Such a little boy for seven, a brave little fellow and cheerful to take things home to his family.
Prayers are finished, dinner is coming, Please send on my emails to those who are interested.
Oh, I’ve just realised why it’s so quiet today. It’s their New Year’s Day. I had no idea at all. It was a half-day holiday. I’m not so much jet-, as culture-lagged.
Dare I ask about Stella?
love you,
Bel
In this bedroom, where I sleep alongside empty drawers, my few things taking up a tiny space in packets that Wendy would not believe me capable of, my thoughts, compressed by the four large walls, could be shaped into a cube. Maybe women in purdah have such cubic thoughts. They could be squashed flat, like cardboard boxes on the way to recycling, stacked, like the paintings stored at Lexie’s. Maybe the women remember their childhood in the outside world and are tempted to go in there and pull out a work to remind themselves that there is more to life than a room, four walls.
I have a friend, a noted painter, who did a series of 3D works to show the act of painting as a yearning to break through the surface and out. He strapped and buckled boxes onto boards, he squashed fast-setting plaster through meshes and made his paint so viscous he could push it through screen wire so that he was working behind the picture plane. He is a man who paints against constraint. When I paint, I want my work to emanate, to throw itself outward, like a far-reaching embrace. My friend and I have written to each other for years; we’ve shared books and enthusiasms and thoughts of love and life, our minds are alike: in his, the history of painting parades hand in hand with the constrictions faced by the painter; in mine, the will to express myself through the painted image parades hand in hand with the history of my life.
My cubic bedroom smells of house paint now that the Dubai perfumes have receded. It has a round plug in one wall. When you pull the plug out, there is a hole. Behind the hole is a flue. It is where the fire vent is attached in winter time. Before we arrived, Edris had the winter stoves removed to storage and he painted the rooms freshly as he does every year because they get smoke-stained. This household regimen is completely foreign to me. I’ve never slept in a bedroom with a portable wood-burning fireplace before – I wasn’t even aware that people used such things in houses. In my early years, we had an open fireplace but only in the sitting room; early on, there was a fuel stove in the kitchen. In summer we still sat around the hearth, but it was empty and in our bedroom, the one I shared with Allegra, it was stifling. We didn’t even have a fan to shift the air. At Christmas, we would go to a place that was hotter still, our Aunt Nina’s property, over near the South Australian border.
Odd to be remembering that as I lie here on a bed of like lumpiness…
Up in the high bedstead of maple veneer with its niche for childhood books let into the bedhead, when it was so hot we couldn’t go outside, I used to cuddle up with the Brothers Grimm and read Little Sister let me in, and imagine my big sister stricken outside my door with the plague at her back.
Actually, she’d be down in the bathroom, having a cool bath with all Aunt Nina’s unguents arrayed on the soap tray and the transistor blaring rock’n’roll, but I’d never let that detract from the book’s smell of mildewed forest, its torn leaves opening up on ghoulish spectacles.
How does my child and how does my fawn? I come but once more then forever am gone. What if our mother died? What if she tried to get back to us and could only come once? Our mother! Our mother gone! It was unthinkable.
Fish of the sea, listen to me for my wife won’t let me be. What if you did a good turn and as a result could have whatever you wanted for the rest of your life? Would you be tempted to ask for too much, like the fisherman’s wife?
Louse is scalded, Flea is weeping, Door is creaking, Broom is sweeping, Scales are running, Dunghill burning. And the little tree quivers. And what if dead things were alive? What if there was an invisible door at which things unborn were scraping, trying to invade life?
‘What?’ cried the miller. ‘You ask me to hew off my little girl’s hands?’ What if Dadda had to cut my hands off?
So terrifying were these tales that I could see why my uncle, whose book and bed it was, had got himself killed in the war. I’d imagine him locked up in a tomb with all those tattered urchins, severed heads speaking, lazy girls covered in pitch, truthful Jews murdered, abandoned soldiers, their feet wrapped in rags rescued from wicked witches by little blue lights. I tried to imagine my life as a little blue light, to evaporate myself and become an evanescent speck. The stories were unrelievedly awful. As far as I could work it out, my grandmother Euphrosyne Motte must have been a moral tyrant, bitter and begrudging, to allow her child such a fright-filled infancy. How terrible it must have been to be a child before the war! What baleful duties lay ahead! What bullet-filled breasts! I was glad to be reading them safely tucked up in modernity, even though the owner of the bed had died from burnt-out lungs after a bombing.
The war lay across everything, a grotesque obstruction that sealed the horrors of the past into the Pied Piper’s mountain. My aunt wasn’t inclined to speak of it. Always covered from head to foot in respectable clothes, she was taken up with good works. Letters and photographs informed us, once we were back in Melbourne, that she’d clapped rosemary to her lapel and, in hat, gloves and topcoat, taken our blind grandfather to a front seat near the bugler on ANZAC Day in rural Scunthorpe. We could see her sitting there in the newspaper photograph, forbearing to sniffle. Grief done and dead remembered, it would be on with roast dinners and solemn decorum in the house with the high, but sadly empty bed, its maple veneer bedhead and book niche.
Our aunt was very well behaved, but not our mother, and especially not on ANZAC Day. On ANZAC Days, Stella would fly into unassailable furies. Three dead brothers, one lost lover, as evil as anything the Grimms could dream up between them. Doors would slam, china would fly, we could do nothing right and the hand would slap.
Dadda would take us, until the furies subsided, to the dump to contemplate the modern apocalypse, dignified as it was by indestructibility. ‘Permanence,’ Dadda used to say. ‘This is per-manence.’ And we, warm in our postwar clothing that kept the draughts out and covered over all the rude bits snugly, felt we knew what he meant. Here was our link with the past, the place that was and is always with us, the earthly, ongoing Armageddon. Here was the museum of broken hope and futility. Here lay the words Destruction and Decay, Redundancy and Ruin. A solid sea replete with gulls. The thin smell of smoke and rot.
Allegra and I romping through rubbish labyrinths, forgetful of our mother-turned-into-the-Witch-of-Rage.
The Grimms were right. There were intractable spells. You had to wait them out, anonymous in no-man’s-land but safe in the attire of children watched over by a loving father.
At home there was heart quake, stomach knot, the nurturerturned-fiend. Not even the deep, spontaneous love of children had the power – history with its awesome crush was on us. We supposed we knew why: four young men dead for a modernity that wasn’t worth their sacrifice. What was there for the bereft woman but the jail of life?
That was the refrain.
The ‘jang’ and the ‘sang’.
The war and the stone.
The jangle and the singing-over.
The petrified fist of bitterness and hate.
Here, in Kabul, where ‘jang’ means war and ‘sang’ means stone, space has been made in the debris for life to go on. It is as if children have abandoned one savage game and started over with one that is more benign. Newly planted trees look like little attempts at forest building and the houses of the rich are like plastic palaces put out by Mattel – as if every aspect of life were a plaything of history. A sign near Meetra’s says ‘Bright your Future at English Class’. Another says ‘Gardin Dicoration’ and yet another ‘Beauty Paler’. There is a second-floor shop whose plate-glass window is entirely taken up with diaphanous curtains of purple, pink,
yellow and green, all spangled and tasselled and tinselled like a little girl’s dream of fairyland.
The wounds of war are healing over but the maimed are not disguised; they hobble on, toys from the Monster Factory whose hands shoot out, palm up.
Even the ground under Kabul is Brothers Grimm territory. It seems sour somehow, mean-spirited. Shallow, mineral rich, but humus poor. Pressing down on grass is pressing on wads of springy fibre under it. Not much digestion going on here, nothing rich and dark, no leaf rot, just a hard and ancient cycle demanding long, conservative practice by those who live here. The herders have to move from place to place to feed their flocks; the plants have to take their chances between extremes – flood followed by drought, mud followed by dust, extreme cold followed by extreme heat. Branches have to be cut back to the trunk; water has to be channelled and pooled between the times of thaw and autumn to keep it on the roots. Gardens have to be protected by mud walls to keep them from the fierce winds and dust storms that sometimes spring up here.
Rural people live in compounds. There are no forests to break the blast, not even parkland trees at this altitude; all must lie low and shelter itself. Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf lives in some parts, as does Goldilocks’s bear. The snow leopard and the civet cat live here, the nights of the herders are set about with flashing teeth and lightning strikes. The little human is a dun-coloured creature in the dun-coloured landscape, persisting.
Today we broke our visit to a provincial school for lunch at the home of our driver, I wrote to Mick. His mother is a widow and, as an adjunct to their work in the local school, Meetra’s group has been allowed by the local council – all men of course – to set up a centre in her home for life skills and tailoring.
Women aren’t allowed to have classes where they might be seen by men, they aren’t allowed to congregate in mosques or at markets, but at the widow’s home, they can relax and take off their burqas. There was a tree with doffed burqas looking like deflated personages stuck in the trunk. A blossoming mulberry dominated the garden around which they had draped the innards of cassette tapes – to frighten off the birds, they said. Oddly, there weren’t any birds and it seemed a strange thing to do with tape recordings; perhaps they’re obsolete, on the other hand, the ultra-religious have been known to smash up the accoutrements of easy living in this part of the world. There was certainly no music being played in the yard, which was hung about with real besoms made from the tree clippings, large harvesting baskets, beating sticks and rubber buckets that are ubiquitous in roadside stalls and look to have been made from inverted truck tyres. There was an old well under the mulberry – although I should be careful when I say ‘old’. Mud structures look old even when they are new and this home has been levelled and reconstructed three times because of the war. We’d just come from the school, which is only eight years old but I almost made the mistake of saying how shabby it looked. The floor hadn’t time to cure before the kids invaded and as a consequence, it is full of craters, like the road outside, down which the thaw pours itself into every crevice. There are dun-coloured men with spades wherever you look, digging deeper trenches to divert water from the buildings. Water there is, on the ground, but there is no tap water, hence the well. The government has just put in a new pump for the fields of crops between the school and the widow’s house; it pumps up water from an aquifer. Kabul also relies on aquifer water; the Kabul River is dry and I imagine that if they can’t manage to put in a sewer and separate the good water from the bad, there’ll be some big epidemics by and by.
Our driver is extremely adept. His reflexes are sharp. On the way we flew between rapid and long-lasting halts – bottlenecks of traffic and sometimes checkpoints where armed guards peer in at windows. You approach his mother’s home down a mud-walled laneway and knock at a slab gate; inside are bundles of sticks stored in niches in the wall of the covered entrance. The supply seems pretty scant; it wouldn’t last us a day in the fire down at your house. I suppose they make charcoal from it to run the tandoor oven, which is an insulated pit over glowing charcoal inside a cube on which the cook squats at the rim. The women cook their bread by slapping pats of dough to the sides; they cook everything else there too, threaded on skewers. The method seems to defy gravity to me; I can’t picture how it is that the glow at the bottom of the great clay pot doesn’t just attract everything to it but it doesn’t and the resulting stews and breads are palatable enough.
We ate with the widow and her large family in a small hall, draped in diaphanous curtains like the ones I’ve seen in Kabul, the floor covered with an elaborate carpet. We sat on cushions and they laid a thick oilcloth over the carpet for big bowls of cooked dishes. First we washed in a big silver dish brought around by one of the girls, who poured water from a jug over our hands. Maybe it’s Zamzam water, who knows? There was bread, of course – there’s always lots of bread – and a very nice meal of bolani, which is a pancake kind of thing stuffed with spinach or potato. They like to eat little green sour plums – I can’t imagine why, but they seem to think that it complements salads and stews, a bit like we’d use capers.
The older girls of the house were brightly dressed and beautiful, but while they would look us in the eye and talk freely to us, they would not have their photos taken with their faces uncovered. Two of the girls are instructors in the tailoring school Meetra has sponsored at the house. The school is in a small room along the wall to the side of the house. From the yard you can see portable sewing machines in their wooden covers ranged along a lightly draped window.
We visited the sewing class where the owners of the burqas were sitting and crouching on the floor, taking notes in exercise books. A few bunches of grapes hung drying over their heads in the wooden rafters. My appearance at the low door with a camera caused a flurry of veiling, but I felt that behind the drapes, where they sat with heads down or peeping, there was curiosity and friendship. They might not like to show their faces but they do like glitter and display. They were dressed in a very tactile and highly visible way. Satins and velvets and gauzy wraps, patterned like honeycomb; some went for shyer pastels, but most were bright, rich colours, shining with sequins, and the velvets were patterned and cut. Tassels, fringes, braids and embroidery did the work for hidden faces – that’s allure for you; that’s what the burqa hides.
The widow gave me a big sprig of mulberry blossom and kissed me three times when I was leaving. Only later, when I looked at my pictures, did I see a poignantly doubtful face. It’s a beautiful face, quite haunting, one of three young women sitting in front of Meetra as she held up the garments they were making to examine them. Two of the girls were looking directly up at Meetra, but the third, who was furthest away, had turned her dismayed gaze on me as I pushed the shutter. Now she is imprinted on my mind as if I myself were the camera that had stolen part of her identity. Such a face! I can hear the outraged voices of the politically correct damning me for my insensitivity. The effaced Christian saints of Spain and Malta and the destroyed Buddhas of Bamiyan all tell me that the girl I photographed feels threatened, even damned. But I cherish the photograph. It is part of Meetra’s courage. Otherwise the beautiful but troubled girl has a lifetime of captivity in her husband’s home ahead of her and that lovely face will never be worn freely in the world.
We left the driver with his mother while we visited the school again in the afternoon. Edris took the wheel and we nearly lost the car at a ford. Edris kept trying to reverse out of it. I got a bit fed up and suggested that he stop trying to reverse, put it in neutral and call over several blokes who were sitting in the shade by a mud wall watching. Meetra and I disembarked and approached the lazy sods in the shade. At first they didn’t want to help, but Meetra gave them lip and they jumped up and got the car out in no time while I said under my breath, Allah-u Akbar, and Meetra-u Akbar and words to that effect.
It is a place of craters and jags. The Russians laid waste here, then came the southern and western warlords, along with the norther
n dissenters, trying to blast Massoud to kingdom come. Buildings are razed to a bit of floor and a sawtooth of wall. Holes are blasted through sturdier constructions, framing the landscape in tatters. That’s the view out classroom windows, yet it doesn’t deter the students; this school is fully attended. Eight hundred kids come here; two hundred and fifty of them are girls. The adolescent boys attend classes in the mornings and the little boys and the girls in the afternoons. Where boys and girls learn the same subjects, this system means doubling the burden on teachers – or halving the instruction time. Anyway, coeducation is out, so inefficiency is in.
In answer to this email, Mick sent back news about his breakfast. He was off to buy the paper. He said I should think of myself as a time traveller, like Dr Who, but to my mind, Dr Who is too recent and I still keep thinking of the Brothers Grimm.
We spend our days flat out visiting officials and academics to build bridges and initiate projects.
‘Eli?’
‘Wait,’ Meetra goes. ‘Soon.’
So I try very hard to be patient.
Edris is expanding the group’s activities. I’m not told where he is off to or when – but if he is not at breakfast, I know he has gone somewhere and, in the evening, when I see him back again, I feel relieved. He is a bit of a Sinbad. His travels take him to extraordinary places such as an arcade carved through rock with caves at intervals along its sides – a long-ago centre of trade. Here, spices and textiles and foodstuffs from the Silk Road would have been traded between turbaned cameleers. He’s been to Bamiyan and come back with tales of the blasted Buddhas and the thousand-year civilisation when they were worshipped. In Samargan Province, he was photographed standing under an outcrop shaped by time into a huge tree fungus and he told me that in Paktia he’d been travelling among blond giants with blue eyes who were the very frightening descendants of Alexander the Great. The mountain people of Paktia and Paktika, he says, are descendants of a Jewish tribe who hid their objects of worship in the mountains and continued, secretly, to practise their faith. This story of his grew into all Pashtun people in reality being the Lost Tribe of Israel.
Window Gods Page 31
