Napoleon's Roads (3 page)

The police, when they came – a man and a woman, both very young – went down and explored for a few minutes, then returned, unhooked the ladder, and took it away to some other part of the cellar. At first she heard some noises and muffled conversation, then silence. When they came back they said they could find nothing. There was a second room, they said, like a cellar beneath the cellar, that had a trapdoor that tripped a light when it was opened, but there was no way down. That was why they had needed to move the ladder. When they got down there they found another trapdoor, a third one, in the corner, and another room below that, but when they moved the ladder again and went down into this third space they found only a stool, and a ladder set up against one of the walls, on the other side, away from the trapdoor, where the big root was.

‘It's very peaceful down there,' the young policewoman said, and paused for a while, before advising her to contact Missing Persons, which she did, and filled in all the forms. Her husband was obviously somewhere else. They needed a photograph but although he must have taken thousands she could find very few of them, and almost nothing of him. The one she gave them was at least fifteen years old. It was from one of his trips out west. He was standing under a huge gum tree (it was a
Eucalyptus camaldulensis
), on top of a hill, with a wide valley behind him. She didn't know who had taken it. Nor, she thought, was it very much like him, not really.

‘KABUL'

Why were they in Kabul? Chantal had no idea. She wasn't sure if Charles knew either. They both seemed to be spinning out of control. By now she had abandoned herself to the challenge of surviving life with Charles. She had lost track of all borders and distances …

The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj
,
Richard Neville and Julie Clarke

There are things seen, witnessed, glimpsed in the world beyond ourselves, that go immediately inward, as if they were external projections of some deep, internal dream – correspondences, that should be asked not what they are, but from where, what country within us they come, and why it is that they should now, at last, appear.

‘Correspondence', Alain Dufort

From one of the narrow side streets, an old woman ambles into the parking lot, squats and defecates between the cars. It is midday, Aix, the city of dogs. We are only feet from the main thoroughfare, only a block from the Hôtel Casino. No-one else sees. As she passes, her dress still caught up behind her, she glances at me as she might at a bird or parked car – or rather her eye falls upon me, without interest or defiance.

‘Sophia,' the night porter says – I have not told him what I have seen, merely asked about the old woman in the square: ‘That is Sophia,' as if she were well known in the town, as if he were pleased I had noticed her.

~

The nurses, if that is what they are: I cannot tell how many, or what is going on behind them, further into the shadow beyond the wide, open doorway of a barn or ancient stone warehouse. They are standing around a large bench that may be an operating table, perhaps a mortuary slab. One holds up her gloved hands as if in defence or surrender, or simply to keep the blood from falling on the stone. Another's hands hang by her side. Between them, on the table, head falling back from it as if to look blindly towards me – as if he or she is too long, too tall for the space they're laid upon – is a man or a woman, I cannot tell which, only see, too far away to identify, a ghost-pale face, upside-down, and long black hair hanging limply from it, stark against the white of the sheet. Some of the nurses (
are
they nurses?) look up in my direction, as if sensing that somewhere out there in the desert heat – perhaps in the old bus that is slowly negotiating its way through the crowded square – someone is watching them.

They are all wearing the same long gloves, bloodied almost to the elbow. Just as they slip from my view – just as the bus turns left at the corner of the square – one of them seems to reach deep into the body cavity. Correspondence. The beginning of a trail. A turn-off, between paragraphs, into the whiteness beyond.

I cannot tell why I think this is Kabul. The dust, perhaps, or light. When I think of Kabul there is not, at first, a great deal to remember. Some talk I once heard of a restaurant there, where travellers on the Asian Highway gathered; an image I once saw of a merchant standing on a cobbled street; stalls of carpets and brass-ware stretching out behind him, towards the vanishing-point.

The older Kabul, before the disaster, before the invasions.

~

My friend tells me there is cannibalism in Kabul. The tense puzzles me. I would understand it better if he said
there had been
, as perhaps there was in the time of the civil war, the siege by the Russians, the Mujahideen. But
there is
is a different matter. So much so that I think he is saying something else, something quite other than that.

~

Dry. So dry. When a shell hits there is mainly dust, small puff-clouds seen through binoculars. No particular target, unless rocks, hillside, something buried or dug in there, silence. And roads to the city, four of them, snaking out over the vast plain. Lorries, jeeps, trucks, sometimes carrying small platoons, sometimes farm produce, sometimes prisoners, often only the dust.

~

She told me that it was alright if I wanted to hurt her, but I didn't. There was blood everywhere – over the sheets, the pillows, my hand – but it wasn't that. She had to leave the next day, she said, and by noon she was gone. I wrote but there was no answer. The next time I was in the city I left a message, but she didn't return my call. When I found her apartment I thought I heard a sound inside, but when I knocked the door stayed closed. I was confused: if I had hurt her, would she have stayed?

~

At a dinner party I meet someone who has lived in Kabul. I ask him about the cannibalism but he is sceptical. He reminds me of the Zoroastrians, the Parsis and the Temples of the Dead, the wooden platforms, exposure of bodies to the birds. Vultures eat the flesh of humans, he says, most certainly, but humans do not. An operation, on the other hand, or post-mortem, these things were possible, given the exigencies of wartime. If, that is, it was not merely a dream; if I saw what I saw at all.

~

P. is a dark place, or was that winter, and cold, right through to the bones. An upper and a lower city, set on and around the hill. Arches, colonnades, places where people can meet in secret. A broad, cobbled avenue leading to the main piazza. Rude waiters, avaricious landlords. And at the end of a dark side street the long staircase down to the Street of the Minotaur and its musty hotels, sad attic spaces, proprietors reluctant to show you their rooms because they know that you will not stay. A long, long staircase, almost a thousand steps.

~

Ka
bul? Ka
bul
? I have heard it both ways, as if there were two places, split by the tongue. Is it necessary to know the actual city? Or would knowledge of the actual city mask the other, prevent us again from arriving? Entry from Pakistan or Iran is not easy. There are border-posts. And within the borders, sieges, checkpoints, further borders. When the city is occupied by one force, it is the other force that prevents us.
If the city could be entered it would not be the city.
Hence the dependence upon fragments, fortuitous glimpses: any other kind would undo itself.
Why would I go there
, my friend writes,
if I could imagine it?

~

We see it repeatedly over the years, whenever something within us draws our attention there, as if it were a need, a part of us – images of people in makeshift hospital beds, their bloodied stumps balled in thick bandages, children growing up without hands, feet. There is violence even in the metaphor, if that's what this is, but perhaps that is the point; people straining out of the skins of themselves; in every construction, every artefact, these moments of rupture.

~

In a book about Charles Sobhraj, the gem-dealer-drug-runner who murdered so many on the Asian Highway, I read about how he and Chantal were imprisoned in Kabul – how he escaped, in pyjamas, onto the Street of the Carpetsellers, and went to Paris, leaving her in prison. How he drugged her mother at the Paris Hilton to get his own daughter back, then was caught again and spent a year in a Greek prison before returning to Kabul, only to find Chantal gone.

~

A sparrow has flown in through one of the large open windows and is hopping about between the restaurant tables under the feet of the waitresses. Out on the square a couple in their mid-thirties are arguing. They are trying to keep their voices down but their anger is evident. First one moves a pace or two away and the other follows, and then it is the other who moves away, as if the anger itself were a rope, only three or four metres long, tying them together, or this were a dance of prisoners.

~

Late at night, unable to sleep, I find myself thinking about Sophia: how, when I was leaving the city, I saw her sleeping on her pile of rags in the white marble entrance to the Crédit Agricole. How I found her again, in a dream, on the long flight of stairs: the rushing, the pool of light, the people grouped about her body. How the stairs continued downwards, into a further dark that the dream did not let me bring anything back from. How I had realised, years later, that this dream may have meant that she was dying, that all along I might have known this without knowing. How there is no-one, after all, no-one to tell.

~

A television has been left on in an empty room. On the screen, several men are standing by a well in which they have just discovered the victims of a massacre. Some of the men have cloths over their mouths and noses, to shield them from the smell. I almost said ‘over their faces', as if to shield them also from the sight, as if to shield them from knowing.

~

It is not always the body, not only. Kabul is within us, but is also a landscape of the days, a positive to their negative, a trace. Weeks marked by craters, explosions of shells. Months marked by lies and betrayal. A field map of engagements, tracks leading inland. (There, on those ridges, a hide-out. And, if you could get to it, a view of the city. The minarets, the domes, convoys moving in or out. The land dry. The puffs of smoke where the shells hit. Or in winter, when it is covered with snow
…)

~

On one side of the great plug of stone upon which P. sits – you could not call it a hill – is a rent or fissure like a crack in a curtain, though the men in the city have always had another name for it. Seen from the outside it looks to be the opening of a large cave, the entrance to an underworld, but in fact it is far taller than it is deep, and the people of P. several centuries ago tunnelled down from the main piazza to create a set of long staircases, hidden from their enemies, by which they could enter or leave the city. The modern city has widened the tunnel and replaced most of the stairs with escalators. You can see, each morning and evening, a long procession of people of all descriptions, standing almost stock still as they are taken up or down into the darkness.

~

We exchange what we know: the long civil war, the damage, the landmines that turned the Dasht-i-Margo into the Desert of Death. I talk about the Taliban and the restoration of the holy law, the executions, the severing of hands, the ineptitude of the peasant government. He tells me how the population undermines it – the small flashes of colour, the eyes – but is also grateful for the peace, a kind of hard certainty after the terror. Again Kabul is not the subject, or is, unexpectedly. One of us is weeping.
There is nothing to do but damage
, I tell him, but even as I say it I know it is the damage speaking.

~

We are in Kabul now, at the Intercontinental. The weather is hot and the airconditioning is not working. The electricity goes off at night and for some stretches during the day. There is talk of rebels in the hills but the hippies seem to get through. You can buy lumps of hash in the markets for a song, good, rich stuff, and all sorts of drugs at the pharmacies. But the problem is getting it out, and there's a limit as to how much you can use while you're here. I prefer the icy vodka martinis, and the bar is a better way to meet people
…

~

Cannibalism, they say, is a site, a sign, a recurrence, whenever we fear the return of the repressed. Looking within, trying to seek out what is buried, is a kind of self-eating, or that other thing, an unleashing of something that might somehow devour us.

~

People on the long staircase at dusk, descending, widely spaced. A small group of students talking animatedly, a businessman, an elderly woman with a shopping basket – the couple from the square, part-way up the middle flight, the only people ascending, he a few metres ahead of her, studiously not turning, and she behind, climbing slowly, as if lost in thought, holding her scarf to her face against the cold wind.

~

No story is seamless. In every story there are unopened rooms, passageways, shafts leading to other stories, staircases, draughts arriving from dark, cavernous spaces that may be stories the mind is not ready for – between one fact and another, one clause and the next. Even the long story of your life that you have been rehearsing over and over. You walk across a landing and a board breaks beneath you. You pause to let someone catch up and there is a door you had not seen before. You turn around, to tell them, and the person is gone.

Charles saw Chantal only once more, four years later in a house in London. He knocked on the door, she let him in, and they talked in the hallway at the foot of the stairs. He offered her money but she wouldn't take it. He seemed anxious to go, kept looking at his watch and back towards the door, as if there were a car waiting outside.

~

In the Hôtel Ana, a short street from the stairs, on the balcony of a room I had strayed into thinking was my own, two doves were perched close together, so white in the late light with the dark cote behind them that they seemed to be haloed or to burn with a cool, invisible flame. I could not imagine creatures more perfect. Even now. It was as if I had discovered the city's secret, come upon it in a moment of great intimacy, nakedness. One expects fury, horror, the Minotaur, and instead this serenity, this pure, unsuspected light.

~

There are no endings, only sites, only moments of pause or clarity: landings, parapets, points where the stairs pass a window and you can look out briefly before descending – or climbing – into the story again. In one of his dreams he calls Chantal at dusk after a day full of rain. She is driving through hills smoky with oleander. From the top of a rise she has just seen the sun setting, on the far ridges, into a nest of burning cloud, or the light from an ideal city they might soon be reaching.

In another dream he is in Kabul once more, searching for her desperately on the Street of the Carpetsellers, pushing through the crowd with an excited urgency, anticipation rather than fear, watching himself even as he does so with a calm aloofness, as if from a balcony above the stalls. She is nowhere to be seen, he reflects from this vantage, watching himself flailing; nowhere, but an evanescence, a sense of her is everywhere.