on texting on her mobile.

  “Oh, you’re back! I was beginning to miss you,” she said cheerfully. “Look at you. You’re yourself again, thank God. I didn’t want to scare you, but you were looking terrible this morning. I thought I might have to send for a helicopter or something.” She laughed.

  As for Imo, she was looking ravishing, swathed in her soft shahtoosh, several Indian glass bangles clinking around her wrist, her eyes darkened by kohl.

  “Good thing you came down, it’s so depressing in here,” she whispered. “Look at these men, don’t they all look suicidal to you?”

  The bar at Babur’s Lodge was one of the few places in Kabul that served alcohol, and in the evening it slowly filled up with Westerners. The South African and a middle-aged German who wore a mud-colored corduroy suit and hiking boots sat on stools at the bar, oozing loneliness and gloom from every pore.

  “See that one? A mercenary or a criminal.” Imo jabbed me with her elbow and looked over at the South African. “I bet he’s one of those who enjoyed putting blacks on the grill instead of sausages.”

  “Jesus, Imo. What makes you say that?” The way she always seemed to know, without a doubt, who was who in this—at least for me—indecipherable world of men was beginning to irritate me.

  “I just know because that kind of South African is always ex–secret police. Probably an escapee from a life sentence. What else would he be doing here otherwise?”

  The German was drunk. He was the one paying for the South African’s beer. He was railing into his beer in English, in that graceless accent full of zees, that Germany had fallen into the hands of pigs, that they were all Communists, and he didn’t want to live there anymore, he was ashamed to be a German. The South African nodded distractedly, lost in his own thoughts, gazing at the bottom of his glass. It was obvious that neither of them was in any way interested in the other, and there was no connection between them, just bitterness alongside bitterness. Two elbow-to-elbow bitternesses, propping up the bar in a hotel a long way from home. The alcohol somehow stripped them bare: it was like seeing them naked through a keyhole; the German obscene and disheveled, the South African stony and still like a wrinkled lizard.

  At a table behind us, the Blond, wearing his usual pakol and a sloppy sweater, was deep in conversation with a man I’d never seen before. He was all worked up and appeared to be in the midst of an elaborate explanation; he had the apprehensive look of a student justifying himself to a teacher. We passed by just inches from him, but he didn’t give the slightest sign of recognition.

  The German burst out in cavernous, raucous laughter. He raised his beer glass and proposed a toast in German to nobody in particular. The South African looked like he was asleep.

  “It just blows my mind,” said Imo, casting a sideways glance first at the Blond, then at the German. “We’ve been here three days and none of these guys has so much as acknowledged us yet. I’m curious as to how long they can go on ignoring the fact we actually exist. Would you like to order something, darling?”

  “I was thinking maybe just tea and maybe a cup o
f soup later on would be good. I don’t want to eat anything too…” I let my words trail off.

  “You know, to me this seems to be the place where all good manners have come to an end,” Imo continued, looking around the room. “And it’s not a very good sign if you ask me. If there were any hope—if any of them actually believed this country could still make it and get back on its feet again—these people would still be engaged in some kind of civilized behavior. But could they care less? They know this is the last stop. After this one there’s only chaos.”

  Imo called the waiter, the young Afghan boy who produced the huevos rancheros for the Dark One every morning, and ordered tea for me and another drink for her.

  The man the Blond was talking to had longish hair, a ginger beard and the crumpled look of someone who’d been on a long journey and had collected a lot of dust on the road. Muddy army boots, a heavy military coat, a face tanned by the mountain sun. He was listening to the Blond intently, but I noticed out of the corner of my eye that he was also scanning our table. Our eyes met for a split second and I intercepted a sort of signal, a nod, possibly half a smile. The Blond picked up on this breach in the man’s attention—it had been barely a power glitch—and immediately moved closer, hiking his chair forward a few inches, placing himself like a screen between us.

  “He’s paying him,” murmured Imo. I turned around just in time to see the man with the ginger beard hand a roll of bills to the Blond, who counted, then pocketed them. The man with the ginger beard gave him a pat on the shoulder. It was a gesture of encouragement, almost paternal. They shook hands, then the Blond stood up and without looking at us at all, left the bar with his head down. The man with the beard stayed where he was and motioned to the Afghan boy behind the bar to bring him another beer.

  “This is Paul. From Canada,” Imo specified, as if I should rejoice that at least he wasn’t another American. “He’s explaining some very interesting things to me about the opium fields. This is Maria, the fabulous photographer I was telling you about.”

  The man with the beard had moved fast. In the time it took me to go to the bathroom and come back, he’d moved away from his table, joined ours and refreshed his drink. He pointed his thumb at Imo’s gin and tonic with ice, and threw me a querying glance, jerking his chin up slightly.

  “…No, thank you, I’m not feeling…Maybe something warm…some green tea.”

  Paul called the waiter behind the bar by name and ordered in Dari, without a trace of an accent, or so it sounded to me. Imo had already pulled out her Moleskine and was taking notes.

  “We were talking about the spray,” she said. “The U.S. is pressuring President Karzai to spray the poppy fields, you know, to show the world that they’re ridding Afghanistan of heroin. Which is actually the dumbest thing this government could do.”

  She then turned to Paul.

  “You know of course how the U.S. did exactly the same thing in Colombia with coke. I’m actually from Medellín, so…”

  But Paul had planted his eyes on me.

  “Right. So, what would you say the alternative is?”

  He was asking me, not because he thought I had an opinion, or because he was interested in hearing it if I did. It was a rhetorical question, something a teacher would ask the class dunce during a test. He lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly right into my nostrils.

  “I wouldn’t know. Sorry, but why is it so dumb to spray?”

  Paul chuckled. He stretched and shook his head in amusement.

  I’d obviously asked the wrong question.

  “Well. First of all, it’s a short-term, one-time effort and it would only push the opium prices up. Second, do you have any idea what the illiteracy rate is in Afghanistan? I’ll tell you, it’s close to seventy percent. How do you think this population of illiterates survives? What work can they do?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Agriculture,” Imo cut in, looking up quickly from the notes she was jotting down.

  “Yes,” conceded Paul. “And where do you think the farmers get the money to feed their families during the winter months when nothing grows?”

  I looked over at Imo.

  “Opium,” she answered.

  Paul approved with a movement of his hand and turned to me again.

  “If they grow opium, then they get an advance on the harvest from the drug lords. And that money gets them through the winter. Then, when they harvest it in spring, they get the rest. But if the field is sprayed, then that farmer finds himself not only without a crop, but now he also has a debt to pay.”

  “And so the poor bugger is completely fucked,” added Imo.

  “Exactly. So, given that these poor buggers make up seventy percent of the country, how kindly do you think Afghans view the Americans who want to spray their only means of subsistence?”

  “Not very kindly.”

  “Right. So even though in Washington this might sound like a really bright idea, the truth is, in this country they want to see every American dead.”

  He mimed the gesture of cutting his throat with his index finger.

  “It’s the worst thing they could do; it’s actually why everything is going down the drain. That, not religion or culture or what have you, is the reason why the Taliban are coming back with the support of the people.”

  Imo wrote and nodded.

  “But why don’t the Americans help them with alternative crops?” she asked. “Then they can destroy the poppies but in exchange they get them to grow something else. You know, in Colombia and also in Bolivia they did exactly that.”

  Paul smiled enigmatically and stroked his chin.

  “Okay. And what crops?”

  “I don’t know. Wheat, barley, for example?”

  A glimmer of amusement flickered in Paul’s eyes, then he shook his head as if Imo’s suggestion was laughable.

  “So how much do you think an opium crop weighs?”

  Imo and I looked at each other.

  “I’ll tell you. I’d say you could transport it on a donkey’s back. And how much does a wheat field weigh?”

  “Obviously a lot more,” I said.

  “I’d say you’d need at least a truck,” said Imo.

  Paul nodded and took a slow sip of beer.

  “Correct. That’s exactly right. You’d need a truck.”

  This way he had of making us guess every answer was beginning to annoy me. He wiped his hand over his mouth.

  “Do you have any idea what the roads are like ten kilometers out of the city?”

  I was wondering if he was ever going to stop asking these questions.

  “The tarmac ends, right?” I said to cut him off. I’d already figured out what he was getting at.

  Paul raised his palms and shrugged, as if there was nothing to add. Imo lit up as if the obvious solution to a mathematical problem had suddenly been revealed to her.

  “Right. Opium is the only crop that can be transported on the back of a mule. Wow. That’s interesting.” She was writing it all down, glowing from this bit of information. “Funny, one never thinks of that,” she said defensively, not wanting to sound naive.

  Paul sniggered.

  “Everyone talks and writes about Afghanistan, but you’ve got to talk to the farmers, the villagers in the remote regions—and you’ve got to talk to them in their language—to figure out the details of how things work or why they don’t work.”

  The waiter came with my tea and their drinks. Paul kept looking at me with a mixture of interest and insolence. He snapped his fingers and took a sip of his fresh beer.

  “If they don’t build roads first they’ll never solve the problem of resources. If you can’t transport it, you can’t sell it. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  We nodded.

  “It’ll be years before they build a decent road network here,” added Imo with the air of an expert. Then she smiled at Paul. She picked up his cigarette from the ashtray without asking permission and took a drag. I real
ized she was on to something. In order to weasel as much information as possible she was actually flirting with him.

  I took my pills out of my pocket and swallowed one with a sip of tea. Everything still hurt: my bones, my muscles, my nerves. The battle with the monster had left me aching all over.

  “What’s the matter?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing, I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

  “There, you see, for example…”

  He picked up the bottle of Advil and turned it around in his hand.

  “Do you have any idea how many painkillers are consumed every day around the planet?”

  He was driving me insane. Maybe it was a syndrome, this thing of closing every sentence with a question mark.

  I didn’t answer.

  “And what is the main substance in an analgesic?”

  “Morphine derived from opium,” Imo said, twirling the ice around in her drink.

  “That’s right,” conceded Paul once more. He took another sip of beer and smiled. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. He looked at us, expecting one of us to cry miracle, as if his beer glass was the Holy Grail and we still hadn’t realized that whatever we were seeking had been under our noses all along.

  “Precisely. There you go,” he said triumphantly.

  “Precisely what?”

  “Pharmaceuticals would be the only solution.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said wearily. “I don’t think I get it.”

  “Simple. In order to produce the quantity of painkillers the world consumes every day, you need about ten thousand tons of opium a year, and the legal market can’t produce enough. If Afghanistan sold its opium to the pharmaceutical market rather than to the drug cartel, we’d all be set. The farmers would be happy because they’d get paid, the American government would be happy because it could show the world that it had eradicated the drug problem, and you, with your headache, would get the drug you need. Does that make sense?”