Into the Sun Read online

  Praise for Deni Ellis Béchard and Into the Sun

  “A ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul—the idealists, mercenaries, aid workers and journalists circling around a war offering them promises of purpose, redemption, or cash, while the local Afghans in their orbit negotiate the ever-changing and ever-dangerous politics of the latter stages of the American war in Afghanistan. Brilliant.” — Phil Klay, author of Redeployment

  “Into the Sun is a story of haunting beauty rendered from the legacy of the Afghan War. In scope and skill, Béchard’s portrait of those who are both drawn to and entangled by conflict is reminiscent of the best works of Graham Greene and Philip Caputo … A fitting paean to the wrecked souls of an endless war.” — Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue

  “Ambitious, elegant, and filled with a kind of ferocious intelligence. Béchard explores the culture of the war zone, creating a compelling picture of that dark and turbulent place.” — Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta

  “Into the Sun has the propulsive force of a car bomb in the bloodstream, quickening the reader’s pulse at every turn, right up to the very last page.” — David Abrams, author of Fobbit

  “Béchard is channeling Melville and Conrad, their oceans and rivers replaced with dust and smoke. There are sentences on these pages that will be quoted in universities and taped to newsroom desks for a century.” — Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

  “One of the finest novels I’ve read in years, an unrelenting and daring masterpiece about war, the quest for understanding after tragedy, and the power of human yearning for connection.” — Jesse Goolsby, author of I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

  Also by Deni Ellis Béchard

  The Last Bonobo: A Journey into the Congo

  Cures for Hunger

  Vandal Love

  Kuei, je te salue: conversation sur le racisme

  INTO THE SUN

  or The School

  }

  Deni Ellis Béchard

  Copyright © 2016 Deni Ellis Béchard

  Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are included only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Béchard, Deni Ellis, 1974-, author

  Into the sun / Deni Ellis Béchard.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0139-1 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0140-7 (epub).

  I. Title.

  PS8603.E41I58 2016 C813’.6 C2016-901575-0

  C2016-901576-9

  Cover and text design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover image: Ellerslie/Shutterstock.com

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be …

  — Ecclesiastes

  · · ·

  Khorasan is the name by which the Afghans, Baluch, and Brahui designate the region known to Europeans as Afghanistan and Baluchistan. It is a softened pronunciation of Khoresthan, or country of the sun or the place of light …

  — Edward Balfour, The Cyclopaedia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia, Volume 2, 1888

  Part 1

  Kabul: March 2012

  }

  美智子

  Winter was premonition. We knew something was going to happen. We saw it in the desolation and poverty, the gusting indeterminate scraps, the men pushing trash carts, their figures like engravings of the plague, heads wrapped in tattered keffiyehs; or the smog of traffic, wood fires, and diesel generators — the effluvium of four million souls desperate to heat concrete and earthen homes — mixing with dust in the thin, chill mountain air and hanging over the city in blunt journalistic metaphors: shrouds, palls, and, of course, veils. Snow fell, churned into mud that rutted and froze. Pipes burst. Handymen returned to our doors, grim and extortionate, like doctors.

  Despite our predictions, the country became so inhospitable that the war itself ground to a halt, the passes closed, the Taliban waiting. As we edged into spring, storms tottered on the horizon and swept down over the rooftops without precipitation, gusts scouring up filth, lifting it in long drifting curtains the color of distant rain. At last the downpours came: hailstones as big as bullets, gutters gorged, streets flooded, a season of trash and excrement rising to the surface. Then the roses bloomed; we sighed, even sunbathed, and the fighting season began again.

  On the night of the attack, spring was still more than a month away, and the taxi carrying Alexandra, Tam, and me worked its way over ice and gouged earth, its shocks creaking, the street dark until we came to the compound’s red metal gate.

  Alexandra had asked us to join her, as moral support, because she was meeting a man at a party, a security contractor and former soldier. In our circle, there was no less appealing object of desire. No one I knew dated military contractors. The ratio of women to men was so in favor of the former that, for an evening’s company, they could pull from a bevy of preening journalists and aid workers.

  If a lesser woman had revealed interest in a mercenary, we’d have mocked her, but Alexandra was so assured and private that her attraction seemed like parlor intrigue. She was a human rights lawyer who defended women in prisons, putting in twelve-hour days to file reports of abuse. She told us about girls incarcerated for fleeing forced marriages and how they’d repeatedly given birth during their years behind bars. At parties, she cited studies to diplomats and reporters, naming those in the government intent on rolling back protections for women and those crusading for them. She spoke so decisively that we forgot she’d only just arrived and had learned everything from books and NGO reports.

  Though I doubt anyone thought of her as an impostor, we all wondered if her taste in men proved a lack of values and a true nature aligned with the occupation we criticized.

  “America’s number one export to Afghanistan,” Tam once declared at a dinner, “is its rednecks.” We spoke of contractors as second-class expats. We abandoned bars when they showed up and sto
od drinking, staring with reptilian eyes at the women among us.

  The contractor’s name, Alexandra told us, was Clay: pleasingly American, an evocation of the frontier, of a man coarse, blunt, hewn from the land. I was eager to see him so Tam and I could discuss the situation later: What did Alexandra like about this kind of man? How did it feel to be the object of her singular attention?

  I’d had a taste of it earlier, at their house, while I was waiting for Tam to get home. Alone with me, though I barely knew her, Alexandra described Clay: magnetic, present, different from other men here, reserved and in control — the sorts of things one said after first impressions. She’d asked me to go with her to the party, touching my hand. She was normally so undemonstrative that the gesture seemed erotic with vulnerability, as if the story she’d become involved in wouldn’t make sense without me.

  Tam arrived on her motorcycle as the taxi pulled up, and she agreed to come along. I knew we were thinking the same thing, not just about Alexandra’s fascination with rough-grained American types, but that she was already involved with one.

  For the past few weeks, she’d been seeing Justin, a born-again Louisianan so bearded Tam had nicknamed him the Mullah. He was here to teach English — a teetotaler who disdained all expats other than Alexandra and almost never left his school. People thought he was boring. A weirdo. A loner. A religious fanatic in that way of Americans from the Deep South. At a dinner party, we speculated why, when all the men in Kabul were throwing themselves at her, Alexandra had picked the dullest. We confectioned theories: she could control him; she enjoyed being the interesting half of the couple; she suffered from self-loathing, like many attractive women. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Justin was an all-consuming sense of purpose and an inclination toward solitude.

  We didn’t expect to see Justin that evening, not at a contractor party. Tam mumbled about slumming as we followed Alexandra like bodyguards through a living room, where people were serving themselves at a bar, to the doorway of a lounge. Alexandra pointed herself at a man — not coarse as I’d imagined, less hewn than carved — who was talking to someone just out of sight, and she smiled as he — he had the magnetism of a warrior, aesthetically, at least — smiled back, his hair dark and his eyes such a pale green they seemed to glow like the pupils of a wild animal at night. She took two steps farther, into the doorway, and froze.

  The person Clay was speaking to was Justin — almost as tall, nearly as military in build — his dispassionate face now aimed at her dissolving smile. Clay and Justin had known each other in the US. They hated each other, according to Alexandra, though they’d once been friends. We’d come to the party to witness not just a desirable woman’s poor taste in men but, it seemed, the opening round of a love triangle. Our only regret was that the men weren’t more high profile — neither established journalists, nor diplomats, nor seasoned humanitarian workers, and therefore hardly fit story fodder in our circles.

  I was nearest to Alexandra. Her black hair and pallor, and the severity of her expression, lent her a European air, though she was from North America. At a distance, her face was an emblem: the clearly defined jaw, just long enough to be elegant, the faint rising slant of her cheekbones. She met Justin’s gaze, her poise intact. Her bones seemed to hum beneath her skin like struck crystal. Her stillness gave the impression she was listening for this sound.

  Tam turned as if on cue, and I followed her back into the living room. She wasn’t tall, only five-six, but had the carriage of a boxer — an authority that caused people in crowds to shift aside. When we were far enough away, we let our laughter go.

  “If the Mullah thinks he can keep Alexandra, he’s delusional,” she told me, “but how did he end up here?” We agreed that Clay should have warned her with a text message, unless he’d invited Justin himself, staging the situation in an act of one-upmanship and using her like a weapon.

  Tam slipped her scarf back, its ends brushing the floor, and let herself come in for a hug, one of her rare moments of public affection — maybe because there were no hard-hitting journos to impress here — before moving away and self-consciously touching her hair, which she wore in a tight braid.

  At the bar, I poured her a vodka tonic. I wasn’t sure who the host was. Someone had put on Lana Del Rey. We weren’t bored of her yet. Talk of her invented persona, plastic surgery, and rich dad paying her way to rock-and-roll fame had yet to reach us.

  As I glanced toward the lounge where we’d left Alexandra, the space my body occupied contracted. My breath was knocked out of me and my ears ached, as if someone had simultaneously shoved me and slapped them. We were all lying down, like toy figurines on a bumped table, glittering with glass.

  I couldn’t breathe. I pushed myself to my knees. It should have hurt, but pain was a faraway sensation, small shards biting into my skin. Someone began wailing. I gasped, but smoke made me gag. The large windows had been blown out. People were fumbling about, shouting, their voices muted by the thud of my pulse and the ringing in my ears.

  I crawled to the balcony, my head a primitive camera, a box with a hole punched in. There was no me, none of my fear, just details: an intact beer stein and tumblers on the floor, shattered glass so thick and white on the leaves of potted plants it resembled snow. I lifted my head above the concrete edge of the balcony.

  At the end of the driveway, the gate was blasted open, barely connected to its twisted frame. A man stepped through it, and my body retracted and curled, my head jerking away from the sound at my ear: a hummingbird’s passing. Small puffs of atomized concrete spurted from holes in the ceiling of the room behind me. I heard gunshots.

  Explosions, shrapnel, indiscriminate bullets — so many expats had died over the years that I couldn’t help but picture my own end: in a restaurant garden one evening, after telling a near-death story, or in a bar, a guesthouse, any of the places foreigners sipped wine, whiskey, and cocktails, smoked pot or snorted methylphenidate — knockoff Ritalin shipped in from Iran or Pakistan, and sold without a prescription.

  The deaths of expats were rarely fully explained. They’d been caught in the gears of war, the overarching historic machinations, plots cooked up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, funded by Islamabad or Riyadh, or power struggles between Kabul and Kandahar, between Afghanistan and America — the circle jerk of politicians, generals, businessmen, warlords, opium kings, and transient diplomats. They were bystanders near someone important, or targeted directly, in strikes against the occupation’s colonial machine. Even journalists were threatened, for publishing propaganda — stories the Taliban hated and we loved — about brave Afghan souls risking everything to be Western: the athletes and musicians and actors, and, above all, the women.

  Thinking back on the attack, I wondered which of us had drawn the Taliban. Of the twenty-one people in the house — Americans, Canadians, Australians, Brits, and so on — most were behind-the-scenes office types or neophyte reporters. Security contractors were generally killed opportunistically while guarding a target. Justin taught Afghan women, but in a school too obscure to inspire such an organized assault; someone would just shoot him in the street. And like Justin, Alexandra was new here, the women’s rights organization she worked for one of many.

  Tam was perhaps the best known among us, but though she’d told stories about being targeted for her exposés, the police or government were usually her antagonists, not the Taliban. Besides, before we’d started dating, I’d heard expats debunk the plots against her, chalking them up to vanity, self-promotion, and a dash of paranoia from having lived here too long.

  Later, security video footage sold to CNN would reveal that a man had run by the front gate and thrown a duffle bag loaded with explosives against it. After the blast, I lost track of Tam, not sure if she’d stayed where she’d fallen or left me there. On the floor, my body was a flare of adrenaline. Behind the ringing in my ears, Lana still crooned, but sof
tly, as if the attack were her doing, and she was whispering to us, calling us somewhere.

  I don’t know why I went to the balcony. In my shock, my brain had become less a thinking organ than a recording device. Bullets whirred past and thudded into the ceiling.

  “This way,” a man shouted behind me. “The safe room is back here.”

  I scrambled inside and across the living room. Downstairs, there was the clanging of a metal security door closing.

  We all followed a burly man with a golden crew cut — definitely ex-military, certainly a security contractor — back to the lounge, a small room with two couches, a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, and a steel trunk for a coffee table.

  “Anyone missing?” he called from the doorway, to no one in particular. The safe room remained open, and people were shouting, “Close the door! Close the fucking door!”

  “There’s no rush,” he said. He wore a black button-down and jeans, and appeared a young forty. He must have been our host, his accent British or Australian. A piece of pulverized glass shone on his lapel like a diamond.

  The gunfire rattled on, with enough lulls to suggest that people were moving about and the guard was returning fire. From the balcony came the sound of an occasional bullet ricocheting. Another explosion, in the courtyard this time, heaved the air and hit us with a wall of sound, resonating in the safe room like an ocean wave slamming into a cove.

  The host went out and came back hauling a young man by the arm — a German I’d recently begun noticing at parties. He’d hidden in the bathroom, spots of urine on his pants.

  “Check if anyone’s missing,” our host said. Alexandra, Justin, and Clay stood near the wall. Tam was fiddling with her iPhone, selling the story before it had finished happening.

  “Everyone here?” he asked and then shouted into the house, “Last call!”