Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [70]
People asked, always: What’s it like, being a woman there?
You are supposed to say that it doesn’t matter a bit. Gender? I never give it a second thought! You are supposed to say that you navigate as a third sex, the Undaunted Western Reporter, clomping around in trousers and ponytails and clumsy head scarves slipping perpetually over your eyes. You are supposed to say that you were privileged, because you had a pass to the secret world of local sisterhood, to a place where faces showed and words were honest, where there was no husband to interrupt and bully. You are supposed to say, in an almost mystical voice, “I could write about the women.” And then you should pause and add, smugly: “Which the male correspondents could never do.” You leave the mythology intact lest you admit weakness and undermine the other women in the field.
And then, too, the truth is not really easy to admit or articulate. You can’t admit how dirty it made you feel, the thousand ways you were slighted and how flimsy your self-assurance turned out to be, how those little battles bit at you like acid. Men who refused to shake your hand; squatting on floors with men who refused to look at your face because you brimmed with sin, not one glance in an hour-long interview; the sneering underfed soldiers who hissed and talked about your ass when you walked past. You can’t admit it made you so bitter that, for a time, you looked at any woman who hadn’t been where you had been as if she were an ingenue who didn’t understand the world she occupied. She was blind to the dark, ruthless fraternity of men—all men, all around the globe—how luridly dangerous they were, how we had to keep pushing against them or we’d wind up where we began hundreds of years ago. You are not supposed to say any of that. It proves you were never really up to the game, that you might as well have stayed home. So you pretend it’s nothing, you tell everyone that you were lucky because you could talk to the women.
In the end, you can’t lose yourself. You can drape your body in black, you can smother your breasts and cover your face and drown yourself in expensive perfumes until your smells, too, are submerged. You can do all of that, but you will still be a woman, and you chose to be there. You can hide but you can’t disappear. Like America itself, you have done a calculation, you have accepted a condition, because you wanted something out of it. You can build walls, cower in the Green Zone, hire armed guards, and never, ever set foot outside the fortress, but you are still an American. You have still chosen to be there. What does it mean that your choice is between being isolated in your own place, and hiding in some other place?
“I left in mid-June and stayed out ’til school started this year. Because of the bombing,” Cora said wearily. “Now people say, ‘Why’d you leave last year and not this year?’”
She sighed.
“We’re putting our kids at risk. My husband and I feel like we’re old, we’ve lived, but they have life ahead of them. If we’re so greedy to stay here and put our kids at risk, what does that say about who we are?”
“Exactly,” said Tracy emphatically.
“To me, it’s not the money. It’s, if you knew for certain, you’d go,” said Amy. “But you’re pulling your kids out of school, and they have games, and they have ballet recitals. And you see all these terror warnings in the U.S., and nothing happens. So how can you know?”
“My daughter was crying because she did not want to go back to the States, it’s too dangerous,” Tracy said.
“The quality of life is incredible here,” Cora said.
“We are so spoiled here,” Tracy agreed.
“Here it’s real friendly,” Pamela said. “We have ballet, soccer, softball.”
No pork is allowed, and the drinkers are reduced to making moonshine with woodchips. But there were consolations: you could cruise the desert on a Harley or in a golf cart, then go home to mingle with like-minded international neighbors. They all underwent background checks and medical exams before arriving, the women said.
“You have to be perfect to