‘Soon. In a week or so.’
‘Well,’ she sighs, ‘I have passed on what I could.’
I’m not certain what she’s referring to, but I sense that it’s more than simply the news she’s given me. It’s her habit to assign more than one meaning to the things she says, but now it’s as if a mask is dropping from her, and she’s preparing to relinquish the role she’s steadfastly played all these years. I have the feeling she knows that, before long, loneliness and infirmity will rob her of all the worldly authority and guile her character has accumulated over a lifetime, and that now she must relinquish it voluntarily, shedding herself of its burden to allow her life to at last become simple and unencumbered.
‘You will remember,’ she says quietly, ‘that the great art is always to find an activity which serves a practical visible purpose but which serves your hidden purpose as well.’
‘You have taught me that and much more,’ I say.
‘Context …’ she begins, but then coughs harshly. ‘Context is everything. I’m a little under par,’ she says. ‘Will you forgive me if I don’t see you out?’
‘I’ll see you as soon as I’m back from Afghanistan.’
‘When you’re
both
back.’ She means Manny, which I’m glad for.
‘Yes, both of us will come and see you.’
‘Of course.’
As I cross the road from her front door I look up to see her standing at a window. She’s waving. But it’s not a modern wave, where the hand flaps from side to side like a metronome. Her arm is upheld but remains still, and her hand rotates with only a slight and stately motion about her wrist. Then her gaze rises towards the sky, and it looks as though she’s holding up an antique ornament towards the light, tilting it back and forth experimentally, as if to glimpse across its surface some tarnished hieroglyph which she alone can decipher.
It’s a Sunday when the call comes.
‘Why not come round for tea?’ asks H in his characteristically gritty voice. It sounds an odd request until I remember it’s the expression we’ve agreed on for our order to move. I make sure the letters I’ve prepared are left neatly on my desk, together with instructions for my sister in case she’s the one who ends up having to deliver them.
Then I go for a short walk, because it’s the last I’ll see of this damp and peaceful world which my countrymen take so blissfully for granted. As I walk, I hear three sounds. One is the whispering of a light wind in the nearby trees, which at moments seems like a conversation between the leaves. The second is a succession of calls between a pair of wood pigeons. The last is a distant cyclical pealing from a church somewhere. The notes descend in an eight-bell octave, but grow confused as the notes begin to sound out of sequence. Soon they become a sonorous tangle, the last note sounding after the first and the others steadily more disordered, until gradually they begin to rearrange themselves. Then, in the manner of a knot that magically unravels itself, the octave regains its proper sequence and the scale is finally resolved and returns to its original harmony. After which there is only silence.
At dawn H and I fly to London in the Puma and are escorted to our final briefing at Vauxhall Cross. We surrender our mobile phones to security and are met once again by Stella, who leads us wordlessly to an upper floor.
Seethrough is waiting for us with what looks like a pair of shopping bags, which contain our personal hiking boots. We scrutinise them in turn but can’t see where the heels have been opened and resealed to accommodate the tiny satellite transmitters that will keep track of our precise locations. The transmitters are almost identical to the kind covertly installed on ships and aircraft sold to allied forces around the world. Seethrough reminds us that they can also be used to designate a target or any other site that requires attention.
Then we move line by line through our operational plans, basically an actions-on list, or what we’ll do in the event of various mishaps. Seethrough plays the role of ops officer, questioning us like a quizmaster and making sure in the process that we all agree, to the extent that things allow, on what happens and when.
He confirms that H’s kit list, which consists of things that we can’t easily explain to curious immigration officials, has been approved. Some items will be picked up at the British consulate in Peshawar, and the rest in Afghanistan through one of the few remaining foreign embassies that still function in Kabul, the identity of which we undertake never to reveal. The only exotic item we actually carry ourselves is our new codes, which are a more personal matter. They’re stored on stamp-sized memory cards and easily concealed.
Then there’s what Seethrough calls last orders, and we hand over the sealed copies of our wills. Nothing in his manner suggests to me he’s aware that the operation will be deliberately threatened. It’s obvious he doesn’t know of any means by which our plans might be compromised, but is conforming faithfully to a well-established chain of command, the tainted origins of which lie far beyond our mutual reach.
No other place I know smells like Peshawar. The city is wrapped in smells like an Oriental tramp in an old coat from which he can’t be parted. There are three main layers to these smells, and infinite lesser ones, the proportions of which depend on your luck, or lack of it.
The first is the smell of the land itself, an ancient alliance of fragrances that probably hasn’t altered since the Buddha, Alexander, Chengiz Khan, Mahmoud the Great and Marco Polo passed through the city in turn. It’s the one that reaches around you as you step from the featureless atmosphere of the plane. It’s a warm smell, humid, sensual and faintly exotic. It comes from the mixture of dust, eternally recycled by wind and rain, and tropical vegetation, the fragrance of which suggests deep green canopies of untamed foliage on an immense scale.
The second layer rises unstoppably from the narrow open channels that run alongside every city street, carrying the full spectrum of human waste like a peeled-open intestine of infinite length, which you spend a good portion of the day anxiously hopping over or crossing on imperfectly balanced paving stones. The opaque slime contained in these primitive sewers cooks slowly in the heat, generously giving up its perfume of decomposition to the surroundings in a constant reminder of earthly dissolution and decay. It is strangely muted and inoffensive, and after a few days ceases to register.
The third layer is the toxic twentieth-century addition of vehicle fumes, which billow into the air from what seems like every passing vehicle. The main culprits are overworked buses and trucks, all obscenely laden and straining under their loads like ageing weightlifters. Clouds of eye-watering black exhaust follow them. On lesser streets and side roads their junior partners in olfactory crime are everywhere: plagues of three-wheeled rickshaws, trailing spumes of unburned oil from their soot-caked two-stroke engines.
Then, depending on where you find yourself, this basic range of smells is refined by the presence of countless others: the bluish smoke of low-grade wood charcoal burning on a million improvised stoves, betel nut, turmeric, cardamom, mildew, wool, concrete dust, whitewash, freshly skinned animal hides, baking bread, dung and the acrid fumes of burning rubbish.
Mercifully, our accommodation lies in the least polluted part of the city called University Town where, since we’re officially working for them as consultants, we’ll be staying at the official guesthouse of the de-mining trust. It’s the western and most prosperous suburb, where the streets are overhung with dusty eucalyptus trees and sprawling vines, and where the UN and foreign NGOs have made their headquarters in spacious houses with gated compounds and gardens behind high walls. Beyond them, from the car that takes us to the trust’s Peshawar headquarters, we catch glimpses of the villas built for the city’s politicians, high-ranking military and all the dealers and players who’ve made their fortunes from the endless war in Afghanistan, and whose white marble towers and balconies gleam like poisonous wedding cakes.
Our first meeting in Peshawar is at the British consulate. It’s there we’ve arranged to collect a large quantity of cash, to be delivered on behalf of the Cousins. It arrived from Islamabad a few days earlier, the consul tells us. He’s a likeable, gangly and urbane figure in his sixties and probably on his last posting. He doesn’t ask what’s in the padlocked bag, though he probably knows.
‘No end-user certificate required, I presume,’ he mutters charmingly as he hands it over, then asks if we’ll stay for lunch. Over the meal he briefs us informally on the situation in Afghanistan: the Taliban’s steady advance into Massoud’s shrinking stronghold in the north of the country and the stalemate in negotiations between the Americans and the Taliban on the ongoing issue of bin Laden.
‘Poor old Massoud,’ he murmurs, working his fork into a Yorkshire pudding. ‘Never met him, but one feels terribly for him all the same.’
On our way back I ask the driver on impulse to take us to the Qissa Khane bazaar, which I want H to see. For an hour we wander through the clamour and chaos of the narrowing streets of the Old City, where the memories of my first visit with Manny return to me in unexpected flashes. I seem to remember the very places where we drank glasses of greenish iced sugar crushed from the raw cane in front of us, and shared kebabs with wild-looking mujaheddin who told us our first real tales of war, and I remember too how we sensed the magnetic pull of the war just across the border, and both felt immortal.
Time still holds this place less tightly in its grasp than most. On the way back we see a little crowd that has gathered around an elderly Punjabi snake charmer. He wears an orange turban and plays a strange sonorous melody on a reed flute to a jaded cobra, which he taps on the back of its neck when it’s too tired to dance. It’s how the two of them make a living. The sight reminds me how quickly we’ve been transported into a different world with different rules and ways which most Westerners don’t even know exist, let alone really understand. I know, at least, that I don’t.
We call our contact the following day. He agrees to visit us for lunch. I’m not sure what kind of person I expect, but he isn’t it. At midday there’s a banging on the gate and the chowkidar admits a lightly built man pushing a bicycle with dusty woven saddlebags. He wears a flowing white shalwar kameez, waistcoat and a black karakul lambskin hat, beneath which his ears project prominently. It must be Hamid Karzai. I recognise him from the photograph that Grace has shown me in Washington.
‘Ah, Grace.’ He chuckles, propping his bike against the wall. He takes off his hat and sweeps a hand over the perspiring and almost smooth crown of his head. ‘She’s a real cowboy. When she came to Afghanistan they treated her like a man.’
He has a quick mind and a keen sense of humour, and H and I both like him from the start. He talks freely in almost perfect English, and our conversation moves rapidly over the burning issues. The situation, he says, has never been more dangerous. Massoud’s forces are hanging by a thread, and unless more help comes he’ll be unable to withstand the Taliban. With help, he’ll be able to survive until rebellions can be spread among Pashtun groups within the Taliban’s own heartland. It’s an ambitious plan, which prompts H to ask if the Taliban can really be defeated. The answer surprises us.
‘Nobody can defeat the Taliban militarily,’ says Karzai, shaking his head. ‘As long as Afghanistan exists, the Taliban will exist. They are the sons of Afghanistan and they will always have their place. But the Taliban are not one entity. They are like – what is the name of that Greek monster with all those heads? If you cut off one, another will take its place.’
‘A hydra.’
‘A hydra. But the Taliban can’t unify my country. They cannot repeat their earlier success.’
‘Success?’ asks H. ‘Do you call their kind of government a success?’
‘My friend,’ he says, ‘for a scorpion, even hot sand is a relief. We have to start where we are. The Taliban have their place in that. You cannot deny them their achievements. People who have not seen the conditions in the country cannot understand their popularity. But by bringing foreign fighters onto the Afghan earth they have done a thing which Afghans cannot forgive. People can see where they are taking our country. That is why we need friends, real friends, who can help to defeat them politically.’
‘Does that include America?’ I ask.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Why shouldn’t it? I don’t dislike America. But America is like the Taliban. It doesn’t have one head. Listen, my friends. I have talked to American diplomats here and in Islamabad. I have talked to the State Department in Washington. I have talked to the CIA and the military. Every one of them has a different idea about Afghanistan, but only America is powerful enough to help us.’ He sweeps his hand again over his head. ‘Their great weakness is to see the world in black and white. It’s always good guys and bad guys with them.’ He chuckles. ‘In meetings they always ask, “Is he a good guy or a bad guy?” They want it to be black and white. But nothing is black and white in Afghanistan. There are a thousand shades between black and white.’
I ask if he thinks that bin Laden will be handed over.
He sighs deeply. ‘Before, it was possible. Now, I doubt. After they tried to catch him, he is too cautious.’ I didn’t know anyone had tried to catch him, but thinking back to some of the things Grace alluded to back in Washington, it makes sense. Karzai raises an emphatic finger in the air. ‘Osama will bring big trouble to Afghanistan, I guarantee. Even though he himself is not the most powerful one. Make no mistake. This is an international war with international players.’