Afghanistan: A Very Short Walk in Bamyan (cont.)

It was –20 degrees Celsius when we arrived in Bamyan, and I saw a barefoot child on the road. Not barefoot and miserable, just barefoot. He was playing football in the snow with a group of kids. He hopped from foot to foot. As our car passed, he waved to my foreign face in the passenger seat and smiled.

These kids are so brave and so tough, it makes me ashamed. I'm nothing in the face of this five-year old boy playing football barefoot in the snow. You could break me over your knee, I'm so brittle.

Football is the only hobby the boys we interview ever mention. When you ask the girls about their hobbies, they just look at you and smile softly, a gentle readjustment of the lips. Their eyes look inward, politely avoiding the question. This question from another world.

The problem is you get impatient, always being indoors, always being protected. The main feature of a dangerous country is boredom: you are constantly guarded, constantly behind walls. You start to lose your sense of fear: it seems more important to be outside than it is to be safe. Just to be free for a few minutes, to be normal. So you wake up early, and outside the sun is an absolute light, like the light of a new world, and it reflects off the crystalline surface of the snow and again into your eyes, maybe into your mind; it's so bright. You have to walk, you have to explore. Over there the cliffs are beckoning, pockmarked with the caves of history—monks lived there, before the name Afghanistan and before Islam, in saffron robes, moving buckets along the paths. Perhaps the troops of Jenghis Khan sheltered there for a night. Then it was refugees just a few years ago huddled together for warmth. Now the caves stand empty. The city of ruins at the base of the cliffs is the Shahr-i-Gholghola. This can be translated two ways: either as "City of Silence" or "City of Screams."

Both translations, at this moment, seem appropriate.

The fear hits me in the shade under the trees. With the snow upon it, even the ground is hidden, and in the ground these little discs that would limb or kill you as impersonally as a hornet might sting the foot that crushed its nest. No, more so—these things without even an insect mind, like anger sown into the soil, slumbering under the snow.

Of course I know I'm being paranoid. These fields were cleared. This area is safe.

I will tell no-one of this, this fear that came over me under the skeleton trees.

I pick my way back to the hotel. Udood and Shoaib, my coworkers, are drinking tea by the reddening iron trunk of a morning stove. My legs feel so good; my feet—I love my feet, folding them under me Indian-style, my feet that have been with me my whole life. I love and want to keep them. I can feel every joyful bone and muscle and tendon, all of it attached to me and mine.

On our last day in Bamyan we drive to the cliffs where once the Buddhas loomed over the town and now their absence looms over the town. Their ghosts are there; you can see their silhouettes, and you can feel the serenity of them as they were blasted apart into meaningless shards. So much anger, and now so much quiet, here in Bamyan. Centuries of anger, beginning even before Jenghis Khan sacked Bamyan in 1221. The Taliban weren't the first to vent religious fury on the statues here: that honor goes to the army of Aurangzeb in the 18th century. Now, it seems that with the passing of the Buddhas, with the destruction of the town, there should be little left to be angry at. But perhaps anger needs no specific target; it simply exists in the soil, and waits.
 
As we pass the mounds of rubble that used to be the statues, the man from UNESCO points at the white-painted rocks.

"The Taliban even mined the rubble after destroying the statues. Halo found 32 mines here. But for years the refugees had walked here carrying food and water. You can see their paths. Nobody stepped on the mines. It was god's will."

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