End of Manners (18 page)

“My wife was ill all night. She has pains and some bleeding. I took her to the hospital and the doctor said it’s better to keep her there for a day or two.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry. Does she also have a cell phone so you can be in touch with her?” Imo said and pointed at his Nokia.

“There’s no more signal beyond that hill,” said Hanif disconsolately.

“But we’ve got the satellite phone for emergencies, haven’t we?” I whispered to Imo.

“Ah, right, the satellite phone,” she said cautiously. And then she sighed.

“You know, I forgot to recharge it. Actually, I left it at Babur’s Lodge.”

In Keith’s lesson on “personal safety,” rule number one was to travel with all the important numbers, like hospitals, emergency air rescue and embassy, memorized on the speed dial of your cell phone. If you were traveling where there was no signal, rule number two was to take a satellite phone with you at all times.

“And the flak jackets?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did you leave those behind as well?”

“Yeah. It completely slipped my mind. The first-aid kit too, by the way.”

“Ah, I see.”

She shrugged. “In any case, if anything happens to us, it won’t be bandages that’ll save our lives.”

I would have liked to tell her that, after my repeated exposures to Obelix’s body, I felt I had a couple of tricks up my sleeve, but I let it slide.

After all those classes, notes, slides and practical exercises, which had earned me a Training in Hostile Environments diploma, I was traveling in a battered Ford with no suspension, with a one-liter bottle of water for three people, no torch and no means of communicating with anyone. The only thing that I had remembered to bring along was a roll of toilet paper and some Advil.

The tarmac ended a few kilometers outside of Kabul. We had been traveling for an hour on a narrow gravel track, which then gave way to dirt and finally turned into just a faint trace on the plain. I’d begun to notice green specks fluttering all over the open, inexorably brown space we were crossing.

“They are flags,” Hanif explained, “for the mujahideen, you know.”

I wasn’t sure I understood. I looked at Imo.

“They mark the spot where they’ve fallen in combat,” she said. “Every flag a dead warrior.”

I shivered. Cruising amid the flailing of hundreds and hundreds of flags, we were, in actual fact, crossing an endless graveyard.

Children sitting on mud-brick walls enclosing the houses waved at us with the tips of their rifles. Old men, their heads wrapped in rags, urging mules along the path, waved, rifles slung over their shoulders. Young men reclining under straw awnings waved, raising their guns at us, smiling. Turbaned men in the distance were praying on shawls laid out across the bare earth, next to their guns. The guns seemed just an extension of the arm, an everyday object—a cane, a broomstick—that had lost its meaning. And yet for some reason this constant presence of death—whether flapping in the wind or flourishing in the greetings—didn’t feel menacing, or even all that sad somehow.

Or maybe it was just me, getting used to seeing it.

I saw a small hill. It would be easy to climb and from its top I could shoot the hundreds of flickering flags which drew the map of the dead. The morning light was still good. It could be the first really meaningful picture of the trip. I felt a surge of excitement.

When I asked Hanif to stop, he pointed at the stones marked in red on the side of the road. I remembered what the red paint stood for—we had been given a lengthy lesson with slides by the Defenders. Red paint marked mined fields. It was a reminder that there was no getting used to anything, that there was no lowering one’s guard.

Back in the car I took my worn-out chamois out of the bag and started painstakingly wiping each lens. Touching my equipment eased my frustration—at least it gave me a sense that I was going to do something with all this equipment sooner or later. I took each camera body out and blew the dust off the sensor, the eyepiece, the mirror, then methodically put each piece back.

“Don’t worry,” I heard Imo say. I’d thought she was asleep, but she had been watching me.

“About what?”

“You’ll take your pictures.” Her large brown eyes were intent on me.

“Oh, that. I know. It’s just that—”

“It’s not easy, here. One doesn’t have the freedom to move. But when we get to the village you’ll have all the time in the world.”

I felt grateful that she would act so relaxed just when I was about to get into a frenzy. She leaned with her head on the window, looking out, and remained silent for a while.

Then she said, “Pierre said it would be hard to persuade you to accept this assignment. That you had decided you didn’t want to do reportage anymore. Why is that?”

“Oh…I’ve had a sort of, how should I say…I think it was a kind of a…”

I stumbled. I couldn’t find a word that wouldn’t embarrass me.

“Yes, Pierre did mention something like a nervous breakdown,” Imo said idly, still looking out of the window.

It surprised me that Pierre would actually phrase it like that. That he would talk about it to people who didn’t know me.

“Oh. Did he?”

“Yes. But he wants you very much to get back into photojournalism. He thinks very highly of you. Your work, I mean.”

“Yeah, well…I wouldn’t call it a breakdown. The thing is, I’m just no longer sure that photojournalism agrees with my personality.”

“But
why
? I don’t understand,” she insisted.

“I don’t know, really.” I paused. Imo scanned me with those big eyes of hers. She was prodding me and wasn’t going to let go. I decided to be honest about it.

“I think what happened to me was more like depression. I also went through a very bad breakup. That too, I think.”

I was aware of how pathetic it sounded. In that particular moment, in that car, in that country.

“I couldn’t handle the pressure, the people. You know, the writers, the editors, the deadlines. I only wanted to shut myself off. Needed a comfort zone. That’s why I do what I do now. I got into the details.”

“Food stuff, right?” Imo asked a bit icily.

“Yes. Big close-ups. Gastro-porn shots,” I said, trying to make it sound light and self-deprecating.

“How long ago was that?”

“Two years? Two and a half now, actually.”

“I see. But one has to get over that, don’t you think? As they say in those American new age books, ‘It’s time you reclaimed your power.’”

I looked at the awesome vista before us. I could still make out the green specks, the red dots in the distance. The indelible marks that the history of violence in this country had inflicted on the terrain.

“Besides”—Imo turned to the big view out the window and sighed—“God may very well be in the details, but don’t we still need to look at the bigger picture to make sense of what’s going on? Isn’t this what our job is about?”

Something had happened to Hanif.

I could tell from the silent, brooding way he was driving; he appeared melancholic and distracted. I knew it must be because of his wife’s being in hospital. Imo, who was sitting next to him, probably felt this might be the right time to find out more details about her, to help him cheer up but also to extract some truths about relationships between the sexes. Half an hour of silence had gone by in the car before she launched into an interview.

When did they meet? Three years earlier. Was it an arranged marriage? Yes, she was the daughter of a neighbor in Peshawar. Did his wife work? Yes, she’d worked as a secretary for a few months, but she’d left the job as soon as she learned she was pregnant. Would he let his wife work again once the baby was born? Why not, if she wanted to he’d be happy to let her. I watched Hanif slowly brighten, as if just talking about his wife was enough to buck him up.

Imo insisted we stop at the bottom of the hill, before we lost the signal, so Hanif could make his last call and get news from the hospital. We got out of the car while Hanif paced back and forth, hunched over his cell, screaming against the biting wind, his index finger closing the other ear, in that familiar pose anyone, anywhere in the world, assumes when the reception comes and goes.

Kabul was already a faded, dense cloud behind us. Ahead lay only empty space, mountain peaks cutting white into the lapis sky.

“I’m sorry to make him spend the night away from home when his wife’s so unwell, but what else could we do? All we have is this week,” said Imo, quickly applying a dab of lip balm, which she had gotten out of a small makeup pouch. She pondered.

“It doesn’t sound good, does it? Bleeding in the seventh month?”

“Perhaps we could try and get back tonight,” I suggested. “Maybe we don’t need to spend the night in the village. Besides, everyone has warned us not to.”

I didn’t want my voice to sound overeager; by now I knew that was the worst way to convince Imo of anything.

“We’ll see. Want some?” Imo offered me the lip balm. “I doubt very much we can make it to the village and back in one day.”

Hanif motioned that he was done and we could go on.

“Well?” asked Imo.

“It’s all right. My wife’s neighbor is there. She says there’s fever and pain, but the doctor’s coming soon and then we’ll see.”

“The hemorrhage?”

“Yes, it’s still there,” he admitted.

“Ah.”

“But the doctor is coming,” he added quickly.

I detected an uneasiness in his eyes, which I could see in the rearview mirror. I began to sense that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing his wife’s condition with the two of us. Almost as if the question of his wife’s being unwell was too private a matter, too personal and too intimate to be shared so openly with foreigners. Western women, on top of it, who obviously hadn’t grasped fundamental nuances of his culture.

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yes, that’s good.” He paused and then turned the ignition key. “Let’s get going.”

Absolutely nothing had been resolved, but the phone call had had the power of calming all three of us. As we pushed farther into this landscape strewn with shells and rusty tank carcasses, where signals, telecommunications, electric generators ceased and the tribal lands began, the idea that Hanif’s wife lay in a hospital bed where at any moment a doctor was going to show up perhaps seemed in comparison a condition of great security.

The road was magnificent. It cut a straight line through a never-ending plateau, surrounded by three-thousand-meter-high peaks glittering with snow. Along the roadsides we passed the remains of numerous half-destroyed villages, built with the same packed earth they were standing on.

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.