After they’d talked for a while, M’Gurgan announced that he had stopped work on poems and his autobiographical novel. He was halfway through writing a new book, the first volume of a fantasy trilogy for teenagers.
‘I don’t care what you think,’ said M’Gurgan aggressively, before Kellas could speak. ‘I’m tired of being poor. The only people I know who read the kind of books I’ve written till now are my wife and other writers like you. I want to make some money. I want to be popular before I die. You’re thinking I’ve sold my soul. Have you seen my soul recently? It’s something the kids kick around the lounge when the telly’s bad. Its eyes are hanging out.’
Kellas’s skin seemed to stretch and contract over his body. His pulse was elevated. ‘How do you know it’s going to be a trilogy if they haven’t published the first one yet?’ he said.
‘How do I know? One hundred and fifty thousand of Her Majesty’s sweet little pounds, that’s how I know.’
Kellas’s decision came that night. It came: he didn’t make it. It arrived while he was staring through his reflection into the spikes and feathers of his incorrectly thriving garden. It came, and his conscience would have to budge up to make room for it. He was beaten. The great words were not in reach and he would rather be popular than obscurely wise. He didn’t delude himself that it would be simple to write a best-seller, to write a novel whose first characteristic was that it would appeal to the largest possible audience. Out there in London were hundreds of writers who believed they could easily write commercial novels if they wished, but chose not to. This false notion was the only barrier standing between them
and the rolling floodwaters of despair. Kellas knew it would be hard. It could not be thought of as a lowering, or a coarsening. He would need to learn to be content in the new medium, not merely study it. The next day he bought five fat paperback thrillers with their titles and their authors’ names on the front in embossed gold lettering two inches high.
In the September of 2001, after Kellas had made his notes and laid out his plot strands diagrammatically on large sheets of cartridge paper, using different coloured pens for each strand, a group of young men hijacked four airliners and flew them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York, causing thousands of deaths and great destruction. Kellas hadn’t talked about his new book at work and when his colleagues at
The Citizen
saw him that day, staring at the TV monitors, chewing his lip, gripping the back of a chair, teeny fireballs popping in his eyes, they were awed at how hard he seemed to be taking it, as if he knew he had a friend trapped on the high floors. He didn’t. He was watching a scenario almost identical to the one he had planned, in the secrecy of his study, as the climax for his novel.
He’d known the thriller market was crowded. He’d allowed for the danger that he might have to compete with a book with the same plot as his. But he had not foreseen the extent to which naïve idealists, with no understanding of human nature, no sympathy with the Other and a childlike faith in the use of violence to produce happy outcomes might persuade real people to act out their lousy plots in the real world. Kellas had worked hard to make his terrorist mastermind a one-sided figure of evil, when the character he had been looking for was a frustrated novelist who did not know he was one. It hadn’t occurred to Kellas that men might find it easier to sell their thrilling, unlikely narratives to the masses by asking armies of believers to perform them than to vend their imaginations at airport bookstalls in the accepted fashion.
A few days later, the woman he’d been sleeping with for six months, Melissa Monk-Hopton, a columnist on
The Daily Express
,
broke up with him, saying the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had made her reassess her life choices. Those were the words she used. Kellas asked her how many other men and women she supposed had used the actions of a group of suicidal religious fanatics to rationalise their break-ups that week. She responded in her column next day, proclaiming an end to her ‘shameful fraternization with the pusillanimous quislings of the liberal left’. He had desired her on the basest grounds. But even though, while she referred to him as ‘my boyfriend’, he referred to her out of her hearing as ‘a woman I’ve been seeing’, he’d been hurt by the manner of her leaving. It seemed curious to him that he put such a value on knowing women, on understanding women, and boasted to anyone about how much he enjoyed the company of women, yet had never been happy with a woman for more than a few months. He took some days off work and tried to drink but couldn’t bring himself to do more than sniff the whisky before he poured it down the drain. He lay on the sofa for hours, cycling his way through the TV channels at two-second intervals, and ordered chicken kormas and calzones from the local takeaways. Salty juices dripped onto his clothes and dried. He studied the faces of the delivery boys, seeking signs of contempt in their eyes, but he saw only fear, or nothing.
When
The Citizen
came to him a few weeks later and asked him to travel to Afghanistan, to relieve a reporter north of Kabul, the editors made the offer in voices brimming with grandeur. They were grave about it, as if they were practising a tone to use for his next of kin, and they were excited. They wanted to be sure he knew he was to be both grateful and solemn. It wasn’t the first time they’d asked Kellas to write about a war for the paper, but it was the first time he’d seen his editors so cherishing of each place on the roster. In other wars, fought between dull foreigners, Kellas and his peers would hack out their despatches and fling them homewards, fragmented lumps of narrative that lived and died in a day or two. What Kellas was being offered here was the privilege of slipping with his
stories into a greater story, a baton-twirling lit-up marching parade of a story that belonged to a mighty nation of storytellers, myth-makers and newscryers, America, but which other, foreign storytellers might attach themselves to. The fabulous thing was that it wouldn’t matter whether he or anyone else in the great onrushing parade was shouting qualifications, or yelling in a different accent that events were occurring in an altogether other way. America’s big loud story would jostle their little stories on together with its own, and his voice would add to the general din, and the general din would give his voice power. He could stay with the parade, or pipe up alone.
Kellas refused to go, and his editors told him they understood, although he didn’t give them reasons. They guessed that he was drinking heavily, and the guess became procedure. They gave him the mixture of respect, fear, latitude and contempt that the letters trade gives presumed alcoholics. They knew he was shaken up by events, even if they didn’t know that Osama bin Laden had stolen his idea for a book, that his closest friend was confined in an attic room writing about hobgoblins, and that he hadn’t expected his lover to leave him. It was true that he didn’t like Melissa, but she’d given him to understand that she was fond of him. She responded to his desire with her own, until the day she withheld, and never gave again.
What had changed Kellas’s mind about going to Afghanistan, what had made him go back to his editors and persuade them to send him after he’d turned them down, was something he heard in the pub.
‘Don’t blame you for turning the Afghan gig down, mate,’ the reporter said. ‘Fucking scare the shit out of me.’ He raised and lowered his glass and the lager suds drifted down from the brim. Kellas had nodded slowly, finished his drink and gone to look for the foreign editor. Like many others before him, Kellas found he wasn’t brave enough to be thought a coward, and he had flown to the war.
A revised version of his opportunistic thriller had been gestating in him, like a well-loved grudge, ever since he arrived in Jabal os Saraj, until tonight, when it began to unload itself onto the page, with the help of the new furniture. Originally the house had no furniture, only carpets and mattresses: an Afghan house. Meals were served on a plastic sheet laid out on the floor. None of the Americans, Europeans or East Asians staying there had challenged this arrangement until a Spaniard, already marked out by his preference for comfort and his loathing for the eight o’clock rush to the mountains, who spent the morning lying on his back and wiggling his toes, one hand holding a novel above his face and the other supporting his head, who ambled out of the compound for a couple of hours around lunch and, when he came back, would be seen writing something for his newspaper without reference to notes, his thick heavy fingers striking the laptop keyboard as if it were an old typewriter prone to jam – this Spaniard was seen by all one day to have bought himself a deep armchair and a floor lamp, which threw a suburban orange light slantwise across his long rounded body while he sat there, at rest and serene. All he lacked was a television. (Later, he acquired one.)
Up to that moment the foreign journalists living in the house had expressed their defiance of local conditions either by bitching about the Afghans’ commercial practices, or by flaunting their gear, their shining multi-tools in hand-stitched pouches, their lightweight trousers of spacesuit fabric or their high-bandwidth antennae, which folded out like altarpieces. The Spaniard’s defiance was of a different kind. The sight of him sitting there in his armchair, when till then there had been nothing but red and blue carpet and cushions, affected Kellas. The lack of vertical furnishings hadn’t bothered him before. After the journey in the lizard-coloured transport plane from Dushanbe to Faizabad, after the trip here through the mountains with Astrid in Russian cars, the house had delighted him with its plain brightness and its peace. Four walls and a roof, a generator, soft pallets to lie on at night, three meals a day if you wanted them
and steel drums in the washrooms which were filled with water and heated by wood furnaces each morning and evening. Kellas didn’t bitch about the Afghans. Two hundred bucks a day for a car, a driver and an interpreter was easy to pay. He was glad to be spending
The Citizen
’s money. Every fresh hundred dollar bill rubbed between his thumb and index finger and given to Mohamed – who would glance at it, smile, fold it in half, put it in his pocket and offset it against the thousands of dollars he owed to local small businessmen, each of whom owned an automatic weapon – was a bill less in the pouch Kellas wore around his waist. When he’d left London the pouch contained twelve thousand dollars. It felt as if a paperback was stuffed down the front of his jeans. When he squatted down over the outhouse hole in the morning and lowered his trousers he imagined the money belt breaking and him having to retrieve it from the Marscape of ordure down there, where mice scampered over hills of turds.
What moved Kellas when he saw the Spaniard in his armchair was an imaginative step bolder and more honest than any of the other foreigners in the house had taken. The Spaniard had dared to face the possibility of living among the Afghans for ever. He wouldn’t, and knew it. But he had allowed the possibility. Living among the Afghans, that is, not as an Afghan; not growing a beard and buying a shalwar kameez and becoming a Muslim. The Spaniard had allowed the possibility to enter him that he might live among the Afghans not as a colonist, a soldier or an aid worker, but as the man he actually was, a tired, well-read, funny, sexually indulgent, godless, twice-married, wine-loving, seventy-thousand-euro-a-year writer from the rich side of the Mediterranean. By making himself comfortable and ignoring (except for lunchtimes) the war that pattered on just over the horizon, the Spaniard had travelled further into this foreign land than any other
farang
in the guesthouse.
Kellas sent Mohamed to get a desk and two chairs. Mohamed found them in the bazaar. They wobbled, on mixed metal and
wooden legs. In this country even the furniture had prostheses. Like all the foreigners in the compound, Kellas was acting, but this time, inspired by the Spaniard, he had decided to change his role. In the clothes they wore, the things they carried and their actions, the journalists were explicitly transient. The Brits played soldier-explorers; the Americans doubled up as missionaries and prospectors. The French were buccaneering scientists, the kind who would kill to get the sarcophagus or bacilli back home before a rival; the Germans cast themselves as students on their study year abroad; the Japanese, astronauts landing on a foreign planet. Some of the British way was partaken of by Kellas, although for him it tended to be less exploratory or military than that of someone sent, with a handsome travelling allowance, to visit a poor relative he had never met and whose address he didn’t know. All these roles had in common dealing with life in the hard countries, like Afghanistan or the Congo, but their salient characteristic was the way they helped separate the reporters from their bourgeois contemporaries who stayed safely at home. Such was the Spaniard’s genius, and selflessness. There would have been nothing easier for him than to go home and impress his middle-class friends and any number of girls with stories of how he’d survived mines and mortars and Taliban roadblocks. He could ride through the dust clouds in a pakul hat with his teeth clenched and his eyes on the far distance, behind aviator glasses. It would impress nobody in Spain to hear that, in Afghanistan, he’d made himself a comfortable sitting room. For that reason the sitting room was the greater achievement. To take souvenirs of Afghanistan back to the bourgeois European world was trivial. To transport fragments of the bourgeois European world, however briefly, to Afghanistan, was a magnificent gesture. The Spaniard had made a sitting room; Kellas would make an office. He had the desk and the chair. He pinned a map to the wall above the desk. He had the computer. The final prop required was the phone, and although Jabal had neither landlines nor mobile coverage, he had one of them on his desk, too, a satellite phone, a square black object the size and weight of a
toasted sandwich maker. It came with a small, square antenna that had to be outdoors, pointed at a satellite over the Indian Ocean, in order to work. Kellas had run the antenna out from the phone on a length of brown cable that stretched from his desk, through a small window and onto the second chair outside. The antenna stood on the seat of the chair, face to the southern stars.