In My Father's Country (25 page)

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 Eric 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.

At the border there are no neat and orderly highway lanes, no agent patrol booths, and no big signs welcoming you to Pakistan. It’s the same at Khost, at Kandahar, and at every other place where the two countries rub shoulders. The border is porous. Anyone, including and especially insurgents, can cross anytime. They never have to explain if they are there for business or for pleasure or—in their case—for jihad.

At Torkham the border is an ant nest, a big, noisy bazaar, crowded with small shops selling everything you can imagine: sandals, soap, drugs, weapons, and, in the last few years, U.S. Army uniforms. For me, the only thing that distinguished this place from any other border town was the army of small children with their rusty wheelbarrows. Afghan taxi drivers drop their fares off at the Afghanistan side of the bazaar, where the kids would take over, loading suitcases, groceries, chickens, and grandmothers into their wheelbarrows. For a few Afghanis they’d
transport the stuff to the other side of the bazaar, just a few yards away in Pakistan, where a Pakistani taxi would wait to take you to your destination.

Later in my deployment Judy and I would visit an American base under construction at Torkham. We left our Humvees at the base and walked through the bazaar. We stopped at a small eatery that sold chai and pomegranate juice by the cup and
chapli kabobs
, fat patties of ground beef fried in oil that had been sitting there for weeks, then wrapped in a
doughdi
. It was the best
chapli kabob
I’ve ever tasted. I attribute it to all the dirt, dust, and grease that found its way into the oil. I wouldn’t let Judy taste mine, for fear she might be sick for weeks.

To the displeasure of the coalition forces, weapons dealers and drug smugglers did business in the open here. The American forces had to collaborate with the Afghan government if they wanted to crack down on the smugglers. Here is where this particular CAT I dilemma came into play: When Sherzai wanted to discuss a possible crackdown with Judy, he was hindered by having to communicate through Jawed, for fear that Jawed might tip off his uncle, the chief of the border police, who was rumored to be on the payroll of the smugglers. So they never discussed it.

Later it came out that Jawed also had relatives in the construction business. When Sherzai discussed projects that required a bid, Jawed would skip that part of the translation. Then, when it came time to start building the clinic, the community center, or the school, only Jawed’s uncles would show up to bid for the job. Judy realized that Jawed scrimped on his translations when it suited his purposes, but she couldn’t bring herself to fire him: He was the only interpreter—CAT I or CAT II—whose English she could understand.

Jawed may have been sneakier and more unreliable than most, but the presence of even the most upstanding CAT I could be a problem. As the decade wore on, working for the Americans became more and more dangerous for the average Afghan. Even though many meetings with governors and government officials involved nothing more than discussing what the people of the province needed, outside the walls
of the governor’s compound, in the street and in the villages, lived the
perception
that these were top-secret meetings where valuable information was exchanged. No governor or PRT commander wanted to be held responsible for the kidnapping and torture of a CAT I, and so they held their tongues. This is what Sherzai meant when he said “real work.” Not only was I not related to anyone in the province, I was from Portland, Oregon, a place most Afghans had never even heard of. Plus, I slept on the base at night, and never needed to leave there unless I was flying out to return to the United States.