In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Page 19

  “If my experience is any indication, it looks like none of the interpreters are professionals,” she said.

  “I just spent six months in Farah,” I said. It sounded so meager, even to my ears.

  “I think it’s a matter of personality and attitude,” she said. We talked for a while about the difficulties of interpreting in a language that differed so much from region to region, and the fact that there was no training that any of us interpreters went through, or even much rigorous testing to screen out the bad from the mediocre. I spoke in a concise manner, at what I thought was the perfect volume to let her hear that I was capable of communicating clearly with her and for her. She must have liked what she heard because she said that I could go with her to the morning meeting at the governor’s.

  Before I left, she asked about my accommodations. When I told her where they’d put me she called in the sergeant with the lopsided smile, who apparently was the PRT sergeant major, and told him to get me out of there immediately. “I don’t care what time it is,” she said. “I don’t care if there are no empty rooms. Move your soldiers around and give Miriam the room on the floor above mine.”

  I could tell that the SM wasn’t thrilled to receive an order to move his people around after they’d all bedded down for the night. And he wasn’t about to say that he’d only dumped me there because it was convenient, and he hadn’t thought I’d last more than a few days. I smiled at him; aware that as a civilian he thought I was a nuisance. Still, an order was an order. He’d been tasked to move me, and move me he would. Before he left, Judy, sensing his displeasure, said, “Cultural sensitivity starts at the PRT, Sergeant Major.”

  I was moved to a room inside the dilapidated building known fondly as Motel 6. A former resort built by the Soviets for short in-country vacations, it had been repurposed as the hub of PRT Jalalabad. My room was on the second floor, directly over Judy’s. It had a private bath and a deck with a view of a stand of tall trees and an enormous swimming pool. The pool, which had been dug at least eight feet deep all around, was empty, and served as a makeshift basketball court; a hoop and backboard were affixed to one side of the pool.

  UNLIKE FARAH, DOZING beneath the sun in the far west like an old frontier town, Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan, was a happening place. The main road from Pakistan to Kabul ran through its center, and much of the food that fed the country was grown on the fertile, irrigated lands around the city. Palm trees lined the streets. The wind carries the tangy scent of basil and citrus. Jalalabad was Afghanistan’s own sensual Mediterranean city. Unfortunately, it was also infamous for sheltering insurgents.

  Most Afghans hold a negative view of Arabs. There is no love lost between the two ethnic groups. When Osama bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, he sought refuge in Jalalabad. The predominately Pashtun city was quiet and prosperous; the economic freedom gave the people the luxury of practicing Pashtunwali in its strictest form.

  To Westerners, Pashtunwali is an utter mystery. Literally, it means “the way of Pashtuns.” It is a set of principles that guide the behavior of Pashtuns in everyday life and unites them with other Pashtuns spread out all over Afghanistan and, after the Russians attacked, to those who emigrated as well. The Farsiban—the main minority ethnic group in Afghanistan—in their inherent contempt for the Pashtuns, have simplified Pashtunwali into three words: zan (woman), zar (gold), and zameen (land).

  Although this Farsiban judgment of Pashtunwali as being barbaric is meant to be insulting, these three words do hold great importance for any Pashtun. The main principle revolves around the concept that a man’s pride is directly linked to his possessions and how he protects them. His possessions are twofold: his land and his women. Anyone who tries to take either of these from him is his enemy; avenging any wrongdoing is a duty, and the only honorable way to exact revenge is by death of the enemy, or of oneself, if one fails at the former. This is not necessarily a passionate act; it is not vengeance taken in the heat of the moment. A true Pashtun will take years to plan his retaliation, with a cool and calm head. And, if he dies trying to restore respect for his family and himself, then it becomes the responsibility of his sons to carry on the mission. Families may take centuries to avenge their lost honor, and during that time the sons are unable to enjoy everyday life. The simple fact that their enemy—or their enemy’s children or children’s children—continues to live and breathe without having paid for dishonoring them makes life unbearable for a Pashtun.

  A man’s honor is linked directly to the conduct of his women; thus, the females in Pashtun society carry the heaviest burden of Pashtunwali. One careless action from a silly teenage girl—such as starting a romance with a boy—can easily trigger a family feud that may take the lives of hundreds of men and women over generations.

  But what most non-Pashtuns don’t realize is that if you ask a Pashtun for forgiveness, and you follow the customs of Pashtunwali while asking him, he will be obligated to forgive you for all you have done to him and his family. His forgiveness exacts a price, however. In exchange, you have to give him your most precious belonging: one of your women (or more, depending on the severity of the offense being forgiven). It is called a blood bride, and my grandmother was one. The life of most Afghan women is difficult, but the life of a blood bride is insufferable. When a woman marries, she leaves her own family and moves in with her husband’s. A blood bride is surrounded for the rest of her life by people who were the sworn enemies of her family and who most likely have killed her close relatives. She is forced not only to live with them but to take care of them for as long as she lives.

  As ancient and seemingly intractable as Pashtunwali may seem, even it has changed with the times and with the past forty-plus years of war in Afghanistan. Due to the Soviet invasion and the resulting Pashtun diaspora, its rules as practiced by the younger generation are far more lax; they tend to forgo family agendas and revenge seeking, although they still hold their women to a strict code of conduct (which I feel has less to do with Pashtunwali and more to do with misogyny and the belief that their women belong to them).

  That being said, there are pockets of Afghanistan, such as Jalalabad, that have enjoyed relative peace even over the last thirty years of national tumult; in these places, strict Pashtun communities still flourish. A visitor to the region, savvy to the ways of the Pashtuns and well aware that a single village can protect you better than an entire company of Afghan National Army soldiers, could easily exploit Pashtun melmastia, or hospitality. This is what Osama bin Laden did.

  Bin Laden knew Pashtunwali, and what it would mean if he sought melmastia from a Pashtun village, which in its simplest form can be defined as protection. Regardless of whether the Pashtuns to whom he presented himself as a guest agreed or disagreed with him and his fledgling movement, Al-Qaeda, the code of Pashtunwali required them to treat him as a guest and assure his safety. Bin Laden was shrewd. He knew Afghan culture and used it to his advantage. He knew the Pashtuns would be unable to refuse him, especially in Jalalabad, where the practice of Pashtunwali was still relatively strong. He hid out there for those first few years of Tora Bora fighting and later was rumored to have moved across the border to Pakistan.

  In the fall of 2005, Jalalabad, despite what was going on in the rest of the country, was among the safest cities in the country. The Taliban was anemic, still recovering from having been ousted four years earlier. That year, there had been only a single suicide bomber. All over the city men fearlessly shaved their beards. There was even a gym in the middle of the city, with a large banner out front depicting a muscled man posing. A few small music stores had opened and were doing big business in Bollywood CDs and DVDs. But as I write this, a mere six years later, it’s as if we have gone back in time. The city is nervous. Just a few months ago, a group of seven militants entered a bank in downtown Jalalabad and killed eighteen ANA soldiers who were getting paid that day—something none of us in Jalalabad in 2005 would have ever predicted.r />
  I AWOKE WITH a start. My room was dark and filled with a weird electronic buzz. Outside, the sky was lightening. The buzz resolved itself into an amplified throat clearing. It was at once like no sound I had ever heard and deeply familiar, from another time. It was the mullah calling the city to four o’clock morning prayer. In Farah the PRT was far away from the city; here the loudspeaker for the neighborhood mosque was right next to Motel 6. The acoustics of the place made it sound as if it was right outside my window.

  Without success I tried to go back to sleep. I’d tossed and turned most of the night. My room was stuffy, the air heavy. I lay awake wondering what I was doing there. I missed Eric, our long talks, and how we teased as a way of finding out things about each other. Still, I knew that the pull he had on me had weakened compared with the pull of the Afghan people who surrounded me at that time. There are times in the night when you cannot hide from the truth, and at that point I could no longer deny that my feelings about happily ever after were changing every day. Once again I was feeling my airway closing in as I lay there listening to the mullah call my countrymen to prayer, inciting their sacred response, as they had for centuries, no matter the hour of the night. How could I have thought that I’d be able to live a normal American life? How could I have changed so much in a mere fourteen years when the rest of my people behaved as they had centuries ago?

  SINCE IT WAS my first morning in Jalalabad, I had assumed Judy would want to meet for further debriefing, but when I arrived at her office she was arranging a green silk scarf on her head.

  “Are you ready to meet the governor?” she asked.

  I must have appeared sick because she smiled and patted my arm. So far she’d been nothing but kind to me, but I kept thinking that she could still fire me at any moment.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s loud and overbearing, but he considers me his sister. He’s just another one of the characters in Afghanistan. Anyway, Jawed will do most of the interpreting. Your job today will be simply to observe.” Jawed was Judy’s current CAT I interpreter.

  The Governor’s Palace was not far from the PRT, less than ten minutes by Humvee. We passed through the gate and drove up a gravel driveway lined with olive trees through the ANA compound. It was so long it seemed as if we’d turned onto another road. We drove through a small bazaar. Little kids stood on either side of the street gawking at us, while the men loitering in front of the mud shops stared as we rumbled by. We passed immense green lawns studded with jacarandas and palms, until we came to an enormous square pale-yellow building with a turquoise-blue tiled façade. It looked as if it belonged in Beverly Hills. I couldn’t help but compare it with the governor’s house in Farah, a basic mud structure furnished with a sofa and a few chairs.

  One of the PRT FORCEPRO soldiers led Judy and me through the mansion’s foyer. Rickety scaffolding hugged one wall. A dozen or so workers were affixing tiny blue tiles to the ceiling, an elaborate mosaic in progress. I wondered where Jawed was. He lived in a village just outside Jalalabad, and I had assumed he was going to meet us here.

  We were ushered into an enormous room. It was bigger than ten average-sized American living rooms put together. In the center stood a table that could easily seat forty people. A half dozen seating areas, with sofas, chairs, and low tables, were scattered around the periphery. At the far end of the room several Afghans stood smoking near an open window. The walls were covered with the same small tiles used for the foyer ceiling, arranged in an intricate geometric pattern of dark blue, turquoise, red, and orange. Crystal chandeliers hung from the cathedral ceilings. The rugs were staggering in their beauty. Afghans love their rugs. The most modest village home has at least one on the floor of the room where guests are received, but usually they are small and machine-made. The governor’s rugs were hand-loomed, made from the finest wool and silk, in rich shades of red, beige, and cream. The rug beneath the large table must have cost several million Afghanis. Every inch of concrete floor was covered. I would soon learn that this governor could not bear to have his feet touch cement, even when he was wearing shoes. This was luxury, I thought. Not just Afghan luxury, but world-class luxury.

  Judy and I were shown a spot at the big table. I stared at the door, willing Jawed to walk through it. Time passed. The governor didn’t appear; nor did Jawed. I folded my hands in my lap and looked out the window, through which I could see a blue-tiled swimming pool. It was the biggest swimming pool I had ever seen. In the center there was a fountain. Judy fiddled with the ends of her scarf. At this point we had both realized that Jawed wasn’t going to make it to the meeting. Finally she said, “Do you want to give it a shot?”

  “Sure,” I replied bravely. “This is what I’ve been hired for.”

  Gul Agha Sherzai strode into the meeting room, the legs of his pants tucked up in such a way as to reveal his beautiful black dress shoes. He roared his “Salaam alaikum” and sat down. With his bright turban, his kohl eyeliner, and his sparkling white shalwar kameez, he looked like a Hollywood Pashtun.

  I knew a little about Sherzai. It’s safe to say that everyone who knew him knew only a little about him. Gul Agha was not his real name. He was born with the simple name Shafiq in a poor section of Kandahar. When he joined the mujahideen he changed his name to Gul Agha; when his father was murdered by the Russians he added Sherzai, which is Pashtu for “son of lion.” But he was more like a bear than a lion, with his enormous head and shoulders and thick limbs. Sherzai had a long history both of opposing the Taliban and of “acceptable corruption,” a term coined by the coalition forces after they had been in Afghanistan for a while and had seen that their previous stance of “no corruption” was unrealistic. They realized that there was no way to control the nation’s Sherzais, men who were a little corrupt but who were also our only allies, much better than the alternative. I would get upset when someone would use the term “acceptable corruption,” and I would ask, “To whom is this corruption acceptable?” Not the regular Afghans, and certainly not the American taxpayer who was funding this war.

  The exact nature of Sherzai’s corruption was unknown. What was known is that he took the PRT into areas where the PRT had never been before. He eased the way for us to build schools and clinics in places we otherwise could not even have visited. He displayed generosity to the people of the province and was beloved in Jalalabad. In the evenings he liked to walk to the bazaar, where people would line up on the streets waiting to talk to him.

  Sherzai had big black eyes that were constantly sizing people up. As he looked around the table I felt my stomach twist. Sherzai was not above inflicting public humiliation. My predecessor, the interpreter who’d nervously lapsed into Dari, had made him hysterical. “I’m a true Pashtun of Kandahari Pashtu!” he’d cried. “Bring me a real Pashtun!”

  I summoned this memory as a way of calming myself. I was a real Pashtun. If he had a problem with a female Pashtun, he should have been more specific in his demand.

  He looked at Judy and in English asked, “And how are you?” Then his eyes rested on me, and in Pashtu he said, “And who are you?”

  He turned to his young assistant, Masoud. Like Sherzai, Masoud had style. He had a small goatee and wore an expensive-looking polo shirt with khaki pants. He rephrased the question in English, as if I wasn’t there. “And who is she?”

  “I am the new turjuman,” I said, addressing Sherzai directly, in Pashtu.

  He raised his heavy black brows. I’d amused him. “Look at this!” he cried. “She speaks Pashtu. Look at her. Just look at her. She is one of us.”

  Judy laughed. Later she told me that she had had a feeling he would have a field day with me. She hadn’t told him she’d snagged for her new interpreter that rarest of creatures, a female fluent in both Pashtu and English.

  “This meeting cannot proceed until I get to know this Pashtun sister,” he said, flattening his palms against the table.

  I told him my name was Miriam and smiled a little. It was the name Er
ic had given me in Farah, to protect my identity as well as that of my family. I told him, roughly, how it was that I found myself at PRT Jalalabad, working for an American contractor.

  “So you come from America?” he asked.

  “I was born in Kabul,” I said. I never mentioned the village. “But yes, now I come from America.”

  “Tell me,” he said, “is America really as crazy as people say it is?”

  “Crazier,” I said. “But still not nearly as crazy as your country.”

  He laughed and slapped the table, then looked at Judy. In Pashtu he said, “I am so happy you brought a Pashtun and a female sister to me. I am so happy that she is not from here. Your other interpreter is from a village nearby, and I am never comfortable talking freely. Now we may speak openly, as friends, and now we can do some real work on some projects I have in Jalalabad.”

  Judy had warned me in the Humvee on the way over that Sherzai’s normal conversational style was speechifying. He liked to hold forth, and he rarely took a breath. My challenge would be to hold everything he was saying in my head until he paused. I soon learned that I could just ask him to stop, reminding him that I had a job to do, and that I needed him to take a break to do it right.

  “I’m very happy,” Judy said. “But you better be nice to her, because I don’t want you to scare her away!”

  Sherzai wagged his finger at her. “Oh, Judy, have I ever scared anyone away?”

  Back at the PRT Judy confided that it was just as well Jawed was unable to make it that day. The evening was warm. It was so humid that I could feel my hair growing wild with frizz as we sat in her office and drank tea. The two windows in her office were wide open. The air of Jalalabad smelled green, fresh, and very different from the dust and sewage of other big Afghan cities.

  Judy told me what I was already figuring out on my own—that the trouble with CAT I interpreters was that one never knew who their cousins might be, or who their relatives might know. Afghans are famously interrelated. Jawed was not simply a random Afghan who spoke English, he was also the nephew of the chief of the border police, who was in charge of the border patrol at Torkham, the busiest crossing point on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, at the top of the winding Khyber Pass.