In My Father's Country (31 page)

One of the times Judy and I went to the Governor’s Palace for a meeting, I asked him whether he would mind if I asked his cook for the eggplant recipe. Judy was out of the room on a phone call.

“Sure, Miriam, ask!” That day he was dressed in a white polo shirt. He could have been one of my uncles in America, except they are not so big and burly. Plus, he smiled at me, and they never did. He had a devilish look that made me wonder if the rumors about him behaving as if he were above the law were true. Then he said, “I am the cook. But don’t tell anyone.”

“You’re the cook?”

“I love this dish, and I love making it for you. No one else can make it right. As a Pashtun you know that we grew up eating it. I can tell you did, too, and it made me happy to make it for you so you can think about your country and its cuisine.”

At that moment Judy returned, and the meeting resumed.

I went to Judy’s office to tell her about his invitation. I couldn’t go without her permission. She had agreed with me wholeheartedly about the importance of building relationships, and that it happened during ordinary moments, when Afghans and Americans were given the chance to interact without an agenda. An Eid party provided exactly this sort of opportunity, and we both knew it.

“Everyone from Jalalabad and the local villages will be there,” she said. “It won’t be safe. You’ll have to take a security detail.”

I didn’t say anything. She busied herself with some file folders. I knew I would be perfectly safe. Sherzai would be my security detail. She knew that showing up with a dozen armed American soldiers would ruin the party for everyone else. I knew she wasn’t thrilled about Eric, but I suspected that she also felt as if I’d replaced her in Sherzai’s esteem. If I hadn’t shown up at the PRT, she probably would have been invited to the party. She would have dragged Jawed along to interpret.

I called Sherzai on my cell to tell him that I was sorry to have to decline his invitation, but I was busy with some urgent matters here at the PRT.

“But this is your first Eid back with your people!” he cried. “I want you to celebrate it properly.”

“Please don’t worry. I’ll come over in a few days and celebrate with you then.”

“I will never cook for you again, Miriam. You rejected my invitation. I had them buy all the ingredients, just for you. Now I am going to throw them away.”

He was such a drama queen. “No, you’re not going to throw it all away. Cook the eggplant like always, and serve it to your guests.”

Sure enough, that night his messenger arrived at the gate with another batch. The next morning the same messenger arrived at the gate, staggering behind an enormous basket of Pakistani sweets. It must have weighed at least twenty-five pounds. I needed a soldier to bring a truck to the gate to transport it back to my room.

I put the basket on the bed that belonged to the ghost. I hadn’t slept at night in this room for weeks. I sat on my bed and stared at the basket, filled with dates, cookies, doughnuts, and candy.

Many Afghans enjoy a life of extreme disappointment, of endless labor and boredom. A few, like Sherzai, know no deprivation. Once Sherzai joked that he would like to make me his fourth wife. I responded that being the fourth wife is indeed a good position to be in, because then you are the spoiled wife. He said I shouldn’t be so sure; his other wives were older and would expect to boss me around. They might make me do all the work. We joked a lot about my marrying him, but never in front of other Afghans. Sherzai knew how disrespectful it would have been for him to joke about something like that with a Pashtun female in front of other Pashtun men. I had never for a minute thought Sherzai was serious. But now, as I stared at that ridiculous basket, I thought perhaps I had been wrong.

I tracked down Judy, sitting in a chair outside her office, reading some
reports in the sun. It was November in Jalalabad and it was still hot. The air still smelled of basil and orange blossoms. I sat down beside her and closed my eyes. The sun’s rays felt heavenly on my face and closed eyelids.

I told her I wanted to throw an Eid party for the soldiers. I had been in Afghanistan for almost a year, and I had never shared anything special with the soldiers. I knew they’d been trained to respect the rituals of Islam, but mostly they were mystified by the religion and those who practiced it. An entire month of fasting seemed extreme to them.

“That’s an awesome idea,” said Judy. Her eyes still on her reports. We sat in silence for a moment. “I suppose it would ruin the fun if I showed up?”

“Of course you must come,” I said. “I’ll give a little explanation of Eid. Come for that, then we can hang out afterward.”

The day of the party was sultry; a golden haze nestled against the feet of the mountains. I wore a white outfit embellished with silver embroidery that I’d purchased at the PRT bazaar. I wore silver bracelets, black eyeliner, and glittery powder on my cheeks. I had taken no makeup to Afghanistan the first time I returned. I had thought it would be silly to wear it while at war, but I did find some makeup in the local bazaar. Like most things sold in Afghan bazaars, it was past its expiration date, but it was better than nothing.

For Eid I had asked one of the PRT shopkeepers to bring me some silver sparkles. This was the army. No one looked like this, ever. I felt so dressed up beside the soldiers in their beige uniforms.

The chow-hall cook had made milk tea for the party. I brought Sherzai’s enormous basket of sweets and supplemented it with some cookies from the bazaar. We set up a table in the MWR and announced the celebration over the loudspeaker. I gave a short talk about the month of fasting and the reason behind it and how we celebrated Eid. I taught the soldiers the proper way to wish someone a happy Eid in Pashtu:
Akhtar de mubarak sa
.

“Although you didn’t fast, we won’t hold it against you and will still let you celebrate with us,” I teased the soldiers.

“Sometimes we did,” said one of them. “Just the other day we had a meeting in a village and for the first time no one offered us tea!”

“Okay, I think that counts as fasting.” I was always generous in giving the soldiers credit.

The party was a success. In a few hours the basket of sweets was empty, not a crumb left, and for the rest of the day I was heartened to hear several soldiers wishing the local laborers
akhtar de mubarak sa
. The laborers thanked them, often offering a quick lesson in proper pronunciation. This was progress.

The wind picked up in the evening. The sound of it rustling in the palms reminded me of being near the ocean. Judy said that the party had been an excellent idea. I reminded her it couldn’t have happened without Sherzai and his determination to be larger than life.

The only thing that marred an otherwise perfect Eid was an incident with some of the local laborers. On the way to the MWR I passed several young guys from a nearby village digging a trench. They’d straightened up from their work and openly ogled me. I was worried about how the party would go, already exhausted from my eternal lack of sleep and the heavy, damp heat. I lost my temper.

I told Judy what had happened. “I just don’t know how long I can stay in this country,” I said. “In the beginning, it was all right, being gawked at by everyone. I thought people would get used to seeing me. But still, wherever I go, everyone stares. I can’t take it anymore.” Although it upset me to be stared at in any country, it upset me a lot more in Afghanistan. I think it’s because I knew that the men doing it would be risking their lives if they were to stare at other Pashtun women outside the wire. So it was insulting on a different level, that they would feel free to look at me like that without fearing the consequences. Usually, I would take matters into my own hands and tell them to stop staring and remember that we were all Pashtuns, hoping to shame them. But that day I was also looking for an excuse to blow up. I missed everyone back home, and wanted to be with my family on Eid.

“I’ll take care of it,” Judy said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, as soon as I realized that I would be
better at yelling at the local men than Judy. “It’s Eid day. Things can get a little crazy. I probably overreacted.”

The next day, without telling me, Judy called a meeting of all the interpreters and local laborers and told them to stop staring at me. She told them it was not permissible to even look at me, and that if she caught any of them so much as glancing my way, they would be fired instantly. I only knew this because I bumped into Haaroon. Quite literally. He was staring down at his shoes. For extra measure, he shielded his eyes with his hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

“The commander said if she caught us looking at you, we’d get fired!”

I found Judy in her office, shuffling papers, her green scarf folded on the back of the chair beside her desk. I said I appreciated her effort, but that this was even worse—now I looked like a prima donna.

“If I have to fire a few local laborers to hang on to you, then I will,” she said.

“There’s no need to fire anyone.”

“I can’t let you go,” she said, in a tone that told me she knew I would be leaving. “I don’t know what they’ll send me if you leave.”

THE LAST TIME
I saw Sherzai before I left Jalalabad he was the star of a local TV-news story. The story concerned a mission we’d undertaken that morning at a nearby refugee camp. It was the same camp where Judy and I and our security detail were invited into the old woman’s tent to partake of the worst milk tea in the history of the nation.

During the months I’d spent working in his province Sherzai had been in hot water with the refugee population, over the land dispute we’d first heard about on our previous visit. The refugees claimed he’d been unfair. It was said he’d favored certain people, depending on their tribal associations, not to mention the fact that he was rumored to have just flat-out kept some of the land for himself. This disturbed him. He was beloved in Nangarhar and he didn’t appreciate any gossip.

We’d agreed to meet him at the settlement camp, but that day we’d had word that there might be an ambush planned for us. Our convoy
moved slowly, stopping at each point of watch, radioing to one another that the road was clear, that there weren’t going to be any nasty surprises, no ambushes or IEDs.

By the time we arrived, Sherzai was already there. Judy and I found him standing atop a small hill, dressed in his Pashtun photo-op gear: his dove-gray
shalwar kameez
, his black vest, and a gold-and-black turban. A crowd of people pressed into him. Children scampered around the periphery hopping and waving their arms. Dust hung in the air, disturbed by all the bare, stamping feet.

We watched as Sherzai extended his big arm, the gold watch on his wrist and in his hand a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Another hand snatched it from him. The crowd jostled. People ran toward him, shouting.

In 2005, $100 equaled about 5,000 Afghanis, more than an average Afghan made in a year. It would be like someone showing up on your doorstep with forty grand. And Sherzai passed out hundreds to everyone, to six-year-old girls and shifty young guys and stooped grandfathers who probably wouldn’t live long enough to spend the $100. This was his solution to the land-distribution mess.

Judy and I stopped. People pushed past us in their rush to get to Sherzai. Most didn’t seem to know who he was, this big Pashtun with the hundred-dollar bills. If they knew, they didn’t care.

“Judy, did we know he was going to do this?”

She shook her head. I knew she was wondering how she was going to explain this to her superiors, Sherzai passing out hundred-dollar bills like paper napkins at a barbecue. We were there to support and mentor the local government, and he was the local government. Even if she could make herself heard over the chatter and cries, she couldn’t stop him. It would have been violating his authority.

Behind the crowd a very old woman, bent nearly in half from a lifetime of sweeping dust from dirt floors, crowed, “Where is the man with the money! I want my hundred-dollar bill!” Her head was raised and tipped at an angle peculiar to the blind.

Sherzai spied her and hollered, “Step away, people! Everyone step away!”

He pushed his way through the crowd. The performance was about to begin.

“Where’s my hundred dollars?” she called again, aware, I imagine, that the mood of the crowd had changed, that something was about to happen.

Sherzai stepped in front of her. It was difficult to tell whether he could see that she was blind, or whether he was so caught up in what he was about to do that he didn’t notice. “
Adhai
, how are you today? I am Sherzai. I am the governor of this province.”

“Son, I do not care who you are. I heard you were giving out money, and I want mine.”

Sherzai laughed. I saw his eyes narrow as they did when he was angry or amused. And most of the time he was amused. Amused by the passing parade, by his lavish, absurd lifestyle. I thought of his immense crystal chandelier swaying over the foyer in his palace, his compulsion to make eggplant, his outlandish stunts, like this one. He was an Afghan warlord, and many people thought he was bad—and just as many didn’t care. Sherzai said, “You do not even care what I am doing here,
Adhai
? Why I’ve come to see you today? You do not care what I have to say?”

“As long as you give me my money, you can say anything you want.”

Sherzai slapped his thighs. He was caught in that loop of laughter, where you laugh and then laugh at yourself laughing. He pulled another roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off five. Five hundred dollars, counted into her cracked and dusty palm.

Judy gasped.

“I know,” I said.

In his eagerness to make a lavish gesture he’d put this grandmother’s life in danger. Tonight, after he was long gone, someone would probably rob her, or even kill her for those five crisp bills. And there would be no one to report her death the next morning to the police, even if there had been police in the city.

T
WENTY-TWO