by Amy Waldman
“Dick wallpaper,” said another soldier. He wore large glasses that made his head look tiny.
“Wallpaper’s for pussies.”
“My mama’s got wallpaper,” said a third soldier in an accent that was faintly Southern.
“Like I said.”
The Southerner took a menacing step forward, then broke off laughing.
“I bet her mom’s got a lot of wallpaper.” The tall pale one, who appeared to be barely out of high school, jerked his head toward Parveen, and she concluded that he hadn’t advanced beyond needling girls to get their attention.
“My mom’s dead,” she said.
There were a few low whistles at how badly she’d burned him; they seemed to expect her to follow up with Just kidding! When she didn’t, there were murmurs of apology.
“You’ve got to excuse Boone, he doesn’t know how to talk to women,” said another of the soldiers. He was compact and sturdy with skin nearly as dark as Parveen’s.
Boone nodded, dropped his head sheepishly, then grinned. “Shit, Kirby’s mom is dead to his family.”
The other soldiers shifted a bit, glancing nervously at each other. Kirby, whose head seemed so tiny, she now realized, because of the grotesquely muscled frame it sat atop, gave Boone a blood-curdling stare. At least, it curdled Parveen’s blood.
“Shut your fuckin’ flytrap, Boone,” warned the Southerner. “Reyes,” he said, addressing the darker-skinned one, “make him shut up.”
Instead, in an apparent effort to defuse the tension, Reyes asked Parveen where she was from.
Union City, she told him.
“So how come Colonel Trotter calls you Berkeley?” he asked. “You know he calls you that, right?” He imitated Trotter: “‘Berkeley says the phenomenally phenomenological views of the women must be taken into account…’”
She laughed even though the imitation mocked her as much as it did Trotter and said Berkeley was where she’d graduated from, but Union City was where she’d grown up.
“We thought you were from this shithole,” Reyes said, then caught himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean it that way. It’s a beautiful country, actually. Just a shitty one to be at war in.”
She nodded as if in agreement or understanding, then told them that, even though Kabul was her birthplace, Afghanistan was almost as foreign to her as it was to them.
“Respect,” Boone said, “but that’s bullshit. You speak the language. We need Elvis to speak for us.”
“Elvis?”
“That’s what some of us, the dumb ones”—and Reyes cut his eyes at Boone—“call your boyfriend. It’s easier.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Parveen said curtly.
“Relax,” Reyes said. “I’m just fucking with you.”
“Fucking with women is as close as we get to them here,” Kirby said. “How come we never see any? Not one other than you. God, I’m tired of hairy faces.”
“That’s sure going to be unwelcome news to your girlfriend,” Boone cracked.
Again the fervid stare from Kirby.
“Ignore Kirby here,” Reyes told Parveen. “He’s only human when he’s working out.”
“Aziz told me he likes it when we call him Elvis,” Boone said. “It’s better than having the people whose doors we’re busting down hear his real name.”
“Shhh, she doesn’t know about the doors—we haven’t done that here,” said the Southerner, whose name she hadn’t caught.
“Yet,” Kirby said. “Give us time.”
She had an image of how terrifying it would be to have people with so much physical power, not even counting the weapons they would bring, burst into your compound at night. Kirby’s words seemed to sour the air, reminding the soldiers that, despite the gorgeous valley of which the khan’s house afforded such spectacular views, the road was dangerous, the locals unreliable, and their enemies nearby.
“So I have a question, Parvenu,” the Southerner said.
Parveen, she reminded him, then hastened to add that even spell-check autocorrected her name to Parvenu. “Which is kind of funny for an immigrant.”
At his blank stare, Reyes chimed in. “Vance doesn’t know what a parvenu is. He didn’t finish high school. They’re so desperate for bodies to feed this machine, they keep lowering the requirements.”
“Well, if I ever get home, I’ll look it up,” Vance said. “And last I checked, college douche, you were shitting in the same outhouse I was. At least I didn’t waste my time. Anyway, Parveen, can you explain to us why we’re getting our asses shot at here when we’re just trying to help? It doesn’t feel so great.”
“Vancey’s feelings are hurt,” Boone said.
“Shut up,” Reyes said. “Let her answer.”
All eyes were on Parveen, who didn’t have a response. Ever since Trotter had come to discuss the trouble along the road, she’d been trying to ask Waheed a version of the same question. Not who was shooting, necessarily—he wouldn’t tell her even if he knew—but why.
“They’re trying to defeat a superpower,” he’d finally said one night. “The road’s just another battlefield to them.”
To the soldiers, she said only “I don’t know any more than you do.”
“One more reason to get the fuck out of here,” Boone said, sighing. “Just ninety-three more days.”
“Don’t count,” Reyes said. “It makes the time pass slower.”
“Is that physics, dickhead?”
“Count, don’t count,” Kirby said. “Either way you’ll get home, hopefully not zipped into an HRP, and after about four days of boredom and hating on civilians, you’ll want to reenlist.” He ought to know, he said. He was on his third tour.
“Watch out or the same thing will happen to you,” Reyes told Parveen. “Stay here too long and you won’t be fit for anywhere else. You’ll just keep looping back.”
PARVEEN WAS SO ENGROSSED in talking to the soldiers that she felt mild regret when Trotter and Aziz emerged from the khan’s. But within minutes, as they retraced their steps to the M-ATVs, she was back listening to Trotter, and the soldiers, spread out around them, were back looking ready to kill.
The colonel told Parveen that the khan had promised to use his influence to get more cooperation from the villagers, and in return, Trotter had promised to have an engineer draw up plans to improve the village irrigation system (akin to the false promise Aziz had made in the very first shura meeting, Parveen remembered). She surmised that this project would somehow benefit the khan, who controlled the water rights, and Aziz said as much to her later. The khan, he was sure, would profit from this bargain much more than Colonel Trotter.
“Did you actually translate Trotter’s promise?” Parveen asked. She was speaking Dari, newly conscious that the soldiers might be listening.
Yes, he’d translated it, Aziz said, partly because he’d thought hard about what Parveen had said, that it was better for the Afghans and the Americans to know where they stood with each other. He was no longer going to try to control this small corner of the war.
Parveen was pleased but took pains not to show it. The soldiers’ teasing had worked on her as a form of policing, she realized, and she was more circumspect with Aziz now.
“What’s the history between you and the khan?” he asked.
She was right, then, that he’d noticed her discomfort. The khan had accosted her and tried to kiss her in the orchard, she said. Ever since, she’d avoided him.
Aziz weighed this and said, “I might have tried the same thing. Afghan men don’t really know how to behave around women, especially women from the West. And there are a lot of stories about you.”
He didn’t mean her specifically, she knew; he meant Western women. Her cousin Fawad had explained as much in Kabul; they were presumed to be loose, available. She had tried to educate him and now found herself doing the same with Aziz.
“So you’ll show me what’s allowed,” he said, and she suppressed a smile.
Chapter Eig
hteen
The Bald Man
IT CONCERNED THE DOCTOR THAT, WHETHER DUE TO DANGER or construction, the road was largely impassable now. A village woman who was deathly ill would have no way to leave, even if she agreed to. Dr. Yasmeen wanted Parveen to be prepared for an emergency in her absence. They were going to start with Latifa, that reluctant progenitor of girls. She looked sickly, with protruding collarbones and yellow-gray skin everywhere except beneath her eyes, where violet pooled. She had delivered early last time, the doctor said, luckily only by four weeks, but it meant there was a high chance of preterm labor this time as well. She was roughly twenty-four weeks pregnant now, but her cervical length was short, barely more than two centimeters, and this was often, although of course not always, a predictor of early labor.
She should be spending the end of her pregnancy in a hospital, Dr. Yasmeen said, but instead she would stay here and cook and care for her family until her contractions began and her life was at risk. The doctor had offered, many times, to teach the dai what to do when there was postpartum bleeding or when the placenta wouldn’t come out, but the woman refused, insisting she had more experience than the doctor. “She’ll say it’s in God’s hands,” Dr. Yasmeen said. “Better a woman dies than for her to admit she has something to learn.” But the dai would not allow the doctor to train any other village women either. This was why, although Parveen had no medical training, Dr. Yasmeen wanted to teach her what to do. As an outsider, Parveen could stand up to the dai.
During Latifa’s exam, over Parveen’s protests, Dr. Yasmeen began to instruct her. If Latifa delivered and was still bleeding, she should take misoprostol, a single pill that did not require refrigeration. But if she didn’t take the medication or it didn’t work, Parveen should try to stop the bleeding manually. She was to put one hand up the birth canal and into the lower uterus and with the other hand press down on Latifa’s abdomen.
The thought made Parveen woozy. “I can’t put my hand in there. It’s—too small.”
“Have you never been examined by a gynecologist?” the doctor said, clearly amused. “Believe me, the hand goes up.” She asked Latifa if Parveen could examine her, and when Latifa said yes, Dr. Yasmeen told Parveen to put on a sterile glove.
“I don’t have your training, your experience,” Parveen said.
“You’re an educated girl. You can learn. You must,” she said with an unmistakable edge.
Parveen had met few people with such persistent good nature—it was almost suspicious, especially when she learned how much the doctor had suffered under the Taliban—so it was perversely pleasing to hear dissatisfaction in her voice, even if it was aimed at Parveen. “What I want to learn, what I’m here to learn,” Parveen said, “is why so many women in Afghanistan are dying in childbirth. Without understanding the structural reasons”—she didn’t even know how to translate this into Dari, so she said it in English—“without tackling the power dynamics that prevent women from having a voice, let alone proper health care, nothing will change.”
She was feeling proud of this declamation, and the doctor nodded as if she were agreeing, then said, “At the end of a labor, Parveen, a woman lives, or she dies. That is all that concerns me. Now try it.”
Latifa was watching them, and she looked awful. Parveen imagined her being forced to take her chances in labor with a dai too stubborn to learn anything that might help. Could Parveen say she was any different right now, with her high-minded excuses? It came down to what her conscience could or couldn’t bear. She wasn’t the least bit confident that even with the doctor’s instruction she would be able to save anyone, but she had to try. Maybe this was why Crane’s book had come into her life—because, as a woman, she could provide the help he hadn’t been allowed to give. Whatever the flaws in his book, this held true.
Parveen put on a sterile glove and wormed her fingers in.
“Move delicately, very delicately,” the doctor instructed her. “There’s a fetus inside.”
Fuck, Parveen thought. As if she weren’t nervous enough already.
Latifa’s lower body hiccuped as Parveen’s fingers squelched up her canal until they touched the cervix, the opening of the uterus, slimy but firm, like a wet rubber ball. Parveen grew giddy, high on the euphoria of doing something she hadn’t thought possible, and she grinned ridiculously at Latifa, who responded with a dismayed look. Parveen’s hand was still inside her.
“Now you know you can do it,” Dr. Yasmeen said. “Let’s hope you’ll never need to.”
“Was that all right? Did I hurt you?” Parveen asked Latifa nervously once she was dressed.
Her color seemed even more alarming now, her face sidewalk gray. “It hurt,” she said, “but it was all right.”
“If Dr. Yasmeen can’t be here, I’ll take care of you,” Parveen said with what she hoped was reassurance.
Latifa replied, with a faint smile, “As the doctor said, let’s hope you’ll never need to.”
THAT A LIFE MIGHT depend on her was not something Parveen carried lightly, and it gave her new empathy for Crane, who, seeing a woman in danger, hadn’t been allowed to help. What would that feel like? Even worse was imagining how Fereshta must have felt to see him barred from coming to her aid.
Parveen asked Bina if she knew how her sister had died.
Giving birth, Bina said.
Yes, but did she know exactly what had happened?
Giving birth was all she’d been told, Bina said. Women died that way all the time. Even though Fereshta was her sister, she hadn’t asked for more.
To be female here was to grasp at scraps of information and sew them into the shape you imagined reality to be. Into fictions, patterned on distortions and inventions. The women needed an accurate understanding of the peril in which they lived—and the reasons for it. Parveen spread the word that they would return to the orchard. She would share with them the chapter about Fereshta’s death.
Was it possible that she also wanted to test the heart of Crane’s book to see how it held up? Only later did she wonder whether this was why she set it all out before the women like meat to be sniffed for rancidity.
It was late summer now. The grass had browned and the trees’ leaves drooped. The earth had been storing warmth for months, and convective waves of it rose from the ground. The women fanned themselves and one another. A few babies, cranky in the heat, cried out. The dai, entering the orchard with a regal hobble, paused over them, as if they were subjects she had knighted into life. Then, holding tightly to a wooden cane, she executed a series of dramatic bends to settle her arthritic figure. Wherever Parveen turned, she appeared, like a floater in her eye.
Parveen said that she was going to share the chapter about Fereshta’s death with them. The name felt odd in her mouth today, as if even to speak it in this company was an appropriation or a presumptuous intimacy. If Parveen was being honest, had Fereshta ever been anything more than a name to her? A story borne on a donkey? A puppet she was making dance? Parveen had read in one of her anthropology classes about herders who would sacrifice an injured cow or sheep to piranhas so that the rest of a herd could safely cross the river. Was this the role Fereshta had been destined to play or the one she’d been shoved into? Her death had made so much possible.
The women were solemn, respectful, which was unnerving. She began partway into chapter ten.
Fereshta told me that her previous six births had gone easily enough, and she had no reason to expect that this time would be any different. She, like all the villagers, did not know her age, but I placed her in her late twenties. She had been bearing children every two years or less since she married Waheed.
When she went into labor, I was taking a walk. One of Fereshta’s children came to find me. “My mother needs help,” he said. I hurried back to the house with him. Inside, the midwife emerged from Fereshta’s room. She was an ignorant crone with no medical training whatsoever.
With the dai present, Parveen skipped over this last line.
The midwife’s face was grave. The baby was stuck, she told me. “Her condition is very dangerous, Dr. Gideon. You must see her. She’s bleeding. She needs your help. There’s nothing I can do for her—”
“No, no,” the dai interrupted. “I was never allowed into where Fereshta was.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t see her. We couldn’t agree—”
“You’ve brought enough children into the world to fill four villages,” Parveen said, trying to placate the dai and so quiet her. “Surely you can’t remember the details of each birth.”
“Each birth wasn’t attended by an American!” The dai’s rheumy eyes seemed to glow; her voice hoarsened. “Of course I remember what happened with Fereshta. It was the American’s fault. The sum he was willing to pay me was a pittance.”
“I’m sorry, what? You and Dr. Gideon argued about money?”
The women were still, their eyes watchful.
“Because I’m a woman and not a doctor,” the dai said, “he didn’t want to pay.” It had been six years since Crane had first come to the village, and her bitterness, rising all that time, was spilling over its banks. “I had five children to feed,” she said, almost muttering to herself, rehearsing the condensed autobiography she’d told Parveen and every woman here so many times before. Still, they listened with polite attention. “When my husband went, there was no one.”
Parveen knew now that her children were mostly grown, her sons supporting her rather than the other way around, but hoarding sympathy had become a compulsion for her, the way bees store nectar or survivalists stockpile guns. Parveen wondered if the dai had tried to gouge Crane, to get him to pay some exorbitant fee because he was American, and if so, whether this had triggered some primal instinct in him, the traveler’s fear of being exploited or tricked, which could lead to fighting over small amounts of money you wouldn’t worry about wasting back home. It was about pride, the humiliation of being fleeced—Parveen had experienced similar flares of resentment after the khan told her how high her rent to Waheed was. But from the sound of it, Crane and the dai had haggled over the worth of a woman’s life as one might over the price of a trinket in the bazaar.