Napoleon's Roads Read online

  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.

  ~

  Kabul? Kabul? 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, r
ich 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.

  CROW THESES

  People behave badly. It is not always their fault, and they don’t always know it or see it that way. But they do behave badly. It stuns you sometimes, to find that this is happening, that it is going on again, but it is. And the people who behave badly in this way I call the crows. Sometimes it seems that they are landing on you somehow – on your arms, perhaps, or shoulders – and taking small pieces, bites, that other people mightn’t see but that leave wounds nonetheless. I know it is unfair to talk about crows in this way. I know that they are just birds, if you can use ‘just’ there at all, and that it is not the birds’ fault that they are the colour they are, or that we humans have this thing about that colour, that blackness, or about the sound they make. But we do have it, and they are that colour, they do make that sound, and they have come to have connotations. Their sound, especially, doesn’t help, nor does their habit, in sheep country, of waiting while a ewe is giving birth, to peck out the eyes of the newborn lambs. I’ll admit that other birds have raucous cries, and other creatures have habits like that. But not so many of them are black, and they are not crows.

  ~

  The heart, spread out in time, wanders through some strange country – deserts, mountain passes, forests, nameless composite cities, but mostly deserts, often deserts. It seems to me that if there could be a map of such places, to show where the heart had been, to show how, alone, it had fought there, survived there, the crows might begin to understand, might begin to be something other than crows. But men – especially men – do not talk of such things. Only sometimes some event, some predictable occurrence will make them speak, if ever they can find the person to speak to – the deaths of their fathers, their mothers, the deaths or illnesses of their lovers, their wives, their children, or even, sometimes, the devastation that a sudden, unanticipated desire can bring, erupting from a place they had not known existed. Then – in broken sentences, unfinishable sentences – they compare notes and experiences; then the possibilities of a Map begin. A landscape seen as a crow might see it; distances measured ‘as the crow flies’.

  ~

  In a film I once saw, of the rituals of a desert tribe in South America – I never did find out what country it was in – a shaman was calling down crows. He was dressed in black, with black wings strapped to his arms, and moving about in a circle, dancing slowly while he chanted, lifting the wings and letting them fall. The sky in the beginning was clear but soon the crows began to arrive, appearing as if out of nowhere. After a time there was a small flock circling about him. When he moved to the centre of the circle he had made, and let his arms fall, they settled on the ground about him and stood there, watching. But what kind of shaman were they watching? The Crow of Loneliness? The Crow of Woundedness? The Crow of Unrelenting Desire?

  ~

  I have a friend who is driven to confess to crimes that he has not committed. That is, he does not think he committed them, although he is harried by dreams that seem to point in their direction, of severed limbs, of disembowelment, of people he has known, or seems in these dreams to have known, weeping inconsolably in familiar rooms. It seems impossible to him that these dreams can have nothing to do with him. It seems to him that if he confesses to a crime – any crime, so long as it is a crime that might somehow fit these dreams – these dreams might go away. I would not have thought about crows at all, were it not for the vision, as he described the persistence of these dreams, of the dark wings circling him, flapping about his shoulders.

  ~

  It is not a good day. Incivilities occur; people act as if their mood were all that matters; things happen that shouldn’t and it’s hard to say why. At last the mail arrives. From one of the envelopes, as I open it, a crow scrambles, all angles and feathers, claws scratching my hands, taking off quickly through the window, circling, returning eventually to perch in a nearby tree. Later, trying to find out about this, I hear crows at the far end of a telephone line. Before I can stop them one or two have come through. For hours they caw about inside my mind. Nothing I can do will silence them.

  ~

  A crow settles on the balcony rail and stares at me through the glass. I go out carefully to talk to it. It does not fly away. I try to explain myself and it listens to me with its crow eyes sceptical, wide. I tell it that the birds I speak of are metaphors only, that I would not presume to speak of crows-in-fact. I tell it that it is not it I name, but a part of a system within and about me, in my own human space, and that it is welcome to treat me, as a human, in much the same way. As a symbol of poisoned corn, perhaps, or bad weather, a storm. I tell it that it is a matter of colour alone, a strange prejudice we have. Perhaps that, and what we can only hear as a harshness in its cry. Which it will repeat, as it flies overhead, as if it would not listen to anything we said.

  ~

  To predict the actions of the human, r
eflects the crow, one must think with the mind of the human. Walking down George Street on an overcast morning, late winter, there is an edginess at the side of things, hovering beside me as I pass a confectioner’s, retreating at the recessed windows by the Strand Arcade, disappearing into the stone wall of the GPO, flashing in and out of a blind-spot with a passing car. Hypocrite, I want to spit at it, familiar compound! Black shoes, black jeans, black jacket, flash of white from my shirt front. Nobody listening.

  ~

  The way I see it, which is the way I sometimes imagine others see it also, I have committed many crimes, but they have always been crimes of love. They have always been done for it, and from it. And I have wanted to say this for a long time now, if only to that other crow, that soft crow, that crow-without-beak-or-claws, that spreads out its wings, to sleep each night on my eyes.

  What are the crimes of love, anyway, but fragments of passion broken from their moorings, evidence of a kind of shipwreck? (But what kind of ship? Where was it? What was its name?) Or crows, a flock of them, high in the air, fighting against a wind that no-one can see.

  ~

  When I lie down at last, far into the night, the darkness seems to leave me and, retreating to corners, the space under the bed, assumes a more natural shape, eventually filling the room. In the early hours I realise that a crow is there, perched high on the suitcases up on top of the wardrobe, a bit like Poe’s raven but also not. Crows are not entirely responsible for their crowness, it is trying to tell me: often, within the mind of the crow, there is a flock of crows circling, driving the crow towards itself. If we could see into the minds of these crows, it is telling me – the crows within the crow – we would find, in many of them, flocks of crows, circling or moving about on the ground there, grown hard and sharp with the warring of the crows inside them.