by Amy Waldman
PARVEEN CHOSE THIS CHAPTER, about Crane’s encounter with Amanullah, as the first one to share with the women in the khan’s orchard. It had a meaty mix of drama and emotion, and it had the flavor of a folktale—colorful, sometimes comical, with a moral attached. As the protagonist, Crane could be both crafty and vulnerable, succumbing to, then outsmarting, then befriending Commander Amanullah. She might have thought better of making the most vocal opponent of this enterprise its first subject, but Waheed’s boldness had emboldened her too. Parveen again created a simplified version of the chapter in her notebook. Only the boys with cell phones struck her as odd, since no one she’d met in the village had one.
She worried no one would appear that first morning other than Bina and Shokoh, who had promised, but soon women, perhaps fifty in all, began to enter the orchard in small groups. They molted their green chadris, which disappeared into the grass, then patrolled the orchard with an inspecting air. When, at Parveen’s behest, they finally sat, they remained restless and talkative, too excited to still themselves.
“We must start our reading to take advantage of the time,” Parveen called out. “We can only use this orchard until the apricots come, and we’ll need a number of meetings to get through the whole book.”
There was a pause, then a burst of laughter.
“And what is so funny?” she asked.
“The khan is playing tricks on you,” Ghazal called out. “This orchard gives no fruit. It hasn’t for years. It gave sweet apricots for twenty or twenty-five years—”
“Then it got tired,” the dai said.
“Are you trying to make us all barren, putting us in an orchard that doesn’t give fruit?” This was Saba, who had been so distraught about menopause. Her tone was pointed.
“I’m going to tell my husband this place is full of fruit,” Ghazal said, as if here was the aphrodisiac she had sought.
“Juicy fruit—”
“Plump fruit—”
“Sweet-smelling and -tasting fruit,” said Anisa, the anemic woman who had seemed so exhausted when Parveen met her at the clinic. She licked her fingers, and the others laughed.
At the clinic, Parveen had seen Anisa and many of the others naked, recumbent, even battered. But here, savoring a rare morning of freedom and leisure out of their husbands’ shadows, they were neither patients nor victims. Here they were lordly.
“Then the khan will hear there is fruit here and come kick us out,” Latifa said fretfully, “for what value do we have against a bushel of apricots?”
By “we” she meant women, and Parveen found this especially painful coming from the mother of three girls with possibly a fourth on the way.
“He got greedy, that’s what Waheed says,” offered Shokoh, with a taunting glance at Bina. “He planted clover, which takes too much water, and the fruit won’t grow.”
“The khan got greedy?” Saba said with mock innocence, and everyone except Bina laughed.
“Fruit or no fruit,” Parveen said, “we must begin.”
She had the women sit in a semicircle. Some held hands, some nursed infants, some sewed. Children wandered in and out of the orchard, but they were more quiet than usual, as if they too had fallen under its spell.
Parveen glanced down at the notebook she’d brought. She would tell a story of something that happened to Dr. Gideon in the village, she explained to the women. This was six years ago, but possibly some of them had heard this story themselves. “One morning, as Dr. Gideon slept,” she started, “he heard a knock on the door. Two men with guns stood there, and they covered his eyes and forced him into their pickup truck. They took him to see Commander Amanullah, the Taliban chief in the village. He was a terrifying man. He had a hook for a hand. He kept a dungeon. He was said to have tortured people and chopped off heads—”
Squawks of protest echoed through the orchard. Parveen stopped, alarmed. The women were all talking at once, making them impossible to hear, until they elected one woman to speak for them. Saba asked if Parveen was talking about their Amanullah.
Yes, said Parveen, feeling slightly faint.
“But he isn’t Taliban,” Saba said. “We’ve never had Taliban here.” The other women made loud noises of assent. “He was a mujahid.”
“Well, yes, he was,” Parveen said carefully. “But then, according to Dr. Gideon, he changed…” She trailed off.
“Amanullah fought against the Soviets—”
“That’s how he lost his hand.”
“Then he went away to fight the Taliban—”
“There are no Taliban here!”
“Why are you saying such things? You’ll get Americans to start dropping bombs on us.”
Parveen took a deep breath and said there was nothing to worry about from the American soldiers, who were far off and would never come to this tiny village. Nor was she asserting that there were Taliban here. “This is what Dr. Gideon wrote in his book,” she said, then suggested that there might be a different commander to whom Dr. Gideon was referring.
“There’s only one commander here with a hook,” the dai said. “Ask Amina how many times in the night that cold touch has woken her up!” She pointed to a haggard woman whom Parveen hadn’t met yet.
“These years I wish it woke me up more often!” said Amina, who was delighted by her own quickness. The women roared with recognition.
Parveen asked Amina if Dr. Gideon had ever treated her eyes.
“It’s my stomach that’s troubling me,” she answered. “Why would I need a doctor for my eyes?”
“Because when your mother-in-law waves her arm for tea, you never see her,” Ghazal said, to more laughter.
“It was another of his wives,” Parveen corrected herself. “It was Gulab.”
“Who’s Gulab? He has no other wife!” Amina spat, now electric with anger.
“Oh,” Parveen said, bewildered. “Oh. Well, all right. I’m sorry.” Parveen wondered if, as with Fereshta, Crane had transformed plain Amina into a more glamorous figure. If so, this habit was starting to make her uncomfortable. It suggested women weren’t enough as they were. “Maybe your eyes bothered you then?” she tried. There was an atemporal quality to the women’s lives, a lack of chronology. What mattered was what ailed them in the present. Since Crane’s initial visit, he’d returned often to build, then rebuild, the clinic. Perhaps this was increasing the women’s confusion. “When Dr. Gideon came that first time,” she asked Amina, “did he give you pills to help your eyes?”
“I’ve never seen Dr. Gideon,” Amina insisted, “and I told you, I have no problem with my eyes.”
Parveen, flustered, wished the women gone so she could think. They would stop for today, she said, and she would write to Dr. Gideon to ask about this. In the meantime she suggested that it might be best for them not to mention it to their husbands. She didn’t want to stir up trouble in the village.
The women drifted off. Parveen lingered alone in the quiet of the orchard, trying to parse what had just occurred. Outside the walls, Bina and Shokoh were waiting for her. In their presence she felt embarrassed, uncertain. “I’m sure this can all be explained,” she said.
“Why does it need to be explained?” Bina said. “It’s just a story Dr. Gideon made up.”
“He said it was—is—a true story.”
“Why does that matter?” Shokoh asked.
“Because it does,” Parveen said impatiently, then tried to explain. “In life, in history, it’s important to know what happened to us.”
“But we know what happened to us,” Bina observed. “Whether the story you tell about it is true or not true doesn’t change what already happened.”
Parveen hesitated, searching for a rebuttal. “We make decisions about the future based on the stories we tell about the past,” she said.
“We’re women,” Shokoh replied. “We’re not allowed to make decisions.”
BACK AT WAHEED’S, PARVEEN crouched in her stall, studying Mother Afghanistan. What Crane had w
ritten about the commander, what he’d inscribed on the page for posterity, was unequivocal. Perhaps that was why people wrote, to close off other versions of the past. Yet whereas the women might want to hide that there’d been Taliban in their midst, she could think of no reason for Crane to have lied.
Suddenly there was a banging on the compound door and Commander Amanullah was bellowing outside it. With Waheed in the fields, Parveen couldn’t let the commander in even if she wanted to, which she didn’t. Full of dread, she slipped out into the lane to speak to him.
“I am not Taliban!” he roared in a voice loud enough to scare off a platoon of them.
His success on the battlefield made new sense to Parveen. Bullets of spittle flew toward her; she closed her eyes as they landed on her forehead, eyelids, cheeks.
“I fought against the Taliban just as I fought against the Soviets,” he said. “I am a mujahid!”
When Parveen opened her eyes, he was punching the air with his hook, as if to remind her of what combat had cost him or hint at what her smears could cost her. Amina, in her chadri, stood just behind him.
“I know, I know,” Parveen said. “It was Dr. Gideon’s story. I don’t know why he put your name in it. It’s all just a misunderstanding.”
“You said that my husband had a dungeon and beheaded people,” Amina trilled.
“Crane—Dr. Gideon—he said that. Not me.”
“Then tell him to come here and answer to me!” Amanullah shouted. “Be glad you’re a woman.”
“I’m sorry,” Parveen said. She was woozy and shaking and close to passing out. She wished she could sit on the ground. She’d never had anyone this angry with her, never been yelled at this way. He was going to hit her, she feared, and she flinched in anticipation.
“Get the book,” Amanullah said. “I want to see it.”
He wouldn’t be able to read it, but Parveen went to retrieve the book. Inside, Bina and Shokoh were huddled against the wall, listening. Bina whispered that she’d sent Bilal for Waheed. Parveen, who now remembered seeing the boy slip past when she’d gone out to greet the commander, nodded gratefully.
It was tempting simply to bar the door until Waheed’s return, but Parveen forced herself to take Mother Afghanistan out to the commander, who nestled it in his hook while paging through it with his other hand. He, too, stopped at the pictures, mesmerized. He was staring at the one of Waheed and Crane when Waheed came running up. The commander, seeing him, exclaimed in amazement, his expression incredulous, “That’s you!” When Waheed asked him in for tea, Amanullah acted as if he’d received an invitation to a royal wedding. “I’m in this book?” he said to Parveen once they were inside. He no longer seemed concerned with how it presented him. He paged through the pictures, looking for himself.
Parveen took the book and found a reference to him. “That says, in English, ‘Commander Amanullah,’” she explained. “Millions of Americans have read your name.”
This was tawdry of her, since his name in the book was connected to a description he disputed. But the confirmation was pacifying. He grew respectful. He asked if he could keep the book. No, Parveen said, but she promised to try to obtain a copy for him.
Amina was sent to help Bina and Shokoh. Over tea, Waheed told Parveen, “Amanullah was never Taliban. He fought against them, just as he fought bravely against the Russians—I’ve told you about that. He’s seen much more of the country than I have. He has lost a great deal; his sons were martyred fighting the Taliban. The three of them left the village to fight together. Only he came back.”
Parveen said meekly that she’d assumed his sons had died fighting the Soviets.
“There’s a lot of history here you don’t know. And even to know is not always to understand.”
“Crane wrote it, not me,” she said weakly. But she still felt it was somehow her fault.
After the commander left, Waheed said, “They say his sons’ deaths were terrible,” and she felt even worse.
That evening, she sat with Waheed and Jamshid while the women cleaned up after dinner. With her back against the cushions, she scribbled away in one of the spiral notebooks she’d brought, describing the day’s events in a letter to Professor Banerjee. Each time she wrote in English, she felt the strain of changing languages a little more.
“Will you write such things about us too?” Waheed asked from across the room.
“Anything I write will be the truth,” Parveen told him. But she put the pad away.
THAT NIGHT, BESET BY ANXIETY that the uneasy truce with Amanullah wouldn’t last, she barely slept. She kept searching for explanations. Perhaps Amanullah had a daughter whom Crane had treated, and he had misunderstood and thought she was the commander’s wife. Except Crane, she realized, wouldn’t have understood or misunderstood anything; he spoke no Dari. The translator he relied on, A., would have been the filter through which he experienced the village, its people, the commander. The errors had to be the translator’s. But had A. even been there for the kidnapping? she wondered. Crane hadn’t mentioned him.
The next morning she went to Amanullah’s house. She expected to encounter a fort, since Crane had so vividly described the high walls. But to her the commander’s compound looked no different than Waheed’s. Fear can profoundly distort perception, she concluded. Today she would likely find the commander, so terrifying yesterday, comical once again. But she didn’t find him at all. Amina informed her, from behind the door, that he was already at the bazaar.
Parveen asked permission to come inside so that they could talk. Amina agreed but kept her eyes on her feet, leaving Parveen to apologize to the part in her hair. “I hope both you and your husband can forgive me,” she said.
“He’s forgiven you,” Amina answered, then she raised her head to look squarely at Parveen and revealed the large purple-red bruise on her face. That sickening instant when Parveen had feared she was about to be struck—the blow had landed here instead. Amanullah had forgiven Parveen, he had forgiven Crane, but someone had to pay.
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
The Smell of Milk
THE WHEAT DIVESTED ITSELF OF GREEN UNTIL IT WAS HIGH AND tan and ready for harvest. In the fields, under a scything sun, the men crouched with sickles in hand, using the same tool, the same motion, with which farmers had been reaping their crops for millennia. The stalks were gathered with the left hand, then severed at the base of their stems with the right, so the sharp curved blade sliced toward the body again and again. Gathering, cutting, gathering, cutting; the men worked for hours, the labor leaving bodies sore and minds numb and skin coated with the chaff that floated snow-like from the yellow-gold stacks of wheat. Parveen, not oppressed by the labor, was content to savor the beauty, the harvest against its backdrop of purple-gray mountains and austere white clouds. This was what she was doing on the July day Colonel Trotter first came to the village.
Three children raced toward Waheed shouting, “Americans! Americans!” As if Parveen weren’t one herself. Shielding her eyes, she saw a group advancing along the valley floor, with more children behind. Their approach through the heat and haze of the day seemed to go on forever, as if something momentous was about to occur. They wore military uniforms the color of sand, which set off an alarm in Parveen. Her fear was that the war had arrived.
This apprehension diminished somewhat as the soldiers drew closer. They were sweaty and pink-faced from the walk, and the tallest of them, at the center of the group, was not in uniform at all. He wore instead a navy-blue perahan tunban, the knee-length shirt and baggy pants customary to Afghan men. Parveen guessed he was trying to convey cultural respect, but the attempt was so blatant she couldn’t help feeling a little embarrassed for him. In his military haircut and Afghan garb, he looked like a frat boy dressed for a costume party.
He waved and called a hello to Waheed. The sound of English jarred Parveen after weeks of hearing only the lilt of Dari. Upon reaching Waheed, the man held his hand out—it was te
pidly received—and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Francis Trotter. “Call me Frank,” he said in the flat cadence of a Midwesterner. His long face was sunburned and ruddy. His hair, thick and dark on top, speckled here and there with gray, was shaved almost to the scalp on the sides. This made his ears, which were prominent, appear nearly perpendicular to his head.
The colonel had a good eight inches on Waheed and an entirely different build, broad-shouldered and strong, the product of gym repetitions, track miles, and carbo loads, whereas Waheed’s spare physique testified to years of fieldwork and a meager childhood diet. Parveen guessed the colonel to be around forty, slightly older than Waheed, but it was Waheed who seemed, after decades of eking out a living from the land and battling to keep his children and wife alive, ancient.
The interpreter was an Afghan in the same uniform as the soldiers. In a glance, Parveen registered instinctive approval of his body—lean and broad-shouldered—and his dark eyes. He greeted Waheed in Dari in a way that suggested they’d met before, which surprised Parveen. The interpreter told Waheed that “this American” wanted to visit “the grave of Jamshid’s mother.” Afghans rarely used women’s names—they usually referred to them in relation to their sons—but Parveen wondered how the interpreter knew Jamshid’s name. Jamshid was standing well behind Waheed, but she realized that the teenager and the interpreter were, even at a distance, staring at each other, as if a line were pulled tight between them.
Waheed pointed the way, and Colonel Trotter and the others began to walk toward the graveyard. Parveen followed behind, with the children, close enough to hear what was said. No other women were in sight. Through the interpreter, Colonel Trotter asked Waheed about the canals, hewn from hollowed-out trees, that carried river water to irrigate the fields. He asked about crops and crop yields, about livestock grazing and the village population and family structures and what kinds of foods they stockpiled for winter (dried mulberries, dried and salted yogurt balls, called kurut, flour, nuts, and so on). He asked about the political structure in the village, about how the shura, the village council, was chosen. The man guzzled information. Parveen imagined it all being sorted into relevant headings in his brain: Agriculture, Governance, Commerce.