The Breadwinner

by Deborah Ellis

  “Thanks!” She put the rest of the apricots in her pocket with the day’s wages and began to pack up. There was no little gift left on the blanket today. Parvana didn’t mind. Seeing Shauzia was quite enough excitement for one day!

  “How long have you been doing this?” Shauzia asked as they walked out of the market.

  “Almost a month. How about you?”

  “Six months. My brother went to Iran to find work nearly a year ago, and we haven’t heard from him since. My father died of a bad heart. So I went to work.”

  “My father was arrested.”

  “Have you had any news?”

  “No. We went to the prison, but they wouldn’t tell us anything. We haven’t heard anything at all.”

  “You probably won’t. Most people who are arrested are never heard from again. They just disappear. I have an uncle who disappeared.”

  Parvana grabbed Shauzia’s arm and forced her to stop walking. “My father’s coming back,” she said. “He is coming back!”

  Shauzia nodded. “All right. Your father is different. How’s business?”

  Parvana let go of Shauzia’s arm and started walking again. It was easier to talk about business than about her father. “Some days are good, some days are bad. Do you make much money as a tea boy?”

  “Not much. There are a lot of us, so they don’t have to pay well. Hey, maybe if we work together, we can come up with a better way to make money.”

  Parvana thought of the gifts left on the blanket. “I’d like to keep reading letters, at least for part of the day, but maybe there’s something we could do for the rest of the day.”

  “I’d like to sell things off a tray. That way I could move with the crowd. But first I need enough money to buy the tray and the things to sell, and we never have extra money.”

  “We don’t, either. Could we really make a lot of money that way?” Often there was not enough money for kerosene, so they could not light the lamps at night. It made the nights very long.

  “From what the other boys tell me, I’d make more than I’m making now, but what’s the use of talking about it? Do you miss school?”

  The girls talked about their old classmates until they turned down Parvana’s street, the one with Mount Parvana at the end of it. It was almost like the old days, when Parvana and her friends would walk home from school together, complaining about teachers and homework assignments.

  “I live up here,” Parvana said, gesturing up the flight of stairs on the outside of her building. “You must come up and say hello to everyone.”

  Shauzia looked at the sky to try to judge how late it was. “Yes, I’ll say hello, but after that I’ll have to run. When your mother tries to get me to stay for tea, you must back me up and tell her I can’t.”

  Parvana promised, and up the stairs they went.

  Everyone was surprised when she walked in with Shauzia! Everyone embraced her as if she was an old friend, even though Parvana didn’t think they had ever met before. “I’ll let you leave without eating this time,” Mother said, “but now that you know where we are, you must bring your whole family by for a meal.”

  “There’s only my mother and me and my two little sisters left,” Shauzia said. “My mother doesn’t go out. She’s sick all the time. We’re living with my father’s parents and one of his sisters. Everybody fights all the time. I’m lucky to be able to get away from them and go to work.”

  “Well, you’re welcome here any time,” Mother said.

  “Are you keeping up with your studies?” Mrs. Weera asked.

  “My father’s parents don’t believe in girls being educated, and since we’re living in their house, my mother says we have to do what they say.”

  “Do they mind you dressing like a boy and going out to work?”

  Shauzia shrugged. “They eat the food I buy. How could they mind?”

  “I’ve been thinking of starting up a little school here,” Mrs. Weera said to Parvana’s surprise. “A secret school, for a small number of girls, a few hours a week. You must attend. Parvana will let you know when.”

  “What about the Taliban?”

  “The Taliban will not be invited.” Mrs. Weera smiled at her own little joke.

  “What will you teach?”

  “Field hockey,” Parvana replied. “Mrs. Weera was a physical education teacher.”

  The idea of holding a secret field hockey school in their apartment was so ridiculous that everyone started to laugh. Shauzia was still laughing when she left for home a few minutes later.

  There was much to talk about that night at supper.

  “We must pay her mother a visit,” Mother said. “I’d like to get her story for our magazine.”

  “How are you going to publish it?” Parvana asked.

  Mrs. Weera answered that. “We will smuggle the stories out to Pakistan, where it will be printed. Then we’ll smuggle it back in, a few at a time.”

  “Who will do the smuggling?” Parvana asked, half afraid they were going to make her do it. After all, if they could turn her into a boy, they could have other ideas for her as well.

  “Other women in our organization,” Mother answered. “We’ve had visitors while you’ve been in the market. Some of our members have husbands who support our work and will help us.”

  Nooria had ideas for the school. She had been planning to go to teacher’s college when she finished high school, before the Taliban changed her plans. Father had given her and Parvana lessons for awhile when the schools first closed, but his health was not good, and the practice fell away.

  “I could teach arithmetic and history,” Nooria said. “Mrs. Weera could teach health and science, and Mother could teach reading and writing.”

  Parvana didn’t like the idea of learning from Nooria. As a teacher, she’d be even bossier than she was as a big sister! Still, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Nooria excited about something, so she kept quiet.

  Almost every day, Parvana and Shauzia would see each other in the market. Parvana waited for her friend to come to her. She was still too shy to run among the pack of tea boys, looking for Shauzia. They talked about some day having enough money to buy trays and things to sell from them, but so far neither could come up with a way to make it happen.

  One afternoon, when she was between customers, something landed on Parvana’s head. She quickly snatched it off. After checking to make sure no one was watching, she took a look at the latest present from the Window Woman. It was a lovely white handkerchief with red embroidery around the edges.

  Parvana was about to look up and smile her thanks at the window, in case the Window Woman was watching, when Shauzia ran up to the blanket.

  “What do you have there?”

  Parvana jumped and stuffed the handkerchief in her pocket. “Nothing. How was your day?”

  “The usual, but I’ve got some news. A couple of tea boys heard of a way to make money. Lots of money.”

  “How?”

  “You’re not going to like it. Actually, neither do I, but it will pay better than what we’ve been doing.”

  “What is it?”

  Shauzia told her. Parvana’s mouth dropped open.

  Shauzia was right. She didn’t like it.

  TEN

  Bones. They were going to dig up bones.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Parvana said to Shauzia the next morning. She had her blanket and her father’s writing things with her. She hadn’t been able to tell her mother about going bone-digging, so she didn’t have a reason to leave her usual work things behind.

  “I’m glad you brought the blanket. We can use it to haul away the bones.” Shauzia ignored Parvana’s objections. “Come on. We’d better hurry or we’ll get left behind.”

  Getting left behind did not sound so terrible to Parvana, but with a quick look across the market to the painted-in window with her secret friend, she obediently fell in behind Shauzia as they ran to catch up with the group.

&
nbsp; The sky was dark with clouds. They walked for almost an hour, down streets Parvana didn’t recognize, until they came to one of the areas of Kabul most heavily destroyed by rockets. There wasn’t a single intact building in the whole area, just piles of bricks, dust and rubble.

  Bombs had fallen on the cemetery, too. The explosions had shaken up the graves in the ground. Here and there, white bones of the long-dead stuck up out of the rusty-brown earth. Flocks of large black and gray crows cawed and pecked at the ground around the ruined graves of the newer section of the graveyard. The slight breeze carried a rotting stench to where Parvana and Shauzia were standing, on the edge of the cemetery’s older section. They watched the boys fan out across the graveyard and start digging.

  Parvana noticed a man setting up a large weigh scale next to the partially destroyed wall of a building. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s the bone broker. He buys the bones from us.”

  “What does he do with them?”

  “He sells them to someone else.”

  “Why would anyone want to buy bones?”

  “What do we care, as long as we get paid.” Shauzia handed Parvana one of the rough boards she’d brought along to use as a shovel. “Come on, let’s get busy.”

  They walked over to the nearest grave. “What if...what if there’s still a body there?” Parvana began. “I mean, what if it’s not bones yet?”

  “We’ll find one with a bone sticking out of it.”

  They walked around for a moment, looking. It didn’t take long.

  “Spread out the blanket,” Shauzia directed. “We’ll pile the bones onto it, then make a bundle out of it.”

  Parvana spread the blanket, wishing she were back in the market, sitting under the window where her secret friend lived.

  The two girls looked at each other, each hoping the other would make the first move.

  “We’re here to make money, right?” Shauzia said. Parvana nodded. “Then let’s make money.” She grabbed hold of the bone that was sticking out of the ground and pulled. It came out of the dirt as if it were a carrot being pulled up from a garden. Shauzia tossed it on the blanket.

  Not willing to let Shauzia get the better of her, Parvana took up her board and started scraping away the soil. The bombs had done much of the work for them. Many bones were barely covered by dirt and were easy to get at.

  “Do you think they’d mind us doing this?” Parvana asked.

  “Who?”

  “The people who are buried here. Do you think they’d mind us digging them up?”

  Shauzia leaned on her board. “Depends on the type of people they were. If they were nasty, stingy people, they wouldn’t like it. If they were kind and generous people, they wouldn’t mind.”

  “Would you mind?”

  Shauzia looked at her, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and returned to her digging. Parvana didn’t ask her again.

  A few minutes later, Parvana unearthed a skull. “Hey, look at this!” She used the board to loosen the ground around it, then dug the rest of it up with her fingers so she wouldn’t break it. She held it up to Shauzia as though it were a trophy.

  “It’s grinning.”

  “Of course it’s grinning. He’s glad to be out in the sunshine after being in the dark ground for so long. Aren’t you glad, Mr. Skull?” She made the skull nod. “See? I told you.”

  “Prop him up on the gravestone. He’ll be our mascot.”

  Parvana placed him carefully on the broken headstone. “He’ll be like our boss, watching us to make sure we do it right.”

  They cleaned out the first grave and moved on to the next, taking Mr. Skull with them. He was joined in a little while by another skull. By the time their blanket was full of bones, there were five skulls perched in a row, grinning down at the girls.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Parvana said. “What am I going to do?”

  “I have to go, too.” Shauzia looked around. “There’s a doorway over there,” she said, pointing toward a nearby ruined building. “You go first. I’ll keep watch.”

  “Over me?”

  “Over our bones.”

  “I should go right out here?”

  “No one is paying attention to you. It’s either that or hold it.”

  Parvana nodded and put down her board shovel. She’d been holding it for awhile already.

  Checking to make sure no one was looking, she headed over to the sheltered doorway.

  “Hey, Kaseem.”

  Parvana looked back at her friend.

  “Watch out for land mines,” Shauzia said. Then she grinned. Parvana grinned back. Shauzia was probably joking, but she kept her eyes open anyway.

  “Kabul has more land mines than flowers,” her father used to say. “Land mines are as common as rocks and can blow you up without warning. Remember your brother.”

  Parvana remembered the time someone from the United Nations had come to her class with a chart showing the different kinds of land mines. She tried to remember what they looked like. All she could remember was that some were disguised as toys—special mines to blow up children.

  Parvana peered into the darkness of the doorway. Sometimes armies would plant mines in buildings as they left an area. Could someone have planted a land mine there? Would she blow up if she stepped inside?

  She knew she was faced with three choices. One choice was to not go to the bathroom until she got home. That was not possible—she really couldn’t hold it much longer. Another choice was to go to the bathroom outside the doorway, where people might see her and figure out she was a girl. The third was to step into the darkness, go to the bathroom in private, and hope she didn’t explode.

  She picked the third choice. Taking a deep breath and uttering a quick prayer, she stepped through the doorway. She did not explode.

  “No land mines?” Shauzia asked when Parvana returned.

  “I kicked them out of the way,” Parvana joked, but she was still shaking.

  When Shauzia came back from her trip to the doorway, they made a bundle of the bones in the blanket, with the skulls thrown in, and carried it together over to the bone broker and his scales. He had to fill the bucket on the scales three times to accommodate all their bones. He added up the weight, named an amount, and counted up the money.

  Parvana and Shauzia didn’t say anything until they were well away from the bone broker’s stall. They were afraid he might have made a mistake and given them too much.

  “This is as much as I made in three days last week,” Parvana said.

  “I told you we’d make money!” Shauzia said as she handed half the cash to Parvana. “Shall we quit for the day or keep digging?”

  “Keep digging, of course.” Mother expected her for lunch, but she’d think of something to tell her.

  In the middle of the afternoon, there was a small break in the clouds. A stream of bright sunlight hit the graveyard.

  Parvana gave Shauzia a nudge, and they looked out over the mounds of dug-up graves, at the boys, sweaty and smudged with dirt, at the piles of bones beside them, gleaming white in the sudden sunshine.

  “We have to remember this,” Parvana said. “When things get better and we grow up, we have to remember that there was a day when we were kids when we stood in a graveyard and dug up bones to sell so that our families could eat.”

  “Will anyone believe us?”

  “No. But we will know it happened.”

  “When we’re rich old ladies, we’ll drink tea together and talk about this day.”

  The girls leaned on their board shovels, watching the other children work. Then the sun went back in, and they got back to work themselves. They filled their blanket again before stopping for the day.

  “If we turn all this money over to our families, they’ll find things to spend it on, and we’ll never get our trays,” Shauzia said. “I think we should keep something back, not turn it all over to them.”

  “Are you going to tell your family wha
t you were doing today?”

  “No,” Shauzia said.

  “Neither will I,” Parvana said. “I’m just going to turn over my regular amount, maybe a little bit more. I’ll tell them some day, but not just now.”

  They parted, arranging to meet again early the next morning for another day of bone digging.

  Before going home, Parvana went to the water tap. Her clothes were dirty. She washed them off as best she could while they were still on her. She took the money out of her pocket and divided it in two. Some she put back in her pocket to give to her mother. The rest she hid in the bottom of her shoulder bag, next to her father’s writing paper.

  Finally, she stuck her whole head under the tap, hoping the cold water would wash the images of what she had done all day out of her head. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Mr. Skull and his companions lined up on the gravestones, grinning at her.

  ELEVEN

  “You’re all wet,” Maryam said as soon as Parvana walked through the door.

  “Are you all right?” Mother rushed up to her. “Where were you? Why didn’t you come home for lunch?”

  “I was working,” Parvana said. She tried to twist away, but her mother held her firmly by the shoulders.

  “Where were you?” Mother repeated. “We’ve been sitting here terrified that you had been arrested!”

  All that she had seen and done that day came rushing into Parvana’s mind. She threw her arms around her mother’s neck and cried. Mother held her until she was calm again and could talk.

  “Now, tell me where you were today.”

  Parvana found she could not bear to say it to her mother’s face, so she pressed herself up against the wall and told her.

  “I was digging up graves.”

  “You were doing what?” Nooria asked.

  Parvana left the wall and sat down on the toshak. She told them all about her day.