CHAPTER 1
SUICIDE BOMBING
JUNE 2005

THE ROAD TO KHAKREZ is graveled now, a hard right turn off cement thick enough to bear the weight of Soviet tanks. It passes behind Elephant Rock and the stony crests that form the northern bulwark of the city of Kandahar. It crosses the Arghandab plain, leaving behind its shock of leafy, mud-walled orchards, then climbs through another range of rocky hills to a plateau, with more mountains bulking in the distance. It is a beautiful road, profoundly peaceful—though once the scene of violent battles against the Soviets.

We drive in a convoy, lights and blinkers on, Toyota Land Cruisers mostly, and white-and-green police pickup trucks flanking the black van that bears the body of Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal. I am in one of these.

A few hours earlier I sat in that van, keeping him company for a little while. Afghans don't do that. They don't sit with the bodies of their dead. But I couldn't keep myself away. "There he is, your friend!" his brother had cried at me hoarsely as he pulled back the blanket to show me his face. It was perfect, come to rest in that stern, almost brooding expression of his. Only a nick, a bit of a bruise, and a scrape above the right eye marred his features. Then what killed him?

A few minutes later, we loaded him, limp and heavy, into the black van. People were flocking to the disused school building near his house, requisitioned for the purpose of receiving them: his brothers serving as hosts, his heartbroken bodyguards and tribal elders weeping silently, raising the long tails of their turbans to their eyes, police officers in uniform, squeezing down to sit cross-legged on the broad veranda. Two men wrestled great blocks of ice to the ground in front of a bank of rose bushes, and left them there. Someone talked about lunch. "What do we want with lunch?" a voice assuaged him. There was obsessive speculation, punctuated by the lament of Akrem's older brother—questions flung at the sky—and by pauses for prayers murmured in unison with hands spread wide. But he was alone in there. And after a time I went to sit with him. I could feel the heat radiating up from the floor of the van, despite the air-conditioning that drew on the motor in pulses like long painful breaths. He seemed so alone, and so small, under his blanket. He who, alive, had been so much the opposite. I sat there with him, a little steadied by his presence beside me. I sat there to stave off my own sudden aloneness, in this impossible place.

It was a suicide bombing. That's what I had heard on the radio, and Akrem's name. And I had dropped everything. A suicide bombing—scourge of our young twenty-first century—words with the alchemy to terrify, to paralyze, wherever they are heard on this earth. It was a suicide bombing in a mosque, no less, my favorite mosque in Kandahar: the ancient one made of mud plaster in the middle of the bazaar, with the four towers leaning a little jauntily into the sky.

An Arab had done it, the governor's thick-lipped voice had lisped on the radio. Documents had been found to prove it, he said. An image was making the rounds, of a young man in a soldier's uniform who had bent down in front of Akrem, as though to reach for his hand to kiss, right before the explosion. That would be the Arab, the implication was. And then, an instant later, the pandemonium so familiar by now from television footage, or worse. The sobs, the smoke, the broken glass, the chunks of bodies—naked, cauterized by the heat—the burning hanks of cloth and hair, the stunned survivors wandering about dazed, the medics overwhelmed. It was carnage. More than twenty dead, dozens injured.

And yet something wasn't quite right with this account. In Afghanistan, there are ways you know things. Outsiders call it rumor mongering or conspiracy theorizing, and when they ask you for some evidence, for something concrete to substantiate this gut feeling of yours, you shrug a little sheepishly because you have to admit they're right—you're only speculating. But still, you know. There is a tuning fork vibrating inside you to the true pitch. A tuning fork forged through years spent here, absorbing the underlying pattern. Because there is a pattern, despite the surface chaos. It just takes some time to grasp its contours.

An Arab suicide bomber does not fit the pattern. We just know it. But now is not the time to prove it. Now we have to go through the motions.

The streets of Kandahar, the dirt roads weaving through baked mud villages, are lined with people, standing silently, watching our cortege pass by. At the left turn leaving Arghandab, about a half hour outside of town, Mullah Naqib and his men, dressed in flowing tunics, turbans or lengths of cloth tied about their heads, have grouped themselves beside the road, symbolically ushering us through their territory. I'm sitting in the middle, and I catch a glimpse of them through the window and my daze. Mullah Naqib, the old warhorse who drove the Soviets out of the Afghan south, looks bowed, his sheep's fleece of a beard shot with gray, his shoulders a little stooped despite the urgency exuding from him as he waves each truck past. Akrem was his armor commander during the decade-long anti-Soviet resistance.

We leave them behind; they will board their trucks and join us shortly, guarding our backs. With them, we leave behind the last vestiges of human habitation. The road mounts the wall of a ravine on a diagonal, then clambers among jagged rocks and hoists itself up over the lip of the plateau. There the peeled, windswept expanse spreads out, uninterrupted to the next set of mountains on the horizon.

The mud-brick village blends in with the landscape. Our trucks pull up and park in rows. Child-sized table-and-bench sets have been dragged out of another schoolhouse and piled up against its walls. The packed-earth yard inside is spread with carpets and seating mattresses. Tents are strung overhead for shade. Akrem's brother waves me to a far corner. Obediently, I step out of my shoes and pick my way across the carpets. But I can't stay a full minute. I can't stay there all by myself, apart from everyone. I skirt the mattresses on my way to the first row, right by the compound door that everyone is entering through, and sit back down. I hear Akrem's brother mutter something about "completely in the way." I know it. I'm in the way. I'm an eyesore.

I shouldn't be here at all, in fact. Women do not attend funerals in Afghanistan. I am the only one. And the only foreigner. I had thrown on charcoal-gray hiking pants that morning, military-looking, a blue-and-white striped man's shirt, and a white embroidered shawl to cover my hair. I watch the graybeards do their double take as they notice me and, distracted, stare. This isn't even Kandahar, this is Khakrez, back in the hills, one of the most conservative villages in this conservative country. And by some miracle I have been allowed to come here, to share this moment. I say a silent word of thanks to Akrem's brother.

The schoolyard is filling now, as people find places on the mattresses; I get up and return to my corner. Friends of Akrem's sit on each side of me: a businessman, the security chief of Spin Boldak district. We start talking. A little later, Akrem's brother summons the bodyguard who was at the wheel of Akrem's car that morning, easing it up to the gate of the mosque, when the bomb exploded.

The young man in his police uniform kneels in the hollow of our circle, eyes cast down, and describes what he saw. Someone left the mosque, crossed the street, and turned around to watch. "And when the Dram! came, the man did not appear surprised." I exchange looks with the boy, and with Akrem's brother.

I know we ate something. It is mandatory. Afghan hosts feed their guests and ply them with cups of fragrant tea, should their own children have to go hungry. Akrem would apologize for having only "soldiers' fare" to give me. But I don't remember it. I remember someone berating himself for not thinking to bring a generator. I remember gas-fired lights arriving, hissing and burning white. I remember leaving the schoolyard at last, under a canopy of stars, four or five of us trailing behind Akrem's brother, who lit our way with a flashlight, escorting us in person to one of the family's mud-walled compounds.

Inside, great loads of spindly twigs are piled everywhere—in chest-high stacks filling half the courtyard, in drifts against the compound walls, spread across the low flat roof of the front room, which is sunk partly underground in the local fashion for insulation against the murderous heat. I know almost at once, even before snapping off a stem and seeing the precious grains clasped at the extremities of its fine, jointed ends. Cumin. Black cumin. It perfumes the night.

Several people offered me their homes and their womenfolk so I would not have to sleep with men. But like a waif, I clung to the people I knew: the bodyguards, bless them, with whom I had hardly exchanged words before, when they would respectfully enter the room where I was meeting Akrem, bearing tea or a dish of grapes. I ask if we can sleep outside, in the clean air, next to the cumin and the stars. My companions humor me. The businessman is with us, Akrem's fast friend and benefactor, as well as a criminal investigations officer from the Kabul police department, who keeps aiming barbs at me.

He is an adept of the suicide bombing theory, and has been describing things to suit it. I had goaded him into going to look at the mosque that afternoon. "The concrete underfoot was unbroken," he proclaimed when we returned, and he repeated the assertion to the assembled company in Khakrez. "It was perfectly flat," he said, sweeping his hand out in a gesture meant to brook no opposition. "No way a bomb could have been planted."

The kneeling bodyguard contradicted him. "The ground was not unbroken," he said, glancing at me for corroboration. I gave it. And so we shamed the investigations officer. In a rage at his disloyalty and his swaggering incompetence, I stared broiling embers at him all evening.

The bodyguards start hauling bedding from the mud-brick house. They arrange pallets for themselves in a square in front of the door. Off to the side, a few yards away, they spread a straw mat for me and place on it a cotton-filled mattress and an overstuffed pillow. Two of them, remembering their training, stake out a position by the opposite wall.

Copyright © Sarah Chayes, 2006.