We Are Now Beginning Our Descent Read Free Page B

Spaniard was seen by all one day to have bought himself a deep armchair and a floor lamp, which threw a suburban orange light slantwise across his long rounded body while he sat there, at rest and serene. All he lacked was a television. (Later, he acquired one.)
    Up to that moment the foreign journalists living in the house had expressed their defiance of local conditions either by bitching about the Afghans’ commercial practices, or by flaunting their gear, their shining multi-tools in hand-stitched pouches, their lightweight trousers of spacesuit fabric or their high-bandwidth antennae, which folded out like altarpieces. The Spaniard’s defiance was of a different kind. The sight of him sitting there in his armchair, when till then there had been nothing but red and blue carpet and cushions, affected Kellas. The lack of vertical furnishings hadn’t bothered him before. After the journey in the lizard-coloured transport plane from Dushanbe to Faizabad, after the trip here through the mountains with Astrid in Russian cars, the house had delighted him with its plain brightness and its peace. Four walls and a roof, a generator, soft pallets to lie on at night, three meals a day if you wanted themand steel drums in the washrooms which were filled with water and heated by wood furnaces each morning and evening. Kellas didn’t bitch about the Afghans. Two hundred bucks a day for a car, a driver and an interpreter was easy to pay. He was glad to be spending The Citizen ’s money. Every fresh hundred dollar bill rubbed between his thumb and index finger and given to Mohamed – who would glance at it, smile, fold it in half, put it in his pocket and offset it against the thousands of dollars he owed to local small businessmen, each of whom owned an automatic weapon – was a bill less in the pouch Kellas wore around his waist. When he’d left London the pouch contained twelve thousand dollars. It felt as if a paperback was stuffed down the front of his jeans. When he squatted down over the outhouse hole in the morning and lowered his trousers he imagined the money belt breaking and him having to retrieve it from the Marscape of ordure down there, where mice scampered over hills of turds.
    What moved Kellas when he saw the Spaniard in his armchair was an imaginative step bolder and more honest than any of the other foreigners in the house had taken. The Spaniard had dared to face the possibility of living among the Afghans for ever. He wouldn’t, and knew it. But he had allowed the possibility. Living among the Afghans, that is, not as an Afghan; not growing a beard and buying a shalwar kameez and becoming a Muslim. The Spaniard had allowed the possibility to enter him that he might live among the Afghans not as a colonist, a soldier or an aid worker, but as the man he actually was, a tired, well-read, funny, sexually indulgent, godless, twice-married, wine-loving, seventy-thousand-euro-a-year writer from the rich side of the Mediterranean. By making himself comfortable and ignoring (except for lunchtimes) the war that pattered on just over the horizon, the Spaniard had travelled further into this foreign land than any other farang in the guesthouse.
    Kellas sent Mohamed to get a desk and two chairs. Mohamed found them in the bazaar. They wobbled, on mixed metal andwooden legs. In this country even the furniture had prostheses. Like all the foreigners in the compound, Kellas was acting, but this time, inspired by the Spaniard, he had decided to change his role. In the clothes they wore, the things they carried and their actions, the journalists were explicitly transient. The Brits played soldier-explorers; the Americans doubled up as missionaries and prospectors. The French were buccaneering scientists, the kind who would kill to get the sarcophagus or bacilli back home before a rival; the Germans cast themselves as students on their study year abroad; the Japanese, astronauts landing on a foreign planet. Some of the British