It was strange. At home with the whole family together in their little house there were days and days when she and Benyamin hardly talked to each other. They lived separate lives. Here in the camp each of them wanted to be sure that the other was really there, that they were still together, so they talked often.
Most days Benyamin went out into the camp with other boys to collect laundry or deliver food supplies, and he brought back news and stories. One afternoon at the beginning of winter he came with big news.
“The war is over,” he said. “Turkey and Britain are no longer fighting.”
“No war,” said Samira. She could hardly believe it. “So we’ll go home soon!”
Benyamin shook his head. “They say it will be a long time before everything gets back to the way it was. We have to stay here for a while.”
“How long?” asked Samira.
But Benyamin didn’t know, and Samira didn’t get a chance to ask anyone else.
The girls never had a reason to leave the Orphan Section. Each morning Samira and Anna folded their nightgowns, put them away in the boxes they had been given, rolled up their sleeping mats with the quilts inside and lined everything up along the wall. Then they helped the little children dress and tidy away their beds. They took a turn at sweeping the canvas floor with the broom that was kept by the doorway. That took care of housework.
Stacks of clothes that needed mending arrived at the tent door, and the girls spent most mornings sewing on buttons and patching worn shirts and blouses. In the afternoon they took the smaller children outside and played games with them and told them stories.
For a while it was fun to try out the strange structures that had been put in the playground. They sat at either end of a long plank and tipped up and down, or perched on a wooden seat hung from a metal frame and swung back and forth. Sometimes boys too old to be in the orphan tents would sneak over the fence and swing too high or tip too hard. The boards broke. No one fixed them. The girls could only look at the useless playground and shake their heads.
The one day that was different was Sunday, when a priest or a missionary came to the Orphan Section and led a church service. Sometimes the Bible stories were interesting but, as Anna said, church services did not exactly add excitement to their lives.
Weeks passed. It grew cold at night and the orphans were given extra quilts. Then it started to rain. The tents leaked at the seams and there was no way to keep everything dry. Some nights Samira could hardly sleep for all the coughing. Nurses came to check for signs of real illness and sometimes a child was taken to the hospital tent, but Samira and Anna and Benyamin stayed well.
“I guess the people who run this camp can say they are keeping us safe here,” said Anna. “But we might go crazy because nothing happens. How long can this go on?”
Samira just shrugged. Winter had almost passed. It seemed that it could go on for a very long time.
One spring morning a woman came to the Orphan Section carrying a heavy canvas bag. She gathered all the girls who were at least seven years old and led them to the unused school tent. She sat on a rug in the middle of the tent. The girls watched her carefully and sat down around her.
The woman reached into the bag and took out a book. She opened it and held it so that all the girls could see the page. Samira saw that it had writing like the writing in the big books in the church in Ayna. It also had a picture of a fox standing in a vineyard.
The woman began to read words from the book. They made a story, a little story about a fox who wanted to eat a bunch of grapes.
When the story was finished, the woman said, “Would you girls like to be able to read such a story?”
Samira answered at once. “Yes. Yes, I want to read. Will you teach us?”
“I will,” said the woman. “That’s why I’m here. Have any of you been to school?”
Two of the bigger girls nodded. One had gone to her village school, the only girl among all the boys.
“My parents wanted me to be able to read,” she said. “The teacher gave me a place to sit right by his desk. It was hard with all those boys staring at my back.”
The other girl, Naomi, had gone to the girls’ school run by the mission in the city.
“My uncle went to work in America,” she said. “When he came back he told my mother that girls there study just the way boys do. She decided that I should have a chance to be educated. So I lived at the school and learned. But then the war came.”
Everyone knew what had happened then. After all, here Naomi was, with the other orphans.
The teacher said, “You two girls can read stories to the little ones and help them learn their letters. You will be assistant teachers.”
Samira hardly heard. She was remembering how her mother had spoken to the priest in Ayna about getting a teacher for the girls. Now she had a teacher. Now she could learn to read.
Not every girl was so enthusiastic. Some found that trying to make sense of the markings in the books made them tired. They were glad when each day’s lesson was over. But Samira loved it. Once she understood that each mark should make a sound in her head, the words seemed to jump off the paper into her mind.
But the teacher only had a few books, and it was not many weeks before Samira was reading them for the second time.
“You can help me,” said the teacher. “I have no way to get more books in Syriac so I want you to write something for the little girls to read. Something they can understand. I have colored pencils. Maybe someone will draw pictures.”
Samira said she would try, but lying in bed that night she thought, “I don’t know what to write. There’s nothing here that makes me think of a story.”
She said to the teacher, “I can write letters and words but a book is not just letters and words. What can I write about?”
“Before you came here you lived in your village,” said the teacher. “Write about something you remember.” She looked at Samira’s face. “Something happy, before the bad things happened. It’s good to remember something happy.”
For many days Samira couldn’t write any words about her village. She practiced the letters and wrote her name over and over until it looked perfect. But every story she could think of ended up with everybody running away, and she didn’t want to write about that.
Then one suppertime the rice and vegetable stew had a new warm and spicy taste. Some of the little girls made faces, but Samira sat with her spoon in her hand, remembering.
It was the taste of peppers, small red ones that her mother dried and put in stews. Just a little because, as she said to Samira, “These are hot hot hot! If you eat one by itself it will burn your mouth! Remember, a small pepper goes a long way.”
Samira sat in the eating tent with that taste in her mouth. She could hear Mama’s voice in her head and she almost cried, but she remembered something else, too. Something that could be a story for the little girls.
It was hard work writing a story. Samira had to write it over and over before she was satisfied. It needed pictures, too, but she had a plan about the pictures. She had noticed that Anna drew curling vines and flowers, donkeys and sheep instead of practicing her letters.
One day after a long writing lesson she told Samira, “When we go home I’ll get married and have a house and a gard
en and some children. I won’t write.”
“I don’t know what will happen when I go home,” said Samira. “But I’ve written a story about something that happened when I was small. I know you can draw the right pictures for my story. Will you do it?”
“I’ll try,” said Anna. “What’s the story about?”
“Listen,” said Samira.
Zena was a little girl who lived in a house that looked like this.
The story told about how Zena and her family slept on the roof in hot weather and how Zena and her friends played on the roof. And Zena’s mother spread fruit and vegetables on the roof to dry in the sun.
Anna drew a picture of a little house with a flat roof and a ladder that went up to the roof.
Zena’s mother said, “These fruits and vegetables are for winter. Do not touch them. Do not eat them.” Zena always obeyed her mother, but one day she was playing with her friend on the roof and they saw berries drying there. Delicious red berries, and only half dry so they would be juicy.
Zena could not help it. She ran over and picked up one bright berry and popped it in her mouth.
But it was not a berry. It was a tiny hot pepper. Very very hot in Zena’s mouth. It made her cry. It made her face turn red. It hurt her mouth.
She could not tell her mother. Never. But her mother knew. She looked at Zena’s red face and her teary eyes. She shook her head.
“You disobeyed me,” she said. “You will see. In the winter we need every piece of fruit and every pepper.” Then she smiled. “But I will not punish you. The pepper has done that. You will always remember.” Zena nodded and she never did forget.
Anna finished the pictures. Looking at them Samira knew that Anna’s village was just like hers.
She thought of Maryam and said softly, “Your sisters would like these pictures.”
Anna nodded but she didn’t say anything.
Samira stitched the pages together to make a book. The girls in the class loved to read it. Many of them could remember sleeping up on the roofs with their families. They grew quiet, remembering, but they laughed when Zena bit into the hot pepper.
“Will you write a book for the boys, too?” asked Benyamin. “One about playing games in the street or banging on pans to keep the foxes from eating the grapes.”
“You have to tell me about it,” said Samira. “I never did any of those things.”
After supper that evening Benyamin sat with Samira and told her how it was to stay in the vineyard watchtower all night, on the lookout for foxes.
“When there was no moon it was very dark,” he said. “If foxes got in and ate the grapes, our fathers beat us so we wouldn’t let it happen again.”
“How terrible,” said Samira.
“Not so terrible,” said Benyamin. “Just a little, so we would be more careful. And our father?” He stopped for a minute. “Once he crept into the vineyard just to test us. We heard him and thought it was a wolf, it sounded so big. We were afraid to come out so we threw down the iron pot that was empty after dinner and hit him, but not where it hurt too much.” He smiled, remembering. “Papa just laughed and said we were good watchmen.”
That story made a good book for the little boys. Anna had trouble drawing the foxes, and Benyamin said they looked too much like dogs. But the boys didn’t care. They wanted to read the story again and again.
Samira always collected both books each time they were used and put them carefully in the bottom of her clothes box. It felt as if she had saved a piece of Ayna on those pages, and she wanted to keep them safe.
The teacher liked the stories, too.
“They remind me of villages I’ve visited,” she said. “I remember the fruit, how delicious it is. And I remember seeing children looking at me over the walls at the edges of the roofs.”
“Not anymore,” said Samira. “There is no one to look after the houses. Every year my father put more clay on the roof. Every year he whitewashed the walls. Now our house will crumble away.”
“The war is over but it takes time for things to settle down,” said the teacher. “Little by little people will return.”
“When I came here I was nine,” said Samira. “Now I’ve been here more than a year so I must be ten. How old will I be when I can go home?”
But the teacher didn’t know.
FALL AND WINTER PASSED. Then another summer was nearly over. Samira knew that she must be eleven years old. She could read any book the teacher could find and was using a slate to work on adding and subtracting, but in the Orphan Section life did not change.
Then one day after class the teacher said to Samira and Anna, “Stay here for a minute, please. Nurse MacDonald is coming to talk with you. She’s in charge of the babies who are too young to be in the Orphan Section.”
“Maybe she wants us to leave the Orphan Section and work in the nursery,” Anna whispered to Samira.
“What if she only wants you?” asked Samira. “You’re the one who is good with babies.”
But there was no time to talk. A small woman in a nurse’s uniform was greeting them.
“I’ve heard that you two girls are very good with the little children,” she said.
Anna looked quickly at Samira and raised her eyebrows. Then she said, “We both looked after children before we came to this place. Do you want to give us a job?”
“Not a job,” said Nurse MacDonald. “A little boy. He was a tiny baby when he came here with his mother soon after the camp opened. She was so weak from the journey that she died before she could tell us her name or his. We named him Elias. He’s strong and healthy and now he’s nearly two. We thought he could come to your tent and be a kind of little brother to you two girls.”
Samira thought of Maryam. “A little brother would be a big responsibility.” She stepped closer to Anna. “The three of us would have to stay together. Like a family. They couldn’t send one of us away from the others.”
The nurse looked surprised. “We don’t send people away.”
“But you could,” said Anna. “We’re orphans. There’s no one to say a word if you decide I’m old enough to live with the women and work in the nursery and never see Samira. Or Elias.” She was quiet for a long moment. Samira wondered what she was thinking.
Finally Anna said, “Samira and I know what it’s like to have little sisters. We want to keep this little brother with us. Not lose him. So you must write down that Anna and Samira and Elias will stay together. And it must be signed by a British officer.”
“I’m an officer in the medical corps,” said Nurse Macdonald. “If it will make you feel better I’ll write you a letter. It will be in English, of course.”
She took paper from her bag and began to write. As she wrote she smiled, and Samira knew that she was thinking, “What will these girls ever do with this letter? I might as well give it to them.”
Samira moved close to Anna.
“What good is this paper to us? We can’t read it and we have nowhere to keep it.”
“I’ve seen how the British want everything written down. The paper might help if they ever wanted to separate us. I’ll put it in the bottom of my clothes box and keep it safe.”
Elias arrived with Nurse MacDonald the next afternoon. He had curly black hair and round dark ey
es. He walked into the tent and looked quickly from Anna to Samira and then all around his new home. When he saw that there was plenty of space for running, he ran. Samira darted to the door so he wouldn’t go outside, and Anna managed to keep him from racing through a group of girls who were sitting on the floor sewing. He was very fast.
When he finally stopped, Anna picked him up and said, “Elias, I’m Anna, your new sister, and this is Samira, your other sister. You’re going to live here with us.”
Elias cocked his head as if he liked the sound of her voice. Then he wiggled to show that he wanted to get down. This time he walked from one end of the tent to the other, looking at everything. Then he began to run again.
Nurse MacDonald quickly said goodbye. When she was gone, Anna and Samira looked at each other and laughed. They could see why she needed to get this boy out of the nursery.
“He’ll be a full-time responsibility for a while,” Anna said.
Samira nodded. “For once I’m glad there’s a fence around the Orphan Section. At least we can’t lose him completely.”
By suppertime Elias was tired of running. He came straight to Samira and leaned against her.
“He needs something to eat before he falls asleep,” said Anna. She got some bread and milk from the eating tent, and Elias ate it with his eyes nearly closed.
“I don’t think he’ll have any trouble sleeping tonight,” said Samira, and she laid him on his sleeping mat between her mat and Anna’s and covered him up.
When she woke the next morning she was relieved to see that the little boy was still there. He opened his eyes and looked at her for a long time. Then he turned his head and looked at Anna. And then he sat up, ready to start running.
“I think he’s made up his mind,” said Samira. “He’s willing to stay with us.”
Helping Elias settle in kept Samira and Anna very busy for several days. He didn’t talk much but he had a way of deciding what he wanted to do and simply setting out to do it. The girls had to keep up with him or he would try to climb the tent poles or unroll all the sleeping mats. To keep him busy they marched around the outdoor area counting and singing songs with him. They all slept very well at night.
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