by Amy Waldman
Parveen ignored this. She was on the edge of understanding something fundamental and also painful, which was that to be an adult was to have to make decisions and take actions that might be wrong. That might cause harm. To live was to bruise, the doctor seemed to be saying; there was no other way. Unlike Professor Banerjee or Gideon Crane, Dr. Yasmeen projected no certainty about which path was the right one to take, the one that would avoid error and hurt; indeed, she seemed skeptical there was such a path.
What made her angry, the doctor was saying now, was not that Dr. Gideon had lied about how Fereshta died but that he’d built this clinic without thinking to staff it. “Parveen, are you listening?” she asked, sensing that the girl had again drifted. “Or are you still thinking about that book?”
Chapter Twenty
Neurath’s Boat
IT WAS A BLOODY SEASON IN AFGHANISTAN. THE COUNTRY HAD held an election, and the incumbent president, as anticipated, had been reelected, in part due to widespread fraud. Although the village itself had been peaceful, violence had flared across the country and the chaos, fear, and mistrust had traveled via radio into Waheed’s house. So, two weeks later, had the descriptions of another catastrophic American air strike, this one killing perhaps ninety civilians in a northern province where the Taliban was newly active. And along the road to the village, the attacks were intensifying.
An IED, remotely detonated from somewhere in the mountains above the road, had tossed an M-ATV into the air. The driver, a father of four, and the nineteen-year-old soldier riding shotgun had both been killed, and the three other soldiers in the vehicle had been wounded. Parveen, offering Trotter her condolences, was relieved to hear that none of the soldiers she’d met were among the casualties.
Two of the injured, Trotter told Parveen, had no visible wounds; it was their brains that were stunned. He would give them a week of rest and hope they returned to normal. The explosion had left an enormous crater in the section of road they’d just paved, he admitted, but he mocked the insurgents for missing with the rocket-propelled grenades they’d fired after the attack.
Parveen wasn’t fooled by his bravado. The Americans had arrived in the village with manned gun turrets attached to the tops of their M-ATVs and massive rollers, designed to preemptively detonate IEDs, attached to the front. The soldiers, edgy and more heavily armored, too, in their helmets and vests, their side plates and deltoid shields and groin protectors, seemed to be thickening before Parveen’s eyes.
By contrast, the village men, in their flimsy clothing and plastic flip-flops, appeared nearly weightless. Exposed. At the Americans’ request, they were gathering by the clinic. Males as old as time and as young as fifteen and every age in between were to come. Waheed arrived with Jamshid. It didn’t need to be phrased as an order to be one, Parveen thought. To resist would be to provoke suspicion; what were you hiding? You asserted your innocence by complying.
Aziz was there, but other than a quick nod, he barely acknowledged Parveen. She couldn’t be hurt; he seemed overwhelmed trying to get the men to stand next to the clinic wall, although there were so many of them their line stretched well beyond it. Usually Aziz spoke to the villagers with respect—it was one of the things Parveen liked about him—but today he sounded peevish, as if he was overtired or, more likely, out of cigarettes. The beefy captain who was in charge kept pointing out men who’d gotten out of line or were too slow to get in it, and Aziz hastened back and forth to tell them to follow directions. Then the captain handed Aziz a loudspeaker. He looked at it queasily, then spoke through it, informing the men that the soldiers would go down the line photographing their faces, getting digital scans of their eyes, and taking their fingerprints. It was strange for Parveen to see him in this role, as not just the interpreter for but the factotum of her country’s army. As the Americans became more assertive, even more bellicose, he had no choice but to do the same, for he was required to convey not just their words but their tone.
The men stood unmoving as an American soldier with a boxy device moved down the line photographing their faces and scanning their eyes. Their irises, to be more precise, which showed up magnified on the device’s display. “Wide, wide,” Aziz instructed them, and the men made staring eyes. Each man’s fingerprints were taken using a pad on top of the device, and his name, tribe, and occupation were input, upon Aziz’s translation, into a laptop.
The captain was running the operation, but Trotter stood some distance off overseeing it. The technology, he explained to Parveen when she sought him out, was called HIIDE—H-I-I-D-E; he spelled it out—which stood for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment. It was being used all over the country, with the hope of capturing the biometric data of as many Afghans as possible, all of which would be stored in a huge database back in Virginia. The digitized faces, fingerprints, and irises of men who’d never left these mountains would live perpetually in a DC suburb. Eternal life of another kind.
The iris was taken, he told Parveen, because the pattern of every human iris is mathematically complex and also unique, different even in identical twins, different even in someone’s left and right eye. The pattern is fixed by the time a baby is six months old and never changes. Humans were better at recognizing faces than computers were, this was true, but we could never match computers in recognizing the patterns of irises. It wasn’t that fingerprints weren’t helpful; those left on IEDs had been used to identify insurgents hiding in the population. But as an identifier, the iris was even more reliable than fingerprints, especially in a country like Afghanistan, where the pads of the fingers could be worn away by a lifetime of labor and many men were missing limbs or digits anyway. A computer could match any iris to a database of scans, thereby making it possible to identify enemy combatants or anyone else. Even the iris of a corpse could be scanned, as long as it was done within twelve hours of death, which allowed for everything from identifying suicide bombers, assuming the eye survived intact, to mapping Taliban networks.
“But the villagers aren’t Taliban,” Parveen said.
Then the HIIDE procedure would help U.S. forces establish that, Trotter said. They could separate the enemy from the civilian population. “It’s a way for us to own ground.”
The villagers were impassive. Parveen wondered if they knew why this was being done; Aziz had said what would happen but not the reason. Would they speculate about it or, as it appeared, quietly submit? They were to the Americans as the village women were to them: powerless. They acquiesced without protest to the soldiers’ harvesting of their biological signatures. Yet they did so without exhibiting subservience. Afghan men never did in the presence of Westerners, Parveen had observed. Perhaps this was because they’d never been colonized by Europeans. They always managed to hold some piece of themselves in abeyance, to retain their independence.
As Trotter was talking, Parveen had been weighing what to tell him about Mother Afghanistan. Her initial instinct had been not to tell him at all. The village still needed the road, even if the story that had inspired its paving was untrue. And yet, watching the HIIDE operation, hearing about the deaths along the road, she had begun to question her own decision. Crane’s myths had led the Americans down this particular fork, and the war had followed them to the village, devouring limbs and lives. This wasn’t going to end simply with a smooth, drivable road; she could sense that now. Each side had its teeth in this stretch of dirt; neither would let go. And so the Americans veered from friendliness to force, one day asking permission to build a road, the next demanding that the men line up by the mosque. The soldiers’ weapons were a reminder that they’d never really needed permission to do anything. What, Parveen wondered, did it mean to offer help to people you didn’t trust?
“Tell him to open his eyes more,” Parveen heard a soldier say to Aziz. “I’m having trouble getting the picture.”
She was half listening while still talking to Trotter.
“This is as far as they open.”
It was J
amshid’s voice. Parveen glanced over. He looked sleepy, his eyes half lidded, which was not their usual state. He was deliberately narrowing them.
“Try harder,” Aziz urged, not acknowledging that he knew Jamshid.
Jamshid began to blink lazily, as if experimenting with what his eyes could do. Watching, the friend next to him smiled and began to do the same. “Cooperate, or there will be trouble,” Aziz growled.
But there already was. “Colonel,” the soldier called, but Trotter, in midsentence, didn’t hear him.
“Open your eyes,” Waheed barked at Jamshid as if calling his son back from the adulthood he’d just leaped into, and Jamshid, as if waking from a dream, did.
“Proceed, it’s fine,” Aziz told the soldier, who recorded Jamshid’s irises with the rest. With more questions, Parveen tried to distract Trotter, feeling some instinct to protect Jamshid and his friends, fearing the consequences for them otherwise. She remembered the first shura—hearing Trotter debrief his soldiers afterward about the body language they’d observed, what it said about the resistance they might encounter—and worried that, despite Waheed’s intervention, this moment would redound on them unhappily.
This was now a combat zone, Trotter was saying. There was no point in laying more pavement until they eliminated those who were getting in the way of the mission. They had to get the intelligence right. Was it the insurgency flaring up here? Tribal rivalry? A criminal enterprise? A shakedown? Commander Amanullah kept suggesting they use his militia to guard the road, Trotter said, suspicion in his voice.
Parveen doubted that Amanullah had a militia. He sat in the bazaar all day doing nothing but gabbing. She guessed that, if the Americans hired him, he would just pay a bunch of village men with rusty Kalashnikovs and call them a militia.
“The commander knows how to play all sides,” Trotter said. “We can’t just ignore his history.”
“What history?”
But they were finished with the HIIDE, and as the village men dispersed, Trotter jogged off to huddle with Aziz and a few of his soldiers. After a while Aziz broke away and walked toward the bazaar, again ignoring Parveen, who started to follow him. When he caught her eye, he gave a quick shake of his head, and she stopped where she was. He seemed as jittery as the first time they’d met, his eyes doing their wild flit. Perhaps ten minutes later, he returned with a pack of cigarettes in hand and Amanullah, who’d gone to the bazaar after the HIIDE, in tow.
The commander called out to Parveen: “The Americans are waking up at last! For weeks I’ve been telling Aziz-jan to tell them to hire my militia—we could stop this nonsense on the road.” He climbed into the M-ATV that would take him to the American base, where he believed he would drink tea with Colonel Trotter and then negotiate the terms under which his militia would be employed to guard the road. Parveen heard him joke to Aziz that for all the Soviet tanks he’d helped to destroy, he’d never been inside an armored vehicle.
“I hope you come home soon,” Aziz told the commander. His voice sounded odd to her. Strangled.
But the commander didn’t return that day or the next. One of his sons traveled along the road to the American base to ask about his father. No American would come out to speak to him, but he learned from a sympathetic Afghan guard that Amanullah was being interrogated. He waited at the base another day, continuing to politely ask to speak to someone, until Aziz was delegated to tell him that the Americans believed his father was a Taliban commander and that he would be released as soon as he could prove that he wasn’t. It was better for the son to wait in the village, Aziz whispered, lest the Americans decide that he, too, merited questioning.
It was an insult to call his father Taliban, the son insisted, when he’d fought so bravely against them. This had to be slander from an Afghan rival, an enemy.
No, Aziz said, it was worse; the American, Dr. Gideon, had written it in his book, which meant there was no way the U.S. forces weren’t going to believe it.
IN HER MIND, PARVEEN rewound and replayed the night she’d seen Gideon Crane speak at the college; she was considering everything anew. His lateness now struck her as nothing more than selfish disregard for the time of students like herself and for the university that had paid him. She wondered if his audience, rather than he, had supplied the emotion she heard in his tale, injecting his words with feeling, and now she attributed his evasion of questions after his talk to fear of exposure. She thought about all the statistics he’d rattled off: days on the road that year, number of talks given, number of books sold, amount of money raised for maternal mortality. That night, the data had added to her awe of him. When he had listed the celebrities and dignitaries he’d met and assured his audience that none of those luminaries had touched him as much as speaking to this gathering of students did, she’d seen humility. Now she saw it for the catalog of boasts it had been. How could her original perception have been so susceptible to priming, her recall of a night so subject to revision? That experience could be so contingent, memory so malleable, frightened her. Could she trust her own mind? She wondered if by lying, Crane had hoped to change not just how the audience saw him but how he saw himself, for it was inevitable, she knew, that over time, our lies become as true, or truer, than the facts they displace. Neurath’s boat—swapping lie for truth, you could construct a whole new self, board by board, while keeping the ship afloat.
But these were speculations, even evasions, of the real conundrum, which was this: If a con man ignited your idealism, if he told you to go out into the world and do good, was it automatically a con? If one American dragooned a whole village into his fable, damn the consequences, did that mean everyone else should stay home? At the heart of Crane’s tale was a mystery, but Parveen wasn’t sure it was about him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Law and Order
AFTER WORD OF AMANULLAH’S FATE SPREAD, PARVEEN WENT TO his house. His wife, Amina, wept without cease and yanked at her own hair. The room was packed with children and with the other women of the village, the air so thick with body heat and humors that it was hard to breathe.
As Parveen pawed her way through, one of the women hissed: “This is your fault. You shouldn’t have gone around telling stories about him being Taliban.”
“I never said anything like that to the Americans, I promise. They read it in Dr. Gideon’s book.”
“Then tell Dr. Gideon to get him back!” she snapped.
Amina threw herself at Parveen’s feet and wailed, then sat up, wiped her eyes and nose, and said, with unsettling calm, that she didn’t believe what the others were saying, which was that Parveen had known her husband was going to be taken or that she had asked for him to be taken. But, she said, turning her head away slightly, perhaps to lessen the harshness of her words, Parveen had told those stories about him. There was a new strength to her—empowered was the word that came to Parveen, and she wondered guiltily if having the commander away for a while might be good for his wife’s confidence. But of course, as Parveen quickly reminded herself, in every other way it was a disaster.
“I’m not ready to be a widow,” Amina said. “And my family needs my husband’s pension.” Now her eyes met Parveen’s again. “We all know you talk to the general.”
Parveen was confused, then realized Amina was referring to Trotter.
“The Americans will listen to you,” Amina said. “Bring him home.”
Parveen didn’t know how to convey her own impotence. What could she do—borrow Waheed’s donkey and ride to the American base? She promised Amina she would write letters to “the general” and to Dr. Gideon, even though she wasn’t sure it would do any good.
Talking to Waheed that night, Parveen mentioned the commander’s pension. With his wry smile he explained that “pension” was a euphemism for a small tax on the villagers to keep the commander in food. When he’d returned from his last battle against the Taliban, he’d attempted to annex some of the khan’s land for his remaining sons. The wily khan had convince
d him that the villagers should pay their hero a pension instead. They’d been paying for close to a decade now. “I told you we’d forgiven him a lot,” Waheed said.
That was what Waheed had meant? A tax? How clueless she’d been. Worse than clueless; thanks to Crane, she’d believed she knew all. There were so many basic questions she hadn’t asked.
But Amanullah’s sins, Waheed said, didn’t lessen the villagers’ anger at his abduction by the Americans. It was unfair, and humiliating, to have him accused, tricked, and spirited away. The commander was their bravest citizen, if not always their favorite.
A FEW DAYS LATER, a shepherd arrived in the village without any sheep. He wore a bedraggled blanket as a shawl and a pakol hat pulled low on his forehead.
It was Issa, in disguise. He had sneaked over the mountain passes. “I used to be a smuggler,” he reminded Parveen with a roguish grin.
He claimed he’d come to check on the clinic’s supplies, but Parveen half suspected he’d made the trek just to see if he could. She asked for his help in reaching Crane. Crane talked to generals, advised them, Parveen said. Surely he could get Amanullah back.
Issa laughed. “Gideon Crane won’t tell the Americans how to fight their war.” Amanullah’s children had better go to work, he said. It would be a long time before their father came home. “Besides,” he added, “even if the commander didn’t do what they’re saying, I’m sure he did something else he should be punished for.”
Parveen winced at this, remembering the bruise on Amina’s face. But the Americans hadn’t taken Amanullah because he beat his wife or shook down his neighbors. The real commander was having to answer for invented sins. It was unjust, Parveen told Issa.