by Gwen Florio
“Farida. And yours?”
The woman shook her head so vigorously the accordion folds of her burqa swirled about her as she backed away, out into the tumult of the street.
“Farida! We’re leaving.”
Farida slid into the backseat beside Liv but twisted to look through the rear window as the car pulled away, remembering her old game of At Least.
Even in this country of privation, I live a life of ease. At least I am not a beggar woman, depending upon the unreliable kindness of foreigners.
She looked and looked as the car crawled through traffic, but the green burqa had vanished into the throng.
* * *
As soon as they arrived at one of Kabul’s largest markets, Liv leapt from the car and headed for the warren of stalls, the driver and Farida scrambling to catch up, Farida taking her arm, the driver close behind.
“I’m so happy we’re doing this,” Liv said. In Islamabad, she’d found Aabpara wonderfully strange, with its jumble of narrow shops and vivid colors. Now, confronting this new bazaar, Aabpara’s wide concrete walkways and shops in actual buildings seemed as decorous as a suburban shopping mall back in Philadelphia. Here, wooden shacks leaned against one another in the barest semblance of order. Dirt alleyways, narrow and crooked, divided the rows. Liv had heard of Kabul’s main money market in the city’s center, where it was said the equivalent of a million dollars changed hands daily. In this market, a lone moneylender—a sort of satellite office, maybe?—sat before bricks of blue afghanis, hands a blur, the bills snapping like playing cards within them as he counted them out.
“Stay with me,” Farida commanded.
But Liv sensed Farida’s own distraction, her head swiveling in its burqa as she peered this way and that. “Come see.” She tugged at Liv, pulling her toward a garish display of toys, cheap plastic figurines and threadbare stuffed animals, their button eyes dangling, fur stiff with Kabul’s inescapable dust. For a moment, Liv envied Farida’s burqa, fearful her face betrayed her own aversion. She thought of the gifts she’d bought for friends’ babies, Steiff bears from FAO Schwarz, stiff-backed and unsmiling, or the faux-primitive Scandinavian wooden toys painted in primary colors, and of how those friends might have reacted had she shown up with, say, the rayon-clad plastic doll within her crackling cellophane wrapper.
The proprietor immediately detected Farida’s condition despite the burqa. By now, Liv had acquired enough Pashto to get the gist of his words.
“Something for your child. A boy, I am sure.” The ultimate compliment.
He pushed toys to the front of the display. A screaming yellow dump truck, huge, bigger probably than a baby itself. A packet of the ubiquitous green plastic army men, something Liv might have seen in a Walmart at home. Liv imagined them in a baby’s fist, his mouth, the inevitable choking. A collection of knockoff G.I. Joe–type soldiers. Most were white, but one sported a bushy mustache that obscured much of his face; a peaked green cap shaded the rest. Unrecognizable weapons—grenade launchers? something more vicious still?—rested in his jointed arms. Farida’s sigh was light, nearly imperceptible. Her head turned toward a half dozen books barely visible beneath the other toys. Her hand, resting lightly on Liv’s arm, jerked, even as she shook her head and murmured her apologies to the shopkeeper.
Liv composed the sentence in her head, and spoke. “I would like to buy a gift for my friend’s child.” She took a breath, summoning those long-ago lessons with Mrs. Khan, and launched, choosing first the truck, then something equally expensive looking, her voice growing loud, shrill as she berated the shopkeeper in her broken Pashto for the inadequacy of his goods, their unreasonably high prices. Finally, she picked up one of the books. Careless, disdainful.
“This, then. Although it is not adequate.”
And it wasn’t, its pages crudely stitched to the flimsy cardboard cover with coarse black thread, a justification for more arguing. Liv heard Farida chuckling beneath the burqa, before the man finally wrapped the sad excuse for a book in a bit of cloth and tied it with string, muttering darkly below his breath about Amriki who refused to spend their obvious riches.
Farida squeezed her arm. “I am as happy with your bargaining skills as I am with your gift. You do me honor on both counts. My son will start his life knowing the importance of education.”
Liv forgot the need for reserve in public. She beamed a smile toward the burqa’s grille. “It was fun!” All of their other outings had been so purposeful, the endless procession of oppressed women so discouraging. On this day, to wander among the stalls playing the tourist, especially one so unexpectedly adept at bargaining, came as such a relief that she fought a brief urge toward tears. How long had it been since she’d simply enjoyed herself?
She forced her attention to the market’s wares. A man sold pomegranate juice from a device that cleverly pressed the garnet liquid from the seeds, then distilled it into glasses, where it glittered, cool and inviting, an antidote to the punishing sunlight. Liv smiled at another stall that offered conflict rugs at a fraction of the price demanded by the Chicken Street merchants. She wondered how Farida felt about them and turned to ask her, but Farida, too, had relaxed, enough to step away toward a stall selling baby clothes.
Liv wished they’d seen that first. She’d far rather have bought Farida a onesie. Assuming Afghan children even wore onesies. She couldn’t see into the stall for the crowd of women around it. She moved back, giving them room.
Something jostled against her, and at first she thought that maybe a parcel had bumped her bottom. She edged away, but then she felt it again and realized with a shock that it was someone’s hand, hurriedly searching. She yelped and pulled back, but a knot of men pressed in close, moving her in a mass around a corner into a dark, narrow opening between two stalls, out of the main flow of shoppers. They pinched and twisted her breasts, and cupped their hands roughly at her crotch and buttocks, fingers squirming insistently upward. The layers of cloth she wore seemed suddenly insubstantial.
“Farida!” she shouted into the low, gasping laughter all around her. She struck out at the men, but they caught her arms. A man rutted at her hip, his breath hot and moist against her cheek. Liv screamed again, and he ground harder against her. He grunted again, the sound different. Something solid crunched against bone. The man toppled back as the driver waded into the crowd, wielding a tire iron, Farida following. Invading fingers retreated. Hands loosened their grip on her arms and her wrists, fell away from her breasts, untangled themselves from her hair.
Liv looked back as Farida hustled her away from the mob. The men bent double, laughing at one of their own who lay on the ground, clutching his broken arm, his gaze boring through her in a mixture of triumph and contempt.
* * *
“Are you all right?” Martin demanded an hour later. “Did they hurt you?”
She sat curled into the corner of the unforgiving sofa, arms wrapped around herself, head turned away. Dirt smeared her kameez. Martin noticed she’d changed her shalwar, into a muddy orange pair that clashed with her lavender kameez. He went into the kitchen, put on water for tea, and tried to compose himself. He returned, looked again at the clean shalwar, and avoided asking the question directly.
“Did they just fondle you, or—?”
“No, Martin. I wasn’t raped, if that’s what you want to know. It was in public. It was over very quickly. It’s what you said. They just grabbed at me. Not that there was anything just about it.”
“I don’t suppose we should go to the police.”
“Why not? We should tell someone. Not the police, but ISAF, maybe. Somebody who would actually do something.”
Martin imagined word of this getting back to his supervisors, as it surely would. Their instructions had been clear: “Do nothing that will draw attention.” Although his supervisors were in Pakistan and Washington, they would surely hear by evening, the next morning at the latest, that Martin’s blond wife was seen cavorting with men in a public place.
Liv put out a hand against the sofa’s arm and pushed herself slowly to her feet. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you.” It was more accusation than question.
“I think it’s better that this not get out of hand. Do you really want people to know what happened to you?”
“Nothing just happened. Something was deliberately done to me.” She moved stiffly toward the kitchen.
“Liv.”
She didn’t answer.
He tried again. “Do you need to see a doctor?”
The teapot shrieked.
He heard tea splashing into cups, and then her voice, faint but firm. “I want to go home.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
From the kitchen came nothing at all.
* * *
Liv lay at the edge of the bed that night, curled on her side, her back to him and her arms clutched across her chest, her breath catching occasionally. After an hour, Martin got up. He came back with a glass of water and some pills. “These will help you sleep.”
He lay back down and listened to her breathing lengthen and deepen. She rolled onto her back and moaned, and turned again onto her side. He rose on one elbow and looked at her in the yellow light of the security lamp just outside the window. She was asleep. Beyond her, a new burqa hung from a nail driven into the wall. Farida had brought it late in the afternoon, knocking softly at the door and laying the bundle of blue fabric in his arms. “Tell her it’s better,” she said in response to his unasked question, and drifted away, lowering her own burqa back across her face as she did. He saw the shadow of her husband outside the gate. Martin had gotten so used to seeing Farida working unveiled in the Face the Future office that he’d forgotten she wore the burqa at all.
In the market, Liv told him, the men had put their hands on her behind, and touched her breasts. “They felt me up,” was the phrase she used, with its reminder of innocent high-school fumblings. Back then, Martin had always stopped when a girl protested. But he wondered what it would be like in a place like this, where a woman alone and unveiled was presumed to welcome attention. Where the penalty would fall upon her for inviting, not the man for accepting an invitation so clearly offered. He thought of what it might be like to encounter an unveiled Farida, not in the office where she was protected but in the market, parcels balanced against her swaying hips, her dark hair sliding across her face, so alluring that he understood the necessity of a covering. At such a sight, any man might be compelled to act—to come up behind her, to cup the fullness of her breasts with his hands and pull her against him with righteous impunity.
“I tried to get away, but I couldn’t,” Liv had said. “They held me too tightly.”
In Martin’s reverie, Farida struggled in his grip. He put his lips to her bare neck, bit her exposed earlobe. Her hair was fragrant against his face. He slid a hand down past her waist. His erection ached.
“I screamed,” said Liv. “But they moved me where no one could see or hear me.”
Farida would know better than to scream. She would consider herself lucky, he knew, to be pulled into a place where no one could witness the shame she had so boldly courted by revealing her face to men.
Liv groaned again in her sleep. Martin moved closer. He touched her bare thigh. She didn’t move. Her breathing continued soft and regular.
“I went numb. I couldn’t move. I tried to make my mind blank. I just wanted it to be over. But they wouldn’t stop.”
Of course they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. No man could. Martin imagined Farida still and submissive in his arms.
“A man pushed his hand . . . there.” Liv had gestured vaguely behind her.
Farida would accept her fate. Martin thought of the pomegranates in their bins at the market, their taut skin, the sweet shock of the ruby interior. These sorts of things happen here all the time, he told himself. It’s the way things are.
“Farida, Farida,” he whispered, moving urgently between Liv’s thighs, realizing only afterward that she was weeping in her sleep.
Thirty-One
Martin sat very still at his desk inside the cinder-block box that passed for the world headquarters of Face the Future, engaging in what he had come to think of as the Afghan national pastime—doing nothing for hours on end.
He’d already made the rounds of his contacts in the city. While Liv visited the women, Martin roamed among the dozens of NGOs whose offices populated Kabul and whose workers were happy for a chance to talk with another Westerner about the problems—so many problems!—they faced in this city where loyalties shifted and rearranged themselves like the crumbly soil underfoot. He made sure to tip their guards on the way out, thus ensuring clandestine meetings in chaikhanas, Ismail and his own guard just out of earshot but always close. He ate and drank as little as possible as they ranted about the injustices perpetrated upon them by members of clans and ethnic groups other than their own. He was now a regular at ISAF, where military careerists, grown-up Boy Wonders who’d stuck it out rather than opting for fat civilian paychecks, dropped the hearty we’ve-got-this-under-control front they maintained for the press and confided in him about flare-ups in the outlying provinces. These meetings always inspired a mixture of envy—at least these men got to act, as opposed to his own strictly defined role of observing and reporting—and relief. Because acting meant being in the shit.
But now he was alone. He assumed that the other Face the Future staffers had found ways of their own to spend an afternoon of indolence, at least until four o’clock, when someone would materialize at his elbow bearing the inevitable tray with teapot and cups. A rattling fan lifted a curtain of dust. Motes veiled the air, then sifted to the floor, only to be scooped up again as the fan rotated back with a clatter.
Martin studied the wall. Bright posters advertising Face the Future’s mission in English, Dari, and Pashto covered the cracks and chips in the uneven concrete. Women and girls looked into the camera and smiled broadly as they crowded together on rough schoolroom benches, or bent with great determination over computer keyboards in offices much like the one in which he sat. The posters, Martin knew, bore no relation to reality, any more than they related to the contents of his locked desk drawers, crammed with fast-fattening files on arms stockpiles, the movements of different militias, and detailed notes on individual warlords. No longer did he need to pepper Liv’s reports with falsehoods. Reality—gleaned with increasing ease from other NGO workers and some of the more inexperienced journalists—had quickly sufficed.
“But what of the training programs?” he’d emailed the director recently, trying to get a sense of just how closely Face the Future was to adhere to its ostensible mission.
“We can’t design appropriate training until we know everything possible about the society we’re dealing with,” came the reply. “Better to spend months in preparation than inadvertently alienate people because of an imperfect understanding of conditions, especially the security conditions.”
“What a crock,” Liv snorted when he showed it to her. After which, he no longer shared the emails. The longer Martin was in-country, the more he agreed with the director’s approach and that of his new ISAF acquaintances. Remnants of the Taliban were already regrouping, firebombing girls’ schools and bullying village elders. Whenever Liv and Farida were away from the office, he turned to his own research, the ISAF officer’s words echoing in his brain. Any information we can get helps. And we need it yesterday.
The fan, wobbling back through its arc, stopped halfway. The dust settled into a clump, its descent nearly audible in the sudden silence that signaled the daily intermittent loss of electricity. His shirt dampened within seconds. The summer sun grew fiercer by the day. With the fan quieted, the street noises—the creaking wheels of wooden carts, arrhythmic hoofbeats, and the incessant blaring of horns—asserted themselves. Martin wondered how people found the energy to move about in the pressing white glare of midday. He couldn’t even summon the energy to step outside and
start the generator.
He looked around the room to reassure himself that it was, indeed, empty, then slid open a desk drawer and pulled an envelope from beneath a file. It was wrinkled from the time it had spent in his jacket pocket, its cheap paper already yellowing, its flap long ago steamed open. He pulled the letter from the envelope and reread it, although he could have recited it from memory, so often during the last weeks had he read Mrs. Khan’s words to her sister: “I have arranged it so that you will work for the same organization with which I work here. You must ask the Amriki couple to help you return home,” Mrs. Khan had written in English, in flowing, confident script. “I cannot imagine what you must be enduring there. It makes me ill to think of you in that place.”
Martin told himself yet again it was long past time to give Farida the letter. Even though she had no password allowing access to the office computers, at some point Farida would discover her sister was trying to contact her. But Martin was sure that if he showed Farida the letter, she would seek his help in leaving immediately. His guilt warred with despair at the thought of the office without Farida’s enchanting presence, the tedium of days alone with the Afghan staff broken only by infrequent meetings with leaders of other equally dispirited NGOs. And, of course, there would still be Liv, with her increasingly pointed suspicions, her resentments, her clanging hurt silences, longer and more pronounced since the unfortunate incident in the market. She’d said she hadn’t been raped, but the way she carried on these days—bracing a chair under the doorknob at night, flinching whenever Ismail or any of the male staff came near, eyes swollen with furtive tears—you’d think she had.
Just a little longer, he told himself. His imagination hurried agreeably along well-traveled paths. Let Farida get to know him better, expose her to the freedoms of a different sort of life. Then maybe she would want to bypass Pakistan altogether and go directly to the United States and, once there . . . well, anything could happen. He sensed movement and stuffed the letter back into the envelope, then tucked it beneath the file and closed the drawer. He picked up a pencil and twirled it, trying to look busy.