End of Manners (32 page)
“Maria, Imo has been raving about you, the editor is very excited and she wants to use the feature as a cover story. The problem is that, according to Imo, you didn’t succeed in getting the picture of any woman who had attempted suicide, which is what we’ll need for the title page. Imo has mentioned you spent the day at the hospital in Kabul because of a problem with your fixer’s wife, so I’m writing you in haste, hoping this reaches you before you leave. Please, please, try and shoot that picture in there. We need a strong image of a suffering, beautiful woman. At this point it doesn’t even matter if we see the burns or not. Just give it a try, will you? It would be a shame if we had to purchase the photo from someone else. Don’t forget you got the Barbie doll pix by a fluke!”
I didn’t write back. I couldn’t face having to explain.
I made myself a cup of coffee. It was still dark outside. I sat and waited for the sun to come up behind the mountain.
The sky had cleared. My head still hurt from the vodka, but it felt lighter: the bitterness, the despair that I had felt the previous night talking to Jeremy had vanished like vapor dissolving in the first morning light. The light that was going to be so beautiful again.
It was then, as I watched the first ray blink behind the dark silhouette of the mountain, that I knew I was going to miss everything about this place. I had fallen in love again and I hadn’t even known it.
I heard the first cart stumble over the potholes, a man’s voice singing in the distance. Soon the streets of Kabul would be crowded again with men shrouded in their camel pattus, the market stalls would be loaded with shiny apples and pomegranates.
This was another day, and everyone in this city needed another dose of hope in order to get through it.
I had touched Leyla’s cold skin, her tiny body. I had held her hand, whispered in her ear. I had been the last person she’d seen when she had opened her eyes for just a moment. Now I was leaving Kabul with a different heart. I had jumped off the diving board and floated back to the surface. And what I saw now from the window looked beautiful—heartbreaking, sure—but nothing I saw felt so distant or alien anymore. A tiny part of me belonged to it now. In some strange way, I knew it had changed me.
Yes, I was in love again.
And I wasn’t running away. I was only going.
THE PLANE ON THE SCREEN
is now tracing the route backwards from Asia to Europe. From my seat I follow the icon on the map: I see Dushanbe, Samarkand, Tashkent, Baku, Tehran, and then Budapest and Baden. There’s a feeling of tenderness in this backwards journey, I can’t explain why.
I recall some images, random fragments.
The way the women I met in the village opened their hands, turning the palms up and running them flat over their faces to wipe away either tears or sweat, in a gesture that was at once feral and graceful. And how Malik, when he spoke, offered his words one by one and every now and again made a particular gesture, bringing his thumb and forefinger together then opening the fingertips again as if he wanted us to receive these particular words one by one, set apart from the rest.
As if he was placing them, gently, on the surface of water. Letting the river take them, like an offering.
The sky is lightening as I’m flying above the Hindu Kush. Imo must be just waking up next to the man she made love to last night; Jeremy is rinsing my coffee cup in the kitchen, wiping away the dark ring I left on the Formica table. Zuleya is probably back in the village from the hospital and is blowing on the fire while the water boils for tea and the bread bakes in the terra-cotta oven. And Hanif.
Hanif is getting ready to bury his wife.
I don’t know what it is that holds all these images together, but there’s something that threads them one after another like glass beads on a string. And for an instant no one seems distant or separated from the others anymore.
I don’t know how to explain this—how to translate the thought—but I feel the excitement, and a sudden hope. I keep feeling it with my hand.
It feels round, its surface cool and smooth, like a shiny pearl that I keep turning and turning between my fingertips.
From: Hanif Massoudi [mailto:[email protected]]
To: Maria Galante [mailto:[email protected]]
Subject: Greetings
Dear Maria,
I am glad you had a good trip and that you have been reunited with your family. I hope that your father’s health is good and that you are all well.
Thanking God I am still alive (every day we thank him for this here in Kabul!) and as you know God Almighty has granted me the gift of a daughter who every day grows more beautiful. Thank you for sending me the seven hundred dollars through Jeremy, I am very grateful to you. I particularly want to thank you for the photograph you sent. It is a truly beautiful portrait and does justice to how I remember my wife and I will always keep it in my heart. The portrait is in a frame next to my bed and it’s the first thing I see in the morning when I wake up. Thus, one day little Leyla will also know how beautiful her mother was. For this we will always thank you, Maria, and for your kindness.
Let me know if you ever need anything, I will be always happy to help you.
May peace and God’s blessings be upon you.
Hanif
Acknowledgments
I’m deeply grateful to my editor, Robin Desser, and to my agent, Toby Eady.
I want to thank Angus MacQueen, Joe Oppenheimer and Mark Brickman, without whom this book could not have been written.
I also would like to acknowledge Susan Adler and Filippo di Robilant.
A heartfelt thanks to Hanif Sherzad.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francesca Marciano is the author of two previous novels,
Rules of the Wild,
a
New York Times
Notable Book, and
Casa Rossa.
She is also the author of numerous screenplays, including
Don’t Tell (La Bestia nel cuore),
nominated in 2005 for an Academy Award in the category of Best Foreign-Language Film, and
I’m Not Scared (Io non ho paura)
(2003), cowritten with Niccolò Ammaniti. Ms. Marciano is currently at work on the script for
The Wedding Party,
set in Afghanistan, which will be produced by BBC Films. She lives in Rome.
ALSO BY FRANCESCA MARCIANO
Casa Rossa
Rules of the Wild
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Audenspice Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marciano, Francesca.
The end of manners / Francesca Marciano.
p. cm.
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Women—Afghanistan—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Afghanistan—Fiction. 5. Italy—Fiction. I. Title.
PR
9120.9.
M
36
E
53 2008 823'.914—dc22 2007029571
eISBN: 978-0-307-37753-1
v3.0