A House in the Sky (9 page)

It was a beautiful, wrecked city. Armored military vehicles crawled like reptiles through the streets, alongside tottering donkey carts and bicyclists. Amputees from the Russian war in the 1980s begged in the markets. Women walked the streets cloaked in burkas, looking like giant badminton birdies or floating blue ghosts. Men in keffiyeh scarves sold mobile-phone airtime from beneath umbrellas, next to shops selling shoes and Western-style business suits and kiosks full of Chinese electronics. The older neighborhoods built in to the rock-scabbed terra-cotta hills overlooking the city, with their half-rubbled, flat-roofed mudbrick buildings, looked like something out of the Old Testament, while construction cranes hovered over blocks of gray Soviet-style buildings being renovated with a flush of foreign aid.

I’d made the trip with Amanuddin, a friendly, middle-aged rug seller I’d met in Peshawar, and one of his young sons. Amanuddin had emigrated to Pakistan decades earlier but came home to Kabul when he could for visits with his family. In Peshawar, I’d stopped in for tea at his carpet shop almost daily. He’d shown me photo albums from his days fighting the Russians as part of the Afghan mujahideen. He’d described Kabul in detail, from the noisy bird market downtown to the beautiful profusion of his mother’s rose gardens.

From the bus station, the three of us took a taxi to a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city and were dropped off when the street narrowed into a lane. Amanuddin had loaned me an abaya from his wife, a draping black robe that was less smothering than a burka and, paired with a head scarf, passed for modest. The abaya was about six inches too short, and I was aware of my jeans sticking out beneath its hem, exposing me for the imposter I was. Carrying our bags, we walked the rest of the way down a rocky path, hopping a trickling brook.

Before we reached the gate to his family’s compound, Amanuddin’s relatives were streaming toward us, shouting their greetings. Kids, women, men, dozens of them. The women kissed me three times, alternating cheeks. Amanuddin’s mother, wearing an indigo burka, took my hand. Everyone swarmed over Amanuddin and his boy. Behind the wall were their three houses, wide and low, made from mud and hay, plus a small outhouse that served the whole family.

After dinner that night, Amanuddin’s mother showed me to a room with a mat on the floor and a candle lit on the windowsill. She settled me in wordlessly, her burka removed, her cheeks sunken, her gray hair in two stalklike braids down her back. On the floor she stacked a pile of handwoven wool blankets to protect against the evening chill, each one stitched with colorful yarn embroidery, thicker and heavier than any blanket I’d ever lifted. She disappeared for a few minutes, returning with a pot of tea and a dish of sweets on a silver tray. By then I was standing at the window, looking at the wide sky and the pale moon, thinking,
I can’t believe it: I’m really in Afghanistan.
I caught sight of the dense rosebushes growing along the side of the compound walls.
Their flowers lay red, robust, and wide open in the moonlight, exactly as Amanuddin had described them.

*

On my sixth day in Kabul, Clementina Cantoni’s kidnappers set her free. Nothing was said publicly about how this came to pass—what deal might have been struck, what concessions had or hadn’t been made during the three weeks she’d been held captive. An Afghan minister would insist to the media that no ransom had been paid and no prisoners were released in exchange for her freedom. Outside of Kabul’s Italian embassy, Cantoni waved wanly at the television cameras before disappearing inside to spend the night under heavy guard. The next day, she got the hell out, flying back to Italy, saying little about what had happened.

On the day she was released—June 9, 2005—I was oblivious. The truth is, I hadn’t thought much about the kidnapped Italian woman since arriving in Kabul. Exploring on my own, I’d taken a taxi that day to a wholesale market area near the center of the city, which sprawled in all directions, straddling the banks of the Kabul River, devolving into a labyrinth of crooked alleys. I bought a plastic cup of raisins and apricots mixed with pistachios and honey-sweetened water and ate them with a spoon. I browsed through little shops. In one, I found a shelf stacked with bars of soap, their wrappers showing a photograph of a smiling woman’s face, except that every face had been scribbled over with a marker. This was a fundamentalist Islamic move, something the Taliban once enforced strictly: Any images of things made by Allah weren’t to be replicated by a human hand, because it counted as playing god. Amanuddin had explained to me: It was okay to paint or print a photograph of a car or a building but not a person or animal. Idolatry was a sin. It was why, several years earlier, the Taliban had dynamited a pair of ancient grand statues of Buddha in the town of Bamiyan, causing a global outcry. I thought about buying one of the soaps as a souvenir, but staring at the blotted-out face of the Middle Eastern model gave me the creeps.

Back outside, I wandered down tightly packed dirt lanes, weaving
between shoppers, browsing the goods laid out on tables and blankets—dried fruits, pyramids of ground spices, mountains of polyester clothing—when I felt something drill into my back, the force of it like voltage from a wire. When I turned, the pressure increased. A young man was at my shoulder. His expression was bug-eyed. I realized then that it was a gun jamming into my ribs, some sort of pistol.

Into my ear, the man said very clearly, “I will kill you. Give me your money.”

It was over before I fully understood what was happening. Only after I handed the man my wallet—a change purse I’d bought in Rajasthan with three hundred dollars in it, about half the money I had for the rest of my trip—and after the crowd had swallowed him up again, did my whole body start to shake. Frozen in place in the middle of the market, with men pushing their bicycles past me and women hurrying onward with their covered heads down, I began to cry—months’ worth of tears, it seemed, maybe even years. I felt lost and small. Every instinct seemed to have left me. I couldn’t think of a thing to do but weep. My head scarf and too-short abaya had done nothing to help me blend in. I felt fully unmasked as a foreigner, sobbing in a way I knew must appear ridiculous and childlike but which I couldn’t tamp down. For the first time in ages, I missed home. I missed my mother. I just wanted to be a woman standing on a street that I knew, in a place where I fit in.

A crowd began to gather, men looking quizzical. Eventually, someone located an Afghan soldier who found a sympathetic taxi driver to get me out of there. A few days later, I used most of the rest of my money to buy a bus ticket back to Pakistan. From there, on a more meager budget than ever, I got myself to Delhi to catch my flight home.

For a week, I carried a star-shaped bruise of that pistol in the soft spot below my ribs, on my right side. It ached and changed colors and then very slowly faded away. But its message remained clear to me, like an asterisk added to what had been almost seven months straight of heady travel, as if at last I’d hit some final fence line.
You don’t fuck with Afghanistan,
it was saying. Yet even so, there was something still flickering inside me, the pilot light that had fueled me all the way through and was not, even now, extinguished—the thing that said,
Yes, do.

I
t was about eight months later, in the winter of 2006, when I first spotted Nigel Brennan—a thin guy wearing a fleece jacket, cargo shorts, and hiking boots, sitting alone on an empty hotel veranda in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. I’d spent the summer and fall waiting tables in Calgary, stockpiling my money. I was now five weeks into what I figured would be a six-month tour through Africa and the Middle East, so long as I stuck to a careful budget.

This was my dream trip. Seeing Africa had been a goal since I first started traveling. Already, I’d made my way through parts of Uganda and Kenya, taking buses over wide plains, passing long days alone. I felt awestruck and intimidated by what I’d seen, by the sweating city crowds and the thorny flatlands. How different the landscape was from Afghanistan’s craggy splendor or the heavy lushness of South Asia. Even the sky looked uniquely African—flatter and wider, like blue chrome layered over the land.

By the time I reached Addis Ababa, I was lonely. It seemed almost like Nigel had been waiting for me, though in reality, he was just a traveler who happened to find a quiet spot to read a book, on a sagging couch on the porch of the one-star Baro Hotel, right about the same time my taxi rattled up on the street out front. I felt an instant pull in his direction.

He was in his mid-thirties, I guessed. I recognized the cover of the book he was reading—a thick paperback travelogue by Paul Theroux
called
Dark Star Safari,
which was becoming a cult hit among the backpacker crowd. I had devoured it twice. The first lines went like this:
All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there . . .

Carrying my bag past Nigel on my way to reception, I said, “Hi, how are you?”

He looked up. He had blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a handsome, unshaved face. “Oh,” he said, as if I’d woken him, “I’m good.” He went back to reading.

At the Baro’s reception desk, I handed over my passport and got a ten-dollar room. A couple of extra-frugal travelers had pitched sun-beaten tents in front of the reception area. My room had a stained carpet and was weakly lit, with a twin mattress and a small bathroom. On a tray over the sink lay a packet of African condoms—a customary gesture in a country working to lower its HIV rates, at a hotel that sometimes doubled as a brothel for locals, and amid intermingling travelers who tended to be young, impulsive, and charged up on adventure.

I moved the condoms to one side, brushed my teeth, fished a pack of cigarettes from my bag, and went back out to find the guy on the porch.

*

Cigarettes, for low-budget travelers, are a universal icebreaker. On the streets of just about any city or town, they can be bartered for directions or the use of a toilet. Among those traveling, they’re an excuse to talk and to share.

I flopped myself down on the chair near Nigel and waved my pack of cigarettes. “Okay if I smoke?” I said.

He shrugged. “Sure.” At last he set the book down, pulling out a cigarette of his own.

He was an Australian living in London—a photographer, he said, newly arrived in Ethiopia to shoot pictures for the International Rescue Committee, to help promote some of its aid projects. He was traveling alone. He’d be in Africa for the next three months.

The conversation flowed easily. Nigel had a ready smile. We talked for a while about the Theroux book. I quizzed him on how he’d gotten
his start in photography. He said he’d realized how much he loved taking photos during a trip to India years earlier, prompting him to go back to school to get a photography degree. It struck me as glamorous, to get paid to travel like that, to capture a foreign landscape or face, to offer it up to all the people who would never have the guts to go see it themselves. Nigel had thin, muscled calves, a quick laugh, and a thick Australian accent. He came across as self-assured, successful. He casually mentioned that he’d had a meeting with someone from the
Times
of London.

I had spent years studying magazines and newspapers and travel books, feeding myself on other people’s impressions of the world while gathering my own. That Nigel was not just a photographer but a photographer
who lived in London
felt significant. And he seemed to wear it well, as if inhabiting exactly the life he’d planned for himself.

It was getting late. I stood up and stretched, announcing that after the distance I’d come that day, I had to get some sleep. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” I said.

Nigel looked at his watch. “Actually, I’m on the six
A.M
. bus to Harar.” Harar, I knew from my reading, was a walled city in the eastern part of Ethiopia, a historic Islamic trade center about ten hours away. “Anyway, I hope you get some rest,” he said. “Good luck with your travels.” He reached again for his book.

I masked my disappointment. He hadn’t even asked for an e-mail address. Maybe, I thought, this was the dividing line between journalists and backpackers.

Walking back to my sparse room, I felt a ripple of confusion. Something about him had stirred me. He seemed to be resisting it, but I believed I’d stirred him, too.

Around nine the next morning, I woke, showered, and headed back out to the terrace.

I was having a second cup of coffee when Nigel appeared at my table. He was dressed in the same outfit he’d been wearing the night before. In the daylight, he looked a bit older. The skin around his eyes creased when he smiled.

“Hey, doll,” he said, using an endearment that only an Australian man can pull off even half-winningly, “looks like I’m back.”

His taxi, it turned out, had gotten marooned in the snarl of early-morning traffic. He’d missed his bus to Harar by five minutes. The next one, he told me, wouldn’t come for another twenty-four hours. A stroke of luck, it felt like. As Nigel dragged a chair to my table, something inside me clicked on.

*

We liked each other, Nigel and I. We spent his extra day in Addis together, visiting the market, flirting gently. In the evening, we went dancing at a nightclub, drinking
tej,
a sweet, potent honey wine. Nigel was intelligent, interesting. He’d grown up on a middle-of-nowhere farm outside of Goondiwindi, Australia, and knew how to do things like build barns and slaughter sheep. He used the word “piss” more often and more flexibly than anyone I’d ever met—“I’m just pissin’ in yer pocket,” he’d say, or “I took the piss out of him, didn’t I?” or “Let’s hit the piss” or “What a piece of piss that was.” He assured me that his family back home spoke the same way. London, he claimed, had buffed some of his rough edges.

Back at the hotel, we went to his room. It seemed we might be beginning to lean in toward our first kiss. I was ready for it, happy for it, but instead, Nigel blurted out some news: He had a girlfriend back in London.