End of Manners (12 page)

The first thing we had to do was collect the equipment that Pierre had recommended we carry with us at all times. He had instructed us to pick it up from the office of Jeremy Barnes, a freelance reporter with Sky News. Imo had turned up her nose.

“I know who he is. He used to work for the
Guardian
ages ago. I’ve never met him, but he had an affair with someone I know.”

I had no doubts that Imo knew him and had him classified. Before getting in the car, she dug her elbow into me.

“Don’t say anything about this guy in front of Hanif. He has worked for Jeremy and totally adores him. He says he’s the number one journalist in Kabul.”

She arched an eyebrow.

On the way to Jeremy’s office Hanif repeated to me how he and Jeremy were old buddies, and he stressed enthusiastically how Jeremy was the best reporter he had ever worked for.

He lowered the car window and waved to the armed guard in the sentry box at the entrance. The guard lit up when he recognized Hanif and leaned into the car, wanting to shake his hand.

We walked into an unassuming building. The ground floor was empty, there was no furniture, and an icy wind came in through the broken windows. A man in a woolen vest had a chair next to a stove, with a teapot on an electric cooking ring. He hugged and greeted Hanif.

Barnes’s office was on the first floor. It was a large room with military maps and photos stuck on the walls, a couple of computers, an antiquated TV, linoleum curling at the corners on the floor. Jeremy was sprawled on a swivel chair with his feet on the desk, his head tipped back, speaking animatedly on the phone with a pen in his hand. He vaguely waved to us and indicated with the tip of the pen that we should sit on a low couch covered with the brown woolen shawl I had seen all the men wear. He made a gesture that meant “I’ll be with you in just a couple of minutes.” Hanif didn’t sit but wandered towards the wall to study the photos with an air of satisfaction. He took one down and brought it over to us. It showed him and Jeremy on a rocky, snow-covered pass, a tank in the background, their arms swung around a couple of bearded characters with machine guns and bandoliers strapped across their shoulders. All four were wearing Afghan hats whitened with snow.

I passed the photo to Imo. I feigned more admiration than necessary to compensate for Imo’s evident lack of interest.

Just then, Jeremy put the phone down and got up to hug Hanif with great enthusiasm, uttering what was apparently a series of Dari niceties.

“Welcome to Kabul,” he said in what sounded like a decidedly upper-class British accent, shaking hands with us. “So what can I do for you?”

“Nothing,” Imo blurted out. “We don’t want to disturb you, we’ve just come to pick up the phone and jackets.”

“Ah, yes, of course, the jackets. I hope you’re not planning on wearing them, because—”

“No, of course not,” Imo said. “We wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a formality, to keep my editor off my back. You know, the insurance.”

“Right, of course,” Jeremy agreed. “These insurance companies, it’s all so crazy.”

He was quite attractive. Very, actually. High cheekbones, hair a bit longer at the back, around thirty-five. Intelligent eyes, good teeth.

“Don’t tell me you had to take that mad course too, the hostile—”

“No, I didn’t have to,” Imo quickly pointed out. “I had done it pre-Sudan, luckily. But Maria had to, poor thing. By the way, this is Maria Galante, the photographer.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, turning to me. “I did it too, ages ago. I remember it was a nightmare.”

“Well, yes. Even though—”

“I mean, I guess there are a few things that could come in handy, provided one remembers them, of course. But all that bollocks about firearms, explosions, land mines…the whole thing, Jesus, is
such
a circus, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said as the man in the vest came in with a tray laden with glasses of steaming tea. “I had no clue about any of those things, so for me it was compl—”

“Sure,” he interrupted me, “I guess if you’ve never been in a conflict zone.”

At this point, Jeremy turned to Imo, sensing that out of the two of us, she was the pro.

“These are things you only learn from experience. You can’t learn them in a classroom watching slides, right? Anyway, at this point, I figure people like us have probably spent more time in war zones than any of those guys, don’t you think?”

But Imo wasn’t into being responsive. She shrugged with an offhand expression that meant she didn’t have an opinion or didn’t care to share one. Jeremy’s smile vanished. He then turned to the man who had brought the tea and said something to him quickly in Dari. The man immediately left the room.

“I told him to put the vests, the phone and the first-aid kit in your car. It’s been a while since I checked the kit, perhaps you should make sure it has all the stuff you need. People here borrow it all the time and never restock it. And the phone needs recharging. I never use it, so the battery’s flat.”

Imo nodded vaguely again, like she didn’t care to register.

Jeremy lit a cigarette and blew the smoke to the ceiling as he settled back in the chair, stretching his arms and legs as if he had just woken up.

“And what kind of story are you—”

“Forced marriages and suicides,” Imo preempted him.

“Ah, yes. Of course,” said Jeremy smoothly, yet somehow condescendingly, as though for a veteran like him this was too much of a hashed and rehashed topic to stir any particular excitement.

By now it was obvious that Imo and Jeremy were engaged in some sort of unspoken competition and Imo was losing it.

Jeremy scratched his head.

“The road to those villages has been closed for quite a while and I doubt you’ll be able to—”

“Yes, I know there’s still a crater, but Hanif says that—”

“Right, Hanif’s the man. He knows everything. You’ll be safe with him. He’s the best fixer in the whole country. He saved my bacon once.”

Jeremy turned to Hanif. “Remember, my friend?”

Hanif nodded and laughed. Jeremy took another voluptuous drag, then pointed to the photo Hanif had shown us.

“We were traveling to Bamyan, it was snowing quite hard and we were crawling along, do you remember? At one point Hanif noticed a dodgy car was following us.”

“Yes, a car I did not like, it would not leave us. I decided we must lose them,” Hanif said.

“So Hanif accelerated. We were in his beaten-up Ford, right? And I thought, oh, my God, one of the tires is going to burst any moment. We managed to outstrip them a bit and after a while we came across a truck loaded with people and goats and God knows what else; Hanif made me get out in a flash, barked orders to the chap at the wheel and shoved me up in the back. He drove off in the Ford, tootling along slowly, so the others could catch up and stop him.”

“Yes, yes, I was going too slowly on purpose so they would catch me.” Hanif was excited. It must have been a great adventure, told and retold many times.

“Then the guys who had been following us in the dodgy car stopped him, they made him get out and searched everywhere, even in the boot, but I was long gone and they had to go away empty-handed.”

Jeremy and Hanif laughed as if the whole thing had been a hoot.

“We’ll be off, then. I don’t want to take any more of your time,” Imo said, standing abruptly, avoiding to make a comment on the story.

Jeremy threw his arms wide.

“Well, please, if you need any help, information, I mean if there’s anything I can do for you…” He escorted us to the door. “Please drop in at our place anytime for a drink, a plate of pasta, whatever. We’re always home in the evening.”

I wondered what the plural implied. A wife? For some reason it seemed unlikely.

“Shall I give you my number?” he offered Imo.

“Yes, of course, but my cell’s turned off now. Could you save it on yours, Maria?”

I keyed in Jeremy’s number on my cell as Imo haughtily turned away.

“What a puffed-up jerk,” she hissed under her breath as soon as we were in the car.

“‘People like us…I’ve probably spent more time under fire than any of those guys’?
Please.
Who talks like that? No, I mean, I’m asking you, is he ridiculous or what?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head vigorously.

“And I’m not even beginning to tell you the way he behaved with my girlfriend two years ago!”

We moved through the city past collapsed walls riddled with holes, through gaping chasms, a sort of unending backdrop of skeletons and hollows. My heart sank. Although I had seen images of Kabul so many times on the news, I was shocked by the actual extent of the destruction. And yet everywhere, despite the devastation, I saw Afghans moving quickly, busily, skirting heaps of rubble and sagging buildings, like ants following an ordered and constant flow, heedless of the obstacles. Everywhere there were street stalls, kiosks selling detergent, condensed milk, mountains of almonds and raisins, donkey-drawn carts preposterously overloaded with goods.

Money changers fished rolls of soiled banknotes out of their cloaks, counting out blackened wads; children were begging and laughing—children with no trace of melancholy or piteous attitudes, but cheeky and dazzling, displaying that same comic talent of certain Neapolitan street urchins—and giving the impression they were asking for money more for a lark than out of necessity. The brown and dust-coated city revealed unexpected gashes of intense color, enhancing the contrast between the archaic and the industrial: made-in-China plastic thongs with the Nike swoosh next to handwoven rugs and blue Herat glass, piles of bootleg DVD copies of
Titanic
side by side with fighting cocks and caged falcons.

I pulled out my camera. Everywhere I looked, I saw a photo. I suddenly realized I hadn’t shot a single frame since we’d arrived and I needed to familiarize myself with the light.

“Hanif, can we stop, please? I want to take a couple of pictures.”

Hanif hesitated.

“Can you pull over? Just for a sec.”

“It’s better not in this area. Too many people.”

He looked at me through the rearview mirror with a contrite expression.

“I’m sorry. It’s not safe here,” he said. As if it was his fault.

“It’s embarrassing, how attractive these men are,” Imo blurted out as she stared out the car window, her nose practically pressed to the glass. “They’re the ones who should be veiled.”

She was right. Everywhere we looked I saw incredibly handsome men. Children, elders, younger men, the flat-nosed Hazaras with their almond-shaped eyes, round faces that had Tibet’s and China’s imprints in their features; the Pashtuns and Tajiks with stunning green or blue eyes that shone in the piercing light like lapis. The old turbaned men with thick white beards stained by orange streaks of henna, who walked behind their donkeys like biblical kings.

I asked if we could stop so that I could take some pictures. But, again, Hanif hesitated.

The men held hands as they talked, held them as they walked, held them as they greeted one another. Big, fiery warriorlike men, guns strapped around their shoulders, holding hands like young girls.

A light blue burqa knocked on our window in the traffic jam. It had no face. Just a dried hand, beating on the stomach, mimicking hunger. She knocked relentlessly, aggressively. Hanif gave her a coin before Imo and I could reach for our wallets, and told her—kindly—to let us pass.

Hanif stopped the car in front of a barely standing two-story building. He got out and we followed.

“This was once a famous cinema. We came to see movies here, when I was a boy,” he said, with the sweep of the arm that a Roman would use to show the ruins of the Forum or the Colosseum to a tourist.

“We can go up. The staircase is still holding but be careful. Please take the camera, here you can take photographs, no problem.”

I took the camera out of the canvas bag and followed Imo up the half-collapsed staircase. It looked as if it was resting only on a couple of steel rods sticking out from underneath it and it couldn’t possibly hold our weight. I went along holding my breath, but Imo looked bored.

“I’ve seen this place already in a documentary. This must be one of those sights where they take every Western journalist,” she hissed to me sotto voce.

On the second floor the facade of the building had giant holes from which twisted metal bars—what was left of the window frames after the blast—dangled in the air. They seemed like tendrils swaying in the breeze and about to fall off, but had probably been like that for years.

The city lay at our feet like a termite mound flattened to the ground. Imo looked down at the destruction below, pointing in different directions.

“Soviet bombs or civil war?”

Each ruin had had its different killer. The destruction had come from outside first with the Russians and then from the opposing factions of mujahideen later. And then, when that was over, there had been American collateral damage and Taliban revenge.

While Imo and Hanif continued their conversation, I wiped the camera lens with chamois and walked out on what was left of the roof.

Short gusts of wind made my scarf flap, tufts of hair got into my eyes. This was the moment—I wanted to savor it. On top of that crumbling building I felt like a photographer again.

I shot the rubble, the gaps, a group of men below who were loading carts with wood and huge burlap sacks. Across the street I shot a sign displayed on a newly built housefront. It said “Aryana Billiard Club” in bright pink and green lettering. It seemed like the beginning of something new in this Hiroshima-like neighborhood.

Imo and I were quiet in the car on our way back to the hotel. An unexpected sadness had seeped into our pores with the dust. It was almost dark, people were still moving around, although there was a sense that everyone was heading back somewhere. To their shacks, half-destroyed houses, who knows where they were going. Everyone carried something, a bundle, a basket, wood, a sack filled with coal. There would be a fire and some food in every house tonight, and tomorrow they would start again.