by Gwen Florio
Jesus, Martin. Liv had dropped her guard when they’d left the college. Now a pretty woman in a veil turned him into a blushing schoolboy. “What’s that?” She pointed to the letter he held.
He looked at it as though he’d forgotten what it was. The paper—thin, grayish, easily torn by a pen—was endemic throughout the region. “This? Something I wanted to show Farida.”
Farida stood near the door, her burqa draped over an arm. She pulled it over her head and adjusted the grille over her eyes. “Now? The driver is already here. But I suppose we can ask him to wait.”
Martin backed toward his office. “No. It’s not important. Never mind.” He slid the envelope into his shirt pocket. “Forget I said anything.”
Liv reminded herself to ask Martin about the letter when she got home. But first, she’d have to survive the trip. She gripped the door handle to avoid being flung forward and back as the driver alternately hit the gas and stomped the brake, occasionally yanking hard at the wheel to avoid hitting something or someone. As usual, cars, trucks, scooters, and bicycles darted about with no discernible regard for orderly traffic flow. Horns blared nonstop, in a cascading series of notes so much more intimidating than the childish beep of cars destined for Western nations. The chaos eased only with the appearance of a dust-colored armored creation that looked like a jeep on steroids. It belonged to ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force purportedly keeping the peace in Afghanistan. Drivers, suddenly respectful, made way. Space appeared. Horns went silent. The vehicle lumbered past, antennas waving as though in greeting.
Farida cleared her throat. “This bakery. It is a replacement.”
The ISAF vehicle swung wide around a corner and disappeared from view. Anarchy resumed. Liv realized she’d been holding her breath, only half listening as Farida explained that the original bakery had vanished some months earlier when an American bomb went astray of its target and landed instead in the warren of hovels across the wide boulevard from the airport, destroying several homes as well as the bakery.
“So the Amriki,” said Liv—how quickly she had adopted the term—“killed the people they were trying to help.”
“Yes. Your army did that.” Your army. The fleeting emphasis of certain words, just short of sarcasm, reminded Liv of Farida’s sister’s mannerisms, and she suggested as much, adding that she thought it odd that she hadn’t gotten even an email from Mrs. Khan since her arrival. But just as Mrs. Khan went silent whenever Liv probed about her mysterious sibling in Afghanistan, Farida now settled wordlessly into herself, not speaking again until they arrived at the blast crater.
They left the car and teetered at the edge, trying to ignore the press of people who, as word whipped through the alleyways that a foreigner was in their midst, jostled for a better view, threatening to send Liv and Farida toppling onto the litter of broken mud bricks below.
The attention, too, was strange for Liv. Although people had stared openly at her in Islamabad’s poorer neighborhoods, she’d drawn barely a glance from the fashionable women focused on the enticing wares in the Blue Zone. But Afghanistan seemed so long cut off from the world by its wars and then the Taliban’s restrictions that many of its people had gone years without seeing a foreigner on television—that being one of the many pleasures forbidden by the Taliban—or even in person.
“Their lives are the same, day after day after day. Their husbands are mujahideen, away fighting, so the women are left to fend for themselves.”
“Mujahideen? Terrorists? Fighting who? Us?” Liv twisted back, looking toward the car parked at the alleyway’s entrance, a distance that suddenly seemed too far.
No mistaking the derision in Farida’s tone now. “You Amriki. Terrorists here, terrorists there, behind every rock, I think.”
Liv thought it best to admit ignorance. “Please. Help me understand.”
Farida’s voice softened. “The mujahideen fight to protect their own—their family, their tribe, their country. Not like”—she glanced around, and whispered—“those crazy Taliban, working to tear down everything, dominate everyone, saying their way is the only way. And not like the true terrorists, seeking to destroy others.” Her chin lifted. “We are proud of our mujahideen. They fight those Taliban trying to return. So we must help their families. All day long, these women scratch and scrape for food to feed their families. The only distractions have been bad things. Like that.” Farida pointed to the pit yawning before them. “Our visit is entertainment for them. And you are the main attraction. Come. We will do our interviews indoors. That will limit the commotion.”
They pushed their way toward the bakery. So many people had come that Liv could no longer see the crowd’s borders, just a sea of burqas flowing through the tributaries of the alleyways, pooling before the bakery. Farida posted the driver in the doorway. “I told him to admit only women.” Liv glanced back and saw a few men, pushing and shoving their shrouded wives into the restive throng.
The interior of the new bakery was dark and warm and comforting, and Liv admired the fast-moving ballet of dough shaped and formed and slapped onto long-handled paddles and thrust into a glowing mud-brick oven.
“They hope to make big sales today because of all the people who are waiting to talk to us,” Farida said.
“Then we must be very thorough in our interviews. The longer we take, the more bread they will sell.” Liv enjoyed such glimmers of complicity with Farida, whose initial reserve she’d found far more forbidding than Mrs. Khan’s frankly overbearing manner. And there was the way Farida scurried away as soon as their work was done each day, nearly running toward the gate where her scowling husband waited.
“Poor thing,” Martin said. “She’s terrified of him. It’s so obvious. That’s why our work is necessary. The more we go among these women and show them there are other ways to live, the more quickly things will change here.”
Our work. Liv had bristled. She was the one actually doing the face-to-face interviews, assignments so immediate and absorbing that she wondered how she’d ever found satisfaction just working at a computer. She didn’t bother correcting Martin’s impression of Farida’s husband. With the composure that Liv had come to expect from local women when they discussed, if at all, their marriages, Farida rarely spoke of him. But when she did, she lingered over the words “my husband,” lips curving upward almost inadvertently. Liv wondered how she herself looked when she mentioned Martin. She deliberately injected his name into the conversation, trying to smile as she did. But Farida’s face became so severe that the attempt faltered. Besides, there was little time for frivolous talk.
Every day, she and Farida interviewed women and girls wherever they could find them: at the university, to which a handful of women had only recently returned, their studies in disarray after the five-year gap of Taliban rule; the orphanages, overwhelmingly populated by girls; and of course wherever there were widows. This bakery, for instance.
“Dera manana,” Liv said to one of the women, accepting a piece of naan, making sure to take it in her right hand. She tore off a piece with her teeth and chewed exaggeratedly, patting her stomach. Tea materialized and she lifted a chipped cup to her lips. The bakers clustered around her with more bread. Liv protested, holding up her pen and pad. There was the usual list of questions. Name. Age. Family situation. How many people in the household. How many children. How many (Liv always hesitated here) other wives. Injuries. Illnesses. Abilities. Skills—the idea being to determine which programs might best serve them. Liv thought that the bakers, despite being widows, were better off than the married women. The bakers, at least, had salaries that allowed them to support themselves, albeit barely. But the married women were dependent upon their husbands for every need, and Liv’s interviews made it clear that all too often, few of those needs were met.
Her interviews ranged beyond the obvious queries. There were other questions, too, ones that Martin had added.
“Ask them,” he said, running his finger down a printe
d list, “about the situation in the neighborhood. With whom their neighbors sympathized during the civil war. During the Taliban rule, too. How did the neighborhood defend itself? Was there a local militia? Is there still?”
Liv thought the questions strange and said as much.
“You mean to tell me that you just walk in and right away start asking them personal questions about themselves?” Martin rebuked her. “Liv, that’s rude, especially in this culture. If you ask them these other things, they’ll see that you care about their lives. They’ll relax, they’ll open up to you. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”
But he didn’t. It was Liv who was out there, doing her job.
Impossible to say that, though, to Martin, who on the rare occasions that she countered his suggestions reminded her of his years of expertise. From books! From reports! From an office within a guarded compound! Liv wanted to shout at him, something she had never done at home and that would be even more unthinkable here, where women rarely spoke up in the presence of men. Besides, the few times she’d broached his questions, the women had gone silent and sullen as Farida translated the phrases so brusquely that Liv could only imagine her words held a command not to answer. But all she said to Martin was, “They seem to prefer talking about themselves.”
Of course they did. Who else ever asked them about what they thought, what they felt? Her interviews often ranged far afield from her prescribed list, though never in the direction Martin sought. In the bakery, one listless wife with dark half-moons beneath her eyes and four children tumbling dangerously close to the oven surprised Liv by saying that she hadn’t minded when her husband took a second wife. She spoke softly, staring at the floor, as Farida translated.
“In fact, she helped him find her. She saw a beautiful young girl around the neighborhood, still too young for the burqa, so that he could see her face, and she said to him, ‘That one. She would be a good wife for you.’ ” Liv started and looked around the room at a girl, a little older than the rest, playing with the children. Liv had assumed she was a sibling or maybe a cousin. The woman, following her gaze, nodded confirmation as Farida continued, “Now he spends his nights with the new wife and this one can rest. Besides, the other wife helps with the children.”
“But she’s just a child herself!”
“No longer.”
Liv looked again at the girl, at the swell of belly beneath her kameez. “How old is the husband?” She tried to keep her voice neutral. The woman and Farida consulted for some moments.
“This is his second family. His first family, his wife and all his children, were killed early in the civil conflict. He was a young man then. He married this one shortly before the Taliban came. Maybe he is about forty?”
“But that girl,” Liv said, trying not to stare, “she can’t be more than thirteen, fourteen.”
“Yes.”
“And he—with her—I mean, look at her.”
Farida stopped translating, but the woman seemed to divine Liv’s thoughts, and spoke for some moments. “Yes, the new wife cried very much at first. Every night, she would try to creep out of the house to get away from him. But now she is accustomed to her woman’s role. And who knows?” Farida lifted an eyebrow as she translated, her voice taking on the sudden hardening of the other woman’s tone. “Maybe someday this girl, too, will go in search of yet another wife to relieve her from her own burdens.”
Liv looked up from her notes. “I never thought of it that way.”
Twenty-Three
Martin hummed as he reviewed his paperwork, the same two lines, over and over again.
“O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, mm hmmm hmmm . . .”
Liv sat across the room and thought about killing him. Or at the very least, finding him a new wife to share her burdens.
Stone, ice. Farida’s advice had become a mantra. Liv forced her mind to the mundane, running down a checklist of delayed tasks.
“The letter,” she said.
“Letter?”
“For Farida. You had one—well, you had something in an envelope you wanted to show her. What was it? Did you give it to her?”
“Oh. That. It’s nothing.”
Flicking away her query, just as he did when she asked him about his report, the big one he’d deliver in a few weeks at a meeting of administrators of some of the NGOs and a commander from ISAF, whose polyglot troops seemed to be everywhere in the center of Kabul and nowhere beyond that. Technically, Liv had contributed to the report. But when she asked yet again to see it, Martin demurred.
“O Livele, O Livele, all things in their good time,” he warbled now, with Christmas still months away. He’d assured her that for him, no matter what words he sang, the tune would always be “Maryland, My Maryland,” the state song of his birthplace. She assured him that she hated it. Yet now he was humming again. Eight notes, then seven.
Liv imagined guns, knives, bare knuckles. She ground her teeth. Lectured herself. This is what bothered her? She spent her days talking to women who routinely tolerated beatings, degradations, second and third wives, and still this silly song drove her to the traitorous thought: If they divorced, she would never have to hear O goddamn Tannenbaum again in her life. The pilaf she’d eaten for dinner churned in her stomach. She coughed.
“Oh, Livele, my Livele, do you need a drink of water?”
If there were a second wife, a younger, subordinate wife, Liv could give her a little push toward Martin and say, “He’s all yours tonight. Him and his humming. For God’s sake, teach him a new song, will you?” She remembered Martin’s colleagues, their various affairs and remarriages, and wondered: All that juggling of wives and mistresses, was it really so different from this system of taking on younger wives as the early ones aged? Her thoughts wandered mutinously further afield, recalling those abandoned faculty wives and her own assumptions about the humiliation they must have felt. What if they weren’t so much ashamed as relieved? Their husband’s shortcomings and imperfections, revealed by long years of marriage, now some other woman’s problem?
“Liv. Liv!”
She looked up and unclenched her hand. She’d been knuckling her fist against her forehead, could feel the mark that must be there.
“Are you all right?”
“Just tired.” The evening call to prayer, broadcast from a nearby mosque, echoed around them. Martin thought it annoying, far too loud and distorted by a tinny sound system, but Liv loved the sinuous melody, and the way the city came to a sudden, hushed halt. “Allahu akbar,” her lips formed the words once, twice, three times, then a fourth. God is greater. “Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah.” Twice. There is no God but Allah.
Martin waited until the last juddering note died away. “Maybe you need a break from the fieldwork. Is that it?”
She blinked back sudden tears. “It’s their lives,” she said when she felt able to control her voice. “What’s Face the Future actually doing with the information we’re gathering? Are they going to help these women? They’re starving.”
* * *
Another day, another interview, another exhausted wife.
So beautiful, Liv had thought when she first met the women of Afghanistan, their features so fine, eyes so prominent, cheeks hollowed in a way that would be the envy of any American model. Which should have been her clue. But she remained oblivious, until the day a woman wrapped her fingers around Liv’s upper arm, sucked in her breath in wonder, then let her hand coast to Liv’s waist, where through the layers of cloth she squeezed a handful of excess flesh.
“Wah,” she breathed, and said something that made the other women in the room lean in close.
Farida translated. “She says she, too, used to be beautiful like you. Nice”—with visible effort, she suppressed a grin—“and fat.”
“Um, dera manana.” Liv coughed her thanks, giving herself a moment to think about a world of plenty that viewed skeletal women as beautiful, and the world in which she now found herself, where a precious
layer of fat bespoke unimaginable security.
“I like your food very much,” she blurted out. “Obviously.” She puffed her cheeks and patted her stomach, earning a round of laughter. “It is so different from what we eat in Amrika. Could you please tell me how you cook your evening meal?”
The woman dropped her hand, sat up a little straighter and, for the first time in the interview, spoke with authority. “You must go to the market and buy an onion, a tomato, a potato. At home you will have some oil and some rice, yes?”
“Ho.” Liv nodded, grateful for the woman’s broadly smiling reaction to even a single word of Pashto.
“You take a handful of rice and cook that first in your pot, and then you put it on the plate. Then you heat the oil in the pot and chop the onion, the tomato, and the potato and stir them in the oil until they are cooked. Then you eat that with the rice. You see? It is really so simple. If you can afford a bit of salt, of course, it will taste better.”
Liv knew the woman was married with several children, despite her youth. A single tomato and potato would hardly suffice for that mob. “And,” she said, her pen scratching fast on the paper, conscious of the other women pressing forward for their turn, “the meat? How do you prepare it?”
Farida translated the question very quietly, and there was a long silence afterward. Liv looked up. When the woman spoke, her lips barely moved.
“There is no meat,” Farida said. “You have shamed her,” she added, telling Liv what she already knew.
Liv apologized. “The shame is on me.”
Farida did not disagree.
* * *
Martin left the house and crossed the courtyard toward Face the Future’s office. One hundred forty-four steps. He’d counted.
The compound’s blue gate stood exactly halfway between the two buildings. Beyond it, the streets of Kabul seethed with car horns and hoofbeats, the singsong calls of vendors, the shrieks of children, and below it all, an indefinable buzz that on his best days Martin took for hope, but on his worst he feared held something darker. A warning.