A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  “It seems my son has been gossiping like a woman.”

  Jamshid wouldn’t tell her anything, Parveen lied. She’d asked him how Waheed had raised the money for Shokoh’s bride-price and had started thinking about the generator herself. Then she’d noticed these cans from Crane’s foundation. “Are you taking fuel from the clinic?” she asked, staring him in the face.

  “We have a proverb: do not stop a donkey that isn’t your own.”

  Parveen folded her arms.

  “Should everyone profit from my wife’s death except me? Everyone but her children?”

  “No one should profit from a death,” Parveen said righteously.

  “In Afghanistan, most often, no one does. Otherwise we would be a very wealthy nation.”

  So how had he profited? she said, refusing to yield.

  “I’m renting a room to you.”

  “Now, yes. Did you do that before? Did Crane pay when he stayed with you?”

  “Dr. Gideon did not stay with us—”

  “But he did,” Parveen said, then paused. “Or the book says—”

  “The book, the book. You act like it has the truth of the Quran. Dr. Gideon stayed at the mosque, like all travelers do. Only because you’re a woman did I allow you to stay in my house. But you’re our guest, not our minder. I know Americans think the whole world is their business, but my house is not.”

  He stalked off to go inside. Parveen stood where he’d left her, torn between the politesse of a guest and the ruthlessness of a snoop. No, of an anthropologist, she corrected herself. How could she understand the village if she failed to see its inhabitants clearly, to decide for herself what she was seeing?

  She went and sat under the grapevine. After some time, Waheed, clean and calm, joined her. For a while they sat not speaking, enjoying a wisp of a breeze. She surreptitiously studied the deep lines etched across the leather of his face.

  Then he began to talk. Perhaps his family looked poor to her now, he said, but they were much poorer when Fereshta was alive. Waheed had far more debts than land, of which he had barely any. On most days the family ate only bread, yogurt, and tea. There was one cow. When Fereshta died, Dr. Gideon gave the family money for her burial, but it was soon exhausted. His children hungered for everything, Waheed said. For a mother, for food. The twins were so young they quickly forgot their mother, but they needed one, and the older ones wanted one; they cried for Fereshta wherever they were—outside, in the fields, or in their beds at night.

  Parveen’s throat constricted as she remembered the weeks and months after her own mother’s death, and as she thought of her father, how alone he still often seemed. Why judge Waheed differently?

  He needed a wife, Waheed continued. It was true that Jamshid had helped earn the money for a bride-price by tending the cows, but according to Waheed, the final installment came when Crane returned to the village, less than a year after Fereshta’s death, to build the clinic. He had Issa with him; they hired Waheed and other men to help. So he had a little money again—enough for a bride-price—and Bina came. She was a good mother to her sister’s children, but she soon bore a child too, and even the best mother cannot make bread from air. Their poverty was worse than ever. Then, a couple of years after Bina’s arrival, Issa returned. Dr. Gideon had written a book about the village, he said, and as a result a lot of money had been raised. Once again Waheed had work, this time taking down and rebuilding the clinic on a much larger scale. Thereafter, again, there was no work, but in other respects Waheed’s life began to change. Important visitors came to the village, and all of them wanted to meet Waheed, just as Colonel Trotter had. Issa explained that it was because Waheed and Fereshta were featured in Dr. Gideon’s book; he showed Waheed the picture of himself with Crane.

  Waheed was honored by this, and moved, and also perplexed; these people had never met his wife, yet they were sad for her, for him, for their children. They all wanted to meet him and take his picture. He let them take it every time but was given nothing in return. Or just some useless things, like clothes the family wouldn’t wear; these were used instead to plug holes in the outhouse walls. Meanwhile the khan was growing richer and richer, renting his field for the helicopter landings, and others were profiting too by stealing medicine from the clinic to sell, which Waheed refused to do.

  Then Bilal had his accident. Waheed took him to the provincial capital, to the hospital there. The doctors severed the limb from the forearm down, but they saved his life. The operation was costly. In the house of an ant, Waheed said, a dewdrop is a storm. He had to sell some land to the khan. Bina, meanwhile, had given birth to a second child and was pregnant with a third. Whenever he caught up, Waheed said, he fell down again. Some days the pressure was so great he thought he couldn’t continue. It was a shameful thing for a man not to be able to bring his children food. As they thinned to barely more than bones, his anger grew. A man could endure anything if he had hope that things would get better. Hope, maybe, was as important as bread. But Waheed had no hope.

  Parveen didn’t know where this story was going, but she let him spin it out. She couldn’t tell if he was unburdening himself of years of trauma or trying to anticipate and ward off her judgment. Whenever she softened toward him as he spoke, vigilance would rear up in her, but then she would conclude she was being too harsh. The correct emotional calibration seemed impossible in the face of such a story and the way it touched, however obliquely, on her own.

  Had the clinic been no help to Bilal? she asked.

  The clinic was almost never open then, Waheed said. Most of the time it had no doctor. There’d been the man—useless to the village women—sent at first, then occasional guest doctors brought by Crane’s foundation for a day, usually with a photographer in tow. Then, for a long time, no one, then Dr. Yasmeen. As Waheed talked, Parveen tried to absorb what he had just offhandedly confirmed—that, as the dai had claimed, the clinic had barely ever been operable.

  This was why, Waheed was saying, Issa had gotten the idea to give Waheed the clinic’s backup generator and provide the fuel. The accounting at Dr. Gideon’s foundation was poor, Issa had told Waheed. People there sent money to him without asking how it was spent. If Issa told them the clinic needed more fuel, they sent more money.

  And they didn’t know that the clinic was hardly ever open? Parveen asked.

  Waheed didn’t know what they knew.

  Why hadn’t Issa just told the foundation he needed fuel money and kept it all for himself? Parveen asked. Why bring in Waheed at all?

  Waheed didn’t know. “Ask Issa,” he said simply. Issa gave him money too—sometimes the equivalent in afghanis of a hundred dollars a month. Waheed, grateful, had never asked why. He assumed Dr. Gideon had directed Issa to help Fereshta’s family. The money had changed their lives, he said—among other benefits, he’d bought more land—but so had having lights and electricity. When night fell they no longer had to just sit and look at one another through lantern light, then crawl to their beds. They’d become addicted to light. “Before Dr. Gideon arrived here I was a simple man. A good man,” Waheed added, almost helplessly, as if Crane’s virus of want was an infection he’d caught.

  Parveen couldn’t tell whether Waheed was seeking absolution or daring her to report him to Crane. Who would blame the husband of the dead woman for wanting to give her children food, give them light?

  “The fuel could be used to keep the clinic open more,” she said at last.

  All the fuel on earth wouldn’t help the women here when there was no doctor, he said. Besides, he’d told her already—there was no shortage of fuel. He could get as much as he wanted from Issa. And anyway, none of this—not the clinic, not the generator—would be here if he hadn’t lost his wife.

  He was hardly the only man in the village who had lost a wife, Parveen fumed to herself. She felt strongly that Waheed and Issa were committing a grievous moral harm. Yet she couldn’t say against whom. “You don’t see how this is wrong?” she s
napped.

  “You sound like my son. A boy with no family to support can afford to be pure, as can an American girl. My children eat better than they ever have. Should I apologize for that?”

  He had done more than buy food, she said. He’d used his gains to get Shokoh into his house, his bed.

  “In marrying Shokoh I helped her family,” Waheed insisted. Parveen was taken aback but said nothing, and Waheed continued. “Her father was sick—he is sick—but she doesn’t know. When he dies, the family will have no one to provide for them. So I offered to marry Shokoh. She is settled here; she’ll be taken care of.” He’d paid a very high bride-price, he said, which would help support the rest of the family after Shokoh’s father was gone.

  So while Shokoh believed that her father had sold her, more or less, it seemed less mercenary reasons drove his bartering. If the truth was that her father was dying and hoping to make sure his family was provided for, then in this telling, Waheed was coming to their aid. But how was Parveen to know what was true?

  “The sum was much larger than a more suitable mate would have had to pay,” Waheed said. His humility reminded her of Bina, so confident about her lack of beauty. Both refused to partake in self-delusion.

  “And her father?” Parveen asked, refocusing. “How is he?”

  Waheed said he didn’t know.

  “And you’re not going to tell her?”

  “When the time is right, I’ll tell her.”

  “What, when he’s dead?”

  “No, before.”

  “But you don’t know when that will be. What if I tell her?”

  “Then she’ll know. Nothing will change except her happiness.”

  Was it possible he believed Shokoh happy? “If you were so worried for her family, why not just give them money and let her stay there and finish school?”

  “But then what use would she have for a village man like me?”

  What use did she have for him now? Parveen thought angrily. The urge to somehow pry Shokoh free returned. “So it wasn’t just from charity that you married her,” she accused. “You wanted her.”

  He looked straight at Parveen. “You thought there was only virtue here?” When, embarrassed, she didn’t answer, he said, “I’ve been working almost since I took my first steps. My belly has been empty more days than it has been full. Should a man never take into account his own wishes? I married Bina to give my children a mother. Shokoh, I married for myself.”

  For all the differences between Waheed and Crane, Waheed’s words reminded Parveen of the way Crane had tried to make up for the privations of his childhood far longer than that childhood had lasted. As Crane had suggested, self-pity was a blank check that would cover the costs of almost anything. It wasn’t that Waheed lacked a moral calculator. No, he had conceptions of fairness, and he believed his behavior comported with them. The problem, hardly unique to him, was that he had narrowly constructed those conceptions to favor himself. Was he a hardworking, long-suffering widower or a lascivious oldish man? Could he be both? You could view a man from so many different directions and never see him whole. Parveen wanted someone to tell her how to judge, how to think about Waheed. She would write to Professor Banerjee.

  That night Waheed didn’t switch on the generator. It needed a small repair, he told his family. The small repair, he did not say, was Parveen. “You decide what to do,” he had told her at the end of his confession. “Would you rather we all stay in darkness?”

  Little by little, like a line being reeled in, the day’s light went. They sat in the dark then. Lanterns, once lit, cast a spooky romantic glow on the half forms of the family. Everyone moved more slowly, talked less. Shokoh didn’t write. Bilal didn’t draw. The children whined at first, then grew silent. Parveen said good night and descended to bed, shuddering as she imagined the village from above, hooded by mountains, the light from this household extinguished.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Covenant

  PARVEEN HAD SHARED NOTHING FROM MOTHER AFGHANISTAN with the women since her run-in with Commander Amanullah nearly a month before. Now, perhaps because of her tutorials with Jamshid, they began accusing her of neglecting them. The orchard beckoned and they wanted to return—mostly, she suspected, because it gave them a reason to get out of the house. Seeing the khan at the bazaar one Friday, she told him, while making sure to stand several feet away, that they would be using his orchard again. He smiled and glided his hand, palm up, in front of himself, as if to say, You’re welcome.

  The day on which they gathered was warm, but the orchard was pleasingly cool, suffused with watery hues of green. As a joke, the women had brought basketfuls of apricots harvested from their husbands’ orchards. The apricots were, like the rest of the valley’s fruit, extraordinary: silky to the touch, a gorgeous pale yellow in color, and intensely sweet.

  Parveen ate her share, but she nearly choked on the one in her mouth when Ghazal called out, “How is your fiancé?”

  “Fine, fine,” she said.

  “You’d better marry him soon,” Ghazal said, then looked around saucily for the best moment to land her punch line. “Because if you don’t hurry and bear fruit, your womb will look like this.” She held up a pit to whoops of laughter.

  “Very funny,” Parveen said. She would never admit this to the women, but she’d begun to think about, even dream about, children of her own; being twenty-one in a village full of teenage mothers was doing that to her. Twenty-two, actually; her own birthday, July 25, had just passed, unmarked by anyone but herself. No one in the village celebrated birthdays because they often didn’t know when they were.

  “I won’t be sad when my womb looks that way,” said Latifa, who held one infant while her two tiny girls gamboled around her in the orchard. At her most recent checkup with Dr. Yasmeen, she’d learned from the ultrasound that she was most likely going to have another girl, her fourth. She had told the doctor and Parveen that she wasn’t going to tell her husband in the hope that the machine turned out to be wrong. Massaging her belly now, nearly five months along, she appeared uncomfortable to Parveen, perhaps even miserable. In her implicit complaint, Parveen saw boldness. Unlike some of the women, Latifa never pretended to enjoy being a vessel for reproduction.

  “You’ll change your mind after the baby comes,” Bina said. “We always do.” She smoothed the head of her youngest, six months old, who was nestled in her lap. Parveen had to acknowledge that Bina was a tender mother. Latifa tilted her head in half-hearted agreement.

  As for what to share this time, Parveen had settled on Crane’s chapter about getting the clinic built, mostly because it didn’t seem to cast anyone in the village in a bad light.

  Mother Afghanistan, Chapter Eleven

  Back in America, haunted by Fereshta’s death, I went into a deep depression. Like a platoon leader who has lost a soldier in battle, I relived the sequence of events—her ride on the donkey, those hours of torment—again and again, wondering what I could have done differently. I railed against cruel fate, which had exiled the women of that village from medical care.

  One night I dreamed of my father, a dream so vivid it stayed with me for days afterward. In it he beckoned me to follow him, and we passed through a wall and into Fereshta’s village. There before us stood a white building, tall and strong. “Look what you built,” my father said, and for the first time I heard pride in his voice. When I woke, or when Gloria woke me, I was sobbing. Soon after, I told her that I had to return to Afghanistan and build a clinic for the women in Fereshta’s village, that by doing so I could make her death serve a purpose. It was a covenant with myself, or perhaps God had found a path for me after all. My pastor and the members of my church—God’s flock, some would say—raised the money for me to return to Afghanistan and build the clinic…

  …On my way back to the village, I stopped to ask directions from a Kochi nomad. Dressed in white, with a white turban, he was leading a camel piled high with his possessions. Except he turned o
ut not to be a Kochi nomad but a man disguised as one. His name was Issa, and he made his living by raiding archaeological sites and selling their antiquities on the black market. He looked as ne’er-do-well as he was, with a black mustache and impish eyes. But inside he turned out to be a softie. As soon as I told him of my mission, he announced that he was going to join me. His own mother had died giving birth to him. As a boy he had slept with her shawl, the only item of hers he had. As a man he still dreamed of her touch. We were two black sheep trying to make good on our lives.

  Getting the clinic built would turn out to be by far the hardest thing I have ever done. On the highway to the village, we came upon a roadblock placed by bandits. They surrounded Issa’s jeep and demanded money, and we got out with our hands up. I was less afraid for myself than I was for the as-yet-unbuilt clinic. If they took our cash, we would not be able to buy materials or hire laborers. Then Issa did something remarkable: He told them where we were traveling and why. He said I had come to build a clinic that would save women from dying in childbirth. He told them about his own mother dying, how he, like so many other Afghan children, had grown up without a mother’s love. As he spoke I saw tears come into the eyes of some of the bandits, and several told Issa that their own mothers or wives or sisters had died giving birth. Then not only did they let us pass—they gave us money, no doubt stolen from other travelers. I didn’t think we should take it, but Issa said it was better if we did. He didn’t want to anger or offend them, and it was possible that this act of generosity might set them on a more righteous path. And so we sailed on toward the village…

  …Our travails weren’t done. A petty provincial official—is there any other kind?—saw profit in our plans. He and his flunkies intercepted us during our rest stop at the provincial capital and insisted that we needed a permit to do any kind of building in a village. This was bunk, since the villagers had been building without permits for probably thousands of years. But it was different for me, he said. I was a foreigner wanting to build a health facility. And he was a corrupt official wanting a bribe. The “permit-application fee” would go right into his pocket. Issa argued that we should just pay him so we could move on. But on principle I objected, and I also suspected that once we paid off one official, we would confront a long line of others seeking their ounce of flesh. We sneaked out of our hotel in the early morning to leave for the village.