A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  “How do I feel about them?” The doctor smiled. “This is like asking a bride on her wedding day about the groom her parents have arranged for her to marry.” Which, Parveen remembered with some embarrassment, was more or less what she’d asked Waheed about Fereshta. “This marriage between us and the Americans was arranged, and my feelings about it don’t matter,” Dr. Yasmeen said. “Of course I celebrated when they came. I was in a prison, and they freed me.”

  The prison to which she referred was her house. Once the Taliban had taken over, she said, she was essentially incarcerated there, even as her husband continued to work. Dr. Yasmeen had started medical school after Naseer was born and finished just before the Taliban came to power. They’d exiled her from her profession. Only when a powerful Talib wanted a doctor for his wife was she able to work.

  “You can imagine how grateful I was when the Americans came. But remember—unlike the Afghans with the Americans, I chose my husband. I didn’t have an arranged marriage.”

  Straining for her meaning, Parveen asked if she wanted them to go.

  “I don’t want them to stay forever, which is different. Or so I tell myself. Then again, it’s easy to congratulate ourselves for our courage when in reality all we’ve done is survive.”

  “I’m not understanding.”

  It wasn’t clear what would happen, the doctor said, if the Americans left Afghanistan. Everything was precarious. Even when the surface looked smooth, there was great tumult beneath it. “Once you’ve lost your freedom, or home, or stability,” she told Parveen, “you never take anything for granted again. Your parents must have felt that.”

  Parveen didn’t know what her parents had felt, since their feelings about either the past or the possible instability of the future were never a topic of conversation. They had given her the gift of innocence. She sometimes had a hazy sense of adult difficulties, as a child at the beach might note a ship sailing along the horizon before she returns to playing in the sand. But because her family’s circumstances had seemed so immutable—when she was young, she was sure that her parents, and possibly her sister and herself, would forever live over the dollar store—Parveen often forgot that they’d ever lived anywhere else. Of course, when her mother died, she learned that nothing was immutable. Change was an insurgent. Whether it was a death or a war, it most often arrived when you were looking the other way.

  And yet, the doctor continued, the health of a country could never be good as long as it was dependent on other nations. With all the help, the money, had come so much corruption. “You don’t see it here,” she said, “but in the cities—”

  Parveen took a deep breath. “I know where the second generator is,” she said in a rush.

  Naseer stopped mopping. His mother looked at him as if to confirm what she’d heard. Then they both looked at Parveen, who was reminded of when she’d confessed to her fake fiancé.

  She told them the whole story. “The work and risk that went into getting this place built,” she said, all of it fresh in her mind from the chapter she’d shared with the women, “and then Issa and Waheed treat it like a bank.” She told them about the thousands of idealistic Americans, some as young or younger than Shokoh, who’d raised money to save Afghan mothers. How would they feel if they learned that some of their donations had allowed Waheed to pry Shokoh from her family and school? She didn’t want to imagine what Issa had done with his gleanings.

  Dr. Yasmeen’s frown deepened as Parveen spoke, and when she finished, the doctor urged her to tell Waheed to return the generator.

  But if she did, Parveen protested, he might send her from his house or even the village.

  The doctor didn’t want Parveen to leave, but this country’s greatest problem, she said—perhaps even greater than war—was that no one took corruption seriously. Waheed’s ill-gotten wealth might appear to elevate him, but it actually debased him. “I suspect he can be brought to understand this,” she said. He struck her as a simple man, not a greedy one.

  As for Issa, Dr. Yasmeen had had her own dealings with him, none of them pleasant. She’d begun coming to the village after meeting the khan’s wife, who’d been at her hospital for a medical procedure. The woman had described a beautiful clinic that had had no doctor for several years. Curious, Dr. Yasmeen visited, assuming it would be decrepit. Instead, it was well kept, nearly immaculate. A ghost clinic. She’d found it eerie. She volunteered to travel there weekly to see the village women. One day Issa showed up at the clinic and told her to go; it turned out he was worried she would want to be paid. When she said she didn’t care about the money, she only wanted to help the women, he started haggling with her over how much fuel and supplies she could use. Finally the villagers intervened on her behalf—they wanted her.

  She’d never met Crane. “Sometimes I don’t believe he exists,” she joked. Still, she thought Parveen should write to him about Issa’s finagling, because to keep this secret would debase Parveen as well.

  Professor Banerjee had a different take. In an e-mail that Dr. Yasmeen had printed, folded neatly into an envelope (without reading, she stressed), and brought to Parveen, her professor pooh-poohed her discovery about Waheed, though in higher-flown language. Like Dr. Yasmeen, Professor Banerjee saw this as a story of post-9/11 Afghanistan writ small, a narrative in which American aid created dependence and fed greed, but they differed on the question of whether Waheed should be held to account. From Professor Banerjee’s perspective, such “amoral familism” was a common, and essential, survival strategy of the impoverished. All corruption by the poor was necessary, since the state and elites afforded them so few opportunities for advancement. Of course, she went on, “amoral familism” is itself a contested concept with a long history in anthropology… Blah-blah-blah; for the first time, Parveen found her professor’s erudite lecture of little comfort and even less use, and she put the letter aside.

  SOME DAYS LATER, BILAL reported to Parveen that Issa was at the clinic. Ordinarily, this would have caused her to stay home until he was gone, but this time she hurried there. Inside, he and Waheed were sitting in the waiting-room chairs, which the women never used. Cans of diesel were set neatly in a row in front of them.

  Issa invited her in as if there was nothing to hide. “I was just telling our friend Waheed that with the roadwork, I may not be able to come for a while.” If he could, he said, he would finagle rides on the Americans’ helicopters—someone had to check on the clinic, after all—but they might not allow him to transport diesel. And even if he were to to ask the soldiers to bring it by road, for the sake of the clinic of course, he couldn’t send too much lest it attract attention.

  Preparing for moral combat, Parveen balled up her fists. People, Americans, hadn’t raised money for Issa to enrich Waheed just so he could get another wife, she said.

  Issa’s cold eyes showed the faintest flicker of surprise, and Parveen feared, for just a moment, that he might harm her. But the thought felt like something out of a bad movie, in part because she realized that she trusted Waheed to protect her—Waheed, whose life she had just splayed out as evidence for her prosecution and who was now looking at Issa apologetically. Maybe it was Waheed who needed protecting from her.

  When Issa spoke, it was in a leisurely voice. Was it better, he asked Parveen, for Waheed’s generator to be buried in cobwebs and dust because it was never used? And was it a sin, here in Fereshta’s clinic, to help Fereshta’s husband? The sin, he said, was how little attention Dr. Gideon and his foundation paid to what was happening to their money. It was almost a pleasure to take it from them.

  But why was he helping Waheed? Parveen said. Out of the goodness of his heart?

  “I wouldn’t say, nor likely would you, that I have a good heart,” Issa replied, and Waheed gave a sage nod of agreement. No, Issa said, it was that Waheed was helpful to him. He explained the details of his schemes: He requested far more fuel money from the foundation than any clinic could ever use, and the staff never balked. “
They toss out money the way farmers do seeds.” The extra money went to himself or Waheed. But occasionally some new employee—they never seemed to last long—would ask for receipts for the fuel Issa was supposedly buying. This was inconvenient, because then Issa had to buy the fuel and sell it to get cash. Some of the fuel he would bring to Waheed for use in his generator. The village hadn’t seen an auditor or staff member for years, but this way, in the unlikely event that one did come, Issa would have enough empty canisters to show them.

  All of this he freely admitted, showing no fear that Parveen might expose him. She wondered if this was because he thought no one at the foundation would care.

  It sounded awfully complicated, she said, and Issa agreed. Perhaps he missed the challenge of his old life, he mused, almost wistfully. He described for Parveen the improvised bricolage of obtaining and transporting antiquities. The knowledge he possessed of the many civilizations—the Greco-Bactrian, the Kushan, the Ghaznavid, the Ghorid; he could go on—in whose shards he trafficked. The complexity of the black market. To smuggle artifacts in unlikely ways, including in jugs of freshly harvested honey, required real cleverness. Working for Crane, much less so.

  As to why he also gave money to Waheed, that was partly because Waheed was helpful to him with the fuel. “But also there’s more money than I need. Much more. And I like Waheed.” He recounted coming here with Crane to build, then later rebuild, the clinic and getting to know the villagers. Waheed had so little, yet he didn’t ask for anything. Everyone else did. The mullah wanted money for the mosque, the commander wanted money to provide protection, and the khan—well, the khan wanted money for everything: for the land, for water, for the procurement of laborers, for the use of his field as a helicopter landing. “But Waheed, whose wife, may she rest in peace, was the reason all this money was pouring into the village, demanded nothing. So he was the one I gave to. I haven’t made him rich but I’ve made him richer. And this has driven the khan nearly mad!” Issa laughed. “He doesn’t understand where Waheed’s money is coming from, why he’s not poor anymore. He hates that Waheed has a generator.”

  Parveen, despite herself, was starting to laugh too.

  It wasn’t the point, Issa said, but it was nevertheless a nice reward to baffle and irritate the khan. And it was even more enjoyable to take a humble man and raise him.

  Issa was, or saw himself as, a social engineer, Parveen thought, a Robin Hood redistributing this negligent foundation’s wealth. She remembered the mullah’s words: That clinic has made kings of beggars. It wasn’t Crane who had done so, but Issa.

  Of course, once Waheed began getting Parveen’s rent, he didn’t need Issa’s money as much. In fact, Issa argued that Waheed should now be giving him part of his earnings, a kind of commission. “But you don’t need it,” Waheed said.

  “This is true, but shouldn’t brothers share everything?”

  “You’re too ugly to be my brother,” Waheed said.

  “This is why I trust him,” Issa said to Parveen. “Everyone else tells me I’m handsome.”

  She tried out the doctor’s argument on him, that corruption was Afghanistan’s greatest problem, that it was tarnishing Waheed, realizing as she said this that she was talking about Waheed as if he weren’t there.

  Issa shrugged. The country’s corruption wasn’t his creation or his problem. Others could lead that jihad. As for Waheed—here, Issa placed his hand on Waheed’s shoulder and left it there a few beats—he wasn’t a child. He could make his own decisions. “Like all of us,” Issa said, “he will face God on the day of judgment.” He turned to address Waheed. “Perhaps you will have a conversation like this one, although I hope it will sound less like a mullah’s sermon. And if he took another wife”—he leveled his gaze at Parveen—“that’s his headache. I myself prefer to be unmarried—women bring difficulties.”

  Issa’s misogyny was so blatant that, counterintuitively, it was almost hard to take offense. But it did make him an odd choice for Crane’s crusade against maternal mortality. Mother Afghanistan had made it sound as if Issa took saving each woman’s life almost personally, when in fact he seemed to take nothing seriously. Though perhaps by now she shouldn’t have been, Parveen was surprised at how little sentiment, how little investment—other than the financial kind—he seemed to have in Crane’s work. He was having fun, that much was clear. Was this, so different from her own gravity toward everything, a better way to be? “I don’t like the khan either,” she said.

  “They say that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, so I suppose that makes us friends.” Then again, Issa said, ticking off the unpopular, unsavory warlords whom the American military had empowered to help it fight the Taliban, an alliance born of a common enemy wasn’t always the best approach. “One must be careful in choosing friends.” And with that, he said he needed to go. Dr. Gideon would be in Kabul in a week (or so he claimed; he often canceled these trips) and Issa had to prepare.

  Would he come to the village? Parveen asked, remembering all the questions about his book she meant to ask Issa.

  Why would he? Issa answered. There was nothing for him here.

  Issa departed in his Land Cruiser in time to reach the highway before dark. Within a day or two, Parveen heard booms in the distance, the sound of the Americans blasting the mountainside away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Half a Loaf

  WHEN TROTTER CAME TO THE VILLAGE IN MID-AUGUST, HE’D added a protective vest and helmet to his military uniform. This made his sitting with the shura more awkward, but he managed it, right down to the crossing of his legs, although it gave his face a constipated look. Across from him sat a soldier wearing, over his armor, a backpack from which antennas protruded, as if he were an insect complete with exoskeleton. The other soldiers didn’t sit at all, nor did they lay down their guns. Instead, they spread out in a perimeter around the meeting, their backs to the shura and their weapons aimed outward. Aziz, who crouched near Trotter, had hidden his eyes with dark wraparound sunglasses.

  It was an unusually hot day, even in the shade. Moisture pooled on Parveen’s back and dampened her dress. Flies blackened the plates of sugared almonds, which grew sticky in the sun. Trotter left his tea mostly untouched, and irritability seemed to float in the air like an allergen.

  Trotter began to talk. The construction of the road was going well, he said, and he offered a litany of statistics to prove it: tonnage of rocks cleared, feet of dirt graded, number of laborers employed, amount of equipment used, and so on. Then he said, almost casually, that there had been one wrinkle, unexpected in this peaceful place. During the preceding week, the road laborers had come under attack—he left its nature unspecified—as had the soldiers who’d gone to protect them.

  When Aziz translated, the faces of the elders betrayed no surprise. Or any other emotion.

  Trotter continued. Those perpetrating these attacks were enemies of Afghanistan, determined to prevent its progress. They would fail; they would be defeated. The villagers could help by sharing any information, anything they’d seen or heard, about who might be behind the attacks. Trotter spoke placidly with neither anger nor frustration, and in doing so he conveyed his confidence that any resistance to the road would be subdued, because those resisting were on the wrong side. He didn’t speak like a preacher—his flat Midwestern tones and his evenness precluded that kind of delivery—but the villagers listened first to him, then to Aziz’s fairly scrupulous interpretation, with the rapt concentration a good preacher commands.

  But when that raptness, that utter stillness, held firm even after Aziz finished, it began to seem less like the giving of attention than the withholding of something. As Trotter looked from face to face, the silence gathered until it seemed to overflow.

  At last an elder spoke. No one in the village knew anything about this, he said. They farmed their fields, nothing else. But he reminded Trotter they had told him that to do this village’s road and none of the others could stir up bad feelings. He r
epeated their previous counsel: progress was important, but so was peace, and to favor one son over another would create division in a family.

  “Other tribes and subtribes, other villages, might have jealousy that only this village gets a road,” Aziz explained to Trotter. “Afghans have a saying: Half a loaf, but a peaceful body. They’re quoting this.”

  “I understand that,” Trotter said with a flash of impatience. The army was reaching out to the leadership of other nearby villages and tribes, he said, so that they understood this project was a beginning, not an end. The Americans wanted to connect all of Afghanistan. But anyone sabotaging this road, whatever the reason, was going to be held to account for his actions. Also, Trotter said, did the elders remember that he had offered employment to the whole village? That any man here could be put to work on the road?

  Yes, they remembered.

  And yet not a single villager had taken a job, Trotter said. Not one. That surprised him. These were good jobs, well paid, as he was sure they knew. Men were coming from all over the district asking for work. They were being put to work. Yet no one from this village had come. Trotter waited a few beats, then said, “I trust that’s not because anyone here knew that there might be attacks. I trust that anyone in this village who knows anything will reach out to us.”

  The colonel hoped the villagers would share anything they learned, Aziz interpreted.

  There were nods, nearly enthusiastic, all around.

  “Good,” Trotter said. “Good. Let me tell you, we get this road done, a lot else flows in here—all kinds of development. Schools. Help with agriculture and irrigation, which I know you want. The road doesn’t get finished? None of that happens.”

  Aziz tried to leach the colonel’s words of their threat, and Parveen had a flash of insight into the interpreter’s work, into the cognitive compartmentalization required to be an emissary of unpleasantness. You were being paid to act as a ventriloquist’s dummy when you had thoughts and feelings of your own. This gave her newfound compassion for Aziz.