COMING BACK

Tough travels in a religion-haunted, ruined land.

There are three phrases, writes Italian novelist and poet Albinati, that a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan needs to know how to say in both Dari and Pashto, the country’s major languages: “I am a good man. I work for the UN. Please do not kill me.” Not that Albinati, to judge by this journal of three months in the field in the spring and summer of 2002, is often in danger of being killed by an assailant close enough to speak to; mostly, whether tucked away in a crummy hotel room in Kabul or roaming from town to town in a UN truck, he’s imperiled by rockets and mortars fired from afar. He faces other dangers: the strong desire to take up smoking again after having quit a dozen years earlier, the temptation to drink too much scotch (“Three glasses is the right number, the perfect number to get rid of the day’s rage without ending up completely wrecked”). In between trying to suggest ways to impose order on chaos—Albinati allows that, if elected mayor of the bombed-out capital, the first thing he’d do “would be to give every street in Kabul a name and put up a sign, so that everyone would have an address, even the prefabs, the shanty towns, the muddy open spaces, the heaps of stones”—and conduct a census of the countryside (involving, among other things, counting sheep), Albinati marvels at the resilience of the Afghan people and their capacity to endure what would have broken just about any Westerner. Some of his journal entries are oddly mundane (as when he watches Disney’s Jungle Book, humming the Italian version of “The Bare Necessities” to himself), while others are thoughtful and moving, as when he writes of the lives of street children: “What they want more than anything else is to play.”

A solid contribution to a rising genre: the noncombatant’s war memoir.