by Lavie Tidhar
* * *
It was three days to the elections, it was in the paper that morning, and I stopped on my way to the station for a cup of cortado, easy on the milk, leafed through the paper. It looked like it was going to be a nice day. I was thinking — tomorrow’s Friday already. I caught the cercanías at more or less my usual time. I was going to Atocha, had to change there. It was packed on the train, it always is in rush hour, but I got a seat and was reading the paper, really not paying much attention to anyone around me. I was going to take my wife for dinner that evening, it was our anniversary, and I was looking through the restaurant listings, trying to decide on a good restaurant, what sort of food to order. That was the last thing I remember thinking — what did I want to have for dinner that evening with my wife.
* * *
It picked me up and I went flying through the air. I hit a wall. I remember thinking — this is silly — I remember thinking about red Indians. Like in the Westerns. Red Indians, with war paint over their faces. I…I touched my face but my jaw was gone. I heard an American woman say, ‘Please help, please help my kids,’ and I heard another woman shout, ‘George, can you help me?’ I didn’t know who George was. There was a…there was a hand lying on the floor. Just a hand. It had a ring on its wedding finger. I tried to move then but realised that I couldn’t. Something was holding me down. I could hear people, but it all seemed to come from far away. I…I became very thirsty. I didn’t feel the pain at first, I guess I was in shock, but it crept over me, slowly, and then I was screaming too, but I don’t know if anyone heard me. I remember crying. It became very dark. I don’t know how much time passed. Then there were men calling to me, telling me to hold on, and I could hear them, and I tried to talk back but I don’t know that I could speak, by then. I heard them pulling someone out and she was alive. I remember being really happy then. Then there wasn’t much pain any more, and the voices all faded away, little by little. Then there was no pain at all. I remember thinking that was lucky.
* * *
The pain… the pain was like a boiling sea across my skin. I never knew I had so much skin. I never knew it could hurt so much. I was screaming, begging them to kill me. There were flames eating my flesh, eating me. I couldn’t see. I just kept begging them, begging them to kill me. Then I couldn’t even think, not in words, all there was was pain, a kind of torture I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t make it stop, there was fire, fire everywhere. Then there was a sting, something bit me, and the pain began to go away — I don’t know how to describe it. The pain went away and I heard someone say, ‘The morphine should do it,’ and the world constricted, from hell into a hospital bed, and I wasn’t in pain any more. It was the best feeling in the world, that lack of pain. I just lay there, and I was so relieved. Then I fell asleep. At least, I think I did.
* * *
There was a heart-shaped stain on the back of the seat in front of me. It was hard to breathe. There was a heavy sick smell where people had been puking. I had a window seat. I looked out of the window. I had my fist in my mouth and was biting on it, so hard I drew blood. I heard someone talking on the phone, talking softly. ‘It’s getting bad, dad,’ he said. There was a child, a girl, and she was crying. I tried not to think about the dead stewardess. They’d stubbed her. I looked out of the window. The sky was so blue. New York was beautiful below. I had always liked flying, before. I tried to shut out the screams. I could feel us descending, and without thinking I popped my ears, like I always do. I popped my ears. I don’t know why I did that. I could see the towers out of the window. My left hand was resting on the windowsill. My right was still in my mouth. One of the towers was burning. Someone said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over. The towers came closer, very quickly. Then there was a noise, like a thousand bones, breaking.
PART SIX
ENDGAME
postcards
——
He came to in a quiet street and was violently sick on his shoes. Only when it was done did he straighten up. There was a queasy feeling in his stomach, a turbulence, a rough sea heaving this way and that in a storm. He puked again, almost daintily, missing the tips of his shoes, a puddle of stomach fluid that was almost clear water sipping into the hard, dry ground below. When he straightened up for the second time he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling his throat burn with the ejected acid. He took off his hat and patted it, raising a tiny storm of dust.
Joe, the dusty street, the puddle of steaming sick at his feet. There were low-lying houses on either side, small gardens, a few old-fashioned boxed cars parked haphazardly on the side of the road. Joe examined himself. The shoes were leather, soft and worn and brown, and were very comfortable, as if they had been worn by him for a long time. Trousers, a light shirt already beginning to stain with sweat from the heat. He turned the hat over in his hands. It was the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought in Paris, and which he had thought gone. When he looked up, over the roofs of the houses, he could see the mountains rising in the distance, shrouded in clouds. A whole world seemed to be hidden beyond them, just out of reach. He looked down the dusty road and his hands fell to his sides, and for one moment he expected to find two pistols there, strapped to his belt, but there was nothing there and he felt a disappointment he couldn’t, had he been asked to put it into words, been able to explain.
The voices had quieted around him. The sun was high in the sky, and there were few shadows. He walked down the road and his feet raised tiny dust-devils with each step. The ground was a desert brown and so were the houses. The mountains dominated his view. He felt both attracted and repelled by them, as if they hid within their enormous quietude a multitude of secrets, that he would have liked to know and would have been afraid of had they been revealed. He came to a main road. There was a mosque in the distance, minarets rising into the impossibly-bright sky. He passed by a school where children in white shirts played in a yard, pushing and shouting and laughing. Across the road from the school was a shop and he went inside and silently purchased a packet of cigarettes, discovering money in his pocket. The money was inscribed in a cursive script he didn’t recognise. So were the cigarettes. ‘What is it?’ he asked, in English, pointing at the writing, and the seller gave him a bemused look, reserved for tourists everywhere, and said, ‘Pashto.’
He stepped out into the glare of the sunlight and lit a cigarette.
All at once the enormity of what had happened hit him, and he sagged against the dusty brown wall, his hand resting against the warm material, finding purchase and solidity in its existence. He wasn’t sure what had happened. It all seemed like a bad dream. There was a book he had liked, once, about a girl falling through a hole into a subterranean world that slowly grew more and more into a nightmare. But when the girl could not take it any more, just as she was being attacked by a pack of sentient playing cards, she faced the unreality of her situation and woke up. It had all been just a dream.
Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was — there could be — nothing real about such things.
Cars passed on the road as he stood there. He saw compact Skodas and Ladas and a couple of shining black German Mercedes and a Volvo with diplomatic license plates. There were also large Chevies, Pontiacs, Chevrolets and Cadillacs; a United Nations of cars. Across the road, the children were playing at the school. A sign above the building said, in English, Cyrillic script and in the same romantic, cursive script on the cigarettes, that this was the Mohammed Zahir Shah Primary School, and was opened by Ahmad Shah Khan in the year of his inauguration, nineteen eighty two.
It was hot. A plane passed slowly overhead, jet plumes streaking across the sky, descended gradually over the rooftops. The city had a dry, not unpleasant smell. Joe ground the remains of the cigarette and walked on. He could sense
the end of his journey, somewhere nearby. He was following instincts, the way a migratory bird might follow magnetic north, the world a map below with borders unmarked. He came to a market, by the river. There were heavy, beautifully-wrought rags on display. A wooden shelf held small glass cups, and next to it was a battered samovar, and Joe could smell the tea as it boiled inside. He could glimpse a couple of old men through a doorless entrance, sipping cups of tea, at the same time sucking on hard candy. He could smell cigarettes, and pipes, and as he walked through the stalls, seeing eggplants and tomatoes, grapes and chickpeas, raisins and nuts and bags of white rice, he could also smell the heavy, sweet scent of the opium that lay, here and there, on low tables, in dark pellets and in bars that were stamped, in English and Pashto: Product of the Kingdom of Afghanistan.
Further down there were tables covered in books. He stopped and let his fingers run along the covers; they felt like skin, were warm to the touch. The book titles were in a mélange of languages and alphabets, French and English, Arabic and Dutch, Urdu and German and Pashto and Chinese. He picked one up, leafed through it. A Tourist Guide to the Tora Bora Caves. Books, he thought, were a sort of migratory bird. Here they rested a while, weary of their travels, before taking flight again, before moving, settling in another nest for a time. They seemed to him like a flock that had descended on these tables, pages fluttering like wings, and here they rested in the shade, enjoying the lull, knowing it would soon be time to go on their way again. Near the books was a revolving stand with postcards stacked on it. A couple of tourists, their pale skins in sharp relief to the muted earth colours of the buildings and the people, were browsing the postcards. The man had a camera around his neck. The girl was pretty in a summer dress. He looked at them and felt a sudden, overwhelming stab of jealousy inside him. It seemed to him he had once been like that, too, somehow completed, and he watched them as they chose and paid for three postcards and walked away, hand in hand: as if they were a postcard themselves.
fading
——
There were houses on the hill above the river and he made for them. The sun was very strong. Dust devils chased each other around his feet. In the distance the mountains looked bare and forbidding, with no sign of vegetation. When he was high up on the hill he turned, and looked down on the town below.
Kabul looked sleepy in the sunlight. A haze covered the dust-coloured buildings and reflected off the sluggish moving cars. Far in the distance he could hear snatches of music, conversations, children at play. Another plane came over the mountains, heard before it was seen, a great metal bird changing course, descending slowly, casting sunlight off its wings. There was a lake down below, the snaking river, wide tree-lined avenues and narrow, serpentine alleyways, an old city overlaid with the new. It seemed to have sat there for countless years, basking in the sunlight, patiently waiting in an endless afternoon.
He watched the plane descend. As it did the sound of it grew larger, and in the noise of the engines were voices, calling out. Joe shook his head, no, no, but the voices continued, growing louder in the thrumming of the plane.
He watched, as the voices grew into a frenzy around him, and the city below began to change.
It was a fading. As he watched parts of the city disappeared, were blacked out, others shifted, buildings growing larger, smaller, the city filling with holes that hadn’t been there before.
To the drone of the plane joined others: a storm of engines growing over the city. Their shadows fell on the dry ground below, and from their glistening bellies fell their eggs, dark metal, matt, whistling through the air.
As they hit the buildings they were born: a multitude of chrysalides emerging from their cocoons. They spread wings of bright flames over the city, gorging themselves on brick and flesh and metal. He watched cars being blown apart, doors and seats and passengers torn and thrown up in the air. He saw roofless houses and doorless homes, a headless child with a football still held under one lifeless arm. The planes were dark clouds in the skies above Kabul. They were migratory birds flying in formation, dropping their charges almost haughtily, as if the city below, this insignificant emptying place that lay huddled in on itself below the mountains, was barely worthy of their notice.
He watched the city as a chequered board of light and dark, illumination sweeping over black squares, shifting, changing, leaving behind the burned-out shell of a car, a crater where a house had been, a fallen doll, somewhere in a street a window, standing upright in the dust, its wooden shutters clanging.
He heard gunshots. Rockets whistled as they flew up into the sky. He watched the lighted lines of tracer bullets racing each other, saw a second sun erupt over Kabul as a desert-coloured helicopter erupted into bright and unexpectedly beautiful flame. He heard screaming, and cursing, and a baby wailing endlessly until it was suddenly silenced, as if the needle of a turntable had been abruptly jerked away. He smelled smoke and urine and roasting flesh and acrid chemical smells he couldn’t put a name to. Down below the city faded and re-emerged, engulfed in smoke that cleared, every now and then, to give him glimpses of another world beyond it. He didn’t know how long he stood there, high above the city of Kabul, looking down.
strands
——
He shook his head, trying to clear it. The drone of the lone plane was long gone, and it was quiet. The city below slept in the sun. There was no sound. Wood smoke rose from chimneys, and a single bird swooped overhead, once, and dove for shelter in the shade. Joe turned away.
The path led him through the low-lying houses. The sky was a bright cloudless expanse, its colour the startling blue of a far-away ocean. As he walked he peeled away the layers of himself, like a man worrying at a loose tooth. He felt very alone there on the mountain-side. What held him together was little more than a name, an occupation. There was a man named Joe and he was a detective. What led him on, what kept him bound into the strands of that identity, was a question. Up there he felt the closest to the skies as he had ever been. Up there the spirits of the dead wafted in the clean and hallowed air. Up there was heaven.
The house lay at the end of a road. The mud-coloured bricks had been given a lick of white paint that was already peeling in places. A low wall surrounded the courtyard of the house, and a wrought-iron gate was set into the wall like a dash. No smoke rose from the chimney. A lone bird twittered somewhere nearby, out of sight. Joe tried the gate and it was unlocked. It creaked when he pushed it open.
There was grass growing around the house in clumps, separated by patches of dry ground. A tap on the left dripped water, very slowly, two turrets of untidy mint plants growing underneath. A bicycle was leaning against one wall, its tires empty.
Sleep lay over that house like an enchantment.
There was a veranda, empty. Past the veranda was a door. The door was made of wood, unvarnished. Joe walked towards the house and, with each step, the land seemed to expand and contrast simultaneously around him, as if he had encountered a strange region of space and time, a naked singularity. There was a pain behind his eyes that wasn’t physical. It was as if all the things that made him up, the threads of his being, were coming unravelled.
The question, for the moment, held him bound. When he reached the veranda he stood very still, listening. There was no sound. Even the lone bird had stopped singing. The house was hushed, its silence not echoing but mute, the silence of forgotten things, the quiet of abandoned lives. A teddy-bear with missing eyes was slumped with its back to the wall, its fur a patchwork of dye and mould. Joe knocked on the door. There was no answer.
He pushed the door, and it opened.
time
——
Light fell softly through the window on the worn Afghan rug. The room was cooler than the outside. A whisper of wind breezed through the air. There was a ceiling fan above, unmoving. There was a familiar smell in the room though it didn’t immediately register. There were two large, comfortable-looking armchairs with the stuffing poking out through
holes in the fabric. There was a low coffee table, the wood lacquered, holding an ashtray with three cigarette stubs, and intersecting dark rings where hot glasses had been placed and removed. At the far end a doorway led into a kitchen. The left wall was covered in a tall bookcase. A large desk sat against the right wall, opposite the window. There were books strewn on the desk, half-opened. Also on the desk were envelopes, papers, pens, coins, seashells, elastic bands, a broken stapler, small round stones, two feathers, a pencil sharpener, a closed bottle of ink: a fantastical treasure map with mountains and valleys, chasms and springs. In the middle of the desk, rising like a mountain, was a typewriter. There was a sheet of paper inserted into the machine. The chair had been pushed back from the desk, as if its inhabitant had momentarily departed and would soon return to occupy it.
Joe stood in the middle of the room and took a deep breath. The smell, lingering, sweet, cloying, familiar. He began to touch things. The armchairs, the coffee table, the bookcase, the walls. They felt solid and real, strangely reassuring. He ran his finger against one level of the bookcase and returned with dust. The books looked like they had been sitting there for an age, unmoving. They were lined up in no particular order he could discern. Letters of the alphabet crowded next to each other in a festive jumble. Tall books sat next to short ones. Fat books squatted next to slim, elegant volumes. Where there was not enough room books had been piled on top of other books or shoved sideways into available gaps.
