by Amy Waldman
The dai was defending herself to the other women as much as to Parveen. Back then, she said, Waheed had nothing. He was one of the poorest men in the village. He could barely feed his own children. For Fereshta’s other births he hadn’t even called her because he couldn’t pay. He called her in this case because Fereshta was in trouble or maybe because the American told him to get help. “You know our saying,” she said. “‘If the bald man were really a doctor, he would have cured his own head.’”
Parveen had heard her call Crane “the bald man” more than once. The first time or two, Parveen had corrected her—“He’s not bald!”—and the dai had cackled. After that Parveen had let it go, thinking the dai must be a little touched. Now dread dropped into her as she realized the dai had had her reasons all along.
“I wanted to help,” she went on. “I’m not a cruel woman, but I was a widow with five children to feed and I simply wanted to know who would pay my fee. So my own children could eat. Dr. Gideon said he would, and that’s when our argument began. He asked what the fee would be.”
A widow with five children, just as Crane’s own mother had been. Surely he wouldn’t have tried to stint on paying her? Parveen looked around at the other women and asked what the truth was. She was sweating, rivulets trickling down her back and forehead. She wiped her face with the back of her arm. Her eyes stung.
“How would they know?” the dai asked, amused. “They weren’t there. Only Dr. Gideon and I were.”
So it was her word against Crane’s, one story against another. The women evinced no angst about this. Life, history, memory—all were capacious enough to contain competing stories. As in their crowded homes, there was always room for one more; you just shifted a little to make space.
“Aziz, the interpreter,” Parveen said. “Was he there?”
“Of course—how could we talk without him? The American couldn’t find his own cock without Aziz. And I cannot ask for my own cunt in English.”
Some of the women, perhaps relieved to have the tension broken, laughed. Not Bina, Parveen noticed. She looked uneasy, and partly because of that, Parveen snapped, “It’s not funny!”
“No,” the dai agreed. “No. But you see, it was because of Aziz that I knew Dr. Gideon had money and was trying to cheat me. He was paying Aziz thirty American dollars a day—Aziz had told us.” She dropped her head, awaiting her crown of sympathy.
“But you left, right? You abandoned Fereshta?”
“I left,” she said. “What more could I do?” A little later Jamshid came to ask her to return to Waheed’s, she continued, but without challenge in her voice. Jamshid told her that his mother needed help, that Dr. Gideon was asking her to come back.
The dai stopped speaking.
Had she had gone with Jamshid? Parveen asked.
She hadn’t, the dai replied, defiant once more. She’d still been angry with Crane; she felt he deserved to suffer. About Fereshta’s suffering, she said nothing, although she looked at Bina and whispered, “It was God’s will.”
Bina kept her gaze on her own hands, which she stroked, roughly. The dai seemed nonplussed; Parveen could see her swallow even in the loose skin of her throat. It was almost a relief when her usual combativeness returned. “Dr. Gideon was rich, I was poor, what could I do?”
No one answered. Parveen had the same feeling of unsteadiness, of waking-falling, that she’d had all those months ago in Berkeley when she’d been panicking about her future. Now she was in that future, and it looked nothing like she’d imagined. With a sense of doom, she’d resumed the story.
I immediately began to prepare, ordering water boiled for sterilization. But before I could go inside to Fereshta, Waheed insisted the mullah had to approve. I assumed, wrongly, that this was a mere formality. The mullah was brought. He stroked his chin and consulted his Quran—with every minute that passed putting Fereshta’s life at greater risk—then gave his ruling: It was not right for me, a male and an infidel, to treat Fereshta. All of the other village men backed him up. If they allowed it, they insisted, they couldn’t safeguard their own souls or Fereshta’s for the day of judgment.
“But she’ll die!” I said.
“That’s in God’s hands,” the mullah said. “Her virtue, her family’s honor, matter more than her life.”
“You’ll have blood on your hands!” I shouted, but it was in vain. I wouldn’t be permitted to help. Not by the mullah and so not by Waheed. I begged him to make up his own mind. But he wouldn’t defy the mullah. Waheed said that whether Fereshta lived or died would be God’s will.
Next I tried appealing to the commander, who had allowed me to treat his own wife’s eyes. He insisted that the mullah had to be obeyed, that Fereshta should go to a hospital where there was a female doctor.
But there was no hospital anywhere nearby. Between us and the district center stretched that abysmal road. And we had no way to travel it; there was no car or truck in the village, not even a bicycle. The wheel—it’s a stage of civilization, one the village hadn’t yet reached.
“Someone must have a car,” I kept saying to Waheed. No one did. There was only one way out, which was the way we had come in: by donkey. There were two of them. We put Fereshta on one and took turns leading it. These were the most agonizing hours of my life but far worse for Fereshta. She was barely conscious for most of the ride, although I tried to keep her talking. I told her stories of my mother, of brave and noble Americans—Paul Revere, Rosa Parks. I talked about my own daughter and Fereshta’s children and my hope that one day they could meet. Waheed, by contrast, kept saying to no one in particular that it was God’s will whether she lived or died. His fatalism infuriated me. I felt he’d already made his peace with the failure to save her—and with his own failure to act more boldly.
At last we reached the hospital, where the doctors rushed her inside. Again, as a foreign man, I was barred. I paced around the outside of the small hospital as goats nibbled from trash heaps threaded with medical waste. Her screams came out the windows, tore me apart. I stretched myself on the ground, spread my arms wide, and asked God to take me instead. As I prayed, the screams ceased abruptly. I thanked God; the baby had been safely born. Then a bay, a single extended unearthly note that still echoes in my ears, broke the silence.
I rushed into the hospital and raced down the hall until I saw, through an open door, Waheed bent over his wife’s lifeless body. I turned away to give him time with her and so that I could weep. My heart was ragged until it was inflamed by Waheed’s first words to me: “It was God’s will.” No, I wanted to scream, it was the will—or the want of will—of men. But you can’t scream at a man in mourning. I rented a cart to return Fereshta’s body to the village. It was pulled by the donkey she had ridden, alive, to the hospital.
“But my sister never went on a donkey!” Bina said when Parveen paused. “She died in Waheed’s house. In the room where we eat, the room where we sleep.” She spoke with uncharacteristic intensity.
Parveen looked at her. “Who told you this?”
“Waheed. Jamshid. Everyone. It’s what happened. I don’t know much else, but this I know.”
The other women nodded as Bina spoke. Having been in the village at the time of Fereshta’s death, they knew what Bina said was true. Now Parveen waited, resigned, for the next blow, which was delivered by the dai.
“None of the part you’ve just told us is correct,” she said. No one had stopped Dr. Gideon from trying to help Fereshta. “He tried, but he wasn’t capable. He couldn’t help. The bald man.” She sighed in what sounded like pity for his ineptitude. “When Jamshid came to me, it was to say that the baby was stuck and Dr. Gideon needed help getting it out. And then he crushed the baby’s skull trying to get it out on his own, and after that Fereshta bled to death.”
Vomit rose up in Parveen; her vision wobbled and wavered. She gripped a tree branch, scaly and psoriatic beneath her hand. She wanted not to believe the dai. She wanted the other women to rise up and deny, de
nounce, condemn the dai’s words, to say that this was not how Fereshta had died. But no one did. The dai spoke the truth, and Gideon Crane was a liar. It seemed so unsurprising now; the clues had been everywhere. But the mind prefers order, it prefers logic, and it will do what is necessary to make sense of events. You could gaslight yourself trying to keep someone else’s story intact. Parveen saw that now, but only now.
For the village women, the revelation of Crane’s deceptions was less shattering. They’d never seen him as any kind of witness to truth. He was a storyteller, one whose tales occasionally intersected with events they’d experienced. Yet the gruesome particulars narrated by the dai had distressed them, Parveen saw. Absorbed by her own reactions, she’d failed to notice Bina’s face, which looked like it was melting. Her mouth had softly collapsed; her eyes leaked tears. Parveen had never seen her cry, had secretly thought her incapable of it, and now rued that she herself had brought this about. Bina’s friends hovered in a protective knot around her. Even Shokoh leaned in awkwardly, on her knees, to caress Bina’s back. Parveen walked over, knelt down, and apologized to Bina, then hugged her, and feeling the tiny frame of Fereshta’s sister shake with grief in her arms, she wondered whom it had served to exhume this truth.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON PARVEEN sat in the main room of the house and looked around at the walls, at the floor. Her mind inched toward practicalities: How had they cleaned it of blood? Of odor? How soon before they resumed eating here, or sleeping? There was nowhere else to sleep.
Waheed came home to find the atmosphere in the house unsettled. When Bina and Shokoh began to tell him about the orchard, he looked at Parveen, troubled. But over dinner, he agreed to answer her questions.
Fereshta had never gone to the district hospital, he confirmed. “She wouldn’t have made it three stone’s throws. Even here, she was already dying. Bilal, Jamshid—go check the cows,” he said gruffly.
Though at this hour the cows were certainly fine, Bilal obeyed. Jamshid, however, stayed where he was. His words that day in the meadow—I was there when she died. I heard it—came to Parveen. Rather than believe him, she’d refashioned his experience to fit Crane’s fantasia.
She asked Waheed if Crane and the dai had fought over money. When he nodded, Jamshid, startled, pressed him to explain. Waheed’s account largely matched the dai’s, but it differed in one respect. He said that when Dr. Gideon left, after Fereshta was dead, he’d had Aziz give Waheed money. It was much more than the dai would have cost. “But it was too late,” Waheed said.
Jamshid rubbed his eyes, nearly scrubbed them, as Waheed spoke. He was trying not to cry, Parveen knew. She wished he could. Where did grief go in men? She imagined it packed like gunpowder, waiting for a fuse, a release, an explosion that might never come.
“My mother’s life,” he said bitterly. “Not worth a few more dollars to Dr. Gideon. What’s money to an American?”
“Most Americans wouldn’t behave that way,” she said gently. “My question”—she turned toward Waheed—“my next question is whether anyone stopped Dr. Gideon from trying to help…your wife.” After months of bandying about Fereshta’s name, Parveen found herself unable to say it. “Did anyone tell Dr. Gideon that because he was a man and a foreigner, he shouldn’t help her? The mullah? Anyone?”
“Why would they stop him?” Waheed said. “He was the hope.”
He was the hope.
“We thought God had sent him to save her,” Waheed continued. “For the first time in my life, I felt lucky.”
Parveen was dizzy, but she kept on. So—what then? What went wrong? To demand someone else’s memories could be an act of aggression rather than empathy, she knew. But she needed the full truth.
“Dr. Gideon tried to save her but he couldn’t,” Waheed said, his voice rising slightly. “He didn’t know what to do. She died, the baby died.” He paused to collect himself. “It was God’s will.”
Crane, in his book, had quoted Waheed saying these very words, making them a reason to reprimand Waheed for his passivity. But now Parveen understood that they were an exoneration—Waheed’s exoneration of Crane for failing to save his wife. Waheed, whom she’d judged harshly all these months, had done everything he could.
She held her breath for a few moments, then exhaled.
“I owe you an apology,” she told Waheed. “All this time, I believed Crane’s story. I thought she’d died because no one would let him help and you agreed—”
Confusion clouded his face and she stopped. It wasn’t only that he’d never read Mother Afghanistan, she realized, it was that he’d never even heard the story it contained. He didn’t know how Crane had described Fereshta’s death. It fell to Parveen to explain it to him. As she did so, he slumped against the wall, blinking his amber eyes, and Parveen grasped the magnitude of Crane’s deceit, or rather the intimacy of it. Waheed had been made unrecognizable to himself, transformed into the kind of man who, in the name of his religion, would allow his wife to die.
“This story, it is the one every American has read?” he asked. “It is the one Colonel Trotter has read?”
Parveen nodded, curious at the invocation of Trotter. It made sense, she supposed. He wore America’s uniform. And he was powerful.
“So now this is what they think Islam is,” he said slowly. “This is who they think Afghans are. That we are all like the Taliban.”
Waheed’s concern was not Crane’s slander of him but his slander of his religion, which was also Parveen’s, and of his country. Crane, by claiming to be the friend of the Afghans, by speaking about love, had crafted a beautiful vial for his poison. It wasn’t as if some men here didn’t mistreat their wives or claim that Islam sanctioned doing so. But Crane had deliberately distorted the truth. That so many Americans would believe the worst of Afghans after the 9/11 attacks didn’t necessarily surprise Parveen. What stunned her was how readily she’d believed Crane’s tale herself. Her adolescent alienation in that fall of 2001, when for a time she had denied her very identity, had embedded much deeper than she’d thought. The body dysmorphia that made the anorexic looking in the mirror believe herself fat—wasn’t this a kind of equivalent?
Waheed heaved himself up, crossed the room to the aluminum trunk, and retrieved the family copy of Mother Afghanistan, the hardback of which they’d been so proud. “Here,” he said, handing it to Parveen. He was done with it.
THE NEXT TIME HE and Parveen were alone, Waheed said, “You asked me if I remembered the first time I saw the face of Jamshid’s mother, on the day we married. What I wanted to tell you, but not in front of my son, is that I watched my wife die, and after that every picture I had of her in my mind from before was gone.” It was like when a snake swallowed a mouse, he said. For a while you could still discern the shape of the mouse, but you couldn’t truly see it, you would never see it again. Then even the shape disappeared, and all that was left was the snake.
Chapter Nineteen
Kismet
PARVEEN WALKED A LOT IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, AS IF STEPS could be expiation. Up and down the village lanes, through the fields, into the mountains, until skin began to flake from her feet. It felt like rightful punishment. She was crashing inside. Whatever part of her selfhood had been lashed to Crane had been loosed to fall and shatter.
And yet she wanted to know more. She wanted as many details about the truth of Fereshta’s death as had embroidered Crane’s fictions. She didn’t know yet what she would do with the information. She vacillated between believing she had a moral obligation to expose his fraud and burning for vengeance. But all she had was the dai’s dark sketch, which Waheed had confirmed, but he hadn’t volunteered more details, and Parveen hadn’t asked. It felt unseemly to demand more from him or Jamshid. She had little choice but to wait for the return to the village of Aziz, the only other witness.
When she spoke to him, he told her he didn’t want to talk about what had happened between Dr. Gideon and Fereshta. He didn’t like to think about it. He wished h
e couldn’t remember it. When he finally relented and told Parveen what had occurred, his eyes grew wide and still, like black glass.
Aziz and Dr. Gideon had been in the village only two days, sleeping at the mosque (Aziz confirmed they’d never stayed with Waheed and Fereshta), when a boy came running to say his mother needed a doctor. He’d led them to Waheed’s. The dai was there, and Dr. Gideon insisted that, as a woman with experience in childbirth, she should be the one helping Fereshta, not him. Dr. Gideon said he would pay her fee, but they began to argue over the amount. She was greedy, having been told he was an American, and Dr. Gideon was stingy. Aziz couldn’t get them to agree on a sum, a failure that still haunted him. The dai left in anger, and Dr. Gideon reluctantly went into the room. Waheed joined him, which was unusual—fathers didn’t typically attend the births of their children—but for honor’s sake, Waheed couldn’t leave Dr. Gideon alone with his wife. That was the mullah’s sole injunction.
“Wait,” Parveen said. “The mullah said it was fine?”
Aziz nodded. “As long as Waheed was there.” Waheed was to stay in the room with his wife and Crane, the mullah had said, and Aziz was to stay outside it. He stood just beyond the doorway, translating from there, unable to see but unfortunately able to hear, both Dr. Gideon’s muttering and cursing and Fereshta’s crying and screaming. Then Dr. Gideon yelled to Aziz that he needed forceps. Aziz didn’t know what he meant—he didn’t know the English word. “I was scared to tell him I didn’t understand,” Aziz said. “But I had to and then he started cursing at me: ‘Jesus fuck! Something to pull out the baby! The goddamn baby is stuck.’ Like what you use to pull out a tooth, but bigger, he said. But where did he think I would find such a thing in a village?”