A Door in the Earth Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Amy Waldman

  Cover design and illustration by Lauren Harms

  Author photograph by Katherine Wolkoff

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-45158-1

  E3-20190726-NF-DA

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter One: Arrival

  Chapter Two: Spilling Time

  Chapter Three: An Existential Wager

  Chapter Four: The Distant Fire

  Chapter Five: Shake the World

  Chapter Six: Two Melons

  Chapter Seven: A Flower Has No Front or Back

  Chapter Eight: Farther from Home

  Chapter Nine: A Donkey’s Tail

  Chapter Ten: The Dog and the Cobbler

  Chapter Eleven: The Orchard

  Part Two Chapter Twelve: The Smell of Milk

  Chapter Thirteen: In the House of an Ant

  Chapter Fourteen: The Covenant

  Chapter Fifteen: An Arranged Marriage

  Chapter Sixteen: Half a Loaf

  Chapter Seventeen: Elvis

  Chapter Eighteen: The Bald Man

  Chapter Nineteen: Kismet

  Chapter Twenty: Neurath’s Boat

  Chapter Twenty-One: Law and Order

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Young Deer

  Part Three Chapter Twenty-Three: Clear Sight

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Eye of Nothing

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Tears from Blind Eyes

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Washing Blood with Blood

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Between the Far Sky and Hard Earth

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Distance

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Amy Waldman

  About the Author

  Also by Amy Waldman

  To Alex, Ollie, and Theo

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  Antimachus was a friend of Paris

  Who put the case for war

  He opened a door in the earth

  And a whole generation entered

  —Alice Oswald, Memorial

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Arrival

  AS SOON AS SHE SAW THE ROAD, SHE UNDERSTOOD HOW IT had seduced him. Unmarked and unpaved, it rose up between mauve foothills, then slipped through them. If you were bored, as Gideon Crane had been—by your traveling companion, by the very journey (to where, exactly?) that you’d insisted on undertaking—the mouth of the road would have leaped at you like a spark. You would’ve ordered the driver, as Crane did, to leave the highway, and when he refused to risk either his truck or his payload of melons to satisfy a foreigner’s curiosity about a shit road to nowhere, you too would have climbed from the truck and taken the road by donkey.

  Parveen Shams was being carried onto the same turnoff in a white Land Cruiser, which made her admire Crane’s grit all the more. She was giddy at retracing his steps, six years after he’d first made this journey. In his memoir—the book that had propelled her here—Crane had written of the “hunger for adventure” that had thrust him onto this road and of his conviction that going deeper into Afghanistan would take him deeper into himself: What we think of as comforts are buffers, ways of not knowing ourselves, not becoming ourselves. I wanted to turn myself inside out, to empty my pockets and so to learn what I contained. At twenty-one—roughly half Crane’s age then—Parveen believed herself similarly fashioned. She was traveling to a remote village to join Crane’s crusade to save Afghan women from dying in childbirth; she would live with a family there and share its privations. Clearly she was hungry too.

  But that self-conception soon jolted against the rocks littering the way. Crane had described the road as a “wretched rutted hell,” a condition that felt less romantic beneath the axle than it had sounded on the page. The surface was an obstacle course of pebbles to jog over, boulders to ease around, craters to gingerly traverse. Mud bogs sucked at the wheels as if trying to draw marrow from bone. All of this slowed the car to a walking, lurching pace, and time seemed to slow too. As the minutes crept by, as her apprehension mounted, Parveen began to question her own fortitude. She’d been born in Afghanistan but left at the age of one and hadn’t returned until now. She’d lived a sheltered American life—just how sheltered she saw only as its comforts receded. She’d consciously tried not to drink too much tea before they’d set out four hours earlier, but the Land Cruiser’s jerks still sent unwelcome tremors through her bladder.

  They left the foothills behind. Taking hairpin turns, they wound along a canyon lined with towering cliffs of schist, and amidst the powerful sensation of being constricted by these mountains, Parveen briefly forgot her physical torments But then she noticed that the so-called road had dwindled to nothing more than a one-car-wide dirt lane hewn from the rock face. When she dared to look out the left window, she saw nothing; it was as if they were aloft. In fact, they were inching above a crag that fell steeply to a river below. She gripped the armrest, envisioning the car plummeting off the edge and tumbling down to the water. It was a sullen green, the canyon in gloom even though the day was sunny. Only over the opposite cliff face was there a startling strip of blue sky. She was chilled, hungry, and stiff. Knots ridged her back. As the road twisted, she scanned for signs of the village, but the only evidence of habitation she saw was, high on a pinnacle of rock, a nest.

  “How much longer?” she shouted to the driver, Issa.

  He didn’t respond, nor, by now, did she expect him to. From the time he’d collected her in Kabul, he’d kept music blaring—mostly Bollywood soundtracks to which he sang along in a surprisingly pleasing falsetto—which made him deaf to Parveen’s queries. His conversation was saved for her cousin Fawad, a college student who was acting as her chaperone and to whom Issa had offered the front seat. Parveen he treated as a package he was tasked to deliver.

  He wasn’t what she had expected. Issa was Crane’s right hand in Afghanistan. The memoir described him as an impish do-gooder who’d abandoned a career as an antiquities smuggler to help save Afghan mothers. When Crane had sought to build a clinic in the village to which Parveen was now headed, Issa was relentless in his efforts to help, dogged in his negotiations with bureau
crats, bandits, and the Taliban, saying and doing whatever it took to save more women’s lives, in part because his own mother had died giving birth to him. As a boy, Crane wrote, Issa had slept with her shawl; as a man, he still dreamed of her touch. Long before Parveen met him, she’d pitied the motherless boy within, though this was too personal a topic to broach. It was odd to know more about someone from a book than from what he chose to share, which was almost nothing.

  Instead of puckishness, Issa had inert eyes and a dour mouth; his fertile mustache, black and thick, was by far the liveliest thing on his face. When they met, he’d grunted a greeting, then scanned her clothing—a red tunic as long and loose as a dress, a pair of jeans, and a navy-blue head scarf—as if it were a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Eyeing her three suitcases, he’d said, “Village women dress very simply.” Men usually responded to, if not her beauty, a sensuality she’d been told she possessed—abundant dark hair, lively dark eyes, a lush mouth. From Issa there wasn’t a flicker.

  She tried to see if Fawad was as nervous as she was, but she was directly behind him. This was his first trip of any distance from Kabul, and he’d come along reluctantly, at the insistence of his father, Parveen’s uncle, having been told that upon depositing Parveen with her village hosts, he could return home right away. He wore a leather jacket, fake designer jeans, and fancy loafers, a getup she found faintly amusing for a trip to rural Afghanistan. He’d texted compulsively for a time after they left Kabul but had now given up. The mountains had swallowed the signal.

  Just then, as if the sun had breached a dam, light flooded the canyon, painting the river emerald and turning the strip of sky fiery orange and violent pink. A pair of birds crossed their path and flew along the canyon, their shadows trailing in the warm yellow light on the opposing cliff wall. Parveen, her vision aflame, was alarmed, for the lowering sun meant they might not reach the village before dark.

  As quickly as it had come, the color was gone. Twilight seeped in, its violet-blue ethereal, elusive, and soon snuffed by night. She’d never seen darkness so thick or a driver so tense. The Land Cruiser’s headlights barely pierced the night. Issa switched off the music, although her ears continued ringing with it. He was gripping the steering wheel, and in the dim glow of the dials, his knuckles looked slug-white. He and Fawad weren’t talking, and the silence scared her.

  The river, the whole world outside the car, had vanished. The road, what she could glean of it in the headlights, narrowed further. Their pace slowed. She felt both terrified and stupid to have taken such a risk with her life, and yet contemplating the possibility of her death made her feel thrillingly alive. She checked her watch, its light flashing in the blackness. It was twenty-five kilometers from the highway to the village, according to Issa, but they’d been traveling for more than two hours with no markers of distance, no road signs of any kind. She’d begun to doubt the very existence of the village when a white building flared in the headlights and disappeared.

  “Dr. Gideon’s clinic,” Issa barked.

  “Fereshta’s clinic,” she reminded him with some force, twisting back to look for what she could no longer see. Gideon Crane was adamant in his memoir that the clinic he built be named for Fereshta, the woman whose death had inspired its creation. Issa was one of Crane’s top lieutenants—he had to know that. “It didn’t look open,” she said. In her imagination, the clinic had been brightly lit and bustling twenty-four hours a day. A beacon. Not that still, sealed building with the darkness closing in.

  Before Issa could answer, they were in the village bazaar, the headlights’ beams poking at empty stalls. He yanked the gearshift into park, gave thanks to Allah, high-fived Fawad, and said they would walk from there. But first he disappeared into the darkness and left her and Fawad to listen to the sound of him urinating.

  Upon his return, he handed Parveen a flashlight and her small suitcase, gave a heavy one to her cousin, took the other himself, then motioned for them to follow him. She shivered a bit. It was the end of spring—a week into June—but the temperature had dropped as the Land Cruiser had climbed.

  After some time Parveen stopped and switched off the flashlight to freeze this moment in her memory. She could hear her watch ticking. Sharp, clean air filled her lungs. Charcoal-dark mountains loomed all around. The three of them seemed to be standing on the lip of a plateau. On the plain below, moonlight skimmed the black surface of the water. Overhead, the sky was webby with stars, arrayed in constellations that hadn’t been visible back home. This night world might have been created moments before for all the relation it bore to any version of night she’d ever seen.

  Issa and Fawad were waiting. She returned slowly to self-consciousness, to the capacity to be embarrassed, and switched the flashlight back on. They angled up through a maze of lanes flanked by earthen walls, which hid the homes behind them. The flashlight did little more than illuminate Issa’s back, the moonlight scarcely brushed their labyrinth, and in the dark every noise resounded: the scrape of dirt beneath feet, the roll of suitcase wheels, the unseen animals rustling in sleep, Parveen’s breath. All of the walls looked alike, as did all of the wooden doors in them, including the one at which Issa stopped and pounded.

  “Fereshta’s house?” she asked.

  “Her husband’s.”

  A lantern with legs opened the door, or so it first appeared. Then, to Parveen’s growing excitement, the man behind the light took form. This had to be Waheed, the husband Fereshta had left behind. He was so central to Mother Afghanistan, Gideon Crane’s memoir, that Parveen felt as if she had summoned a storybook character from word to flesh.

  Those words weren’t flattering. Crane had called Waheed “a bearded nebbish,” depicting him as a nervous, garrulous man bullied by life and unable to step up and save the mother of his children as she lay dying in childbirth. Whether his wife lived or died would be God’s will, he’d pronounced. The photograph of Waheed that Parveen had seen most often—the one that seemed to accompany every newspaper story about the clinic Crane had built and was in the memoir too—didn’t dispel the impression of weakness. In it the much taller Crane had his arm roped around Waheed, whose eyes were nearly closed.

  Waheed greeted Parveen and Fawad as well as Issa, then ushered them in from the path. She couldn’t see much of the space inside the wall and perhaps because of that could smell it all the more: the earthy odors of animals and manure, grassy hay, woodsmoke. From behind her came lowing and a sudden hot blast of animal breath. She shrieked, then regretted it, not wanting to remind everyone so quickly that she was an outsider. She sneaked a look behind her. It was a cow. And Issa was laughing.

  The small room Waheed led them into once they’d removed their shoes was lit only by a couple of lanterns. Its walls appeared to be adobe, hairy with bits of straw. Its furnishings were negligible—a rug cool underfoot, cushions lining the walls.

  Male visitors were received in this room in order to safeguard the purdah of the women in the house. Issa and Fawad sat on the floor and leaned back against the cushions, and Parveen did the same. Waheed unrolled a vinyl tablecloth, and two sons, the younger of whom was missing a hand, brought the food in and set it down before them. Parveen was the only female, although the voices of others drifted in from above. In this borderland between men and women she would live.

  Dinner’s main course was a platter of rice topped with raisins and carrots. Parveen knew there had to be meat buried inside because she’d grown up in Northern California eating the same dish. Qabuli pilau was a staple of all family gatherings, celebrations and burials alike, the lamb pressure-cooked, the carrots chopped to matchsticks, the raisins sautéed until they plumped, the rice boiled, the sugar, salt, cumin, and broth added…She’d sometimes found the number of steps tedious, but now it was a comfort to recite them in her head. The admixture of past and present was powerful, as if her family there and this family here were part of one clan, sharing an unseen network of roots. Nonetheless, in the interest of protecting her s
tomach, she steered clear of the hunk of meat once it was unearthed and hoped no one would notice.

  During the meal Issa ignored Parveen as he talked to Waheed without cease. She resented his volubility all the more because she couldn’t fully understand it. She spoke quite a bit of Dari, and she’d spent two weeks with her relatives in Kabul working to improve it, but she was catching only words and phrases, just as she’d caught intermittent glimpses of vistas on the switchback mountain road. It was because she kept dozing off, she realized with embarrassment, and she was thankful when at last Issa stood, yawned, and petted his mustache, preparing to decamp for the mosque, where he and her cousin would sleep.

  “You should put a light bulb in here,” Issa instructed Waheed, gesturing around the room where they’d eaten.

  “Why, so I can see your ugly face more clearly?”

  The quickness of the joke, if it was a joke, raised Waheed in her estimation.

  As she bade her cousin farewell—he was driving out with Issa in the morning—tears started to come to her eyes. They hadn’t exactly bonded during the trip, and they’d met only two weeks before. But he was her last connection, however attenuated, to her family.

  Waheed led her outside, up a set of stairs, and into a room so bright it blinded her. The source, she saw once her eyes adjusted, was a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was the contrast—to lantern light, to moonlight—that made it so strident. Before Parveen could get her bearings, women and girls surrounded her, crowding in to plant perfunctory kisses on her cheeks and clasp her hands in theirs, which were callused and bark-dry. She stood back to study them but they closed in again, brushing her with their long dresses.

  Was she well? they asked. Was her family well? How was her health? How was her trip? The greetings continued for quite a while, in the customary Afghan fashion. Their names came and went. Their odors—smoke, sweat, meat, oil, breast milk, the smells of cooking and mothering—stayed with her. At five feet five inches, she wasn’t tall, but she towered over the group. If she’d grown up on a village diet, she thought, she likely would have been as small.