by Amy Waldman
The graveyard sat at the narrow opening where the valley fanned out from between the foothills of the mountains. The graves were mounds of stones and rocks, one looking like the next, other than a few with faded, ragged green flags honoring those martyred while fighting the Soviets, and the tiny mounds that signified lost babies. Parveen had visited several times and always found the site unnerving. Graves generally went unmarked here, just as official birth and death certificates were rarely written. Villagers’ lives and passings were registered only in memory.
There was, in this cemetery, one exception: Fereshta’s grave. She had a marble gravestone that looked, amid the gray rubble, like the last good tooth in a rotted mouth. The tablet, complete with inscription, had arrived in the village without advance notice two or three years earlier, Waheed had said. Gideon Crane had paid for it. For visitors—for pilgrims, among whom Parveen reluctantly numbered herself—finding Fereshta’s grave was easy now. Her name was carved in both Persian and English, although the graveyard’s pervasive dust had silted into the letters. The American soldiers gathered around the grave and bowed their heads as if they were praying.
Parveen imagined Fereshta as a goddess at whose shrine visitors came to light votive candles. She asked Jamshid, who was standing next to her, if other foreigners had come to the grave.
Yes, he said. Many had come, usually by helicopter in the first couple of years after Dr. Gideon wrote his book. More recently, there’d been far fewer; Parveen was the only one they’d seen this spring. Still, he said, his mother was the most important person here.
Parveen couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. Envisioning foreign soldiers making a pilgrimage to her own mother’s burial site in California, she wasn’t sure whether it would feel like an honor or an invasion.
“More people care to know her when she’s dead than when she was alive,” Jamshid said.
Parveen didn’t think his comment was directed at her necessarily, but it shamed her nonetheless. Would Fereshta, alive, have held her interest? She found Bina nowhere near as compelling as her dead sister.
“At least he met her,” Jamshid said. He was talking about the interpreter, she realized, who was now deep in conversation with Waheed. Every once in a while, he would glance toward Jamshid, and occasionally his eyes would find Parveen. She sensed that he could tell she wasn’t from the village.
Who was he? Parveen asked.
That’s Aziz, Jamshid said. He’d been to the village before, years earlier, as Gideon Crane’s interpreter.
“Are you serious?” Parveen couldn’t believe her good fortune. In the two weeks since she’d recounted Crane’s chapter for the women and faced the commander’s outrage, she’d grown certain that Crane’s translator, A., was to blame for the mistakes in Mother Afghanistan. She’d even mentioned this theory to Waheed, who’d replied that the interpreter was a decent man. But since when were decency and incompetence incompatible? Now, with A.—Aziz—here in the valley, she could find out what had gone wrong.
THE AMERICANS, AFTER A cursory examination of the rest of the graveyard, marched back across the valley floor. Sagging from the heat, they arrived at the clinic, where Waheed led them on a tour, offering garbled explanations about the equipment and the donors of which the interpreter made garbled translations. To the Americans it all seemed to make sense. They offered admiring remarks, then exited to wait for the gathering of the shura, with which Colonel Trotter had requested a meeting.
Little happened fast in the village—there was no reason it should—and the tension between politeness and efficiency was evident on the colonel’s face. Speaking in low tones to the men who’d accompanied him, he pored over a map and checked his watch every few minutes. At last the interpreter, Aziz, called the soldiers. The council had assembled, and Colonel Trotter and his team moved to join them. Most of the village men—no woman other than Parveen was present—had seated themselves beneath and around a stand of poplar trees near the river, with the elders at the front. The mullah had come, as had Commander Amanullah, who lifted his hook to greet Parveen. She pretended not to see.
A woven plastic mat was spread on the grass, and the Americans sat together on one side of it. One boy dosed small glasses with pale clear tea while another piled sugared almonds onto plates. The soldiers were careful to cross their legs and not present their feet and to lay their weapons down next to them or prop them against trees. Light dribbled through the leaves above, patterning the faces, landing like lace on the guns. Afghans were used to guns, of course—many kept them in their homes—but they hadn’t brought any to the meeting. The Americans’ automatic rifles, so casually displayed, seemed to create an imbalance, a disturbance, in the air.
Colonel Trotter ostentatiously removed his watch and handed it to one of his soldiers as if to suggest he had all the time in the world. A nearly toothless elder gave a long, florid welcome during which he praised both God and the American presence in Afghanistan, even as he also thanked the colonel for respecting the wisdom and authority of the shura.
“He welcomes you to the village,” Aziz told Colonel Trotter.
It was an honor to be here, the colonel replied. He said he was from an American state called Kansas and that his father had been a soldier, then a farmer, so he understood what it meant to earn a living from the land. As the elders surely knew, the Americans had come to Afghanistan because there were bad actors who were threatening the United States and harming the Afghan people, and the Americans had stayed in Afghanistan in order to help to rebuild it. To make it prosperous and strong as well as safe. They were here to serve the Afghans, to listen to them, to work together on delivering what the people needed. He commanded a battalion of five hundred soldiers who were doing everything from training the Afghan army to practicing counterinsurgency to working on development projects.
He used a lot of superlatives in his speech, Parveen noticed. His soldiers were “outstanding”; the governor of the province, a man the villagers had never seen, was a “tremendous friend”; and Gideon Crane’s book Mother Afghanistan was, as they all surely knew, “magnificent.”
It was the book that had brought him here, Colonel Trotter said. A lot of Americans had read it. The former president of the United States, who in 2001 had ordered the American military into Afghanistan, had read it, as had his wife. All of those readers had come to care about the village. They knew there was a clinic, but was there more that the people of the United States could do to help? The answer, he said, was the road to the village. Crane had written about how God-awful it was, and traveling it for the first time today, Trotter could confirm he was right. “Right now, it’s a real impediment to progress, not to mention a real nightmare for my back.”
This joke, once translated, earned a polite laugh or two.
Colonel Trotter grew serious. The road was going to be widened and paved, he said, so that cars and trucks could drive in and out, which would allow women in medical peril to get help. This was why he had come; this would be a gift from the American people to the village. Not just its women; farmers would benefit too, because they’d be able to sell their crops all over the country. Roads had transformed the lives of earlier Americans, linking them into a market economy. They’d do the same for Afghans. No more losing whole days going to a town to get seeds or tools, Trotter said. “Bam, you can do it in just a morning, drive right back. Your productivity goes way up. Your incomes go way up. Progress.” He nodded at his own words.
Parveen, hearing the reason for the visit, was relieved, partly because it wasn’t about the war at all and also because it turned out that she hadn’t been the only one to come because of Crane’s book. A road, an easily traversable road, would change so much here, she thought with growing excitement. Dr. Yasmeen, or any doctor, could drive in much more often. The woman who’d died from eclampsia in the doctor’s car would probably still be alive if the road had been paved and the journey along it a half an hour instead of two hours or more. Fereshta wou
ld still be alive; Colonel Trotter was saying this now, pronouncing her name “Fresh-ta,” like a soft drink. Parveen waited for the reaction of Waheed and Jamshid, who were sitting together, but Aziz, when he translated, left out the part about Fereshta.
For a few moments the only sound was the clicking of prayer beads. Then the elders began murmuring among themselves.
“Will every village nearby also have its road paved?” one elder, his beard as white as a burial shroud, finally asked, and the others nodded as if this were the question on all of their lips. The question, which seemed so provincial, disappointed Parveen. Colonel Trotter was talking about changing their lives!
They’d been paving roads all over Afghanistan, the colonel said, but this village—well, Americans knew about this village, they knew its story, because of Gideon Crane’s book. So in this area, they wanted to start with this village’s road, because it would mean a lot to the American people too.
“The president of the United States wants your road to be paved,” Aziz said, and more murmuring among the elders ensued.
Parveen was surprised by how much the interpreter abbreviated. Yet even with the shortened renditions, it felt interminable. Because Parveen spoke both languages, it was like waiting for a slow student in class to finish his math problems. While the words were translated, her mind moved on, so when the reply finally came, after its own translation, it seemed to have arrived from the past.
Colonel Trotter estimated that the project would take about four months to complete. Unlike in many parts of the country, they didn’t have to pacify the area before starting work; it was already peaceful. He introduced his team’s civil engineer, who described how they would use excavators and rock hammers to widen the road and, where that was insufficient, blast the rock away after drilling holes into the mountain. There was always a danger of triggering landslides or creating instability, he went on, but this would be managed. Controlled violence, thought Parveen. The engineer described how the debris produced by cutting into the mountain could be used as fill to widen the road on the river side if the ground was stable enough. He made the terrain that Parveen had conceived of as solid and permanent sound like a room to be renovated.
“He still has the smell of milk on him,” one elder said of the engineer, to laughter.
Parveen laughed too; he looked barely older than a college student.
Colonel Trotter glanced toward Aziz, who said, apologetically, “To the elders he appears very young.”
“Old enough to have a master’s degree and be on his third tour,” the colonel said tersely. He took over the talking to say that any villager who wanted to be employed on the road project would be hired. The road would be paved before the snows came. Were there any questions? Anything he should know?
No one answered this solicitation because Aziz didn’t translate it, and the colonel unfurled a large map. Everyone shifted back on the mat to make room. “This is your neck of the woods,” he said.
Parveen stood up to see. The map had Cyrillic lettering, which suggested that it had been made by the Soviets during their invasion. With the heart of their conflict much farther south, apparently the Americans themselves had yet to map this region. On the Soviet map, the mountain altitudes were captured in concentric waves, the paths in spidery lines, the highway in a solid one. The Americans had added a red star to show the village and a dotted red line to show the road that led from it to the highway.
The elders stared at the map; some of them, Parveen discovered later, had never seen one. They’d learned the area on foot or by donkey, and they remembered it by landmarks, judged distances by time, not kilometers. They lived in three dimensions, they had no reason to translate into two. Maps were for going places you’d never been or recording places you’d left behind. The elders did neither. With their fingers they jabbed at features on the map that were inscrutable to Parveen and argued about the locations of other villages, villages they knew by walking.
Why pave the road to this village? They asked the colonel again. Why not all the others?
“Star, star, star, star, star,” one elder said, placing his finger on the map again and again in different spots to show the locations of other villages.
It’s a funny thing how men will fight to the death for an advantage, Parveen thought, but when handed one may retreat from it as from a live grenade. These elders and their ancestors, she knew from Waheed, had joyfully schemed to annex land from or interfere with the water rights of other subtribes. Yet now they seemed to be resisting—at least, Parveen interpreted their questions as a way of indirectly declining—what would be an obvious boon to their village.
With effort Colonel Trotter repeated his explanation. Simply by allowing the Americans to pave the road, the villagers would progress from a subsistence economy to a market one. They could buy plows, tractors. Clothes for their wives. Longer lives for their wives. A better future for their children.
“Everything will change with this road,” Aziz told the elders.
In response, the white-bearded elder began to recount the history of the village, taking a route from past to present as winding as the road itself. Herders seeking land to graze their animals had first discovered this valley, and their goats had made a track barely wide enough for a man to follow through the mountains and along the river. With time, houses were built and fields were laid out to make use of the abundant water and fertile soil. Here another elder picked up the story. The track widened so that a donkey could pass, then widened still more for its cart. And this was sufficient. A better road was not what they needed. No one in the village even had a car. They needed help with their aging irrigation systems; they needed a schoolhouse and teacher for their children, who were currently educated in the mosque. To pave this road and not do the same on roads leading to villages nearby could create envy and therefore lasting enmity between tribes. This point, of course, required a genealogy of all the local tribes and subtribes…
Parveen had crept around to the other side of the assembly to see Colonel Trotter’s face more clearly. His eyes were gray and shrewd. He kept sneaking glances upward, as if anxious, or maybe hopeful, that rain might intrude. The sky was clear. The speeches of the elders ran their long courses, only to be reduced by Aziz to a three-minute history and a list of concerns, which the colonel quickly dispatched.
They shouldn’t fear change, he lectured them, his knee jiggling slightly. By paving roads, the Romans had vastly expanded the reach of their empire. By building an interstate highway system in the 1950s, America had cemented its status as the greatest country on earth, Trotter said. And decades back, the Americans and especially the Soviets had built many of Afghanistan’s highways; this was nothing new.
Aziz did not talk of the Romans or the Russians or of America’s highways or its greatness. He repeated that the road could help transport goods to market and ill family members to a hospital. The village men again agreed that this was important but again insisted that the road was not the aid most needed.
Parveen was beginning to suspect that the villagers’ true sentiments lay hidden beneath their words, their speeches like long tangled vines covering the trellises supporting them. They were talking around the real source of their stubbornness—whether because it couldn’t be spoken aloud, because words couldn’t properly convey it, or because they couldn’t even identify it, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was simply that they would feel anxiety about any foreign power rolling into the valley and telling them what they needed. The gun on the grass.
“They agree that to save the life of the woman is important,” Aziz said, “so I think they’ll work with you.”
This stunned Parveen. Nothing she had heard the elders say could be interpreted this way.
“Terrific,” Colonel Trotter said, visibly relieved. This was a tremendous day for the village and he looked forward to their cooperation. “This is just the beginning of the relationship with us,” he said, hooking his index fingers together to s
ymbolize their intertwining. Once there was a functioning road, there would be much more that his engineers, various NGOs, and, of course, the Afghans’ own government could do for them.
Aziz told the shura that the American engineers would do a lot for the village, that they would work on their irrigation canals and whatever else was needed. Now the villagers also looked pleased. Each side had the sense that it had achieved what it wanted but only because this interpreter had created the illusion of agreement where there was none. Now what?
It all made a kind of horrible sense to Parveen. If Aziz’s behavior today was any indication, he hadn’t just made mistakes when he was working for Crane. He had twisted, even invented, information. Whatever game he was playing, both Crane and Colonel Trotter needed to know about it.
“Who will guard the equipment for paving the road?” Commander Amanullah was saying.
When Aziz translated this, the colonel stared at the commander as if trying to remember where they’d met. “We have a saying in America—we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” It was hard at this point, he said, to know what or who the equipment would need guarding from.
“The guarding will be negotiated later,” Aziz said.
There was a bit more small talk, and then, with a brief prayer, the elders ended the meeting. All the men stood to extend their hands and stretch their kinked legs. Colonel Trotter and his team walked back up toward the clinic, where their vehicles, a band of Humvees, were parked. A couple of the soldiers were reporting on the body language they’d observed during the meeting—who’d seemed enthusiastic and who querulous, who’d stayed quiet and what that might mean. No one mentioned the two elders Parveen had seen yawning behind their hands. She followed, eavesdropping. It was amazing, she thought, and sometimes quite useful how invisible a woman could be.