Elsa giggled. “That’ll be Alki-Drop.”
“Who?”
“When you run out of booze, you call him up and he brings more wine.”
“Really? Here?”
“Yep. It’s risky, especially for an Afghan, but he makes a lot of money. I guess he’s raking it in while we’re still here and he still can. It’s not cheap, and it’s pretty disgusting. But at this time of night, who cares?”
I had some of the wine. She was right: it was rotten, especially after the Italian red, which was long gone, but I drank it anyway, listening to Silvia discuss her trip back to Rome with Elsa.
“You know, it was weird,” Silvia said. “I was so desperate to get home, and just be able to walk down the street without feeling in danger, and hang out with my friends – but after a couple of days I was lonely.”
“I know,” said Elsa. “I felt the same in Amsterdam. There wasn’t this big group of people always around. People had their own lives, their jobs. I saw my friends maybe once for coffee or a drink, and that was all. I never thought I’d miss Kabul, but I was happy to be back.”
“It’s the ‘Afghan bug’,” said Orla, leaving a disappointed-looking Henrik on the other side of the table.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“There’s something about Afghanistan that keeps you coming back. Once it bites you, you’re done for. You never get it out of your system. I tell myself I’m doing it out of the good of my heart, but the truth is, I need this job as much as my patients need me. I’d be rubbish doing a nine-to-five in Dublin, I’d die of boredom.”
She stood up, drained her wine and went to drag Henrik off to dance.
“The Afghan bug,” I said to myself. “I like it.”
I’ve been thinking about what Elizabeth said about everyone wanting to make a difference. It’s what Orla was talking about, despite her bravado. It’s what I always hoped for too. Photographing something makes it matter, makes it important. It’s how those who aren’t there understand a war. At least, that’s what I always thought, but now I’m not so sure. People look at my pictures over their cornflakes, but then they flick to the horoscopes or gossip pages and they haven’t understood much more than before. While I’m there taking the photograph, I’m not doing anything to make the situation any better. If I have any power to help, it’s trying to prevent it the next time, and really, will that ever happen? That’s what’s bugging me, Suze, almost as much as the stuff that happened when I was away. I know the power of photographs to move. I also know their lack of power to make any difference at all.
Sixteen
ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY
8th February 1915
I have not written in this diary for some time, not because I have had nothing to report: quite the opposite, in fact, is true.
At last Robert came back on leave, as he promised. I was awfully nervous beforehand, wondering how he would have changed after everything he’d been through and whether he would think that I was any different. When he was back in India, up on the North-West Frontier, I worried terribly, but it was nothing compared to these past few months. Perhaps it’s because all I know of the Frontier is what little Robert has told me, whereas this is all so very close. The Gazette prints its list of casualties twice a week, as well as pictures of the Front; never quite enough to show exactly what is happening, but sufficient to pique one’s imagination. They are horrible photographs: blank, muddy wastelands with scorched trees, deserted villages. The descriptions printed alongside tell equally terrible stories.
But I’m straying from the point, which is Robert and me. While he was here, he invited me to dinner at the Grand Hotel, where he was lodged. I had only been there once before, for afternoon tea to celebrate Mamma’s birthday. Then I looked at it with the eyes of a child; this time I walked through the revolving doors proud to be a fiancée. I will become a proper captain’s wife in India, a memsahib, and everything that entails. The day before, Robert had been in the Gazette’s weekly list of Brighton’s most important visitors. I clipped it out and put it in the little rosewood box on my dressing table, together with the announcement of our engagement and news of Robert’s promotion to captain.
I had dressed with care, feeling anxious. Next to “Lists of Visitors” was “In Society Circles”, with its descriptions of the ladies at the Grand:
Mrs Tarling, whose husband Major Tarling is at the Front, wore a gown of tête de nègre velour with a wrap of natural musquash. Lady Dunn was charmingly dressed in dull-rose pink broché cloth with a kimono of moleskin, ornamented with ropes and tassels of silk of the same hue.
Mamma was wonderfully soothing and said that anything would seem lovely to Robert after the trenches. Hoping that she was right, I chose an evening gown from before the war, pale-blue chiffon over silk, adding the string of pearls that Grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday.
Papa escorted me to the lobby. He and Robert have always liked one another, and they greeted each other with real affection.
“Bring her back safely,” Papa said, and I blushed, but Robert said: “Of course.”
He looked so handsome in his uniform, taller somehow, but it was still the same old Robert underneath. When Papa had gone, he smiled and held out his arm, and we went to the bar for a drink.
Sitting next to the fire and sipping my sherry, I knew that I was exactly where I wanted to be and with exactly the right person. It was stormy, the wind coming straight off the sea and rain battering against the windows, but I felt safe and snug. We said nothing for a while, content just to look at each other, then Robert fumbled in his pocket, bringing out a box, which he handed to me.
Inside was a pair of pearl earrings in a silver setting.
“Robert!” I said. “They’re beautiful!” Taking them out of the box, I put them on and turned my head from side to side so he could see them, feeling cool pearls brush against my cheeks.
Robert was looking at me, an odd expression on his face, and I was immediately anxious again, and asked if they suited me.
“Oh yes,” he said, and his voice was proud. “They suit you perfectly.”
I waited until he had chosen the wine and we had ordered our dishes: consommé to start, then roast beef for him, Dover sole for me.
“I’ve heard,” I began, “that the Indian Corps has had a hard time of it, that the men have suffered a lot.”
He gave me a curious look. I had heard of men getting shot on purpose, I told him, of sticking their hands out above the parapet until they were hit, or getting a friend to do it, just to get away from the Front.
Robert frowned and said that would be a court-martial offence and that if he found out that any of his men had done something like that he would have to report them immediately.
“But I’ve also heard,” I said, “about a thing called izzat. Surely that would prevent them from doing such a thing.”
At that point he guessed something was up. Of course, he said, no decent soldier would indulge in that sort of behaviour, out of concern for izzat or honour, call it what one liked. But what he was interested in was how I suddenly seemed to know so much about the Indian Corps.
I flushed and said that I had taken on a job at the Pavilion.
He put down his knife and fork. “I’m going there tomorrow,” he said. “Some of my men are there.”
I had to confess that I had thought so, and that I’d been even more worried on his behalf after seeing the state that they were in. Feeling rather guilty, I explained how I had decided to wait to tell him because I hadn’t wanted to bore him by going into every detail of my life in my letters.
“I’m never bored by your letters,” he said. “Please, Elizabeth. They’re like – I don’t know – sunshine to me, when they arrive.”
He launched into a story about being at boarding school and living for his mother’s letters, which of course were sporadic because the post from India was never reliable. Later, after he had met me, he’d had to rely on my
letters getting to the North-West Frontier, and now, at the Front, letters were the only thing that reminded him of why he was fighting at all: that there were things and people worth preserving.
I was astonished at the passion in his voice and was instantly filled with regret. I promised to write more often, every day if he liked.
Taking my hand, he asked me to tell him about the Pavilion, and so I began, telling him all the little details I could think of, from how the patients are cared for to how excited the townspeople seem to be about their arrival, to how different it is to work in a military hospital. He sat back and listened, seeming interested in what I had to say, and I continued, glad to have something to tell him.
The mood changed, though, when I explained about not being able to do any proper nursing. I smiled as I said it, expecting him to agree how silly it was. Instead I was astonished when he nodded.
“The authorities are quite right,” he said. “The men might be patients to you, but they’re still men with all the usual rotten desires of an ordinary Tommy.”
I rushed to defend them, saying that I had never felt the least bit threatened; on the contrary, they were always extremely polite, and they even put their hands together to say thank you each time their wounds were dressed.
He snorted. “A quick salaam means nothing. It’s something they do all the time.”
I didn’t want a fight. Putting my hand over his, I said it was very sweet that he was so concerned for my honour, but that I was perfectly safe and had taken the post because I had thought that, when we are married and living in India, it would be helpful for me to understand a little about the people and their customs. I might even try to learn some Hindustani, I added, as an afterthought.
He shook his head and told me I wouldn’t need it: that memsahibs barely come into contact with the people, especially the kind of uneducated men from the countryside who join the army. Our paths, he said, wouldn’t cross, and the only Hindustani I would need would be to instruct the cook.
I wasn’t about to give up.
“I still want to find out about India,” I said, “and make you proud of me. Are you proud of me, Robert?”
He took my hands in his. “Yes, my darling,” he said, “I am.”
I do hope that when he comes to the Pavilion he will see it for what it is, and the men for what they are. He seemed so very cynical about it all, as if being at the Front has made him somehow rather unfeeling. I do not believe that Robert and the authorities are right to doubt the patients so. When this war is over and we are together in India, I will make him see that people are better than he gives them credit for.
Seventeen
I’m slightly envious of Elizabeth and Robert. How certain they were of their future – or, at least, their intentions of one. They knew what they wanted after the war was over: a wedding, moving to India, children, setting up home. I was never any good at that. You’d try to bring things up, to talk about the future, and I’d dodge the conversation and say “After this trip” or “It depends”. It always depended on something else, something outside our own world that you couldn’t argue against, something bigger – a political situation, an uprising, rebellion, war.
I remember the post you’d leave out for me, stacked in a pile on the table in the hall – bank statements, cheques from magazines, subscriptions, the occasional postcard. I dreaded that pile. I could last for weeks, months, in the midst of war, of rockets exploding, of violent mobs, and not be afraid, caught up in what was happening exactly there and then. Nothing else mattered. Real, everyday life seemed a long way away, and that was the way I liked it. Bills, dental appointments, bank statements, relationships – those were the things that scared me, the things that made me want to run away and hide.
When things got bad between us, I remember you screaming that my leading my kind of life depended on you – paying the bills, fixing the boiler, taking out the bin. I never cared about those things: they didn’t seem to matter next to bodies with their hands chopped off or orphans crying out for dead parents – but you were right, someone had to sort them out, and it was always you, not me.
I want you to know that I loved being with you – I really did – especially those nights in our flat when we’d shut out everyone and everything else. It was as if nothing else existed, just us, cooking dinner, drinking wine, listening to the radio, making silly jokes.
I loved the feel of your body against mine too, later on, between the sheets, the softest skin I’ve ever known.
But it was always the same; in the morning I’d switch on the radio and hear what was happening in the rest of the world, and I’d know I had to go back, to follow the story as far as it went, right to the end. When the news came on, something would rise up inside me, a sort of buzzing, an excitement, and I’d know I’d go, and that you’d hate it, and we’d have our usual conversations about keeping safe and keeping in touch and keeping the faith between us – and then I’d leave.
I’m sorry. I know it’s too late, but I am.
I thought of you today when I went for a run along the seafront. I needed to exercise – my trousers are getting tight from all this sitting around. I used to love it when we’d get up early and throw on exercise gear and set off, running down to the canal and along its banks, past the warehouses, the posh flats and the scruffy houseboats with their cheerful pots of flowers and logs stored in baskets on the roof. I always wanted to stop at that barge that sold books, and you’d never let me because we had to keep our heart rates up, keep on going along the towpath, under the bridges, past mothers with buggies, and cyclists trying not to run anyone over, and the odd fisherman casting off for fish that no one would ever want to eat. We’d go all the way to Broadway Market, then come up the steps and stretch, then flop in the café and have coffee and croissants and read the papers. It felt great.
You always laughed at my choice of running music, said my pop classics were cheesy. You were right, but they reminded me of times when everything was much simpler, when I first came to London and hung out in clubs where men took their shirts off and danced on podiums until dawn, the Pet Shop Boys telling us it was a sin, and us loving it all the more for that. We’d drink too much and take whatever we could get our hands on, and none of us would care, because we had no responsibilities and nothing to get up for.
Sometimes I miss those days, Suze. I miss them a lot.
It’s all changed now. Things don’t work unless I pay them some attention. Apart from the tightness in my trousers, my whole body feels weird. I think it’s left over from Kabul. When you’re somewhere like that, always having to be on your guard, you tense up without noticing it, you hold yourself as if you’re about to be attacked. When you come back and start to let go again, it gets you in strange ways.
Another reason to go running, I guess. I thought about Kabul as I ran, as well as you, and about Rashida. One afternoon she took me to the Ka Farushi bazaar, deep in the old city behind the Pul-e Khishti mosque – a strange place: hideous, fascinating, beautiful. Bazir came with us, keeping close. For once there were no honking horns or revving engines, just a medley of birdsong, the alleys too narrow for anything more than a bike. Hundreds of small booths bristled with brightly coloured cages. Some were old style, made of curved wicker, others wire or plastic, bent into the shape of domes or Chinese pagodas. Most of them were empty, the birds themselves stacked in practical square cages: everything from canaries and finches to pigeons, parrots and turkeys, sitting next to more cages full of quivering rabbits. The air was thick with bird dust and the dry smell of guano.
“Who buys them?” I asked.
“It depends,” said Rashida. “Some are for eating, like the chickens, some are for singing, like that one there, the… I don’t know the name – we call them bulbul.”
“It’s a nightingale, I think.”
“And some are for fighting. Like those ones.” She pointed to a cage.
“Partridges.”
“Or those ones, b
odhana.”
“Really? Those tiny ones? I think they’re quail. In the UK, we’d eat them.”
“Here we use them to fight. I’ve never seen them, but my brothers go to watch. They gamble.” She smiled. “Sometimes they win, but usually not.”
The alleys were crowded with customers, merchants and children balancing enormous bags of chicken feathers on their heads.
“They’re taking them to the cushion shops to use as stuffing,” Rashida said.
At the end of the market, dozens of doves were packed into cages, waiting to be released. Men with Kalashnikovs casually hung over their shoulders stood nearby, like on any other Kabul street. I thought of all the ceremonies I’ve been to, when the fighting’s stopped and people are full of hope, and doves are released as a symbol of peace, and all the times that I’ve gone back to those places, the doves long gone, and any hope of peace as well.
“Let’s go,” I said, suddenly feeling sad.
We left the bird market and walked towards the river.
“What was it like to work in Iraq?” Rashida asked, as we picked our way along what passed for a pavement, trying to avoid hawkers, stray dogs and small boys carrying enormous loads.
“How did you know I was there?” I said, surprised.
She smiled. “I’m a journalist, Jo-jan, I looked you up on the internet.”
I realized that I’d underestimated her again.
“You’ve worked in so many places. And your awards! It made me very proud to see them. You must be proud too, no?”
I thought about it, wondering how to explain. I’m a bit embarrassed about them, actually. Of course it’s nice to get a bit of recognition, to know that someone’s looking at your work, someone who knows what they’re doing and who likes what they see, but I find the whole thing about awards ceremonies and cocktail parties a bit, well, I don’t know what the word is – obscene’s maybe too strong, but they’ve always seemed in rather poor taste. You used to tell me to get off my high horse and not be so self-righteous, that it meant people got to see the pictures, which is what I’d wanted – and of course you were right, but there was always a bit of me that felt it was odd.
The Repercussions Page 7
