The Darling of Kandahar Read online

  The awareness of your own beauty changes you into another person, for beauty, whatever people say, is always a big asset. The number of gorgeous women who have a good life is incredible, especially when compared to the lives of intelligent women. Under the admiring gaze of my classmates, I was becoming someone I could trust.

  Two weeks later, I was still enjoying this boost to my self-esteem, in spite of the fact that my mother had put the magazine out of sight on the highest shelf in the apartment. By the time Pierre got home, she would have forgotten the incident and neglect to show him my picture. You can see how inconvenient it is not to have a big family, friends, and good neighbours. My mother had nobody to talk to about my achievements. As for my father, she had no intention at all of calling him to inform him about my new status as cover girl.

  We were therefore about to forget the incident when the phone rang one day. It was my mother who answered, as I was not at home. That evening, she told me that somebody from Maclear’s had called because there was a letter for me from Afghanistan in the new issue.

  Afghanistan? I could not believe my ears. Who could possibly be writing to me from Afghanistan?

  It was a Canadian soldier, my mother explained curtly. She had started to feel afraid. What was this all about? How could you trust the media? And what was going to happen? Her fear amused me, especially as she was the one who gave the caller my email. In time, this would look to her like a terrible betrayal.

  The following day, in class, everybody knew about this letter. They did not get the information from the magazine, which came out at the beginning of the week, but from one of the big newspapers that had heard the news and was now spreading it under the appealing title, “The Darling of Kandahar.” Somebody showed the article to me and at lunchtime I went to buy a copy of Maclear’s for my mother.

  On the second page, in the Mail Bag section, there was a letter that seemed to me addressed to the magazine:

  I am writing this letter from my checkpoint, looking forward to getting off duty, and looking at this girl who is playfully watching me from the cover of your magazine. She’s the best thing I have to look at here. Ever since I’ve been deployed to operations in Afghanistan, Maclear’s has become my preferred source for Canadian news. Here in the desert, people read a wide range of material, including Playboy, which does not excite anyone because everything in it is so superficial and overdone. However, since my lads have seen this issue, they’ve all been impressed with the young lady’s natural beauty and incredible sexiness. The whole garrison agrees that she is the best pin-up in our collection. You’ve made me very happy with this refreshing image, so I wonder if it is possible to thank this girl on my behalf for being who she is. I won’t hide from you that I badly want to know her name.

  The letter was signed by Corporal Yannis Alexandridis of the Second Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment.

  After the break, I found on my desk a piece of paper with these words on it: “For the sexiest girl in Afghanistan.” One of my classmates, an Argentine student working on Borges, admitted that he was the culprit. This foolishness surprised me, coming from Fernando who had always been Borges’s watchdog, defending him tooth and nail.

  To understand what I am talking about, you should know that while Borges remains a major figure in world literature, his star had faded in our department. This is because of one of our professors, who is of Polish origin – and don’t not forget that Poland is the motherland of Witold Gombrowicz, the writer who in his novel Trans-Atlantyk makes fun of Borges (named Cortez in the novel) and his habit of traveling everywhere with a coterie of fans.

  One day, when Fernando was quoting Borges for the umpteenth time, this prof asked him: “My dear friend, could you explain to me why Borges had to dedicate an ode to Peron after the latter had appointed him head of the national library? I know it was his dearest dream to be a librarian, but did he really need to lick the boots of such a dictator?”

  I don’t remember Fernando’s answer, but his veneration for the blind poet was unshaken. The fact that Fernando was able to come down from the tower where he was keeping an eye on Borges’s reputation to write me a snide note surprised us all.

  I sometimes had a strange vision of my classmates as they sat behind their desks, stuck to their chairs, with only the upper part of their body visible. I used to imagine they were all turning into monsters, half-human, half-object, their fleshy torsos living on a wooden bottom. I would see these human-objects leaving the room carrying out this square body, walking on four iron feet, wearing four plastic corks to stifle the creaking of the floor.

  Now it was their turn to judge me, to imagine me barely dressed, singing and dancing on an improvised stage in front of the Canadian troops in Kandahar, a latter-day Marilyn being hooted at by soldiers.

  The most scathing was Serguei, a young Russian recently landed on Canadian soil who had not yet learned the finer points of political correctness. When one of our classmates from Senegal came to school one day all dressed in white, he even said, “Yédidya, look at you! You’ve become white!” He now advised me to focus on classical Afghan literature, as the long civil wars had not allowed the arts to develop recently.

  “You should know,” an Armenian classmate retorted, “given the length of time the Russian army spent in Afghanistan.”

  It was strange to see how even literature can become a battlefield. People don’t only fight for bread and water but for ideas too. This is the terrible difference between human beings and animals. There were 20 of us in my M.A. group, and almost everyone represented and defended a different part of the world. For most, the department was a transit stop between their native country and the new one. Before trying something else, young people with a literary background land in schools for three main reasons: to improve their language, to transfer their diplomas, and to get scholarships, which are sometimes their only income.

  They all liked to believe that universities are the democratic environment par excellence, places where it was possible to make a smooth transition to another language and culture. When they spoke, they all had their native accents and made their own grammatical mistakes. At the outset, their origins seemed of no importance, but after just one semester they had sorted themselves into groups from different regions, remembering old conflicts between their forefathers. After the second semester, their friendships with their fellow students – and their antipathies – were no different from those of their own people. In their new country, they carried on old national adversities as if they were back at home. This country was not multicultural enough to allow them to forget their parents’ suffering and humiliation.

  What now? I had felt so good at school, and suddenly everything seemed so politicized to me. Unlike the working environment, in universities people still trust the politicians’ good will and the fairness of multiculturalism. Thanks to the huge number of classes on racism, colonialism, and hyphenated-identities, we thought it possible to take the theory from university out into the street and apply it to ordinary people.

  In our classroom, the most interesting people were the non-Americans and the non-Europeans, that is to say the Others. Bearers of two cultures, familiar with two different social, political and religious systems, we thought they were more tolerant and more comprehensive. It was their mission to make it possible for our two worlds, East and West, to join; it was their job to annihilate the Eurocentric discourse that was so old it had become annoying. These new figures were fresh.

  We were taught to be ashamed of the racism and discrimination that our parents and grandparents had perpetrated against their kin. Now, finally we could speak freely about issues such as the Jews and the Holocaust, the extermination of the First Nations in the interests of democracy, faith and fundamentalism. All the Others had to be known in their doubleness and their non-domestic identity. We no longer dared to raise issues of difference or specificity,
because that supposed we were still dividing the world up into a centre and its multiple peripheries. We all agreed we should finally give the Others the right to express their needs as they wished, and to represent themselves and their identity in their own way.

  This made me understand, nevertheless, that even at university differences remain the same outside the amphitheatres, as cut off from the life and the noise of the street as a prison. Great ideas were swarming around, certainly, but it would take time for them to break through the thick concrete walls. Almighty multiculturalism was no more than a political slogan, which often took hilarious, absurd, turns. All we hoped was that in the future it would breed real change. If the form has already been set, one day the contents would follow.

  My case reawakened some of these old adversities. But I decided neither to get angry nor to feel hurt. I was famous for a reason that did not touch me particularly, and one I had done nothing to deserve. Here I was faced with a big dilemma: what does an individual wish for most in his life? Or, to put it more simply: what had I hoped to achieve through my existence? Had I ever had aspirations that went beyond our neighbourhood, the house I lived in, or my mother’s personal example? Money, men, love? What had really excited me in the years since I embodied Jeanne Mance?

  The sad reality was that I could not think of anything, so perhaps I have never had big aspirations. Marika was right. I had a vocation for being a nurse. Nevertheless, even Jeanne Mance, a humble woman dedicated to the sick, ended up having a street and also a park named after her in the mystical city for which she worked all her life.

  Fame is annoying when you did not struggle for it and you never even dreamt about it. Fame is good when you have a lot of friends and a big family interested in your career and impressed by your achievements. When you live anonymously, fame is just a nuisance. I understood that the same evening, at work, when I was tying on my green apron and about to enter the room where the noise of the customers was growing. I forgot to tell you that I work at Les Trois Brasseurs, which I hate because of the peanut shells that everybody thinks they’re allowed to spill all over the floor. The crack of broken shells underfoot drives me crazy.

  Of all the small jobs I’ve had as a student, though, this was the least annoying, even if it was also the most exhausting. What I find hard with jobs is the repetitiveness of small, mechanical gestures. Monotony drives me mad. I am talking about the work I did for two manufacturers. The first was a toy company where I had to match small kitchen utensils and box them. The second was a small family business producing jewelry boxes. That was where I met my second lover, Manuel.

  So, at present, I am working at Les Trois Brasseurs on St. Denis, on the corner of de Maisonneuve, not far from UQÀM and the Cinémathèque. Apart from students, the customers are people who read all kinds of stuff – people who might well, in other words, have seen my picture on the cover of Maclear’s magazine.

  No one made any comment, however. The week the issue was released, not a single customer had seen the cover. It was the letter sent by Yannis that caught one man’s attention, as under the text they had reprinted a small copy of my picture with the mortarboard on my head. It was probably somebody who, less drunk than usual, had noticed the likeness between the image and the first floor waitress. The same person must have shown the picture to one of the guys behind the bar and commented on the resemblance.

  I wasn’t working that day, but my fame among the other waitresses increased all the same. Someone had the idea of putting the article up in the restaurant. The next day, when I went to work, I saw my picture pinned up at the main entrance, above the menu. At the beginning, this meant nothing to me, and the attention I got from a few customers, which was fine, convinced me to leave the article in its place. Why not?

  From the next day onwards, I was acting again, for the second time in my life. This time, I was playing myself, a woman loved by a whole regiment of Canadian soldiers and the best thing that had happened to young men fighting for justice in Afghanistan. At the end of his letter, Yannis told the magazine to thank me for what I was. But finally, who was I? I did not know myself well enough to be happy with that.

  The new issue of Maclear’s might help me to find out.

  That same week, a team from Maclear’s came in and asked for me while I was on my shift. The photographer I knew by name, Kevin, was accompanied by a journalist whose face vaguely resembled that of the woman on the six o’clock news, though there was in fact no connection between them. They had my whereabouts from my mother, whom they had been in touch with again that morning.

  Jane approached me smiling, asking for a short interview and a new picture for the next issue of the magazine. Her smile spoke of her conviction that she was the kind of person who does you a favour for which you should be grateful. I still wonder, even now, what would have happened if I had refused to answer her questions. Would Yannis have stopped writing to me?

  I agreed, and Jane’s smile showed me that she had not expected me to refuse. I asked the supervisor to let me off for half an hour, and I followed them, leaving my apron on a chair in the kitchen.

  Jane walked beside me to the Cinémathèque, where Kevin stopped in front of the big-windowed wall. The sun was reflected in the glass, casting a yellow glow all over de Maisonneuve. He told us he’d like to take some pictures here, adding that we did not need to set up any complicated background, as Yannis had liked me for my naturalness. I asked Jane if this picture was for the Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, but she ended the discussion briefly: “Don’t listen to him! The picture is for everybody.”

  So Kevin took pictures of me in my bleached jeans and my close-fitting black T-shirt, which covered my belly button quite decently, as I have never been fond of exposing this part of my body. I was wearing my hair down, except for a few locks I’d clipped back near my forehead. My hands were in my pockets. I looked like any other girl in the street. Once the photography session was over, what remained was easy, as Jane had not come for the story of my whole life, just for a tiny part of it. I did not yet have the status of a star, and the space the magazine granted me was just a short column. The person who mattered in this story was Yannis, not me.

  Jane wrote a few notes about my biography and my hobbies on her pad. I had always despised interviews in which celebrities unveiled their simplest pleasures to please their fans: a salad, a ride into the forest, an orange pullover, their dog, their car. How could people be so silly? What meaning does a daily routine have for a celebrity’s career, and what is the connection between private pleasures and the public image?

  When you’re the one being interviewed, though, your view changes completely. I was suddenly aware how pleasant it was to have my life taken seriously and to think that people would be interested in my likes and dislikes. Routine can be interesting. Even if one person’s habits, down to the smallest detail, are just like another’s, they are all still unique and incomparable in the universal cycle of life. The alchemy which takes place in our mind when we are performing the very same acts of eating or making love remains an exclusive and indescribable process for each of us.

  Under the pressure of Jane’s questions, I discovered another being in me, someone eager to make herself known, to be revealed. What did I love the most in the world? Whatever could Jane possibly mean by this? For me it was not an easy question. On the contrary, it was charged with deep meaning. Do human beings ever understand what they do for pleasure or by force of habit? How much of it is just mimicry imposed by the herd? Which are our real joys? Do we ever know what we deeply love?

  What should I have said? Should I have talked about my favourite authors? Maclear’s was not a literary magazine, and my thesis on Postcolonial literature would have been too heavy for that readership. Names such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith would mean something in a literary circle, but how could I summarize what The Buddha of Suburbia, for example,
meant to the social paradigm in the late twentieth century? Should I have spoken about what scholars were calling hyphenated identities? I could consider myself an expert in this field, and I would have enjoyed talking about it. Jane came to my rescue:

  “What colour do you like?”

  This was a more difficult question for me. I had never questioned myself about my favourite colour. Who asks themselves about their favorite colour, anyway? Was it red, thanks to its gaudy strength of attraction and evocation? I always envied women wearing red, which seemed to me an act of courage. As for me, the only red thing I owned was a wool scarf that I did not often wear, as I had nothing to go with it.

  White? Not sure. The only white thing I owned was a skirt. Black? Maybe; my T-shirt was black, but what did this mean? In a few seconds, I reviewed my whole wardrobe, my shoes and even the stones in my rings. Impossible to make up my mind! This really was too hard a question to answer right away. What saved me was a passerby waiting next to the red light, a young woman wearing an emerald-green skirt. Her sandals, with flat soles, made her look so light-hearted and carefree, that I said without any hesitation:

  “Green. I like green.”

  I wanted to add some details to this choice, as I imagined that if people were interested in my preferences, they would also be interested in my reasons. But Jane rapidly passed to the next question.

  “Do you have any special meals or a place where you go to eat?”

  It was getting more and more complicated. Meals and favourite restaurants? My brain became empty right away. It had never occurred to me to rank the food I wolfed down every day. Meals should definitely provoke in celebrities such intense pleasure that they need to qualify and measure their food in a very special way. What did I like to eat? When did a meal give me so much pleasure as to darken my mind like a prolonged orgasm? I tried hard to think of a time in the past few days that had been as exciting as that, but all I could find were my mother’s soups and macaroni, which I loved without making any big deal about it.