End of Manners Read Online Free Page A

had lost its audience—us—and run out of steam.
    The end of the ritual didn’t affect their marriage. But maybe they were right about the jinx. Because it was right after they stopped that my mother got sick.
             
    My mother had the romantic look of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, but she didn’t know it, and never carried herself as such. If anything, she was self-conscious of her freckles and flaming hair. Her taste in clothes was funny, very un-Italian. She was not quite frumpy, but she wore all the wrong colors. I remember watching her on the nights of parent-teacher conferences; I’d be praying that my teacher wouldn’t think her ridiculous, and that the other kids wouldn’t laugh at her. They never did, yet I worried: she looked so helpless to me, cloaked in her funny caftans, or in those large, bold prints she liked to wear, the blouses with ruffles and puffy sleeves she saved for special occasions. I loved her and feared for her—could sense her anxiety, the insecurity that seemed to follow her wherever she went, whether on the bus, in a grocery shop or at the beach. She blushed when people didn’t understand her pronunciation, or when she got the tenses wrong. No matter how many years she’d lived in Italy, she seemed never to belong.
    I worried too much about her; over the years, that worry spilled into my personality and became my own.

    Pierre was, he said,
aux anges,
“to the angels.” A flamboyant expression for ecstatic, which conjured putti trumpeting on clouds.
    He sent me links to some of the stories Imo Glass had written in the past for the
Guardian
and the
Observer
and articles on the situation of women’s rights in the southern provinces. He also sent me via courier a guide to Afghanistan that had just been published in England. I spent the next few days online reading the
Kabul Daily,
looking at ads for new restaurants and at the classifieds, scrolling Wikipedia like mad on different Afghan entries, checking from geography to literature to food. I waited anxiously for the guide to come, as if the book had the power to dispel all my fears and answer all my questions. In the meantime my mother’s yellowing edition of
The Road to Oxiana
provided wondrous descriptions of what Kabul, Herat and Kandahar had been like in the forties: “Hawk-eyed and eagle beaked, the swarthy loose knit men swing through the dark bazaar with a devil may care self confidence. They carry rifles to go shopping as Londoners carry umbrellas.”
    The guide finally came through. Its content proved more up-to-date than Byron’s journal but far less alluring. It wasn’t aimed at travelers—there had been none for decades and none seemed to be coming anytime soon—it had been conceived for use by aid workers, reporters, donors, local NGOs. The security tips went something like “Don’t walk off the road into the bushes for a leak! Mines are everywhere; minimize your time in bazaars and crowded areas, vary your routes to and from office/residence as much as possible. Do not go outside while there is shooting. What goes up must come down.”
    A short paragraph on women and photography stated that photographing Afghan women had often proved difficult, particularly in the most conservative Pashtun areas. Taking their portrait without their consent could lead to an ugly situation. A CNN crew who had been filming women in a hospital without their permission had been detained at gunpoint.
             
    Pierre rang to say that the insurance for me and Imo Glass was going to cost the paper a fortune. His voice was crisp, ebullient almost.
    “You’re going away covered by a policy that’s the Ferrari of insurance,” he said. I guess he thought this sounded reassuring.
    “Great. Does that mean they cover the ransom in case we’re kidnapped?”
    Pierre laughed as if I had said something really funny.
    “Probably. In any case you’re most welcome to go over the policy here at the office when you come to