by Amy Waldman
A literal translation would be, in addition to exhausting, unnecessary, Parveen had decided after rereading this first chapter. There was too much the women wouldn’t understand. Instead, in a notebook, she jotted down the outline of the abridged story that she wanted to tell. Once Waheed had left the house, Bina and Shokoh joined her outside, Shokoh eagerly, Bina reluctantly, even though it was she who had asked to hear Crane’s book. She carried one child, the baby, and was trailed by two others. There was a new swing in the yard that Parveen and Jamshid had made by crisscrossing and knotting her jump rope and a piece of fabric around her exercise ball, then suspending the whole thing from a tree branch. The four-year-old, Haroon, demanded that Bina push him on it, which she did until Parveen called Hamdiya and Zahab to take the children away.
The three women sat together beneath the grapevine. It had to have been growing there for decades, so thick were its stems, like gray cables that intertwined to form a trellis above and around an old mulberry tree. The vine’s wide, tooth-edged leaves resembled open hands, layered one atop the other to create an entrancing shade. Parveen placed Mother Afghanistan between herself and the women but with the front cover facing down, since it felt weird to have that stranger—that non-Fereshta—staring up at them.
“Is it a long story?” Bina asked. “We have work to do, even if this one”—she gave Shokoh a poke—“tells you otherwise.” Parveen wondered if Shokoh’s pregnancy was easing the tension between them.
Bina was fidgety, unused to leisure time, whereas Shokoh did not seem in the least uncomfortable sitting still. She leaned against the vines, her face piebald with shadow and light. As Parveen talked, Shokoh reached over her shoulder to pluck leaves that she then tore into ever tinier strips.
Bina scowled. “Soon the whole vine will be naked.”
Shokoh looked at Parveen, laughed, then returned to plucking and tearing. They were like siblings, Parveen thought, remembering the delight she had sometimes taken in needling Taara about her vanity or her habits or her fiancé. Bina and Shokoh knew, after only six or seven months together, exactly how to torment each other.
Parveen began: “One time there was a boy who grew up in a place called Africa.”
“We’ve heard of Africa,” Bina said dryly.
Parveen had forgotten their nightly steeping, via the BBC, in the world’s affairs. “Of course,” she said. “South Africa. Where that very old woman died.” Then she continued: “The people were very poor. Even poorer than those of Afghanistan.” She wasn’t sure this was true.
“Do they eat dirt?” Bina asked. “In South Africa?”
“No,” Parveen said uncertainly.
“Then they cannot possibly be poorer than us.”
“More poor, less poor, I don’t know,” Parveen admitted. “But you don’t eat dirt either. They were very poor. That’s all you need to know.”
She told them that Dr. Gideon’s parents were very good people—doctors as well—and that his father ran a hospital. The fact that they were missionaries she left out. Instead, she presented his mother as an altogether different kind of proselytizer. She taught women how to space their children farther apart, Parveen explained, so the children would be healthy and the mothers less likely to die in childbirth. This seemed to Parveen a mild and virtuous emendation of the truth. Crane didn’t mention contraception in his memoir, but Parveen felt compelled to; women delivering fewer children was the simplest way to reduce the number of mothers who died while giving birth.
Parveen continued with Crane’s biography. When she talked about his desire to please his father even as he also chafed against his authority, Bina said, “It’s like Waheed and Jamshid.” Parveen eyed her, waiting for more, but Bina wouldn’t expand on that. Parveen went on. When Crane was thirteen, his father died. His family moved back to America, where his mother worked as a nurse. Though his parents were American, until then he had never lived in the country and it was difficult for him to acclimate. Slowly, though, he learned.
Parveen tried to explain to Bina and Shokoh how she related to Crane’s difficulty with returning to America, even though she’d moved to America at a much younger age. This was the power of books, she told the women, that you could see yourself reflected in someone not at all like you. “I know you’ve never moved from one country to another, but…” Parveen trailed off, not sure what she was hoping for.
“To leave your family and start over in another place,” Bina said, “with a husband who’s a stranger in a village you don’t know—it’s the same.” Then to Parveen’s surprise she asked Shokoh, “Isn’t that so?”
Shokoh nodded miserably. “Worse,” she said, “because you don’t go with your parents. You go alone.”
IF WAHEED WANTED TO speak to Parveen and she was in her room, he would send one of the children to fetch her rather than approaching her private space himself. The day after Parveen read to Bina and Shokoh, Zahab came to say that her father wanted a word. Parveen was sure that Waheed was going to admonish her for reading to his wives; she knew there were no secrets in the house, or at least none kept from him. She began to rehearse her arguments, seeing this as an opportunity to challenge the patriarchy. By the time she left her room, she was in a froth. She would tell Waheed that he had no business controlling what his wives heard or learned.
But when Parveen met him in the dirt of the courtyard, Waheed asked if she would read to them again.
Yes, she said when she recovered from her surprise. She would read to them again.
“Good,” he said. “It’s the only way they will ever travel.”
Parveen sneaked a glance at him, mystified. “Why don’t you just take them somewhere?”
“Where would we go?”
“Anywhere,” Parveen said. “To see their families. To a city. Wherever you go. You saw—you met—Shokoh at a wedding, right? Where was that?”
His cousin’s town, he said. Her cousin too. It was halfway between the village and the provincial capital.
“So go there. There’s no reason they can’t travel.”
Waheed looked as if he’d never considered such a thing. “The khan’s wife travels,” he acknowledged, referring to the largest landowner in the village. The khan had a home in the provincial capital, and the family went back and forth.
“If the khan’s wife can go, why can’t yours? He’s no better than you.”
Waheed nodded slowly, stroking the nose of the donkey, who had meandered over.
“I could go with you,” Parveen offered, already imagining the four of them—her, Waheed, Bina, and Shokoh—on a road trip. But he appeared more annoyed than pleased by that suggestion, and she wondered if she had pushed too hard. “Where did you meet Fereshta?” she asked, to change the subject.
Their marriage had been arranged, he said. “On our wedding day they held up the mirror and I saw her.”
This was an Afghan tradition that Parveen knew well: the bride and groom together read a passage of the Quran, after which a mirror was held before them so they could see themselves as a married couple for the first time. The ritual was performed—purely symbolically—even by urban Afghans who had met or dated before the wedding, even by Afghan-Americans who had slept together before the wedding. But in the case of Waheed and Fereshta, it really was the first time they’d seen each other.
“How did you feel?” Parveen asked.
He snorted, as if her question was too ridiculous to answer.
Before they parted, Parveen asked if Bina and Shokoh had told him they wanted to hear more of Mother Afghanistan. They had, Waheed said. They wanted to know why God had brought Dr. Gideon to this village.
Mother Afghanistan, Chapter Two
…My father’s kind of poverty, his renunciation, his selflessness, was an achievement, the sort of asceticism and abnegation that put him in a club with Gandhi and Mother Teresa. It would have allowed him to hold his head high with the richest guy in our town had he ever returned there. I didn’t think myself capa
ble of that kind of selflessness, so I decided to impress people by amassing wealth. I look back on my own crassness sadly. I was earning a good living, yet it never felt like enough. I see now I was desperate for recognition. If I couldn’t be the best, I wanted to have the most.
Which is what led me into fraud. Up-coding, double billing, possibly unnecessary diagnoses—I did it all, and Medicare gladly reimbursed it all. Sometimes it felt like the government wanted me to cheat…
My father often said that one kind of sin calls forth others. Cast off the first moral restraint, and the rest start to seem like paper chains. Still making up for what I’d missed as a kid (at this point I had been compensating for my childhood far longer than I had been a child), I felt entitled to do whatever felt good. It’s limitless, really, what self-pity can justify.
I began to drink more. I strayed from my marriage. I had first one affair, then another, with nurses I worked with. Warm beds breed loose lips—isn’t that what they say? I couldn’t help but brag about my ill-gotten wealth, some of which was providing gifts for these nurses. One of them turned me in. She wore a wire. I was so consistent in my lack of ethics, so uniform in my sleaze, that it never occurred to me that a woman untroubled by having an affair with a married man might disapprove of stealing from the government.
I was served a search warrant at the clinic; my poor wife, Gloria, was served one at home. Then I was arrested, and that scene was replayed on both the six p.m. and ten p.m. local news. The feds were prosecuting me. My wife considered leaving me, and I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. Our daughter, thirteen years old, was humiliated.
I felt as low as a man can be. As sordid. I wanted to cleanse myself, redeem myself. Seeking a fresh start, my wife and I joined a new church, Crossroads, and I publicly repented for having backslid. Our pastor brought many good Christians to rally in my defense. Because of my cooperation, the government sentenced me to five hundred hours of community service and agreed to let me do it abroad.
God provides, and He guides too. I chose Afghanistan. Where else did America have such a strong interest? Where else was there such a strong need? In Afghanistan I could be a soldier without a gun. Perhaps I could help open the door for others who wanted to serve there in some way.
I said goodbye to my wife and daughter. My wife had stood by me with the utmost loyalty, what any man would hope for. But I’d hurt her. By going abroad I could spare Gloria not only the humiliation of a jailed husband but also the salt in the wound of my presence, the constant reminder of my mistakes and betrayals. I promised to return a better man.
I meant it from the bottom of my wounded, humiliated soul, but it was easier said than done. I had assumed Kabul would be a hardship. I wasn’t prepared for its comforts, its mix of decadence and familiarity. In the 1970s, it had been a stop on the Hippie Trail, the overland route that young Westerners took from Europe to South Asia. The mere name evoked a loose-limbed morality. Now, in the long wake of 9/11, it was inhabited by a new round of expats, do-gooders, and profiteers.
Each day I saw scores of patients, performed several surgeries, and trained Afghan doctors. The work, the unrelenting pace of it, exhausted and cleansed me. There was no time to think or err, only to do. By the end of every day I felt purified, but the night was full of parties to attend and bars to visit and I’d soil myself again, imbibing wine rather than the Spirit because drinking in a Muslim country had a frisson of transgression. Or because I was weak.
Then my five hundred hours were up, and it was time to go home. But what did home have to offer other than the tedious, painful work of reconstructing my marriage and my career? I wasn’t ready. In Kabul I felt free, and I imagined that outside the capital I would find greater freedom still. I hungered for adventure. To go deeper into Afghanistan, I was sure, would take me deeper into myself. I wanted somewhere, something, harder to push against. What we think of as comforts are buffers, ways of not knowing ourselves, not becoming ourselves. I wanted to turn myself inside out, to empty my pockets, and so to learn what I contained.
I found a passable interpreter, A., to accompany me where I was going, which was admirable of him, given that I didn’t know where that was. (I’m withholding his full name to protect his privacy.) “I will gladly go to anywhere, sir,” he said, making “anywhere” sound like a state or city.
What I contained, at least in the beginning, was complaint. The driver whom A. hired proved unwilling to venture more than half a day from Kabul. Once he left us, we relied on a combination of taking “taxis” (beat-up cars and trucks whose drivers asked for money) and hitchhiking (beat-up cars and trucks whose drivers didn’t). The less interesting a place, the more vigorously A. asserted its significance. I couldn’t have been more bored. So one day when we were on a highway and I spotted an unmarked, unpaved turnoff leading up into the mountains, I told A. to stop the driver. The dust on the dirt road caught the light; the upward slant of it was arresting. It beckoned me, bred an inexplicable curiosity in me. A voice from within told me that was the road I had to travel. I didn’t know that it would lead me to a mission that would transform my life and those of many others, that at last I would do something worthy of my father’s approval.
But we had to get there first. The driver refused to take us, saying he wouldn’t risk his trunkful of melons on a road to nowhere. My interpreter, A., was skeptical too. “I’m sure nobody lives up there,” he said. “The road’s probably just for grazing animals. Maybe there’s a poor village. But most likely, there’s nothing.”
“Well, nothing is what I want to see,” I retorted. I had become more and more certain that this was the path for me. We argued for a few minutes, and then, once it became clear to A. that I wouldn’t change my mind, we got out of the truck. I settled in a shady spot beneath an overhanging rock while he went off to find us donkeys. I didn’t even mind the wait, which turned out to be long, so pleased was I at the prospect of an actual adventure. As I sat beneath my rock, various men—shepherds, drivers—stopped to investigate me in a friendly way. To one I tried, through body language, to explain that we needed two donkeys. He nodded and held up one finger, I held up two, he held up one, I held up two, then he left. Eventually A. returned, donkey-less and embarrassed. A few minutes later, my friend of the fingers arrived with two donkeys. He’d been trying to tell me he would be back in one hour…
Seven hours later, A. and I stumbled into the village, our donkeys so tired we nearly had to carry them ourselves. The valley glowed before us, as verdant, fertile, and harmonious a setting as I’ve ever seen. The sun kissed the tops of the mountains, which were ringed by clouds.
We found the bazaar. No foreigner, I learned, had ever come here before. Soon all of the villagers had gathered, climbing trees, crowding on rooftops, to stare at me. This is when I first saw Fereshta. Clearly pregnant, she emerged from the crowd to offer me water. I was struck by her beauty—her long-lashed black eyes, her rosy cheeks and creamy complexion, her delicate nose and small, perfect mouth. A luminous Afghan rose in the countryside. There was a grace to her. She told her husband, Waheed, that he should offer to let me stay at their home, and he did.
I spent much of my time in their house. Waheed was a bearded nebbish, a timid, nervously talkative man bullied by life, although he worked hard farming rice to provide for his large family. It was Fereshta who was the heart of the household. The children crowded around her like petals to a flower’s center. There was joy in that home, laughter. Fereshta, heavily pregnant, would direct a son or daughter to bring me tea, or sometimes, waddling dreamily, she would bring it herself. She made sure I lacked nothing. She was a marvelous cook, her lamb always tender, her spinach mouthwatering, her beans savory…
BINA AND SHOKOH WERE silent as Parveen spoke, and she guessed they were trying to take it all in. She’d provided them a simplified version of Crane’s actual chapter, dispensing with Crane’s sordid history, which she found too complicated to explain and feared was too easy, in some fashion, to m
isconstrue. As she described Crane arriving in the village, she scrutinized their faces, looking for signs of emotion or recognition. Given that they didn’t often leave the village, did it feel strange to have an outsider describe his arrival here? Parveen had expected Bina to be moved by the description of Fereshta, and indeed this was when Bina interrupted.
“Fereshta wasn’t beautiful,” she said in the same matter-of-fact tone she’d used to say that Fereshta wasn’t special. Parveen, caught off guard, tsked to show her disapproval of Bina’s jealousy.
“What’s wrong with what I said?” Bina asked. “She looked like me.”
Shokoh laughed, a little too appreciatively. Parveen found Bina’s honesty about her own homeliness plangent.
“Waheed was very poor,” Bina went on. “He couldn’t even buy a donkey’s tail. How would he marry a great beauty?”
Parveen considered this. Bina had hit on a near-universal truth: the higher a groom’s status (as determined by his wealth, education, career prospects, and family lineage), the prettier his bride. Parveen had often seen and critiqued this phenomenon in Union City.
“Maybe he forgot what she looked like,” said Shokoh. Her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks, which were flushed from the warmth of the day.
Shokoh’s face would require no enhancing on the page, and Parveen wondered how Waheed, a humble farmer, a small landholder, had mustered sufficient funds to pry her from her family. What change in his circumstances since he’d married Fereshta and then Bina had made this possible? Already inclined to dislike him, she now began to suspect him.
As to Crane, Parveen didn’t fault him for making Fereshta out to be comelier than she was, if that was in fact what he’d done. He knew his readers, maybe better than they knew themselves. If you wanted people to weep at the death of a tragic heroine, you didn’t make her plain. She had to glow.