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.