by Amy Waldman
“The world is unjust,” he replied. “You’ve had a fortunate life if you’re only learning this now.”
They ate together that evening—she, Issa, Waheed, and Jamshid—back in the reception room where they’d gathered on her first night in the village. Same cushions, same hairy walls. Issa, famished from his journey, scooped up food like water from a stream, stranding bits of rice in his mustache.
From him, too, Parveen sought information. Her hunger to expose Crane’s lies felt bottomless. It wasn’t much of a surprise when Issa said they hadn’t met on the road to the village, as Crane had written, but at the Kabul guesthouse where Crane was staying. Issa went there regularly to peddle artifacts pillaged from archaeological sites. He had a knack for languages and a love of crime procedurals. It was mostly by watching pirated episodes of Law and Order, in fact, that he’d picked up enough English to talk, banter, and barter with the foreigners who stocked the guesthouse. One day, he said, he struck up a conversation with Dr. Gideon, who told him about his plan to build a clinic in a village. Issa was surprised that he would be doing it on his own, since most foreigners worked in organizations. But when he asked Dr. Gideon if he had the money for it, he said that he did. Although Issa had never attempted anything of the kind, he told Dr. Gideon that he could get his clinic built, which seemed to greatly relieve the American.
“He put all his trust in me,” Issa said. “As a child might.” He asked Dr. Gideon if the clinic could be in any village. This would make his job much easier, and after all, there were few villages in Afghanistan that couldn’t use a clinic. Yes, any village would be fine, Dr. Gideon said.
“Wait,” Parveen said. “You’re saying he didn’t care where the clinic was?”
“He didn’t care,” Issa confirmed.
Issa took him to a village only an hour from Kabul. There Dr. Gideon hired labor and bought materials. But a few days later he changed his mind. He said the clinic had to be built in a certain village and told a complicated story about a woman dying while giving birth there. Crane wanted to write a book about it. While there was no bringing the dead woman back to life, a picture of her husband, maybe her children too, in front of a new clinic would do. Americans needed hope, he said.
“It bothers you Americans that the world is the way it is, doesn’t it?” Issa asked Parveen.
Issa was a scoundrel of many stripes, Parveen thought, but he hadn’t yet proved to be a liar. His recounting was a freshet of truth biting at a riverbank of disingenuousness. He seemed to revel in the truth, actually. It was Crane’s cynicism that made her quiver, partly in shame. Even then, he had been calculating, knowing that readers like Parveen would demand an ending that was, if not happy, at least redemptive, which made her one among millions of unwitting accomplices to his fraud. He told his readers what they wanted to hear. The clinic had been built to serve not patients but a book’s narrative arc. No wonder Crane had given so little thought to how it would operate.
A Potemkin clinic, then. The story, which Parveen had learned in college, had fascinated her: Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s aide and lover, was said to have built fake and portable settlements in postwar Crimea so as to deceive the empress with the illusion of reconstruction. But Parveen was equally intrigued by the lesser known theory that the story itself was an invention, a slander against Potemkin by a rival for Catherine’s esteem. A false story about a false village, the fakery of fakery, truth as a floor that kept falling away.
Issa wasn’t done. Crane didn’t know how to find the specific village, but he said the translator who’d been with him would be able to provide directions. He and Issa went to the Sunshine American English School, where Crane had first found Aziz. The mother-and-son pair who ran it were very excited by Crane’s project and eager to help. There was talk of Jesus and good works, and Issa guessed immediately that Caleb and Louisa were missionaries. He did a wicked impression of them now, their wide eyes and fluttering hands and pious ecstasy at Crane’s plan. Do-gooders seemed to amuse him. He had thought that perhaps Crane, too, was a missionary, if a more discreet one. But once the two men began working together, his impression changed: Crane was as much an exploiter of opportunities as Issa himself was. The only time he mentioned Jesus was when he was cursing.
They reached Aziz, who’d kept in touch with Caleb and Louisa, by telephone; he was by then interpreting for the military in southern Afghanistan. From him Issa got instructions on how to get to the village. He tried to persuade Aziz to come, but Aziz had no interest. “It’s quite funny that he ended up back here anyway,” Issa said, laughing. “I suppose it took the whole U.S. Army to make it happen.”
His jest annoyed Parveen, since of course it wasn’t funny to Aziz.
They made it to the village, Issa said, and located Waheed. Crane was anxious about seeing him again. He instructed Issa to convey immediately that they were building a clinic in honor of Fereshta.
“I thanked him for this,” Waheed said. “I never expected to see him again. I thought he would forget my wife as soon as he left the village.”
Jamshid, listening to all this but not speaking, was mashing his fist into his hand as a mortar grinds into a pestle.
“Did you see Crane then?” Parveen asked him quietly.
Issa answered for him. Crane had said that he thought it better not to see the boy, lest he upset him.
Parveen turned to Jamshid. “So you never spoke to him on his trips back to the village?”
Jamshid shook his head. But he’d found spots to watch Dr. Gideon from, he said. To study him. Sometimes he was sure that Dr. Gideon saw him too. He wanted Dr. Gideon to see him. But they never spoke.
“Now I know why he was in such a hurry to get the clinic built,” Issa said, only half joking. There were a lot of headaches—he’d told Parveen of some, like the khan.
“And Dr. Gideon helped?”
Issa looked at her like she was crazy. No, he said, Dr. Gideon spent his time sitting in the shade with pen and paper, writing. Waheed confirmed this.
So the men had never learned the cowboy song, Parveen thought. Such a minor detail, yet it still seemed important to tell the women.
Crane would pester Issa, who had his hands full, for help with translating his questions for Waheed or conjuring up characters and nuggets to add to the story. The book needed Taliban, Dr. Gideon insisted one day, or Americans wouldn’t be interested. He explained to Issa that a book about Afghanistan without Taliban would be like a Law and Order episode without a criminal. Who would want to watch it?
“Then you have a problem,” Issa had told him, “because there are no Taliban here. You’re in the wrong part of the country.”
But soon they encountered Amanullah. His petty extortion had annoyed Issa, but Dr. Gideon was delighted by him; Amanullah, he said, looked like a Taliban. So many of them, from what he’d read, were missing eyes or hands. And so, just like that, Amanullah had become Crane’s villain, and, as Parveen noted to herself, Crane had found a publisher.
The absurdities continued to pile up. The logs being floated from Kabul, for example. She’d sat by the river countless times, so knew that it flowed toward Kabul, not away from it. Crane could never have shipped logs to the village via water, let alone ridden them to transcendence. When she mentioned this part of the story to Issa and Waheed, they laughed uproariously.
Why hadn’t this inaccuracy, and many others, occurred to her before now? And why hadn’t a single person of the millions who’d read the memoir consulted a map to see if the events it described were possible? When Parveen herself had first read Mother Afghanistan, she hadn’t thought to question how one man could have so many dramatic adventures and close calls. Now, as one deception after another was made plain, the abundance of wild episodes was telling. Here was the overactive imagination of a man who’d read too many boys’ adventure stories, a man for whom the mild topography of ordinary existence was not enough, who craved, in the landscape of his life story, mountains as impressive
, as breathtaking, as those of Afghanistan. Who’d never abandoned his habit of exaggerating his exploits to his father.
“Your wife’s mantus are almost as good as my mother’s,” Issa told Waheed.
How could Issa have tasted his mother’s cooking when she’d died giving birth to him? Parveen knew the answer even before she asked, in a voice so small it embarrassed her, “Your mother’s alive?”
Issa, his mouth full of beef dumpling, nodded, and when Parveen told him that Crane had written that his mother was dead, Issa nearly spit out his food. “If that’s so, God is even greater than we imagine, because Dr. Gideon has eaten her cooking. Dr. Gideon wrote many things, you know. Some are even true.”
PARVEEN DASHED OUT A hasty, scorching letter to Professor Banerjee that night, using all the details she’d amassed. She wanted to give it to Issa before he left. During the past months, as many of Parveen’s cherished abstractions had disintegrated, her professor’s hold over her had diminished. Yet there was no one else whose advice she could think to seek. If she told her father about the violence along the road, he’d only worry that she was in danger.
So it was to Professor Banerjee that she wrote about Crane’s lies, about how the Americans had been lured to the village under false pretenses, as had Parveen herself. She complained that she’d been manipulated and compared her situation to the American citizenry being misled about the reasons for the Iraq War. The consequences of Crane’s deceptions, she wrote, had been almost as ruinous: the commander’s detention, the insurgency’s arrival in the village, the deaths along the road. She described Waheed’s pain when he learned how Crane had portrayed the Afghans. She wanted to know what to do with this information, how to think about it.
Then she tried to write to Crane, filling pages with her rage. But every draft seemed wrong, and she tore them all up. After an hour of this she was spent and had no letter to show for it. In the end, “Fuck you” was all she really wanted to say.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Young Deer
IT TOOK TWO WEEKS FOR PARVEEN’S LETTER TO REACH BERKELEY but only two hours for Professor Banerjee to type it up and send it to the Huffington Post, the Journal of Medical Anthropology, and her critical-anthropology listserv, from where it spread like flame through old growth. Since no one could reach Parveen, she was described only as a “recent college graduate who has gone to Afghanistan to attempt anthropological work.” Professor Banerjee did not edit the letter at all. Parveen’s pondering and floundering, her confusion, were in full view.
But Parveen was still ignorant of her newly public existence when Trotter brought Commander Amanullah back to the village. The copter landed, and as word spread that the commander had emerged from it, Parveen hurried with Waheed, Jamshid, and the rest of the village men to the bazaar. It took a long time for Amanullah to walk from the khan’s field, and when he drew near, Parveen saw why. His gait was unsteady, his beard grayed, his girth shrunken; where he had been bulky, he was baggy. He blinked a lot, as one does when emerging from the dark, and peered around with a perpetual question on his face. Parveen thought of Aziz’s father, hollowed out by the Taliban, never the same again. Aziz, who was holding the commander’s elbow, had to be thinking of him too.
Trotter was there, although looking like he didn’t want to be. “Tell him he’s free,” he said curtly to Aziz. “He’s free to go.”
Instead, Aziz led Amanullah toward the villagers, who were watching from the end of the bazaar, where its central path curved down to the fields. An elaborate dance ensued in which Aziz relinquished the commander before reaching the knot of men, who then waited for Aziz to retreat before advancing to encircle Amanullah. As a group they escorted the commander toward home.
He found his voice, although it too was diminished, nothing like the basso profundo in which he’d once bellowed at Parveen. “The same questions, over and over,” she heard him say. “Taliban this, Taliban that. Nonsense.” He still seemed to believe it was all part of the “security clearance” to get his militia hired, but even if the Americans wanted his militia, he said, he’d have nothing more to do with them.
None of the village men had spoken to Aziz. A penumbra of resentment or hostility seemed to extend from them over him. Even when he bought a pack of cigarettes at the sundry stall, there was none of the customary banter or gossip. In the villagers’ eyes, he was a traitor who’d led the commander into detention. “Trotter’s dog,” she’d heard Jamshid and his friends call Aziz a few times. Determined to defy his ostracism, she walked right up to him and asked how he was.
He offered her a cigarette, even though he knew she didn’t smoke, and said, “Sometimes I think demining wasn’t such a bad job after all.”
“Why’d they finally bring back the commander?” she asked in a whisper.
“Colonel Trotter will explain that to you,” he said. He was speaking English, which surprised her.
“You make it sound like I’m in trouble,” she said, half joking.
“I think we both are. So stop talking to me and go to him. You know what they say: if two thirsty men get together, they’ll both die.”
What kind of trouble? she was about to ask, but Aziz motioned with his head toward the M-ATVs, where Trotter awaited her, and, stung, she backed away. As she neared the colonel, she apprehended how much he’d changed. When they’d first met, only a few months ago, his vigor had seemed inextinguishable. Now his face was rumpled with lack of sleep, his eyes puffy, his hair, she thought, grayer. He was clean-shaven, as always, yet the faintest shadow seemed to adhere to his jaw.
Without speaking, he handed her a sheaf of papers.
She began to read, and her hands began to shake. Her mouth went dry. The words on the page were hers, the same words she’d written in her last letter to Professor Banerjee. “She published my letter?” Her first thought was that she would rather the world had seen a picture of her naked.
“You sound surprised,” Trotter said.
“I’m shocked! I was just writing to her for advice.”
“I guess she gave it, then: just put it all out there, regardless of the consequences. Those are yours to keep, by the way.”
She scanned the interviews he’d printed out in which Professor Banerjee explained her decision to betray Parveen’s confidence. Her kind of anthropology allowed for no loyalty to student or friend, to family or country, Professor Banerjee said. Not to anyone but the powerless. It was the largest airing for this view she’d ever had.
Learning that the powerful must always be held to account was a necessary part of Parveen’s education, Professor Banerjee said. She attributed Parveen’s solipsism, notably her comparison of her own situation to the Iraq invasion, to ingenuousness. The true cost of Crane’s deceit, she insisted, wasn’t Parveen’s betrayed idealism but rather the lives that had been lost and the bodies maimed during the roadwork, the laborers and soldiers who’d shed their blood in a place they had no business being. In her telling, the road was an allegory for Afghanistan, a land where America didn’t belong. If Crane had told the truth—that this woman’s death was the result of his own bumbling—would the military be sending men to that corner of the country to die? As for the millions who’d bought and believed his memoir or contributed to his foundation, they should have known better.
Trotter was watching her read. “No loyalty, huh?” she heard him say. “Every soldier here lives or dies by it.”
He spoke as if his mouth were full of ash, and at that moment Parveen shared his disgust for her and people like her, those whose loyalty was only to themselves, to their own desires. She wondered what it would feel like to be within a circle like the military rather than perpetually standing outside and judging it. She regretted not having told Trotter about Crane’s lies herself. She felt, somehow, that she’d owed him this. It couldn’t have been easy to have news from up the road boomerang from halfway around the globe.
And yet she also felt relief that her professor had done what she
herself didn’t have the courage to do, which was expose the truth, because Parveen agreed that, as her professor put it, only total transparency gave people a hope of making a just world and understanding their place in it. Or was she simply flattered when Professor Banerjee called her letter an “important document” that, without its author’s meaning to (a qualification that reduced the flattery), had provided “the most complete and damning portrait of the folly of this war.” That her professor had first argued against Parveen going to the village was conveniently omitted from her assessment.
“Let me tell you the cost of no loyalty,” Trotter said.
Parveen looked up from her sheaf of papers to meet Trotter’s eyes, which were severe, like the gray rocks fixed beneath the clear water of the river.
By exposing the resistance his battalion was encountering along the road, he said, Parveen was undermining public support for the war back home. This would hurt his soldiers’ morale, but worse, it would further endanger them, further endanger all pro-government forces across Afghanistan, by emboldening the insurgents. “Roads ain’t roads,” the army’s counterinsurgency guru liked to say. They were symbols. Until her letter was published, this road had symbolized all the good America could do and the success it could have in Afghanistan. Thanks to Parveen, now it symbolized how the war was going wrong.
But the war was going wrong, she said. Here and, from what the BBC reported, not just here. Shouldn’t Americans know that?
“Any single snapshot of the war gives a false picture,” he said. War was about controlling the story as much as the territory. That made information—its release and sometimes, if necessary, its withholding—a weapon.
Parveen was flummoxed. Did that mean Trotter thought it was fine, even defensible, to lie? she wondered. There was something condescending in this lesson about war, a province from which women were mostly barred only to be damned for their ignorance of it.