My Dark-Haired, Dark-Eyed Beauty

‘What attracted you to your fiancé?’ Chantal asks me. We are walking back along the beach to our house after going for a swim in the lagoon after work. Chantal is the South African. She is bright and to the point. I envy her because she is African, and she fits in and I don’t. I come from the northern hemisphere, from a cold and clean country where everything is simple. Over Christmas back home I rode the bus and listened to two teen-agers tell about all the parties they’d been to, and all the cars they’d crashed, and all the times they ran from the cops, and it made me think of the Fall of Rome. But you know, I like my country and the fact that it is a dying world doesn’t make me feel any more at home in Africa. All that stuff I said earlier about knowing I belong here was completely borrowed from the movies, blatant, nostalgic Hemmingway-envy.

‘She is beautiful,’ I say without hesitation. Celestina used to wear white to work sometimes, the fitted shalwar kameez native to Pakistan and the flowing shawl that goes with it. She looked like a princess from a story in the Arabian Nights or something. So that was really it; I didn’t really know anything else about her, just that she was beautiful. I can imagine her walking along this beach towards us in white, with her shawl trailing in the wind and her hair blowing everywhere. She likes beaches and oceans; she likes her hair long and she likes wearing white. But all of this I found out later. First, it was beauty.

The beach itself reminds me of a Madeleine L’Engle novel about the south, Louisiana or Alabama, during the time of slavery. In Liberia I feel as if I’m back in time somehow, because the ghosts of Old America haunt the place. Liberia, if you didn’t know it, was where the visionary American statesmen of the enlightened northern states decided to send the newly freed slaves, who apparently no longer had a place in the land of the free. The freedmen came here and started their own system of oppression, modeled on their former southern plantation owners, with the local native people cast as the underclass. Old Dixie in Africa. The whole place, weakened by American commercial interest and rotted further by the greed of leaders lining their pockets with American aid money and kickbacks, finally caved and collapsed in a bloody heap of coup after coup, then disintegrated into a hell of civil wars full of rape and looting and little boys getting addicted to drugs and shooting everything that moved. Then as if God had finally had enough, it stopped. There were UN-monitored elections, which by all accounts were fairly held, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was voted in. The country has stabilized and there is hardly a gun to be seen except in the disciplined fist of a UN soldier in his powder blue helmet. Driving through the city, I have to look hard to find any bullet holes left in the walls. All my fears of being poked at by guns have come to naught. Instead, I’m walking up the beach as the waves roll in and the sun goes down in an equatorial haze, holding pleasant conversation with my teammate. We could be on holiday. I feel slightly let down. I kind of want stories about guns, but I’m sure that’s just fool’s talk.

Cel (I call her) writes me now from where she’s working in Kenya, and she says she’s lonely and she misses me a lot. I think it’s absolutely unreal that a week ago I was with her in London. It feels like it happened in another life. This seems like my real life now, this mad parachuting into an emergency program in some other place I’ve never been, expected to learn everything in a matter of minutes and produce results immediately. Landing and having everyone look at you and say, Oh, good, you’re here now … can you do this? Yesterday? This is my life, this has always been my life, traveling all over, being on my own, surviving - maybe even thriving - on the adventure. London, my engagement, was a dream, long ago. But if I stop and concentrate, then I remember.

She was a lot of work, and she laughs about that now when I bring it up. I like to bring it up, I like to shine up my medals. You should have to fight at least a little to win a princess. A princess in Pakistan has her own challenges for a boy in love, because in Pakistan boys and girls don’t date. They rarely even see each other, except at church and school, or maybe the odd, giggling glance at the shopping centre or during wedding season. So if you like a girl, if you think she’s pretty, how do you go about the whole thing? I tried subterfuge. I made up innocent-sounding reasons for her to come out with me, like: Hey, Cel, can you come and help me find gifts for my mother and my sister? After politely diverting three invitations and just when I was depressed and ready to give up, she said she’d come. So that, I guess, was our first date: we went with two other co-workers and shopped for pashminas. After that, it was a walk by the pond and ice cream at the parlour, and driving her home after work at night. It was staying up late in the compound in Bagh, talking about everything we could think of and squeezing more little moments in when no one was looking. The way she suddenly reached out and held my hand in the car when I got up early to take her to the airport. The way she hugged me the first time, as if I was glass because she’d never hugged a boy before. The letters and notes, dancing around the words for marriage and love with words like ‘fairytale’ and ‘dream.’ You know, Falling in Love. It was like that week before it’s official, that breathless space of time when you both know you are smitten with each other, but no one else knows yet and you are still sneaking around, stealing delicious, exciting little moments with each other when people aren’t looking. Like that, except for us it lasted months. And then one morning I looked at her sitting by the stream in the Bagh valley with the sun coming up golden and said before I could stop myself: I don’t want to leave you. And she looked back and said quietly: Me too.

I’m not supposed to be in Liberia. I’m supposed to be writing in Vancouver, settling down to an official, legitimate attempt to finally follow my true calling as a writer. One day I’ll just admit that I do this because I like it. I’m in Liberia because I like being the guy who suddenly gets to say: I’m going to Liberia. Next Tuesday, in fact. I want to be a writer because I like stories, but this way I get to be the stories.

The office here is way too cramped and hot, and my room is dingy and devoid of all charm. Mice run around at night, keeping me awake, and the power goes off at midnight, stopping all fans and letting the muggy heat settle on my skin and, like a cheap polyester hotel blanket, vex what little sleep I get. In the office I’m asked to do a million impossible things a minute, and then computers break and pumps break and suppliers show up with demands, and emails scream in like Japanese Zeroes until the power goes off and the fans stop again and the sweat trickles in itchy lines down your back and legs. By the end of the day, my inbox is overflowing and my desk is littered with little half-scribbled notes. My brain is scrambled and when I take stock I’ve maybe done one complete thing the whole day. If I have to drive into Monrovia, it takes hours to go a few kilometers and everything is dirty and hot and no one has any answers or motivation, and when they do it’s too expensive and usually wrong. The whole place literally crawls all over with people and stuff – shirts and shoes and fruit and trash and beggars and wheelbarrows and car parts and taxi drivers yelling. The cars are backed up and everyone sweats and the heat glimmers off the standing water.

I watch myself here in disbelief that anyone buys it. I feel like I’m pretending.

But here I am, and here we live on the beach with the ocean out our front door, and we spend Sundays lying on the sand or swimming in the water. And Jonas is our boss, a man who used to be a boxer and who brings an orange football to the beach and rounds up the local boys for a game, which they all play with such stunning moves you might be watching the World Cup. We sit with the Irish from Concern and the French from Solidarites and watch the Ukranian UN soldiers stand around in white flocks, showing off their speedos and talking on their cell phones as if they are some kind of ritualistic herd on a rest stop during migration. And after the beach we go up to Anna’s porch, and she smiles her impish smile and offers us wine or a cold beer and we sit and tell stories as the sun goes down in the west over the crashing pink waves. There is nothing between us and the ocean, and there is nothing stopping us from being this story. Here we are, with a millionaire’s view on the coast of Liberia, drinking white wine under an African sunset, and Anna is a French Huguenot Afrikaaner nurse who used to assist on open-heart surgeries, and Chantal is an English South African who used to make millions of dollars for a multinational company, and I am a little boy from Langley, BC, who somehow walked out of a deadening average life into this splendid scene. Then I remember that I’m also marrying a princess from a far eastern land and my mind goes into a white-wine-fuzzy flat spin at the unlikelihood of it all.

Yes, I’m marrying her. Just before Christmas I was in Taos, New Mexico, living in a trailer in my friends’ meadow, waking up to absolute silence and the sun knifing over the shoulder of the hill to melt the frost. Jesse and I watered the top layer of the little pond by the meadow so it would freeze again smooth for a hockey rink. I would get up early and skate around and around, fingering my rosary and trying to cast my future in the warp and weft of the Eternal. Or I would walk into the shadow of the mountain and sit in Eva’s shrine and pray with the little girl I held in my arms only a year ago. I let the tumbling in my head slow and stop, I let my heart beat a little. Celestina left me in London on a Thursday afternoon at the departure gate in Heathrow airport and nothing was sure. I left London two days later with my heart growing walls, just in case, because we had no plans. I know what it was like for her, going back to Pakistan where all the memories lived like ghosts in an empty room. I’ve gone back to empty places, too. It takes strength to keep moving. Willpower. At least some dribbling love of life. In New Mexico, with Emma as my soft-spoken coach I managed to get a phone card and call. It took a few tries before the tipping point, but then it was like a tree falling, slow at first, then the rush, unstoppable and beautiful, the light breaking everywhere. And we knew we were getting married.

There were two engagements. In honourable Pakistani tradition, my father and mother called her parents and discussed, then agreed upon and blessed the engagement of their children. And four days later, on a Sunday night in London’s Green Park, I got down on one knee in the rain and asked her to marry me. The willows and the bridge over the lagoon were lit up and the palace watched from the far side of the water. The rain poured and our hair clung in wet strands, and she lost all her words and could only nod, breathless. A week later, she left for Kenya, and I came to Liberia. But this time, there are plans …

On Anna’s porch the level of wine in the bottle is sinking just a little faster than the sun into the sea. They ask if I have a picture, so I show them. There is general agreement that I have done well. I look at the picture again before putting it back in my pocket. Her long hair is tied back, and she is not smiling because it is a passport photo, but she looks gentle and wise, and she looks patient and kind. Her eyes are large and dark and she has her own Mona Lisa mystery and a delicate, regal beauty. One night years ago, my heart torn apart by my latest misadventure in love, I prayed for a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. It was the kind of prayer that I hardly believe in, the kind that’s like rubbing a rabbit’s foot or tossing a coin in the fountain at the park. A child’s prayer. I put the photo away again, and raise my glass. My dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty.

Finishing There, Starting Here, and Maybe It's All the Movies

I’m on British Airways flight 85 to Vancouver, finally going home. I’ve waited until now for the final post from my time in Pakistan because … well, because there’s a girl, but you won’t hear much about that here. Some things need to remain private until the right time, and now is not it. Anyway, I usually wait until things boil up inside me to say before writing for this and the things boiling up inside recently have been distinctly non-bloggish. But there must be something for the end, some ritual or closing ceremony. So here it is.

We closed our compound in Bagh with rockets and roman candles exploding overhead. November is marriage season in Kashmir and we packed our bags to the popping sound of what the locals affectionately call ‘marriage bombs’. They blew up in the distance, or boomed so loud the sound filled your lungs to bursting. When night took over and we could no longer work we broke up old boards and sat in a ring around the fire to keep off the cold while the freezing stars appeared like white snowflakes in a lake of ink. Beyond the fire and the compound fence the oil lights of poor houses lit up the crouching hillsides, and the fireworks burst all over the sky. We ended as if we were the last line of a Tennessee Williams play: ‘Blow out your candles … for nowadays the world is lit by lightning.’ They didn’t set them off for us, but the glow lit our faces and the sparks fell all around us. You couldn’t help but be moved. Sometimes the whole world groans in dreariness, but then there are moments when the air everywhere is stuffed with miracles.

By the light of day, the army came and took away our bedrooms and our offices. The shipping containers we’d lived and worked in for the last six were hoisted by roaring, belching forest green diesel crane onto the truck of a particularly dim-witted truck driver and hauled off to be used by the government in the ongoing effort to rebuild Bagh. They were grateful. They’d been working out of tents. Meanwhile, the government officials in Islamabad had been spending money tagged for earthquake reconstruction on new computers and fancy photocopy machines, which didn’t seem to help them much when it came to working faster or more efficiently, or doing anything at all, really. But so it goes.

The last few days of November were chilly in Islamabad and we could almost see our breath as we emptied out the house where we used to live. At night we had fires in a huge metal wok on the balcony and drank the last of the wine. Paul and Sarah and I got suits made where the president gets his tailored. We shopped, we packed, we moved out, and in the end, we left. Oh sure, there were lots of speeches before that, lots of dinners to say goodbye, but in the end it felt like the end of the play, when those who are left slowly walk off stage and the curtain drops with a red velvet swish. We were organized. There was nothing more to do. That is, there was plenty more to do, but we wouldn’t be doing it. We’d organized ourselves out of Pakistan.

But for me, it was not over. You see, there was a girl …

***

You have waited a long time for this, haven’t you? By now I wonder who is still reading these anymore. The happenings of my world have been internal for so long, but they are starting to emerge again into the open. I said there was a girl, and there is. There was a girl, and a night full of rain and a garden lit like a fairytale and the glint of a ring and a happy, nodded ‘yes!’ But you will wait for news of her. I know you will. I may have been gone for a long time, but I know how to come back …

***

Places have smells. Everybody knows that. The west coast of Vancouver Island - on Long Beach where I grew up going on vacation - has the smell of wet sand and seaweed, salal bushes and rain-soaked pine trees. You slip into it gradually as you drive there, past the tangy green smell of lake water and the hot smell of sun-dried rock. The ocean rolls its way towards you in a sea fog, pushed slowly by an old man wind, with it comes the pine and all the rest, and suddenly, you are there. But in other countries, the smell comes at once, appearing out of nowhere as you step off the plane. People used to smell countries from the deck of a ship, but we smell them walking down the roll-up steps at foreign airports. Kabul smells of diesel fumes and the dust of the plains, mixed with fresh bread and the burning fat of sheep. Indonesia smells of ripe things left in the heat, and the colour green. But Africa smells like Africa, some indefinable mixture of red dust, burnt corn, and a million years rolled together. It was the smell of Mozambique, and it is the same smell on an entirely different part of the continent when I step off the plane at Roberts Airport in Liberia. Somehow you know when you are in Africa, though ‘know’ is not the right word. It’s as if you remember something suddenly, arriving here, but you don’t know what it is, but it tugs at some old, old corner of our minds. Apparently, say the anthropologists, this is where we’re all from. I don’t know, but the smell here seems as if it’s just as familiar as the smell of Long Beach where I grew up. I step off the plane, and into the crowd packing its sweating mass into the tiny airport terminal, and I feel almost at home. But you know, maybe it’s just all the movies. I don’t know why I’m talking like this. I’ve been in Africa a total of 7 weeks in my entire life. I don’t qualify to talk like this.

I was nervous on the trip to Liberia, and I had a long time to be nervous. It’s an hour from London to Brussels, three hours wait, six hours from there to Freetown in Sierra Leone, an hour wait, and another hour up and down to Monrovia. Brussels is a postcard perfect green little land, neat as an accountant’s desk and tidy as a gardener’s lawn. The airport is brisk and spare, a brushed steel and glass monument to efficiency, sterility, and sheer boredom. I found one bench with a row of those armrest/separators busted off sitting in a corner like a citizen in a late forties distopia novel who hasn’t been reconditioned yet. I took advantage of the overlooked disorder to stretch out and sleep for two of my three hours. The last hour I spent watching the Africans gather around the gate in an impressive gallery of loud style, hip jargon, and fluid, effortless physicality. These were not the subtle people of the Asian plains, with their smooth, discreet manners and an Islamic ebb and flow to their lives. My friend Jordan said once in one of his sweeping and accurate pronouncements that Africans are people of the flesh. Not being entirely certain what to do with my own flesh most the time, this statement came back to me in that last hour in Brussels and my nerves started bumping. It didn’t help that I’d been spending the time before coming reading books by celebrated former Africa bureau chiefs for American newspapers, blithely offering their penetrating analysis on ‘what the hell happened in the 90s’. These analyses mostly involved jabs at the Clinton administration, crusading statements against the colonial powers, and scary stories of having guns poked in through their windows by child soldiers hopped up on dope. In the scary situations, apparently, you are not supposed to look scared, which is dubious advice, and besides, I was, and I hadn’t even met the gun wierdos yet. I was just looking at people in the airport. I felt like I should be making a Woody Allen film.

***

I thought on the plane, somewhere between Freetown and Monrovia, that it would be nice if it crashed now and I didn’t have to do any of this. I wonder if I’m in the right line of work.

***

When it comes right down to it, I actually like the airport. I like the press of people, the controlled chaos, the moment when the guy in the uniform takes your passport and you wonder if you’ll ever see it again. I like the bewhildered looks the newcomers give each other, and the knowing smile I give everyone in return. I don’t get scared of these things. A feeling of great immunity comes over me and I see it all like they say dying people see the scene from above their bodies, they way they say child-soldiers strung up on drugs think the bullets will not hit them – I see it like that. Nothing bad will happen to me, I float above all this like a leaf on the wind. I don’t know why I think that. It has no basis in reason. It is pure primordial fatalism. Que sera sera. Inshallah. He’s got the whole world in His hands. Smiling, I collect my passport, show the suits the piece of paper that I’d got stamped correctly, and they let me pass. Out of the customs room, packed up next to the baggage track with all the rest of the passengers, waiting for my luggage, it comes to me that I’d never even asked who was to meet me, or where, or how I’d know, or what to do if no one was there. I took my laptop out on the plane, and now I regret it, advertising that I had one to every watchful, preying eye. Suppose I was stranded out in the parking lot? They would come for me, then. For me and my laptop. I find my luggage, I walk outside, I find my driver, and we drive off into the night, exchanging pleasantries. I am in Liberia and it is covered by the night, so I can’t even see what I’m getting into. The breeze outside is cool, and the land smells earthy. I didn’t even break a sweat getting my luggage. Nothing bad will happen to me. I float like a leaf on the wind. Like a leaf on the wind. Or maybe it’s all the movies.

Next time, I’ll tell you about my girl.