A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  Parveen read on. Her spirits lifted when Fereshta arrived with Crane and Waheed at the district hospital, then sank when Crane discovered no female doctor there either. But the male doctor at least was not a foreigner, and Waheed agreed to let him help.

  I paced around the outside of the small hospital, Crane wrote, as goats nibbled from trash heaps threaded with medical waste. Her screams came out the windows, tore me apart. I stretched myself on the ground, spread my arms wide, and asked God to take me instead. As I prayed, the screams ceased abruptly. I thanked God; the baby had been safely born. Then a bay, a single extended unearthly note that still echoes in my ears, broke the silence.

  Parveen’s stomach dropped. Perhaps she’d already known Fereshta would die, since talk of the book had been everywhere. But Crane’s skill as a storyteller was to make Parveen believe Fereshta would pull through. Besides, didn’t these types of stories always end happily? Parveen’s fear was the kind you ride during a horror movie or on a roller coaster, where there is a pleasure in the terror, which is inextricable from the subconscious awareness of your own safety. Surely Fereshta would live, and Crane, having gotten her to the hospital, would end his own narrative as its hero. That was how these books worked.

  I rushed into the hospital, Crane wrote, and raced down the hall until I saw, through an open door, Waheed bent over his wife’s lifeless body.

  Fereshta died, as did her unborn child. Six children were left motherless, and Parveen, reading years later, was devastated. It wasn’t a shock to her intellectually. As an anthropology student, she’d learned all the ways—structural inequality, food deficits, austerity regimes, neoliberal policies, inherited wealth, gendered oppression, and more—that progress left people, most of them female, behind. She’d read countless academic studies and texts to that effect. But she’d never read anything that made her feel the outrage of this so strongly. Fereshta was singular in her beauty and charm, perhaps, yet her death wasn’t. Her life’s abridgment had been almost ordained by her birth. Millions of women like her gambled every time they gave birth, and many lost.

  Parveen kept reading, faintly hoping for a miracle, as if this might be a fairy tale in which a grandmother is removed intact from a wolf or a princess is restored to life by a kiss. No such resurrection was in store. Crane, bereft, vowed to wrench something good out of Fereshta’s death by saving others like her. With heroic effort, he built a clinic in her village and named it for her.

  There was no bringing Fereshta back, no restoring her to her children. I grieve for this, ache for this, still. But we can—we must—keep other mothers alive, prevent their needless and agonizing deaths. Imagination is the highest capacity we human beings have. It allows us to grasp suffering we don’t experience ourselves, and it allows us to see remedies for that suffering that don’t yet exist. I imagined a clinic that could have saved Fereshta, and then I built it. The terror, the long odds, that these mothers face demanded no less.

  Parveen closed the book in tears, aware of its sentimentality and yet helpless before it. There was something pleasurable in cynicism yielding to emotion. And within her grief was something grubbier: the sense that Crane’s journey was one she should be making herself. Among the feelings that surged through her as she read was envy. Or maybe possessiveness was a better word, the petty, proprietary thought that Afghanistan was hers to care for, and yet here was Crane, a stranger, adopting it.

  IN HER GRIEF OVER Fereshta’s fate, Parveen wasn’t alone. The book had sparked an unusual outpouring of idealism among Americans, so much so that Crane in one interview compared it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, known vaguely to Parveen as the novel that, in vividly depicting the cruelties of slavery, had helped bring about its end.

  Church groups, book groups, moms’ groups, youth groups—all had been moved to raise money to support the clinic Crane had built in Fereshta’s village. A fourteen-year-old girl in New Jersey started a fund-raising initiative called Money for Mothers that spread first to other schools and then, via social media, to other states. Kids across the country held bake sales and dance-offs; they mowed lawns and tithed from their allowances to help women in Afghanistan. Gideon Crane’s book signings drew long lines; his lectures, crowds. For the American people, so many emotions had been pent up since 2001: anger at the attacks, concern for the fate of women in Afghanistan, guilt about the volunteer soldiers deployed and killed, confusion about why they were still in the country at all. Crane seemed to provide answers that were a kind of salve.

  When Parveen chanced on the memoir, America’s war in Afghanistan was already more than seven years old. It had spanned all of her time in high school and now her nearly four years in college too. America had disrupted al-Qaeda and driven the Taliban from power, but the nation’s intervention had dragged on long enough, with vague enough aims, to see the Taliban return as insurgents, thereby necessitating the war’s continuance. The previous year, 2008, had been the most violent since 2001. There were close to fifty thousand American soldiers in Afghanistan—as many as the Soviets had brought to their initial invasion—and seventeen thousand more on their way. The war effort was ramping up even as public support for it fell. Crane’s book seemed to bridge this disjunction by reminding Americans why their intervention in Afghanistan was still needed. And he suggested that the war, if fought differently, more humanely, could be won.

  His TED Talk had drawn millions of viewers, and now Parveen joined them, watching on her laptop in her room. Never having seen one, she found the format of the talk odd, like a one-sided conversation, and she was preoccupied at first by Crane’s puffy eyes and the way his long arms sailed out to punctuate his points. On the screen behind him flashed images, mostly from the book. One showed Fereshta’s clinic, sparkling white in the sun. The clinic already had saved so many lives, Crane explained, through emergency cesarean sections and blood transfusions and intravenous medications. It was taking on the most common causes of maternal death: obstructed labor, postpartum bleeding, fistulas, infection, eclampsia. He had moved on to building clinics in other villages only because dozens of elders had trekked over mountains to beg him to do so. Their women, too, were dying in childbirth. It seemed there was a Fereshta in every house.

  Maternal mortality killed more women than war did, he pointed out, yet these deaths garnered no attention. Childbirth remained an existential wager. The screen behind him filled with the startling image of a woman covered by a bloody sheet. If Americans used their power and know-how to address this threat, he argued, the hearts and minds of the majority of the Afghan people would be theirs. Compassion was a tool of war, one the nation was failing to deploy. He had briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to this effect; during his TED Talk, he showed pictures of generals holding Mother Afghanistan or gripping his hand. But he was even prouder that ordinary soldiers were being told to read Mother Afghanistan before they deployed to the actual Afghanistan and that the book was being assigned to every student at West Point.

  Parveen wasn’t sure how to feel about the war. In October of 2001, as scenes of the Taliban fleeing Kabul were broadcast, her parents had wept with relief in front of the television. They were grateful to the Americans for ending five years of barbaric Taliban rule and hopeful that the Americans would prevent a return to civil war and help rebuild their battered country. But as civilian deaths at American hands mounted, many Afghan-Americans started to question the war (her parents, fighting her mother’s cancer, barely talked about it anymore). She couldn’t say whether her country was helping Afghanistan or damaging it, and she didn’t like not knowing where to stand. She was still young enough to consider ambivalence a cop-out.

  NOT LONG AFTER PARVEEN read Mother Afghanistan, Gideon Crane scheduled an appearance at a private university near San Francisco. She bought a ticket and on a rainy Tuesday found herself in an amphitheater with three thousand seats, all of them occupied.

  Crane arrived more than an hour after his talk was scheduled to start. For most of that stretch, as
pump-up-the-volume music was blasted to fill the empty time, the stage was occupied only by a podium whose protruding microphone began, as the minutes passed, to look as if it were going to begin speaking itself. Yet Parveen did not sense impatience or hear complaints around her; uncharacteristically, she felt little impatience herself. What was the value of their time compared to Crane’s? He had earned the benefit of all doubts.

  The crowd was mostly around her age, students like her, she guessed, but different than her Berkeley peers. Less diverse, for one: she couldn’t remember when she’d last been in such a sea of whiteness. But also less ironic, more earnest, and she let herself enjoy the enthusiasm bubbling around her. She was enjoying her anonymity, too, the unlikelihood of anyone she knew being in the audience. She didn’t have to affect an attitude or have an explanation ready for why she was there, and tonight at least she wouldn’t have to talk about the future, which was pretty much all she and her friends did nowadays. The future was mostly what she thought about, too, although neither talking nor thinking was bringing her closer to solving the problem it presented.

  She was four months from graduation with no firm idea as to what to do next. Her original plan, to apply to graduate programs in anthropology, had been abandoned the previous September, after Lehman Brothers collapsed. At first its demise had seemed irrelevant to her, but as the repercussions spread, joining with other signs of economic woe, she concluded that it was no time to take on more debt. In the succeeding months, she and her friends, most of them idealistic liberal arts majors like her, fought genteelly and mostly unsuccessfully for scraps: scarce fellowships, meager stipends, nonprofit work that barely paid. The job market was the worst it had been in two decades. Returning home after graduation to wait out the downturn, as many of her friends planned to do, wasn’t an option for Parveen, even though home was where she’d lived all through college. Her father had decided that upon her graduation, he would give up the apartment they’d had for two decades and move to San Jose to live with Taara and her husband and son. Taara assumed that Parveen would join them and share a room with her baby nephew until she married herself. Just the idea of this made Parveen sweat; it sounded like a second childhood lived under her sister’s judging eye.

  Through the fall and into the winter, panic had built in her, anxiety keeping her up at night, nerves knotting her stomach at dawn. Even Barack Obama’s election and inauguration, as electrifying as they were to her, didn’t dispel the underlying dread. She felt fragile, prone to tears, and alone. Her mother, had she still been alive, would have provided comfort but not necessarily guidance, since she had never tried to find work in America. Her father didn’t know how to keep from sinking himself. He was a journeyman professor teaching poetry and Persian at Bay Area community colleges, but now his classes and so his income were being reduced, which was why he was moving in with Taara. The life of Parveen’s secure teenage years was being dismantled piece by piece, and walking Berkeley’s streets, she sometimes had the dreamlike sensation that she was falling.

  When Gideon Crane finally took the stage, to a protracted ovation, Parveen thrilled to his charisma, even though logic suggested that this charisma, rather than inherent to him, was born of his fame. She was struck first by his height—he towered over the university president who introduced him. His hair looked yellow under the bright lights. His face was rumpled with exhaustion, which made her tender toward him. No doubt he was fatigued by his relentless efforts. His suit was rumpled too, and Parveen found this lack of attention to his own person moving. It reminded her of the photo revealing a hole in Adlai Stevenson’s shoe that her History of American Politics professor had shown the class.

  Much of Crane’s talk simply recapped the book. As he told the story of Fereshta, of not being allowed to help her, of the donkey ride, of her death, there was total silence. Then a cell phone rang, audible to all even in the giant space, and everyone looked around in a limb-tearing rage until it was shut off. Crane, unbothered, carried on. His anger at Fereshta’s death seemed so genuine, as if drawn from a constantly replenishing reservoir, and his reading of his listeners was so perceptive that they were rapt. He knew that young women especially were preoccupied with preserving the right to choose what they did with their bodies, he said, but he wanted them to remember women in places like Afghanistan who had no choices at all and fight for the rights of those women as hard as they fought for their own. He wanted young Americans to take their heads and hearts out into the world to do good. “But don’t forget, while you’re young, to have fun,” he added. “You don’t have to be perfect to change the world.” He was talking about himself, Parveen guessed, but his words resonated with her own feelings of being as yet unformed. You don’t have to wait until you become something or someone to help, he seemed to suggest. Maybe action was how you became who you were meant to be.

  When they gathered that he was done speaking, they all rose to their feet to applaud. Even as the university president was walking to the podium, still clapping, Crane was waving a long arm and loping off the stage. He took no questions. He signed no books. They were told that a car was waiting to drive him to the airport for a flight to Oregon, where his next event would take place. Parveen hurried to talk to him, but she was caught in the crush of those exiting, and by the time she’d made her way out of the amphitheater, anyone connected to Crane’s organization was gone. She’d hoped to find someone who worked for him because, as he finished his talk, inspiration had struck her. “Go out into the world and be the best of America,” Crane had said. “Give the best of yourself.” Suddenly Parveen could think of nothing she wanted more and nowhere she wanted to do it more than Afghanistan—in Fereshta’s village, to be precise. It made so much sense; she, probably alone in that auditorium, had the language, knew the culture. The ongoing war didn’t deter her. By seeing it up close, she hoped, she could decide for herself what it was.

  She wrote to Crane through his foundation website. He didn’t reply, not to that letter or the next three she sent. This wasn’t surprising, given the volume of correspondence Crane surely received; what was surprising to Parveen was that she persisted. She called the foundation, then pestered his executive assistant and chief of staff. The passion Crane had stirred in her was real and so was the ambition. Her identity had begun to form around this idea of going to the village. The awe in acquaintances’ faces when she told them her inchoate plan was gratifying, even addictive. To revert to her ordinary self would disappoint. It must serve some human need, she thought, to believe there are individuals willing to do more, sacrifice more, than most people are capable of. Wasn’t this what had attracted her to Crane?

  When Crane at last responded, he told Parveen to get in touch with someone on his staff about her donation. She wrote back to clarify and received a vague but encouraging response, then a more detailed e-mail from a staff person who had been directed by Crane to help with arrangements. After another long delay, Parveen was told she would live with Fereshta’s family. The news thrilled her; she boasted about it. Fereshta’s fame, even though it was posthumous, was a magnet.

  Later, on that first morning in the village, she would wonder superstitiously if this boasting had landed her in misery. Where was everyone else? The true believers? How was it that of all the legions of fans of Mother Afghanistan, only she had been foolish enough to transplant herself to the village? She remembered, a bit sourly, the people who’d cheered her on. Maybe it wasn’t nobility she had offered them but drama. There were times she herself had cavalierly exhorted wavering friends to take a risk or do a rash thing—dump a decent but uninspiring boyfriend; change majors midway through junior year—that she never would’ve done herself. It was a guilty and vicarious pleasure to watch other people leap off a cliff and see how they landed. Still, she did not want to admit that those who’d warned her against coming were right.

  THE AGENDAS BEHIND, or the emotions beneath, these warnings had been almost as interesting to Parveen as the words th
emselves. Her father’s chief worry had been the danger the war might place her in. Parveen had assured him that the far northern province to which she was going was safe, but he hadn’t been convinced. There ensued a flurry of phone calls to relatives in Kabul, who agreed with Parveen. The fighting was worsening across the country, but it was concentrated in the Pashtun heartland in the south, far from Fereshta’s village. The peaceful province was of interest to neither the insurgents nor the Americans. Still, they expressed surprise that Ashraf would allow his unmarried daughter to go on her own to a village, and this got to the heart of Taara’s objection: that by venturing off alone, far from her elders’ watchful eyes, Parveen would compromise her honor and thus her chances of marriage.

  After their mother’s death Taara had appointed herself, without asking permission, as a maternal substitute, which Parveen resented, particularly because Taara proved more stifling than their mother had ever been. She acted as if everything Parveen did reflected on her, which became a problem when rumors that Parveen was hooking up with a boy on campus reached Taara. They’d had a screaming fight and hadn’t spoken for a week.

  For Parveen, her sister’s raising of her marriage prospects as a reason not to go to Afghanistan was reason enough to go, and so the battle began. Parveen announced that she didn’t care if any Afghan-American boy wanted to marry her; indeed, she didn’t care if she married at all, and besides, she was going to the village to be with the women, not the men, so where was the dishonor in that? She accused her sister of not being concerned for the women of Afghanistan, to which Taara replied that Parveen didn’t care about the feelings of her own family, which was worse.