Napoleon's Roads Read Online Free PDF

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.

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