A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  Parveen was shaking. She’d witnessed her mother’s death. She’d been holding her hand when it happened, but even though her breath had rattled a bit, that had been peaceful compared to this; it was as if her mother had walked across the line over which Boone had just been hurled.

  Then, with a searing boom, an M-ATV not forty feet away burst into flames, the heat so strong it singed her eyebrows. There were screams; inside, a driver was burning alive. Around her, men shouted terms she couldn’t understand—Fucking indirect! Where the fuck is close air?—as they tried to figure out the direction the RPG had come from. Gunners in the other M-ATVs launched grenades toward the hills as Trotter emerged suddenly from the smoke and pointed.

  In the passing seconds, Parveen’s thoughts slowed with painful clarity and remorse. Her every mistake loomed up before her, none more than ignoring her father’s letter pleading with her to come home. Why hadn’t she listened? She pictured him and Taara receiving news of her death, only a few years after her mother’s. For that reason alone, she decided that she had to survive—she couldn’t make them endure another loss. She wouldn’t be passive anymore; she wouldn’t yield.

  Trotter was blitzing out instructions: “Make smoke! Head to the mosque!”

  “Careful, careful” from Charlie to Mandy as they and two other soldiers prepared to ferry away the dead and the wounded.

  Then again the billow of yellow smoke: another grenade. No longer able to see, Parveen stopped. Gunfire popped and voices sounded all around her. Someone was shouting her name.

  “Aziz?” she called in reply.

  “Which way is the mosque?” he said with a note of panic. “I’m turned around.”

  “Follow my voice,” she told him, suddenly confident. She knew the terrain between the clinic and the mosque better than anyone around her. Faint images emerged through the smoke—other soldiers, but also the trunks of trees she recognized. Little by little, scraping along on their hands and knees, they made their way to the mosque.

  In its courtyard she fought to catch her breath, her lungs burning in the thin mountain air. Perhaps afraid of offending, none of the soldiers went into the mosque itself. Instead, at least a dozen of them, including the medics with their dead and two wounded men, sheltered along with Parveen and Aziz in the small courtyard beneath the paltry wall. Parveen moved close to Aziz, having settled on him as her protector. Around her, smoke-reddened eyes peered out from grimy faces. Two soldiers on their bellies pointed their weapons out the courtyard opening, ready to blast anyone who approached. Others aimed over the low wall or tried to force holes into its chinks, the mosque now a makeshift fort. Speech compressed to murmured orders and curses.

  Then, in the distance, rotor blades beat the air, and the soldiers gave half smiles and quiet fist pumps. Soon two helicopters—smaller, darker, meaner than the kind that used to ferry the doctor and her son to the village—swung into view.

  “Hellfire that fucking clinic,” a soldier muttered.

  Remembering Latifa, Parveen shouted, “No!” and crawled a short distance to Trotter, who was crouched in a corner next to the radio operator. She told him a woman and her newborn were in the clinic. “If you hit the clinic, you’ll kill them,” she said. “You can’t just keep killing innocent—”

  Trotter cut her off with a glare as if he wished the Apaches could take her out instead. It seemed as if he thought forever, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. “No clinic,” he said to his radio operator, who, after a pause, transmitted the order, and a chorus of Fucks broke out around them.

  Then gunshots burst from the mosque right behind them and everyone dropped back to the ground and Trotter’s men unleashed a torrent of bullets on the structure. Aziz again grabbed Parveen’s hand, and on their bellies they shimmied across the dust of the courtyard; after reaching the gate, they ran hunched over to the bazaar, twenty yards away, where they hid in the first stall they came to, the tailor’s. Gunfire crackled like burning wood, the rare pauses sodden with tension. Parveen, high on having survived the fiercest part of the danger, unexpectedly laughed, and Aziz silenced her with a look.

  Then a skinny young insurgent with an unkempt beard who was bearing an AK-47 dashed into the blacksmith’s stall. Aziz, in his uniform, had no weapon. The two men stared at each other in surprise.

  “The Apaches, they’ll come here,” Aziz said in Dari. “We need to run.”

  And in almost slapstick fashion, the three of them took off all at once, the insurgent going in one direction, Aziz and Parveen in another. They sprinted down the path to the fields, then crawled across them, raked by thistles, harrowed by insects. Brittle stalks crunched beneath their weight and stabbed at their legs. Dirt and dried wheat tickled Parveen’s nose until she sneezed.

  At last they reached a row of poplar trees, their remaining leaves blazing yellow, and took shelter. They sat next to each other, their backs against a thin trunk, legs stretched out. Parveen, drenched in sweat, began to shiver in the cold. Her ankle, which she’d twisted, was throbbing. Her ribs ached. Her throat burned with smoke. She stared at the silver-white tree trunk next to her, its markings like watchful eyes.

  In the distance, back up the path, the Apaches hovered above the village. One of them fired into the bazaar again and again, blast after blast, smoke rising in answer. The noise rang down the valley, shattering its stillness. The other helicopter chased insurgents trying to flee. Aziz and Parveen clutched each other’s hands, not speaking, as the men gunned down in the fields toppled and fell. Soon there was no more movement on the ground.

  Parveen cleared her throat, trying to see if she still had a voice.

  “You’re okay?” he asked.

  “Scared.”

  “Me too.”

  For a long time they sat without talking.

  “This is okay?” Aziz said, then squeezed her hand, which was still clasped in his.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  Parveen didn’t know how much time was passing. The only units of measure were events, which came irregularly. The Apaches, after circling for a while and firing a few more shots into the bazaar, flew off, though they remained tattooed in her mind’s eye.

  They began to speak in broken streams, pausing often to listen for footsteps or voices, though they heard nothing.

  “I always felt sorry for Boone,” Aziz said. “He seemed to forever be saying the wrong thing. But he was so young—maybe he would’ve outgrown it.” Given Boone’s mouth, Reyes was constantly having to keep him out of trouble, to save him from himself. And from Kirby! Anyway, Aziz said, Reyes was like a big brother to Boone, always looking out for him, so Boone’s death would hit him like a brother’s. Reyes would feel responsible for failing to protect his friend. “I’ve seen this a lot,” Aziz said. “The ones who survive feel like they should’ve been killed instead.”

  Parveen thought about the letter Trotter would write to Boone’s family. No doubt it would play up his heroism, the sacrifice he’d made for his country. But in its own way, it would be as fictive as anything Gideon Crane had written. Absent would be Boone’s goofiness and crude jokes; absent would be the absurdity of his death, struck down as he loped along exchanging raps with his friend. The letter wouldn’t say that Boone had been scared just before he died, that he’d sensed something was coming. The truth about a death in a faraway war was both sacred and secret, Parveen thought. So many witnesses—commanders, fellow soldiers, innumerable Afghans—carried this kind of knowledge, yet they kept it to themselves. As, most likely, would Parveen.

  “What’d they die for?” she asked Aziz. Regardless of what Trotter might tell the men’s families, she said, it was hard to see the through line from dying in this village to protecting America. So had they died to protect Afghanistan?

  Aziz made a sound of understanding and said, “That’s the question, isn’t it. I know I wouldn’t want to die for someone else’s country. If I’m honest I don’t even want to die for mine. I’m not b
rave.” And yet, until the Americans showed up here, there had been nothing to defend. Aziz knew this as well as anyone else. “Will you leave this place now?” he asked.

  The question surprised her. She wouldn’t, she told him.

  “That’s because you can,” he said, and he withdrew his hand from hers to scratch his face. Her own hand felt naked now.

  She didn’t understand and told him so.

  “You don’t think about leaving because you know you can go whenever you want. I have no way to go, and so I think about leaving—this job, my country—all the time!” He said it lightly, as if it were an amusing paradox, but his face in profile was grave.

  Parveen swallowed. Why couldn’t he go? she said.

  There was no way out, he said. It wasn’t easy for an Afghan to get a visa to anywhere, not even to America, despite working, as he had for so many years, for the Americans. There were now “special immigrant” visas for those who were in danger from their employment with the Americans, but only fifteen hundred a year were issued, and you needed your superior to testify to your “faithful and valuable service” to the U.S. government. He wasn’t sure Colonel Trotter would do this. The colonel had been angry that Aziz had let him think everything in Crane’s book was true—Amanullah’s dastardly history, even the story of Fereshta’s death—and Aziz had been forced to confess that he hadn’t read it. This had diminished the colonel’s trust in him. This, then, was the trouble Aziz had been in.

  Then, more recently, he’d challenged Colonel Trotter about the doctor’s death and how he was handling it. It was the first time he hadn’t told the colonel what he wanted to hear. So in his way Aziz had been brave, Parveen thought; he’d stood up to Trotter even knowing what it might cost him.

  Aziz asked if she’d heard on the radio about the air strike in Kunduz. She had. And had she also heard about the reporter who had gone to investigate and been kidnapped by the Taliban?

  Yes, she said, but the news was that the reporter had been rescued.

  He was rescued, Aziz confirmed, by the British army, because he had a British passport. But the interpreter with him, a man who was said to have the purest character but who also had only an Afghan passport, was shot and killed during the rescue, then his body left behind, as if he wasn’t deserving of, wasn’t in need of, a proper burial. Local villagers had recovered the corpse and made sure it was returned to the family.

  It was partly because of this story, Aziz said, that he’d argued so fiercely with Colonel Trotter after the doctor’s death. At that point, of course, nothing could be done to save Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer, but even in death they deserved to be treated as humans, no less than any American. During the firefight in the village, it was this interpreter Aziz had thought of—that and whether Parveen was safe.

  She reached for his hand again and muscled her fingers through his. Adrift, they needed to hold tight.

  If you asked Colonel Trotter, Aziz continued, he wouldn’t say he valued an Afghan life any less than an American one. But of course he had to value American lives more, just as the soldiers believed they were justified in shooting at Dr. Yasmeen’s car to save themselves. It was the nature of war. Of nations. Of an occupation. “If I was shot, would anyone remember me?” he said. “Or would they leave me behind?” That was his fear: that when things became difficult, even though there were soldiers in this battalion who’d called him their brother, his life would matter less than theirs.

  “But Trotter said the day I met you that you’d done more deployments than any of his soldiers. That you should have combat stripes. He appreciates what you’ve done.”

  “You’re American, they’d save you” was all Aziz said, and Parveen could think of no reply. She didn’t want the passport she held to make her worthier of living.

  AFTER A TIME ANOTHER helicopter made landfall far off, in the khan’s field.

  “Medevac,” Aziz said.

  They rose from their tree and moved toward the helicopter. American soldiers had debarked and were running with stretchers toward the bazaar and the mosque. They returned with the wounded and also two body bags, black and anonymous, the purgatory preceding the flag-draped coffins in which Boone and the dead M-ATV driver would return home. The bags had handles for carrying, and Parveen couldn’t get past the thoughtfulness, as she acidly phrased it to herself, of the design, couldn’t get past the objects themselves, because it allowed her to avoid thinking about what they contained. War’s signal achievement, it struck her, was to strip the significance from individual deaths, to make them just numbers. These soldiers, like the doctor and her son, were motes of dust that would vanish when the light shifted.

  Except in the eyes of their intimates. Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer would never disappear from their family’s consciousness or Boone from that of his friends. Weak from loss of blood, the bullet still in his bandaged arm, Reyes nonetheless insisted on walking next to Boone’s body. Kirby and Vance were there with him, impromptu pallbearers all, yet with nothing to carry. Their eyes were vacant with grief, and Parveen grasped how much affection their roughness with one another had camouflaged.

  The copter was loaded with its human cargo, living and dead, and after a few shouts, unintelligible beneath the rotor’s noise, it lifted off. Charlie was on board with the wounded, who included Reyes, and also the soldier who’d believed himself to be bleeding out, to be dying. He was, almost unfathomably to Parveen, alive. The medics so far had saved him.

  Mandy stayed behind to help any villagers who might have been hurt, although everyone knew there were none. Noticing Parveen’s limp, she offered to take a look at her ankle, and, after pressing and twisting it enough to make Parveen wince in pain, she said it was only a sprain and that she should elevate and ice it. Parveen, while appreciative, also wanted to punch her; where did Mandy imagine that she would get ice?

  Trotter had already given orders to construct a combat outpost in the village. The war had come to stay. Even now, Parveen could picture his first, jolly approach across the fields, waving hello to Waheed. His optimism, his faith in his own intentions, had run up so quickly against the elders’ resistance. She wondered if they’d seen this coming—if when they said they didn’t want the road paved, they’d meant they didn’t want the war, knowing it would follow the Americans here. Waheed had said once, when Parveen asked how the village had changed since Crane, “Before any Americans came here, we were nothing. This village mattered to no one.”

  Within the hour, a Chinook landed in the khan’s field, and a batch of fresh soldiers, charged with adrenaline, boiled out the back. The grim survivors of battle filed in. They’d been victorious, yet they dragged with defeat. What was winning when two of their brothers had been lost and all the obliteration a superpower could summon would never resurrect them? The bravado with which the firefight would likely be described didn’t match the ashen, beleaguered faces of the soldiers who’d fought it.

  Trotter’s face was caked with black soot and white dust except for where runnels of sweat exposed red skin. He was more like Waheed than she’d realized—responsible, like a father, for keeping all his charges alive. In war, as in poverty, the odds were long. As the medevac took off, mourning contorted Trotter’s face. But within moments that expression had been replaced by something more chiseled. He still had a war to fight, and the mortal losses seemed to have redoubled his determination to win it.

  “I’m sorry,” Parveen said. “I’d talked with Boone—he seemed like a great kid.” That word sounded funny; he couldn’t have been more than a couple of years younger than she was. “Person,” she amended.

  “He was,” Trotter said. “Nicholson too. Fine boys, both.” He paused, then said, “We drove right into their trap.” Without looking at her, he asked, “Would you still say the people here haven’t chosen a side?” He already had his answer. Even with the battle over, not a single villager was in sight.

  “They’ve chosen survival,” she said, a lump in her throat, but he was walking a
way, marching along the fields toward the bazaar with Aziz and newly arrived soldiers, skittish and green, at his side.

  When the colonel was called to the dead bodies in the fields, Parveen limped behind. The insurgents’ remains were gruesome, pulverized by the Apaches’ giant bullets and caked with blood. At Trotter’s instruction, their eyelids were closed.

  Parveen gagged and wondered whether the young man who’d come into the stall was tailor’s in the ranks of the corpses. She caught Aziz’s eye, and as if reading her thoughts, he gave a subtle shake. No, that one wasn’t here. Aziz, in seeking to drive him out, had likely saved him.

  They walked up from the fields to the bazaar. Holes as big as heads perforated the walls and roofs of any stalls still standing. The rest were in cindery chunks, amid which she spotted a few more bodies draped at odd angles. The world she’d come to know, the one she’d imagined to be mapped within her, was gone. Only rubble remained.

  “The shops,” she said, distressed.

  They’ll rebuild, Trotter replied. Afghans were resilient, and it wasn’t exactly complex architecture. Maybe it would serve as a reminder that there was nothing to be gained from sheltering the enemy. Sometimes you had to attempt progress to find out who was in opposition to it. “We didn’t ask for this fight,” he said. “We came to build a road. And we didn’t fire the first shot, but you can be sure we’ll fire the last.”