Reverberations

The bombings in this country expose a kind of schadenfreude. Not joy in a neighbor's misfortune so much as the primacy of self-preservation, and relief that it's not your turn. Those who suffer around you are no more deserving of sympathy than you once were or will be soon, so people look toward the sites of the bombings with curiosity rather than concern. New visitors to Afghanistan think Afghans are numb to violence for having witnessed so much of it, but it's the opposite; each bomb summons a cascade of memories, which people try to ignore. A visit to the morgue after an earlier bombing left an Afghan friend sick and sleepless for a week, while we Westerners are in fact better equipped to bear witness clinically.

Still, throughout the city, there is a disturbing air of normalcy among Afghans in the minutes and hours after the attack. I think of the chaos of 9/11, of people running down the streets of New York with faces white from ash and fear. Here, minutes after the explosion I see a girl cross the street casually on her way to run some errand, wearing a New York Yankees hat.

The young men are a different story. After the wreckage of the bus is hauled away on a flatbed, hundreds of boys are summoned to the site. They're stopped a hundred yards away by a soldier who says there is an investigation going on, that the minister of the interior is on site, so no one can pass. The boys are eager; some try to scurry by the soldier, who responds by yelling at them, by throwing rocks at them, and by pulling his pistol from its holster and brandishing the weapon in the air. A half mile away convoys of International Security Assistance ForceHumvees rumble up and down Darulaman Road, while here a solitary Afghan Army soldier armed with only an unimposing-looking Soviet-era 9mm tries to protect an investigation from a throng of onlookers.

The soldier gets word that the investigation is finished—it is only two hours after the explosion. "Burra," he says with resignation: "Go." The young men swarm past him, hundreds of young people on bikes and foot rushing gleefully toward the scene, where firemen are still hosing the blood and body parts too small for hand-picking into the open sewers that flank the street. The young men gather over the crater, look at the crumbled storefronts, pick up pieces of the bus left behind, sift through the open sewers for blood and bits of bodies.

In a taxi with all its windows and a tire blown out, sitting neatly on the driver's seat as if deliberately placed there, is the only remnant of human life: a pakol, the woolen cap known as the "Massoud hat" for Ahmad Shah Massoud, the American ally and avowed enemy of the Taliban who tried to warn the West of an attack, and who was slain by bin Laden's men two days before September 11, 2001.

© 2007