In My Father's Country (29 page)

Most of the interpreters were like me, Afghans who’d been forced to flee to Pakistan, where they’d grown up to become men and women who belonged to no one culture completely. Haaroon was my favorite. He was around twenty-two, long-faced and serious, the youngest child and only son in his family. He had long, slim fingers, like a musician. He was careful with his words and spent most of the time sitting quietly, observing his surroundings. I immediately thought of him for my sister. Unlike me, Najiba said she would not marry an American, and wanted to be with someone of similar background.

I’m sure they had a TV-watching room at the airfield, but Haaroon and a few others, all Afghans with heavy brows, white teeth, and a slight smirk always playing on their faces, liked to come to the PRT and hang out with the other PRT interpreters.

Most days I wouldn’t show up at the tearoom until long after dinner. I would have had a meeting with Judy after dinner, or I’d find myself in a conversation with some soldiers at the chow hall, or Eric would have called me. I’d arrive to find them slouched in front of the TV like a bunch of retirees. It looked as if they’d been sitting in those chairs, or reclining on that slim mattress, for many years, bored and unmoving. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing. If there’s one thing an Afghan is good at, it’s sitting and waiting, a must-have quality in a U.S. soldier. The similarities between Afghan culture and U.S. Army culture baffle my mind.

When I finally showed up, one of them named Ahmad, who had bright black eyes and a fat black mustache, would say, “Oh, good, now the talking can start. When it’s just us guys it’s so boring.”

“That’s your own fault,” I’d reply. “If you allowed your women to be CAT I’s, they could be here talking to you, like I do.”

“Ah, no,” they’d say. “Our women are not like you.”

Whenever I could wrestle the conversation around to the topic of their women, I did. So much attention is paid to building schools for girls, but their men refuse to allow them to go. In a culture where women
are so dependent on the goodwill of the men, how can we expect to move women’s rights forward without getting the men to bring them to the new age of liberty and democracy? Without my realizing it, this had become a personal mission of mine, to keep a running conversation about Afghan women.

Haaroon seemed to be more interested in the subject than the others were.

“Women need some freedom,” I’d insist. “You need to let them go to school, to support them in their studies.”

“They don’t want to go to school,” Haaroon would say. “They’re not like you.”

“Perhaps they need a little encouragement.”

“Perhaps,” he said, doubtful.

Some nights Haaroon showed up by himself. I think the other men had wives back in their villages, but Haaroon was alone. On those nights we’d discuss philosophy, politics, and Bollywood, for which Haaroon had a secret passion. Other nights, the group would discuss issues of the day, but gradually everyone but Haaroon would leave, and he and I would sit drinking tea and talking. He could talk for hours, his soft voice never seeming to tire.

“Do you ever speak with your sisters about the things we talk about?” I asked one evening.

“They’re only interested in women stuff,” he replied. “Not the rest of the world.”

“Explain to me this woman stuff. What do you mean? Am I not a woman?”

“Once I tried to talk to my sister about Karzai, and she couldn’t figure out what was going on. It made her nervous and stressed out, so I stopped.”

“You stressed her out, trying to talk about politics.”

He frowned, confused, as if I’d asked him to solve a difficult math problem. I thought he was cute. I told him I would love to have met his sisters and to be there while he talked to them.

“I know it’s strange for me to be saying this, Haaroon, but I think you
would be a good match for my sister.” As a Pashtun female, I was not supposed to offer up my sister like that because his family was supposed to beg for her hand—in fact, I wasn’t even supposed to acknowledge the fact that I
had
a sister of marriageable age. Still, there was an American matchmaker in me. Najiba had begun getting to know (since it was not dating in the true American sense) a young Nepalese man named Kabir, but I didn’t know at the time that it was serious, and found Haaroon to be handsome and earnest. As soon as the words left my mouth I realized my cultural blunder and wanted to explain.

“My sister is very Pashtun. She’s not like me. She has no idea I’m saying these things.”

At that moment Ahmad came back with a couple of soldiers from his unit. They wanted some tea. One of them turned on the hot plate and set about making it. A plate of green grapes sat on the table. Haaroon stared at it and was silent. What had I done? Clearly, he was upset. Before he could open his mouth, another CAT I appeared in the doorway. He was one of the regulars. He loved to tease me about being a rich American.

“What about you, Miriam? Don’t you want to marry a nice Pashtun?”

“I’m already engaged,” I answered without thinking. I could have gone all deployment without saying a word: I’d shipped Eric’s beautiful gold-and-ruby ring back home, for fear it would be stolen, and as far as anyone knew, when I took personal phone calls they were all from my family in Oregon.

Miriam is engaged! This was breaking news. I rarely shared anything personal about myself. By the next evening word was out that I was not simply engaged but engaged to an American soldier. Pointing out to them that he was an officer and not a soldier was going to be irrelevant. In the tearoom, there were shouts of
Woo-hoo!
and fist pumping from the Americans, as if they’d scored one for their team. The CAT I’s were dumbfounded. How could I do this to Pashtun men? How could I betray them so? Our evening gatherings became combative. For Pashtuns, arguing is like a sport. The interpreters argued with me mercilessly, and I argued right back, all in good sport. Don’t take it personally, I assured
them. You’re all great, but even if I wasn’t already engaged, I would never marry any of you; you’re too controlling. You can’t help it; look at how you’re trying to control me right now! We were arguing in English, for the benefit of the soldiers, who were watching, mesmerized.

Once, while we were going back and forth, my cell phone rang. A smile must have crept onto my face as I looked at the caller ID, because Ahamd cried, “It’s him, it’s him!” And the others chimed in, “We are your people! You belong with us. He’s a foreigner. He doesn’t understand you. Don’t talk to him!”

I excused myself and took the call from Eric. He wanted to know if I’d given any thought to our guest list. It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about. The guest list? The interpreters were just teasing me about Eric, but they were right. He was so different, which was part of his enormous appeal, part of why I couldn’t help but love him. He had lived a life totally different from that of the men from my country. True, he had lived amid missions and bombs and tanks, just like the Afghan men, but he had chosen to join the army and to be in that environment. The Afghan men were forced to live there in war. Having had no choice about that had made them bitter and angry to a degree that frightened me. Eric could separate the violence around him from within him; the Afghan men’s violence became them; you could see it hovering behind their dark eyes.

Once I returned to the party the other interpreters cried, “Did you break up with him?”

“Not today. Ask me again tomorrow.”

Haaroon never joked about my engagement, nor did we ever mention my sister again.

Judy already knew I was engaged to a soldier, although I hadn’t divulged that he was a fellow PRT commander. Shortly after I’d arrived, when I saw she wasn’t going to fire me, I had told her, to explain all the time I was spending on the computer and the phone in the evening.

She was married to a fellow commander, and she cautioned me that it wasn’t easy. I think she was genuinely concerned. One day not long after, I was sitting on a bench beneath the
narange
trees, and an older U.S.
Army officer I’d never seen before sat down beside me. He was tall, slender, and blue-eyed. His hair was completely gray. I thought he was just a nice officer out for a walk, but he turned out to be the army chaplain. He said that he heard I was engaged to marry an American.

“Is he Christian?”

“Catholic,” I said.

He asked if there was anything he could explain to me, anything he could help me understand.

“To be honest, I’m not very religious, and my fiancé respects my religion enough. We both pretty much feel the same, that it’s important to be good and to do good, and if you don’t, there are consequences.”

“I can’t argue with that,” he said. Then he told me that he’d done several tours in Iraq and studied Islam; he felt it was important to know the religion of the host country. He said he deeply admired my faith and certainly wasn’t going to encourage me to convert; it sounded as if I was going into my marriage with my eyes open. Then he asked about Eric’s ethnic heritage. I told him he was half Italian and half Argentinean.

“Oh, boy,” he said, and began to laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked.

“It’s just that Afghans are volatile, emotional, and expressive, and so are Italians. And so are Argentineans. I don’t envy your neighbors. You’re going to be screaming and yelling one minute and making up the next. Your friends will never know if you two are getting a divorce or going to live happily ever after.”

“That’s pretty much it,” I said. We sat for a moment without speaking. I asked him who had told him I was getting married, and he said that Judy had sent him. She was concerned and wanted to help. During those early weeks, it was empowering just to feel that I’d made a friend who cared about me.

T
WENTY-ONE

I
n 2005, Ramadan, the month of fasting, began on October 4. It started with an unsettling occurrence. I was sitting in the yard when a soldier on desk duty in the Tactical Operations Center came to get me because Judy was looking for me. There was a fight in the bazaar that some were saying was instigated by the Taliban. Judy quickly told me what had happened. A teenager who’d refused to honor the fast had been beaten. All Muslims are required to fast. It doesn’t matter how observant we are the rest of the year—for one month we must go without food and drink from sunrise to sunset, the better to empathize with people who are less fortunate, who don’t have a choice about when they can eat and drink. It’s also meant to strengthen the community. Each day after dark we invite people into our homes to break the fast; or we take food from the home to the mosque. It also cleanses our bodies to fast from food, and to give them a break from eating. During Ramadan we’re also supposed to refrain from lying, stealing, or having impure thoughts.

Judy’s CAT I, Jawed, went into the city to see exactly what had happened. The boy, who was clearly old enough to be fasting, had been chewing gum—another indulgence prohibited during Ramadan. The locals called him out. He shot off his mouth, saying the Taliban was no
longer in power and that he could do whatever he pleased. According to Jawed’s report, shopkeepers then tackled him and beat him severely.

It was the talk of the tearoom that day. I said to one of the CAT I’s that I felt conflicted about it. “That boy was old enough to have an opinion and to speak his mind. And he was right—ultimately fasting was his own choice, something between him and God. At the same time, I can see how his behavior was insulting to traditional and fasting Muslims.”

The CAT I looked at me coldly. “He deserved it,” he said. “If you choose not to fast, then don’t fast, but don’t show it in public. We don’t have that kind of freedom in Afghanistan.”

In October Judy was called away to a meeting of PRT commanders. I loved my job and I loved staying busy, but I felt relieved when I heard she would be gone. Her absence would give me time to go on missions with the Civil Affairs Team and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where I would meet villagers, and not just attend the governor’s meetings.

During the month of fasting, Muslims are encouraged to read the Koran from start to finish, a little bit every day. Mosques in the cities use public speakers to read the Koran in Arabic, as it is traditionally read by Muslims worldwide, but they go a step further; they not only read out loud the translation in the native language but also preach in between the verses. Because it was in Arabic and Pashtu, the soldiers could easily block it out. But I knew what they were saying and I was tormented by it.

The morning it happened I was lying in bed, listening to the
Qari
(one who has memorized the Koran) talk about hellfire and how everything we do here on earth will be judged by God, and how we will be held accountable for it. Even though the rational side of me knew better, I couldn’t help but feel that the
Qari
was talking to me directly, telling me that for marrying Eric, an infidel, I would burn in hell for eternity.

Then, at 8:50, the ground started shaking. I saw the time on my travel clock just before it fell to the floor. I could feel the earth’s roar in my joints and bones. I leapt up from my bed just as it was being heaved into the air, causing me to stumble when my feet hit the floor.

My room was on the second floor. I ran down the curved cement stairs, petrified as they groaned and swayed with each step, filling the air with dust. By the time I had staggered to a bench near the edge of the swimming pool, the shaking had stopped. Soldiers were streaming from their rooms, barefoot, shirtless, cussing.

A little boy, who worked as a janitor at the MWR, sidled up to me and whispered, “Do you know you’re not wearing any shoes?”

“I’m just glad I’m wearing clothes!” I replied.

“I didn’t feel anything!” he said. He sat down next to me. “You should put some shoes on.” The earth rocked and shivered again. I grabbed the side of the bench. The boy giggled and ran off. God, how I wished that I was so fearless about death.