End of Manners (6 page)

When she was gone, Nkosi was gracious enough to pick up the conversation where we had left it and ignored my fainting spell as if it had never happened. He asked what I was going to do in Kabul. I muttered something about arranged marriages and diverted the conversation to him and the situation in South Africa. I wasn’t really listening, just nodding occasionally whenever I heard the familiar names, like Soweto, Mbeki, Mandela, Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Nkosi mentioned how one of his best friends had been shot by the police back in the eighties and how he himself had been to jail, I lost myself gazing at the roast with mashed potatoes and baked carrots sitting on my plate. I began to nudge it imperceptibly with my fork, imitating the way Nori assembles the food for a shot, creating neat symmetrical mounds of vegetables next to the entrée.

The Defenders were all sitting together at a long table at the back of the room, hunched over their plates, their heavy shoulders caved in, elbows resting on the table. They were gnawing meat from bones like characters in a medieval painting. They were taciturn and gloomy, doubtless not looking forward to another interminable week of lessons repeated all over again to a bunch of fools who passed out at the mention of blood.

I had the impression I could actually hear their teeth grinding the bones.

“I’ve had dinner with this very nice South African journalist,” I said on the phone to my father, who called me that evening.

I could just picture him, sitting on the checkered sofa in front of the mute TV screen tuned to the satellite news channel, cigarette in hand, eager to hear my report.

“Which paper does he write for?” he asked, as if he read the Johannesburg dailies regularly and knew the names.

“Um…I didn’t ask. He’s very smart. I think he was an activist during the apartheid years.” I sighed, realizing that I hadn’t listened to Nkosi with enough concentration to appease my father’s insatiable curiosity.

“How’s the weather?” I asked.

“November weather. The same as you left. What do you care about the weather, anyway?” He sounded impatient now. “Tell me more about this South African journalist.”

“What do you want to know? He seems bright, he’s nice, he’s…I don’t know. It’s not as if he told me his life story.”

“
Va bene.
What is it like over there? What about the marines? What kind of place is it?
Allora?
Do you think you could give me some kind of description?”

By now he would’ve had his plate of pasta and the one glass of red the doctor allowed him for dinner. He had probably saved this phone call till the end of the day, in order to savor it with his last cigarette. I could feel his excitement buzz through the phone line.

“All right. What would you like me to tell you? It’s like, let’s see—there are all these aid workers and journalists, the food’s terrible, the hotel is like a badly refurbished manor house they rent out for weddings, with fluorescent lights and blue carpeting on all the floors; it looks like a rest home. Actually it’s almost funny. The Defenders are…I don’t know, kind of impenetrable. They look like a herd of bison. Quiet and dangerous. How does that sound?”

“A pretty caustic description.”

I heard him chuckle. I had succeeded in amusing him. Now—I knew it—he would put down the phone and repeat all I had said verbatim to Leo.

The next day I woke up at five. Outside it was pitch-dark and rainy.

My room was tiny, not much bigger than a closet, and I was feeling claustrophobic and unhappy. Another source of anxiety was the lesson on firearms that was scheduled to open the day. I certainly didn’t want to pass out again.

I started surfing the satellite channels and suddenly came across the images of one of the English hostages in Iraq—a middle-aged, kind-looking man in an Day-Glo orange jacket—pleading with his government to help and listen to the kidnappers’ requests. I immediately switched to the next station, where a family was pouring breakfast cereals in slow motion and smiling at one another. In the background I could hear a cheerful jingle.

“Right, this morning we’re going to learn something about weapons,” Alan announced with a grin. His hair was still damp from the shower and combed back like a schoolboy’s. Despite the freshness of his cologne, the withered look of someone fighting a fierce hangover was still plastered all over his face. Laid out in front of him on two long, narrow tables was an array of guns, automatic weapons, machine guns and bazookas, like a window display of a spooky toy store.

“Now, on this table we have various types of weapons, those we call low and high velocity. Some of these can pass through the body without significant soft tissue damage, some can shoot up to four hundred rounds in three seconds, others will cause extensive crushing in the wound. On the other table we have more of the nasty stuff. M-16s, rocket launchers, grenades. Naturally, it’s important you know how to distinguish one weapon from another, because in case you find yourself under fire, there are vital choices you’ll need to make rapidly. For example, some of these weapons can penetrate even concrete, so hiding behind a wall wouldn’t do you much good. But let’s look at them one by one and learn to recognize them by their shape first.”

I had been the last to come in, and Alan had greeted me with a little cough and motioned to me to take a seat in the back. Liz Reading was sitting in the front row and was already taking notes. Nkosi was busy talking to the Australian Reuters journalist. He waved at me, but I didn’t want to seem clingy, so I sat at the very back, next to a guy named Mike—a balding, short fortysomething who didn’t wear gear and looked just plain and old-fashioned, more like a priest than an adventurous reporter.

Alan showed the class one gun after another, running his fingertips over the barrels, triggers, levers and mechanisms with the same expertise and admiration that mechanics have for engines. He described caliber to us, power, wound volume, kinetic energy theory, entrance and exit holes. Then he proceeded to hand the bullet corresponding to each weapon in question to Liz Reading, who was sitting in the first row right next to him, so she could pass it on to the rest of the class. Liz examined the cartridge for a while, ruminating on its shape and weight as if it could disclose precious information, then reluctantly passed it to the person next to her, so that after a lap of the room the bullet finally reached me.

Two hours later we had covered only the weapons of table number one and we had handled about twenty bullets of various sizes. My companions were growing excited, they kept asking questions and took notes. The women especially, I noticed.

Mike, the silent guy in gray sitting next to me, had begun to give almost imperceptible signs of impatience. I seemed to remember he belonged to a Catholic organization that worked in the Amazon. As I passed the shells to him I noticed he didn’t even bother to turn them over in his fingers, feigning interest like the others (some actually knitted their brows as if the object presented unexpected characteristics); Mike instead passed each bullet straight on to the person next to him without even bothering to look at it, as if he found the whole thing silly and didn’t want to be part of it. I tried to intercept his attention. I wanted him to know I too was beginning to feel that the whole thing was ridiculous. We started handing our bullets incrementally faster, as if they were getting hotter by the second, averting our eyes from them with identical disparaging expressions.

“Now,” Alan announced three hours later (by which time we were supposed to have memorized the names and functions of about forty weapons), “we’ll go outside and get cracking on what we call the ‘awareness path.’ You’ll find the suits on that table; put them on and I’ll see you outside in two minutes.”

Alan went out for a smoke with some of his pals while we clambered into navy blue overalls conceived for extra-large-sized men. Through the glass doors I could see the Defenders smoking, heedless of the rain, kidding around amongst themselves. Then I saw Obelix, Roger and Toby set off for the woods, guns slung over their shoulders, an image that looked sinister and foreboding. I had rolled up my navy blue overalls at the wrists and the ankles the best I could, but I felt strangely humiliated having to wear them. Now that we had on identical uniforms we looked like a group of convicts. We stared at one another with sudden wariness, a bunch of unwitting victims of something that was yet to happen.

The earth was soaked, blackened with peat and chestnut leaves.

Toby explained to us that now we had to set out along a path and things would happen. We would have to react accordingly, bearing in mind what we had just learned.

“Don’t be afraid, whatever you hear, don’t panic. Everything we use in the scenarios is harmless, no one can get hurt. Go on, off you go now,” said Keith, pointing to a path leading through the trees. “And good luck.” He grinned.

We set out, hampered by the extra-large suits, timid and hesitant, like Little Red Riding Hoods who know they’re about to stumble upon the wolf. Although we knew perfectly well that this was only a scenario, we pushed on unsteadily, clinging together.

At the first volley of gunfire we all flung ourselves to the ground. We landed one on top of the other—a human pyramid of legs and arms tangled together—flattening ourselves, heads down, the whiff of wet leaves in our noses.

“No, no, no!” yelled Toby. “What are you all doing on the ground? You’re a perfect target like this. What would it take to do this, for example?” He raised his rifle and mimed a mass execution.

“No, when you hear this kind of shot, from a low-velocity weapon, you’ve got to find shelter behind a tree, a bush. Your only hope is to hide. Throwing yourself to the ground is the worst thing you could do. Come on, get up, let’s get a move on.”

We laughed. It didn’t even take a second to see that Toby was right.

“What idiots,” someone said.

“Automatic reaction,” someone else added.

Smeared with mud, we got up and continued to advance, our ears pricked, ready to detect the slightest signal. As we kept walking, the wait became nerve-wracking. Then suddenly, four sharp shots, close together. I ran for all of one and a half seconds, then dived again, flattening myself onto the frozen ground. The others all did exactly the same. Toby emerged from the bushes shaking his head.

“No! I told you, that’s not an option. You have to learn to think when you hear gunfire, not panic. You have to try and work out, first off, where the shot’s coming from, and then, by the sound, you will have identified the type of weapon being fired. For example, what kind of gun you reckon that was?”

Nkosi, Jonathan and Liz Reading seemed the most prepared. They stammered some of the names and numbers we were supposed to have memorized. Toby merely shook his head disapprovingly.

“Nope. Sorry. It was a Beretta. A handgun. Anyway, come on, keep moving and keep your ears open.”

We were hit again and again. First, going past Toby, we were caught in a cross fire, then by a sniper with a high-precision rifle, then by an M-16 and lastly by a grenade. Unfailingly, we ducked down each time, without trace of a strategy of any kind. Each time we leapt as if a heavy shutter slammed down as soon the shot fired and all our bodies wanted to do was disappear. There was no way of ramming any other reaction into our brains. It didn’t help to remind ourselves the guns were fake.

The sequence was identical for the entire awareness path: we would get up from the ground, learn what we did wrong, and then go for more. Another bang, another leap, more mud, more leaves in the nostrils.

At one point I even held my breath, thinking I could get away with just playing dead.

Dinner found us all lined up, plates in hand, in front of the usual buffet of roast meat and pale, frozen veggies.

Nkosi beckoned me to sit at his table, next to Jonathan Kirk, the American journalist who lived in Bogotá, a forty-year-old who definitely worked out at the gym a lot; square jaw, sandy hair and that bespectacled-superhero look that some women find attractive. To break the ice and get it out of the way, we joked about our failure on the awareness path. Nkosi, however, went on to recount a hairy five minutes he’d spent in Sierra Leone at a checkpoint held by trigger-happy rebels. Jonathan Kirk seized the ball and in turn described a demonstration in Jakarta where bullets had been flying everywhere. This ping-pong braggadocio between the two went on for a while. It wasn’t the least bit interesting.

“Maria leaves for Kabul on Monday,” Nkosi said to Jonathan, as if giving me the cue that it was finally my turn to recount a dangerous adventure.

I nodded, offering no further explanation. Jonathan smiled. Nkosi cleared his throat.

“She’s doing a story on arranged marriages,” he continued.

“A good friend of mine lives in Kabul,” proffered Jonathan. “He used to be a correspondent for the
Financial Times,
but now he works for an NGO. You may know who he is—Steve Gilmore? He knows everyone there. I’m sure he can give you a hand.”