End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  He stumbled and nearly tripped on the step of the stairway.

  “You’ll be so fuckin’ sorry if you try and fuck with me,” I hissed.

  He raised a hand.

  “Hey,” he said, like a drunk to no one in particular down an alley, and stumbled away.

  KABUL’S STREETS WERE deserted and cloaked in snow. The city had sunk into an unearthly calm, more like a suspension than peace. Jeremy’s Land Cruiser was the only car on the road.

  “I don’t get it. Is there a curfew or not?” I asked, alarmed.

  “No. This is not an official curfew. There’s just nobody around.”

  “Are you sure? Won’t they shoot us on sight?”

  “What? No, ‘they’ won’t. It’s okay, I told you,” he said as he checked the rearview mirror again. “I’m not completely out of my mind yet, you know.”

  “Sorry. Do I sound paranoid?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We smiled at one another. I broke into nervous laughter. I liked him.

  He had recognized me at once when I had called him. He remembered both Imo and me perfectly.

  I had inundated him with my torrential list of problems. I was stranded, I had no money, I was in the hands of weird guys who—

  “Okay, okay, calm down,” he had said, stemming the flow of excuses. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Tomorrow we’ll call Hanif and tonight you can stay at my place. I’ve got plenty of room.”

  Chet Baker’s nocturnal trumpet was spreading softly from the CD player. The darkness in Kabul at night was thick as petrol—more like a bottomless pit than an absence of light. Every so often there would be a flicker on the side of the road—it felt like just a quick flutter of wings—but it invariably turned out to be what seemed to always be the same man: the same dark silhouette on every street, walking with the same stride, the same cloak wrapped around his shoulders, the same turban on his head.

  As he drove confidently through the pitch-black streets and alleys, Jeremy tried to explain to me what it had been like to be living there for the last two years; how the situation had been getting worse since he had first arrived, it crept along so slowly that it was hard to register; how he felt hope, excitement at first, but then things had gradually worsened, like a fever rising half a degree every day, until one day it was clear to everyone that the country was on its knees again.

  “Kamikaze attacks are increasing, security is decreasing, the government is corrupt and the country is in the hands of drug dealers. And this is only the beginning of the bad news. Everyone knows the Taliban are coming back, stronger and stronger. They’ll launch their attacks again as soon as the snow melts on the passes.”

  He seemed permeated by a deep exhaustion, as if he had lost his reserves of good faith.

  “My family, my friends back home, even my boss, everyone tells me I should get out. But from here it’s hard to imagine that London does really exist somewhere. Even Islamabad seems like a mirage. I’m happily stranded, I guess. Or maybe unhappily, I can’t tell which at this point. It must be the Kabul syndrome.”

  He sounded like someone who had been holding the rearguard to keep watch over a place that had been forgotten by everybody and was slowly falling apart, someone who was going to hold out till the end—for purely sentimental reasons, in any case certainly not for the money—until the day the roof would collapse. Perhaps only then would he give in and pack his suitcase.

  “These days, there are fewer and fewer people prepared to work in Muslim countries. You know, there are no more American journalists living full-time in Kabul,” he said. “And certainly nobody with wives and kids, that’s a given. We’re a thinning tribe.”

  He said this with a mixture of sorrow and pride and looked at me to gauge my reaction. I smiled at him. I wondered whether he wanted me to know he didn’t have a girlfriend or a wife.

  “Well, maybe that’s a good thing. We should all leave, probably, and let them decide for themselves,” he added, patting his breast pocket in search of his pack of cigarettes. He lit one without asking if I minded the smoke, and exhaled deeply, like a long, forced sigh one would perform in front of a doctor.

  There were some friends at his house, he said.

  “We were having dinner when you called. I hope they left us something to eat.”

  “I’m sorry you had to get up from the table for me.”

  “Don’t mention it. I’m glad I could help. No, I just said that because maybe some of them will stay over tonight. You know, not everyone likes driving at night, especially after a bombing, so we’ll just have to make do the best we can.”

  “No problem. Listen, I can sleep on the floor.”

  Jeremy stopped in front of the armored sentry box at his compound.

  “You don’t have to sleep on the floor. There’s a spare guest room. I don’t know how comfortable the bed is, though, that’s all I meant.”

  He leaned out the window and greeted the guard—an older man wrapped in a thick coat and a shawl tightened around his head—who opened the gate. It was still very cold, but it had stopped snowing. As I got out of the car my lungs filled with the icy air mingled with the scent of coal and for some reason I felt utterly safe. It was only for a second, but my heart leapt with a sudden bout of intense happiness.

  The remains of dinner were left on the table, the ashtrays crammed with butts. At that time of night the generators had been turned off, so the room was lit only by candles dripping onto the lid of a paint tin and a couple of kerosene lamps. There were four people sitting at the table smoking and slowly working their way through a bottle of whiskey.

  “This is Maria, a friend of mine, who—surprise, surprise—has been grounded,” said Jeremy, who in the meantime had taken off his boots. I noticed everyone in the room was barefoot except for me and I was smearing the rug with snow and mud.

  I made them out by the dim light of the candles. One of the two guys had a thick handmade scarf around his neck and a woolen vest; the other looked bookish, with round glasses, a keffiyeh, an old tweed jacket patched at the sleeves. The two women were both wearing shalwar kameezes under thick woolen sweaters. One of them was heavy, with a square jaw, thick wrists and the rosy complexion of a country maiden. The other one was wafer thin; she wore her curly hair piled up on her head like a girl in an Egon Schiele drawing and had long, nervous hands. Jeremy quickly did the introductions. The stocky girl and the man in the vest, Ylva and Fabian, were Swedish, UN staffers; the guy with the keffiyeh, Reuben, was a Spanish journalist; and the blonde, Florence, was a photographer.

  I took a closer look at her and realized I had seen her before. It took me a few seconds and then it clicked. It was the French woman Imo and I had briefly met that day with Roshana, the one who had the pictures to go with Imo’s story. She looked at me; there was a flicker, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe I was one of the many faces she hadn’t memorized, or perhaps she had just decided to ignore me.

  The house was bare, there were thick rugs on the floor, a brown couch with tattered upholstery, a few pieces of ugly office furniture, probably inherited with the house; a kitschy poster of General Massoud with the inscription “The Lion of Panjshir” on the wall, shelves full of books, a wildly eclectic CD collection. There were bars on the windows, padlocks and chains everywhere. It was a sad house—more like a box designed to contain transient foreigners than a home to anybody. I doubted it had ever had a family living in it or children growing up in it; it had no soul and seemed to possess no memories.

  Jeremy made me up a plate of leftovers. Cold spaghetti with congealed tomato sauce.

  “Would you like me to heat it up for you?”

  “No, please. Really, it’s fine like this.”

  I looked around as the others topped off their glasses with what was left of the whiskey and picked up the thread of their interrupted conversation, a rosary of shocking stories and rumors. This was the drill, by now I had come to know it. As I listened to them recite, I was struck yet aga
in by how little all of us foreigners—including the ones who had lived here for years—seemed to actually know about what was really going on in this country. Their sources were never quoted, their tales sounded more like guesswork, or hearsay. The round of hypotheses must have been a mantra that got repeated every day to keep the worst at bay—another form of exorcism.

  The interpreter of a colleague who lived in Herat had his throat cut in broad daylight as an act of retaliation. It seemed that insurgents opened fire on an English convoy in Helmand Province, that their Pakistani friend who worked for a children’s aid organization in Bamyan had received a death threat, that the UN personnel were going to be repatriated any day. That today’s incident was nothing, just a warning. The big one was coming tomorrow.

  There was neither apprehension nor fear in what they said, only weariness. Actually, now that I was able to take a better look at them, they all seemed to have become like their clothes: rumpled, washed out from too much laundering. They had lost shape and luster. Perhaps this progressive discoloration was taking place precisely because they were lacking in the necessary dose of madness and cynicism that the men at Babur’s Lodge had, with their automatic weapons on their bedside tables and their stratospheric salaries.

  I looked at Florence.

  “We’ve met before, perhaps you don’t remember. I came to speak to Roshana with Imogen Glass, the English journalist.”

  Florence gave me an inquisitive look. Her sweater had slackened around the wrists, the sleeves were too long and covered half of her long, thin hands. She seemed in need of calories and warmer clothes, but was quite beautiful despite her somehow tragic appearance.

  “Yes, now I remember. You’re the photographer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything more and started rummaging in the bag hanging off her chair, looking for her cigarettes. I was toying with some breadcrumbs on the table; I could feel Florence’s gaze still lingering.

  “Did you succeed in photographing the women who attempted suicide?” she asked, and I detected a note of apprehension or suspicion.

  “No, of course I didn’t.”

  I didn’t offer any explanations. There was a pause. We both pretended to be following the conversation going on around the table. My desire was to ignore her for the rest of the evening. But I swallowed my pride.

  “It’s likely my colleague will be getting touch with you if she needs any photos,” I added. “Roshana told us you’ve done great work around Herat on the women in the hospital.”

  She nodded, sucked on her cigarette.

  “It depends. I’m trying to do a book with those photos. I don’t really want them published beforehand. But if they pay well, maybe it can be arranged. It depends what kind of magazine wants them. I’m not going to sell them just to anybody.”

  Despite my friendly tone, she was defensive.

  “It’s the Observer. I think it could be worth your while,” I said, trying to still sound forthcoming.

  Florence shrugged and did the sort of pouting sigh that only the French dare to do. That unbearable emission of breath through pursed lips that sometimes stands for irritation, sometimes for scorn and sometimes simply for tedium.

  I didn’t let it get to me, although I did find it difficult to warm up to her.

  “It was good to see you again,” I said as I got up from the table, “but now I’m off to sleep. I’m absolutely exhausted.”

  I slept on a monastic bed in a small room on the second floor. A Da Vinci Code probably left by another passing guest was sitting on the bedside table, a gas stove burning in the corner.

  Jeremy had taken me upstairs, showed me the bathroom, taught me how to avoid flooding the shower. He seemed rather drunk when we said good night and I saw him wobble a bit on the stairs as he returned to his guests.

  Distant thuds woke me at dawn.

  I leapt out of bed like a jack-in-the-box and looked out the window, heart in my throat. The world appeared like the inside of an empty fridge, everything white, the sky opaque like milk. I heard the cars plowing over the asphalt: the ominous thuds were not bombs in the distance but rickety suspensions on the potholes.

  There was no one down in the kitchen, but someone had already tidied up. Clean plates were dripping in a rack by the sink, the table had been cleared, the ashtrays emptied. I put on some coffee and sat waiting for it to brew.

  The silence of the kitchen was broken only by the ticking of an old-fashioned alarm clock. I realized this was the first time I had been able to sit all by myself and be still since I had left Milan. It was good to feel the quiet. I needed it.

  As the smell of coffee filled the room, something slowly insinuated its way under my sternum and gradually spread out lightly, inoffensively, like ink in water. A longing, a sudden burst of nostalgia I didn’t even know I had in me.

  It was almost ten years ago. My mother was in the hospital in the early days of her illness. It was morning; my brother and I had been looking for the doctor all over the ward, desperate to hear what he had to say. Finally, we collapsed in silence outside the nurses’ station. There was nothing more we could say to one another. At last, we saw the doctor coming: a surprisingly young man with a pleasant face. For some reason, I thought he might be kinder than an older doctor, friendlier. But as it turned out, he had no time for niceties. “I’ve seen the scan,” he said, but he didn’t look at either of us. He was very quick, saying that what he’d seen left no doubt. Leo and I stared at him as he named the thing that was going to kill our mother. It was a difficult word—neither of us was able to retain it to repeat later to our father. The doctor said he was sorry, but I could tell he was impatient to get rid of us. There were other patients, other families, other bad news he had to give.

  Later that evening, I painstakingly covered moldings and fixtures in duct tape and repainted the walls of my kitchen in pistachio green, possessed by a relentless determination. I painted all night, cold, till I felt as if someone had thrown a knife between my shoulder blades. As I was cleaning the brushes and the sky was beginning to lighten, I was already planning how I could do the living room and the bedroom in a different color. I checked the hours of the paint store, contemplated going back there as soon as it opened. It seemed very important at the time that I finish right away.

  I know what it’s like, that new feeling that arises in the proximity of pain. A need for numbness, for a personal anesthetic. When I saw my mother again at the hospital the next day, something had shifted. I was ashamed to admit it at the time, but I had removed myself already, even if by just a fraction.

  I had hardened, just when I should have softened.

  And now the scene had come to me the way dreams do, unbidden, with staggering clarity.

  Jeremy was standing in the kitchen doorway watching me cry. He touched my shoulder as he went to turn the coffee off.

  “Has something happened?”

  “No, nothing. I’m just…I don’t know…” I quickly wiped my nose with my sleeve.

  “It’s okay. Sugar?”

  “No, thanks. Have your friends left?”

  “Not all of them. Some are still sleeping.”

  He sat down, facing me. There was only the sound of the teaspoons stirring the coffee in the cups. I sniffed.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that…”

  “Don’t be sorry. You have no idea how many people I’ve seen burst into tears in this kitchen first thing in the morning. Men lose it too, you’d be surprised, and are much harder to console.”

  “I bet.”

  “Normal people are supposed to break down under this kind of pressure. Getting used to it is the first sign of insanity.”

  “Funny you should say that. I remember you seemed so casual about, you know, the whole security issue when we first came to see you,” I said, dabbing my eyes with a paper napkin.

  Jeremy laughed. “There are days when I like to act a bit more macho than I am.”

  I smiled and sip
ped my coffee.

  “This is good espresso.”

  “Italian. Would you like a chocolate chip cookie? Reuben brought some from Madrid.”

  He opened a packet of chocolate biscuits and ate one carefully, savoring it. I wondered if Florence was still there. And in which room.

  Reuben—the Spanish journalist with the keffiyeh—stumbled into the kitchen in a worn-out T-shirt and an Indonesian sarong tied around his hips, barefoot. He cleared his throat and greeted me with a friendly smile, then started opening and closing the kitchen cabinets.

  “That red wine last night. Oh, man…or maybe it was the scotch,” he said in his nearly perfect American English.

  Jeremy stood up and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Hey, sit down, let me put on some more coffee.”

  Reuben smiled.

  “Thanks. That would really help.”

  I watched them move around the kitchen, with ease, as if they both were equally familiar with its space; I detected a slight, almost imperceptible stir of excitement in the room, as if a different type of energy was generated by their bodies. Suddenly it struck me that they could be the couple of the house and that I had gotten it all wrong.

  After he had put the coffee back on the burner Jeremy looked at his watch.

  “I have to dash. Today is going to be crazy at work, because of yesterday’s attack. I don’t think I can meet you and Mark for lunch,” he said to Reuben.

  “Don’t worry, it was just a thought.”

  Jeremy pulled a business card out of his wallet and handed it to me.

  “Here’s Hanif’s number. You’ll see, he’ll get you on some flight or other. The best thing, usually, is to get on a flight to Islamabad, those are more likely to leave. And in any case everything there is simpler, as you know. Islamabad has a normal airport, I mean, not a madhouse like this one. Let me know if you need any help. Anyway, you’ve got my number.”