Limbo (39 page)

“It was a routine operation, just a cordon and search,” Manuela downplays, using the English phrase. “Which means?” “It means surround and capture.” “Surround and capture”: to Mattia, it's a sinister phrase, one that ought to be avoided. Maybe headquarters thinks the same thing, which is why they prefer to use the English. In an attempt to encrypt the code and make it incomprehensible to outsiders, the army—every army—uses a private language, a monosyllabic slang stuffed with acronyms and technical terms, euphemisms, and foreign words. “Basically,” Manuela explains, “you encircle a village, search the houses, or have the Afghani soldiers search them rather, because at this point they're capable of doing it on their own, and whoever flees is blocked by the cordon of troops. That's what we did, and we flushed out an insurgent.” She stops. So much time has passed. She's not even sure she's the same person who advanced in total darkness among the partially destroyed houses of Negroamaro. “It was a bloodless operation, we didn't fire a shot, and I was hoping we wouldn't have to.” But as she speaks she realizes that this is how she feels now, a thought of this moment, born in the overpass pizzeria, while looking into Traian's excited face and Mattia's myopic eyes, wide with astonishment, because he can't seem to reconcile his Manuela, the girl who moans in his bed at the Bellavista, with the sergeant armed with night vision goggles and an automatic rifle who searched a remote Afghani village in the dead of night. In that moment she was ready; her hands didn't shake. “They ambushed us on the way back, and we had to defend ourselves. That was my big action in Afghanistan. There's nothing heroic about it. I didn't kill anyone. I never killed anyone, Traian.”

“Whatever happened to Mullah Wallid?” Teodora joins in. “I don't know,” Manuela responds, “it wasn't our duty to try him, we're guests there, our job was to offer ANA support in the capture of the wanted individual.” “If he was an insurgent he was probably tortured until he revealed who subsidized him and then shot,” Mattia theorizes. “Not necessarily,” Manuela says. “A leader is worth more alive than he is dead. He might side with the government one day, you never know. Alliances are unstable, nothing lasts. And everything has a price. I learned not to ask myself what will happen when we pull out. To live day by day, and to do the right thing at the right time. I wouldn't have been able to survive there otherwise.”

*   *   *

That night at the Bellavista, when he turns back the comforter and slides in bed, Mattia sees her scar. Manuela's leg, slender and white, is visible between the rumpled sheets. She was too tired to wait up for him and has already fallen asleep. Instinctively he runs his fingertips along the wound. The hard, compact flesh is the color of blood. The edges are uneven, the line wavy and wandering. Her flesh, ripped apart by the shrapnel, has been stitched back together, but along the edges the skin is rippled, and little knots have formed, rough to the touch, like rope. A transparent membrane has formed where the epidermis was destroyed, as smooth as a baby's skin, forever fragile. A hieroglyph of pain.

He doesn't want to wake her, and yet he can't keep from bringing his lips to the scar and kissing it, from her knee to her ankle, following the painful hem of flesh. He shivers at the touch of her skin, as if it held the memory of the metal that had pierced her so deeply. “What are you doing?” she murmurs, feeling around for the sheets. The room is dim, and lines of light cut across the bed. “I'm listening to you,” he says.

16

HOMEWORK

“We have a problem, Sergeant Paris,” Colonel Minotto said, as soon as I—sighing with relief—crossed the threshold of the command hut. June was suffocating. It was already 86°F at seven in the morning, and might reach 122°F by noon. The sun was an incandescent brass disk that burned in a cloudless sky for weeks, the heat turned our rifles red-hot, singed our hands, and cooked the soles of our boots. The glare seared our eyes, the dry air flayed our lips. It was hard to breathe, and agony to go outside in the daytime. Inside the sealed Lince we roasted like meat on the grill. During downtime I would gasp for air on my cot, or drag myself to the shower, where the refreshing water would make me shriek with delight, but it lasted only a second; after only a few steps toward my bunk I'd be drenched in sweat again. The tents and containers were cremation ovens, so hot that the day before, my thermometer exploded. The wind had kicked up—an obsessive, furious wind that the Afghanis call the
sad-u-bist ruz
, the 120-days wind. It had raged for five days and the weather report warned us that this was only a brief reprieve. It was sandstorm season in the Persian Gulf. The
sad-u-bist ruz
would calm down at night, but then it would pick up again, worse than before. It was like a tornado, but instead of forming a spiral turbine, it moved at ground level, like the hellish breath of a dragon. The earth had turned to dust; the sand inflamed our eyelids and scorched our lungs.

At that moment it was 115°F in the shade outside the command hut, and my fatigues were tattooed to my skin. I was swimming in sweat, I felt I was melting like ice cream. My skin, my hair, and my underwear were all boiling wet. None of my physical training had prepared me to handle this climate. I was afraid I would faint. And I worried about the kids on guard duty at the entrance to the base, in their helmets and bulletproof vests under that murderous sun. It must have been like wearing an iron breastplate in a furnace. The command hut had air-conditioning, but it couldn't be turned on because it used too much electricity and shorted out the system. Three fingers of sand had collected beneath the rusty window. The colonel was suffering from the heat, too, and trickles of sweat ran down his cheeks. I remained at attention, wary. Minotto was forty-six, with a basketball player's build, a pelican's nose, and beady eyes that sank into his cheeks, as if they'd been chiseled absentmindedly in his face. From his grim expression, I expected to be bawled out.

The rapport among officers, NCOs, and troops had broken down. Once we'd passed D
+
120, in other words two thirds of our tour of duty, the platoon leaders limited sorties from the FOB as much as possible. Even though it brought bad luck, the soldiers were counting the days till they could go home. The officers were tired, and the slowness, the bureaucracy, the lack of coordination, the delays, and the unexpected difficulties, which they had faced boldly in the beginning, now discouraged them. Captain Paggiarin nearly wept with rage over the cancellation of a cooperative project—the construction of a bridge on the Farah River—that had cost the regiment a great deal of effort and the Italian government a great deal of money. It was whispered that Carlo Paggiarin of Feltre, the imperturbable Skinny Buddha whom no one, in his thirty-eight years of life, had ever seen get angry or lose his cool—until he came to Afghanistan—had broken his hand punching a wall. And sure enough, his right hand was bandaged. The soldiers' discontent was even more physical. Fights broke out over nothing—for refusing to lend a cigarette, or cutting in line, or over a box of cookies that went missing. Some people's nerves gave out. Others sought doctors' excuses, the infirmary was always crowded. Complaints of crippling stomach pains and headaches that the doctors were convinced were made up. Nevertheless, orders came from headquarters to eliminate all dead weight, so as to avoid slander spreading about the competence of the health care. Private Rizzo—who faked an asthma attack every time he was supposed to leave the base—was sent home. A soldier from Cerberus platoon was repatriated for insubordination. But I didn't want to go home. I felt I was just beginning to understand Afghanistan.

Still, I was scared of what the colonel wanted to tell me. One of the NCOs from the Ninth—I could never figure out who—had complained to the captain, accusing me of causing hierarchical confusion among the troops and their superiors. He insinuated that I was having a relationship with Corporal-Major Diego Jodice, which was—in addition to being regrettable—also prohibited. He therefore requested that Sergeant Paris be sanctioned with repatriation.

“What do you know about Karim Ghaznavi?” Minotto asked without any sort of preamble. “The interpreter?” I replied, relieved. No, it wasn't about me. The captain hadn't given any weight to the complaint. He had plenty of other things to think about besides gossip. The colonel nodded. Ghaznavi was a bright little man, with amber skin, refined manners, and sad eyes behind his round glasses; he wore tired leather moccasins, and too-short, Western-style pants that revealed a pair of droopy, coffee-colored socks. He was always sweaty, dusty, breathless. He slept in a hut at the entrance to the base with the other two interpreters, younger than him by at least thirty years, and much more resourceful. His every gesture displayed the exhausted, impoverished dignity of a man who has seen better days. When I was introduced to him, I instinctively called him Professor, and I could tell that he appreciated the nickname. I didn't trust the Afghani officers, whose pasts, I imagined, included stoning women and cutting off the hands of thieves; I was suspicious of the Afghani police who collaborated with our regiment; at times I was afraid of the impetuous, arrogant, and careless ANA soldiers who roamed the base with guns loaded even though it was forbidden; I found the other interpreters greedy for money or gifts and superficial in their imitation of Western ways with their slicked-back hair and stylish sunglasses—or else unscrupulous and ready to betray us. I was always apprehensive when I went on patrol with them, afraid they'd sell us out to the insurgents by communicating our movements, our coordinates, or our itinerary, which I would choose with my squad leaders right before leaving the base. Whoever was planting IEDs always knew when and where the Alpini were going: my platoon alone had identified and defused five of them. Someone had to be informing them. But the sad Professor seemed trustworthy to me.

“For what it's worth, sir, in my experience Ghaznavi is reliable,” I said warily. I didn't want to go too far out on a limb because I gathered from the colonel's grim expression that he, on the other hand, had a low opinion of the interpreter. I thought I knew Ghaznavi well. Ever since I arrived, I'd had the impression that he wanted to strike up a conversation with me, but wouldn't let himself because I'm a woman. The pleasure of discovering that we shared a passion convinced him to overcome his reluctance. He'd surprised me one evening holding a book and said, rather ceremoniously, that Sergeant Paris must be a special person: soldiers and NCOs never read. “Maybe in Italy one has to be at least a lieutenant or a captain to love books. But that's strange, because poetry is for everyone, and anyone can appreciate it. Poetry is like a flower growing in a field. It doesn't ask permission to be there, it takes root wherever it pleases.” I've always loved reading to learn or to escape from the world, but I'd never read a book of verse: my indifference to poetry seemed shameful, so—to keep Ghazvani from realizing the misunderstanding—I slipped my volume on strategic analysis into my jacket pocket. “If I had met someone when I was young who knew how to talk to me about poetry with so much conviction, perhaps I wouldn't be here,” I responded. Then I started to cough, because it was the time of the 120-days wind, and the blowing sand burned my throat. “Poets say that the wind is the voice of God,” Ghaznavi had commented. “He prefers to speak to mortals in a language that only sensitive people can understand.” “And do you believe them?” “Poets always speak the truth,” Ghaznavi assured me, “but my grandfather used to say that the summer wind is the army of angels that travels the country in order to inspect the battlefield before the Apocalypse, and my grandfather always spoke the truth, too.”

The Professor was from Herat. As an archaeology student he had worked with Italians on the restoration of Qal'a-i-Ikhtyaruddin, or the Citadel—sometime around 1976. It was a magnificent site, a fortress with eighteen towers over a hundred feet tall, covered in Kufic inscriptions, majolica, and frescoes. Almost totally destroyed. According to Ghaznavi, most of Afghanistan's archaeological treasures had been lost, and the rest were at risk. No one understood art here. But Italians, then and now, always ask a lot of questions. And every time I saw a mound of stones I would ask him, “Are they ancient?” Ghaznavi had learned Italian from the archaeologists. He'd never been to Italy, though.

I sensed that the colonel wasn't interested in the Professor's archaeological experience, however, and I didn't allow myself to express too forceful an opinion. I was only a sergeant, after all. “We've received a report from the Afghani police,” Minotto said, scribbling in a notebook. “It seems that Ghaznavi is selling drugs to someone on the base.”

“Drugs!” I exclaimed. “Impossible.” “That's what I said, too.” The colonel sighed. “It has to be a lie, someone who wants revenge, or his job, you know he earns in a month what an Afghani working at a ministry earns in a year,” I added, and then repented immediately because a subordinate answers only what is asked, and doesn't make inferences. “It's a very detailed report,” Captain Paggiarin cut in. “It seems it's been going on for a while. It mentions two female soldiers. Now, Paris, other than Lieutenant Ghigo, the only women at Sollum are you and Giani. The military police have already questioned Giani, discreetly because it's a serious case, and the corporal swears she knows nothing about it. Besides, she handles supplies, she's only been off the base once, it does not appear she has had any contact with Ghaznavi—whereas you, Sergeant, have often been seen conversing with him.”

It was true. But they were innocent chats. We either talked about books or theology. Ghaznavi told me he would have liked to be able to give me a volume by Rumi, the greatest classical poet of Persian literature. He wrote the
Mathnawi
, a fifty-thousand-verse poem in rhymed couplets, the
Diwan
, and a collection of maxims. Ghaznavi used to have an English version of Rumi's
Selected Poems
, from the end of the nineteenth century, it had belonged to his grandfather. Jal
ā
l ad-D
Ä«
n Muhammad R
Å«
m
Ä«
was a poet but also a Sufi mystic, an enlightened man, it's said he was crazy for God. “Do you believe in God, Sergeant Paris?” “Yes, yes,” I was quick to say, because during mission prep our instructors had coached us not to offend the Afghanis with our lack of faith. And to say that we were Christians, regardless of what we really believed. For them a life without God was inconceivable, and they wouldn't trust anyone who did not fear him. The Koran teaches that God is closer to us than our own blood. “You really should read him,” Ghaznavi said. He believed that Sergeant Paris appreciated the beauty of light. Every thought that is not a memory of God is merely a whisper. And no one knew how to speak of God like Rumi, he had even written him a love song.