In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

by SAIMA WAHAB

  “Can’t we wait a little? I just got home. I don’t think I can talk about anything.”

  “What do you mean?” The alarm in his voice annoyed me.

  “I mean, I just flew halfway around the world, and I need to chill out for a while.”

  “For how long? I don’t understand. I thought you’d be glad to hear I was coming to see you. Don’t you want to be together anymore?”

  It went on like that for a few minutes. I felt myself growing frustrated. He’d been in the army for years. Didn’t he understand that I needed a week or two to get reacclimated, that it wasn’t about him, or us, or my feelings about the wedding? He jumped to conclusions. He wondered if I’d met someone else. He kept asking me if I still loved him.

  Looking back, I realize I was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Most Americans who are lucky enough not to live in a combat zone don’t understand PTSD. There are so many forms and shapes of it that it even surprises those of us who are very much aware of it in ourselves and others around us. A lot of people I have talked to think that unless you are caught in a firefight or survive an IED explosion, you can’t have PTSD. But just the trauma of living in an environment where you never know whether you might be bombed the next day, or if the person you are talking to while eating will be there tomorrow, is emotionally stressful enough to create the kind of extreme anxiety that leads to PTSD. On top of that, there are loud noises—outgoing mortars, incoming rockets, helicopters landing steps from where you are sleeping—and when you return to a place like Portland, a car backfiring on the street will take you back to Afghanistan instantly. And the feeling stays with you. Waking up and telling yourself that you’re at home and out of harm’s way does little to help allay your fear.

  For the next week I spent most of my time reading in my closet. I had a walk-in closet with good lighting. My bedroom was simply too big. I felt too exposed, and if I heard noises from other parts of the house, I would be forced to investigate. It was nerve-wracking. My closet had just enough space to contain me, and the clothes muffled the sounds of the rest of the house. It also reminded me of my B-hut.

  I rearranged my bedroom, pushing my bed into one of the corners farthest from the door. I could only sleep if my back was against a wall and I could keep my eye on the door. One night in late December, just as I’d started to drift off, I heard gunshots. I leaped out of bed before I was fully awake. My heart felt as if it was trying to break free from my chest. It banged in my ears; my head was swimming. I couldn’t think of anything to do but text Najiba, who was out with Kabir.

  “Naj!” I typed. “There are gunshots. Someone’s shooting up the neighborhood.”

  Our house was on a cul-de-sac. My bedroom faced the street. The gunshots were loud.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she texted back. “Those are fireworks. Are you okay?”

  Sure enough, I peeked out the window and saw a gang of older kids lighting strings of firecrackers in the middle of the street. I had totally forgotten that it was New Year’s Eve. Days blend together when you’re trying to hide from everything around you.

  “I can come home!” she texted again.

  “I’m okay. Enjoy ur night,” I texted back.

  Eric called four or five times a day, wondering if I felt better, wondering whether we could now get on with the wedding, wondering whether I’d talked to my family. He was relentless, and the more I dissembled, the more I begged for time, the worse he got. I thought that if only he had called to check on me and ask me how I was dealing with being back, I could have unburdened myself to him—who better to understand me than Eric, who had been dealing with PTSD for years? But he didn’t. He was worried about the wedding and my reluctance to talk to him. His behavior was making me feel like I had a cause to be questioning our compatibility. In Jalalabad I had been concerned that we were of two very different cultures, but I had been more concerned with making our families understand and accept us. I had never worried that we would be having this issue with each other. But now, back in the States, he acted like he had no clue what I was going through and was in such a hurry to start our lives that I felt like he was rushing me into making a mistake.

  ONE DAY NAJIBA asked, “Who was that? Who is this person who calls you so many times a day?”

  “It’s funny you ask,” I said slowly. “It is actually my fiancé.”

  My sister looked at me a long moment to see if this was yet another Saima joke. I assured her it was not.

  If I’d stopped and listened, I might have heard Wahabs the world over calling one another and shrieking in disbelief. In Portland, London, somewhere in Germany, Peshawar, and Ghazni Province, Sunday meetings were called to figure out what was to be done. Saima was getting married! Saima was marrying an infidel, and not just any infidel, but an American infidel, and not just any American infidel, but a soldier, a commander, a man who was in charge of invading and further ruining Afghanistan.

  When it became clear that Sunday meetings were not enough, emergency midweek sessions were held. The uncles summoned Najiba, Khalid, and Mamai. To my brother they said, “You are a good-for-nothing brother if you let your sister do this.” To my sister they said, “This is the worst thing that your sister could have done. If you are still talking to her, that means you are okay with it, and you are just like her.” To my poor Mamai they said, “Your daughter is out of control; you’re a horrible mother to allow her to get away with this.” Not surprisingly, they never asked for my presence at these meetings.

  I had not spoken to the uncles in years. But when I saw Mamai’s tear-stained face after they had lectured her, I knew something had to be done. I contacted an aunt who lived in the States and was still on speaking terms with me, and who in the past had served as a messenger between the uncles and me. “What do you think you’re doing to my mother? You guys washed your hands of me and kicked me out in the middle of the night because you weren’t able to control me. Do you think that makes you all good Pashtuns? How do you expect Mamai to do something you men weren’t able to do? You had every resource in the world, and you weren’t able to control my behavior at the end. Why do you expect my mother to succeed where you failed?”

  Mamai went to the meetings because her brothers-in-law demanded her presence, and Khalid and Najiba were there in order to support her. But Mamai had not been surprised to hear I was marrying an American. She remembered that declaration that I’d made when I was nine or ten: “I’m never going to marry an Afghan man!” Mamai’s friends were over for tea, and had told Mamai that it was time to start thinking about finding a husband for me. I was still a little girl. I had no idea what it was I was saying no to, exactly. My father was gone, and my only brother was a reasonable boy, a low-key observer of life. I had no real sense of the ways in which a man could take over a woman’s life. There were distant female members of the family whom I occasionally saw with fear in their eyes and bruises on their bodies. These girls would say, “Oh yes, my brother beat me up, but he stopped when I promised not to upset him again.” I remember wondering why anyone would willingly give someone else the right to do this to her. Where were the mothers of these girls? I didn’t know at the time that the mothers were treated just as badly and wouldn’t have been able to defend their daughters. When I wouldn’t shut up about never marrying an Afghan, Mamai told me to find something else to do and not come out when her friends were visiting. I embarrassed her.

  Word came down from the uncles that since Mamai could not control me, they did not want to have anything to do with her. Mamai is not stupid. Even while they were ordering her to tell me this and tell me that, they never offered to take her in. Mamai finally said to hell with them. She realized that her children were her true allies, and that her future lay with us, not with the uncles. One day I heard her say to someone on the phone, “My future is with my daughter.” It was the first time in my life I felt as if my mother was on my side. I had waited almost thirty years to have my mother on my side,
and the happiness I felt hearing her say that was inexpressible.

  Mamai refused to go to any more meetings, and one night, while I was making tea, she stood in the middle of the kitchen and said, “Marry whomever you want. I am okay with your decision.”

  Still, the gossip reached us. All day long, from inside my walk-in closet (where I still retreated on occasion), I could hear the phone ring. It would be my aunt calling to urge Mamai to disown me. Or someone from Kuwait or Peshawar with other ideas on how to force me to obey. The uncles were beyond displeased and unhappy. Word got back to me that at one of the meetings the idea of an honor killing was raised, but they would have to have someone else do it because they didn’t want to get caught.

  I heard this and laughed out loud. “They are Pashtun enough to decide on an honor killing but they can’t do it themselves? They have to outsource it? How American of them!”

  I called Eric. “Don’t get too attached to me,” I said, “I might be stoned any day now.”

  “I’m calling your uncles to talk to them,” he said. His voice shook with anger.

  “They don’t mean anything to me. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

  “Then I’m reporting them.”

  “To whom? You know these people. They’ll just side with each other. They’ll deny everything. I’m just telling you because I thought it was funny.”

  For weeks it seemed as if all I did was talk on the phone, pausing only to eat Mamai’s delicious parakay, fried in butter, stuffed with potato and leek. I felt exhausted by the whole subject of my wedding, even as I began to plan it. I was American enough to know what needed to be done, but the Pashtun in me was at a complete loss. A bride planning her own wedding is unheard-of in my culture. The family organizes everything, and the bride is only told when to appear. Why couldn’t I have been more like the other Pashtun girls of my family? I would agonize over the stress of wedding planning, but in the next breath I would thank God for giving me the ability to plan my own wedding.

  Still, I pressed on. Things fell into place. I wanted to be married in a room with a view of the mountains and the river. The Marriott downtown had the perfect room, and it was actually available on the date we’d selected, February 14. More amazing was that when I told the cook at the Marriott that I wanted to serve Afghan food, he was all over the idea. He was going to learn to cook every dish I wanted to serve.

  Our wedding was going to be small—no more than fifty people—and my wedding colors were deep burgundy, gold, and beige. Wedding colors! Could I have been the first Pashtun female in the recorded history of my tribe to have deliberated over wedding colors? The invitations were beautiful, printed in gold, with a Koranic verse at the top, in Arabic, and the rest in English. I loved the way the invitations had turned out, and couldn’t wait to mail them.

  My spirits started to lift. I felt good enough to taunt my brother, a sure sign that I was returning to my old self. “What kind of a Pashtun brother are you?” I teased him. “Why are you not planning my wedding and telling me just to show up?”

  “If you want me to be a good Pashtun brother, I will tell you not to marry Eric,” he replied, half joking.

  I ran into problems trying to find a suitable wedding dress. White was out of the question. Farsiban wear white; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that every white prom dress from the 1980s had been shipped to Central Asia, catering to the Farsiban taste for shiny, poofy white dresses. Pashtuns wear colors, and I wanted to wear a traditional outfit, the most elaborate I could find. I saw it in my mind’s eye: royal-blue, emerald-green, and hot-pink silk, decked out with beadwork, mirrors, and lace. There was nothing like it in Portland or even Seattle. In Afghanistan they are all made by hand; little girls work on those dresses for many years so they can wear them on their wedding day. I ordered something I thought was similar from a tailor in Nepal suggested by Kabir; when it arrived it was all wrong—not silk but chiffon, and decorated on the front but not the back.

  I’d been told by my American friends that brides always feel this way, but I took one look at the failed chiffon wedding outfit from Nepal and called Eric. “I can’t do this. This is a sign from God that I am not supposed to be getting married.”

  “Honey, everything is going to be just fine. Please don’t bring God into this—your god, my god, any god.”

  To prove his point Eric tracked down several shops in Florida that specialized in wedding clothes for people from the Near East and sent me a plane ticket.

  I had only seen Eric in uniform and in Farah, where no one knew we were together and we had to act like we meant nothing to each other. Seeing him in sunny Florida, wearing a flowered, short-sleeved shirt, walking toward me at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize him. Until he smiled. I’d have known that smile anywhere, and suddenly I felt a heavy weight lift off of my shoulders. I had been worried that I wouldn’t feel the same way about him, and I was happy to be wrong.

  We found ourselves at a bridal shop specializing in Indian wedding clothes. What was I doing there? Even though it wasn’t what I thought I wanted, I found a deep-burgundy silk skirt and top, heavy with gold embroidery and Swarovski crystals.

  “Go try that on and come out and show me,” said Eric.

  “You’re not supposed to see me in my outfit before the wedding. According to your culture it’s bad luck.”

  “Honey, we’re breaking so many other cultural traditions here I don’t think one more will matter.” He never got tired of calling me honey.

  Eric lived near Orlando. That evening we took a walk in a park near Disney World. As the sun fell toward the horizon, it turned cold. The air smelled odd, like rotting vegetables. I felt my hair frizzing around my ears. It put me in a bad mood. Eric’s urgency to marry felt like a pair of strong hands on my back. We passed a family wearing Mickey Mouse hats, arguing about their favorite ride. The tops of their cheeks were pink from the sun. This was important to them.

  “There’s nothing worse than a tourist!” I cried.

  “You’re a tourist,” said Eric.

  “I’m not,” I said. “I would never go to that Disneyland place.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I want to go back to Afghanistan,” I said. We stopped in the middle of the path. An airplane flew overhead. The wind picked up. I told him that I’d already researched it. I’d found a company that would be happy to hire us back as a couple. Since he’d been a PRT commander he could write his own ticket.

  Eric considered the idea. He said he liked it. I could see his military mind ticking away, figuring out how to use my enthusiasm. On the way to the airport we reminisced about Farah, about Country-and-Western Fridays, Ping-Pong tournaments, and the late nights we spent sitting beneath the Milky Way on my bench. We were encouraged by the memory to believe we had a future.

  The idea that we’d be returning to Afghanistan distracted me from our impending marriage. The wedding became something that needed to be accomplished in order to redeploy. After weeks of meetings (arguments, debates, crying), my extended family decided they had no choice but to allow me to marry my infidel. But I had yet to meet Eric’s parents.

  A week before the wedding Eric called and said he wasn’t sure his parents were going to be able to come. When I asked him whether they objected to my being Muslim, he cleared his throat. I hummed with irritation at his hesitation.

  “Just buy the tickets and tell them they’re going to Argentina. When they arrive in Portland they’ll have no choice but to come,” I joked. I didn’t feel like joking, but this was how Eric and I operated.

  “That’s an excellent idea!” he said. “Problem is, he’s not supposed to fly at all.”

  “He’s not?”

  “Because of the stroke,” he said.

  This was the first I’d heard of any stroke. For a minute, I had to think. Stroke of the hour, golf stroke, to stroke the cat. The stroke he meant was like a heart attack of the brain.

  “Your father had a str
oke and you didn’t tell me?”

  “It wasn’t really a stroke, it was just … he can’t fly right now.”

  “Was it a stroke or not?”

  “It’s fine, honey, it really is.”

  “Did he have the stroke before or after you told him you were marrying a Muslim?” I asked.

  For the first time I could remember, Eric had nothing to say.

  I CALLED OFF the wedding. Perhaps it was inevitable. I canceled the hotel, the caterer, the cake. I put the lovely deep-burgundy dress away in the attic. There were many qualities that Eric and I shared, and the most important ones were that we were both hot-tempered and prone to be impulsive. He put everything he owned in storage in Flordia, except his computer, his printer, and a duffel bag full of clothes, which he threw into the back of his car. Then he drove to Oregon.

  He had his own unacknowledged PTSD. He refused to fly. He couldn’t bring himself to get on an airplane, to sit wedged in a seat in economy class between a crying baby and a snoring fat man, at the mercy of the commercial pilot and his crew. He believed he could drive straight through, almost three thousand miles without a break. He called me on the phone when he started getting sleepy. I told him to pull over to get a hotel. He refused.

  After he arrived, he sat in my living room with his hands on his knees. While we went through the motions of arguing, while we wept and held each other, a part of me felt lighter. I closed my eyes and saw Afghanistan, the blue dome of sky, the big-shouldered mountains, and the mud houses huddled at their feet, the stars and moon bright enough to read by.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I knew I had made a full circle of the last two years of my life, sitting at the passenger terminal, PAX in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, waiting for my flight to Bagram Airfield. It was the middle of the night. There would be no flight for hours. I had a small bag of cold popcorn and a book. I was impatient. The longer I had to wait, the more time I had to think, which I didn’t want to do. Thinking meant replaying the mess I’d made of my life, and of Eric’s.