Tuesday
The handsome teenager lying on the highway on the morning of the liberation of Kabul looks so alive it's hard to believe he's dead. He lies there with fresh face, neat short hair and the beginnings of a beard, stretched on his belly with only a fresh, red exit wound in the small of his back to indicate he's been shot.
Close by on the gravel divider between the two-lane Salang Highway are his four friends, also so freshly dead that they look alive.
Even with blood and the shiny spilled guts of one man, they look like they could just jump up and say hello.
These are the last Taliban left in front of Kabul - five unlucky men who had fled the fighting of the night before, when their front caved in, and didn't quite make it.
Thousands of their comrades escaped the brutal bombardment of artillery, rockets, mortars and American B-52s. But these five were just a little too slow. They drove straight into a Northern Alliance patrol.
After ordering the men out of their car, they were herded into the middle of the road - so as not to disrupt the traffic, and shot, a few hours before we arrived. In Afghanistan, the Geneva Convention does not apply.
The sight of them, on this day when the sun shines and civilians have come out of their houses to cheer the troops, is so odd that I feel bemused rather than horrified. Reality takes a break.
A soldier hitchhiker I had picked up starts darting from body to body, labelling this one a Pakistani, that one an Arab, though how he can tell I don't know.
The night before, as part of the assault force that broke through the Taliban line, he had found a wounded Arab Taliban soldier. And had killed him - but only after first removing his jacket. "Of course I took the jacket off first," he said as if I'm an idiot. "You think I wanted blood on it?" I get back in the car, thinking that today can only get better, and around the next bend so it proves.
Tanks and trucks and jeeps and armoured personnel carriers and a great jumble of people, civilians and military, are all packed together in a great mass.
The soldiers are the spearhead of the Northern Alliance army that last night fought its way to the gates of Kabul - here, six kilometres outside the city.
And the people are the inhabitants, coming out to welcome them in.
"The Taliban are gone, the Taliban are gone," they keep shouting, but it is some hours before the military police finally bows to the inevitable and opens the road - the Northern Alliance has promised the Americans that Kabul will be an open city, with troops kept out.
The liberation is all you might expect; thousands of people all cheering and waving and treating me, a journalist, as the personal envoy of the Western air forces whose bombs have made it all possible.
Further in, horror and joy come together: five dead Pakistani Taliban soldiers, executed that very morning with bank notes stuffed up their noses, lie close to young boys happily flying kites - one of many things banned by the Taliban.
Around a corner, crowds of men are taking it in turns to kick four dead mutilated Arabs. At the same moment, a colleague goes around another corner to see an Arab Taliban soldier being kicked to death. He takes a photograph, then runs for it.
Northern Alliance official Yonus Qanuni arrives just in time to tie himself in knots, when he denies the troops swarming into the city are in fact soldiers. "They are police," he insists. "But we ran out of police uniforms so we had to use those." The soldiers happily contradict him, giving me their unit numbers.
Having changed its mind about occupying the city, the Northern Alliance gets in fast, but not as fast as the looters. On waking to find the city empty of Taliban - who fled Monday night - they zoomed out to ransack the Pakistani embassy and official buildings.
These included that most Orwellian of all the Taliban operations - the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. This is the home of the dreaded Religious Police, in reality gangs of thugs who took great pleasure in beating women for showing an ankle or men for having hair too long or beards too short.
Now they are gone, the offices deserted.
Wednesday
The euphoria of the day before having worn off, Kabul gets down to the serious business of shrugging off the many bizarre restrictions imposed by the Taliban. The Taliban were, by some distance, the nuttiest regime on earth.
Kite flying is now pursued with a vengeance. So is beard trimming, with the barbers breaking all records.
Music was banned under the Taliban, together with singing and dancing, all viewed as provoking lust. Now the ban is over, the little music stores clustered together in Farashgar Street are open again, with young customers jostling each other while the road outside fills with a cacophony of Afghan, Indian and Western tunes.
In Chicken Street, Abdul Jabal, owner of Chez Abdul jewellery shop, is happily unpacking his wares. "You are my very first customer," he announces. "Please tell the foreigners about me." Jewellery was yet another item restricted by the Taliban - it was viewed as a dangerous temptation to improper idolatry.
"The Taliban knew we were selling these things in secret," says 40-year-old Abdul. "They knew they could get money out of us.
"They would come into the shop and say, 'OK, go home and get your Kalashnikov, we know you were issued with one'. And of course we had no Kalashnikov, so we could not produce it, and that meant you either made some bribe or you went to jail for about a week. I was in jail like that four times. "The Taliban were gangsters, just gangsters," says Jabal. "There is a saying in French, 'the one who hides the black hand in the white glove'.
"It means you hide your bad deeds in a nice disguise, and that was the Taliban. They were bad guys and they covered it all in the white glove of Islam."
On the streets, the driving is mad; cars race and zig-zag in a crazy dance somehow missing the floods of bicycles that dart this way and that.
Shops are open, a great jumble of shacks selling tin baths, cases of Pepsi, washing powder and biscuits, plus strings of kebab houses with the meat hanging outside being attended to by the flies.
But the joy of daytime turns into the fear of night. Driving home after working late was the most frightening thing I've done in Afghanistan.
The roads are now dark and totally empty, with the partial curfew becoming total after 10 p.m.
At most intersections, squads of ultra-nervous soldiers emerge from the shadows, guns pointed straight at my head, as my translator shouts "journalists, journalists" from his open window.
The first few times, this is hair-raising, with the soldiers terrified that we might be Talibans who had been holed-up and were now making a break for freedom.
Finally, a soldier takes pity on us and tells my translator the code word for tonight is Kalashnikov - the name of the assault rifle most soldiers here use.
Two minutes later is a new checkpoint and more jumpy soldiers. My translator shouts "Kalashnikov", but it serves only to make the soldiers freeze, rifles raised. I think: "this is it". My translator switches back to shouting "journalist journalist!" and finally one soldier edges forward and peers into the car. "Why didn't you say so before?" he says. "Why shout Kalashnikov?" "It's the password," says my translator.
"I never heard of that," is the reply.
I have never been happier to get back to a hotel room lacking water, electricity or protection against the freezing cold.
Thursday
The day after the day after liberation sees reality bite. It bites in the shape of some awkward developments. First, why is the Northern Alliance pouring troops into the city, rather than withdrawing them? Second, why do these soldiers, tasked with watching for thieves and controlling the traffic, wander around with anti-tank rockets and heavy machine guns? And if this is an open city awaiting a power-sharing government, why is the Northern Alliance grabbing all the power for itself? Jeeps scurry around the city as Alliance officials who, a week ago, were sitting in the countryside in mud houses, seek out the plushest offices.
Suddenly, we have a foreign minister, a defence minister and an interior minister. Not only are they all from the Alliance - a group of mostly Tajik warlords with almost no representation among the more numerous Pashtuns. But also, they are all from the same tiny party within the Alliance. A short drive around the city yields the information that all the military units, far from being part of a unified army, are in fact controlled by a group of warlords who are all from the same valley 40 miles north of here.
Far from being a broad-based group, the people in charge of this city come from one tiny spot of this country. Not a good omen for the future, once the other tribes get wind of it.
Seeking an explanation, I try and fail to locate Qanuni, now self-proclaimed minister of the interior. He is too busy to meet journalists, so I meet a deputy, Azet Ali, hoping to get some answers.
"We are the government. We are the Islamic state and we are in control," he says.
But had the Alliance not had agreed not to form a government until after a meeting of all sides, the Loya Jurga, had taken place? He nods his agreement and contradicts himself. "Yes, the Loya Jurga will establish the government. We are not the government," he says. "We are in Kabul assuring security."
Before I can try to iron out this contradiction, he begins insisting that the tiny group of warlords he represents be labelled the United Front, not just the Northern Alliance. "Pashtuns are welcome too, of course. If they bring peace in Afghanistan we will welcome them."
But this is unlikely. These same warlords last occupied Kabul nine years ago, turning several suburbs into a virtual wasteland with years of fighting. Now these warlords are back. For the moment, the populous is relieved. Soon it may get nervous.
And in all of this account, I have left one group out. It is an easy mistake to make - they played no part in any of this: not the fighting, not even the cheering, not the driving not the business not the kite-flying. In fact, they are to all intents and purposes invisible in Afghan society. They are called women.
The religious police have gone, but the burqas, the great tent-like garments that cover women and make them look like shapeless cartoon ghosts, remain.
Foreign-newspaper photographers, under pressure to produce images of the city's rejection of the Taliban, can be seen each day persuading a few women to remove these garments. What the photos do not show is the women putting them back on again moments later.
For the fact remains that the Northern Alliance feels the same way about women as the Taliban does - they are chattle, to be tolerated but kept out of real life. Instead of religious police, the Alliance uses shame as its weapon - to walk around in normal clothes is to walk around naked, inviting ridicule on the husband who owns you.
Among all the grand promises of respect for human rights swirling around here this week, one moment stands out.
Driving along in my taxi, a woman of indeterminate age - how can you guess the age of someone when all you can see is a walking tent? - steps into the road. I expect my driver to at least slow down. But his foot hits not the brake but the horn, as he bears down on her.
The poor woman breaks stride, trying to run but forced by the swirling blue burqa to use pigeon steps. Jumping out of the way, she stumbles and nearly falls, and as I look back there is no raised fist, only cringing acceptance of her position.
For the women of Kabul, liberation is a relative concept.