A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  But that week, for the first time since Parveen’s arrival, the doctor didn’t come.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tears from Blind Eyes

  IT WAS A DAY BOTH GLORIOUS AND MELANCHOLY, THE SKY A BLUE of almost vexing purity, the fields stubbled and gray. Women crowded into the clinic, asking about the doctor.

  Maybe the Americans didn’t have a helicopter available, Parveen suggested. Or perhaps Dr. Yasmeen was sick. Or her husband. Or maybe Naseer had an important exam.

  The doctor wouldn’t miss them for such a trivial thing, the women admonished her. As much as her treatment and advice, the doctor’s willingness to make the journey and her consistency mattered to them. The eyes of a few—those more knowing or less trusting—betrayed the fear that she had decided they were no longer worth the bother.

  “Only if she is dead would she not come,” said Saba, who was promptly reprimanded by the others.

  To appease them, Parveen made a list of every patient who wanted to see the doctor and, after conferences in the exam room, what their ailments were so that when Dr. Yasmeen did come, she could move quickly. By now they trusted Parveen enough to talk about their bodies, to relate their pains, to describe their discharge, even their beatings. Or at least they trusted her as a conduit to the doctor. But by late afternoon, when the single tree’s shadow pointed like a finger across the courtyard, it was clear the doctor wouldn’t be coming.

  They waited again the next day, and the one after that, listening, in vain, for the sound of the helicopter that would bring her. Her absence unsettled Parveen. She scanned the mountains, the snow creeping down their flanks. Was winter closer than she’d thought? Perhaps the doctor had decided to wait until spring to return. But surely she would have sent word with the Americans if that was the case. Parveen felt a peevish sense of abandonment. In the wake of her success with Latifa, she was hungry to learn more, to try more.

  At night the family listened, as usual, to the BBC. One brief report caught their ears because it referenced the district they were in and because it was unusual: coalition forces had killed two suspected insurgents, one of them female. In this war, there were no female insurgents, at least none that Parveen had heard of.

  “It’s the new Malalai!” Bina joked, a reference to the fearsome female warrior who was said to have rallied Afghan fighters against the British at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. Even uneducated Bina knew about her.

  Jamshid scoffed. It wasn’t the new Malalai, he said, probably not even an insurgent. “They’ve killed an innocent woman, I’m guessing. You can call a dead body anything you want.”

  MORNINGS IN THE VALLEY often began now with a thick fog, a ground cloud, into which family members disappeared as they went about their work in the yard. Like anyone who’d lived in the Bay Area, Parveen knew fog, but here it was denser and colder, a thief of light and heat. Each day, until it lifted, it felt as if they might swim in it forever.

  Parveen had spent the night in the clinic, in a bed next to Latifa’s, as she had done for the past week and a half, since the birth. Latifa, still recovering, was mostly quiet, but Parveen enjoyed sharing the room with her. It was like being back with her sister, whom she’d missed terribly when Taara first married and moved away. In theory, being at the clinic should have felt like a hotel stay—to sleep in an actual bed!—except that the building had no central heating system, just a few space heaters, and it was poorly insulated. The baby, thankfully, was warmed by the incubator, and at night Parveen piled blankets atop Latifa, then layered long underwear, a sweater, and a coat on herself, her warmest clothes already not warm enough. If it was this cold in early November, Dr. Yasmeen was right that she wouldn’t be able to manage the winter.

  In the mornings Parveen made tea for herself and Latifa, and together they waited for the delivery of warm bread, eggs, and yogurt that the women took turns bringing. On this foggy morning, three days after the doctor’s failure to come, the Americans came instead. Parveen was surprised they’d made the drive, because the lack of visibility as they twisted along the canyon would have turned the road treacherous even if it were in good shape. At first she heard the M-ATVs but couldn’t see them out the room’s window for the fog. Then, like a latent image becoming visible, they emerged. The convoy entered the village as slowly as a cortege and parked by the clinic.

  Parveen told Latifa that she would go see if the Americans knew anything about Dr. Yasmeen. She walked outside, hugging herself. The sun nudged through the fog, and after days of fretting, first about Latifa, then about the doctor’s absence, that hint of light made Parveen hopeful. It was possible that the Americans had brought Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer, and Aziz would have to be with them too, and she could tell all of them about saving Latifa’s life.

  But from the moment she approached the three M-ATVs, something seemed off. She waved at the driver and front-seat passenger in the lead vehicle, and they raised their hands in return, but no one emerged. She waited for a strange minute until, at last, the doors opened and soldiers climbed out. Trotter was among them, and Aziz too. She felt such relief at seeing him that she gave an embarrassingly broad grin, then cringed at the memory of her last, charged interaction with Trotter, when he’d brought the news about her letter. Neither the colonel nor Aziz returned her smile. They both looked as if the drive had made them queasy.

  Trotter took her elbow, guided her toward the clinic, and said, to her surprise, that he needed her help. Did she know anything, could she tell him anything, about Naseer, the doctor’s son? Was he a member of any militant groups? Did he have a relationship with Commander Amanullah? Meetings with anyone in the village?

  “Why? Have you detained him now?” Parveen asked, stopping short. That would explain why neither he nor his mother had come to the village. Dr. Yasmeen would be frantic—and furious.

  No, Trotter said uneasily. No, they hadn’t detained him. His men were running a checkpoint on the highway near the base when a car came at them. Its driver was Naseer.

  “Naseer tried to run them over?” Parveen asked. This was preposterous, and she laughed. She and Trotter were facing each other. She sensed the other soldiers and Aziz watching from a few feet back. “You’re joking, right? Why would he do that?”

  “We don’t know. I don’t know. Did you ever hear him express support for the insurgency? Or mention any anti-American or anti-government sentiments?”

  “Give me a break—he wants to go study in America more than anything.”

  Trotter was quiet. The pulse beneath his eye was back.

  “So you have detained him,” she said, suspicious now. “If you’re saying he threatened your—”

  “My men had to defend themselves. There were multiple commands to stop. He didn’t stop, Parveen.”

  Trotter’s words seemed to tumble slowly toward Parveen, coming apart before they arrived. There was some essential point she was missing, a connection she couldn’t make.

  “His mother, Dr. Yasmeen, was she with him? They were probably just talking about her cases and not paying attention—”

  She was in the car, Trotter said. The pulse beat faster, and she stared at it, briefly mesmerized. Her staring only seemed to speed it up, and she remembered her ninth-grade math teacher halving each of his steps as he walked across the room and explaining that if you were able to do that indefinitely, cutting your steps in half each time, that’s what infinity was, and if the pulses beneath Trotter’s eye got closer and closer in time beyond what was physically possible, was it the same, was that infinity? Her mind was circling away like a plane refused permission to land, except in her case it didn’t want to land; it wanted to rise into the clouds and disappear.

  “They haven’t come here,” she said finally. “It’s the first week they’ve missed since I got here.”

  “Because they’re deceased,” Trotter said. “Both of them. Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer—they’re deceased.”

  The word, with its peculiar passivity, made it sound as i
f they’d just fallen over, Parveen thought. “You mean they were…killed,” she said, hesitating in spite of herself, because to say that was to accuse.

  “My men had no choice but to engage the vehicle—”

  “Engage.”

  “Fire on it. In a situation like that, you see a car coming toward you, a split second of morality can mean you end up dead. They acted appropriately.”

  “They killed them.”

  “Verbal commands, hand gestures, shouts, you name it, they tried everything, but the car kept coming. If someone doesn’t recognize our authority, we have to assume they’re opposed to it.”

  “You killed—” she started, but then, woozy, was down on the ground in an instant, her fall broken just in time by Trotter, who’d reached out when she wobbled. She bent her head over her knees and heard a woman tell her, in English, to take deep breaths. This woman was offering water, a PowerBar, all of it surely an aural hallucination. But no, it was real, for when Parveen looked up, there beneath a helmet was the face of an American woman, with freckles splashed across her nose and blue eyes wide with concern.

  “This is Charlie, she’s a medic,” Trotter said. “We brought two for the women here—”

  “Because you killed their doctor,” Parveen said stonily. “You brought female medics because you killed the female doctor.” Rage—grief—burst in her, and regret at her last strained meeting with the doctor, who’d been so worried for Parveen even as her own life and that of her son were days from ending. Parveen began to shout “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and then to cry, sending out great yawps of sadness. She wanted to make Trotter’s ears hurt. The medic’s hand was rubbing her back, as a mother might, as her own mother once had, and unable to stop crying, she remembered the day her mother died, when, after months of tears during her illness, Parveen had been unable to cry at all. She’d felt numb, depleted. Some of their relatives, her sister told her later, found this odd. How strange, then, to be so uninhibited here, among strangers, for the loss of a woman who wasn’t blood. Not blood, and yet she saw how, like Professor Banerjee, Dr. Yasmeen had come to seem a maternal substitute, and she wondered if the lesson forevermore would be never to get attached to anyone. It seemed like a sign when she looked around for Aziz and couldn’t see him.

  When Trotter suggested they go into the clinic courtyard so that she could sit down there, Parveen knew it was because the village men were staring. Through tear-blurred vision, she saw Jamshid standing maybe fifty feet away with a knot of his friends, watching her, watching Trotter. She hadn’t seen them come, and Jamshid’s expression, cold but not curious, surprised her. This was no longer the boy who’d accosted her in the yard and begged her to teach him.

  With the two medics supporting her, one on each side, Parveen walked haltingly into the clinic courtyard, then sat down with her back against the wall. The cold in the ground began oozing into her, immobilizing her.

  Trotter, fully armored, paced as he spoke, stopping occasionally to plant himself directly in front of her, to loom over her, only to resume pacing. He could tell her more about what had happened, he said, but he needed to know whether she planned to write to her professor, or anyone, about it. If the news of Dr. Yasmeen’s death was broadcast widely, he said, it could stir up a lot of resentment among Afghans and put American soldiers in danger. Surely she wouldn’t want that.

  “You want me to lie for you?” Parveen asked. “Help you cover it up?”

  “We’re not trying to cover up anything,” he said and stopped abruptly in front of her—she’d insulted his dignity now. “It’s about the strategic release of information.”

  She thought for a moment. “The female insurgent—we heard that on the radio. That was Dr. Yasmeen. That’s what you mean by ‘strategic’?”

  Trotter scrunched up his nose, an almost comical pantomime of regret, then folded his arms and gazed off into the distance. “That went out too quickly. There was a lot of confusion—there always is in these situations.” It would be corrected, he said, but the mistake at least had bought them time to think about how to put this out there.

  “You want to control the story.”

  He nodded gratefully, believing he had her agreement. Did he imagine her as his student, dutifully imbibing his rules of war? She would capitalize on his imaginings to learn what she wanted, then write to whomever she chose.

  “I guess you’re in luck,” she said, trying to make her tone friendly. “Dr. Yasmeen was the one who sent my letters for me.”

  He grimaced, then bowed his head in a way that recalled his visit to Fereshta’s grave. Yet he must have been secretly relieved, or at least put at ease, for he began to talk. Four of his soldiers had been staffing the checkpoint, he said, two of them new to country. There was intelligence about possible suicide attacks, and his men had been briefed on these threats. No doubt it had put them on edge. As Parveen knew, the doctor had for weeks now been driving onto the base so that she could be brought to the village by helicopter. But the soldiers, maybe because they were new, or maybe because they were stationed some distance down the highway, didn’t recognize her car. It came fast and it wouldn’t stop. They assumed—had to assume, based on the intelligence—that the car itself was an IED or that the driver planned to run them over. Trotter hoped Parveen could see that under those conditions, they had no choice but to engage. His soldiers were still sorting out who among them had fired first, Trotter continued. They couldn’t rule out that they’d been fired upon.

  The way he related all of this, it was almost as if he expected Parveen to sympathize with him for the burden of having to reconcile such a crosshatch of conflicting testimonies. But sympathy was far from what she delivered. Naseer would never have done anything to endanger his mother, she told Trotter vehemently. That was all the colonel needed to know about him. He’d put out lunch for Dr. Yasmeen every week! “You met him,” she said. “You flew on a helicopter with him. He wanted to talk to you about photovoltaic technology or whatever it was. He wasn’t a terrorist; he was a nerd. He was a teenager.”

  In a theater of war, Trotter said, one where boys started fighting before their balls dropped, there were no teenagers, only military-age males. The enemy embedded itself in the population, took advantage of the population. You never knew where the next attack was coming from or how it was going to look. An old man could be just an old man, or he could be the enemy’s newest recruit. Trotter spoke as though his words were bricks building a defensible wall, and he seemed surprised that he had to explain all of this to Parveen. Given the strain his men were under, he felt they’d shown remarkable impulse control. Some of them wanted to be driving down the road shooting anything that moved. How were they supposed to respect people who were trying to kill them? He was asking—ordering—his boys to suppress the completely natural response to fight back. More than natural; they’d been trained for it, trained to kill. It’s what they’d signed up for. And now in this war they were having the rules of engagement changed on them every single day, sometimes more than once a day. “He should’ve obeyed the commands,” he finished.

  Parveen wished she could stretch up her arm and scratch Trotter’s face, the only breach in his carapace. A balloon of sorrow and rage had swelled so thickly in her throat that it was blocking her breath. Maybe violence could free it. Wanting, at least, to be closer to his level, she struggled to her feet, her limbs stiff with cold, and leaned against the wall for support.

  Perhaps because of her movement, he began to talk about the day they’d met. It might have turned out differently if it had happened today, he said. She’d taken her time disclosing who she was, he reminded her. She hadn’t spoken all the way to the graveyard and back. He’d thought she was Waheed’s wife. Then, after the shura, she’d walked toward him with a directness so out of character for an Afghan woman that he’d thought, just for a moment, she might be weaponized. If his men were less disciplined, they might have shot her. Instead, she came up to him, opened her mouth, and starte
d speaking perfect English, which was the last thing he was expecting. He mustered an unconvincing smile at the memory. He and his men were jittery now, he said. They’d been made that way. Today, in that same situation, with Parveen walking toward him, there would be one second to think, and what he would inevitably think was It’s either her or me.

  Then he quoted Clausewitz to her—“‘War is the realm of uncertainty’”—and added, “The fog of war, it’s real, Parveen. At any single moment in any given combat situation, it’s hard to see or know exactly what’s going on.”

  “But this wasn’t a combat situation. They were just driving along a highway.”

  “We thought it was a combat situation, and we had to react accordingly.”

  They could snipe at each other all day, Parveen thought. It wouldn’t change a thing. The doctor and her son would still be dead. Just outside this clinic wall, at Parveen’s suggestion, Dr. Yasmeen had stood in front of her battered car to testify that the road badly needed improving. Would that video still serve as propaganda for this mission, Parveen wondered, even though the car was full of bullet holes and the woman who’d been interviewed was dead? For eternity, perhaps, in an obscure corner of YouTube, Dr. Yasmeen would be praising the American initiative that had killed her. But determined to preserve the illusion of a truce with Trotter, Parveen spoke none of this aloud.

  Trotter said that he was working on finding a replacement for Dr. Yasmeen, but given the scarcity of female doctors in the province, it might take some time. He asked, his tone nearly plaintive, “What can we do? For the village, I mean. How can we make things right? I’m not unaware of how damaging this is. We’re here to help, and then…if you have any thoughts…” He trailed off.

  She had no thoughts, and her silence made this clear. His willingness to ask her advice wouldn’t make her agree to whitewash his mistake.