by Gwen Florio
Farida dared a question. “Who are these people?”
“They are coming to town for the demonstrations. You see what they carry? Those things that look like large dolls? Those are George Bush and Tony Blair. They will burn them today,” Gul said.
Farida sucked in her breath and tried to concentrate on keeping her balance as the car bounced and rattled onward, its occupants jostling against one another. It had been decided that only Nur Muhammed and Maryam, Gul and Farida would make the trip. Bibi, with a new baby, and her family would join them when safety had been established. Despite the discomfort of the ride, the others dozed.
They awoke when the car turned off the road and bumped across a field that climbed steeply toward a grove of plane trees, their pale, peeling trunks ghostly in the wavering lines of the headlights. The car stopped among the trees, well screened from the road below. Farida lingered in the car after the others left.
Again, Maryam pulled at her. “Hurry. Hurry.” The car backed away, carrying with it Farida’s last hopes of escape.
A man waited in the deeper dark beneath the trees. Beside him, a burro dozed. Gul took the rope from the man’s hand. He tugged at it and, after a brief back-and-forth, the burro took a single step forward. “This is for you,” Gul said.
Farida found herself giving grudging thanks for the burqa’s disguising abilities. At this moment, she realized, no one would be able to see the utter stupidity of her expression. Was it a pet? She stretched a timid hand toward its nose. It turned its head away as if bored.
“Please,” Gul said. “Get on. We must be quick. It is for you to ride.”
“But no one else is riding.”
“The others are used to walking. You are not. The way will be rough. It will take some time.” Gul urged the burro still closer to Farida. It lifted its tail and deposited a pile that sat moist and steaming in the chill morning air. Within her covering, Farida felt free to make a face.
“If everyone else walks, I must walk, too. The burro can carry our things.”
Maryam stepped in. “If she wants to walk, fine. But if she falls behind, she rides.”
“I will not fall behind.” No one gave any indication of having heard. Nur Muhammed vanished into the shreds of morning mist. Maryam followed with long, smooth strides despite her limited vision. The folds of her burqa billowed and receded, giving her the appearance of a blue, heavily breathing apparition.
Gul turned to his wife. “Let’s go, then.”
* * *
Farida stepped onto a trail that she couldn’t really see.
She had not yet mastered the art of walking within the burqa, using her feet to sense obstacles. Sharp pebbles bit into the thin soles of her fashionable slippers. She tried walking on the sides of her feet to avoid the pain but twisted an ankle so severely that she stepped normally despite the blisters she felt rising on her heels. She had divided her remaining rupees from Alia into two packets, tucking one into the toe of each shoe, and now they rubbed against her skin.
“Fifteen minutes,” she told herself. She could stand it that long. Besides, wherever they were going could not possibly take more than that. But fifteen minutes passed, and then another fifteen, and after an hour and a half, Farida’s feet blazed as though she had thrust them into the glowing remnants of a cooking fire. The path angled upward, and soon her lungs seared in agony. The others labored ahead of her, breathing audibly, but if anything, moving more briskly than before. Farida credited the excitement of their return to their homeland. She tried to stifle her own gasps. Sweat drenched her forehead. Salty rivulets stung her eyes. She squinted toward the blue mass that represented Maryam and willed herself to think of nothing but following close behind. She was aware of someone beside her but did not dare turn her head to look.
“Are you all right? Do you need to ride?” It was Gul, falling back to walk with her.
“Yes. And, no.” Farida did not trust herself to utter more than single syllables. Still, she needed to know something.
“What”—she drew a breath that she prayed would not come out as a gasp—“are we doing?”
“The border is closed, as you know.” Farida had just enough energy to be annoyed at the fact that he didn’t even sound winded. “So we are crossing it here.”
“Where”—breath—“is here?”
“This is one of the routes my father uses for his . . . his business. The Afridi people along here know us. We will be allowed to pass undisturbed.” Gul had never told Farida exactly what Nur Muhammed did. Her own father had been evasive on the topic, saying only, “a businessman, very successful.” She thought she was beginning to understand.
“Don’t worry.” Gul’s voice sounded far away. The sun was up. Heat radiated from jagged rocks that reared high above them but provided little shade. “Not much longer now. A few more hours, maybe. Cars will wait for us in a safe place.”
Hours? Farida was more inclined to believe him than before. Hours?
With each step, pain radiated from her feet into her hips and the base of her spine. She concentrated on becoming accustomed to it. Just when she thought she had succeeded, a different sensation made itself apparent in her feet, one of moisture. She moved her toes within her slippers, and the sensation spread. Her blisters had begun to burst. Within the next half hour, as her shoes ground her stockings into the raw wet patches on her feet, Farida realized that nothing she had felt before even qualified as pain. She bit her lips, trying to distract herself, but left off when she tasted blood.
She began counting her steps.
When I get to one hundred, we’ll be at the cars, she reassured herself.
Then two hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. Maryam was a blue smear ahead, Gul an occasional voice at her side. She had no idea what he said. She was too busy counting, concentrating on the rhythm of it, a new number each time she moved her right leg forward. They headed downhill, and the momentary relief when the fire in her lungs eased was replaced with a whole new aspect of suffering as her toes jammed repeatedly against her shoes.
Farida breathed and counted, stepped and counted. Sweat soaked her shalwar kameez, dried, and soaked it again. Farida counted. Her stiffened shalwar scraped her soft skin. Farida counted. She breathed open-mouthed, no longer caring whether anyone heard her. Farida counted. She moved on wooden legs, shoving first one rigid limb and then the other ahead of her, rocking sideways with each awkward step. Farida counted.
A new awareness nudged its way into her consciousness, someone grabbing at her. She wrenched herself away, trying to whisper her count aloud through thick and cottony lips so that she would not lose her place in the numbers.
“Farida. Farida.” Gul.
“Where does she think she’s going?” Maryam this time. “The car is waiting for us.”
“Farida. Stop.” Gul stood before her, grasping her elbows. Her legs collapsed. He lifted her, bearing her weight. “Lean on me,” he whispered. “It’s only a few steps.”
As he helped her toward the car, her dangling feet barely brushing the ground, Farida registered a dim surprise at his words. She saw a vehicle before her, and then she was in it, Gul sitting between her and his mother.
“We will go only to Jalalabad today,” he murmured. “We’ll rest there with family a few days, maybe longer, then on to Kabul.” He raised his voice for the benefit of the others. “I think you will find it very beautiful. The Hindu Kush, so high, their peaks so white—you will wonder that you ever found the Margalla Hills remarkable.”
He kept up in that manner for a while, chatting about sights they passed, as though she could see them, as though she were even capable of looking. Every so often, Maryam or Nur Muhammed chimed in, pointing out things they remembered. They rode not in the comfortable sedan that had borne them around Islamabad and Peshawar but in a sturdy Russian jeep whose design gave no thought to comfort but was able to withstand the cruel beating administered by the rock-strewn unpaved road over which they traveled. Gul casually
guided Farida’s hand to a bar over her head.
“Hold on to this,” he said beneath his breath. “If you brace yourself against it, it won’t be so bad.” And so she clung, concentrating on keeping her fingers wrapped around the bar as fiercely as she had counted her steps earlier. At some point, she became aware that the jouncing had stopped, that the jeep rolled along on smooth pavement. Later still, the sides of the road seemed to be closing in on them, and she realized that it was lined with houses.
Gul pried her hand from the bar, whispering, “Jalalabad.”
Eight
PHILADELPHIA, SEPTEMBER 2001
Martin’s face, smeary with ink, peered at Liv from newspaper boxes around town. His voice poured from the radio.
“The myth of the Afghan as a tough, hardened fighter who will keep a multibillion-dollar fighting force at bay is just that: a myth. If we go to war, and I use the term loosely, against Afghanistan, it will be a matter of days, not weeks and certainly not months.”
There were precious few specialists on Afghanistan, and those with the best credentials were so besieged that Martin found himself in immediate and ongoing demand from local reporters willing to overlook the fact that he’d never actually been there. The interviews for the moldering dissertation he’d done on Afghan refugees, parts of which he’d used for an op-ed that ran days after the attacks, had all been done at refugee camps within Pakistan.
Martin had the habitual slump of the tall man, and the years had padded a stomach that pulled him farther forward. But now he threw his shoulders back and moved once again with the confidence that reminded Liv of the rangy, loose-limbed teaching assistant who’d courted her, against the rules, two decades earlier. Accustomed to obscurity ever since, she found herself once again aglow in reflected light.
Her own project was set aside as the college library tried to cope with a rush of students and professors alike researching papers and articles on terrorism, Islam, and countries with a Muslim population.
“Talk with Mrs. Stoellner,” became the library’s mantra. “She’ll know how to help you. Her husband, you know. Did you see him on TV last night?”
At first Liv, who worked in the silence and solitude of near anonymity, didn’t like it. Then she did, cultivating an air of crisp efficiency as the weeks passed after the attacks, one that fell just short of annoyance at yet another interruption, and woe to the students who approached her unprepared. The attention went beyond the professional. Invitations to dinner parties and other events abounded, including one from the endowment-minded college president, who seated Martin between potential donors and prompted him to spin his secondhand tales of Afghanistan.
Liv, inevitably at the far end of the table, found herself flanked by one of Martin’s history department colleagues and a stranger dressed in varying hues of gray. His jacket was gray tweed; his shirt, gray cotton; tie, gray silk; and even—she peeked when she bent to retrieve a dropped napkin—shoes of soft gray leather. Silvery hair and a fussy, clipped mustache completed the effect.
The meal featured the same generic chicken dish that seemed to make its appearance at all the lower-level faculty events. The wine was better, though. The history professor next to Liv maintained a sullen silence throughout much of it, probably unhappy at being relegated to the company of spouses. The Gray Man sat so still that it would have unnerved Liv, had it not allowed her to catch bits of Martin’s conversation.
“And then Mahmoud said—”
“Yes, whole families, babies and all, shot by the Taliban. The faces of the survivors—my God. You never forget that sort of thing.”
The B-listers near Liv eavesdropped openly. Liv strove to play her own part. “My husband,” she said to those around her. “It was so many years ago, but it haunts him still. He couldn’t believe the way the world forgot about Afghanistan. He was so afraid something like this would happen.” After all, she told herself, B-listers had rich friends, too.
She caught Martin’s eye and suppressed a smile at his nod of approval. Early in their marriage, her status as a student and his as an instructor still at the forefront, she’d preened in his company, electrified by the proximity to the sort of ambition she’d never permitted herself, raised as she was to see such naked aspiration as unbecoming. His raw hunger—for her, and for the rest of his life; to move up and out of the small Midwestern college where they met; to establish himself as an expert in regions across the world—awoke in her a sense of possibility both disturbing and thrilling. Then, her friends had reacted with simultaneous disapproval and envy. Now pride bloomed anew within her.
“I suppose he’ll go back there now.”
It was Martin’s fellow professor, his features pinched with the same restless, fretful expression that, until recently, her husband had so often worn. She searched her memory for a name. “Ambitious,” Martin had said. “Wait until he figures out that this place is the express elevator to oblivion.” Jake. That was it. Jake on the Make, Martin called him, for his relentless pursuit of prestige and lissome teaching assistants alike.
“Go back?” Liv asked Jake.
“Over there. To Afghanistan. Well, not there—”
“More wine?” Liv interrupted him, before he could blab to the whole table about the limitations of Martin’s earlier work. Jake’s glass was nearly full. Still, she reached for the bottle.
He waved it away. “I should think he’d want to see things firsthand. For a change.” He raised his voice. “Martin!”
Conversation stopped. Silver clinked against china as someone set down a fork. Liv tried to look a warning toward Martin, but his face was open, unsuspecting, as Jake pulled the pin on his verbal grenade and lobbed it.
“Maybe it’s time for you to actually go to Afghanistan. Put your mouth where your money is.”
“Oh, dear,” the Gray Man whispered.
Jake the Snake, Liv thought. She contemplated bringing her heel down on his instep. Spilling her wine into his lap. But Martin batted the grenade right back. Rather, he deflected it toward the president.
“I couldn’t agree more. Think of the benefit to the college to have one of its professors on scene. Maybe we could work out an exchange with the University of Kabul. They’ll need books, materials. We could lead the way.”
The president offered a tight smile. Liv’s grin to Jake showed no such restraint.
“Right,” Jake muttered. “Like he’d go to a war zone. Like any of us would.”
“Oh, he would,” Liv said, secure in the knowledge that no matter what the president might say in public, he’d never invest that sort of money. “Martin would go there tomorrow if he had the opportunity.”
“Interesting. Are you sure?” A new voice at her elbow.
She’d forgotten about the Gray Man. “Of course,” she lied. “Why not?”
He spoke so softly she had to lean toward him to catch his words. “I’m sure every single person at this table, even our enthusiastic young colleague here, could think of a dozen very good reasons why not.”
The more Jake glowered, the more expansive Liv became. “But those people aren’t my husband.”
“No.” The man blotted his mustache with his napkin, startlingly white against all that gray. “Most assuredly they are not. And what about you?”
“What about me?” Liv returned her attention to the chicken, which had not improved during the interlude. She took a rubbery bite and chewed and chewed.
The Gray Man waited until she’d swallowed. “Would you, too, be willing to go to Afghanistan? To accompany your husband should he find himself with the opportunity?”
The chicken lodged somewhere in Liv’s throat. She ducked her head and coughed. When she raised her eyes, Jake stared a renewed challenge her way. She met his gaze as she answered the Gray Man.
“Martin would go at the first opportunity. And given the chance, I’d go with him.”
Nine
JALALABAD, SEPTEMBER 2001
The jeeps that had brought them
out of the mountains to Jalalabad skirted the edge of town and headed into the countryside, pulling up before a compound with the high mud walls of a fortress.
Men with Kalashnikovs paced before a gate. Bandoliers crossed their chests. Dark eyes flashed a warning beneath elaborately wound turbans. Despite her exhaustion, Farida straightened at the sight of the guards. The men stood aside and waved them through, bowing toward Nur Muhammed as the first jeep passed.
In the confusion of their arrival, it was not so noticeable that Farida needed help getting out of the car. As before, Gul half carried her in a semblance of walking toward the door. She stopped at the pile of shoes beside it. Her own, she knew, would not be easily kicked away. Gul removed his and urged her onward.
“I can’t,” she said, grateful that Maryam was in animated conversation with a crowd that Farida could only assume included more aunties. Was there no end to Gul’s relatives? “My shoes. They are stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“Please, if you can just get me to a place where we can be alone, I’ll show you. I am so sorry.” She knew it would hardly make a good first impression for her to go trooping through this strange house in her filthy footgear.
“Stoop a little.”
She obeyed so that the hem of her burqa covered the offensive shoes. Yet another use for this garment, she thought as Gul hustled her down a hallway and into a room. Where, finally, Farida sank to a thick carpet and lifted the burqa away from her face.
“Show me.”
She raised one of her legs. He took her ankle in his hand and turned it, stopping when she flinched.
“Aah-cha. Wait here. I will be back shortly. I will see to it that no one disturbs you.” Farida closed her eyes, afraid to see what had caused his dismay. She heard tremendous commotion in other parts of the house. Maryam’s voice rose above the others, already giving orders. Gul returned bearing a basin of water and some rags. He took both her feet, shoes and all, and thrust them into the water. “Keep them there.” He disappeared, coming back with another basin of clean water. “I am afraid that this will hurt.”