The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg Read Free Book Online

grandmother’s house once, in my mother’s collection of books. “Do you remember the quote at the end? ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’?”
    “Yes, yes.” Azita smiles and her eyes drift off a little. “It was difficult for me to understand, but I cried a lot in the end when she died. I cried a lot. When I grew up I understood the exact meaning. I watched the movie, too, several times.”
    “Have you ever been in love?”
    She looks at me, silent for a moment before she speaks.
    “I love my husband, Jenny.”

CHAPTER FOUR
THE SON MAKER
    Dr. Fareiba
    T HOSE WHO MAKE it here are the lucky ones.
    Most often, the promise of new life arrives by car. Poor hydraulics and patchy road make the heavily pregnant patients under powder-blue burkas sway in the backseat of the battered Toyota Corollas. The sign on the gate shows a crossed-out machine gun: No weapons allowed. That rule will be disregarded, as most everywhere else in Afghanistan. The guards, who have watched each car barrel down the hillside, give a nod to swing open the steel doors. Inside is a two-story hospital, where a handful of doctors work in shifts at this sole medical clinic in a largely Taliban-controlled area of thirty-two thousand people. Some patients are nomads; most are from poor, rural families.
    On average, one hundred and sixty-six new Afghans are born in the maternity ward here each month, according to the hospital’s records. It rests in the middle of a quiet flat plateau in the Wardak province, about an hour’s drive from Kabul. Quiet, that is, on a good day: A few miles north of the hospital is an American military base—the primary target for rocket attacks by insurgents, as all resistance to foreign troops is dubbed. Those insurgent fighters take aim at the foreign enemy from several angles, the hospital squatting betweenthemselves and the target. When fired, the rockets arc through the sky above the little hospital and often hit just outside the grounds. At times, they fall a bit short and hit the hospital.
    Thermal cameras on unmanned drones hum in the air above, trying to discover the rockets while they are still on the ground, often mounted on makeshift piles of stones and sticks, connected to batteries and timers. If the drone operator spots something of interest, an attack helicopter armed with machine guns, rockets, and missiles can be dispatched in a preemptive attack.
    Regardless of who aims to kill whom out there, most efforts inside the clinic frantically revolve around life. Nobody will ask patients what family or clan they belong to, or who they may have been fighting outside the gate. Every ragged, hollow-eyed child is cared for, every pregnant woman is ushered inside. The men will wait outside, leaning back in rows on benches along a yellow stone wall with a backdrop of snowy mountains, while the fate of their families plays out in the hospital. Most are in the typical villager dress of white cotton pants, vests, and plaid turbans, with open sandals or plastic shower shoes also in the iciest of winter.
    Inside, layers of burkas, hijabs, and shawls are pulled back by sunburned henna-painted hands. The hands often look older than the faces underneath, with their soft cheeks and unwrinkled eyes. A few mothers-to-be have only recently become teenagers. Every few hours, a woman’s struggle to have a son ends here, inside a white-tiled room, where three gynecological chairs have been covered with black plastic bags. A baby boy is triumph, success. A baby girl is humiliation, failure. He is a
bacha
, the word for child. A boy. She is the “other”: a
dokhtar
. A daughter.
    The woman who returns home with a son can be celebrated with a
nashrah
ceremony, where music is played and prayers are said. Food and drink will be brought out in abundance. The new mother will be presented with gifts: a dozen chickens or a goat to celebrate her achievement. She may even be offered a few pounds of butter to help her