As Beautiful As We Were: Re-post ... Seven Years Later

I first posted a version of this in 2007, while on our honeymoon. Now, on our seventh wedding anniversary, it's still true. Sometimes, even with sleepless, child-raising nights, and the constant wear and tear of Life, we're still that beautiful. So, since seven is a heavenly number, I'll leak this out again. For you, Esti, because you're still wonderful enough to make me cry.

***

‘Do you think you’ll cry?’ Corrie asks me. I am leaving for Pakistan in two days. To get married.

Corrie is my good friend. We are both – at the moment – still single, and we’ve often talked about our various relationships and the ways our hearts have been tried and broken and educated in love – or what we thought was love. Maybe sometimes it was. This time, for me, it is. I feel a bit guilty for being the one to go into that mystical golden city, Marriage, while she must stay, waiting another year at the gate. God knows I have watched others do the same, leaving me behind to feel in my heart a kind of obligatory happiness mixed with lonely despair. Anyway, this kind of thing is exhausting to keep talking about, so we switch to my upcoming wedding and she asks her question. Will I cry when Celestina comes to me as a bride?

I think for a minute, take a sip of my latte, now slightly cooled by the late spring wind. A few big drops fall from the apocalyptic sky but the wind is too furious and before they can really rain on us the blackened clouds are blasted along like smoke. The evening sun lances sudden, long spears of pure light through the boiling sky to prick the earth golden where they touch.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t really cry.’ We walk home, talking of other things. When the day comes, I fly to Pakistan, where my words will be proved wrong.

***

I have departed the country many times, usually to the sight of my dad’s face as his heart fills with words he wants to say and my mom’s eyes tearing up. This is the first time they have ever come with me.

There is a moment of confusion at the check-in counter because I have told them they can have two carry-on bags and now the British Airways people are telling them in bland, repetitious voices that they can only have one. There is some frantic on-the-floor shuffling of parcels and shifting of things into my aunt’s and uncle’s cases under the expressionless stare of the BA staff until the baggage composition computes properly to their programmed minds and they let us through.

We collect, the lot of us, my aunt and uncle, my parents, me and my brother Kevin and his girlfriend, Holly, around the Bill Reid sculpture in the departures lobby at Vancouver international. Kevin and Holly are not coming with us, they are only here to see us off. I like the way my brother does things like that. The first time I left for Afghanistan he called me on my way to the airport and wished me well and said he was proud of me. There are some things that do make me cry, and my brother saying things like that is one of them. My younger brother, Jeremy, and Krista and their kids aren’t coming either. Pakistan is a difficult place for people to get away to, even for a wedding. So this is all of my party, nearly. We will be joined by my cousin Deb and her boyfriend Danny in London at Heathrow and finally my friend Mark will join us in Islamabad a day after we arrive there. This is it, all I’m bringing with me of my world as I go to make my vows and change my life forever.

This is not how I imagined it. My mind had idly daydreamed – assumed, really - a party in mid-autumn with my well-loved friends all around. I imagined marrying in my circle, and the sun going down in russet flame and the dry leaves shivering and all of us laughing until dawn, the wine bottles slowly emptying, the fire burning low, the voices fading into that companionable silence so rarely achieved.

Throughout my life, I have had two conflicting daydreams. One has been like an ad for Abercrombie and Fitch, friends sitting around the fire or lying in the grass, the background in soft focus, all of us wearing our well-designed sweaters and our comfortably crumpled jeans. A guitar, an old picnic basket, wine, wind, beauty, laughter. A perfect moment, captured forever. I used to say my life’s pursuit was the perfect sweater, which was my slightly loopy way of saying I wanted that moment where the perfect sweater fit perfectly. I’ve since found the sweater, but the moment did not come with it, and that is exactly the problem with that daydream: It is smoke on the wind, the stuff of ad campaigns, which tune into our longings and do nothing to meet them, only promise, promise, promise until we’ve forgotten what we truly long for. And from this dubious source came the picture of my wedding as I thought it would be. There may be nothing wrong with this. More probably, it is the siren’s song that lures people to their deaths. A life spent in the pursuit of a perfect moment is worthless in the end, leading only to a torpid soul, the emptiness behind the paper-thin world of Abercrombie and Fitch.

But I had another daydream, one that filled my soul to bursting, one so wild that I am only now beginning to believe it might be true. It came from a lot of places, but mostly the best kind of books. I could feel it when Jess Aarons crosses the bridge to Terebithia after Leslie dies, when Jill Pole fits arrow to string, preparing to die in The Last Battle, when Gandalf rides over the ridge to the aid of his friends in Helm’s Deep, when Dumbledore tells Harry that his mother’s love was more powerful than any magic. It is more of a feeling than a daydream, really, a kind of hugeness inside, sad and beautiful, glory catching in your throat. Tolkien was on its trail when he described the eucatastrophe – the sudden turn for the Good. C.S. Lewis called it Joy and said it made you feel like dancing – or fighting. I have a friend who calls it Resurrection Power, and having tasted it once, he is forever haunted by it. I have called it different things, most often ‘The Big Beautiful Thing’, and sometimes, ‘Heaven’. For awhile I thought it might have been getting married, but I knew even before I was married myself that it was not. Maybe the moment of falling in love is like it so much, we’ve let ourselves believe that marriage is heaven. As St. Paul said, there is a mystery in marriage that is like heaven, and St. John describes heaven as though it is a wedding, with the bride coming in white. Maybe in the end it is like that, but for now I know that marriage is more like sharpening your sword on a rock than it is like seeing shooting stars every night. Love, if it is worth anything, will make you bleed. Love fights.

I guess it was this daydream, this hugeness of feeling that drove me out of my door, clear off to Afghanistan four years ago. There were other things, of course, more immediate symptoms of longing – relationships that hadn’t worked, friends that had scattered and moved along, my own failure to become a man in any way I could believe in. I kept telling myself that I would come back, that after I went off and did whatever it was that I had to do, I’d come back and by then the campfire and that perfect autumn day would be waiting, and all of us with our perfect jeans and our perfect sweaters … and the girl I’d always thought I’d marry (whoever she was) would be there beside me, laughing prettily over her glass of merlot. But always, underneath, the other daydream gave this picture the lie. My favourite words from the Old Testament, spoken by Daniel’s three friends to the raging king of Babylon: ‘The God we believe in is able to save us from your fire, O King, but we want you to know, that even if he does not, we will not bow to your statue’ – These words spoke of something I wanted, something that made the first daydream seem like a cheap trinket, the thing of a moment, worth nothing. My friend who is haunted by the Resurrection wants sometimes to be able to call fire from heaven; I just want to be able to stand up and say, ‘but even if he does not …’ to the bullies of the world. I am nowhere near having done it. But in my stumbling way I did find a stone to sharpen my sword on. I met her in Pakistan and there wasn’t a campfire or a perfect sweater in sight.

I’m not going to tell you everything. I’m only going to tell you about one moment. In Pakistan there is a ceremony called the Mehndi, usually held the night before the wedding day. Historically, the groom was not allowed to a girl’s Mehndi – it was her preparation to meet her husband. She was washed and perfumed and her hair was oiled and combed. She was arrayed in all her beauty. Then she was brought to her husband, in the style of a princess come to meet a king. These days, usually, the groom is present at the Mehndi, but his bride is still brought to him in the same way. I came in first, with a red and gold shawl held like a canopy over my head as I walked. Girls in bright dresses threw flower petals. I was led to stage and a seat and garlanded with flowers.

Then she came.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to describe it properly. She came walking, under the same red and gold shawl, held up by her attendants, sisters and cousins and friends with rivers of shining black hair and dressed in the brightest of colours, violet and scarlet and saffron and emerald, with gold jangling on their wrists. They adorned her, but she walked in the middle of them all, set apart, dressed in bright pink and pistachio green, shot through with silver. The light fell on her and time seemed to hold its breath. The flower petals hung in the air and all besides her faded, even her maidens were like dimming fairy shapes on the edges of her glory. I know this is the kind of thing you are supposed to say. I know this is what they try to make you believe in the soft-focus moments of Hollywood romances and Hallmark cards. But I am telling you that it is also real, sometimes. It was spring in Narnia, and the white tree of Gondor flowering, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

They say that marriage is a sacrament, a place where God touches the earth and a little of heaven slips through. Maybe there are more of these places than we know, maybe we kill them with disbelief. But I know for sure that when Celestina came to me like a princess in a story that it was in one of those places where the veil between what is now and what is to come was lifted a little and I saw and I believed. The next day I made my vow with my mouth, but that moment was my heart’s vow, and while I made it, I cried.

While I write this we are in England, in a borrowed apartment overlooking a diamond-studded sea. She is standing in a white dress on the veranda with her face upturned to the sun and the wind moving lovingly around her. We both know that this is both truth and illusion, because I know, I know. This is what they all want: a fairytale. Love and rockets, a wedding, a happily-ever-after. But I know what it was. The veil may have lifted for a second, I may have caught a glimpse of the Big Beautiful Thing, but it was only a second, and we live on this side of the veil, still, seeing through a glass, darkly, and love must still fight while it draws breath. Each day I get up and bow my head before the one with whom I have joined and allow the friction of our rubbing souls to scrape mine clean as a beach stone, smoothed by the waves and the tumble. One day we may actually be as beautiful as we were that day – and stay that way. So in that hope, we live.

Magic in the Mixture

‘You shouldn’t say things like that over the phone,’ she says to me. ‘They might be listening, it’s real easy for them to listen.’ I’ve just been giving details of my travel plans to a colleague over the phone. ‘They’ refers to the nefarious agents of chaos and mayhem – sometimes the Taliban, sometimes others – the people who listen. The Bad Guys.

‘Ok,’ I say. ‘Good tip.’ I hang up. Then it strikes me that our entire security protocol involves calling into a central dispatch and updating our movements. By phone. ‘Hm,’ I say to myself. I mention this to the Programme Director later and he says sometimes people can overestimate the amount of time ‘they’ spend listening to our boring conversations, but still … We decide to make up more code words for places. Just in case.

I’m leaving today. Celestina left last week for Pakistan and I’m going to join her now for a week’s visit with her family. In our whole time here we’ve never seen The Bad Guys once. Actually, from the news it seems that Pakistan is more infested with them at the moment than Afghanistan. Esti tells me on the phone that the mood is subdued in Islamabad. Not many foreigners are around in the main shopping areas; people are more careful, more quiet. We’ll be staying with her family, out of the way of busy areas, so I’m not particularly worried about anything, but it’s sad to hear that the city where I lived for a year, where I got married and used to walk the streets has become cowed.

***

Since Easter, when we were in Kabul, we’ve been busy on a mad dash to the finish of our time trying to get everything done. We had to completely set up a house and office from scratch and write reports and project proposals and start up a new project – all in about one month. Esti took the set-up part, and actually had the better time, I think, because she got to go out to the markets to shop for furniture and household goods. I did all the writing and organising to get projects finished and others started. Then we went home from the office and stayed up late cleaning and organising and assembling furniture. For the last two weeks, we never went to bed before midnight and never got up later than 6 am. Esti left a few days before me to go down to Kabul for her Pakistan flight and I stayed up even later. I was still calling instructions over my shoulder to the staff as I got on the little plane that took me down to Kabul last week. But we got it done.

***

Meanwhile, this land goes on in its ancient way. Last year drought, this year it won’t stop raining. Last year drought, this year floods. In villages on the very edge of the desert, the old men gather around when we come and shake their heads at their fortune and listen with guarded hope to our plans to help them. People have come before, come and gone again, while they remain. The wind still blows and it brings rain or it dries up the land. On good years there is enough to eat.

Women peek from dark doors, you catch the flash of their bright shawls like the plumage of some endangered bird seen far off in a forest. Children gather and scurry, gather and scurry, running barefoot and impossibly grubby along the rims of canals, grinning and shoving each other as they gather around the windows of our vehicles.

Once we visit some villages to plan water reservoir construction and Steve the Engineer brings candy, which we fling out the windows as we drive off, inciting little riots and toothy smiles as the kids chase our car grabbing for sweets. ‘Any other payload we can dump?’ he asks, looking around for oranges and whatever is left from lunch. The oranges go out the window too. Sometimes this is a joyful occupation. We both chuckle, watching the kids race and laugh in the wake of the truck. Later on another visit I make friends with a little boy with his arm in a sling. ‘Che shud?’ I ask him (what happened). He grins and points up at the tree. ‘Tuut!’ he says. Mulberries. He was picking them and he fell out. I look up and see a girl a little bit older than the boy up in the tree, her blue dress bright in the leafy shadows. She looks down at me fiercely, then climbs higher. ‘Amshira?’ I ask the boy. He shows his gap-tooth smile and bobbles his head in the affirmative. I point at his arm and then up to his sister in the tree, resorting to mime and inference now that my Dari words are exhausted. We both laugh. But she is sure-footed as a goat and disappears into the high branches.

When we drive out the village leader escorts us to the borders of his land on an ancient Russian motorbike with Cyrillic lettering on the gas tank. The village dogs bark and chase him, snapping at the tires, their huge bodies like those of lions and their heads sleek as a harbour seal’s, ears cropped at birth lest they are gripped in the fighting ring. At the edge of the village, he stops on top of the canal bank and stands waving in silhouette against the sun, the line of bent silk trees beside him like aging bodyguards from a time when there was water and the silk still brought food to the table. We drive home, with the fields on our left painted with new grass and red flowers and the desert on our right as bright as the flash of an atomic bomb.

***

My last night in Kabul a few of us go out to a French restaurant called L’Atmosphere. The day has been warm and the season for table in the garden has started. Oil lamps and cigarette cherries light the faces of the foreigners huddled around their laughter and shared sense of lucky fortune on the edge of life. Under the table you can pick out the desert-coloured boots of the soldiers and above the table they laugh loud, louder if there are women nearby. People wear fashionable articles of clothing borrowed from the local culture – a scarf, a long embroidered shirt or jacket – mixed with designer jeans, Italian shoes, and combat fatigues. It‘s like a movie, and somewhere inside we all know this. At our table we are casting ourselves, as if. Winona Ryder, Charlize Theron, Keifer Sutherland, Eddie Murphy. They can’t decide for me at first, but end up with Viggio Mortensen, which of course secretly pleases me. I look around at the groups of other adventurers and I wonder at their thoughts, what they dream of, what they are here for. Everyone glows attractively by firelight and my table falls silent as the end of the evening comes upon us. I sip the last of my wine. Part of me wants to stay here forever, but we all know better, or we should. We finish our drinks. Time to go.

***

I go one more time to the Chapel at the Italian Embassy. This time it’s a weekday, so there are only three Missionaries of Charity, the priest, and me. After mass I sit awhile alone in the darkened room with the Presence. Above the altar there is a cross-shaped painting of Christ rising over a map of Afghanistan and below him St. Peter’s in Rome is painted with its curving arms embracing a city of Afghan mud houses. It says something is Latin, too, but I can’t figure it out. Pax and Domine are part of it. Peace and the LORD.

The car is late to pick me up so I take my time walking slowly down the treed walk to the gate, where the be-stubbled French Resistance guys still stand guard and one of them chats expressively to an attractive woman in very well cut clothes. She is leaving, too, and I hold the door for her. She greets me in Italian and I say ‘You’re welcome.’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I thought you were Italian. You’re not.’ I smile, and she says, ‘Well … Ciao!’ The guards lift the gate for her and she ducks under and slips into the shiny blacked out metal and glass protection of her diplomatic escort SUV. The gears growl, the vehicle surges forward, and she is gone. I stand in the shadow of the gate and watch men pass by on their old-fashioned bicycles, carrying bread home for supper, the ends of their scarves held in their teeth. They ride on, disappearing into the dusk. There is the squeak of a water pump across the street and a little girl bounces up and down on the handle in a skipping rhythm, balancing perfectly on a jerry can to give the height she needs for leverage. She ignores the high cement wall of the American Embassy, and the eye of the armoured soldier in the guard tower, covering every angle in his scan.

There is some magic in the mixture of all of these things, in the heart of this place, the way it falls and rises, the way the light strikes it. I used to think I knew it, that it could be caught and told, but now it feels both alien and familiar, and the meaning of it evades me. I don’t know what to call it. All I can think of is Peace, and the LORD.