A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  THE MORNING AFTER HER visit to the clinic, Shokoh sat against the wall in the main room of the house, pulling the rope to rock the cradle. Her eyes had a faraway look; a smile played at the edges of her mouth. The cradle could have turned over and tumbled Bina’s infant out without her noticing. Parveen was certain that Shokoh was dreaming of Naseer.

  Despite her constant industriousness, Bina was observant and shrewd. She couldn’t account for Shokoh’s new degree of abstraction, but she clocked it. “You are more useless than usual today!” she said, and she leaned down to pinch the girl’s arm. “Leave this. Go for water.”

  Shokoh hesitated. She wanted to escape the house, Parveen guessed, but not at the expense of having to lug back the full water jug. When Parveen offered to accompany her, Shokoh leaped to her feet, leaving the cradle rope swinging. The cradle slowed. The baby cried. Zahab, ever helpful, hurried to take Shokoh’s place.

  Shokoh snatched a chadri off a hook and made a face before slipping it over her head. Did Parveen want one? she asked with exaggerated politeness. Parveen demurred, feeling guilty that she had a choice.

  As they left the compound, Parveen was struck, once again, by the view. Each time her eye found something new to praise—today, the stands of poplar trees that punctuated the valley floor, often clustering near the river’s gentle curves, their trunks skinny and white, their leaves reflecting an almost silvery-green cast when the wind ruffled through. “Isn’t it glorious?” she exclaimed.

  “Not when it’s the only view you’ll ever see,” Shokoh said, her voice swimming out from within the fabric.

  Parveen kept quiet. Unlike her, Shokoh wasn’t here on a lark. A marriage, in Afghanistan, was a life sentence.

  “And to think that just last year I was still free,” Shokoh said. “I lived in a city! I didn’t have to wear this horrible covering whenever I went outside. I was in school. I could go to the shops with my mother or go see relatives or friends. Now if I leave Waheed’s house once a week, I’m lucky. They say they’re not Taliban, but what’s the difference?”

  Parveen wasn’t sure herself. Because the village wasn’t in the Pashtun south, the most conservative part of the country, she hadn’t anticipated how homebound its women would be—hadn’t expected that they would have to cover themselves completely when they left the house. Crane hadn’t mentioned that. Then again, the village commander had fought for the Taliban, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising after all.

  As they walked toward the river, Parveen carrying the empty jug, they came upon Ghazal, of the imperious nose, berating one of her sons for letting their donkey wander off while he played with his friends. “The donkey has more sense than you!” she said as the boy cowered. “He came home and asked for breakfast. So I gave him yours! He even sat in your spot.”

  The boy’s eyes grew enormous, and Ghazal laughed and tousled his hair.

  “Even the commander’s scared of her,” Shokoh said, giggling.

  They walked on, and Shokoh’s story came in fits and starts. Waheed was her father’s distant cousin, she said. Most likely he had seen her at a family wedding a year or two earlier, although, given the hundreds of relatives who’d attended, she had no memory of him. Her branch of the family had once lived in this village but it had left several generations ago. Now they resided in a bustling city where there were schools, a hospital, hotels, and people who didn’t live with animals.

  When her mother told her that Waheed had come to ask for her hand, she laughed. “I was still playing with dolls,” she said. In villages, girls were considered marriageable early, but she was a city girl, still in school. She’d seen the internet, she told Parveen, by way of telegraphing her sophistication. She would never marry an old goat and go live in a village. It was unthinkable—but only to her.

  While her family had escaped this village, they hadn’t escaped poverty. Thirty years of war in Afghanistan had made sure of that. Her father worked at a government office, but his salary was low and the family large: Shokoh and three younger siblings, her mother, her unemployed uncle’s family, her grandparents. Many months her father’s salary wasn’t paid. Waheed’s proposal, while unexpected, also came with an unexpectedly generous bride-price, and so, although he was less educated than Shokoh and more than twice her age, the offer was hard to refuse. Her twelve-year-old sister could take her place as their mother’s main helper in the house. Her father had sold her, in her words, into a life where there were no books to read, no paper to write on, no pencils to hold, only cow teats to grip. She was married to a man who was not only too old for her but also illiterate and dirty, who smelled of the fields and poked his corncob in her all the time.

  “The day I came here,” Shokoh said, flicking her hand at the valley, “my dreams died.”

  Parveen asked if her mother had agreed to this.

  “It didn’t matter whether she agreed.”

  “But surely your parents loved you.”

  They did or they didn’t; another thing that didn’t matter. Now Parveen understood why Shokoh had looked so conflicted at the doctor’s offer to communicate with her parents. As Parveen had learned from Bina, when Afghan girls married, they often never saw their parents again, since the bride moved to her husband’s home. Shokoh hadn’t seen her parents since her wedding. Waheed would decide when or if she could. Parveen wondered how Shokoh’s parents would tell this story.

  When Shokoh had arrived in the village, she said, it was winter, a season she didn’t think she would survive. Day and night she huddled by the woodstove and cried as the life of the house went on around her and the snow mounted outside the windows. Secretly she hoped that if she was troublesome enough, they would send her home, but this didn’t happen. She was always cold and the air always smoky, and she felt that not just her lungs but her very soul was being tarnished. Soon sick, she ached for her mother, for anyone, to nurse her, but no one did. If Bina seemed fierce with her now, it was nothing compared to those early days. “Two melons cannot fit in one hand,” Bina had muttered under her breath more than once, giving a dark twist to a common proverb. She accused Shokoh of faking her illness. At her worst moments, Shokoh said, she had prayed that the sickness would kill her. There was so little connection between the life she had left and this one that she was convinced that only one was real; the other was surely a dream. But which was which?

  The sole mercy was that Waheed had never beaten her, not even when she raged at him or crawled away from him in the night. (She no longer bothered, she said, finding it easier just to get it over with.) This set him apart from many of the village men, who struck their wives at the slightest provocation. Waheed was prepared to wait her out.

  But he wasn’t nearly as different from the other village men as Shokoh’s father had thought. Waheed had shown him “Dr. Gideon’s book,” which contained that picture of him with Crane. This had convinced Shokoh’s father that Waheed was important. “Silly man,” Shokoh said of her father. He couldn’t read English to know what the book said.

  Waheed had also boasted about being the only man in the village with a generator. Shokoh’s father deluded himself into believing that she would still be able to study at night. But other than Dr. Gideon’s book and the Quran, there were barely any books in the village, let alone in the house, nor was there a school for girls her age. When would she study, anyway, since all of her time was now conscripted by domestic work?

  They’d reached the river, where the air was cooler. The water revealed every rock beneath. Shokoh knelt to fill the jug.

  “When I’m out in the village, under my chadri,” she said, “I look at the faces of other men and wonder what they’d be like as husbands. Some, maybe, are a little less ugly, others a little fatter. Some are younger. But otherwise they all seem like Waheed.”

  Parveen waited, sensing what was to come.

  “The doctor’s son—he has education. He lives in a city. Seeing him—I felt…”

  Just that: I felt. There was something about
the chadri that allowed for the discharge of greater intimacies, Parveen thought. Passion, shame, desire—all were hidden behind cloth.

  Shokoh asked Parveen if Naseer had a wife, and on hearing that he didn’t, she demanded that Parveen tell her everything she’d learned about him. Parveen relayed what she knew—that Naseer wanted to study in America, that he loved gadgets and machines, that he didn’t have a girlfriend. But it seemed dangerous to feed a crush that could fester but never progress. Maybe she should be trying to persuade Shokoh to accept her unhappy lot.

  But suddenly Parveen herself was sixteen again, looking out her bedroom window at the back alley, where, out of his parents’ disapproving sight, Omar, a boy from the building next door, was changing from a conservative polo shirt and khakis into the motorcycle pants he preferred. Omar was eighteen. Parveen liked those motorcycle pants, and she liked the boy who wore them even more—she could still summon the shortness of breath she’d felt whenever they’d spoken. (Even if, as she learned later, to him she was only the smart girl next door.) What would it feel like to experience that tingle at the sight of someone, the compulsive need to say or hear his name, and already be married to a man more than twice your age, with no prospect of escape? Overcome with pity for Shokoh, Parveen wished she could spirit her out of the village, then wondered at her own impulse to be a savior.

  “Naseer is very nice to his mother,” she said finally. “And also very clumsy.” She imitated him spilling his tea, which made Shokoh laugh.

  Parveen bent to splash her face; the water, descended from the snowy peaks far above, was bracing. Shokoh lifted her chadri and splashed her own face, then, seeing Parveen’s surprise—there were men passing nearby—gave a saucy smile. “The village isn’t quite as strict as everyone wants you to believe,” she said, though she made sure to keep her eyes on Parveen, not the men. “I don’t think women here even wore chadris much until outsiders started to build the clinic.”

  Parveen confirmed this later with Bina. When she’d first come to the village, Bina said, women rarely covered their faces, even in the presence of unrelated men. But when strangers began to arrive to help with or visit the clinic, the mullah, or maybe the commander, said that these people shouldn’t be seeing the faces of their wives. The tailor started to stock more chadris, and he did a good business. Half the men in the village now insisted this was the way it had always been.

  So this was why Crane hadn’t mentioned the chadris. They hadn’t really been worn when he was first here. His effort to help the women of the village had led to their greater cloistering, Parveen thought with consternation. Was idealism an experiment whose variables couldn’t be controlled? She’d pondered how the village might change her but never given a thought to how she might change the village.

  Now Parveen noticed the other women at the river also had their chadris pulled up. They’d been watching her—she was still a novelty—and when she smiled, just to be friendly, they began to approach.

  Among them was an old woman Parveen had met briefly the previous day. She’d hobbled into the clinic’s courtyard, then propped herself up beneath its single tree, leaning on the trunk for support. She looked a bit like a gnarled ancient tree herself, her spine twisted, her fingers tuberous, the backs of her hands spotted with brown as fungi patched bark. She was the dai, a title commonly rendered in English as “traditional birth attendant.” For half a century she’d been delivering the village’s babies. Parveen didn’t learn her name; everyone simply called her “the dai.”

  The number of deliveries the dai had made would remain forever a mystery, for, being fully illiterate, she kept no records. This also meant there was no telling how many mothers or infants had perished along the way. Happy outcomes, tragic ones; all were fate, she believed, which was why she obstinately refused all efforts by Dr. Yasmeen to impart instruction or provide medicine that might save more women. To the dai the doctor was competition, and the dai would triumph using history, superstition, and, most of all, endurance. Her tenure testified to this. The doctor came and went. The dai never left.

  She’d barely spoken to Dr. Yasmeen other than to greet her in a crinkly voice that seemed to contain a laugh. But now, by the river, she began to talk to Parveen, telling her how she had been married as a girl and borne five children, then lost her husband to illness. He had no brothers, meaning there was no one to marry her, no man to care for her brood. She had to work, and she believed she had a gift for bringing babies through the passage and into the world. She knew how to comfort the women; she knew the power of the herbs and where they grew; she knew the spells. “The lady doctor couldn’t chase off the evil eye if it was staring her in the face,” the dai said, although Parveen hadn’t mentioned Dr. Yasmeen. The dai began defending herself against the doctor’s imagined criticism. Who else had been there for the women, day and night, year after year, in winter as well as spring? she asked, not waiting for a reply. It wasn’t her fault she’d been denied an education. And the clinic had changed nothing in the village. In the lonely hours when labor began, often at night, with a blanket of darkness over the village, the dai was still the only one there for the women. The only light, as she put it.

  But the clinic had saved many women’s lives, Parveen said.

  Name them, the dai said, smiling, her mouth a checkerboard of yellowed teeth and blackish gaps. Parveen, to her great frustration, couldn’t remember the names, if Crane had even mentioned them. But they’d had cesarean sections, she said, and blood transfusions, and—

  “Find me a woman who says the clinic saved her,” the dai taunted. “Then I will believe you.” No, the clinic had never done much of anything. Crane’s foundation had sent a male doctor, whom the men of the village, but not its women, were happy to see. He didn’t stay long. Ever since, only Issa had come, to maintain the equipment. “The machines have a doctor,” the dai joked, “even if the women don’t.” At least Dr. Yasmeen unlocked it once a week now—the dai gave her that.

  Parveen didn’t like being baited by this unlettered woman, and she determined that she would find women the clinic had saved. What the dai said couldn’t be true. Crane, in his TED Talk, had been so definitive about the clinic’s accomplishments. And yet the dai also seemed certain, and Dr. Yasmeen had implied something similar. Was it possible that Crane’s staff—Issa, most likely—had exaggerated or lied about what was happening at the clinic? Crane needed eyes and ears in the village, and Parveen would provide them. At the very least he should know that the doctor was not being paid and that women were still dying; for Parveen, this was the greatest shock.

  In the meantime, she would defend Crane as if her own reputation were being assailed. “Dr. Gideon has done so much for the women of Afghanistan,” she told the dai. “Don’t make fun of his work until you’ve done as much.”

  “Be careful!” Ghazal warned Parveen. “She’ll put a spell on you.”

  Unsure if this was a joke, Parveen told Shokoh they should go and hefted the full water jug. But it was as heavy as a small child, and Parveen was soon short of breath, and when Shokoh offered to take it, she didn’t object.

  Chapter Seven

  A Flower Has

  No Front or Back

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, HER FIRST FRIDAY IN THE VILLAGE, PARVEEN went to the mosque for prayers. To be precise, she stood outside it. Friday prayers were for men, Waheed had made clear when she asked. Whatever “third sex” status she had at his house or elsewhere in the village didn’t extend to its sacred spaces. Nonetheless, she moved toward the entrance after the men had gone in. She wasn’t especially religious and never went to mosque at home in protest against the segregation of the sexes there. Here protest pushed her to try entry even though it was riskier. Having until now been treated more or less like the men, she wanted all of their rights.

  Compared to the clinic, the mosque was almost ridiculously humble, a single story built from mud bricks. It was surrounded by a low wall and topped by a stubby minaret from which, five
times a day, the mullah broadcast the call to prayer. Now he emerged from its precincts: a petite man with a bulbous black turban and a thick scar, shiny as a snail track, down his cheek. He wouldn’t meet Parveen’s eyes, even as he demanded to know her destination. Despite his rudeness she greeted him as politely as possible and introduced herself.

  “I know who you are,” he said, and again he asked where she was going.

  “To the clinic,” Parveen lied.

  “It’s Friday, it’s not open,” he said. “Nothing is open. I think it’s Waheed’s house you’re going to.” He pointed in that general direction and waited for her to turn.

  Seething inside, she pretended to comply, walking slowly away, tossing a few glances back over her shoulder to see that he was still watching her. She couldn’t stop thinking of his abuse of the pregnant woman with eclampsia, couldn’t stop looking at his hands—small, pale, gnarled—and imagining them around a woman’s neck. The double standard galled her; it was fine for the mullah to touch a woman in order to choke her but not for Crane to touch Fereshta to help her?

  Until the mullah was safely inside the mosque she waited in the empty bazaar, then, feeling faintly ridiculous, walked over to the building to listen. The mullah was one of the forces, maybe the primary one, holding women back in the village. It was important to know what he was saying.

  He wasn’t hard to hear, as if he was amplifying his voice to compensate for his size. His sermon included a story about a village where an outsider brings in a disease that infects all the inhabitants. At first, thinking he was referencing the Europeans who’d brought smallpox to the New World, Parveen was impressed by his cosmopolitanism. Then she realized, with mortification, that she herself was his subject. The disease in question was immorality, spread by women in “Western dress” (if only he could see what passed for Western dress, or dress at all, in Berkeley). The danger, he said, was that the women of the village would take sick with the desire for freedom, the belief that it was fine to abandon their families and live among strangers.