We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

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Authors: James Meek
Tags: Fiction, Literary
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sort of calls in the same sort of order, and told her she could talk for as long as she liked. He stood a little distance away. There was a green glow from the phone display. It touched her face but he couldn’t see her. It had just been her dark shape moving likea wing across the starfield and her voice asking to use his phone. So in those first minutes he only knew her by her voice. She sounded preoccupied with herself, but when she spoke there was a hesitancy and an opening-up, a kind of respecting shyness, as if to her everyone was wise until proven a fool, and she didn’t want to risk missing the thoughtful ones.
    When Astrid finished her calls, they stood and talked in the gardens. They’d both arrived that day, Kellas by plane from Tajikistan, Astrid overland in one of the convoys from Dushanbe, across the Aru Darya river, then east by truck. Neither had been to Afghanistan before.
    ‘They have a way of looking at us here. At us, the foreigners,’ said Astrid. ‘They make me feel less real than they are. They make me feel recorded and projected, like I can be switched off and not exist, while they go on existing. I’m going to sit down. I’m not feeling so good.’
    They sat on the dirt. Kellas was starting to be able to see by the starlight and he saw that Astrid had a narrow face, with high cheekbones and a wide, finely delineated mouth. When she frowned, which she did often when she spoke, as if to reassure others and herself that she was thinking seriously, a dense pattern of four horizontal lines appeared on her forehead – they made her look older, and carried pain; when she smiled, the lines vanished and her face shone with more happiness than she could possibly use for herself. There was enough there for everyone.
    He could see by the tired, impatient way she moved that she was sick and uncomfortable. His transition had been sharper than Astrid’s. He hadn’t known that morning if he would fly or not and until the lizard-coloured transport plane had taken off from Dushanbe airport, he doubted. He and the other foreign journalists and Alliance Afghans sat on canvas seats against the fuselage. In between them, occupying most of the aircraft’s cargo space, sat two tons of bottled water for CNN. Forty minutes after they took off they landed on a stretch of roughly flattened earth and stonessurfaced with the steel strips put down by military engineers when they’re in a hurry. They walked out of the plane off the back ramp into a cloud of dust from the aircraft’s propellers and when it cleared they could see a line of Afghans waiting and watching, letting the dust settle on them. For the children the arrival of the plane was the final grand, ridiculous piece of stage machinery in the play of the day, and they jumped, singing in English, ‘How are you? How are you?’ Most of the others were drivers, but not importuning. They held back and waited for the foreigners to come to them. One of the Afghans waiting seemed to have no reason to be there other than to watch the plane come in. He looked at Kellas with blank intensity, with his hands behind his back. It was a look Kellas hadn’t seen before, and would see again in Afghanistan, the look of clever, curious and uneducated men, lusting for a messenger. They would fight and die for their religion here but a bold man could write his own religion in eyes like that, if he dared and the religion was bright enough.
    Kellas put his gear into a Uazik and for twenty-five dollars was driven into town along a cratered highway. On either side of the road, traders were lighting kerosene lamps in their wooden booths. There was a smell of cooking fires. The country was rich in darkness and its lights and fires shone against it correspondingly, like gems in fur. Kellas’s doubts in London belonged to someone else. He was glad that he had been sent to this other world to carry out tasks, to report back. There were duties and some were his.
    ‘I might stay here a

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