by Gwen Florio
He stopped and looked toward the closed gate. He could see the guard’s sandaled feet in the gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground. Maybe this would be the day he ventured beyond it. Oh, he’d been out—but nearly always within the confines of the car, accompanied by Ismail and one of the guards, on his visits to the other NGOs or the UN. Sometimes he and Liv went to one of the restaurants frequented by foreigners, which guaranteed a contingent of aggressively armed guards, hired by a proprietor eager to protect the influx of Amriki dollars. Early on, he’d even forced himself to stroll along the relative safety of Chicken Street, whose antiques shops and galleries only tourists could afford. He shoved his hands into his pockets to still his trembling fingers and clamped his arms tight to his body to conceal the damp patches widening beneath them. He’d be fine, he told himself. After all, he’d been in the shit.
But even with Ismail on one side and the guard on the other, so close their arms sometimes brushed his, he couldn’t shake the memory of that day in Aabpara Market. Shut up, Amriki. The rough hand on his elbow, the rush past the stalls whose shopkeepers turned away so as not to see.
“Let’s go,” he snapped at Ismail, who was steering him toward a display of conflict rugs, those prayer-rug–size floor coverings adorned with tanks and helicopters, beloved by journalists and aid workers as souvenirs.
“But—”
“Now.” Just because he’d been in the shit didn’t mean he wanted to chance it again. A child approached, palm up, mouth curved down. Eyes beseeching. “Mister, please.”
Martin remembered the jeering swarm that had set upon him in Aabpara, the fingers in his pockets. Were the boy’s cohorts waiting around a corner, betting on their ability to distract Ismail and the guard? Worse yet, what if the boy was a decoy, sent unknowing by an entrepreneurial father or uncle, someone more practiced in kidnapping than the trio in Aabpara?
“Now.”
But there was no escape the next day, when an officer from ISAF showed up without warning at Face the Future’s door. The Boy Wonders had taught Martin all about matériel but neglected to throw in a session on military rank, so Martin had no way of deciphering the brass on the shoulders, the hardware on the chest, knowing only that it signaled Importance.
“Tea!” Martin shouted unnecessarily to Ismail, already assembling the cups and the tray. The lieutenant—major? captain?—cut his eyes toward Ismail. Martin got the message and waved Ismail away. The officer pulled out a flask, dosed the tea, and got down to business.
He established that Clayton Williams, Martin’s stateside supervisor, was a mutual acquaintance. He established that it was ISAF’s business not only to train Afghan troops but also to protect the interests of the United States. He established that the NGOs were invaluable partners in that enterprise.
“Anything I can do to help,” Martin interjected. He tried not to gulp his tea, with its welcome enhancement.
“Your reports,” the officer said, and Martin knew better than to ask how he’d seen them, “they could use more detail. So much information about families. About women. But nothing of what the men are up to.” He eased the flask from his starched shirt pocket and raised an inquiring eyebrow—a test, maybe.
Martin thought he should decline a second splash. He pushed his cup forward, anyway. He’d dropped clumsy hints to Liv—“Ask them if their husbands have any way of protecting them”—but so far, she’d yet to mention as much as a Kalashnikov in any of the places she visited, let alone the more lethal hardware of such intense interest. The officer had said he knew Clayton Williams. But did that mean he knew everything?
“Yes, very little about the men,” Martin said carefully. “After all, our job is to help the women.”
The officer paused, holding the flask above Martin’s cup. “Let’s cut the bullshit.”
Martin hitched his chair forward. A rebuke almost certainly awaited. He wasn’t delivering the goods they wanted—and now he knew they included ISAF. But there’d be a certain relief in frank censure. He’d thought academia was all bullshit, but it was nothing like this world of opacity he’d entered upon landing in Pakistan and now, here, where every sentence carried indecipherable meaning, every action the risk of being misunderstood. Finally, someone who would talk straight.
“The women.” Whiskey glugged into the half inch of tea left in Martin’s cup. The officer made as though to pass over his own, but at the last minute his hand jerked, a few drops added. His hair was iron and his skin coppered by the sun, and his blue eyes had the hard stare of too many of the people Martin had met here. “Equal rights. In this place. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Maybe not equal.” Martin sipped at tepid liquid that nonetheless burned. “But better. We at least have to try.”
The officer grimaced. “Oh, we’ll build a few schools, invite the reporters in as soon as they open, and pray to God they don’t come back a few weeks later to find the building bombed and the teachers killed and all the girls gone to who knows where. Women.”
He spat the word like a curse but looked more exhausted than angry. “Of all the insoluble problems in this place, we’ve got to solve the bigger ones first. Any information we can get helps. Any. And we need it yesterday. You understand?”
Martin understood. But as much as he pushed Liv to ask the questions he provided, her accounts remained frustratingly vague. A few days after the officer’s visit, he called up Liv’s most recent report on his computer, scanning past the usual details of too many children and too little food. His gaze snagged on a phrase.
“Husband absent.”
Martin’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He thought of what he knew of Afghanistan, of what he’d learned since arriving. The NGO gossip network buzzed with news of insurgent activity, tidbits that could save a life if they meant a trip postponed, a route changed. What had he heard lately? Something about the border, beyond Kandahar, a place with a strange name. He closed his eyes until it came to him. The keys clattered as he typed by touch.
“Husband gone to Spin Boldak, along with other men from community. No word on return date.”
He opened his eyes, checked for typos. And hit Send.
Twenty-Four
The blue metal gates to Face the Future’s compound swung open.
Gul, watching from a half block away, shook Nur Muhammed awake. Together they peered through the smeared window of the ancient Lada they had borrowed from one of Nur Muhammed’s employees. A white Toyota sedan pulled through the gates and nosed into traffic. Gul stepped on the accelerator, swerved to avoid a horse-drawn cart, and drew nearly even with the Toyota.
“Hssst. Not so close. They’ll see us.”
“What if they do? To them, we all look the same. Farida heard That Man say so.” It still was an effort, even after so many months of marriage, to speak so familiarly of his wife to his father.
“But the driver.”
“He is new. They fired the old one. He was Hazara, but the guard was Tajik and refused to work with him.” Nur Muhammed nodded understanding. Only foreigners would be so stupid as to pair members of the two groups, one Sunni, the other Shi’a, enemies from the beginning of time.
“They go now to the United Nations,” he told Nur Muhammed. “That Man prepares a packet of information that no one else sees, and he takes it himself to the UN.”
“Maybe he should get the UN to give him one of its cars.”
Face the Future’s car was small and dented, more like most of the other vehicles on the street than the UN’s shiny Land Cruisers that careened through Kabul, outsize antennas waving aggressively, scattering lesser vehicles in their paths. The Toyota Taliban, people called them. Griping about the United Nations was a favorite pastime, not only among Afghans but also by members of the smaller NGOs that lacked a worldwide cash flow.
“They have heat in the UN offices, even in deep winter,” Gul said now, repeating some of the things that Farida had told him. “Only the finest carpets on their floor
s, carpets that mysteriously disappear when someone goes back to his own country. But new carpets always come. All of their offices have running water. And those European-style WCs.”
“I never liked those. They are unclean. There is no way to wash afterward.”
Gul himself had never seen such a toilet until his family moved to Pakistan, and then only in the hotels catering to foreigners. It confused him, the way one perched upon them and did one’s business from a great height, and how afterward they roared and swirled with water, but that there was no separate water with which to adequately clean oneself, just paper. Farida had confided to him that the ones in France were much better, with a sprayer any civilized person would find a comfort.
“Hurry. That way,” cried Nur Muhammed as the car made a turn. Gul sped up to catch it, making sure he was following the right vehicle. Kabul was full of white Toyotas. Nur Muhammed craned his neck, looking back toward the street they’d just left. “But the UN is there. Where are we going?”
Gul squinted down the long boulevard, through the ever-present haze of dust and smog that blurred the outlines of the bulky green trucks at the far end of the road. “He’s not going to the UN after all. He’s going to ISAF.”
* * *
They waited two hours, Gul shifting to stay alert in the sweltering car, Nur Muhammed dozing beside him.
Gul lowered his own eyes, letting his mouth fall open slightly, feigning sleep as yet another military truck rattled through the gates, raising choking clouds of dust. Gul fought an urge to raise the window. Even with it lowered, the car was an oven. Through the open gate, he glimpsed men in drab uniforms moving purposefully about. The gate clanged shut, too late to block Gul’s flash of envy at the plenty within—the soldiers’ expensive boots, their matching uniforms, and their gleaming new weapons, not the ubiquitous Kalashnikovs, dull and pitted from years of abuse in the desert, seemingly carried by every male over the age of twelve in Afghanistan.
He jerked in his seat, yanked from true sleep by the clanking gate. Nur Muhammed’s words reached him, insubstantial as smoke. “He comes now. Don’t move.”
Martin and a man in uniform approached the gate. They spoke, voices loud. The man in uniform shook Martin’s hand, slapped him on the back, grinned, and said something in English.
Gul rolled the unfamiliar syllables in his mouth, memorizing them. He would ask Farida what they meant.
The men moved out of sight. A car started. A few moments later, it emerged through the gate. Again Gul followed, but it returned to Face the Future with no further stops.
Martin never went to the UN that day at all.
* * *
“Gujabadi?”
“Something like that.” Gul had recited the ISAF officer’s words to Martin in his head all day, burning the sounds into his brain. Now he whispered them in the dark, his lips to Farida’s ear.
It was late, and they had already loved each other that evening. But Gul fought to stay awake afterward, not wanting to waste their private time together in sleep. The morning would come quickly enough, and with it the obligation to go their separate ways during the day, Gul with his father, Farida to her job at Face the Future, or more often than not these days, into the courtyard with Maryam and the aunties, who hovered ever closer, protective of her advancing pregnancy. The house was always crowded. This time, Nur Muhammed had not repeated his mistake of going to Kabul in isolation, but instead had persuaded several relatives, and all of their family members, especially the young men, to come with him from Jalalabad.
“Gujabadi.” Farida’s earlobe brushed his mouth as she shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like English. Say it again, slowly, please.”
He did. She repeated it. “Gu. Ja. Ba. Di.”
“Not exactly. The last two faster, I think. The second, louder.”
“Gu. JA. Badi. Gu JA. Badi . . . Oh!” She laughed, burrowing her head against his chest to muffle the sound.
“What? What is so funny?”
“I just figured it out. ‘Good job, buddy.’ ” She translated it for him. “Where did you hear that?”
“On Chicken Street,” he lied.
“Ah. Well from now on, whenever one of Those People says those words, I shall think gujabadi.” A peal of laughter escaped.
“You make fun of me. You are not a respectful wife.” He shrugged her away and turned his back, maintaining his mock anger just long enough for her to put her arms around him, pull him to her, comfort him with kisses, and more and more, until once again they lay sweat-slicked and smiling.
“Do you know who truly has no respect?” Farida whispered.
“Who?”
“That Man. He does not respect his wife.”
“How does he disrespect her?” Gul shifted, solely for the pleasure of feeling their bare bodies slide against each other. He eased his hand over her hip to her belly, still moist, and ran his fingers across its taut, rounded surface. “Is my son asleep?”
“Almost. Here.” She put her hand on his, guiding it to the fluttering within. “When I am as big as this house, will you still lie with me like this? Besides, how do you know that it’s a boy?”
Gul ignored her and returned to his question. “Does he beat her?”
“The British and the Amriki, they don’t beat their wives. No, they are cruel to their wives in a way that I think hurts worse than hitting.” She rolled on her side and put her arms around his neck and told him how foreign men would talk about their wives right in front of them as though they weren’t there. “They say the most awful things and then laugh as though it were a joke.” She told him how Liv’s eyes went dark with pain when Martin did this and how, even though Liv was a tall woman, she somehow became smaller and smaller as Martin spoke.
“What does he say?” Gul was nearly asleep. But his father would give him no rest in the morning if he did not bring new information, and the only way to get it was to talk first of things of no consequence. It was important that Farida be seen as useful, even if that meant continuing her odious work for the foreigners. He saw how his father looked at Farida, his gaze cold, assessing. Gul was sure he was recalling the crushing bride price that had gotten him what, exactly? Nothing made Nur Muhammed angrier than a bad bargain.
So Gul questioned Farida nightly and hoped to persuade his father of her continued worth. “Does he laugh at her? Is it because she is barren?” Liv and Martin’s lack of children was the subject of endless speculation, especially considering that Martin had not divorced her and taken a new wife years ago, the only reasonable response to such circumstances.
“Nothing so terrible, at least not on the surface. He makes fun of how she likes to wear our local dress and eat our food. He says the lamb makes her fat. It’s just the way he says it. I don’t like it. Sometimes I think our way is good, with the men and women apart so much. A man can’t talk about his wife then. To say such things, especially in front of another woman . . .” Her voice trailed off and her arms slackened their gentle hold.
He shifted again, forcing her to return to wakefulness. “Surely he doesn’t spend all day making fun of his wife.”
“No. He sits at his desk and writes reports. That’s a fancy way of saying he doesn’t do much. She goes around town with me, talking to women all day long, but he never seems to want to hear what she has to say.”
Gul held his breath, then exhaled, trying to sound natural. “What are his reports about?”
Farida spoke slowly, with an edge of thoughtfulness to her voice. “History mostly. But not long-ago things. Recent times. He asks about it all the time. Who was aligned with whom when the Taliban were here. Where they stand now. The strength of their factions.” She paused, speaking even more slowly. “Where they are headquartered. What weapons they are likely to have. He says it helps him to understand Afghanistan, why we are the way we are. I think it does help him understand, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the women they say they are trying to help.”
Good job,
buddy.
“Gul? Gul. What’s the matter?”
He didn’t even have to lie. “Are you alone with him when he asks you these questions?”
“Of course not. That would be wrong.”
Gul told himself he imagined the hesitation before her reply. He turned onto his stomach and feigned slumber. But he felt her next to him, as tense and awake as he.
Twenty-Five
Gul thought it was unfair that just as he was learning to take such delight in his wife, Nur Muhammed finally brought him fully into his work.
The next morning, an embarrassed servant shuffled and coughed outside the door until Gul emerged to the unwelcome news that Nur Muhammed again demanded his company on business, earlier than usual this time. Nur Muhammed had made several recent trips of some length, traveling not just beyond Kabul but also—as he told only Gul, brushing aside Maryam’s anxious queries—out of the country, to Syria and once even to Saudi Arabia, returning tense and purposeful, though largely uncommunicative. He’d acquired a satellite phone and despite the exorbitant per-minute cost conducted long conversations almost nightly, out of earshot of the rest of the household, whose members grumbled about the phone’s priority status on the generator.
They kept those thoughts to themselves, though, mindful of the sudden flow of luxuries into their midst, the prime cuts of lamb and goat available at every evening meal, thick new Baloch carpets that replaced ones threadbare from years of use, and—Maryam’s pride—a washing machine imported from Turkey, one that required a generator recharge to get through an entire cycle, its rattle and shake so alarming that the neighborhood children shrieked and ran away.