In My Father's Country (10 page)

“You could have a job tomorrow.”

Ahmed talked about the rush of working as a translator in a war zone, about the sense of doing work that meant something, about the good pay. I let him ramble on. I considered my less-than-thrilling nine-to-five job at a Japanese export firm downtown, and about the house we’d just bought in the drowsy Portland suburb of Beaverton so that my family could finally be all together.

“Thanks for thinking of me, Ahmed, but this is not a decision that I can make quickly.”

I had been thinking about returning for a while—just not considering the
when
or the
how
. I’d never ever imagined I’d be doing anything connected with the U.S. military. Most Afghans, including my own extended family, considered the Americans to be no different from the Soviets. I was already the black sheep of the family; I couldn’t imagine their response to my returning to Afghanistan as an employee of the
invading infidels. I could hear the phone lines buzzing. What on earth is Saima doing now? She’s run off to Afghanistan to revenge her father’s death! She’s going to use her Pashtu to targer insurgents and tell the Americans who to kill! She’s going to use her Pashtu to point out spies to the Americans and tell them who to torture!

It was out of the question. Or was it? What were my options? I could have visited my family in the village in Ghanzi Province for a week or two. While this sounded enticing, it also felt limited. I would spend time only with my relatives. The idea that by taking Ahmed up on his offer I could meet hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Afghans from all walks of life, stirred something inside me. It had been so long since I’d felt anything resembling excitement. My thoughts went round and round. I might be able to find out what inspired my father to give up his life to preserve the way of Pashtuns. Just that thought alone caused me to pick up my phone several times and put it back down.

Most of my work at the import-export firm was finished by 10:00
A.M.
, which gave me plenty of time to stare out the window at the Oregon sky and replay the conversation with Ahmed in my head. At lunch, as usual I walked to Banana Republic, where I looked at the same rack of cream-colored linen jackets every day. What would I be giving up as an adult—and what would I learn about what I had given up as a child?

A few days later I was sitting in a restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes with my friend Seema and her young son, Arsalan, eating a salad when my cell phone rang. I said hello, but the caller answered me in Pashtu. He asked how I was enjoying the weather. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Who is this?” I demanded.

“You don’t know who this is?”

“Should I?” I could hear the hostility in my voice. Who was this man? The only male I spoke Pashtu with anymore was my brother. How did this random male Pashtu speaker get my number? I felt my inner Pashtun female awaken. Why does this man think he can just address me in this way? It completely violated the code of the culture of the language being spoken.

He laughed. “Your friend Ahmed gave me your number.”

“You should have introduced yourself in English and explained the reason for your call,” I responded.

“I’m sorry; you are right. Ahmed gave me your number and said that I should convince you to come and work for us. There is a great need for female Pashtu speakers, and since you are female, you would be able to dictate the kind of assignment you want and they will do anything to make you happy so you will stay. This is your duty as a female and as an Afghan. We can’t expect the American soldiers to know anything about our culture or language. We have to make sure they know, and you can do that like no one else can.” I knew he was appealing to my sense of pride and also to the protectiveness I would feel for wanting to make sure my people’s interests remained protected. “Now that I know you really do speak Pashtu I’d like to pass your number on to a recruiter who can set up an interview and testing,” he continued.

The recruiter phoned a few hours later and volunteered to fill out all my paperwork, including the monstrous SF86 national security form. In three days it was done. I was officially a Category II interpreter, cleared to work for the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

I WAS SCHEDULED
to travel to Fairfax, Virginia, for a predeployment orientation before being sent to Afghanistan. The night before I left, Mamai and I had our worst argument yet. I can’t remember how it started, but I remember telling her that I’d gone to the trouble of bringing her here to enjoy the freedoms that I knew America could give her.

“I wanted you to be able to see a doctor, or go visit your friends or call your sisters whenever you wanted to, without having to ask permission or feel guilty about it. I brought you here to enjoy a good life. I didn’t bring you here to mother me. I’ve been without a mother for over a decade. I’m all grown up now. This isn’t the village. It isn’t Peshawar or Kabul. I need you to adjust to having me as a daughter.” I hated to be so tough on her, but I needed the two of us to live together as two autonomous adults. I also wanted to push her to adjust faster because I
knew that if I gave her too much time, if she thought too much about it, she wouldn’t be able to deal with the cultural shock of being in America.

She looked at me sadly and said what she would say many times in her life: “I don’t know what sins God is punishing me for by giving me a headstrong daughter like you.”

The next morning, in the dark, Greg took me to the airport and I was gone.

THE NEW-EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION
was held in a large chain hotel that tried to look fancier than it was. I had been hired as a Category II interpreter. CAT IIs, as they’re called, are Afghans who are American citizens with security clearance. CAT I interpreters are either Afghan émigrés who possess a green card or work visa but no citizenship, or local Afghans who live in Afghanistan.

We spent the first two days filling out reams of paperwork to apply for security clearances. For reasons I didn’t understand, we were also lectured on the basics of Afghan culture. In some of the sessions I was the only woman in a room full of Afghan men, good practice for what lay ahead of me in Afghanistan.

We took a written test in Pashtu. An older guy who before the week was over would ask me to be his second wife offered to lend me his dictionary. He was short and stocky, with tufts of white hair growing out of his ears.

“Dictionary!” I exclaimed. “There’s a war going on. You’re not going to have time to whip out your dictionary in the middle of a combat zone.”

“It’s just to pass the test. They don’t care,” he said.

“They should care. I care,” I replied righteously.

On the third day I returned to my hotel room in the evening. I was standing in the middle of my room trying to figure out what to do for dinner, when the phone rang. Everyone I knew called me on my cell. I stared at the hotel phone. Its ring was loud to the point of aggression. I answered it rudely, just to stop it from ringing. It was Greg. Before I could ask why he was calling me on the hotel line he said, “Guess what?
I’m in the lobby. I wanted to surprise you, but they won’t give me your room number.”

“You are?” I was so happy to hear his voice. I had been afraid it was the dictionary lender with the hairy ears who had been calling.

“I got to thinking. If you go to Afghanistan, you’ll miss our anniversary. So I came here to celebrate it early.”

Greg was great with a map. That night he took me to an Afghan restaurant I’d heard about. The food wasn’t very good, but it hardly mattered. The company was exactly what I needed. The next afternoon we went to the Smithsonian. We took the Metro into Washington, D.C., the first time in my life I’d ridden on a subway train. The clatter made it too loud to talk, but we had been together long enough for me to know he wasn’t there just to celebrate. This wasn’t any anniversary. When we had first met and he asked me to marry him, I had carelessly told him to come back and ask me in five years. It was nearly five years later.

While we were looking at the dinosaur skeletons he asked, casually, if I knew how many years we’d been together.

“These dinosaurs are amazing. I wish Riley could see this someday. Don’t you think he would love this place?” I asked, hoping to distract him.

“We don’t have to get married immediately. You can go do your Afghanistan thing, and we can just get engaged.”

“I’m not sure I want to be engaged.”

“We wouldn’t have to tell anybody. It could just be our little secret.”

“Now you sound like some old pervert,” I said. Using humor as an escape was an Afghan trait I could always count on. “What’s the purpose of that?” I continued. “Don’t you think I would stay true to us?”

“I just want to be able to look forward to your return and starting a life with me. The rest is up to you; any way you want it, I want it.”

“If it’s up to me, I would prefer not to complicate our relationship.”

I adored Greg. There was no one else in my life. I didn’t want to end our relationship. I wanted to be with him, but I just didn’t want to be married to him. I wasn’t planning on walking away, I just needed to
know that I would always have the freedom to do so. I had paid a great price for my independence and never wanted to give it up, ever.

I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day analyzing my aversion to marriage. When I was a child I once heard Mamai tell some friends a story about a thirteen-year-old girl in the village who’d been married to a man much older than she. One evening she cooked his dinner and either oversalted it or undersalted it, I can’t remember which. She placed the food in front of him; he took one taste and was so displeased that he smacked her so hard he broke her neck and she died instantly. What amazed me when I heard them tell the story was not the horror of it happening but the casualness with which this story was shared and discussed. It wasn’t shocking to them, nor was it a lesson not to marry young girls to old men—it was just told as general conversation, a piece of local gossip. When I thought about marriage I could never shake this story, couldn’t file it under Beastly Things That Happen Only in Afghanistan. I couldn’t dismiss from my mind the worry that one day I would get the salt wrong and Greg, who’d never even said an unkind word to me, would break my neck.

“Greg, you’re not ready for life with me,” I said. “You think you are, but you’re not. You are so sweet, and so kind. I would just make you miserable. In thirty years you’d look back and realize how unhappy you were with me and your life would have been a waste.”

“How can you even say that I would think that? You mean everything to me, and you know we belong together.”

We’d found a bench in one of the galleries. I sat there and let him hold my hands. What could I say? That the thought of marriage made me feel like I was suffocating? That I would rather go to Afghanistan than get engaged to him? How could I protect the one person I cared the most about, while still keeping my own liberties, which I cared about even more?

AT THE END
of the weeklong military training I was scheduled to board a military plane to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where I would catch a plane to Bagram Airfield (BAF).

I called Najiba to say good-bye.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Just come back.”

“I’m going to try it for at least six months,” I said. “That’s the shortest contract they offer.”

“Saima, you’re talking about
Afghanistan
. Just because we were born there doesn’t mean we belong there. You’re too Americanized. Don’t you like your life here? Plus, you can’t even get along with the Afghans in your own family here in the States. What do you think is going to happen there? Those people aren’t going to be welcoming you with open arms. Afghanistan is no place for an opinionated and pigheaded woman like you. They stone to death women like you.”

E
LEVEN

M
y recurring nightmares were coming true. I was on a plane back to Afghanistan.

The difference being, it wasn’t my uncles making their threats a reality—I was returning of my own free will. As the flight crew read through the roll call for the manifest, I realized that the company I had chosen to go with knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to push me through all the paperwork and training within two weeks. If I had being given any more time to think about it, I would have backed out and decided to stay in sleepy Portland.

What was I thinking? For one thing, I have always thought that the only way to stop fearing something is to be immersed in it. Of course, I can’t seem to make this work when it comes to swimming, but returning to Afghanistan I wanted and could do. So, I thought, I will sign up for the shortest contract—and if I needed to leave before that was over, I would do just that. Feeling in control of the situation and of the timing of my return made it a lot easier to get on that plane.

I had not been happy in America, not the way I knew I could be if I took care of what I considered unfinished business from my childhood. I had left Afghanistan under the worst possible conditions. All those years later, sitting in Oregon, trying to find satisfaction and happiness in freedom, I would randomly be reminded of one thing or another from
my early years in Afghanistan, and it would instantly take me back to the despair of my childhood.

ATLANTA TO SHANNON
to Bishkek to Bagram. On the outside, the plane looked like a commercial jetliner, but inside it had been stripped down to the basics. Wires dangled from the ceiling. There were no overhead bins, no inner shell, no disguising the fact that we were traveling in a tin can with wings. The back of the plane was reserved for cargo—mostly food and ammunition. As I crawled over duffel bags and stretched legs to find a seat, I vowed to never complain about flying coach again.

The engines were loud enough to warrant earplugs. The soldiers all had them, but no one came down the aisle, offering them. You were meant to have grabbed them from a tray as you boarded, but I hadn’t known that. From this I learned one thing: It’s impossible to doze off while trying to cover your ears with your hands.