by Amy Waldman
As if to confirm this theory, Fereshta’s oldest daughter, the pretty one, appeared smiling outside Parveen’s room. Like Bina, she wore a loose-fitting dress of a light, linen-like material, but while Bina’s dress had been a drab brown, hers was a pearly blue and better cut. The girl was on her way to milk. By the time Parveen joined her outside, she was crouched next to a cow with a tin pail. Her name was Shokoh, the girl said, a word that translated roughly as “splendor.”
Parveen asked her age. Shokoh guessed that she was sixteen. Pouting, she began to complain that Bina made her do the milking each day, then scolded her for taking too long. That Shokoh wasn’t much of a milker, even Parveen could see. When she talked, she paused in her milking and then, on resuming, managed only a few jerky tugs before stopping again to massage one hand with the other. In the meantime the cow did a slow tap dance of impatience, and occasionally, swatting away flies, she struck Shokoh with her tail. “That’s nothing,” Shokoh said when Parveen commented on it. She’d been kicked more than once. The cows, she’d concluded, did not like her.
“Because you don’t like them,” Bina said from behind them. Shokoh started at her voice. “The cows aren’t interested in your talk; they only want to be free of their milk.”
Poor Shokoh, Parveen thought; she’d lost her mother and gained an unkind stepmother.
The girl retreated to the house. Bina took over the milking, using motions that were at once rapid, graceful, and economic. She had her own complaints. Every time Shokoh milked, Bina had to come after her to make sure the cows had been emptied lest they get blockages. And only a woman who’d nursed knew how painful such blockages were, she murmured. A child like Shokoh couldn’t know that. Shokoh often forgot to wipe off the udder before she started, so bits of straw and dirt and manure made their way into the milk. She couldn’t remember that this cow liked to have her two front teats emptied first, and that cow liked the right front and right back done first, then the left side, and that cow never kicked, but this cow did, and when Shokoh got nervous, she let the milk spill onto the ground…on and on Bina went, milking and murmuring to the cows, stroking and scratching their backs, their bellies, and their udders with ease.
Cows were as different from one another as people were, Bina said as she stroked another’s white forelock. “A few years ago this cow had a calf, darker, also with white here”—she ran a finger down her nose. “A male. One day, a few months after he was born, he wandered off during grazing and broke a leg, and when Waheed found him, we had to butcher him. Even today, we still talk about this calf—how he looked when he slept, how sloppily and happily he nursed, whether he was afraid in the mountains. If we can’t forget it when a calf dies, how could I forget my sister? How could those children forget their mother?”
This swerve caught Parveen off guard. She let out a small gasp in apology.
Bina went on: When Fereshta died, she’d already been gone from her family for a decade. Bina, much younger, had been a girl of only seven when her sister left. She’d never seen her again.
How was that possible? Parveen asked, taken aback.
The village here was two days’ walk from their parents’ home, Bina explained. Once rural women married, they usually left their families forever. There wasn’t time or money for travel, and who would watch the children? Men weren’t overly concerned with their wives’ family ties.
Four years earlier Parveen’s own older sister, Taara, had married and moved to San Jose, twenty-five miles from the family apartment in Union City, California. When their mother was dying, Taara had returned home to live for a few months, and even after that, Parveen and her father had seen Taara just about every weekend, especially once her son was born. And the sisters talked and texted all the time—almost too often for Parveen, who, busy with college, privately thought Taara to be lonely or bored and sometimes let her calls go to voicemail. Her sister had done what was expected in their community: gotten married young to an Afghan-American and had a child within a year. She had taken the paved route, Parveen thought, whereas Parveen saw herself as traveling down an unpaved road much like the one that had brought her to the village. Parveen hadn’t hidden her feminist disdain for Taara’s choices, just as Taara, four years older, hadn’t hidden her disapproval of Parveen’s. They often clashed. But now Parveen had a sudden urge to reach out to Taara. She couldn’t, and this was the state in which Bina and women like her lived permanently.
“Did you write each other?” Parveen asked.
How could they? Bina answered. Both of them were illiterate. Like most village girls, they had stopped going to school at the age of nine. Word would reach home, after considerable delay, of Fereshta’s children. Yet Bina said she’d often thought about her sister over the years—not seeing her hadn’t made her any less alive. “Then a message was brought to our family village. That whole time it took to travel to us from here, I was believing Fereshta still lived.”
“I’m so sorry,” Parveen whispered. As agonizing as it had been for Parveen to watch her mother die, receiving the news unexpectedly would have been so much worse.
Bina picked up the milk pail, full now, and carried it to the kitchen at the back of the house. Beneath her thin dress, her back muscles bulged from her tiny frame. She was strong, as she had to be.
“I thought the message only carried news of my sister’s fate,” she threw over her shoulder. “But it also carried news of mine.”
The news that she would become Waheed’s wife and also mother to his and Fereshta’s children. Parveen shuddered at the idea of being handed over to her brother-in-law. They got along only because they weren’t married.
“Did Shokoh tell you she can read and write?” Bina asked suddenly.
No, Parveen said. She’d assumed Waheed’s whole family were illiterate.
“She can,” Bina said bitterly. It was clear that she felt inferior to her stepdaughter, who possessed more learning or more intelligence or both. In Parveen’s mind, this jealousy helped to explain, if not justify, Bina’s cruelty.
“Perhaps Shokoh could teach you,” Parveen suggested. They were in the kitchen now, at the back of the house. Bina, straining the milk into a large pot, snorted. She was the one who had to teach Shokoh! Teach her everything! Waheed had told her he was taking another wife because Bina’s cooking wasn’t good enough. “But Shokoh can’t cook at all!” Bina said. “And she spills time.”
Parveen thought she’d misheard. “Another wife? Who? I thought Shokoh was Fereshta’s daughter. She’s so young.”
Bina’s laugh was mordant. Shokoh was Waheed’s wife, she said, placing the pot of milk on a low fire. “I wasn’t much older when I came here. It’s the same for most of us.”
“But—” Parveen stopped. She didn’t know what to say—that in America such a marriage wouldn’t even be legal? What was the point? Child marriage still took place in Afghanistan. She didn’t know what to ask other than when the marriage had occurred.
Last year, before the first snow, Bina said. Waheed, after telling her that he was taking a new wife, had gone to marry. When he returned with his young bride, Bina was expected to incorporate her into the household. “She still needed a mother,” Bina said with distaste, as if this vulnerability were a character flaw. Her expression said that Waheed’s choice was still a wound, perhaps always would be.
Light-headed, Parveen sat down on the dirt floor. Her mind paired Shokoh’s fresh, dewy face with Waheed’s leathery one, and revulsion was the natural result. She was wary of being the judgmental outsider; it seemed too easy, too predictable, to be horrified by the backward ways of rural Afghan folk. But Shokoh couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
Why was she so surprised to find that Waheed hadn’t stayed frozen in a posture of grief? She’d expected this family to exist as Crane had left it, as if his memoir had arrested time. Perhaps this was the problem of first encountering someone through a book—she barely knew Waheed, and already he’d disappointed her.
Chapter Three
An Existential Wager
BY THE TIME MOTHER AFGHANISTAN CAUGHT PARVEEN’S attention, she was a senior at UC Berkeley, and the book had been on the paperback bestseller list for three years. She’d seen many references to it, of course—it would’ve been almost impossible not to—but she assumed it was yet another attempt to capitalize on Americans’ hunger for information about a country that was newly, dangerously relevant to them. In the more than seven years since the September 11 attacks, the academic tomes about Afghanistan had been supplemented with a host of memoirs about the country—Westerners who’d founded women’s secret sewing circles or started beauty schools or served as soldiers or CIA officers or reporters, many of them acting as if they’d discovered Afghanistan the way Columbus had discovered America. She’d read none of these books and dismissed them all.
When she found a paperback copy of Mother Afghanistan on a table at the café where she’d gone to study, Parveen picked it up, anticipating that she’d loathe it. The cover showed a photograph of a woman with dewy dark eyes, most of her hair hidden under a black head scarf, this image superimposed over the country’s leaflike shape. But the description on the back gave Parveen an unexpected twinge. Gideon Crane, it said, “had fallen in love with Afghanistan.”
The possibility that Afghanistan, in its present, battered form, was a country you could fall in love with was news to her. Her parents loved Afghanistan, longed for it, but it was their homeland, one they’d never reconciled themselves to losing. They remembered, perhaps idealized, a different place: the peaceful country, the urbane Kabul, that preceded the Soviet invasion. Their Afghanistan had been a place of Friday picnics amid almond blossoms; of salons at which musicians played and poets declaimed; of thousands of years of history in which many of the world’s great civilizations had played a part. Now, though, Afghanistan was regularly described in news accounts as existing in the Stone Age, which was hard for Parveen, American almost from birth, to square with her parents’ elegiac memories.
If anything, since al-Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers, Afghanistan had been the stuff of Parveen’s nightmares. When the attacks were launched, she’d been fourteen, just a few weeks into high school, her adolescent insecurity at its peak. The new animus toward Muslims felt personal, and the recycled images from Afghanistan of women in head-to-toe burkas and bearded, gun-toting men had posed an almost existential threat. Wanting no connection with those images, for the next several years she took to lying to new acquaintances about where her family was from (Italy, India; dark eyes and dark hair gave her a wide range). By the time she started at Berkeley, in 2005, she’d relaxed a bit; she even, briefly, joined the Afghan-American Society, helping to put on feasts and dance performances to educate her fellow students about her culture. But the country itself she kept at a distance. When she began to imagine a global career doing anthropology or development work, she pictured herself in Africa, Appalachia, or Brazil—anywhere but Afghanistan. Yet here was this American man with no ties to the country finding his life’s purpose there. This discrepancy—this inversion, even—unsettled her. Crane had embraced Afghanistan. Why had she felt compelled by shame to shrink from it?
On her BART ride home to Union City, she opened the book and devoured the early, vivid chapters about Crane’s childhood in Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he described his return to America as a “missionary kid” at the age of thirteen, he won Parveen’s sympathy. His alienation—his sense that he would always be an outsider—was familiar to her, although she’d immigrated at a much younger age.
Over dinner with her father, Ashraf, with whom she lived, she kept the book open at her elbow. Since her mother’s death, they’d both lapsed into reading at the table often, just as they often ate reheated food that Taara had cooked for them. Ashraf didn’t cook, and Parveen, with her school schedule, didn’t have time.
She tried to explain what had drawn her into Crane’s book and how she identified with his feelings of foreignness. Not wanting to hurt her father by saying that her parents’ lack of ease in America had rubbed off on her, she talked instead about feeling foreign among Afghan-Americans, who seemed to value her high GPA less than her honor, her sexual purity, and her marriageability. This she could say without guilt; her father had always encouraged her academic ambitions.
“You’d think it was a bad thing that I’m going to have a graduation instead of a wedding!” she said.
This wasn’t a new subject for Parveen, and her father merely nodded in agreement. He seemed only vaguely interested in Crane’s story, maybe because in her recounting, Crane hadn’t yet reached Afghanistan. Then again, Parveen thought, maybe Crane’s connection to Afghanistan was the problem. Even after September 11, her parents didn’t speak of returning, although others in their community were doing so. Had all of their longing been a performance? The real reason, she knew, was her father’s lack of moxie, which was the flip side of his gentleness. He had no entrepreneurial hustle, as many returning exiles did, no ambition for a government post. Then her mother got sick, which obviated the question of return entirely.
The conversation with her father having stalled, she turned back to Mother Afghanistan. Crane was, by his own admission, a cheater, which made it even more surprising to Parveen that so many people wanted to read his book. He’d gone to medical school and become an ophthalmologist, then developed a sideline in fraud, participating in a scheme to bilk the government of hundreds of thousands of dollars by filing phony Medicare claims. Then, although married, he used some of his ill-gotten gains to seduce not one but two nurses at the hospital where he operated. After one of them blew the whistle on him and his co-conspirators, he found, or re-found, religion. He joined the megachurch of an influential pastor, whose congregants advocated on Crane’s behalf. Parveen rolled her eyes at this predictable arc—the man who is brought low and then finds God. And when Crane cooperated with prosecutors and reached a plea deal that allowed him to do community service abroad, Parveen prickled in outrage at the leniency shown white-collar criminals who happened to be white when millions of young black men were sent to prison for far less. Only Crane’s self-awareness kept her reading. I’d behaved badly and gotten off easy, he wrote.
Crane picked Kabul as his destination abroad. It was 2003, and Afghanistan’s future seemed promising. There was no sense that the Taliban, so thoroughly vanquished two years earlier, would return, and an influx of foreigners and international aid was transforming the capital. Crane took up residence in the comfort of a guesthouse and spent weeks operating on the eyes of poor Afghans, on their cataracts and melanomas of the iris.
Because of his hunger to plumb his depths, he’d set out from Kabul, accompanied by an interpreter he identified only as “A.” At this point, Parveen was reading the book in her room, the same room she’d occupied in the same five-room apartment over a dollar store that her family had lived in since their arrival in Union City twenty years earlier. Her room was still furnished with the donated twin beds that the refugee-resettlement agency had provided for them, and the common space still contained the original furniture package: a sturdy secondhand dining table and one of those clunky generic living-room sets you can buy on installment at those stores that display half their wares on sidewalks. The only thing that had changed in the apartment, other than the upholstery fading from burgundy to pink, was its inhabitants. Her sister, with whom she’d always shared this room, was in San Jose, and her mother had died, leaving Parveen and her father to rattle around a space that overnight became unbearably cavernous. Looking around with the book in her hand, Parveen identified with Crane’s restlessness. She’d long wanted a life where she wouldn’t know what was coming next.
The valley Crane reached at the end of the road was a kind of paradise, a bucolic pocket untouched by foreigners, unvisited by—unknown to—even most Afghans. Parveen tried to imagine how she would behave if she was the first outsider to walk into a village, as Crane h
ad been. She thought he’d handled it exactly right:
I’ve been asked often since if I was afraid, and I can say honestly not in the least. What was there to fear? These were no extremists, only ordinary Afghans, living peacefully. The friendliness on the faces that greeted us as we walked into the village was unmistakable. They bore no animus to Americans. I was the first one they’d ever met. Seeing myself as an ambassador for all of my countrymen, I tried to make neither assumptions nor demands. I said I wanted to be at the service of the villagers, to learn their customs, so that I could give Americans a true picture of them.
Waheed and Fereshta, poor but generous, had been his hosts. Fereshta was a “luminous Afghan rose” who tended to him with grace and generosity, cooking savory meals and supplying him with tea and blankets even as she mothered six children and carried her seventh.
But then she went into labor, and in labor she began to struggle, as do so many Afghan women, especially rural ones. Most Afghan women, however, do not have an American doctor at hand. True, Crane was an ophthalmologist, not an obstetrician, but he knew far more than the “ignorant crone” who served as the village’s traditional birth attendant. So there was hope, or there should have been. But Waheed said he needed the mullah’s permission for Crane, as a foreign man, to help his wife, and the mullah refused. Crane pressed Waheed to let him help anyway, but Waheed wouldn’t allow him to. Whatever happened, he said, would be God’s will. All Crane could do was try to get Fereshta to a hospital with a female doctor, but there was no car or truck to carry her there. Desperate, Crane put her atop the donkey he had ridden into the village. A donkey!