Parvana's Journey

by Deborah Ellis

  Parvana carried him most of the time. He wanted to be crawling, so he kicked and fussed whenever he was carried. He stank, so Parvana stank. Her once beautiful light blue clothes were now a stinking mess.

  “We’re worse off than we were before,” Parvana said to the air. To top it off, she was dressed in girl clothes. Whatever she did now, she’d have to do it as a girl — a girl who was getting to be too old to be uncovered in public, according to the Taliban. She didn’t even have a head covering. She had been enjoying her hair too much on the night of the party to cover it up.

  “Are you just going to sit there like an idiot?” Asif yelled. He had to yell loudly to make his voice heard over Hassan’s screeching.

  She sat with her back to them for a while longer, then got to her feet. She went back to the others, lifted Hassan, helped Asif stand up, and gently nudged Leila.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  The children started walking again, because there was nothing else to do.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon, Asif let out a shout. “There’s a stream!”

  Parvana looked where he was pointing. He was right. It wasn’t much of a stream, but at least it was wet.

  “We should boil it first,” Parvana said, but Asif and Leila were already scooping water into their mouths. Parvana realized she was being a fool. There was no way they could boil water. If they got sick, they got sick. It was better than dying of thirst.

  She made a cup with her hands and drank deeply. The water was muddy, but that didn’t matter. She scooped up water for Hassan to drink, too.

  She started to undress the baby.

  “What are you doing?” Asif asked.

  “I’m going to wash him and wash his clothes. In case you haven’t noticed, he stinks.”

  “I thought that was you.”

  Parvana snatched the blanket shawl from Asif’s shoulders. “To keep the baby warm,” she said. For a moment she hoped Hassan would wet the blanket — it would serve Asif right — but quickly changed her mind when she remembered that they all had to sleep under that blanket.

  They stayed by the stream for the rest of the day, drinking water whenever their bellies felt empty again.

  “Hassan’s clothes aren’t dry,” Leila said as night fell. “We can’t dress him in wet clothes. He’ll catch cold. You should have waited until tomorrow to wash his clothes.”

  Asif took off his shirt and wrapped it around the baby. Parvana could feel Asif shivering all night long.

  The next morning was chilly. Hassan had messed Asif’s shirt, so Parvana had to wash it out. Asif kept the blanket around his shoulders, while he waited for his shirt to dry, but it took too long in the cold air. He eventually put it back on while it was still wet.

  “You don’t know where we are, do you?” Asif accused Parvana, as his thin body cringed at the touch of the cold, wet cloth on his skin.

  “No, I don’t,” Parvana said, too tired to try to think up something reassuring.

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “We’re going to find food,” Parvana replied. “Now you know as much as I do, and if you don’t like it, you’re free to go off on your own.”

  “Don’t think I won’t do that,” Asif grumbled.

  “Is there any food in your bag?” Leila asked.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Why don’t you check?” Leila suggested. “Maybe there’s something in there you forgot.”

  “I wouldn’t forget about food. There’s no food in my bag.”

  “Then why don’t you check?” Asif said. “If you don’t check, it’s because you’re hiding something. You probably have all kinds of food in there that you eat when we’re asleep.”

  Parvana let out a deep, annoyed breath and dumped the contents of her shoulder bag onto the ground so everyone could see.

  “Matches, notebook full of letters to my friend, pens, my mother’s magazine, book.” She touched each item as she identified it. “No food.”

  “What is that book?” Leila asked.

  Parvana picked up the small book with the paper cover. “It’s in English,” she said, pointing at the letters.

  “You know some English,” Leila urged. “Tell us what it says.”

  Parvana’s English was not very good, and she had to concentrate, which was hard. Her brain had that sluggish feeling it always got when she was hungry. She sounded out the words the way her father had taught her, then translated them.

  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she said slowly.

  “What’s a mockingbird?” Asif asked.

  Parvana didn’t know. “It’s like a...a chicken,” she said. “This book is about killing chickens.”

  “That’s dumb,” Asif said. “Why would anyone write a whole book about killing chickens?”

  “There are lots of ways to kill a pigeon,” Leila said. “Maybe there are lots of ways to kill a chicken. Maybe it’s a book that tells us the best way to kill a chicken. Or maybe it’s about what to do with a chicken once it’s been killed. You know, different ways to cook it.”

  “I like it cooked over the fire the best,” Asif said. “Remember the chicken we stole?” he asked Parvana. “That was delicious.”

  Parvana agreed. That had been a particularly good meal.

  “My mother used to make a stew with chicken,” she said. “She made it for my birthday once, back when we lived in a whole house with lots of rooms. We had a party. Even Nooria was nice that day.” More out of habit than hope, Parvana quickly looked around in case her mother was coming.

  “Do you suppose the book tastes like chicken?” Leila asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t think so,” Parvana said.

  “It probably does,” Asif said. “She’s probably keeping it all for herself. She’s mean like that.”

  “Parvana’s not mean,” Leila insisted, which was the first nice thing she had said about Parvana since the bombing. “If that book was good to eat, she’d share it with us.”

  “She’s meaner than an old goat,” Asif insisted.

  “Oh, here, see for yourselves!” Parvana tore some pages out of the mockingbird book and handed them out.

  “What about you?” Leila asked. “You must be hungry, too.”

  Parvana tore a page out for herself and one for Hassan, but Hassan was getting that floppy-baby look again and wasn’t interested.

  “What are we waiting for?” Parvana asked. She bit into the page, tearing a chunk off with her teeth. The others did the same.

  The book didn’t taste like chicken. It didn’t taste like anything, but it was something to chew on, and each child ate another page after they finished the first.

  “Where do we go from here?” Asif asked.

  “Someone else decide,” Parvana said, stretching out on the ground. “I’m tired of being the leader.”

  “If it doesn’t matter where we go, why don’t we follow the stream?” Leila suggested. “At least we’ll have something to drink that way.”

  Parvana sat up and looked at the girl with admiration. “At least one of us is thinking,” she said.

  “I was just going to suggest that,” Asif insisted.

  The children looked up and down the stream. “There are some trees up this way,” Asif said. “Maybe we’ll find something to eat.”

  It was good to have a plan, even a small one, so the children headed off again.

  SEVENTEEN

  The bombing continued night after night. Sometimes it was far away, sometimes a little closer, but always, when darkness fell, thunder sounds rolled across the sky.

  “Who is under the bombs?” Leila asked one night. All four children were huddled together under the one blanket. The two youngest ones were in the middle where it was warmer. Parvana had the old rocks-in-the-back problem, but moving herself would have m
eant moving all four of them. Asif and Hassan were sleeping.

  “Parvana, who’s under the bombs?” Leila asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Parvana whispered back. “People like us, I guess.”

  “Why do the bombs want to kill them?”

  “Bombs are just machines,” Parvana said. “They don’t know who they kill.”

  “Who does?”

  Parvana wasn’t sure. “Since the bombs come from airplanes, someone must have put them there, but I don’t know who, or why they want to kill the people they’re killing tonight.”

  “Why did they want to kill Grandmother? She never knew anyone who put things on planes, so how would they even know her to kill her?”

  “I don’t know,” Parvana said. She took hold of Leila’s hand under the blanket. “We’re sisters, right?”

  “Yes, we’re sisters.”

  “As your big sister, it’s my job to protect you,” she said. “That’s why I had to keep you from going to your grandmother that night. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Leila said. “You were doing your job. I was angry at you, but I’m not any more.”

  “When my father died, it made me feel better to remember things about him. Why don’t you tell me something you remember about your grandmother?”

  “She used to sing,” Leila said, after thinking for a moment. “She taught me a song about a bird. Would you like to hear it?”

  Parvana said she would. Leila sang the song.

  “It’s like she’s still here when I remember her like that,” she said. “Do you think she’s happy now? What do you think she’s doing?”

  “I think people get to do what they want after they die,” Parvana said. “Your grandmother wanted to read, so she’s probably sitting in the warm sun surrounded by books, reading and smiling.”

  “I’d like to be surrounded by pretty things,” Leila said.

  “You are a pretty thing,” Parvana told her.

  “So are you. We’re both pretty things,” Leila giggled.

  “Can’t you girls ever stop talking?” Asif complained. He turned his back to them, yanking the blanket with him.

  Parvana didn’t yank it back. Asif’s cough had returned. She moved in closer to Leila for warmth against the cold, dark night.

  For the next few days the children stuck close to the stream as it got thinner and thinner. The water made them all sick, but they kept drinking it anyway. They ate leaves and grass and some more pages from the mockingbird book.

  Hassan stopped crying. He barely whimpered now, and he wouldn’t eat any of the leaves they tried to put in his mouth. He didn’t turn his head away or spit them out. They would just fall from his lips because he couldn’t hold them there.

  The ground by the stream was rocky and hard to walk on. They had to move slowly so Asif wouldn’t fall. Sometimes they saw people in the distance, but they had no energy to rush over to them for help, and their voices would not carry that far.

  They had been walking for four days when Leila suddenly spotted something up ahead.

  “Look,” she said.

  Parvana had been keeping her eyes on the ground, looking for the smoothest way for Asif’s crutches. She looked up. Not too far in front of them were some people on a cart. They didn’t appear to be soldiers.

  “Maybe they’ll give us a ride,” Parvana said.

  “I’ll run ahead and see,” Leila said.

  As they got closer, Parvana could see a woman in a burqa and children in the cart, and a man standing beside it.

  They caught up with Leila. She looked up at them and shook her head, then nodded at the broken cart wheel.

  “We cannot help you,” the man said. “We cannot even help ourselves.”

  “Can you at least give us food for the baby?” Parvana asked, holding Hassan out to show them what bad shape he was in.

  The woman in the cart uncovered the baby she was carrying. It looked like Hassan. Parvana noticed the other children also had dull eyes and sores on their faces like Leila used to have.

  “Our baby will soon die,” the man said. “Yours will, too.”

  “He won’t,” Asif said.

  The man went on as if Asif hadn’t spoken.

  “I am a farmer, but the bombs made holes in my land. There has been so little rain — nothing to help the land recover from the bombs. This stream used to be a river. I caught fish here as a boy. The water was good to drink. Now there are only rocks. Can we drink rocks? Can we eat rocks?” He touched the broken cart wheel gently, too worn out for anger.

  “Where do we go now?” Parvana asked him.

  “We have heard there is a camp in that direction.” He pointed across the river. “I don’t know exactly where. Go that way. You will meet others. There are many people trying to get away from the bombing.”

  Parvana reached out and took hold of the hand of the woman under the burqa. The woman squeezed her hand back. Then the children went on their way.

  “This must be the river bank,” Parvana said when they got to the edge of the rocky surface. “See where the water cut through the soil?”

  The river bank was steep. Asif had to go up backwards on his bottom while Leila carried his crutches. It was slow going, and the effort made him cough a lot. They had to rest before they could go on.

  “I smell smoke,” Leila said later that afternoon. “Maybe there are people ahead cooking supper. Maybe they have lots of food and will share some with us.”

  “I don’t think anyone around here has lots of food,” Parvana said. She could smell the smoke, too. “But we might as well go and see.”

  They headed toward the smell. They found it at the bottom of a small hill.

  The children stood on the hill and looked down at a forest of blackened trees. Some of them were still smoking.

  “What is it?” Leila asked.

  “It’s an orchard,” Asif said. “See how the trees are in rows? It’s a place to grow fruit.”

  The trees would grow nothing now.

  “My uncle had an orchard,” Asif said. “He grew peaches, mostly, and rows of berry bushes. He accused me of stealing berries from him. Is it stealing to take food when you’re hungry? I worked and worked for him, and he didn’t give me enough food.”

  “Is that why he whipped you?” Parvana asked. If Asif wanted to talk, she wanted to listen.

  “He never told me why he whipped me. I don’t think he needed a reason. When he caught me eating the berries, he locked me in the shed. He said he was going to get the Taliban to cut off my hands.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Crutches are good for breaking locks,” Asif said. Then he headed down the hill into the burnt-out orchard. The others followed him. They soon came across bomb craters in the ground.

  Parvana didn’t like it in the orchard. She kept thinking she saw things moving among the silent black tree trunks. She wondered what sort of trees they had been. Peach? Apricot? Cherry?

  There were no birds singing. That’s why it was so quiet.

  “Leila, teach us the bird song your grandmother sang to you.”

  “I don’t feel like singing.”

  “But I do. It will help me to not be afraid.”

  Leila taught them the song. They sang it until they were out of the orchard. It was a place of death, and Parvana was glad to leave it behind.

  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 hav
e 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.