A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

“In our culture it’s rude to refuse hospitality,” he said.

  “I know; it’s my culture too,” Parveen replied. “Of course I’ll eat.”

  They sat quietly. His steady gaze on her made her uncomfortable. Abruptly he said, “Come, let’s go see the orchard,” and without bothering to inform his wife they were going, he ushered Parveen outside.

  “What about the food?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  As they walked along the valley, his long finger worked overtime to point out all the fields that were his. They came to the orchard. Its mud walls were crumbling like stale cake, but inside it was lovely, cool, tranquil. The apricot trees twisted and leaned out of the grid in which they’d been planted, their branches bent and curved like dancers’ arms sleeved in vivid green. Shadow and light trembled against each other on the orchard floor, where grass and clover grew calf-high. A fruit-sweet scent perfumed the air and the bees circled dizzily.

  Would it do? the khan asked.

  It would, Parveen said blandly, not wanting to betray her excitement.

  “I’m glad,” he said.

  When he held out his hand for her to shake, by reflex she took it, not stopping to think how unorthodox it was for an Afghan man to offer a woman his hand. In a single motion he pulled her to him, put his other hand on the back of her head, bent his face to hers, and forced his tongue into her mouth. He thrust his groin against her and she felt him harden. She reared back, rebelling so strongly against his hand that she felt a stab of pain in her neck. “If you do that again, I’ll tell!” she sputtered.

  “Tell who?”

  He said this with infuriating innocence. He wasn’t taunting her, she realized. The threat of exposure meant nothing to him because he was right; who would she tell? His wife, who could do nothing? The village men, who would likely think that if anyone had done something wrong, it was Parveen, coming to this village—and now this orchard—on her own? She had no protection except her own instincts, which were in urgent need of sharpening.

  THE ENCOUNTER RATTLED HER enough that she thought about abandoning her plan to read to the women. She considered herself lucky not to have been raped, and she didn’t want to be in any way indebted to the khan. But if she changed her mind, she would have to explain why to Waheed. And the argument for empowering the women was even stronger now. They needed to recognize injustice as it happened so that the next time a man tried to take advantage of them or deny a woman medical care, they would fight. She remembered Lysistrata, the Greek play in which women banded together to stop a war by withholding sex. Maybe, little by little, she could foment a similar kind of collective action.

  And so Parveen began to tell the women about her plan to read to them, giving Ghazal credit for making it happen. Parveen spoke to their husbands too, assuring them that the mullah approved. But one day Waheed came home to report that Commander Amanullah was trying to turn the men against her plan. Waheed agreed to accompany Parveen to speak to Amanullah. They found him sitting, as usual, with the blacksmith, sipping tea from a tin mug. A group of men gathered when they began to talk.

  “It’s only an hour,” Parveen told him. “The women could get a little sun on their faces. They could learn something. Then they’ll be back home.”

  “The honor of our family, of my name, is more important than the sun on my wife’s face,” Amanullah boomed as the men around him nodded.

  Parveen wondered why he was referring to only one wife. She knew from Mother Afghanistan that he had three.

  Amanullah continued: “If our honor is lost, it’s as if we are in shadow forever. Besides, she gets plenty of sun inside our compound.”

  “Then don’t send your wife.”

  Startled, Parveen gulped; had she let slip words so blunt? But no, this time it was Waheed, standing next to her, who had spoken calmly, directly, to this bull of a man.

  “Then don’t send your wife,” he repeated. The meaning was clear: Decide for yourself, but you won’t be deciding for the rest of us. The reading will go ahead with or without your consent.

  Parveen tensed, sure that Amanullah wasn’t often challenged like this.

  “If I don’t send her, how will I know what’s being said?” he asked, to laughs. But it wasn’t a joke; he seemed genuinely befuddled. He proclaimed that his wife would attend, and the other men looked at Waheed with new respect.

  On the way home, Parveen thanked him.

  “That which thunders does not rain,” he said, presumably in reference to the commander. There was a time, he went on, when he, Waheed, was a “smaller man,” and he would have been afraid to be so bold. He didn’t need to spell out what he meant, which was that Gideon Crane had made him someone important.

  Parveen wondered if he’d agreed to accompany her in order to demonstrate this. His story, when she thought about it, was extraordinary. This village was a static place. A family’s standing could easily diminish, but little other than finding a way to profit from war could improve it. She was quite sure that no one here had ever sprung from his low place the way Waheed had. He hadn’t come into land, gotten an education, or shown a knack for agriculture or business or politics or battle. Nor had he grown opium, bred a militia, or bartered with the Taliban. He’d become a celebrity, which made his a very American story—one authored, fittingly, by the American Crane.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Orchard

  Mother Afghanistan, Chapter Eight

  I woke one morning in the village to a knock on the door. Two men stood there with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, which told me that when they said, “Come,” it wasn’t a choice. Outside, one hoisted me by the arms while the other placed a black bag over my head. In such a moment it is not just the inability to breathe that you must fight but the fear of the inability to breathe. For the panic is as much a threat to you as the bag itself. It was the panic that drew the bag to my nostrils, making me suffocate, making me panic more, until I forced myself to calm down and could breathe again.

  They bundled me into the back of what I thought was a pickup truck. I could feel cold metal beneath me, open air above.

  “Where am I being taken?” I cried through the bag.

  “To Commander Amanullah” came the answer, and I began to shake with fear.

  Amanullah was the local Taliban commander. Here is what they said of him: That he had wielded his whip on women who dared to leave their homes. That he beheaded anyone who defied or betrayed him. That he ran a personal dungeon where those he arrested for petty infractions were hung by their elbows from a bar until their families paid to have them freed. That he should have been sent to Guantánamo but escaped by bribing local Afghan officials. That he flaunted his liberty and terrorized the villagers and abused his three wives.

  I’d never laid eyes on him, but from the time I arrived in the village, he’d pressured the mullah to issue a fatwa calling for my death, even though at any moment he could have executed me himself. Perhaps since he was a Talib—which meant, in theory, that he was or had been a religious student—his standing with the villagers would require legal cover for his sins. The mullah, a generally cowardly man, had so far refused.

  Now it appeared that Commander Amanullah had decided to take matters into his own hands. My legs were jelly; my hands, bound, were numb. I prayed and tried to think of any arguments that could stave off my death. The pickup truck rattled along terrible roads, and in the back, with my hands tied, I banged and rolled like a loose marble until I found a way to curl up and use my feet to steady myself. Then the truck jolted to a stop.

  I was taken out, and the men walked me a short distance. I had to be supported on both sides so I wouldn’t collapse. When the bag was taken off my head, I was inside a compound with a dirt floor and high walls. Such a plain, sad place to die, as if it mattered. Would they bother sending my body back to Gloria? Could I ask them, at least, for that? Strange how the mind turns to practicalities at a time like this. It did not occur to me to beg for my life,
only for the small dignity of having my body, even bullet-riddled, even separated from its head—at this I shuddered—returned to my wife. Then I thought about my daughter, about her having no father, and what nearly made me weep was realizing that she already barely had a father, that I had been absent even when I was present, busy with my affairs and my fraud (which I had rationalized by saying it was for her, for her future), then consumed with my exposure and humiliation. She was hazy in my mind during that time. I think she mostly retreated to her room; she must have been embarrassed to see her friends. Then I left for Kabul, and I’d hardly spoken to her since. If I were to die, would it feel any different for her? I vowed that if, by some miracle, I made it out of here, I would become a much better father to her.

  I was led to a long narrow room with a few tables and chairs and one window. Two young teenage boys came in and began to take pictures of me with their cell phones. This alarmed me; I had seen the images of executed foreigners that appeared on the web after their deaths. Never had I imagined that children might be the photographers.

  “Can you help me?” I asked. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I have a daughter about your age. She wants a father too.”

  They looked at each other and giggled, took more pictures, then vanished. Eventually I was led to Commander Amanullah. It was all I could do not to urinate on myself when I saw him. He had the build of a giant, a black turban, a black beard, and black eyes; there was black beneath his fingernails and a bile-yellow coating on his teeth. Black beneath the fingernails on one hand, to be precise. Where his other hand would have been, there was a steel claw. He alone among his men held no weapon. This scared me most of all.

  “I have three wives,” he began with no preamble. “Gulab is the newest, but she is losing her eyesight. You are an eye doctor. You will treat her. And if you help her, you’ll live.”

  This was not a scenario I was prepared for. “I-I-I’ll do my best,” I stuttered. “May I examine her?”

  “No!” he thundered. “You’re a man, a foreigner, an infidel. You cannot see her.”

  “Then I have no hope of fixing her eyes, which means…” I didn’t finish the thought.

  I should tell him how to help her without seeing her, the commander said.

  This was impossible, I told him. He needed a female doctor.

  How many female doctors of any kind did I think there were in Afghanistan? he snapped. And of those, how many would be willing to come here? “You’re an American,” he went on, “you have the best medical training. All of our commanders who went to Guantánamo Bay came back with many of their medical problems solved, even if they’d also acquired new ones. Your doctors and your torturers, it seems, are equally advanced.”

  Under more congenial circumstances, I might have appreciated his wit. But my life was at stake; I had to be cunning, buy time. I asked him to describe the problem, when it had started, how it had progressed. The more we talked, I reasoned, the harder it would be for him to kill me. I didn’t have the exotic tales of A Thousand and One Nights at my disposal, but I could bore him with several years’ worth of dry material from medical textbooks.

  Instead, it was he who began to tell a story, of the beautiful young girl—probably not much older than my own daughter—he had taken as his third wife, his sweetest wife, and how her eyes had begun to hurt. In bright light she cried out, and even opium didn’t relieve her pain. She was losing her sight. Her household duties had become difficult for her to manage. The other two wives, already resentful of her favored position, had started to complain. Commander Amanullah wanted to protect her, to heal her, to save her from this agony. If she didn’t recover, he couldn’t ask his other wives to care for her. She would have to return to her family, and this would be a shame upon them, upon her, and upon the commander himself.

  “Fix her,” he told me. “You must fix her eyes.”

  It was clear not just from what he said but from how he spoke that he loved her. The thought flared across the darkness of my predicament and made the commander harder to hate. Love among those we label barbarians should not surprise us. They are as human as we are. I realized my own eyes were wet now.

  “I want to help,” I said finally. “I can guess at the problem. But I cannot prescribe a solution without seeing her eyes. I could do more damage, and I would never forgive myself for that. If you don’t want me to look, it’s better to leave them be and just kill me now.”

  He was silent for a long while. Then he uttered a few words and waved his hand. Two men grabbed me and returned me to the small room. Here were my last minutes, and here came my last meal: a huge hunk of pale brown, roughly hewn meat. If Commander Amanullah didn’t kill me, this would. I eyed it warily, as if it might move. Then I ate. My hand reached out, as if of its own volition; it tore off strips and brought them to my mouth. The meat was as tough and flavorless as leather. Still, I worked my jaw. If I was going to die anyway, why die hungry? But also, I couldn’t help myself, and as my blood sugar rose, a great peace—as in the wake of a migraine—came over my body. I was relaxed enough to sleep.

  Then the door opened. My guards barked at me to move.

  “What’s happening?” I cried. “Where am I being taken? Please let me finish my meal.” Ridiculous, but those few bites had left me ravenous. At death’s threshold, I could think only of that meat.

  I was led into a pitch-black room. I heard rustling—whether rats or humans, I couldn’t tell. Fear sickened me, as did the stench of manure, and I gagged. My eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and a candle flared, glinting off the shiny polyester of a woman’s burka and also the hook hand of Commander Amanullah. There was no one else in the room.

  “This is Gulab,” the commander said. “You will examine her eyes, nothing more, and then you will make her better.” He held the candle up and I saw that the burka’s netting had been delicately cut away. I had a rectangle to work with.

  “It’s not enough light,” I told him. “I can’t see properly.”

  He moved the candle closer, so close that I feared either the cheap fabric or my hair might catch fire. The heat cooked my cheek. Drops of wax pocked the floor. I heard our mingled breathing and the rustle of fabric when she moved. I smelled sour breath, sour meat, sweat, and, most significant, the discharge of pus from her eyes. The light had made Gulab cry out in pain, but when I dared look into her eyes, they merely reflected the flame, along with a miniature version of my terrified self.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t see anything this way,” I said to the commander. “I need my equipment and more light.”

  To my surprise he agreed to allow that. He went to the door, called one of his men, and returned a minute later with my medical bag, which had been kidnapped from my room along with me. Lanterns were brought. I removed my binocular loupe and ophthalmoscope from the bag and examined first Gulab’s eyelids, then her corneas, which were slightly opaque. I suspected trachoma. But to confirm my hunch I needed to evert her eyelid, to turn it inside out. I needed to touch her.

  When I told the commander this, he hesitated. Then he said, “Go ahead. But only the eyes.” I wondered if he would have me killed afterward so that no one would know I had touched her.

  I put on sterile gloves, taking my time. I have performed hundreds, maybe thousands, of eversions during my medical career, but never with hands trembling as they were now and never on a patient who flinched so dramatically at my touch.

  “Hold still,” I murmured, as much to myself as to her.

  Normally the conjunctiva, the membrane lining the inside of the eyelid and the forepart of the eyeball, is a smooth transparent pink. But Gulab’s conjunctiva was so thickened and inflamed that it was spotted with white follicles, like little tapioca beads, and it glistened with fibrous scars, also white. Without a doubt, this was trachoma, which comes from the Greek word for “rough.” Luckily for me, and of course for her, Gulab’s trachoma was still at a treatable stage. If I’d seen her much later, her eyelashes would have b
egun to turn in and rub on her eyelids, which is excruciating and correctable only by surgery.

  “I can treat her,” I told Commander Amanullah, and in the dim light I saw tears of relief well in his eyes. So powerful was his love that it felt like another presence in the room with us.

  A single dose of azithromycin, two 500-milligram tablets, would cure her, and I had snared a few extra from the eye hospital in Kabul. I gave Gulab the two pills. Commander Amanullah wanted more. He assumed, as ignorant people do, that more medicine would kill more disease. I refused, more confident now about standing up to him. Then I insisted on examining all of his men, his two other wives (through the same method), and his children, to look for signs of trachoma. I put drops to battle infection in the eyes of the children, and I taught all of them how to keep their eyes, faces, and hands clean. They needed to be more intolerant of flies, which spread bacteria. And the women were not to use their burkas or dirty rags to wipe the eyes and faces of the children.

  Gulab’s pain began to abate within a day. There followed a feast of celebration, a sheep slaughtered in my honor. The commander and I sat together and talked man to man of what it means to love your wife. I thought of Gloria, of my infidelities and indiscretions. Commander Amanullah was not the only one changed by our encounter. For all of Gloria’s freedoms, could I say the commander treated his wife worse than I did mine? It was my freedoms, not Gloria’s, that were the problem. I’d abused them and, through them, her. I wasn’t at her side…

  I was sick for three days afterward. I don’t know if it was the meat, the feast, or the stress, but it was worth it to learn this lesson: how easily we can win these people over if we recognize their common humanity, if we see ourselves in them, if we use our power and skills to solve their problems rather than to rain bombs on their heads, and if we help the men help their women. What is the cost of a dose of azithromycin compared to a cruise missile? Love is universal. We forget this at their peril—and ours.