The authorities tolerated Leo’s unorthodox behaviour and eccentricities with a leniency unheard of in the Soviet Union. Rules and regulations that applied back home were quietly ignored here. The concept of discipline was re-defined. Kabul was a frontier town, a revolution perched on a cliff face that every day was in danger of crumbling into anarchy. Many advisers begged to return home, resigning their posts, citing health problems, even cultivating dysentery. They argued that they could never be naturalized in the way that Leo had been. Yet though he was the longest serving Soviet adviser in Kabul, Leo did not consider himself any more Afghani than the day he’d arrived. The claim that he’d gone native was made by scared Soviet soldiers who’d just stepped off the transport plane, many of whom had never been abroad before. None of the Afghans Leo came into contact with thought of him as one of them. He was acquainted with many: he as a friend to none. He was foreign and being foreign was not scored on a graded scale. He was recognized as different from other Soviets. Seemingly without beliefs of any kind, whether nationalistic or spiritual, he did not sing praises for his homeland. While he seemed restless and unsettled, he did not appear to miss the place where he was born. He spoke of no wife. He did not talk about his daughters, nor did he show anyone their photographs. He said nothing about himself. He was not of this land, nor did he belong to the land he’d left behind. In many ways it was easier to understand the more conventional Soviet forces, in uniforms, with ideology and purpose, objectives, strategies and timelines. They represented something, even if it was something to be despised and a force to be defeated. Leo represented nothing. Nihilism was a notion even more alien than Communism itself.

***

Leo squeezed his brakes. Up ahead a truck had caught a tyre in a pothole and spilled thousands of plastic bottles of treated drinking water. There was shouting between those involved. The traffic had backed up. Impatient drivers honked their horns. Leo glanced at the rooftops, at the casual spectators – he’d seen enough road accidents in Kabul to tell when something was staged and the set-up for an ambush. There were no Soviet vehicles in the traffic, and unable to see any reason for the obstacle than the perilous state of the roads, he weaved his way through the scattered bottles, ignored by the angry participants, before continuing past the truck. Glancing over his shoulder he saw children filling their ragged shirts with bottles before scuttling away with their loot. He’d passed through the accident as if he didn’t exist.

Picking up speed, he recited a poem by Sabbah, written many centuries ago:

Alone in a desert

I have lost my way:

The path is long and I am

Without help or companion