We were at the Commander’s headquarters in Khoja Bahauddin, close to the Taliban front lines but even closer to the Oxus River. The Oxus is beautiful there: so quiet, solemn, calm. We used to sit on the bank and watch it flow.

The storyteller is Masood Khalili: son of a great poet, Afghanistan’s ambassador to India, and – central to this story – closest friend and ardent follower of Commander Ahmad Shah Masood. We had the same name, says the diplomat. Why did only one of us die?

Masood the Commander was killed by a suicide bomb on Sept. 9, 2001 – two days before our own hideous explosions. Khalili, sitting next to him, barely survived. As this piece is written, he’s in Washington as a presidential guest at National Prayer services. Khalili was first invited a year ago, but could not attend then because of his wounds. I’m better now, thank God. Never mind that I have only one eye. Maybe the other will recover. But even if God wills that I lose the good one, there will still be an inner, spiritual eye.

Afghan culture permits and even celebrates such talk. Here spirituality requires no explanation, involves no embarrassment. Rather than New Age, it’s ageless and omnipresent. Afghans sprinkle conversation with talismanic invocations (see “God on Afghan tongue” in this column, Dec. 6, 2001). Those who can read and afford to buy books incline toward religious tracts. A photograph in Khalili’s living room shows Commander Masood dressed in white, sitting on an aircraft, and completely absorbed in a book. I took the picture on his helicopter on Sept. 8, his last full day. He was reading a biography of saints. A Russian inscription is stenciled on the bulkhead above Masood’s head. The Cyrillic script recalls why this man became a legend, both in life and now as a martyr: More than anyone else, arguably, he defeated the Soviet Union.

That victory came in 1989, but civil war then led to the Taliban and a safe haven for al-Qaida. By late summer 2001, only Masood’s forces stood against Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. It was then that Masood, seemingly on a whim, had summoned Khalili from India to the remote encampment. He told me, “Really, it’s nothing serious, nothing grave. I simply wanted you to be with me in these days.”

They’d met in Tajikistan on Sept. 7, then flown the next morning across the Oxus to Khoja Bahauddin. The village is named for a long-deceased holy man. Khoja means spiritual master, someone conversant with charms and cures, miracles and premonitions. It would take a miracle for Masood to halt the Taliban. He had great faith. He used to say, “Hang on.” People would say, “How long?” He’d say, “Until something happens. It will.” That miraculous something did come: alliance with America in the aftermath of 9-11. First, however, came premonition and tragedy.

Now it was late evening on Saturday, Sept. 8. He dismissed the others around 11 p.m., so that only we two were together. Here Masood and Khalili typify another Afghan cultural feature: the idealization of male friendship. Free of homophobia – but seldom homoerotic – men who are close friends frequently hold hands in the street or sleep on mattresses placed side by side. Masood and Khalili would often stay awake together, alone in a room long after others had gone to bed. We’d talk about all kinds of things – war and politics, of course, but also other deeper things. We’d recite poetry to each other. We both loved Hafez.

Afghans revere Hafez above all other Persian poets, not least because of his Masood-style perseverance. Khalili again: Until he was 45 Hafez tried to be a poet but couldn’t. People mocked him. Then he went into the desert for 40 days and prayed that God free his tongue and grant the gift of poetry. Khidr [Islam’s enigmatic Green Man] came in a dream and said, “I will give you verses to last forever and make you the king of poets.” In the old days every mosque, every house had a book of Hafez poetry. Many Afghans still choose Hafez as the text for their semi-serious practice of literary fortune-telling.

Despite its ban by Prophet Mohammed, augury remains irresistible in Afghanistan – on a par with our tarot readings, horoscope columns or soothsaying in the Reagan White House. A favorite do-it-yourself technique entails thinking of a person or question, opening a book (preferably Hafez) at random, and then letting your eye fall on some passage on the right page. You read the lines aloud and examine their possible relevance for whatever topic you’ve had in mind. We stayed awake very late that night, until after 3 a.m. It was a beautiful night. The window was open, and you could smell fall coming. You could feel the Oxus out there in the dark. Inside there was only the light of our kerosene lantern. Finally Masood said, “Open Hafez for me.”

But then, as Khalili tells it, Masood hesitated, changed his mind, then changed it again. First he asked for a reading for himself, but then he said, “Open it for both of us.” I began, but then he said “No, open it only for me.” I opened it and read. No translation compares with the sonorous Persian original, especially when delivered in Khalili’s rumbling bass. His English version: “Oh, you two who are sitting tonight together / Value this night. Many years will pass, / Days will go, months will disappear. / You won’t have this night again. Value it.”

Both men were stunned. Neither of us spoke. The Commander’s breath stopped short. His eyes closed, and his chin sank to his chest. Finally he said, “That one is very deep.”

Khalili tried to be upbeat: I quickly said, ‘Look, here’s what it means; it means this night. Think of its uniqueness: We two alone in this village reading Hafez.. We smell the autumn. The stars are hanging. The Oxus is flowing past us. I used words of my father [Afghanistan’s greatest 20th century man of letters] for the river, how it “looks like an arrow in the heart of the history of mankind.” I told him it didn’t mean that we would die.

Only that this one night would not come again.

By way of response, Masood asked Khalili for another Hafez poem. My Commander said, “Do you know the one about pregnancy?” I remembered immediately and recited. “The world is nothing but a story, / A tale full of lies and deception. / Tonight is pregnant with tomorrow: / You never know what that child will be.”

Then he said, “That one is beautiful, but the first one is deeper. It has a meaning deeper than we can understand.”

Six hours later Ahmad Shah Masood was killed by an Islamist suicide bomb. His assassins were two Moroccans posing as journalists. The Commander had chosen the time and asked me to translate. I asked him to wait so that I could go wash, but he said that that he’d already kept them waiting for 45 days. (Quick memo to U.S. War on Terror analysts: Note that this long wait, if true and if determined by Masood, means that the date of his assassination was not planned to coincide so closely with 9-11. Indeed, the two events may not have been – contrary to common belief – orchestrated together. Generalized implication: That, as we are learning elsewhere, militant Islamism is loosely organized and hydra-headed, utterly different from a modern Western nation-state. Psycho-strategic question: How can a rigid hierarchy such as the U.S. government avoid mirror-image assumptions about an enemy whose basic structure is so unlike its own?)

Khalili remembers a blue flash, a last glimpse of Masood, but nothing of being evacuated to Tajikistan. He awoke in Germany where, more than a week later, doctors finally stopped the hemorrhaging. It was in a German hospital that his wife told him of Masood’s death and tried to ease the pain – of shrapnel, third-degree burns and a detached retina – by reading Hafez aloud. Day after day and verse after verse, she read the whole book to me. My bodily eye was closed, but the voice of my wife reading Hafez opened my spiritual eye.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.