Eventually, talk turns to a recent rash of mail theft that has hit the neighborhood.
Lying in bed that night, Idris says, “Do you think we have to have all this?”
“ ‘All this’?” Nahil says. He can see her in the mirror, brushing her teeth by the sink.
“All this. This stuff.”
“No we don’t need it, if that’s what you mean,” she says. She spits in the sink, gargles.
“You don’t think it’s too much, all of it?”
“We worked hard, Idris. Remember the MCATs, the LSATs, medical school, law school, the years of residency? No one gave us anything. We have nothing to apologize for.”
“For the price of that home theater we could have built a school in Afghanistan.”
She comes into the bedroom and sits on the bed to remove her contacts. She has the most beautiful profile. He loves the way her forehead hardly dips where her nose begins, her strong cheekbones, her slim neck.
“Then do both,” she says, turning to him, blinking back eyedrops. “I don’t see why you can’t.”
A few years ago, Idris had discovered that Nahil was supporting a Colombian kid named Miguel. She’d said nothing to him about it, and since she was in charge of the mail and their finances Idris had not known about it for years until he’d seen her one day reading a letter from Miguel. The letter had been translated from Spanish by a nun. There was a picture too, of a tall, wiry boy standing outside a straw hut, cradling a soccer ball, nothing behind him but gaunt-looking cows and green hills. Nahil had started supporting Miguel when she was in law school. For eleven years now Nahil’s checks had quietly crossed paths with Miguel’s pictures and his thankful, nun-translated letters.
She takes off her rings. “So what is this? You caught a case of survivor’s guilt over there?”
“I just see things a little differently now.”
“Good. Put that to use, then. But quit the navel-gazing.”
Jet lag robs him of sleep that night. He reads for a while, watches part of a West Wing rerun downstairs, ends up at the computer in the guest bedroom Nahil has turned into an office. He finds an e-mail from Amra. She hopes that his return home was safe and that his family is well. It has been raining “angrily” in Kabul, she writes, and the streets are packed with mud up to the ankles. The rain has caused flooding, and some two hundred families had to be evacuated by helicopter in Shomali, north of Kabul. Security has been tightening because of Kabul’s support of Bush’s war in Iraq and expected reprisals from al-Qaeda. Her last line reads You have talked with your boss yet?
Below Amra’s e-mail is pasted a short paragraph from Roshi, which Amra has transcribed. It reads:
Salaam, Kaka Idris,
Inshallah, you have arrived safely in America. I am sure that your family is very happy to see you. Every day I think about you. Every day I am watching the films you bought for me. I like them all. It makes me sad that you are not here to watch with me. I am feeling good and Amra jan is taking good care of me. Please say Salaam to your family for me. Inshallah, we will see each other soon in California.
With my respects,
Roshana
He answers Amra, thanks her, writes that he is sorry to hear about the flooding. He hopes the rains will abate. He tells her that he will discuss Roshi with his chief this week. Below that he writes:
Salaam, Roshi jan:
Thank you for your kind message. It made me very happy to hear from you. I too think about you a lot. I have told my family all about you and they are very eager to meet you, especially my sons, Zabi jan and Lemar jan, who ask a lot of questions about you. We all look forward to your arrival. I send you my love,
Kaka Idris
He logs off and goes to bed.
On Monday, a pile of phone messages greets him when he enters his office. Prescription-refill requests spill from a basket, awaiting his approval. He has over one hundred and sixty e-mails to sift through, and his voice mail is full. He peruses his schedule on the computer and is dismayed to see overbooks—squeezes, as the doctors call them—inserted into his time slots all week. Worse, he will see the dreaded Mrs. Rasmussen that afternoon, a particularly unpleasant, confrontational woman with years of vague symptoms that respond to no treatment. The thought of facing her hostile neediness makes him break into a sweat. And last, one of the voice mails is from his chief, Joan Schaeffer, who tells him that a patient he had diagnosed with pneumonia just before his trip to Kabul turned out to have congestive heart failure instead. The case will be used next week for Peer Review, a monthly video conference watched by all the facilities during which mistakes by physicians, who remain anonymous, are used to illustrate learning points. The anonymity doesn’t go very far, Idris knows. At least half the people in the room will know the culprit.
He feels the onset of a headache.
He falls woefully behind schedule that morning. An asthma patient walks in without an appointment and needs respiratory treatments and close monitoring of his peak flows and oxygen saturation. A middle-aged executive, whom Idris last saw three years before, comes in with an evolving anterior myocardial infarction. Idris cannot start lunch until halfway through the noon hour. In the conference room where the doctors eat, he takes harried bites of a dry turkey sandwich as he tries to catch up with notes. He answers the same questions from his colleagues. Was Kabul safe? What do Afghans there think of the U.S. presence? He gives economical, clipped replies, his mind on Mrs. Rasmussen, on voice mails that need answering, refills he has yet to approve, the three squeezes in his schedule that afternoon, the upcoming Peer Review, the contractors sawing and drilling and banging nails back at the house. Talking about Afghanistan—and he is astonished at how quickly and imperceptibly this has happened—suddenly feels like discussing a recently watched, emotionally drenching film whose effects are beginning to wane.
The week proves one of the hardest of his professional career. Though he had meant to, he doesn’t find the time to talk to Joan Schaeffer about Roshi. A foul mood takes hold of him all week. He is short with the boys at home, annoyed with the workers streaming in and out of his house and all the noise. His sleep pattern has yet to return to normal. He receives two more e-mails from Amra, more updates on the conditions in Kabul. Rabia Balkhi, the women’s hospital, has reopened. Karzai’s cabinet will allow cable television networks to broadcast programs, challenging the Islamic hard-liners who had opposed it. In a postscript at the end of the second e-mail, she says that Roshi has become withdrawn since he left, and asks again whether he has spoken to his chief. He steps away from the keyboard. He returns to it later, ashamed of how Amra’s note had irritated him, how tempted he had been, for just a moment, to answer her, in capital letters, I WILL. IN DUE TIME.