“Are you sure this will get us to the village?” Imo asked.
“No problem. In this we have been everywhere. It is perfect. Very safe.”
“And the crater?”
“There is still rubble, but I think we can get through. Not a problem.”
“Mmmm.”
Imo eyed the exhaust pipe dubiously. Then she turned to me and shrugged.
“What can I say? He’s probably right. And we sure won’t stand out in this thing.”
I cast a glance at the drivers of the 4WDs in camouflage jackets and mirrored shades, wishing I could clamber into one of their cars instead. But Imo held a different view.
“Suicide bombers aren’t going to waste time blowing up two women in a clapped-out Ford. Those guys look way more promising as far as hostage material.”
Right outside the airport the first thing we came across was an Italian army military vehicle crossing the road. Neapolitan and Sicilian faces, strangely familiar, looking tense and drained in their heavy camouflage. I felt like waving to them, as if they were a good omen. I knew that since 2001 there had been thousands of troops deployed to Afghanistan, from thirty-seven countries, but mainly American and British. ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, had about 32,000 men spread between Kabul and the provinces. American soldiers seemed to be everywhere, manning the roundabouts, waving guns outside buildings protected by high blast walls.
On top of the troops, Hanif told us, there were thousands of foreign civilians living in Kabul: UN personnel, consultants of all sorts, NGO workers, contractors and dodgy businessmen. Thousands who needed proper housing, working telephones, good restaurants, good cars, satellite dishes, pasta, Crest toothpaste, ketchup, white bread and cornflakes, soft toilet paper, Coca-Cola, alcohol. There was a black market that catered to these extravagant needs. It used to be called the Brezhnev Bazaar at the time of the Soviet invasion and it sold Russian items. Now it had been renamed after Bush.
“You can find Oreo cookies and Aunt Jemima pancake syrup at the Bush Bazaar. It’s crazy what they sell there. Even coconut tanning oil.” Hanif chuckled. Because of the foreigners, prices for nearly everything had skyrocketed to such an extent that life had become unaffordable for the Kabulis, more now than before the American intervention. Although the city was a mound of rubble, “the cost of housing is higher than Manhattan,” Hanif told us. And prices were still rising.
“I should’ve bought the house where I live when my wife and I came back from Peshawar. Now it costs twenty times more,” he said and, without bitterness, he shook his head.
Hanif took us straight to the hotel that he’d booked for us. It was a brand-new guesthouse that belonged to a cousin of his wife’s.
“Maximum comfort,” he assured us.
“Are you sure it has an Internet connection?” Imo asked suspiciously.
“Yes, yes, connection. There’s a phone, television, everything. My cousin came back from London six months ago and he built this guesthouse European style.” Hanif chuckled with satisfaction. I saw his face smiling at me in the rearview mirror, from which dangled a tasseled plastic gizmo in the shape of an Arabic letter.
Outside the window was Kabul.
I peered out, squinting my tired eyes. Only one word came to mind to describe it. Brown.
The city lay like a cloak spread over two hills. It had been climbing obstinately over them like strangleweed, leaving no space, and had managed to cover both and spread at their feet. Everything was brown: the color of the houses, the bare trees, the dirt resting on every surface. Brown were the faces of the men who walked in groups, brown were their cloaks, brown the burlap bags of coal stacked along the roadside. The sky was brown. A camel-colored city covered with a layer of dust: a panorama that by the first light of morning was already looking worn.
Hanif’s cousin’s guesthouse was a work in progress. Someone was mixing cement in the courtyard. Two workmen were building a wall in what was supposed to be the lobby. An enormous refrigerator was parked in the hallway, still wrapped in its plastic packaging. Other men were doing the wiring. Hanif led the way, smiling as he elbowed through the workmen, dodging paint tins, wooden boards, ladders.
“This way, please, follow me.” There was a smell of plaster and paint and the sound of a drill. Hanif called out to someone, his voice booming in the empty room.
“Everything is going to be okay, just a little more work, but your rooms are ready.”
His cousin appeared; he was the slim one with the drill. His name was Rashid. He’d been a minicab driver in London for ten years, he said, and braced by his metropolitan experience, had decided to return to Kabul and go into tourism. Imo and I were herded to just-painted rooms. One was empty, the furniture was all piled up in a pyramid in the center of the other one.
“The water will be on tomorrow,” Rashid said. Hanif nodded, convinced. There were no tiles, no toilet bowl, no sink in the bathroom.
“But the room is ready…there’s a big bed, the desk, a television…”
I felt my heart sink. The temperature in the room couldn’t have been above five degrees, given that a white puff issued from my mouth with every breath. Imo moved away.
“Great. Now, listen, Rashid, there are just a couple of things.”
Imo hadn’t stopped smiling. She sat on a chair she had pulled from beneath the pyramid and crossed her legs. She was looking around, sizing up her surroundings as if she were the editor of
The World of Interiors
and was scouting a shoot.
“First of all, I’d like to compliment you; this is going to be a sensational guesthouse. Well done, really. I think you’ve had a brilliant idea. It’s true that Kabul needs more hotels; there’ll be more and more Westerners who need a comfortable place to stay.” She gestured towards the furniture. “Look at this lovely bed, the desk, all these antiques. The main thing is to put a lot of beautiful rugs in the rooms, you know? Rugs really help. But—”
And here she stood up and took me by the arm, drawing me to her as if I were her suitcase.
“We really need to go now, because we can’t wait another five minutes before we have a bath. We’ve been traveling for eighteen hours, you see. Maria hasn’t slept, I’m absolutely dying for a plate of scrambled eggs with bacon and some fruit, and it looks to me like you’re not ready yet to organize the kind of breakfast I have in mind. Thank you for everything, my compliments again, my friend, keep up with the good work. Come, Hanif, let’s go.”
Imo held her hand out to Rashid, who gaped at her, perhaps unprepared for such a swift reaction.
“All the best to you and your family, to your business, I wish you great prosperity and success. It has been a great pleasure meeting you, really. My compliments again.”
Hanif’s smile drooped. He exchanged a disconcerted, disappointed look with his cousin, but decided against further persuasion.
In the car, Imo avoided any reference to Hanif’s clumsiness. She was flipping through a guidebook.
“Let’s see. Right, here it is: Babur’s Lodge, or the Kabul Garden, for example. Hanif, what do you think? Do you know where they are? Do you have a phone number for either of these places?”
It was a call to order, it was clear she wasn’t into wasting any more time, but she had made it sound as if she were asking his advice and cared about his opinion. Hanif stammered that yes, he knew both places, it was not a problem, and he started fumbling with his old-fashioned Nokia.
The roads were slowly filling up with people. Streams of men were walking in columns, or pushing carts on the side of the road. A pallid sun broke through the sand-colored clouds and now illuminated the festive splotches of color on the street stalls: mountains of pomegranates, red apples, dark green leaves.
Now and then a woman crossed the road, a sky-blue blur, a ghost, an azure flutter that swelled with air and disappeared behind a car. It was like coming across a giraffe for the first time in Africa. After all, isn’t a giraffe just an oddity in a photograph? Somehow I always found it hard to believe that such a prehistoric animal, with such a long neck, does really exist somewhere. Crazy to think one could actually come across it, placidly grazing on a spiny acacia. And now, surrounded by absolute indifference, women in burqas too appeared—just like the ones I’d seen in so many pictures, of course—but these women were busy doing their shopping, counting money in their purses or waiting for the bus on the side of the road, seemingly taken by their daily chores, as if it were completely normal to be living under a tent.
The Kabul Garden had closed down, but after some haggling, Hanif succeeded in convincing the manager of Babur’s Lodge to give us two rooms, with the promise that we would vacate them in a week, as they had already been booked for some time by someone else.
My room was spacious, with heavy, dark furniture, rugs on the floor, mirrors. Under the window was a collapsed green velvet sofa, an old lacquered desk and a wooden swivel chair. A gas heater in a corner diffused a pleasant warmth. I inspected the cushions on the couch, I ran a finger along the windowsill, peeked under the rugs; there was dust everywhere. The rugs were threadbare, the upholstery on the couch ripped. The electric sockets looked like they dated back to World War I. The hissing of the stove made me anxious. I wondered about the gas fumes, they smelled so toxic.
The bathroom was on the landing and had no heating. Going in there was like entering an igloo. On the windowsill stood a number of clues indicating male presence. A jar of shaving cream and a skimpy slice of yellowed soap, a cheap shampoo bought in an American supermarket. I made out two thick black hairs embedded in the soap.
An hour later, I knocked on Imo’s door. I found her curled up on the couch, her hair wrapped in a towel and a triumphant smile on her face. She smelled of shampoo. She had lit a stick of incense and connected her Nano to a pair of portable speakers. She was listening to some strange electronic music mixed with what sounded like Tibetan monks chanting. Colored shawls and clothes dangled in the wardrobe, books were stacked neatly on the desk. It looked as though she’d been living there for ages.
“Look at this. Isn’t it perfect? I’m starving, how about you?”
On the low table was a tray with scrambled eggs and bacon for two, orange juice, a pot of black tea and two slices of cake. She patted the couch next to her, the way you’d call a little dog.
“Come here, Maria. We deserve a proper breakfast. Look out there.”
She pointed to the window, which offered a view of one of the two hills, its slopes carpeted with mud-brick houses. The sky had cleared—from brown it had suddenly become an intense blue. A light wind was blowing, sweeping away the dust and ashen clouds.
The plan was to spend a few days in Kabul doing interviews, getting permits in order to be able to travel outside the city, then to head off for the villages. There we would try to speak to the families of the women who had immolated themselves, and possibly to other girls of marriageable age. On paper it looked doable. But by lunchtime both Imo and I had already realized that in Afghanistan the concept of movement needed reinterpretation.
After our sumptuous, cozy breakfast we met Hanif in the big dining room of the hotel. At the back, the guests of the lodge were having breakfast seated together around a long table like a family. They seemed to be all Westerners and males. I only dared to cast a glance and caught a glimpse of powerful backs, army jackets, desert boots. I overheard a nasal drawl from the south of the States. Something about their attitude had instantly discouraged me. Maybe it was their lack of response to our appearance. Not a single head had turned, not a greeting was uttered, not a smile was produced. If anything, judging from the chill that came from their table, it seemed that our arrival had disturbed them.
Imo sat at a smaller table, turning her back, openly ignoring them. She spread a map of the country on the table and showed Hanif where she wanted to go. He seemed dubious about the possibility of covering great distances. Many stretches of road were interrupted, but above all, traveling wasn’t safe anywhere.
Every time Imo asked him about a village, I saw him tilt his head in a movement that expressed some apprehension, but he never openly said no. It was almost as if he feared that his prudence could be interpreted as rude. He invariably assumed a vague, falsely willing air, which in fact conveyed a sense of terrible uncertainty to me.
“Everything can be done, it’s not a problem. We just have to go slowly.”
“But are these safe areas? Could we be attacked?” I asked, alarmed, as Imo refolded the map, pleased with her plan.
“No, but maybe a good idea to travel with your heads covered outside the city. Better to look like Afghan women. That way nobody will bother us,” said Hanif, satisfied that he had put forward a solution.
Did “bother” in his lexicon mean “kidnap”? I wondered.
In the next couple of days we realized that getting around the city was no easy feat either. Kabul had no electricity and when night came the city was plunged into darkness. Even though the curfew had been lifted, Hanif had told us it was better not to go out in the dark. And never, ever walk.
There were armed checkpoints at every main crossroads, barbed wire coiled along the walls, gigantic blocks of cement stacked around the embassies and the headquarters of military organizations, to shield them from possible attacks. The roads would be closed to traffic for hours if military vehicles had to go through and the traffic would go berserk; big American army guys in helmets stopped the cars, waving machine guns and shouting at drivers to give way to U.S. military vehicles. These roared out of their headquarters with screeching tires, accompanied by intimidating shouts, by a wave of tension that presaged danger, anxiety, imminent unforeseen events.
The war was over and this was a time of reconstruction, the politicians kept saying. Pierre had stressed this too in his first phone call; the military presence was only a force to ensure that the process of peace and democracy followed its course. Yet this felt nothing like peace. Not just because of what I saw out on the streets—a half-destroyed city besieged by soldiers and guns—but because of what I felt in the air. It was plain to see we had entered a world out of bounds, a world of a far greater insanity than anything I could’ve envisioned back home. What was worse, I could tell nobody was in control of the situation. I just sensed it like a dog sniffs fear in people around him: everyone had to be constantly ready for any eventuality. No, nothing looked like peace to me on the streets of Kabul.