“What do you mean? I am not!” Parvana stood up and went after him.
She found him in the dining hall, leaning against the door frame. She saw what he was looking at.
Asif was right.
She was a fool.
Seated around a table were Maryam, Badria, Ava, Hassan, Kinnah and her baby. All were bent over books. Maryam was quietly reading to Badria and Badria was repeating it, word for word. Little Hassan was showing Ava and Kinnah how to write the letters he knew. They were copying them down on their own sheets of paper. Kinnah’s baby, cleaned up and fed, was watching everything intently with her big brown eyes.
Everyone was learning.
The school wasn’t closed at all.
TWENTY-SIX
Rung by rung, Parvana climbed the ladder, one hand grasping the handle of a can of paint left over from when the school was constructed. She climbed with great care, planting each foot firmly before moving herself up. The moon gave just enough light for her to be able to see where she was going.
The foreign army had moved their explosions closer and closer to the school. Each day brought more helicopters, more low-flying jets that roared so loud that they hurt Parvana’s ears, more shooting from the hills. Several missiles had landed on the hill right behind the school.
The shooting was almost constant. Parvana couldn’t tell if someone was shooting at the school or shooting at somebody else and the school was just in the way. At least some of the shooters were either not good shots or they were deliberately trying to scare the children. When Parvana or Maryam went out to the garden for onions, or to the hen-house for eggs, gunfire would land in the dirt near them. Bullets would be shot into the walls behind them.
“Maybe they don’t know we’re a school,” Asif suggested.
Which is when Maryam piped up that they should paint the word SCHOOL on the roof in big English letters, so that the foreigners, if they were the ones shooting, would know it was a school and put their guns away.
When Parvana reached the roof, she had a moment of sheer panic. She couldn’t remember how to spell school! Was there an h or not? Probably not. The h would make no sense, but she was sure she had seen one in there.
She started with the s, making it big and wide. She did the c because she knew that came next.
Then she sat. She simply could not remember.
What if one of the shooters is also an English teacher, she thought. What if he sees that she spelled such a simple word wrong and decides that either the school is no good and deserves to be destroyed, or it really is a home for the Taliban and they are just trying to disguise it as a school?
Parvana searched her brain and drew a blank.
Then she heard a whisper.
“S-c-h-o-o-l.”
Badria was at the top of the ladder.
“Are you crazy? Get back down!”
“Asif thought you might be having trouble with the spelling,” said Badria. “He told me what to say.”
“You tell him I can outspell him any day of the year!” Parvana whispered back. “Now go back inside. And be careful!”
Badria giggled and went back down the ladder.
Two days had passed since she had left a message with Mrs. Weera’s office, and Parvana was pretty sure she had wasted her time and the last of the cell phone’s power tracking her down.
No help was coming. No one was going to rescue them. They were on their own, and they were running out of time.
They had tallied up their food, and they could last for quite a while on what was in the storeroom. They had a good water supply, thanks to the pump one of the foreign charities had installed, and they had high, thick walls that gave them some protection.
But Parvana knew — they all knew — that it would just take one rocket, one grenade, one bomb, one mean man with a gun, and all the food and water and walls would mean nothing.
And the police could come back at any time.
They would have to leave.
But where would they go?
Parvana had wandered in the wilderness with hungry children before. She wasn’t anxious to do it again. But how could they just wait for the return of Kinnah’s husband — and whoever he might bring with him? Wandering in the wilderness was better than that.
She concentrated on painting, and finished the job.
The valley was quiet. Perhaps all the shooters had gone to sleep. Parvana felt close to the stars up on the roof, and she decided to sit a moment before she went inside. She needed a bit of time to herself. She needed to think about Mother.
She wished her mother had liked her more. She wished she hadn’t given her mother such a hard time. They always seemed to be fighting. They fought when times were good, when they lived in a fancy house and Parvana was in school, before the Taliban. They fought when times were hard, when they lived in one room in Kabul, her mother trapped there by the Taliban while Parvana went out to work. They fought in the refugee camp, as Mother tried to get Parvana to obey her when Parvana had been running her own life quite well for a long time. And they fought in the school, when they were finally living the dream they had worked so hard for.
But I loved her, Parvana thought. Did she love me?
Her mother had taken care of Parvana in the refugee camp, when Parvana was so sad over little Leila’s death. And she had praised Parvana when her class performed well at the festival.
Yes, her mother had loved her.
But she hadn’t always liked her.
And when Parvana really thought about it, she had to admit that she hadn’t really liked her mother, either. Not all the time, anyway. But she had loved her very, very much. And she was going to miss her.
She was so caught up in her thoughts she almost didn’t notice that someone — or something — was slowly coming up the road toward the school. In the darkness she couldn’t make it out. It sounded like an animal and it sounded like bells.
She lay flat on the roof and watched it come out of the night and stop at the front gate of her school.
It was a peddler. Parvana saw a thin man with a long beard sitting on a wagon. Pans and pots hung below — their rattling had been the bells she had heard. She saw chairs, wheels, lumber and other things piled high on the cart. She saw an old, tired horse snuffle in the dirt.
The peddler got down from the wagon and knocked on the gate.
Parvana scrambled down the ladder and crossed the yard before Asif made it out of the guardhouse.
“It’s a strange time of night to be selling things,” Parvana whispered.
“Maybe he’s lost and needs shelter for the night.”
“Maybe it’s a trick.”
“The Taliban doesn’t need to trick us,” Asif said. “They can just blow us up. So can the foreigners.”
Asif opened the little slot in the gate. Parvana heard the man say he was lost and tired and would pay if they would give water to his horse and let him and his cart spend the night inside the gate, away from bandits.
Asif didn’t even look to Parvana for permission. He just opened the gate to let him in.
Tugging on the reins of the horse, the man and his cart came into the yard. He looked shorter on the ground than he had from Parvana’s perch on the roof. He busied himself unhooking the cart. Ava brought a pail of water for the horse.
Only when the horse was drinking did the man look at each of the children, going from one to the other.
I should have grabbed a weapon, Parvana thought. She shifted her eyes from side to side, looking for the nearest stick or shovel.
The man finally came and stood before Parvana. He looked squarely at her, straight in the eyes.
They were exactly the same height.
“Well,” he said, “it’s not exactly the Eiffel Tower, is it?”
Parvana couldn’t take it in. She could
n’t understand what he was saying.
And then, all of a sudden, she did.
She reached out, grabbed the man’s beard, and pulled.
The beard came off.
Underneath it was her old friend, Shauzia.
“Mrs. Weera sent me,” Shauzia said. “How can I help?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
There was too much to talk about and no time to do it.
“There is a safe house in a village thirty kilometers away,” Shauzia said. “You can stay there for a day or two until I can arrange to get you to the next place. It will take us a while to get you out of the area, but we’ll do it, don’t worry.”
“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” Parvana asked.
“Mrs. Weera’s helpers.” Shauzia grinned. “You ought to know. You worked with her in Kabul.”
“But …” Parvana was struggling to accept what was right in front of her. “You’re supposed to be in France!”
“France?” Asif asked. “Is this that girl you’re always writing to?” He looked at Shauzia. “I thought she made you up!”
“You write to me?” Shauzia asked.
“Don’t pay any attention to Asif. He’s just an annoying boy I found in a cave. Why aren’t you in France?”
“I only got as far as Pakistan. I was waylaid by one of Mrs. Weera’s little jobs. You remember what that’s like.”
Parvana did. Mrs. Weera was a never-ending series of little jobs.
“Now I’m part of an organization,” Shauzia said. “We rescue girls from bad husbands and bad fathers and get them to shelters or other safe places. Some of the men are high up in the army or police. They would kill us if they found us. And the foreigners would back them up. No one wants a bunch of women messing with their plans.” She paused a moment. “I’m sorry about your mother.” Then she looked at Maryam. “You got bigger. And is this Ali?”
“This is Hassan,” Parvana said. “I found him, too. Ali didn’t make it.”
“What about your father?”
Parvana shook her head.
“Oh. Too bad. You liked him a lot.” Shauzia shifted gears. “I’m going to smuggle you all out of here.”
“Smuggle us out?” Maryam asked. “That sounds dangerous.”
“Living is dangerous,” Shauzia said. “But we’re all brave, aren’t we?”
Parvana looked at her old friend and tried to find the little girl she remembered in this confident young woman who moved with such speed and strength, as though there was no problem she couldn’t fix. Next to her, Parvana felt clumsy and old.
I’m just tired, she thought, as Shauzia told them how she had rescued a girl in another province who was being beaten by her father and brother.
The end of her story was cut off by the roar of fighter jets zooming low over the valley.
“Rude,” Shauzia said, when the noise had subsided. “I can’t stand these rude foreigners. It’s the middle of the night. Babies are trying to sleep.”
A moment later there was the sound of an explosion. Not nearby, but not far away, either.
“Let’s use this nonsense to our advantage,” Shauzia said. “How soon can you be ready?”
It was just a matter of packing up some food, water and blankets. Then there was only time for a quick prayer at her mother’s graveside before they all piled into the cart.
“Everyone under the tarps,” Shauzia said. “It will be a squish for a while, but as soon as we get out of this valley and away from whatever eyes are in the hills, then it will be easier.”
A short time later, under the buzzing of still more planes, and through the blackness of the pre-dawn sky, the peddler and his horse and wagon moved slowly out of the gate and down the road, away from the village. The pots and pans were tied down. They no longer jingled. The wheels glided over the dirt, and the horse’s hooves, wrapped in cloth and padding, made little noise as the animal pulled the wagon through the night.
Parvana was up at the front, covered by a blanket but able to peer out. Behind her, under the false bundles, the other children sat still and silent. The rhythm of the horse’s walk lulled the little ones to sleep between the sound of the planes, and they made it out of the valley without being shot.
“You want to take one last look at your school?” Shauzia asked. She turned the wagon around so they could look through the gap in the hills. The sky was lighter now. They were on a slight rise. The word SCHOOL could clearly be seen, painted on the roof in bright white against the black tarpaper.
The children flung back their blankets to take a look.
The scream of a low-flying jet came up the valley behind them.
It seemed to Parvana to happen in slow motion: the plane flying low over the school, the bomb dropping like poop from the plane’s belly, the explosion that burst the school wall open like a giant flower.
Shauzia didn’t wait for the dust to settle. She just turned the cart back around and they went on their way.
Parvana eased down under the tarp. She took Maryam’s hand and put her arm around Ava. She looked at Asif through the dim morning light and couldn’t think of anything to say.
The children moved through the day. Night was falling when Shauzia pulled the cart alongside a nondescript door in a nondescript wall.
She got down from the wagon, knocked on the door and said, “Mrs. Weera sent me.”
The gate opened and they were let inside.
They all got down from the wagon and crossed a courtyard with gardens and a children’s swing. Shauzia led them right into the house.
The women who ran the place greeted her with hugs and smiles. It was a house of warmth and light and the scent of good cooking.
Parvana took the tea that was handed to her and sank down on a toshak. All around her was kindness and calm, with grown women caring for each other and for children. She heard laughter and women talking about arrangements for beds.
Asif leaned his crutches against the wall and lowered himself to the toshak beside Parvana.
“I like your friend,” he said.
“I told you she was real.”
Shauzia wasn’t sitting. She was bouncing around, talking with the women who ran things, helping with the young ones. She seemed bright, cheerful and at home.
All Parvana felt was loss. The loss of her mother, the loss of her job, the loss of her school. Even the loss of her friend, because although Shauzia was right there in the room with her, the Shauzia she had been having conversations with in her head and in her notebook was the Shauzia who was sitting in a field of lavender and planning a trip to the Eiffel Tower.
That Shauzia didn’t exist, and now Parvana felt like she had no one to talk to.
Then she sat up so suddenly that she spilled the last of her tea on Asif’s leg.
“Hey!”
Parvana went over to Shauzia and pulled her away from the women she was talking to, out into the quiet of the yard.
“I forgot something,” she said. “I need to go back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to go back.”
“Why?”
“I left my father behind.”
“Your father?”
“His bag. I left my father’s shoulder bag behind. It’s all I have of him. I have to go back.”
Shauzia grabbed her arm.
“You can’t! There’s nothing there. They bombed it, remember?”
“The bag might still be there,” Parvana said. “I’ve looked through rubble before and found good things. I found Hassan in the rubble of a bombed-out village.” She shook Shauzia off.
“The foreigners destroyed it,” Shauzia said. “Maybe they made a mistake or maybe they thought it should be bombed. Either way they’ll be swarming all over it. And if the foreigners aren’t there, the Taliban will be, or some ot
her stupid army. Whoever is there, they won’t like you!”
“I’ve lived in Afghanistan as long as you have,” Parvana told her. “I know how to look after myself.”
“Wait and see how you feel in the morning,” Shauzia said.
“No. I need to leave now.” Parvana knew that if she waited until the morning, she would talk herself out of it. It was a foolish trip, but she had to make it.
Shauzia looked like she wanted to keep talking Parvana out of going. But instead she said, “Give me a minute.”
Parvana stood in the yard. She looked in the window. Hassan had climbed into Asif’s lap and fallen asleep. Kinnah cradled her baby. Maryam and Badria were doing one of their dances. One of the women was brushing Ava’s hair. Everyone was all right.
If anything happened to her, at least she had done her job. Everyone was safe.
Then Shauzia was back with a blanket and a pack full of food.
“It’s not hard to find your way back there,” she said. She told Parvana how to do it. “Better not to have a written map. The fewer things written down, the better. We don’t want any armies showing up here.”
She handed Parvana the food.
“I can’t go with you,” she said. “I have to get the others to the next safe house. Don’t talk to anyone. You won’t know who you can trust. And if you are captured, by the police or anyone else, say nothing for as long as you can. Not a word. Your silence will help keep you calm. And no matter what you say, they’ll jump on it and twist it and make you crazy. Give me a chance to get everyone moved. Better still,” she added. “Don’t get caught. Do what you need to do and then get back here. Someone will know where I’ve taken everyone.”
Parvana gave her friend one quick hug. Then she started walking. She did not look back through the window and she did not tell anyone goodbye.
She walked all night, hid out among some boulders during the light of the next day, then started walking again.
By dawn after the second night of walking, she arrived back at the school. She knew it had been blown up, but it was still a shock to see it.
No one else was around. She walked right through what had been a wall.
My Name Is Parvana Page 12
