What? I want to ask him, scouring my brain for the Persian words, then ask him the same thing in the Dari dialect I’ve picked up from the soldiers. “What do you want?”

He points to his water bottle. Yes, I’m thirsty too. I’m constantly thirsty because my thirst is only ever stilled momentarily. But the boy keeps staring at me, his eyes restless, wavering, hypnotic. Like the candles on the floor beside the bed in Wau, the night I slept with Marie-France.

I glance over my shoulder. Is someone following me?

I never slept with Marie-France. In the plane, just before I fell asleep, I did imagine doing it, but I didn’t sleep with her.

My head is spinning from the heat, alcohol, and thirst.

The boy tugs at my sleeve. He’s about twelve years old and looks like a chai boy in one of Kabul’s ruling households. Servants and errand runners—they keep boys for every single task. Were this boy mine, I’d shoot his master, I think as violent, irrational anger comes boiling up inside me.

The boy doesn’t have his hair cropped short like pupils at a Koranic school. His reddish-brown locks are longer and peek out from under an embroidered purple cap. His eyes are two shiny green marbles in his emaciated yet beautiful face. The boy grabs my hand.

“Ibrahim,” he says. “I am Ibrahim. They told me to bring you.”

I let him pull me along. It is easier to be pulled along, and I feel lighter with every step. I shouldn’t let the boy lead me anywhere. I should take him by the hand, but something tells me that it won’t work any other way. Not now. Because I didn’t kiss her. That was the start of this other life. If I’d kissed her I would now be in Paris.

I spit out this absurd thought. I must have caught something in Africa. Dengue fever? I’m hallucinating. I must talk the army doctor into giving me some medicine later.

We wend our way past the bazaar stalls, the shops, the wheel-barrows, and the birdcages, through the swirling fug of colors and fragrances. It’s as if we’re sliding down a never-ending pipe. I catch a passing glimpse of a pink rucksack.

A deep female voice shouts inside my head, “Don’t go!”

But I can’t do otherwise. I’m losing touch with myself and I can’t do otherwise.

Soon after that absurd thought, the air smells of singed cables and hair, and someone screams, “Adrenaline!” My heart contracts into a stone, and the pain takes my breath away. Then there’s a massive explosion, the detonation of a huge bomb only a few yards away. The pink patch fragments. I’m hurled backward and smash into a stone wall, my mind a mass of pain and blackness. Ibrahim’s hand is torn from mine.