In My Father's Country (7 page)

At school the next day I told Kristen what had happened. I asked her if she knew who had called me.

“Probably Jason,” she said. We were walking to the bus after class. “He told me he missed math and needed to get the homework assignment from you.”

“But how did he get my number?”

“I gave it to him,” she said.

“My uncles are so mad,” I said. “They’re totally … pissed off.”

For a moment I thought she was going to comment on me saying “pissed off”—something I had never said before. She laughed and clapped her hands together. She was always on the lookout for evidence that I was becoming a real American teenager.

“Did you tell them Jason is a football player?” she said. “He’s, like, the most popular guy in our class.” I realized how confusing it must have been for the Americans around me to learn that what their parents might consider a good thing would send my uncles through the roof.

E
IGHT

I
had decided to ask my uncles to send me back to the village.

The Professor and Uncle A had been more than generous in bringing us to Portland and arranging for our education, but after I enrolled at the Professor’s college, I became increasingly aware of the hypocrisy in their behavior. When it came to our learning, they treated the boys and girls equally, but outside of the classroom they expected the girls to behave like traditional Pashtun females and the boys to behave, well, like boys. It is something I have realized over and over again throughout the years: Our uncles offered us a magnificent education, but they never counted on us applying what we learned to our own lives.

I’d made some friends of my own, other Muslim girls, but I wasn’t allowed to go to their homes for dinner unless they ate really early. I had a 9:00
P.M
. curfew—in college. But my brother and male cousins had no curfew. Uncle A had even bought another house into which he moved the boys. So now the girls lived in one house with the uncles and the boys lived in the other house by themselves. One of my girlfriends once told me that the boys were famous on campus for their parties. At family barbecues I would look at the American girls the boys invited, fuming inside that we weren’t even allowed to have any guys call us, while their girlfriends were welcomed and fed at our family dinner table.

The injustice and inequality got under my skin. I was living in America, receiving an American education, and taking courses in human rights and women’s studies, while the Professor and Uncle A treated me no differently than if I had stayed in the village in Afghanistan. Actually, it would have been easier to live with this hypocrisy in the village, where I wouldn’t have known any better. I expected to be treated like a second-class citizen in Afghanistan, but it was hard to stomach it in Portland. So we fought, loudly. I cried and screamed at them. Every word out of my mouth would have earned me a stoning in Afghanistan; I’m sure my uncles would have been happy to do the honors. Conflicts were still handled at Sunday meetings. For years at those meetings I was the subject: my strong-willed nature, my refusal to be thankful to them for having given me the education to know the freedoms I had only dreamed of in Pakistan. Their plan had been simple: to educate us, make us citizens, and then send us back to marry some son of distant or not-so-distant cousins and bring him to America, where he could find a job, make money, and send it back home so that the whole tribe could benefit and prosper. I was expected to sacrifice my personal happiness for the good of the community—a true Pashtun sentiment. To this day, the memories of those Sunday nights make me feel sick to my stomach. Oh, how I envied the boys for being able to drive off to their home after those meetings!

I GRADUATED WITH
a bachelor’s degree in political science and was hired at a language agency. I was only allowed to take this job because the agency was run by an old lady who operated it out of her house. The Professor came to the interview with me to question the owner and made sure her answers were satisfactory before he allowed me to work there. I was expected to drive straight to her home in the morning, then straight home after work. I was the office manager, supervising a staff of four people who fielded calls for interpreters.

One Friday afternoon just as we were getting ready to leave for the day, one of our clients called for a Russian interpreter, whom they would need the very next morning at seven o’clock. Our usual Russian interpreter was Vasily, a textbook Russian. He was enormous, at six feet five
and heavily muscled, a stern-faced, blue-eyed blond. He seemed to have made it a practice never to smile and was famous among the staff for being difficult. No one wanted to contact him so late for such an early appointment. They spent forty-five minutes trying to find alternatives and arguing over who should make the call, but I didn’t have time for that nonsense and was anxious to get on the road. My uncles knew what time I got off work. More than once when the traffic had been bad and I’d return home late the Professor would be waiting, ready to pounce. “Where have you been? You get off at six o’clock and now it is six-thirty and it’s a fifteen-minute drive home!”

I called and told Vasily we would need him at 7:00
A.M
. and were sorry for the late notice. He laughed. Was I out of my mind? It was Friday night and he required a few days’ notice before weekend appointments. But he said he’d take it, as long as I agreed to have dinner with him. Was
he
out of his mind? I told him not that night, but one day, when hell froze over, or when my uncles allowed me to date a Russian. The odds of hell freezing over were significantly better. Even though at first I didn’t give in to his repeated invitations to dinner, he took the appointment.

Surprisingly, Vasily turned out to be charming and kind, and we began a strange relationship. I was almost twenty-three, but I had no concept of what it meant to have a boyfriend. He could only call me at work and we could only meet for lunch—and even then, he would bring me lunch and we would eat at my office. We watched one movie, Disney’s
Tarzan
, during which I wept noisily. I tried to explain between hiccups that it was something about the music—Phil Collins singing about two worlds and one family. Vasily was baffled. Here he was, this menacing Slav, watching a matinee of an animated movie with a sobbing Afghan woman who wouldn’t even let him try to comfort her by putting his arms around her.

Sex was out of the question, as was kissing and hugging. When I had known him for almost six months, I let him hold my hand once as we were leaving a restaurant, but I made him promise that he wouldn’t take that to mean that it would go any further. Vasily believed it must be true love. “If any of my ex-girlfriends had ever said no to sex,” he said, “my immediate question would have been ‘Then why am I buying you dinner?’ ”

“You don’t need to buy me dinner,” I said, surprised. “I can buy my own dinner.”

He was the first man to buy me jewelry: a necklace with a gold Red Wing charm, in honor of his favorite hockey team. He even told his mother, who lived in Ukraine, that he was going to marry me. He reported with some satisfaction that she was hysterical with fear that the men in my family were going to track him down and kill him.

I was never emotional about my relationship with Vasily, which I think is what made it so easy for me to draw boundaries. I was logical in my decision to see him, and never held what the Russian army had done to my people against him. For one thing, I knew that the Soviet government at the time of the invasion was not a democracy, elected by the people, and therefore did not represent a national consent to invade. For another thing, even if the public of the Soviet Union had been asked to vote on the matter, Vasily would have been too young to even remember the decision. How could I fault him for what he was never a part of? But my uncles indeed would have killed Vasily in a heartbeat, if they had been in a country that allowed honor killing. Luckily for me they were in America, not Afghanistan, when they eventually found out about him.

I think Vasily was the first person to whom I could express what I really wanted to say to my uncles. He would let me fume, and I knew he would never judge or tell anyone how ungrateful I was being toward my uncles. I did appreciate what they did for my life, but, ultimately, they asked me to give up the one thing I had wanted to have in America: a chance to find my destiny, uncontrolled.

So before they ended my dream of a life here, I decided, I was going to take control one last time, by asking them to send me back to the village. I could not handle living in America with the constant feeling that my days of freedom were numbered. I didn’t want to be forced to return to marry. I was not going to let them win by getting me citizenship only to bring over a boy of their choice to replace them as the man meant to control me.

Before I could find the courage to ask them to send me back to Afghanistan, Uncle A found out about Vasily. The years-long Sunday-meeting
tradition was broken, because on a Thursday night we were all told to meet in the dining room. That should have been my first clue that the gloves were about to come off. Even today, I think about that fateful day and I tremble.

They were enraged, and thought I was seeing Vasily only as a rebellion against them, and that I had chosen the most heinous country I could think of and picked the blue-eyed devil that they remembered from the Soviet invasion. All to get back at them. In retrospect, I can see why they thought that. But I was appalled by their closed-mindedness and their hypocrisy; although they talked with their American friends as if they were liberal, and expected American society to be tolerant of them, they were not tolerant of others. I knew that it was not going to be long before they took drastic measures to get me under control. If they had only tried to shame me for befriending a member of the opposite sex, something that is forbidden in Pashtun culture, I would have stopped seeing Vasily. Instead, they tried to shame me by casting him as responsible for my father’s disappearance. The newly educated and worldly Saima knew this made no sense, whereas as a Pashtun, I knew the rules of
Pashtunwali;
I was a part of that society and was obliged to accept their rules.

I truly believe I would have ended up with a totally different life if the Professor had uttered any sentence other than the one he did: “Saima, your father would be ashamed of you.” Those eight words changed the course of my life, by igniting the fierce Pashtun pride that had lain dormant in my heart since the day my father walked out of our house in his slippers. My ears started ringing when I heard the hatred in his tone and saw the disgust on Uncle A’s face. He said other things, too, and gratefully I did not hear any of them, because my heart was beating so loudly, I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of it in my head. I actually envisioned how easy it would have been for that to happen and kill me on the spot. I knew that what I had to do was going to require every ounce of the strength given to me by my father and grandfather. I knew I had not done what they were accusing me of. I knew that my father would
not
have been ashamed of me, but he would have been ashamed of how his brothers were treating me. I felt this to be the ultimate truth;
my father loved me and would have known that I was not a woman with loose or misguided morals. Had he been sitting there at the dining table, he would have protected me. My certainty of that fact gave me the courage I had been lacking all those years when I had lived in terror of being shoved into a life I didn’t want; when I had been too much of a coward to stand up for myself. I would have loved to have been able to rise to my feet for what I said next, but I couldn’t feel my legs. “Enough!” I said quietly, looking Uncle A squarely in the eyes.

“I will forgive you everything you have said to me until this day because you are my father’s brothers, no matter how much that fact hurts me. But from this day forward, your words will never touch me or make me feel dirty and disgusting. I will not say any of the things I want to say because you are my Baba’s children, and it would be disrespectful to him.”

I didn’t dare look at anybody else around the table, because I knew the horror on the faces of Najiba or any of the others would weaken my resolve, and if I lost that, I would have nothing to live for. I rose from the table, got my car keys, and started walking out. I didn’t know where I was going; I just needed to leave my uncles’ house.

Uncle A followed me to the door, trailed by a crying Najiba, who stopped at the doorstep.

“Where do you think you are going?” he asked icily.

“Out. I can’t take this anymore,” I answered with all my heart.

“If you walk out this door right now, you will never be allowed inside again, and you will never be allowed into the family either,” he threatened calmly.

“I know,” I said, just as calmly.

I looked up the steps again at Najiba standing there crying. Leaving her was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I made a silent promise to her then; I would come back for her as soon as I could. Three years later, I did. But on that first night, I got into my car and drove away alone, leaving everything behind, just as I had done as a child more than a decade before. The difference was that I was in a Honda and not on a camel; I was a college graduate and not a child.

N
INE

I
was officially a disgrace to my family, in the United States and in Afghanistan and Pakistan. My uncles told everyone who would listen that I had moved out to live with my Russian boyfriend. For several years Mamai and I didn’t speak.

I had not moved in with Vasily. He had wanted me to, but it had never been an option for me. The day I drove away from my uncles’ house I broke up with him. I did not leave my family to move in with another man. My decision to be on my own had nothing to do with something as trivial as a boyfriend.