by Gwen Florio
Liv stood in the doorway. “What’s new?”
He shrugged, the movement exaggerating the discomfort of his sweat-soaked shirt. “It looks as though we’ve created a prison at Guantánamo. In Cuba,” he added, in response to her blank look. “It’s an old U.S. military base.”
“We?”
“The government.”
“Why is the government building a prison in Cuba? And what does that have to do with us?”
“It’s for the terrorists.” He caught her look. Liv was increasingly skeptical—vocally so, in a way that sometimes made things uncomfortable for Martin—of the seemingly indiscriminate sweeps that netted dozens of Afghans and labeled them all terrorists.
“Terrorists. You mean the mujahideen? People fighting for their country?”
Martin braced himself for one of her outbursts. But she contented herself by following up with a listless jab.
“What are you doing? Filing another one of your so-called humanitarian reports?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
She went to her desk and punched at the keyboard. “Power off again?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“Nothing.” He thought it was the only way he had appeared to adapt to Afghanistan. The national torpor had so seeped into his consciousness that these days it merely exasperated him. Whenever he went over to the old presidential palace, whose high-ceilinged rooms with their painted-over bullet scars and gouged parquet floors housed innumerable bureaucracies, the guards at the front gate routinely ignored him until they had finished watching the latest Bollywood music video on a generator-powered television, the grainy black-and-white screen full of young women with bare arms and bellies, shaking prodigious amounts of flesh. The guards leaned forward, openmouthed, as though they did not spend all day, every day, watching spectacles exactly like this one. Martin often thought, as he waited and waited in the heat, that a terrorist could have parked himself in front of them, planted a bomb at their feet, and smilingly triggered the detonator without the guards ever having known what hit them. It made him wonder if maybe the Taliban hadn’t had a point, banning music and television as unacceptable distractions.
He could imagine Liv’s disgust if he were ever to voice such a thought. She had dived into her make-work duties, combining anecdotes from the interviews with whatever statistics she could glean into memos that she emailed to the United Nations, and to various corporations and wealthy people back in the United States, seeking support for the NGO’s work. Martin did not think it necessary to tell her that Face the Future’s emails queued up for a batch transmission every twenty-four hours, and that he reviewed them all, editing her reports or deleting them entirely as he saw fit—along with the increasingly frantic incoming emails from Mrs. Khan. Liv’s way of coping with the aftermath of her experience in the market was to keep busy, even though that left her preoccupied and even obsessed. But that was another thought he kept to himself.
* * *
“Listen to this.” Liv brandished her most recent collection of outrageous statistics. It didn’t matter that they were at their favorite restaurant, one of the few still deemed safe for foreigners.
It was across the street from the cinema that had been shut down by the Taliban but was now enjoying a brisk resurgence. She was the only woman in the main dining room, as was frequently the case. Afghan women, fully shrouded in their burqas, when they came with their husbands and children moved quickly through the dining room into a curtained space beyond for families.
“One in four children dies before the age of five. We’re talking something similar to the scale of HIV in Central Africa. Except that we don’t need expensive antiretrovirals to fix this. Just clean water, antibiotics, adequate nutrition—that’s half the battle. How hard is that? Because at some point, these sorts of things are part of Face the Future’s mission. Aren’t they?”
Whenever Liv went on one of her rants, Martin thought of Farida, of how she moved with quiet efficiency around their small office, rarely speaking. Sometimes, she would stand silently at his side, waiting until he noticed her there, before bringing something to his attention. When she spoke, always in a murmur, she bent her head and gazed at some point on his desk. The rare occasions when her glance slid across his stayed in his memory.
He sometimes wondered whether Liv’s manner had indeed changed, or whether she just seemed increasingly strident the longer he went without being around Western women. She waved computer printouts in her left hand. With her right, without looking, she scooped up bits of meat and rice in a torn piece of naan, nimbly bringing it to her mouth.
Martin pushed his own food around with a fork. “How do you get the antibiotics to them? Fill up a jeep with pills and drive out to the villages? Oh, wait. I forgot there’s no road. And the trails are still mined.”
“Maybe if ISAF took those damned trucks out of Kabul once in a while instead of tying up traffic here—”
Martin cut her off. “You know they’re targets. It’s bad enough for them in town. Do we have to go over all of this again?”
The waiter brought a salad, as he always did, even though Martin always asked him not to. During their first week in Kabul, he’d made the mistake of eating a kiwi—after first washing it in a bleach solution, then peeling it—an experience that despite his precautions brought home the inadequacies of Face the Future’s little toilet.
“Honestly, Martin,” Liv had said on the second day, handing two buckets through the bathroom door, one of warm, soapy water so that he could clean himself, the other to help the toilet flush, “just use the hole in the floor. That’s what I do. Why not take advantage of a system that has worked for centuries?”
It infuriated him that Liv rarely got sick. She bit into a slice of kharbooza, the sugary white melon frequently served as dessert, its delicate color and flavor making cantaloupe and honeydew seem garish and cloying by comparison.
They sat at long tables that ran the length of the room, well away from another part of the dining area, where men lolled on carpets on a raised platform, reclining against cushions as they ate. The space beneath the platform was inadequately curtained. Boys squatted there, rinsing heads of lettuce at a streaming tap that Martin was sure spewed little better than raw sewage. Goats lurked and shat nearby, snatching at the lettuces before becoming meals themselves. Martin’s stomach knotted. He always ordered his meat barbecued, reassured that it sat directly above the glowing coals in the braziers on the sidewalk just outside, where other boys waved rubber fans to coax the low flames that, Martin hoped, charred every last microbe. Two of the boys snared one of the goats and dragged it from beneath the platform and around behind the restaurant. It bleated and kicked within their grasp. Those awaiting their meals laughed in anticipation. The restaurant was famed for the freshness of its meat.
Martin felt another forceful tug in his gut. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use the restaurant’s latrine, with its ubiquitous green plastic pitcher beside the hole. He carried folded squares of toilet paper wherever he went. He looked away as Liv finished her last slice of melon, then ran her finger through the juice left on the plate.
“You don’t have to eat like that, you know. They expect us to use these.” He held up his fork. Her fingertips were stained red with the spices from the lamb. He hoped the melon had distracted her. It hadn’t.
“We’re not making one goddamned bit of difference here. I tell you these things, and you talk to me about how I eat. You, touching your food with your left hand, talk to me of etiquette.”
“Christ, Liv.” He dropped his fork. It thudded against the table’s greasy plastic cloth. Around them, turbaned heads lifted again. Sometimes, the scrutiny he attracted whenever he was out in public made Martin feel as though he were on television. “I don’t wipe my ass with my hand.” Martin had no idea whether those around them understood English, and didn’t really care. “So it’s okay that I touch my food with it. Don�
�t you think that to pretend to be anything other than who we are is to insult them? Or to invite trouble? You of all people should know that. You think of yourself as Farida’s friend, but don’t think she doesn’t know she’s just your pet.”
Liv’s eyes seemed pale and lost within their heavy outlines of kohl. Her hands fell to the table, her painted fingernails digging into the scarred wood. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“Only a friend would do what she did for me. You know exactly what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for Farida.”
Thirty-Two
Of course word of Liv’s assault had gotten out. Embers of gossip smoldered among the shopkeepers and even the wives doing their shopping, catching flame with the drivers and cabbies, becoming puffs of noxious smoke that coiled through the bars of the gates guarding the NGOs and the ISAF compound. By then it was all so distorted that Martin believably smothered it with a roll of his eyes.
“Some people said something to her, that’s all. It got blown way out of proportion. She wasn’t even sure what they said—just the tone. You know how things are these days.”
And they did know, chiming in with tales of far worse incidents, ones that quickly erased all talk of whatever had or hadn’t happened in the bazaar, and to women, after all. Liv dropped—mostly—her foolish idea of notifying the authorities. Martin breathed easier. Life resumed, normalcy underscored by yet another daytime power failure that erased everything from his computer screen, leaving it a mocking blank.
“Goddamn it.” It came out weary, more plea than curse.
Liv sat across the room, her back to him, bent over a report she was editing by hand. She did not turn, but merely lifted her pencil and waggled it accusingly. While even pens ran out of ink, she was fond of saying, a pencil never broke down. “Did you save it?”
He cursed again, more emphatically. Liv put pencil back to paper. “When in Afghanistan,” she said. She wrote most of her reports by hand now, later retyping them into the computer.
“That’s your solution? To go back to the eighteenth century? That’s the problem with this country. They’re content to live like this.”
Liv’s back stiffened. “Maybe not content,” she said. “Maybe they have more to worry about than your report.”
It was always this way now. No matter how reasonable his complaint—really, was it too much to expect reliable electricity in a city of three million people?—Liv met it with a calm, exasperating acceptance.
He pushed back from the desk, chair scraping loudly across the concrete floor. “That’s why nothing ever changes here. Everybody just shrugs and says, ‘This is Afghanistan,’ and so nothing ever gets fixed. And now you’re doing it, too.”
“Yes, Martin sahib.” It was her new term for him, implying that he was some sort of condescending colonialist. There was a routine in these sharp exchanges. Martin criticized Afghanistan, Liv criticized Martin, in a back-and-forth of rising voices and well-placed barbs that led to another evening of tense silence, and a night where each kept to his or her side of the bed.
Bad enough that Liv said these things at all, but she hardly confined them to their home. On this day, Farida moved about the office, silent as usual, her face a lovely mask as Martin fumed about the failure of the generator. “How is it that we ran out of gasoline? I gave— What’s the new one’s name? The one who needs a bath. I gave him money just a couple of days ago. He probably pocketed it. Now I’ve lost all my work.”
“I don’t think it’s Hamidullah’s fault that ISAF bought up all the gas this week.” Martin took Liv’s easy recall of the new guard’s name as the rebuke it was meant to be, and seethed at her showing such open disrespect before Farida.
“Is that true, Farida? Did ISAF take the gas?”
“I don’t know why there is such a shortage of petrol.” She stood before an open file drawer, addressing its contents.
“Thank you, Farida.” He pitched his voice lower, as he always did when he spoke to her. He wanted her to notice how he appreciated her, but she never gave him any sort of acknowledgment, speaking to him in the same cool, impersonal tone she used with everyone except Liv.
Liv stood and stretched. “I’ll go talk to Hamidullah about the gas, and then I’m going home. Everyone else here takes a midday break, and we should, too. It’s too hot to work.”
Farida grimaced. Martin thought he knew why: Hamidullah was markedly uncomfortable in Liv’s unveiled presence, averting his eyes and scowling theatrically. Well, let her talk to him. For all her vaunted understanding of the poor, benighted Afghan people, she’d get nowhere.
The door closed behind her. Martin rested his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes, ever sore from the constant scrub of the dust in the air. He wanted nothing more than to go back to the house and read the three-week-old issue of Time magazine that had arrived in the mailbag on the morning’s flight, but he did not relish the chill of Liv’s presence. Taking a walk was out of the question; he would have to wait until the next day, at the combined meeting of NGO administrators and ISAF brass, to see if he could find a few people to accompany him on another outing to Chicken Street. Although he referred to all the merchants there as Ali Baba, he enjoyed the brief sensation of normalcy involved in a simple stroll.
A drawer closed. “I have finished the filing. Is there anything else you need?”
Martin crossed the floor to the file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. He had never been alone in the office with her before and wanted to prolong the moment. He chose a file at random. Farida turned up the file behind it, marking its place. Martin opened the folder and found a report. “This one. I’m unclear about it. Maybe you could explain it to me?”
She glanced at the page and looked at him in bewilderment. She looked back at the page. “The Opium Rapid Assessment Survey for November?”
“Yes.” Anything to keep her there, less than an arm’s length away, her increasingly lush proportions evident even within the generous disguise of her kameez. “Remind me what the summary says.”
Her gaze darted to the side, and she made as if to move past him, but he leaned toward her, just enough to check the impulse. She stepped back against the drawers and began to read, her voice unsteady. He stopped her after a few sentences. “You are feeling well? The baby?”
“Yes, yes, I am fine.” But she didn’t look fine. She gestured with a shaking hand toward a chair across the room. “Maybe I need to sit down.”
Martin took her arm, thrilled to touch her. She tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip. “Here. Lean on me.”
Now her whole body trembled. “Please. You shame me.”
“Farida.” He moved his hand up her arm as he spoke. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Why do you hide yourself?” With his free hand, he reached for the dupatta she wore indoors at Face the Future. Once, she had draped it loosely, but lately she wore it low on her forehead and wrapped beneath her chin, so that not a strand of hair showed, a disappointment to Martin. The dupatta fell to Farida’s shoulders. She tried to pull it back onto her head as he stroked her hair.
“In our country, an educated woman like you would never be a file clerk. You would hold a high position. You could be my research assistant. You would receive a good salary. It’s what your sister wanted.” He remembered she’d never seen the letter, and hurried on. “I could arrange for free housing on campus for you. You should come back to Amrika—to America—with us. With me.” He untangled his hand from her hair and touched her face, so soft compared to Liv’s sun-roughened skin. His fingers came away damp. Tears of gratitude, he thought. “I know you can’t say anything. But I’ll get you out of here. I promise.”
Emboldened by her silence—she would dare not cry out; he knew as well as she that to draw attention to this moment could bring death—he moved closer. She let the dupatta fall and struck at his chest. “Stop! You must not.”
He moved closer still, pinning her hands with his own, his body pressing against her bel
ly. He sensed the motion within. It made him feel even more protective. “Your baby, too. I’ll take care of it. School, everything it needs. You won’t believe how different everything is there.” He folded her in his arms and pressed his lips to her cheek, taking care to be gentle so as not to frighten her further. She jerked back. He wrapped one arm tighter still around her. The other moved to her chest.
She started, and at first he thought she was responding to his touch, so he touched his mouth to hers, softly, softly, hardly believing this was finally happening. But she wrenched her head away and looked past him.
“Oh, no,” she breathed. “No.”
Martin turned, his hand still on the front of Farida’s kameez.
Liv and Hamidullah stood in the doorway, each holding a jerry can of gasoline for the generator, Liv pale and gaping, Hamidullah looking at Farida for the first time, his expression both triumphant and knowing, his lips forming a single word:
“Whore.”
Thirty-Three
Farida stumbled into the street, arms windmilling, beseeching passing cabs.
Some drove past—a woman alone, it was not proper—but finally one slowed. Farida hesitated when she saw the Hazara driver, but then reminded herself that he had, after all, stopped. The man’s face was kind, and a little tired, and she said her thanks as she fell into the car and urged him to drive quickly to Gul’s family home. The driver looked surprised as she named the neighborhood whose women surely did not customarily go out alone, but he drove her there without comment and gravely accepted the outrageous tip she offered him.
She nodded to the guard at the gate, trusting in the sort of slow stupidity that, while he noted the strangeness of her arriving alone, would not think—not immediately—to inquire further. She paused outside the house, trying to catch her breath. Inside were the aunties, who would beset her with questions the minute she entered, wondering why she was home so early, and unaccompanied by Gul. She glanced down the street, fearing the sight of Hamidullah. But no, she reminded herself, he would not confront her. That would be the job of the men of the family. She wondered when it would come—soon, she knew—and how they would do it. She knew well the story of Gul’s cousin’s wife, and she thought, too, of the cooking fire. But the fire was how women killed. Men would most likely use knives, and it would be men who dealt with her transgression.
