The Repercussions Read online

  I never told you much about that trip. You were too angry with me, first for leaving, then for staying away so long. I saw the paintings you did while I was gone, the anger in them, the hurt and the loneliness. That was when you slept with someone else, your first affair, and that was what filled our conversations in the weeks that came after, not where I’d just been.

  That trip was where it all started to go wrong, the stuff between you and me. That’s where I have to begin.

  I knew I’d never be allowed directly into Kabul, so I went the long way round, via Moscow and Tajikistan, then a helicopter to Khoja Bahauddin, seat of the Northern Alliance, a bleak Afghan desert town the colour of mud, houses rising seamlessly up from the ground, their walls moulded out of the same dull earth, camels and donkeys carrying firewood – no electricity, no sewerage, no running water, no paved roads. I found myself a driver and an interpreter. My friend Tim, a reporter from the Washington Post, hitched a ride, and together we drove in an old Russian jeep through the Hindu Kush, across tumbling rivers, dusty foothills, desert plains, past soldiers kneeling to pray, the curve of their backs mirrored by the shape of the mountains behind them. We went through villages whose inhabitants went barefoot in the freezing cold, and stayed at filthy guest houses where we ate greasy goat and naan bread, then wrapped ourselves in anything we could find to sleep as best we could. The landscape was extraordinary: enormous walls of rock towering above us, streaked with torrents of water that splashed to an ending out of sight far below.

  It took us a week to get to the Shomali Plains, a no-man’s-land, a buffer zone between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban – a desolate, windy place, dotted with houses riddled with bullet holes, wrecked tanks and burnt-out jeeps. Bodies lay at angles in the dust, legs twisted, heads thrown back. Plastic sandals lay scattered along the road, next to pieces of clothing and dark splashes of blood.

  We made our way to the top of a hill and suddenly Kabul was below us, a vast spread of low houses broken up here and there by Soviet-style blocks of flats. The setting was magnificent: a city surrounded by a ring of mountains and more mountains behind them, tipped with white. The sun was disappearing over the horizon, drenching the mountains in a soft pink glow. Lights were being switched on, the first sign of electricity I’d seen since I’d arrived, little twinkles dotting the hillsides.

  I wondered what we’d find when we got into the city. My mental image of Kabul came from news reports and a handful of faded photographs. Edith had visited in ’68, on an epic trip in a Land Rover from London to Calcutta. In her photographs, women in dresses rode on buses and children slid down brightly coloured slides in playgrounds. The news reports from when the Taliban were in control had been very different: women reduced to silent blue forms; that secret footage of one of them publicly executed in Kabul’s football stadium, brought in on the back of a truck and forced to kneel, then shot in the head as her seven children watched and wept.

  Now the city was in ruins. We drove past block after block of houses without roofs or walls, gaping holes where windows once had been. Façades were pocked with bullet holes, walls punctured by tank shells. Joists and girders stuck out at crazy angles, holding up what little there was left. Filigree balconies hung, cracked, off the front of once gracious houses. Rubble lay in mounds. As evening fell, smoke began to fill the air, as families cooked or huddled close to fires to stay warm.

  “It’s like Dresden,” said Tim. “Or Hiroshima. Fuck, Jo, what have we done?”

  Mahmoud, our interpreter, coughed. “It wasn’t the Americans,” he said quietly. “It’s been like this for years. It was the Taliban, and before them it was the civil war, it was the mujahidin. It wasn’t outsiders. We did this to ourselves.”

  The Intercontinental Hotel was a white, rather ugly building high up on a ridge in the middle of the city, packed with journalists fighting for rooms. We’d poured in as fast as we could persuade anyone to bring us, the only species on earth to run towards trouble instead of away. I’d managed to blag a bed in a room with Molly, a CNN correspondent I’d been with in Sierra Leone. As usual, she had a bottle of gin on the go. We mixed it with some cans of sour lemonade and sat, wrapped in our sleeping bags, drinking it from chipped glasses.

  “What kept you?” she asked, with a smile.

  It was only three days since the Taliban had collapsed. Molly had been one of the first journalists to get to Kabul, sneaking across the border with Pakistan.

  “It was pretty crazy,” she said. “The road was packed with Taliban, lines and lines of those white Toyotas that bin Laden paid for, all filled up with wives and children, and baggage piled up right to the back of the trunk. It reminded me of the highway out of New York on Labor Day.”

  All I wanted to do was to get drunk with her and gossip, but after the first gin she stood up and went over to the table in the corner, ran a lipstick over her mouth and pulled a brush through her hair.

  “I have to give a broadcast,” she said. “From the roof. Come and watch if you like.”

  The roof was full of correspondents, cameras and satellite dishes, powered by a row of generators, one for each news corporation. For the first time I was working freelance – no contract, no deadline, no boss. To have any chance of competing, I knew I had to find myself someone to help me, and fast: a translator, a fixer, someone I could work with, someone I could trust, the person who would make all the difference to what kind of shots I’d be able to get.

  Early the next morning, avoiding the offers from the group of men outside the hotel gates, I took a taxi to the bazaar. The city looked even worse than the night before, the bright sunlight making everything seem more tattered. Children with orange hair from malnutrition played in open gutters; stray dogs ran about sniffing for food. Men sat by the side of the road with things for sale spread in front of them – a pile of mismatched sandals, spare parts for cars, scrap metal.

  I bent to look closer at a collection of what looked like human bones. The vendor’s face suggested nothing unusual, they might as well have been vegetables or flowers.

  A voice said softly in English, “Yes, that’s right, they’re vertebrae. And look, there’s a fibula too.”

  I turned to see a man, youngish, in his twenties, his chin blotched and covered with bits of cotton wool.

  He saw me looking and smiled. “I got rid of my beard this morning,” he said. “The barber was a little out of practice. My name is Faisal. Salaam alaikum.”

  “Walaikum salaam. I’m Jo.”

  “The Taliban banned us from trading in many things. Bones were one of the few that they didn’t.”

  “Why would anyone want to buy them?”

  “To send to factories in Pakistan. They make them into buttons and soap.”

  “Where did they get them?”

  He laughed. “The bombs made the earth shake so badly that the graves spat out their bones. You don’t have to dig hard to get them. Little children usually do it. Their hands are small, so they’re good for the job.”

  He noticed my expression. “You know, people didn’t have much choice.”

  “And how about you?” I asked.

  “When the Taliban came, I was at university, studying medicine. I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. It’s my dream. So while they were here, I kept on studying, at home.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m waiting for the university to open again.”

  “I’m here to take photographs,” I said. “I’m looking for someone to work with me, to translate, show me around, tell me where is good to go. Would you be interested?”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Faisal took me through narrow walkways, past deserted compounds with cracked flowerpots fallen onto their sides and birdcages that hung empty. We walked for hours, as if he were reclaiming his city’s streets, pointing out barbers shaving off more customers’ beards, crowds of men outside a cinema waiting for an afternoon show, h
ordes of teenage boys staring at postcards of Bollywood stars pinned up for sale. As we made our way down a street full of fruit stalls, he stopped.

  “Can you hear that?” he asked.

  The faint sound of tinny pop drifted down the street.

  “That makes me very happy,” he said. “It’s the first music I’ve heard for five years.”

  On the way back to the Intercontinental I took a picture of a man pushing his bicycle, an enormous bunch of balloons tied to the handlebars, bobbing as he bumped over the potholes. They glowed in the winter sunlight, hopeful snatches of colour in the dust.

  Kabul was at such an altitude that just walking down the street was enough to make me dizzy. Over the next few weeks it grew so cold that it hurt to breathe. My nose was constantly running, my lips sore and cracked. I moved with Molly and the rest of the CNN crew to Wazir Akbar Khan, a posh part of the city to the north. I’d been desperate to leave the Intercontinental. There were too many of my own sort there, too many journalists and photographers and camera crews.

  It had become – like the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, or the American Colony in Jerusalem – a little community, full of intrigue, gossip and sex. It was, as it always is, the buzz of the front line, the aphrodisiac effect of danger and distance from home, from normality from everything that might, in real life, make you think twice. I didn’t get involved – I never did, despite your fears and the arguments we had about it all. Even if I’d wanted to, war reporting’s a pretty straight sport.

  But let’s not get into that particular discussion. I settled into a routine, walking the streets with Faisal, looking for subjects. At first I photographed a lot of burqas, trying to figure them out, trying to capture what they meant. Aesthetically, they worked beautifully, pale blue against beige dust, but I began to feel uneasy at reducing them to a colour palette.

  When I said so to Faisal, he laughed.

  “Come to my house. I have five sisters. Ask them.”

  Faisal’s sisters were very different to the ghostly blue creatures on the street – beautifully dressed in silk shalwar kameezes, their faces expertly made up. They were quiet at first, then bolder, firing off questions, with Faisal translating.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “London.”

  “How old are you?

  “Thirty.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  They looked at me pityingly, whispering amongst themselves. I wondered what they thought of me, scruffy from weeks of travel and not particularly clean.

  After a minute or two, Sushila, the eldest sister, went over to a box in the corner. She rummaged in it for a minute, then took out a little bag.

  “The Taliban banned us from painting our nails,” she said. “So we kept our nail polish hidden. But now it is allowed. If we paint yours you’ll have more chance of finding a husband.”

  You’d have laughed at my face, but I could hardly turn them down. I nodded and smiled and tried to look enthusiastic. They told me off for not looking after my hands properly, and tutted over my nails being so short. Their hands had smooth skin and long nails, all painted the same shade of bright red.

  By the time they’d finished, so were mine. I smiled and nodded, and thanked them very much.

  We huddled around the old bukhari stove, which gave off a cosy smell of burning sawdust.

  “Will you tell me about burqas?” I asked. “I want to know what it’s like to wear one.”

  They brought them down from their hooks. I was surprised at how different they were from each other. I’d assumed they were all exactly the same.

  When I said so, the sisters laughed.

  “No, no,” said Sushila. “Sometimes the material is fine, sometimes rough, and the embroidery around the top comes in lots of designs. Look, this one has flowers, but this one is very plain.”

  “But they’re always blue, right?” I said.

  “No,” said Leila, the second sister. “Sometimes they’re white.”

  “But only if you’re rich,” said Sushila. “They’re hard to keep clean, so you have to be able to afford more than one, and have someone to do your laundry.”

  They made me try one on, lifting it carefully, then arranging it until the top part fitted closely around my head. They spread the material out around me and stood back. I was immediately conscious of the weight of it. Faisal’s house was already warm from the bukhari: now I felt hot and almost unable to breathe.

  “Walk around a bit,” said Leila.

  Slowly, feeling my way, I walked across the room. It was difficult to see out, my vision restricted to the little mesh. I could only look straight ahead, unless I turned my head.

  “Stop,” said Leila. “There’s the mirror.”

  I stared at myself, transformed into one of the blue shapes I’d seen making their way slowly along the streets.

  Leila laughed. “She’s feeling it.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The same thing we all felt when we first put one on. Like you don’t know who you are.”

  I watched the blue shape nod. “Yes. That’s it,” it said, in my voice. “I don’t.”

  Ten

  ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY

  5th January 1915

  A letter from Robert!

  France, 28th December 1914

  Dear Elizabeth,

  I hope you had a very happy Christmas. Mine was uneventful, which was the best we could have hoped for, although the most extraordinary thing happened: a ceasefire, of all things, a truce of sorts. Unofficial, of course. Apparently, some of our Tommies and the enemy exchanged carols and greetings, and on Christmas Day itself they met in no-man’s-land to play football. I know that this will be reported in the newspapers, despite our best efforts to the contrary, so I am not giving anything away by telling you.

  My boys didn’t have much to do with it. Christmas is just another day to them, although the night before, my orderly pointed over to the German trenches, where I saw a line of tiny trees lit with candles.

  “Like Diwali,” he said.

  Have I ever told you about Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights? I used to love it as a boy in Calcutta. The whole city glows; they put lamps everywhere – in the houses, on the streets – to bring prosperity and luck.

  We could certainly use some luck. It’s been particularly ghastly these past few weeks, as the weather has got even worse. The men are in bad shape, and morale has been awfully low.

  I have no words to describe the mud: a miserable, stinking quagmire that slops everywhere and holds onto one’s boots like some awful creature of the deep. Two days ago, I found three of my sepoys sitting in it almost to their armpits, huddled together, moaning in their sleep. I woke them and got them out, and found a man for each one to rub them warm and put them somewhere dry outside the trench for a few hours, until the morning mist had cleared, at which point I had no choice but to order them back in again, which felt all wrong.

  But there is some good news in the midst of all this gloom. My leave has been confirmed: a week, beginning on 1st February. I’ll visit mother and father in Aldershot, and then I’d very much like to come to see you. These last two months have passed very slowly and very quickly at the same time, if that makes any sense at all.

  I hope that you are well.

  Love,

  Robert

  Poor, poor Robert. I find it hard to imagine what life has been like in those trenches, although I have some small idea from the state of our patients. I am so much looking forward to seeing him again and having a proper conversation. I didn’t get his letter until this evening; the newspapers have already done as he predicted, and published photographs of the truce. After everything one has read in those very papers about the Hun assaulting nuns and mutilating children, it is odd to see German soldiers standing next to ordinary Tommies singing carols. Apart from their uniforms, they look almost exactly the same.

  Eleven

  It’s Guy Fa
wkes Night, Suze. I haven’t changed. The curtains are closed and I’m wearing earplugs to block out the noise. Those flashes and bangs, that horrible whistle as the fireworks begin to fall will always remind me of mortar attacks. Do you remember that New Year’s Eve display on Primrose Hill, when I dropped to the ground with my hands over my ears? I couldn’t help myself: it was a reflex action.

  I’m not going to make a fool of myself again. Better to stay in and get on with my story.

  Afghanistan: May 2011. Ten years after that first trip. I wasn’t going to the front line. You can’t, now, unless you’re embedded with the troops, and I didn’t want to do that again, to take photos through the filter of what the army allows. It’s always been the things I’m not supposed to see that interest me, the things they’d rather keep hidden.

  I’d be confined to Kabul, but that was fine with me. For the first time, I was doing something against my journalistic instincts, away from the main story. If I’d wanted to be in the thick of things, I’d have gone to Egypt, Libya, Syria with everyone else, racing to get the story, to catch the news as fast as it happened. Afghanistan’s a long war, a tired war, a drawn-out war, a war that follows on from thirty years of other wars. Osama’s gone, and so is most of the press. The world’s moved on, even if the troops remain and the Taliban are back, making strongholds, gaining strength, regrouping, waiting for the foreigners to leave.

  The freelancing hadn’t really worked out that first time, as you know. I was too inexperienced, couldn’t quite compete. It costs a lot to report from a conflict and I soon realized the benefits of life insurance, satellite communications, help at the other end of the phone. So I went back to a proper job, to calls from the bureau chief, to jumping on planes to dreadful places to take photos of the terrible things that happened in them, sending them back to my editor, hoping that no one else had got there first.