Parvana's Journey

by Deborah Ellis

  We can drink the water here without boiling it, and we don’t get sick. The other children tell me it’s magic water. All the children here have both arms and legs. No one is blind, and no one is unhappy. Maybe Asif’s leg will even grow back.

  Parvana finished reading. She sighed deeply and put the letter down. It sounded foolish. While she was writing it, she could see everything so clearly! But now she could only think about her empty belly, Asif’s terrible cough and blown-off leg, and the horrible smell coming from Hassan.

  “Green Valley.” Asif kicked at the dirt with his foot. “There’s no such place.”

  “No,” Parvana said flatly. “There’s no such place. I made it up.”

  “Why?”

  Parvana shrugged. “I just thought… I guess I just thought that if I could imagine it, I could make it real.”

  “Just like Alexander the Great’s treasure in the cave,” Asif taunted.

  Parvana was furious with herself for sharing her dream with Asif, but mostly for having a dream in the first place. His leg would not grow back, there would never be enough food, and unboiled water would always make people sick.

  She ripped the paper out of the notebook, balled it up and threw it into the field.

  A breeze picked up the little ball of paper and sent it back to her. It landed just out of her reach.

  She picked up a stone and threw it at the paper. She missed, then threw another stone angrily.

  “Those are lousy throws,” Asif said.

  “Oh, you think you could do better with those skinny arms of yours?”

  “I could throw better than you if I had no arms!”

  The challenge was on. Parvana helped Asif stand up, and she handed him some stones. He leaned on one crutch as he threw. His first throw went a lot farther than hers.

  “I told you!”

  “My first throws didn’t count,” Parvana insisted. “I wasn’t trying.” She threw another rock. This was much better.

  They kept throwing. Sometimes Asif’s throw went farther, sometimes hers did. She kept handing Asif rocks, and he kept throwing them.

  “Anyone can throw these small stones,” Asif said. “Get me some big rocks, and I’ll show you how to really throw.”

  Parvana made a little pile of rocks big enough to need two hands to throw. She had to hold him up while he threw these, because he couldn’t throw and hold onto his crutches at the same time. The effort made him cough, but he kept trying.

  Parvana picked up the largest rock in the pile. It was quite heavy. She put all her strength behind it and heaved it into the field.

  The ground roared and rose up in front of them, as if a monster was punching its way through from below.

  The children screamed. They screamed and screamed, and kept screaming as the dust settled.

  Asif threw a stone at Parvana’s shoulder. “You led us into a mine field!” he hollered, his rage making his voice even louder than Hassan’s screams. “You are the stupidest girl. With all your writing and all your France, you don’t know what you’re doing! We will all be blown up! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!” As he yelled at her, his hand kept grabbing at the place where his leg used to be.

  Something made Parvana put her arms around Asif’s frail body. They dropped to the ground, gathered up the stinking, weeping Hassan, clung to each other, and cried and cried.

  TEN

  Parvana didn’t know how long they sat like that. It seemed like hours and it seemed like minutes.

  She shielded her eyes and looked out at the rocky, dusty field. She couldn’t tell by looking at it how deadly it was.

  Sometimes land mines were spread on top of the ground, brightly painted to look like pretty things. People would try to pick them up and get their arms blown off. Most of the land mines were buried just a few inches under the ground. People didn’t know they were stepping on them until the bombs exploded.

  Parvana didn’t know what to do now. If they were in a mine field, all they had to do was take one wrong step, and the earth would rise up beneath them.

  Should they head out across the field and maybe get blown up? Should they stay where they were and wait to die from hunger and thirst? How could she know what was the right decision? She was too tired and sad to even guess. Either way, it looked as though they were all going to die. She would never meet up with Shauzia after all. She thought of her friend, sitting at the top of the Eiffel Tower, waiting and waiting and waiting.

  Parvana rested her chin on Asif’s shoulder as their crying subsided into quiet sobbing. She looked out at the field. All she saw was rocks and dust and hills with more rocks and dust.

  Something caught her eye. It was moving toward them. She blinked a few times to be sure she was seeing correctly, then sat up straight.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said, “across the mine field.”

  Asif turned and looked where she was pointing.

  “I think it’s a girl,” he said.

  “I think you’re right,” Parvana said, seeing the chador flow out from the girl’s head as she ran toward them.

  “Do you think she’s real?” Asif asked.

  Parvana wasn’t prepared to guess. Things that seemed real to her turned out to be things she had just dreamed up.

  “We can’t both be imagining her, can we?”

  Before they had time to wonder, the girl herself was there.

  “Children!” she exclaimed. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen children!” She bent down to hug them.

  Parvana and Asif were too stunned to hug her back.

  The girl was smaller than Asif. She wore a filthy green chador over her hair. “And you have a baby. Oh, this is wonderful! Did anybody die?”

  Parvana’s brain, sluggish from hunger, was slow to respond.

  “What?”

  “The explosion,” the girl said, waving her hands in the air. “Is anybody dead?”

  “No, no, there’s no one dead.”

  “What’s the baby’s name?” the girl asked.

  Asif answered. “His name is Hassan.”

  “It’s too bad you’re all boys,” she said. “I’ve been wanting and wanting a sister.”

  “She’s a girl,” Asif said, jerking his thumb at Parvana.

  “Are you? You’re a very strange-looking girl.”

  Asif giggled. Parvana frowned at him. She could say the same about this girl. She wore a dress that looked like a long piece of flowered cloth with a hole cut out for her head. Her belt was a rope. Her face was covered with sores like the ones Parvana had seen on other children. Her father had told her they came from disease and infection. The girl wore an assortment of bangles and necklaces made from objects Parvana couldn’t completely identify — a nail in the necklace, and something that looked like the twisty end of a broken lightbulb. The jewelry clanked and jingled as the girl pranced around them.

  Parvana felt too overwhelmed by the girl’s energy to ask her any questions.

  “Well, let’s go,” the girl said.

  “Go where?”

  “To my house, of course. I always take what I find in the mine field back to my house. You are even better than a wagon or a donkey. Have you ever eaten donkey? Of course, I couldn’t get the whole donkey home. I had to cut off a bit of it, just big enough to carry. I came back for more, but by then the flies and the buzzards had found it. I don’t like to eat things if the flies have been on it, and those buzzards scare me.”

  The girl kept talking as she picked up the two bundles and walked away, leaving Parvana to pick up Hassan and Asif to pick up himself.

  “Wait!” Parvana called after her. “What about the land mines?”

  “Land mines won’t hurt me,” the girl called back. “Just follow me and they won’t hurt you, either.”

  The girl headed out across the mine field
. She moved so quickly, skipping along, that Parvana had to call her a few times to wait for them. The mine field was dotted with animal skeletons, broken wagon wheels and bits of soft-drink bottles.

  The girl led them down a short canyon and into a small clearing sheltered on all sides by rocky hills.

  “Welcome to my house,” she said, spreading her arms as if she were welcoming them to a palace.

  It was the stench that hit Parvana first. The smell of rotting meat seemed trapped in the clearing. She saw half-butchered sheep and goats on the ground, covered with flies.

  The house was a mud shack like many others Parvana had seen in her travels. It was coming apart in many places. The mud was patched in spots, but only a short ways up. Parvana realized that the girl, who looked to be no more than eight years old, could not reach any higher. A cloth that was more holes than material hung over the doorway.

  Apart from the animal carcasses, there was litter all over the yard — broken boards, empty bottles, bits of leather harness, frayed ropes, filthy bits of cardboard and tangles of weeds. There was another smell, too. Parvana guessed the girl had been using the yard as a latrine.

  There was no one else in the yard, and no one came out of the house to greet them.

  “Do you live here all alone?” Parvana asked.

  “Oh, no. I live here with my grandmother. Come and meet her. She’ll like you a lot.”

  She led them into the house. It was dark inside, and it also stank.

  “I’ve found some children, Grandmother. Isn’t that wonderful? Say hello to my grandmother,” she urged Parvana and Asif.

  At first Parvana thought the girl had gone completely mad, that there was no one else in the room. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the darkness of the little house.

  She saw a tall cupboard, some shabby mats against the walls and a pile of clothes in the corner.

  The little girl went over to the pile of clothes, knelt down and appeared to be listening to it. “Grandmother says she’s very glad to see you, and to please stay as long as you like.”

  “We’d better take the kid with us,” Asif whispered to Parvana. “She’s as crazy as you are.”

  Parvana was about to agree with Asif when she took a closer look at the mound of clothes.

  She knelt down and put her hand on it. She felt the boniness of a human spine and the slight rise and fall of breath.

  The girl’s grandmother was curled into a ball on a thin mattress, with her back to the door. She had a dark cloth draped over her whole body. Even her face was covered. She did not move or make a sound. Only the tiny movement of her breathing and the absence of the death smell proved to Parvana that the woman was alive.

  The little girl didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. She took them back outside.

  “Grandmother needs a lot of rest,” she said, before twirling around in a dance of activity.

  Parvana remembered that her own mother had been like that, lying on the toshak at home when her father was in jail. She remembered the woman on the hill.

  This was what happened to grownups when they became too sad to keep going. She wondered whether it would ever happen to her, too.

  She had a hundred questions for the girl, but for the moment she just asked one.

  “What is your name?”

  “Leila,” the girl said, and she fetched them some water and cold rice.

  The food and drink revived Parvana and Asif, but neither of them could coax Hassan to eat. He just didn’t seem interested.

  “He’s almost dead,” Leila said very matter-of-factly.

  “No, he’s not,” Asif insisted. “He’s going to be fine.” He soaked the edge of his shirt with water and put it in Hassan’s mouth. For a long minute it seemed as if Hassan would just let it sit there. Then he started sucking the water out. “See? He’s going to be fine.” He made a paste out of a bit of rice, and Hassan ate that, too.

  There was a well in the clearing with a hand pump, and they were able to wash. Leila brought out clean clothes for them.

  “These were my mother’s,” she said.

  Parvana felt very proud of herself for not laughing at Asif as he came out of the house dressed in a lady’s shalwar kameez until his own clothes were washed and dried. His stick-thin body was lost in the grownup clothes, and a glower covered his whole face.

  Parvana liked being back in girl clothes. The shalwar kameez Leila gave her was light blue with white embroidery down the front. It made her feel almost pretty again.

  In the yard there was a cook-fire with rocks around it that made a place to set pots on. Leila cooked some rice and meat stew for supper. Before serving it, she took a pinch of food from the pot and put it in a little hole she made in the ground with her fingers. Parvana was too tired to ask what she was doing.

  “It’s pigeon stew,” the little girl said. “I hope you like it.”

  Parvana wouldn’t have cared if she were eating vulture. Any food was good food. Asif spooned broth from the stew into Hassan’s mouth. Hassan swallowed everything, keeping his eyes on Asif’s face.

  They ate their evening meal in the one-room house with Leila’s grandmother. Leila talked non-stop as she put some food on a plate, lifted her grandmother’s head cover a little and placed the plate underneath it.

  Parvana watched closely. Eventually she saw slow movements under the cover as the old woman lifted morsels of food from her plate to her mouth.

  Through it all, Leila talked and talked. Words spilled out of her like she was a pot boiling over.

  “I know I’m talking a lot,” she said, “but it’s been such a long time since I had anyone to talk to, especially children. Of course, I have Grandmother, but she doesn’t talk much.”

  As far as Parvana could see, Grandmother didn’t talk at all.

  “Was she always so quiet?” she asked Leila.

  “Oh, no. She used to talk all the time. All the women in my family are big talkers. She didn’t go quiet until my mother wandered off.”

  “Mothers don’t just wander off,” Asif said.

  “Well, really she went looking for my brother and father. Someone came by and told us they were killed in the fighting, but she didn’t believe them and went off to look for herself. She hasn’t come back yet. I sit up on the hill every day and watch for her, but she hasn’t come back yet.” She looked confused, Parvana thought, as if she couldn’t understand why her mother was taking so long.

  Asif asked the question Parvana was almost too afraid to ask.

  “How long ago did she leave?”

  Leila seemed puzzled.

  “Did she leave before last winter?” Parvana asked.

  “Yes,” Leila said. “Before the winter. The nights were still warm when she left.”

  That was months and months ago.

  “You’ve been alone all that time?”

  “Not alone,” Leila insisted. “With Grandmother.”

  Asif and Parvana exchanged looks. Being alone with a grandmother like that was as bad as being all alone.

  “Go ahead and talk all you want,” Parvana said. “We’ll listen.”

  TWELVE

  They spent the night in the little house. Leila shared her mattress with Parvana, and Asif slept next to Hassan. Parvana slept deeply and did not dream.

  The flies woke her up.

  We’ll have to do something about that, she thought as she scratched at the flea bites on her ankles. They would have to do something about the bugs in the beds, too.

  She realized she had decided to stay for a while.

  The others were still sleeping. Parvana gently lifted Leila’s arm from where it had fallen across her chest and went outside.

  The clearing was a little world by itself. The way the hills surrounded it, it was hard to tell there was a world outside at all.

  Par
vana walked around the little house. In the back was a patch of dirt that looked as if it might have been a vegetable garden at one point. There were sticks in the ground that could have staked tomatoes, like the ones she had seen in gardens in the villages she had passed through with her father.

  Near the garden was a rusty wire cage full of pigeons. The cage was taller than Parvana, but the perch had broken and was lying on the ground covered with droppings. Most of the pigeons hopped around in the muck on the bottom. One was trying to work its way through a hole in the wires. Parvana put her hand against the hole and felt the bird’s soft head butt against her palm.

  “We ate one of those last night,” Leila said, coming up behind her. “We eat some, and they keep having babies, so we have more to eat.”

  Leila took Parvana on a tour of the clearing. “These are apple trees,” she said, pointing to two scraggly trees with shiny green leaves and little green apples on the branches. “The apples will be ready in the fall. They’re good, but you have to eat around the worms.”

  In another part of the yard were sacks of flour and rice. Parvana could see mouse holes in some of the bags.

  “Come and see my treasure house,” Leila said.

  The treasure house turned out to be some boards leaning up against a rock. Leila pulled one of the boards away. Parvana peered in and saw cans of cooking oil, several bolts of cloth, a box of light bulbs, cooking pots, sandals of many sizes, men’s caps, lengths of rope, several thermos flasks, and a box of bars of soap, some chewed by mice.

  “Where did all this come from?” Parvana asked.

  “A peddler got blown up in the mine field. That was a really good day. We got all these things. I made myself this dress from some of the cloth.”

  Parvana struggled to understand. “You mean you go out into the mine field when you hear an explosion?”

  “Of course. That’s how I found you.”

  “What happened to the peddler?”

  “Oh, he was blown up. His cart and clothes were all blown up, too. Nothing there we could use. I had to make a lot of trips to carry all these things back.”