Home Is Beyond the Mountains

by Celia Lottridge

  The girls moved as close together as they could to share their warmth. Samira thought she would never stop being cold, but when she woke in the morning she found herself sandwiched between Shula and Monna and so cozy that she hated to get up.

  Before she could quite get up the courage to pull herself out from under the covers, Miss Shedd came to the opening of the tent.

  “You needn’t jump out of bed. It’s not snowing anymore but it’s going to take a few hours to get the cook wagon out of the ditch, so we’ll not be going on today. There will be tea and breakfast in an hour or so. The snow will melt. It’s not winter yet.”

  The children tried to go back to sleep, but they were so used to getting up before dawn that they just couldn’t do it. They kept sitting up and then lying down again until Anna said, “We’re like a pot trying to bubble. Best to get it over with. Everyone up!”

  Once they were all out of bed Samira looked around at the girls of the Rooftop Family and thought, “We are a pretty sorry-looking bunch. Our clothes are wrinkled and we’re muddy and our hair is sticking up every which way. What will they think of us in Tabriz?”

  She and Anna got everyone brushed off, and then Anna went off for a pot of warm water so that all faces could be washed.

  Everything seemed to take a very long time that day. The sky was gray and a mist rising from the snowy mountainside made it impossible to see down the road in either direction. After breakfast Benyamin and Ashur and some of the other boys went off to get the cook wagon out of the mud. They took four mules with them.

  Benyamin said to Malik, “We need you to come and talk to the mules so they’ll pull their best for us.”

  “They will,” said Malik, and he actually grinned before he disappeared into the whiteness with the other boys.

  “At least they have something to do,” said Anna. “What can we do? I’m out of stories and no one wants to play any of the games.”

  “I know,” said Samira. “Let’s braid all the girls’ hair. No one has done it for days.”

  “And those people in Tabriz might think a little better of us if we’re properly braided,” said Anna.

  They settled themselves where they could see the road, and one by one girls from all the families came and sat in front of Samira or Anna. They carefully loosened the tangled braids and combed out the snarls. When each girl was finished she was content to sit and watch another head of hair being neatly braided.

  It was afternoon before the boys triumphantly arrived with the cook wagon. The cook was sitting in his usual place, holding the reins and smiling broadly.

  “It was quite a job to get us out of the mud,” he told everyone around the fire. “It took every boy pushing and Malik making every mule pull. Then we had to take one of the wheels off and pound it back into shape. It was so bent it wouldn’t turn. But we lost nothing. We’re getting low on food, though. Lentils and onions for tonight and for tomorrow, beans. Then we had better get to Tabriz.”

  It really wasn’t quite so desperate. The outriders brought bread and enough eggs that each child could have half a hard-boiled egg for lunch the next day. Still, Samira knew she was ready for something different. Pickled cucumbers, maybe. Or rice pilaf with chicken. Or really, really hot soup.

  She rubbed her cold hands and thought about hot soup.

  “It won’t be long,” she promised herself.

  The next day the sun shone, but frost glittered on the grass and there was a thin skin of ice on the bucket of water Samira had filled the night before. When Miss Shedd made her rounds she said that the cold was a good thing.

  “The mud won’t be so sticky,” she said. “We should make better time. Unless something else goes wrong we’ll camp just one more night before we get to Tabriz.”

  With that promise everyone walked briskly. The road went downhill, sometimes gently and sometimes quite steeply.

  The feeling of reaching the end of the journey made everyone a little giddy, and they laughed and sang as they walked. Malik found two sticks and beat them together to the rhythm of the songs.

  “Remember, we have to keep walking all day,” he reminded Elias and David, who were racing to see who could reach the next bend first.

  When the travelers reached the caravanserai, they saw that it was a good one with enough roofs for everyone to sleep under shelter. Their high spirits even affected the chavadars, who unloaded the bedding and laid it out before the children got to the mule enclosure. The boys found dry willow branches along a stream and made a larger fire than usual, and the cook, in spite of his prediction of plain bean soup, produced a delicious lamb stew.

  “Some angel delivered meat to me,” he said, and Miss Shedd smiled.

  When the stew was gone she passed around a big tin filled with sugared almonds.

  “I’ve been saving them for our last night. It’s been a long journey and we all deserve a treat.”

  Samira ate her share slowly. They made her think of the almonds stored in the umbar in Ayna. And the tree where the almonds grew.

  When all the almonds were gone Miss Shedd said, “I want to tell you what will happen when we get to Tabriz. In the city there’s a boys’ orphanage and a girls’ orphanage so you will not all be in one place. I’m sorry that the families can’t stay together but the two orphanages are right next to each other and I’ll make sure you get to see each other often. Remember that you will only be in Tabriz over the winter. I’ll start working on getting you home as soon as you’re all settled and going to school.”

  She stopped speaking and everyone was quiet. They had gotten so used to being together on the road that it was hard to think about being inside buildings and separated.

  On the last day of the journey the wagons, the line of children and the mules all started out at dawn. The family groups stayed together but now and then a child would dart along the edge of the road, looking for a special friend in another family.

  When Miss Shedd came by she said, “You’ll have plenty of time together. You don’t have to say goodbye.”

  Anna came to walk beside Samira. “If they find a home for either of us we’ll have to say goodbye,” she said. “When that happens we’ll probably never see each other again.”

  Samira looked down the line of children walking toward Tabriz. If each one could suddenly go home they would end up walking in a hundred different directions, not together at all.

  “If we could have stayed in the orphanage in Hamadan none of us would have to be separated. Would that be better?”

  “Maybe,” said Anna. “It was a kind of home, and none of us knows what home we will find when Miss Shedd sends us on from Tabriz. She says that we all have family. Maybe some of us don’t.”

  “I hope I’ll have some family,” said Samira. “My aunt or my cousins. But it won’t be the family I had before.”

  “You know more than I do,“ said Anna sadly. “I was away from my village when we had to leave. I never found out what happened to my mother and my sisters. Maybe they went to a different camp. I’m afraid to hope but I do hope.”

  Anna had never spoken about what had happened to her family. Now Samira knew that Anna’s story was different from hers. She might even find her mother or her sisters.

  Samira could not hope for that. Her mother wo
uld not be waiting for her and neither would her father or Maryam. Her hope was to find Aunt Sahra or someone in Ayna who would remember her and Benyamin.

  In spite of all the questions Samira could feel her spirits lifting. She knew that not very far away was the big lake, Lake Urmieh, that she had heard about all her life. Now she could imagine that she would see it and even cross it in a boat and return to Ayna.

  At midday a group of men and women from the orphanages and schools in Tabriz came on horseback to meet the travelers. Miss Shedd was riding at the head of the caravan on Sumbul. She wore a dark blue jacket and a scarf striped with many shades of red wrapped around her head and shoulders. The children had never seen these fine clothes before.

  Samira suddenly remembered the men of Ayna putting on their finest coats and riding to meet expected guests, to greet them and honor them.

  “She must have brought that jacket especially for this day,” she said to Anna. “I’m glad we braided the girls’ hair. We don’t look fine but we aren’t a disgrace, either.”

  “Will they talk for a long time?” asked Elias. He was watching Miss Shedd and the people from Tabriz exchanging greetings. Samira thought he was right to be worried. When grownups were being polite they could talk for a very long time.

  This time, however, they did not, and all the children were pleased to see that the welcomers had brought big baskets with them. They spread out trays of grape leaves rolled up around meat and rice, bread spread with jam, sticky dates and little cakes made with almonds.

  “This is not what we eat every day,” warned the director of the girls’ orphanage with a smile. “It’s a special picnic to welcome you to Tabriz.”

  After lunch Miss Shedd spoke to the whole group.

  “The people of Tabriz and everyone in the orphanages want to welcome us to the city. We aren’t far now so brush yourselves off and look as tidy as you can. Boys, you walk on the left side of the road and girls on the right. That way you won’t have to sort yourselves out when we reach the two buildings.”

  Benyamin was sitting near Samira. When he heard the word orphanage he stirred restlessly and said to her in a low voice, “I’m seventeen. I don’t think I belong in an orphanage.”

  Samira was surprised. Where else could he go?

  But there was no time to talk. It was time to move on to Tabriz.

  When they got to the city the sides of the streets were so crowded with welcoming people that Samira saw nothing but smiling faces until they came to an open square with two big buildings on one side. Lined up in front of the buildings were many children neatly dressed in uniforms.

  When they saw the travelers they began to sing, and Miss Shedd led the caravan children forward to the buildings. Then the girls went up the steps of the building on the right and the boys went up the steps of the building on the left.

  Samira looked around at Anna and Maryam and Monna and all the girls of the Rooftop Family and the other families. After thirty days of walking together under the sky they were going through tall wooden doors into a new part of their lives.

  Before she crossed the threshold she turned toward the boys’ building. No one was left on the steps. Like magic Benyamin, Elias, David, Malik, Avram and Ashur were gone.

  FIVE

  Wait for the Morning Star

  Tabriz Orphanage

  November 1923

  THE GIRLS STOOD crowded into the dim front hall of the orphanage. A woman standing halfway up a staircase talked to them about baths and clean clothes.

  Anna whispered in Samira’s ear, “Just like going into the camp at Baqubah.”

  But it really wasn’t. For one thing the water was wonderfully hot. For another their clothes weren’t taken away and burned.

  “Your clothes are a little worn but they are perfectly good,” said a woman as she handed out new clothes. “You can mend them and keep them to wear when you go home. For now you’ll wear the uniform of the orphanage.”

  The uniform was a white blouse, a dark blue skirt and jacket and a blue headscarf. The clothes made Samira remember Mrs. McDowell and the green dresses, all alike. She wished that Mrs. McDowell could know that she and Anna were in Tabriz, almost ready for the last step that would take them home.

  Hot water was not the only luxury. The soup they had for supper was really hot, too, and there was a bowl of sliced cucumbers and onions on every table. The first fresh vegetables the children had had in a month.

  The Hamadan girls were pleased with the new clothes and hot soup, but when they saw the dormitories where they would sleep, they were uneasy. There were no familiar sleeping mats to unroll. Instead the long rooms had beds lined up along each wall, and each bed had another bed above it.

  There was no word for such beds in Syriac, so the matron told them the English word. Bunk beds.

  “I can’t sleep up in the air,” Samira whispered to Anna. “I’ll fall off and break my bones.”

  She was not the only one to feel that way. When it was time to go to bed the caravan girls, without any talking, arranged to sleep so that each bunk bed had one big girl and one small girl, and the two girls both slept in the bottom bed.

  One evening Samira looked down the line of bunk beds and thought, “I used to sleep on a roof. Surely I can sleep on the top bed.”

  She settled Monna in the bottom bed, saying, “I’ll be right above you if you need me.” Then she climbed up and slept soundly all night.

  The other girls waited a few nights to make sure Samira wasn’t going to fall off. Then they stopped crowding each other in the lower bed and took turns sleeping up and down.

  “We shouldn’t get too used to these fancy beds,” said Anna. “If we do get back to our villages we’ll be sleeping on the ground again.”

  “That will be easy,” said Samira.

  It was not easy to get used to the organized life of Tabriz Orphanage. There was less work than in Hamadan but more schooling. Each day the children had lessons in the morning and training in the afternoon. Training meant learning to do something that could earn some money in the future. Samira was learning to be a teacher of children just beginning school, or at least a teacher’s assistant, and Anna was learning to be a nurse’s aide.

  After training came outdoor games and circle dancing. Sometimes the boys and girls played together, but they were expected to keep the games going so there was not much time for visiting. Being told what to do most of the time made Samira restless.

  “I miss having time to talk and be with our friends,” she said to Anna one day. “And you know what? I miss our caravan.”

  “I know what you mean. Watch Elias and Malik when you see them on Sunday. You can see how much they miss being outdoors.”

  It was on Sundays after church that the caravan families could gather in the big square or in the boys’ dining hall if the weather was bad. Nothing organized, just a chance to be with friends.

  The next Sunday Samira watched Malik and Elias chase each other through the groups of children. Malik was faster, of course, but Elias was small and quick. He could sometimes dodge around a corner and come back and surprise Malik.

  The rest of the Rooftop Family was happy to sit and talk together.

  Miss Shedd usually spent some time with the caravan children during these gatherings, but she was
now director of both the boys’ and the girls’ orphanages so she was even busier than she had been in Hamadan. Often she had to rush off to a meeting, but she always made sure that each caravan family had a chance to be together before she left.

  Then one Sunday Miss Shedd did not hurry off. She sat with the children in the boys’ dining hall and spoke to all of them.

  “I miss the days when we were getting our caravan organized and when we were out on the road together,” she said. “We all got to Tabriz but our purpose was to get you home and you aren’t home yet. Miss Sabat, one of the teachers, is ready to go across the lake as soon as the weather warms up. She will visit the villages to try to find your family members or friends. Your job is to be patient. You have the rest of the winter to work hard at your school lessons and training so when it’s time for you to go home you’ll be ready to be useful, and the people in the villages will be glad to welcome you.”

  After Miss Shedd left, Samira saw Benyamin coming toward her. He looked tall and serious.

  “You look as if you have bad news,” she said.

  Benyamin looked past her out the window.

  “It’s not bad news but I know you’re not going to like it…” His voice trailed off.

  “Just tell me,” Samira said. She had a cold feeling that she knew what he was going to say.

  Benyamin looked straight at her now. “Ashur and I have decided not to go back to our villages. We want to leave the orphanage but we’ll stay here in Tabriz in a lodging with some of the others our age and go on with our schooling. We want to do more in the world than tend vines or take care of sheep. Miss Shedd says it’s a good plan but I need to know that you understand. Do you?”

  Samira’s head could understand, but the words that spilled out of her came from somewhere else.