A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  “We kept the generator running late for you,” Waheed broke in, and the women fell silent.

  His bluntness wasn’t endearing. In contrast to Crane’s description of him as overly verbose, Waheed seemed to feel no obligation to say other than what he thought. Under the stark light, she had her first good look at him. Like that of most rural Afghans, his skin was sun-cured and lined. Funny that in the picture with Crane, his eyes were closed, because they were his most striking feature, nearly beautiful, the color of dark amber.

  Parveen didn’t know if he was intimating that she should offer to pay for the extra fuel. When it came to money, she didn’t know what was expected of her beyond the seventy-five-dollar-a-month “contribution” to the family’s expenses that Crane’s foundation had suggested she make. She didn’t want to take advantage of Fereshta’s family. Yet she also didn’t want the family taking advantage of her.

  The children began making long-practiced rearrangements, spreading bedrolls and blankets on the floor, then draping themselves atop them. As composed as artists’ models, they waited for sleep.

  Parveen asked Waheed if she could see her room.

  This was her room, he said. This was everybody’s room.

  Not hers, she vowed, imagining waking to pungent breath and entangled limbs, and she told Waheed that she’d assumed she would have her own room. “I’d be happier that way,” she said, not troubling herself with why he should care for her happiness.

  “No one in the village has their own room. We spend our whole lives sharing,” he answered.

  Later she would learn that they found it strange, sad even, that Westerners chose to sleep alone, even stranger and sadder that they forced their children, from very young ages, to do so. Over Parveen’s time in the village, she would come to question this solitary confinement too.

  But not yet. “I’ll contribute more if I can have my own room,” she said just as the generator moaned into silence, cutting the light. “Perhaps the guest room, where we ate?”

  Whispers scurried through the dark. Then lanterns were lit and Waheed picked up a bedroll and motioned for her to follow him out the door and down the stairs. She was pleased at her own assertiveness, at its evident success. But instead of taking her back to the guest room, Waheed led her to another chamber, small and stinky. With shouts and kicks, he displaced a goat and some chickens but not their manure, laid the bedroll on the straw, and said that he would see about finding a door in the morning. He left a single lantern behind, and in its glow Parveen shook with anger, convinced that coming here had been a grave mistake. Gideon Crane also had stayed with this family, but he had described them as the most gracious hosts. Maybe he was a better guest. Maybe he’d slept where he was told without complaint.

  Someone thumped a pitcher of water down nearby, then all went quiet. She blew out the lantern, and the night pulled tighter. It is not just the inability to breathe that you must fight but the fear of the inability to breathe, Crane had written of his kidnapping from the village, during which a black bag had been pulled over his head. For the panic is as much a threat to you as the bag itself. It was the panic that drew the bag to my nostrils, making me suffocate, making me panic more, until I forced myself to calm down and could breathe again.

  She couldn’t bear to remove her clothes, grimy as they were from the drive. She crawled onto the bedroll. It still carried the impress of other bodies, and their warmth.

  Chapter Two

  Spilling Time

  IN THE MORNING, PARVEEN DREAMED THAT A CHILD WAS tugging, almost lovingly, on her hair. She awoke to find a goat gnawing on it. The animal seemed nearly as surprised to find a live being at the end of its snack as Parveen was to be snacked on. With a cry she pushed the goat off and chased it out, then crouched against the back wall. Dawn came through the door frame, the light mixing into the darkness like milk into coffee. Coffee. Its absence was the first small sadness of the day.

  The goat hovered in the doorway, letting Parveen get a good look at its yellow eyes, large ears, and unsightly teeth. Parveen reached for her phone, already writing the caption—My new roommate—for a Facebook post. Then she remembered that she had no way to post anything. The village had no internet, no computers, no television, no cell service. It is not an easy place for someone used to the comforts of America, Crane had warned in one of his talks. This had only made her want to come more. But now, lacking an audience for her experiences, she felt lost. Unwitnessed. She tapped the screen randomly, then scrolled through photos of her college graduation, which had happened only a few weeks ago, though it already seemed like much longer. But seeing how happy she’d been then just made her more miserable now, and she tossed the phone onto the bedroll.

  When the morning light grew strong, she stepped into the compound yard and inventoried its contents: three goats, a few chickens, four cows, a donkey; piles of hay; a vegetable garden; a grapevine; a pomegranate tree; an outhouse; and stacks of dried dung that had been formed into what looked like brown puffy pancakes to be used later as fuel. Between the house and the outhouse hung a line of laundry. The men’s pants on it ballooned in the breeze as if they yearned to walk off.

  She looked up and nearly fell back, so vertiginous was the shift in scale. The mountains were sharp and precise nearby but softened with distance. They changed colors too, from brown, red, and green to gray and lavender. The farthest were smoky blue and skullcapped with snow. Parveen had flown over these mountains, or maybe others like them, traveling to Kabul from Dubai. Seen from the air they’d been majestic, but viewed from the ground, they unnerved her, and she was thankful when a child descending the stairs broke into her reverie. They stared at each other for a moment, Parveen taking in the girl’s scabby face, unbrushed hair, and bright, mildly crossed eyes. Then Parveen smiled, and the girl tore back up the stairs. As her own smile faltered, Parveen resolved to toughen up. She couldn’t be wounded by every small slight.

  After a few deep breaths, she climbed the wooden steps from the yard to enter the main room. All faces turned to her, and in her anxiety they blurred together. Only the anomalies stood out. The girl she’d just seen at the outhouse appeared to have doubled; she had an identical twin. There was the boy with one hand.

  A murmuration of simultaneous questions rose from a half dozen mouths: How did you sleep? What news came in your dreams? Did the goats keep you warm? Did the sun wake you up? Would you like an egg? Do you know how to make bread? Will you bathe? Can you cook?

  Tracking who was saying what felt like trying to untangle the string of a kite in motion. Parveen wasn’t sure whether she was even meant to answer. She’d forgotten most of the names provided to her the previous night, except for one, maybe because the face it was coupled with was hard to forget.

  Bina was the wife Waheed had taken a year after Fereshta’s death. She was also Fereshta’s younger sister and therefore both aunt and stepmother to the six children Fereshta had left behind. Issa, who’d told Parveen about this development, argued that this was a good thing, to have the children raised by Fereshta’s sister. Bina’s sallow skin and hooded eyes, however, suggested that it might not be good for her. Her mouth rested in a perpetual quarter-snarl, as if she wanted to bite the world before it bit her. Even if involuntary, this defiant expression saved her from looking completely defeated. Her age was indeterminate, though Parveen guessed her to be in her early twenties, about Parveen’s own age, which was likely the only thing they had in common. A baby nestled in a shawl wrapped around Bina; to her skirt clung a toddler and a little boy perhaps four years old.

  Seeing these children, Parveen felt a sharp longing for her nephew, who was a year old. Ansar had been the hardest family member for her to leave. There was nothing complicated in her relationship with him; it was a pure love, a very physical love. She never tired of his fat rolls or long eyelashes or baby teeth, of cuddling him and making him laugh.

  These babies, scrawnier and dustier, didn’t have the same effect on her. Bin
a confirmed they were hers. Adding them to Fereshta’s, she was now mother to nine. She seemed to be breastfeeding and hand-feeding and wiping all at once. She made a point of saying she’d been up for hours; she’d risen before dawn to light the fire for tea, knead the dough for bread, and do a half a dozen other tasks before anyone else woke.

  God, you must be tired, Parveen wanted to say. Instead she said: “You must miss Fereshta so much.”

  The words were met with silence, as if Parveen had tossed a ball that neither Bina nor anyone else reached out to catch. It was a presumptuous way to begin their acquaintance, and Parveen regretted it immediately, but for her, and for the millions of others who had read about Bina’s sister in Crane’s book, Fereshta’s passing was fresh, her memory vivid. Parveen felt as if she’d personally lived the death of a woman she hadn’t even known.

  The main room was a rectangle, perhaps fifteen by thirty feet, with small high windows. This was the stage for the life of the family, the place where they gathered, ate, slept. By day the bedrolls were stacked in the corner, the only other furnishings being an aluminum trunk, a woodstove, and a cradle suspended from a beam by a rope. Aluminum pots hung on the walls, which were patched in places with a darker shade of mud. The carpet on which Parveen sat was threadbare. A narrow wooden shelf held a small battery-operated radio.

  She leaned against the cushions along the wall and tucked her legs beneath her. The women served Waheed, Waheed’s older son, and Parveen before they served themselves. As she ate—bread, tea, yogurt—the eyes on her face made it hard to chew. No better was the scrutiny of her jeans or her toenails, whose blue-green polish the small girls crawled over to touch.

  Between mouthfuls of bread, Waheed issued questions as if it were a physical task to dispatch, like chopping wood. “Who are your parents?”

  Parveen gave their names and said that her father had once been a professor at Kabul University. About her mother they asked no questions, and while Parveen could’ve found this insulting, she was instead relieved. Her mother had died three years earlier, long enough for Parveen to become comfortable talking about it. But the prospect of discussing her mother with this family left Parveen unexpectedly raw. If they were uninterested or said the wrong thing, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. Her mother could live for a little while longer here.

  “What will you do during your stay?” Waheed asked.

  Parveen had assumed that Crane’s staff would’ve explained that. “I want to help at the clinic,” she began.

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “No, no, I’m not a doctor, I just finished college.”

  “So you’ll become a doctor?”

  “No. I hope, I plan, to be an—academic. To teach at a university. And do research—”

  “Then you must’ve gotten lost, because there is no university here.”

  The whole family, down to the children, laughed. As amusement ricocheted around her, Parveen put her hands on her knees, as if to hold herself in place. The only consolation was that she understood more of what was being said than she had the previous night.

  “We don’t even have a school building,” said Waheed’s oldest child. Jamshid, that was his name. He was around fifteen, with his father’s distinctive eyes. Young children learned in the mosque, he explained. Older children, like him, didn’t learn at all.

  Parveen hastened to explain that she didn’t want to be at a university now, that she’d come here to study how the clinic that Gideon Crane had built had changed health and childbirth for women in the village and to understand the risks they still faced. She was blathering, stretching her Dari far beyond its capacities and comprehensibility. She could see this in the expressions of those around her, yet she seemed unable to stop. She kept succumbing to English to fill in the gaps: “I studied medical anthropology, which looks at how people in other cultures live and how the structure of culture determines how medical problems are treated, what the outcomes are—”

  “You’re married?” Waheed interjected.

  “Engaged,” Parveen lied.

  “And the man you’ll marry allowed you to come here?” Waheed asked.

  She sensed Jamshid watching her. They all were watching her. “In America, women don’t need a man’s permission to travel,” she said, smiling at the girls. She hoped to be a positive, even motivating, influence on them. Only one, the oldest, a teenager of striking prettiness with glossy hair, gleaming eyes, and a mouth like a pale pink lily, smiled back.

  “Your father—he gave permission?” Waheed said.

  “In America, women can do anything they dream of,” Parveen said, truly irked now. Everything he said fit with a man who’d treated his wife’s life as something not worth fighting for. “Women can even run for president. Or go into space. Anything. We don’t need permission to do it.”

  “And with anything possible, you dreamed of coming here?” Waheed said, to more laughter.

  WAHEED FARMED WHEAT AND alfalfa; he also grew mulberries. After breakfast, he planned to leave for the fields with Jamshid as usual, but first he asked Parveen for the money she owed him for her room and board. The request flustered her because it suggested he didn’t trust her; it wasn’t as if she had any way to leave without paying. She hurried down to her room to get the funds. The children started to follow her, but Waheed ordered them to stay put.

  Through Crane’s foundation, she’d arranged to pay Waheed seventy-five dollars a month for rent and food. Now she and Waheed agreed that an extra twenty-five dollars a month would be added for the luxury of a private room, for, as she thought to herself, a stench so strong she’d barely been able to breathe during the night. She knelt down on the floor and began to count out a huge stack of afghanis. She wanted to pay for three months, both to preempt further requests from Waheed and to bind herself to life here. The discomfort she’d felt during breakfast would lift, she told herself, not fully believing it. She kept replaying the conversation with the family in her mind, trying to figure out what had jarred her, then losing track of her counting—she hadn’t brought enough large bills—and having to start over. Her frustration built, and when a chicken wandered in, she kicked at it and yelled, “Are you coming to eat my hair too?” To her embarrassment Waheed and Jamshid were standing in the yard not far from her room, waiting for her. She grabbed the money, marched out, and said to Waheed, “Here, three months.”

  He nodded then squatted to count it himself. She prayed that she hadn’t handed over less than the required amount—he’d think she was trying to cheat him. “I lost track,” she warned him. Concentrating, he didn’t respond.

  “Extra,” he said at last, handing her a single hundred-afghani banknote.

  At least he was honest. She stopped herself from saying that he could keep it. Even with her lack of experience abroad, she knew better than to act like money was of no consequence.

  Once Waheed left for the fields, Parveen’s sense of oppression lifted slightly, as if she, like the rest of the family, had been under his thumb. The others seemed to feel freer as well, because as soon as the compound door shut behind him, the children stampeded down the stairs and into Parveen’s room.

  “I guess I’ll unpack,” she said cheerfully and crouched to open her suitcases. The children pressed in, gaping at the carefully packed contents: stacks of tunics, jeans, and long skirts; a bazaar’s worth of toilet paper, Tylenol, and tampons; sunscreen, underwear, moisturizer, mosquito repellent, mascara, and wipes; PowerBars, notebooks, and books, more than a dozen, including Mother Afghanistan. A hair dryer. A jump rope. A yoga mat. An inflatable blue exercise ball, which seemed especially absurd. The children’s gazes landed like flies on each item. “She’s very rich!” a small voice called out.

  No, no, no, she wanted to rebut, but the fact that the contents of her suitcase were unremarkable for an American was exactly the point. Whatever her strained personal circumstances, her country was rich. She couldn’t help but compare herself unfavorably to Crane, who’d
come here, from what she could tell from his book, with little more than a medical bag. Through the children’s legs she scanned the room, but there was nowhere to put anything. She packed it all back up as though preparing to grab the first ride out of here. Which, given her low spirits, was tempting.

  “Out! Out!” Bina chased the children off, then came in herself and bestowed her quarter-snarl on Parveen.

  Until now Parveen hadn’t grasped how physically small Bina was in both height and weight. It seemed impossible—terrifying, really—that three children had come out of her.

  “Is any of that for us?” Bina gestured at the suitcase.

  It was—Parveen had brought a host of gifts, from books to candy, for the family. But Bina’s tone, which married antagonism and entitlement, made Parveen want to withhold them—to regain control. She did have gifts, she said, but she’d wait to give them until the whole family was together.

  Bina asked Parveen why she’d come, and Parveen repeated what she’d said earlier, adding that it had made her sad to read about Bina’s sister. She wanted to help, she said.

  “Do all Americans love to help?”

  “Not all, but many. We’ve been—fortunate.” Parveen said that she also wanted to learn more about the lives of women here. Women like Bina.

  “And then, once you have learned, you will go.”

  It was more command than question. Parveen nodded, trying not to show she’d been pierced. She cried, quietly, but only after Bina had left. This wasn’t the reception she’d expected. She knew that she was lucky to have been raised as an American and spared a lifetime of war. But in return, she had chosen—chosen!—to come back, to give back. She had assumed that this generosity—her sacrifice—would be, if not celebrated, at least welcomed. Surely it deserved better than the indifference and even hostility she had encountered so far. Gideon Crane, by his account, had been embraced by this family. Perhaps the distinction lay in the character of Waheed’s wives; where Bina was pinched and suspicious, Fereshta had been gracious and warm.