Returning

Last October when I made the long way from Vancouver to Kabul it was a glamorous thing. I was to fly to Paris, overnight in Baku on the Caspian Sea, be met by anonymous taxi drivers with my name on their felt-penned signs, be driven to hotels and locations, all expenses paid. The whole magical thing would unfold from one end of the world to the other with wild strange experience and international destinations. Since then I have been in and out of airports and hotels and they have lost some of their shine, so this time returning to work in Afghanistan from a holiday at home felt like a long, long commute. But even with the faded glamour, the weariness and resignation, I was still going halfway around the world. At least it sounds exciting, and it’s not like nothing happens.

From Vancouver to Toronto I sat next to an American from Ohio who was in the stocks and investments line and moved to Canada with his company. I asked him about his business and he told me. He was a capitalist in the best sense of that word, which means he was working hard to provide an honest service for people who buy it because it’s good and it’s honest and he’s just doing his best and not trying to scam anyone. He told me a nice story about the founder of the company, who had driven the same old pick-up he started with even after he was rich and until the day he died. I liked to believe him; he himself was sitting with me in what they call the “hospitality” section of the airplane and I think they must be saying that tongue in cheek. We laughed through the movie together, which was a Jack Nicholson flick about growing old and falling in love and how we’re just human in the end and how funny that all is. I got up to go to the bathroom and looking at him in the seat in his blue blazer and striped tie organizing his notes on a palm pilot I thought that he looked just like William Shatner. At the end he gave me his card and some money and asked me to send him some souvenirs from Afghanistan and keep the rest of the money for a donation. He misquoted T.S. Eliot to me: “We shall not cease to explore, and the end of all our travels will be to return home and know it for the first time.” I can’t remember now why he said that, but he did, and it restored the wonder and romance and hugeness of the world somehow. Then we got off in Toronto.

The airport lounge at Pearson International was full of high school students and their post-pubescent smells and their maniacal enthusiasm for shocking t-shirts and running around shrieking. I sat down opposite them and took out my laptop computer and clicked the keys and stared at it but there was nothing to look at really, so I clapped it shut and watched the students instead. There was a girl with short red hair and white skin who looked about as normal as anything trading adolescent digs with everyone else, and a boy made of arms and legs in a black t-shirt with a Maoist red star on it and black painter’s cap with a German cross on the peak. He was stroking the hair of another girl, who was doing everything to lie on his knees and look relaxed like that. Her little shirt pulled up over her belly, which rolled softly over the brim of her tight pants. Every now and then a group of boys would get up and mill around together and push each other and laugh squeaky laughs full of teeth braces and uncertainty. Then the girls would roll their eyes and secretly admire the boys for reasons unclear. I heard the red-hair normal girl say to everyone, “I can be, like, all civilized and proper if I want,” and she sat up and straightened her shoulders and pursed her lips and gave her head such a little toss with half-closed eyes that I wanted to believe her despite all the evidence. Everyone else joined in with impressions of the hoity-toity. They had not a single clue and million questions; they couldn’t hold it all in, all their immediate life. It made me wistful and sad and a little amazed at the persistence of youth against the weariness of things.

The flight to Paris was called and I shouldered my laptop bag and joined the line-up. The students hid their anxiety by looking unconcerned in their seats and laughing at all of us who jumped to the queue. Some hidden signal amongst them revealed the exact right and cool moment to gather and mill. We all shuffled onboard and stowed our luggage and the stewardesses ghosted around saying reasonable things in pleasant voices and the pilot came on the overhead with the humour of a grade school principal to tell us temperatures and times and joke into a void. Then everyone strapped in and they cranked the engines and we left the New World behind.

My seat companion was a French girl and we had an understanding. She moved her legs slightly when I had to go to the bathroom and we raised our eyebrows at each other when the stewardess tried to talk to me in French. The rest of the time we slept or watched the movie, which was about a British navy captain who had courage and resolve and played the fiddle and I have no idea how the French girl understood any of it except the fiddling parts and when they shot the cannons and yelled. After the movie I drank some wine at incredible altitude and tried to write poetry. Nothing happened and I ended up feeling sad and tired and bored. I watched people wait for the bathroom until we got to France.

I felt like I’d crossed Charles De Gaulle airport a million times by the time I arrived there this time, full of stale airplane air and exhaustion, smelling of airline upholstery and teenagers. Everyone was taking no notice of everyone else. I went outside for some fresh air and it slammed into my lungs like the sweet first pull on a cigarette. I felt restless and bewildered. I repacked my luggage and sat down on my bags on the sidewalk and watched the sky drizzle and the people being pulled along by their mobile phones.

My flight was six hours late, the man at the counter told me with a smile he must keep in reserve for that sort of news. I wandered around the airport terminals, amusing myself by finding different wireless networks on my laptop and flipping off emails to various contacts. A large bearded man with a black Asics t-shirts stretched over his bulging belly wheeled his cart up to my bench and flopped down next to me. He smelled like sweat and urine and a million back alleys and train station stairwells. He kicked off his shoes and I braced my self for more. He lit up a cigarette and muttered into his beard and ignored me. I packed up my things like I was making a robbery and slunk off. Later I wrote a poem about it, which was a kind of confession about leaving him behind. I found another bench, fell asleep, and woke up to Russian men with flat faces gesturing and talking all around with lugubrious syllables and a couple of fashionable British boys grooming themselves and picking lint of each other’s clothes and saying sweet nothings. I got up to wander some more and lost my seat to the boys, who used the extra space to cuddle.

They finally called my flight and I joined the shuffle through the metal detector to wait some more in another room. I watched the beautiful women at the counter being busy and talking in French. One of them had a bob haircut that only looks good in Europe and sharp features that made me think of a Russian novel I read in high-school English about a rational utopia and a rebellious woman whose face was like an X, representing love and sex and all unknowns and irrationality. The sharp-faced beautiful woman at the airport kept her back straight and ran on the balls of her feet from counter to counter. Her haircut bounced. The other woman had chocolate skin and sensuous lips and talked on the phone a lot. She wore her scarf around her neck with the sort of breezy elegance that undoes me completely and I once again thought of how easy it is for men to confuse unknown women with God. All the beautiful mysteries of the world are contained in them, it seems. At last we boarded and I slept all the way to Baku.

The Baku airport is full of thick dark men in green military uniforms, and women with the same uniforms but clicking along in spike heels and wafting hideous perfumes. There are more of these uniforms than there are passengers. A grinning man gathered us together when we landed and shuffled us through some mindless procedures with smiles and vague promises: “Don’t worry, I take care of everything for you, you must wait here, you do not worry, no problem.” He deposited us in a lounge with a few more “Don’t worry’s” and vanished with our passports. After that nothing happened. I lay down on a bench and listened to the click of the stilettos and the mutters of the dark men and finally fell asleep. At dawn I got up and looked out the window to the runway and the empty spaces and saw an old woman in a dress and an overcoat with a scarf tied around her head like a Russian peasant. She was walking across the tarmac with a straw broom and a bucket, sweeping up bits of paper. It was the loneliest scene in the world, just an old woman and an empty dawn in a deserted, surly country. Everything was cold; the new sun made no difference. All I wanted was a bed. They called my flight. Smiley swept in at the last minute with our passports and grins all around. The airplane was deserted. I curled up on three seats, got a blanket from a giggling stewardess, and tried to sleep while a flat-faced man with hair poking up from his back collar complained loudly about everything and walked up and down flinging his luggage. I finally got tired enough of him and lost consciousness.

“You must sit up now. Now we are going to landing.” The stewardess was as charming as any employed by Azerbaijan Airlines. We dropped through the clouds and the whole dusty scene of Kabul revealed itself. Houses rising from the edges of the plain and gathering mass until they became a sprawling city cut through with a dead river and teeming with people and cars and everything else. In my sleepy stupor I thought the pilot was lining up to land on the city itself, ignoring the runway. Death crossed my mind. There was a young guy a few seats ahead of me moving around with excited energy and his head was twitching everywhere trying to get the best view. I almost asked him if it was his first time in Afghanistan, but I realized that I hadn’t spoken to anyone but ticket agents and the American this whole endless trip and somewhere back in the collapsing time I’d forgotten how. I would have to acquire speech again when I’d slept in a bed. I watched the boy crane around and he reminded me of youth and excitement and other blessed things I missed, so I wished him luck in some wordless way and felt old. I remembered coming here the first time over a year ago when everything was new, and there was a proud kind of weariness about it all. It was the first day of the Islamic New Year, and it seemed like there was some exotic promise about the future in that, but I couldn’t think what it was. We landed. The pilot had found the runway after all.