believed to be descended from the Mongols — this was the first time I’d walked here so at ease, my mind unobstructed by visions of danger.
A crowd was forming in Abdul Haq Square, near the Dunya Wedding Hall, men skirting pieces of smoking metal. The bomb had been in a car, its doors blown open and its paint blackened. I’d anticipated the scorched bodies of bystanders, but the attacker seemed to have targeted an empty roadside or just the car’s occupants.
The interior was on fire, and the victims — much of them at least — must have been in that cloud, drifting across the river. I lifted my chin, considering sentience — memories, intentions, dreams — and this wind-pushed smoke. As far as having your ashes spread, it might not be a bad way to go, if a little unexpected.
I’d been in Afghanistan for more than a year, and only in the last week had I seen any attacks. When I moved here, my mother had put money in my bank account for body armor, but few expats used it, with the exception of paranoid diplomats or security contractors on duty. Kabul wasn’t what people saw on TV. When foreigners died, my mother would hear about it on the news, and I would reassure her that they were just unlucky.
Cars were stopping, hands holding cells out windows to snap pictures. I hadn’t been dating Tam long enough to know whether the stories were true and she really did make it to every major attack in Kabul within twenty minutes. But then I heard her motorcycle, and she pulled up, dressed for an Armageddon road movie: head wrapped in a white-and-gray keffiyeh, torn jeans over black yoga leggings, a scuffed leather biker’s jacket with a vest of yellow sheepskin from Oruzgan, its ruff warming her neck. I waved, but she drew her Nikon D4 out of a holster and began shooting. A few dumbfounded traffic police stood around in oversized suits. Green pickups started arriving with more police crammed in their beds.
Wind and a brief icy rain the previous night had purged the smog, and even distant mountains appeared close, hanging above the horizon. The parking lot and street had filled. Horns blared. More men came through the traffic. The cloud of incinerated lives was already dissolving over the frozen streets — just something else Kabul’s inhabitants would have to breathe.
As I edged out of the crowd, I came to a circle of men with their backs to me. They were gazing down, and I walked along their perimeter until one peeled away and I took his place. My stomach clenched and my knees pulsed, a feeling like when an elevator reaches a floor, an airy sensation in the joints, of being buoyed and dropped at once.
A hand lay on the asphalt, on its back, the skin pale and intact, its fingers curled slightly, as if it had been severed in the moment of receiving an offering. It was probably a woman’s, though Afghans are generally small, and a bloodless hand must decrease in volume.
I prided myself on being able to look, and then turned away. I’d seen similar things when I’d left the safe room, but in my euphoria, they hadn’t bothered me.
Tam was busy interviewing people in Dari, her camera set to video. She’d already published two pieces on the safe room: a photo-essay of the attack featuring pictures I hadn’t noticed her taking with her phone, and a witty story about how it feels when the people on TV are trying to kill you. Soon, she would have a car bomb article, a slide show, and a video report ready so that when the police announced the victims she could plug in their names.
I hailed a taxi and continued to the Inter-Continental on its hill overlooking the city. For a travel piece, I interviewed the manager about its history back to 1969, when people sipped champagne on the terrace and women lay in bikinis by the pool. I ate lunch there and fished online, but found nothing about who’d died in the bombing. I settled into a chair with a view. At a distance, Kabul bore no trace of any attack, except for maybe 9/11, which had drawn the world’s attention here and transformed a modest capital into this sooty, sprawling metropolis.
I intended to write about the car bomb, but the details I’d witnessed were generic — no different from hundreds of other events like it. I took Humboldt’s Gift from my backpack and tried to read, but the morning’s events made it impossible to concentrate. I felt both as if I’d come here to experience these attacks and as if nothing I’d lived here mattered. My persistent state of alertness was at once potent and disconcerting.
That evening, when I opened my door, Tam was reading the collected works of Gertrude Stein on my bed, near the bukhari, a cylindrical metal woodstove that, once lit, immediately radiated heat. She was alone, a crimson scarf spooled on her shoulders. In the next compound, the Afghan death metal band was rehearsing. I’d written a piece about them and gone to a few of their parties, but since the success of their album, they were no longer as friendly and I’d begun to resent the noise.
I lay on the bed next to her. This was something she liked when we saw each other — not talking, just touching. As she rested her cheek on my shoulder, I had the impression that I was with a superhero’s vulnerable alter ego.
The reverberations of the blaring music ceased, and I undressed her, kissing her skin. She was conscious of her hips since it was hard to exercise in Kabul, so I slowed for them. She had dozens of tiny poppy tattoos, one for each person she’d seen dead. They clustered on her shoulder blade, circled a biceps, framed her heart, and otherwise freckled her in random spots: an ear, a knuckle, a breast. She lay with her chin back as I kissed up along her chest. I moved my fingers over her throat’s long lines and her collarbone.
“I read a passage today that made me think of you,” I told her. As I took the book from my backpack, she kept the fingers of one hand on my waist. I’d found a stash of Saul Bellow novels in an expat’s home and become obsessed with him. His awareness and self-examination, his study of others, was addictive. The Americans I knew seemed to have emerged from a civilization that had since declined.
I leafed through for the passage that reminded me of when I’d met her during a dinner at the Wall Street Journal house. She’d been drinking gin and tonic, a ceiling light shining on her sculpted clavicle as she told me that though her father was Manhattan high society, her mother, a model from Alabama, had named her Tammy after a favorite aunt. When the dotcom bubble imploded, they moved to Burlington, Vermont. Tam, then a teenager, asked if she could change her name before enrolling in her new school. Attentive for the first time in her life, her father suggested Tammany, for New York’s Tammany Hall, but she read about its corruption and would have refused if not for the original Tammany: the Native American chief who made peace with the English settlers. She was a child of the nineties, a chic hippie educated in a Manhattan Montessori, from whose vantage the earth appeared in a golden age, and the name suited her idea of what America was meant to be.
As I searched through the novel, her cell chimed. She swung her legs down and crossed the room, her hips curving deeply, the rice-paper lamp at the bedside casting her shadow.
She read the text and was suddenly haggard. I put the book aside, and she returned to lie against me, her hand with the cell on my chest.
“Tam?” I said. The way she touched me had changed. Her tears ran along my throat.
“It’s Alexandra,” she told me. “She and Justin were in that car.”
My grief was slow in coming, my emotions stunned. I could sense the mechanical intonations of the city beyond the room — the battering of a truck motor, a motorcycle’s whine — more clearly than whatever was happening inside me.
She shifted onto her back, her gaze abstracted, as if the low smoke-dimmed ceiling was the night sky and her attention moved along the constellations.
EVENTUALLY, we went to Tam’s house, where she and her friends gathered — hugging, crying, or sitting, their heads lowered like those of people fathoming an impossible equation.
