A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  Platitudes had a certain altitude, Parveen thought, which could be seductive when things got bad. Kevlar talk, she would come to call this—language that sounded as though it had been issued just like the uniforms and body armor had, language that protected you against the existential questions. Against doubt. Even Trotter the philosopher, Trotter the classics expert, was not immune to it.

  The clinic—that white glowing building—had always looked, in this earth-toned landscape, like a pill slipped from God’s pocket. Now bullet holes pocked the walls broken windows gaped, and the courtyard glittered with shattered glass. Trotter said they would get the engineers in to look at starting repairs, and it angered Parveen that he would think Crane’s white elephant worthier of fixing than the villagers’ shops.

  After telling the colonel that she wanted to check on Latifa, Parveen picked her way across the shards. She went inside and upstairs to Latifa’s bed. Which was empty. Parveen stared and stared. Of course—she was hiding, Parveen thought. She would’ve been terrified when the firing started from the roof. Parveen looked under the beds, in closets and corners, in every room. No Latifa. Worse, the incubator was empty too. Both gone. How? Had the insurgents dragged her off? Had she run?

  Parveen couldn’t think clearly, and when she went outside she told Trotter that Latifa was fine. Shaken, but fine. She lied by instinct, nothing more, a sense that she should find Latifa herself and that Trotter’s help would only complicate things.

  “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?” he asked, and she realized that her tone had suggested otherwise, and also that Trotter expected gratitude for exercising the restraint she’d demanded. “It’s great,” she said. “Thank you.”

  The colonel asked if Latifa had seen the insurgents or knew anything about how or when they’d gotten up to the roof.

  “She was asleep when it started. She didn’t see anything.”

  Trotter seemed to accept this. But Parveen couldn’t stop puzzling over where Latifa might be. She was so preoccupied that she didn’t hear Trotter telling her she should go pack up until he repeated it. “You’ve got a spot on the next helicopter out of here,” he said.

  “But I’m not leaving,” she said. “I can’t.”

  She couldn’t leave without finding Latifa. But also, here was Trotter confirming exactly what Aziz had said and what she was sure the villagers thought, which was that as an American, with an American’s privileges, she could end her sojourn and call for rescue whenever danger threatened. Part of her wanted to be rescued, wanted to fly with Aziz away from the danger and chaos of the village into a hazy romantic future. But the paradox was that doing so would prove him right, and he would think less of her. And part of her disdained the idea of rescue altogether; she was stubborn that way. She wasn’t some damsel in distress who needed Trotter to ride in on his M-ATV to save her. Besides, the doctor’s death had made Parveen newly essential. She couldn’t abandon the women to the hands of the dai; Dr. Yasmeen wouldn’t want that.

  It was true that during the battle she’d been determined to get home to her father, her sister, her nephew. But surviving had given her a sense of immortality, accompanied by an adrenaline rush that, as it wore off, had her craving more. This was what the soldiers she’d talked to that day outside the khan’s—one of whom was now dead and another wounded—had been trying to tell her. That she would miss this. That there was no rush to get to whatever life awaited her in California.

  She wasn’t leaving, she told Trotter again. The villagers needed her.

  His mouth thinned to a grim line. He couldn’t make her go, he said, but he could see where her staying would lead. She’d get in a jam and they’d have to come back for her at a high cost to taxpayers and at great risk to his troops. “You’re going to put lives in danger if you stay, Parveen. You think you’re doing good, but this is selfish.”

  His words cut deep enough to make her reconsider, but she held firm. “The women here don’t have a doctor anymore,” she said, trying to inflict pain on him in return. “I’m all they’ve got.”

  She accompanied Trotter and Aziz back to the khan’s field, where they would get on the waiting Chinook.

  “Last chance,” Trotter said.

  She shook her head. Her ankle throbbed.

  Before he boarded, he told her that if she needed him, she should get the word Berkeley to his men. Say it, write it, sing it, whatever she had to do, and his men would get it to him.

  Parveen knew he was just doing his job; he was nothing if not professional. But she was grateful nonetheless.

  Then he turned his attention elsewhere, which gave her a few furtive moments with Aziz. “Come with us,” he whispered in Dari. “You’re not safe here.”

  His words nearly convinced her. But pride, stupid pride—imagining Trotter’s satisfaction when she climbed on board—held her back.

  Aziz hastily touched her fingers, urged her to be careful, and said that he would pray for her.

  PARVEEN LIMPED TO WAHEED’S, then collapsed in her room as soon as she reached it. The children crowded in, both relieved and delighted to see her. “We thought you were dead,” Hamdiya said. The force of their hugs affirmed her decision to stay.

  They fetched Bina, who examined Parveen’s bulbous ankle with the same combination of gentleness and detachment she used on her beloved cows. The queen of remedies had one for Parveen too—she left and returned with a chopped onion contained in a soft cloth, which she placed on Parveen’s ankle.

  Parveen asked, as Bina adjusted the poultice, if she knew that the doctor was dead.

  Yes, Bina said, showing little emotion. Death was not a novelty for her. She merely posed a few factual questions that Parveen couldn’t answer: Who had washed the body for burial? Where was the car?

  “There’s something else,” Parveen said, and she told Bina that Latifa was not in the clinic.

  “Yes,” Bina answered without surprise. Her eyes, when she lifted them to Parveen’s, were calm.

  How was that possible? Parveen asked.

  “We have been good to you, yes, Parveen-jan?” Bina whispered.

  “Very good.”

  “Then be good to us.”

  “I—of course.” Parveen waited for more.

  “Jamshid is his father’s eldest. Help keep him safe.”

  “What would make him unsafe?”

  Bina took the poultice off the ankle, opened it, shook up the onions, rewrapped them, and placed the poultice exactly as it had been.

  “His new friends,” Parveen guessed.

  The barest flicker of a nod.

  “He helped them get onto the clinic roof.”

  Silence.

  “Did he take Latifa out?”

  “He protected her,” Bina said. “She is home, she and the baby both.”

  Parveen instinctively removed her ankle from Bina’s touch. Her face burned, and her ears buzzed. Jamshid had saved Latifa, but he hadn’t tried to protect Parveen, with whom he’d shared a house all these months, by whom he’d been taught. Nor had the other villagers. They’d called their children from the clinic courtyard and left Parveen out there exposed. Of all people, only the dai had suggested that she go home.

  “So Jamshid knew it was going to happen,” she said finally. “Did you, Bina?”

  When there was no answer, for the first time Parveen thought to be as afraid as Trotter wanted her to be. They didn’t see her as one of them. She wasn’t one of them. If they’d told her, she would have warned Trotter—what other choice would there be? She couldn’t have allowed anyone to walk into an ambush. But if she confirmed the colonel’s suspicion that the villagers had known the attack was coming and that perhaps some had facilitated it, he would come down on them all indiscriminately.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Between the Far Sky

  and Hard Earth

  IT WAS THE IMAGE OF JAMSHID AND HIS FRIENDS WATCHING EXpressionless as she wept over the doctor’s killing that Parveen couldn’t shake.
The lack of surprise on his face. He’d already known that Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer were dead. She hazarded that he’d found out about the killing a day or two before the rest of the family, the news traveling faster in whispered messages over mountain passes among the insurgents than it did along the road. As she and Bina and the others speculated about the doctor’s whereabouts, as they joked about the BBC report and the warrior Malalai, he must have been seething inside.

  When word came that the Americans were on their way to the village, the insurgents, aware that Waheed controlled the clinic, sought access to it through his oldest child. From its roof, they would hold the high ground. They knew the fog as sailors knew tides; they knew how much time it gave them, how much cover. Jamshid provided the keys and asked the women to evacuate Latifa. When Parveen went out to talk with Trotter, mother and baby were hurried out, probably through the back entrance.

  But this was just a theory, one she didn’t know how to test with Jamshid. He wanted to talk only about the Americans, to hear how they explained the deaths of Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer. He was so insistent that she saw no choice but to share what she’d learned. Waheed, within earshot, said little, but he didn’t object to his son’s questions.

  “So any of us could be killed,” Jamshid said hotly, “if we don’t follow the Americans’ orders. If we drive too fast or too slow. If we don’t hear them or we hear them and choose not to listen. If we’re in the wrong place.” For any of these things, he repeated, they could be killed. But it was their land. How could there be such a thing as a wrong place? If there could be, then they had no freedom in their own country.

  In that statement was a history every Afghan knew—a history of imperial armies that had attempted to conquer and subdue Afghanistan. The British. The Soviets. And now the Americans. As Jamshid saw it, the elders and his father had been right to oppose the road: “The Americans came here saying they could solve our problems,” he said, “but they only grow them.”

  The same could be said of the insurgents, Parveen thought, but not in Jamshid’s mind. He had chosen a side, and she wasn’t sure whether to blame him. She supposed she couldn’t even say definitively that he’d chosen; it was possible he’d been coerced. Threatened. Yet somehow, she didn’t think so.

  Young people, it occurred to her, were like foreigners in their own culture: they could see clearly what the natives—the adults—no longer did. Jamshid understood that there was no such thing as a benevolent occupation. In other contexts, Parveen had known this too. She’d been raised, for instance, to sympathize with Palestinian kids throwing stones at the Israeli defense forces. How else were they to resist? Against power, there was only canniness, deception, or symbolism—the fly razzing the beast, maybe even driving it mad. Unlike adults, young people didn’t build hedges out of reasons not to act. Not so very long ago Parveen had been consumed by that same passion, that same impulsiveness. It had brought her here.

  She was as angry about the doctor’s death as Jamshid was, yet she felt obliged to temper his wrath, to push him to see the other side. The Americans were acting this way because they were frightened, she said. Because they were being attacked just for trying to build a road. They’d made an awful mistake.

  Then, unable to help herself, when Waheed went to the outhouse she asked Jamshid directly if he’d let the insurgents into the clinic.

  “‘If the mullah invites himself to dinner, you must accept,’” he replied.

  SHE HAD TO LEAVE, this much was clear now, but she’d turned down Trotter’s offer. And she was stuck not just in the village but in the house, where Waheed, for her safety, insisted that she remain. This precluded her from visiting Latifa and learning who’d smuggled her and the baby out of the clinic.

  Mother and child were fine, Waheed would say whenever she expressed concern. She’d refrained, for reasons she didn’t entirely understand, from telling him what she knew, what she suspected, about Jamshid. It seemed better, safer, to leave it unspoken.

  In a way her confinement was a relief. Paralysis had set in, leaving her uncertain what course to take. She understood now that there was no such thing as an innocuous interaction with the villagers; there were always repercussions, always collateral damage, for others. The freedom in being an American that she’d boasted of early on—carnage could come from it too.

  The only mention of the battle on the BBC was a report that two American soldiers had been killed and two wounded in a firefight in the district—nothing about the circumstances surrounding the casualties, nothing about the clinic’s destruction. Nothing that would tell anyone that this battle had taken place in Fereshta’s village. The world knew whatever the Americans decided should be known.

  Waheed left the compound only when necessary. He took to fetching water himself, not wanting his wives or his children to walk down to the river. Every other man did the same. The bazaar was closed, as was the mosque, which had also been strafed by the Apaches. The village was eerily empty, while the skies, through which American planes, helicopters, and drones regularly crossed, were full. In the distance the occasional explosion sounded. One day Jamshid reported, flatly, that the meadow was gone. Via one of their drones or planes, the Americans had seen a group of men there—goatherds, insurgents, who could ever say?—and dropped a bomb.

  Days, then a week, passed this way. Sometimes, in the very early morning, Parveen would climb to the roof to survey the valley. Condensation hung above the river, as if the water had reconstituted itself more ethereally. The last blazes of yellow and orange had dampened, leaving a palette of rust and lead, and in the diminishing sunlight, the snow on the mountain peaks glittered. The first frost was close.

  The Americans had set up their combat outpost high above where the road came into the village. They chopped down trees that obscured their sight lines; they dug up earth to fill their sandbags. In metal barrels brought specially for the purpose, they burned their waste. The COP, as it was known, was named for Private Boone, while the road would be named for the dead driver whose last act had been to navigate it, just as roads, radio stations, and bases all over the country had been named for dead Americans, their history superimposed on the Afghans’.

  During the days, the soldiers patrolled the village and the mountains overhead, keeping a vigilant watch for any sign of insurgents. At the COP they worked out with pulleys and weights. Parveen thought, sometimes, about walking up to the outpost and asking to be taken home. But she remembered the doctor and Trotter’s description of his troops’ heightened state of anxiety. It was safer to stay away.

  When dark came—incrementally earlier each day—the family crept to bed. Waheed hadn’t turned the generator on since the battle. He was running low on fuel, and as Issa had made clear, no more would come. Besides, light would only draw unwanted attention—from the insurgents hiding in the hills or from the Americans overhead or from rivals like the mullah and the khan, who might use the conflict to expunge the source of their envy. It was not a good time to think yourself better than, or to be better off than, anyone else in the village. Waheed was sinking back to the position he’d occupied before Crane entered his life. He had as much control over this as he did over the passing clouds. Even so, his equanimity in the face of his diminishing status was striking; it was almost as if he’d always known he was merely on vacation in the guise of an important man, and now the trip was over.

  SHOKOH HAD BEGUN TO sob, as a child might, when she learned that Dr. Yasmeen and Naseer were dead, and for several days she barely stopped. Her eyes swelled shut, her voice grew hoarse. The family went about its business until Bina made clear she would tolerate no more. Then Shokoh grew sullen and dull, devoting her free time to dozing or lying next to the woodstove and staring blankly into space. The flush of energy, of hopefulness, that had bloomed with her pregnancy was gone. She no longer talked of the road and where it might take her. Her devastation began to seem out of all proportion to her relationship to the dead; it was as if she had been the doct
or’s own daughter or Naseer’s betrothed. Parveen’s efforts to talk to her about it were fruitless. Shokoh couldn’t explain it, Parveen suspected, even to herself. When she spoke, it was to complain—her head hurt, she couldn’t see well, she couldn’t pee, she was nauseated. It was as if having no doctor to treat her had made her aware of all the ways a body could fail. When Parveen tried to get her to write about her grief, Shokoh turned on her. “You just want poems to put in a book.”

  But Shokoh’s lack of luster didn’t exempt her from her domestic duties. Bina told Parveen several times that she herself had worked up until and even after her labors began. She expected the same of Shokoh. Parveen once would have said this was cruel, but her sympathies kept tilting back and forth, never finding the perfect place to rest. In Parveen’s time in the village, Bina had never gotten sick or even pretended to be sick, which Parveen would have done in her shoes, just to get a few hours off. Seen through Bina’s eyes, Shokoh was lazy and entitled, someone who wrapped herself in drama as armor against obligation. But then, as Shokoh groaned to her swollen feet—the same feet and ankles that had once been so delicate—and eased herself down the stairs to milk the cows, Parveen would repent of her own assessment. She wasn’t the only one who noticed Shokoh’s discomfort. More than once, Jamshid emerged from the house just in time to relieve her of the milk bucket and carry it to the kitchen.

  One late afternoon, Zahab ran upstairs shouting that something was wrong with Shokoh. Parveen found her outside, bent over, collared by golden light, shaking and foaming at the mouth. A cow with innocent eyes and impatient legs stood a few feet away. The bucket lay nearby on its side, the milk soaking the dirt. Rather than tend to the girl, Bina picked up the bucket. Was this simply an instinct for survival so muscled that it looked like callousness? Or did Bina think Shokoh was shirking?