Ben Ehrenreich in Kabul

The hotel is dusty, dank, and generally shitty, but it’s Kabul, and half the city is in ruins, so it would be worse than stupid to complain. Plus, it’s one of the few places around where you can get a drink — the hotel bar has become something of a hub in the ex-pat social world, especially on Thursdays, when they serve kebabs out on the rooftop patio. A handful of restaurants and guest houses sell booze, but this is the city’s only proper bar, and certainly its only “Irish pub,” which as far as I can tell just means that they sell Guinness (at five bucks a pint, roughly half the average local weekly salary). The pub used to be somewhere else, but there were bomb threats, so they closed it down and reopened here.
_____The walls of my room are made of glass, painted white on the inside to provide some minimum of privacy. I’m on the third floor, facing the street, and I spend my first night in Afghanistan sweating and imagining what would happen if a car bomb blew on the street below. I watch the windows and walls implode and shatter into thousands of dagger-sharp shards. I watch them fall, and slice through me. Repeat
_____The following night is a Thursday. I take a cold shower in the bathroom down the hall to wash the dust from my ears and eyes. I dress and hustle out of the room to the pub. I order a beer and a kebab, and introduce myself to the two men on stools beside me. They’re also staying on the third floor, and I’ve seen them coming and going. They’re Americans, both in tight black tee-shirts, with the kind of gym-thickened upper bodies, firm handshakes and blandly optimistic middle-American accents I associate with L.A. cops. They introduce themselves as Tony and Curtis. I try not to blink. (Later that night I lie awake trying to remember if they smiled even slightly when they gave their names, if their voices gave anything away. But they did not.) Curtis is tall, with a military buzzcut, and looks to be in his late thirties. Tony is shorter and bulkier, five or ten years older, his face ruddy, his hair going gray.
_____I ask them what brings them to Afghanistan. They exchange a glance. “We work for the Army,” Tony says, and offers no details. The U.S. military base is 50 kilometers away, and they’re staying in a hotel. They’re clearly not enlisted men, but I don’t pry. We exchange some banter about jetlag and the local eating options. Tony declines a second beer. “I have to fly tonight,” he says. We talk for a few minutes more — California, we all agree, is a beautiful place, but so is New Mexico, and Colorado too — before Tony excuses himself. “I’ve got to make that call,” he says to Curtis, and leaves.
_____I sit with Curtis a little longer, ask him how long he expects to stay in
Afghanistan. “Probably for years,” he says. Then the bar owner, who is in fact Irish, arrives to chat with Curtis and I go out to the roof with a couple European journalists. It’s breezy outside, and pleasant enough. The lighting is low, and you can forget for a while just what’s around you. We have another beer and talk about politics, work and travel. We speculate on the next likely car bomb target. Here, we all agree, it would have to be right here.
_____In the morning, I run into Tony in the breakfast room and take a seat across from him. We complain about the undercooked eggs, the hotel’s lousy mattresses. He asks a lot of questions: what exactly I’m working on, what else I’ve written, and for whom, what I’ve seen and plan to see, what I think of it all so far. He tells me he’s confident that the reconstruction effort will go well, because “I’ve seen it firsthand—DoD is pouring tons of resources into this place.”
_____I can’t help but notice that there are fresh cuts on the knuckles of his right hand. He sees me looking, and fingers them self-consciously.

Ben Ehrenreich is a contributing writer to the L.A. Weekly. He's working on a novel.

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