In My Father's Country (33 page)

My spirits started to lift. I felt good enough to taunt my brother, a sure sign that I was returning to my old self. “What kind of a Pashtun brother are you?” I teased him. “Why are you not planning my wedding and telling me just to show up?”

“If you want me to be a good Pashtun brother, I will tell you not to marry Eric,” he replied, half joking.

I ran into problems trying to find a suitable wedding dress. White was out of the question. Farsiban wear white; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that every white prom dress from the 1980s had been shipped to Central Asia, catering to the Farsiban taste for shiny, poofy white dresses. Pashtuns wear colors, and I wanted to wear a traditional outfit, the most elaborate I could find. I saw it in my mind’s eye: royal-blue, emerald-green, and hot-pink silk, decked out with beadwork, mirrors, and lace. There was nothing like it in Portland or even Seattle. In Afghanistan they are all made by hand; little girls work on those dresses for many years so they can wear them on their wedding day. I ordered something I thought was similar from a tailor in Nepal suggested by Kabir; when it arrived it was all wrong—not silk but chiffon, and decorated on the front but not the back.

I’d been told by my American friends that brides always feel this way, but I took one look at the failed chiffon wedding outfit from Nepal and called Eric. “I can’t do this. This is a sign from God that I am not supposed to be getting married.”

“Honey, everything is going to be just fine. Please don’t bring God into this—your god, my god, any god.”

To prove his point Eric tracked down several shops in Florida that specialized in wedding clothes for people from the Near East and sent me a plane ticket.

I had only seen Eric in uniform and in Farah, where no one knew we were together and we had to act like we meant nothing to each other. Seeing him in sunny Florida, wearing a flowered, short-sleeved shirt, walking toward me at the airport, I almost didn’t recognize him. Until he smiled. I’d have known that smile anywhere, and suddenly I felt a heavy weight lift off of my shoulders. I had been worried that I wouldn’t feel the same way about him, and I was happy to be wrong.

We found ourselves at a bridal shop specializing in Indian wedding clothes. What was I doing there? Even though it wasn’t what I thought I wanted, I found a deep-burgundy silk skirt and top, heavy with gold embroidery and Swarovski crystals.

“Go try that on and come out and show me,” said Eric.

“You’re not supposed to see me in my outfit before the wedding. According to your culture it’s bad luck.”

“Honey, we’re breaking so many other cultural traditions here I don’t think one more will matter.” He never got tired of calling me honey.

Eric lived near Orlando. That evening we took a walk in a park near Disney World. As the sun fell toward the horizon, it turned cold. The air smelled odd, like rotting vegetables. I felt my hair frizzing around my ears. It put me in a bad mood. Eric’s urgency to marry felt like a pair of strong hands on my back. We passed a family wearing Mickey Mouse hats, arguing about their favorite ride. The tops of their cheeks were pink from the sun. This was important to them.

“There’s nothing worse than a tourist!” I cried.

“You’re a tourist,” said Eric.

“I’m not,” I said. “I would never go to that Disneyland place.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“I want to go back to Afghanistan,” I said. We stopped in the middle
of the path. An airplane flew overhead. The wind picked up. I told him that I’d already researched it. I’d found a company that would be happy to hire us back as a couple. Since he’d been a PRT commander he could write his own ticket.

Eric considered the idea. He said he liked it. I could see his military mind ticking away, figuring out how to use my enthusiasm. On the way to the airport we reminisced about Farah, about Country-and-Western Fridays, Ping-Pong tournaments, and the late nights we spent sitting beneath the Milky Way on my bench. We were encouraged by the memory to believe we had a future.

The idea that we’d be returning to Afghanistan distracted me from our impending marriage. The wedding became something that needed to be accomplished in order to redeploy. After weeks of meetings (arguments, debates, crying), my extended family decided they had no choice but to allow me to marry my infidel. But I had yet to meet Eric’s parents.

A week before the wedding Eric called and said he wasn’t sure his parents were going to be able to come. When I asked him whether they objected to my being Muslim, he cleared his throat. I hummed with irritation at his hesitation.

“Just buy the tickets and tell them they’re going to Argentina. When they arrive in Portland they’ll have no choice but to come,” I joked. I didn’t feel like joking, but this was how Eric and I operated.

“That’s an excellent idea!” he said. “Problem is, he’s not supposed to fly at all.”

“He’s not?”

“Because of the stroke,” he said.

This was the first I’d heard of any stroke. For a minute, I had to think. Stroke of the hour, golf stroke, to stroke the cat. The stroke he meant was like a heart attack of the brain.

“Your father had a stroke and you didn’t tell me?”

“It wasn’t really a stroke, it was just … he can’t fly right now.”

“Was it a stroke or not?”

“It’s fine, honey, it really is.”

“Did he have the stroke before or after you told him you were marrying a Muslim?” I asked.

For the first time I could remember, Eric had nothing to say.

I CALLED OFF
the wedding. Perhaps it was inevitable. I canceled the hotel, the caterer, the cake. I put the lovely deep-burgundy dress away in the attic. There were many qualities that Eric and I shared, and the most important ones were that we were both hot-tempered and prone to be impulsive. He put everything he owned in storage in Flordia, except his computer, his printer, and a duffel bag full of clothes, which he threw into the back of his car. Then he drove to Oregon.

He had his own unacknowledged PTSD. He refused to fly. He couldn’t bring himself to get on an airplane, to sit wedged in a seat in economy class between a crying baby and a snoring fat man, at the mercy of the commercial pilot and his crew. He believed he could drive straight through, almost three thousand miles without a break. He called me on the phone when he started getting sleepy. I told him to pull over to get a hotel. He refused.

After he arrived, he sat in my living room with his hands on his knees. While we went through the motions of arguing, while we wept and held each other, a part of me felt lighter. I closed my eyes and saw Afghanistan, the blue dome of sky, the big-shouldered mountains, and the mud houses huddled at their feet, the stars and moon bright enough to read by.

T
WENTY-THREE

I
knew I had made a full circle of the last two years of my life, sitting at the passenger terminal, PAX in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, waiting for my flight to Bagram Airfield. It was the middle of the night. There would be no flight for hours. I had a small bag of cold popcorn and a book. I was impatient. The longer I had to wait, the more time I had to think, which I didn’t want to do. Thinking meant replaying the mess I’d made of my life, and of Eric’s.

It was a year after I’d called off my wedding, and I was returning to Afghanistan; I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to find courage to face what lay ahead of me, again.

I RETURNED TO
Afghanistan with a company that had a contract to provide interpreters for a small section of the country. Unlike my first time, when I had to wait at BAF for over a month to be sent out to my site, I was assigned to Asadabad in Kunar Province within hours of arrival. BAF had grown bigger and had more of a city feel now. There was a Jamba Juice, which I thought was just too much. Were we trying to fool the soldiers into thinking they were in a mall in the United States instead of in the dry desert of Afghanistan?

The next morning I caught a ride on a Chinook headed for Asadabad, where I was supposed to be yet another PRT commander’s interpreter.

The helicopter took off, then hovered for several long minutes over BAF. Out the window, I could see the row of battered Soviet tanks by the runway that had been abandoned decades ago. All over Afghanistan abandoned Soviet vehicles decorate the landscape, commemorating the time when the Afghan people brought a superpower to its knees. When an ordinary car breaks down and is left by the side of the road, within minutes it is stripped for parts. But these same people would not touch Soviet machinery of war scattered all over the vast landscape of Afghanistan. It’s as if Afghans had an unspoken understanding that the sight of all the tanks and other vehicles left behind by the fleeing Russians as they exited from our country was worth more than the money they would get by stripping them. I’ve experienced this same feeling while driving down roads throughout the country. I see the old rusted tanks and I feel a surge of Pashtun pride, a reminder that we are strong and have defeated many fierce enemies.

Suddenly I felt my stomach drop as the Chinook descended. We weren’t going anywhere. Mechanical problems, we were told.

I WAS HAPPY
to leave BAF so quickly, even if I was being sent to Asadabad. At the time, in March 2007, Kunar was one of the hottest spots in Afghanistan. The Korengal Valley, a few miles to the southwest in the neighboring Pech district, was known as Ambush Valley. As if I could have missed this detail, a few days after I arrived at the PRT I went to the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation center and turned on one of the computers. The home page had been set to Yahoo!, and the pop-up news headline read:
THE HOTTEST SPOT ON EARTH: KORENGAL VALLEY
. I clicked away from it. I had learned some of the soldiers’ tricks while in a combat zone; one of them was not to dwell on the news when you’re the news.

While I waited for the Chinook to be repaired, I stood on the tarmac with the other passengers, soldiers deploying to different parts of eastern Afghanistan. The one standing beside me introduced himself as John. Tall and burly in all his army gear—the armor vest, weapons, and
a dozen other gadgets hanging off of him—he was a newly promoted lieutenant, and full of friendly optimism.

“What were you doing at the retirement center?” he asked.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what we call Bagram. There are interpreters who are too old to be sent outside the wire, but their company won’t send them home. So they lounge around, drink tea, and take lots of walks. Just like retirees at a community retirement center in the States.”

“You think I belong in a retirement community?”

“No, you’re far too young to retire. Plus I don’t know if you speak any other languages, but your English is great, already something that most those interpreters lack,” he said with a grin. He told me about the few interpreters they had at Asadabad, including a CAT II who was quite popular with the younger CAT I men. It was rumored that she bought them alcohol, and spent most of her days doing her hair and makeup, and smoking like a chimney. “We have no real evidence that she speaks Pashtu,” he said.

That sounded familiar. “Is her name Suraya?” I asked.

“No clue,” John said. “Never got close enough to find out.”

Late that night when we arrived at Asadabad PRT, I was shown to my B-hut by a sergeant major, where I unpacked my sleeping bag and alarm clock and went to sleep. Just as I was drifting off—
kaboom!
The flimsy walls of my hut shook. Things started falling around me; my clock broke. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest. Another earthquake? Was God still upset with me? I threw on my jacket and ran outside in the dark.

On the other side of the B-huts, not far away, was a shallow, circular ditch reinforced by sandbags. The mortar pit. Two soldiers worked in the pit, their beige T-shirts bright in the moonlight.
“Outgoing!”
one of them hollered. I saw a white flash; right after that the earth rumbled.
Kaboom!
The sound of the explosion set my teeth on edge. Making sure there was no incoming, I ran back to my hut and tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use.

The next morning I walked outside my B-hut, and there, sitting on a plastic patio chair with her legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was Suraya, my first roommate in BAF. I recognized her perfect hair. It was dyed light brown, then highlighted. She wore lipstick, eyeliner, and eye shadow. Even though it was 8:30
A.M.
, she looked ready for a night on the town.

When she saw me she leaped up from her chair, knocking it over. “Oh, Saima-jan! It’s you! We’re roommates again! This is going to be so great!”

Suraya’s use of
jan
, a Farsiban term of endearment, didn’t help her case. I’ve always hated this faux-friendly term that Farsibans throw around so casually in conversations that it has lost all endearing qualities. It implies the kind of familiarity that I had never had with Suraya.

Suraya had been one of the first people I’d met in Afghanistan, back in 2005 when I was new.

We had been roommates at BAF with two other interpreters in our wooden B-hut. Even there she sat outside and smoked a lot. She’d been a hairdresser in Southern California, and she liked to give the soldiers free haircuts.

One day, soon after I had arrived at BAF that first time, she had presented me with some
doughdi
. I hadn’t adjusted to the food in the chow hall and was always hungry. Suraya had made it her business to know all the CAT I interpreters, who regularly brought her Afghan food. I told her I loved the bread and was so happy to have it.

She said that she could get us an entire Afghan meal for dinner. I offered to pay for it, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Then she went outside to have a cigarette. The walls of the B-hut were only plywood. I heard her say, “There’s a new female here. You should come by tonight.”

Later, a bunch of Farsiban guys showed up to share the meal. I thought perhaps it was always this way, that BAF was just a warm and friendly place, with interpreters mingling, sharing tea, and hanging out. Then I began to notice a pattern: These large gatherings always happened on the nights after Suraya had made a series of phone calls, telling her callers that I, the “new female,” was going to be there.