by Amy Waldman
When it became clear the prayers were nearly over, she scuttled away from the mosque and toward the bazaar. Waheed and Jamshid found her outside the tailor’s shop. She told Waheed, as if she’d just spent all of Friday prayers thinking it over, that she wanted to have some clothes made. “Clothes like Bina and the others wear,” she clarified, not mentioning the mullah’s sermon.
She was reminded, with some discomfiture, of an earlier transformation, during her first seminar with Professor Banerjee. Back then, feeling her professor sizing her up, Parveen had imagined a hint of disappointment in her gaze. Parveen was in her full California-girl phase, or rather the cliché of a California girl; she’d arrived at Berkeley with pale streaks in her hair, artful rips in her artificially faded jeans, hot pink on her lips, none of which was remarkable in Union City. But the friends she was making and the people, such as her professor, whom she admired dressed minimally, almost severely. Over that semester, she let her hair revert to its natural near black, traded her ripped jeans for intact black ones, dialed down the lipstick color, and bought a secondhand black pleather jacket (actual leather being out of her budget), all in an attempt to be taken seriously by Professor Banerjee and the other students in the class. It struck her, even at the time, that there was no self, no core, unshaped by others, that from the moment you’re conscious that you’re being viewed, you’re being molded. Here was another reminder of that.
When the tailor reopened his stall, Parveen searched among several bolts of fabric standing against a middle shelf. She chose a terra-cotta hatched with black Xs, then remembered that she hadn’t brought money. Waheed said that he would settle with the tailor—her three months of rent, it seemed, had made him feel flush—and have Bina make the clothes. Parveen grimaced; this would give Bina another reason to resent her. No, she insisted, she would repay him, and the tailor should make the clothes.
“Fine,” Waheed said. “Then he’ll have to measure you.”
As soon as he said this, Parveen guessed that she’d made a mistake, that having a male tailor take a women’s dimensions simply wasn’t done. But it was too late. Pretending nonchalance, she stood still while the tailor, embarrassed, applied the tape measure loosely so as not to touch her.
As they walked home, Parveen let on that she’d heard some of the mullah’s sermon and that she knew it was about her.
Waheed laughed, then said, “He also likes to speak against me. When he talks about beggars becoming kings, that is me.” There was something like pride in his voice.
Parveen asked what the mullah meant by that.
“I’m not as poor as I once was,” Waheed said. “Not everyone likes that.”
When they arrived at the compound, Waheed went upstairs, leaving Parveen in the courtyard with Jamshid. She went to the outhouse; he was still there, scuffing his feet in the dirt, when she came out. Newly hatched chickens, tiny downy clouds, were following one another around the courtyard, and he picked one up and handed it to her to hold. The donkey rolled in the dust. The breeze rippled through the drying laundry. Parveen, stroking the soft chick, was, for a moment, content. He and Bilal were going to take the livestock up to the meadow to graze, Jamshid finally said. Did Parveen want to come? He glanced at her as he said this, his shoulders hunching up toward his ears.
She wondered if she should ask Waheed’s permission to go on this venture. But he wasn’t her father or the arbiter of what was allowed in the village. “I’d love to,” she said, both uneasy and excited about this possibly illicit trip.
The spry goats took the lead, followed by the donkey, while the cows brought up the rear. Leaving the houses behind, they took a narrow path that led up the slope. Above them a falcon turned, having detected their movement below. The path faded—the animals led the way around boulders—then returned, snaking upward. The plant life grew hardier at these heights, gripping on to bits of soil or emerging from cracks between rocks veined with rose quartz and verdigris.
It was afternoon, the day’s peak heat past, but although the air cooled as they climbed, the exercise warmed Parveen. She realized how, cooped up in Waheed’s house, she’d missed moving her body. The yoga mat had been used only to protect her bed from goat and chicken droppings.
In college, she’d jogged at least three times a week in the Berkeley Hills. The landscape had been exotic to her, a dirt track lined with silvery sagebrush and manzanita, mugwort and mule’s ear, and, in one cool stretch, a row of eucalyptus trees with that pungent vaporous scent so vivid that it strung together, as if on a necklace, all the moments of her life in which she had encountered it. High in the hills, she felt she could really breathe. But the Berkeley Hills, while technically mountains, topped out under two thousand feet. The village’s elevation was nearly double that, and these mountains stretched two or three times as high again. They were geologic epics, composed across millennia. After half an hour of ascension, they all passed through a gap and into an alpine meadow carpeted with wild grasses and flowers. At its edge it gave way to a vast plain of pale blue sky with the mountains rippling into the distance. Parveen, elated, extended her arms wide, as if to embrace the view.
The animals settled to their grazing. Parveen sat on a flat rock that still held the day’s warmth, and Jamshid stretched out on his back nearby, propping himself up on his elbows. They stayed like that for a while, not speaking.
Bilal wandered off, and Parveen asked Jamshid about the boy’s missing hand. It had been an accident, two years ago, Jamshid said. Bilal had been trying to help with the harvest and had sliced his left forearm with a scythe. The damage was so severe that the only choice was to remove the limb from the forearm down, leaving a sheared-off stump, knobby with scar tissue. Parveen shuddered at the pain he must have suffered. Already she felt affection for the boy. His large eyes, a mellow brown, dominated his face. His smile came rarely, which made it all the more lovely. He was observant and quiet, lacking the boisterousness and toughness that even the younger children possessed.
“You’ll get used to looking at it,” Jamshid said. “We all did.” It had been hardest for his father. “He loves Bilal too much.”
Parveen pondered this phrasing. Was there a danger in loving too much? “Your family has suffered a lot,” she observed.
“Every family suffers a lot, at least in Afghanistan. Maybe not in America.”
Not as much, she said. There was no war and much less hunger. But loss and grief, they were everywhere. Her mother had died too, she told him. From cancer, three years ago. Motherless children were a morose yet tight-knit tribe, she’d found, and she hoped that her disclosure might establish a bond with Jamshid. From the way he looked at her, as if truly seeing her for the first time, it had.
“I’m sorry, may she rest in peace,” he said.
She asked Jamshid what he remembered of his mother.
“One day we had a mother, and the next we didn’t; I didn’t have time to memorize her.” Parveen turned his words over. She’d had lots of time, months at least, to “memorize” her mother, but had it worked? The images she’d stored shifted in and out of focus all the time.
“This meadow was her favorite place,” Jamshid said.
Parveen’s first emotion, which she quelled, was a thrill at this glimpse of the dead Fereshta. “She came here often?”
Jamshid laughed. How could his mother have come here often? She’d been working all the time. But she came sometimes, he said, once he could walk. His sister Hamdiya, she would carry. Mostly it was to bring the animals. But sometimes as a family they came here for picnics. “Not much,” he said, “just bread and leeks. Or walnuts and mulberries, like the mujahideen live on in the mountains.” At his effort to sound tough, Parveen stifled a smile. “We had very little food then, much less than now. But we never thought about our stomachs up here.”
Across the meadow Bilal was bending, then moving, then bending again, picking flowers with his single hand. Jamshid watched him too.
“I was the oldes
t. I would help my mother, when I wasn’t making trouble for her. I could be very naughty,” he said almost apologetically, but he insisted his mother had never scolded him. Parveen wondered if this was true or if it was just the haze of loss softening the edges. “She’d put me in charge of the younger ones. Mostly I just let them play in the dirt.” He smiled at this. “She loved flowers. Bilal gets that from her.”
“Was she like Bina?” Parveen asked, thinking of Bina’s fondness for flowers.
Jamshid shook his head scornfully. Sometimes he didn’t believe they were really sisters, he said.
Parveen had seen him take umbrage at Bina’s treatment of Shokoh, if only Waheed wasn’t around. Just that morning, Bina had sniped at Shokoh for forgetting to mind one of Bina’s toddlers, and Jamshid had protested that it wasn’t Shokoh’s child.
“Shokoh isn’t my child,” Bina had countered, “yet I must take care of her.”
“You’re mean because you’re jealous,” Jamshid blurted.
“Oh yes, I’m jealous that she has a boy with no beard in love with her,” Bina said, and Jamshid had fled in embarrassment.
“You didn’t want your father to marry Bina,” Parveen ventured now. She felt, unexpectedly, a little sorry for Bina.
“When has what I want mattered to my father?” Jamshid said. “‘Feelings are like air to earth,’ he says. Not solid. They do nothing to feed you.” Besides, he added, Bina’s coming was good for his sisters. Until she arrived, they’d had to do all the work his mother used to do.
Parveen shifted off her rock and lay down on the grass. She nibbled at a piece of it and briefly closed her eyes, lulled by the soft tickle of the air and the mellow afternoon light. How long had they been up here? Time had dropped away. When she was a child her family had sometimes taken day trips to the coast. The ocean’s thunder and sparkle had thrilled her, but its monotony, its endlessness, had terrified her. The grandeur, the gravity, of the mountains was, for her, more profound, more provoking of ecstasy. For all their poverty, these two brothers were rich in a way she’d never thought to covet.
“I was there when she died,” Jamshid said suddenly. “I heard it.”
Parveen snapped to attention. He hadn’t been near Fereshta when she died. Crane had taken her from the village to a hospital. But the agony she experienced before that had probably been seared into Jamshid’s brain, and it wasn’t surprising that a nine-year-old boy desperate to understand what had happened and trying to cling to his lost mother any way he could would mix things up. This grieved Parveen, but she saw no reason to correct him, nor was it her place. He was sitting up, arms wrapped around his knees, watching Bilal. Jamshid looked badly in need of a hug, but he seemed too old for one from her, which made her sad too.
“I’m so sorry,” she told him. “You were too young to have that happen.” After her own mother died, she added, she’d had all kinds of dreams where reality and fantasy seemed to mix. In one, for example, her mother was explaining to her and her sister how to cure her cancer, as if there were a recipe that they had failed to follow correctly. When he simply nodded, still glum, she tried to lift his mood. “You must be glad that the clinic is named for her.”
“Yes, my mother died, and I must thank the American,” Jamshid replied with unexpected heat.
Parveen said softly, “It’s not Gideon Crane’s fault she died.” But to a child it would have seemed simple: an American took his mother away, and she never came back. He wouldn’t be aware of the role the men in his village had played or how his own father had allowed his mother to die. Parveen wondered whether, at some point, she should explain this to Jamshid. He would be angry at Waheed. Did she want him to be? It wasn’t fair for him to blame Crane.
The sky was turning pink, and vermilion backlit the clouds. Bilal returned with his bouquet, a ragged but glorious mix of scarlet, yellow, fuchsia, and blue, and presented it to Parveen. Him, she could hug, and when she did, he smiled bashfully. Later, in her room, she pressed the flowers between the pages of Mother Afghanistan, then turned the book over to inspect Crane’s author photo. His pale blue eyes gazed out at her; she’d never noticed before, but they weren’t exactly aligned, the left one slightly cast off into the distance while the right looked straight ahead. It was an imperfection that somehow seemed an advantage, as if he had a wide range of vision than everyone else. That night she wrote to him detailing everything she’d learned about the clinic.
THE TRIP TO THE meadow emboldened Parveen, and in the following days she started to venture farther on her own. In a house with a dozen inhabitants, she needed, on occasion, to escape. Although she’d given up many luxuries without complaint, she insisted on solitude. But it was awkward, always, leaving. The first few times Bina or Shokoh had asked where she was going. “For a walk,” she said, unsure whether to invite them. They couldn’t go as far as her; they couldn’t leave their duties. She felt guilty about this, but not enough to stay home.
She began to wander regularly through the lanes of the village, down to the fields and orchards, up the slopes, though never as far as the meadow on her own. Each walk made her face less surprising to the villagers, more a feature of the landscape, so that eventually she was left alone. Her powers of observation grew microscopic. She noticed, as she climbed, the spring of tiny pink alpine flowers from a mountain crevice that had been bald just days before, or the lilac blossoms foaming from scree. Wild irises of a deep magenta. Wild geraniums, violet or pale pink. For plants she couldn’t name she made lists of adjectives: spiny, woolly, prickly, showy. Leaves toothed or smooth. Stems fat or thin, hairy or nude. Weeds like unbrushed hair or brazen scarlet colonizers of wheat fields. She lost—gave—countless minutes to watching mother birds feed hatchlings and carry white balls of waste from the nest. Without the pressure to extract moments or memories and offer them up for consumption to friends, she found that time slowed, became sinuous.
She had been returned, almost overnight, to a pre-digital life, as if she had traveled back in time to 1990, or even 1930. In her first week there’d been a withdrawal period during which her yearnings for the constant drip of news from other lives, for diversion, was strong. She could feel it physically, a low-level irritability, this ache for more than what the present contained, for relief from the tedium of a given moment. But the immediate moment—the people in front of her, the experience she was having, her own thoughts, her own imagination—was all she had, and slowly her brain adjusted to this. Everything around her began to take on a startling vividness. Simultaneity, multitasking, that quintessential condition of twenty-first-century life in America, was no longer possible. Every channel was off but the one deliverable by her five senses and her own mind.
Her mind stilled, a tranquility derived as much from what wasn’t in the village as what was. There were no cars, for one thing, no blaring horns, blasting radios, cursing drivers, backfires, traffic, or exhaust. A car door slamming here sounded like an explosion. No music, for another. Parveen’s mother had once said to her father, as they trailed in the wake of a teenager leaking noise from his headphones, “Do you remember when you could walk around playing music only by holding an instrument?” In the village, it was still that time.
On the way back to Waheed’s compound, she would sweep her hand along the village walls, dry and smooth, almost the texture of hands themselves, and try to imagine living within enclosures built by one’s ancestors and that still, beneath layers of repair, held traces of their touch. Throughout the day the walls were repainted by shifts in the sun’s position overhead—warm sand, then ocher, then amber. They were as smooth to the eye as they were to the hand. The village had no visual clutter. No billboards, no advertisements, no graffiti. No names on street signs, no numbers on the homes. The village was washed clean of words. What use did the villagers have for writing? Most of them didn’t know how to read, and anyway they didn’t need such guidance in the village where they’d lived their whole lives. The map of this place, the location of each f
amily compound, had been laid down in every head in childhood, probably around the time language was. They could no more forget how the village was arranged than they could forget how to talk.
For Parveen the absence of written words was at first a shock. From the time she could read, she’d read everything that had passed before her eyes. Didn’t everyone? she thought. It wasn’t even a choice; reading was perhaps the only learned behavior that became as involuntary as breathing. It couldn’t be unlearned, couldn’t be switched off, she couldn’t not read what was put in front of her: GOT MILK? on a passerby’s T-shirt; GOT JUNK? on a speeding truck. Most of the time she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. Her eyes flickered or jerked to wherever the words were, funneling them up to her brain to be sorted then mostly tossed. She passed newspaper racks and magazine stands, inhaling headlines on the move. She read when she went to the bathroom: PLEASE DISCARD SANITARY NAPKINS IN THE RECEPTACLE PROVIDED. EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. She read when she walked down the street: STOP. 25 MPH. NO SMOKING. NO SKATEBOARDING. PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR. PLEASE USE REVOLVING DOOR. TENANTS ONLY. EMPLOYEES ONLY. NO TRESPASSING. NO PARKING. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED. She read when she went to a restaurant or a supermarket or a movie or a class or on a drive. She read advertisements on billboards, on the sides of buses, on lampposts (in Berkeley, especially on lampposts). It was chaff, most of it. Word waste. She read it anyway. Her eyes were not her own, which was why only now could she truly see the blizzard of letters and digits she had lived in back home, the constant barrage of information and images to metabolize or ignore, process or discard. Only now did she feel, in the absence of this constant assault, how much work, how much filtering, her brain had been doing to withstand it. And that wasn’t even counting the internet, that endless virtual bazaar, flat and bottomless at the same time.