A Door in the Earth

by Amy Waldman

  Then Shokoh collapsed to the ground, her breathing rapid, her eyes closed. Parveen and Bina both knelt over her, calling her name, pressing her hands, lifting her eyelids. After a minute or so she came to and asked if the cow had kicked her. They didn’t know. They helped her into Parveen’s room to rest. She slept fitfully until dinnertime.

  That night Parveen begged Bina to let her assume all of Shokoh’s chores. “We both know I can milk as well as she can.”

  Bina laughed, knowing this was more of a dig at Shokoh than a boast by Parveen, who had, it was true, tried milking a few times over the summer. She found she enjoyed it, enjoyed connecting to the world through not just her brain but her hands—the soft hide, the rubbery udders, the spurt of warm milk. She couldn’t say she was adept, and Bina definitely wouldn’t say that, but she agreed that Parveen wouldn’t be any more useless than Shokoh, especially in Shokoh’s current state.

  As they worked together the following morning—baking, milking—Bina talked. She told stories of the animals her family had kept in her childhood, of the games she’d played with her siblings and friends. She described Fereshta’s wedding to Waheed, remembering how the impish expression of the young boy who’d played the harmonium in the women’s area had made all of them laugh, and the girl cousin with whom Bina had climbed a tree to spy on the men, who were dancing and playing cards. Fereshta had cried when she left home with Waheed, just as Bina herself would cry many years later. Some of her own tears, Bina admitted shyly, had been because she had always believed she would marry a cousin with whom she’d played those same childhood games. Instead, just like she’d always been given her elder sisters’ old dresses, she’d been given her sister’s old husband too.

  Her journey to Waheed’s, on the back of a borrowed donkey, was the first time she’d left her village. They climbed high in the mountains. At the top of the pass, before descending to the next valley, she turned back to look at what she was leaving behind. “I saw it whole,” she said, then cupped her hands. “I saw it small.”

  The journey took two days, and that whole time there was little conversation between the two other than Waheed asking if she was thirsty or hungry. Her first days in his house were trying—so much to learn, to do. She’d inherited six children, but as the youngest in her own family, she’d had very little experience caring for any child, let alone six at once! When she kept mixing up the twins, they told her their mother had never done that. Only God had given her the strength to go on, Bina insisted, although Parveen urged her to give herself more credit. The first time Bina lay with Waheed, which was the first time she had lain with anyone, she cried. She didn’t want her sister to be forgotten, and yet she also worried that Waheed was thinking about Fereshta rather than her. The sex itself was painful too, and for her this never changed. In that sense Shokoh’s arrival had been a relief but in no other, for Bina had come to care for Waheed and believed he cared for her too, which was why his marrying Shokoh had so destroyed her. But what could she do? she said. Where could she go? This was her life. She had to make peace with it. And now she met Parveen’s eyes directly. “This is my home,” she said. “This is my family. I will do everything I can to protect them.”

  Which was when Parveen realized that Bina’s sudden openness with her had a point, all of this meandering talk a destination: it was her way of warning Parveen that her presence here was endangering what Bina had inherited, what she had made.

  “Waheed will never ask you to leave,” she said. Parveen was his guest; his honor demanded that he protect her. His hospitality would hold. The question was whether Parveen, in choosing to stay, was abusing it.

  THE THREAT CAME A couple of nights later, when Bilal found a letter near the door of the compound. American, go home or the family will pay, it said in Dari. And yet, reading it, Parveen felt strangely calm. She fingered the paper, its size and lines clearly matching her own notebook from which, she deduced, it had been torn. She traced the handwriting, which she also recognized, because it was she who’d taught Jamshid to write some of these very words: American, home, family.

  Had she become the enemy to him? Or was this an act of protection? Perhaps he was trying to warn her, as Bina had, telling her that she was putting the family in danger or that she herself was in danger. A foreboding squeezed her lungs. Jamshid was no longer under Waheed’s control. Parveen didn’t know what he would do if the insurgents demanded that the family turn her over to them. Perhaps they were already making this demand.

  If Waheed knew that Jamshid had written the letter, he didn’t say. He did say that, for Parveen’s safety, she should start sleeping with the children upstairs. Where once she’d disdained the idea of sharing that crowded room, now there was nowhere else that she wanted to be. But she didn’t sleep much. By the single lantern left burning, she tried to memorize faces that looked like masks in the glow, the funky smell of so many bodies pressed together, the soundtrack of their sleeping—sighs, snores, the occasional sharp cry. The warmth.

  For his part, Jamshid seemed almost monk-like, alone with his thoughts in the bustle of the house. He ate little and dropped weight, his cheekbones protruding, his eye sockets deepening. Parveen wondered if he was squirreling food away for the insurgents or preparing to go into the mountains himself. Then again, the whole family was eating less. Winter was essentially at hand, the temperatures in the thirties. And Waheed, not immune from the insurgents’ demands himself, had turned over a goat, he told Parveen after the fact.

  One night as they ate chicken—an old rooster that Bina had killed and cooked only because if they waited any longer he’d be too tough to eat—Jamshid emerged from his brooding to hold up a bone and ask Parveen if she knew what Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban, had said about Osama bin Laden.

  “Jamshid,” Waheed said firmly.

  Parveen waited without reply.

  Jamshid, undeterred, continued. “Mullah Omar said, ‘He’s like a bone stuck in my throat. I can’t swallow it, nor can I spit it out.’”

  He was talking about her, Parveen knew. “I guess the Americans got him out,” she whispered. “They got the bone out.” For although the military hadn’t yet caught bin Laden, they’d driven him from Afghanistan.

  “They removed the throat as well,” Waheed observed, because Mullah Omar, too, had been forced out of the country.

  Jamshid put the bone in his mouth and coughed, pretending to choke.

  SHOKOH HAD A SECOND seizure early one morning. Parveen, called by Waheed, found her foaming at the mouth as her muscles convulsed. It lasted less than a minute, yet it felt like forever. When Shokoh came to, she had no memory of what had transpired. Sitting at Shokoh’s side as she shifted futilely in search of comfort, Parveen feared the girl might die. She racked her brain for the possible cause of Shokoh’s fits. Her best guess, based on the informal tutelage of Dr. Yasmeen, was eclampsia. It would explain the symptoms whose danger Parveen had overlooked: the bloating, the difficulty urinating, the headaches, all of which could be caused by excessively high blood pressure. Parveen squeezed her eyes shut and tried to conjure the doctor, her full, smiling face, her smooth skin, and for a few moments it was as if she heard the doctor talking to her about the woman the mullah had choked because of her seizures—seizures caused by eclampsia. She remembered Dr. Yasmeen saying that maybe she should’ve given the woman magnesium sulfate or tried to induce labor.

  Parveen asked Waheed to take her to the clinic to look for magnesium sulfate. They walked slowly so as not to alarm the Americans in their nearby COP. Parveen didn’t know any of the soldiers, who were new, and she called out to them that she was just looking for medicine.

  In the clinic, her feet crunched over bullets and shards of glass. She found magnesium sulfate but put it back when she realized it had to be given intravenously; she wasn’t about to try sticking a needle in Shokoh. Nor did she have a way to make a baby come if it wasn’t ready. Maybe the dai had a potion—an herb culled from the hills, a root yan
ked from a mountain crevice—that could draw a baby out of a girl, but Parveen doubted it. And even if she did, then what? Parveen remembered Shokoh’s slim figure in the examining room and the doctor’s words about the risks that delivery posed for a girl whose pelvis wasn’t yet fully formed. She’d been lucky enough to save Latifa. She didn’t think she’d be able, on her own, to save Shokoh too.

  The next day, when Bina rose at dawn to start her day’s work, Parveen followed her to the kitchen. Bina lit the oven and began to make the bread. She nodded, as if she’d been expecting Parveen, and silently passed her some dough to knead.

  “Shokoh has to leave the village,” Parveen said. “She needs a doctor.”

  “It will pass, she’ll be fine,” Bina said, her old sharpness back.

  “But if it doesn’t? It’ll be too late to get help.”

  “So? What choice do we have?” The veins popped on the back of her hands as she kneaded the dough. She had the strongest hands of any woman Parveen had ever known.

  “I want to take her out of the village.”

  The hands froze. “And how would you do that?”

  “I’ll ask the Americans to take us.” Parveen paused. “Both of us.” The idea had come to her in the night; there was a way to save Shokoh that, as it happened, could also save Parveen. Shokoh would be Parveen’s donkey, and Parveen hers. “I’ll say she needs to be rescued. That if she isn’t, she might die.”

  “Both of you,” Bina repeated.

  “I couldn’t send her alone.”

  The truth, of course, was that Trotter wouldn’t come for Shokoh alone. But as Aziz had reminded Parveen, as Trotter himself had reminded her, if an American needed help, the colonel would send it. When he did, Parveen would insist that they take both her and Shokoh. She was trying to avoid admitting, even to herself, that Trotter had been right in his final speech to her.

  The hands unfroze and began to knead again, forcefully now, as if punishing the dough. Parveen would always carry with her the image of Bina poring over the photographs in Crane’s book, her finger on each one as if to pin it in place. These glimpses of a world she would never see or know.

  “You think I can’t take care of her,” Bina said. “Or that I won’t.”

  “No!” Parveen was taken aback. “No, that’s not it at all. She needs a hospital—she’s in real danger. And you need to take care of Latifa.” Parveen had a flash of insight just then, and of regret. It was Bina, not Parveen, whom Dr. Yasmeen should’ve been training. Was there still time? Before Parveen left, she would teach Bina what she could. How she’d stopped Latifa’s bleeding. How to use the suction cups. When to challenge the dai and when to help her. It would place yet another burden on Bina, but Parveen understood her better now. For Bina, being of use gave meaning to a life in which she otherwise had little say.

  Bina asked if Waheed knew what Parveen was planning to do. Not yet, Parveen said; she’d wanted to tell Bina first. For this, she got a quarter-smile.

  SHE’D EXPECTED WAHEED TO protest. Instead, when she told him that she wanted to contact the Americans for help, he asked if they would bring a doctor or take Shokoh to a hospital, and if they took her, whether Parveen would escort her. Parveen assured him that she would. He thought for a moment, nodded, then said that she should summon them. No emotion accompanied this directive. His motives were inscrutable.

  She wrote out a message—Col. Trotter: I need to go / Berkeley. Waheed thought it a bad idea for her to be seen talking to the soldiers at the COP, and she wondered if it was safe for her even to approach them. More and more, she had this awareness of belonging to neither side, of being distrusted by everyone. But despite the tensions in the village, the soldiers remained friendly to the children, and so the note was entrusted to Bilal to deliver. Parveen still worried on his behalf, less concerned about the soldiers than the insurgents, who might label him a spy for carrying a message to the Americans. She was on edge the whole time he was gone, and when he returned after successfully handing over the note, she held him tightly.

  She gave Bina what lessons she could, then prepared to wait. Trotter would come, she knew; he was a man of his word, and she realized now that she’d implicitly counted on that conscientiousness when she’d insisted on staying in the village. To distract herself she went to check on Shokoh, who was in her usual spot next to the woodstove. Parveen patted the girl’s hand absently until Shokoh asked where Bilal had gone. Chagrin pricked Parveen; she hadn’t thought to get Shokoh’s consent to leave the village any more than Waheed had.

  When Parveen relayed the plan, Shokoh grew alarmed. Had Waheed agreed to this, to her leaving? she asked.

  He had, Parveen said.

  Would he come?

  How could he? Parveen said. He had to stay with the family, with the house.

  Shokoh withdrew her hand from Parveen’s and placed it on her swollen belly. In her bloated face, her eyes, still beautiful, were troubled. “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

  “There’s nothing to fear,” Parveen lied.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Distance

  ALL DAY BRUTISH CLOUDS HAD BEEN HUDDLING, AND SOON​ AFTER Bilal’s return, they bullied the weak sun into hiding and began firing icy raindrops at the earth. Inside, everyone circled around the sandali, trying not to dwell on whatever noises the storm might be obscuring. Then the drama passed, leaving behind an ordinary rain that was almost pleasant, the water light-footed overhead. When it stopped, Parveen walked outside. Pleats of sun fell through stone-gray clouds. She climbed the ladder to the roof. The valley was still. Only the light moved, playing fleetly on the mountains.

  Parveen went to her room and sat alone for a while. She’d never actually dispensed any of the gifts she’d brought the family, never needed to, because what was hers had long ago become theirs. Still, she earmarked a few books for specific people. Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan would go to Jamshid, she decided. He cared for his country. She thought of that long-ago conversation they’d had about what, other than a farmer, he might be, and she didn’t know whether he was finding or losing himself.

  In the hope that the book might allow them to reconnect, she went in search of him. He wasn’t upstairs or in the yard or in the kitchen. The outhouse, she decided, seeing that it was occupied. But it was Zahab who emerged. She didn’t know where Jamshid was, Zahab said, before hurrying up the stairs.

  Dread slid through Parveen. Perhaps Jamshid had gone to tell the insurgents that the Americans might come, perhaps even now they were readying another ambush. She was contemplating sending Bilal back to the outpost with another message, this one to abort, when he shouted from the roof. Parveen ran outside, saw nothing, but then heard, as he must have, the distant sound of rotor blades. Knowing the Americans wouldn’t linger, she dashed upstairs.

  The plan was for her and Waheed to take Shokoh to the field. Bina handed over the packet of food she’d prepared along with a neatly tied bundle of clothing for Shokoh. They all helped her to stand and make her way down the stairs. At the compound door, Bina whispered in Shokoh’s ear, kissed her three times on the cheeks, then drew, with an almost mournful tenderness, a chadri over the girl’s head. Time bent before Parveen, and she saw an image of Bina wrapping Shokoh in white for burial. Then the image flew off. Instead, together they wrapped Shokoh in brown blankets for warmth.

  “Friendship cannot be broken by distance,” Bina said to Parveen, who hugged her and then each of the children in turn.

  As they stood at the compound entrance, Jamshid materialized, as if he’d been teleported there. She weighed whether to offer him her hand, then decided against it for fear that he might refuse. Yet she still had the instinct to reclaim some bond with him. Maybe, she suggested, he should accompany her and Waheed to the field, in case Shokoh faltered.

  Alarm crossed Waheed’s face, but it was Bina who spoke. “Our son should stay here,” she said, “with the family. I’m asking you this.” She took Parveen’s hands in hers, their rough
texture jolting Parveen back to her first night, and her eyes sought Parveen’s.

  They thought she wanted to turn him over to the Americans, Parveen realized. It had never crossed her mind to do so, but now she wondered if she should. Jamshid hadn’t killed Boone and the other soldier himself, but she believed he’d made it easier for the insurgents to do so. What did she owe Trotter, who had come to her aid? She understood what Professor Banerjee hadn’t, which was that having no loyalties was easy. It was having too many that was hard.

  “We need to go,” she said, as much to herself as to the family, although she didn’t move. “If the insurgents attack the Americans again, there will be nothing left of this village.”

  “Yes, we should go,” Waheed said, “but there won’t be an attack.” He spoke calmly, moving nearer to Jamshid as he did so. “We promise you.”

  Again Parveen had a sense of how little she knew, of how much, as Dr. Yasmeen had tried to tell her, she didn’t understand. It wasn’t a promise Waheed would make lightly; he, like Trotter, was a man of his word. But she also knew he wouldn’t tell her how he could make this guarantee. Perhaps in order for Shokoh to depart unharmed, the elders of the village had negotiated a temporary peace with the insurgents, the price to be paid later. Or maybe Jamshid himself had persuaded them to forgo another ambush so that she and Shokoh could safely pass. All Waheed wanted in return was that his son be allowed to remain at home.

  “Khodahafez,” Jamshid said—it meant “Go with God”—and she repeated it back to him. Bina and the children murmured it too, “Khodahafez, khodahafez,” their final shared word.

  Then she and Waheed each took one of Shokoh’s elbows, left the house without Jamshid, and began to walk. Yellow leaves, slick from the storm, cobblestoned the lanes. They moved slowly, with caution, their breath puffing from their mouths. The fields, when they reached them, were boggy, and Waheed picked Shokoh up and carried her as Parveen squelched alongside. The dormant Chinook, guarded by tense soldiers, waited in the khan’s fallow field, which the Americans’ continuing usage had made more lucrative than any crop ever could. At the trio’s approach, the engine started and its rotors spun to life. The noise drowned out all talk. All thought.