by Gwen Florio
No wonder the armies of Genghis Khan and all the other invaders who followed had been so bloodthirsty, Martin thought as he craned his neck, seeking a wider view of the brown, crumpled landscape through the inadequate window of the blue-and-white UN shuttle to Kabul. Coming from a land such as this, the sight of the water and greenery that bespoke the alien concept known as ease must have maddened them, made them crazy to have it for themselves.
Liv leaned past him. “It’s so barren. How can anything live there?”
“If you believe the reports, half the Taliban live there somewhere. Osama is probably looking up at our plane right now.” Martin thought back to his glib commentaries, in which he’d so lightly dismissed the Taliban. Now, as the plane droned above their rumored stronghold, he wondered if he had discounted them too easily. He couldn’t imagine so much as a woody shrub or a blade of tough mountain grass surviving in such a landscape, let alone the ragged remnants of an army. Yet the regular dispatches that showed up in Face the Future’s secure mail bag told him the blank landscape below crawled with fighters and “entrepreneurs,” as the warlords had so quickly renamed themselves when they returned with comical ease to their old habits of smuggling opium across arbitrarily drawn national borders. More than opium, Martin reminded himself. There were reports of weapons transports, as the strongmen hastened to round up old Soviet armaments and bartered enthusiastically for the American hardware so temptingly displayed by the U.S. troops who searched the country in their heavily armed convoys. Even without the cautionary briefings at Face the Future, Martin was well aware of what such munitions, so much more accurate than their workmanlike but outdated Soviet counterparts, could do in the wrong hands.
The sound of the plane’s engines deepened. Liv rapped at the window. “There it is.”
The blue-tinged mountains caught his attention first, thrusting above the haze of the city, as if floating against the pale sky, their peaks—higher and more jagged than the Spin Ghar—washed with white. He focused his attention downward with difficulty. The city rose to meet them. From above, it seemed orderly, neat grids cut by wide, angled boulevards, but as the plane drifted lower, Martin saw block after block of low mud homes interspersed with acres of bombed-out wasteland. Despite the mountain snow, Martin had been assured temperatures already were beginning to climb toward Kabul’s searing summer.
He touched his hand to the front of his jacket and felt the crackle of paper in the breast pocket within. As he was leaving the Islamabad office, Mrs. Khan had thrust a sealed envelope into his hand. “I would normally have given this to your wife, but I fear things are different there. One woman giving printed material to another may be suspect, even now. You must give this to your interpreter.” Her voice caught. She turned and walked rapidly away.
Somehow, through the mysterious channels by which so many things seemed to be accomplished, Mrs. Khan had used her connections to arrange for her sister to work as the interpreter in Face the Future’s Kabul office.
“We are an organization that works with women. We cannot approach them with male interpreters,” Pervaiz explained. “We’re lucky to have signed this woman. It’s quite difficult to find an educated female there, especially one whose family is willing to let her work with foreigners.”
The plane touched down before Martin was prepared for the jolt of being earthbound. Liv gathered her things. The runway ran through a graveyard of rusting aircraft, their metal skins pierced by shrapnel, nose cones shot away. The plane rolled up to a low concrete building, its walls bearing the long raking scars of automatic-weapons fire.
The Boy Wonders had stuffed his head with names, with numbers, with images of weapons, static on the screen, preparing him for everything but the devastation those weapons could cause.
“Good God,” he said.
Liv stood, waiting for him.
Martin forced himself from his seat, fighting an urge to stay put until the plane taxied back down the runway, lifting itself out of this mad place and speeding back to the reassurance of Islamabad’s tedious inefficiency. He motioned to the other passengers to go ahead of them. A refrain ran through his head: What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?
He must have spoken it aloud because Liv turned back to him. “You’re about to find out.”
* * *
“It is a most modern home.”
Ismail, one of the local employees at Face the Future’s Kabul office, showed Martin and Liv around their new home in the organization’s compound. Martin thought that at least Ismail’s appearance was reassuring, even if nothing else about Kabul was. The man was tall and lean, with a neat beard and a thatch of coarse black hair above expressive eyes, everything Martin had remembered of Pashtuns from those long-ago meetings. Kabul was higher, and correspondingly colder, than Islamabad, and Ismail wore a woolen waistcoat over his shalwar kameez. More than anything, he had a solemnity that Martin found refreshing after the garrulous criticism so freely offered by Pervaiz.
Ismail had coolly negotiated the drive from the airport into the center of town, making relaxed small talk as the car dodged a variety of vehicles and pedestrians that made the chaotic streets of Islamabad seem orderly in retrospect. As in Islamabad, the cars were British-style, with the steering wheel on the right, but the traffic lanes used the American system, or at least Martin thought they did. Actually, it seemed to him as if nobody made an effort to keep to the proper side of the road, and it cost him a great effort not to close his eyes against imminent disaster as Ismail whipped the car around the teetering overloaded buses, donkey carts, and bicycles carrying entire families, the women’s blue burqas spreading like sails in the backwash of passing vehicles.
Face the Future’s compound was in Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul’s best neighborhood, Ismail told them with a bit of a flourish. So Martin tried to hide his apprehension at the sight of the small cinder-block house, its stone floors bearing the streaks of an indifferent attempt at cleaning. Rolled-up rugs leaned against the walls.
“Western-style dining room.” Ismail stood beside a wobbly table and chairs. He led them up a narrow staircase. “Real bed.” A lumpy mattress topped a plywood frame. “View of courtyard.” He pushed aside a sheer curtain that did little to deflect the blinding sunshine pouring through the dirty glass. Martin stepped to the window. The roof over the kitchen formed a balcony of sorts. Below lay a courtyard of bare earth bordered by a few anemic rosebushes, leaves white with dust.
“And finally,” Ismail’s voice rose in excitement, “real WC.” He held open the door to a closet-size room that indeed featured a toilet, its bowl stained orange, beside the more traditional hole in the floor. A green plastic pitcher with a long spout sat beneath a faucet in the wall. Higher up the wall, directly above the faucet, was a rusty showerhead. There was no separate stall or even a curtain, just a drain in the floor. Martin thought longingly of the palatial bathroom at the Marriott.
“Well,” he said into the silence. “This will be—”
Liv broke in. “This will be very fine.”
She did not look directly at Ismail. Sometime before she’d left the plane, she’d tucked all of her hair beneath her dupatta and wound it around her neck so that it wrapped her face, nunlike, giving her eyes extra prominence.
“Dera manana, Ismail.” She used the Pashto phrase for thanks. They had learned just a little of the language before leaving. Martin missed his facility with Urdu but knew it would be of little use in Kabul, where the main languages were Pashto and Dari and smatterings of Russian, a remnant of the Soviet invasion. Not for the first time, Martin regretted his failure to learn more than the basics of Pashto years earlier. But the country had been at war for so long that his college adviser had insisted that Urdu, Pakistan’s main language, would be far more useful.
“I understand there is someone to teach us Pashto,” he said to Ismail as his new employee led them from the house.
“The interpreter is coming here this morning to meet you. I believ
e you already know her connection in Islamabad.”
“Yes. Mrs. Khan assured us she would be most helpful.” He sighed inwardly, imagining another lumpish, bossy female. He’d never understood why Liv was so taken with Mrs. Khan. He dreaded spending hours cooped up learning Pashto with someone just like her.
“Ah,” said Ismail. “Here they are now.”
They?
The corrugated metal gates to Face the Future’s compound swung open, revealing a couple chatting with the Kalashnikov-toting guards who flanked it. Rather, the man spoke. A woman stood silent behind him, draped in the ubiquitous blue burqa that had shrouded the few women Martin had seen on their ride into town from the airport. Ismail called to them. The man turned away from the guards and stalked toward them, the woman following more slowly behind. Martin wondered how she could see to walk at all, tangled as she was in all that fabric. The cement sidewalk bordering the courtyard was broken and uneven in spots, and Martin watched in fascination as the woman approached, placing her feet firmly on the level spots, even though she couldn’t possibly have seen them. He noticed that she wore fashionable patent-leather pumps, filmed though they were with the dust that gave Kabul’s air a fuzzy, filtered quality. She must have been able to see him staring, because she flicked her burqa in such a way that only the very tips of her shoes protruded from its narrow pleated folds.
“This is your interpreter,” Ismail said. “She will teach you Pashto. I think you will find her very helpful.”
“A salaam alaikum.” Martin held out his hand to the woman’s husband, who like Ismail was very nearly Martin’s height, and strongly built, but with a more guarded expression.
“Ve alaikum salaam.” The man touched his fingertips to Martin’s. He glanced toward Liv, and it seemed to Martin that his expression softened at the sight of her attire. Liv made her salaam but kept her eyes fixed on the ground.
The man spoke to Ismail. “He says that his wife, like yours, is a very modest woman.” Without waiting for a response, Ismail talked for some moments with the man, who fixed Martin with a skeptical, almost angry, gaze. “I told him,” Ismail said, “that Face the Future is a program for the betterment of Afghan women. That within these walls, the strictest proprieties are observed. That here, no woman, most certainly not his wife, will ever be disrespected in any way.”
Martin wondered what the husband might think if he knew more about Face the Future’s stated agenda of better health care, education, and jobs for Afghan women—a job Clayton Williams reassured him superseded the other goals he’d been given—the unspoken assumption being that those things would help them become less dependent on their men. But the man strode back down the path without a word to his wife or anyone else. Martin noticed, though, that he raised his hand to brush his wife’s elbow as he passed, and he also noticed how she leaned into that barest hint of a touch. But that seemed so unlikely he thought maybe he had imagined it.
They entered the small office building where they’d do most of their work during the two-year contract. The interpreter stood by in silence as Ismail made introductions. The permanent staff was small and all-male. The only women in the room besides Liv and the new interpreter were a couple of German girls on loan from another NGO, there to set up the record-keeping systems and databases, jobs that Martin planned to assign to Liv. They pulled Liv aside, leading her to a computer that looked to be a decade old. Watching them, Martin wished that Face the Future’s administrators had not been so set on relying on locals. He understood the philosophy behind it, but even in Islamabad, whenever he came into contact with people from other NGOs, he was struck by the camaraderie of their staffers, the reassurance they obviously felt in working with their own countrymen amid such pervasive strangeness. The German girls laughed easily together as they showed Liv how the computers and other appliances in the office were hooked into jury-rigged extension cords that ribboned behind the desks and disappeared through a window, where a steady chugging and faint gasoline fumes announced the presence of a generator.
Martin rubbed his hands together after the introductions. He would hold a staff meeting at the end of the day, he told everyone, after he’d had time to look things over. In the meantime, since the tutor was present, he and Liv would start this and every day with a language lesson.
“Shall we go to my office?” He pointed to the walled-off space at one end of the room. “Liv will join us when she finishes with the computer.”
The interpreter flinched visibly beneath her burqa.
Ismail stepped to Martin’s side. “It would not be proper for her to be alone with you there. I will bring tea,” he added, turning to the region’s default handling of awkward situations.
“But to work out here will be impossible.” The building’s main room was small, with several conversations going on simultaneously. A clerk shouted into a satellite telephone in a mixture of Dari and Pashto, while another wrote a report laboriously on a manual typewriter, striking the keys with—so it seemed to Martin, long accustomed to the quiet clicking of a computer keyboard—unnecessary force. The German women conferred in their own language, then helped each other translate their instructions into English for Liv. The generator rattled beneath the window.
“You will just have to concentrate. Perhaps it will help you learn.”
It took Martin a moment to realize that the low, melodic voice had come from within the burqa. The folds of blue cloth shifted in what to Martin seemed like impatience. “Shall we begin?” She moved toward an old Formica table that Ismail had hopefully identified as the “conference center” where one could speak with visitors. The front of the burqa briefly parted to enable her to lift a tote bag crammed with papers onto the table.
“Wait,” said Martin. “I can’t work if you’re going to wear that. No one else here is covered,” he added, aware that even to his own ears, he sounded petulant. The other women wore only light scarves, and Liv, as soon as Ismail had departed, loosened her own dupatta around her face.
“But of course. I think we must make a study of culture as well as our language. The burqa is for use in public only. At home, a woman does not have to fear seeing strange men. Her husband or her father would take great care to make sure such a thing never happened.”
“In this office,” Martin said, “we are not strangers. We are colleagues.”
“Yes,” the woman agreed. “There are gray areas, and the office is one.” She slid the garment over her head in a single motion, draping it carefully over the back of a chair.
Martin exhaled slowly.
He’d thought her bulky, but attributed that girth to the packet she’d held beneath her burqa, now clasped to her midriff like a shield. This woman was as slender and graceful as one of the poplars bending so prettily before the harsh gusts scouring Face the Future’s courtyard. Her hair, wound into an artful bun, was covered by a sheer white drape that set off the darkness of her wide eyes and the deep color she’d applied to her generous mouth.
“So very nice,” Martin heard himself say, then hastily added, “to make your acquaintance.”
He touched his hand to his jacket pocket, feeling the letter. He crossed his arms in front of his chest as if to hide it. The letter could wait.
“Perhaps,” the woman said smoothly, sitting and gesturing that Martin should do the same, “we will begin with introductions. I will speak in Pashto and then in English.
“Zema num Farida dai. My name is Farida.”
Twenty-Two
KABUL, APRIL 2002
The poverty that had so dismayed Liv in Islamabad seemed quaint compared to the desperation confronting her each day in Kabul.
Before, she’d pitied the burros that plodded beneath towering loads of bricks. In Kabul, men stacked the bricks into slings, hoisted them onto their own backs, and staggered down the street. Children barely older than toddlers collected burlap bags full of the brittle leaves that dropped from Kabul’s scrawny trees, an activity that bewildered Liv until Farida c
ommented that it was a pity it took so many sacks to sustain a fire long enough to cook a single meal.
“They cannot afford coal or even sticks,” she said. The widows were the worst, drifting ghostly in cheap, tattered burqas, seemingly everywhere in the city racked by a quarter century’s unceasing warfare, their wretched lives made even more hopeless when the Taliban arrived and forbade women to work. “After that, if they had no families to take care of them, they begged. Or the ones young enough sold themselves.” Farida went hoarse with embarrassment as she explained the situation to Liv. “You understand, of course, that the punishment for prostitution is death. So if a woman displeased a client or, more likely, someone decided he didn’t want to pay, or give her a bit of food, he could report her crime with no real fear of retribution to himself.”
Liv thought of her life in the sheltered embrace of the college campus, first as a student, then a researcher and Martin’s wife. Of the things in that universe that depended upon the whims of men. A door held open for her, or not. A date. A promotion. In this world, a woman’s very life could turn on whether a man had had a bad day. “How do they stand it?”
Farida tapped Liv on her head, then her chest. “You play a role. You learn to lie. You turn these—your head, your heart—into stone, into ice.”
But surely the years of poverty would grind stone into dust; the scorching glare of oppression would evaporate ice? Liv kept this thought to herself.
Farida ran her hand over her face as if wiping away a troubling memory and, her tone lighter, reminded Liv that the United Nations managed to alleviate the situation in a few cases by negotiating an agreement with the Taliban that permitted widows to work in United Nations–funded bakeries, as long as no men were present.
Liv and Farida were on their way to one of those bakeries. Martin had come out of his office to see them off, puffed with the false heartiness he assumed around Farida. “You ladies have fun,” he almost shouted, his face reddening. “Stay safe.” He held an envelope in one hand.