The first bomb had been a couple of weeks after she had arrived in Kabul, and so close to the square that the sound of the explosion saw her hitting the floor in terror. Trembling like a terrified animal, she had waited until the gunfire ceased to be replaced by the sound of ambulances. Crawling over to the window, she had pulled herself up and looked out. A thick black plume of smoke was rising in the air about four blocks away. In the square below a few people had been standing in groups talking, but most were going about their business as if nothing had happened.
Over time, Sofia had come to react to explosions just like every other resident of Kabul. The initial, unconscious response was an overwhelming sense of relief that the bomb hadn’t gone off under her, after which she tried to work out where it was and whether any friends might be in the vicinity. She would then try to call them, which was always problematic considering everyone else was doing the same thing and the signals were often jammed. Eventually, she would go back to whatever she had been doing beforehand, hoping no bad news would find its way to her door.
It was unsettling just how quickly she had adjusted to living with the constant threat of violence until the next explosion arrived, and her heart somersaulted in her chest and the adrenaline smashed through her veins and she was aware once again of the underlying tension that permanently fizzed through her body.
Like all the residents of Shaahir Square, Sofia had come to see the safety of the square and the danger of Kabul as two completely different, albeit interconnected, worlds. It was, she knew, a particularly dangerous illusion.
2
IN THE COURTYARD below Sofia’s window and out in the square beyond the gate, the day was beginning to unfold. Ahmad, the owner of the tiny hole-in-the-wall shop that sold all manner of household goods, was entering the darkness of the square. Ahmad didn’t go to mosque in the morning. From the gossip that passed Sofia’s way she suspected it was because the blind cleric, Imam Mustafa, was especially fond of the time after morning prayers to let his thoughts wander off to distant and random horizons, keeping the worshippers – according to some – on the cold mats far longer than was strictly necessary. Ahmad, with his serious, frowning eyebrows and his thick black moustache, was a man in a hurry. And yet, thought Sofia, as she watched him heave up the heavy metal shutter on the front of his shop, time was one of the few things her friend had an abundance of.
In the shadow of the shop awning Ahmad lit a cigarette, and as he drew the nicotine deep into his lungs the glow illuminated the craggy corners of his young-old face until he coughed, pulling raw pieces of tobacco out of his mouth with tar-stained fingers. Sofia thought him too young to have such fingers, but Ahmad had been a village boy addicted to nicotine from the age of eight. As he smoked he straightened out his moustache with his thumb and forefinger, contemplating what the day might bring: enough money to put food on his family’s table and perhaps a little left over? Insha’Allah.
As the sun began to lighten the sky and the darkness of the square turned a cold unwelcoming grey, she could see Ahmad more clearly in his white perahan tunban and raggedy old suit coat. Stamping the cigarette out on cobblestones that were older than the square, she watched him stretch the last of the sleep out of his whippet-thin body before rolling out his prayer mat and hurrying through his solitary salutation. Finishing, he rolled up his mat and lit his second cigarette of the day. It was always thus: shutters, cigarette, stretch, prayer, cigarette and wait. Always wait. Wait for the customers who seldom came. Wait for Allah to look favourably upon his miserable soul. Wait for the sake of waiting; wait for the timeless monotony of time slowly passing, just as generations of Ahmad’s forebears had done before him.
Afghans were good at waiting, Sofia thought. The English were good at queueing; the Brazilians good at partying; the French good at eating; the Afghans good at waiting. They were also good at accepting, which was probably what made them good at waiting. Insha’Allah, thought Sofia. If God wills, it will happen. She wondered what Australians were good at and decided it was fun. Australians were good at having fun.
The doors of the mosque swung open and men began pouring out. Collecting their shoes, they called out greetings before disappearing back around the corners of the square to their homes or places of work to make ready for the day ahead.
Iqbal, the old cobbler, with his dishevelled clothes and misshapen leg, headed back to the warmth of his bed for just one more hour of sleep, while Omar, the local apothecary, in his immaculate perahan tunban and jacket to guard against the morning cold, was crossing the square to his shop until he veered off course to disappear behind the high gate that separated the courtyard from the square. When he reappeared a few seconds later he was stuffing something into the pocket of his vest. As Sofia was registering this oddity she was distracted by her landlady, Behnaz, who appeared in the courtyard below her window. After hanging the canary cage she was carrying on one of the low branches of the pomegranate tree, she removed the cover, blew the husks off the seed bowl, checked the water and then headed out the gate with her broom to clean the square of the previous day’s dirt and disorder.
On the opposite side of the square, Hadi, who owned the shop next to Ahmad that sold various dried goods in hessian sacks and canned goods that lacked use-by dates, raised a hand to Ahmad.
‘As-salaam alaikum,’ he said, the greeting carrying all the way up to Sofia’s window in the stillness of the dawn.
‘Wa alaikum as-salaam,’ Ahmad replied.
As Hadi began the ritual of opening his shop, Ahmad was finishing, carrying his green stool outside to position it in exactly the right place to afford him the best view of the comings and goings of the square. Hadi, when he finished, would also set a stool out front, close enough to Ahmad so the two friends might pass the time of day but far enough away to define which business belonged to which man. On particularly slow summer days the two friends might pull their stools together, lay out an exquisite bone and inlaid mother of pearl backgammon board they had borrowed from Babur many years before and had forgotten to return, and begin a new game.
Babur was folding back the shutters of his chaikhana, the tea house that had been in his family for more than three hundred years, before firing up the coals of the grill that in summer radiated a scorching heat onto the square and in the depths of winter became a gathering point for the men. With the tea house also producing meals these days more elaborate than the usual street food, the tantalising aromas of onion, garlic and fragrant, sizzling goat would soon be filling the square, causing those who had just finished breakfast to begin dreaming of lunch.
‘Babur makes the best palau in all of Afghanistan,’ Jabril would often say to Sofia, swearing her to secrecy because his wife, Zahra, who was Sofia’s best friend, had put him on what he liked to call ‘Allah’s Eternal Diet’.
Considering everyone in the square – and probably half of Kabul – knew that on most weekdays between the hours of one and two, or thereabouts, Dr Jabril and Imam Mustafa could be found outside Babur’s chaikhana tucking into large plates of rice topped with skewers of succulent chargrilled goat and braised eggplant drenched in fresh yoghurt that Babur made especially for them, Sofia suspected this couldn’t have been much of a secret from his frighteningly perceptive wife.