We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  . ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Watch your film.’

  ‘I like Toby Maguire,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I guess I gave up hoping to hear your story.’ She looked at Kellas with a casual affection he’d seen before, a distant sort of concern, between a mother’s mocking patience with a slacker son and a daughter’s amused but short moments of affection with her misanthropic father. She smiled, put her headphones on and made Toby Maguire move again.

  With luck, one of the engines would fail, and they’d have to divert to Greenland or Goose Bay. A night in the Arctic, stolen from events. Only luck could steal time like that. Otherwise it was avoidance. The appearance of sea ice meant that they were approaching the Canadian coast. He would land in New York in two hours, and events would begin again. Kellas put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out a piece of ruled paper, folded into four. It had the Cunnerys’ address, and in a different colour, written with the hotel pen, the text of the email from Astrid he had copied off the TV Internet screen, lying on the heavy dung-coloured corporate counterpane, smearing the remote keyboard with blood. Adam Kellas, it began. On a line by itself, no punctuation. The fact that she had used both his names was strange. Perhaps she was emphasising her seriousness. The message was short. I want to see you now. I want you to come to me, it doesn’t matter how late it is, and tell me exactly what you want from me. He wondered about the ‘doesn’t matter how late’ part. It was as if she thought he was in America already. The final phrase also puzzled him. It seemed to refer to a conversation the two of them had been having recently, yet they hadn’t exchanged a word since the day in December 2001 when she jumped out of the helicopter in the Panjshir. The three ‘wants’ in the message aroused and encouraged him. If, instead of the first ‘want to’, she had written ‘wish I could’, he wouldn’t have taken a plane. He counted the words. Only twenty-nine! With twenty-nine words she’d picked him up and hurled him from one side of the Atlantic to the other at five hundred miles an hour. The dispiriting word was the ‘exactly’. Astrid surely meant what she said: an oral test on love. On the evening of this day, because he could make it to Chincoteague by then, he’d be ringing a doorbell and seeing the woman who’d been in his mind all year, and there would not be any evasion. She wouldn’t tolerate him telling her what he wanted simply by the act of taking it. He wouldn’t be able to touch her, or sleep with her, or walk with her, or even be around her, until by spoken word alone he was able to convince her he’d found there really was a state of being which refused to be called anything except love. This when love was a word neither of them should utter until each was sure it coded for the same condition. It was an unreasonable set of terms and surprising so many people signed up. It was like begging an executioner for your life without knowing which language the executioner spoke, and without any way of finding out, until she lifted off the hood and embraced you, or the trap door opened under your feet.

  He unfolded the piece of paper. It was a page torn from one of the notebooks in which he’d written Rogue Eagle Rising in longhand before transferring it to his laptop. The lines were badly broken up by crossings-out and insertions. It was one of the passages he had found most difficult. The task, at that stage of the book, had seemed both clear and straightforward: to commit an act of deliberate misimagining. To take a real, complicated country, in this case, the United States, and to simplify it to a set of caricatures so blatant, and so crude, that few readers would doubt his sincerity. A naïve entertainer, but sincere. The simplified country was an elementary exercise. It was populated by a homogenous mass of deluded, toiling dopes, decent but easily swayed, and a handful of crooks and thugs who’d led them astray and had them in thrall. What the thugs and the dopes had in common was their language and their lack of a sense of humour. The defining quality of the misimagined country was that it did not contain within it the possibility of its own salvation.

  The secretary of defense – don’t give the thugs in the simplified country names, only positions – was a tall, tough old man who’d seen ten presidents come and go and served half of them. It wasn’t the first time he’d did done what he did now, take a pile of black folders out of an attaché case and deal them toss them to the eight other people sitting around the table, like a dealer as if he was dealing the cards for a hand of poker. It wasn’t the first time he’d astonished experienced men and women at the heights of power, whose careers had taught them not to be astonished by anything, with the reach of the Pentagon’s foresight. But he knew that this time on this occasion astonishment would be too mild a word. This would be shock. He sat back in his chair and listened to the sound of turning pages.

  The secretary of state was first to speak. ‘You mean to tell me you actually had a plan ready to attack Germany?’

  Defense chuckled. ‘We’ve got a lot of plans.’ Too human!

  ‘Is there a plan to attack the State Department in there?’ Too much humour! Too democratic!

  Defense placed his fingertips together on the table in front of him. The thick glass and frames of his spectacles hid his eyes. Too real! ‘That is correct,’ he said. ‘This contingency was foreseen by our planners. We can be ready to move in 24 hours.’

  ‘Bottom line?’ asked the president.

  ‘Summarize the likely success of this operation,’ said the president.

  ‘We have the capability to immobilize the tactical and satellite communications of all our Nato allies, apart from the French,’ said Defense. ‘This is a low-casualty, surgical operation. We’ll have our boys out of there return our forces to the Continental US before you can say New World Order before any European politician or general knows what’s hit them what has happened.’

  ‘We can’t afford to lose this one, gentlemen We cannot afford to lose face!’ said the vice president.

  ‘We got the Brits on board?’ asked the president.

  ‘I take it those patsies in Downing Street are playing ball,’ said the president.

  ‘Are the British on our side?’ asked the president.

  ‘Their government has learned that their foreign policy has only one dimension – ours.’

  Kellas heard villainous laughter around the table in the film of the book. He would have to process the karmic consequences of this 110,000-word lie for the rest of his life. He put the paper back in his pocket. The cabin attendant came to offer food and more champagne. Kellas shook his head, which was hurting. Even if all four engines failed now, they would be able to glide to a safe landing in Canada. He could fly to DC, hire a car and drive to Chincoteague from there. His guts hopped with anxiety. He was close.

  It was Astrid who had imprinted him in Afghanistan, yet if proximity, dependency and time were the components of intimacy, Kellas might have married Mohamed. Each day for weeks the interpreter had called for Kellas after breakfast in the compound in Jabal os Saraj. They’d driven around Parvan province and parted in the evening, when Kellas went into the compound for supper and to write, and Mohamed went to the lodgings he rented in town. The residences of the Afghan generals and men of power were scattered and they seldom answered their satellite phones. Kellas and Mohamed visited in the hope they would find them, in the hope they would be treated as guests. Lunches lasted for hours around the platter of mutton-hidden-in-rice. The generals and ministers grinned and guessed the future as if they had no way to affect it. The public lie was not a lie. Around them, rising up over white buildings and autumn tanks sheathed in barkish rust, and tiny skinny Alliance soldiers in half-buttoned new uniforms and blistering new European boots such as they’d never worn, some of them wearing eyeliner and some of them smoking dope, were the bare red mountains. They overwhelmed human action with their size, age and stillness, like a physical manifestation of fate. The white chalkstripe drawn across the always blue sky by the B-52s seemed to belong to that world of fate. There were no humans up there at the tip of the chalk. They could not see you or know you. The stripe of white in the blue and the red peaks belonged to eternity, for which
flesh was as transient and insubstantial as light. Kellas found himself no longer looking up as he roamed with Mohamed on the Alliance’s stubs of roads. He studied the yellow mulberry leaves, and the brass kettles, the steam curling off the glass and the leaves turning in the amber tea, the tensing of fishing rods over the river, the women on the road covering their faces as they passed, and the men taking the ends of their shawls in their mouths when the wind blew. Sometimes he met their eyes. He smelled woodsmoke, cardamom, kerosene, sheep dung and cooking oil. He and Mohamed sat on the veranda of the teahouse in Gulbahar and in the kebab restaurant at the Charikar crossroads, a cavernous empty place whose trade had died with the war, and span out lunches. They sought interviews from refugees and bandits and people smugglers and heroin dealers and doctors. Kellas had brought no music. He became used to the riffs of the different muezzin. Once he’d asked Mohamed to find him musicians and one afternoon sat like an impresario in the garden of the Charikar police station while four bands played for him, one after the other, on lutes and pipes and wooden boxes containing pegs and strings. They took it in turns to curse the Taliban for taking away their wedding business. While they were packing up afterwards a shrieking sound pointed at them from the sky and they bent and hobbled for cover like felons running the gauntlet. When the Taliban rockets exploded in the marketplace half a mile away the police chief took Kellas’s elbow, grinning, and led him into his office to feed him sugared almonds while he listened to casualty reports on his walkie-talkie. Kellas and Mohamed went to the market and saw the chickens walking free with human blood on their feathers and the dark stains on broken melons and the dead wrapped in rags. They marvelled at the redundancy of those who had died. That night Kellas filed a long story about the musicians and the next day his editors asked if he’d heard about a rocket attack on Charikar, which was in the rival papers that morning.

  When the days were a drive up the Panjshir, through the gorge where cars scraped each other passing rather than fall off the edge or yield, past Yunus Qanuni’s residence, refugee camps, the unfinished monument to Massoud, to the high green pastures where the Panjshiris farmed and hid long-range rockets and where their big broken Soviet helicopter gunships sat in the mulberry groves like worn-out old hounds slumped in the shade; these days ended on the road between Gulbahar and Jabal, at dusk. The road looked down thousands of feet over the Shomali plain and the evening sun was attenuated three times, once as it dipped behind the mountains at the rim of the plain, by the atmosphere, and by the dust rising from the roads and fields. The plain was rich with trees and crops, but mainly trees; from up on the road at sunset, it looked like a forest. The crinkled surface made by the tops of the trees seemed to swell in the hazy gold light, and to vanish into the promising yellow distance.

  Mohamed was a man of curves and circles, like a happy pagan idol, with a long, bulbous nose, a round face and a tranquil, comforting belly. He had a thick black beard and eyebrows and moved around the Alliance towns and valleys in a black leather jacket over a brown shalwar kameez. He tried to make his five prayers a day. He often forgot. During Ramadan the communal sense of imminent fast-breaking that built up in the late afternoon, when the food stalls were cooking full pelt, the air was rich with hot fat and the Afghans clenched their jaws to stop themselves drooling, affected Mohamed badly. He would buy bags of doughnuts fresh fried at the roadside and stow them on the back seat, sit in silence, jiggling his foot, muscles twitching in his face, till the appointed moment for the fast ending, when he would reach back with a poor attempt at nonchalance and begin chewing. He had no authority, land or money, just a house in the Salang pass and a house in Kabul he hadn’t seen since the Taliban came, but the local generals and men of power knew him, and seemed to Kellas to respect him. He had his debts; money debts. It wasn’t as if he was owed a great many favours. The smoothness with which he navigated the social terrain of Parvan was a consequence of the way he had moved through a generation of civil war without partaking of the disgrace, shame and dishonour that was as much a parasitic attendant on it as buzzards and scrap metal merchants. Mohamed appeared at first to be so amiable in his slyness, to be so recklessly optimistic about every project, so fallible and jolly in the matters of dollars and eating, that Kellas had mistaken him for a clown. He was not, and he had been required to compromise. He had served the Soviet occupiers as an artillery instructor for Afghan troops, then served Massoud. In the Jabal marketplace his eyes saw all the layers of collaboration and resistance piled one on top of each other in each face, and others saw it in him. Here it was almost impossible to distinguish between constancy to a cause and madness. If you wanted to be virtuous, you had to accept that virtue would have a crooked shape. What Mohamed had done was to change uniforms and to change sides.He had been there while comrades in arms turned homes and schools and mosques from places of life, light and voices to broken piles of dirt with human meat in rags laid out beside them. Perhaps he’d even helped, but not directly. For those who commit atrocities, atrocities are just business, but they do know what they have done, and with men like Mohamed there, who find a rare point between condemning them and joining in, those who commit atrocities are in a dilemma. They want the Mohameds to be implicated. They want the Mohameds to dip their fingers in the blood and smear it on themselves, to spread the blame more thinly over more consciences. But they also want the Mohameds to be clean. Whether they take pride in their wickedness, or still believe there is a route to redemption, they need to carry a stock of virtue among their supplies, as a reference point to how far they have travelled from goodness, and how far back the journey might be. Still, it had been difficult for Mohamed, after all those years moving through war without it entirely corrupting him, to remain a good man without acquiring, if only as a screen, some of the characteristics of a buffoon. He never looked comfortable in the shalwar kameez, like a Scotsman wearing a wedding kilt to the office on Monday. When Mazar-i-Sharif unexpectedly fell to the Alliance in November, and it became clear that the Taliban’s time in Kabul was numbered in days, Mohamed asked for time off to visit a tailor and ordered two new suits for his return to the big city. As soon as they were ready, he began to wear them. They were made of thick brown corduroy; the jacket came in at the waist, cinched tight like a British soldier’s battledress of the 1940s, and had epaulettes, and two rows of huge buttons down the front. It was tight over his belly and his beard spread over the little collar. He looked like an extra-large stuffed toy.

  Mohamed introduced Kellas to the generals, told him in secret which of them were illiterate, explained to him how he could tell the difference between a T-54 and a T-55 tank and sat with him on the roof of a forward outpost one night with the lights of the Taliban pick-ups a mile away, the ripped-fabric sound of American fighters shooting across the sky and the occasional fireball on the horizon, and the shrieking of the jackals from the Shomali groves around them, like a mob of drunken teenagers. Once they drove up to the mouth of the Salang tunnel, at the top of the valley, on the road to Mazar. They passed Mohamed’s house along the way, embedded in an agglomeration of mud buildings behind grey stone dykes, and Mohamed went inside for half an hour and then came out. He didn’t invite Kellas in to meet his wife and children. He had two sons and three daughters. He was the same age as Kellas. Kellas knew enough now not to be surprised or offended. He was disappointed. Mohamed’s Kabul liberation elephant cords had seemed like a vote for modernity, a vote for the party of coming down from the hills and embracing the big post-Taliban city, electricity and yellow taxis and free women. From the roof of the farmhouse on the plain that night they’d seen the grey glow of Kabul’s streetlights, thirty miles to the south. The news of the fall of Mazar had come over the radio and the Alliance trenches had started singing, the soldiers’ voices merging with the shrieking of the jackals. The teeth of Mohamed’s grin had shown in the light from Kellas’s laptop and he had been hearty and happy and Kellas had believed he could ask him for help in a matter concerning Astrid.
Kellas wanted Mohamed to arrange a place where he and Astrid could be alone together, undisturbed for a night, with a roof and something resembling a bed. Before the beginnings of the Taliban collapse the small-town morals of Parvan province had made it seem a hard thing to ask Mohamed for. When the sense of the imminent opening of Kabul gushed into the hearts of the Alliance and the foreign journalists quartered with them, it was as if the way lay open not only to the reunification of Afghanistan but the unblocking of channels that connected Afghanistan with the shining light-bubbles of Islamabad, Tehran, Beijing, and beyond to Paris, New York, London, LA. For a short while Kellas allowed himself to imagine that the true Mohamed was one who had tasted and enjoyed the liberal facet of communist Kabul and Soviet Uzbekistan, where he’d once been stationed; more than the vodka and the miniskirts, that he’d seen a bigger, brighter world in the faces of the girl and boy students talking in the cafés, on street corners with bundles of books under their arms, unveiled and rebellious. When Kellas saw Mohamed strolling away from his Salang village that afternoon with a serene smile, looking sated and paternal, moving slowly towards the car as if Kellas and the driver were working for him, Kellas understood that the mountain road, with its guns and old feuds and sequestered women, was as much his home as the city, and that his awkward observance and shalwar kameez were more a sincere sign of wanting to belong in the village than the camouflage of a liberal yearning to escape it. The corduroy suits were sincere, too. Mohamed wanted to belong in Kabul. But of the two worlds, he was less himself in the metropolis, and he knew it.

  Kellas hesitated to say or do anything which might turn on him the expression that must have passed across Mohamed’s face when he’d been present at the wicked deeds of his companions. Kellas hadn’t seen the expression, but it had to exist, and he didn’t want to witness it directed at him. Of course, Kellas wasn’t going to be responsible for a massacre. But there was a possibility that by asking Mohamed to help in the arrangement of an act of fornication -Kellas hoped, several acts of fornication – by two infidel foreigners in a Muslim country, in a war zone, Kellas would see that expression. If not when he first raised the subject, then when he raised it a second time, or when it was time for it to happen, or after it had happened. The jollier and kinder Mohamed was, the more Kellas dreaded the moment of his seriousness, when he would distance himself from the foreigner. In spite of this, Kellas had to bring it up. It was a commission of a sort. ‘Listen,’ said Astrid one night. She spoke with a gentleness, clarity and directness that made his hide tingle. ‘What you and I need is a place where we can sleep together. You arrange it, and I’ll come.’