Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  The two or three seconds through that space seemed like minutes. In the attacks she’d read about — a few times against the Serena Hotel, where diplomats and foreigners stayed — there had been multiple rockets. Her mind worked methodically, evaluating the timing and probability of a second rocket. She felt suspended in thought, floating.

  Then the car broke through to the other side and a glow of taillights reared up before them. Idris hit the brakes, jammed the wheel to one side and then the other, pulling as far as possible into the traffic.

  Hide your faces! he shouted. Your faces — hide them!

  Her mind kept measuring the distance to the rocket strike, fifty meters, maybe less. She looked back to assure herself that they were far from the hotel, but it was just behind them.

  The car, caught in the brilliance of the traffic’s light, seemed exposed. Dust swirled in updrafts of exhaust. A man walked through, pant legs flashing past headlights, his scarf over his mouth. Idris again told them to stay down.

  The car just in front stopped while traffic advanced on either side. Idris threw open his door and ran out and beat on its roof, yelling. He returned and checked that the doors were locked. They began to move again.

  Alexandra was still holding her cell and texted Tam. Almost got hit by rocket.

  Fifteen seconds later, Tam answered, You’re joking.

  She tried to text back No but her thumb kept writing On.

  She listened for her heart, felt the sensations surging through her body the way she had when she was a girl, after the first time she’d made herself come.

  Sirens approached and police walked between cars, slapping fenders as if herding steer. They opened a channel, and several pickups, their beds loaded with men clutching rifles, moved in single file against the direction of the traffic. As the first truck pulled alongside the car, Alexandra realized that the only military in the area was inches away and could be a target.

  A soldier with a short beard and full lips stared down at her, aiming his rifle just above the car’s roof. The trucks passed, and the traffic closed the channel.

  I should take you both home, Idris said.

  She touched her solar plexus and slid her fingers to her stomach. The nausea was gone, and she was hungrier than she’d ever been.

  I still want to go to the restaurant, she said.

  Justin asked if she was sure. The misting cars made her think of close-packed cattle in a run, their breath and bodies steaming in the cold.

  Only when the traffic was flowing did she and Justin begin to talk. As if recalling an event they’d experienced years ago, they pieced together their memories.

  Have you seen anything like this before? he asked Idris.

  During the civil war, he told them. There were many rockets and mortars.

  Briefly, she felt guilty for her sense of bravery, for her growing pleasure at the adrenaline streaming through her.

  Two hours after they’d left the school, they reached the checkpoints near the diplomatic area and were allowed inside. Idris pulled into the narrow drive to the restaurant, through two red-and-white striped gates and between staggered concrete blast walls.

  I’ll wait here, he said once he’d parked.

  Justin told him to go home. We’ll take a taxi. Please get some rest.

  Idris insisted that he would study in the car. Otherwise, he explained, he’d spend the same amount of time in traffic. In an hour or two, the streets would be empty.

  As Alexandra and Justin walked to the door, Idris got out of the car and spoke with a group of drivers, most likely about the attack. All the men were older, and when she glanced back, Idris stood out, their stern eyes evaluating him, a boy among men.

  The guards passed a metal detector over Justin and Alexandra. Inside, dishes clinked as expats chattered and drank wine. It dawned on her that the attack might not make the news. She’d never felt so alive.

  Justin sat across from her, flushed and seeming to glow. Danger had ignited a metabolic process that was making him incandescent.

  Tell me about Clay, she said, her body so restless she felt she was soothing an animal into place, coaxing it, petting it, gripping its collar.

  He described Clay as one of those people who didn’t understand what it meant to be part of society and took pleasure in the losses of others. An emotion stirred in her, a memory of her brother. Justin must not have joined the military because of his handicap, she realized. The thought of him as a born soldier forced to harness his violence and serve the world turned her on.

  After dinner, Idris drove them to her house. When she invited Justin inside, he said he should head back to the school, but she reminded him that tomorrow was the holy day and insisted that he stay awhile. They said good night to Idris.

  She led Justin inside, to her bedroom, and took fistfuls of his black shalwar in her hands. Stitches popped, and he whispered, Easy. They kissed as she pulled off his clothes and moved her fingers along the muscles of his chest. She pulled him onto the bed, bit his shoulder, and put his hand on her breast, squeezing his fingers with her own.

  Fuck me, she said.

  He moved away, onto his side.

  What’s wrong? she asked.

  I’ve foresworn sexual intercourse until I’m married.

  His palm pulsed against her nipple. His quick departure the evening he’d walked her home finally made sense.

  Justin talked about his mission, how he had to give body, mind, and soul — how God made Himself known through a sense of purpose. She wanted to ask, Then why are you here with me? But having him here, their skin touching, was something she couldn’t yet surrender.

  He started talking about Clay again, and the years after losing his eye, and she understood that his determination was larger than the school or anything he could accomplish as a teacher.

  Were you afraid tonight? she asked.

  At times, I’m afraid of being killed before I’ve done something meaningful. But when my faith is strong, I know I won’t be. I’ve been doubting a lot. Because of Idris and Sediqa, I’ve been questioning my purpose here. Tonight, that went away. Who am I to think I’m entitled to an easy path?

  He laid a heavy arm against her ribs, its pressure on her diaphragm.

  Let’s sleep, he said.

  She reached and shut off the lamp. Her brother had once written to her about life on the army base in Texas and bars where girls talked about Jesus and the Rapture, and fucked as if it was coming tomorrow. He described the erotic push-pull of desire and contrition, the guarded hymens, the generous blowjobs and anal sex to skirt the divine rules and share a little pleasure in the blind spot of the Lord. Why couldn’t she have been so lucky?

  Justin adjusted his body next to her and fell asleep.

  美智子

  The morning after the rocket attack, Tam and I ate a late breakfast and she warned me, cryptically, “Godfrey is here.” Moments later, Justin followed Alexandra out of her room.

  Tam invited them to a picnic. Two weeks earlier, an Afghan businessman she’d once interviewed had called to ask if she could find renters for a single-storey home that dated to the sixties. The Australian head of a surveillance company had renovated it, hanging numerous mirrors and transforming a bedroom into a pub. Between the house and the rear compound wall, he’d built a greenhouse, put a heater inside, and, not long after, returned home. When the businessman told Tam he was worried the plants would die, she asked him to keep the heater going. The bottom had dropped out of the housing market as foreigners left and the building boom continued — real estate being one of the few ways to invest earnings from the poppy fields that produced ninety percent of the world’s heroin — so she convinced the owner to match the cost of rent at the much lesser building where some of her friends lived. They’d decided to celebrate with a picnic in the courtyard greenhouse, on the grass.


  More than twenty people arrived, bearing bowls of chips, cheese plates, and kebabs. Bottles of wine were set along the wall, behind potted succulents whose neglected leaves had the texture of raisins.

  Tam knew everyone at the picnic, and people were curious about who I was. I said only that I wrote for a Japanese magazine. One rule of expat ambition is that you don’t voice your goals unless you’ve already made significant achievements; otherwise, people will mock you in your absence. Many great expat journalists emerged suddenly, after having published a feature in a notable American magazine, and then began waging cramped political debates on Twitter.

  Word had gotten around that Alexandra was seeing Justin, and people gathered to speak to him. They wanted to understand her interest or draw him away so others could flirt with her.

  Tam asked about his plans. “A lot of people come here with more than one,” she said. “They teach a little while doing a bit of journalism or keeping a blog, and then end up working for an organization.”

  Justin said he was just volunteering, and Andrea, a Canadian administrator at the American University of Afganistan, told him she knew Frank.

  “With a few exceptions, his kids aren’t in the system. They don’t get a sense of what is normal in education, of the levels and demands. We have tests, and if the kids don’t work, they lose their scholarships. But Frank tells everyone he got fed up with us. The truth is he was fired for favoritism. He’s proud of saying he’s gone native, and in terms of nepotism, he was giving the Afghans a run for their money. Now he’s chasing windmills.”

  Justin flushed a little but said nothing, maybe not willing to admit he’d come for a school built around one man’s personality, whose mission wasn’t even to let the best rise on their own vague merits, as claimed, but to ship his favorite girls to the States when money was available.

  Paul, a handsome New Zealander with a red beard and receding hair, swirled his whiskey as he spoke with Alexandra. He oversaw historical preservation for UNESCO. Tam, who counted him among her conquests, pushed his shoulder and said, “Girl time, Paul. Scat!”

  She walked Alexandra out of the greenhouse, and I followed, as did Holly, the busty Connecticut socialite who ran the dog shelter.

  We walked down the hallway, into a bedroom where a mirror had been hung on the ceiling.

  “So how was your sleepover with Mullah Omar?” Tam asked.

  “It was …” Alexandra said, “terrible.”

  Tam flustered her with questions, and Alexandra explained his faith, his belief in waiting until marriage.

  “What the fuck,” Tam said. “That makes me so embarrassed to be American.”

  “But at least I discovered the school,” Alexandra said. “It’s another side to Afghanistan. I didn’t know there were young women here who were so impressive.”

  “Just be careful,” Tam told her. “Frank has asked me to be a mentor like a thousand times. He’s a crazy old guy hanging out with a bunch of Afghan girls.”

  “There are boys too,” Alexandra said.

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t there when I went.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But the girls are amazing.” Then she talked about the scholarship, about Sediqa and Idris, and how Justin had called him that morning and planned to take him to lunch and tell him.

  “The kid just needs to escape that school,” Tam said. “Frank will promise anything to get what he wants. As for Justin, you’re living the quintessential Kabul experience. Expats bond quickly. You have the impression of sharing so much. You’re both brave. You’re exceptional. You’re all alone. And then you wake up one day and realize you’re in bed with a whack-job.”

  Alexandra hesitated. “At least he’s trying to help the girls. If he doesn’t, who will?”

  Tam shrugged. “Anyway,” she said, “you rarely get bonding like that back home, and there’s no downside, because the disappointment isn’t much different. Well, maybe the Mullah is a special case.”

  She tilted her head back to the mirror, and we did too, standing where the bed must have been, staring up at our four faces as they floated above us, as if in a sunlit well.

  As we explored the house, Holly talked about her frequent Kabul romances, how she’d had her heart broken by one she’d thought was different — Luis, a former army dog trainer from Florida who’d come back to Afghanistan to work for her organization as a civilian. Alexandra asked about her work, and Tam grimaced in my direction, showing her teeth as Holly talked about the shelter and her favorite dog, Hank, who pushed on things with his paw to make sure they were safe before eating them.

  Tam opened a storage room that hadn’t been renovated, its ceiling water-stained and old hand-carved furniture crowding it. We moved through, touching headboards, dressers, and a rolltop desk, and then worked the dust off our fingertips as if crumbling salt. Piled against the walls were dozens of full-to-bursting roller bags, eight padlocked aluminum trunks, numerous taped-up cardboard boxes, two plastic Christmas trees, a bike with flat tires, and a few Kabul street signs — the ultimate souvenirs, stolen during binges of drunken partying. Tam said that expats often abandoned everything they owned in other people’s houses when they left, promising they’d return for some not-yet-funded project.

  “But this furniture is really old,” Alexandra said. She opened a cabinet, rows of pigeonholes crammed with fusty yellow papers. We began pulling them out, looking at news clippings from the late seventies and eighties, from the Soviet period and the civil war.

  “I should write a piece about this cabinet,” Tam said.

  Holly reached to one of the upper pigeonholes. A roll of what might be receipts was stuffed in like a cork. She removed them, felt around inside, and brought out a dusty sphere whose rugged surface resembled chunky tire treads.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh fuck. Oh my God. What do I do?”

  “Don’t move,” Tam told her and cupped her hands. “Just slowly tip it into my hands.”

  Holly did as she was told. She backed away and then ran into the house, shouting, “We found a grenade! We found a grenade!”

  People lined the hallway as Tam marched through with the pomp of one bearing a Fabergé egg. In the greenhouse’s winter light, she placed the grenade in the grass.

  Holly was talking quickly to Paul. “I just kind of grabbed it. I had no idea. I mean, the pin could have fallen out.”

  Expats often did this — seeing danger constantly, heightening encounters with the police by speaking loudly, waving their hands, getting flustered. If a ministry was attacked, they talked about every time they’d been there. In the expat bubble, living in a war zone was less dramatic than they’d expected, and they were compensating.

  Justin stood by the doorway alone, his jacket on, his cell to his ear.

  “Idris,” he said. “Come inside. Maybe you can help us.”

  Everyone was crouched, as if the grenade had fallen from one of the potted trees — a cubist avocado.

  Idris came inside wearing a snug new leather jacket. The cold had left two pink thumbprints on his cheeks. He walked to the center of the small crowd.

  “It is a Russian grenade, an old one. These are known for being very fair weapons.”

  “You mean because they’re effective?” Paul asked.

  “No, because sometimes they blow up your enemy — sometimes, when you pull the pin, they blow you up. They do not pick sides.”

  People laughed and sat back on their heels or cross-legged in the grass. The mood had shifted. Expats loved a humorist who could make light of the war.

  “How do you know this?” Paul asked. “You’re too young to have been in the army.”

  “Actually,” Idris said, “I am too old. They like their recruits fresh and tender.”

  Everyone laughed again. Most of the wine was gone, and se
nsing he had an audience, Idris stood a little straighter, his smile bringing out his youth and easing his angular features.

  “Afghans know grenades the way Americans know cars,” he told them.

  Tam interrupted to say she’d read that Soviet grenades had different fuse systems. The average delay was 3.5 to 4 seconds, but some exploded immediately for use in booby traps.

  Idris cocked his head in Holly’s direction.

  “Yes, it was a thirty-year-old booby trap. The string tied to the pin must have rotted off.”

  “Oh my God,” Holly said and held up her palms as if she’d touched filth.

  After the laughter subsided, Idris reassured her this wasn’t true. “It’s not a booby trap. These used to be as common as pomegranates. During the civil war, when it was very bad here, I lived with my uncle in Laghman Province, and he taught me how to fish with them.”

  “How bucolic,” Paul said.

  “We would build a dam with rocks,” Idris told them, “to stop the fish. Then we’d throw in the grenade or shoot in an RPG, and we’d all hide. We got sometimes a hundred fish, enough for the whole village, but we had to be careful of pieces of metal in the fish, the chara …”

  “The shrapnel,” Tam said.

  “Yes. Thank you. The shrapnel.” Idris flushed a little and glanced at Holly. “Dynamite is much better and easier and cheaper now that Afghanistan has used up most of its grenades.”

  “Where do you get dynamite?” Holly asked.

  “Everywhere. In any bazaar. A stick is maybe one dollar. People make it with fertilizer.”

  “How comforting,” Paul chimed in.

  “You do not have to hide as much from dynamite, so many Afghans use it, or electricity.”

  “Electricity?” several people said at once.

  “Yes, you take a generator and put the wires in the river. But fishing like this is illegal now. Too many people were electrocuting their neighbors. One man would be taking a bath, and his neighbor would put the wires in.”