A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  “The guy with the hook, he’s the Talib in Crane’s book,” the colonel said. “Did he think I was going to hand him a bag of money right there for protection?”

  Amanullah might be capable of extortion, but Parveen knew now he wasn’t a Talib and wanted to prevent that misunderstanding. She hurried up to Colonel Trotter, who stepped back at her approach. “Hello, Lieutenant!” she blurted out.

  At first startled, he recovered his composure and said dryly, “Lieutenant colonel, actually. It’s just a rank or two higher.” She winced at her mistake, and he smiled to show he hadn’t taken offense. “I thought you were—never mind,” he said, and he held out his hand. He asked where she’d come from, and when she told him, he laughed. “A Berkeley grad here? What, are you going to train them to grow arugula? Sorry, that was too easy. You’re Afghan?”

  “American.”

  “Right, I meant—you speak the language.”

  “Dari, yes.”

  “I’ve had Dari for Beginners on my desk for months,” he said ruefully. “I should be better than I am.” He asked what had brought her to the village.

  Mother Afghanistan, she said.

  “The power of that book,” he said, shaking his head to show his respect. It was really something, he went on, the way Gideon Crane had managed to figure out what everyone from Alexander the Great to the British to the Soviets had missed, which was that, while Afghans couldn’t be subdued, they could be understood; they could be respected. Crane had given the military a road map to succeed where every empire had failed. They just had to follow it, Trotter said. That’s what this road project was about. Kind power.

  “About the book,” Parveen said. This was her chance. Aziz was some distance off, smoking and watching them. His eyes were as black and restless as carpenter bees. They looked like they didn’t miss much.

  Yes, Trotter said again, the book was really something. This time it almost sounded, to Parveen, as if he was trying to convince himself of this. His wife had read it in her book club; they’d gone whole hog for it, and she’d pressed it on him—this was before all the generals were reading it, he said modestly. In fact, his wife’s words had sparked the idea of doing the road, although he wouldn’t tell his superiors that. One day when they were Skyping, she said that she hoped it was easier to get in and out of that village now than it had been for Gideon Crane. A light bulb went on, he said. Here was a project that would not only benefit Afghans, Afghan women, but also resonate back home. Thanks to Crane, this was the one village in Afghanistan a whole bunch of Americans had an interest in; they cared about it, even if they didn’t care about Afghanistan itself. Heck, this village was more real to them than the country as a whole was. The road would create goodwill with the Afghans and good feelings among the Americans, real bang for the buck.

  “Yes, but can I tell you—” Parveen tried to interject, speaking quietly so that Aziz wouldn’t hear.

  Unfortunately, Trotter seemed not to hear either. How long did she plan to stay in the village? he asked. “Your family must want you home.”

  “I promised I’d be home for Thanksgiving,” she said, “but—now I want to stay long enough to see the road built.” She hadn’t realized this was true until the words barreled out of her mouth. It was more than wanting to see how the road would transform the village. It was that, seeing her idealism mirrored in Trotter’s, she felt less alone. It no longer seemed quixotic to believe change could come.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll drive out of here on a paved road and be home in time to cook the turkey. Or eat it.” His own deployment ended in early December, he added, which meant that, unlike last year, he would be home for Christmas.

  In America, Parveen said, she’d imagined soldiers staying in Afghanistan for years on end—going gray here, going native.

  Not so, Trotter said; deployments were for six months or a year, although by now the war had gone on so long that many soldiers had returned two, three, or four times. He himself had been deployed twice to Iraq before coming here. And there’d been stop-losses, which meant that soldiers who were due to rotate out couldn’t because there weren’t enough soldiers to replace them. But in general, the equipment stayed while the units turned over. The equipment and the interpreters, Trotter said. Their war had been longer than any of the soldiers’. “Right, Aziz?” he shouted.

  Aziz, still smoking, gave a quick nod. Had he head what they were talking about, or was this reflexive affirmation for his boss?

  “It’s not really fair that he doesn’t get combat hash marks,” Trotter said. “He’s probably seen four deployments come and go. Get over here, man, and meet Parveen,” he called. “Actually, finish killing yourself with that cigarette first.”

  Yes, Parveen thought, take your time. She didn’t want Aziz coming over yet; she was enjoying her conversation with Trotter. She knew so little about the military, and the colonel seemed eager to educate her.

  “Generals turn over too?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “We’re on our third Joint Chiefs chairman since 2001. The third army chief too.” He spoke almost gently, as if trying not to call attention to her ignorance. In Vietnam there’d been four commanders in chief and three generals, he said. “Hopefully this war doesn’t go on as long.”

  So if he left, Parveen said, someone else would finish the road?

  “I’ll finish it,” Trotter said, less gently. But yes, if necessary, his successor would take over where he’d left off. He couldn’t pretend there weren’t occasional complications, the main one being that every leader assuming command tended to think that his predecessor was an idiot, he said with a smile. It made her think of sunlight hitting a rocky cliff that spent most of its life in gloom. The muscles of his face seemed surprised whenever he worked them.

  The military was like a superorganism, she thought, a giant body constantly shedding cells and generating new ones. Aloud she wondered: if everyone was changing all the time, if every soldier was always being replaced, was it even still the same war, philosophically speaking? She worried that she sounded stoned (she’d never actually been stoned; all her knowledge of that state was secondhand) and so was confirming his stereotypes of Berkeley.

  To the contrary, he seemed to embrace her question. “It’s the Ship of Theseus,” he said.

  She nodded as if she understood, then eyed him. “What was that again?”

  “Theseus. He founded Athens, killed the Minotaur in his labyrinth, did a few less savory things. But that’s what’s great about Plutarch—he wrote about Theseus in his Lives—he doesn’t sugarcoat, gives you warriors with their warts and all. The Argos, the ship Theseus returned to Athens on after killing the Minotaur, the citizens put it in the harbor as a memorial, and they would take away the old timbers as they rotted and put new ones in their place, so it became a puzzle for philosophers: Was it the same ship if over time you swapped out every plank?”

  Parveen must have looked surprised, because he smiled.

  “Listen, Berkeley, not everyone in the military is a moron, despite what your college may have brainwashed you into believing.” He had studied classics at West Point, he said. “And I took quite a bit of philosophy, so I can also tell you about Neurath’s boat. Otto Neurath, German—no, Austrian—philosopher. We’re like sailors on the open sea, Neurath said, who have to rebuild and repair their ship without ever being able to start fresh from the bottom to the top. But any part can be replaced as long as there’s enough of the rest for support,” he went on. “Neurath was talking about the foundations of knowledge—arguing there was no such thing because any plank could be swapped out—but it could be applied to many contexts. Identity, for one; how do you replace the rotted parts of yourself while still staying intact as a person? And war, for another.”

  As he talked, his men began exchanging winks and stroking their chins, tipping their heads back and gazing contemplatively at the sky. Trotter didn’t seem to notice. Clearly this wasn’t the first time he’d po
ntificated, but it was the first time for Parveen, the first time meeting anyone in the military at all, and almost against her will she was impressed. Transfixed. Excited. Even, she had to admit, a little aroused, though he was basically old enough to be her father. She couldn’t help but contrast his barely camouflaged impatience with the elders with his interest in schooling her.

  And he wanted to learn from her too. He began asking her questions about the village women, drilling for information like a farmer in search of groundwater. What were the women’s days like? How much education did they have? Was the clinic helping them? Had it saved lives? Not being able to talk to women, he said, was like being blind in one eye.

  The problem with the clinic, she said, was that it didn’t have a full-time doctor, and no one seemed to want to pay for one. He nodded knowingly and said that most likely Crane had made an agreement with the government to staff the clinic, and they hadn’t followed through. The military often had the same problem with the schools and clinics it built; the government didn’t pay salaries to staff them.

  Now it was Parveen’s turn to show off. She told him about a medical anthropologist studying child mortality in Brazil who had been perplexed about why families were so accepting of their infants dying. A key reason, the researcher found, was that the state—the bureaucracy—was completely indifferent to these deaths. If the government treated high rates of maternal mortality—or child death or hunger or whatever the issue was—as normal, it became normal to the people too. They assumed that is how things were meant to be.

  “Especially when you have a religion as fatalistic as Islam as your guiding principle,” Trotter agreed. “It just about killed me in Crane’s book when our friend Waheed there kept calling everything God’s will.” He caught himself for a moment and paused. “Sorry—you’re probably Muslim, but you grew up with a different mentality.”

  Parveen had no idea how to respond to this.

  Anyway, he said, once the military paved the road, there would be no more excuses. It would be easy to get a doctor in here every day, he said, and he inquired further about Dr. Yasmeen.

  Parveen had his ear, and she poured as much into it as she could, everything she’d been told about the ailments of the women and much of what she’d seen in the clinic. She forgot about protecting patient confidentiality; she saw the women less as patients than as stories, stories that would horrify and move Trotter as they had her. It was probably safe to say that the colonel had never heard so much about female parts before, but Parveen wanted to spare him nothing, including embarrassment. She imagined him reporting all of this on some occasion to the First Lady, maybe even to the president. Only later did she understand that anecdotes did not travel up the chain of command. Which wasn’t to say they couldn’t influence the course of events.

  Although she worried that it would cement an image of the village as backward and primitive, she told him about the mullah choking the eclamptic woman and her subsequent death. The story was too good—too important, she thought—not to tell. And it was true. Perhaps she was also attempting to separate herself from “that kind of Muslim,” even as she felt queasy at her impulse to do so. It was a sort of juvenile betrayal, as if she were back in school trying to ingratiate herself with the cooler kids.

  Trotter shook his head in disgust. “Another good reason to pave this road, to strip guys like him of power.”

  With this, Parveen agreed. The mullah wouldn’t be able to control a village where people could come and go as they pleased, where they were exposed to much wider influences. Even the khan would have less power, she thought with delight. But she hadn’t forgotten the elders’ hesitation, and she raised it with Trotter.

  “Oh, the elders came around,” he responded. “We just need to make them feel ownership. And get it done—they’re used to promises being broken.”

  But they hadn’t come around—that had been his interpreter’s intervention. She wanted to tell Trotter this, but Aziz had been edging closer as they talked, preceded by the smell of a thousand cigarettes. He wasn’t as tall as Trotter but he wasn’t short, and his features—those dark eyes, a Roman nose and sensuous mouth—made for a face that was intriguing and therefore unnerving.

  She greeted him in Dari.

  “I speak English,” he replied in English, showing badly yellowed teeth.

  “And you probably want to practice it as much as I do my Dari,” Parveen said in Dari.

  “I’m an interpreter, I don’t need practice,” he said, again in English.

  She considered informing him that he did need practice but thought better of it. Under Trotter’s gaze, they were both stiff, like under-rehearsed performers.

  Where was Parveen from? he wanted to know.

  Kabul, she told him in English. She’d been born in Kabul.

  He asked where her family lived now.

  Parveen didn’t want to simply say “California,” a place so much easier to grow up in than Kabul in wartime would’ve been, so she told him that her family had left in 1988 and with great difficulty found their way to California. She knew she sounded defensive.

  “I live in Kabul, I’ve always lived in Kabul,” Aziz said, emphasizing the word always, and she knew that he was shoving in her face everything that he’d endured and that she’d escaped. Between her and Aziz a whole conversation was happening beneath the conversation that Trotter could hear.

  Oblivious to this tension, the colonel broke in: “Parveen changed her life because of Gideon Crane’s book, Aziz. She left America and came back to this country. She’s living here, working here, because of that book.”

  “You’re A.,” she said, hoping her voice conveyed accusation.

  “I’m Aziz. I don’t like that he called me A.”

  “He was trying to protect your privacy. He says that in the book.”

  Parveen didn’t say that, given his descriptions, perhaps Crane had done Aziz a favor by withholding his name.

  A. seemed to be having a harder time in the village than I was. He would begin each day with a litany of woes. His bones hurt from sleeping on the floor. His nose ran from the altitude and his rear end from the food. He missed his mother’s cooking. He insisted that the villagers, illiterate and uneducated, were little better than the animals that lived in their compounds. I couldn’t say they were much fonder of him; people don’t like to be judged, especially by someone who fails their own tests of manhood. A. could not chop wood or harvest wheat or butcher an animal. He had no children and no wife. His only skill was interpreting, and I’m being generous in calling it a skill. But I liked him. And he didn’t snore.

  She wanted to keep talking about the book, thinking she could at least hint at Aziz’s mistakes—or fabrications. But Trotter asked her to explain to Aziz what she’d been studying. As she spoke, Aziz folded his arms and stared down at her, making his boredom clear. Asshole, she thought, imagining telling friends back home about him. They would get his type exactly: both arrogant and insecure, probably a misogynist, nowhere near as good-looking as he likely thought himself.

  “So could a medical anthropologist look at, say, how protocols for treating battlefield casualties have evolved?” Trotter, ever the eager student, asked.

  “Perhaps,” Parveen said hesitantly, unsure whether this would actually be a legitimate subject of study for her discipline.

  Trotter ran with it anyway. In this war, he said, they’d reduced lethality—soldiers who died from their wounds—to about 10 percent, whereas in Vietnam it had been 24 percent. “When you consider the tremendous advances in firepower,” he said, “and the junk they keep thinking up to put in goddamn IEDs, it’s that much more impressive. Outstanding, really.”

  Mostly to be polite, Parveen asked how the improvements had happened, which started Trotter on a long disquisition. There’d been advances in equipment and armor, he said, but mainly the evolution in the medical system on the battlefield, with field hospitals going into battle right behind the troops, carrying e
verything from anesthesia packs to ultrasound machines. The goal was basic triage that would get the wounded as swiftly as possible to a combat-support hospital, usually Bagram. If they needed more than three days’ treatment, they’d be sent out of country. To Germany, usually. All high-level hospitals. And if it would take them more than a month to heal up, they were sent home to the States.

  The more Trotter talked, the more any attraction Parveen felt to him fizzled. And when Aziz glanced at the afternoon sun, dropping glacially but perceptibly, and said, “Colonel, we should—” she realized that it was the interpreter with whom she wanted more time. Some part of her craved the vexation he provided.

  “And the Afghans, how are they treated?” she interrupted before Aziz could convince Trotter to go. She felt Aziz’s attention shift ever so slightly toward her, the incremental turn of a weather vane.

  “The same,” Trotter said. “With the best we’ve got.”

  “Meaning field hospital, combat-support hospital, then, if needed, Germany or wherever?”

  “Yes,” Trotter said. “Well, no,” he clarified, “they’re not flown out of country.”

  “Because…”

  “Because this is their country. They want to stay here.” Trotter didn’t look at Aziz as he said this. “They have—they need to develop—they have their own medical apparatus.”

  “So what’s the setup for them here?” Parveen said, as neutrally as possible. “Can you walk me through the process?”

  “Not my ambit,” he said, looking toward the vehicles. “You’re better off talking to the medical folk. And we should hit that road so we’re not trying to take it in the dark.”

  I took that road in the dark, Parveen wanted to boast. Instead she persisted with “Just a few more questions, if you don’t mind.” What were the Afghans’ hospitals like? Trotter hadn’t seen them. Was the lethality rate for Afghan soldiers and interpreters about 10 percent, as it was for American soldiers? Trotter didn’t know. So he couldn’t say for sure they were receiving anything close to equivalent care? No, he acknowledged, he couldn’t. Then he cut off her questions and said they had to depart.