Napoleon's Roads Read Online Free PDF Page A

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