Samira looked around. Where was Miss Shedd? Surely she would come to say goodbye.
The Rooftop Family stood together in the courtyard with other children who would be returning to villages around Urmieh. Miss Sabat would soon arrive with a truck that would take them to the boat.
Seeing Benyamin standing there made Samira remember how she had seen him under the chinar trees at the end of the terrible journey. Then he had been thin and dirty. Now he was healthy and clean. And old enough to choose how he wanted to live his life.
But he was still her brother and now they had to say goodbye.
“We’re each doing the right thing,” he said to her. “You know that, don’t you?”
Samira could only nod. If she spoke she would start to cry.
“I’ll write to you and I’ll come to Ayna as soon as I can and see all the good work you’ve done. I promise.”
That was all he could say, she knew. The truck was there. She only had time to give Monna and Sheran and David a quick hug each and Elias a longer one. Then she climbed into the truck and sat down on one of the benches. Benyamin reached up and clasped her hand.
Then he lifted Elias up in his arms and everyone waved as the truck pulled out of the orphanage gates. Samira kept waving until they were out of sight.
They had not gone far when the truck suddenly stopped. In the silence Samira heard the sound of a horse coming at a brisk pace. She looked back and saw Miss Shedd riding up on Sumbul.
The children all scrambled out of the truck and Miss Shedd dismounted.
“I wanted to come and see you off when you left but I couldn’t get there in time. Sumbul has been needing a good gallop so I saddled him up and here I am.” She looked at Samira. “I had to come in my skirt,” she said. “No time to change to my traveling clothes.” And she smiled.
Samira wanted to fling her arms around Miss Shedd, but she knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Everyone would start crying and they couldn’t say goodbye that way.
Miss Shedd looked around the group of children and said, “We made such a journey together. And none of it could have happened without your work and your ideas. We managed to have a good time, too. I’ll remember every one of you. Now you had better get on the road. You have a long way to go today.”
She put her foot in the stirrup and swung herself up onto Sumbul’s back. The children crowded around.
“Goodbye, goodbye,” they said and watched Miss Shedd ride away.
THE DAY DID SEEM long, and Samira was on the verge of dozing in spite of the bumpy road when the sight of the lake roused her. It stretched away, a sheet of blue water moving up and down gently as if the lake was sleeping and quietly breathing.
They slept on the shore of the lake that night. When they woke a boat with black smoke puffing from its smokestack was waiting at the dock. In no time Samira found herself standing on its wooden deck holding tight to the rail. The boat was going up and down on the gently rolling water. It was terrible.
“I’d rather be on our caravan journey in a dust storm,” she managed to say to Anna. Then she kept her mouth shut tight, determined to keep her breakfast down, and closed her eyes.
Someone came and unclenched her fingers from the railing and laid her down on a pile of canvas. When she woke up the boat was still and all the people were rushing around gathering up their things.
“You missed the whole crossing,” said Anna. “I threw up once but after that I could see everything. The birds and the islands and the other boats.”
Samira didn’t care. She was just waiting to put her feet on solid ground.
“I guess I’ll never go back to Tabriz,” she said.
“Oh, yes, you will,” said Miss Sabat. “You’ll forget about being seasick and you’ll want to see Benyamin and Elias. You’re a traveler, remember.”
Samira smiled but she wondered. To be a traveler you surely had to want to travel. She had never wanted to leave home at all. But she had made a great journey. She remembered the lake at Kermanshah and the view of the mountains from the Hamadan orphanage and the river at Sain Kala. There would be other things to see if she traveled farther. Maybe some day.
Right now she was busy carrying ashore the things she and Anna were taking to Ayna. Their clothes and schoolbooks, of course, but gifts for Aunt Sahra and Ester, too. A bundle of fabric, a bag of rice, a box of dried fruit, and seeds for the garden they would plant.
Miss Sabat couldn’t take Samira and Anna to Ayna. She was traveling with the other children to villages that lay in another direction. Instead, Miss Grant from the Near East Relief office in the city came and camped with them beside the lake. She brought a donkey to carry the bundles and a man to take care of the donkey.
They started out early in the morning when the stars had faded away and the sun was just rising over the lake.
Samira said to Anna, “I’m glad we waited for the morning star to come and go before we started on our journey.”
The road went across a flat plain and then began to climb into the hills. Miss Grant asked them many questions about their journey from Hamadan to Tabriz.
“Everyone was amazed that Miss Shedd would undertake such a journey with so little help,” she said. “It was a miracle that you all made it safely.”
Samira and Anna tried to explain about the caravan families and how they had all helped, but Miss Grant kept on being amazed so the girls just smiled and nodded.
Samira thought it probably was a miracle that all the children arrived safely in Tabriz. But it was a miracle that had taken a lot of hard work. She remembered Malik running up and down the line of Rooftop children, making sure they were all there.
“I wonder how Malik is,” she said to Anna. “Do you think he’s happy with his grandmother?”
“We’ll never know,” said Anna. “He certainly won’t write us a letter.”
“You’re right,” said Samira. “But I can’t help wondering.”
They walked for a long time in silence. Miss Grant had run out of questions but she kindly offered them dried fruit and water she carried in a bottle.
It was dusk when they got to Ayna, making Samira’s first look at the village seem a little like a dream. She saw a shadowed street and she remembered it well. But it was not quite right. The houses were still standing but many of them were clearly uncared for, with clay bricks crumbling and doors hanging on their hinges.
Which was her house? There should be a roof over a terrace and a pot of flowers on a stone by the doorstep, but every house seemed to have the same blank face.
Then one of the doors opened and a woman came out. Behind her came a girl. Miss Grant stepped forward to speak to them but the woman looked past her and straight at Samira. She ran forward with her arms open.
“Oh, my dear, dear Samira. You have come home.”
When she stood back Samira knew that this really was Aunt Sahra. Her face was familiar but it was thin, not round as she remembered. And she was so short.
But, no, of course, she was the one who was taller.
Ester was taller, too, not the little girl Samira remembered. She came shyly to Samira and Samira put her arms around her and Aunt Sahra hugged them both. Then she took Samira’s hand as if Samira might suddenly run off, and looked at Anna.
“Aunt Sahra,” said Samira. Her voice trembled. “This is my friend Anna. She has been with me this whole time. Now she has no home to go to. Her family did not survive and her village is destroyed. She has been my family all these years and we wondered…”
Aunt Sahra went to Anna, still holding Samira’s hand.
“You must stay with us. I have only Ester and now Samira. I will be so glad to have you.” And she let go of Samira’s hand and put her arms around Anna.
It was nearly dark.
“We must unload the donkey and this man and I will need to stay here tonight,” said Miss Grant.
Aunt Sahra went over to her.
“Forgive me for not greeting you and offering you the small hospitality of my house. The man will eat with us and sleep in the stable with the donkey and you, dear lady, are welcome in my poor house.”
“I’ve brought bread and cheese from the city,” said Miss Grant. “And some honey for your household. And I thank you for offering me the warmth of your house.”
Suddenly Samira knew she was home. Hospitality and gifts and honoring a guest. All those things had been missing for five years. There had been kindness but not this.
She was home and Anna was home. She took Anna’s hand and led her into the house.
IT WAS SUMMER. Samira stood on the roof of the house and looked over the wall up to the hill where she and Anna had planted their garden. She didn’t have to stand on tiptoe now to see the rows of tomatoes and squash and melons, and the almond tree Aunt Sahra had planted to replace the one cut down during the troubles. Soon there would good things to gather and eat, and to preserve for the winter.
She walked to the other side of the roof, noticing how smooth the clay surface was under her feet. She and Anna had spread that clay so the roof wouldn’t leak anymore.
Aunt Sahra had returned to find her house damaged by water and stripped of everything that could be used for fuel. Window frames, the carved chest and even baskets were gone. Samira’s house was bare, too, and part of the ceiling had fallen.
But the umbar under the terrace had not been touched.
“Most of the food was too dried out to be used,” Aunt Sahra told Samira. “But your beautiful rugs are here for you.”
The rugs were in Aunt Sahra’s house for now, but Samira hoped that one day she could take them with her when she went to live in her family’s house again.
Now she looked down into the street where she used to watch Benyamin and his friends run to school. It made her sad to think that most of those boys were gone. If they were alive, no one knew where they were. But Benyamin was fine. She had received a letter from him just the other day. His studies were going well but he and his friends found that keeping house and preparing food was hard work. Miss Shedd made sure they had the supplies they needed but they had to do all the work themselves.
When she read that part of the letter to Anna they both laughed, remembering how the boys hated kitchen duty.
In the letter there was a drawing Elias had made for her and Anna. It showed a boy with a big smile on his face waving one hand in greeting and holding a large red ball under his other arm. Aunt Sahra had pinned the drawing to the wall so the girls could look at it and smile.
Now Samira saw Anna come out the front door with Ester. They were going to clean up the old schoolroom beside the church. It was a solid stone building with a good tile roof, but inside, the floor was covered with bat droppings and broken plaster. When the place was clean and they had whitewashed the walls, Anna and Samira planned to start a school for the little children.
The priest who came to Ayna once a month was pleased with their plans.
“I’m trying to find a teacher for the older children,” he said. “It’s going to take some time because so many Assyrians have not come back. Or they’re busy rebuilding their villages. But I won’t give up.”
Samira knew it was time to leave the roof and help Aunt Sahra with the bread baking, but something drew her to look at the garden again. For a moment she thought of the night she had seen the soldiers, but there were no soldiers now.
Then she did see something coming over the far hill. A fox? No, it was bigger. And it had two legs, not four. It looked like a boy or a man moving very fast. He disappeared behind the near hill. Then suddenly he was coming down past the garden.
No one ran like that except…
Malik! It was Malik.
Samira called out, “Malik, Malik, I’m here. On the roof.”
Malik stopped. He looked up at her.
“Come down,” he said. “Come down.”
Samira had never climbed down the ladder so fast. Malik was standing at the bottom.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “But why are you here? You went home to your grandmother, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Malik. “She wanted to see me. To see that I was alive. She wanted me to see that she had gotten through the war. But she didn’t want me to stay. She said the same thing she said when she sent me off before the soldiers came. She said, ‘Malik, go. It will be better for you somewhere else.’ So I came here to see whether you had come home.”
“Will she be all right without you?” asked Samira.
“She’s strong. She’s managed all these years.”
“So you came to Ayna. Will you stay? Anna is here, too, and I know my aunt will welcome you.”
He was listening to her but his eyes were skipping from the house to the garden and through the gap between the houses to the village street. She knew he was thinking of the next thing he would do.
“I want to stay,” he said.
“But what will you do? Could we get some sheep?”
“No more sheep,” said Malik. “I’ll build. I learned in trade school.”
“No more sheep,” agreed Samira. “But building! We need a builder and I know exactly where you can start. In my very own house. Will you come inside and look?” She was filled with joy.
“Show me,” said Malik.
Where the Story Came From
MY MOTHER, LOUISE SHEDD BARKER, was born in Persia, the country now called Iran, in 1906. Her family lived near the city of Urmieh where her father, William Shedd, was an American missionary to the Assyrians, a people who have lived in northwestern Iran for thousands of years. The Assyrians speak an ancient language called Syriac or Assyrian. They have been Christians since the very early history of Christianity.
When I was growing up, my mother told me many stories about her childhood in Persia — her family’s house, the food she ate, the people she knew and the games she played — until she went to live in California with relatives at the age of nine because of danger during the First World War.
She also told me about her oldest sister, Susan, who went back to Persia in 1922, after the war was over, to be the director of an orphanage for Assyrian refugee children in Hamadan. The story of how Susan ran the orphanage and how she managed to help the children return to their own part of Persia was one of my favorites, and I thought that it should be made into a book.
I had a few letters written by Susan, by her stepmother who visited the orphanage, and by Mrs. McDowell, who worked with the Assyrian orphans when they were in Baghdad. And I had the stories that Susan had told my mother. There were also some newspape
r articles about the journey made by the children. These gave me information about the orphanage and about the journey itself.
As I worked on Home Is Beyond the Mountains, I learned about the history and geography that had shaped the lives of the children before my Aunt Susan came to know them.
The History Behind the Story
THE FIRST WORLD WAR lasted from 1914 to 1918. Turkey fought in the war on the side of Germany. For much of the war Turkey controlled the territory that is now the country of Iraq, to the south of present-day Turkey. The British fought against the Turkish army in this southern territory with the fighting spilling over into Persia east of Baghdad.
Although Persia was neutral in the war, Turkey invaded Persian territory in the north several times, hoping to take land. This made the position of the Assyrian villages that were near the Turkish border very dangerous.
The biggest invasion happened in the summer of 1918. So many Assyrian villages were destroyed and so many people killed that an estimated 80,000 Assyrians, along with many Armenians who lived in Persia, took whatever they could carry and fled, hoping to get behind the lines of the British army several hundred miles to the south. This was a very difficult journey, and about half the people who set out died on the way.
The British took responsibility for the refugees who came to them. They quickly built large camps using tents and equipment that were available because the war was actually coming to an end. One of the largest camps was at Baqubah, north of Baghdad.
Refugees arrived at the Baqubah camp in the late summer of 1918. The war ended just months later on November 11, 1918, but it took years for the details of the peace to be worked out. During this time the Assyrian refugees were not allowed to return to their homes. Many families and adults found ways to get to North America, Australia, Europe or other parts of the Middle East, but many others, including the orphans, had to wait three years or more before they had a chance to return home.
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