In the cradle of my father’s lap, I learned the history of Afghanistan. Boba told these stories in the way the voice on the radio would tell stories, giving each historical figure a distinct voice, a posture, and a weakness. One night he would tell me of the day Alexander of Greece fell madly in love with an Afghan woman, Rukhshana. The next night he would tell me about Genghis Khan from China, who organized his Mongol army into units of ten. Ten multiplied into a thousand, which was how, some theorized, his descendants, the ethnic Hazara, got their name.

Love and war are two ends of a single rope, Boba told me once. Poetry comes from the tangling of the two. Deep into the night, high in the hills, warriors would gather around fires, strumming lutes and singing songs about love as old as the mountains, with their swords tucked under one leg.

Even in peacetime?

Of course! For a warrior, peacetime is only the prelude to war.

The Marines ushered us down a maze of hallways. Everywhere I looked, people were closing windows, stuffing papers into folders, and moving toward the innermost parts of this massive building.

“Will someone please tell us what is happening!” Tilly shouted.

“We must hide,” I said. I squeezed Tilly’s hand, my eyes skittering from the soldiers running beside us to the walls and windows around us, looking to see which would fail us first.

We moved as a cluster, feet shuffling in disunity. We stood in a room with a long table at its center when we heard a series of booms. Tilly held me so close that I felt the rise and fall of her chest. Her breaths were short and shallow, quickening every time we heard artillery fire break through the near-silence. People around us offered reassurances.

“Everything will be fine. We’re behind brick walls and a metal gate. The police will get them under control.”

“He’s right. Their backup is probably just arriving now.”

My parents had been just as confident.

I could hear shouts coming from outside, a cacophony of anger. How far into the streets did this go? I thought of Antonia, sitting at a desk in the embassy back in Kabul. I wondered if she and her colleagues were under attack also.

“What’s happening?” Tilly asked the woman standing next to us. She was fiddling with a walkie-talkie, trying to secure a connection to someone outside.

“Protests. Just some students probably. Some people don’t want us here,” she said. But the shouts seemed to be getting louder, and the smell of smoke wafted into the room.