• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I didn’t call at first, but I couldn’t help running into him everywhere. Sean was a few years older than me, his hair was prematurely gray, his chin was slightly receding, and his nose balanced out his chin. Yet there was something about him. Sean was so funny, he was always the center of attention, the ironic self-deprecating smart aleck with glasses who sat in the corner surrounded by smart attractive women. Sean was Kabul’s version of a B-movie star. He was also a war junkie, having done time in Iraq, and that addiction went a long way toward explaining why he was separated from his wife. Sean and I became quick friends. He had taken me on my first social outing to a brothel in Kabul, and he had told me when his friends had decided to drop me off early because I was cramping their style. He told me when he wanted to copy my story about the first traffic light in Kabul, as part of his documentary. In fact, Sean told me pretty much everything, as he told everyone pretty much everything, even when he told something that was supposed to be secret. Everyone knew that Sean was going through a divorce. Everyone knew that Sean really wanted to stay with his wife. And everyone knew that the divorce was pretty much Sean’s fault—he was always on the road, bouncing between war zones, an ageless man-child. But of all the people I had met in Kabul so far, few were as good company as Sean.

Now the construction next door stalked our days and nights. The Gandamack was a two-story guesthouse. The new project, allegedly another guesthouse, soon grew taller than the Gandamack, and the construction workers only seemed to stop working to leer at the female guests in the garden. Any silence was a kind of torture, filled with waiting for the pounding to start again. The hallways echoed with combinations of four-letter words I had never before heard. We tried various tactics to stop the banging at a reasonable hour. Someone found out who owned the land—a respected spiritual leader, a man I had interviewed. I called him one night in a panic.

“Please, please, please, can you get them to stop working by eight?” I asked the holy man. “None of us can sleep. None of us can work. I think I’m losing my mind.”

I even played the female card. “The construction workers are harassing the women living here. They’re looking at us. It’s against Islam.”

The spiritual leader was kind, conciliatory.

“Don’t worry, Kim, I will stop it. I understand. Don’t worry. It’s no problem.”

I got off the phone. “He says he’ll stop it,” I told the others.

But within an hour, the banging again sounded like war. I was reminded of what I already knew—any time I was told “no problem” in Afghanistan, the problem bit my head off. I again tried calling the spiritual leader, but the phone rang and rang. He never answered.

The next night, at about eleven, Sean pounded on the upstairs door of one of the security contractors, already in bed, not sleeping.

“Can I borrow your gun?” Sean asked the security guy. It’s possible Sean was drinking.

The security guy gave him a toy BB assault rifle and a real gun laser. Sean took the gun and aimed it toward the construction workers. He trained the laser sight on a man’s chest. It took the other workers seconds to see the red laser point, then a few more seconds to look over at the Gandamack and the window where a crazed Brit clearly was pointing a remarkably real-looking gun at them. That was what finally stopped the pounding—not reasonable talk, not negotiations, not promises, but the threat of violence. Another Afghan lesson learned.

Finally the election was held. The results were predictable—the warlords, drug lords, and fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami candidates won their seats, along with a smattering of do-gooders, former civil servants, and women, who under the constitution were given one-quarter of the seats. Despite allegations of fraud and illegal militias, the international election-complaints commission could do little.