We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

just inside a circle the men formed. The women of the village stood further back, in a body, under the shade of the trees, and the foreigners formed a loose outer perimeter, the writers leaning in to listen to their interpreters, the photographersroaming to and fro for good shots. The one who preached had a white beard and a haj cap and a string of beads swinging from his hands clasped in front of him. He spoke with his eyes closed. His clothes weren’t ragged or dirty, but they weren’t expensive. He was older than many in the gathering, but he wasn’t old. Some of the elders there were bent and shaking. Surely he was the preacher, the one who led the prayers, the one who best knew the Book and the writings of the scholars who had subjected it to thirteen and a half centuries of exegesis. He was like the others; that was what gave him authority, not his learning. For a preacher, he lacked vanity. He stood there speaking like a man who didn’t believe he had a special self and it was his ordinariness that could give his words the tune of revelation, if his words were good enough. Kellas relied on Mohamed to tell him what the preacher was saying. It was hard for Mohamed to do that. He wasn’t up to simultaneous translation. He could manage just about every second sentence, or clumps of sentences. It was like looking at a flip-book cartoon of the sermon. It moved and jerked and the action became clear in fifty flickering stills. The preacher said: ‘A woman has been killed. She had wishes in life, but we must think of God, and how we are subordinate to his will.’ Later, he said: ‘The Americans come here, drop their bombs on Afghanistan and kill innocent people. We do not condone this. Still, is it not our fault? We invited them here. Nothing breathes without God. God is using America to hurt the guilty among us by punishing those of us who have done no wrong.’ The villagers stood and listened without words or expectations and then went back to work.
    Kellas asked a reporter he knew from the Prague years if he’d seen Astrid.
    ‘She was here earlier,’ the reporter said. ‘She asked about you. She wanted to know about your wandering days. She seemed disappointed when I told her you’d moved back to London to settle down.’
    ‘Disappointed,’ repeated Kellas. He watched Jalaluddin drift awayfrom the burial place, his shoulders bent and his body racked with trembling.
    ‘I’ve had enough,’ said the reporter. ‘I’ve been to too many strangers’ funerals in places like this. I want stories where I can be home for supper. I want stories I can wear cardigans to. I miss my children.’
    They saw Jalaluddin talking to a group of village men, who shook his hand and left him. Jalaluddin looked up at the ruins of his house, where his neighbours were starting to sort good bricks from the rubble. He climbed a little way up the heap, slowly and doubtfully parted some earthen shapes, then stopped, dropped the lumps he was holding, and sat down. He bent his head a little. Kellas went over to him, followed by Mohamed. Kellas asked Mohamed if he should give him money. Mohamed said it’d be a good thing. Kellas took a million in the local currency out of his pocket, about twenty-five dollars, and gave it to Mohamed to give to Jalaluddin. He shook Jalaluddin’s hand and told Mohamed to tell him that he hoped life would become good again. Mohamed said something and gave Jalaluddin the money and Jalaluddin took it without looking at it or them and murmured something.
    ‘He says God be praised for your kindness,’ said Mohamed.
    ‘Did he really say “God be praised for your kindness?”’ said Kellas as they walked away. ‘Did he mean it?’ He trusted Mohamed least when he was translating the small courtesies of the poor. Mohamed tended to snobbery when he was bored, which he often was. His view, Kellas suspected, was that the poor could not afford to depart from stock platitudes, and if they did, he would correct