End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  “Thanks. You’ve been so…” I couldn’t think of a good enough adjective. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without—”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” He waved a hand to stop me and grinned. “In case you still can’t get out, call me at the office. This evening, if there isn’t another blast like yesterday, we could go out to dinner, or we could watch a DVD back here. If you like.”

  When I rang Hanif, he actually sounded frightened, as if it were his fault that I was still in Kabul. He kept repeating that he was sorry, that he should never have left me on my own, that he should have waited until the plane took off.

  But I was so happy to hear his voice at last that I kept laughing—I felt like I had been fortuitously reunited with a long-lost brother after many adventures—and I kept reassuring him that it didn’t matter, not to worry, it wasn’t at all his fault. All I wanted was for him to help me get on a flight, any flight; I absolutely had to get out by that evening at the latest. Could he help?

  “Yes, yes, yes, not a problem. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said breathlessly. “There’s very much traffic. It will take me a while because I am on the other side of Kabul.”

  When he showed up at Jeremy’s house two hours later—in the meantime I had hungrily read an old “Style” issue of The New Yorker cover to cover lying on the couch next to my packed bags—Hanif looked more disheveled than I had ever seen him; even his usually impeccable Inspector Clouseau uniform was crumpled. He smiled at me with such warmth that it moved me.

  “Today is red alarm,” he announced as if this were a piece of good news while he pushed my luggage into the trunk.

  “How come?”

  “They say that perhaps the big attack will be today. They said it on Al Jazeera too.”

  “I heard it. Do you think that’s possible?”

  Hanif shrugged and jingled the keys to the Ford, eager to get in the car and start the day. Obviously this type of news had long since ceased to affect Kabulis. The rumor of another explosion probably sounded to them like a snowstorm announced on the weather forecast.

  “Who knows. And anyway, what can we do?”

  The snow was reduced to a dirty brown sludge and there was a stench of kerosene in the air from all the burning stoves in the city, black fumes, car horns blaring.

  We moved slowly forward, Hanif speaking on his cell.

  I watched him, impressed as ever by how resourceful he was—and, judging by how crumpled his clothes were, I had a feeling he might have slept in them. His hair too needed a wash.

  He nodded, thanked someone and shut the phone. Maybe, he said, a friend of his at a travel agency could help us. We drove in silence for a while.

  “How is your wife?” I asked him.

  Hanif’s expression changed, as if my question had finally given him permission to talk about what was really on his mind.

  “She’s not well. She has a high fever.”

  “Where? Is she still in the hospital?”

  “Yes.” He ran his hand over his moustache. “Yes. There is an infection. She is rather ill.”

  “But what is it? Why does she have an infection?”

  “I don’t know. Another doctor is coming today to see her.”

  “But when I called you this morning, were you at the hospital with her?”

  He nodded, as if it were normal to just leave her there and rush to pick me up. And now I felt too guilty to ask just how bad she was; I didn’t dare ask whether there was a risk she’d lose the baby. All I said was that I was sorry I’d had to bother him, that I would have much rather left him in peace. But Hanif smiled and swore it wasn’t a problem at all, that it was his duty to see to my safety until the end and that I mustn’t worry.

  We both knew this wasn’t true, but we both pretended that it was and crawled on through the traffic in silence.

  At the travel agency, there was a crowd of people who had been waiting in a disorderly queue for a long time. I recognized some of the passengers from my supposed flight the day before. The same cloud of heavy malcontent had followed them and now hovered over their heads here too.

  A big man with gray hair and the weathered, Scandinavian looks of a ski instructor (aid worker? diplomat? medical personnel?) looked up from the five-hundred-page book he had brought with him—some kind of narrative history, or so it seemed from the golden lettering on the jacket—as he noticed Hanif jump the queue. He watched him extricate himself from the crowd with insouciance, lean on the counter and call to one of the employees. Now the man was glaring at me with open hostility to demonstrate that he knew perfectly well that I was the one who had unleashed my fixer like that, in blatant disregard of precedence. Others noticed too, but they were Afghans and therefore used to the shortcuts that Westerners thought they deserved.

  Out of the corner of my eye I followed Hanif’s negotiations, the dubious face the clerk pulled as he looked at my Turkish Airlines ticket. The man rubbed his chin. Hanif interrogated him repeatedly. The man kept staring at the ticket, then the screen, without replying.

  Hanif came over and handed me my ticket. He told me the airport was still closed and might reopen only tomorrow. He also informed me that if I wanted to leave on the next flight, they’d have to issue a new ticket to Dubai with PIA and then on to Europe. Apparently my best bet was to leave the money with his friend behind the counter, so that as soon as the flights resumed, he could immediately reserve me a seat.

  “All these people are waiting to get on the first flight out of Kabul, you see. He is my friend, if you leave him the money he can do us a favor and buy the ticket straightaway.”

  “Of course. How much is it?”

  “Seven hundred dollars.”

  I held out my credit card. Hanif scratched his head dubiously.

  “No cash?” he asked.

  “No. No cash.” I waved my Visa card. “But this is like cash.”

  Hanif showed his friend behind the counter the card, but the man shook his head.

  “Only cash,” Hanif reported back dejectedly, as if to excuse a country that had not yet entered the world of plastic money.

  “But I have to leave tomorrow,” I insisted with a new, harsh edge to my voice.

  Hanif nodded and stared gravely at the toes of his shoes.

  “What can we do?” I prodded.

  We looked at each other. We both knew that there was only one solution to the problem.

  Hanif put his hand in his pocket.

  “I can lend you the money,” he said with only the slightest hesitation. He took out the wad of dollars, his pay for a week’s work. It was a fat roll of fifties.

  “Hanif. You don’t have to do this,” I said weakly.

  “Yes. It’s the only way. We must pay right now.”

  I knew it too. Yet I couldn’t believe the swift certainty of his offer.

  “Hanif, I swear, I’ll get it back to you straightaway. I give you my word of honor. I’ll send it to you through Jeremy. Next week at the latest, you’ll have it back.”

  He smiled politely.

  “Sure. Not a problem,” he said and went over to the counter. I watched him as he slid the rubber band off the roll and, with the same experienced movement of the thumb, counted out fourteen bills.

  There was nothing else we could do but wait. Once we got back into the car I suggested that we go to the hospital and check on his wife. I was tired of being only a nuisance.

  “We’ll wait for the doctor, so you can talk to him,” I said.

  “No, the hospital is a long way away,” Hanif said, “and besides, it’s not a very nice place. I’ll take you to Jeremy’s office. It’s better.”

  “No, no, please don’t worry about me now. Let’s go and see how your wife is. I’ll sit somewhere and read a book. Look, I have a book in my purse.”

  Hanif glanced at his watch. He got in the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. Then he smiled uneasily.

  “All right, then. Let’s go.”

 
We crossed the city again in the opposite direction. The sky had lowered and was looming heavily over us like a comforter filled with snow.

  “Tell me about your wife,” I said to him. “Tell me how you two met.”

  I was suddenly aware I had started speaking to him in the same tone Imo would have used, a cross between affectionate and condescending. I was also aware that I was beginning to feel rather at ease in Imo’s shoes.

  “She was the daughter of one of my neighbors in Peshawar. Her mother is a schoolteacher and her father is a printer. They are good family, very well educated. They used to live here in Kabul, but they fled to Pakistan when the Taliban first started. I used to always see her coming home from college. She was always loaded down with books. She was reading even on the auto rickshaw.”

  Hanif paused, looked straight ahead, waiting for the traffic to untangle.

  “I liked that.”

  “What?”

  “That she read. I didn’t want a wife from a village. I wanted someone I could talk to. About anything. About the world.”

  “Of course. Absolutely. That’s important.” I encouraged him: “And then?”

  “After I spoke to her father, you know, about marrying her, she said to him, ‘All right, but I’ll only marry him on the condition that he does not bring me back to Kabul.’ Because at the time Kabul was under strict Taliban rule and she did not want to live in a place where she couldn’t work. When we first met she said, ‘If I have a daughter, I want her to be educated.’ I promised her I would. We only came back to Kabul when the Taliban were forced out. And now look. We might have to flee again.” He sighed.

  I thought it might be a good idea to steer the conversation away from gloomy political predictions.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why did you choose her precisely? How did you know you’d get on for the rest of your lives?”

  Hanif thought this over. Something in him loosened, warmed up.

  “I don’t know, but the first time I saw her, I felt something here.” He placed his open palm on his chest and flailed it.

  “Ah, yes, I see. We say farfalle nello stomaco.”

  “Pardon?” Hanif frowned.

  “Butterflies in the stomach. See?” I made a flapping movement with my hand. “They move their wings like this.”

  “Yes, of course, butterflies. Quite right.” Hanif nodded energetically and laughed. “And when I saw her eyes,” he added.

  “Her eyes?”

  “Yes. Green. Like those of a cat.”

  “Was that all it took?”

  He nodded.

  “We say, if a man feels, then a man knows.”

  At the entrance to the Rabia Balkhi Hospital was a sign with a drawing of what looked like a toy gun crossed out and the warning “No Arms Inside.”

  I followed Hanif along the corridors and we quickly went through the maternity unit, which smelled of Lysol. Voices and noises boomed with a strange echo, like eerie submarine sounds.

  I saw a shoeless woman in an apron hosing what looked like sheets stuffed inside aluminum tubs. The water that spilled onto the floor was stained with blood.

  Hanif motioned for me to take a seat on a bench in the corridor together with some other women.

  “Please sit down. I’ll be right back,” he said.

  The women’s heads were covered and only some of them had coats and closed shoes in that freezing temperature. For the most part, they were wearing plastic slippers on their bare feet and thin cotton clothing. Their children at their necks, they clutched plastic thermoses and parcels of home-cooked food they had brought for their relatives. They squeezed in to make room for me, startled by my presence. I smelled spices, kitchen smoke and sweat on their skin and felt their eyes boring through me, checking my clothes, my heavy boots, my bare head. I felt it was too late to pull up my scarf, I would’ve felt awkward doing it then, but I wished I’d thought about doing it earlier. I took the book out of my bag so they could spy on me in peace.

  I could feel them pushing gently in on both sides, very gradually regaining possession of the space they had given up to me. They all looked at me, some of them pointing and whispering to one another. Obviously they wanted me to be part of the group and were disappointed to see me read. One of them patted me on the shoulder and offered me a cup of steaming green tea she had poured from a thermos. Now they all stared at me, encouraging me to drink. I smiled and said, “Tashakor,” thank you. They nodded, some laughed, covering their blackened teeth with their hands. I drank a few sips then returned the glass, signaling that I’d had enough. This seemed to make them happy.

  An elderly nurse in a white coat opened the glass door to the ward. She gestured towards us with her hand—it was visiting hour at last—and the women gathered their things, rearranged the babies in the blankets, huddled together with their tiffins, children, baskets and thermoses. They turned to look at me, waiting for me to follow, but I waved, as if to say that I was fine where I was, not to worry about me. They waited for a few seconds, then, seeing that I kept shaking my head, they moved off, disappointed, perhaps, to be losing their new object of interest so soon.

  “There’s a big problem now.”

  Hanif slumped onto the bench next to me. There was a new heaviness about him. I quickly put my book away.

  “My wife needs a transfusion, but in this hospital they do not have her blood type.”

  “They don’t?”

  “No. She has Rh-negative”

  Hanif looked at his watch.

  “What can we do? Unfortunately, I’m not Rh-negative, otherwise I’d…” I wanted to have a brilliant idea, suggest something that would save the day, but I couldn’t think what.

  “Oh, no, please. That is not necessary, but thank you. I have to go and look for it at the other hospital because they don’t have a blood bank here. The doctor told me I might find it there.”

  “Okay, then let’s go.”

  I stood up, gathered my things.

  Hanif hesitated for a moment, scratched his head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Perhaps is best I go. And pehaps you can…well, maybe you could stay with my wife so that, if something happens…I don’t know, in case there’s an emergency, at least you can call me. You know, men are not allowed into the wards.”

  “What do you mean they aren’t?”

  “No. Out of respect for the other women. Only in critical situation men are allowed to be with them. In the final moments the doctors will let them. And they can enter to collect the remains, of course.”

  He said this with a strange detachment, as if this were just another custom of the country that he was explaining to a foreigner.

  “Of course, absolutely. I’ll stay, it’s not a problem.”

  “Her mother and her sister are on their way by bus from Peshawar. My sister is at the doctor’s today and our neighbor will come later. So right now there’s no woman from the family who can stay here. I’ll be as quick as I can, I’ll go and come straight back.”

  “It’s fine, really, don’t worry.”

  I switched on my mobile and turned it towards him, miming a connection between our two phones. Hanif nodded, and smiled back.

  “All set. Now if anything happens, we’re in touch,” I said, holding up my phone.

  As I sat outside her room, keeping watch over her, it struck me as inexcusable that I’d never asked him her name before.

  Hanif had led me through the stairs on the second floor into another ward, where his wife was. I had peeked behind the plastic curtains that shielded the overcrowded rooms, stealing glimpses of rusty iron furniture, chipped tiles on walls, bodies bundled in sheets. There were two women to a bed, with their heads at opposite ends, dozing.

  “That’s Leyla.”

  She had a room all to herself. Hanif had pointed her out to me from the corridor. It looked as if it was some kind of emergency room, outfitte
d with obsolete equipment.

  I had taken a seat on a bench in the corridor, right outside her room. The door was ajar and I could see her perfectly from where I was. She had an IV tube in her arm with a bluish liquid flowing into it. Behind her, hanging on the wall, was a chipped oxygen tank. I had a feeling the machinery and the equipment didn’t work but just sat there gathering dust. The room, like the rest of the hospital, was freezing.

  I’d been sitting there for almost an hour when my cell rang. Imo’s number appeared on the display.

  “Maria! I just read your text! This is unbelievable. Can you get on the next flight out? I just rang Pierre, he’s going to take care of it from his end, tell me if there’s anything I—”

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Really. It’s okay.”

  I told her where I was and about Leyla. I tried to sound calm and unaffected by what was happening.

  “Darling, I’m going to make sure you get on that plane. They will fly you back on business. Whatever it takes. Don’t worry, I’m right on top of this, everyone is.”

  “Okay, okay, don’t worry. I’m fine. I really am.”

  “You’re such a trouper.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m not, actually. You should see this hospital. I’m sitting across from this sign that says ‘Laura Bush Maternity Ward.’ Next to it there’s a sink clogged with filthy water, the window has a shattered pane, pipes are leaking onto the floor, it’s just appalling.”

  “Great. Take a picture.”

  “I already did. Did you have that bottle of red wine and all the rest?”

  “Yes.” I heard a chuckle. “Lots of all the rest.”

  “Okay, then,” I said conclusively. I didn’t want her to spend a fortune on this call, even though her phone bill probably counted as expenses.

  “Wait. Don’t rush off,” she said. “Guess what? I’m going to pitch a couple of stories out of Afghanistan to my editor at the Times magazine. If they like the Roshan idea we may have to go back in right away.”

  I smiled. Despite the fact that all I wanted at that moment was to board a plane and be homebound, the idea that she was serious about us working together soon cheered me up.