A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  When the meeting broke up, the elders formed small huddles. Trotter greeted Parveen distantly. A weight seemed to be drawing his features down even as his well-exercised optimism fought to hold them up. He gave Parveen the gruesome details. An improvised explosive device packed with ball bearings, nails, and rocks had taken divots out of a laborer working the road; he’d been left a bloody pulp. When Trotter’s soldiers rushed to help, they’d come under fire, and one of them had taken a bullet in the thigh. That soldier had been medevaced to a combat hospital and was stable. The laborer, although taken out on the same medevac, was dead.

  “We heard explosions,” Parveen said. “We thought it was you, blasting for the road.”

  “Could’ve been,” Trotter said grimly. “Or it could’ve been the IED. It was a doozy.” But this was a sign of the American-led coalition’s success, he insisted. The militants were being squeezed elsewhere, so they’d come here. He paused, and his gaze wandered upward to the mountains, then out to the pastoral tableau of fields and orchards, as if all of it was, in the end, just vegetation for trouble to hide in. “You know, when people talk about Afghanistan being tough terrain, they talk about the mountains, but it’s really the valleys. Our biggest battles, the worst kill zones—all valleys.” He reeled off a list of places she’d never heard of: Pech, Shok, Korengal, Ganjgal, Tangi. “Real death traps. It’s the damn geography.”

  “Aren’t the damn people the problem?” Parveen tried to joke. “They’re the ones planting the bombs.”

  Trotter didn’t take the bait. “Plenty of good people here,” he said. “They just need to stand tall.” He’d asked Aziz to go around and quietly encourage the villagers not to be afraid to tell him or his men what they knew.

  “But shouldn’t they be afraid if the enemy”—the word sounded strange coming out of her mouth—“is nearby?”

  “The enemy’s days are numbered,” Trotter said with confidence.

  Parveen lost his attention then to a mechanic. This time the Americans had come not in Humvees but in mine-resistant all-terrain vehicles—M-ATVs, in Trotter’s parlance. They were rectangular, sand-colored, and—although they could hold only five people, driver included—huge, higher than the Humvees and slightly broader too, which meant the road had to have been widened in places already to permit their passage. Their metal armor was meant to defend against IEDs and their V-shaped hulls to deflect the force of an explosion. Parveen felt claustrophobic just looking at them; they reminded her of rolling tombs.

  One M-ATV had overheated on the way into the village, which didn’t surprise Parveen. It seemed inevitable that, like obese hikers, these cumbersome giants would regularly conk out. The mechanic was telling Trotter that they might have to attach a towline from another M-ATV to pull the vehicle out.

  It was the same problem the British had experienced getting their wheeled guns to these villages, Trotter said with what sounded almost like satisfaction.

  Parveen decided to search for Aziz. She hadn’t yet confronted him about the untruths in Mother Afghanistan, although she thought often, maybe too often, about doing so. Almost against her will, her eyes had roamed toward him during the shura meeting. She couldn’t tell if Aziz was watching her from behind his sunglasses.

  He wasn’t in the bazaar drumming up courage or whatever Trotter had asked him to do. A couple of village men directed her down to the river, where she found him alone, cross-legged, smoking. His armored vest and helmet lay next to him, and his sunglasses were atop his head. He was silently examining his own reflection in the water, and when Parveen sat down next to him, their reflections appeared side by side. It reminded her of the moment an Afghan bride and groom saw each other for the first time in the mirror.

  Rather than turning to Parveen, he nodded at her watery avatar. Neither spoke. Smoke curled up from the cigarette in his right hand. She studied her own face, the changes in it since her arrival—eyebrows bushy, skin browned, cheekbones emerging as she lost weight—then, more discreetly, Aziz’s. There was something comforting in his presence. He looked like half the guys she’d grown up with.

  Suddenly he smiled, a wide grin that rippled over his face and created the illusion that the water was rippling as well. “Our wedding,” he said.

  She laughed, not telling him how their thoughts had overlapped. To joke about such things was what children playing adults might do. But they were adults, and at the freedom suggested by that, she tingled. It was an instinctive reaction, and like an intelligence officer in her own body, she tried to read what it might signal.

  For want of a fitting reply, she mentioned that the soldiers were trying to fix the vehicle.

  “They love to fix things,” he said.

  She laughed again, because again she’d had a similar thought, that rather than dispiriting Trotter and his men, the challenge of the disabled vehicle seemed to energize them. Unlike negotiations with cagey villagers, it had a concrete solution. Suddenly she felt shy, though, which wasn’t usually her problem. “Trotter thinks you’re talking to the villagers. Are you hoping they’ll come see you here?” The question sounded snotty, though she hadn’t meant it to be.

  “What’s the point? They won’t tell me anything even if they know everything.”

  Without discussing it, they’d slipped into the perfect way of conversing: Aziz spoke Dari and Parveen spoke English, each of them using the tongue that came most easily while still understanding the other. It was the opposite of their first meeting, when she’d tried to insist on Dari and he on English.

  If the villagers informed on the insurgents, Aziz said, or on whoever had carried out the attack, then they would be prey for vengeance after the Americans left. He’d tried to explain this to the colonel, who said that to refuse to help the Americans was to side against them. It was better for Aziz just to pretend he’d talked to the villagers and they didn’t know anything. All they wanted was to be left in peace by both sides.

  Parveen wondered if he was saying this for the benefit of the village men, some of whom were passing within feet of them, ostensibly coming to drink from the river or to wash their hands but really, she suspected, to gawk at the two of them in conversation. To sit and talk like this was not something men and women here regularly did, and it was even more exotic to see an American and a military interpreter do so. That sense of possibility she’d had just moments before quickly constricted as it had on her first foray from Waheed’s house. There were almost no private spaces where she and Aziz could talk, certainly not without opening herself to the same possibly dangerous judgment she’d feared for Shokoh. She didn’t know whether it was her own reputation or Waheed’s she was worried about or if, since she was his guest, the two could even be separated.

  “So you’ll lie to Trotter,” she said a touch combatively, as if to put verbal, if not physical, distance between her and Aziz.

  Aziz reached into the pack for another cigarette, then said, “Sometimes not lying puts people in danger.”

  This was her opening to ask about his fabrications regarding Commander Amanullah, yet she held back. The weight on him, the decisions he had to make, seemed heavier than anything she’d ever contended with and so rendered her moralizing frivolous, even impertinent. She would lead him to talking about Crane, she promised herself. But first she asked for his story, how he’d come to work for the Americans at all. She wanted to know more about his intractable life—not just the constraints on him but how he had flexed against them. This resistance, she was coming to see, was one of the things that made living a creative act.

  He gave a sardonic smile. The first time he’d met Dr. Gideon, he said, he’d also had to give his story. Americans collected and offered them like they were business cards.

  Parveen was embarrassed at having conformed so completely to this observation but pressed gruffly ahead anyway. “So what is it? What’s the story?”

  No story had a single beginning, he said, but he would start a decade earlier, when the Taliban had bee
n three years in power. In Kabul, as in all Afghan cities, the Taliban imposed many dictates. They were trying to force urban Afghans back into rural conservatism, as one might lead a tall man into a room with ceilings so low he had to bend. While a few of these rules were sound, most of them were arbitrary, theologically or otherwise. And they were all cruelly enforced. Shops were supposed to close during Friday prayers, but one Friday, when Aziz’s smallest sister was very sick, his father ran to the pharmacy to buy medicine for her, and although prayers were just starting, the pharmacist kept his shop open a few extra minutes to help Aziz’s father. The Taliban arrested them both. Aziz’s family had to borrow money from relatives to bribe officials for his father’s release, which took several days. In that time in prison he was beaten, mocked, and who knew what else. He came home an old man. He didn’t talk much, just smiled. It was as if his captors, his torturers, had opened him up and swept him out. He didn’t want to leave the house. Although previously a teacher, he never worked again. It fell to Aziz, at twenty the oldest of six hungry children, to leave his studies at the university and support the family. At the time this didn’t seem a great loss, as under the Taliban the school was barely functioning anyway.

  “Kabul University?” Parveen interrupted, feeling an unexpected pang. That was where her father had once taught poetry. She had visited during her time in Kabul, looking for clues about who her father used to be. There weren’t many; his department had been eviscerated during the Soviet invasion and most of his colleagues from the 1980s had died or dispersed. Strange to think that if life had been different, her father could have taught Aziz. She wasn’t sure the interpreter had a poet’s soul, but perhaps her father would have divined it.

  Aziz only nodded in answer to her question. At the time, he repeated, it hadn’t seemed a great loss, but later it did. Hearing her talk to Trotter about her studies had reminded him of this.

  “I thought you were bored when I was talking,” Parveen said. She turned to him as she said this, but he kept his eyes on the water.

  Not bored, he said. Angry. It seemed unfair that she’d had a chance to learn so much, to think about how people live, while he was just trying to survive life, to help his family survive. Upon leaving school he’d gone to work for an international organization that trained him as a deminer. Telling Parveen this, he trailed a finger in the dirt, making figure eights. Mines were easy to plant, he said—almost anyone could do it—but they were dangerous to unearth. You had to move very slowly, either sweeping your detector over the ground or crawling across it, creeping, creeping, poking very gently every few inches. Aziz got on his knees, grimacing a bit at some old pain, to demonstrate. You were looking for hard metal, he said. Listening for its sound, its ping. He sat back on his haunches. You couldn’t stop paying attention, he said, not for a moment. He’d done this for eight hours a day. The way truck brakes burn out on mountain roads? That was what happened to his knees. And even though he wore protection on his face, the dust coated his skin, all of it, his eyelashes, inside his nostrils, inside his throat, inside his lungs. He hadn’t stopped coughing since, although he admitted that starting to smoke hadn’t helped. He’d begun to walk bent over, because he was bent over all day. It started to hurt so much to stand up straight that he became convinced that his muscles had re-formed and hardened around his curved spine. He wouldn’t even turn thirty until later this year, he said, but his body was already that of an old man.

  “We should walk,” he said. “I get stiff if I sit too long. It might be better for you too.”

  This was an oblique reference to their growing audience, the men squatting nearby or on the opposite bank. Suddenly Parveen was back in high school, or maybe the Freaks and Geeks version of high school, and she wished she could watch the show with Aziz and explain it to him.

  They stood up and Aziz shouldered his Kevlar vest, kept his helmet in his hand. She suggested they do a loop along the fields, through the orchards, then back to the bazaar. As they began to walk he squinted up at the sky and said, “There was the sun too. It made my head hurt, made spots swim in front of my eyes. Doing that work, death becomes your shadow. It’s as if you see the lid of your own coffin, and all that remains is to open it. It requires so much alertness that sometimes it seems easier to give in. I wonder if the soldiers who patrol in dangerous areas ever feel this way. I’ve never asked them. Only the thought of my brothers and sisters kept me going—who would feed them if I was gone?” They were like fledglings, he said, waiting for him to pluck worms from the dirt. Then his talk veered to a different topic. “Why’d you come back?” he burst out. “You had the good luck to leave. Why are you back?”

  It’s still my country, she nearly said, but it wasn’t. And yet after the attacks, America hadn’t felt entirely like her country either. She tried to explain what it had been like to be a Muslim then, and as she spoke, she reached some new understanding: perhaps that feeling, almost an internal exile, had also driven her back toward her origins. If so, Gideon Crane’s book, which she’d thought had propelled her here, had merely been a spark for material ready to catch.

  September 11 had changed a great deal for him too, Aziz said. Until then, for all his family’s struggles, he’d considered them fortunate. His father was free. Aziz was working. They had food. But what you’re grateful for one day, he said, can seem like too little the next. That was what happened when the Americans came and the Taliban left. Everything changed for everyone, it seemed, but him. All the young men he knew, even some women, were getting jobs with the Americans or the British, jobs that paid a lot. They were interpreters or drivers or computer technicians. He didn’t know how to do any of those things. But he wanted something that would lift him up from the dirt.

  He found English classes he could take at night, he said, which allowed him to work during the day. The Sunshine American English School, it was called. To get to it he climbed a flight of stairs over a copy shop, from which he could sometimes smell the ink of the machines. There were two teachers, Louisa and Caleb. Louisa was older—she had a long gray braid. Caleb had a weak beard and a belly like a small hill. He wore light blue button-down shirts. He spoke some Dari; Louisa, none. They were the first Americans he’d met—others he had only passed by in the street. These two were always cheerful.

  He would finish his work, wash and eat dinner at home, then go to class. But after crouching all day in the sun, he mostly slept during the lessons, and phrases from the teachers—Aziz is going to the bazaar; Khalil is happy—floated across his dreams. But he kept going to the school, which seemed his only hope for a better life.

  As they passed alongside the wheat fields, Aziz’s story was interrupted at regular intervals by the greetings of villagers, some of whom stopped for extended salutations. They treated him a little bit like they treated her, she thought, welcome but foreign, as if Kabul and America were equally distinct from the village.

  One day Caleb and Louisa asked him to stay after class. They’d noticed him sleeping. Was he okay? they asked. Americans could be so…sympathetic. He used some Dari and a little English but mostly pantomime to explain his job to the teachers, getting on his hands and knees for them just like he had for Parveen. But when he did it for them, he started to cry. When he stood up, Caleb and Louisa held his hands, which embarrassed him, because compared to their soft hands, his were cracked and hard from all the dust. And now he noticed how alike their faces were—the same blue eyes, the same full cheeks, even the same clean smell. They were mother and son, it turned out. They’d tried to explain this in the first lesson but he hadn’t understood. Louisa offered him her handkerchief, which was embroidered, and this made him cry more, because it reminded him of his mother, who also did embroidery.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said to Parveen. He gave her a furtive look, as if to ascertain whether she could be trusted with his disclosures. Whenever he turned toward her, she would get a whiff of his smoker’s breath. Each time it bothered
her less.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “when I have a heavy bag, I say to a friend, ‘Pick this up, feel how heavy it is.’ I don’t want her to carry it. I just want her—want someone—to know. Maybe it’s like that.”

  “Or maybe I’ve become like an American.” He laughed at this. “Maybe more than English, this is what Caleb and Louisa taught me.” They’d asked him questions about his history, he said, on that night and many nights thereafter. They wanted to know what it had been like living through the wars, all of them. Aziz didn’t have the English to explain, and within a few sentences he’d had to switch to Dari. He’d never told his story to anyone before, had never even thought of it as a story. For him it was life. No more, no less. And no different than the lives of most other Afghans.

  “They gave me my story,” Aziz said, using the Dari word dorogh, which could also be translated as either “narration” or “lies.” They’d even taught him the words to tell it. “So that was after the rockets landed in your neighborhood? I can’t imagine your terror,” they’d said. His English vocabulary grew: Terror. Depression. Trauma. Post-traumatic stress. Anxiety. Loss. Fear.

  Parveen was amused at his careful pronunciation of these words, imagining the long practice that must have gone into learning how to say post-traumatic stress, but then, chastened, she remembered the scarring experiences they connected to.

  “I don’t think they understood everything,” Aziz said. There were things he didn’t try to explain—for example, that his family thought his uncle had told the Taliban when his father went to buy the medicine because of a dispute the two men were having over a tiny piece of property in their ancestral home. “My uncle has that property now,” he said.