by Amy Waldman
She wrote a condensed version of this to Professor Banerjee. The response, which Dr. Yasmeen delivered a couple of weeks later, came in the slashing script familiar from seminar papers where it had accused Parveen of sophistry, insufficiently interrogating the hegemony of the gaze, and other intellectual crimes. Now Professor Banerjee worried that Parveen was romanticizing the village’s pre-literate state. (She remembered, with a twinge, how she had recoiled at the DVDs in the bazaar, feeling that they didn’t belong here.) Who in the village could read? Professor Banerjee asked. And to whose benefit was the illiteracy of the rest? What structures did the lack of knowledge hold in place as mortar holds bricks?
She received another letter too, this one, to her delight, form Gideon Crane. He was distressed by her report, he said, but in his experience, all those years ago, the dai wasn’t the most reliable witness. Whatever was happening now, he knew that in the past the clinic had saved many women. Perhaps, as he was distracted by building more clinics and having to raise more funds (he’d been on the road for almost six months now and had missed the birthdays of both his daughter and his wife), the original clinic had suffered for a lack of attention. He would send someone to investigate or would come himself, and in the meantime he encouraged Parveen to keep writing to him. “Your idealism is an inspiration to me,” he finished.
The praise warmed her. She imagined him coming to investigate and to meet the young woman who was so zealous about safeguarding his mission. She saw herself, clipboard in hand, translating for Crane as he spoke to Dr. Yasmeen and the village women about the clinic’s history. She heard him praising her in his talks back home for saving him from the mendacity of his trusted lieutenant. Perhaps he would even include her in an updated version of Mother Afghanistan. Her faith had been restored.
Chapter Eight
Farther from Home
ABOUT TWO WEEKS INTO PARVEEN’S STAY, SHOKOH BEGAN to vomit—mostly, but not always, in the morning. Parveen suspected the cause and was sure Bina did too. But they didn’t discuss it beyond Parveen suggesting that Shokoh should return to the clinic and Bina agreeing. Only Shokoh seemed clueless.
Again Shokoh arrived at the clinic after the other women had gone, and again she boldly showed her face to Naseer, who again seemed undefended against her beauty. She entered the examining room glowing, heady with her effect on him. Dr. Yasmeen greeted her, listened to her symptoms, then asked her to urinate in a cup. Thinking this a joke, Shokoh laughed. The doctor raised her eyebrows and showed Shokoh how to do it while asking Parveen to hold up her dress. Afterward, Shokoh solemnly handed the cup to the doctor, mirth in her eyes. But minutes later, when Dr. Yasmeen had performed the confirming pregnancy test and delivered the news, Shokoh’s face was defeated and white.
The baby would arrive in winter, the doctor told her. She was more than two months along. Yasmeen looked as downcast as Parveen felt. A child would be the final ligament binding Shokoh to Waheed, to his house and village. And the birth would be, as it was for every girl whose pelvic bones weren’t yet fully developed, a trial.
“But Waheed told my father I could study,” Shokoh whispered. Her naïveté—the belief that such an assurance was somehow contraceptive—tore at Parveen. So did her hopeful next question: “So I don’t need to do any more housework?” As if Bina would spare her!
The doctor explained that for now she could carry on with regular activities as long as she made sure to eat well and rest.
“You should write to your parents,” the doctor urged.
Shokoh, her eyes wet, shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again. After a brief checkup she put her chadri on. Dr. Yasmeen nodded at Parveen to follow her. The girl trudged through the waiting room with her head bent, not even glancing at Naseer. It was as if she now belonged to this place, this village, and could no longer consider herself better than it. They walked home mostly in silence.
A hundred feet from the house, Shokoh stopped. When she spoke, her voice shook. “I will be like Fereshta or Bina, won’t I? Child after child after child until I die.”
Any possible words of comfort Parveen could think of seemed false. Again the notion of helping Shokoh escape came to her, a vision as absurd as it was unshakable.
It fell to Parveen to tell Waheed, since Shokoh seemed unable to speak. He was delighted by the news, as if this were his first, not his tenth, child, there being no apparent limit on the number he wanted. Parveen feared, on Shokoh’s behalf, Bina’s reaction, wondering what new cruelty her jealousy might spur her to. But Bina’s face went as soft as Parveen had seen it. She kissed Shokoh three times and said that now there was much she would understand. Shokoh would know how it felt to care for another life more than her own.
THAT NIGHT, BENEATH THE single bright bulb, Shokoh did write, in a script so tiny it thwarted any attempt at reading by others. The children watched her but she made no effort to teach them. She allowed only Bilal, of whom she was fond, to use the pencils that she had brought from home and carefully hoarded. Parveen felt especially bad for Hamdiya, who tried to shuffle closer to Shokoh, only to be driven off with a scowl. Just two years younger than Shokoh, she clearly craved her as an older sister, a friend. There seemed to be so many possible configurations of unhappiness within this one family.
Using his remaining hand, his right, Bilal drew picture after picture of birds. To conserve the paper Shokoh dispensed, he worked on a very small scale, creating pages dense on both sides with avian life. Later, as Bilal and Parveen walked in the village or the mountains, he would show Parveen some of his real-life favorites—golden or azure, red-tailed or white-throated—and imitate their calls. Others he had invented. Birds were all he ever drew.
As for Shokoh, Parveen asked her the next day, while she was milking the cows, what she wrote.
Poetry, Shokoh said, and, after making sure that Bina was nowhere nearby, she recited fragments:
I keep hidden that
Thistles line my soul
Only when the light goes and
Night comes am I at home
These walls are mountains
Too high to be climbed
The falcon swallowed me
I flew in darkness
The hour of my wedding was time enough
To cross from child to old woman
And this, written the previous night:
My own cage
Grows within me
Shokoh milked as she spoke. Her face was averted and her voice flat. But Parveen was enthralled by the lines—their raw emotion, their play with images and language, their subversion. She told Shokoh her poems should be published so people could read them. Parveen imagined a joint book tour during which she would give interviews about instantly recognizing the girl’s gift and be credited with having discovered the Afghan Emily Dickinson. Perhaps her father could write the introduction to the book; this would be good for his career and his confidence. Shokoh was present in this fantasy but blurry and rather silent unless Parveen was translating for her.
“Yes, I’m sure many people want to know about this life,” Shokoh said, nodding savagely toward her hands, which were working the udders.
Into Parveen’s mind intruded a memory of college boys manipulating video-game consoles. These irruptions always came suddenly, violently, as if her subconscious was still reconciling itself to being transplanted to this village. Parveen pushed the image off.
Lots of people would want to know, she insisted. All of the people who had read Gideon Crane’s book, for example—they cared about the village. They didn’t want to learn about its women only after they were dead. Her professor’s words came to her: I would read Fereshta’s story told by Fereshta.
Shokoh had talent, Parveen said. She should develop it, put it to use.
“You’re not in America anymore!” Shokoh retorted. “This is Afghanistan. Not a place where a woman can do anything—fly to the moon or whatever. I can barely go to the river alone. For us, this is a prison witho
ut bars, and what good does it do me for you to come here and pretend otherwise? Better to tear up all of those silly poems.”
Taken aback, Parveen weighed her words, hesitant to provoke Shokoh again. Reconcile yourself to our reality, Shokoh was telling her, but that was exactly what Parveen didn’t want to do. She wanted Shokoh to believe that more was possible, that her life mattered. Again she brought up Mother Afghanistan. Did Shokoh know much about the book? she asked.
Shokoh had seen it when Waheed showed it to her father. In Waheed’s house, it was kept in the aluminum trunk, and Bina had instructed Shokoh, as well as the children, never to touch it. “As if I want to,” Shokoh sniffed.
Parveen said she had her own copy, and she went to fetch it from her room.
When she returned with it, Shokoh paused in her milking and wiped her hands on her dress. Then she took the book from Parveen and flipped with authority backward and forward through the pages, even though she couldn’t read a word of English. She pored over the photos in the insert: Crane as a boy in Africa, then a teenager in America; Crane as a young medical student and husband, then a doctor, performing examinations; lurid newspaper headlines of his arrest; Crane examining the eyes of men, women, and children in Kabul; Crane posing with his Afghan colleagues at the hospital; Crane in a pajama kurta and blanket next to a donkey.
This last one made her giggle, but it gave Parveen an unexpected chill. Was that the same donkey that had carried Fereshta from the village?
Bina, as they spoke, came in and out of the edge of Parveen’s vision. Ostensibly she was collecting the manure in the yard, but Parveen thought with annoyance that she was trying to eavesdrop on their conversation. Then Bina disappeared. When she rematerialized, she was gripping—brandishing, really—the hardback of Mother Afghanistan.
It was the family’s precious copy, which Dr. Gideon had given to Waheed, Bina said. But no one in the family could read it; they didn’t even know anyone who had read it until they met Parveen. Now Bina wanted to know what the book said about her sister.
“Oh, it says how wonderful she was,” Parveen told her. “How special.”
Bina looked almost puzzled. She said, without malice, her tone uninflected, “But she wasn’t special. She did what we all do. Have children, cook, clean, sleep, wash, pray. Die.” Bina sounded almost bored; to her, Parveen sensed, the statement was mere fact. She pointed at the cover of the book, at the photo of a woman in a head scarf over the shape of Afghanistan. “And that’s not my sister,” she said.
Parveen conceded it was not. How could it be when Fereshta was dead and no photo of her existed? Parveen explained that the publisher had just picked a picture to go on the cover.
But who was she? Bina asked.
Parveen had to say she didn’t know, tried to say it didn’t matter. But even she was curious now. Was she an actual Afghan, or perhaps a Saudi, an Indian, an Indonesian? Or merely a model posing as an Afghan woman? Did it, indeed, matter? Parveen had to credit Bina for making the photo, the very practices of book publishers, so strange for her.
“Is the book about this woman or my sister?” Bina persisted. “Waheed said it was about my sister, but he can’t read, so how would he know?”
Parveen assured her that it was about her sister. Then Bina joined Shokoh in looking at the photo of Crane with Waheed, the same picture Parveen had seen in the various newspaper accounts of the clinic, the taller Crane with his arm over Waheed’s shoulders, Waheed with his eyes half closed. The two women stared for a long time, as if drinking in, through a very narrow straw, the image of their shared husband.
“Can you read the book to me?” Bina asked abruptly. She looked so defiant, almost scowling, that at first Parveen mistook her words for a challenge. But when Bina looked away, chewing her lower lip and smoothing her hands, Parveen saw that the request was genuine.
“Of course I’ll read it to you,” she said. She explained that she would have to translate it first. And she wanted to read to Shokoh too.
“As you wish,” Bina said with an uncharacteristic airiness, as if the power to grant something had ennobled her.
Chapter Nine
A Donkey’s Tail
AS PARVEEN CROSSED THE YARD TOWARD THE GRAPEVINE, anticipation swelled in her. She’d spent the previous two days translating parts of Mother Afghanistan, her fantasies about how the reading would go coalescing as she worked. Once she read the climactic scene of Fereshta’s death, she would ask Bina and Shokoh to explain, in their own words, what had happened. Why did Fereshta die? Who was responsible? They knew, she presumed, but asking them to articulate it, to name the forces oppressing them, was the first step toward changing the status quo. In her mind this had become a political project, one that she was sure Professor Banerjee would endorse. She wouldn’t just fill Bina and Shokoh with knowledge; they would create it together.
Mother Afghanistan, Chapter One
Perhaps the only thing worse than having a very bad man for a father is having a very good one, a saintly one, because you can never live up to his example. This was the story of my childhood.
When I was two years old, my family moved to a South African mission in KwaZulu-Natal, an area with hills as green and soft as Ireland. My father, along with my mother, who was raising five children, established and ran a hospital there. My father took neither salary nor payment from his patients. We lived off what they brought us (often chickens, once even a calf) and what we grew. My toys were fashioned from sticks and husks, and my friends were the African children who lived around the compound or, when their families needed help or refuge, inside it.
For me, my father was Mount Rushmore: impressive but untouchable. We were forever in awe of his selflessness, forever in want of his love. In his eyes, we were blessed, because we were fed, housed, and saved. We didn’t need love. The Africans did…
Albert Schweitzer, the missionary who sacrificed the comforts of a European life to move to the jungle of Gabon so he could doctor Africans, was a hero in our house, a man who made our own service look paltry. I flipped through the Life magazine containing those dramatic black-and-white photographs of him, his mustache white as snow, until the ink smudged my fingers. I decided I would become another Schweitzer, and I practiced by pretending to be Schweitzer. I’m embarrassed to admit that I forced my African friends to lie down and be lepers, to affect horrific afflictions that I then cured. I even tried to treat their worms. When my sister reported this to my father, he punished me with a branch against my backside for pretending medical knowledge. That was the stated crime. The real crime, I suspected, was pretending greatness before I’d achieved it.
I would achieve real greatness, then. After I saved my best friend, Kumbalu, from drowning, I taught him to swim. Then I taught all of the village boys to swim, despite their fear of crocodiles. When I excitedly told my father this over dinner one night, he reprimanded me for boasting. He quoted Peter: “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
Walking back to my house one day, I spotted a woman in labor in the bush—she’d been on her way to our hospital—and I sprinted home to get help. My father duly followed me to tend to her, but he gave me no praise. His only comment was “I wouldn’t expect you to do anything less.” I was crushed, so badly did I want his approval. I began to exaggerate my good deeds, even invent them, all the while knowing I’d suffer his wrath for boasting and likely for lying as well. I invented stories of fending off snakes that were threatening livestock, of chasing off a lion that was stalking Kumbalu. Was this a rebellion of sorts? I vowed that one day I would achieve something true and so great that he would have to acknowledge it.
And then, in a single night, he was gone. My father, who had saved so many lives, had no one to save him, although my mother tried. She found him slumped over at his desk, where he had gone after supper to attend to paperwork. He had been halfway through checking the hospital accounts when a massive stroke killed him instantly. I was bereft, naturally, but I was al
so furious. He’d gone while my backside was still stinging, before I’d had a chance to redeem myself, or achieve anything that would earn his respect, or stop being angry at him, or ask the question that occurred to me later: Didn’t Schweitzer posing for those photographs and talking about his work amount to boasting? I didn’t believe he was looking down on me from heaven, yet I was still determined, maybe more than ever, to accomplish something that would earn his esteem.
Our family returned to America soon afterward—we had no choice. My mother couldn’t run the hospital alone. Another missionary doctor came with his wife and four children to take over, and we moved to North Dakota, where my mother had grown up and where her family could help care for us. She found a job as a nurse, and my siblings and I were enrolled in the local public schools.
I was thirteen then, an impressionable age, a “missionary kid” turned alienated and rebellious teenager. In Africa, I’d had nothing material to call my own, yet I’d wanted nothing, because I didn’t know what there was to want. On our return to America, I saw what I had been missing—the games and books and clothes and cars and treats and plastic and electronics and drugs that are the diet of American children, at least those who can afford it, which we mostly couldn’t. I felt deprived; in time I began to crave it all: Girls. Cars. Clothes. Money, and the freedom it would bring. For an adolescent, there were unlimited temptations. In high school I drank and smoked pot. I slept with girls and skipped school. I thought I’d given up on impressing my father. The truth was that I’d given up on myself.