End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  I quickly took stock of the situation: all I had was a fifty-euro note and some change in local currency. Imo was going to be in the air for the next fourteen hours. I tried Pierre’s cell and it was off. It was Friday night, and I knew he went to the country for the weekend; I also remembered him saying proudly that he always turned his mobile off on weekends, to de-stress. I didn’t have Hanif’s number either: Imo had always been the one in charge and I’d never thought I would need to have it. I didn’t even remember the address of Babur’s Lodge. I knew that as soon as I found myself out in the parking lot with my suitcases, I’d be lost.

  Suddenly I saw him from behind. He was still wearing his pakol, his green cargo pants, a heavy sweater. A tuft of blond hair stuck out from under his cap. He carried only a canvas bag flung over his shoulder, as if he were going away for the weekend. I saw him head for the exit too, but more slowly than the others because he was engrossed in the display of his cell, either checking or sending a text.

  “Hey! Hey, wait!”

  I leapt at him.

  “What happened? Why did they cancel the flight? Did they tell you when the next plane is?”

  The Blond slowly lifted his eyes from the display. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, maybe he pretended not to recognize me, or maybe he really didn’t have a clue who I was because he’d never bothered to look me in the face before.

  “I don’t know,” he said listlessly. “Could be the weather. Or maybe a bomb.”

  “A bomb? Where?”

  “I don’t know, I heard something.”

  The Blond shrugged and kept walking toward the exit. I followed him, struggling with my two suitcases. He didn’t offer to help me.

  Outside, the parking lot was nearly empty. The Turkish workers had almost all dispersed. There were only a few parked cars left.

  “But what happens now? When’s the next flight? Were you going to Istanbul too?” I babbled in a torrent, tailing him. The Blond was my last hope. If I let him go, I knew I’d be left in the snow together with a handful of soldiers with moustaches and machine guns.

  “Nobody knows. They cancel flights every second day here. You have to keep going back to the airport every day until you manage to get on a plane.”

  He was heading for his car. I was right behind him. I realized I was in such a panic I might just burst into tears in front of him.

  “No, listen, hey, excuse me…wait.” I made a gesture of trying to stop him as he turned his back on me. He was already fiddling with the car keys, considering our exchange over and that I’d be off about my business.

  “Listen, can you just wait a minute? I…I can’t stay here, I don’t even know where to go…I haven’t…”

  The Blond looked at me, not exactly alarmed, but he was beginning to realize that getting rid of me was going to be more complicated than he had bargained for. I moved closer and put my hand on the car door that he had just opened.

  “…I don’t know where my driver is, the journalist I was with has left, I have no money for a taxi…I…” As I listed all the certainties that I had lost, I actually did start to cry.

  A few seconds went by. In the meantime, the Blond was staring over the roof of the car, his gaze unfocused, like someone trying to look away from an embarrassing scene. He patted his pocket, searching for a packet of cigarettes. He pulled one out with his teeth.

  “Don’t you remember me? My colleague and I were staying at Babur’s Lodge too last week. I was in the room opposite…”

  But the Blond jerked his chin, a sort of assent that, however, also seemed to mean “Move it, get in and shut up.” Which I instantly did.

  The Blond’s car reeked of dirty socks and cigarettes. It was full of stuff—boxes, muddy boots, electrical gear, a car battery, pages ripped from old magazines thrown on the floor. I spotted an ad for a hunting rifle on one of them. I wiped my nose on my coat sleeve. The Blond put the car into first gear and drove through the checkpoint, with a quick salute to the guard as if they were old acquaintances. He kept his gaze straight ahead; he wasn’t thrilled to have me on board.

  The traffic was infernal. It was a different frenzy from the usual one, as if the level of tension had risen exponentially. American soldiers were flailing their arms with frantic, hysterical gestures in front of the many roadblocks we encountered. Sirens wailed in the distance. The Blond braked and got out of the car. I watched him cross the road, stop in front of the soldiers and show them something, some sort of ID, I supposed. He showed it with the same rapid gesture that plainclothes cops use in movies when they pull out their badge to get into an off-limits area. They talked for a bit. The soldiers gesticulated, pointing in a certain direction. The Blond scratched his chin and then shambled, slow and gangly, back to the car. I didn’t expect any explanation, but I gave it a moment. Then, after he reversed, once we were back on the road, I cleared my throat.

  “What did they say? Is there a problem?”

  “A bomb. They blew up sixteen people.”

  “Where?”

  “On the way to the Canadian base, by the Darulaman Palace.”

  “The one with all those holes, on the hill?”

  The Blond nodded, slowly lowering his eyelids.

  “Oh, my God. We were right in front of it just a few days ago. The journalist and I with our fixer,” I said, as if the fact that I had narrowly avoided that explosion could shake him, rouse in him the desire to look me in the face—this person restored to life, escaped from death—and perhaps be a little nicer to me. But instead, the Blond kept his eyes on the road and scowled.

  “They plant them on purpose, the bastards, where everybody goes past.”

  The Blond pulled up at the sentry box outside Babur’s Lodge. He waved at the armed guard, the other responded and opened the gate.

  “There,” he said.

  “You’re not getting out?”

  “No, I’m not staying here anymore.”

  “Ah,” I said, not even bothering to conceal my disappointment.

  At this point even the Blond had turned into a familiar figure, one whom I didn’t want to leave.

  “All right, then. Well, thanks for the ride, it was very kind of you.”

  He didn’t reply. He waited for the guard to take my suitcases out and screeched away in reverse as if the bomb about to explode was me.

  Babur’s Lodge looked like it had been evacuated.

  I crossed the deserted lobby and went into the dining room. There was no one there either. I did, however, hear a voice coming through the closed door of the bar.

  They were all in there, watching the news, propped up on the bar in front of their drinks, their eyes glued to the TV on the wall. There was the South African and the German, drunk and heavy-lidded, in his worn-out Tyrolean outfit, General Dynamics nervously chewing gum, his hair damp from the shower, in his perfectly ironed multipocketed vest. There was Paul, the King of Questions, the sleeves on his military jacket rolled up, the khaki shirt and the boots, vodka and tonic in hand, unmindful of the thread of smoke from a cigarette forgotten in the ashtray. Next to him, the Dark One in a Springsteen concert T-shirt sipping a Coke, stroking his short beard. The lodge staff were in there too: the cooks, the waiters, the dishwashers, but they were standing in a second row and not drinking anything, their aprons still on.

  On the screen I took in what must have been CNN footage of the bombing, with a voice-over in Dari commenting on the incident.

  I saw debris, the remains of a military vehicle, injured Afghans being carried on a stretcher. The body of an ISAF soldier halfway emerged from the stones. He was covered in blood; someone had laid a sheet over his face. A solitary man in civilian clothes was standing holding his head between his hands, looking at the ground.

  In the background, I recognized the shape of the palace I had photographed only a few days back, the battered wedding cake that now stood as a backdrop to death and destruction.

  I had been standing right there, on the left-hand side of t
he frame to be precise, right next to the barrier that said “No Entry.” I had taken pictures of the guards from that very spot, carefully framing out the barbed wire. Could it be they were all dead? I tried to remember their faces, their smiles while they puffed up their chests next to Hanif.

  Just as when I watched the video of my kidnapping with the Defenders, I could analyze the scene of my potential death on live TV, picture the position my body would have been in under the rubble, how the shot would have depicted my demise.

  Then the vision stopped; they returned to the studio.

  And then Hanif appeared.

  He was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on when he left me at the airport. I recognized the tufts of hair coming out of his ears, the length of his moustache, the slight double chin that spilled over the collar of the striped shirt that I knew for a fact to be polyester and not cotton. The familiar sight of his face shocked me precisely because I couldn’t put any distance between me, him, the location of the bombing and the news he was reading. What had happened wasn’t somewhere else, it was here and now, the death on the screen had spilled too close to me.

  Someone switched off the TV and only then did the men of Babur’s Lodge turn and notice my presence. They merely tossed the odd opaque glance; none of them smiled. Only Paul grinned and raised his glass. But it didn’t feel like a greeting as much as a sort of obscure threat.

  “Ah, here you are. So, you couldn’t bear to leave, huh?”

  I ordered a gin and tonic, then I tried to explain first to the South African, then to General Dynamics, that I had been grounded and I needed to get hold of my friend Hanif, the newscaster, but they just shrugged and ordered another beer. The Dark One and the German had heard what I said perfectly well but decided to ignore me just as the others had done. I asked the staff, but no one had any idea how they could find the number of the TV station in Kabul, as there were no “Yellow Pages” or phone books in the hotel and no one seemed in any way moved by my request for help.

  The owner of Babur’s Lodge, tracked down on the phone by the cook, was not coming to the hotel that night. The city was in gridlock because of security and anyway he said he didn’t have any rooms available.

  “I told you when you came last week that I had a booking. Paul took your room. When he comes to town he stays with us for two or three months, he’s an old client,” he said.

  “But what am I supposed to do?” I was standing in the deserted reception area holding the receiver. I heard my voice boom in the empty room. “The city is at a standstill, I don’t even know if I can find a taxi to go looking for another hotel.”

  “You can sleep on the other bed in my room.”

  I swung around. It was Paul, who had silently approached.

  “Give me that,” he said and snatched the phone from my hand.

  “It’s cool, Ahmed, I’ll put her up for tonight.”

  He hung up and bared his teeth. He had pointy canines, or perhaps that was just the way he looked to me then.

  “No, absolutely not.” I tried to object, politely, but then in a crescendo. “It’s no problem, really. I’m going to look for a hotel right now. I’m sure there must be a room somewhere.”

  “Where do you think you’re going now? There’s a curfew. You can’t go anywhere.”

  He touched my arm, indicating that I should follow him to the bar.

  “Let’s go in there and have a drink. Come on, Maria. It’s Maria, isn’t it?”

  “No, listen, what I really need is to get in touch with our fixer, that guy who reads the news on TV, Hanif. Do you know him? He came to get us this morning, he’s quite well—”

  “Hey, chill out. I’m not going to eat you. I said you can sleep in the other bed. We can look for your friend tomorrow. Relax now, let’s go in there and have a drink.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me lightly but firmly towards the bar door. His touch felt like handcuffs snapping shut.

  Paul insisted on ordering me a second gin and tonic. All within the space of three minutes—as soon as he had offered me his spare bed, leaving me no option—he was treating me as if I were his property and he had made this clear to the others. It was strange, but I had already given in. Maybe it was the weariness, but I felt exhausted, like I had actually been to Europe and back; I even felt a sort of hysterical jet lag and slipped into being a hostage without any resistance. Passive, careful to attract as little attention as possible, just like the Defenders had recommended.

  Paul, on his third vodka since I had arrived, was now in the process of explaining to no one in particular why this country was going straight to hell. The South African, the Dark One and the German nodded in turn, but each one was thinking about his own stuff.

  “…No one from NATO, none of the diplomats, none of the guys working for intelligence, not a single one of them speaks a word of Dari. They don’t know the people, the topography, the history, the culture. They come here for three months max, get astronomical salaries and then go back home again. None of them have a fucking clue how an Afghan’s head works. And do you know what that means?”

  The others nodded for him to go on, just to keep the background noise of his voice on and be left in peace.

  “The helicopters, the cars, the armored vehicles are all crawling with interpreters. And do you know what these interpreters do?”

  The others shook their heads. No, they didn’t.

  “They get paid twice. Once by us, and once by the Taliban, who pay for the information. We’re paying spies who are paid again to translate all our information, you see what I mean?”

  General Dynamics shook his head, urgently needing to add his bit, to reestablish the authority that Paul was endangering. Perhaps General Dynamics was one of those who came for three months, took the money and ran without understanding a thing.

  “It’s nothing to do with spies, in the end it’s just a question of money,” he rebutted. “The Taliban pay double what the Afghan army does. In the Helmand Province, the men get up to twenty bucks a day to fight us and for twenty bucks a family can live for at least two months.”

  But Paul wasn’t listening. He kept haranguing to the wall.

  “You want to win the war on terror? You want to eradicate Al Qaeda? Then you’ve got to hire the guys who can sit with their legs crossed for hours, drink green tea and chew tobacco with every village elder, listen to every bit of local gossip, learn every track, road, name of the tribal leaders. Forget defense specialists, technology, expensive weapons. Hire the anthropologists, the linguists, the mad historians, any genius kid with a Ph.D. in Islamic culture”

  I let my eyes drift out of focus. Right at this time of the night my body would have been flying over Iran toward Turkey. And yet here I was, in the company of men I had nothing in common with, one of whom I now was supposed to share a room with. I knew that room, I had slept in it for a week and I knew perfectly well that it did not have twin beds.

  The conversation was slackening, had taken a drunken, nasty, end-of-the-night turn: god-crazed cutthroats…bloodthirsty fanatics…with an IQ of fifty…

  Paul knocked back the last of his vodka and shot me a look. He ran his hand distractedly between his legs, rubbing his dick. He looked at his watch. I remembered what I had felt when Imo and I had first sat among those women in the village school. How they had seemed—compared to Hanif, to his cousin, even to Malik—like characters spat out from another era. But in this particular moment—as hopelessly impotent and frustrated as I was—I felt that the distance between my world and theirs had vanished and we were almost on equal footing. In fact, my nationality, education, race, profession counted zero as far as Paul or the rest of them were concerned. When the money and the guns are in the hands of the men and there’s a war outside, a woman who has neither can’t do much except what she’s told. I sat with my glass of gin and tonic and let this bewildering thought sink in.

  Given that what was outside this room terrified me and what was i
nside it horrified me, I was obliged to choose the lesser evil. I slipped out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” Paul asked, suddenly alert.

  “To the bathroom, why?”

  He nodded. In other words, he was giving me permission.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor and sat on a freezing marble step. I trawled the names in the phone book of my cell looking for Imo’s number. As soon as she landed in London and got my text, she could send me Hanif’s number and it would all be over. It was a question of killing time for a few hours, no mean feat.

  Suddenly next to the “I” of “Imo” I read the name of someone I didn’t remember meeting.

  Jeremy.

  Even before I could answer the question “Who is this Jeremy?” I knew—my survival instinct had told me already, a charge of pure adrenaline had made me vigilant, clairvoyant, ready for anything—that his name held my salvation.

  Jeremy What’s-His-Name. I had stored his number on my phone because Imo’s battery was flat. The one who had said, “Come to dinner whenever you want, I’ll give you a plate of pasta.” Pasta!

  “There you are.”

  Paul was coming up the stairs.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  He pulled me up. His breath smelled of peanuts and vodka.

  He grinned, then touched my hair, my neck. I shook my head.

  “Stop it,” I said and tried to slide past him. He grabbed my wrist.

  “Hey.”

  I felt his body press on mine, then push me against the wall. The stiffness of his prick beneath the fabric of his pants.

  “Don’t you want to lie down a bit now?” he slurred.

  His hand was already fumbling under my sweater. I pushed him away.

  “No. I don’t want to. You leave me alone.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong now? What’s your problem?”

  “Fuck you,” I snarled. “Get your hands off me, you filthy motherfucking bastard.”

  I caught a glitch of surprise in Paul’s glassy stare. I gained momentum and pushed him harder. I felt a supernatural force shoot from my shoulder into my fingertips, as if my arm was an extension of the laser-beam sword in Star Wars. For a split second I thought I would actually be able to kill him with my bare hands.