End of Manners

by Francesca Marciano

  On the last night, the euphoria in the dining room was palpable. Everyone was busy swapping cell numbers and e-mail addresses, promises to keep in touch and send photos.

  My companions all felt compensated for their efforts. Thanks to the Defenders they had discovered a second nature that lay asleep in the depth of their souls, whose existence had been unknown to them till now. It had taken only a little training to awaken it as if it were an atrophied muscle. During the week they had seen the anxiety and the panic abate and the ability to make rapid, efficient decisions grow. What had terrorized them on Monday didn’t bother them anymore by Saturday.

  I saw them wholly transformed by this new discovery. They had gained strength, character; they were walking away from this rejuvenated. This renewed confidence in themselves didn’t irritate me, but my personal defeat—my cowardice—if anything, felt infintely more real to me.

  Tim handed out the certificates to everyone, the usual piece of paper with your name in calligraphy. He handed me mine without comment (the Defenders had been courteous enough to ignore my failure and never mention it in front of the others) and they wished me—without irony, I believe—good luck in Afghanistan.

  That piece of paper was worthless. It was just a certificate of attendance that some of my companions would have framed and casually hung on a wall of their offices, with the idea of making humorous remarks whenever asked about it. But as far as I was concerned it did certify one thing for sure: that I didn’t possess a second nature.

  There was no dormant one within me, awaiting a Defender to awaken it.

  I was going to take the first train for London at seven in the morning the following day. Before going to bed I went to say good-bye to my instructors. I felt uneasy dragging myself over to their table on my own, but there would have been no other time to say good-bye.

  They were still sitting around, their table strewn with the remains of dinner and empty bottles. Obelix was cleaning his teeth with a toothpick.

  “Hi, I just wanted to thank you all. I’m leaving tomorrow and in the evening I’m catching my flight for Kabul,” I said.

  The Defenders grunted. Keith, who was the closest, shook my hand.

  “Good, well, have a good trip, then. If you can put to practice even just a tenth of what you have learned, then the course will have had a purpose.”

  It was probably just a stock phrase, he had said it mechanically, as if it was the hundredth time he’d uttered it.

  I glanced at Obelix; he was really the one I had meant to say something to. I wanted to find a way to let him know he had meant a lot to me, that I had felt sorry I’d abandoned him.

  “I’m sorry I blew it. I just couldn’t do it,” I said, hoping to meet his eyes.

  Obelix shrugged, still busy dislodging what was stuck in his teeth. His hair looked stringy and bleached, tied in that sad ponytail. His tan was too dark to be natural.

  “It happens,” he mumbled, looking at the ceiling while he maneuvered the toothpick; he coughed and turned away, covering his mouth with his hand.

  “All right, then. Good-bye,” I said.

  I stretched out my hand. I meant to say something like I hope to see you again. It was my last chance to let him know his body had been more than an anatomy specimen to me. He wasn’t just a guinea pig I had experimented with.

  But Obelix didn’t turn around to meet my hand. He kept coughing as if his lungs were about to burst.

  “SO? DID THEY STICK YOUR HEAD IN A BAG?”

  On Monday night Imo was waiting for me at the Emirates check-in wrapped in a full-length black coat cinched at the waist with a wide men’s leather belt. With a pair of worn old boots and an astrakhan cap, she looked all set for the Afghan adventure, at least costume-wise. I assumed that her inspiration lay somewhere between Clint Eastwood and Tolstoy, yet somehow it looked as if she’d always dressed like that.

  “Well…yes,” I stumbled. “They kidnapped you as well?”

  “Of course. It’s their pièce de résistance. Everybody knows that at one point you get hauled out of the van with lots of screaming and they stuff your head inside a burlap sack. Big surprise.”

  She started rummaging in the large bag she had over her shoulder.

  “These guys, the ones who run it, have all retired. I mean, come on. They have to do something to bring home the bacon, right? Oh, please, where did I put it…? I swear it drives me crazy, I can never find anything in here.”

  She was kneeling down emptying the contents of her bag onto the floor. The wallet had come out, a voluminous makeup pouch, a perfumed candle, a pair of perfectly folded cashmere socks, a very soft shawl—probably one of those outlawed shahtooshes—a biography of Catherine the Great, the latest Nano, a jar of La Mer cream.

  “Ah, here it is.” She snatched up her tiny phone and started putting everything back in again. “Remind me later I have to call the paper and get the number of this guy in Kabul where we have to pick up our stuff.”

  “Which stuff?”

  “You know, the flak jackets, the helmets and the satellite phone.” She flashed her eyes and sighed as she zipped up her bag.

  “Oh, good,” I said, reassured. I had been waiting for her to mention the fact that we were going to take that sort of equipment along.

  We’d had an entire lesson on various types of bulletproof vests, we’d looked at different kinds of material—it was called Kevlar, but I had learned there were various kinds of Kevlar with differing capacities to absorb the impact of bullets. By now I felt something of an expert and I couldn’t wait to show off.

  “Did he tell you what kind of vest we’re getting?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t have a clue, but it doesn’t really matter, darling,” said Imo, standing up and taking me by the arm. “We’re not going to wear them anyway. We’ll have them in the back of the car just in case, to keep the insurance and my editor happy. He was adamant that we should keep them handy. But there’s no way we’re going around looking like soldiers.”

  “We’re not going to wear them, then?”

  “Of course not. That’s all we need, to show up in helmets and flak jackets. It’d be like having ‘Western target, please kidnap’ written on our foreheads. Come on, let’s go, they’ll be calling our flight soon. God, look at the size of that suitcase. How much stuff did you bring?”

  “No, it’s just that…I thought…But listen, Imo, about the flak jackets: you know, at the course, the Defenders were saying that one should be—”

  “Forget the course now, Maria. It’s useful but they also tell you a bunch of crap. Believe me, it’s better to go around looking like locals, you know, like normal people. The point is to blend in as much as possible.”

  Imo was evidently privy to information I did not have and that appeared to be at odds with the basic rules of personal safety I had just learned.

  “I see. Then we should wear what? Burqas like the Vaginas of Journalism?” I tried to sound sarcastic, wanting to conceal my disorientation.

  “No, I mean we shouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, that’s all. Regular clothes. Without showing any tits or legs, of course.”

  She eyed my coat.

  “You haven’t got anything less bright than this, have you?”

  “No, this is the warmest thing I’ve—”

  “Hmm.” She gave a slight shake of the head. I could tell she wasn’t crazy about my thick green quilted jacket. The color was hideous and it didn’t suit me. I’d bought it on sale at the last minute, terrified by the polar temperatures in Kabul I’d seen online.

  “Why, what’s wrong with it?”

  “No, it’s just that in this color they’ll see you coming a mile off. Besides, only a Western woman would wear a Day-Glo green down jacket. The idea is to camouflage ourselves with the colors they wear up there, you know what I mean?”

  “Right. Unfortunately I’m not sure I brought any—”

  She grabbed me by the sleeve.

  “It’s okay, don’t worry
, I’ll lend you something. Come on, let’s go buy some silly magazines. It’s an endless flight.”

  Just then her cell rang. She read the name on the display and did a graceful twirl on her toes, curving in on herself.

  “Hello?” Then she roared with laughter and started speaking very fast in Russian.

  She grabbed my arm and moved away in long strides, her expression becoming suddenly serious and attentive, asking one question after another of her interlocutor. She kept a strong hold on my elbow throughout the conversation and directed me towards the newsstand. Still talking and sounding a bit more concerned now, she pointed with her chin towards Vogue, Harpers & Queen and then moved to the next shelf and indicated The New Yorker, which I dutifully picked up along with the other two. She then proceeded to guide me to the cashier, where she made a gesture with her hand, holding her cell between ear and shoulder while fumbling in her bag, meaning that she wanted to pay, now listening to her caller’s monologue and interjecting a series of sparse “Da…Da…Da” as she pulled out her wallet. She paid and mouthed a silent thank-you to the cashier, still on her Russian conversation, then guided me to the gate. When they finally called the flight to Dubai, she was still pacing up and down a distance away, immersed in her phone call. I had to wave my arms wildly to attract her attention, gesturing to her that all the other passengers had boarded and we were the only ones left. She walked over, shut the phone and sighed.

  “Work, work, work. You know what it’s like.”

  On the plane, Imo slept almost the whole time, curled up in her shahtoosh with her Nano buds in her ears, wearing that very soft pair of cashmere socks she carried in her bag.

  I couldn’t close my eyes for one second. I spent most of the flight staring at the monitor that showed our progress. As we advanced, the names of the cities I read on the blue screen acquired an increasingly fabulous sound: first Baden, Budapest, then Tehran, Baku, Tashkent, Samarkand, Dushanbe. Enclosed as we were in the cocoon of the plane, cradled by the hum of the air-conditioning and the muted sounds in the cabin, it was mind-blowing to think that these two realities—the plane with the randomly assorted crowd it contained and the lands below—had actually merged into one. I looked at the sleek Arab businessmen working on their laptops, the noisy Pakistani children running up and down the aisle, the Eastern European stewardesses in their veiled Emirates uniform handing out juice from the trolley, the young Australian couple checking their Lonely Planet. If we’d had to make an emergency landing, would we have found ourselves surrounded by nomad tents? Or would it be the steppes? The desert? Or rather, wasn’t Mongolia the one with the desert and the nomad tents?

  By the light of dawn, the Hindu Kush suddenly opened out beneath the belly of the plane. Glinting in the first rays of the sun that tinged it with pink, this gigantic range of mountains was a herculean apparition that evoked blaring trumpets, a Wagnerian sound track. I wanted to wake Imo and yell to her that we were flying over the Himalayas. I was possessed by an unexpected, mad euphoria (but then, what was that, actually? the Himalayas or the Hindu Kush? weren’t they the same thing? how annoying that I shouldn’t even know that), but she was sleeping so soundly it didn’t even seem like she was breathing; she looked like a bundle of expensive wool forgotten on the seat.

  Beyond the peaks I saw the stony desert begin to spread from the foot of the mountains announcing Afghanistan. The Wagnerian sound track went up a notch. I knew that desert. I had seen it drawn on the maps I had looked at in the previous weeks. As the plane started its descent I realized that the desert’s vastness, the ruggedness of its terrain, were no longer just abstractions, mere colors on a map. In just a few minutes, once the cabin door opened, I was going to fall right into this place called Afghanistan. Just looking at it from above, that immense, corrugated territory ringed by mountains, was enough to tell me that here the game was of immense proportions. Suddenly the whole week spent with the Defenders—the slides, the dummy shots, the pumps squirting blood, the latex intestines and the explosions among pruned hedges and wet oak trees—seemed like a pathetic attempt to put some order into an expanse ruled by titanic forces.

  Once I had reached as far as this no-man’s-land, I felt I was back to square one.

  Hanif had been highly recommended to Imo by a colleague at the BBC and was supposed to be the man who would solve our every problem from the moment we set foot in the country. He’d been described to her as an excellent fixer, someone who knew lots of people in the various ministries, who could easily get permits, get us through checkpoints without a problem, who spoke English well and who was used to working with Westerners. In the early days of the Taliban regime, Hanif had fled to Pakistan and had lived in Peshawar as a refugee; he’d been back in Kabul for only a couple of years and currently worked for the recently revived Afghan TV. In short, Hanif was reputed to be number one as far as efficiency and charisma went, and Imo had bent over backwards to secure his services.

  “He’s the guy who actually reads the six o’clock news. Apparently for the last couple of months he’s also the presenter of a quiz show that goes on air once a week. Everyone will ask for his autograph on the streets. It’ll be like traveling with Madonna,” Imo said as we were beginning our descent.

  Kabul looked like a dusty patch with no color.

  “Why does he need an extra job if he’s a TV star?” I asked.

  “Because we pay him one hundred and eighty dollars a day, which is probably more than half of his monthly salary, that’s why. I don’t think you get it: there’s still no electricity, no roads, in this country.” She looked me in the eye. “Everyone is poor, everyone is struggling. Nobody is a star in Afghanistan, Maria.”

  She pulled out from her diary a printout of an e-mail he had sent her.

  “Good day, Miss Glass, I trust your health is fine and so too is that of your family. I wish your profession may proceed as you desire and I wish you much prosperity. I shall be honored to work at your complete disposal, but I am obliged to warn you, the road to the village you wish to visit is greatly in disorder because of debris from an explosion and presently it is not possible to surpass the crater, but inshallah, perhaps the detritus may be removed before your arrival and we may proceed.”

  The first thing to greet us on Afghan ground in the early-morning light was three big posters plastered on the outside of the airport building. One was a huge portrait of President Hamid Karzai in his astrakhan cap, quoting a phrase in English on peace and democracy. The second one was an even bigger image, of the great Afghan hero Commander General Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, leader of the resistance against the Taliban—a handsome man with slanted eyes and a pakol, the Pashtun woolen hat. Below his face was a sentence explaining how peace and democracy had been his mission but unfortunately he hadn’t lived to see it fulfilled. The third, truly gigantic poster, was an ad for Roshan, the new mobile telephone company, welcoming incoming passengers to the new Afghanistan.

  “Excellent,” said Imo, eyeing the Roshan ad. “They have no electricity yet, but they already want to sell them mobile phones.”

  We looked around, expecting to find a rugged guy with Ray-Bans in a multipocketed jacket, leaning on an SUV. Instead, Hanif—rotund, with a prominent nose, double chin, tired black eyes—looked more like an Eastern version of Inspector Clouseau, with bushy eyebrows and a well-trimmed moustache. Despite the subzero temperature, he wore a navy pin-striped suit—the same one he wore to read the six o’clock news, it later turned out—with a red tie, a light trench coat and black patent-leather shoes. I had spotted him right away at the arrivals, holding a sign that said “Imo Glass.” My heart sank: he looked more like a limousine driver than a fearless hack working in a war zone. He helped us collect our bags and quickly led us outside to the parking lot. There were lots of people moving quickly, in and out of cars, waving and calling to one another. Everyone had guns. While our flight companions were all screeching out of the airport car park into high-tech diesel 4WDs driven by sturdy m
en, Hanif swung open the doors of a dusty old Ford—the car was included in his daily rate—whose exhaust pipe seemed to be dragging on the ground. No Defender worthy of the name would have approved the security standards of this vehicle.

  “Are you sure this will get us to the village?” Imo asked.

  “No problem. In this we have been everywhere. It is perfect. Very safe.”

  “And the crater?”

  “There is still rubble, but I think we can get through. Not a problem.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Imo eyed the exhaust pipe dubiously. Then she turned to me and shrugged.

  “What can I say? He’s probably right. And we sure won’t stand out in this thing.”

  I cast a glance at the drivers of the 4WDs in camouflage jackets and mirrored shades, wishing I could clamber into one of their cars instead. But Imo held a different view.

  “Suicide bombers aren’t going to waste time blowing up two women in a clapped-out Ford. Those guys look way more promising as far as hostage material.”

  Right outside the airport the first thing we came across was an Italian army military vehicle crossing the road. Neapolitan and Sicilian faces, strangely familiar, looking tense and drained in their heavy camouflage. I felt like waving to them, as if they were a good omen. I knew that since 2001 there had been thousands of troops deployed to Afghanistan, from thirty-seven countries, but mainly American and British. ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, had about 32,000 men spread between Kabul and the provinces. American soldiers seemed to be everywhere, manning the roundabouts, waving guns outside buildings protected by high blast walls.