Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat.
— Wislawa Szymborska, "Reality Demands"
NEAR SHAHRAQ, Afghanistan — The dirt track unfurls through the desert northward: unbroken, straight, infinite. Patches of drought-shriveled cotton fields daub the blanched plains. Ascensions of larks tumble out of sunflowers, spilling fine clouds of husks and dust, and, dipping in unison, wing toward some other field. On the horizon, where the road seems to bend downward with the world's curvature, two motorcycle riders clear out of the quivering sky. The man driving my car reaches for his 9-millimeter Luger.
Northern Afghanistan's roads project a sense of constancy. Their appearance is biblical: unmarked and unpaved stretches coursing past villages of crumbling cob, traversed by donkey-drawn carts and camel caravans laden with almonds and hay. Hardly anyone has ever maintained their surface. Every pothole to slow down for, every chunk of sharp rock to swerve around, every roadside hollow where iridescent sewage pools has probably been there for decades, maybe centuries.
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But in this systematically violated land, no road ever remains the same. Each is a treacherous route of the latest invading army or insurrection, suppurating with wounds old and new. On the northbound track from Mazar-e-Sharif, tomb raiders sift through the sands of Askar Qaleh for treasures left two millennia ago, but no one can tell me whether they were left by the invading army of Alexander the Great or the Kushans, who colonized Bactria after him. In Siogert, teenage goatherds play lonesome flute tunes in the sandcastle ruins of a bazaar: The mujahideen shelled it as they wrenched the village from Soviet hands in the 1980s. A mile or so away, there is an abandoned wheat field -- don't go there! -- planted with POMZ-2M land mines, a remnant of the ethnic wars of the 1990s. A green flag flutters from a stake driven into a nearby rocky shoulder: Someone attacked a car carrying ballots for the 2009 presidential election here, killed the driver, and set the car ablaze.
But as always, Afghanistan's palimpsest of violence is being scrawled over with fresh iniquities. In recent months, the ancient road has become the instrument, and the witness, of the Taliban's steady creeping advance through the Khorasan.
Here is the spot, as yet unmarked, where in June the Taliban killed Sober, a teacher from Siogert. Several people have pointed it out to me; Sober was well-loved by many. Half a mile to the north, a crater scoops out the road's shoulder; a homemade bomb detonated here three weeks ago near the car of a Siogert village elder, Malah. (Malah, a hard man with cold eyes, was unharmed. He doesn't like to talk about it.) A few hundred yards further is the sooty chimney of the Shahraq brick factory. Two dozen Taliban, armed with Kalashnikovs, showed up there two weeks ago to demand a donation of $2,000 to their holy war coffers.
Nameless, limbic angst hangs over stretches of the road. "If you and I go to Shahraq we won't come out alive," a taxi driver tells me one morning. Later, he clarifies: "If you and I go to Shahraq they won't even find our bones."
(We drive past Shahraq twice that day. The road runs through it.)
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