A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  He seemed peeved not just by her queries but by her tone, which perhaps had grown overly interrogatory. To take this tack with a military man was tricky; she worried that Trotter might question her patriotism. But she reminded herself that Professor Banerjee had taught that to be a radical anthropologist was to alienate and be alienated, from your nation as well as your race, your class, your gender, your subculture, even your family. “No loyalties” was her professor’s mantra. Loyalty was the enemy of dispassion. Loyalty could prevent clear sight, the demand for truth, the exposure of injustice.

  Parveen wanted to show Aziz how concerned she was for the welfare of Afghans, and she also wanted to impress her professor, to whom half her brain was composing a long account of the conversation with Trotter as they were having it. It was Professor Banerjee who had drummed into Parveen these fundamental questions about who would live, who would die, and why. “Power, not fate,” Professor Banerjee would say over and over during her lectures. It was power that dictated that wounded Americans would be flown out of country to ever more sophisticated levels of care, just as it was lack of power that dictated that Afghans would eventually be consigned to their own country’s broken health-care system. This was why Parveen was ethically obliged to interrogate. It wasn’t just so that she could know but so that Trotter would see. He had the power, possibly without even being cognizant of it.

  Yet she regretted that she’d alienated him even as she’d failed to warn him about Aziz. The look of vague disappointment on the colonel’s face made her cringe, and she tried to smooth things over by asking, as Trotter and his men climbed into the Humvees, how their vehicles had managed the narrow road.

  “Oh, we’ve got inches to spare,” Trotter said with another smile, this one tight. “We’re comfortable with small margins.” But, he added, one benefit of widening the road was that it would become easier for the Americans to pass.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the House of an Ant

  THAT EVENING, THE WHOLE FAMILY CLIMBED THE LADDER TO the roof. They did this frequently in summer, treating the flat surface almost as another level of the house. It was cooler up there, and the view at dusk was lovely, the whole valley infused with lilac-hued light. Other families, too, were on their roofs, and the sounds of their voices floated toward Parveen.

  She asked Waheed what he thought about the Americans’ plan. The others listened deferentially, as if his answer would be oracular. He was unequivocal: the elders were right to oppose the road, and the Americans should listen to them.

  “But how can you not want a better road?” Jamshid spoke up. The elders wanted nothing to change, he said. They would keep the village a “dead place.” Why didn’t they see that the village was lucky to have been chosen by the Americans?

  It hadn’t occurred to Parveen until then that while the shura might speak for the village, it didn’t speak for every villager. She wondered if other young people felt the same, if the prospect of an easy exit would stir new aspirations for them.

  Still, it was rare for any of Waheed’s children to argue with him, rare for Jamshid to express a dissenting opinion so strongly to his father. Hamdiya elbowed him as if to say, Watch it. Waheed said nothing, which was sufficient to convey his displeasure. For a while no one else dared to talk. Then, tired of the silence, Parveen brought up how Aziz, the interpreter, had, in the face of the elders’ clear objections to the road paving, told Trotter that they were fine with it. He’d made things up, she said, and she suspected that he’d done the same with Gideon Crane, which would explain the problems in his book.

  “I told you, Aziz isn’t a bad man,” Waheed said.

  Fine, Parveen said—although she didn’t necessarily agree—but wouldn’t this false sense of agreement cause problems?

  “He knows from experience that the Americans will do what they want anyway,” Waheed said. “They’ll talk about how much they’re helping you even as they’re breaking what’s most dear to you.”

  The causticity of this comment caught Parveen off guard, but before she could reply, Jamshid spoke, his voice cracking slightly from puberty or from feeling. “But if they finish the road, we won’t need their help again.”

  “Do you think this will be the end of it?” Waheed said. “That they’ll finish the road and leave?”

  “Listen to your father,” Bina said. “He’s correct.”

  He was always correct in Bina’s mind, Parveen thought bitterly. Like Bina, she’d been raised to respect her elders, but in her case, she’d been allowed to have her own opinions as well. The members of this family could do with more of that.

  Again, however, no one spoke. Faces disappeared into the dimness as stars emerged across the indigo sky.

  Shokoh crept near Parveen. “Ask him,” she whispered. “Ask Waheed if I’ll be able to travel.”

  Shokoh’s morning sickness had mostly passed by now, and the pregnancy was enlivening her. Her enervation—her depression—had lifted, at least most of the time. She looked vital, aglow. She complained less and laughed more, and not always in the sarcastic way that Parveen had become accustomed to. Sometimes Parveen would hear her soft humming. No melody, no tune, just happy sound. She talked about how she would teach her child to read and write. This chatter amused Waheed.

  Hearing about the road project that afternoon, Shokoh had clapped her hands and asked Parveen questions about the Americans—what they looked like, how they spoke. Then she’d asked if, after the baby was born, Waheed would take her and the child to see her parents, whom she seemed, for now, to have forgiven. How easy it would be to go to her old home! Imagining the paved road, she seemed to envision caravans of buses, honking taxis, and motorbikes speeding along it, filling the sleepy village with the conveyances of her old life, her old city.

  “I don’t know,” Parveen had answered cautiously, afraid to encourage her hopes. They would have to ask Waheed.

  Now, on the roof, Shokoh was prodding her to do just that. Perhaps Parveen drew strength from not being able to see Waheed’s face. Or perhaps, frustrated at his petty tyranny, she wanted to provoke him. “When the road is done, will you take Shokoh and the baby along it to see her parents?” she asked, her voice ringing loudly.

  “Maybe,” Waheed said.

  Certain this answer would disappoint Shokoh, Parveen pushed harder. “The other men look to you. They’re likely to follow your lead. Even if you don’t agree with the road, will you use it once it’s finished?”

  After a long pause he said that when the baby arrived and the road was paved, there was no reason they couldn’t visit Shokoh’s parents, which wasn’t, Parveen noted, the same as promising they would. He sounded grumpy, as if it was dawning on him how much the road might change and what these small challenges by his son and impudent houseguest might portend. Soon after, he went downstairs, and the others trailed behind, until only Parveen and Jamshid remained on the roof.

  “That was impressive, that you stood up to your father about the road,” Parveen told him. “He’s not used to anyone ever disagreeing with him!”

  “It’s not impressive to challenge your elders,” Jamshid said dispassionately. “He’s a good father, he deserves respect. I often disagree with him, but I rarely say so.” He was a faint silhouette to her, his head tilted back, and she couldn’t tell whether he was chastising her. For what felt like a long time, he was quiet. Then he said: “I sometimes look at the sky and think how much there must be beyond this valley.”

  Seen through his eyes, Parveen imagined, the pattern of stars might resemble the map the Americans had brought, a topography of mountains, rivers, roads. Of possibilities. A similar restlessness had brought her here. But now she knew that the stars were the same everywhere—only in most other places, the view of them was obscured. The world beyond the valley held no attraction for her. Everything that mattered was here, contained in this small patch of earth. This as much as anywhere was the center of things, but perhaps Jamshid needed to discover that for
himself.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, he accosted Parveen as she was leaving her room. It was clear he’d been loitering, waiting for a chance to catch her alone. His question wasn’t one she’d anticipated. He wanted to know if she would teach him to read. “I’ve wanted to, but I can’t,” he said. “I only learned a little in school. Shokoh can read.”

  “I know.”

  “She thinks I’m stupid. I’m sure you do too.”

  “No, no,” Parveen said. In truth, until the night on the roof, she’d thought him pitiable, so deeply was he tucked beneath his father’s shadow. When Waheed went to the fields, Jamshid went; when Waheed came home, so did Jamshid. They prayed together. They ate together. He was yoked to his father’s farming life as surely as Waheed’s oxen were yoked to the plow.

  “I’d like to marry a beautiful educated bride,” Jamshid told Parveen. “As my father did.”

  It struck her that he might be as jealous of Waheed as Bina was of Shokoh. After all, Jamshid made more sense as a mate for Shokoh than his father, who was some two decades her senior. But Jamshid would never be able to earn the bride-price for such a bride—this was what he was telling Parveen now. Which made her wonder: How had Waheed found the money?

  “If I’m at least a little educated,” Jamshid said, “a father may appreciate that for his daughter.”

  “Is that the only reason you want to learn?”

  “Until I can read, how do I know what I’ll learn? Can I look at the ground in winter and guess what will grow from it?” The sunlight was hitting his eyes, and the tiny gold flares around his pupils seemed to suggest an inner light that Parveen hadn’t recognized until now. With the road, Jamshid added, more would be possible. If he could read and travel, maybe his life would change.

  There was upheaval within him, Parveen sensed, ever since the Americans’ visit. Yearning, once released, was hard to rebottle. She asked what he would want to do instead of farming if he had a choice.

  He thought hard. “A shopkeeper?”

  His knowledge of professions was limited, but to him, Parveen saw, this was a step up.

  Or a trader, he said, so he could visit a lot of places. With the road, it would be easy.

  Jamshid, she was learning, was not alone in his aspirations. The Americans’ visit and the prospect of the road had cracked something open in the village, at least among its youth. For all the valley’s isolation, its teenagers were more aware than Parveen had realized of what they were missing. At the river and at the clinic, women were reporting exchanges similar to the one between Waheed and Jamshid between their own excited sons and reproving husbands. The fathers and, especially, the elders had memories of the Soviets, who had also started by helping, by building roads and highways, even. Later, behaving themselves like fathers angry with rebellious sons, the Soviets had invaded and broken the country on the very same roads they’d built for it. It was better to remain independent from any hand that offered help, the elders believed, because it was usually control that was wanted in return. But the sons insisted that the Americans were different, they didn’t want to stay, they didn’t want to rule.

  Parveen agreed. She thought the village graybeards too suspicious and asked Waheed why it was fine for an American to build a clinic but not for Americans to pave the road.

  “The clinic barely changed anything,” he said.

  She wrote that line down in her notebook. Was the clinic nothing more than a stone dropped in the river, a brief disturbance that the onrushing water soon rendered immaterial?

  She wanted to teach Jamshid, but it wouldn’t be easy to find a time. He left early for the fields, stayed there most of the day, and returned home sweaty and spent. Location was a problem too. After dark the only usable light in the house was that single bulb in the main room, but he refused to take his lessons in front of his family, especially Shokoh, who he was convinced would mock him.

  Parveen suggested lunchtime at the fields, when most of the men took a rest. They might tease him at first, she said, but they’d grow used to it. And—who knows?—maybe some of them would end up wanting to learn too.

  To Parveen’s dismay, it wasn’t Jamshid’s peers who teased him but his own father, and before the lessons had even begun. When they suggested the idea to him that evening, he asked Jamshid what he would do with this knowledge. Write letters to the cows? Waheed never minded getting a laugh at others’ expense, Parveen had observed, but beneath his sneering question she suspected hid fear—the fear that if Jamshid learned to read and write, his willingness for fieldwork would diminish, as might his respect for his unlettered father.

  “What’s the harm?” Parveen asked.

  Waheed shrugged. “No harm. And no help.”

  She took this as permission. The next day when Bina carried lunch to Waheed and Jamshid, Parveen went along, and when the men stretched out to rest, she and Jamshid found shade. They nursed watermelon slices down to the rind, the juice soon a sticky coat on their fingers. The seeds felt foreign in her mouth, and she told Jamshid that in America most watermelons no longer had them—they’d been bred out. Scientists were working on doing the same thing with humans—getting rid of the things people didn’t like. Illnesses passed from parents to children, for example.

  “God should change things,” he said. “Not people.”

  That was debatable, Parveen said. Some argued that man was assuming divine powers, others that if man had the capability to invent such things, it was because God had granted it. And still others—she took a breath—said there was no such thing as God at all.

  He looked at her, curious. “Infidels,” he said.

  “Infidels,” she agreed, wondering if that’s what he would call her if he knew of her own doubts.

  She had borrowed the twins’ primers, which, it turned out, had once been Jamshid’s, from his own time of schooling in the mosque. He knew the basics, but he’d had almost no occasion to use them. Parveen made him copy the letters of the Dari alphabet over and over, as her father had once made her. Jamshid was reluctant to read out loud to her because there were so many words he didn’t know, but she insisted and he relented, although he wouldn’t look at her when he read.

  They agreed to meet twice a week. Their sessions took place in full view of his father and any of the other fieldworkers who cared to observe, which, after some initial curiosity, they mostly didn’t. After a few lessons, Parveen tried to probe more deeply into his hopes, especially those unleashed by the prospect of the road.

  He wanted to earn enough money to woo a beautiful bride, he said, as he had before.

  Parveen suggested, as delicately as she could, that maybe the village wasn’t the best place for a girl like Shokoh.

  But the road would change the village, Jamshid insisted—it would become more like the district center. He spoke as if the district center were a booming metropolis when Parveen guessed it to be a paltry town.

  When Parveen asked how much it would cost to get the bride he dreamed of, he named a high sum. How then, she asked, had Waheed managed to raise the bride-price for first Bina, then Shokoh, while being just a farmer himself?

  To earn Bina’s bride-price, Waheed had sent Jamshid out to tend other people’s cows, he said. He would take them up to the meadow in the months after his mother’s death. It made him feel closer to her.

  “And for Shokoh?” Her beauty and education would have made her price much higher than Bina’s, Parveen knew. Shokoh herself had said the price was too high for her family to turn down.

  Jamshid looked over at his father, stretched out some distance away, an arm over his eyes, apparently asleep beneath the baking sun. “He would say it was God’s will.”

  “You don’t agree.”

  “It’s a way to take what you want. If you can get it, God meant you to have it.”

  “What does that have to do with Shokoh’s bride-price?”

  “Clearly God meant him to have her.”

  “Okay, fine, but it’s not like mone
y just fell from the sky.”

  Again Jamshid looked toward his father. “He would say that God sent Gideon Crane here.”

  Parveen, confused, asked whether Crane had given Waheed money.

  “Don’t you notice anything?” Jamshid said bitterly. How, he asked, was his father the only one in the village with a generator when not even the khan had one? How did they eat so well when his mother, during her life, had probably eaten meat no more often than he could count on two hands?

  So Crane gave the generator to Waheed? Parveen asked.

  “I don’t think he gave it,” Jamshid said. Then, seeing his father stir and sit up, he stopped speaking.

  With the lesson concluded, Parveen walked back to the house, replaying in her mind her arrival in the village that first night, fumbling through the darkness, only to be blinded by Waheed’s light—the only light in the village. She was fumbling still, it appeared. She remembered the mullah’s comment: How does the moon shine only for him?

  As she entered the courtyard, her eyes caught on the empty diesel cans neatly lined up against a far wall. She’d seen them every time she came into the compound but had never truly registered them. Now she picked one up, then another, then another; on the bottom of each was a sticker identifying it as the property of Gideon Crane’s foundation. It made no sense that Crane’s foundation would provide Waheed with fuel when at the clinic it was so carefully rationed.

  Waheed arrived home late in the day, basted in sweat and chaff, drained from working in the heat. Parveen had to subdue a spasm of compassion to interrogate him. How had he gotten a generator? she asked. Only him and no one else. How come?