We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  A few days later, the woman he’d been sleeping with for six months, Melissa Monk-Hopton, a columnist on The Daily Express, broke up with him, saying the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had made her reassess her life choices. Those were the words she used. Kellas asked her how many other men and women she supposed had used the actions of a group of suicidal religious fanatics to rationalise their break-ups that week. She responded in her column next day, proclaiming an end to her ‘shameful fraternization with the pusillanimous quislings of the liberal left’. He had desired her on the basest grounds. But even though, while she referred to him as ‘my boyfriend’, he referred to her out of her hearing as ‘a woman I’ve been seeing’, he’d been hurt by the manner of her leaving. It seemed curious to him that he put such a value on knowing women, on understanding women, and boasted to anyone about how much he enjoyed the company of women, yet had never been happy with a woman for more than a few months. He took some days off work and tried to drink but couldn’t bring himself to do more than sniff the whisky before he poured it down the drain. He lay on the sofa for hours, cycling his way through the TV channels at two-second intervals, and ordered chicken kormas and calzones from the local takeaways. Salty juices dripped onto his clothes and dried. He studied the faces of the delivery boys, seeking signs of contempt in their eyes, but he saw only fear, or nothing.

  When The Citizen came to him a few weeks later and asked him to travel to Afghanistan, to relieve a reporter north of Kabul, the editors made the offer in voices brimming with grandeur. They were grave about it, as if they were practising a tone to use for his next of kin, and they were excited. They wanted to be sure he knew he was to be both grateful and solemn. It wasn’t the first time they’d asked Kellas to write about a war for the paper, but it was the first time he’d seen his editors so cherishing of each place on the roster. In other wars, fought between dull foreigners, Kellas and his peers would hack out their despatches and fling them homewards, fragmented lumps of narrative that lived and died in a day or two. What Kellas was being offered here was the privilege of slipping with his stories into a greater story, a baton-twirling lit-up marching parade of a story that belonged to a mighty nation of storytellers, myth-makers and newscryers, America, but which other, foreign storytellers might attach themselves to. The fabulous thing was that it wouldn’t matter whether he or anyone else in the great onrushing parade was shouting qualifications, or yelling in a different accent that events were occurring in an altogether other way. America’s big loud story would jostle their little stories on together with its own, and his voice would add to the general din, and the general din would give his voice power. He could stay with the parade, or pipe up alone.

  Kellas refused to go, and his editors told him they understood, although he didn’t give them reasons. They guessed that he was drinking heavily, and the guess became procedure. They gave him the mixture of respect, fear, latitude and contempt that the letters trade gives presumed alcoholics. They knew he was shaken up by events, even if they didn’t know that Osama bin Laden had stolen his idea for a book, that his closest friend was confined in an attic room writing about hobgoblins, and that he hadn’t expected his lover to leave him. It was true that he didn’t like Melissa, but she’d given him to understand that she was fond of him. She responded to his desire with her own, until the day she withheld, and never gave again.

  What had changed Kellas’s mind about going to Afghanistan, what had made him go back to his editors and persuade them to send him after he’d turned them down, was something he heard in the pub.

  ‘Don’t blame you for turning the Afghan gig down, mate,’ the reporter said. ‘Fucking scare the shit out of me.’ He raised and lowered his glass and the lager suds drifted down from the brim. Kellas had nodded slowly, finished his drink and gone to look for the foreign editor. Like many others before him, Kellas found he wasn’t brave enough to be thought a coward, and he had flown to the war.

  A revised version of his opportunistic thriller had been gestating in him, like a well-loved grudge, ever since he arrived in Jabal os Saraj, until tonight, when it began to unload itself onto the page, with the help of the new furniture. Originally the house had no furniture, only carpets and mattresses: an Afghan house. Meals were served on a plastic sheet laid out on the floor. None of the Americans, Europeans or East Asians staying there had challenged this arrangement until a Spaniard, already marked out by his preference for comfort and his loathing for the eight o’clock rush to the mountains, who spent the morning lying on his back and wiggling his toes, one hand holding a novel above his face and the other supporting his head, who ambled out of the compound for a couple of hours around lunch and, when he came back, would be seen writing something for his newspaper without reference to notes, his thick heavy fingers striking the laptop keyboard as if it were an old typewriter prone to jam – this Spaniard was seen by all one day to have bought himself a deep armchair and a floor lamp, which threw a suburban orange light slantwise across his long rounded body while he sat there, at rest and serene. All he lacked was a television. (Later, he acquired one.)

  Up to that moment the foreign journalists living in the house had expressed their defiance of local conditions either by bitching about the Afghans’ commercial practices, or by flaunting their gear, their shining multi-tools in hand-stitched pouches, their lightweight trousers of spacesuit fabric or their high-bandwidth antennae, which folded out like altarpieces. The Spaniard’s defiance was of a different kind. The sight of him sitting there in his armchair, when till then there had been nothing but red and blue carpet and cushions, affected Kellas. The lack of vertical furnishings hadn’t bothered him before. After the journey in the lizard-coloured transport plane from Dushanbe to Faizabad, after the trip here through the mountains with Astrid in Russian cars, the house had delighted him with its plain brightness and its peace. Four walls and a roof, a generator, soft pallets to lie on at night, three meals a day if you wanted them and steel drums in the washrooms which were filled with water and heated by wood furnaces each morning and evening. Kellas didn’t bitch about the Afghans. Two hundred bucks a day for a car, a driver and an interpreter was easy to pay. He was glad to be spending The Citizen’s money. Every fresh hundred dollar bill rubbed between his thumb and index finger and given to Mohamed – who would glance at it, smile, fold it in half, put it in his pocket and offset it against the thousands of dollars he owed to local small businessmen, each of whom owned an automatic weapon – was a bill less in the pouch Kellas wore around his waist. When he’d left London the pouch contained twelve thousand dollars. It felt as if a paperback was stuffed down the front of his jeans. When he squatted down over the outhouse hole in the morning and lowered his trousers he imagined the money belt breaking and him having to retrieve it from the Marscape of ordure down there, where mice scampered over hills of turds.

  What moved Kellas when he saw the Spaniard in his armchair was an imaginative step bolder and more honest than any of the other foreigners in the house had taken. The Spaniard had dared to face the possibility of living among the Afghans for ever. He wouldn’t, and knew it. But he had allowed the possibility. Living among the Afghans, that is, not as an Afghan; not growing a beard and buying a shalwar kameez and becoming a Muslim. The Spaniard had allowed the possibility to enter him that he might live among the Afghans not as a colonist, a soldier or an aid worker, but as the man he actually was, a tired, well-read, funny, sexually indulgent, godless, twice-married, wine-loving, seventy-thousand-euro-a-year writer from the rich side of the Mediterranean. By making himself comfortable and ignoring (except for lunchtimes) the war that pattered on just over the horizon, the Spaniard had travelled further into this foreign land than any other farang in the guesthouse.

  Kellas sent Mohamed to get a desk and two chairs. Mohamed found them in the bazaar. They wobbled, on mixed metal and wooden legs. In this country even the furniture had prostheses. Like all the foreigners in the compound, Kellas was acting,
but this time, inspired by the Spaniard, he had decided to change his role. In the clothes they wore, the things they carried and their actions, the journalists were explicitly transient. The Brits played soldier-explorers; the Americans doubled up as missionaries and prospectors. The French were buccaneering scientists, the kind who would kill to get the sarcophagus or bacilli back home before a rival; the Germans cast themselves as students on their study year abroad; the Japanese, astronauts landing on a foreign planet. Some of the British way was partaken of by Kellas, although for him it tended to be less exploratory or military than that of someone sent, with a handsome travelling allowance, to visit a poor relative he had never met and whose address he didn’t know. All these roles had in common dealing with life in the hard countries, like Afghanistan or the Congo, but their salient characteristic was the way they helped separate the reporters from their bourgeois contemporaries who stayed safely at home. Such was the Spaniard’s genius, and selflessness. There would have been nothing easier for him than to go home and impress his middle-class friends and any number of girls with stories of how he’d survived mines and mortars and Taliban roadblocks. He could ride through the dust clouds in a pakul hat with his teeth clenched and his eyes on the far distance, behind aviator glasses. It would impress nobody in Spain to hear that, in Afghanistan, he’d made himself a comfortable sitting room. For that reason the sitting room was the greater achievement. To take souvenirs of Afghanistan back to the bourgeois European world was trivial. To transport fragments of the bourgeois European world, however briefly, to Afghanistan, was a magnificent gesture. The Spaniard had made a sitting room; Kellas would make an office. He had the desk and the chair. He pinned a map to the wall above the desk. He had the computer. The final prop required was the phone, and although Jabal had neither landlines nor mobile coverage, he had one of them on his desk, too, a satellite phone, a square black object the size and weight of a toasted sandwich maker. It came with a small, square antenna that had to be outdoors, pointed at a satellite over the Indian Ocean, in order to work. Kellas had run the antenna out from the phone on a length of brown cable that stretched from his desk, through a small window and onto the second chair outside. The antenna stood on the seat of the chair, face to the southern stars.

  Mark’s satphone rang. It was still morning in America. It was the early call from his editors. Kellas was expecting a call of the same sort from London. It was overdue. He tapped one of the buttons on his phone. No bars.

  Mark hung up. ‘Not getting a signal?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Kellas.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s related,’ said Mark, ‘but you know that kid, the little one who guards the gate some nights? He was looking so happy and comfortable in a chair when I came in. It looked like one of yours.’

  An emotion dragged at Kellas’s insides. The hormones shot first and asked questions later. They fizzed, and notified the brain to step aside while they went about their work. Kellas, under anger’s direction, got up and went out into the corridor in his socks. Past the door of the room Astrid shared with the NPR woman and the elderly fellow from Sweden. Had it been open and light and had she been there, cross-legged and the curve of her body over the laptop, eyes looking up through her blonde fringe, anger would have yielded. But not. Through to the broad lobby, past the humps of asleep Koreans, to the door. Boots! Forbidden in the house. Among that park of muddened suede and dust, stiff laces with space fabric, were Kellas’s tanky Scottish boots. He had to find two among a hundred still boots before his anger stood down. It was not standing down, however. It was recruiting. Kellas found his boots. He was in too much of a hurry to loosen the laces and push his feet all the way in so he walked out into the darkness with his toes hooked under the tongue of the boots and his heels squashing down the backs. It made his stride jerky and galumphing, like a stop-motion animated monster from a 1960s B-movie. The cold night settled round him and the line of trees along the compound wall spread a dim net of twigs across the sky. Kellas came to the corner of the building and saw that the chair had been taken from underneath his window and the antenna left on the ground, facing the wrong way. The same thing had happened the night before. He had been angry then, but now it was more wonderful and intoxicating, a gush of rage that made him refreshed, clean and free. He was astonished to find so much of something in him that he hardly knew he even had a little of. He stalked over to the gate of the compound. The guard stood up quickly from the chair. He was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, a head shorter than Kellas, in a frayed shalwar kameez with an old v-necked woollen jumper on top. He wore plastic slippers on his bare feet. His Kalashnikov hung diagonally across his chest, held there by a filthy canvas sling over his shoulder. The varnish was almost worn off the stock, like a piece of driftwood, and each raised edge of pressed gunmetal was worn silver with age. It was probably the family gun, the only thing worth money he and his kin owned apart from sheep and daughters. The boy’s broad face told Kellas how angry Kellas looked. The boy’s head was uncovered and his hair was short and almost fair and he narrowed his eyes and pinched his mouth. He trembled a little and looked red and defiant. Kellas saw that this was how the boy’s face would front up to a beating or a humiliation from an elder and that now he, Kellas, was the elder. The anger still poured through him, undammed, with the terrible quality of a flood, concealing or simplifying all boundaries. Kellas was both the flood and the body being carried along by it. Kellas grabbed the chair with his left hand and lifted it.

  ‘I told you!’ he yelled. ‘That’s my fucking chair!’ The night seemed to record the words in a deep, adamantine groove, and play them back to Kellas many times. The part of him being carried away by the flood couldn’t speak. The flood surged again and Kellas shouted the same words to the boy, who didn’t move, and didn’t utter a word. He didn’t know English. Kellas’s words were a mad roar. With his left hand, Kellas shoved the boy in the chest. His palm came into contact with the teenager’s hard warm little body for an instant before the boy teetered back a step. He recovered, compressed his mouth more tightly and stared into Kellas’s eyes. Kellas turned and stomped to the house with the chair. The rage had ebbed and he felt calm. The shame came on behind. He placed the antenna back on the chair.

  A sound came from the darkness overhead, as if the sky had turned to stone, and a slab was being dragged across it. Sometimes the engines of an American aircraft would hush or roar out suddenly. Kellas looked south. In the far distance he caught a faint flash. He heard the sentry boy murmuring behind him. He wondered if it was a prayer, or a curse. Kellas had fallen back on the striking and the screaming. Language was the obstacle, of course, but since the break with Melissa, Kellas had come to distrust words and his skill in their use even when he shared the language. Even in their moments of greatest apparent unity he and Melissa, and his ex-wife Fiona, and Katerina in Prague, had remained impermeably single.

  Shoving the sentry boy was the closest he’d come to feeling the warmth of another human body since he’d put his hand on Melissa’s bare shoulder to wake her up on the morning she left him. No, this wasn’t true. For some reason he’d found himself holding Astrid’s hand in the bus to the hospital the night before. They’d talked. They’d looked into each other’s eyes. It was too bad that he no longer put faith in talking, or seeing. There’d been a time when Kellas thought the meeting of eyes, with its infinite regression of looking, him looking at her looking at him looking at her, and so on for ever, was the purest form of intimacy, when souls come close to meeting, like two birds flying down to drink from the same deep, narrow pool. Now he wondered if the meeting of eyes, even lovers’ eyes, was nothing but a more refined form of blindness.

  From many miles away, the slightest of thuds came from the direction of the flash. Strange that it should carry so far; a trick of the atmosphere. The sound of America prodding the surface of the night side of the world.

  He intended to keep away from Astrid. He’d given up on an old hope that two peo
ple might form a whole. He remembered thinking once that two people could experience together a communion with the world that the solitary soul achieves easily. He could imagine. He had done that. The first time he’d fallen in love, as a boy, it had been with a girl he never spoke to. He achieved what he couldn’t have if they’d been together: he shared the ecstasy of solitude. For that reason, and because it was the first time, it acted on him like a toxin, like not-fatal cancer. He recovered, but he was changed. Damaged, perhaps. Where love was concerned, it was impossible to distinguish between damage and mere change.

  On the way to his room he passed Astrid walking in the other direction carrying an open laptop. She had on her too-big anorak. They smiled at each other.

  ‘Hey,’ said Astrid. Through her fringe her grey eyes looked at him with curiosity and doubt. She passed him and stopped and said over her shoulder: ‘Did you get your chair back?’

  Kellas turned round. ‘The shouting wasn’t cool,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Astrid. ‘Young boys with guns. That’s as proud as it gets.’

  In Virginia she was a hunter.

  ‘He wasn’t going to use it on me.’

  ‘That’s what makes you a bully.’

  ‘Was I being a bully?’

  ‘Yeah. When unarmed men shove armed boys around because they know they can. What does it sound like to you?’

  ‘I didn’t see you at the bomb village today,’ said Kellas.