by Amy Waldman
Aziz explained what he needed to Waheed, who told him to try the blacksmith or the baker, to see what tools they had. Aziz ran to the bazaar, and from the blacksmith he borrowed forceps, large and heavy, and from the baker, tongs, the long ones used to pull bread from the oven. When he returned, Dr. Gideon called him into the room and instructed him to put the instruments in the fire several times to sterilize them. As Aziz did so, he stared only at the flames, determined not to look at Fereshta. Dr. Gideon kept telling him to hurry, but the instruments had to cool. When they had done so, he handed the tools to Dr. Gideon and returned to his post outside the door. Dr. Gideon asked him to tell Waheed that he didn’t know whether the baby was alive, that its head was stuck in the birth canal. It might be too big to come out. He would have to try to pull it out to save both the baby and Fereshta.
Aziz told Waheed this but got no response. He could only assume Waheed nodded, because then came the awful noise: “Crane cursing, telling her to push, Fereshta screaming so loud that I couldn’t think. It sounded like she wanted to tear open the sky.”
Parveen asked whether Crane had given Fereshta anything for the pain. Anesthesia, for example—what a surgeon uses to put a patient to sleep.
“Where would Dr. Gideon get anesthesia in a place like this?” Then, as if struggling to recall, he said he did remember now that it wasn’t just money that Dr. Gideon and the dai were fighting over; before that, they’d argued over whether to give Fereshta opium, which was used sometimes by the villagers in childbirth for the pain. Dr. Gideon was opposed because of some mistaken idea that she might become addicted. Then he fought with the dai over the money, too, and she left. It certainly didn’t sound like Dr. Gideon had given Fereshta anything for the pain, Aziz said. The screams kept getting louder for what felt like forever, until they stopped, and he heard crying, though whose it was he never learned, not even whether it was a man or woman. Then Dr. Gideon came out.
“He looked terrible,” Aziz said. “His face—awful. Gray. Like people look when they’re being shelled. His hair sticking up.”
Dr. Gideon placed a tiny bundle wrapped in a dirty cloth in Aziz’s arms and told him not to open it and to make sure Fereshta never saw it. His eyes avoided Aziz, avoided the bundle too. Then he went back into the room.
“I had it in my arms,” Aziz said, bending his arms around air to show Parveen. He guessed it was the baby, and he thought, or maybe hoped, that it was still alive, although the way Dr. Gideon had wrapped it, covering it completely, suggested it was not. Aziz was afraid to open it, and he tried to stroke it through the cloth instead. Where he thought the head was, he felt pieces that moved beneath his hand, like a broken bowl. The cloth there was moist, as if whatever had been in the bowl had leaked out. He’d seen many horrible injuries from combat in the years since then, he said, and he’d learned more about medicine, and he now believed this must have been fluid from the brain. But he’d sensed it even then. “We’re not strangers to death,” he said, “we Afghans. But a dead baby in my arms?” He didn’t want to hold it anymore, yet he couldn’t put it down.
For a while there was no sound, then Aziz heard words tumbling from Fereshta’s mouth—the names of her children, the names of God, bits of prayers. Waheed tried to quiet her, and Dr. Gideon called to Aziz to bring back the dai because Fereshta was bleeding. But Aziz didn’t know where to find the dai and doubted she would even return, given the quarrel with Crane. He told Jamshid, who he realized only then had been crouched near the door, listening to everything, to run and fetch her.
Then time seemed to lag, to slow. Death in war often happened very quickly, Aziz had learned since, but not in childbirth. It took its time. Fereshta still talked, but less, and more dreamily, as Aziz’s young siblings did when falling asleep. Aziz couldn’t make out what she was saying anymore. There were moments he heard nothing at all, like when a radio loses its signal. Sometimes she’d moan, he said, not a moan of pain but one of sadness. Of a mother who knew she was leaving her children. Then quieter, quieter.
Aziz stopped talking. Parveen waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. Quieter, quieter; between them, too, there was silence now.
“What happened next?” Parveen asked at last.
“There was no next,” Aziz said. “She was dead.” Dr. Gideon emerged from the room looking even worse. His shirt was striped with blood, and his eyes were so red they looked bloodied as well. He’d lost Fereshta too, he told Aziz. Then he washed himself and said they should go and leave the family to mourn. Aziz tried to hand him the bundle—the baby. But Dr. Gideon shook his head and moved away. He’d thought if he let the baby die, he could save Fereshta, he said, then he told Aziz to take the baby to Waheed and that while he was in there, he should retrieve Dr. Gideon’s medical bag and give Waheed any money he found in the inside pocket for the burial. Aziz did as Dr. Gideon instructed, keeping aside only a few afghanis for the journey back to Kabul. He didn’t know how much he was leaving Waheed, but his hands shook as he put the money down. Waheed sat with his head slumped, as if he were sleeping, and didn’t lift it even when he thanked Aziz. Blood was everywhere.
Jamshid was waiting outside to say that the dai wouldn’t come. Dr. Gideon reached out his arm, that long arm, to put a hand on his head, but Jamshid ducked away. Maybe he was frightened by Dr. Gideon’s appearance, by the blood on his clothes. It was left to Aziz to inform Jamshid that his mother was dead and to instruct him to tell his brother and sisters and fetch women to wash and wrap the body. The boy started to cry, then fiercely wiped the tears from his face. Aziz had thought of him, of that gesture in particular, often in the years since. He’d seen soldiers, grown men, permit themselves more crying at the death of a friend, although usually they, too, tried to tamp down their grief.
By the time Fereshta was buried, Aziz and Dr. Gideon were gone. They barely spoke the whole way to Kabul. They’d ridden their donkeys back along the road—that part was true, although Aziz, not Dr. Gideon, had found the animals for them to ride to the village—then sold the donkeys for almost nothing to the first farmer they found and hitchhiked the rest of the way. When they reached the city, Dr. Gideon said he didn’t have enough cash to pay Aziz because of the money they’d left with Waheed. He told Aziz to meet him the next day in the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel.
Parveen had visited the hotel during her stay in Kabul. It had been built forty years earlier, its cornerstone laid by the then king. It sat atop a hill in the western part of the city, overlooking Kabul University, and had a swimming pool. To reach it, you drove up a long, curving driveway, passing through several security checks.
Aziz, not having a car, had walked up. As he did, he was thinking that he didn’t want Gideon Crane’s money. He believed that he’d failed, that maybe it was a fault in his interpretation that had led to Fereshta’s death. He felt shame every time he thought of the moment when he hadn’t understood what Dr. Gideon was asking. Those words—forceps, tongs. But his family needed the money; he couldn’t refuse it. Perhaps, he thought, he could seek the assistance of Louisa and Caleb, his old teachers who’d helped him get the job, yet he was reluctant, for they would ask how the trip had been, and if he told them what had happened in the village, they might judge him or, worse, give him sympathy.
Dr. Gideon arrived late to meet him, Aziz said, and right away he began making excuses. He said that the bank hadn’t been able to provide him all the money he owed Aziz and that Aziz had given too much of his cash to Waheed, so he didn’t have enough left over. It enraged Aziz that Dr. Gideon was blaming him when he’d only done exactly what Dr. Gideon had asked. As he recalled Dr. Gideon quarreling with the dai over money, his anger grew. The American, he saw, was treating him the same way he’d treated the dai, as if Afghans didn’t deserve to be fairly paid. “I wasn’t the one who left so many children without a mother,” Aziz said pointedly.
And now Parveen knew why Crane hadn’t used his interpreter’s full name in the book. It wasn’t Aziz he
was protecting but himself. Aziz knew English, and Aziz knew the truth. Crane didn’t want anyone to go looking for him.
Aziz told Dr. Gideon that Waheed, with six children, needed all the money the doctor could give. Dr. Gideon looked surprised, as if he hadn’t paid attention to how many children Waheed and Fereshta had, and now he seemed terrified that he might be financially responsible for all of them. He asked Aziz a lot of questions about how the courts in Afghanistan worked. There was insurance for mistakes he might make at the eye hospital in Kabul, but he wasn’t sure that covered any freelance doctoring in the countryside. It was important that Aziz not talk to anyone about what had happened with Fereshta, Dr. Gideon said, but he relaxed when Aziz told him he had nothing to fear from Afghanistan’s courts, which barely worked for those with influence, let alone for a poor man like Waheed. There was no chance they could squeeze money from the pocket of an American.
The question of Aziz’s pay still hadn’t been resolved (it never was, Aziz added as an aside; even today, Dr. Gideon owed him money), but before he could begin to argue, Dr. Gideon pulled out a letter of recommendation and handed it to him. It described his translation abilities very generously—more generously than they deserved, given how new he was to English. Dr. Gideon said that he had given a copy to an American contractor he knew, and not long afterward, after a very brief interview, Aziz was hired as a linguist for the military.
So it was Crane’s overly effusive letter of recommendation, Parveen thought—no more credible than anything else he’d written—that had launched Aziz’s career as a military interpreter.
Aziz was assigned to units in the south, even though Pashto wasn’t his first language. Then, some years later, he was assigned to Colonel Trotter. Neither the contractor who’d placed him with the colonel nor the colonel himself knew that Aziz was A. from Crane’s fabled book, and Aziz hadn’t known the colonel would be building a road to this village. It was the colonel who’d put the pieces together, Aziz said, and realized he’d been to the village before.
Kismet, Colonel Trotter had called it. “It’s a word we also use in Afghanistan,” Aziz said. “For us it means our destiny—what God has written for us.” But while they both agreed that fate had brought Aziz back to the village, the colonel considered it a happy outcome, whereas Aziz did not.
The day he’d met Parveen was the first time he’d returned to the village since he and Crane had left six years earlier. As soon as they turned off the highway onto the road, he’d begun to feel uneasy. On their way into the village they passed the clinic. Aziz knew about it from what Colonel Trotter and others had said about Mother Afghanistan. Upon seeing it, he was impressed: Dr. Gideon had made something good from sorrow.
As he walked through the bazaar that day with Colonel Trotter and his men, he smelled bread baking and then the baker gave them fresh bread, straight from the tandoor. “I felt ill and had to turn away,” Aziz said. “In my mind I couldn’t stop seeing the bread being pulled from the oven with the baker’s tongs, couldn’t stop remembering those tongs…” He paused, unable to finish the sentence. “I walked off a bit to smoke,” he continued. “To cut the smell of the bread. But then I heard the blacksmith banging and hammering and thought of his forceps, probably the same ones Dr. Gideon tried in Fereshta. Tools like that would never be thrown out. They can last through generations. Again I felt that broken bowl—the baby’s skull—the cloth damp beneath. I couldn’t stop my mind from building roads between the past and now. I wanted to smoke and smoke; it was the only thing that helped. Colonel Trotter doesn’t like me smoking. He says it’ll kill me too young, which for an Afghan is kind of a joke. But he means well.”
Aziz hadn’t known if Waheed would recognize him, he said. They hadn’t spent time together until Fereshta went into labor, and for most of Fereshta’s struggle, Aziz was outside the room, while Waheed was inside with Crane. Plus Aziz was in uniform now. But Waheed knew him. He thanked Aziz for having left the money and told him that his children had a mother now. He asked what it was like working for the Americans and why they’d come. It was Jamshid who’d looked at Aziz as if he were the messenger of death.
The rest, he said, Parveen knew. They’d walked to the graveyard that day to see Fereshta’s gravestone, with Aziz passing the colonel’s questions to Waheed and Waheed’s answers back to the colonel. And they’d gone to the clinic.
He’d seen many people die, both before and after Fereshta, Aziz said. He’d lived through violence in Kabul and then, as an interpreter, had been at war. It never became routine, he said, because every death was singular, each teaching you something new. He wished there were a way to unknow all the things he’d learned; the distances the parts of a body can fly, for instance, or how to lie to a dying man and tell him he will live, or that a bomb can make a person disappear, or that a leg can remain attached to a body by a string of flesh as thin as embroidery thread.
But while there were deaths fresher than Fereshta’s, that first day back in the village it was only hers, her final hours, that he could think of. “It was like someone had hung pictures in my head without my knowledge,” he said. “And now lights were turned on over them, and I realized they’d been there all this time. They still are. When I sit in my head, that strange sleepiness from when I was demining comes back, and I’m not sure whether it’s better to fight against death or give in.” So far in his life, he said, he hadn’t seen a person die peacefully. Maybe Fereshta’s death haunted him because she was a woman, or maybe it was because of the baby. “It should have been easy. That’s what Dr. Gideon said to me when I told him about all her children: ‘If it was her seventh delivery, it should’ve been easy.’”
How wrong she’d been to imagine Aziz inventing stories when the excruciating facts were etched in his memory, these bits of death lodged in him for good. He still grieved all these years later. Almost miraculously, it seemed to Parveen, suffering—enduring it, witnessing it—hadn’t made him hard.
On behalf of Fereshta and Waheed and, most of all, Jamshid—the nine-year-old boy who’d heard his mother’s screams of agony, who’d cowered beneath the ghoulish American’s giant hand—she felt horror. Toward Crane, she felt revulsion, yet also an unexpected spasm of pity. No amount of good works or fame or adulation could compensate for a memory like that. She wondered if he’d lied because he was ashamed.
AT THE CLINIC THE following Wednesday, Parveen told Dr. Yasmeen the story of Fereshta’s death. The doctor wasn’t surprised. She’d heard long ago that the death had been excruciating, though she hadn’t known the details. Obstructed labor was common, and if you didn’t have the right tools, it was almost impossible to save the mother or the baby. She interrupted herself then, held up a finger, left the room, then returned with a bizarre contraption. It consisted of a glass jar with a pressure valve atop it, a pump, and a mushroom-shaped metal cup that was attached to a tube. A vacuum extractor, the doctor explained, meant to assist in obstructed labor. Perhaps Gideon Crane had asked that it be placed in the clinic.
Please, please, don’t make me learn how to use that thing, Parveen thought, but of course that was what Dr. Yasmeen intended. It would be preferable to demonstrate during a live birth, she said, but for now, the back of Parveen’s fist would stand in for a head. As the doctor applied the metal cup, she said Parveen would have to be very careful with it so as not to injure the fetal scalp, and stabs of terror coursed down Parveen’s spine.
She wanted to keep the focus on Crane. If his failure was understandable, she asked, why didn’t he just write the truth?
“Maybe he didn’t like the truth,” the doctor said.
But wouldn’t it be better, Parveen argued, if people knew how women were actually dying in the villages?
Yes, of course, that would be much better, Dr. Yasmeen agreed. She was pressing the pump now, and the cup lightly suctioned Parveen’s hand. There were so many simple things that could be done, the doctor said. As she had advocated many times, village women and
girls should be trained to be midwives. This, in her estimation, would save the most women. One day she would find time to do this…
But Parveen was barely hearing her, and the doctor knew it. She stopped, set down the equipment, and said, “I, too, have seen lives slip out of my hold, just as Gideon Crane did.” Now she had Parveen’s attention. Remember, she said, her story about the woman with convulsions, with eclampsia, whom the mullah had tried to choke? She had told Parveen that the woman died in her car. That was true. What she hadn’t said was that she’d often questioned whether she should have put the woman in the car at all, whether it wouldn’t have been better to keep her in the village and try to induce her labor or give her magnesium sulfate intravenously to control the seizures instead of putting her on that horrible road to get her to a hospital. Dr. Yasmeen did think the woman needed to be in a hospital, that she might need a C-section, that her baby should be delivered as soon as possible. But she was also furious at the mullah, and she’d wanted to get the woman away from his spells, his violence. “Decisions made in anger are usually mistakes,” she said. “Perhaps that was one.”
These words brought Parveen to the edge of tears. Had she believed Dr. Yasmeen infallible or had she simply needed her to be? “But you didn’t make up a story,” Parveen burst out. “You didn’t say the mullah or someone stood in front of your car to keep you from driving out and so she died. You didn’t lie. You didn’t lie to the world.”
“No, I didn’t, but then, the world has never asked me for my story. If it did, who knows what I would say?” Then, perhaps seeing the frustration, the childish petulance, in Parveen’s face, she said, “I understand your disappointment. At your age I’m sure I also believed that people are better than they are. But my experiences make it hard to get too angry at what’s written in a book or at the untruths people tell. Remember your fiancé?”