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.