Babur’s Lodge looked like it had been evacuated.
I crossed the deserted lobby and went into the dining room. There was no one there either. I did, however, hear a voice coming through the closed door of the bar.
They were all in there, watching the news, propped up on the bar in front of their drinks, their eyes glued to the TV on the wall. There was the South African and the German, drunk and heavy-lidded, in his worn-out Tyrolean outfit, General Dynamics nervously chewing gum, his hair damp from the shower, in his perfectly ironed multipocketed vest. There was Paul, the King of Questions, the sleeves on his military jacket rolled up, the khaki shirt and the boots, vodka and tonic in hand, unmindful of the thread of smoke from a cigarette forgotten in the ashtray. Next to him, the Dark One in a Springsteen concert T-shirt sipping a Coke, stroking his short beard. The lodge staff were in there too: the cooks, the waiters, the dishwashers, but they were standing in a second row and not drinking anything, their aprons still on.
On the screen I took in what must have been CNN footage of the bombing, with a voice-over in Dari commenting on the incident.
I saw debris, the remains of a military vehicle, injured Afghans being carried on a stretcher. The body of an ISAF soldier halfway emerged from the stones. He was covered in blood; someone had laid a sheet over his face. A solitary man in civilian clothes was standing holding his head between his hands, looking at the ground.
In the background, I recognized the shape of the palace I had photographed only a few days back, the battered wedding cake that now stood as a backdrop to death and destruction.
I had been standing right there, on the left-hand side of the frame to be precise, right next to the barrier that said “No Entry.” I had taken pictures of the guards from that very spot, carefully framing out the barbed wire. Could it be they were all dead? I tried to remember their faces, their smiles while they puffed up their chests next to Hanif.
Just as when I watched the video of my kidnapping with the Defenders, I could analyze the scene of my potential death on live TV, picture the position my body would have been in under the rubble, how the shot would have depicted my demise.
Then the vision stopped; they returned to the studio.
And then Hanif appeared.
He was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on when he left me at the airport. I recognized the tufts of hair coming out of his ears, the length of his moustache, the slight double chin that spilled over the collar of the striped shirt that I knew for a fact to be polyester and not cotton. The familiar sight of his face shocked me precisely because I couldn’t put any distance between me, him, the location of the bombing and the news he was reading. What had happened wasn’t somewhere else, it was here and now, the death on the screen had spilled too close to me.
Someone switched off the TV and only then did the men of Babur’s Lodge turn and notice my presence. They merely tossed the odd opaque glance; none of them smiled. Only Paul grinned and raised his glass. But it didn’t feel like a greeting as much as a sort of obscure threat.
“Ah, here you are. So, you couldn’t bear to leave, huh?”
I ordered a gin and tonic, then I tried to explain first to the South African, then to General Dynamics, that I had been grounded and I needed to get hold of my friend Hanif, the newscaster, but they just shrugged and ordered another beer. The Dark One and the German had heard what I said perfectly well but decided to ignore me just as the others had done. I asked the staff, but no one had any idea how they could find the number of the TV station in Kabul, as there were no “Yellow Pages” or phone books in the hotel and no one seemed in any way moved by my request for help.
The owner of Babur’s Lodge, tracked down on the phone by the cook, was not coming to the hotel that night. The city was in gridlock because of security and anyway he said he didn’t have any rooms available.
“I told you when you came last week that I had a booking. Paul took your room. When he comes to town he stays with us for two or three months, he’s an old client,” he said.
“But what am I supposed to do?” I was standing in the deserted reception area holding the receiver. I heard my voice boom in the empty room. “The city is at a standstill, I don’t even know if I can find a taxi to go looking for another hotel.”
“You can sleep on the other bed in my room.”
I swung around. It was Paul, who had silently approached.
“Give me that,” he said and snatched the phone from my hand.
“It’s cool, Ahmed, I’ll put her up for tonight.”
He hung up and bared his teeth. He had pointy canines, or perhaps that was just the way he looked to me then.
“No, absolutely not.” I tried to object, politely, but then in a crescendo. “It’s no problem, really. I’m going to look for a hotel right now. I’m sure there must be a room somewhere.”
“Where do you think you’re going now? There’s a curfew. You can’t go anywhere.”
He touched my arm, indicating that I should follow him to the bar.
“Let’s go in there and have a drink. Come on, Maria. It’s Maria, isn’t it?”
“No, listen, what I really need is to get in touch with our fixer, that guy who reads the news on TV, Hanif. Do you know him? He came to get us this morning, he’s quite well—”
“Hey, chill out. I’m not going to eat you. I said you can sleep in the other bed. We can look for your friend tomorrow. Relax now, let’s go in there and have a drink.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me lightly but firmly towards the bar door. His touch felt like handcuffs snapping shut.
Paul insisted on ordering me a second gin and tonic. All within the space of three minutes—as soon as he had offered me his spare bed, leaving me no option—he was treating me as if I were his property and he had made this clear to the others. It was strange, but I had already given in. Maybe it was the weariness, but I felt exhausted, like I had actually been to Europe and back; I even felt a sort of hysterical jet lag and slipped into being a hostage without any resistance. Passive, careful to attract as little attention as possible, just like the Defenders had recommended.
Paul, on his third vodka since I had arrived, was now in the process of explaining to no one in particular why this country was going straight to hell. The South African, the Dark One and the German nodded in turn, but each one was thinking about his own stuff.
“…No one from NATO, none of the diplomats, none of the guys working for intelligence, not a single one of them speaks a word of Dari. They don’t know the people, the topography, the history, the culture. They come here for three months max, get astronomical salaries and then go back home again. None of them have a fucking clue how an Afghan’s head works. And do you know what that means?”
The others nodded for him to go on, just to keep the background noise of his voice on and be left in peace.
“The helicopters, the cars, the armored vehicles are all crawling with interpreters. And do you know what these interpreters do?”
The others shook their heads. No, they didn’t.
“They get paid twice. Once by us, and once by the Taliban, who pay for the information. We’re paying spies who are paid again to translate all our information, you see what I mean?”
General Dynamics shook his head, urgently needing to add his bit, to reestablish the authority that Paul was endangering. Perhaps General Dynamics was one of those who came for three months, took the money and ran without understanding a thing.
“It’s nothing to do with spies, in the end it’s just a question of money,” he rebutted. “The Taliban pay double what the Afghan army does. In the Helmand Province, the men get up to twenty bucks a day to fight us and for twenty bucks a family can live for at least two months.”
But Paul wasn’t listening. He kept haranguing to the wall.
“You want to win the war on terror? You want to eradicate Al Qaeda? Then you’ve got to hire the guys who can sit with their legs crossed for hours, drink green tea and chew tobacco with every village elder, listen to every bit of local gossip, learn every track, road, name of the tribal leaders. Forget defense specialists, technology, expensive weapons. Hire the anthropologists, the linguists, the mad historians, any genius kid with a Ph.D. in Islamic culture”
I let my eyes drift out of focus. Right at this time of the night my body would have been flying over Iran toward Turkey. And yet here I was, in the company of men I had nothing in common with, one of whom I now was supposed to share a room with. I knew that room, I had slept in it for a week and I knew perfectly well that it did not have twin beds.
The conversation was slackening, had taken a drunken, nasty, end-of-the-night turn:
god-crazed cutthroats…bloodthirsty fanatics…with an IQ of fifty…
Paul knocked back the last of his vodka and shot me a look. He ran his hand distractedly between his legs, rubbing his dick. He looked at his watch. I remembered what I had felt when Imo and I had first sat among those women in the village school. How they had seemed—compared to Hanif, to his cousin, even to Malik—like characters spat out from another era. But in this particular moment—as hopelessly impotent and frustrated as I was—I felt that the distance between my world and theirs had vanished and we were almost on equal footing. In fact, my nationality, education, race, profession counted zero as far as Paul or the rest of them were concerned. When the money and the guns are in the hands of the men and there’s a war outside, a woman who has neither can’t do much except what she’s told. I sat with my glass of gin and tonic and let this bewildering thought sink in.
Given that what was outside this room terrified me and what was inside it horrified me, I was obliged to choose the lesser evil. I slipped out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Paul asked, suddenly alert.
“To the bathroom, why?”
He nodded. In other words,
he was giving me permission.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor and sat on a freezing marble step. I trawled the names in the phone book of my cell looking for Imo’s number. As soon as she landed in London and got my text, she could send me Hanif’s number and it would all be over. It was a question of killing time for a few hours, no mean feat.
Suddenly next to the “I” of “Imo” I read the name of someone I didn’t remember meeting.
Jeremy.
Even before I could answer the question “Who is this Jeremy?” I knew—my survival instinct had told me already, a charge of pure adrenaline had made me vigilant, clairvoyant, ready for anything—that his name held my salvation.
Jeremy What’s-His-Name. I had stored his number on my phone because Imo’s battery was flat. The one who had said, “Come to dinner whenever you want, I’ll give you a plate of pasta.” Pasta!
“There you are.”
Paul was coming up the stairs.
“What are you doing out here?”
He pulled me up. His breath smelled of peanuts and vodka.
He grinned, then touched my hair, my neck. I shook my head.
“Stop it,” I said and tried to slide past him. He grabbed my wrist.
“Hey.”
I felt his body press on mine, then push me against the wall. The stiffness of his prick beneath the fabric of his pants.
“Don’t you want to lie down a bit now?” he slurred.
His hand was already fumbling under my sweater. I pushed him away.
“No. I don’t want to. You leave me alone.”
“Hey, what’s wrong now? What’s your problem?”
“Fuck you,” I snarled. “Get your hands off me, you filthy motherfucking bastard.”
I caught a glitch of surprise in Paul’s glassy stare. I gained momentum and pushed him harder. I felt a supernatural force shoot from my shoulder into my fingertips, as if my arm was an extension of the laser-beam sword in
Star Wars.
For a split second I thought I would actually be able to kill him with my bare hands.
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.