by Amy Waldman
Waheed set Shokoh down, and when Trotter emerged from the Chinook with ear protection for Parveen, she put an arm around Shokoh’s waist to guide her toward him. The colonel, in full body armor, pointed at Shokoh and shook his head. Parveen couldn’t hear it, but his mouth formed the word no. Except he wasn’t saying no to Shokoh; he was saying no to a sack of green fabric draped in brown blankets, which was all he could see. She could have been anyone. Anything.
The soldiers, not knowing who or what was beneath the chadri, raised their weapons, and Parveen’s heart beat so hard it hurt. Trotter’s remarks about his soldiers’ jitteriness pinballed in her head and she put her hands in the air. With each second she had the most heightened consciousness of being alive, of continuing to be alive. In any moment of life there were so many things not happening that could be happening, but it was rare to consider all the possibilities that were evaded. Parveen wasn’t just alive. She was Not Dead. Not Shot.
But she was, again, naive—and her plan, she realized, had been ill-considered. Trotter had no idea what she was trying to do, and she had no way to tell him; the roar of the helicopter canceled out all but the most gestural human exchange. He was yelling and pointing at her, that was all she knew, and she was pointing back at Shokoh and trying to explain. Then he disappeared back into the copter and within moments the engine cut off. The startling quiet demanded recalibration.
Trotter reemerged, removed his earmuffs and earplugs, and walked right up to them. “What’s happening here,” he said flatly, then nodded at Waheed.
“We need to take her,” Parveen said. “She’s pregnant, she has eclampsia—”
“This isn’t a medevac.”
“It’s Waheed’s wife, and if you don’t take her, she’ll die. Another wife of Waheed’s will die. What kind of story will that make back home?”
“I’m authorized to take Americans.”
“Aren’t you in Afghanistan to save women? Isn’t that why you’re paving the road? Right here is a woman who needs saving.”
All of their encounters, Parveen thought, all of their talks had led to this moment of decision. Now Trotter would have to reveal whether he cared about Afghanistan’s women as anything more than an abstract cause or a justification for war. Would he leave an Afghan in danger behind, as Aziz maintained? She willed Aziz to be in the helicopter, because believing him to be there strengthened her resolve to test Trotter, who was saying he would do only what he had authorization to do, which was evacuate Parveen.
“You don’t take her, I don’t go.” Her own words surprised her. Terrified her. If Trotter called her bluff, if he refused to take Shokoh, she would have trapped herself in the village. And yet she meant them.
“Goddamn, Parveen.” Trotter checked his watch, then glanced at the sky, these gestures of his by now familiar to her. “I need to see her,” he said.
Parveen thought to ask Waheed’s permission even as she was appalled at the instinct. In the end she didn’t ask; she announced in Dari loud enough for both Waheed, who stood some distance away, and Shokoh to hear that she was going to lift the chadri, then translated her words for Trotter.
Waheed said nothing but he pivoted in the direction of his house. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a wife exposed to an American man, and he’d never seemed especially insistent on the chadri. But for all the brutal, fatal intimacy between Crane and Fereshta, when every curtain of privacy had been torn, this unveiling, at an American’s insistence, was different. It shoved Waheed’s impotence in his face.
Parveen caught the hem of the garment and pulled it up. Shokoh trembled and the air around her seemed to tremble too.
“Jesus—his wife?” Trotter said at the sight of her young face.
Shokoh stared straight ahead, her cheeks flushed, the crushed fabric crowning her forehead, as queenly in appearance as she was powerless in fact.
Time paused, as if at the crest of a hill, then rolled on. Trotter gave the pilot a thumbs-up, then again protected his ears. A soldier handed Parveen two sets of gear. She put hers on—first the plugs, then the earmuffs over them—and then did Shokoh’s. The Chinook’s engine started. Trotter motioned that they should bend when they went beneath the rotors, and they did. Boarding the copter, Shokoh, who was in front, halted and turned, trying to see Waheed. But he was gone.
FETTERED BY SEAT BELTS, their backs against the copter’s side, Parveen and Shokoh clutched hands as the Chinook lifted off. Its back was open so the soldiers could keep their weapons trained on potential hostiles below, and the cold rain from earlier in the day tamped down the dust that the blades usually churned up. Nothing obscured Parveen’s view; nothing dampened her exhilaration. She could sense already how hard it would be to adjust to the lack of such highs, to a tepid daily life back home.
She spotted Waheed on the far edge of the khan’s field, walking away, shrinking. Shokoh gave no indication whether she saw him too. Their connection to him was spinning out, stretching thinner, and soon would snap. Parveen wondered if she would ever find out what became of him or of Bina, Jamshid, and the other children. She didn’t think so. She’d always considered herself a cosmopolitan, a believer in the mixing of people, of cultures. Her parents had believed in this too. But her greatest wish for Waheed, for his family, for his neighbors, was for them never to have another foreigner come. Another American. In trying to help the village, they—Trotter and his men, Crane and Parveen—had destroyed it. To live was to bruise, Dr. Yasmeen had said, but this was wreckage of a different order. Among their sins was leaving the women worse off, with even less care, than Parveen had found them.
She could only hope that what she’d stirred up wasn’t all to the bad, that maybe when each of their times came, Waheed’s four girls—Hamdiya, Zahab, and the twins, Adeila and Aakila—would tell their father they weren’t ready to marry yet, that they wanted to travel as that American woman who’d lived in their house had, and perhaps Waheed would agree. She hadn’t properly said goodbye to him, she realized; she hadn’t even said thank you. Was she still pretending she would return? She’d taken nothing with her; she had not a single picture of these people, this place.
This place—the fields beneath them stretched into ribbon, the peaks dissolved into sky. The beauty worked on her no less this last day than it had her first. She feared the loneliness of trying to translate it to those back home, of having to shelter it from their conceits and imaginings. In her head lived swatches of color: young wheat, fall sky, the blood of the living, the blood of the dead. Of all the things she’d seen and learned, the most powerful couldn’t be conveyed. This view was the same one Dr. Yasmeen would have seen, the same one Naseer thrilled to, when they were brought to and from the village. It was silly, but she regretted that she’d never translated Yasmeen’s words of anxiety about flying to Trotter. It was a small thing; it would have changed nothing. But Parveen felt that she’d robbed the doctor of her voice.
Light entered the helicopter only through the open back and the porthole windows. In the dim interior, Parveen couldn’t see Trotter and she was glad for that. But now, partway down the row of perhaps twenty soldiers seated opposite her and Shokoh, she made out Aziz’s profile, his familiar nose. He turned his head toward her and gave her a neutral nod that made her wonder if he judged her harshly, either for ignoring the warnings she’d been given or for availing herself of the rescue that being an American guaranteed her. She pointed to Shokoh as if to say, She’s the only reason I called for help and also See, he would take you, he would save you. But Aziz wouldn’t understand until they landed, and she mentally urged the helicopter on. At the possibility of freer exchange with him, if not at the base, then perhaps later, in Kabul, she felt unsteady, in a pleasurable way, but also uncertain. The fact that nothing was possible in the village had made everything desirable. In the light of relative freedom, how would he appear?
The clinic, battered but intact, came into view. Fereshta’s clinic. It had been a long time since Parveen or an
yone else had called it that. What, then, was Fereshta’s legacy? She hadn’t written a word to leave behind; no image of her was preserved, other than Crane’s invented one, which in its falsities threatened to extinguish her. But Fereshta’s family members hadn’t read Crane’s book, and when it came to their memories of her, this was their salvation. She wasn’t special. She wasn’t beautiful. They cared for her—they loved her—just the same.
Shokoh was still gripping Parveen’s hand, which was damp with sweat. When Parveen tried to free herself, Shokoh grasped harder. Her fingers were so small, their nails so gnawed. What had Parveen done? This helicopter ride gambled with Shokoh’s life almost as much as her staying in the village would have. We will live, or we won’t. At the base, she’d be in good hands—American medics had sewn blown-off limbs to soldiers’ backs for proper reattachment later, they could safely get a baby out of a girl. But then what? Parveen hadn’t imagined that far ahead, caught up as she was with the excitement of extracting both of them. While it was true that she was trying to save Shokoh’s life, it was equally true that she’d used Shokoh for her own purposes, to give herself an excuse to leave. With chagrin she imagined Professor Banerjee’s reaction to her so-called rescue. Even now Parveen couldn’t shake her former mentor’s voice in her head, and she knew Professor Banerjee would condemn, in the baldest terms, her coercing Trotter into taking Shokoh. In her professor’s eyes, Parveen would be no different than the missionaries trying to save Muslim souls or the American soldiers using their concern for Muslim women as a pretext for killing or occupation. No different than Crane, who had made an Afghan woman’s life his bestseller material. Professor Banerjee would disdain the very act of asking the Americans to save a woman.
The urge to intervene, a high of its own, was a hard habit to break. The salvation of others could become an addiction too. For months, Parveen realized, the fantasy of rescuing Shokoh had percolated in her head. Only now did the magnitude of its consequences begin to sink in. The rescue was ephemeral, the responsibility it yielded eternal. Shokoh couldn’t simply be taken from home, then left, along with her newborn, to her own devices. If Shokoh was going to return to the village, Parveen would have to find a way to get her back there. But she wasn’t even sure Waheed wanted Shokoh back. He’d relinquished her so easily, without so much as asking when or how his treasured young wife would return. Was it as simple as him choosing Shokoh’s health, her life, over his own needs, his own honor? More likely he’d sacrificed her because he wanted Parveen gone. It was a woman’s fate to be as expendable as she was desirable.
And what if Shokoh herself didn’t want to return? This was Parveen’s hope and also, now, her fear. Shokoh would then go back to her family—far from a simple matter. There was the question of her father’s health, which Parveen had never told Shokoh was failing, and of the family’s finances. If they wouldn’t allow her back or couldn’t afford to keep her, Shokoh and her child would be Parveen’s burdens to carry.
A very long time ago, it seemed, she had imagined promoting Shokoh as a poet in America. Now, one step closer to that possibility, it struck her as unrealistic, even ridiculous. There was no money in poetry. How would she even get Shokoh to the States; how would she support her there? The girl spoke no English, had no marketable skills. She would be a teenage mother. Against the backdrop of the village, Shokoh seemed remarkable, but in America she would be just another refugee struggling to survive. She was intelligent, yes, but also petulant, prone to depression, and traumatized by the circumstances of her marriage. She would need—demand—considerable help, and Parveen didn’t have a plan for earning a living herself. She imagined Shokoh sleeping in the bed that had once belonged to Taara, then remembered that bed, that room, and that apartment were no longer her family’s. Would the two of them—three, with Shokoh’s baby—crowd in with her little nephew in San Jose? Her love for Ansar by now felt more like a memory of love. Their bond would be restored, she knew. But that didn’t mean she wanted to share his room for more than a few days.
At the end of a labor, a woman lives, or she dies. That is all that concerns me. The words had formed Dr. Yasmeen’s mantra, and by that standard, evacuating Shokoh was the right choice, which didn’t make it a good one. But then Dr. Yasmeen had also taught that sometimes there was no good choice. Parveen tried again to imagine how Shokoh might subsist in America. Her story, truth be told, was the most commodifiable thing about her. Perhaps she could publish a memoir that Parveen would help her write. Would this please Professor Banerjee? Shokoh’s story as told, mostly, by Shokoh…
There were so many people in Parveen’s head, all trying to direct her. So much mental noise that it was impossible for her to hear. The only person she hadn’t consulted, she realized, was the one right next to her, the one most affected by her whims and plans. She turned to Shokoh and shouted, “What do you want?”
Shokoh, unable to hear, shook her head with a look of consternation. Parveen patted her hand in reassurance. She would ask again when they landed or once the baby had come. What do you want? It was the question no one had thought to put to Shokoh or to any of the women in the village about the road, the war, or anything else in their lives. What do you want? Those shura gatherings were absent of women, yet Trotter had never objected. Had he even noticed?
Shokoh, not Parveen, needed to choose whether to return to Waheed, go back to her family in the provincial capital, or try to get to America. It was the choosing that mattered. And as for her story, it would be hers, not Parveen’s, to tell.
They were over Trotter’s road now, the one he’d promised that Parveen would drive out on. Instead, they were tracing its path through the air, and it was still less than half paved. Craters filled with water reflected the pewter sky and, in miniature, the helicopter flying beneath it. Piles of gravel glistened from the rain. The equipment was mostly covered by blue tarps, and a few men, their bright orange vests glowing in the gray landscape, milled about.
Would the paving ever be finished? For now, she was sure, the Americans would persist, Trotter would persist, because to abandon the road would suggest that the American soldiers who’d died for it had died for nothing. You wouldn’t try to cut your losses; you’d try to redeem them, even if that meant sending an arm after a leg, one death after another. The war would continue to be fought because it hadn’t yet been won. Lambs to slaughter. Sheep for dead doctors. Her nightmares would collide.
One day, Parveen guessed, they would abandon it all—cancel the road project, close the combat outpost, leave the lives lost unredeemed—and the road would become one more loose thread in a war shaggy with them. Perhaps they would blame the ingratitude of the villagers. Perhaps no reason would be given at all. The same, she suspected, would be true of the war—years more of wastage and death, then an end that America’s leaders would pretend made sense of what had come before. The dragon’s tail of 9/11 swept back and forth, back and forth, devastating everything in its path.
Yet even though this project had never been a good use of resources, financial or human, Parveen felt a keen sadness at the prospect of its end. She remembered how elated she’d been, sure that improving the road would change so much for the women. And how invigorated Jamshid had been, imagining the arrival of a new life: a bride, a job, a way out. It pained her that he’d defected to the side of those intent on sabotaging it. The insurgents made no pretense of trying to help; they cared nothing for the village except as a platform to strike at the Americans. Her glimpse of their cruelty made her fear for Afghanistan’s women once the Americans left. She wished Jamshid could see this, but maybe it was she who needed to see that for him there was no other way to become a man, an Afghan, than to refuse the empire trying to extend its reach.
Aziz, by contrast, had become, for lack of a better job, a servant of that faltering empire. His whole life had been lived in war, and his future—how long he would stay with Trotter, how long the Americans would stay in Afghanistan—was as uncertain as it had e
ver been. He too was a loose thread, as were all Afghans who had tied their fates to the Americans’ doomed enterprise. It wouldn’t be easy to weave them back into the fabric of their country. Her heart contracted. Perhaps it was only pity she felt for him. But if so, why did her body, her blood, stir whenever his eyes turned her way?
She would help him get a visa, she decided, as the Chinook veered away from the road to fly over the river. She had to try. Even as she guarded against another fantasy of rescue, she knew her own parents had once been every bit as much in need. Entanglement was the natural order of things.
Entanglement even with the lies of others. Gideon Crane’s map had been full of distortions, but Parveen couldn’t say she regretted where it had taken her, or what she had learned there. Realizing this, she relaxed for the first time since coming on board. She was going to enjoy the ride, because there would never be another like it. She wanted to register everything: the storm-fattened water, the dark pelt of cloud, and the mountains that hemmed her in like village walls.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many books for information or inspiration, including these: No Good Men Among the Living, by Anand Gopal; Little America, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; Veil of Tears, by IRIN News; Three Cups of Deceit, by Jon Krakaeur; Afghan Post, by Adrian Bonenberger; Zarbul Masalha, compiled by Captain Edward Zellem; The Unforgiving Minute, by Craig M. Mullaney; When Bamboo Bloom, by Patricia A. Omidian; Death Without Weeping, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes; Snapshots, edited by Tamim Ansary and Yalda Asmatey; Soldier’s Heart, by Elizabeth D. Samet; Pink Mist, by Owen Sheers; Zinky Boys, by Svetlana Alexievich; Points of Departure, by James Cameron; A Fortunate Man, by John Berger; and Memorial, by Alice Oswald.