Into the Sun Page 2

  He reached into the door frame, slid out a slab of iron, heaved it shut, and locked it with a lever. The sounds in the room became muted, like those on an airplane. Faraway gunshots popped, quiet as pebbles tossed at a window, as if the attackers had come here to court us.

  With the safe room closed, I realized the silence wasn’t that of an airplane at all, but of a bunker, far beneath the earth.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said and took a remote from its holster on the TV. He changed channels, from ESPN to Al Jazeera to a replay of Friends to a grainy colorless image of the compound yard, the guard booth obliterated and a dead man lying where he’d taken cover near a Toyota 4Runner riddled with bullet holes. Then he switched to a feed showing the metal security door at the house’s entrance. Three bearded men in shalwar kameez and body armor were inspecting it.

  A woman in the back of the room called out a question, her voice a fearful chirrup. It took me a moment to realize she’d asked whether the men outside were Taliban.

  “They are now,” he told her and turned from the TV. “Come on, everyone, there’s no need to be scared.”

  “I’m not,” Tam said, holding up her phone. “I’m trying to get reception. I need to tell my editors what’s going down.”

  “Now this is a proper safe room,” he replied as he made his way to an iPad console. “The walls are too thick for much cell reception, but we’ve got Wi-Fi. Password is end of the world, all one word.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And what is your name?”

  “Steve Hammond.”

  “And you’re from?”

  “South Africa.”

  “And is there any reason you would be targeted?”

  “I have twenty foreigners partying at my place.”

  This was what I envied about Tam: she had the presence of mind to ask questions others would consider only once their survival was guaranteed. She was already trying to deduce the target, an activity I’d engage in later, recalling memories as vivid as frescoes.

  The room was crowded and hot, and we repositioned ourselves, easing out of our protective huddles. In the back, two people helped a woman who had glass in her eye.

  “And this safe room is secure?” Tam asked, pausing from her typing to assess me and the few other journalists among the guests.

  “Secure as it gets,” Steve replied. “There’s no access to us but through two steel gates on the ground floor and this one here. I’ve already put out a call to the police. And for those of you who are feeling queasy, there’s a bathroom behind that sliding panel.”

  Tam was studying him.

  “And what do you do for a living?” she asked.

  “I sell safe rooms, among other things.”

  A few expats actually laughed with relief, their voices unnatural, nervously hysterical as they touched each other for reassurance.

  Steve unlocked a cabinet. I expected guns, but there were four bottles of Macallan 30 and one of Hendrick’s gin. He ignored the gin, cracked the whiskey, took out a stack of plastic cups, and asked who was drinking. Those who didn’t accept at first soon did, seeing others calm a little but also realizing we might not get a second chance to taste Scotch this old or this expensive.

  Tam motioned me to the space on the couch next to her. Specks of glass glittered in her hair, like a party girl’s sparkles, and her eyeliner was smudged. If I were American, I would have boasted that an attacker had shot at me. He’d seen me peering over the balcony, and I’d felt the wind of a bullet at my ear.

  Everyone was engrossed with the Taliban on the screen, and though I sensed the fear around me, I felt emptied of my own. It had suddenly become a pointless emotion, unable to offer me anything.

  The woman who had something in her eye rinsed it out — Steve had the place stocked with water, food, and first aid kits — and her eye was fine, only a little red. She admitted that maybe it was just dust, “though it felt like glass,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it was glass.”

  “Fuck!” the German shouted. On the TV, one of our attackers had taken a brick from a green backpack, the kind schoolchildren wear. He attached it to the front door, lit a fuse, and ran. Tam studied Steve, who sipped his drink, observing the screen. A few men and women held their heads, squealing until they were out of breath. The blast took out the camera near the entrance. It sounded like someone slamming a door in an old house. The floor vibrated.

  Steve switched to a different feed. In the yard, the three insurgents held their Kalashnikovs at the ready and ran through the blackened doorway.

  “How many doors left to go?” Tam asked.

  “One on the first floor, at the bottom of the stairs,” Steve said, “and this one here.”

  Something deep in my head seemed to contract, and everything in the room, the lines of the walls and ceiling, the TV and the expats, became sharp, as if a razor had cut away the dullness. Tam’s eyes, the crystalline departure at the iris’s dark blue edge, their whites slightly gray — a side effect, she believed, of nine years in Kabul’s pollution, and a source of insecurity — were now infused with light.

  I’ve often returned to my memories of that evening, when death was no longer an ending but an opening into a shadowless world, and each glimpse felt like a lifetime. Among the images that haunt me are those of Alexandra, Justin, and Clay. The people in the safe room — a few ex-military types, NGO workers whose security Steve’s company handled, and independent journalists or videographers for hire who went to any party that would have them — had formed groups on the couches or the floor, holding hands, whereas Alexandra and Justin stood apart, staring at the TV, their expressions beatifically blank.

  Clay also stood alone, the tallest person in the room, at once compact and long-limbed, hard-faced like a fighter but not blunt, the lines of his skull crisp, his brown hair cropped short. He appeared detached despite the feral green of his eyes.

  At the time, I made only cursory note of these three. The two men and her desire for them, so uncouth as to seem illicit, had become irrelevant. I noticed Justin and Alexandra because I saw in them the purity of what I felt, and I evaluated Clay’s strength as I asked myself who would protect us if the safe room was blasted open.

  I might have forgotten their love triangle altogether — its only purpose, perhaps, to underscore the foolishness that brought about my near death — had they not died two days later. Though expats would fail to find a connection with the attack on the safe room, months of my own investigation would reveal that we were all nearly killed because of that very love triangle: a convoluted story of pettiness; less a plot than a conjunction of character flaws.

  “The help is here!” Steve shouted. He’d switched from the camera downstairs, where one of the insurgents was setting up a round of explosives at the next door, to the camera in the courtyard. Afghan Special Forces were coming in, stout men in uniforms and body armor. We admired the determination with which they crossed the yard under fire.

  “We’re going to be fucking okay,” Steve called out. “Who needs a refill?”

  Two days later, I was in a private taxi, on my way to an early interview at the Inter-Continental. The young driver — cleanly shaven and so doused in cologne the car smelled like a duty free — was enjoying the largely empty streets, swerving around potholes, racing into intersections, veering and braking when yellow-and-white public taxis cut into our lane, glittering calligraphy spelling the names of Allah in their windows.

  Suddenly, he slowed. I’d heard a thud and thought nothing of it, but he was scanning the horizon. A white cloud rose above the rooftops and drifted toward the river, trailing a line of darker smoke.

  “Let’s go take a look,” I said.

  “No,” he told me. “It is dangerous for you.”

  “It’s not. Let me out here. I’ll walk.”

  Both of his cells were ringing. News spread qui
ckly among Afghans when there was an attack. He pulled over, and I dropped eight dollars on the front seat.

  The absence of fear I’d felt two nights before was still with me as I followed the road’s scant shoulder. Though my features allowed me to pass unnoticed as a Hazara — an Afghan 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 dot-com 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 thos
e of people fathoming an impossible equation.

  A plainclothes officer, a well-groomed man in his forties, came by with an escort of two green Ford Rangers. He sat with us, holding the tea Tam had served as he explained that there had been three people in the car. The scant remains offered few clues, but the car belonged to the school where Justin taught. Justin and Alexandra were missing, as was one of his students, a young man named Idris, who was Justin’s driver. The Taliban had tweeted that the victims were killed for immoral contact with the Afghan girls they were subjecting to Western educations. Justin must have been the target, since many mullahs forbade men from teaching girls after puberty, but Alexandra had recently become involved at the school as a mentor, so her death wasn’t incidental.

  After the officer left, we discussed why the Taliban would bomb a car when they could have stormed the school and killed its teachers and founder, a septuagenarian named Frank Alaric who’d been in Kabul since the American invasion. Tam phoned Frank, offered her condolences, and then mostly listened.

  “I would love to do that,” she said finally, “but I’m starting a documentary on the US Special Forces. It’s a long one … Yeah, a month of embeds at different bases … I leave this week, but I’ll come see you as soon as I’m back. I’ll do a feature. I promise.”

  Even when grieving, Tam existed to create stories. She hung up and said Frank sounded almost proud to have been targeted. He vowed he’d never shut down his school.

  By 2 a.m., the last of our friends had gone, leaving Tam and me alone in the house she’d shared with Alexandra. We decided to get some rest, and in bed she pulled close.

  When I’d moved to Kabul, I’d tried to shift from travel writing to journalism, selling pieces to a Tokyo online zine that distributed to cell subscribers. The editors liked having a correspondent in Afghanistan, and I liked the idea of being one. The title served me well, and I sent in short articles about culture and social life, even about conversations overheard in bars.

  The people I met in the expat scene — journalists and aid workers who’d spent decades abroad and had personas big enough to contain their restless lives — fascinated me. At parties, we laughed about those who’d become unhinged in their quest for purpose while we quietly worried about our own. I’d been drawn to Tam because I wanted to understand where she found her courage. She was both ruthlessly ambitious and emotionally fragile, and I learned more than I expected from her. After the safe room, I realized what kept her here. I’d seen the attack I’d lived through anatomized in the online news and repeatedly played on CNN. I’d experienced the connection to something bigger that came with living in a war zone.