The Book of Dreams

by Nina George

  “So, don’t you want me, you arrogant prick?”

  She waits for me to answer. If my limbs weren’t so heavy from the whiskey, I’d already be embracing Marie-France. I can hear her loneliness calling, begging me. I can see the gentleness and goodness through her rage. I fight the urge to console her because I don’t want to; it’s only pity.

  “I don’t know why people find love so important that it only comes to their minds when they’re in mortal fear. I’d rather have a bulletproof vest and a bottle of whiskey.”

  Marie-France’s hand lurches forward as if she’s going to slap me. She’s too tired, though, and instead makes a dismissive gesture in the freezing air, topples back onto the bed, and nearly falls asleep.

  “Kiss me at least,” she mumbles, slurring the words.

  I lean over her. Her mouth is a fruit. She’s a beautiful woman and she craves what I too so desperately miss—life. Such thirst for life. I could drink life straight from her lips!

  It’s one of those moments. What moments?

  The thought fades as I pull the camel-hair blanket a little higher and cover Marie-France with it. The nights are very chilly in Wau. My desire to kiss her has passed. I vaguely regret not making love to her but also feel relieved.

  Two days later we fly to Paris, where our ways part in transit. I feel another surge of wistfulness as I watch Marie-France cross the large, bright marble slabs of the terminal floor with quick strides and then stop at baggage claim. Lost in thought, she runs her hand over her flat stomach.

  I feel discontented, empty, cheated of something beautiful and bright. I don’t understand my mood but put it down to the difference in temperature and to Wau.

  I think of Nelson. The Blue Helmets recovered his body and took it to his family. How quickly life can end, and how mysterious are the paths leading to death and life. An accumulation of tiny decisions. A few small gestures and life will take a very different course from the one it would have taken an hour or a day ago.

  And what about me? Should I have kissed Marie-France? Slept with her? Would that decision have brought me closer to death or distanced me from it? I try to shake these thoughts out of my head, but they cling on, like fear-sucking leeches.

  Survive, from one moment to the next. Do everything right. But how do you know what’s right?

  I look around for Marie-France once more, but what would I do with her? I don’t particularly like her or her cruelty, born of a vulnerable ego, which unleashes her aggressive libido. Nor do I like the feeling of having to console her, as though consolation would make her a good person.

  Nevertheless…My feeling intensifies that our brief encounter might have opened a door through which I could have stepped, and that by slamming that door I have missed out on something.

  I go to the Hilton bar, get drunk, and then, out of anger and spite, board the next plane to Kabul with a sickening feeling that I’m wasting my life for no good reason.

  I fall asleep. My dreams are aggressive and confused. I dream that I’m lying silent and numb in a hospital bed. Nobody will meet my eye. I want to scream but discover I have no tongue.

  I resurface briefly from my slumbers and press my forehead to the cool window of the plane. I’m thirsty. My head is aching. My throat too. I doze off again, and just below the threshold of waking, I find myself back at the hospital, with strange faces bending over me but not looking at me. One of them belongs to a woman with piercing eyes. She seems vaguely familiar, but then she disappears and I have an unmistakable feeling that I’m going mad.

  Ten years ago my editor in chief Gregory gave me a piece of advice that was supposed to serve as a sort of psychological life jacket. “You have to know who you are or else you’ll go missing in action. Do you know who you are? Do you have a mantra? What’s your headline, Henri? What reminds you of who you are?”

  I’m still thinking about that.

  I know Greg’s wife, Monica. On his birthday, every birthday, she brought a New York cheesecake with strawberry topping to the editorial office, and Gregory would cut it very seriously and share it. Very calmly and coolly, Greg would stare down all the old, cynical, smart-ass hacks who viewed any show of emotion with contempt and might be tempted to make some derogatory comment about this ritual, saying, “Family saves you. Every man needs a family to save his soul.”

  I don’t have a family. It feels as if the wounds of my forefathers are also in my blood and determine my direction in life.

  I no longer have a mother; she died shortly after I was born. No grandmother either: she went missing after going out alone in a storm, and for years afterward Malo would stand on the cliffs, waiting for her to return.

  Greg also told me, “Henri, give up this job before it’s too late. You should start a family after your wars but not during them. You must never make your wife and children watch you walk out of the house with your helmet, your bulletproof vest, and your passport, numb with despair that you might never come back. Wait until you’ve had your fill of war and really trust yourself to live life, then look for someone who loves you and can cope with the fact that all the warfare inside your head prevents you from sleeping at night. But don’t wait until you’re thirty-five to wean yourself off war. It’s your only chance of breaking free.”

  * * *

  —

  I have a headache when the plane touches down. On the way from the German military airfield to the US camp in Kabul I swig some water from a canteen. I’ve made many trips to the devastated city, as the Afghans call Kabul. Some people say that if you come here too often, one day you won’t come back.

  I think back to the tea merchant who came to Camp Holland last time I was here and took me along to an opium den in Kabul to introduce me to an alleged jihadi who was undergoing reform. We drank. We smoked opium. Mud houses in Afghanistan might not have toilets or windows, but they always have a Kalashnikov in a cupboard and a poppy patch out the back.

  Maybe I should go back to smoking opium and find some peace. No more dreams ever again. I’m fed up with dreaming. I’ve been dreaming my whole life, and I feel weary, so weary.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re early, ”the commander of the American camp snaps. “We were expecting you three days from now.”

  “That’s the problem with a free press,” I reply. I can understand his annoyance. The army is only able to keep an eye—in both senses of the term—on a limited number of journalists. The Americans would love to have more reporters they can keep under control by embedding them with their troops because then they can’t file unbiased accounts.

  To get out from under the commander’s feet, I hitch a ride to Kabul on a mule cart. Greg has left me a voicemail message to announce that Time would like to ask me a few questions on my return from Afghanistan.

  The scorching heat here is different from the heat in South Sudan. It’s dry and smells of fire, exhaust fumes, sweet tea, and curry. I walk along dusty dirt tracks, past stalls selling chickpeas from gray sacks, most of them old German army mailbags marked Deutsche Bundespost.

  There’s an aroma of lamb sprinkled with Persian spices roasting on skewers over open fires. Vendors shout loud advertisements for the wares—figs, dates, or melons—in baskets hanging from the flanks of their donkeys. Merchants sit in the open-fronted shops among piles of silk wedding robes, European-style secondhand clothing, and electronic waste, relating dirty jokes and headlines from the Anis daily newspaper to one another. Some women stroll around the market in light-blue floor-length burqas, others in black niqabs with a slit for the eyes, but many women wear fashionable dupatta shawls that leave their faces uncovered, more reminiscent of Grace Kelly’s head scarf than forced marriage.

  I’m thirsty.

  I see soldiers with machine guns and legless beggars on low carts. Paper kites soar through the flickering blue air alongside a minaret.
Splinters of glass on their lines, designed to cut through their competitors’ strings in midair, sparkle in the sunlight. In the distance are the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush, as white as the perahan tunban—flowing trousers and knee-length shirts—worn by two passing men. I look for my confidential informant from my last visit. I steer my way through the crowds, past fat moneychangers and vendors whipping up interest for camels’ heads in wheelbarrows, past sheep intestines going gray in the sun, surrounded by clouds of buzzing black flies.

  I buy some fresh peppermint tea and drink it with small, greedy sips. It soothes my mouth and throat.

  I have no idea how the little boy suddenly pops up in front of me. He blocks my path, shakes his head, waves his hands, and chatters away insistently at me.

  What? I want to ask him, scouring my brain for the Persian words, then ask him the same thing in the Dari dialect I’ve picked up from the soldiers. “What do you want?”

  He points to his water bottle. Yes, I’m thirsty too. I’m constantly thirsty because my thirst is only ever stilled momentarily. But the boy keeps staring at me, his eyes restless, wavering, hypnotic. Like the candles on the floor beside the bed in Wau, the night I slept with Marie-France.

  I glance over my shoulder. Is someone following me?

  I never slept with Marie-France. In the plane, just before I fell asleep, I did imagine doing it, but I didn’t sleep with her.

  My head is spinning from the heat, alcohol, and thirst.

  The boy tugs at my sleeve. He’s about twelve years old and looks like a chai boy in one of Kabul’s ruling households. Servants and errand runners—they keep boys for every single task. Were this boy mine, I’d shoot his master, I think as violent, irrational anger comes boiling up inside me.

  The boy doesn’t have his hair cropped short like pupils at a Koranic school. His reddish-brown locks are longer and peek out from under an embroidered purple cap. His eyes are two shiny green marbles in his emaciated yet beautiful face. The boy grabs my hand.

  “Ibrahim,” he says. “I am Ibrahim. They told me to bring you.”

  I let him pull me along. It is easier to be pulled along, and I feel lighter with every step. I shouldn’t let the boy lead me anywhere. I should take him by the hand, but something tells me that it won’t work any other way. Not now. Because I didn’t kiss her. That was the start of this other life. If I’d kissed her I would now be in Paris.

  I spit out this absurd thought. I must have caught something in Africa. Dengue fever? I’m hallucinating. I must talk the army doctor into giving me some medicine later.

  We wend our way past the bazaar stalls, the shops, the wheelbarrows, and the birdcages, through the swirling fug of colors and fragrances. It’s as if we’re sliding down a never-ending pipe. I catch a passing glimpse of a pink rucksack.

  A deep female voice shouts inside my head, “Don’t go!”

  But I can’t do otherwise. I’m losing touch with myself and I can’t do otherwise.

  Soon after that absurd thought, the air smells of singed cables and hair, and someone screams, “Adrenaline!” My heart contracts into a stone, and the pain takes my breath away. Then there’s a massive explosion, the detonation of a huge bomb only a few yards away. The pink patch fragments. I’m hurled backward and smash into a stone wall, my mind a mass of pain and blackness. Ibrahim’s hand is torn from mine.

  The world goes dark, night encroaching from all sides, from above and below, and beyond this blackness shadows jostle me, grope for me, stab me, clasp their hands around my heart.

  A boy screams, and I hear him yelling, “Dad! Dad!,” his voice cracking with panic. Then the darkness recedes, and it’s Ibrahim who is screaming, on and on, until all at once the screaming stops.

  The camel-head seller is staring helplessly at his missing lower legs. An embroidered purple cap lies discarded on the ground, alongside scraps of silk and chunks of melon.

  My father emerges from the fog of blood and dust. He walks calmly toward me. He’s wearing faded jeans and a striped Breton fisherman’s sweater, just as he was on that day when we both went to sea but only I came home. He kneels down beside me and whispers, “Oh, Henri. You’re still caught in between everything, between different times and different paths.”

  A sheet of newspaper wafts past, and I glimpse the headline. THE GIRL WITH A BOMB IN HER RUCKSACK. My name is printed underneath. I don’t understand.

  Ibrahim’s lying there, unmoving. Blood is running from his eyes.

  I’m sorry, I want to tell my father. I’m sorry that I don’t know which path is the correct one, but I have no courage or strength left.

  There is a tear in reality. Through the tear I spot women and men in blue smocks, bending over me, and beyond them I see a boy staring at me. I had it before. I had it but it was too big for me to cling to.

  The “in-between” zone. The hospital. The girl in the river, and this woman. To her, always to her, to tell her something very, very important.

  This world is dying. I’m falling into the silence beyond the void. I’m falling and…

  Sam

  “Is that ballet you’re watching, mon ami?” Scott asks.

  I can’t pause the YouTube video fast enough and am forced to turn off my smartphone screen. “Maybe,” I lie.

  “Maybe? Or was that one of those videos my father always turns off when my mother knocks on the door of his study?”

  “I don’t know what your father turns off.”

  “And you don’t want to know.” Scott’s voice turns bright yellow. It doesn’t suit his look. He’s posing as the playground tough guy at the moment by wearing things like studded belts with his school uniform. Geeks are out.

  Scott plops down onto the immaculately tended lawn on the far side of the hockey pitch and digs out a packet of Lucky Strikes. Smoking is one of the habits he indulges in purely to annoy his father. Last month he was planning to become a synchronized swimmer, and before that he was learning to knit and to crochet. His dad hates his guts.

  He lights a cigarette and takes a drag, but the smoke soon filters out of his mouth again. Then he lies back on the grass and takes some more languorous puffs. He tries to blow smoke rings. I know it gives him a head rush, but I also know he’d never admit it.

  “Coming to Forbidden Planet this afternoon, mon ami? There’s a SIG.”

  I shake my head.

  Scott blows an unsuccessful ball of smoke. “Going back to the veg compartment?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  For almost four weeks now I’ve skipped not only lessons but also most of the Mensa SIGs to go to the hospital.

  “And your mum seriously hasn’t noticed anything?”

  I shrug.

  “So what was that video?”

  “I thought you could tell your dad you’re going to be the next Billy Elliot, only in a tutu.”

  “With my smoker’s lungs? Who’d want to see a smoked swan?”

  I don’t tell Scott that the dance videos I was watching feature a girl who can see every world but this one with her eyes open. In the videos she dances and laughs and fools around and is the most beautiful and fabulous girl in the world. She tells stories with her body. Her eyes and her movements paint feelings and forests and laughter in the air. Her blue eyes stare out at me when the camera zooms in on her face. They glow like sparks of sunlight on the surface of the sea, like a glorious summer day.

  There’s also an interview with her on YouTube. I must have watched the video a hundred times, and, seeing it, my chest first expanded and then contracted.

  “Hey! So what do you reckon, mon ami?”

  I didn’t even hear Scott’s question.

  “Are you at least coming to Kister Jones’s later?” he repeats. “He wants to do a reading at his house today. He’s invited a few fellow writers—Joanne, Dave, and some others—and he’s
going to read some extracts from his as-yet-unpublished novel Slackline.”

  Instead of answering, I hold up my smartphone so that Scott can see the video.

  “Wow,” he says after a while. “So that’s her.” He looks at me with the cigarette stub dangling from the corner of his mouth and arches his eyebrows theatrically. “Got you there, eh? You thought Brainman didn’t realize what was going on? Didn’t notice that you were watching dance videos even in English lit? Well, who is she, when are you going to see each other again, and how come you haven’t introduced me to her? Scared she’ll immediately swoon for Brainman?”

  I tell him all about Maddie. Almost everything. Not what I do when I leave her room. Every time I glance back to see if I can catch her eyes brightening, focusing, and boring a secret grin into my back. But I’m never quick enough.

  “Have you noticed, Valentiner?” asks Scott after a while.

  “What?”

  “That life’s being good to you.”

  “Good? You call this good?”

  “Yes, you moron. It is. Listen to me. The life you’re leading is probably the most interesting of anyone at this school. I know it may not be an easy or comfortable life, where the only things that matter are eating and sleeping enough and making sure your phone’s charged. But it’s a real life, and you can be what you are and who you are. When else, other than in a crisis, does a man have a chance to show his mettle?” He squints at me, says, “My God, where did I get my gift of gab?” and gives me a wry smile. I know Scott’s right. He’s right about everything. I also know that he is actually the more brilliant of the two of us. He has real flair, greater talent, a quicker wit, and more courage.

  “You look as if you’d love to give me a hug or something disgusting like that. I’m warning you, I won’t stand for any of that,” he says boorishly.

  I nod and say something like, “Hug you? Dream on!” Instead I tell him about Realitycrash and insist that he meet Poppy.

  The school bell rings once. We stand up. We’ve often had this kind of conversation, but something’s different this time. We are. It’s as if we have changed for good between the moment we sat down on the grass on the other side of the hockey pitch and the moment we got up again. It feels as if something has happened, as if we’re no longer children and know, for the very first time, who we might be in the future.