End of Manners (29 page)

Jeremy was standing in the kitchen doorway watching me cry. He touched my shoulder as he went to turn the coffee off.

“Has something happened?”

“No, nothing. I’m just…I don’t know…” I quickly wiped my nose with my sleeve.

“It’s okay. Sugar?”

“No, thanks. Have your friends left?”

“Not all of them. Some are still sleeping.”

He sat down, facing me. There was only the sound of the teaspoons stirring the coffee in the cups. I sniffed.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that…”

“Don’t be sorry. You have no idea how many people I’ve seen burst into tears in this kitchen first thing in the morning. Men lose it too, you’d be surprised, and are much harder to console.”

“I bet.”

“Normal people are supposed to break down under this kind of pressure. Getting used to it is the first sign of insanity.”

“Funny you should say that. I remember you seemed so casual about, you know, the whole security issue when we first came to see you,” I said, dabbing my eyes with a paper napkin.

Jeremy laughed. “There are days when I like to act a bit more macho than I am.”

I smiled and sipped my coffee.

“This is good espresso.”

“Italian. Would you like a chocolate chip cookie? Reuben brought some from Madrid.”

He opened a packet of chocolate biscuits and ate one carefully, savoring it. I wondered if Florence was still there. And in which room.

Reuben—the Spanish journalist with the keffiyeh—stumbled into the kitchen in a worn-out T-shirt and an Indonesian sarong tied around his hips, barefoot. He cleared his throat and greeted me with a friendly smile, then started opening and closing the kitchen cabinets.

“That red wine last night. Oh, man…or maybe it was the scotch,” he said in his nearly perfect American English.

Jeremy stood up and touched him lightly on the shoulder.

“Hey, sit down, let me put on some more coffee.”

Reuben smiled.

“Thanks. That would really help.”

I watched them move around the kitchen, with ease, as if they both were equally familiar with its space; I detected a slight, almost imperceptible stir of excitement in the room, as if a different type of energy was generated by their bodies. Suddenly it struck me that they could be the couple of the house and that I had gotten it all wrong.

After he had put the coffee back on the burner Jeremy looked at his watch.

“I have to dash. Today is going to be crazy at work, because of yesterday’s attack. I don’t think I can meet you and Mark for lunch,” he said to Reuben.

“Don’t worry, it was just a thought.”

Jeremy pulled a business card out of his wallet and handed it to me.

“Here’s Hanif’s number. You’ll see, he’ll get you on some flight or other. The best thing, usually, is to get on a flight to Islamabad, those are more likely to leave. And in any case everything there is simpler, as you know. Islamabad has a normal airport, I mean, not a madhouse like this one. Let me know if you need any help. Anyway, you’ve got my number.”

“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.”