by Amy Waldman
They will question everything, Dr. Gideon had told Issa, and this proved true. The same journalists who’d celebrated Dr. Gideon were now investigating him, like a swarm of bees suddenly shifting direction. They’d discovered what Issa had long ago learned from Law and Order, that the villain was rarely whom you expected and often the person who seemed too good to be true. The reporters pestered Issa with questions and scurried to the foundation’s work sites. Only the American soldiers’ insistence that the road couldn’t be traveled right now kept the journalists from coming to this village; otherwise, Issa said, there would be hordes. It was as if Parveen’s letter had been sent through a wormhole that had since collapsed.
Crane had told stories of elders from other villages begging for clinics of their own, but no one, least of all Issa, knew who these men were. Most Afghans had never heard of Crane or his book. As Parveen knew, it hadn’t ever been translated into Pashto or Dari. Nor would these men have known where to find Crane. For help, for hope—for clinics or schools or peace—ordinary Afghans sat in the waiting rooms and courtyards of warlords, provincial officials, and minor personages like the khan. And most of the time, they went home empty-handed. The foundation had built some other clinics, Issa said, most nearly as nice as this one, in villages that were easy to reach. But they’d come at the foundation’s directive, not that of the villagers, and their numbers were far fewer than Crane or the foundation’s publications had said. And most of them, like Fereshta’s, were closed except for when journalists or VIPs planned a visit.
This was adding to the credibility problems of the foundation. Everything was falling apart, Issa said. He was going to return to smuggling soon; it had fewer headaches. He’d come to tell Waheed and Parveen not to talk if there was an investigation. He wanted to bury all the diesel cans in the mountains. Parveen he rebuked for quashing Waheed’s hope for a better life—what ingratitude she’d shown toward the family that had hosted her. Issa was grateful that she hadn’t mentioned him and Waheed in the letter, but he warned her against making any further disclosures. He’d lived on the wrong side of the law for a long time without going to jail and he wasn’t about to go now.
This was the man whom Crane had chosen to work with in Afghanistan, a mercenary whose devoted character had been another of Crane’s inventions. He seemed devoted only to himself, although when he said, in the guest room, “I’ll miss this place. I’ll even miss you, Waheed,” Parveen had an inkling of why Issa had remained a bachelor, and she guessed that his life would be lonely.
To reach the village this time, Issa had bribed a subcontractor working on the road to hire him as a laborer so he could travel along it. There was no reason other than his love of subterfuge for him to have done this, Parveen thought, given how easily he’d come over the mountains before.
Issa showed off his laminated ID and said that, with such poor security, it didn’t surprise him the Americans were getting beaten up. Insurgents could infiltrate the work crews as easily as he had. Issa himself had moved along the road entirely unmolested with no one remarking on a new face. “Even one as ugly as mine,” he said, beating Waheed to their habitual joke.
Parveen hadn’t been on the road since her arrival more than four months ago, and it gave her a small shock to realize how completely she’d succumbed to the cloister of the village. From what Issa said, she wouldn’t recognize the twenty-five kilometers she’d jolted along back then. It was wider, of course, and flatter, and the blasting had exposed rich stripes of geologic color in the mountainside, which to Issa looked newly fragile. Everywhere the landscape was populated by men in neon-orange vests and helmets and their equipment: steamrollers, graders, pavers, asphalt mixers. And meanwhile, Issa said, you couldn’t turn around without having a gun pointed in your direction, whether by the American soldiers or by all the private security the contractors had hired. The construction activity felt frantic, for they were in a race against the snow, which would completely degrade an unsealed surface. Issa thought they had no chance of finishing in time, in part because the tarmac was being sabotaged almost as soon as it was done. Dozens of explosives had been discovered and removed, laborers told him. Even so, Issa said, he’d still counted half a dozen craters bowled out by IEDs. The winter might halt the saboteurs’ drive to undo the Americans’ work, but only because during that time, the weather would do it for them. In the spring, Issa said, their efforts would resume.
TROTTER WAS SUPPOSED TO leave Afghanistan in December, Parveen remembered him saying, and she wondered how he’d react to ending his deployment with the road unfinished. The road had become a symbol each side wanted for its story of the war, but it was also a measure, the measure, she suspected, of Trotter’s own war. His area of command was much larger than this valley, but this was the project with resonance for him, for Americans, and for his superiors. Mixed in with his rectitude and idealism, she was sure, was ambition. You didn’t get to be a lieutenant colonel without thinking about your career.
In moments of clarity she understood that the village was a backdrop against which Americans played out their fantasies of benevolence or self-transformation or, more recently, control. She was as guilty of this as Trotter or Crane. She’d come to play at being an anthropologist, and play was all it had been, because at some point, without much thought, she’d set all her anthropological work aside. In nearly five months in the village, she’d done little more than interview a handful of women about their childbirth experiences and make some notes about the clinic’s minimal effect on the local population. What had she done with all her time? There’d been the daily walks, and the hours at the clinic and in the fields. She’d taught Jamshid and read to the women in the orchard; she’d played with the children and helped in the house when she could; and she’d written, both letters and journal entries. But mostly it seemed there’d been an unconscionable number of hours spent daydreaming. Was she any less of a poser than Crane?
Yet she felt no regret over abandoning her ostensible anthropology project. Professor Banerjee’s path wasn’t going to be hers, not after she’d learned what, and who, her professor was willing to sacrifice for her principles. Parveen didn’t possess that ruthlessness. Dr. Yasmeen seemed to urge, by both example and philosophy, a less dogmatic but more concrete course of action, and while Parveen knew she didn’t have the constitution to be a doctor herself, she’d begun to consider a life in public health. The doctor was right—of all Crane’s failings, his greatest wasn’t Fereshta’s death or his book of lies but the fact that his clinic wasn’t set up to truly help the village women.
Perhaps, then, she would return home and apply to grad school in this newly chosen field, but she still couldn’t see how to end her story in the village. Thanksgiving, which she’d promised her father she’d be home for, was just weeks away. Yet her reluctance to go was unabated, and it felt both arbitrary and anticlimactic to simply pick a date and fly out with the doctor. That wasn’t the final image she wanted the villagers to have of her. She’d never been particularly good at finding the right time to leave a party, always fearing that she’d miss out on something or be talked about or, worst of all, have her absence go unmarked. The same worries flickered now, maybe because she guessed that the family and the villagers wouldn’t pine for her the way she would for them.
Thinking that departing would be easier if she could obtain some proof of sentiment, she probed various family members in turn, telling them that the doctor thought she should leave soon, before winter.
“That’s good,” Waheed said. “The goats and chickens will want their room back. The donkey too.” Soon it would be too cold for them outside, he said. It didn’t sound like he was joking.
Disappointed, she suggested that maybe she would return to the village in the spring.
“You could build a school,” he said.
She was crushed to think that to Waheed, she was just another Crane. Americans he expected to come, go, return to build something. Which she hadn’t even tho
ught to do, so she was also embarrassed. She’d been content with imagining the joyful reception on her return, a fantasy that blunted the awkwardness of leaving.
“And maybe you’ll bring a husband,” Waheed said. As they spoke, he was chopping wood in the yard; either he or Jamshid was always chopping wood these days, like all the other village men, in preparation for winter.
The statement was so unexpected that at first she thought he meant Aziz, a leap that told her something about where her mind was. But no, she realized, Waheed meant her fictional American fiancé, although she hadn’t mentioned him in so long that she wondered if anyone in the family still believed in him. The permanent crinkling around Waheed’s eyes made it hard to tell when there was mirth there. But his words implied that she wasn’t valuable enough on her own, which was hurtful. He seemed as excited by the prospect of meeting her mythical husband as he was about seeing her again.
Next she tried Bina, who commented only that in winter the snow would be as tall outside the windows as she was. This made Bina recall Shokoh’s arrival the previous winter, and she grew subdued and seemed to completely forget Parveen’s impending departure. Parveen was left still searching for evidence that she’d made an impression on this family at all.
Only Shokoh displayed any true emotion. “You can’t go!” she implored Parveen, holding her hands and treating her to a velvet gaze. They would have so much fun with the baby, she insisted. But first she had to get through the delivery, and she couldn’t do that without Parveen or Dr. Yasmeen. “What does the silly dai know?”
“What do I know?” Parveen asked honestly.
Her entire tenure in the village struck her, newly, as ridiculous: an American hanging around, not doing much of anything at all, as the rhythms of this family and the march of the seasons continued undisturbed. Even Amina’s weeping gratitude for Parveen’s help in facilitating Amanullah’s return was undeserved, since the help had been accidental. Nor had the appreciation lasted long, given the commander’s diminished condition. He was still doddering, and Amina, who seemed to spend more time at the river complaining about this than actually being with him, broadly blamed “Americans,” a sweeping judgment in which Parveen had the sense she was included.
Amanullah’s detention was over but it would not be forgotten. Jamshid and his friends continued to call Aziz “Trotter’s dog.” They seemed to savor the phrase, to look for excuses to say it, and Parveen cringed every time. But she left it to Waheed, who was also disturbed by this talk, to take it up with his son.
As upset as Waheed had been by the commander’s detention, he made it clear that he didn’t blame the interpreter. Aziz might not have known the Americans’ true plans when he was told to fetch Amanullah from the bazaar, Waheed told Jamshid one evening after dinner. Besides, if he was working for them, he had to do their bidding. What choice did he have? He was supporting a large family. “When you’re doing that too, you can judge him,” Waheed said. “Not before.”
“There are many ways to support a family other than drinking from an American’s teat,” Jamshid snapped.
Waheed’s eyes narrowed at the implication of Jamshid’s rejoinder. “Should I have kept trying to suckle from a stone, like most poor people do?” His voice was low. “At least milk comes from the Americans.”
“The Americans aren’t my mother.”
“And your new friends aren’t your father. I am, and I’m telling you, take care. You can be lured into danger too.”
Parveen was back in the half comprehension of her first night, but it wasn’t a question of language. Who were Jamshid’s new friends? she asked. When neither father nor son answered, she sought to explain—to defend—Aziz, saying, “It’s hard to be caught between the two sides.”
Jamshid turned toward her, his eyes bright, and said, “Don’t see clearly for others and be blind for yourself.”
A common proverb, yet it chilled her. When someone changed in front of you, it could be hard to discern; she’d thought this once about Waheed’s failure to recognize how age had softened Commander Amanullah. Now she wondered if Jamshid had been undergoing a transformation without her realizing it. She kept trying to shift her focus, to get some distance, in order to study him. To see him clearly. Without doubt he was surlier than he’d been even a month or two earlier. He was inattentive to his siblings and uninterested in her lessons, as if his hunger to be taught by her had passed. Then again, he was a teenager, and she remembered how moody she herself had been in those years, sullen one minute, tempestuous the next. Whether in America or Afghanistan, it was a time of natural separation from parents, from adults.
When she told Jamshid she’d be leaving before winter, he said brusquely, “Yes, you should go.” When she suggested that maybe she could return in spring, he said, “It will be a dangerous season for Americans,” then again shut down.
The insurgents, while invisible to Parveen, were an increasing presence to everyone else, seeping into the village like dye into water. At the river the women whispered to Parveen about men who came down from the mountains at night to demand food and a place to sleep. Ghosts, they called these visitors. Shadows. The villagers gave what was asked and hid their resentments. There were rumors of warnings against cooperation with the U.S. forces, although it seemed to Parveen that if there was a house to be warned, it would be Waheed’s, where an American slept, and unless he was keeping it from her, no warning had come. But at night sometimes she bolted awake, picturing these insurgent ghosts bedded down in guest rooms throughout the village.
One morning word spread that the insurgents had brutally beaten a villager—a man whose bout with meningitis had left him with diminished mental capacity—because he’d denied them shelter. Parveen went to see him and was shocked; one side of his head had been pulped by a rifle butt. His eyes were swollen shut, his lips clownish. They wanted to make an example of him, the villagers said. From now on, no one would dare to refuse.
When Dr. Yasmeen came next, Parveen asked her and Naseer to visit the man. The doctor administered various salves, left a supply of over-the-counter pain medications, and said time would heal him. When they left the house, she turned to Parveen and said, “Now. You must go now, my dear. Not later. Do you think these men in the hills don’t know you’re an American? They’re just waiting for the time they can make use of you.”
Parveen shivered at the doctor’s words, but she argued anyway. She was a guest and therefore protected, she insisted. Just as she was a “third sex”—not governed by the usual rules of gender—she was a “third nation” too, neither American nor Afghan exactly. No harm would come to her here.
All the way back to the clinic, Dr. Yasmeen tried to convince her otherwise, even as Parveen offered reasons why she should prolong her stay. As politely as possible, she asserted that by now she knew the village better than the doctor. “I’m part of it,” she said.
And here the doctor rebuked her. “Parveen, I understand your heart. I know you want to help. But don’t forget you grew up in America. You’re deluding yourself if you believe this is your home, and to think you understand everything happening here is to wager your own safety. Please don’t.”
They hugged as usual when the doctor left that day, but it was an awkward parting, and beneath Parveen’s confidence ticked unease. In truth she didn’t know all of the villagers by sight, and unfamiliar faces now became objects of fear. Had they been here all along or were they new? Other times she would pass men with their faces wrapped and wonder if it was to ward off the cold or to camouflage their identities. She no longer roamed freely, and not only because of the weather.
It was a cliché of this war to describe Afghans as being squeezed between the Americans and the Taliban, but Parveen was coming to see that didn’t make it less true. As wary as the village men might be of the insurgents, they were equally afraid that the Americans might swoop in and take them as they’d taken Commander Amanullah. When the military helicopter brought the doctor each week
, Parveen noticed, the bazaar and lanes emptied. No one attempted to travel the road anymore, not even to buy seeds or needed medicines. The khan hadn’t been seen in the village in weeks; he felt safer, it was said, in the provincial capital.
Returning to her room one day Parveen found dried flowers, flat and powdery, on the floor. They were the ones Bilal had collected that day in the meadow and that she’d compressed in the pages of Mother Afghanistan. The flowers were all that remained. Both her copy of the book and the one Waheed had given her in disgust were gone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eye of Nothing
IT DIDN’T SURPRISE PARVEEN THAT THE INSURGENTS WOULD BE seeking shelter. The nights now were brisk, sometimes bitter cold. The family often ate dinner around a sandali, a small, low table covering a pit of warm charcoal, which they used to warm their feet. Parveen slept beneath layers of blankets, and she was grateful when Aakila and Adeila, and sometimes Zahab and Bilal too, smuggled themselves onto her bedroll. She might find them there when she went to sleep; other times they sneaked downstairs in the dark. They didn’t ask and Parveen didn’t object, even when there were as many as four crowded in with her, farting, snoring, kicking, squirming, planting their feet in her face, tucking their heads in the hollows beneath her arms. They moved in waves and sleep-spoke in tongues and often spilled off the bedroll onto the floor, where they slept soundly. Parveen’s palm would settle on a sleeping child’s chest, the heartbeat pulsing in her ears, or on the soft belly beneath the ribs, which she’d feel rising and falling with metronomic regularity, the comfort of this flooding her with endorphins and also distracting her from worrying about who was in the dark beyond the walls.