The mud houses looked more like an archaeological find, as if their ruin had occurred through a slow crumbling away rather than from mortar shells. Through the cracks, behind the half-collapsed walls of seemingly abandoned houses, we caught glimpses of skinny children, goats, the bright colors of the washing hung out to dry. We’d see smoke coming from the chimneys, flatbreads piled in baskets resting on the adobe walls, water spurting from wells. Hanif stopped the car and bought a couple of naan, the elongated flatbreads, from an old man resting against a wall. They were wrapped in newspaper, and when I touched them they still felt warm from the clay oven.
Even the vestiges of the Soviet tanks slumbering in the sun like unused tractors had come to be part of the landscape. They looked like cyclopean animals whose fangs had been removed. Rusty pieces stripped from these carcasses had been reutilized here as a dam to divert the flow of a river, there as a beam over the entrance to a house. All this destruction lacked a sense of violence or, at any rate, I couldn’t read it. What I saw was life that had obstinately resprouted over the ruins like a climbing plant clinging to a wall. This was not the arrested life of a mortally wounded country.
I looked for the red marks. There were none.
“Pull over,” I said to Hanif.
I got out of the car and felt the dry gravel crunch under my shoes. The effervescent air, as light as a wisp, caressed my neck. I looked around. Three hundred and sixty degrees of azure and earth, mountains and valleys, blue morphing into purple, then strips of green, yellow and ocher. I started taking pictures, it didn’t matter really where I pointed my camera. On the horizon, a little child running towards us over the frozen ground in bare feet. A stain of pink in a field, perhaps a woman. Everything worked itself out in the lens, the images were composing themselves.
It was only a moment, a sweeping breath. The instant when everything rises by an octave and you feel a shiver come up the spine.
Imo got out of the car too and came towards me in the stunning light. She smiled and struck a pose, hands on hips. I aimed at her, pushed the button and knew that this too was a perfect shot. We grinned at each other.
This was sheer happiness and we knew it.
After about an hour, the landscape suddenly closed in. Without any warning we entered a narrow gorge cut between high walls, as if the mountain had been sliced in half with a knife to let us through. The dazzling morning light suddenly gave way to the gloom of dark rock. There were men working in the middle of the gorge, at the narrowest point. They were cutting rocks, seemingly to build an embankment to shore up the watercourse that ran through the bottom of the canyon. The Ford jolted over the stones at a snail’s pace. The men lowered their heads to check who was in the car. Their heads were wrapped in rags and turbans, their faces darkened by too much sun and their bodies muscular and strong. Their eyes rummaged inside the car. It wasn’t just—or perhaps it wasn’t all—a lascivious look. It was a heavily charged gaze that left its mark and couldn’t get enough. I instinctively pulled the scarf over my head. The insistence of those eyes disturbed me.
Women. Uncovered. Foreign. Was this the sequence that flashed through their minds as we moved past them?
We held our breath in unison: me, Imo, Hanif, the sweaty men who’d laid their stones and pickaxes, all of us joined in the same moment of suspension.
I felt a molecular change in the atmosphere, as if the scene in front of my eyes had frozen, its contours hardened. It was fear. Nothing had happened but suddenly everything was different. My heart was beating wildly, my hands had turned cold and clammy. I recalled one of the lessons on in-vehicle safety measures the Defenders had given us back in Hampshire. Dangerous routes one should avoid—routes that make the perfect place for an ambush, like a gorge where a car can’t go faster than ten kilometers an hour, with no way out. Two Western women and a TV presenter with one bottle of water between them and no phone. How could we have been so stupid? I felt a surge of hostility towards Imo and her arrogant ways of snubbing danger. Nobody made a sound. Not even afterwards, when we’d passed the men and their stares, when everything opened out again and the mountain peaks reappeared, gleaming in the sunlight, the valleys strewn with poplars lining riverbanks. The orchards and the women bent over in the fields, dressed in pink, green and purple, and it was as if the gorge had never happened.
I glanced at Imo, hoping for a look of complicity, but she was leaning her head on the window, gazing out, and didn’t turn around. I looked at Hanif’s shoulders—they had seemed contracted only a minute earlier—but he didn’t say anything. I thought perhaps I had imagined it, that rustle in the air, the feeling of danger and its smell; after all, we’d only driven through a gorge at crawling speed, arousing the curiosity of men who never see anyone go by. Or maybe that ripple of fear had been real—the three of us had actually been holding our breath—but we’d decided not to talk about it because we’d come through it and we still had a long way to go.
The woman we were going to visit in the hospital had set herself on fire to get out of marrying a man four times her age. It appeared that we might be able to talk to the women of her family living in the nearby village if the head of the village would grant permission. Hanif had managed to establish contact with him through God knows which of his many channels and he’d assured us that we would be received.
“When we get there, we’ll sit and speak, and little by little explain to him what you want to do,” he said.
Imo stiffened.
“What do you mean exactly by ‘little by little’?”
“We bring gifts, we drink tea, then we explain that you want to talk to the women. But it’s best not to say straightaway that you want to know about suicide,” said Hanif, waggling his head and smiling.
“No?”
“No, best not to say it straightaway.”
“Right. Not a problem if you want to interview a drug lord who sells tons of heroin, or a terrorist who wants to blow up an American base,” Imo said, “but just in case you want to talk to a woman who’d prefer not to marry a toothless old man who’s going to beat her up, it mushrooms into a diplomatic incident.”
Imo shook her head as she went over her notes in her Moleskine book.
We had been driving through the open plain for at least an hour, in what seemed a completely deserted area. The afternoon light was painting the mountains in an increasingly warm, golden hue. Hanif pointed at the only visible building in the distance. It stood alone, on top of a rise, in the middle of a rocky expanse. He said the building was the district dispensary, where the woman who’d attempted to burn herself had been admitted.
A certain Shirin—another one of Hanif’s finds—was supposed to meet us there. She was going to be our translator both in the hospital and in the village, given that Hanif wouldn’t be allowed inside the women’s quarters.
As we got closer the clinic turned out to be a concrete block that seemed on the verge of disintegration. Its walls were peppered by bullets, a few of the windowpanes smashed. We found Shirin waiting for us, sitting on a wooden bench outside reading an airport thriller in English. Hanif had told us that, like him, Shirin’s parents were Afghan refugees in Peshawar. She had grown up there, and was able to finish her studies, learn English and lead a freer life than girls her age back in Afghanistan.
When she stood up to greet us I saw that she was barely in her twenties and had the slanting eyes and high cheekbones of the Hazaras. She was wearing a scarf on her head and a pair of oval glasses, a brown wool jacket and gray flannel trousers. She looked strangely contemporary in this setting; she shook hands with us with her eyes cast down. She seemed apprehensive.
“It’s the first time she has worked as a translator,” Hanif told us in a protective tone. “She is afraid of making a mistake, but I told her that you are very kind ladies and that she need not worry.”
The woman who had tried to kill herself was called Zuleya and must have been barely seventeen. She was lying on an iron cot with her ar
ms and legs completely bandaged. I had lost a few minutes setting up the cameras and the lenses outside the building, and when I went into the small ward, I found Shirin bending over Zuleya, explaining something to her in a soft voice. Imo was kneeling in front of the bed and holding her tape recorder with her arm stretched out in the attempt to record Shirin’s whispers.
There were about ten women in the other beds and they all looked in pretty bad shape. There was a little girl who had a blank stare and cropped hair and a blood-soaked bandage on her arm: her hand was missing. Zuleya had her face to the wall and would neither turn around nor answer Shirin. All we could hear coming from her were harrowing, guttural sounds. The women were disturbed and frightened by our intrusion. Many had covered their faces with their sheets, others stared at us, but with a gaze so distant it seemed to be coming from another world. I gingerly approached Zuleya’s bed, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, but the slightest movement in that contained space felt like an avalanche. Imo was asking questions and urging Shirin to translate them. But Zuleya’s only reply was that moaning, her face pressed against the wall.
“Please, ask her if she’d ever seen this man she was supposed to marry.”
Shirin repeated the question in a hushed, soothing tone. Then, as Zuleya didn’t answer, she looked back at Imo. It was a timid look, but I could tell Shirin felt it was a violation to insist.
“Can you ask her what will happen to her once she gets out of here?”
Shirin leaned in to Zuleya again, her voice increasingly tenuous. But Zuleya didn’t utter a sound. She lay with her face to the wall, perfectly still, as if she were dead.
“Then ask her if—”
“She can’t, she’s too sick.” Shirin cut Imo short in her thin, grave voice.
Imo lowered the arm brandishing the recorder. She didn’t say anything for a moment, as she weighed the situation and looked around. The women were watching her. No one said a word.
“Is she so sick she can’t talk?”
“She is suffering,” replied Shirin.
Imo heaved herself up with a sigh. For a moment she didn’t know what to do. She tied her hair in a knot and looked around. The women were still staring at her, waiting for her next move.
“All right, what can I say? We’ll have to leave it, then.”
There was a foul smell pervading the room. Someone had thrown soiled bandages in a corner on the floor. Perhaps the putrid smell was coming from there.
“Maria, you try and shoot something. See if you can get her to turn around. I’m going outside. The fewer of us in here, the better.”
I drew closer to Zuleya’s bed. She was small and thin. Her little feet emerged from the bandages; the tiny toenails were painted dark red. The varnish was chipped; her heels were dirty. Who knows what was under those bandages, how many sores. Who knows how much medication they had to stave off infection in this clinic in the middle of nowhere. Maybe she had burned her face too, I couldn’t tell. Who knows whether she had been beautiful and whether she still could be. All I could see of Zuleya was her head covered by a veil, a few wayward locks of chestnut hair and her bony shoulders. She shuddered violently. Shirin and I exchanged a look. She eyed me sternly as I removed the lens cap.
I saw Zuleya’s image through the lens: her jutting shoulder blades, her bandaged arms, as she pressed her face against the wall. An oblique ray of light picked out the pale blue of her veil, the flaking, faded moss green of the wall, the russet blanket. They were velvety, powdery hues, already discolored like the pigments of frescoes of the trecento. Even though you couldn’t see her face, it would be a magnificent photo. A dying Madonna, shot from the back.
As the image came into focus, its contours now sharp and my finger still barely touching the shutter, I knew this was wrong. I’d known it the minute I’d walked into the room, but now, as I leaned over Zuleya, the feeling had become so clear I couldn’t pretend to ignore it. That feeling of shame and rage for what I was about to do had surfaced again.
A voice piped up behind me and was immediately joined by others. Suddenly they were all shouting. Shirin tugged my arm.
“Put it down, put it down, please.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They don’t want you to. Please, put the camera away. Don’t take the picture,” she pleaded.
An older woman barged into the room; she must have been a nurse or a doctor and she was shouting at me, waving her arms around. She grabbed me and bundled me out the door. As I skirted the beds of the women, some shrieked at me, shaking their fists, while others hid their faces with their sheets.
All the while, the little girl who’d lost her hand stared at me wide-eyed and blank, motionless, as if she were drugged and I were merely a hallucination. Zuleya never turned around.
“You could have shot something.”
Imo was sitting next to Hanif on the wooden bench outside the dispensary. She took a long, deep drag off her cigarette and blew it out, looking upwards.
“Did you just lose your nerve—or what?”
“There was no way, Imo. No way. They literally threw me out. Everyone started yelling at me. It was mayhem in there.”
“I know, but you could have shot anyway, it didn’t matter if it wasn’t perfectly framed or focused. At least we’d have something.”
“I don’t do out-of-focus shots just to have something,” I snapped back at her.
I was angry at her, besides being mad at myself. If from a strictly professional point of view I knew I had already failed her at the very onset of the job—and it hurt—on the other hand I was furious that she would pretend not to see how predatory the act of taking Zuleya’s photo would’ve been.
In my earlier days as a photographer I had been in similar situations while on assignment with different writers. I had had to elbow my way into painful situations—hospitals, housing projects, slums—and shoot, despite the anger of the subjects. If being the one holding the camera had made me feel like I was pointing a gun then, this time I couldn’t bear to be the hit man again.
Imo sprang to her feet and crushed the cigarette butt under her boot.
“All right, all right. Let’s not get all wound up. Maybe we just need to wait a bit and familiarize with them.”
She turned to Shirin.
“Tell me something, dear. What were those women saying exactly?”
“They said that you do not enter a hospital like thieves to steal a photograph without asking permission,” Shirin said carefully.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“And what else?”
“That you foreigners have no respect. You do not know what honor means to an Afghan woman.”
There was moment of silence.
“They also said I should be ashamed to bring you here to help you to steal a photograph of a woman who is suffering,” Shirin admitted, her eyes on the ground, her cheeks flushed.
Hanif had started to speak to Shirin in Dari. They went on for a bit; evidently Hanif was concerned about what had happened in the ward and wanted to hear it in his language. Shirin gave her account in her even-tempered voice and Hanif nodded with an increasingly worried expression.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what.” Imo offered me a sip of water from a bottle she kept in her bag. “Let’s relax for a moment and wait for things to calm down in there. Is there anything to eat in the car, by the way? Any of that delicious bread Hanif bought? In a minute I will talk to that woman doctor and explain what we’re doing, okay?”
I was still sulking.
“Yes, we better do that. Shirin is right. I can’t walk into a room and start taking pictures just like that. It’s like armed robbery,” I said. “Besides, I think that poor girl was really in pain. To me she looked like she was about to—”
“I know, I know. But we’ve only got two days, Maria. Today and we have tomorrow. That’s forty-eight hours, since it’s not a good idea to sleep in the middle of nowhere as far as security is concerned. O
ur insurance won’t even cover it. Hanif advises against it and the paper categorically forbids it.”
“But what about that French photographer who spent four years—”
“I don’t give a toss what the French woman did. I don’t operate like the French woman, all right? If I did, I’d still be squatting in a hut in southern Sudan drinking rancid milk curdled with cow piss with some Dinka family in order to write an in-depth story about the war. I just can’t afford to work like that. I can’t morally, financially.”
There was another silence. Hanif shuffled uneasily on his feet. Shirin was looking blankly into space. Imo sighed. She walked away a couple of steps, then turned around and continued.
“And guess what? The world can’t afford it either. I wrote my story about Darfur in a week and, yes, people spend years. They write books, they devote their lives to one cause. But my piece—think what you will about how I did it, how I work—my little piece was effective, and that’s all I care about.”
“Hey, you don’t need to explain,” I said and raised my hand as one would a white flag. “I didn’t mean to say that the way you work is superficial.”
The minute I said it I wondered if in fact that was exactly what I meant.
Hanif tapped his finger on his watch face. It was getting late. He said we had no time left if we wanted to get to the village before nightfall. So Imo and I looked at one another and, without saying anything, got in the car.
Halfway to the village a new passenger was supposed to come aboard, a guy called Abdur Raman, whom Hanif had arranged to meet via another one of his many connections. Abdur was either a cousin or a nephew of the head of the village, and he was going to do the introductions and show us the way.
“Very important to show up with Abdur Raman,” Hanif said. “If we go in with him, we are under the chief’s protection and nothing can happen to us. We won’t have any problems, do you understand?”
End of Manners Page 15