by James Meek
The declaration hadn’t come out of nowhere. It came at the end of days when Kellas was distracted by thoughts of Astrid. He never dreamed about her. Yet because he thought about her when he was awake, he twisted the interpretation of what dreams he had onto the Astrid path; it affirmed his care and deepened his fascination. In one dream, he was in a small café in a narrow street in an Italian city. He sat inside because the tables outside were covered with a seething mass of sparrows. A waitress came to him, a short, stocky, buxom, dark-haired girl who looked nothing like Astrid, and told him he would have to leave, because of the sparrows. Kellas said that he wasn’t afraid. The woman said: ‘The sparrows are just holding the tables till the eagles arrive.’ Kellas, who believed dreams to be the chaotic by-product of thoughts and impressions, leftovers passing out of the mind like other material surplus to life’s requirements, nonetheless put this down as a dream about Astrid. That he had been waiting for her without knowing it; that he’d patiently sit out the tiresome chatter and squirm of the world in the hope of the arrival of something dangerous but magnificent. In the dream, there were no eagles, and he turned into the waitress, but he ignored that part.
Kellas couldn’t remember when the sight of Astrid began to trigger such a strong reaction in him. He tried to think about chemicals and signals, to hide from himself his joy at the return of a state he’d believed he could no longer reach.
Even before the terrible question of what she felt for him, he tried the nature of his attraction to her. He had time while the war stuttered, and The Citizen, which had flooded south Asia with correspondents, spurned the nuanced inconclusiveness of his despatches in favour of the punchy certainties of unattributable sources in London and Washington. No matter who they sent to Jabal, the editors enjoyed the decisive reports of journalists who wanted to be there more than the uncertainties of the journalist who actually was. For weeks on end in the October and November of 2001 the marketable truth in Afghanistan lacked narrative or familiar reference points. Since Astrid refused to work alongside him, pointing out that he had to file most days, whereas she was only there to write one or two long articles – ‘My drum beats once a quarter,’ she said – there was time for glimpsing, glancing, paths crossing first and last thing, awkward courtesies at the doors to the washrooms, and for Kellas to wonder what he was doing. He tried matching Astrid to the template of old attachments. None fitted, although he couldn’t be sure he was remembering them right. Love belonged to that class of experiences that couldn’t be remembered. Only its symptoms and proximate causes could.
He had found that it was hard to turn adoration into sex, but easy to turn sex into dangerous, short-lived adoration. This discovery was made early in the course of his premature marriage to Fiona. She had been so fascinatingly curly and petite and wide-eyed and had a way of blushing rapidly and deeply whenever she was in the grip of any strong emotion. One night when the two of them were in the company of another journalist in Edinburgh who was blind to any human relations outside the sphere of politics and who could talk for ever in a steady, insistent monotone, Kellas tuned out his words into an insect hum for half an hour while, first, he thought about how much he wanted to touch Fiona, and then looked at her, and knew she was thinking the same thing. Their soft, sweaty young palms and fingers locked and squeezed under the table. For a while, sensing that their heartbeats and desires were in synch, they sat watching the other journalist’s lips forming words, and remained aware of the undulating whine coming from his vocal chords. Then they made their excuses and ran into a taxi, out of the darkness of the pub, one of those places in the gullies of the old town where the smells of damp, old wood and stale alcohol merge and thicken, and into the warm pulses and scented skin of each other’s necks. Kellas had passed the subsequent few days in a state of such bliss, such delight in her endearing shrieks, in the freeness with which Fiona gave her body and the pleasure she seemed to take from him, that he forgot how much his happiness was sharpened by the period of sexual famine preceding it. The long silences that punctuated their lovemaking, when they lay breathing, skin to skin, in each other’s beds, seemed at the time like evidence of telepathic understanding, rather than evidence that they had nothing to say to each other, which is what they turned out to be. Kellas noticed the fanatical neatness of Fiona’s flat. How could he not? All the surfaces shone, nothing old or worn survived, the furniture was arranged at Pythagorean angles. The flat was a declaration of the need for order made at well above conversational level. But he chose to believe that the quick, careless, eager way Fiona undressed, the way that to begin with there was no part of each other’s bodies they couldn’t touch, was likely to transmit itself to a more relaxed attitude to house-cleaning, instead of the other way round, which was what happened. A few months after they were married, Fiona began asking him to wear a second condom on top of the first.
Kellas hadn’t made that mistake again. He’d made different mistakes. He marvelled at the variety of his errors, which came disguised as success. Katerina in Prague had been so beautiful that it had seemed to compensate for her love of dancing to German techno music in the clubs four nights a week, and for her reluctance to take a paid job, and for the hours she spent sitting hunched on a hard chair on the balcony in a shawl, one knee up, smoking, watching the steeples and biting her nails. But it hadn’t compensated. She’d boarded the train to Beauty at thirteen and when a few years later she arrived, instead of getting off, she decided to stay on and see if there were more, better stops on that line. By the time Kellas met her, when she was twenty-six, she believed she was old. She confessed it to Kellas like a secret, weeping on his shoulder.
There was an area of ground in front of the Jabal house, inside the walls of the compound and partly overlooked by trees, where the Afghans had tried to make a lawn. The grass hadn’t taken and it grew in patches and single tough blades out of the dirt. In the mornings an ex-special forces reporter from Australia would do press-ups there, and talk to his wife in loud, fluent Thai on his satellitephone, while correspondents wearing flip-flops walked across the grass to the outhouse in the far corner, trailing toilet paper, like disaffected campers. In the evenings, photographers would set up their transmitters on the failed lawn, spaced out and all aligned by compass towards the same artificial star in space above the Indian Ocean. They sat there with their backs to the house, silhouetted against the glow of their screens, watching the byte-count bars track from left to right, absorbed, cultic, elsewhere. One night Kellas was on the near-grass with Mark and Rafael from The New York Times. Rafael’s interpreter was dialling the satellite phone number of one of the generals in the north over and over again, to break through the busy signal. Rafael was in a hurry. He was one of those who believed the war was faltering, like a slow line of goods. It needed promotion. Mark, who usually worked at this time – at all times – was waiting for his editors in California to wake up. He’d brought his red plastic fly swatter out with him. His only recreation was to sit upright in his sleeping bag in the early morning and kill as many flies as were within reach.
‘Where do the flies go at night?’ he asked. ‘Do they go home to their fly-homes with their fly-wives and their 2.2 million fly-children?’
Kellas was watching Astrid, who he could see in the dimness at the far edge of the lawn, where the light from the house was faint. She was talking to the reporter from The Guardian, who lodged in another street. Astrid was half-smiling as she looked down, her hand stopped in the middle of a gesture while she thought about what she wanted to say.
‘Why’d you get your translator to ask me about my arm?’ asked Mark.
‘I didn’t,’ said Kellas.
‘I don’t mind. I just don’t understand why you couldn’t ask me yourself.’
‘He wanted to know. He was curious.’
‘You were too embarrassed to ask me yourself so you got your translator to do it.’
‘I didn’t!’ Kellas laughed. They wouldn’t see him go red in the
dark.
‘My guys think you had it cut off for stealing,’ said Rafael. ‘Did you get through?’ His interpreter shook his head. ‘Keep trying.’
‘I’ve been dialling the same number for two hours. My finger is hurting.’
‘Keep trying. I pay you to get sore fingers.’
‘In Somalia,’ said Mark, ‘they said “He makes love to women using his stump.”’
‘So what happened?’ asked Rafael.
‘I was born with it.’
‘No shit. Did you get through?’ The interpreter began yelling into the phone. ‘Ask if he can get the American special forces guys on the phone. Ask if I can speak to an American!’
‘I suppose you’ll put me in some cheap British novel,’ said Mark to Kellas.
‘They’re not that cheap.’
‘I’ll sue, you know.’ Mark was speaking to the side of Kellas’s head. Rafael and his interpreter were shouting over each other in English and Dari. Mark said: ‘She’s like a cat.’
‘Who?’ said Kellas.
‘Astrid. The cat who walks by herself. She never travels with anyone.’
‘She’s trying to get an interview with Massoud’s widow.’
‘You never travel with anyone either,’ said Mark.
‘Mohamed. Drivers. People we pick up on the road.’
‘Anyone not Afghan.’
Kellas asked him if he knew anything about Astrid. Mark said he’d read a couple of her articles, one about Bosnia and one about Kosovo. They’d been good, unusually good, memorable. She’d got deep inside a Serb family getting ready to leave Pristina. They’d made space for her in the truck that took them to Serbia, with their family tombstones stacked in the back and their ancestors’ remains bagged up in builder’s sacks. Mark mentioned the name of a famous photographer she’d been going out with in those days.
‘I say “going out”. They slept in the same hotel bed, I heard, the same cowshed or cave or whatever, when the things they wanted to do happened to take them to the same area. They were living in different cities at the time, one in Rome and one in Zagreb or Budapest, I don’t remember. It wasn’t like they ever really dated. They relied on coincidence to get together. But coincidence can be pretty reliable in this line of work, can’t it? There are only so many places giving off the smell of that sort of death at any one time.’
‘It doesn’t say much about what she’s like.’
‘You think? I heard “wild”.’
‘What the fuck’s “wild” supposed to mean?’
‘Steady. That’s all I remember, and I don’t know who said it. Wild, I don’t know. Party animal? Wild in bed? Feral, raised by wolves?’
Kellas’s eyes were red with early starts and the dust of the day. He pressed them tight shut and opened them. No moisture, like the tenth squeeze of a lemon. Mark was too kind a man to be anything but married and content and he’d forgotten how immense the gap was between two people who hadn’t decided to be together. He’d forgotten what a journey that was to make. How easy it was now to travel thousands of miles to be within touching distance of somebody, and how hard to travel those last few inches from their head to their heart. In the early Afghan mornings Mark would be on the phone to his desk in San Diego, where it was still the evening of the previous day. He’d be trying to sell his article to the front page, and he’d be selling Sheryl’s pictures. ‘Art,’ he always called them. ‘The art’s great.’ The art was always great. Sheryl wasn’t his wife, she was a colleague, but it must have made her feel good to overhear it. It was a kind thing. Mark was boosting his own chance of a front-page shot, and Sheryl was talented, but it was still kind, the way Kellas supposed a good married couple would be, supporting.
‘Would you go for Astrid?’ Kellas asked Mark.
‘No.’
‘Why not? Don’t you think she’s good-looking?’
‘Yeah, I guess she is.’
‘She’s clever.’
‘Yup, she’s smart. Good at what she does.’
‘So why wouldn’t you go for her?’
‘Why do you care?’
‘I don’t. Just tell me.’
‘I told you at the start. She’s a cat. She hunts by herself. She always goes after what she wants and you have to follow her or let her go and neither is what I’d like to be doing all the time.’
‘What if what she wants is you?’
‘I don’t want to be hunted.’
‘You don’t know her.’
‘I never pretended to. I’m just telling you what I see.’
Kellas looked over at Astrid again. He felt the gut-bite of jealousy. Was Mark so virtuous, or was it that he was too busy to cheat? The man from The Guardian was getting up and leaving Astrid. He was a small pale man with delicate hands, gingerish hair, round glasses and a slightly lopsided smile. On his way across the lawn his foot caught in one of the photographer’s leads and he stumbled, shook the cable off, and walked on. Kellas wondered if Astrid was carrying the pistol. He wondered how many other people in the compound knew she was armed. It would hurt her if it came out. Still, knowing the gun was around was something they shared.
He got up and went over to where she was sitting. She’d opened her laptop and was typing. She looked up and moved her fringe to one side.
‘Hi,’ she said. She smiled.
‘You look busy.’
‘It’s OK. The guy from The Guardian was trying to get some contacts for Massoud’s widow off me. Sit down. We never get time to catch up, huh?’
Kellas sat cross-legged on the grass opposite her and Astrid closed her laptop and laid it to one side. She clasped her hands in front of her and looked at him. Kellas had become so convinced of the disorder and carelessness of the universe that the possibility of harmony staggered him. He trembled. His desire was accompanied by a fear that she would lose interest in him quickly. It was the old, just, women’s suspicion about the wants of men, and now he faced it from Astrid. Her care for him had become precious and he did not want to lose it afterwards. His novelty could go stale in a night. One night! All this time he watched her, her eyes on him, and saw the freckles on the bridge of her nose and a single strand of one eyebrow making what little gold was to be gleaned in the dimness. Once, in London, he’d spent evening after evening listening, with real interest and partial concentration, to a woman whose account of her life was like Borges’s fabulous 1:1 map of a country. Every story she told lasted at least as long as the events she described, often longer. One night they did go to bed together and afterwards saw each other for exactly enough time for Kellas to understand how hurt she was that he no longer wanted to listen to her. What made it worse was that she tried to hide it. She was tough, laughing, making out that she was as bent on gratification as him. That this was what grown-up men and women did. She didn’t think it, and she was hurt. Kellas could see and he promised himself he would never do it again. Then he did it again.
He wanted Astrid, and some other state inside him was trying to stop it, hold it back, would rather be like the satellite to Astrid’s Indian Ocean world, eternally descending towards her at exactly the same speed as she was moving away, so they would always be face to face, but never collide, never merge, never know.
‘I don’t want to break the silence,’ said Kellas, ‘but I can’t deal with it.’
‘I’m just checking you out,’ said Astrid.
Kellas asked her where she’d gone that day.
‘I watched,’ said Astrid, starting slowly, then picking up speed, ‘I watched a bride being dressed for her wedding. One of Massoud’s distant relatives. She was sixteen. She stood in the middle of the carpet and she didn’t know which part of her she should cover with her hands. Her nipples were the colour of rainclouds. The women from her family made her step into a tub and they washed her with water from jugs they brought from a room next door. They shaved her all over with an old cut-throat razor, and washed her again. After that they dried her, and sprinkled her body with cologne, an
d gave her a pair of silk bloomers to put on, and a white petticoat without sleeves. They put her in a red dress, a bright red, like poppy petals.’ Astrid stopped, smiled at Kellas, and went on. ‘It was tight over her arms and her waist and it had gold coins sewn to it that clinked together when she moved. I asked her if she’d met her husband and she shook her head. I asked her if she wanted to get married and she nodded and started to cry and turned around and I could see her shoulders shaking. She shook her arms a little to make the coins clink to hide the sound of her crying, but all the coins on her back were shaking anyway…Are you jealous of me, Adam, seeing that today?’
‘No.’
‘You’re lying! Did it turn you on?’
‘Yes.’
Astrid gave Kellas a light punch on the shoulder. ‘She was only sixteen!’
‘You titillated me! That’s entrapment.’
‘If that’s titillation for you, does that make you easy to please, or hard to please?’
‘I didn’t ask to be pleased.’
Astrid stopped smiling and widened her eyes. ‘That’s not you. Being tough and hardboiled.’
‘I’m tougher than you think.’
