A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  But on our way we ran into a fierce bunch of local Taliban in huge turbans and foot-long beards. They didn’t want me building in the village. Here, again, Issa proved indispensable. His personal tragedy, the mother lost before he knew her, fed his perseverance and ingenuity. He was relentless; this wasn’t merely a job for him, it was a mission. He found out how much the Taliban were paying their fighters, then offered them one and a half times that amount to come work for us building the clinic. Fereshta’s clinic may be the first joint venture between the Taliban and an American…

  Parveen had skipped this last paragraph when making the outline of the story in her notebook, as she didn’t want to provoke the women by talking about the Taliban again. Nor was she sure any longer that the men Crane had run into actually were Taliban—it seemed unlikely, given their lack of presence in the area. Her best guess was that Issa had told him they were Taliban, and Crane perhaps had been too willing to believe him.

  There were more logistical challenges to overcome. I wanted the clinic to have a wood frame beneath the traditional mud-brick construction (and I planned to insist on white paint, the color of health and sanitation, over that), but trees with strong enough wood didn’t grow in the village. We had to buy them just outside Kabul. But hiring trucks to transport them was going to break our budget. Plus even if we could persuade a driver to travel the road to the village in his truck, the truck would probably plummet over the road’s edge. Issa and I were confounded. But as we stood at the lumberyard where we had bought the logs, we saw the Kabul River, and—hit simultaneously by the same stroke of inspiration—we quickly consulted a map. That river traveled through three provinces, eventually passing alongside the road to the village and then into the valley. We would float the logs to the village. And we would ride partway. We lashed them together, put them in the river, climbed on top, and crossed our fingers. Soon we were moving, leaving the city behind. The journey was transcendent. The peace of the soothing water combined with the prospect of building the clinic helped me begin to heal from the trauma of Fereshta’s death.

  When we reached the village, a joyful reunion took place. Waheed wept with gratitude that his late wife had not been forgotten.

  “I have never seen Waheed weep,” Bina said sharply. It was the first interruption and one that Parveen had no polite answer for. So she simply kept on.

  The men of the village rallied to help us build the clinic, working fourteen or more hours a day, refusing any pay.

  Here, Parveen herself stopped, as she remembered Waheed saying explicitly that he was paid for working on the clinic. She asked the women about this; did they know whether their husbands earned money for helping with the construction?

  “Of course they were paid,” Saba said. “Why would they build it for free?”

  “Because the clinic was meant to help their wives—to help you,” Parveen said thinly.

  “Well, their wives also needed to eat!” Saba said. “Their children too. That was a good time in the village,” she added, almost wistfully.

  The women who’d been married then remembered not just that their husbands had been paid but also, in moving detail, what they’d done with their respective windfalls: a feast of lamb; a new plow; a fibroid as big as a watermelon removed; medicine for a child’s epilepsy; money for a wedding.

  Parveen didn’t know what to make of this discrepancy. It was certainly more heartwarming to have them volunteer, and she guessed that Crane would have preferred that gauzier version of reality. Perhaps Issa or Aziz told him the men had turned the money down, or perhaps Crane had convinced himself that was the case. She was coming to understand how superficial his understanding of the village had been, even as so many Americans looked to him to explain, to define, the Afghans, who in this adventure abroad were both enemy and friend.

  The Afghans were used to such hard labor, but the American with them, white-collar soft, was not. I crashed into deep sleep each night until my sore muscles began to adjust and strengthen. The women of the village, in a lovely gesture, brought us meals as we worked. We probably consumed five hundred watermelons among us. We sang and joked as we worked—imagine dozens of Afghan men singing “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”! It was like a barn raising. In twenty-two days, the clinic was finished. Fereshta’s clinic; I wouldn’t allow it to be called anything else.

  “SING THE SONG!” GHAZAL called out.

  “What?”

  “You said the men here sang a song with Crane. Can you sing it?”

  Parveen demurred, saying she couldn’t sing and didn’t know the words. But the women insisted, their calls ringing through the orchard. Finally, in halting fashion, she sang, to laughter and applause, what few lines she could remember:

  Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys

  Don’t let ’em something something…

  Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such

  Then she had to translate the words, explain what a cowboy was and what a lawyer was, convey that the singer didn’t really mean what he sang, and so on. It was exhausting. Worse still, the women, after trying and failing to sing the first line of the song, concluded they were stupid; how else to explain that their men had learned it when they could not?

  “I’m sure the problem is with your teacher,” Parveen said, but the women looked unconvinced. Then they began squabbling over when the clinic had been built. The dai insisted it had been in the fall, which meant watermelons wouldn’t have been in season, and someone else said it depended whether you were talking about the construction of the clinic the first time or the second, and with that Parveen dismissed the gathering.

  She needed to talk to Issa and wondered if he’d be back soon. He’d returned to the village several times since bringing her, but she’d avoided him and he, apparently, her, since he never came near Waheed’s house. No one else from Crane’s foundation had visited, not even to investigate what she’d written him about the clinic, and she no longer believed that Crane himself was going to make an appearance. She’d responded to his letter, then written him another one after her run-in with the commander. There’d been no reply.

  Chapter Fifteen

  An Arranged Marriage

  I AM ON FIRE,” THE PATIENT—A WIFE, MOTHER, TEENAGER—announced. Her vagina was burning. Her back hurt, too, and she had fever and chills, nausea and vomiting, and unbearable pain during intercourse, which didn’t make it any less frequent. “The whole time,” she told Dr. Yasmeen, “I am screaming in my head.”

  The doctor helped her lie down on the examining table and place both feet in the stirrups, then she snapped on gloves and began the pelvic exam, apologizing in advance for the pain she was going to cause. She inserted her hand, removed it to show Parveen a finger thick with discharge, then slid in the speculum, and the woman, Reshawna, cried out. Parveen shivered, remembering her own less traumatic but still unpleasant encounters with the cold metal, and remembering as well what she’d learned in one of her medical-anthropology classes about the speculum’s origins. It had been devised by a doctor who’d experimented, repeatedly, on his female slaves.

  Parveen was holding the patient’s baby, and the infant smiled up at her with his mother’s face—broad, with wide-set eyes and a spud of nose.

  Had Parveen ever had a urinary tract infection? the doctor asked.

  She shook her head.

  It does feel like a fire inside, the doctor said, and what Reshawna had—pelvic inflammatory disease—was worse. It was common in the young here, because they began having children before the uterus had properly developed and because infections were so easily acquired (the village women, for example, believed it was wrong to bathe during menstruation, though the doctor was slowly educating them otherwise). If left untreated it would recur until it caused infertility. Dr. Yasmeen injected Reshawna with antibiotics and said it would be best for her husband to stay off her for a few days so she could recover.

  “He won’t,” Res
hawna said.

  “I know,” the doctor said, sounding fatigued. “But tell him I said it would be best.”

  Parveen wondered how the village men took such advice when delivered by their wives. Reshawna’s faint laugh suggested it might not be delivered at all. She asked: “Should I wait until he has opened the door”—she meant penetration, Parveen realized belatedly—“then say, ‘Oh, I just remembered, the doctor says you aren’t to do this!’” Even through her pain she was a natural comic, circling the fingers of one hand around an invisible penis and with the other waving a finger in her husband’s imagined face. “Or will you write him a letter saying he should leave me alone? Remember, he can’t read!”

  Dr. Yasmeen curled her plump hand into a fist. “Can he read this?”

  All three women laughed, too hard. What could be said or mimed or imagined in the clinic could not be repeated or enacted outside of it, which meant the wit packed an extra punch.

  “Sometimes I wish I could implant an IUD in every fourteen-year-old in this village,” Dr. Yasmeen said with a sigh after Reshawna had left. But the women tended not to agree to contraception until they were six or seven children in, by which point their health was already damaged.

  There was a knock on the examining-room door. A woman entered and handed Dr. Yasmeen a piece of paper. It was a note from Naseer saying that the Americans were outside the clinic and wanted to speak with her.

  “What do they expect, that I should walk out on my patients?” she said, half to herself, half to Parveen. She wrote that she would come out at lunchtime. This was at least an hour away. Parveen imagined Trotter checking and rechecking his watch.

  This was the first time the Americans had returned since their initial visit a few weeks earlier. In the interim, an Afghan recruiter had come on their behalf, looking to hire laborers, but after a couple of hours he’d left without a single villager having signed up. It was too far to travel, Waheed had explained to Parveen. The work on the road was starting at its far end, where it peeled off from the highway.

  Excavators and rock hammers had begun attacking the mountainside, the doctor and Naseer reported on their visits. Naseer’s eyes had gleamed; he loved machines. If he had the chance to talk to the engineers about their work, he asked Parveen, would she translate? His English wasn’t good enough for a technical conversation.

  Dr. Yasmeen was, of course, pleased by the American project, since she and Naseer would so clearly see the benefits of it. Yet she also seemed slightly amused by it. A superpower bringing its resources to bear here was, she joked, like putting a stent in a capillary. She captured, in her lighthearted way, the arbitrary nature of the Americans’ ambitions, how her country was being remade by their whims. It was a different version of the elders’ “Why here and not there?” objection, yet not completely at odds with it.

  At her lunch break, Dr. Yasmeen went outside to meet Trotter. He was in uniform this time, like his men. He’d come by helicopter, he said, landing in the field of the khan, whom Parveen imagined, with a shiver of disgust, counting his new riches. Accompanying the colonel was a camera crew, part of a public-affairs team producing a piece about the road project.

  “I’ve heard so much about you from Parveen, from others,” Trotter told Dr. Yasmeen, who smiled warmly and introduced Naseer.

  Aziz was there, looking nowhere near as villainous as Parveen had convinced herself, in his absence, that he was. He gave her a passably friendly greeting. Trotter told Dr. Yasmeen she was doing wonderful work and that he wanted Americans to know more about it and about how she might benefit from the improved road. Would she mind if they recorded a short interview with her?

  She didn’t mind, she said.

  Parveen, worried that the video might somehow be seen by the judging gaze of her professor, made sure to move out of camera range. The crew asked Dr. Yasmeen about her commute, about the brutality of the road, and after Aziz translated, she replied plainly, “If you drive the road you will see its condition.”

  Parveen fretted; she wanted Dr. Yasmeen’s heroism, her grit, to be clear. “Show them your car,” she suggested.

  Splattered with mud, coated in dust, the vehicle was the perfect prop. Dr. Yasmeen stood next to it with the camera rolling and spoke stiffly about how the widened and paved road would make her commute so much easier and allow women who needed help to get to the hospital, to specialists. She said all the right things, yet the interview made Parveen uncomfortable, maybe because the doctor was put in the position of being an unwitting prop herself, called forth to justify and praise the American decision to improve the road.

  Perhaps Dr. Yasmeen also felt this, for she said, “But this road won’t help most villages.” It was more important, she insisted, to train more women from villages like this one to be midwives so they could offer decent and consistent care.

  Aziz’s interpretation for the camera crew left out the part about how the road wouldn’t help most villages, which irked Parveen.

  Trotter signaled that they had gotten enough footage. Then, with the camera off, he began to question the doctor himself, with Aziz translating. Were there any medicines she lacked? What vaccines did she give?

  None, she said, because they required refrigeration.

  But the clinic had refrigerators, he’d seen them, and a generator, so why couldn’t such medicines be stored there?

  Her understanding—she looked at Naseer for confirmation—was that it would take much more fuel than the foundation could provide to keep the refrigerators on all the time. She’d asked about it when she first came and was told it wasn’t possible.

  Trotter asked if his men could take a look at the generator. He thought they should consider solar panels. He talked at length about the success of photovoltaic technology as Aziz tried futilely to keep up. The doctor, who valued her time as much as Trotter did his, didn’t camouflage her impatience; she cast her eyes frequently toward the door to the clinic courtyard, where women were waiting for her. She wasn’t going to have a chance to eat.

  But Naseer was thoroughly interested. He wanted to know exactly how the technology worked, and when Aziz ignored his questions, Parveen took over translating, ignoring, in turn, the annoyance on Aziz’s face. She made sure to say those were Naseer’s questions and was pleased with herself for making Trotter see what an intelligent, curious young man Naseer was. The particularity of a person, once you saw it, couldn’t easily be erased.

  They all walked to the back of the clinic, where the generator was kept. Trotter was surprised there was only one generator. What if this one went out? he said. They needed a backup.

  Parveen’s face grew hot; should she tell Trotter where the backup generator was? She looked down at her feet, seeking time to think, to weigh her obligation to be honest against the possible repercussions.

  Trotter was rambling on about the steps necessary to get photovoltaic, about how the village ought to be making more use of a clinic so advanced. “I heard about the woman who died in your car,” he said to the doctor. “The one the mullah choked.”

  Suddenly Parveen was preoccupied not with Waheed’s sins but her own. Dr. Yasmeen had told her on the first day they met that what was discussed in the clinic should remain confidential. It was a condition of Parveen’s presence, laid down so that the women would feel safe sharing the most intimate details of their lives and also so the villagers wouldn’t think the doctor was gossiping. This would be evidence that she’d violated the doctor’s injunction. Now, as the translator, she had to decide whether to confess her transgression or hide it. Squirming inside, she rendered Trotter’s words as “I know it’s been hard to get women to hospitals in time,” then darted a glance at Aziz. She’d always conceived of herself as a straightforward person, but she’d sided with dishonesty twice in quick succession. Maybe it was time to stop being surprised at her own evasions.

  Trotter asked Aziz to tell the doctor that as they began to blast the mountainside, the road would become impassable at
times. He didn’t want this to curtail her visits to the village in any way, so when the road was impossible to drive, the Americans would fly her in by helicopter.

  Her face paled. She’d never flown, she said. Not in an airplane, not in a helicopter. It scared her.

  “We’ll be fine,” Naseer said. He looked excited to escort her—what young man wouldn’t be? Besides, he was the one who drove them on the grueling road. Parveen couldn’t blame him for wanting a break from it. “They have the best engineers,” he told his mother, “the best equipment.”

  “They still crash,” she insisted.

  Aziz didn’t relay the doctor’s concern to Trotter, and Parveen decided not to either. There would be no other way into the village once the roadwork was in full swing, she reasoned, and the women needed Dr. Yasmeen to come as did Parveen. In fact, she suggested to Trotter that he could fly the doctor to other villages also.

  He shook his head. Right now he wanted her to reach one place, which was here.

  THAT AFTERNOON PARVEEN ASKED the doctor how she felt about the Americans. The patient visits were finished. Dr. Yasmeen was sterilizing her tools; Naseer was mopping the floor in a systematic way, as if he’d mapped it into rectangles. He had an organized mind, Parveen concluded; her mother had always said you could learn a lot about people from the way they performed mundane tasks.