A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  They had arrived at the orchards. The trees were laden with peaches, apricots, and apples, and they wandered through, plucking the occasional fruit.

  Not long after, Aziz said, Caleb and Louisa told him they’d found him a new job. He was surprised; he wasn’t the best student in the class, perhaps barely in the middle. And he wasn’t the only student with a sad history. Nearly every Afghan had one by then. But Caleb and Louisa wanted to help him. Besides, all of the best students were saving themselves, like rich or pretty would-be brides, for the American newspapers or the military or the United Nations, the jobs with real money. Aziz would never get one of those jobs—his English wasn’t good enough at the time—which was why, when Dr. Gideon came looking for an interpreter to travel outside Kabul, Aziz’s teachers suggested him.

  Caleb and Louisa told Aziz that when Crane interviewed him, he should tell Crane, in English, the story of his life. Nervous, he practiced over and over with his brothers and sisters as audience. They knew no English, he said, but that didn’t prevent their opinions: Stop swinging your arms so much! Now you’re too stiff, like a wooden soldier. Your mouth looks funny when you make those words.

  Then came the day for him to meet Dr. Gideon. Aziz was impressed by his height, he said, by his very long arms. Dr. Gideon kept using his hands to flatten back his hair, the color of ripe wheat, which rose up again as soon as he took his hands away. Aziz, unable to read his eyes, simply told Dr. Gideon his story, using all the words that Caleb and Louisa had given him. To his relief, Dr. Gideon asked no questions. Instead, he told Aziz his own story. How he was an eye doctor and had cheated the government and gotten in trouble for it, which surprised Aziz, since he’d never known anyone in Afghanistan to get in trouble for cheating the government. But Dr. Gideon had “cut a deal,” he said—Aziz had no idea what this meant—to do community service in Kabul instead of serving time in prison. He’d gotten lucky and “won the lottery,” and now he’d “done his time” and was ready to “get out of Dodge,” more phrases that meant nothing to Aziz. This was Aziz’s introduction to the strangeness of English, its impossible idioms. Caleb and Louisa, he said, had been so careful to lead their students step by step, never using a word or phrase that couldn’t be found in a dictionary or a grammar book, that wasn’t building on something they’d already taught. Being careful wasn’t of concern to Crane.

  Dr. Gideon kept telling Aziz he wanted to go “off the grid,” another mystery expression. He wanted to see the real Afghanistan, he said. The villages, the mountains, the Minaret of Jam, the hollows where the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan had been before the Taliban destroyed them, the yaks in the Wakhan. He planned to travel for two weeks, maybe more. It was adventure he was after, he kept repeating, adventure and penance, for he hadn’t just cheated the government, he had cheated on his wife. He’d committed adultery.

  “I hiccuped when he told me this,” Aziz said, “I was so surprised.” He stopped to do a full Crane imitation, first extending his arms, then running his hands through his hair as he said, “‘I slept with two black nurses at the hospital, Aziz. Don’t know what I was thinking. I mean, I do, but I’m not proud of those thoughts.’”

  The imitation was almost too perfect; she wondered whom, over the years, he’d performed it for and felt somewhat chastened by her worship of Crane. Aziz clearly had a more jaundiced, or more balanced, view of him. She had been so…devoted, that was the word. To Aziz, Crane was only human.

  They were nearing the khan’s orchard, where she’d read to the women. She’d planned to show it to Aziz, to tell him about her project. Instead, unable to articulate to herself exactly why, she steered him away and suggested they head back toward the bazaar.

  “Do you know what I asked him?” Aziz smiled in embarrassment. “I asked him, ‘Why black?’” No one had ever confessed adultery to him before, he said. He didn’t know what questions were proper. He didn’t even understand what Dr. Gideon meant when he called the women “black.”

  “What was his answer?”

  “He said, ‘Why not?’”

  This made Parveen laugh.

  Aziz had concluded that it was through private stories like these that Americans made friends. He’d even adopted the habit himself; look at how much he was telling Parveen!

  On the surface it seemed this way with Americans, she conceded. But what was it, really, that Crane had disclosed to him? Revelation could be a performance; it could be rehearsed. Didn’t it seem like this processing and presentation of memories changed them, or at least discharged their emotion? Sometimes, even as you said what you’d felt, you no longer felt it. She told him about a junior-high science class in which she’d had to poke at a pellet regurgitated by an owl in order to deduce from the tiny bones the nature of its prey. It wasn’t necessarily obvious but it was no longer mysterious, the way the hidden contents of a stomach are. It was probably the same, she felt, with these scraps of disclosure.

  Aziz considered this for a moment, then said, “Maybe this is why, when Dr. Gideon finished his confession, I didn’t really have anything to say.”

  As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to say anything. Dr. Gideon decided they were a good fit, and that meant Aziz was hired. He didn’t tell Dr. Gideon that for a tour guide he was poorly traveled. He’d been nowhere outside Kabul except his relatives’ village, which was not far. He had never traveled merely to see something, as Dr. Gideon seemed to want to do. But his duties would be simple: arrange transport and food, help plan the journey, act as an interpreter, and get the American safely home. And the pay, while not large, was more than a deminer earned, and with much less danger. He could fake his way through their travels, he decided. “For all Dr. Gideon knew, I could call a pile of rocks the Minaret of Jam.”

  “So that’s where it started,” Parveen said abruptly. “That’s when you began to make things up. Like when you told Crane that the commander here was Taliban.” She hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but she was relieved that at last it was out.

  Aziz looked baffled. “Why would I say that? Everyone knows there were no Taliban here then. That commander fought against them.”

  Parveen paused, uncertain. Was Aziz sure he’d never said anything like that to Crane?

  Of course, Aziz said. It was a horrible accusation to make if untrue. It could ruin a life.

  Had Aziz been with Crane when he was kidnapped by the commander? she asked.

  Kidnapped? Crane had never been kidnapped, Aziz said. At least, not while they were together.

  How could he so blithely contradict part of the tale that Crane had told to millions? she wondered, though she quickly realized that her frustration wasn’t with Aziz but with Crane. She could no longer pretend he hadn’t invented the story about being kidnapped by a Taliban commander. Perhaps he thought the tale would never get back to Amanullah. Or perhaps he didn’t realize what smearing a man’s reputation meant in this part of the world. Either way, it burned her. “Did you even read Dr. Gideon’s book?” she asked Aziz.

  He hadn’t, he said, dropping his head. His English wasn’t good enough to read a whole book like that. He’d opened it, looked for his name, discovered that he was A., and closed it. When Colonel Trotter asked him questions about his time in the village, he said that whatever Dr. Gideon had written was what happened, and he couldn’t remember anything more. He didn’t want to admit to Trotter that he couldn’t read the book, because it might make Trotter question his English skills. “But I told Colonel Trotter I read it, so please—”

  “Like you told him the villagers had agreed to the road when they hadn’t.” Her tone was cutting because she was angry—angry at him for refusing to take responsibility for the lies about the commander. She could no longer deny that Crane alone was responsible, and this she found almost impossible to bear.

  Aziz’s eyes began to dart. “I didn’t know then that you could understand everything.”

  This was hardly an acceptable excuse. But again she felt compassion for him, re
calling her own recent transgression, which she described to him, reminding him of the day Trotter had mentioned to Dr. Yasmeen the woman who’d died of eclampsia. “I shouldn’t have been talking to him about that—the doctor is, rightly, protective of her patients’ privacy—so I didn’t translate what he said. It was like I had this strange power, where only I could know everything that was happening.” She wasn’t sure whether to admit that she found it intoxicating, as if the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge were hers to distribute. “You have that power too.”

  It wasn’t a power he wanted, Aziz said. The consequences felt too much for him.

  They’d reached the bazaar, and Aziz was thirsty. Parveen suggested they go to the chai khana, a stall that intermittently served as a teahouse. Parveen never went there on her own—it was too clearly a space for the men—but today she confidently followed Aziz into its dark recesses. Because it was so small, everything could be overheard by the few other men there, and as if by instinct, Aziz began weaving much more English into his Dari, speaking in a code that only Parveen could crack.

  In the beginning of his work with the Americans, he’d tried to translate every word, he said, but it was impossible. He sounded morose at his failure. Americans talked too fast, as fast as bullets. He couldn’t keep up, and he worried that if he kept asking them to repeat what they’d said, he’d lose his job, because part of that job was to convey authority to the elders or whomever else the Americans were meeting with. He couldn’t show his ignorance. At night, unable to sleep, he would replay over and over in his head what he’d missed, wondering if some catastrophe might happen as a result. But then he began to see that it didn’t matter what he missed, because life—events—just formed around what he’d left out. It was like there was a place where a road split, and one fork followed the complete and accurate translation and the other the translation he was capable of, and he was directing them onto that second fork, which they would take to wherever it led.

  As he spoke, Parveen could sense his wariness giving way to relief. “I’ve never been able to…never had anyone to talk to about this,” he said. He continued: The other problem was that the Americans—especially the soldiers and most of all Colonel Trotter—were very efficient and often in a hurry. They didn’t really want every word; they wanted the direct route in everything. Afghans, of course, often told stories to explain what they meant. “We love history—you know this,” Aziz said. “We’re very polite. An elder doesn’t want to insult anyone, even an enemy, and sometimes being too direct can be an insult or sound like one.” That roundabout way of talking frustrated the Americans, though, so Aziz felt he had to get to the point. But it seemed to him that the more each side talked, the less the other side understood. Or the unhappier each side became at what the other side was saying. So he began to make…choices. Changes in the translation that he thought would help avoid confusion, avoid conflict, and please each side. With time, his editing became habitual. “Sometimes I can’t believe I’m the only way they have of understanding each other,” he said.

  “But if they don’t agree,” Parveen said, “isn’t it better if they know that now?”

  “If they think they agree, maybe they’ll move forward in harmony.” But ultimately, he admitted, his reasons weren’t that lofty. “The most important thing for me is to keep the colonel happy. I need this job.”

  The words seemed to remind him of Trotter, and Aziz suddenly rose, ducking his head beneath the low ceiling of the stall. For her this only served to dramatize the puzzling dynamic in which the employer had the financial power and the interpreter the linguistic power. While she was sure most interpreters were honest—that even Aziz was, most of the time—it seemed a fragile basis for an occupation.

  “I’d like to talk more,” Aziz said as they walked through the bazaar toward the M-ATVs.

  She wanted that too. In the chai khana, for the first time, they’d spoken face to face rather than side by side, and she’d felt him studying her features when he thought he was unobserved. Her body at that moment had begun to heat, and only then did she realize how profoundly her sexual hunger had diminished in the village, for lack of an object. Yet she had no idea what might come next. At college, she would have known exactly where this was going to lead, or where she wanted to lead it. But here? Aziz, though older, was less experienced, she intuited, but the real problem was practical, the impossibility for talking privately, to say nothing of touching, in this village. She felt a new kinship with Shokoh, longing for Naseer.

  In Dari now, because they were approaching the Americans, she asked what Trotter would do if the attacks continued.

  Aziz sighed and said he didn’t know. “The colonel’s frustrated. Doing this road was supposed to be easy. The war wasn’t supposed to come here.”

  “I guess wars don’t obey orders.”

  “Life doesn’t obey,” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Elvis

  AS TROTTER HAD PREDICTED, DR. YASMEEN WAS BEING BROUGHT in by helicopter now. On Wednesday mornings, she and Naseer would drive to the American base and then fly from there. The village was so quiet that you could hear the helicopter coming—the rat-a-tat of its rotors battering the air—well before you saw it. The sound suggested speed, but whenever Parveen saw a helicopter emerge from the gap between mountains, it moved slower than she expected. She always thrilled, secretly, to its arrival. The drama of its touchdown in the khan’s field never lessened. Naseer loved these flights—his country was even more beautiful from above, he said. His mother, by contrast, looked green when she disembarked.

  A couple of weeks after Trotter had interrogated the shura about the attack on the road, Dr. Yasmeen told Parveen that at the base that morning, the colonel had asked her to talk to the women about who might be planting the IEDs. This request, which came via his interpreter, had made her uncomfortable, and she’d told the colonel so. She couldn’t ask her patients to report on others in the village, she said, nor could she repeat to Trotter anything her patients told her when she was examining them. “I’m a doctor,” she said. “Not an intelligence service.”

  Parveen agreed that the request was untoward, though she also found it revealing. If the Americans were asking Dr. Yasmeen for information, they had to be pretty desperate. She speculated aloud that there must have been more attacks on the road.

  Yes, Dr. Yasmeen said, that was what Colonel Trotter’s interpreter had told Naseer. IEDs were being placed in culverts and construction barrels. There had been severe injuries—hands lost, legs maimed—to two laborers. Others were refusing to work because of the danger. Dr. Yasmeen thought she and Naseer were being flown in not because of work on the road but because the colonel didn’t think it was safe to drive.

  The colonel was looking for help wherever he could find it, Parveen soon learned. He wanted not just information but levers that would move the village to the American side. He was perceptive enough to have figured out that asking for help or information in front of the shura wasn’t going to get him anywhere. “I need a mayor,” he kept telling Aziz, who kept telling him that even unofficially, there wasn’t one. These villages didn’t work that way. There were people with more power, like the khan and commander, and those with less, but decision making was collective, consensual.

  Trotter already knew this, since he’d devoured all the ethnography and anthropology and political science about Afghanistan he could find, questing for that elusive key to the villagers’ “hearts and minds.” But he decided that a private audience with the khan was worth trying, since the khan was profiting so richly from the Americans’ rental of his field. Parveen went along on the walk to the khan’s in the hope of talking more with Aziz, but it was Trotter who monopolized most of her attention. The model for what he was hoping to achieve, he told her, was the Sunni awakening in Iraq the previous year, during which sheikhs had rallied their tribes against al-Qaeda. Trotter hoped to inspire the villagers to rise up and protect their road.

&nb
sp; Parveen, even knowing little about Iraq, thought this a fool’s errand. The khan didn’t have the power of a sheikh, and he wouldn’t be able to keep any promises he might make about the village’s cooperation. She had no intention of going inside the house to be prey for his lewd thoughts and, in keeping with her recurrent fantasy of threatening the khan with the Americans’ retribution, even considered telling Trotter about his behavior. But she knew such retribution was no more likely than the awakening Trotter wanted. They were both without recourse.

  At the house, the khan insisted it would be rude for Parveen to refuse his hospitality and tried to lure her inside.

  “But I had so much of your hospitality in the orchard already,” she said.

  Aziz, who knew how impolite it was to refuse an invitation and could no doubt discern the archness of her Dari, looked with interest from her to the khan before following Trotter and two soldiers into the khan’s compound.

  The remaining eight stood guard outside. Several paced off in different directions, out into the sunlight, while a few others sheltered beneath the ancient trees shading the compound. They checked their weapons and talked quietly until Parveen joined them, at which point all conversation stopped. She cast around for a way to restart it—the weather? Their hometowns?—but every possibility felt wrong and none of the soldiers broke the lengthening silence. Trotter was easier for her to talk to, although it embarrassed her to think of how their earnest discussion about the Ship of Theseus must have sounded to these soldiers. In age, at least, they and not the colonel were her peers.

  “Look at this wall, not a mark on it,” said one of the soldiers at last, gesturing at the pristine compound exterior. He was tall and gangly with unusually pale skin and pale eyes, made more so by his colorless lashes. “If this were a base porta-potty, there’d be pictures of dicks from top to bottom.”