In My Father's Country by Saima Wahab

and stocky, with tufts of white hair growing out of his ears.
    “Dictionary!” I exclaimed. “There’s a war going on. You’re not going to have time to whip out your dictionary in the middle of a combat zone.”
    “It’s just to pass the test. They don’t care,” he said.
    “They should care. I care,” I replied righteously.
    On the third day I returned to my hotel room in the evening. I was standing in the middle of my room trying to figure out what to do for dinner, when the phone rang. Everyone I knew called me on my cell. I stared at the hotel phone. Its ring was loud to the point of aggression. I answered it rudely, just to stop it from ringing. It was Greg. Before I could ask why he was calling me on the hotel line he said, “Guess what?I’m in the lobby. I wanted to surprise you, but they won’t give me your room number.”
    “You are?” I was so happy to hear his voice. I had been afraid it was the dictionary lender with the hairy ears who had been calling.
    “I got to thinking. If you go to Afghanistan, you’ll miss our anniversary. So I came here to celebrate it early.”
    Greg was great with a map. That night he took me to an Afghan restaurant I’d heard about. The food wasn’t very good, but it hardly mattered. The company was exactly what I needed. The next afternoon we went to the Smithsonian. We took the Metro into Washington, D.C., the first time in my life I’d ridden on a subway train. The clatter made it too loud to talk, but we had been together long enough for me to know he wasn’t there just to celebrate. This wasn’t any anniversary. When we had first met and he asked me to marry him, I had carelessly told him to come back and ask me in five years. It was nearly five years later.
    While we were looking at the dinosaur skeletons he asked, casually, if I knew how many years we’d been together.
    “These dinosaurs are amazing. I wish Riley could see this someday. Don’t you think he would love this place?” I asked, hoping to distract him.
    “We don’t have to get married immediately. You can go do your Afghanistan thing, and we can just get engaged.”
    “I’m not sure I want to be engaged.”
    “We wouldn’t have to tell anybody. It could just be our little secret.”
    “Now you sound like some old pervert,” I said. Using humor as an escape was an Afghan trait I could always count on. “What’s the purpose of that?” I continued. “Don’t you think I would stay true to us?”
    “I just want to be able to look forward to your return and starting a life with me. The rest is up to you; any way you want it, I want it.”
    “If it’s up to me, I would prefer not to complicate our relationship.”
    I adored Greg. There was no one else in my life. I didn’t want to end our relationship. I wanted to be with him, but I just didn’t want to be married to him. I wasn’t planning on walking away, I just needed toknow that I would always have the freedom to do so. I had paid a great price for my independence and never wanted to give it up, ever.
    I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day analyzing my aversion to marriage. When I was a child I once heard Mamai tell some friends a story about a thirteen-year-old girl in the village who’d been married to a man much older than she. One evening she cooked his dinner and either oversalted it or undersalted it, I can’t remember which. She placed the food in front of him; he took one taste and was so displeased that he smacked her so hard he broke her neck and she died instantly. What amazed me when I heard them tell the story was not the horror of it happening but the casualness with which this story was shared and discussed. It wasn’t shocking to them, nor was it a lesson not to marry young girls to old men—it was just told as general conversation, a piece of local gossip. When I thought about marriage I could never shake this story, couldn’t file it under Beastly Things That Happen Only in Afghanistan. I