by Gwen Florio
She sat in the dark, studying the glowing screen.
Then she moved her cursor to the end of the sentence and tapped Delete until the screen was blank.
Twenty-Six
KABUL, MAY 2002
Farida knew something of the men’s plan, of course.
She found it simple to do her mending or to knead dough or otherwise occupy herself with some small task just behind the curtain that separated the women’s quarters from the men’s when Nur Muhammed held rare meetings in the house. Maryam was usually busy during these visits, supervising the preparation and serving of food. Bibi was always elsewhere, caring for her children and astutely avoiding Maryam in the process. Farida easily worked in relative solitude, alert to the conversations in the next room, the memory of Nur Muhammed’s words fresh in her mind: We are seeking a target. We have a possibility.
Her salary from Face the Future, which disappeared weekly into the pouch beneath Nur Muhammed’s kameez, was no doubt going to bolster his operation—as well as the information she passed to Gul, each pretending to the other that their conversations were merely casual. She ground the heels of her hands into the dough at the men’s big talk, made possible only by her work. Her work. Always before—as an interpreter in Islamabad before her marriage, and even as a fixer of sorts for Liv—in a subordinate role. But now everything hinged upon her. Even Nur Muhammed acknowledged her presence, according her a brief, grave nod just minutes earlier as he passed on his way to the men’s sitting room.
Her kneading stilled as the men’s voices rose, each trying to outdo the other with suggestions that would guarantee glory. Bitter pride welled within Farida.
She was as much a fighter as all of them. Without her—a woman—those men had no plan.
It was the same with Martin and Liv, Martin taking credit for the information gleaned during Liv’s excursions, while he compiled those reports of which he talked so much but revealed so few details. The longer she worked at Face the Future, the more Farida thought she knew exactly what Martin was up to. And when she was certain, that knowledge, too, would be handed off to Gul, details that would steer Nur Muhammed and his men toward a time when Martin would most likely be alone in the office.
Likewise, she fought the temptation to ask Liv for access to Face the Future’s computers to send Alia a quick, reassuring email, despite the fact that early on, Martin had stressed that, for security purposes, only he and Liv were permitted to use them. The fewer people with whom she had connections these days, the safer they all would be. “I am stone,” she reminded herself, turning to her sister’s advice. “I am ice.”
She resumed her homely task, digging her thumbnails into the dough’s warm, yielding surface, patterning it with rows of quarter-moons, and imagined shards of metal scissoring the air, embedding themselves deep within Martin’s plump, yeasty form. Her abdomen quivered with a series of swift kicks, almost as though her mujahid son were responding to her thoughts. Farida put her hand on her stomach.
“Soon, my sweet boy,” she said.
* * *
“I have noticed something.”
Farida kept her tone light, striving to sound casual, but not so much that Gul dismissed her entirely. The men had discussed a number of possibilities but, as far as she knew, had yet to settle on a final target. She needed Gul to pay attention to her words, and also for him to believe that she herself had no idea of their import. They were in the market, a rare trip outdoors for her these days. Even within the confines of her burqa, Farida enjoyed the sensation of fresh air—relatively fresh, she reminded herself, as she tasted the pervasive dust mingled with charcoal smoke and dried dung and diesel fumes. Still, it was good to be out among people who ignored her, unlike at home, where her pregnancy made her a constant focus of the women’s attention, which, while pleasing, also could be exhausting.
The aunties pleaded with her not to leave the house. Who knew what could happen, with bombs going off around the city nearly every day and the ISAF troops so jumpy they shot at anything that moved too quickly? But she had learned something from her time among the women, after all.
“You are right, of course.” She allowed her hand to linger over her stomach. “But my husband insists I go with him, and honestly, I must agree. No matter how clearly I tell him what I need, the man would come home with all of the wrong things.” She grimaced at the obvious incompetence of men, earning understanding laughter from the aunties.
Now she lingered before one booth and the next and then the next, beseeching Gul to wander with her a bit longer. “It has been such a while since I’ve been out, other than to go to my job at That Place. Please, I just want to look at everything.”
He obliged, leading between the aisles of waist-high tables presided over by the spice vendors, their wares shaped into conical mounds, the dull gold of turmeric placed for maximum effect between the scarlet peak of red pepper and the olive-green of dried, crushed coriander. The vendor measured a bit of pepper for another woman. Farida sneezed as the breeze carried some of the grains toward her.
“Be careful.” Gul hurried her away. “You’ll hurt the baby, sneezing like that.”
“What are you now, one of the aunties? Shall we admit you to the women’s rooms so that you can sit with us and gossip all day?” She laughed at the scowl that crossed his face.
He strode ahead of her, toward the fabric sellers’ stalls. “What have you noticed?” he called back over his shoulder, reminding her of the conversation she had started.
She moved quickly to keep up with him, holding the burqa’s edges together in front while lifting the hem, but not so much as to expose an ankle, or to give an unthinkable glimpse of calf. She had perfected the sliding gait that let her feel for the broken pavement.
Gul halted before a stall. Maryam had recently expressed such vocal admiration for a certain auntie’s garments, that Farida knew—and now, Gul did, too, because Farida was sure to tell him—that her mother-in-law wanted some new clothing of her own. With Farida’s help, Gul would buy the fabric and then pass it on to Nur Muhammed so that he could make a gift of it to Maryam. All around them, women in burqas zigzagged back and forth between the stalls like so many blue shuttlecocks, shopping in large groups for propriety. The fewer men who could overhear her conversation with Gul, the better, Farida reasoned. She would linger among the fabrics. She signaled to the seller that she wanted to look at several bolts from the back of the stall. As he went to fetch them, she spoke quickly. Nur Muhammed must see but a single target.
“I have noticed that there is only one guard at Face the Future these days.”
Gul’s expression did not change, but she sensed an alertness that had been absent from their casual banter a few moments earlier.
“And that guard,” she continued, “is not armed.”
Gul did not raise his head, addressing his words to the remnants of cloth on the table before them. “He has a gun. I have seen it myself.”
“But the magazine is empty. I have heard the servants talking among themselves. They say Those People are trying to save money. That Those People think no one will attack a charity, anyway, so why bother to spend the money, especially with the staff stealing all the ammunition provided?”
The vendor, his face red with the exertion of carrying so much cloth even a few steps, returned and dumped the bolts on the table with a loud bang and explosion of dust. The women who had flowed toward the stall to examine Farida’s choices, eager to comment upon them and offer advice, backed away, coughing beneath their burqas as the cloth ribboned across the table in a rainbow of hues.
“Aren’t they afraid? Especially given all of the attacks on foreigners these days.”
“They are too foolish to be afraid. They think that because they say they are helping the women of Afghanistan, the Afghan people will be too grateful to hurt them.”
“And do they indeed help them? Send girls to school?”
As he spoke, Farida realized that she had never on
ce heard him voice an opinion on the subject, even though voluble groups of schoolgirls, the younger ones wearing white head scarves, the teenagers in burqas, trooped past his family’s gate every morning.
Even Bibi, who had attended school in Pakistan before her marriage, took an interest in her interrupted studies, asking Farida to help her learn English.
Farida introduced her to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, albeit with unconventional results. “Brillig!” Bibi was apt to utter these days when something went wrong, even though Farida had tried to explain to her that the satisfyingly foreign-sounding word made no sense even to English speakers. Despite the sketchiness of her education, Bibi made rapid progress. She read with a stubby finger running under the lines of strange print in Alice—“left to right, Bibi, left to right,” Farida corrected her tendency to revert to the right-to-left reading of Arabic script. But Bibi always got distracted by the drawings, not so much those of the fantastical creatures but of Alice herself, of her defiant scowl so much like Bibi’s own.
“Ah-lees,” she mouthed, finding the one whole word she knew on page after page. The name was strange to her, but a name was an easy thing to grasp. She struggled, though, with the concept of Wonderland. “A magical place, where people become bigger and smaller, or disappear altogether,” Farida told her.
“A place like this.” Bibi had yet to reconcile this new Afghanistan with the one so dimly remembered from her childhood.
Farida started to disagree, then thought of the book—of the incomprehensible rules confronting Alice at every turn, of the scramble for power, even the threat of beheadings. “Yes. Like this.”
Farida thought Bibi’s headway was an example of what could be accomplished, if only resources were devoted to the effort. But even though Martin and Liv talked and talked about just how much they cared about bettering women’s lives, they had done little, as far as she could tell, to actually further the cause that brought them to Kabul.
“No,” she told Gul finally. “Not a single widow is now working because of them. Not a single girl has received a scholarship to university. They don’t even hire women to work for them.”
“Except for you.” He meant it as a rebuke, she knew.
“Except for me.” Echoed with defiant pride.
In silence, they examined the assortment of fabric before them. Farida slid her fingers beneath a piece of silk and lifted it, seeking to distract him, admiring the easy drape, the shimmering silvery print across a background of deep royal blue. “This, I think.”
He took it from her and held it to the dim light that leaked into the stall’s interior. “Like the stars emerging in the evening sky,” he said with a shy smile.
She turned, delighted, the moment’s tension forgotten. “You are a poet.”
He made no reply, but by his halfhearted argument with the vendor, barely an attempt at bargaining, Farida knew he enjoyed the compliment. “Your mother will be pleased,” she said as the man began to wrap it for them.
“This is not for my mother. This one, maybe.” He patted another bolt and called for the man to cut the appropriate length and wrap it, too, reminding him that a discount was in order because he was buying more than expected. “The blue is for you.” His fingers brushed the small of her back.
She let his touch linger, and then she pulled away, murmuring that maybe they were done shopping for the day and should go home? Quickly, yes? She knew that such talk, the words innocuous, the tone saying everything, both stirred and pleased him, and she wasn’t sure which she enjoyed more—her easy sway over him, or the anticipatory thrill of her own surrender.
* * *
At night, as Gul slept with one hand on her belly, Farida lay awake, the baby tumbling slowly inside her. She thought of a kite soaring through the sky, all smooth motion, endlessly swooping and dipping. She wondered what it was like when a baby swam from the womb into the world, bumping up against hard dry surfaces from which it could not simply float away. She slid her hand beneath Gul’s and pressed down, feeling for the sharp knob of elbow or knee.
This baby would be a new kind of mujahid. Not one who hid in the mountains, always half starved and underequipped, doomed to guerrilla exercises, lucky to survive into his twenties or even thirties with only the loss of a limb to a mine. No, her son—however she might tease Gul, she, too, willed the baby to be a boy—would use his mind to vanquish his foe. Those People.
At the thought of Liv, her features tightened in regret tinged with guilt. Try as she might, she could not consider Liv an enemy. She forced herself to relax. It was important, more now than ever, to present a placid surface. The stronger her discipline, the better her façade. Still . . . Martin. A tremor ran through her. The baby quieted, as though its tiny being focused with her on the important matter at hand. It was difficult to conceal her feelings about Martin.
* * *
“Farida.”
That’s how he summoned her—the disrespectful use of her name. Not even lifting his head to look in her direction, although she saw his eyes following her when he thought she wasn’t looking. The way he called her close to him, sliding documents to one side of his desk so that she was forced to lean over him in order to read them. And always, during these consultations, some sort of personal remark. It had started with her work—comments about her perfect English grammar, her typing skills, the depth of the information presented—but soon the tenor shifted.
“That is an especially attractive shalwar kameez.”
“Thank you. My husband selected the fabric.” She stressed the word “husband” and decided never to wear that particular shalwar kameez to work again. Later, she would not respond at all to such compliments, remaining silent until the topic returned to work. Still, when she least expected it—say, during a review of a nutrition program in one of Afghanistan’s more troublesome provinces—he would lower his voice so that Liv, working at the computer across the room, could not hear.
“Why do you wear your dupatta here, Farida? You have such beautiful hair. Even Liv goes bare-headed in the office.” Farida bowed her head, flushing in shame.
How dare he presume to speak so familiarly with her? She thought of what would happen among Gul’s relatives if a man, a stranger—invited into their home, yes, but not a relative—had approached a woman to say anything at all to her, let alone so obviously lustful a remark. Farida contemplated with fierce enjoyment the mayhem that might follow such an insulting and imprudent action, even as she realized the impossibility of her fancy. No strange man in a Pashtun household would ever encounter any of the women. It was only within the odd arrangements of the foreigners that these things happened.
When she was done with this job, no matter how Nur Muhammed pushed, she would never again work for such people. Gul rarely asked about her family, her previous life in Pakistan, but even his few queries betrayed his fear that she would feel the tug of the worldly life from which he’d taken her. She hoped the vehemence of her desire to end her time at Face the Future would reassure him otherwise.
She stroked her stomach, feeling the waves within. Her son would not be the kind of man who would blame a woman for attracting a man’s attentions. He would have his father’s strength and courage, his mother’s cleverness and compassion. He would outwit his enemies, his own and the family’s.
But until he grew to manhood, she would have to outwit them for him. And she would start, she thought, with Martin.
* * *
“Why do they still need you?” Gul asked as he walked Farida to the gates of Face the Future a few days later. “You yourself said that Those People hardly leave the compound anymore, even to shop on Chicken Street.”
“They are finishing their reports in preparation for one of their meetings with the other organizations. I help with the typing, and I check for the proper use of our languages. He speaks our languages, Urdu well and some Pashto, but makes mistakes when he writes it.”
“Why do they need to learn our languages? Why d
on’t they just stay home and speak their English among themselves?” He changed the subject. “Is the office very crowded?”
Farida tensed at what was surely not a casual question. “Sometimes. Tuesdays, they have a big meeting to plan the week’s work. All of the staff must be there and usually people from other NGOs. This week’s will be the largest yet, with some representatives from the UN. Those People are very nervous, wanting everything in order, so there is more work for me because of it.”
She didn’t have to pass him wrong information about Liv after all. As it turned out, Martin had insisted, over Liv’s objections, that her presence at the meeting was unnecessary. For insurance, Farida planned to arrange a final outing with Liv that day, so that she would be far from the compound.
“Does ISAF accompany the UN?”
She recognized the studied disinterest as he posed the question. It was the same technique she often employed herself. She wondered for a moment whether either of them was fooling the other, and decided it didn’t matter. “That Man has assured them there is no need. That we have our own security guard, who searches everyone entering the office. If you can call it a search. They make me hold open my bag”—she lifted the flimsy plastic bag she carried when she did her marketing—“and they pat down the men.”
“Not the women?”
Farida affected shock. She did not tell him about her visits with Liv to the UN compound, which could afford the luxury of female guards to search women visitors. The women were notoriously thorough, lifting Farida’s pregnancy-swollen breasts and feeling roughly beneath them, ordering her to stand with her legs apart and prodding so deeply at her crotch and between her buttocks that she had felt faint. Still, she had to laugh at the look on Liv’s face after her own session, and the remark she made afterward to Farida: “Even my husband doesn’t touch me like that!”