Parvana's Journey (10 page)

EIGHTEEN

Dear Shauzia:

The man with the broken cart was right. We see a lot of people now, traveling like we are. We beg from everyone we see. We even beg from people who are trying to beg from us. Most people don’t have anything. If they do, they share it with us
 —
sometimes just a mouthful, but it helps us stay alive another day.

People keep telling us to take Hassan to a doctor, but we don’t know any doctors, and we have no money to pay for one.

I wonder if that man ever got his cart out of the river bed. I wonder if their baby will live.

I wonder if we will live.

The children followed a road now, going in the same direction as the other travelers. Sometimes a truck full of soldiers passed them. Once a short line of tanks rumbled by, and everyone had to get off the road to let them pass. Parvana remembered the tank the children had played on in the village where her father died. She wondered if children would play on these tanks one day.

Later they heard the tanks shooting at something.

The planes were bombing in the daytime now, as well as at night. Some of the bombs were so loud that the noise knocked the children to the ground. Asif cut his face when he fell against some rocks. A lot of blood ran from his forehead. He had to keep wiping the cut with his blanket, because they had no bandages.

More bombs fell. One exploded just ahead of them. People scattered, huddling in clumps on each side of the road.

“Get down!” people shouted. “Take cover!”

Parvana ran with the baby to the side of the road. Asif was close behind her. She was face down in the dirt, dust and rocks billowing around her, when she realized Leila wasn’t with her.

She peered out through the falling rubble and saw Leila still standing in the road. The little girl had her hands cupped over her mouth, and she was shouting something into the sky.

Parvana slid Hassan over to Asif and ran into the road. As she got closer, she could hear what Leila was saying.

“Stop!” Leila shouted at the airplanes. “Don’t do this any more!”

The airplanes ignored her. The bombs kept falling.

Parvana would never know how she found the strength. She picked Leila up and ran with her to the side of the road, then lay on top of her to keep her from rushing out again. Her free hand found Asif’s. They stayed like that until the planes finished their bombing.

When everything was quiet except for the crying of people who had lost loved ones, and the screaming of those who had been injured, the children got up and started walking again. They couldn’t help anyone, and no one could help them.

Parvana saw a man cradling a dead boy, an injured woman with her burqa flipped back from her face, gasping for air, a child shaking a woman on the ground who was not responding.

The children had to walk around dead pack animals and broken wagons and bits of people’s belongings scattered in the road — shoes, pots, a green water jug, a broken shovel. There was smoke and the smell of gasoline, and the sounds of agony and madness. It all made Parvana feel as if she were walking through a wide-awake nightmare.

“Do you suppose we’re all dead?” Asif asked.

Parvana didn’t even try to answer. She just kept walking.

The children walked for the rest of the day. They were just four more bodies in a long line of people moving forward only because there was nothing to go back to.

“I don’t even feel like me any more,” Parvana said, talking more to herself than to anyone else. “The part of me that’s me is gone. I’m just part of this line of people. There’s no me left. I’m nothing.”

“You’re not nothing,” Asif said.

Parvana stopped walking and looked at him.

“You’re not nothing,” he said again. Then he grinned a little. “You’re an idiot. That’s not nothing.”

Before he could stop her, Parvana wrapped his frail body in a gigantic hug. To her great surprise, he hugged her back before pushing her away with mock disgust.

They kept walking.

As the sky grew darker, mountains and hills became balls of fire and pillars of smoke from the bombs dropped on them. Parvana’s eyes stung from the thick smoke in the air. Her throat, already parched from thirst, burned when she tried to swallow.

Night was almost upon them when they reached the top of a small ridge and looked down.

Spread out below them, as far as they could see, was a mass of tents and people.

Parvana knew what they were looking at. She had stayed in a place much like it, with her father, last winter.

It was a camp for Internally Displaced Persons. It was a camp for internal refugees.

It was a home for four tired and hungry children.

NINETEEN

“We have hundreds of people a day flooding in here,” the nurse in the Red Crescent Clinic said to Parvana and the others as she took charge of Hassan. “Things were bad enough already. Then someone dropped a bomb on our supply depot. Tents, blankets, food and medicine all went up in smoke before — ”

“Will Hassan be all right?” Asif asked.

The nurse had Hassan stripped, washed and diapered with a few quick, practiced movements.

“He’s suffering from severe malnutrition and dehydration,” she said, putting a needle into Hassan’s arm and taping it down.

“What does that mean?” Asif asked.

“It means he’s hungry and thirsty,” the nurse said.

“I
know
that,” Asif almost yelled. “I asked you if he’s going to be all right.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” she said, and she began to head off to another patient.

“That’s no answer.” Asif stuck out his crutch to block her way, and for once Parvana was glad for his rudeness.

The nurse stopped and turned around.

“He’s in very bad shape,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll be all right or not. I’ve seen sick babies like him recover, though, so don’t lose hope. Now, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave.”

Asif lowered himself to the floor beside Hassan’s crib. Parvana and Leila sat down beside Asif.

“Where’s the rest of your family?” the nurse asked.

“We’re it,” Parvana said.

The nurse nodded. “Don’t get in the way,” she said, but gently.

The clinic was just a big tent. They had stood in line for hours to get in. From her spot on the floor, Parvana couldn’t see much of what was going on, but she could hear the moans and the weeping, and the sounds from the camp that filtered in under the tent canvas.

Asif and Leila stretched out on the floor under Hassan’s crib and were soon asleep, but Parvana was quite content to sit. She felt as though she could sit for the rest of her life.

The nurse came back after a while. “Here’s another blanket for you. Don’t tell anyone you got it here. There aren’t enough to go around, and we don’t want a riot on our hands.” She also gave Parvana some bread and mugs of tea. “You won’t be able to stay here all the time,” she said, “but you can for now.”

For now sounded fine to Parvana. “You’re not Afghan,” she said to the nurse, who spoke Dari with a foreign accent.

“I am from France,” the nurse said. “I am here in Afghanistan with a French relief agency.”

“Do you know the fields of purple flowers?” Parvana asked, so excited that she gripped the nurse’s arm. “My friend Shauzia is going there. Do they really exist?”

“Yes, I have seen the fields,” the nurse said. “The flowers are called lavender. They are made into perfume. Your friend picked a beautiful spot to go to. Now, drink your tea while it’s hot. Wake up your brother and sister. They should have a hot drink. They can sleep later.”

Parvana woke them up. They drank the tea and went back to sleep.

Parvana spent the night hovering between sleeping and waking. She would start to drift off, then bombs would explode in the distance. Or she would start to dream that they were still walking, walking, walking, and she would wake up again. Every time she did, she checked on Hassan. He looked so small in the crib with a tube sticking out of him. Sometimes when she got up, Asif was already standing there watching the baby.

After a couple of days, the hospital was so crowded that the nurse had to ask the children to leave.

“I’m sure we can find some families who will take you in with them.”

“We’ll stay just outside the clinic,” Parvana said. “We want to stay near our brother.”

The nurse gave them a letter. “The World Food Programme has set up a bakery on the other side of the camp,” she said. “Give them this letter, and you’ll be able to get some bread every day... well, almost every day. I’ll get food to you when I can, but it won’t be very much or very often.”

As a final parting gift, she also gave them a piece of plastic sheeting. Parvana was grateful. She knew how to build a shelter with that.

Outside the clinic, Parvana draped the plastic against the barrier separating the clinic from the rest of the camp. She made a little tent, with enough plastic left over to line the floor.

“We’ve only been here a few days, and already we have food, shelter and an extra blanket, and Hassan has seen a nurse,” Parvana said, forcing her voice to sound cheerful.

“I don’t like it here,” Leila said. “It’s noisy and crowded and it smells bad. Can’t we go back to Green Valley? Maybe Grandmother is all right now. Maybe she’s sitting on top of the hill waiting for us to come home.”

“We’re here for the winter,” Parvana said firmly. She didn’t remind Leila that Grandmother was dead. “We’re a family. We stick together. I’m the oldest, so you have to do what I say.”

She didn’t add that her legs had no more steps in them. As bad as this place was, at least it was somewhere. There were grownups around, and the possibility of regular food. Besides, she wouldn’t know where to go from here.

“I’ll go and get our bread,” Asif offered. He was already lying down in the lean-to, coughing. Both he and Leila were coughing all the time now.

“No, it’s all right, I’ll go,” Parvana said.

She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to wade into the sea of desperate people. She knew from her experience at the other camps that going for bread or anything else meant standing in line for hours. She couldn’t let Asif do it.

“We need you here to guard our belongings,” she told him. To Leila, she said, “You should stay here, too, so that one of you can sleep while the other stands guard.”

She told them not to expect her back until the end of the day. Then she put her bag over her shoulder and headed off in the direction the nurse had shown them.

Parvana’s days fell into a pattern. She began to move through them as though she were dreaming.

Dear Shauzia:

I can’t sleep at night. I doze off for a bit, then Asif coughs, or Leila coughs, or they cry out in nightmares, or the neighbors yell, and I wake up again. I can’t sleep during the day because I have to spend my time standing in lines.

Often my time in lines is wasted. Three times I’ve lined up for bread only to have the bakery run out before I got there.

Two days ago there was a rumor that someone was in the camp to choose people to go to Canada. I stood in that line all day, but nothing happened. The line fell apart, and I never found out if the Canada people were really here or not. Either way, I missed lining up for bread that day.

When we first set up our lean-to we were alone on that patch of ground. By the end of the day, when I got back with our bread, there was barely an inch of bare ground around our shelter. I couldn’t find our place at first, and ran around in a panic before finally getting home.

Asif’s cough is worse. Leila’s cough is worse, and we are very cold at night. Hassan is getting better, though. Asif goes to see him every day, leaving Leila to guard our few things. He said yesterday that Hassan was able to grip his fingers, and that he laughed when Asif made funny faces. He said there is another baby sleeping on a mat under Hassan’s crib, so the nurse wasn’t lying when she said there was no room for us.

Everywhere I go, I look for my mother. I should do a proper search, tent to tent, but I spend all my time standing in lines. I’m not even going to hope that I’ll find her. Hope is a waste of time.

The nurse told me the purple fields of France really do exist. I hope you’re there. I wish I was.

Parvana put her notebook away and shuffled forward a few inches with the rest of the line. She really should be more grateful, she thought. After all, they weren’t alone any more, and a proper adult was caring for Hassan. She tried to make herself feel grateful as she stared out over the tents made of rags, stretching all the way to the horizon.

“Excuse me, what is this line for?” a boy asked her.

For a long moment Parvana couldn’t remember. She had been standing in the line for such a long time. “Water,” she recalled, and held up the empty cooking oil can she had begged from someone else.

Eventually it was her turn at the water truck, and she lugged the full can back to the lean-to.

The bombing was still going on, and refugees kept pushing their way into the camp, squeezing into every square inch of land.

“Why do they have to squash in here?” Parvana complained, as new arrivals threatened to take over the children’s lean-to. “There’s a whole field on the other side of the clinic. Why don’t they go there?”

“It’s a mine field,” Asif said.

“How do you know?”

He looked at her with his usual scorn. “I know lots of things you don’t.”

Parvana felt as if she were back in the tiny one-room apartment she had shared with her family in Kabul. Whenever she got angry with Nooria, there was nowhere to go to get away from her. Now with all the bare ground being taken up with tents and shelters, there was nowhere to go to get away from Asif.

She looked out the flap of the lean-to. Inches away was the neighbor’s tent. The man and his wife were arguing loudly in a language Parvana didn’t understand.

Is this it? she wondered. Have I come so far, just to be here? Is this really my life?