End of Manners (10 page)

Although the footage was always the same—the video the kidnappers had sent to Al Jazeera had been played over and over again in the last few weeks—it looked different to me now. It was as if their ghostly pallor, the tufts of dirty hair plastered to their foreheads, their empty gazes now appeared to me like the foreshadowing of their certain death. It was as if their destiny lay hidden in those details, and with each rerun it was beginning to come to the surface.

I had to switch channels. A documentary about the aftermath of the tsunami showed archival footage shot immediately following the catastrophe. An arm sticking out of the rubble, a mother beating her fists in the sand beside the body of her child, tourists’ bodies washing ashore like dead fish, a redheaded woman in a floral swimsuit bobbing facedown in the water like a puppet. I switched channels again. A bombing in Tel Aviv. Police sirens, blood-spattered kids fleeing a discotheque, stretchers, dogs, rubble, dust, people screaming, bodies under plastic sheets. I heard the muffled sound of an alarm going off in the next room. It was time to get up. I turned the TV off with a snap of the grimy remote.

The final scenario the Defenders had conceived was like a Fourth of July fireworks display where the bangs go on forever. It was the summa of all catastrophes, Armageddon, the Atomic Mushroom.

We heard screams somewhere in the distance and headed in that direction. When we reached the clearing by the artificial lake, we stumbled upon a massacre.

It wasn’t clear what exactly had happened, but maybe that wasn’t even the point; it looked as if every accident, attack, explosion, fire, shooting that one could conceive of had taken place at the very same moment.

Our casualties lay in pools of blood, hair matted, clothes soaked with blood. They had shards of glass rammed into their flesh, gunshot wounds, hands lopped off, bellies hacked open. Some were screaming, some gasping for breath, some looked dead or unconscious.

I grabbed a body by the shoulders, the first that came to hand. I struggled to turn him over, I could hear him wheezing. It was him again—my casualty of choice, the man I had lent more assistance to than any other in the history of my life.

I pulled my hands away; they felt sticky and wet and, in fact, were already covered with blood. Under his shirt, which I had promptly cut open with my scissors, I felt something soft and warm. His intestines, the famous latex intestines, spilling out of the gash in his belly. I dragged Obelix by the shoulders towards a tree and I leaned him against it, bending his legs to prevent the intestines from slipping all the way out. There was blood everywhere; he was missing a hand too.

All at once, something came undone in me. The tension, the anxiety that until that moment had kept me going, responding and acting promptly, drooped like a parachute touching the ground.

By now Obelix was barely breathing. The wheeze he emitted and the bloodstain that was rapidly spreading around his lungs told me I had to act fast, that I had only a few minutes before the lungs would collapse and he would bleed out from his wounds.

But I didn’t even attempt to pull out bandages or tape from my backpack. I kneeled down next to him and took his hand. He let me hold it without resisting. I stroked it. I just sat there, still, looking at him as the rain pummeled my face and my boots slowly sank into the mud. I waited until Obelix’s wheeze turned into a hollow rattle. I didn’t move until he stopped breathing altogether. Only then did I let go of his hand and close his eyelids with my thumbs. I gently laid him on the ground and covered his face with a blanket.

I left him there and slowly started walking away down the path.

Behind me I could hear the shouts and moans of the injured grow fainter, as did the orders my companions were calling to one another—what a perfectly synchronized rescue team they had become—as they stanched, bandaged, sewed, revived and evacuated the casualties of this mise-en-scène.

Only then did I start to sob uncontrollably.

Because I knew there was nothing to be done. At least nothing I could have done, whether in a scenario or in real life. Because I knew perfectly well I would’ve never been able to fix something so tragic as Obelix’s mangled body; there was nothing anyone could do to prevent life from slipping away from him. Because watching a man die is an unbearable sight no matter what, much more than I could bear.

And because that gesture—walking away from Obelix and leaving him in the mud—had triggered something deeper than just fear.

It was like a crack beginning to run along steep walls. They were my walls, and they were crumbling.

I saw it now: death facedown on the side of the street, death in a war, was a different death than the one I had experienced in the whiteness of the hospital ward when my mother died.

Yes, I saw it now. One could actually walk away from a body, leaving him or her in the mud, like an animal rotting in the rain. Swollen, bloody, half naked because his clothes had been ripped. One could—or had to—walk away from it in order to move on, because the dead bodies were too many, or simply because there was nothing one could do. Death in the dust, on the ground, was about the dead body; it asked us to close its eyes, wash its dirt, wipe its blood, using our hands, hoisting its weight on our shoulders.

And this is what death looks like every day in so many parts of the world.

As sanitized as my mother’s death had been in her hospital bed, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to touch her either. There had been other people in charge of washing, dressing her body, maneuvering it from the bed to the morgue to the coffin. People whose job was to perform this procedure every day on the dead bodies of strangers. Instead I had done everything I could to avoid looking at her afterwards, when she had become just this frightening thing and not my mother anymore. I had desperately wanted to run away from it.

I was crying out of rage, for the sinister game I had been forced to play all week had left me weaker than before. What was I thinking, that some tailor’s or butcher’s trick would suffice to patch up a body riddled with holes? That it would be enough to stop me from fainting at the sight of blood? My father was right—we had only been playing danger, playing death. But on Monday I was going to a place where nothing sounded like a game.

My final surrender hadn’t surprised the Defenders. It’s true that I had let Obelix die on me without even attempting to save his life, but I doubt I was the first one ever to have hoisted the white flag. Nor the first to have had a breakdown that required chamomile tea and a tranquilizer.

My buddies had all succeeded, without exception, in completing the last exercise seamlessly. Even Liz Reading, in spite of the initial crisis after the abduction, had fully recovered and had finished with flying colors. During the final evaluation, Keith, her victim of the day, had complimented her. Liz had blushed, still breathless from the effort, her face spattered with blood, her helmet crooked on her head, her hair caked with mud, incredulous and radiant, like a teenager taking a bow at the high school play. Even Mike, the rebellious accountant, had thrown himself headfirst into treating the wounded from the
War of the Worlds
and had amazed everyone with his presence of mind and his quick responses, issuing orders left and right, revealing unexpected leadership qualities.

On the last night, the euphoria in the dining room was palpable. Everyone was busy swapping cell numbers and e-mail addresses, promises to keep in touch and send photos.

My companions all felt compensated for their efforts. Thanks to the Defenders they had discovered a second nature that lay asleep in the depth of their souls, whose existence had been unknown to them till now. It had taken only a little training to awaken it as if it were an atrophied muscle. During the week they had seen the anxiety and the panic abate and the ability to make rapid, efficient decisions grow. What had terrorized them on Monday didn’t bother them anymore by Saturday.

I saw them wholly transformed by this new discovery. They had gained strength, character; they were walking away from this rejuvenated. This renewed confidence in themselves didn’t irritate me, but my personal defeat—my cowardice—if anything, felt infintely more real to me.

Tim handed out the certificates to everyone, the usual piece of paper with your name in calligraphy. He handed me mine without comment (the Defenders had been courteous enough to ignore my failure and never mention it in front of the others) and they wished me—without irony, I believe—good luck in Afghanistan.

That piece of paper was worthless. It was just a certificate of attendance that some of my companions would have framed and casually hung on a wall of their offices, with the idea of making humorous remarks whenever asked about it. But as far as I was concerned it did certify one thing for sure: that I didn’t possess a second nature.

There was no dormant one within me, awaiting a Defender to awaken it.

I was going to take the first train for London at seven in the morning the following day. Before going to bed I went to say good-bye to my instructors. I felt uneasy dragging myself over to their table on my own, but there would have been no other time to say good-bye.

They were still sitting around, their table strewn with the remains of dinner and empty bottles. Obelix was cleaning his teeth with a toothpick.

“Hi, I just wanted to thank you all. I’m leaving tomorrow and in the evening I’m catching my flight for Kabul,” I said.

The Defenders grunted. Keith, who was the closest, shook my hand.

“Good, well, have a good trip, then. If you can put to practice even just a tenth of what you have learned, then the course will have had a purpose.”

It was probably just a stock phrase, he had said it mechanically, as if it was the hundredth time he’d uttered it.

I glanced at Obelix; he was really the one I had meant to say something to. I wanted to find a way to let him know he had meant a lot to me, that I had felt sorry I’d abandoned him.

“I’m sorry I blew it. I just couldn’t do it,” I said, hoping to meet his eyes.

Obelix shrugged, still busy dislodging what was stuck in his teeth. His hair looked stringy and bleached, tied in that sad ponytail. His tan was too dark to be natural.

“It happens,” he mumbled, looking at the ceiling while he maneuvered the toothpick; he coughed and turned away, covering his mouth with his hand.

“All right, then. Good-bye,” I said.

I stretched out my hand. I meant to say something like I hope to see you again. It was my last chance to let him know his body had been more than an anatomy specimen to me. He wasn’t just a guinea pig I had experimented with.

But Obelix didn’t turn around to meet my hand. He kept coughing as if his lungs were about to burst.

“
SO? DID THEY STICK YOUR HEAD IN A BAG
?”

On Monday night Imo was waiting for me at the Emirates check-in wrapped in a full-length black coat cinched at the waist with a wide men’s leather belt. With a pair of worn old boots and an astrakhan cap, she looked all set for the Afghan adventure, at least costume-wise. I assumed that her inspiration lay somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Tolstoy, yet somehow it looked as if she’d always dressed like that.

“Well…yes,” I stumbled. “They kidnapped you as well?”

“Of course. It’s their pièce de résistance. Everybody knows that at one point you get hauled out of the van with lots of screaming and they stuff your head inside a burlap sack. Big surprise.”

She started rummaging in the large bag she had over her shoulder.

“These guys, the ones who run it, have all retired. I mean, come on. They have to do something to bring home the bacon, right? Oh,
please,
where did I put it…? I swear it drives me crazy, I can never find anything in here.”

She was kneeling down emptying the contents of her bag onto the floor. The wallet had come out, a voluminous makeup pouch, a perfumed candle, a pair of perfectly folded cashmere socks, a very soft shawl—probably one of those outlawed shahtooshes—a biography of Catherine the Great, the latest Nano, a jar of La Mer cream.

“Ah, here it is.” She snatched up her tiny phone and started putting everything back in again. “Remind me later I have to call the paper and get the number of this guy in Kabul where we have to pick up our stuff.”

“Which stuff?”

“You know, the flak jackets, the helmets and the satellite phone.” She flashed her eyes and sighed as she zipped up her bag.

“Oh, good,” I said, reassured. I had been waiting for her to mention the fact that we were going to take that sort of equipment along.

We’d had an entire lesson on various types of bulletproof vests, we’d looked at different kinds of material—it was called Kevlar, but I had learned there were various kinds of Kevlar with differing capacities to absorb the impact of bullets. By now I felt something of an expert and I couldn’t wait to show off.

“Did he tell you what kind of vest we’re getting?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have a clue, but it doesn’t really matter, darling,” said Imo, standing up and taking me by the arm. “We’re not going to wear them anyway. We’ll have them in the back of the car just in case, to keep the insurance and my editor happy. He was adamant that we should keep them handy. But there’s no way we’re going around looking like soldiers.”

“We’re not going to wear them, then?”

“Of course not. That’s all we need, to show up in helmets and flak jackets. It’d be like having ‘Western target, please kidnap’ written on our foreheads. Come on, let’s go, they’ll be calling our flight soon. God, look at the size of that suitcase. How much stuff did you bring?”

“No, it’s just that…I thought…But listen, Imo, about the flak jackets: you know, at the course, the Defenders were saying that one should be—”

“Forget the course now, Maria. It’s useful but they also tell you a bunch of crap. Believe me, it’s better to go around looking like locals, you know, like normal people. The point is to blend in as much as possible.”

Imo was evidently privy to information I did not have and that appeared to be at odds with the basic rules of personal safety I had just learned.

“I see. Then we should wear what? Burqas like the Vaginas of Journalism?” I tried to sound sarcastic, wanting to conceal my disorientation.

“No, I mean we shouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, that’s all. Regular clothes. Without showing any tits or legs, of course.”

She eyed my coat.

“You haven’t got anything less bright than this, have you?”

“No, this is the warmest thing I’ve—”

“Hmm.” She gave a slight shake of the head. I could tell she wasn’t crazy about my thick green quilted jacket. The color was hideous and it didn’t suit me. I’d bought it on sale at the last minute, terrified by the polar temperatures in Kabul I’d seen online.

“Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“No, it’s just that in this color they’ll see you coming a mile off. Besides, only a Western woman would wear a Day-Glo green down jacket. The idea is to camouflage ourselves with the colors they wear up there, you know what I mean?”

“Right. Unfortunately I’m not sure I brought any—”

She grabbed me by the sleeve.

“It’s okay, don’t worry, I’ll lend you something. Come on, let’s go buy some silly magazines. It’s an endless flight.”

Just then her cell rang. She read the name on the display and did a graceful twirl on her toes, curving in on herself.

“Hello?” Then she roared with laughter and started speaking very fast in Russian.

She grabbed my arm and moved away in long strides, her expression becoming suddenly serious and attentive, asking one question after another of her interlocutor. She kept a strong hold on my elbow throughout the conversation and directed me towards the newsstand. Still talking and sounding a bit more concerned now, she pointed with her chin towards
Vogue, Harpers & Queen
and then moved to the next shelf and indicated
The New Yorker,
which I dutifully picked up along with the other two. She then proceeded to guide me to the cashier, where she made a gesture with her hand, holding her cell between ear and shoulder while fumbling in her bag, meaning that she wanted to pay, now listening to her caller’s monologue and interjecting a series of sparse
“Da…Da…Da”
as she pulled out her wallet. She paid and mouthed a silent thank-you to the cashier, still on her Russian conversation, then guided me to the gate. When they finally called the flight to Dubai, she was still pacing up and down a distance away, immersed in her phone call. I had to wave my arms wildly to attract her attention, gesturing to her that all the other passengers had boarded and we were the only ones left. She walked over, shut the phone and sighed.

“Work, work, work. You know what it’s like.”

On the plane, Imo slept almost the whole time, curled up in her shahtoosh with her Nano buds in her ears, wearing that very soft pair of cashmere socks she carried in her bag.

I couldn’t close my eyes for one second. I spent most of the flight staring at the monitor that showed our progress. As we advanced, the names of the cities I read on the blue screen acquired an increasingly fabulous sound: first Baden, Budapest, then Tehran, Baku, Tashkent, Samarkand, Dushanbe. Enclosed as we were in the cocoon of the plane, cradled by the hum of the air-conditioning and the muted sounds in the cabin, it was mind-blowing to think that these two realities—the plane with the randomly assorted crowd it contained and the lands below—had actually merged into one. I looked at the sleek Arab businessmen working on their laptops, the noisy Pakistani children running up and down the aisle, the Eastern European stewardesses in their veiled Emirates uniform handing out juice from the trolley, the young Australian couple checking their Lonely Planet. If we’d had to make an emergency landing, would we have found ourselves surrounded by nomad tents? Or would it be the steppes? The desert? Or rather, wasn’t Mongolia the one with the desert and the nomad tents?

By the light of dawn, the Hindu Kush suddenly opened out beneath the belly of the plane. Glinting in the first rays of the sun that tinged it with pink, this gigantic range of mountains was a herculean apparition that evoked blaring trumpets, a Wagnerian sound track. I wanted to wake Imo and yell to her that we were flying over the Himalayas. I was possessed by an unexpected, mad euphoria (but then, what was that, actually? the Himalayas or the Hindu Kush? weren’t they the same thing? how annoying that I shouldn’t even know that), but she was sleeping so soundly it didn’t even seem like she was breathing; she looked like a bundle of expensive wool forgotten on the seat.

Beyond the peaks I saw the stony desert begin to spread from the foot of the mountains announcing Afghanistan. The Wagnerian sound track went up a notch. I knew that desert. I had seen it drawn on the maps I had looked at in the previous weeks. As the plane started its descent I realized that the desert’s vastness, the ruggedness of its terrain, were no longer just abstractions, mere colors on a map. In just a few minutes, once the cabin door opened, I was going to fall right into this place called Afghanistan. Just looking at it from above, that immense, corrugated territory ringed by mountains, was enough to tell me that here the game was of immense proportions. Suddenly the whole week spent with the Defenders—the slides, the dummy shots, the pumps squirting blood, the latex intestines and the explosions among pruned hedges and wet oak trees—seemed like a pathetic attempt to put some order into an expanse ruled by titanic forces.

Once I had reached as far as this no-man’s-land, I felt I was back to square one.

Hanif had been highly recommended to Imo by a colleague at the BBC and was supposed to be the man who would solve our every problem from the moment we set foot in the country. He’d been described to her as an excellent fixer, someone who knew lots of people in the various ministries, who could easily get permits, get us through checkpoints without a problem, who spoke English well and who was used to working with Westerners. In the early days of the Taliban regime, Hanif had fled to Pakistan and had lived in Peshawar as a refugee; he’d been back in Kabul for only a couple of years and currently worked for the recently revived Afghan TV. In short, Hanif was reputed to be number one as far as efficiency and charisma went, and Imo had bent over backwards to secure his services.

“He’s the guy who actually
reads
the six o’clock news. Apparently for the last couple of months he’s also the presenter of a quiz show that goes on air once a week. Everyone will ask for his autograph on the streets. It’ll be like traveling with Madonna,” Imo said as we were beginning our descent.

Kabul looked like a dusty patch with no color.

“Why does he need an extra job if he’s a TV star?” I asked.

“Because we pay him one hundred and eighty dollars a day, which is probably more than half of his monthly salary, that’s why. I don’t think you get it: there’s still no electricity, no roads, in this country.” She looked me in the eye. “Everyone is poor, everyone is struggling. Nobody is a star in Afghanistan, Maria.”

She pulled out from her diary a printout of an e-mail he had sent her.

“Good day, Miss Glass, I trust your health is fine and so too is that of your family. I wish your profession may proceed as you desire and I wish you much prosperity. I shall be honored to work at your complete disposal, but I am obliged to warn you, the road to the village you wish to visit is greatly in disorder because of debris from an explosion and presently it is not possible to surpass the crater, but inshallah, perhaps the detritus may be removed before your arrival and we may proceed.”

The first thing to greet us on Afghan ground in the early-morning light was three big posters plastered on the outside of the airport building. One was a huge portrait of President Hamid Karzai in his astrakhan cap, quoting a phrase in English on peace and democracy. The second one was an even bigger image, of the great Afghan hero Commander General Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, leader of the resistance against the Taliban—a handsome man with slanted eyes and a
pakol,
the Pashtun woolen hat. Below his face was a sentence explaining how peace and democracy had been his mission but unfortunately he hadn’t lived to see it fulfilled. The third, truly gigantic poster, was an ad for Roshan, the new mobile telephone company, welcoming incoming passengers to the new Afghanistan.

“Excellent,” said Imo, eyeing the Roshan ad. “They have no electricity yet, but they already want to sell them mobile phones.”

We looked around, expecting to find a rugged guy with Ray-Bans in a multipocketed jacket, leaning on an SUV. Instead, Hanif—rotund, with a prominent nose, double chin, tired black eyes—looked more like an Eastern version of Inspector Clouseau, with bushy eyebrows and a well-trimmed moustache. Despite the subzero temperature, he wore a navy pin-striped suit—the same one he wore to read the six o’clock news, it later turned out—with a red tie, a light trench coat and black patent-leather shoes. I had spotted him right away at the arrivals, holding a sign that said “Imo Glass.” My heart sank: he looked more like a limousine driver than a fearless hack working in a war zone. He helped us collect our bags and quickly led us outside to the parking lot. There were lots of people moving quickly, in and out of cars, waving and calling to one another. Everyone had guns. While our flight companions were all screeching out of the airport car park into high-tech diesel 4WDs driven by sturdy men, Hanif swung open the doors of a dusty old Ford—the car was included in his daily rate—whose exhaust pipe seemed to be dragging on the ground. No Defender worthy of the name would have approved the security standards of this vehicle.