A House in the Sky (11 page)

Then one afternoon he called me and, in short order, started to cry. The truth followed quickly, propelled by a rush of fully uncorked guilt. As it turned out, Nigel did not have a girlfriend in London named Jane. The woman in London named Jane was his wife.

They’d been together about ten years, like he’d told me in Ethiopia. What he’d left out was the part where they’d spent the last year of it married. They still were married, though it had been rocky, he said. He had gotten himself—with her, with me—into the ugliest sort of jam and was confessing all around. On the phone, I could hear his breath catching as he spoke, his tone pleading. He was calling the marriage a mistake, and lying to me about it had been another mistake. For a few minutes, we were both sobbing until, without another word, I hung up on him and stared at the yellowish high-rises outside my Cairo hotel window as both my plans and my heart seemed to burn up on the spot, as I thought,
Did that really just happen?
Then came the secondary thought as the recklessness of the last five months replayed in my mind, this time with “Married Man” subbing for “London-based Lover”:
How stupid am I?

I felt adrift, cheated, alone. For the next few months, I traveled numbly—through Egypt, then Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. Damascus had a labyrinthine covered souk where men sold things that glittered—glass beads, jeweled slippers, rolls of silk embroidered with gold thread. In the old city, there were cobblestone streets and arched wooden doors and vine-covered buildings built by the Ottomans some five hundred years earlier. There were shops selling flaky pieces of baklava dripping with honey and tiny cups of strong Turkish coffee. Rows of dark-suited old men sitting on benches in the shade. I met people, I saw things. My cell phone buzzed with calls from Nigel, but I ignored them. In my weaker moments, I clicked back through my photos of Ethiopia, studying his face, looking for signs of guilt and fakery. Sitting at an Internet café one day, I Googled Jane’s name, wondering what she made of the whole mess, trying to guess at what kind of person she might be. I put labels on all of us—her, me, Nigel—good, bad, villainous; innocent, dumb, guilty. Or maybe it was just victim, victim, victim. I wasn’t sure.

*

I got past my heartbreak the only way I knew how—by making more plans, bigger plans. I bought myself a new camera, a fancy professional one, an upgraded version of what Nigel had carried with him in Ethiopia. In some ways, given my finances, it was an absurd purchase, but I saw it as an investment in my future. I’d watched Nigel use his photography to sponsor several months on the road. It didn’t seem illogical to think I could teach myself to do something similar. I was a traveler, after all, and the world was full of travel magazines. Who was to say I couldn’t try to sell photos of the places I went? I wasn’t thinking about a career, just a little income here and there. The goal was to keep myself moving.

The camera became a salve, a new repository for my hope. I went back to Canada and spent the rest of 2006 waitressing to recharge my bank account. Meanwhile, Nigel never stopped calling. He was back in
Australia, in the middle of divorce proceedings. His family and all his friends were mad at him, he said. Though the whole thing was uncomfortable and weird, I’d started picking up the phone when he called, feeling somewhere between still pissed and totally lonely.

I was twenty-five years old, fully accustomed to the cycle of making money fast in a Canadian bar and then spending it slowly, as far out in the world as I could get. I could travel on fifteen dollars a day without feeling hungry or uncomfortable. I still felt a knock of fresh happiness every time I reached a new place. I was also getting older, slowly outgrowing the flightiness of the people around me, both the waitresses back home and the travelers I met on the road. I didn’t want a desk job, but I did want to be something more than a waitress. I went back to Calgary and took a photography class between waitressing shifts. I started to nurse a larger purpose, thinking that if I declared myself a photographer, something good would come of it.

All the while, I continued to talk to Nigel, laughing a little bit more, wondering whether we really were fated to be together. Maybe it was his other relationship that had been the fluke and ours that had value. He lived in a house he’d built with his own two hands. He had a job he liked, working as a photographer for a newspaper in a small city called Bundaberg. It all seemed very stable and grown-up. About ten months after he broke the news about Jane, while I planned another trip through Asia for the winter of 2007, Nigel talked me into stopping for a layover in Australia.

*

It wasn’t instantaneous, the rebuilding of our romance, but it wasn’t slow. I landed in Sydney on a February morning, and after fighting off a full-blown panic attack in the airport bathroom, I walked into the arrivals hall, where I watched Nigel turn and catch sight of me with a slow smile spreading upward. The beard he’d sported in Ethiopia was gone. He looked to be a paler, more neatly trimmed version of the person I’d known, dressed in new jeans and a pressed shirt. When he hugged me, it was firmly, as if placing me with a prolonged squeeze in his world.

This kicked off a honeymoonish tour of eastern Australia. We had two weeks before my I was to continue on to Bangkok and then Delhi, where I had plans to meet Kelly Barker, my favorite travel companion from home. Kelly had shifted from waitressing into working as a flight attendant, which had perks for both of us: She’d given me a “buddy pass” for a discounted flight to Asia and was flying for next to nothing herself.

In the meantime, Nigel and I climbed the Harbour Bridge, picnicked in a lush green park, and took a ferry to Manly Beach to play in the waves. We flew up the coast and booked a cabin on a small charter boat headed to the Great Barrier Reef, where we scuba-dived on psychedelic-looking blue and yellow coral and swam silently among flapping rays and gliding turtles. At night, we drank a lot. We picked apart grilled pink prawns and mud crab, dipping the sweet meat into melted butter. We sat up late, talking in the balmy sea air beneath an unreal pantheon of stars before taking ourselves happily to bed.

Still, I had flashes of paranoia. Was the man I’d met traveling, with whom I was now traveling again, the more authentic rendition of the guy who not too long ago had a wife, a flat in London, and an entirely different future? Had I rearranged that, or was I merely an excuse for the rearrangement? I tried to shove off the doubts, but we were operating under some pressure: The wreckage of Nigel’s marriage became less horrid when repurposed as a true-love story, a meant-to-be affair so predestined that it couldn’t have been helped, in fact,
shouldn’t have gone any other way,
for if it had, we wouldn’t be narrating it to nine grandkids someday from our rockers on the porch, having long ago made one painful correction for the sake of a full, happy life.

The whole premise worked if we ended up together, if I loved him and he loved me. We said these words to each other, but this time I made no promises to move to Australia. I tried to be bold in order to feel less weak. When I left Nigel, I did so on my terms. I told him I was going to end this next trip through Asia with a longer stay in Afghanistan, having banked some extra money during my last stint at home. Once there, I thought I’d try to get some paid work as a photographer. If he wanted to be with me, he could save his money and join me there. The next step belonged to him. Our lives, I said, could be fantastic.

T
hat spring, I made it to Afghanistan as planned, moving into the Mustafa Hotel in downtown Kabul, negotiating a monthly rate and landing myself a small room with dark carpeting and a twin bed covered by a soft pink blanket. The window overlooked a busy square.

The Mustafa was famous, the place most journalists had bunked at the outset of the American invasion of Afghanistan, when foreign correspondents first poured into the city. It had been one of the first places in post-Taliban Kabul to start serving alcohol. The era when the hotel teemed with journalists, though, had passed. As the war in Afghanistan dragged on, some of the press had moved into fortified compounds or guesthouses that had been converted into news bureaus. Other media organizations didn’t bother to keep a regular correspondent in Afghanistan, funneling their resources toward the other dragging-on war in Iraq. As a result, I’d heard that Afghanistan was a freelancer’s paradise—rich in conflict but not overly populated with media. The barriers for people just starting out were far lower than they were at home.

Kabul, in May of 2007, resembled a stripped-down rock garden, with whole blocks of half-destroyed Soviet-style buildings followed by blocks of sprouting commerce. The dust off the plateau sat like a second skin on the faces of the raggedy kids who sold chewing gum and old maps on the street corners, the crispness of the high-altitude air
lacquered by the motor buzz and stink of hundreds of diesel generators attempting to make up for missing infrastructure.

I had business cards that read “Amanda Lindhout, Freelance Photographer,” and listed my e-mail address and new Afghan mobile phone number, with the same words written on the back in Dari, the most common language spoken in Afghanistan. I pressed them into the hands of everyone I encountered. At the Mustafa, I met a friendly photojournalist from England named Jason Howe, who’d charted his own way through the guerrilla war in Colombia, through the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon in 2006, followed by a stint in Iraq. He was now en route to Helmand Province to embed with British troops.

He explained the tenets of freelancing. You planned for yourself, paid for yourself, and assumed your own risk. You rode out the bumps, went without health insurance and long-term plans of any sort, and grew accustomed to being broke. When it came to assignments, you created your own, getting yourself to the most opportune spot.

Nothing about this intimidated me. It did not, in fact, sound a whole lot different than the tenets of low-budget backpacking.

I took pictures of everything I could, though I found it hard to photograph Afghans. Even women fully shielded behind burkas turned away from my lens. Men glared openly at me through my viewfinder. I had reconnected with Amanuddin, the rug seller I’d met a couple of years earlier. He’d relocated permanently from Peshawar to Kabul, where he’d opened another store. Thinking he might be able to help me, I asked whether he’d take me out to see the Kuchis, the nomadic people who camped in makeshift villages in the bald brown hills behind his extended family’s house on Kabul’s southern fringe, where I’d stayed during my first visit.

There were Kuchis all over Afghanistan. Most were of Pashtun heritage; some were more nomadic than others, moving across the highlands over seasons. You’d see the Kuchis walking the sides of otherwise remote roads with their sheep, the women wearing bright wool dresses with beaded bodices and wide sleeves, the men wrapped in scarves and topped by mushroom-shaped Pakol hats. The few hundred living in the furrowed valleys beyond Amanuddin’s house slept under
a patchwork of woolen tents. The locals—the Afghans with land and homes—tolerated them, but mostly with distaste. The Kuchis reminded me a little bit of the First Nations people back in Canada, independent and unintegrated and pretty much worse off for it.

Having packed all my camera gear and all my ambitions as a newly minted, not-exactly-making-it professional photographer, I proposed to Amanuddin that we spend the night at the Kuchi camp.

His response was sharp: “Why do you need this?” Amanuddin’s idea of a good time was listening to Bollywood music or bringing a picnic of lamb kebabs wrapped in newspaper and eating them on the shady banks of Qargha Lake. It was clear there were limits to what he would do in the name of tour guiding.

He did agree to walk me out to where the Kuchis were staying and make an introduction. The sun was beginning to dunk behind the hills as we approached, softening everything to a dusty plum. People were driving their herds of sheep and goats in toward camp for the evening. The scene had looked pretty and pastoral from a distance, but now I could smell the shit stink of hundreds of animals as they rivered closer. A turbaned man dressed in loose white clothing and a brown vest was moving toward us from the tents—the headman of the group, who introduced himself as Matin.

After some conversation in Pashto with Amanuddin, Matin took me to the tent belonging to his sister, saying I could sleep there. Amanuddin continued to insist it was not a good idea to stay—not safe, he said—but I was set on it. Giving me a suit-yourself shrug, he said he’d return for me in the morning and then loped back over the hills just ahead of the darkness.

The headman’s sister was in her forties, with a sun-weathered face and her hair in two matted braids. She wore a red dress patched with pieces of green wool. Matin loudly pronounced her name for me.
Maryam.
He then pronounced mine for her.
Almond-a
. By way of bidding me good night, Matin touched his hand to his heart. I touched my hand to my heart in return.

Maryam lifted the flap to her tent and waved me in. A small fire burned inside. Her two children wrestled on a carpet laid over the
gravelly ground. Their possessions were stacked neatly in canvas bags against the tent’s far wall. Maryam set about making us a dinner of rice and thick yogurt and naan, which we ate right out of the cooking pots, washed down with sweet, warm tea.

After the meal, she swept the dirt floor and hauled several thick woolen blankets from the back of the tent. She took me outside so we could pee, side by side, on the hillside. Then the two of us lay awake, lit by the orange embers of the cooking fire, each propped on an elbow, talking in our respective languages, aided by hand gestures, somehow never tiring of the effort. We discussed our families and the war, converting a thumbnail’s worth of actual comprehension into something that, in the moment, anyway, felt significant. When she couldn’t make herself clear, Maryam laughed and reached for my hand, as if to say,
Whatever. We are having ourselves a little bit of fun
. From time to time, she leaned over and pulled the blankets higher over my shoulders.