***
There was a heart-shaped stain on the back of the seat in front of me. It was hard to breathe. There was a heavy sick smell where people had been puking. I had a window seat. I looked out of the window. I had my fist in my mouth and was biting on it, so hard I drew blood. I heard someone talking on the phone, talking softly. ‘It’s getting bad, dad,’ he said. There was a child, a girl, and she was crying. I tried not to think about the dead stewardess. They’d stubbed her. I looked out of the window. The sky was so blue. New York was beautiful below. I had always liked flying, before. I tried to shut out the screams. I could feel us descending, and without thinking I popped my ears, like I always do. I popped my ears. I don’t know why I did that. I could see the towers out of the window. My left hand was resting on the windowsill. My right was still in my mouth. One of the towers was burning. Someone said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over. The towers came closer, very quickly. Then there was a noise, like a thousand bones, breaking.
PART SIX
ENDGAME
postcards
——
He came to in a quiet street and was violently sick on his shoes. Only when it was done did he straighten up. There was a queasy feeling in his stomach, a turbulence, a rough sea heaving this way and that in a storm. He puked again, almost daintily, missing the tips of his shoes, a puddle of stomach fluid that was almost clear water sipping into the hard, dry ground below. When he straightened up for the second time he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling his throat burn with the ejected acid. He took off his hat and patted it, raising a tiny storm of dust.
Joe, the dusty street, the puddle of steaming sick at his feet. There were low-lying houses on either side, small gardens, a few old-fashioned boxed cars parked haphazardly on the side of the road. Joe examined himself. The shoes were leather, soft and worn and brown, and were very comfortable, as if they had been worn by him for a long time. Trousers, a light shirt already beginning to stain with sweat from the heat. He turned the hat over in his hands. It was the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought in Paris, and which he had thought gone. When he looked up, over the roofs of the houses, he could see the mountains rising in the distance, shrouded in clouds. A whole world seemed to be hidden beyond them, just out of reach. He looked down the dusty road and his hands fell to his sides, and for one moment he expected to find two pistols there, strapped to his belt, but there was nothing there and he felt a disappointment he couldn’t, had he been asked to put it into words, been able to explain.
The voices had quieted around him. The sun was high in the sky, and there were few shadows. He walked down the road and his feet raised tiny dust-devils with each step. The ground was a desert brown and so were the houses. The mountains dominated his view. He felt both attracted and repelled by them, as if they hid within their enormous quietude a multitude of secrets, that he would have liked to know and would have been afraid of had they been revealed. He came to a main road. There was a mosque in the distance, minarets rising into the impossibly-bright sky. He passed by a school where children in white shirts played in a yard, pushing and shouting and laughing. Across the road from the school was a shop and he went inside and silently purchased a packet of cigarettes, discovering money in his pocket. The money was inscribed in a cursive script he didn’t recognise. So were the cigarettes. ‘What is it?’ he asked, in English, pointing at the writing, and the seller gave him a bemused look, reserved for tourists everywhere, and said, ‘Pashto.’
He stepped out into the glare of the sunlight and lit a cigarette.
All at once the enormity of what had happened hit him, and he sagged against the dusty brown wall, his hand resting against the warm material, finding purchase and solidity in its existence. He wasn’t sure what had happened. It all seemed like a bad dream. There was a book he had liked, once, about a girl falling through a hole into a subterranean world that slowly grew more and more into a nightmare. But when the girl could not take it any more, just as she was being attacked by a pack of sentient playing cards, she faced the unreality of her situation and woke up. It had all been just a dream.
Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was – there could be – nothing real about such things.
Cars passed on the road as he stood there. He saw compact Skodas and Ladas and a couple of shining black German Mercedes and a Volvo with diplomatic license plates. There were also large Chevies, Pontiacs, Chevrolets and Cadillacs; a United Nations of cars. Across the road, the children were playing at the school. A sign above the building said, in English, Cyrillic script and in the same romantic, cursive script on the cigarettes, that this was the Mohammed Zahir Shah Primary School, and was opened by Ahmad Shah Khan in the year of his inauguration, nineteen eighty two.
It was hot. A plane passed slowly overhead, jet plumes streaking across the sky, descended gradually over the rooftops. The city had a dry, not unpleasant smell. Joe ground the remains of the cigarette and walked on. He could sense the end of his journey, somewhere nearby. He was following instincts, the way a migratory bird might follow magnetic north, the world a map below with borders unmarked. He came to a market, by the river. There were heavy, beautifully-wrought rags on display. A wooden shelf held small glass cups, and next to it was a battered samovar, and Joe could smell the tea as it boiled inside. He could glimpse a couple of old men through a doorless entrance, sipping cups of tea, at the same time sucking on hard candy. He could smell cigarettes, and pipes, and as he walked through the stalls, seeing eggplants and tomatoes, grapes and chickpeas, raisins and nuts and bags of white rice, he could also smell the heavy, sweet scent of the opium that lay, here and there, on low tables, in dark pellets and in bars that were stamped, in English and Pashto: Product of the Kingdom of Afghanistan.
Further down there were tables covered in books. He stopped and let his fingers run along the covers; they felt like skin, were warm to the touch. The book titles were in a mélange of languages and alphabets, French and English, Arabic and Dutch, Urdu and German and Pashto and Chinese. He picked one up, leafed through it. A Tourist Guide to the Tora Bora Caves. Books, he thought, were a sort of migratory bird. Here they rested a while, weary of their travels, before taking flight again, before moving, settling in another nest for a time. They seemed to him like a flock that had descended on these tables, pages fluttering like wings, and here they rested in the shade, enjoying the lull, knowing it would soon be time to go on their way again. Near the books was a revolving stand with postcards stacked on it. A couple of tourists, their pale skins in sharp relief to the muted earth colours of the buildings and the people, were browsing the postcards. The man had a camera around his neck. The girl was pretty in a summer dress. He looked at them and felt a sudden, overwhelming stab of jealousy inside him. It seemed to him he had once been like that, too, somehow completed, and he watched them as they chose and paid for three postcards and walked away, hand in hand: as if they were a postcard themselves.