by James Meek
When Astrid finished her calls, they stood and talked in the gardens. They’d both arrived that day, Kellas by plane from Tajikistan, Astrid overland in one of the convoys from Dushanbe, across the Aru Darya river, then east by truck. Neither had been to Afghanistan before.
‘They have a way of looking at us here. At us, the foreigners,’ said Astrid. ‘They make me feel less real than they are. They make me feel recorded and projected, like I can be switched off and not exist, while they go on existing. I’m going to sit down. I’m not feeling so good.’
They sat on the dirt. Kellas was starting to be able to see by the starlight and he saw that Astrid had a narrow face, with high cheekbones and a wide, finely delineated mouth. When she frowned, which she did often when she spoke, as if to reassure others and herself that she was thinking seriously, a dense pattern of four horizontal lines appeared on her forehead – they made her look older, and carried pain; when she smiled, the lines vanished and her face shone with more happiness than she could possibly use for herself. There was enough there for everyone.
He could see by the tired, impatient way she moved that she was sick and uncomfortable. His transition had been sharper than Astrid’s. He hadn’t known that morning if he would fly or not and until the lizard-coloured transport plane had taken off from Dushanbe airport, he doubted. He and the other foreign journalists and Alliance Afghans sat on canvas seats against the fuselage. In between them, occupying most of the aircraft’s cargo space, sat two tons of bottled water for CNN. Forty minutes after they took off they landed on a stretch of roughly flattened earth and stones surfaced with the steel strips put down by military engineers when they’re in a hurry. They walked out of the plane off the back ramp into a cloud of dust from the aircraft’s propellers and when it cleared they could see a line of Afghans waiting and watching, letting the dust settle on them. For the children the arrival of the plane was the final grand, ridiculous piece of stage machinery in the play of the day, and they jumped, singing in English, ‘How are you? How are you?’ Most of the others were drivers, but not importuning. They held back and waited for the foreigners to come to them. One of the Afghans waiting seemed to have no reason to be there other than to watch the plane come in. He looked at Kellas with blank intensity, with his hands behind his back. It was a look Kellas hadn’t seen before, and would see again in Afghanistan, the look of clever, curious and uneducated men, lusting for a messenger. They would fight and die for their religion here but a bold man could write his own religion in eyes like that, if he dared and the religion was bright enough.
Kellas put his gear into a Uazik and for twenty-five dollars was driven into town along a cratered highway. On either side of the road, traders were lighting kerosene lamps in their wooden booths. There was a smell of cooking fires. The country was rich in darkness and its lights and fires shone against it correspondingly, like gems in fur. Kellas’s doubts in London belonged to someone else. He was glad that he had been sent to this other world to carry out tasks, to report back. There were duties and some were his.
‘I might stay here a long time,’ said Astrid. ‘It clears my head. Kinda…exalted. Can you excuse me for a moment?’ She moved to the edge of the garden. Kellas heard her retching and coughing. He heard a limb slipping through grass, a cry and the sound of a branch breaking. He ran over and caught Astrid’s wrists as she slid down a steep embankment towards the sheer rocks above the river. He helped her scramble up and she thanked him. Her wrists were cold and clammy and she was trembling slightly. He put his hand on her forehead. It was cool and damp.
‘That was so clumsy,’ said Astrid, laughing in relief. ‘I shouldn’t have tried to throw up in the river.’
‘That’s what they drink here, too,’ said Kellas.
‘Yeah,’ said Astrid. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any of it on me.’
‘You need to be warm,’ said Kellas. They went back to the guesthouse as the generator started up and the lights came on. He made sure the Poles she was sharing a room with got her, shivering, into her sleeping bag and he came back later with some mutton and rice the Afghans had cooked, a glass of tea and a couple of ibuprofen tablets. Astrid consumed it all. A group of Swiss was taking two Uaziks to Jabal os Saraj the day after tomorrow, she said, they could both go with them. Kellas said she should rest more.
‘This’ll be gone by tomorrow night,’ said Astrid quickly. She shuddered with nausea, turned on her side and closed her eyes. Strands of her hair were stuck to her forehead.
Next morning Kellas called for her. His room was at the other end of the building’s single corridor. It was seven and barely light. The Poles said she had gone out. She’d left her things behind. Kellas walked down into Faizabad, the smoky clench of mud brick, crooked timbers and dark, narrow openings that sat fast on the valley floor and mountainsides like burned scrapings in a stewpot. He exchanged dollars for a greasy wad of Afghan money and found the town baths, where he stripped to his pants before the eyes of laughing men in sodden bloomers and dipped his body in a steaming font. Later he walked through the alleys, by ways of straw and dung and mud marked by foot- and hoof-prints. There weren’t many vehicles. Every time a Uazik or a Kamaz or an old Toyota drove through it came like a tiger on a leash, roaring and honking, parting boys and elders and women in pale blue burqas as if they had never heard an engine. It occurred to Kellas that if he spoke Dari, he’d be able to find Astrid easily. She was the only skinny white one in jeans and a too-big black anorak and blonde hair coming out from under a pakul hat. They would all have seen her. He felt like a fool without the language.
He came to a marketplace, where old men who looked as if they had heard the crying of their children fade and turn to silence too many times led donkeys carrying panniers of gnarled, sawed-up tree roots, drawn like wisdom teeth from the back jaws of deforested hills, to sell as firewood. He found Astrid with her head bent towards a cage that held a plump, exquisite grey bird.
‘Bet they’d cook it for you,’ said Kellas, who was hungry.
‘Bet they wouldn’t,’ said Astrid. ‘It’s a fighting partridge. The fight’s tomorrow, though. We’ve got to be out of here. I’d have put money on this fella to take down any partridge in this city. See the eyes? This one’s a killer. What d’you think? Could I take it with me to Jabal?’
‘Why not?’ said Kellas. There was no fever left in her. She looked younger. She still had faint lines under her eyes. It made her look wise. She tried to get Kellas to buy another partridge, so they could stage fights when they crossed the mountains.
‘If you like,’ said Kellas. One of the two would end up in the pan that way.
Astrid looked at him in a manner he cared for, intense and curious. ‘No, you’re right,’ she said quietly. ‘It was a dumb idea.’
‘I said yes.’
‘It wasn’t what you were thinking, was it.’ said Astrid.
At dawn next morning they found places in the two Uaziks hired by a Swiss TV crew to make the three-day journey through the mountains to Jabal os Saraj, where Alliance troops had been preparing a last stand against the Taliban until the Americans began to hammer from the air at their new common enemy, there on the Shomali plain, at the portals of Kabul. With the Swiss reporter and cameraman and his Slovenian producer, their Tajik interpreter from Dushanbe, an Afghan escort and two drivers, they were nine with their gear in the cars when they drove up the valley. The escort was a former bodyguard of Ahmed Shah Massoud, proud without scale of his acquaintance with the hero of the Hindu Kush, a pride not dented by his failure to prevent Massoud being assassinated by al-Qaida a few days before the attacks on New York and Washington. The bodyguard was a handy cocky talker through each of the checkpoints they passed, always three young men with old guns and a piece of rope stretched across the road. Before setting out the westerners wrapped their equipment in clingfilm and wound scarves around their faces. The Swiss reporter invited Astrid to ride with him, the cameraman and the bodyguard, while Kellas rode with th
e interpreter and the producer.
‘The old Swiss guy, he’s going to fuck her,’ said the interpreter, Rustum, after half an hour’s travelling. He said it without emphasis, as if he were talking about the past, rather than the future.
‘What if she doesn’t want to?’ said Kellas. He was mistrustful of the producer, a tanned and moody individual looking for an opportunity to turn into Werner Herzog once he had a good day of wilderness on either side of them.
‘Where’s she going to go?’ asked the interpreter, but less confidently, startled and then made gloomy by Kellas’s assertion that Astrid was capable of independent action. He was twenty five. He’d already made one profitable trip to and from Afghanistan since the big western TV networks rediscovered the country. He smoothed his moustache and rested his chin on the shoulder of the Slovenian producer in the front seat.
‘What do you think, Alex?’ he said.
‘Is fifty old?’ said Alex. ‘Not for a Swiss guy.’
At first the road was a swathe of small, half-loose rocks embedded in soil that had become dust as fine as talcum powder. Once a second, the old Soviet army car jolted and lifted the passengers in their seats. The dust splashed off the tyres of the Uazik in front as fluid as milk before spreading high and wide around them so that the day turned yellow and they bound their scarves tight across their mouths and nostrils. It was mid-October, and they were thousands of feet above sea level, and climbing, yet the sun shone. It was warm. In the heights the dust lessened and the stones of the road became coarser still, rounded boulders the size of cow heads, with gaps between. However high they climbed there was always a swoop of red rock and scree on either side looming over them, a hard gradient up to a ridge implausibly close to the sky. They passed ammunition trucks, boxes marked ‘Grenades’ shifting in their open trailers with each bump, and CNN’s water, and convoys of brutalised donkeys carrying panniers of dried dung. They drove round lakes where the water was the colour of blood and lakes where the water was the colour of grass. At the first crossing of a river, they stopped, and everyone got out except the drivers. The bridge was a row of crooked, spindly tree trunks laid from one bank to another without being fixed to either bank, or to each other. The drivers crossed with swift bravado and the others walked across. When they got back into the cars, Astrid switched. She sat in the middle of the back seat, between Rustum and Kellas. Kellas noticed that she sat down warily.
‘Wait,’ she said, holding up her hand when he tried to get in beside her. She reached into the waistband of her jeans, under her anorak, and took out a pistol.
‘Never seen a reporter with one of those before,’ said Kellas.
‘I bought it just now from the bodyguard. He wanted five hundred for it but I beat him down to one-twenty. Don’t worry, the clip’s not in. Here. Move to one side a second.’
She held the chunky L-shape by the grip, ran the action back and forth, squinted down the bore, held the gun up with both hands, pointed it out of the open door at the rockface, closed an eye, sighted and pulled the trigger till the hammer fell with a sharp tap that rang in the empty chamber. ‘What a crummy piece of Soviet crap,’ she said. ‘They must’ve pressed these out like tin kettles back in the day.’ She unzipped a pocket, took out a pair of ski gloves, put the gun inside and stuffed the gloves back on top. ‘Get in, Adam, let’s get moving. Don’t look at me that way. You can guess what kind of sanctimonious garbage I was getting from the Swiss guys. More of it now because they know they can’t be taking advantage of me. What you see in that car up ahead is Nietzsche in action. “Truly I’ve laughed at those who think they’re virtuous ’cause their claws are blunt.”’
‘I told you!’ said Rustum, slapping his knee with one hand and pinching his moustache with the other.
‘There’s no law here,’ said Astrid. ‘Single girl needs protection.’
‘I’m tired of guns,’ said Kellas. ‘There are too many in this country.’
‘That’s one out of circulation.’ She grinned at him and patted her pocket. She was energised by the purchase. Kellas’s conscience impelled him to tell her that he disapproved, while some other force within him made him dizzy and blinking, as if he’d come out into the bright light of the present after a long time in a dark room. He believed it was foolish for a journalist to carry a gun. Guns attracted guns. But he had no righteous indignation left. He didn’t care. He asked Astrid if she’d be able to claim it on expenses.
‘They paid for a helmet and a flak jacket, which I left behind,’ she said. ‘They must be dropping a thousand a week on the insurance. They can pony up a hundred and twenty bucks for one of the Kremlin’s Saturday night specials.’
‘It makes you a combatant,’ said Kellas.
‘Oh, and you’re not a combatant?’ Astrid laughed. ‘What do you think you’re doing here? You’re looking for where the war’s at. You’re selling it. That’s enough. You’re in it. You’ve joined.’
‘You gun nuts, you’re bad comedians,’ said Alex, the Slovenian producer. He didn’t turn round. He lifted his head and they saw the blurred trace of his eyes in the rear-view mirror as the road of boulders shook the Uazik.
‘I’m not a gun nut,’ said Astrid.
‘Maybe,’ said Alex. He was shouting over the noise of their travelling. ‘You’re not a man. Maybe that makes a difference. I used to think men loved guns because they made them seem serious. It’s death in a tube, and death’s serious, right? Carrying death around, it makes you a serious person. I saw what happened to friends of mine who joined up and went into elite units, you know, the special forces bullshit. I saw what happened. These were the guys who really wanted to be able to make people laugh, but they were so dumb, they couldn’t tell a joke. They couldn’t even tell a funny story. And all jokes in the world are variations on one joke: man walks along the street, slips on a banana skin, falls over, looks like a fool. That’s the only thing that the gun nut understands about comedy. They understand that death’s the greatest banana skin joke of all. It’s the most ridiculous thing that happens to anybody. One moment you’re walking along, hey hey hey, king of the world, the proud guy, centre of the universe. Then bang! The comedian pulls the trigger and the proud guy’s eighty kilos of meat. Much funnier than a pie in the face. The gun nuts are terrible comedians, and they’re always itching to tell the one joke they know. It’s a deadly, final, no-comeback joke, they’re longing to tell it, and they know they can’t.’
‘That’s good. You go with that when the Indians come over the ridge there,’ said Astrid. ‘You go with that philosophy of yours because I am not coming to your aid.’
The next day, after spending the night in a village where men reached inside the folds of their clothes and brought out lumps of lapis lazuli to sell, the convoy took a noon break in a marketplace outside the walls of a warlord’s fortress. They ate kebabs tasting of petrol. Cloud cut off the peaks of the mountains and the air was dank. It smelled of winter. The grazing was thin and muddy. The traders, and men who were not traders but squatted and watched, looked at them as if reckoning the worth of their valuables, and their party’s strength. The walls of the fortress were twenty feet high, flush with the sheer rock they rose off, and pierced with slits.
While they were eating, a convoy of three cars arrived, heading back towards Faizabad. They halted close to the Swiss team’s Uaziks and the occupants got out. Kellas recognised Miriam Hersh from Reuters. She came over to him and Astrid. Kellas kissed her on both cheeks and Miriam told them how squalid it was down in Jabal os Saraj, how overcrowded, how little was happening. She was going home. Kellas asked where she was based now and she looked at him with tired, watery eyes.
‘That’s it, finished,’ she said. ‘When I say home, I mean home. London. Reuters is bringing me back for good.’ The wind blew her wispy brown hair across her face and she tossed it away and pulled the cuffs of her fleece down over her hands. She was beginning to shiver. ‘It’s time. I’ve been abroad long enough.’ She sniffed an
d shifted her weight from foot to foot. ‘I don’t want to be a professional expat when I’m fifty.’
‘Miriam and I met when I was based in Warsaw,’ said Kellas to Astrid.
‘Based?’ Miriam laughed. ‘When were you ever based anywhere?’
Kellas blushed. ‘I was,’ he said.
Miriam smiled at Kellas, although her shoulders were shaking with the cold, and turned to Astrid. ‘Adam was famous in eastern Europe in the 1990s for never living in one city for more than six months. And he was there for – how long? Ten years?’
‘Nine,’ said Kellas. ‘Two of them in Prague.’
‘They weren’t consecutive years in Prague, though, were they?’ said Miriam. ‘It was like a king rotating his residency through his dominions. Six months in Budapest, four months in Kiev…’
‘I think it sounds like a good life,’ said Astrid.
‘You know how it is,’ said Kellas, looking from face to face. ‘You stay in one country for more than a few months, you start to know so much about it that the editors aren’t sure what you’re talking about any more. They want you to get some of your ignorance back. You’ve moved too far from the readers.’
‘What he means is that he was never satisfied,’ said Miriam to Astrid.
Kellas laughed and denied it.
‘You’re a good reporter, but you were short of staying power,’ said Miriam. ‘You were the opposite of those TV reporters who think that because they’re somewhere, that place must be where the story is. Wherever you were, you were sure that place wasn’t it. Whatever it was, it was somewhere else.’ ‘
And a woman in every port?’ said Astrid. ‘
