In My Father's Country (32 page)

W
hen I left Jalalabad, I didn’t tell Mamai I was coming home. I wanted to surprise her. Najiba and her boyfriend, Kabir, picked me up at the Portland airport. They were slightly late and rushed right past me on the way to the gate.

I knew I didn’t look like the Saima who had left them nearly a year before. I was too tan, like a homeless person or a prophet lost in the desert; the points of my shoulders were visible beneath my tunic and the whites of my eyes were dark pink. I blamed my failure to use sunscreen, the pork-heavy army cuisine, which meant I missed more meals than was healthy, and my dirty contact lenses, which I had worn throughout the long flights. Later, Kabir, who would become my sister’s husband, would tell me how shocked they’d been at my appearance. They blamed Afghanistan and always would. What they couldn’t have known was that I was also stressed not only from having hidden my engagement to Eric but also by the simple fact of him.

Mamai slept with her door open. When I arrived she was sleeping on her back, her thick black hair threaded with gray coiled into two braids.

“I’m back after all these months, and you’re sleeping like it’s no big deal?” I said, standing in her doorway.

“Shrenghay? What’s going on? What are you talking about?” Mamai
sat up and blinked. Shrenghay was Najiba’s childhood nickname. She’d mistaken me for my sister.

I turned on the light. She sat up in her nightdress and blinked, then started to cry, then started to laugh. She leapt to her feet, hugging me and slapping my shoulder at the same time, both upset and overjoyed to see me. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home?”

It was midnight, but she insisted on warming me up some dinner and making tea. I said I only wanted a little tea, that I was too tired to eat, but she wouldn’t hear of me not eating.

While they were in the kitchen warming the food and making tea, I went to my bedroom. I dropped my bags on the floor, then tucked into the bathroom, closed and locked the door. I had missed my bathroom as if it were a close personal friend. When I’d phoned Najiba with my flight information I’d asked her to please make sure there were fresh towels in my bathroom and told her I was going to spend hours in there. At the time she thought I was joking. She had also gone to the trouble of scouring the sink. I could smell the cleaner. I closed the toilet lid and sat on it. I inhaled the good smells. I pressed my face into one of the clean towels.

Almost an hour passed. I had been showering in tepid, overchlorinated water for a year. I looked at my shower with affection. I thought I could easily go to sleep in the bathroom, curl up right on the bath mat. It was so safe and clean.

There was a soft knock on the door. “Are you okay in there?” asked Najiba.

I came out, only because I knew it was upsetting them that I was staying in there, and drank some tea. As long as an Afghan can choke down some tea, all is well. My cell phone rang. Mamai and Najiba looked at each other. Who was calling at this hour? I mumbled some excuse and left the room to take the call.

“I’m coming out to Oregon. I’ve got to see you.” Eric had been living in Florida with his parents. They didn’t know about me yet, either.

“Can’t we wait a little? I just got home. I don’t think I can talk about anything.”

“What do you mean?” The alarm in his voice annoyed me.

“I mean, I just flew halfway around the world, and I need to chill out for a while.”

“For how long? I don’t understand. I thought you’d be glad to hear I was coming to see you. Don’t you want to be together anymore?”

It went on like that for a few minutes. I felt myself growing frustrated. He’d been in the army for years. Didn’t he understand that I needed a week or two to get reacclimated, that it wasn’t about him, or us, or my feelings about the wedding? He jumped to conclusions. He wondered if I’d met someone else. He kept asking me if I still loved him.

Looking back, I realize I was probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Most Americans who are lucky enough not to live in a combat zone don’t understand PTSD. There are so many forms and shapes of it that it even surprises those of us who are very much aware of it in ourselves and others around us. A lot of people I have talked to think that unless you are caught in a firefight or survive an IED explosion, you can’t have PTSD. But just the trauma of living in an environment where you never know whether you might be bombed the next day, or if the person you are talking to while eating will be there tomorrow, is emotionally stressful enough to create the kind of extreme anxiety that leads to PTSD. On top of that, there are loud noises—outgoing mortars, incoming rockets, helicopters landing steps from where you are sleeping—and when you return to a place like Portland, a car backfiring on the street will take you back to Afghanistan instantly. And the feeling stays with you. Waking up and telling yourself that you’re at home and out of harm’s way does little to help allay your fear.

For the next week I spent most of my time reading in my closet. I had a walk-in closet with good lighting. My bedroom was simply too big. I felt too exposed, and if I heard noises from other parts of the house, I would be forced to investigate. It was nerve-wracking. My closet had just enough space to contain me, and the clothes muffled the sounds of the rest of the house. It also reminded me of my B-hut.

I rearranged my bedroom, pushing my bed into one of the corners
farthest from the door. I could only sleep if my back was against a wall and I could keep my eye on the door. One night in late December, just as I’d started to drift off, I heard gunshots. I leaped out of bed before I was fully awake. My heart felt as if it was trying to break free from my chest. It banged in my ears; my head was swimming. I couldn’t think of anything to do but text Najiba, who was out with Kabir.

“Naj!” I typed. “There are gunshots. Someone’s shooting up the neighborhood.”

Our house was on a cul-de-sac. My bedroom faced the street. The gunshots were loud.

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” she texted back. “Those are fireworks. Are you okay?”

Sure enough, I peeked out the window and saw a gang of older kids lighting strings of firecrackers in the middle of the street. I had totally forgotten that it was New Year’s Eve. Days blend together when you’re trying to hide from everything around you.

“I can come home!” she texted again.

“I’m okay. Enjoy ur night,” I texted back.

Eric called four or five times a day, wondering if I felt better, wondering whether we could now get on with the wedding, wondering whether I’d talked to my family. He was relentless, and the more I dissembled, the more I begged for time, the worse he got. I thought that if only he had called to check on me and ask me how I was dealing with being back, I could have unburdened myself to him—who better to understand me than Eric, who had been dealing with PTSD for years? But he didn’t. He was worried about the wedding and my reluctance to talk to him. His behavior was making me feel like I had a cause to be questioning our compatibility. In Jalalabad I had been concerned that we were of two very different cultures, but I had been more concerned with making our families understand and accept us. I had never worried that we would be having this issue with each other. But now, back in the States, he acted like he had no clue what I was going through and was in such a hurry to start our lives that I felt like he was rushing me into making a mistake.

ONE DAY NAJIBA
asked, “Who
was
that? Who is this person who calls you so many times a day?”

“It’s funny you ask,” I said slowly. “It is actually my fiancé.”

My sister looked at me a long moment to see if this was yet another Saima joke. I assured her it was not.

If I’d stopped and listened, I might have heard Wahabs the world over calling one another and shrieking in disbelief. In Portland, London, somewhere in Germany, Peshawar, and Ghazni Province, Sunday meetings were called to figure out what was to be done. Saima was getting married! Saima was marrying an infidel, and not just any infidel, but an American infidel, and not just any American infidel, but a soldier, a commander, a man who was in charge of invading and further ruining Afghanistan.

When it became clear that Sunday meetings were not enough, emergency midweek sessions were held. The uncles summoned Najiba, Khalid, and Mamai. To my brother they said, “You are a good-for-nothing brother if you let your sister do this.” To my sister they said, “This is the worst thing that your sister could have done. If you are still talking to her, that means you are okay with it, and you are just like her.” To my poor Mamai they said, “Your daughter is out of control; you’re a horrible mother to allow her to get away with this.” Not surprisingly, they never asked for my presence at these meetings.

I had not spoken to the uncles in years. But when I saw Mamai’s tear-stained face after they had lectured her, I knew something had to be done. I contacted an aunt who lived in the States and was still on speaking terms with me, and who in the past had served as a messenger between the uncles and me. “What do you think you’re doing to my mother? You guys washed your hands of me and kicked me out in the middle of the night because you weren’t able to control me. Do you think that makes you all good Pashtuns? How do you expect Mamai to do something you men weren’t able to do? You had every resource in the world, and you weren’t able to control my behavior at the end. Why do you expect my mother to succeed where you failed?”

Mamai went to the meetings because her brothers-in-law demanded her presence, and Khalid and Najiba were there in order to support her. But Mamai had not been surprised to hear I was marrying an American. She remembered that declaration that I’d made when I was nine or ten: “I’m never going to marry an Afghan man!” Mamai’s friends were over for tea, and had told Mamai that it was time to start thinking about finding a husband for me. I was still a little girl. I had no idea what it was I was saying no to, exactly. My father was gone, and my only brother was a reasonable boy, a low-key observer of life. I had no real sense of the ways in which a man could take over a woman’s life. There were distant female members of the family whom I occasionally saw with fear in their eyes and bruises on their bodies. These girls would say, “Oh yes, my brother beat me up, but he stopped when I promised not to upset him again.” I remember wondering why anyone would willingly give someone else the right to do this to her. Where were the mothers of these girls? I didn’t know at the time that the mothers were treated just as badly and wouldn’t have been able to defend their daughters. When I wouldn’t shut up about never marrying an Afghan, Mamai told me to find something else to do and not come out when her friends were visiting. I embarrassed her.

Word came down from the uncles that since Mamai could not control me, they did not want to have anything to do with her. Mamai is not stupid. Even while they were ordering her to tell me this and tell me that, they never offered to take her in. Mamai finally said to hell with them. She realized that her children were her true allies, and that her future lay with us, not with the uncles. One day I heard her say to someone on the phone, “My future is with my daughter.” It was the first time in my life I felt as if my mother was on my side. I had waited almost thirty years to have my mother on my side, and the happiness I felt hearing her say that was inexpressible.

Mamai refused to go to any more meetings, and one night, while I was making tea, she stood in the middle of the kitchen and said, “Marry whomever you want. I am okay with your decision.”

Still, the gossip reached us. All day long, from inside my walk-in closet (where I still retreated on occasion), I could hear the phone ring. It would be my aunt calling to urge Mamai to disown me. Or someone from Kuwait or Peshawar with other ideas on how to force me to obey. The uncles were beyond displeased and unhappy. Word got back to me that at one of the meetings the idea of an honor killing was raised, but they would have to have someone else do it because they didn’t want to get caught.

I heard this and laughed out loud. “They are Pashtun enough to decide on an honor killing but they can’t do it themselves? They have to outsource it? How American of them!”

I called Eric. “Don’t get too attached to me,” I said, “I might be stoned any day now.”

“I’m calling your uncles to talk to them,” he said. His voice shook with anger.

“They don’t mean anything to me. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

“Then I’m reporting them.”

“To whom? You know these people. They’ll just side with each other. They’ll deny everything. I’m just telling you because I thought it was funny.”

For weeks it seemed as if all I did was talk on the phone, pausing only to eat Mamai’s delicious
parakay
, fried in butter, stuffed with potato and leek. I felt exhausted by the whole subject of my wedding, even as I began to plan it. I was American enough to know what needed to be done, but the Pashtun in me was at a complete loss. A bride planning her own wedding is unheard-of in my culture. The family organizes everything, and the bride is only told when to appear. Why couldn’t I have been more like the other Pashtun girls of my family? I would agonize over the stress of wedding planning, but in the next breath I would thank God for giving me the ability to plan my own wedding.

Still, I pressed on. Things fell into place. I wanted to be married in a room with a view of the mountains and the river. The Marriott downtown had the perfect room, and it was actually available on the date
we’d selected, February 14. More amazing was that when I told the cook at the Marriott that I wanted to serve Afghan food, he was all over the idea. He was going to learn to cook every dish I wanted to serve.

Our wedding was going to be small—no more than fifty people—and my wedding colors were deep burgundy, gold, and beige. Wedding colors! Could I have been the first Pashtun female in the recorded history of my tribe to have deliberated over wedding colors? The invitations were beautiful, printed in gold, with a Koranic verse at the top, in Arabic, and the rest in English. I loved the way the invitations had turned out, and couldn’t wait to mail them.