We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (8 page)

The bomb site was on the plain between Jabal and Bagram airfield. It was several miles from the closest Taliban positions, among fussily divided portions of loamy fields that were themselves divided by duckponds, irrigation channels, clusters of poplar and willow and narrow mud dykes. The houses were big and roomy and solid, but humble between the trees, with their outlines made by the quick weathering of untreated mud-bricks. The journalists from Jabal had to park their cars half a mile from the place where the bomb had fallen and take a zigzag course on foot between the channels, with their interpreters stopping often to ask for fresh directions. The lines of cars badly parked and jammed together where the road ran out made Kellas think of a country wedding rather than a funeral. As Kellas and Mohamed walked between the trees, they could see other journalists and interpreters behind and in front of them, converging on the site along parallel dykes, carrying notebooks and cameras and bags like guests bearing gifts.
The sky was the same rude clear blue as every morning, and it was the most comfortable hour, when the night chill had gone and the midday sun hadn’t begun to burn. The sound of water flowing from channel to channel and the touch of willow branches on Kellas’s shoulder took away his awareness of past and future and he felt contented. Crowns of sharp yellow mulberry leaves, cruel and fine like victory, bit the sky.

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in front of the bombed house. It was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and his brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

Most of the reporters, including Kellas, asked him how he felt towards the Americans. Perhaps he’d say something unexpected. Come up with a theory that they had done it on purpose, or shrug and scratch his nose and say: ‘It’s better that the Taliban should be beaten than that my wife should live and my children not be hurt by shrapnel. I’m sorry about my family, but that’s war. It’s all for the greater good, in the end.’ But Jalaluddin didn’t say anything unexpected. Kellas could have written that the Afghans do quiet dignity awfully well but it would not have been true. They did not do it. It was what was there. All Jalaluddin said, as Mohamed translated it, was: ‘My wife is dead. The Americans destroyed our family. What should I do? They should bomb the enemy. Not us.’

He’d been watching his sheep the previous afternoon when he heard the explosion. He ran back and with the other villagers began pulling his family out of the rubble with his bare hands. There was no doubt that it was an American bomb. Kellas could still see bits of it, jagged tearings of thin steel painted dark green, and the swivelling tail-fins that were supposed to steer it. It had numbers painted on it in white. You could see it had been a neat and well-made thing. The fragments were embedded in the rubble the bomb had made. Because of the nature of the material, it didn’t look like rubble, or ruins. It looked as if the ground had spontaneously shaped itself into lumps with some straight edges and belched into the air. A man from the BBC was standing halfway up the slope of fragmented clay, doing a piece to camera. Kellas climbed up to where one of the family rooms stood opened up to the world, cross-sectioned, half-intact. The inner walls of the surviving part were whitewashed. A narrow, lumpy bed was carefully made, with the edges of the counterpane quite straight and no wrinkles. Pink and green plastic vessels which had been used many times were still stacked on a dresser. The small wall clock with arrowhead hands had stopped at half past four. On the wall was a photograph of a young man wearing an American sports top and grinning, with modern Middle Eastern buildings in the background. Kellas found out from a neighbour that the picture was of a cousin of the dead wife’s in Iran, and from Mark that the cousin was wearing a San Francisco 49ers shirt. He wrote it down. Jalaluddin’s wife had already been buried in the overgrown village plot, under a short oblong of raised earth. Villagers had dragged thorny branches over the top to stop livestock walking on it or dogs and jackals digging the body out. Half an hour after Kellas arrived a memorial service began. One of the elders spoke a sermon. He stood just inside a circle the men formed. The women of the village stood further back, in a body, under the shade of the trees, and the foreigners formed a loose outer perimeter, the writers leaning in to listen to their interpreters, the photographers
roaming to and fro for good shots. The one who preached had a white beard and a haj cap and a string of beads swinging from his hands clasped in front of him. He spoke with his eyes closed. His clothes weren’t ragged or dirty, but they weren’t expensive. He was older than many in the gathering, but he wasn’t old. Some of the elders there were bent and shaking. Surely he was the preacher, the one who led the prayers, the one who best knew the Book and the writings of the scholars who had subjected it to thirteen and a half centuries of exegesis. He was like the others; that was what gave him authority, not his learning. For a preacher, he lacked vanity. He stood there speaking like a man who didn’t believe he had a special self and it was his ordinariness that could give his words the tune of revelation, if his words were good enough. Kellas relied on Mohamed to tell him what the preacher was saying. It was hard for Mohamed to do that. He wasn’t up to simultaneous translation. He could manage just about every second sentence, or clumps of sentences. It was like looking at a flip-book cartoon of the sermon. It moved and jerked and the action became clear in fifty flickering stills. The preacher said: ‘A woman has been killed. She had wishes in life, but we must think of God, and how we are subordinate to his will.’ Later, he said: ‘The Americans come here, drop their bombs on Afghanistan and kill innocent people. We do not condone this. Still, is it not our fault? We invited them here. Nothing breathes without God. God is using America to hurt the guilty among us by punishing those of us who have done no wrong.’ The villagers stood and listened without words or expectations and then went back to work.

Kellas asked a reporter he knew from the Prague years if he’d seen Astrid.

‘She was here earlier,’ the reporter said. ‘She asked about you. She wanted to know about your wandering days. She seemed disappointed when I told her you’d moved back to London to settle down.’

‘Disappointed,’ repeated Kellas. He watched Jalaluddin drift away
from the burial place, his shoulders bent and his body racked with trembling.

‘I’ve had enough,’ said the reporter. ‘I’ve been to too many strangers’ funerals in places like this. I want stories where I can be home for supper. I want stories I can wear cardigans to. I miss my children.’

They saw Jalaluddin talking to a group of village men, who shook his hand and left him. Jalaluddin looked up at the ruins of his house, where his neighbours were starting to sort good bricks from the rubble. He climbed a little way up the heap, slowly and doubtfully parted some earthen shapes, then stopped, dropped the lumps he was holding, and sat down. He bent his head a little. Kellas went over to him, followed by Mohamed. Kellas asked Mohamed if he should give him money. Mohamed said it’d be a good thing. Kellas took a million in the local currency out of his pocket, about twenty-five dollars, and gave it to Mohamed to give to Jalaluddin. He shook Jalaluddin’s hand and told Mohamed to tell him that he hoped life would become good again. Mohamed said something and gave Jalaluddin the money and Jalaluddin took it without looking at it or them and murmured something.

‘He says God be praised for your kindness,’ said Mohamed.

‘Did he really say “God be praised for your kindness?”’ said Kellas as they walked away. ‘Did he mean it?’ He trusted Mohamed least when he was translating the small courtesies of the poor. Mohamed tended to snobbery when he was bored, which he often was. His view, Kellas suspected, was that the poor could not afford to depart from stock platitudes, and if they did, he would correct them by translating what they should have said. Kellas and Mohamed began to walk back to the car. Kellas looked round once and saw that Jalaluddin hadn’t moved. He sat still with his head bowed, looking at nothing, the money in his hand, while his neighbours threw bricks on their pile with exaggerated energy.

Kellas leaned forward, pulled out the airline’s entertainment
guide and leafed through the films on offer. He took a glass of champagne from the tray offered by the attendant.
Sweet Home Alabama
. That had been kindly reviewed, Reese Witherspoon revealing a talent for mainstream romantic comedy. It’d been that night, the night after he’d gone to the village and met Jalaluddin, that he had lost his temper with the sentry boy and shoved him in the chest and screamed at him that it was his fucking chair. One of those moments of rage that seemed to come from nowhere, but couldn’t, since Kellas experienced them so seldom. He could still replay his shout exactly as it had sounded in the darkness, so loud as to be distorted in his ears, and remember how it felt when his palm touched the boy’s warm bony chest. If he’d taken up
The Citizen
’s speculative offer of psychiatric counselling, shyly suggested by the managing editor like a father slipping a drugs counselling service brochure under his son’s door, he could have made it sound neat and sympathetic. Sensitive, liberal Kellas goes to the village where the careless executioner of war has carried out his fatal warrant. Kellas’s heart begins to bleed. His conscience swells to enormous size, pokes into his brain and turns it to poisoned mush. I had a breakdown, doctor. War is so cruel and my noggin is so fragile. I don’t know what came over me. I lost control. A cheap doctor nods and understands. A smart doctor would tell Kellas he was lying. How come, smart doctor asks, you didn’t lose control when the Taliban let three rockets off into the market in Charikar when you were there and there were body parts everywhere? If you were so frazzled that afternoon, what’s with you being fly enough to lie to Astrid about how much money you gave to Jalaluddin? If you were all cut up by the cruelty of war, what’s with sitting down that evening at your crippled desk to write your bullshit novel? Smart doctor sees into Kellas. Smart doctor says: I know you. You know I do. I don’t see you made berserk by bombing. The way you went for that Afghan boy was something else. Like a man in a mask and helmet and goggles looking down through a Perspex canopy at something far away
he doesn’t understand, and the only way he can try to understand it is to hit it.

Kellas had finished his champagne. He looked around for a refill. The woman next to him was coming back to her seat after applying a fresh layer of crimson lipstick, which contrasted appealingly with her pale skin and the perfect white of her suit. She smiled at Kellas as she sat down and picked up her book.

‘Don’t move,’ said Kellas.

‘What?’ The woman smiled again, less easily.

‘I remember,’ said Kellas carefully, ‘that when I was a child I used to play with my mother’s lipstick – don’t move! – not to put it on, I mean, only to make the stick come in and out of the tube, it looked like a robot’s tongue, and sometimes tiny flakes of it would fall off. I’m surprised now, thirty years later, that they haven’t got around to making lipstick that doesn’t flake – keep still, I’m nearly finished – there’s a piece on the lapel of your jacket. Don’t brush it off! You’ll smear it.’

‘I can use my fingernail.’ She had an American accent, and Chinese features.

‘No. I know a better way. This is how the vacuum cleaner was invented.’

‘You brought a vacuum cleaner on the plane?’

‘Wait.’ Kellas took a paper napkin from his table, peeled off a single sheet of the two-ply tissue, exhaled till his lungs were almost empty, and placed the tissue over his slightly open mouth. He began to inhale gently and lowered his mouth to the woman’s lapel where the crimson mote lay. With the tissue paper fluttering against the stiff cloth he sucked in sharply, pulled away and folded the cloth in his right hand. He picked apart the folds with his fingers and pointed to the minute speck of lipstick. The woman looked down at her lapel. There was no mark. She laughed and clapped her hands a couple of times.

‘Well, thank
you,
sir,’ she said. ‘That was smooth. Do you always put a tissue over your mouth when you do that?’ They both laughed and blushed.

‘An old girlfriend taught me,’ said Kellas. ‘The only other time I tried it, I made a terrible mess.’

‘Either way, it’s an introduction, right?’ Her name was Elizabeth Chang. She was from Shanghai – ‘CBC,’ she said, ‘Chinese-born Chinese’ – her family lived in Boston, she was studying art history at Oxford. It was her second degree. She was on her way to visit a friend in New York. There were diamonds set in the gold of her earstuds. She was big, not fat but tall and broad and strong. She had a deep, hearty laugh, like an older woman’s, which made Kellas feel comfortable, and she laughed readily, at the slightest hint of a joke.

‘Oh, my God, my friend’s a writer!’ said Elizabeth after she asked what he did, and he told her. ‘She’s just got an amazing deal with Karpaty Knox for her first novel.’

‘That’s my American publisher,’ said Kellas. ‘I’m signing the contract for my book there this afternoon.’

Elizabeth congratulated him.

‘Thanks. Karpaty Knox, you know, and my British publishers, they’re owned by this old French publishing house, Éditions Perombelon. The guy who runs the operation, Didier, he made his Anglo-Saxons buy it. He liked the plot. He had me go over to Paris to meet him. How much is your friend’s deal worth, if you don’t mind me asking?’