In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  When Sabir turned and saw me, his look of shock and alarm, which he tried to disguise in order to maintain his composure, was something I will remember until I die. I had done something on impulse, an American quality that could easily get me killed in Afghanistan—worse, it could get all those with me killed. I realized right away I shouldn’t have done it, but Pashtun pride kept me from admitting my mistake. I stared at Sabir stubbornly, as if asking what he was going to do in the middle of the bazaar. I knew he wouldn’t want it to appear like, God forbid, he had lost control of his women.

  “Why would you do that? Do you wish to die and take all of us with you?” he hissed. He reached out to grab me by the arm, then thought better of it. He glared at Shafika. “Why would you let her do this?”

  “Don’t yell at her!” I said. “It’s not her fault. It’s your fault. You stood around chitchatting. It’s hot under these cursed chadri. I asked you to hurry and you ignored me. We finally get to the store I wanted and you keep walking past it. You think we came out here for a stroll with you?”

  Sabir was speechless. He had never been talked to this way by a female, and here it was happening in the middle of downtown Ghazni, by a female he knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t punish. He just shook his head and told me to go to the store and get anything I wanted, but I only had five minutes. Word would travel that a woman had taken off her chadri and everyone would likely want to come and see for themselves. I did put the chadri back on and went into the shop. The shopkeeper was so shocked that he didn’t even bargain with me, and let me buy all the fabrics at rates that even I didn’t think I was going to get. I think he just wanted me out of his shop, as soon as possible, before the mob came and interfered with his business.

  Back at the compound, Shafika, who’d barely said a word, scooted into the kitchen to prepare tea. I felt horrible for ruining her first trip into town in years, but I really did think that Sabir had been inconsiderate in his treatment of us and should have tried to focus on our needs, since we were the reason he went to the bazaar in the first place. Sabir started to tell his brothers what had happened. I said I didn’t like how here, back at home, he talked to me as if I was an actual human being, but in the bazaar he behaved as if I wasn’t even there. My cousins and uncles consoled Sabir. They thanked God it hadn’t been them in the bazaar with me.

  While we were arguing and drinking tea my cell phone rang. I excused myself and went outside, hoping it was Eric. Since I had left Farah, he’d called me every day. My family was curious. Who was calling me here? If it was my mother, they wanted to talk to her, too. I told them it was my boss. It would be impossible to tell them he was my fiancé. My family at home in Portland didn’t even know Eric existed. I tried not to think about this too much. If they thought my taking off the chadri in the bazaar could have gotten us all killed, what would my extended family do when they learned I was buying the fabric for my bridal dress for a marriage to a white non-Pashtun non-Muslim?

  Some of the children were playing outside in the garden. I walked to the kitchen and took the stairs from there to the roof. The kids followed me; they always did, being unaware of the American concept of privacy while talking on the phone. Between the rows of raisins drying in the sun were a handful of pink-and-green woven mats. The roof was surrounded by a decorative metal fence painted aqua blue. I loved to sit up here and look out over the garden and courtyard down below. The compound was surrounded by the customary tall, baked-mud wall, at the base of which grew enormous sunflowers.

  Eric was still in Farah, wrapping up loose ends; his tour of duty was ending and he would be back in the States in another month. We chatted about how it would be for him to return to Florida and see his kids. He couldn’t wait for me to come home, so we could start planning our wedding. He talked about what my new life would be like in Florida. We would buy a house, which I could decorate any way I pleased. He knew I wasn’t really one for cooking, but I would have time to learn.

  “You just want to marry me because you think Pashtun women are submissive, and I’ll have dinner ready for you every night when you get home,” I teased.

  “Honey, the second I met you, and you told me you didn’t belong to anyone, I knew that you were nothing like the submissive women I had heard about in Afghanistan. Knowing you, you would probably make me cook you dinner, after I come home from work, while you recover from shopping all day with my money.”

  I laughed. One of the things I loved about Eric was his ability to give as good as he got.

  From the day he had mentioned the word engagement, I had told him that anytime he wanted I would give him a Get Out of Jail Free card, except this would be a Get Out of Marriage to Saima card. He always refused, but he did ask me to keep offering, in the event that he would one day want his freedom—to remember how it felt to wear the pants in a relationship. The more tension there was between us, the more we joked; after many tours in Afghanistan Eric had picked up the Pashtun habit of joking about things you can’t control.

  As I listened to him describe my luxurious future as a Florida housewife, I started to squirm. I felt something I couldn’t define. Awkwardness? But I had never felt awkward around him before. Guilt for sitting up here on the roof speaking English to my American boyfriend, while my female cousins were treated so harshly down in their own home? I let him talk. He knew something was up, because in the few months he’d known me, I had never been that quiet or withdrawn.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I could feel the pressure for me to say “I love you, too,” something that Pashtuns don’t do. Soldiers always ask me, “How do you say ‘I love you’ in Pashtu?” and I have to explain that in a culture where parents don’t even develop bonds with their kids until they are much older and there is no danger of losing them to one of the many illnesses that claim thousands of infants’ lives, we don’t have any three Pashtu words to express that sentiment. There are ways you show it, and that is how we like to express our love. We are loyal, and through taking care of our loved ones, we tell them how much we love them. As for romantic love, how could I ever explain to an American that in a culture where almost all of the marriages are arranged by the families, and you meet your spouse for the first time on your wedding day, not knowing if the person is even capable of being loved or loving you, there is no need to say those words? To a Pashtun woman, a husband who doesn’t beat her regularly is showing her he loves her. He never has to utter those words. She returns his love by bearing his children and taking care of his family.

  It makes me suspicious of a man’s intentions when I hear him say “I love you” so casually. It is hard to resist some cultural influences, I guess.

  “I miss you, too,” I said. I didn’t even tell him what had happened at the bazaar or that I had been able to buy all the material for my Afghan bridal dress. I knew he would be ecstatic to hear I was planning on having a traditional Afghan dress, and I couldn’t handle his enthusiasm right then. He got off the phone because I was not being responsive and he wrongly assumed that I was not in a place to talk openly, so he hung up, making me promise to call as soon as I was able to talk freely.

  In two days I would be heading back to BAF. Eric was eager to get on with our life together, but I’d received a phone call from the site manager at Bagram. In mid-September the country was holding its first-ever parliamentary elections, and they needed a Pashtu interpreter at PRT Jalalabad. At first I’d dismissed the idea. I had completed my six-month contract, which was the most time I had told myself I would do when I had impulsively signed up for this.

  But I couldn’t get past the feeling that I hadn’t really accomplished anything. In retrospect, my months at sleepy PRT Farah seemed less like a mission to reconnect with my father’s country and more like a camping vacation punctuated with weekly barbecues at the governor’s compound. I’m not very good at hiding the truth from myself, and the truth was I had done nothing yet, and I wanted much more. So I signed up for another three months at Jala
labad. Eric was unhappy, but I convinced him I would have regrets if I had left before I felt I had really done something to help my people. He said he never wanted me to have any regrets about marrying him, so he gave me permission. I told him I didn’t need his permission, and he said, “I know, honey. I’m just trying to make myself feel good, as your man.”

  I sat on the roof among the rows of drying grapes and thought about my parents, my siblings, my relatives, carrying on their lives in the house beneath me and in faraway America. Another call came in from Eric, and I ignored it. I felt displaced, yet strangely at peace with my descision.

  My female cousins didn’t laugh at me for my poor cow-milking skills or for socializing with the men. They treated me with so much kindness, and I loved them for their open acceptance of my limitations. My skills were nothing compared with what they were capable of doing. Their capabilities were feeding tens of children, their men, and so many other relatives who depended on them. I might know how to read in English, but that skill was no good in this village in Ghazni because women were never allowed to work outside their homes. They were always trying to figure out how to entertain me once they got done with their chores. So, the day before I left, I was sitting in the middle of the courtyard talking to several little children when I heard Shafika was looking for me. The women were finished with their chores for the day and wanted to take me to the house my mother had been born in, and then to the vineyard for a picnic.

  My older aunt, two younger brides, two single cousins, Shafika, and I donned our long shawls and set out for the vineyard, located not far from the compound. People don’t realize that women in the villages have a lot more freedom of movement than they do in cities like Kabul. In villages, families know everyone, and they only socialize with one another—so as long as the women stay within the village, they can come and go as they please during the day. Since during the day, most of the men are also working outside the village, this gives women in the village even more freedom, because there are only other women and children there. I wore an outfit my cousins had sewn for me: a deep-teal silk frock with a wide hem of heavy gold embroidery. The matching pants were made of plain teal silk, and the scarf was chiffon, shot through with gold thread.

  I was astounded at how comfortable I felt, strolling along the dusty streets with my female relatives. I felt both free and protected. I felt, for the first time, as if I blended in, as if I was part of my own culture. We had grabbed Bashir, who was on break from school and thus at home on this afternoon, as an escort. Even though it wasn’t unusual for a group of women to walk through the village, we still needed a token male. Bashir was only fourteen, wiry and small, his beard just beginning to come in. Even he knew how ridiculous it was, the idea that he could protect us.

  “If we’re attacked, you’ll probably run!” I teased him.

  “Yes, but I’ll run fast and find a real man to come help you.” His answering smile was quick, like he had already figured out what he would do if, God forbid, there were an incident.

  Our vineyard was surrounded by high mud walls. Five or six varieties of grapes grew there. I pulled my scarf over my head without experiencing the accompanying storm of conflicting emotions. We ate grapes straight from the vine. We sat in the sun. It was warm, but the air was still crisp. Was it really only five days earlier when I was struggling to put on the heavy burqa (don’t get me wrong, I still hated it) inside the gates at BAF?

  On the way back we passed the old house where my mother had grown up. Like everything else, it was made of baked mud, surrounded by high mud walls. The doors were gone, the windows removed and repurposed elsewhere. My aunts insisted they give me the guided tour. I saw the room where my mother, as a little girl and then as a young woman, had slept with her sisters, cousins, and aunts. This house had a kareez running through the courtyard. It was a sign of affluence; it meant the women never had to leave the compound to fetch water.

  I stood in her house and inhaled deeply from beneath my scarf. This was the place I had come from, and these were my people. I felt that strange tug of guilt and pride I’d experienced while sitting at the bedside of the young bride who had set herself on fire, that now familiar internal struggle. I was headed to Jalalabad to work again as an interpreter, but it didn’t feel like that was enough. I was an American. I had freedom. I had these women who accepted me and my strange life without question. Shouldn’t I be doing more for them, more to fulfill my father’s prophecy for me? I had been alive more than half the life span of the average Afghan woman, and I was not even able to help these close relatives, much less Afghans all over the world. Suddenly, I heard the clock ticking, but it had nothing to do with a biological urge to reproduce. It had everything to do with fulfilling what had been foretold by a loving and caring father, about a daughter whom he didn’t know at the time and would never have the chance to get to know, but in whom he had faith. I vowed then to spend the rest of my years on earth making his words come true.

  EIGHTEEN

  In late August 2005, when the Chinook touched down at the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Jalalabad, a sergeant greeted me with a crooked smile. He hoisted my duffel bags onto his shoulder, walked me off the helipad and around the wall that surrounded the compound, and led me to my new home in a barracks next to where the marines were housed. He showed me to an empty room at the end of a row of B-huts. “This should work for now,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be here long.” I tried not to think about what that meant.

  If Eric knew I was being stuck in a barracks so close to the men, he would have thrown a fit. I missed him. But even though it was hard to imagine what it would be like to translate for another commander—and a female commander at that—I felt a flutter of excitement in my chest.

  The sergeant told me that my new boss, Lieutenant Colonel Judy Cabano, was at a meeting at the governor’s, and he wasn’t sure when she’d return. I sat on the edge of my bed for a while. I was getting hungry. I wondered what time the chow hall served dinner. I left the barracks and walked around to begin getting my bearings. Jalalabad wasn’t a big PRT, but it was bigger than Farah.

  I ran into an older Afghan who introduced himself as one of Judy’s former interpreters. He worked with the Civil Affairs Team on projects and village assessments. Tall and thin, with short gray hair, he had a serious look, but as another Afghan passed him and greeted him as Engineer-Saab, he smiled and his face became that of any old Afghan man. He wasn’t an actual engineer; engineer-saab is a Pashtun term of respect for someone who has had the good fortune to acquire some basic education in any field. Engineer-Saab was eager to clue me in about how strict Judy was, how uncompromising. Judy—everyone called her PRT Commander, but when we met she asked me to call her Judy—used to yell at him for mumbling during meetings. She accused him of being a low talker, which simply wouldn’t do.

  I knew from my own meetings with the governor in Farah that there was no telling how the pace of a conversation would go. Sometimes it stopped and started like a sulking child on the way to school, and sometimes it raced along so quickly it was almost impossible to keep up, much less convey the all-important details, the nuances that contained the most meaning. It would waste time and cause embarrassment for the commander to keep saying “What was that?” If you get the tone wrong, you miss so much nonverbal communication, and these meetings are conducted by U.S. personnel who pay so much attention to the exact translated words that they miss the tone, which often contains the essence. A good interpreter takes time to draw attention to that. The problem I noticed early on was that not only were most of the interpreters poorly trained, but they were too intimidated by the U.S. forces, as well as by the local Afghans, to stop the proceedings and take the time to explain. I never had any problems with feeling intimidated, and never felt bad asking either side to stop so I could do my job. I realized quickly that if the Americans understood the Afghans, there wouldn’t be any point in even having the meetings. It was crucial that the two parties unders
tood each other, or we would be in that country forever and no one would benefit from our presence.

  Engineer-Saab said he wasn’t the only one who had been sacked. Judy had gone through four other interpreters in less than a month. There had been a variety of problems. One of them spoke Pashtu at a third-grade level and kept lapsing into Dari when she got nervous. Another was simply too old and couldn’t keep up with the physical requirements of the assignment. Engineer-Saab took a few minutes on his way to the prayer room to tell me this and then said he would find me later to introduce me to the rest of the interpreters, probably after the commander had had her talk with me. His look as he left me was a mixture of pity and glee—surely, I would be the next interpreter to be sacked.

  I wondered whether he was right, and if Judy would fire me, too. Perhaps it would be a good thing. I could return to the States, marry Eric, and move to Florida to start my new life. At the same time I was thinking, There’s no way I will let her fire me. I will be the best interpreter she’s ever had. This was a challenge too personal to ignore.

  I ate dinner at a long table with the other CAT II interpreters. Just as I was finishing my tea, Judy walked in. She reminded me of an elf. I don’t know what I had expected, but this tiny woman with a heart-shaped face and big blue-green eyes was not it. She scanned the room and when she spied me, the new girl on campus, she came over and introduced herself.

  “Maybe when you’re done here you can stop by the office,” she said. My first impression was that she was uptight and angry. I wasn’t surprised. By then I knew that she hadn’t gotten to where she had in the army by being sweet. It was dark outside when I arrived at her office in the TOC. I sat down on the sofa in front of her desk. She asked me where I had interpreted before. I tried to stress that I was not a professional interpreter.