Two months later, on a hazy morning this past March, we arrived in the town of Chaman after four hours on a crumbling road over the Khojak Pass. The town’s Afghan counterpart, Spin Boldak, sits just a few kilometers away, separated by a high concrete arch and a few dozen rifle-toting guards. As we paused for a break, squatting down in the dust of a truck yard for a late breakfast of bread and sour butter, the deep boom of an explosion echoed from the direction of the border. We all cringed at the sound. Sikander swept up the blanket we were eating on, and we walked back though the hard-packed, greasy yard to the car. A consultation ensued with a man dressed, like us, in a traditional long tunic; he leaned in through the driver’s window to speak urgently in Pashto.

“It is confirmed,” Sikander said after the man left. He swiveled around to where I sat in the back seat with Jahanzeb, his cousin. His lips were pursed together. “There was an explosion at the border,” he told me. Jahanzeb, younger and with more delicate features, fixed his eyes on me as well.

“Oh, Matthieu,” he said mournfully. “You are a big problem.” They had planned to avoid formalities by smuggling me across the border; now, because of the explosion, the guards would be on high alert. A few more of Sikander’s friends came over to the car, and as they began to discuss a plan, Jahanzeb turned to me occasionally to ask questions in English. Do you want to go back? Do you want to go across on a motorcycle? I didn’t want to go back—it had taken me weeks of hanging around Quetta to arrange the trip—so we decided that Sikander and Jahanzeb would go ahead and send for me later.

After a few tense hours in Chaman, a white Corolla with a gold plastic armani air-freshener on its dashboard arrived for me. The driver, tall and clean-shaven with a gap-toothed smile, looked me over as we accelerated north. “Do you speak Pashto?” he asked me. I shook my head. “Urdu?”

“I speak Persian,” I offered in that language.

“Then just don’t say anything,” he muttered in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian. He examined my half-Asian features and wiry beard, which together gave me the look of an Afghan from the north—an Uzbek or Hazara, perhaps—and then placed his red embroidered cap, a typical Pashtun accessory, on my head.

At the checkpoint, cutting into a side lane, my driver wove, honked, and waved his way past the black-clad Pakistani and camouflage-clad Afghan guards. They waved back in recognition. We drove around the arch and onto a wide, rough-paved highway swirling with dust and traffic. “How are you, my dear?” the driver asked in Dari, grinning widely. “This is Afghanistan!”