by Amy Waldman
But when she told them that her aunts cooked qabuli pilau the same way Bina did (this was a lie, since her aunts used much less oil), Bina asked her why she hadn’t eaten hers.
“I’m not feeling well,” Parveen lied.
“My food made you sick?”
“No, no—just all the travel, I think.” She hoped the tremble in her voice wasn’t audible.
“Bina can make you a remedy for your stomach,” Zahab offered shyly but also proudly. “She can cure anything.”
That would be great, Parveen replied, although it was her mood, not her stomach, that needed remedying.
“You’re an Afghan with an American stomach,” Bina joked. “Like a camel with a mouse’s bladder.”
Parveen laughed along with everyone else, but she saw coldness in Bina’s eyes. You don’t make sense; you don’t belong here, Bina was saying. Parveen couldn’t even rustle up a comeback; her Dari wasn’t limber enough. She despaired of ever being truly known here, where everything that had defined her—her friendships, her politics, her taste in men, music, and books, the campus groups she’d belonged to and the ones she’d shunned—was irrelevant or insignificant. Bina had yet to ask her a single question. She acted as if Americans landed in her house all the time, yet as far as Parveen knew, none had stayed here since Crane, and that had been before Bina’s arrival. Parveen had the eagerness to stand out common to those who feel they never quite fit in. She didn’t like being treated as a nonentity.
BINA DID TAKE TIME, the next day, to show Parveen her vegetable plot, which was in a sunny corner of the yard. The plot had been laid by Waheed’s mother or perhaps his grandmother or great-grandmother and would once have been tended by Fereshta, although this Bina did not mention. She made a point of saying she’d expanded the garden, and she named, with awkward pride, each plant: celery, caraway, chicory, coriander, dill, carrot, fennel, parsley, spinach, and cress. Like many Afghans, Bina had a talent for growing flowers, some of which had curative properties, she said. For example, gul-e-jaafari, gorgeous orange flowers in pots, were conscripted to fight against stomachache, parasites, and diarrhea. Variants—cousins—of the herbs Bina grew could be found in the wild, she said, but those were often poisonous.
“Like me!” Shokoh, who’d trailed them, said wickedly, and Bina nodded as if this were wisdom. Then she was done playing tour guide. It was time to work. For the rest of the day, she gave exasperated sighs whenever Parveen approached and batted away her queries as the cows did the flies. Trying to keep out of the way, Parveen seemed constantly to be in it.
She had grand plans to interview all the village women about their reproductive histories, and she’d thought she’d start with Bina. She wanted to learn about the experiences the women here had in childbirth, she explained to Bina, and asked if they could make a time to discuss Bina’s pregnancies and deliveries.
Bina looked at her incredulously, then laughed harshly. “The babies were in me, then they came out. There, we have discussed.”
When Parveen tried to help with household chores—rinsing dirt from spinach, straining yogurt, chopping meat—Bina shooed her away, saying, “Better to keep your pants clean and your hands soft.” Parveen protested, but Bina said, with feigned lightness, “You’re as useless as Shokoh in the house!”
The words stung, especially because Parveen disagreed with them. She’d grown up doing very similar tasks in her mother’s kitchen; she was skilled enough at shredding carrots. But she put down her knife and walked away. There was nothing to gain from a fight. She sulked in her room, wondering if she was being punished for the previous night’s conversation with Shokoh.
Underemployed, she told herself that this was a well-earned vacation after the frenetic schedule of her senior year. Yet the sense of being unwelcome made it hard to relax, as did her lack of purpose. The women of the house didn’t have freedom, but they did have work, an abundance of it. As she sat foolishly in corners or under the grapevine in the yard, the small children staring at her, even her hands came to feel superfluous. Her only previous experience of such female idleness had been in literature—the women of Palace Walk, so desperate for glimpses of the world outside, or Rosamond, the destructive, fantasy-prone young bride in Middlemarch—and it was easy to see how the condition, the gaseous swamp of boredom, gave rise to ill-considered love affairs and poisonous intrigues. Would men, confined and slack, be any different?
Every time she asked Waheed to take her to the clinic, he replied, “Not now,” and she lacked the nerve to venture out on her own, not least because she wasn’t sure, given the maze of lanes and the identical doors, that she could find her way home. “Home.” Inwardly, she placed the word in quotes. Not home was more accurate. Parveen had never lived on her own before and so hadn’t known until now that homesickness had physical symptoms: sleeplessness, loss of appetite, nausea. These were also symptoms of grief, which was perhaps why she missed her mother with renewed acuteness. Parveen scrolled through the photos of her mother she kept on her phone, deliberately making herself despondent, until the ache in her grew so strong she wanted to gouge it out. The image of her father bidding her farewell at the airport kept returning. She couldn’t stop seeing his graying hair, dutifully combed, or his frame, which had so doggedly thinned in the years since her mother’s death. Or his eyes, expressive and concerned. By now he would have relocated to Taara’s place in San Jose, and it occurred to Parveen that there was a hole in Union City where the Shams family had been, a hole that was rapidly closing. It was as if her entire childhood had vanished. Even if she could somehow see back home, the view would be blank.
And would her family, in trying to imagine her situation, picture her balled up on her bedroll in a room littered with straw? Would her friends guess that the first woman she’d tried to interview had shut her down? No one back home would ever know if this was how she spent her time in the village, but she’d know, and it was that determination to give her story a different ending that kept her in place. She’d promised her father she would return before Thanksgiving. With June having only just arrived, that seemed impossibly far off. But she wouldn’t quit, not yet. She’d invested too much to leave.
She went to her room to read; in light of Bina’s sensitivities, it seemed like showing off to do so in front of the family. She turned and re-turned the pages of Mother Afghanistan, as if the book might provide the key to this household. But Crane, now that she looked closely, hadn’t provided many details about life with the family, and of those he had, some didn’t match what she’d found. He’d written, for example, that Fereshta had three sons and three daughters. According to Parveen’s tally, the boys numbered only two. Perhaps one had died; she’d have to inquire delicately about this. He hadn’t mentioned the identical twins. He’d said that Waheed farmed rice when in fact he farmed wheat. But then Crane had written his memoir at least a year after leaving the village, and he probably hadn’t taken notes. Of course he wouldn’t remember petty facts. He’d trained his vision higher.
But for her own accounting, perhaps to avoid similar mistakes, she set down in a notebook the names of the children and their approximate ages, along with brief descriptions: Jamshid, about fifteen. Hard to see where his father leaves off and he begins. She was still fresh from her student life, and research was a familiar hand to hold.
Hamdiya, fourteen. Will she be married off soon? Need to learn her knowledge of sex, contraception, etc.
Zahab, twelve, I think. Dutiful. Seems most attached to Bina, maybe because there’s a resemblance.
Bilal, about ten. Only one hand—want story but afraid to ask. Sweetheart.
Adeila and Aakila, about eight or nine, twins. Both need glasses. Two or three when their mother died. After she wrote this, Parveen paused. At least she’d known her own mother.
She made notes about the village too—roughly ninety families, Waheed had said, most of them large, totaling about a thousand people. Along the valley spread a dozen or more similar villages
, none within sight of the others. But without a professor to test her grasp of this information, it felt inert on the page. It bored her.
ON HER THIRD NIGHT, Parveen stayed in the main room with Waheed and Jamshid after dinner while the women and girls went to clean up. The radio was on, tuned to the BBC Persian service, as it was each evening, radio being the sole medium by which news of the outside world regularly came to the village. An Air France flight with two hundred and twenty-eight people aboard had vanished; a South African woman claiming to be one hundred and thirty-four, and thus the world’s oldest person, had died; General Motors had filed for bankruptcy—the family solemnly took it all in.
“It’s the worst air crash since 2001,” Jamshid told his father. Parveen looked at him with surprise. “I know what happened in New York was much worse,” he mumbled almost apologetically. “But there hasn’t been this big a crash since.”
“You heard about that? About 9/11? I mean, of course you did,” Parveen said, feeling silly. “I guess I mean, did you hear it through the radio?”
They had, Jamshid said. He had been seven then. He’d dreamed about buildings as tall as the mountains collapsing down on him. So many innocent Afghans had died in decades of war, far, far more than the number who’d died in New York. This had made the villagers more sympathetic.
“We couldn’t believe this had been done to a superpower,” Waheed said. “The same one that had brought about the end of the Soviet Union. And we knew it would bring the Americans to Afghanistan.” But Waheed was more interested in discussing Iran’s elections, which would be held soon. Did Parveen think they would be honest? Was Iran more or less of a democracy than Afghanistan?
She didn’t have good answers. In fact, she knew far less about the subject than Waheed.
Had she at least seen pictures of Ahmadinejad? Was the man as short as they said he was? he wondered, and he guffawed when Parveen estimated where on her chest he came up to.
Most of the news they received, however, was about Afghanistan, its politics and its war, reports of which drifted in through the radio like ash from a distant fire. In every other way the war felt remote, as if it were happening in another country. This was a relief to Parveen, for in Kabul it had seemed uncomfortably close, like metal woven through the fabric of the city—a hard, cold presence you kept butting up against in the course of normal life. Her relatives, as they took her to museums and palaces, a Mughal garden, the British cemetery, and the zoo, not to mention internet cafés, kebab joints, and the homes of many distant relatives, often had to pull over for the military convoys that bulled their way through the streets. They pointed out the blast craters left by insurgents’ bombs, and navigated around the barricades and walls meant to guard against them. Western embassies and Afghan government offices had all clawed out so much territory for their own self-protection that to Parveen, the city read like an aggregation of security fiefdoms. A reprieve her cousins had planned—a picnic in Istalif, a famously beautiful spot north of Kabul—was canceled after a suicide bomber attacked a NATO convoy on the road they would have taken. Such disruptions were not routine, for they could not be predicted, but neither were they surprising. To Kabul’s residents, the war was like a giant pothole that you kept swerving around until you fell into it.
Each night she and her relatives gathered in the living room to watch television, where a more disturbing face of the war was playing out. A few weeks before Parveen arrived in Afghanistan, an air strike in the western province of Farah, some five hundred and fifty miles away from Kabul, had killed more civilians, it was said, than any similar incident since 2001. It made the news in America, but Parveen, preoccupied by preparing for graduation and her journey, had barely noted it at the time. Now she couldn’t escape it. It was believed that a hundred or more people had been killed, and most of them were children, mainly girls. Their bodies had been so badly shredded that not all of the pieces could be recovered, leaving Parveen with a new and chilling understanding of the word remains. Then there were the wounded children in their hospital beds, including three sisters she couldn’t forget. They had singed hair and charred skin that had been smeared with yellow ointment. The youngest, just five, clutched a glass of milk.
“Why is your new president escalating the war?” her aunt asked. “We hoped he would find a way to end it.”
The politeness of her voice hid her emotions. Pessimism? Resignation? Suppressed rage? As the sole American in her relatives’ house, Parveen felt culpable. She remembered her Berkeley friends savaging the military. How could she argue with them now? She’d expected to find clarity about the war by coming to Afghanistan. Instead, the blur had worsened.
Now, on the radio that Waheed had taken off the shelf and set, like a small pet, to his right, came a discussion of the Farah air strike, in which the U.S. government had at last conceded significant errors. Unable to help herself, Parveen began to speak about it, to describe, as best she could in Dari, the images she had seen on television in Kabul. The girls in the hospital. The men pawing through rubble looking for family members. A mass grave.
The females had rejoined the men and Parveen saw the twins, Adeila and Aakila, staring at her in shock and clutching each other’s hands. She could have been describing them, she realized with horror, when she talked about the sisters. She’d given the twins, perhaps the whole family, a new sense of their fragility, their vulnerability, and she wished she could undo that. Although, unlike the radio reporters, she’d witnessed nothing other than what she’d seen on television and the internet, the family reacted as if she were the one offering a firsthand account of the air strike, maybe because this was a place with no screens, to where images didn’t travel. Or maybe the family was rapt because of the guilt she confessed to—an admission that embarrassed her. It seemed so American, to act as if everything was about her own emotions and be so shocked by the barbarism of war in a country whose past three decades had been consumed by it. And yet she wanted to insist, but didn’t for fear of sounding condescending, that it wasn’t silly to expect that your government would act decently and to be crushed when it didn’t.
The family looked to Waheed, the patriarch, to say something. He turned down the radio and began to speak, occasionally stroking his beard as a much older man might. The village had a great commander, he said, who’d fought with the mujahideen against the Soviets. This man, Amanullah, had gone into the mountains for years, eluding the Russians who were hunting him, surviving on roots, nuts, mulberries. He’d lost a hand in battle and he’d gained great fame. Because of his valor, Waheed added, almost as an aside, the village forgave him his sins.
Parveen knew about the commander, for he’d figured prominently in Crane’s book. She also knew his sins. In the late 1990s, he’d lent his courage to the Taliban, becoming a commander for them and terrifying the region for a time. The commander had whipped women, beheaded men, and run a private dungeon. And he’d kidnapped Crane during his stay in the village.
Waheed didn’t speak of any of this. How painful it must have been for the villagers when their hero joined the Taliban, Parveen thought; too painful to be spoken of. No, Waheed talked only of Commander Amanullah’s exploits against the Russians until he reached his point, which was that if Amanullah decided the Americans were an enemy, he’d take up arms to fight them, and many villagers would follow him. Not that anyone wanted that, he added. They wanted to stay here and farm. For the villagers, too, this war felt like another country. No one here had even gone to fight for the government, although that was mostly because they couldn’t meet the literacy requirement for soldiers.
“But the Americans should be aware,” Waheed said, “that this soil has never been hospitable to foreigners.”
It was all Parveen could do not to roll her eyes. This was the one cliché about Afghanistan that every American seemed to know.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON WAHEED came back from the fields and announced, without explanation, that they were going to the clinic. Parve
en wondered if she’d passed some test. From a hook near the door, he lifted a ring with a pair of heavy, ornate keys. Nearby hung a row of emerald-green chadris, what Americans called burqas: the head-to-toe coverings, with netting over the eyes, that the women wore when they left the house. Parveen did not take one—her Kabul relatives had told her that, not being from the village, she should feel no obligation to wear one—yet their mere presence shadowed her into the yard. She chafed at the cloister she’d been living in. The women and girls watched her go.
When she stepped out of the compound she felt free. This was her first clear view of her surroundings, unobscured by walls. The village lay in a long, verdant valley that spilled out from between the feet of the mountains. The valley floor, flat and rich in river silt, had been given over to fields shaped into neat squares or sweeping crescents. Wheat and corn, rye and barley, rice—each claimed its own shade of green. The land had been terraced, and on higher levels there were orchards: almond, apricot, mulberry, peach, many trees enveloped in clouds of pale pink blossoms. The houses, built from tawny mud bricks, stepped up a low stony ridge, their intricate patterning guarding the privacy of each family. And ringing it all, the mountains.
As Parveen was getting her first view of the valley, the villagers were getting their first view of her. When she was just steps from the compound, a passel of boys and a few men gathered around, as if they’d been waiting these past days for her to emerge. Her hair was covered but not her face, and it was her face they stared at, their gazes pinning her in place. Her seconds of freedom vanished.
“Have you never seen a woman’s face?” Waheed shouted. “Don’t you have mothers?”
His assertiveness on her behalf surprised her, although she sensed that some of his irritation was directed at her for putting him in this situation. The boys didn’t move until Waheed took a step toward them and clinked the large keys. Then they scattered, continuing to spy on Parveen from behind walls and around corners. Once she and Waheed reached the bazaar, the boys didn’t bother to hide. They stood a few feet away and gawked.