Letter No. 5: Helicopter Spotting

On Easter and Passover and Seeing

Thanks to moon cycles and ancient math, Easter and Passover fall on the same weekend this year, as does Ramadan, which spans the entire month of April.  This rare confluence of Abrahamic holy days reminded me of the time I wandered the streets of Jerusalem during Holy Week, and as it turns out, I wrote about it: “As we circled back around to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and climbed the stairs to Golgotha, we heard the muezzin’s call to prayer in the distance.  This is what I love about the Old City, the diversity of belief in such close proximity.  We watched as a Christian pilgrim, tears streaming down her face, knelt beneath the altar to touch the place where Christ was crucified.  Somewhere not far from this holy site, Muslims would be reciting the takbir, arms placed over their chest, head down, eyes closed . . . Throughout this city, walls rest on older walls—Romanesque, Byzantine, and Gothic architectural elements exist side by side, and the faiths and customs of civilizations are celebrated together, often within the same structures.  In these places, the past emerges as part of the present, and the stories I once knew by heart seem so immediate.”

I have a lot of half-finished essays about springtime and Easter, perhaps because I grew up Roman Catholic, and even as a millennial “none,” this time of year still feels special.  Religion is a source of fascination rather than belief for me, but I know that Easter is the most sacred feast in the Christian tradition, the one that celebrates the so-called Paschal mystery, which is “the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ.”  As stories go, it’s strange but compelling. 

During law school I spent many a Passover at my friends’ Seder table in Crown Heights.  Back in 2013 I wrote, “I like the ritual and the prayers, and I don’t mind that dinner starts at eight in the evening, ends at two in the morning, and that most of the time we are not actually eating.  We all read from the Haggadah and drink wine and eat bitter herbs.  Her children ask questions about Pharaoh and sing songs about the seven plagues.  We break the matzah, hide the afikomen, and dip parsley into salt water.”  My friend would always thank us for joining and remind us that Passover is not just about Jews and freedom from slavery in Egypt.  It’s also a reminder, she would say, to free ourselves from whatever holds us in bondage.  I really liked that the end of winter and the beginning of spring was tied to a long dinner in Brooklyn and a reckoning about what it means to be free.

I’ve spent Easter weekend everywhere from Parnell (where my parents’ church is) to tiny Orthodox chapels in London, and I managed to keep my Easter traditions in Afghanistan, too, by attending mass at the Italian Embassy in Kabul.  I wrote the essay that follows in April 2018, just before I returned to New York.  It’s a little about Easter and a little about Afghanistan, but overall it’s about “seeing,” which, I suppose, touches on all three traditions.  Happy Easter, Chag Sameach, and Ramadan Mubarak.

Helicopter Spotting

There’s a thin layer of dust on the granite floors in the morning – it’s illuminated in the sunlight that streams through the southeast facing window of the living room, and I can see it as I look at the indistinct trail of footprints I leave behind me as I walk, barefoot, to put the espresso on the stove. Gard o khak is dust in Dari. The particles dance in the sunlight and I remember my phonetic tool – guards of the living room – khak, that’s dirt, but it’s floating and shimmering.

We’re ten stories above the street, eye level with a fortress on a hill and an impressive stretch of the Hindu Kush mountain range. I’ve spent hours looking out that window, the one we stripped of blast film for an unobstructed view. Over time, it seems, beauty is more important than safety.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, there’s a man on a nearby rooftop, looking to the sky. He’s a conductor of sorts, outfitted in dark folds of wool patu instead of a crisp tuxedo, and waving a worn and knobby stick instead of a sleek baton. His movements are fluid and practiced, as if he’s directing an invisible ensemble to a score he’s memorized and rehearsed many times. But lift your gaze skyward and his orchestra appears, a flock of birds, diving between buildings and circling rooftops to the rhythm of his movements. I imagine this kaftar bazi or play of pigeons set to music, to Wagner’s Walkürenritt, to Beethoven’s Fifth, sometimes to my favorite Dvořák. The din of helicopters overhead only adds to the composition. Everything is lyrical from that window; Kabul is poetry from within the comfort of our own ballistic steel-reinforced fortress.

The dust covers everything by the end of the day. There’s a film on the glass top of the coffee table and on book covers that feels grainy to the touch. As Annie Dillard reminds us, “On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place but to forestall burial.” The dust seems to accumulate faster in a place like Afghanistan, so we keep wiping and tidying and moving ourselves and our things as if we were in a normal place at a normal time.

Then a bomb blast stops everything for a moment. There’s an eerie silence, the ground shakes, and we wait for seconds that feel like minutes for the sound of the explosion to reach us. In the immediate vicinity, the landscape is rendered otherworldly. Grey ash covers the twisted remains of buildings and bodies and unidentifiable debris. From afar we see a cloud of smoke rising, and though we remain physically unharmed, our expressions betray an unspoken truth: hate feels intolerable when reverberating through one’s body.

And then we willingly heap dirt on the dead, by the shovels full. One hundred three buried after the ambulance bomb in January. More than forty buried after the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel a week before. Countless more buried after other attacks, in other provinces, at other times. A young Afghan woman recently lamented, “I wish I knew when it would be my turn, so I could kiss my parents one last time.”  I wanted to tell her to keep moving, to stay calm, to brush off her shoes and her jacket. In all places and at all times, the ground is rising around us.

It’s nearly spring again, and I’m still in Afghanistan, almost inexplicably. American airstrikes in the provinces are shifting Taliban sights on the cities, they say, and foreigners are advised to leave. Progress in law and institution building ebbs and flows, as do the foreign monies for projects, as do the people who run them in short, detached tours. Life is cyclical for almost everyone, turning in tedium or tragedy depending on whether one’s aim is a project benchmark or simply reaching home across town, unscathed. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” writes Joan Didion, “we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.” We do this even in Kabul, even in the midst of war.

***

The ritual rather than the mystery of faith draws me in each year to the moveable feast of Easter, and last April, I made my way through the Green Zone to the Italian Embassy for mass. My friend and I knelt when we entered the pew, as the faithful do, and between the outlines of two Italian soldiers, handguns tucked neatly into their belts at the hollows of their backs, I stared at a conceptual map of Afghanistan on the wall where the High Altar might have been. Instead of gold-gilded statues of saints, there were rough sketches of Ghazni, Zabul, and Kandahar provinces, and Herat, Farah, and Nimruz if I cocked my head to the left. The chapel was filled with an assortment of embassy staff with badges and secretarial miens, soldiers of the NATO alliance in fatigues and bulky, sand-colored boots, and NGO researchers I could categorize by subject matter.

As we waited for the opening hymn I flipped to Good Friday in the Missal and began reading through the passion of Christ from the praetorium where Pontius Pilate washed his hands, and on to Golgotha, the place of the skull. I had just reached the ninth hour exclamation from the cross, Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani, when my friend nudged me and nodded toward the aisle, smiling. I half expected a prostrating priest, purple chasuble fanned out around him. Instead I saw a group of khaki-clad officers making their way to the second pew.

I shrugged at my friend as the familiar shuffle to the left ensued. “Too many in that row?” I asked.

“No, look!” he whispered, this time pointing to the third officer as he bent down to genuflect awkwardly and sign himself with the cross.

A thin tortoise shell barber’s comb was sticking out of his back right pocket, like the kind my grandfather uses to keep his wavy pompadour in shape.

He shook his head at my obliviousness, still laughing. “Jess, he’s bald.”

I spent the rest of Easter Sunday thinking about the bald man and his comb, whether he kept it with him out of nostalgia or habit, or for some other eccentric reason. More troubling, though, was that I’d missed the man’s hairless pate completely in the first place, and with it the irony. While I was thinking about suffering, death, and resurrection, and how I felt about Christian worship on a foreign military base in an Islamic Republic, my friend was attuned to the mysteries of the here and now.

So much of my life has been lived in narratives. In novels rich with masquerading gentleman magicians and vengeful merchant sailors, in essays that explicate the tangle of the soul, and in laws that make manifest deeply held political beliefs and ideals.

“The facts are the case,” my torts professor used to say, but the principles always seemed more important.

“What did the man do with the nunchucks, Ms. Wright?”

“I’d rather think about constitutional theories,” I’d think as I scanned my textbook for the answer. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t achieve stellar marks in the law of civil rights and wrongs.

And perhaps the narrow focus on greater principles or unifying theories has been my problem in making sense of Afghanistan, too. There are targets and indexes, RFPs and work plans, but little coherence of vision and very few tangible and lasting results. Nothing seems to compute when probed an inch deeper than the surface.

There are spates of senseless violence, too, that happen now with increasing frequency, and daily reminders of the war’s toll on innocent civilians. At the end of 2016, there were over a million internally displaced people in the country, the majority of whom had fled direct violence or persecution. All of these facts and images sit uncomfortably in our minds with the cohesive meaning we strive to see.

Most of the stories we tell in Kabul are the ones we have to tell – there are more women in the workforce; Afghanistan is on track to rise in the World Bank Doing Business rankings; Parliament has passed a new law, never mind its content. Or the ones we feel compelled to tell. We marvel at the resilience of the Afghan people and spit in the face of terrorism. We speak of political progress and the promise of a united citizenry. We foretell peace and prosperity based on the mere hope of negotiating through stalemate and unearthing the resources hidden beneath layers of conflict.

We tell these stories to satisfy the boards that dole out the money or the commissions that approve the projects or the foreign audiences that need reassurance. But much of the time progress is merely ad hoc continuance, and resilience is something more akin to existence on the brink of despair. People march in the streets shouting epithets against their government and call it political change, but this defiance is merely frustration writ large.

***

Sometimes we watch helicopters over the fortress, a kind of war zone pastime and ritual. There are the twin-engine MH-47 Chinooks used for troop and cargo transport across the country, the Russian-made Mi-17s long utilized by the Afghan Air Force, the AH-64 Apaches with sighting systems like the ones we watched on television during Operation Desert Storm, and the UH-60A’s made famous by the Battle of Mogadishu and the Special Operations Mission that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

It’s the Taliban’s growing footprint that has steadily driven NATO and U.S. forces to the sky, and the frequent hum of air traffic is as commonplace as street noise.

“The Black Hawks are my favorite,” I’d always say, even as an Apache or Mi-17 would pass overhead, shaking the building. Friends would laugh at my generalizations, but I was impervious to their criticism. In my mind, in my Afghanistan story, all helicopters were stealthy, black, and four-bladed with tail rotors. The visual evidence was in front of my eyes, but I had already taken refuge in illusion.

Of course, the poetry from the window and the stories we tell are only part of the whole.  I think it was Octavio Paz who said that poems are actually expressions of things lived and suffered. They are comprised of words that form a bridge between one person and another. The search for a narrative, which often amounts to taking refuge in our theories of what should be, can obscure the reality and hide the important contradictions between fact and lyrical reverie.

Helicopter spotting is seeing the world for what it is. There’s the dust on the granite, the comb in the pocket, the twin-engines when you thought there was one.  This year, if I were sitting around my friend’s Seder table in Crown Heights talking about what keeps me in bondage it would still be, so many years later, closing my eyes to the here and now.  Learning to see opens us up to a reality that can be devastating, but one that is also outrageously beautiful in its complexity. In the end, the facts are the case; the thousands of disparate images are the story.

A Note on the Letters

I’ve always wanted to be a person who can survive on four hours of sleep, but the reality is that I cannot.  I need closer to seven and would definitely prefer 12.  As such—and owning up to the fact that I’m a corporate litigator with a full slate of cases and very demanding ad hoc deadlines—I don’t have enough hours in a day and days in two weeks to write a substantive essay every other Sunday as I had originally planned.  So, I’m resetting expectations and will write one essay a month with occasional interviews and “Notes From” articles in the meantime.  That’s probably more disappointing to me than to anyone else, but it will, I hope, take my stress levels down a notch and give me time to write something substantial each month.

Finally, I want to share two links this week, both from The Atlantic. In Liberation Without Victory, Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg discuss with President Zelensky the weapons systems Ukraine needs to keep fighting.  Zelensky says, “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before.  It’s Groundhog Day.  I feel like Bill Murray.”  He goes on to say that it’s not that world leaders don’t want to help; “They are not against us.  They just live in a different situation.  As long as they have not lost their parents and children, they do not feel the way we feel.”  He discusses the conversations he has had with the citizens defending Mariupol as an example: “[T]hey say: ‘We need help; we have four hours.’  And even in Kyiv we don’t understand what four hours are.  In Washington for sure they can’t understand.”  Zelensky describes what seems to me to be the most insuperable obstacle to saving lives: our milquetoast empathy does not spur us to action. 

This article by Jonathan Haidt on Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid is excellent. He says, “The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”