I arrive at the second blast site, where there are still dead in the street, and two shrapnel-riddled cars. Both of them have those back window stickers so popular here. One reads: “Don’t Cry Girls, I Will Be Back,” and the other, “Don’t Drink, It Is Sin,” complete with an image of a champagne bottle spilling alcohol onto, oddly, Che Guevara’s face. I take photos of the cars, of a can of incense on a chain, still smoking. A woman holding a baby sees me and begins yelling, so I put my phone on record as she shouts. I can’t always understand what interviewees are saying, especially when they’re upset, but I can always play it for Aasif later.
“I was feeding my baby,” she eventually tells me, after she’s calmed down a bit. Her baby is covered in bandages. “I saw the roof fall in on me and fell unconscious. Then I heard my husband shouting over and over. He came to me. I was bleeding from my face, my hands, and my shoulders. My brother-in-law lost both of his eyes. My son . . .”
She holds up the baby so I could see the injuries, though he is so swaddled in bandages it’s hard to tell. The mother herself looks young, with a pretty face still covered in grime and dried blood.
“My husband, he was saying . . . he was shouting, ‘Where are the others? My father, my father? Where are the others?’ He was bleeding from the top of his head. He was wild, he did not know where he was. We have lost everything.”
Later in the day we’ll get the official count for the police bombing—fifty-seven casualties, twenty-eight killed, twenty-nine injured. Add that to this and we haven’t had so much death in one day since the Ashura bombing four years ago.
So this is different, this is dangerous, this is news. I should be excited. But midway through the interviews I realize I’m running out of steam. Or maybe I’m running out of fucks. Afghanistan has a way of leaching those out of you, which is why every wannabe war correspondent adopts an attitude of casual cynicism well before they’ve earned it. It’s our version of the military veteran’s thousand-yard stare. And I’m looking around nervously, worried about an attack on first responders, worried that I’m putting myself at risk, which is not where my head should be. I push those feelings away, and decide, fuck it, I’ll fight the Kabul traffic and head to the first blast site, too. Double the risk, you coward.
When I get there I see this was a much larger blast. The bomb has blown in storefronts, leaving the concrete posts and steel beams and metal railings behind, baring the architectural bones of the market. Walking through a city after a bombing is like coming upon the decayed body of an animal in the woods—enough has been destroyed that you can see the rib cage, a bit of skull and jawbone poking through, the long delicate metatarsals of the feet, enough hints to imagine for yourself the whole skeleton that once structured life.
I walk through the crater, see the edges come up to my waist. Beyond the crater, there’s a man sweeping glass and rubble out of a ruined store. I see a young man searching for valuables in the rubble. And then, shadowed in a doorway, a toddler beams at the world, a chunk of rubble in her fat hand, raised high. She brings it down on a battered piece of metal, making a loud clanging noise.
“Ba!” she says, delighted. “Ba ba BAH!”
And she strikes the metal again. And again. And starts laughing. I take out my camera and photograph her joy.
As the sun’s going down I head back to the office. Everybody is there—Denise typing away, Omar sifting through photos, Aasif and Bob reading transcripts of interviews with Taliban leaders. I file around 9:40, scroll through my photos from the day. Log in to Facebook, where journalists who’ve left the country are posting news of the blast with posts like, “I’ve been there so many times, terrible to see . . .” “More violence in my beautiful Kabul . . .” “Two years ago I did an interview just around the corner from where this bomb . . .” I pull up the photo of the little girl, the happy toddler with the piece of metal in her hand. The girl’s face is in focus, well lit, and the background is a nicely unfocused blur, though you can see the devastation clearly enough. I save it to a folder labeled “Memories.”
Not much later, around ten, we hear a third explosion.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” says Bob.
“That was big,” Omar says. “Far away, but big.”
There’s a moment of silence. We’re tired. We’re all tired.
“Didn’t NDS pick up a couple of Daesh recruiters yesterday?” Denise says quietly.
“The Islamic State?” says Bob. “Nah . . . I don’t think so. You don’t go
