Henri
tumble out of the moving jeep and cover Marie-France’s body with mine, shielding her head with my hands. The jeep rolls forward a few yards and crashes into a wall. Nelson, our driver, slumps forward over the steering wheel. He dies on the edge of the road through Wau in the Bahr el-Ghazal region.
The boy with the machine gun is young, perhaps thirteen, but his eyes are as old as death. I’ve seen many of these old, tired children. Too many. We stare at each other until he lowers his gaze and lets the rifle slip from his thin fingers, as if he’s awfully tired of always doing the same thing, killing and more killing and yet more killing. It must be hell to keep living the same life over and over again, repeating every hour, every mistake, every wasted moment.
Marie-France rolls into a ball behind the jeep. I see her grab her green camera bag. Ever the pro, I think, even now.
The heat flickers before my eyes, and for a moment I think I know how the picture is going to turn out. For a further second I also know that Marie-France will sit alongside the editor in chief at the light table, going through the slides and contact sheets. Their bodies will touch and negotiate something. At the end of these negotiations, after a few weeks and glances, the two of them will be naked, moaning and writhing around inside each other. Years later, there will be more tears.
I see all this in the blink of an eye. My eyes are running, my head’s throbbing, and I feel an insatiable thirst.
One of the company doctors to whom my editor in chief Gregory sent me told me that I had no more room in my brain. It was crammed with images, hyperrealistic footage and polytraumatic emotions that I’d absorbed over the years as if I were a sheet of blotting paper. They’d never been processed, “in therapy, for example, Mr. Skinner.” But can therapy ever drive the war from your mind?
I crouch beside the boy as the shadows shift and Marie-France takes photographs. The murderous boy tells me that his father used to call him Akol. His father is dead, so are his mother and younger sister, but his elder sister is alive, for now, cooking for the commanders.
“Nahia,” I whisper, and he nods. Only I realize that Akol hasn’t mentioned his sister’s name. How then do I know it? What is this? What’s going on? I’ve got malaria, I think. I’m hallucinating. I’m going to die. Am I going to die?
Reality topples over the edge. Boy and Nahia and Nelson’s blood dripping onto the car seat, onto his shattered cowrie necklace. And Marie-France, who will sleep with her boss one day.
I’m dying and I feel a sense of bitterness that there are so, so many things I haven’t done.
Akol jumps to his feet and runs away. The rifle lies where it fell.
We walk back to the camp. Marie-France gives me her protective vest with a label saying “Press” on it, but she carries her bag herself.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she says at one point. “I don’t think I can take a picture of anyone ever again.”
That night on the camp bed lit by two thin candles I take a swig of whiskey and pass the bottle to Marie-France. I keep passing it to her, again and again, as if it were milk to help her sleep.
“I want to make love one more time before I die,” she says. Her consonants are slurred.
“You will,” I reply, thinking of her boss Claude, whom I’ve never met.
“So, don’t you want me, you arrogant prick?”
She waits for me to answer. If my limbs weren’t so heavy from the whiskey, I’d already be embracing Marie-France. I can hear her loneliness calling, begging me. I can see the gentleness and goodness through her rage. I fight the urge to console her because I don’t want to; it’s only pity.
“I don’t know why people find love so important that it only comes to their minds when they’re in mortal fear. I’d rather have a bulletproof vest and a bottle of whiskey.”
Marie-France’s hand lurches forward as if she’s going to slap me. She’s too tired, though, and instead makes a dismissive gesture in the freezing air, topples back onto the bed, and nearly falls asleep.
“Kiss me at least,” she mumbles, slurring the words.
I lean over her. Her mouth is a fruit. She’s a beautiful woman and she craves what I too so desperately miss—life. Such thirst for life. I could drink life straight from her lips!
It’s one of those moments. What moments?
The thought fades as I pull the camel-hair blanket a little higher and cover Marie-France with it. The nights are very chilly in Wau. My desire to kiss her has passed. I vaguely regret not making love to her but also feel relieved.
Two days later we fly to Paris, where our ways part in transit. I feel another surge of wistfulness as I watch Marie-France cross the large, bright marble slabs of the terminal floor with quick strides and then stop at baggage claim. Lost in thought, she runs her hand over her flat stomach.
I feel discontented, empty, cheated of something beautiful and bright. I don’t understand my mood but put it down to the difference in temperature and to Wau.
I think of Nelson. The Blue Helmets recovered his body and took it to his family. How quickly life can end, and how mysterious are the paths leading to death and life. An accumulation of tiny decisions. A few small gestures and life will take a very different course from the one it would have taken an hour or a day ago.
And what about me? Should I have kissed Marie-France? Slept with her? Would that decision have brought me closer to death or distanced me from it? I try to shake these thoughts out of my head, but they cling on, like fear-sucking leeches.
Survive, from one moment to the next. Do everything right. But how do you know what’s right?
I look around for Marie-France once more, but what would I do with her? I don’t particularly like her or her cruelty, born of a vulnerable ego, which unleashes her aggressive libido. Nor do I like the feeling of having to console her, as though consolation would make her a good person.
Nevertheless…My feeling intensifies that our brief encounter might have opened a door through which I could have stepped, and that by slamming that door I have missed out on something.
I go to the Hilton bar, get drunk, and then, out of anger and spite, board the next plane to Kabul with a sickening feeling that I’m wasting my life for no good reason.
I fall asleep. My dreams are aggressive and confused. I dream that I’m lying silent and numb in a hospital bed. Nobody will meet my eye. I want to scream but discover I have no tongue.
I resurface briefly from my slumbers and press my forehead to the cool window of the plane. I’m thirsty. My head is aching. My throat too. I doze off again, and just below the threshold of waking, I find myself back at the hospital, with strange faces bending over me but not looking at me. One of them belongs to a woman with piercing eyes. She seems vaguely familiar, but then she disappears and I have an unmistakable feeling that I’m going mad.
Ten years ago my editor in chief Gregory gave me a piece of advice that was supposed to serve as a sort of psychological life jacket. “You have to know who you are or else you’ll go missing in action. Do you know who you are? Do you have a mantra? What’s your headline, Henri? What reminds you of who you are?”
I’m still thinking about that.
I know Greg’s wife, Monica. On his birthday, every birthday, she brought a New York cheesecake with strawberry topping to the editorial office, and Gregory would cut it very seriously and share it. Very calmly and coolly, Greg would stare down all the old, cynical, smart-ass hacks who viewed any show of emotion with contempt and might be tempted to make some derogatory comment about this ritual, saying, “Family saves you. Every man needs a family to save his soul.”
I don’t have a family. It feels as if the wounds of my forefathers are also in my blood and determine my direction in life.
I no longer have a mother; she died shortly after I was born. No grandmother either: she went missing after going out alone in a storm, and for years afterward Malo would stand on the cliffs, waiting for her to return.
Greg also told me, “Henri, give up this job before it’s too late. You should start a family after your wars but not during them. You must never make your wife and children watch you walk out of the house with your helmet, your bulletproof vest, and your passport, numb with despair that you might never come back. Wait until you’ve had your fill of war and really trust yourself to live life, then look for someone who loves you and can cope with the fact that all the warfare inside your head prevents you from sleeping at night. But don’t wait until you’re thirty-five to wean yourself off war. It’s your only chance of breaking free.”
I have a headache when the plane touches down. On the way from the German military airfield to the US camp in Kabul I swig some water from a canteen. I’ve made many trips to the devastated city, as the Afghans call Kabul. Some people say that if you come here too often, one day you won’t come back.
I think back to the tea merchant who came to Camp Holland last time I was here and took me along to an opium den in Kabul to introduce me to an alleged jihadi who was undergoing reform. We drank. We smoked opium. Mud houses in Afghanistan might not have toilets or windows, but they always have a Kalashnikov in a cupboard and a poppy patch out the back.
Maybe I should go back to smoking opium and find some peace. No more dreams ever again. I’m fed up with dreaming. I’ve been dreaming my whole life, and I feel weary, so weary.
“You’re early, ”the commander of the American camp snaps. “We were expecting you three days from now.”
“That’s the problem with a free press,” I reply. I can understand his annoyance. The army is only able to keep an eye—in both senses of the term—on a limited number of journalists. The Americans would love to have more reporters they can keep under control by embedding them with their troops because then they can’t file unbiased accounts.
To get out from under the commander’s feet, I hitch a ride to Kabul on a mule cart. Greg has left me a voicemail message to announce that Time would like to ask me a few questions on my return from Afghanistan.
The scorching heat here is different from the heat in South Sudan. It’s dry and smells of fire, exhaust fumes, sweet tea, and curry. I walk along dusty dirt tracks, past stalls selling chickpeas from gray sacks, most of them old German army mailbags marked Deutsche Bundespost.
There’s an aroma of lamb sprinkled with Persian spices roasting on skewers over open fires. Vendors shout loud advertisements for the wares—figs, dates, or melons—in baskets hanging from the flanks of their donkeys. Merchants sit in the open-fronted shops among piles of silk wedding robes, European-style secondhand clothing, and electronic waste, relating dirty jokes and headlines from the Anis daily newspaper to one another. Some women stroll around the market in light-blue floor-length burqas, others in black niqabs with a slit for the eyes, but many women wear fashionable dupatta shawls that leave their faces uncovered, more reminiscent of Grace Kelly’s head scarf than forced marriage.
I’m thirsty.
I see soldiers with machine guns and legless beggars on low carts. Paper kites soar through the flickering blue air alongside a minaret. Splinters of glass on their lines, designed to cut through their competitors’ strings in midair, sparkle in the sunlight. In the distance are the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush, as white as the perahan tunban—flowing trousers and knee-length shirts—worn by two passing men. I look for my confidential informant from my last visit. I steer my way through the crowds, past fat moneychangers and vendors whipping up interest for camels’ heads in wheelbarrows, past sheep intestines going gray in the sun, surrounded by clouds of buzzing black flies.
I buy some fresh peppermint tea and drink it with small, greedy sips. It soothes my mouth and throat.
I have no idea how the little boy suddenly pops up in front of me. He blocks my path, shakes his head, waves his hands, and chatters away insistently at me.
What? I want to ask him, scouring my brain for the Persian words, then ask him the same thing in the Dari dialect I’ve picked up from the soldiers. “What do you want?”
He points to his water bottle. Yes, I’m thirsty too. I’m constantly thirsty because my thirst is only ever stilled momentarily. But the boy keeps staring at me, his eyes restless, wavering, hypnotic. Like the candles on the floor beside the bed in Wau, the night I slept with Marie-France.
I glance over my shoulder. Is someone following me?
I never slept with Marie-France. In the plane, just before I fell asleep, I did imagine doing it, but I didn’t sleep with her.
My head is spinning from the heat, alcohol, and thirst.
The boy tugs at my sleeve. He’s about twelve years old and looks like a chai boy in one of Kabul’s ruling households. Servants and errand runners—they keep boys for every single task. Were this boy mine, I’d shoot his master, I think as violent, irrational anger comes boiling up inside me.
The boy doesn’t have his hair cropped short like pupils at a Koranic school. His reddish-brown locks are longer and peek out from under an embroidered purple cap. His eyes are two shiny green marbles in his emaciated yet beautiful face. The boy grabs my hand.
“Ibrahim,” he says. “I am Ibrahim. They told me to bring you.”
I let him pull me along. It is easier to be pulled along, and I feel lighter with every step. I shouldn’t let the boy lead me anywhere. I should take him by the hand, but something tells me that it won’t work any other way. Not now. Because I didn’t kiss her. That was the start of this other life. If I’d kissed her I would now be in Paris.
I spit out this absurd thought. I must have caught something in Africa. Dengue fever? I’m hallucinating. I must talk the army doctor into giving me some medicine later.
We wend our way past the bazaar stalls, the shops, the wheelbarrows, and the birdcages, through the swirling fug of colors and fragrances. It’s as if we’re sliding down a never-ending pipe. I catch a passing glimpse of a pink rucksack.
A deep female voice shouts inside my head, “Don’t go!”
But I can’t do otherwise. I’m losing touch with myself and I can’t do otherwise.
Soon after that absurd thought, the air smells of singed cables and hair, and someone screams, “Adrenaline!” My heart contracts into a stone, and the pain takes my breath away. Then there’s a massive explosion, the detonation of a huge bomb only a few yards away. The pink patch fragments. I’m hurled backward and smash into a stone wall, my mind a mass of pain and blackness. Ibrahim’s hand is torn from mine.
The world goes dark, night encroaching from all sides, from above and below, and beyond this blackness shadows jostle me, grope for me, stab me, clasp their hands around my heart.
A boy screams, and I hear him yelling, “Dad! Dad!,” his voice cracking with panic. Then the darkness recedes, and it’s Ibrahim who is screaming, on and on, until all at once the screaming stops.
The camel-head seller is staring helplessly at his missing lower legs. An embroidered purple cap lies discarded on the ground, alongside scraps of silk and chunks of melon.
My father emerges from the fog of blood and dust. He walks calmly toward me. He’s wearing faded jeans and a striped Breton fisherman’s sweater, just as he was on that day when we both went to sea but only I came home. He kneels down beside me and whispers, “Oh, Henri. You’re still caught in between everything, between different times and different paths.”
A sheet of newspaper wafts past, and I glimpse the headline. THE GIRL WITH A BOMB IN HER RUCKSACK. My name is printed underneath. I don’t understand.
Ibrahim’s lying there, unmoving. Blood is running from his eyes.
I’m sorry, I want to tell my father. I’m sorry that I don’t know which path is the correct one, but I have no courage or strength left.
There is a tear in reality. Through the tear I spot women and men in blue smocks, bending over me, and beyond them I see a boy staring at me. I had it before. I had it but it was too big for me to cling to.
The “in-between” zone. The hospital. The girl in the river, and this woman. To her, always to her, to tell her something very, very important.
This world is dying. I’m falling into the silence beyond the void. I’m falling and…