A Door in the Earth by Amy Waldman

Author:Amy Waldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The Covenant

PARVEEN HAD SHARED NOTHING FROM MOTHER AFGHANISTAN with the women since her run-in with Commander Amanullah nearly a month before. Now, perhaps because of her tutorials with Jamshid, they began accusing her of neglecting them. The orchard beckoned and they wanted to return—mostly, she suspected, because it gave them a reason to get out of the house. Seeing the khan at the bazaar one Friday, she told him, while making sure to stand several feet away, that they would be using his orchard again. He smiled and glided his hand, palm up, in front of himself, as if to say, You’re welcome.

The day on which they gathered was warm, but the orchard was pleasingly cool, suffused with watery hues of green. As a joke, the women had brought basketfuls of apricots harvested from their husbands’ orchards. The apricots were, like the rest of the valley’s fruit, extraordinary: silky to the touch, a gorgeous pale yellow in color, and intensely sweet.

Parveen ate her share, but she nearly choked on the one in her mouth when Ghazal called out, “How is your fiancé?”

“Fine, fine,” she said.

“You’d better marry him soon,” Ghazal said, then looked around saucily for the best moment to land her punch line. “Because if you don’t hurry and bear fruit, your womb will look like this.” She held up a pit to whoops of laughter.

“Very funny,” Parveen said. She would never admit this to the women, but she’d begun to think about, even dream about, children of her own; being twenty-one in a village full of teenage mothers was doing that to her. Twenty-two, actually; her own birthday, July 25, had just passed, unmarked by anyone but herself. No one in the village celebrated birthdays because they often didn’t know when they were.

“I won’t be sad when my womb looks that way,” said Latifa, who held one infant while her two tiny girls gamboled around her in the orchard. At her most recent checkup with Dr. Yasmeen, she’d learned from the ultrasound that she was most likely going to have another girl, her fourth. She had told the doctor and Parveen that she wasn’t going to tell her husband in the hope that the machine turned out to be wrong. Massaging her belly now, nearly five months along, she appeared uncomfortable to Parveen, perhaps even miserable. In her implicit complaint, Parveen saw boldness. Unlike some of the women, Latifa never pretended to enjoy being a vessel for reproduction.

“You’ll change your mind after the baby comes,” Bina said. “We always do.” She smoothed the head of her youngest, six months old, who was nestled in her lap. Parveen had to acknowledge that Bina was a tender mother. Latifa tilted her head in half-hearted agreement.

As for what to share this time, Parveen had settled on Crane’s chapter about getting the clinic built, mostly because it didn’t seem to cast anyone in the village in a bad light.

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