“Yeah. It’s possible.”
Typical, I thought. How reporters move forward to the next story without ever looking back. Each piece like a passionate one-night stand that fades and loses appeal the minute it’s been consummated.
“You know what? I’ll pitch both ideas. Besides, they would be all-male stories, at least that way we won’t have to walk on eggshells the whole time. In fact, these guys just love being photographed. They just love posing, don’t they; such a bunch of narcissists, all natural-born actors. It would be such a walk in the park.”
I wondered whether the “we” she had used included me or was supposed to define a generic figure of discourse, a
royal we,
which would have been very much her style, given the book she was reading.
We drove back through the gorge. The men were still there, with the same dark rags rolled around their heads, breaking and moving rocks in the gloomy early-morning shade. I felt their gaze again, as we crept through the canyon with the Ford’s exhaust pipe clunking ominously over the stones.
Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw something move. Two crouching figures stood up simultaneously and ambled toward the middle of the passage. They had guns. The one on the left slowly waved his, grinning, and seemed to say something. Hanif stopped and rolled down the window. The man pushed the tip of his Kalashnikov inside the car and blurted out an order. He was in his thirties, no beard, wearing military pants. The other one suddenly opened the passenger’s door. He looked younger, his clothes were filthy, I noticed he had a bandaged hand. They didn’t look like the rest of the men working at the dam. These guys were no stonecutters.
Hanif spoke warily, but the man shouted his order again, silencing him.
“He says you have to get out,” Hanif said to Imo and me.
“What do they want?” Imo asked. She was pale. The man who had opened the door grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled at her. Hanif looked at me pleadingly.
“Please do as they say.”
He then lowered his gaze as if he couldn’t bear to watch me as I got out of the car.
The younger of the two said something to us in Dari in a harsh tone, and motioned us to walk ahead of him, as he followed with his gun. The men cutting stones had stopped their work and were all staring at us. Just our footsteps on the gravel were breaking the silence. A swallow darted above our heads, the only swift movement in the absolute stillness. As we reached the steep wall of the canyon, I felt the man’s hand press on my shoulder, motioning me to stop and sit down. It was rough; the feeling made me sick.
Imo and I sat on a boulder. The man remained standing, a couple of steps away from us. We had walked a couple of hundred meters and we could see Hanif speak to the other man in the distance. He was showing him some papers, he kept nodding, keeping his gaze down. My heart sank. It felt like a terrible mistake to have let them separate us from him and the car.
“What the fuck is going on?” Imo asked me. “Is it money they want?”
“Please be quiet,” I said. “The less you speak now, the better it is.”
I had reached a point where I wasn’t going to take any more lessons from Imo Glass.
The man with the bandaged hand looked at me and mimicked holding a cigarette between his fingers. I didn’t answer and lowered my gaze to the ground.
“I think he just wants a cigarette,” Imo whispered. She had sensed something had shifted between us. I could tell from the way her warm shoulder was leaning into mine.
“I know. But don’t let him know you smoke.”
I don’t know why I said this, but it felt like the right thing to say in that moment, like a sensible rule. I didn’t think it’d be helpful to show that we carried cigarettes and confirm their idea that all Western women smoked in public.
I looked towards the other man. He was still interrogating Hanif and, judging from his body language, he seemed angry.
All it had taken was one instant. The moment two men with two guns had stepped in and we had been pulled out of the safety of the Ford, our tiny world had shattered all at once. If we couldn’t figure out what had just happened—were we actually being kidnapped? were these men military or bandits, were they Taliban?—how could we possibly foresee what could happen next?
I heard Imo sniffing. I turned to look at her. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I was shocked: I had never expected that she would be the first to break down. But maybe this predicament was too much even for someone like Imo Glass. I took her hand and she immediately grabbed mine.
“This is horrible. It’s fucking freaking me out,” she said and gave me a crazed look. Her fear was tangible, wild like the fear of an animal trying to escape, wiggling through the holes of a fence. Whatever had been holding her mask together till this moment, now it had broken loose and she wasn’t going to be able to control herself anymore. Somehow I sensed it was the first time this had happened to her.
“No, don’t panic. I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said. My heart was beating like a drum in my lungs, but it made me calmer to say that.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t think this is a kidnapping.”
It was amazing: my mind kept racing back to the Defenders’ classes, in an attempt to select and replay any instruction that could help me rationalize. I had actually been able to think. Like a rock climber, I was trying to hold on to any tiny hook, any cranny I could find.
If they had been right, I thought, then the phase they had called initial takeover hadn’t played out. Yet the minute I tried to hold on to the thought, I felt pathetic. As if the world would play by the rules the Defenders had printed in their booklet. As if one could interpret the intricate reality of this country by checking off the boxes of the safety tips I had learned in the English countryside.
“No, this
is
bad. Really bad,” Imo retorted, still crying.
“Stop it,” I snapped. “That isn’t going to help.”
I didn’t want her fear to infect me. I knew I needed to stay away from that kind of panic if I wanted to function.
I heard the young man’s footsteps move closer to us. I kept my eyes low on the ground and saw his boots slide into my peripheral vision. They were worn out, covered in dust. I had seen similar ones piled up in the stalls around the market in Kabul. I felt the slow-motion close-up of a dream, yet the boots seemed so tangible, probably made in China, so ordinary and so cheap, they had the power to anchor me to some kind of reality.
The man was very close to me now and I could smell his sweat, and something acrid, like rancid milk, on his skin. I also smelled metal. But that, I knew, must be the barrel of the gun.
The other man and Hanif were coming towards us. Hanif looked exhausted, drenched in sweat, as if he had been beaten up.
“He wants your passports, please,” Hanif said, a guilty look in his eyes.
Giving away our only piece of ID didn’t feel right. I wanted to say something but realized we had no choice but to follow to the letter absolutely everything the man wanted from us. He scanned both passports and photographs, then he pointed at me. Again, whatever he said sounded harsh and accusatory. Hanif replied, the man rebutted, his fingers still pointing at me.
“What is he saying?” I asked Hanif.
“He says you look American. Because of your colors.”
I shook my head violently.
“No, no America.
Italiana,
” I said firmly, looking the man in the eye.
I watched the man flip through the pages of my passport shaking his head. Then he handed it back to me. He withheld Imo’s passport for another minute, haranguing Hanif, who kept nodding.
“He says your prime minister is a dog, a slave of Bush,” Hanif translated.
“Yes, I know,” Imo murmured under her breath. She wiped her tears and bowed her head, as the man returned the passport with the royal crown stamped on the cover.
There was a pause. Then the two men turned their backs on us and walked away.
“We can go now,” Hanif said.
We got back in the car and none of us uttered a word until we came out of the gorge. Imo sat in the back next to me and gripped my wrist. She wouldn’t let it go. I felt her nails digging into my skin.
“Pheeewww!” I hissed as soon as we drove out into the sun and the plain. I was drenched in sweat. I rolled down the window. My hair got in my eyes and I felt a rush of cold air on my face; I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with it.
Imo finally let go of my arm and hugged me.
“I swear I thought we were done in!” She was nearly screaming over the sound of the car rambling along the stony terrain “It really scared the shit out of me, man!”
I tapped on Hanif’s shoulder. “Who were they? What did they want?”
“They were just checking. Just control.” Hanif looked at me in the rearview mirror and grinned. “These people, they always think foreigners are spies.”
“What did you tell them we were?”
“Doctors from an NGO,” he said in an unexpected tone of jubilation. “I was sure that those people working with the stones knew we would be coming back this way and they would spread the rumor. I lost sleep over it last night. So I had my story ready. You know, they always let doctors go through because NGO people help the people from every side.”
“You’re so clever. So you knew,” I said.
“I had a feeling. But we were lucky nothing happened this time.”
“And what about the permits we had from the ministry? Couldn’t you show them those as well?” Imo asked.
Hanif smiled and waved his hand dismissively.
“These people, some of them don’t even know how to read. And those who read, if they learn you are journalists they may think you are a spy even more.”
“Jeeez. And we’re not even that far from Kabul. Imagine what it must be like in the south.”
Imo closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh.
I felt dizzy. Only moments before, the universe had shrunk into a hard ball dense with danger and threat, with no space left for anything else. Only menace and terror and thoughts of imminent death. It was difficult now to stretch the ball again, let the light of day, the feeling of the ordinary, seep through once more, allow my muscles to relax. My mouth felt dry, the fear had sucked all the fluids from my body. I drank from a water bottle and handed it to Imo. The water was cold. It tasted wonderful.
Imo sighed and fell back on the seat. She looked at me.
“Sorry I totally lost it. But you were very cool, Maria.”
I smiled.
“Have a piece of bread. It’s really good.” I tore off a piece and offered it to her.
“Thank you,” she said, then grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. We looked at one another.
“Never again, Imo,” I said.
“What?”
“Going off like this without precautions. It’s—”
“I know, I know. Oh, God, please don’t make me think about it, I beg of you. I feel I’ve acted like such an idiot, I don’t—”
“You
are
an idiot,” I said calmly, looking out the window, her hand still in mine, basking in the sun that was warming up my shoulder.
I checked Hanif in the rearview mirror and met his eyes. I saw how he creased his lips into a smile.
Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.
It was as if all our cells had simultaneously gone nuts. They came out of hibernation as soon as they caught the signal on the hill outside Kabul and were now like machine guns firing off notification of messages received.
I had five texts, all from the same sender.
ALL IT TOOK WAS
2
C YR NAME ON THE DISPLAY. CAN’T BELIEVE WE’VE STAYED APART 4 SO LONG. ALL I THINK OF IS US.
The language sounded ridiculous. I felt nothing.
Hanif was reading his texts holding his Nokia over the steering wheel with a worried expression. Imo was jabbering away to someone, as if nothing had happened, keeping her left finger pressed on her ear.
“Remember, they need five days to process the visa…. Yes, yes, I know that…. Please try and book me into the Sofitel but remember to ask them whether there is broadband in the room, it’s very important….”
WHY DON’T U ANSWER ME? SHOULD I WORRY?
It was amazing how he thought he had taken command again. He was already talking to me as if I was his property. How could I dare rebel?
There were another three, all with his name. I didn’t bother to read them.
The car swerved lightly on a curve, as a big truck appeared in the opposite direction.
“Hey! Watch it!” I yelled.
“Sorry, sorry.” Hanif reluctantly put the mobile in his pocket. Imo didn’t even notice, she was so taken by her conversation.
There was another text, this one from my father.
I WON
1,500
EUROS AT BINGO PLAYING YR BIRTH DATE AND LEO’S. WILL TAKE BOTH OF U OUT FOR GRAND DINNER ON MONDAY
2
CELEBRATE YR RETURN AND MY LUCK. WE’LL SPLURGE.
Only then did I realize how much I’d missed him. I felt a sudden impulse to hear his voice, to recount to him what had just happened. But I knew the story, told over the phone, was going to sound too frightening, that my voice would break if I heard his and I didn’t want to scare him. Besides, 1,500 euros was an astronomical sum in the life of a retired professor, and I felt I had no right to spoil the day of a winner. I texted him my congratulations and that I loved him.
We arrived at the lodge after ten. The dining room was deserted, so was the bar. The staff greeted us with big smiles as if we had been away for ages. It was odd, because it did feel that way, but what was even stranger was that stepping inside Babur’s Lodge made me feel as if I had finally reached home.
The next day we woke up to discover that the city had been shrouded in snow during the night. Everyone at the lodge—the waiter, the guards in the sentry box, even the unfriendly guests—seemed more cheerful than usual, as if the snow had brought back childhood memories for everyone.
It was our last day in Kabul. Imo did an interview in the morning with an Afghan journalist who hosted a radio program on women’s issues and gathered more information and data talking to people on the phone. She was done by lunchtime and we managed to dash to Chicken Street—our last chance for a quick fix of shopping before leaving. The street was lined with carpet sellers, antiques shops crammed with leftover goods from the seventies, which the hippies had bought for nothing at the time: piles of wonderful tapestries, Uzbek hangings, shawls, silver jewelry covered in dust.