States and Kabul: February/April-May 2012
Part 7: Quebec: 1998–2006
Part 8: Kabul: February/June 2012
Part 9: Afghanistan: 1993–2012
Part 10: Kabul–Dubai: March/June 2012
Acknowledgments
WINTER WAS PREMONITION. We knew something was going to happen. We saw it in the desolation and poverty, the gusting indeterminate scraps, the men pushing trash carts, their figures like engravings of the plague, heads wrapped in tattered keffiyehs; or the smog of traffic, wood fires, and diesel generators — the effluvium of four million souls desperate to heat concrete and earthen homes — mixing with dust in the thin, chill mountain air and hanging over the city in blunt journalistic metaphors: shrouds, palls, and, of course, veils. Snow fell, churned into mud that rutted and froze. Pipes burst. Handymen returned to our doors, grim and extortionate, like doctors.
Despite our predictions, the country became so inhospitable that the war itself ground to a halt, the passes closed, the Taliban waiting. As we edged into spring, storms tottered on the horizon and swept down over the rooftops without precipitation, gusts scouring up filth, lifting it in long drifting curtains the color of distant rain. At last the downpours came: hailstones as big as bullets, gutters gorged, streets flooded, a season of trash and excrement rising to the surface. Then the roses bloomed; we sighed, even sunbathed, and the fighting season began again.
On the night of the attack, spring was still more than a month away, and the taxi carrying Alexandra, Tam, and me worked its way over ice and gouged earth, its shocks creaking, the street dark until we came to the compound’s red metal gate.
Alexandra had asked us to join her, as moral support, because she was meeting a man at a party, a security contractor and former soldier. In our circle, there was no less appealing object of desire. No one I knew dated military contractors. The ratio of women to men was so in favor of the former that, for an evening’s company, they could pull from a bevy of preening journalists and aid workers.
If a lesser woman had revealed interest in a mercenary, we’d have mocked her, but Alexandra was so assured and private that her attraction seemed like parlor intrigue. She was a human rights lawyer who defended women in prisons, putting in twelve-hour days to file reports of abuse. She told us about girls incarcerated for fleeing forced marriages and how they’d repeatedly given birth during their years behind bars. At parties, she cited studies to diplomats and reporters, naming those in the government intent on rolling back protections for women and those crusading for them. She spoke so decisively that we forgot she’d only just arrived and had learned everything from books and NGO reports.
Though I doubt anyone thought of her as an impostor, we all wondered if her taste in men proved a lack of values and a true nature aligned with the occupation we criticized.
“America’s number one export to Afghanistan,” Tam once declared at a dinner, “is its rednecks.” We spoke of contractors as second-class expats. We abandoned bars when they showed up and stood drinking, staring with reptilian eyes at the women among us.
The contractor’s name, Alexandra told us, was Clay: pleasingly American, an evocation of the frontier, of a man coarse, blunt, hewn from the land. I was eager to see him so Tam and I could discuss the situation later: What did Alexandra like about this kind of man? How did it feel to be the object of her singular attention?
I’d had a taste of it earlier, at their house, while I was waiting for Tam to get home. Alone with me, though I barely knew her, Alexandra described Clay: magnetic, present, different from other men here, reserved and in control — the sorts of things one said after first impressions. She’d asked me to go with her to the party, touching my hand. She was normally so undemonstrative that the gesture seemed erotic with vulnerability, as if the story she’d become involved in wouldn’t make sense without me.
Tam arrived on her motorcycle as the taxi pulled up, and she agreed to come along. I knew we were thinking the same thing, not just about Alexandra’s fascination with rough-grained American types, but that she was already involved with one.
For the past few weeks, she’d been seeing Justin, a born-again Louisianan so bearded Tam had nicknamed him the Mullah. He was here to teach English — a teetotaler who disdained all expats other than Alexandra and almost never left his school. People thought he was boring. A weirdo. A loner. A religious fanatic in that way of Americans from the Deep South. At a dinner party, we speculated why, when all the men in Kabul were throwing themselves at her, Alexandra had picked the dullest. We confectioned theories: she could control him; she enjoyed being the interesting half of the couple; she suffered from self-loathing, like many attractive women. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Justin was an all-consuming sense of purpose and an inclination toward solitude.
We didn’t expect to see Justin that evening, not at a contractor party. Tam mumbled about slumming as we followed Alexandra like bodyguards through a living room, where people were serving themselves at a bar, to the doorway of a lounge. Alexandra pointed herself at a man — not coarse as I’d imagined, less hewn than carved — who was talking to someone just out of sight, and she smiled as he — he had the magnetism of a warrior, aesthetically, at least — smiled back, his hair dark and his eyes such a pale green they seemed to glow like the pupils of a wild animal at night. She took two steps farther, into the doorway, and froze.
The person Clay was speaking to was Justin — almost as tall, nearly as military in build — his dispassionate face now aimed at her dissolving smile. Clay and Justin had known each other in the US. They hated each other, according to Alexandra, though they’d once been friends. We’d come to the party to witness not just a desirable woman’s poor taste in men but, it seemed, the opening round of a love triangle. Our only regret was that the men weren’t more high profile — neither established journalists, nor diplomats, nor seasoned humanitarian workers, and therefore hardly fit story fodder in our circles.
I was nearest to Alexandra. Her black hair and pallor, and the severity of her expression, lent her a European air, though she was from North America. At a distance, her face was an emblem: the clearly defined jaw, just long enough to be elegant, the faint rising slant of her cheekbones. She met Justin’s gaze, her poise intact. Her bones seemed to hum beneath her skin like struck crystal. Her stillness gave the impression she was listening for this sound.
Tam turned as if on cue, and I followed her back into the living room. She wasn’t tall, only five-six, but had the carriage of a boxer — an authority that caused people in crowds to shift aside. When we were far enough away, we let our laughter go.
“If the Mullah thinks he can keep Alexandra, he’s delusional,” she told me, “but how did he end up here?” We agreed that Clay should have warned her with a text message, unless he’d invited Justin himself, staging the situation in an act of one-upmanship and using her like a weapon.
Tam slipped her scarf back, its ends brushing the floor, and let herself come in for a hug, one of her rare moments of public affection — maybe because there were no hard-hitting journos to impress here — before moving away and self-consciously touching her hair, which she wore in a tight braid.
At the bar, I poured her a vodka tonic. I wasn’t sure who the host was. Someone had put on Lana Del Rey. We weren’t bored of her yet. Talk of her invented persona, plastic surgery, and rich dad paying her way to rock-and-roll fame had yet to reach us.
As I glanced toward the lounge where we’d left Alexandra, the space my body occupied contracted. My breath was knocked out of me and my ears ached, as if someone had simultaneously shoved me and slapped them. We