Her Ears, Her Window

The day I left Afghanistan, Naseer drew me aside. “A promise?” he said.

We looked at each other in the grimy light of a winter noon. We’d spent every day together for nearly a month. It was only then that it occurred to me-and the thought felt funny, somehow-that he was the best friend I had in this battered place.

Naseer Ahmed is a 28-year-old translator, a dark, soft-bellied man with fingers like sausages and a quick laugh. He is an engineer who has been unemployed for months. “No problem,” he says. He applies this maxim to everything-that, along with “this belong to you,” which is a nice way of saying, “Don’t ask me; you’re the reporter. That’s your problem.” He eats too much, argues a lot and grumbles bitterly over the social and gastronomical constraints of the holy month of Ramadan. He is a guide of saintly patience but spotty lucidity. Some days he launches on eloquent philosophical treatises; other times his face goes blank when I ask him where I can buy a pen.

That Sunday a rented sedan waited to take me from Jalalabad back to Pakistan. That Sunday there was no gunfire, no mob, no shouting. That Sunday there was no story, just goodbye. The calm felt unfamiliar, and I was pretty sure I’d never see him again.

“Promise what?” I asked.

“You have photographs of the women in my family. Promise they will never be printed in my country.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “But they already appeared in the newspaper in Los Angeles.” “That is no problem,” he said. “But I told you here it is shameful for a woman. It is my family’s name. Please understand.”

He pressed a grubby scrap of paper into my hand. He’d printed his address in block letters. “You are my sister,” he said. “You are always my sister.”

“Thank you, Naseer.” I groped for a farewell that fit into the simple language we traded-but the words weren’t there. So I stuck his address into the pocket of my pants and swung the backpack over my shoulder.

“Goodbye, Naseer.”

“Will you forget me?” he asked. His face bore honest curiosity. I was strange to him, and he studied me, even then, in the last seconds of our acquaintance.

“No.”

He grinned and turned away. He had a new client to tend: Another reporter had come to take my place amid the mountains and mullahs and moujahedeen of eastern Afghanistan. I’d bequeathed my replacement a filthy hotel room, one tiny packet of shampoo, a ratty Pakistani sleeping bag-and Naseer.

Which is to say, I left him a lot.

If I came to know Afghanistan at all, it was because Naseer followed me around for weeks and explained it. He was my ears, my tongue and my window, a sort of bumbling Virgil in the vibrant warscape of his country. He spoke of the regimes that had come before and those that might come again; told who was lying and who was powerful. He steered me high into the snowy mountains when the shooting began in Tora Bora, and he led hikes through the bombed ruins of abandoned Al Qaeda training grounds. He crouched at the bedsides of children whose arms or eyes or legs were blasted off when midnight brought bombs from the sky. Those hospital rooms stank of rotting wool, vomit and sweat, and the wounded Afghans twisted in bloody sheets and rolled their eyes at the stained ceiling. At times like those, I think Naseer hated his job.

When I wanted to write about Afghan women, Naseer took me home to his sisters, mother and wife. When I asked him to show me his favorite place, we visited his brothers in the slanting light of the old grain market, where wheat pours like honey into rusting scales and old men tick off the seasons on prayer beads. I ate lamb and rice on the dirt floor of Naseer’s house the night his baby daughter was born. It was a night of feast and possibility, rich with buttery light and spice. The aunts and cousins swept me into a candle-lit bedroom to dance, draped a scarf over my head and giggled. They named the girl Kathleen, after my mother.

This is how I found Naseer: I was with a photographer named Brian in Jalalabad, at the family home of a warlord named Haji Zaman. It was a great stone house that rose from a sea of gated orange groves and grape arbors and herb gardens, and every time Zaman walked the rows of vegetables, he’d tell us the same thing: “I can grow a salad here.” He’d been to America. “I know you people like to eat salads.”

Kabul had fallen, the Taliban were disappearing from villages all over the country, and Brian and I were sent to cover the changing times. When I asked Zaman to help us hire a driver, car and translator, he was nonchalant. “Yah, there is no problem,” he said. The next morning, we passed the clusters of aimless armed boys who spent their days lolling in the grasses at the edge of the compound. At the gate, as promised, we found a blue sedan, complete with driver, guard and translator. But Zaman was wrong-there was a problem: The translator didn’t speak but a few words of English.

We piled into the back of the car, and I turned to him. “What’s your name?” I asked.

He gave a faint smile. He said nothing.

“Um-what is your name?” I tried again.

“Name-?” he repeated.

Brian leaned forward to regard him from beneath a bundle of camera equipment. “Name,” he said.

The translator squirmed a bit. “I no understand.”

“When did you learn English?” I asked.

Silence.

“Do you understand?”

A leaden quiet filled the car. The guard turned with a smirk and said something to the translator, who grunted and stared stolidly out the window. Brian and I blinked at one another.

“Brian-”

“I know,” he muttered.

Too late: The car veered to the gates of the governor’s palace, and we clambered down into the throngs of reporters, tribal elders and Pakistani expatriates. Those were carnival times in Jalalabad-a restless uncertainty pulsed in the streets. The men were meeting at midnight in the governor’s palace, elders from the ancient hills were making pilgrimages to the palm groves of wizened statesmen, young boys were thirsty for gore and begging to fight in exchange for a Kalashnikov and daily bread. Alliances were being forged and discarded in the shadows of lush gardens. The story was all around us, but we couldn’t touch it, because we could not speak. Amid the clamor, our would-be translator touched my shoulder, held up a finger and disappeared into the crowd. Half an hour later he panted back to us, a second young man in tow. I looked at the newcomer: He was about my age, I guessed, with a scraggly goatee, a face of feline corners and a decrepit sweater buttoned over a paunchy stomach. It was Naseer.

“My friend doesn’t speak English,” he explained, unnecessarily. “If you want, I will work for you.”

“Fine,” I said. The morning was sliding past, and there was no time to be picky. “If he doesn’t work out, we’ll think of something tomorrow,” I murmured to Brian.

We approached a tribal elder perched on a dried fountain bed. “Ask him whether he feels safe under this new government,” I suggested. Naseer consulted with the mullah, who flicked distrustful glances from eyes ringed with black paint.

“No,” Naseer said at last, a ring of triumph in his voice.

“No, what? What did he say?”

Naseer nodded very quickly, as if all had become clear, and held another short dialogue. “He say he-” he began, straightening.

“No,” I interrupted. “When he gives his answer, I want you to repeat exactly what he says. So you say to me, “I,” just as if you were him. Don’t paraphrase. Do you understand?”

“I do not know ‘paraphrase,’ ” Naseer said, haughtily.

“Never mind ‘paraphrase.’ Forget it.” Our novelty was wearing out-the elder leaned sideways to peer around us into the crowd. “Just repeat exactly what he says. In his very words. Pretend you are him talking to me. Now: Does he feel safe with the Taliban gone?”

“He-”

“I.” My patience was wilting.

“Oh. Yes. Sorry.” Naseer gathered his thoughts. “I do not feel safe. These moujahedeen are not good people. We are concerned because we have not had a good government in 25 years.”

“Very good,” I said and wondered if my enthusiasm sounded contrived to both of us, or just to me. “You see?”

“Yes.” It was a tone of precious little conviction. “I do not know journalism.” He pronounced it “generalism.”

“I know,” I said. “You’ll learn. It’s not so hard, just strange.”

Those early days drained us-lamps in Zaman’s house blazed until morning prayers echoed in the orchards. Strange men stepped over me while I slept. There was gunfire at night and the rumble of bombs. After a few nights, I moved out and took up residence in the Spin Ghar hotel, a stone skeleton of gaping corridors and frigid drafts that was falling slowly apart amid tangles of overgrown gardens. Equipped with a filthy mattress, a temperamental shower spigot and a window ledge for my satellite dish, I settled into a routine. Naseer crossed town in the morning and haunted the lobby until Brian and I appeared. When dusk settled over the mountains, his tap-tap-tap sounded at the door of my room. “Anything more?” he asked. “No.” And he drifted off, down the hall and homeward through the blue exhaust and clattering bicycles of the gloaming hour.

One night, I didn’t answer the door. I’m not sure why. That morning we’d stood over the skinny bodies of dead soldiers. That day we’d talked-again-to people who’d lost homes and children and limbs in the bombing. And that night I sat at the window, barely breathing, thinking in pictures instead of words. Torn pants, brains spilling onto canvas stretchers, holes blasted pointlessly into dried fields. I watched the sun set behind a ridge of pines, saw the light melt from groves of thorn trees and felt weightless, almost bleached out of the world. But Naseer tapped and tapped, and then he called my name and rapped some more. By the time I opened the door it was too dark to see his face. “Why you don’t answer?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think you are sad,” he said.

“A little.”

“I too am sad,” he said. “These are my people. This is my country.”

In all the long days and dreary visions, that was the only time Naseer spoke to me of his own suffering. He cleared his throat. “I can go?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to come eat? One hour. You have time. The girls like to see you.”

“No, I have to write.”

He wandered off, home to dinner and bed. The night would pass, adolescent guards muttering over their hash joints until slumber found them curled up on the hotel steps.

Morning would bring Naseer as sure as daylight, and we’d start over again.

IN EVERY TRANSLATION, YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THAT THINGS GET LOST: WORD, nuance, metaphor. And more: corners of memories, vividness of vision, scraps of life. With every layer of translation, the truth becomes cloudier. The story’s the thing, and if we are lucky it comes through intact, just a little smeared. Sometimes we grope at the edges of stories, unable to fathom their dimensions. Other times, surely, and this is the worst thought of all, we never realize the story is there to be told.

But we translate all the time. We cram moments and emotions into sentences, even as the words overflow and snap and collapse. The language of language is nothing next to the language of the world, where trees interrupt the landscape instead of commas and walls stand in for periods; where silence is a space and a face is an adjective and a touch of the hand is a lyric “I.”

Some translators spoke decent English, some garbled and groped-and a hapless few couldn’t even discuss the weather. There were translators who knew shortcuts, secrets and passwords. There were translators who smoked too much hash, and one who tried to convert his television crew to Islam. Some didn’t understand a thing about warfare, but they knew which urchin in the bazaar could drum up a flask of black market Indian whiskey.

We learned our translator’s linguistic idiosyncrasies. Instead of saying, “He is laughing,” or “they are fighting,” or “she is fasting,” Naseer said, “he is in laughing position,” “they are in fighting position” and “she is in fasting position.” I assumed that, at some point in his checkered academic past, somebody explained the phrase “sitting position,” and Naseer applied it to everything. I never corrected him. Somehow, it never seemed the right time.

A good translator knows who’s telling the truth, why a topic is culturally offensive and who might pull a gun on us for broaching the subject. The translator is like a doctor who inspects our flesh, an accountant who opens up our books- he studies our weak spots and has the grace to step lightly around them. Likewise, his flaws and talents become indivisibly our own: What Naseer didn’t understand, I didn’t understand. If Naseer blundered, I blundered. If Naseer was eloquent, my prose was graceful. If Naseer hadn’t slept well, 1 million readers unwittingly paid a small price.

But here is the real trick, the final transformation: When the story appears in ink, the translator is nowhere to be found. He wields his power-and then he is gone.

NASEER IS POOR, BUT HE’S NOT HUNGRY.

His mother, his brothers, their wives and babies-everybody sleeps in a cramped string of mud rooms hidden from a shaded Jalalabad street by a tall wall. Carpets stifle the chill from the dirt floors. Water comes from a well, milk from a tired old cow and eggs from a handful of chickens. Radios prattle on, spilling the BBC news into dim rooms. There is electric light when the government du jour keeps the municipal plant running. The family counts on a minimal amount of political security because they are related-albeit distantly-to Jalalabad commander Hazrat Ali. By local standards, it is an upper-middle-class existence.

Naseer’s mother’s cheeks are crumpled and as dark as chocolate. She is a village woman, Naseer says. She knows the mountain, and the river, and the field. She is perplexed by the city. She doesn’t go to the bazaar. Naseer’s father left her long ago for a younger, prettier woman. Naseer hasn’t seen his father in a long time.

When the other women winced and bobbed their heads and cooed-gestures they employed because we could not speak-she looked at me with the impassive eyes of an interested child. I never heard her talk, not even to her sons. It was Ramadan, and none of the adults ate or drank during daylight hours-but the old woman took lunch with the babies, crouched in the dust, and broke her bread with spindly fingers. When the sun stood high overhead, and the women split logs and chased the hens, she muttered to herself in the shade of an ash tree.

“How old is she?” I asked Naseer.

“I don’t know.”

“Ask her.”

He said something, but she did not blink.

“We don’t know,” Naseer said.

I should not be surprised: Age is liquid here. Most people can only guess how old they are, and Naseer thought I belabored the questions of how old, how long, how many. I suspect he sometimes invented ages to pacify me. I noticed an overwhelming majority of our subjects happened to be 28 or 34.

“Ask her what time she remembers as the most peaceful time, as the best years,” I told Naseer. “Under which government was she happiest?”

He paused, then spoke dutifully. The younger women tittered. The old woman stretched her lips over her gums and stared at Naseer.

“She is simple,” he told me. “She does not know. She is not educated.”

Naseer talked a lot about who was and who was not educated. It is one of his favorite phrases-”They are not educated people.” He used it to condemn the moujahedeen who ran wild in the streets, smacking the villagers with bamboo canes. He used it to excuse the roundabout replies of the Afghans we interviewed. When he spoke of the injustice of the Taliban regime, he said, “It was not important. They were not educated people.” He trotted out this platitude the day I set off a minor riot in the bazaar by trying on a burqa. He said it when a little boy grabbed my breast in the mountains. He said it when I stared at the hungry old men crouched in the doorways of dirt huts. “Forgive them, they know not what they do. Better yet, forget them, for what they do is of little consequence.”

Drought and war have turned his country into a dusty madhouse of malnutrition and land mines; of crutches and graveyards and absent men. But in Naseer’s eyes, nothing is so bitter as the death of education. He carries this grudge against his government. Because he is an engineer, he measures peace in bridges, cement and tracts of farmland. The nongovernmental organization where he once worked fled Afghanistan months ago. Naseer is certain his colleagues will be back; he carries his expired identification badge everywhere he goes. He fingered the worn plastic like a talisman when he wanted to remind us that he wasn’t always unemployed. Sometimes, on long drives, he held the old badge and stared out the window, droning on about the durability of concrete. “I am not interested in politics,” he said the day we met. “I am interested in pavement.” I HAD NEVER SEEN THESE MEN. THEY DIDN’T LOOK LIKE FARMERS OR TRANSlators or soldiers. I thought they had the wrong door when they came to my room at the Jalalabad hotel. They glanced over their shoulders and crowded into my face, voices soft and urgent.

“Let us come in,” the short one said.

“What do you want?”

“Just let us in to talk.”

“No,” I said. “We can talk in the hall.”

Their eyes flashed quick, silent thoughts between them.

“I’m busy,” I snapped. “What do you want?”

“How do we know you work for the Los Angeles Times?”

“I suppose you don’t. So what?”

“You don’t have a card?”

“Who are you?”

“What was your interest in the Al Qaeda houses?”

“Forget it. I will not answer unless you explain who you are.”

“Please.”

“No!” My voice was rising. “Who the hell do you think-”

Naseer heard me from the terrace and ran down the dim corridor, hammy hands flopping in panic. The strangers turned to watch him. I leaned against the door jam, crossed my arms and waited: The three men rattled in Pashto. It was fast. Arms waved, Naseer made sweeping motions with his flat hand as if to say, “Absolutely not.” Finally the two men slumped off down the hall, and Naseer turned to me. Pools of worry stood in his eyes. He swallowed.

“This very bad,” he said.

“Who are they?”

“Pshht-I don’t know.”

I found out later. The men worked for a primitive secret service cobbled together by the new government. They had been asking the translators about me. Maybe they thought I was a spy. Maybe they thought I was sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Maybe they thought there was some money to be made in harassing me. Who knows? Whatever they thought, they made Naseer awfully nervous about being associated with me. We drifted down the cold stone stairwell, out the door and into the decrepit gardens. December was coming.

“What did they say to you?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“Let’s sit here,” I said.

“You want to sit?”

“Yes.”

He laughed, then shrugged and said, “OK.”

“Why? Is that bad?”

“No, not bad.” He glanced toward the lawn, though, to see who was watching.

Scabby grass, cold dirt. The tangles of tattered roses were taller than our heads. Nobody weeded the flowers anymore. From behind screens of thorny branches, beggar children fixed us with coffee gazes. Naseer folded his hands over his gut, mouth pursed.

“What was that, Naseer?”

“You don’t know my Afghanistan,” he said. “This not America. Here you go to jail, and nobody comes. This is not a country of courts. This is a country of beatings.” He should know. Naseer once had a job installing water pumps, bridging rivers and fixing roads in remote villages. He loved the work, but it came with a quotient of violence. There were beatings from the Taliban and from roadside thugs. Beatings for refusing to give the pumps to crooks, beatings for refusing to pay bribes, beatings for refusing to apologize. He didn’t mind so much-those years were thick with bruises anyway, no matter what. Beatings for women, and beatings for men. Late on Naseer’s wedding night, he slipped a forbidden cassette into his car stereo. He hummed along, and music spilled into the inky night. He was happy. He was too loud. The vice and virtue officers chased him down. Naseer went to his wedding bed bloody, and his wife bandaged his wounds.

“What will my family do if these men come to my house after you leave?” he asked. “You’ll be in America. What can you do then?”

I looked at Naseer and said nothing, because I had no answer. Afternoon was giving way to night; warplanes lumbered overhead.

“I am a poor man, and I need work,” Naseer said, twisting a strand of grass. “But not if my family is hurt. Nothing is enough for that.”

He stopped and made a hard “Shah!” at the knot of beggar children. The reeds snapped, and they were gone.

“If I die,” he continued, “that belong to Allah. But I think I should not work for you more.”

“Naseer-”

“I have family.”

“Naseer-” He’s right; what do I know? “You have to decide.”

“I will talk to my brothers tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow I will tell you.”

“All right.”

“Now,” he said, “we should go.”

“From the garden?”

“Yes, of course. This not America,” he scolded. “This is not a country for sitting and discussing.”

The day was old. Sunset bled in the sky. My room was as cold and dirty as the day before. I lay on my bed, listened to the dull mutter of voice and foot, watched a thin gray dusk wash the ceiling. I fell asleep thinking about Naseer’s family. When I awoke it was a few hours to dawn and black everywhere. I wrapped myself in a sleeping bag and pecked out a story for the day’s paper. Winter crept in the windows and numbed my fingers. I felt Naseer was gone; I knew in my sleep I had said goodbye.

But when morning broke he was back, scrambling up the steps, his new shoes a-clatter on the tiles. He was there when I came from morning tea. I looked at his face and knew. “So?” “My brothers said, ‘What are you afraid of?’ ” Naseer said. “They said, ‘Megan is a woman. If she isn’t afraid, why should you be?’ ” Then he shrugged and laughed a quavery laugh. But he didn’t look at me. It was the only time he smiled all day.

It was the last I heard from the strangers. I saw them around sometimes and made a point of meeting their eyes, but they never approached me again. A few days before I left Afghanistan, I caught sight of them for the last time. They were hiking up a rocky slope alongside a television crew. Naseer saw them and nudged me. “Look,” he murmured. “They too are now translators.” “Really?”

Naseer spread his hands and grinned. “That is the way,” he said. “Everybody is having to eat.”

BECAUSE WE TALKED ENGLISH, WE WERE TRAFFICKING IN WHAT HAD LONG been a taboo tongue. To speak English was illegal under the Taliban. But as the regime weakened, scattered and fled, tentatively the ban evaporated. English survived the years in the shadows, just as women still knew how to dance and little boys whistled the tunes they’d learned from forbidden Pakistani cassette tapes. We found a crude English, faltering and spotted with remnants of British imperialism (an Afghan commander of scant vocabulary told me his men would get Al Qaeda “by hook or by crook”)-but it was there.

And in those times, it was precious. What had been a whispered tongue became a rich commodity as journalists swarmed eastern Afghanistan, hungry for stories and lost in a wilderness of Pashto, Urdu and Dari. Men who spoke English could feed their families for months. Prospective translators swarmed the lawn in front of the hotel-little boys with scrawny necks who’d pored over banned texts; old men who remembered faulty English from their days in the old schools; former university students who’d quietly polished their grammar with the help of foreign aid workers. In an economy that had lurched to a dead stop, English meant a chance to pocket between $35 and $75 a day. It was the best gig in town-in fact, one of the only gigs in town. The translators were unemployed doctors, students and merchants.

I was peering over a ridge in Tora Bora when Brian tapped me on the shoulder. “Look who I found,” he said. At his side stood a moujahedeen we’d interviewed weeks earlier, an idealistic literature student from Kabul who’d ventured east to do battle against the Taliban. But as the war moved into the snowy mountains-and turned from patriotic theory to a reality of whistling mortars and empty stomachs-he’d abandoned the guerrilla troops. Why? He spoke decent English.

“I am translator now,” he told me and shrugged a little sheepishly. He’d pulled a polyester tuxedo coat over his robes. “I work with the Spanish television.”

One day Naseer was unusually morose. “What’s the matter?” I asked. He rattled out a deep sigh. “You know your first translator?” I didn’t know who he meant. “Yes. My friend. He did not speak English.” Oh, yes. Of course.

This is what Naseer said: Because he had linked Naseer with steady clients, our sullen, long-forgotten translator was collecting a daily finder’s fee. He waited after sundown in the gate of Naseer’s house, haunted the hospital entrance when Naseer’s wife was in labor, pestered his brothers at the bazaar. When he found Naseer, he shook him down for a cut of his salary.

“That’s absurd,” I told Naseer. “We haven’t seen him in weeks. Why should he get paid?” “I don’t know,” Naseer said.

“Tell him you won’t pay him. Tell him it’s extortion.”

“I can’t. He is my friend. It is bad for my family name.”

“Why?”

“That’s just-” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.

“That’s just the way it is?” suggested Brian.

“That’s just the way it is,” Naseer agreed.

KNOWING NASEER IS LIKE ENTERING AN AFGHAN HOME-IT IS A SLOW, ELABorate pass from the public facade through gates and walls and layers of constructed personality. He opens one door at a time, and only when he is ready.

One day I learned something about Naseer: He is in love with a woman who is not his wife. He speaks of his lover over green tea one afternoon, cross-legged on the floor of his house. His wife’s belly is swollen, their baby is due any day. But Naseer talks in a big voice, as if daring his family to protest.

His wife is named Sediqa. She is 22, a slight woman with creamy skin, coarse hair and a thin voice squeezed from the top of her head. Her family was poor, and she had no schooling. With me she is shy, drops her eyes and guards her responses. Marriage to Naseer was a coup for the farmer’s daughter. “I love my wife,” Naseer sighs. “But I don’t like her family. They are not educated people.”

He was studying at the university in Kabul when he fell in love with a medical student. She was sharp, saucy-she debated religion and philosophy and, like Naseer, wanted to mend her broken country. They walked on the river banks, held hands and promised to wed. Then Naseer came home to Jalalabad and found that his family had brokered a marriage to Sediqa. So he drove back to Kabul and gave the news to the doctor. To hear Naseer tell it, his lover was sorry, but everybody knew there was no choice. To back out of an arranged marriage would bring shame on his family. “If I can lift off my poverty, I will marry Doctor and have two wives,” he said. “Doctor is waiting.”

“Doesn’t Sediqa mind?” I asked, wondering at the same time how long Doctor will wait. “What she can do? If she does not like, she can go back to her people. I already told her I do not care if we get divorce. She said, ‘No, that is shame for me.’ ”

I don’t say anything. Naseer says: “How is it in your country? Do the girls and boys choose?” “Most of the time. Most of the people pick their own partners. I guess it’s still complicated. People marry for all sorts of reasons, not always for love.”

“I think marriage is for love,” he said. “Will you choose for yourself?”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. Definitely.”

“That is good, that is the way it should be,” he nodded. “I am a democrat. I think everybody should decide for themselves. Boys, girls, it does not matter. But-” He looks at me. “What about loving?”

“What do you mean?”

Blood seeped into his cheeks, but he pressed on. “You know. Loving. Touching. I am having a baby now . . . you see . . . “

“Oh. Uh-huh. What about it?”

“Are the boys and girls free there? Can they love before they are married?”

“Well, yes. I mean, they’re free. There’s no law if they’re 16.”

“That is good.”

“What about here?” I asked him.

“Usually there is nothing before marriage. But sometimes you can negotiate.”

“With whom?”

“Ah-with the fathers.” Naseer wagged a finger. “Father of Sediqa is very poor. He wants the marriage very much. I talk to him, and we agree that we can touch before wedding. Not everything. Almost everything. As long as there can be no baby.”

“Really? Is that common?”

“Not so common,” Naseer said. “That was special.”

“And did you follow his wishes?”

“Of course,” Naseer said. “We were in agreement.”

IT IS A COOL AFTERNOON, AND I have come to sit with the women of Naseer’s family. Khaista serves us. The first wife of Naseer’s brother, Khaista is sterile. Her husband took a second wife to bear his babies, but he tells the family he loves Khaista best. A chilly air hangs between the two women. Now Khaista sets a pot of tea before me, scoops sugar. She has speckled eyes and a toothy smile.

“Tash-a-cour,” I say.

A giggle ripples through the room.

“They say they wish you could speak Pashto,” Naseer says.

“Tell them I wish I could, too,” I say.

He repeats it, and “ahhh . . . “ they beam and nod. Naseer crosses his arms on his chest and stretches his legs before him.

“OK,” he says, “I will not translate. You learn.”

“No, Naseer. Come on.”

“Yes. It is best way.”

His sisters groan and chatter, but Naseer shakes his head. And just like that, the strings of conversation have snapped. We try to get along: draw our thoughts with our hands, squabble and pose and flounce, laugh and yell and pound the dirt floors. Their eyes are big and warm and they touch my hair and cheeks, but I don’t know what they’re saying. I am alone in a riot of sound. From this noisy island, I glance at Naseer. He smirks as if to say, “See what happens? You do need me,” and I incline my head to tell him I never doubted it. But what I say with my lips is this: “You think you’re so smart.”

He laughs, because he gets it.

ONE WINTRY DAY IN TORA BORA, THE winds stung with the breath of snow, and even the trees trembled. Al Qaeda fighters were brokering a cease-fire with Afghan commanders on the peak of a mountain, and we drove and hiked as close as we could. But then the soldiers came stomping down the dirt trail, pushing the journalists before them. Bloated with indignation, Naseer turned, put his hands on his hips and yelled at the soldiers. The men sneered, and before he could duck, the barrel of a gun came cracking down onto his shoulder. Naseer winced and touched his arm as if to make sure it was still there. “There is no problem,” he said, and we trudged down the mountain. “What did you say?” I asked him.

“I say, ‘These are journalist people. They have right to see. They must tell the world what happens here. This is their job, and this is their right.’ ”

“You did? Naseer, when did you get so passionate about press freedom?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and we walked on. I still don’t know whether he didn’t have an answer, or didn’t understand my question.

Later that day, he turned to me. “Do you think I could be journalist?”

“Do you want to be?”

Maybe, he said. And then he changed the subject.

I HAVE SAID GOODBYE, AND I AM leaving Afghanistan-the light that falls like powder on the poppy fields, the mortars stacked like firewood in the broken-down sheds at the abandoned terror compounds, the throaty green of the mineral rivers.

It is a few days before Christmas. In the back of the car, I am tired, staring into a scrubbed sky, dreaming of red wine and a deep bath as the empty plains slip past. It is Eid al-Fitr; Ramadan is over, and a hungry land has sat down to eat. Along the road women split pomegranates, and the red juice stains their fingers. Men roast lamb shanks over open fires, and children turn from the blaze to watch us pass with eyes like globes. This old road is cloaked in the amnesia of holidays. We are drawing close to the Khyber Pass. The mountain route will drop us down into Pakistan.

Then everything slips: A tire snags on a roadside rock, and the car spins out. We are swinging across the pavement in sickening loops. I see the grill of a cargo truck rear up before us, and I am certain I am about to die, so I close my eyes. What a pity to perish like this, on the margins of a war. I remember that drunks survive accidents because they don’t stiffen up, and I tell myself to go limp. The car, this seat, is a fixed point in a mad, slipping-away landscape. I am the axis now; the country, the mountains, the war and the wide yards of dirt stretching back to Jalalabad revolve around me.

That’s illusion, of course. I’m the one careening. I’m the one who’s out of control. These old hills, what do they care? This smuggler’s path, the road to Pakistan and India and China-these things stand where they’ve always been. I remember what Naseer said. “I am not afraid of killing. This is a country of killing. Only I am afraid for my family.” There was knowledge in his eyes.

Then there is a great, grating crash and everything, everybody slams. The car stops, shuddering and smoking, wrinkled as a steel leaf. I sit and breathe. Alive should be impossible. We scramble from the car and take the air, cold and sweet with gasoline. I am running, pounding over the empty land. The adolescent guard hired to protect the car is laughing and laughing. His Kalashnikov clatters on the rocks. I stop. I am shaking. The men look politely away. It is dark by the time we reach Islamabad, and the night is gaudy with strings of light. At the Marriott-impossibly bright, lush, rich-I marvel at whispers of perfume in a twinkling lobby, a basket of fruit on my bedside table, sweet soaps in the bathroom. My eyes are numb, as if they haven’t seen colors in years. I let the water pound in the tub, wrap a hotel robe around my dusty body and stare into the mirror.

I don’t know why I am looking for Naseer’s address. Maybe I half-remembered it wasn’t there when I dug out some rupees for the truck driver who had let us hitch a ride to the border. Or maybe I know, somewhere in the underground of my thoughts, that it’s gone. I snatch up my jeans-and the back pockets are empty. I rifle through worn notebooks, but it’s not there, either. Not folded with the veils. Not tucked into my journal. My fingers scramble through vacant pockets. Soon there is no place left to look, and I know I’ve lost it. I turn my eyes to the darkened hills outside, and think how easy-and impossible-it is to leave people behind.

I am home now, in the States. And I think and think but can’t recall whether I gave Naseer my address. It seems as if I should have, but I can’t find a memory of doing so. Still, I open the mailbox thinking that maybe-maybe-there will be an envelope addressed in his shaky hand. Maybe Afghanistan will establish a postal system, or a neighbor will make a trip to Pakistan and mail a letter for him. Maybe he will tell me he’s an engineer again, and his daughter is walking, and his sisters are learning English in school. Maybe he’ll say he has relinquished hope of marrying the Doctor, and turned his attention to his wife. Maybe he will say his brother’s medical school has opened back up, or that his mother has died peacefully in her sleep. I haven’t heard a word.

*

Megan K. Stack is a Times national correspondent who covered the war in Afghanistan.