A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  PARVEEN WASN’T DONE WITH her reading, but Bina insisted that she had to get back to work.

  “Just a few more minutes and we can finish the chapter,” Parveen said. She wanted at least to get through the part about Crane in Fereshta and Waheed’s house, although she worried that the flattering portrait of Fereshta’s cooking and mothering might irritate Bina. Maybe she wanted to irritate her, a bit.

  “My work won’t do itself while I sit and listen to this,” Bina said. Parveen folded her hands and watched the leaves move and said nothing for a few moments. Then she told both of them that anytime they wanted to look at the book they could come into her room.

  You can come into my room. This message soon reached the rest of the family too, and, except for Waheed and Jamshid, come into her room they did. (Waheed’s orders, she knew, had previously held them back.) Parveen would return home from walks and, upon entering the compound, see that her door—which Waheed, after a few not-so-gentle reminders, had built from poplar wood—was open, meaning another pillage was under way. Adeila and Aakila tried her lipstick (on their cheeks and noses as well as on their lips) and unraveled her tampons; Shokoh spilled her lotion, whose lavender scent at least improved the odor of the room. Parveen adopted the only sensible response—she became less protective of her things. Most she didn’t need anyway. She no longer wore makeup, barely bothered with sunscreen. She bathed less often, hardly brushed her hair. Her eyebrows went untamed, which, after years of wrestling with them, was a relief. When she glimpsed herself in the stillest part of the river, where the village women, having few mirrors at home, went to examine themselves, her own appearance always surprised her. She looked free. Unbridled.

  Shokoh began to take paper from Parveen’s room. She tore it carelessly from the notebooks, then wrote on the pages in front of Parveen. There was a silent challenge in this, Parveen thought—Shokoh’s way of saying, You want me to write? Fine, then make it possible. On occasion Shokoh would leave poems in the notebook. In them Parveen detected new glints of optimism:

  The morning light wakes me.

  I open my eyes and dream.

  Parveen was always pleased when she found someone perusing a book in her room. The children’s favorite was Louis Dupree’s comprehensive anthropology of Afghanistan, with its grainy gray pictures of things both known and strange. Parveen had read it during the hasty survey of the anthropology of Afghanistan that she’d undertaken before her journey here. The book was more than thirty-five years old, but there wasn’t much recent literature, which made sense; the country had been at war for the past three decades, since the Soviets had invaded, and thus inhospitable to anthropological research. She’d found Dupree’s book fascinating and useful, but it also underlined the broad appeal of Crane’s memoir, although she would never say so to Professor Banerjee. We were wired for stories, she thought, all the more when they contained a protagonist we could relate to. Crane was a stand-in for his readers.

  One day Parveen came home from a walk and noticed the slight movement of a shadow as she rounded the corner to her room. Feeling playful, she decided to catch whoever it was—probably one or more of the children—by surprise. She crept toward the doorway and then, a few feet away, stopped. It was Bina, whom she had never seen in her room before. Bina, so absorbed in a book that she didn’t sense Parveen’s presence, was moving her index finger across the page as if she were reading, but Parveen knew that was impossible. She craned her neck to see better and realized that the book was Mother Afghanistan; Bina’s finger was tracing its photographs as if they were lines from a lover. Slowly, noiselessly, Parveen backed away. It seemed worse for her to trespass on Bina’s reverie than for Bina to trespass on Parveen’s space. If caught, Bina would be, at the very least, embarrassed or defensive. Parveen went up the stairs to the main room of the house, and when Bina came up a few minutes later, she pretended to be absorbed in rocking the cradle.

  “The baby’s not in there,” Bina said.

  “Oh, how silly of me,” Parveen said.

  Those photographs contained no trace of Bina’s sister; it was as if Fereshta had been blotted from history, Parveen thought. Yet the text around them enshrined her there. Parveen still thought it admirable, most of the time, that Crane had kept Fereshta’s story alive. Maybe only someone who’d been low in the eyes of men could see what was so special in her. Yet in the village, the nature of that specialness was so elusive, its details so obscure, that Parveen was beginning to question an American man making use of it. To what degree was it legitimate to fill in the blanks in an Afghan woman’s life and to what degree had Crane done so? It seemed to Parveen that, just as with the war, the closer she got, the blurrier Fereshta became.

  Chapter Ten

  The Dog and the Cobbler

  VERY EARLY ONE MORNING NEAR THE END OF JUNE, PARVEEN wandered down to the river. She loved this time of day, before most families stirred from home, when the sun, still more suggestion than observable fact, banded the sky with navy and pink. The fields were wet with dew, and the birdsong had a lonely sound that Parveen found perversely pleasing.

  But on this morning, Parveen found her path blocked by Ghazal. Usually Ghazal made her laugh with jokes about her husband’s impotence or her own sexual appetites, which, it turned out, were legendary among the villagers whose sympathies tended to lie with her husband. So far, Ghazal was the only woman who’d agreed to answer Parveen’s survey questions, the others having either demurred or directed Parveen to talk to their husbands. With Parveen taking notes, Ghazal had graphically described her sex life, back when she had one; her pregnancies, complete with incontinence, constipation, heartburn, and farts; her deliveries and the condition in which they’d rendered her vagina. Given that Ghazal’s youngest child was already ten, her memory for these details was extraordinary, Parveen thought as her hand cramped from writing. When she suggested they stop, perhaps to resume another day, Ghazal said, “You don’t have more questions?”

  But this morning Ghazal was distended with anger. Shokoh had been boasting about Parveen reading to her and Bina, and Ghazal wanted to know why Parveen wasn’t reading to all of the women. “Don’t we deserve to learn too?” she asked. It was bad enough that Parveen was living with Waheed; now his wives would have another reason to feel superior.

  Parveen apologized for not having considered this and started to explain why it wouldn’t be practical, but the look of disappointment on Ghazal’s face stopped her. “You’re right,” she said, “I should read to all of you.” And without bothering to think through how, she promised that she would.

  Ghazal squeezed her hand in glee, and they walked back from the river together.

  Over bread, eggs, and tea that morning, Parveen told Waheed that she wanted to begin reading to all of the women, not just Bina and Shokoh. Both wives looked peeved, but Parveen ignored them. There was no reason why they alone should receive her attention, and she refused to feel guilty.

  Waheed took a long slurp of his tea, which she took to mean that he wasn’t opposed to the proposal. “The mullah will be the biggest obstacle,” he said, then laughed because of the mullah’s diminutive size. He was sure to resist the idea, Waheed said, and while the men here didn’t really like him, much less respect him, they wouldn’t go against what he said.

  I know, Parveen thought. You listened to him when he said Crane shouldn’t help your wife. Still, she was pleased not to have Waheed opposing the plan, and she asked him to accompany her to petition the mullah. “My presence won’t help you,” he said. “He’s jealous of me. Better that you go alone.”

  She tied her dark blue head scarf tightly and set out for the mullah’s. Even by the standards of the village, his house was tiny, his chickens scrawny, his cow bony. He was poor; his faults, apparently, did not include corruption. Afghan mullahs, she knew, were often itinerants who relied on villagers to provide their food and housing. “If the mullah invites himself to dinner, you must accept” was a popular joke, one of many
Parveen had heard about village mullahs, whose spiritual authority was checked by their unfortunate need to eat.

  The mullah answered the door with a Quran in hand, no doubt to show off his literacy, then called for his wife. When Parveen said that it was him she had come to speak to, he reddened. Nadia greeted Parveen with warmth, and Parveen noted with a pang that even at home, Nadia kept her goiter covered; she had a piece of fabric wrapped almost stylishly around her throat.

  While Nadia made tea, Parveen laid out her plan. The mullah found it disturbing. The men of the village didn’t know what Crane’s book contained, he said. Why should the women? “The only book the women need to hear is the Quran.”

  “Why can’t they know both?”

  He took offense; was she suggesting the two books were equal?

  Of course not, Parveen assured him, and she reached for analogies. Was the ant equal to the yak? The pebble to the mountain? And since Crane’s book was so insignificant compared to Islam’s holy text, what was the harm in allowing the women to hear a little bit of it?

  The book was not insignificant, the mullah said. It had changed much, too much, in the village. In building the clinic, Crane had privileged the healing of the body over the care of the soul. The clinic was literally twice the size of the mosque. Why hadn’t Crane given money for what mattered more to both the villagers and God?

  Parveen thought: Because you have Fereshta’s blood on your hands. She said: “But the clinic helps your wife. The lady doctor is treating her sadness sickness.”

  “The clinic didn’t save my first wife. She, too, died in childbirth.”

  “But not in this village,” Nadia dared to whisper as she knelt with the tray of tea.

  Parveen feared the mullah might punish Nadia for correcting him. Instead, he ignored her. “For two years,” he said, “until I remarried, I was both mother and father to my children as they cried.” He added, almost parenthetically, “It’s not easy for a mullah to find one wife, let alone two, with so few funds.” Then he returned to his dead wife: “No one wrote about her in a book. No foreigners came to offer me condolences.”

  “I’m sorry,” Parveen said.

  “That clinic has made kings of beggars.”

  Again, that phrase. “Isn’t that better than making corpses of women?” she said, surprised by her own quickness and boldness. “Besides, who here is a king?”

  “You live in his palace.”

  “Waheed hardly lives like a king.”

  “Then how is it the moon shines for him alone?”

  Parveen had no idea what he was saying, and she told him so.

  “The dog and the cobbler know what’s in the sack,” he replied.

  “So does the mullah!” Parveen said, hoping to bait him into explaining himself.

  It didn’t work. Instead, he began to lecture her, growing so animated that he forgot not to look at her face. Foreigners worried only about trying to prolong life a little more, he said, but that was in the hands of God. When the day of judgment came, it was the condition of the soul that would matter. What were a few more weeks of life next to the eternity of hellfire? “You look at a woman and see only a body,” he accused Parveen. “I see a soul and evil spirits trying to possess it. There are forces. A much more powerful battle under way. Not all answers, not even most, can be found in your science.”

  As he droned on, Parveen’s mind drifted. There were echoes in what he said of what she’d been taught in her medical-anthropology courses, that the medical profession didn’t have all the answers, that it only pretended to, which was why it was essential to question doctors who would never admit doubt, whose neat narratives reinforced their authority. It was only natural that humans, when faced with the inexplicable, posited complex theories dense with jargon, then conveniently forgot they were theories. Not so long ago surgeons had hacked away at women’s chest muscles to remove their breast cancer. Was it less chauvinistic to believe you could beat an illness out of a woman? At least the mullah admitted to the power of what could not be seen or known. Here was Foucault’s priest, but a humble one, and Parveen told herself to listen deeply, to ascertain his worldview.

  The problem with trying to enter into the head of the Other, though, was that the Other was always more than one. No sooner had she tried to see the world through his eyes than she began seeing it through the eyes of the pregnant eclamptic woman he’d whipped and choked to evict the djinns. Did she cower as she was beaten? Did she gag as she was choked? He persisted through her pain. How she must have cried out, how she must have feared for her child’s life, for her own. Or had he made her, too, believe that she was possessed? No doubt any resistance would have been taken as further proof of the djinns’ occupation of her body, the inability to meet an absurd test of innocence confirming her possession. His imagining of this great spiritual battle had been more real to him than the woman before him. He was a superstitious simpleton as arrogant and power-drunk as any Western practitioner, another man experimenting on a woman’s body just as men always had. If Western medicine was too willing to reduce illness to the body alone, here was the countervailing, and even more dangerous, reduction to spirit, in which a man had the power to make a woman’s loved ones stand by while, in the name of God, he choked her.

  All the tea Parveen had drunk was straining her bladder, and she wanted the meeting to end. She tried flattering the mullah by telling him how much he was teaching her, how much she had to learn, then hit on another idea—she promised to write to Crane’s foundation about donating funds to improve the mosque. Crane would never do this, Parveen knew, but she implied she had the power to make it happen. She felt sordid, lying in this manner, but she did it anyway.

  The mullah thought for a few moments while Parveen studied her dirty fingernails. “You can read to the women,” he said. Then he ordered his wife to follow him into another room.

  Alone now, Parveen heard them whispering. She wondered if she was meant to show herself out. But they returned.

  “We want to give you something,” the mullah said.

  He motioned, with sudden formality, for his wife to hand Parveen what she was holding—a folded cloth the color of celery. Parveen spread it open. It was one of Nadia’s shawls, begrimed by use and faded in places to gray. Parveen swallowed hard before thanking them. They had so little to give.

  PARVEEN WALKED HOME FEELING triumphant and eager to tell Waheed about her success. She realized that, despite herself, she was warming to him. He kept confounding her expectations, first by encouraging her to read to his wives, now by helping her with her plan to read to more women. But she told herself to remain wary, that perhaps this was how patriarchy was maintained, through small liberal concessions that did nothing to diminish the control men had.

  “So where will you do this?” he asked when she told him of the mullah’s agreement.

  She hadn’t thought about that. To choose one house, including Waheed’s, would create envy among the others, and envy was a force she was learning to respect. There was the clinic’s courtyard, but it lacked shade beyond its single tree, which looked more like a prop than a shelter.

  Waheed suggested that Parveen ask the khan, the one person who might have land to spare. In addition to being the village’s largest property owner, he also controlled the water rights and acted as the liaison to the district government. These privileges, as well as most of his land, had been inherited from his father, who had inherited them from his father, who had inherited them from his father, and so on. Distinguished-looking, with a leonine face and a neatly trimmed gray beard, the khan had the supercilious air of one who believes his advantage stems from his own virtue. The gold watch he wore had also come from his father.

  The khan, as Waheed had told her, lived mostly in the provincial capital, but he often came to the village on Fridays. After prayers she went to his house and found his expansive reception room crowded with village men—friends, courtiers, petitioners.

  “The American
girl has come to study me,” he told them. “Or maybe she wants accommodations more comfortable than a storeroom!”

  His audience laughed as if they were being paid to. Later she would imagine delivering quick, devastating comebacks, but now she stood mute, a frozen smile on her face. The khan dismissed everyone and invited her for tea with himself and his wife.

  By the standards of the village, his house was palatial—airy and well-proportioned, shielded from the sun by a row of stately poplar trees. The glass windows were clean; the carpet where they sat was velvet-soft. The khan cocked his head at her, a possibly lewd twinkle in his eyes, and waited for her to speak.

  Parveen’s idea bemused but did not especially interest him, since there was nothing for him to gain. But he had an orchard she could use until the apricots came, he said. How long that gave her, Parveen didn’t ask.

  She should have known that the khan was not a man who gave anything away for free. His first price, in her case, was information. How much was she paying Waheed in rent? he wanted to know.

  A ransom, she gathered from his expression when she named the sum. It hadn’t seemed much in Berkeley.

  “Waheed’s good fortune was to lose his wife,” the khan said.

  “And was it also good fortune for six children to lose their mother?”

  “No, no, it wasn’t,” he said with what Parveen mistook for contrition. “Luckily they have been blessed with not one new mother but two.”

  Parveen gritted her teeth. Coarse words were worse when they happened to be true.

  The khan directed his wife to prepare food, although Parveen insisted she wasn’t hungry.