A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  Could she at least provide guidance and interpretation for his medics? he asked, and when she agreed, he left the clinic courtyard so they could get to work.

  In her head, Parveen ran through the chronicle of the women’s complaints and needs that she’d made on Wednesday, when the doctor hadn’t arrived. Mira had preeclampsia; should Parveen check her blood pressure? Storai’s ankles had swollen again, elephant-big; was that normal? Anisa was complaining of pain during sex. Reshawna burned worse than ever when the urine came. Nadia had run out of her iodine tablets, and the mullah, fearful that the Americans might take him as they had the commander, was refusing to travel for more. Fatima had missed her period and was in tears at the prospect of another child so soon. Mashal had told Parveen of a lump in her breast; her husband, hardly observant, had noticed, so it must be large. What could you do for that?

  The medics, the first American females she’d seen since coming to the village, were disorienting. Their helmets were off, and from their hair—Charlie’s blond and butch; Mandy’s long and copper, catching the light—came a whiff of familiar, nearly forgotten American smells: baby shampoo, coconut, laundry detergent. For some reason, this made Parveen cry again.

  “I’d give you a hug but it probably wouldn’t feel that great,” Charlie said, knocking on her Kevlar-shielded chest.

  Although the joke was a lame one, it softened Parveen a bit. “I just don’t understand,” she blubbered. “Do you agree with Colonel Trotter? That they had no choice?”

  “We always agree with him,” Mandy said with a raised eyebrow. “He outranks us.”

  “Just like the private will agree with the sergeant who says the car was speeding,” Charlie added, “even if the private thought it was crawling. Honestly, once the shooting starts, it’s a shit-show trying to make sense of something like this.”

  Parveen asked if either medic had treated Yasmeen or Naseer, if they’d tried to save them. Charlie said she’d been sent to the scene as soon as they realized there was a woman in the car.

  “They wouldn’t let a male medic treat her?” Parveen asked in disbelief.

  “They’re trying to respect cultural sensitivities,” Charlie said. Sometimes, unfortunately, these different priorities tripped over each other. And the truth was that no one had been allowed to treat either of them at first. The unit had to scan the car and the bodies with robots to make sure nothing was booby-trapped. That was SOP. But she could see how upset Parveen was getting, and she hastened to add that she was pretty sure both the doctor and her son had died instantly. There’d been a lot of soft-tissue injuries, a lot of organ damage, she said, as if she were merely speaking to another medic. But when Parveen, unable to form words, simply stood there, rigid, Charlie said, “I know this doesn’t make anything better, but the soldiers—I think they felt terrible.”

  IF THEY WERE GOING to examine any women, Charlie and Mandy said, they should probably get started because Trotter wasn’t going to want to linger.

  Parveen looked around. The dai was watching them from her habitual spot beneath the tree. Should she tell her that the doctor, her erstwhile rival, was gone? Other than the dai, there wasn’t a village woman in sight. As usual when the Americans came, they’d stayed home. And she suspected that the women wouldn’t want to be treated by medics who, in their uniforms and body armor, were bigger than many of their husbands. Only children were in the courtyard. They kept daring one another to run over and touch Mandy’s red hair.

  Latifa, of course, was in the clinic, along with her baby. Parveen knew she should take the medics in to check both mother and child, but she couldn’t bear to go in there yet, knowing the doctor was dead.

  Mandy and Charlie stood awkwardly, then announced that they’d brought some pens and stuffed animals for the children. “Hearts and minds,” Mandy joked. “At least the little ones.” While they walked to their M-ATVs to get the swag, Parveen clapped her hands and called together the children. “Line up quietly,” she told them, “and you’ll be given something.”

  Mandy and Charlie and a few soldiers entered the courtyard carrying boxes, which they set down. The men exited, Mandy and Charlie opened the boxes, and the line of children exploded. Boys and girls barnacled themselves onto the two Americans, who, unable to move, began tossing pens and small stuffed cats and dogs to any outstretched hands they could reach. To Parveen, the toy animals, with their synthetic fur and big plastic eyes, looked garish and cheap, their hot pinks and electric blues artificially bright next to the natural palette of the village. But the children wanted them badly. Fights sprang up, tears ran, the strong stole from the weak. Children who lived cheek to flank with real animals, who could cuddle live calves and lambs anytime, were crying and screaming because they couldn’t get hold of plush ones. In no time the medics had been stripped of even the pens in their pockets. They stood frozen amid the mayhem.

  Soon after that the village teenagers—Jamshid and his friends—began to call their younger siblings home, virtually chasing them out of the courtyard, sometimes pulling them by the ears. Parveen, remembering the day of the HIIDE, wondered if this, too, was about asserting some kind of resistance to the Americans, or at least rejecting their efforts to buy the children’s goodwill.

  “Parveen-jan, you should go home too,” the dai called, then she herself left.

  But Parveen wasn’t going back to Waheed’s. She needed to find Aziz for both information and consolation. He was outside the clinic wall, smoking, of course, and the way he angled his head in sympathy when he saw her red, swollen eyes nearly made her cry again. Even as she stood stiffly a couple of feet from him, an imagined self, ungoverned by convention or propriety or fear, moved toward him, and the real Parveen watched with envy.

  Once Aziz began to talk, he didn’t stop. Because news of the shooting had come when Colonel Trotter was away at meetings in Kabul, Aziz had accompanied a captain to the checkpoint. He recognized the car right away. Naseer and his mother were inside. “Don’t make me describe it,” he begged Parveen. It was better if she didn’t have the pictures in her head; they were worse than she could imagine. Aziz had had no choice but to see. He lit one cigarette after another.

  When he informed the soldiers who the passengers were, they grew panicky, defensive. The incident had happened so fast they hadn’t had time to recognize the car, they said. The driver, whoever he was, had been bent on their murder, they insisted. Aziz listened to their stories evolve. Their arguments over who’d yelled or signaled which commands to the driver, the distance the car had been from them when they’d opened fire, and which soldier had shot first slowly cohered into a single version, defensible as a fortress. Although each of them had experienced the moments differently, with time, all of them would describe them the same way.

  From the Afghan laborers, Aziz secured different accounts. As was often the case in Afghanistan, it was hard to separate the directly observed from the secondhand. Some said the car had braked, others that it had continued driving slowly despite commands to stop. Had those commands been given in Dari as well as in English? Were there commands at all? One worker claimed the soldiers had been playing cards and the approaching white car had caught them by surprise. This possibility, with its suggestion of dereliction, Aziz had chosen not to relay to Trotter.

  The soldiers kept looking for ways to prove they’d been in the right. But a search of the car turned up no weapons, no explosives. Naseer’s iris and fingerprints matched no known insurgent’s. It was clear, at least to Aziz, and he suspected to some of the soldiers as well, that they had killed two completely innocent people. Of course, in the Americans’ eyes, these two weren’t innocent, because they hadn’t obeyed orders. So it was a terrible mistake, yet not a mistake, a contradiction that Aziz was finding hard to bear. Whose country was this?

  At dusk, he said, a full eight hours after the shooting, the soldiers returned to the base with both the bodies and the bloodied car. Aziz couldn’t sleep, thinking about Dr. Yasmeen’s hu
sband, who had to be wondering where his wife and son were. And according to the Muslim tradition, they needed to be buried as soon as possible, ideally within twenty-four hours of death.

  The next morning, as soon as Colonel Trotter came back, Aziz went to tell him that he thought the doctor’s husband should be notified immediately and the bodies returned. It was a painful, awkward conversation, he said, for the colonel still seemed to be scouting for—or maybe just hoping for—evidence that might put his soldiers in the clear.

  “Even with me, he was doing that,” Parveen said.

  Aziz nodded. There were the obvious reasons—how bad it looked and the revenge attacks it might spawn—but Aziz also had the sense that Colonel Trotter didn’t want his men, two of whom were only weeks into their deployment, to have this on their conscience. Part of being their leader was finding a way to make it clean. Who could blame him for wanting the dead to be insurgents? It was hard to justify his soldiers having shot a doctor, a female doctor, one of the few in the whole province, and her son.

  But Aziz kept insisting that there was no way to change the facts of what had happened or who Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer were. “You know Naseer wasn’t an insurgent, you know she wasn’t, you have to tell the family and let them be buried properly.” It was by far the most confrontational he’d ever been with Colonel Trotter, and he could see in the American’s face how unwelcome it was. But Aziz reminded the colonel that he’d always asked Aziz to interpret not just language but the culture. To bring the bodies to the doctor’s husband with an acknowledgment of the wrong that had been done wouldn’t make the situation better, but it might save it from becoming worse.

  Colonel Trotter balked at first, then did the right thing; he had Aziz call the husband. For Aziz the long silence over the phone line was like a punch beneath the ribs. Dr. Yasmeen’s husband came to collect the bodies of his wife and son. Aziz told him what he knew. Her husband was, as Parveen would have expected, an educated and dignified man. He seemed in complete shock, not least when Lieutenant Colonel Francis Trotter, on behalf of the United States of America, apologized to him.

  THE NEXT DAY, AZIZ said, on the advice of the provincial governor, Colonel Trotter decided to provide the doctor’s family with compensation: twenty-seven thousand dollars and three sheep. Aziz was sent to buy the sheep, which rankled him. He was from Kabul and knew nothing of livestock. The colonel was the one who’d grown up on a farm.

  Two soldiers escorted Aziz to the bazaar. On the way, the trio passed a shepherd grazing his herd. Aziz stopped to ask whether there would be sheep at the district bazaar today and also what he should look for when buying them.

  When the shepherd saw the soldiers, his eyes brightened—he imagined supplying a whole battalion with mutton and lamb. Upon learning that only three sheep were needed, he slumped a bit, then quickly revived and said that Aziz should take his.

  “The best ones,” Aziz replied.

  “For the best price,” the shepherd said. They both knew it would be exorbitant.

  Aziz told the soldiers that this man was the seller of the best sheep in the province and that by buying the sheep now rather than at the bazaar, they would get a better price, even though he knew the soldiers didn’t care about the price. They cared about finishing as quickly as possible. A month earlier and this might have been fun for them, larking about in the countryside, cracking sheep jokes. But the attacks on the road and at the checkpoint, where many of the soldiers believed they’d faced mortal danger, had played on their nerves. They wanted to get back on base. Although the shepherd’s attire—his ragged clothes, his plastic slip-on shoes, his dirty pakol, the old blanket slung over his shoulder—was what most Afghan men wore, the soldiers eyed him with suspicion. But they agreed nonetheless.

  Aziz inspected the small flock, shoving his hands into their dirt-brown fleeces to feel the muscle and fat beneath, peering into their ears, commanding the shepherd to show the teeth and lift the legs so he could look at the hooves. He realized he was performing for the soldiers, but he couldn’t say why. They seemed amused by all this and by the haggling that commenced once he’d selected the three sheep.

  When he finally told the soldiers the price, an amount that would feed the shepherd’s family for three months, they laughed. They’d spent more on their Oakley sunglasses. The sheep were loaded into the M-ATV. They stank, as sheep do; one of them shat, which made the soldiers curse wildly.

  That afternoon the sheep, along with the money and a more formal apology, were presented to the doctor’s bereft family. Colonel Trotter didn’t take Aziz along. Until then, he’d taken his interpreter everywhere.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Washing Blood with Blood

  AS SHE AND AZIZ SPOKE, PARVEEN GLANCED OCCASIONALLY AT Trotter, who was in a heated conversation with a captain and his intelligence officer next to the M-ATVs. His eyes roamed in agitation over the mountains and back toward the clinic, then he swiveled his head to study the bazaar and, presumably, the cropland and valley in the distance. His stare landed everywhere but on her, which only seemed to confirm the guilt she thought he should feel. It puzzled her, angered her, that even after having compensated the doctor’s family, he was still seeking a way to clear his men.

  “Elvis, where the fuck is everyone?” an approaching soldier called out. “Where are the villagers?”

  It was Boone, the one who’d made the mistake of teasing her about her mother’s wallpaper that day outside the khan’s house. And with him was Reyes, the one who’d warned her—presciently, she saw now—that it would be hard to leave.

  Her stomach plummeting, Parveen realized that not a single villager remained in the area. There was no one but her, Aziz, and the Americans.

  Aziz noticed it too. “They’ve all gone home,” he said with urgency. “Why are we still here? What are we waiting for?”

  “To get the shit kicked out of us,” Boone said.

  His eyes, like Trotter’s, were on the move, and now Parveen understood that it hadn’t been evasion but vigilance that she’d observed in the colonel.

  They were all stuck for the time being, Reyes explained. There’d been an attack at the turnoff from the highway, and they had to wait until it was cleared.

  “We should’ve fucking flown,” Boone said.

  “The fog,” Reyes reminded him.

  “Fog, my ass,” Boone said. “They want to show we still own the road. That we’re the boss. All they’re showing is that we’re stupid.”

  “Doesn’t take much to do that,” Reyes said, and he suggested they go tell the captain that Elvis thought they were fucked. The two soldiers drifted back toward the M-ATVs, with Reyes softly rapping: “‘N-now, th-that that don’t kill me can only make me stronger.’” Boone came in louder, as if to scare off any threats: “‘There’s vomit on his sweater already, Mom’s spaghetti. He’s nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready…’”

  “Mom’s spaghetti” was still in Parveen’s head when the first shots sounded. Although she’d grown used to seeing guns, she’d never heard actual gunfire and was slow to react. She was saved only by virtue of being next to the courtyard wall, which shielded her, and by Aziz slamming her to the ground, his body, armor and all, atop hers. She had the faint thought that he’d broken her ribs. They lay against the wall as the soldiers scrambled to figure out where their attackers were, then began to return fire, sending hundreds of rounds toward the clinic. It was from its roof, perhaps the one place Trotter might not have expected, that the ambush had been launched.

  Latifa, Parveen thought in horror as bullets clattered against the building’s walls and its windows shattered. Her newborn. She hoped that if they survived this initial onslaught, Latifa would have sense enough to get her baby and hide under the bed.

  “We’ve got to move!” Aziz shouted in her ear. Bullets skipped through the dust near them and plinked off the wall above. “Follow me!”

  He scrambled away on his belly but Parveen didn’t. Coul
dn’t. Instead, she stretched her body out against the wall, her face to it, and prayed that no bullet would find her. Her senses were charged but her muscles paralyzed. Then a cloud of yellow smoke obscured everything, and someone was tugging her by the back of her coat as though she were a sandbag. She closed her eyes and surrendered to being dragged, nearly serene except for the grit abrading her face and, despite her clothes, stripping her skin. When she opened her eyes, she was behind one of the M-ATVs. Aziz had pulled her to safety.

  As if in the heightened colors and slowed time of a dream, Parveen saw that she was in a makeshift hospital, the patients laid out in the dust. To her left Charlie was tending to a soldier whose blood soaked his uniform and the ground beneath, resurrecting the specter of Latifa’s skirt of blood as she’d hemorrhaged.

  “I’m bleeding out, I’m dying, I’m dying,” he cried. “Oh, fuck, I’m bleeding out.”

  “Shhh, stay calm, you’ll be fine,” Charlie said.

  From her right Parveen heard “Morphine, morphine.” Nausea buckled her knees when she turned toward the moaning to see a soldier missing a chunk of his face. “Morphine,” he said again, as if trying to hold to life with the word. Parveen couldn’t believe that he was still breathing, let alone speaking. She stared at him, at the pale eyes flapping open and closed like wings pumping in slow flight. It was Boone.

  “The morphine’s in, it’ll kick in in a sec, squeeze my hand,” Mandy urged him. “You’re not going anywhere. Squeeze, damn it, squeeze!”

  Inwardly, Parveen urged the same.

  There was a scuffle of dust as another soldier scooted toward them. It was Reyes, clutching his bleeding arm. Mandy shouted that someone, anyone, should put a pressure dressing on the wound. But when another soldier tried, Reyes shouldered him off. “Boone, listen, it’s me!” he said. “Listen, you’ve only got sixteen days on your fucking countdown, man. Sixteen days! Don’t give up now. I should’ve told you the real reason not to count: it’s bad luck, it’s bad luck. Shit like this always happens near the end. But you’re almost home—” Reyes was crying now, though, because he’d seen what Mandy had, which was the private’s eyes rolling back in what remained of his face. “Fight, Boone, fight it,” he said through gritted teeth, but Mandy, after putting a stethoscope on his chest and hearing nothing, was calling for a body bag, and now Reyes wept shamelessly. Mandy put a hand on his back and then, without him noticing, applied the pressure dressing to his arm.