A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  “‘A herd of dumb deer,’” Trotter said, quoting her. “Couldn’t have been any clearer how you see us.”

  He saw condescension in her words too, she realized. More than revealing the folly of the war, her letter illuminated for him the gap between the tiny number who served and the civilians who judged them. “‘Young deer,’” she corrected him. “That’s what I said. ‘Young deer.’” Though even this was somewhat disingenuous. Her exact words had been They seem to me like a herd of young deer, separated from their mothers, crashing through the forest wide-eyed and dumb with targets on their sides. “And I didn’t mean you.”

  “Just my grunts.”

  What she’d meant, she clarified, was that Trotter and his men were victims of Crane too, that they’d all been played. The colonel’s mouth twisted in disapproval. Men, Parveen had noticed, didn’t like to be called victims, even when they were. Women were used to it.

  “To be honest,” Trotter said, “I couldn’t care less whether Mother Afghanistan is twenty or eighty percent true.” He hadn’t read the book for truth, he said. He’d read it for guidance on how to fight and win this war. He’d read it for lessons, the same way he always read: in extraction mode. What knowledge could he take away from this piece of material? For him, it was more like a counterinsurgency manual. Here’s how you can win this thing. Get the population on your side. Commonsense stuff. His wife was more into the story, he said. Was it sexist to say maybe that was more of a woman thing?

  Yes, Parveen replied.

  Well, fine, he said, call him sexist, but it was irrelevant to him exactly how Fereshta had died. Or maybe he should say that how she’d died didn’t surprise him. That fundamentalists would rather let her die than be treated by a kafir man pretty much confirmed everything he’d read.

  But that wasn’t what happened, Parveen pointed out.

  “But it has happened, Parveen. If not in this case, then in many, many others. Maybe Crane didn’t tell the truth about some things, but he sure nailed a truth about this place.” Its women had been oppressed for too long.

  “But the truth matters!” she cried like some desperate prophetess. “The truth. Not a truth. Talk to Waheed about it, the damage those lies have done. He cares what you think. Crane owes him an apology.”

  “Then Crane should give him one,” Trotter said curtly. Would Parveen honestly say an easier way out of the village wasn’t needed? he asked. Because of Crane, the U.S. military was here helping people who’d been forgotten. Because of Crane, Parveen was here helping—or whatever it was she was doing. Tearing down heroes was easy, Trotter said, but all that did was leave people without hope, and who wanted that? Even if some details in Crane’s book were off, it was still a useful story, and that over there was a useful clinic. A fact on the ground.

  “But it’s not useful because—”

  He cut her off to say that Americans didn’t expect Crane to be perfect because they knew he was trying to do good. Which is why when Parveen returned to the States, she was probably going to find a lot of people angry not at him but at her. She must have looked unsettled at this, because he seemed to soften a bit. “Look, it’s not that I’m blind to certain things that are—that could be working better in our effort,” he said, choosing his words carefully. The coalition was constantly revising its approach. But you couldn’t fight a war by getting bogged down in your mistakes. Afterward was for lessons learned. “We’re still processing the lessons of Vietnam,” he said.

  It was less that Trotter wasn’t bothered by Crane’s inventions, Parveen thought, than that he couldn’t afford to be. The projection of certainty required that there be no despair or anger confessed, no doubt acknowledged, at least not publicly. The only indication that he accepted that Crane’s book was wrong was the commander’s return.

  Without knowing what answer she wanted, Parveen asked Trotter if he was going to stop work on the road.

  A slight twitch, like a tiny beating heart, took up at the corner of his right eye. They couldn’t stop, he finally said, although the long pause suggested that he’d given it some thought. The problem was that the enemy didn’t know the Americans had come because of Crane’s book, and if Trotter and his men left, they wouldn’t know that was why they were leaving. They would think they’d driven the Americans out. “The optics,” Trotter said, as if it were self-explanatory. Not to mention that at this point the investment was too big. He had men who’d paid the highest price. He couldn’t just walk away.

  THERE WAS A STORY Aziz had told Parveen. The previous year he’d bought a plot of land in the desert outside Kabul. Thanks to the influx of foreign aid and opium cash, real estate in the city proper had inflated to punishing levels, and this parcel was all he could afford. There was nothing in the desert, as yet, but officials had promised to install electricity and water, developers would build houses, and eventually Kabul and the place where Aziz had bought land would meet. When construction was finished, he and his family, who were currently living in a rented house with a leaking roof, would move there.

  On one of his weekends home, he decided to check on the progress of construction. Although he’d dutifully made his monthly payments, it had been many months since he’d visited the site. He borrowed his brother’s car and drove out. It was a smoggy day, the air the color of a cigarette filter. The landscape was flat except for, in the distance, a wall of chocolate-brown mountains with the faintest purple tinge. The sign for the development was still there, but it was surrounded by nothing—no houses, no holes, no plots marked off, no foundations, no construction machinery, no poles, no pipes. Nothing. Just dust, which the wind blew into his eyes.

  He got back into the car and drove to the developers’ office. It took an hour and a half; Kabul’s traffic, as Parveen had learned in her two weeks in the city, was that bad. It was hard to sustain a rage for so long, and by the time Aziz reached the office, he already felt defeated. Inside were all the slick maps and renderings that had first seduced him. They were probably printed, now that he thought about it, not in one of Kabul’s crappy shops but by professional outfits in Dubai. These top-quality materials boasted detail down to the tree level. As if a single sapling could live out there.

  The broker who’d sold him the plot and promised progress every time Aziz came calling was Karim, a man who wore a suit and carried two, sometimes three, cell phones that rang all the time; who used English terms like cul-de-sac and investment potential; who wore, when they’d first visited the desert together, giant blue-tinted sunglasses that looked like they’d been carved from one of the blue-glass buildings all over Kabul; who’d waved his arm over the empty land before them and spoke with practiced reverence about solar-powered streetlights and hot-water tanks and garages of dimensions greater than Aziz’s current house, then told Aziz to “act fast” because so many government officials were trying to buy into the development that he was lucky he’d even learned about it (Aziz remembered only too late that he’d learned about the development from the glossy billboards shading his family’s muddy home) and added that there weren’t many plots left, they were about to raise the prices to capitalize on demand, so if Aziz was going to buy, he should buy now, and Aziz had.

  But this Karim had been let go, the slightly older version of him (more sober shoes, grayer hair) who was now manning the office informed Aziz. They’d had to let him go for making false promises to people about the schedule.

  So there was a schedule? Aziz asked hopefully.

  No, that was just the problem, the man said. Karim had claimed, wrongly, that there was.

  But what was the plan? Aziz asked. When would they put in the water pipes? The electric lines?

  For this they were dependent upon the municipality of Kabul, the man said. Once they put in the infrastructure, then they could begin to build the houses. Until then, they could do nothing.

  “Nothing except collect my money,” Aziz said sourly to Parveen. He’d almost told the man that he worked for the Americans
and would report them for fraud, an instinct she recognized from her own fantasies about the khan. But he couldn’t tell anyone whom he worked for, and the Americans wouldn’t have done anything anyway. They talked and talked about the rule of law, he said, but they didn’t enforce it, which was the reason he’d had to go to the desert in the first place. The people with power in Kabul just took the land they wanted in the city limits, with no consequences.

  But the man at the developers’ office was older than Aziz and so, unlike Karim, deserving of respect. Politely, Aziz asked him why they kept taking his family’s money if they couldn’t build.

  They had to be ready for the day they could build, the man said. It was up to Aziz if he wanted to forfeit his deposit. The man could only tell him that one day the desert would become a city, that Kabul would grow out there, just like the pictures showed, because Kabul was bursting, overflowing; people were running out of hills to live on, and the city had to go somewhere, so it would grow. Aziz had to have patience, the man counseled, and remember that everywhere there was a palace now there had once been nothing.

  “And everywhere there are ruins,” Aziz told Parveen, “there was once a palace.” He didn’t believe in the vision the man tried to make him see. Yet he would keep paying, even though it wasn’t likely to lead anywhere but disappointment, because he’d already paid so much.

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Clear Sight

  EACH AFTERNOON NOW, THE TREES’ SHADOWS STRETCHED farther into long elegant lines. Red and yellow seeped across leaves, plant stalks browned, the donkey’s coat thickened. In the hills the villagers gathered dry vegetation to store as fodder, and in the fields they sowed wheat with haphazard flings of the seeds. It was late October. The mountain winter, with its feet of snow and months of hardship, would soon come, which meant that it was time for Parveen to go.

  This, at least, was what Dr. Yasmeen kept telling her. If Parveen waited too long, the doctor warned, snow and floods might cut the road off for months, and the weather would become too treacherous for helicopters to land. The village in winter was no place to be, the doctor said, and she worried, too, about Parveen’s health. During her nearly five months in the village, she’d lost perhaps twenty-five pounds. She had never acquired a taste for Bina’s food, which was both monotonous and excessively oily, and she’d had not infrequent bouts of gastroenteritis. The publication of her letter had only increased her physical attrition, as the stress killed what was left of her appetite. Bina was constantly taking in her dresses, and Shokoh joked that she was gaining the weight Parveen had lost. She felt desiccated, her skin coarse and dry and beset by occasional blooms of rash, and she was having regular yeast infections. But she dismissed the doctor’s concern; compared to the ailments of so many villagers, hers were minor.

  For if winter scared Parveen, so did the prospect of going home. Even her father, not exactly a Huffington Post reader, was aware of the furor her letter had caused; he had written, via Dr. Yasmeen, to implore her to leave. It was the violence along the road, which she’d detailed in her letter to Professor Banerjee, that concerned him. At his request her cousin Fawad had tried to travel to the village to retrieve her, but the Americans wouldn’t let him onto the road. They claimed the ongoing construction made it impassable; the locals he asked for information said it was too dangerous. He’d returned to Kabul.

  Parveen’s father, as an educator himself, was deeply distressed by Professor Banerjee’s violation of his daughter’s trust. Not being Muslim, he’d written, perhaps she didn’t understand that, for you, the blowback was always going to be more extreme. There’d been a certain amount of “agitation” in the wake of her disclosures, he explained. Some of Gideon Crane’s legions of fans, no doubt angry at themselves for their naive credulity, had redirected that anger at Parveen for bringing down their hero. (In this respect, she realized Trotter had been prescient, and perhaps Crane had been too. Was this why he hadn’t worried that Parveen would learn the truth in the village and then expose him? Because he sensed that, even if she did, many of his readers wouldn’t care? He understood how essential, how indispensable, was the myth that he had created.) A small number of those were blaming her Afghan roots, accusing her of disloyalty, as if questioning Crane was akin to questioning America itself. And some faulted her for putting U.S. troops in danger, neglecting to consider the fact that she herself had never intended her letter to be published. Her father’s position was that if military leaders had truly approved and persisted with this enterprise on the slender basis of a memoir, then they bore the blame: I told the reporters who called that you had merely toppled a statue that should never have been erected in the first place.

  At this last line, Parveen’s whole body tensed. Reporters contacting her father? She didn’t know whether to believe him when he said not to worry, that Americans had short attention spans and this would pass. Meanwhile, he wrote, President Obama was even now trying to decide whether the war was folly or necessity, whether to bring troops home or send more there, and Parveen’s letter had become ammunition for both sides. To some, if such a simple gesture of goodwill was being met with resistance, it proved that America’s involvement in Afghanistan wasn’t as welcome and successful as military leaders claimed. To others, it showed why the nation’s involvement was essential: to support decent Afghans, and Afghan women especially, in the fight against terror. Her father admitted that he didn’t know the right answer. All he knew was that he wanted her home.

  Almost every hour Parveen would remember, with the same stomach jolt each time, that she—or the cartoon version of herself floating around the internet—was being discussed and, in some quarters, reviled, though she also carried the faint hope that Obama had been among her readers. She’d written an angry, anguished letter to Professor Banerjee but she hadn’t sent it because she didn’t trust her not to publish it. She waited in vain for an apology or explanation from her professor, or at least an acknowledgment of what she’d done. It was as if Professor Banerjee had forgotten that there was a real person at the other end of her correspondence or as if she’d wrung what she needed out of her former student and discarded her. Parveen believed this only at her most bitter moments. More often she focused on those maternal flashes from her professor—the Indian food she’d brought her in her office—although she wondered if, in grieving her own mother, she’d given these small gestures too much weight. Perhaps Professor Banerjee cared more for what was good for the world than what was good for Parveen.

  The village had become a safe limbo she didn’t want to leave. Her imagination sputtered out, like the generator at night, when she tried to think about what she would do back in California and who she would be. Her past, all she’d done and learned before coming here, seemed to have little bearing on her future. What Shokoh had said about her own life—about the parts being so unconnected that only one of them could be real—fit Parveen too.

  She’d been dwelling on the absence, from the village, of Aziz. Their last encounter had been upon Commander Amanullah’s return, when Aziz had told her they were both in trouble. Parveen knew why Trotter was angry with her, but what Aziz’s infraction had been was still a mystery, and she worried that something in her letter had turned Trotter against him. If the colonel dismissed Aziz and he returned to Kabul—which, for all she knew, might already have happened—she would never see him again. Even if he was still with Trotter, what was she supposed to do upon leaving the village, stand at the gate of the base and ask for him? This would make her feel pathetic and exposed; she couldn’t forget the soldiers’ teasing. And yet if she went back to America without seeing Aziz, a question she couldn’t even phrase would stay forever curled in her.

  She read and reread the articles Trotter had brought until, nauseated, she could look at them no more. Many of them contained interviews in which Crane defended himself. Memory wasn’t a machine, he said when questioned. It was fallible. “I call it the ‘fog of life.�
�” He had done his best, even if a few details were off. Perhaps the fault lay with his interpreter, on whom he had depended for information, or perhaps it lay with his wife, Gloria, who had helped assemble the book from the notes and jottings he’d brought back from Afghanistan. (“They were in a Marshalls bag,” she told one interviewer.) Or perhaps it lay with the publishers, who believed memoirs should work as predictably as the human eye. But no matter: The important work would carry on. The focus should stay on the women.

  Besides, he told one sympathetic interlocutor, fiction disguised as nonfiction in the service of justice had a long and noble history. Abolitionists had invented or amplified escaped slaves’ narratives to dramatize their cause. Benjamin Franklin had written the first-person account of a made-up woman named Polly Baker, supposedly prosecuted for bearing illegitimate children, and passed it off as true to show the unfairness of the law toward women. Americans hadn’t faulted him for this—they’d celebrated him. Not that Crane was comparing himself to Benjamin Franklin, of course. And not that he’d written a fiction. He insisted he hadn’t. Moreover, there was nothing fake about what his readers had felt.

  Issa, who came to the village a couple of weeks after Trotter had returned Amanullah, provided a less lofty picture of Crane’s mental state. Once the scandal broke in the States, Issa said, he’d begun receiving calls from Dr. Gideon at all hours. Perhaps forgetting that his own foundation had facilitated Parveen’s journey to the village, Dr. Gideon raged about her, insisting that rival nonprofits or antiwar activists had put her up to her disclosures. Sometimes he even cried to Issa, who in describing this sounded less amused than annoyed. Dr. Gideon cried because his funding was drying up and members of his board were resigning. Or he cried because he had the taint of a baby’s grisly death on him now. He was not only seeking a sympathetic ear (though the ear he reached could hardly have been less so), but also warning Issa that the two of them were, as Dr. Gideon put it, “in for it.” No doubt reporters would begin digging into their record keeping, their staffing, their finances, and their operations.