Parvana's Journey

by Deborah Ellis

  That was too horrible to think about.

  Parvana didn’t think. She just ran, up and over the hill away from the village.

  Why Hassan didn’t cry out, why the Taliban didn’t see her scurrying over the hill, why she didn’t stumble under the weight of all she carried, Parvana never knew. She ran and kept running. When she finally stopped, there were three hills between her and the Taliban.

  Hassan wasn’t at all disturbed at being jostled about. He thought it was great fun and gave her a big grin.

  “It must be nice to be young,” Parvana said, catching her breath and wiping the drool from Hassan’s face.

  She knew she could not keep carrying everything. The weight of her bundle would wear her out before she got anywhere. But she dared not get rid of any food.

  “We don’t know when we’ll get more,” she said to Hassan.

  She opened the other bundles and decided they would probably need everything in them, as well.

  That left her father’s books.

  She opened up that bundle. Four big books with thick hard covers and one small book with a paper cover lay on the cloth. There was also a copy of the secret women’s magazine her mother had written articles for back in Kabul. It had been smuggled into Afghanistan by women who had printed it in Pakistan. Parvana was supposed to give it to her mother when they saw each other again.

  “I’ll bury the biggest three books,” she said, “and come back some day and dig them up again.”

  Using a rock to help her dig through the hard ground, she made a hole big enough for the books. One book was about science, one was about history, and the third was a book of Persian poetry. She couldn’t spare a cloth to wrap them in, so the red dirt was plopped right on top of the covers.

  She patted down the soil, then kicked some rocks and pebbles on top so no one would be able to tell something was buried there. She thought of her father being underground with his books. Now he would have something to read.

  With a heavy heart, Parvana picked up her bundles and the baby, and walked on.

  FOUR

  Crouching near the mouth of the cave, Parvana listened for the sounds of something that might have gone in there before her.

  Hassan fussed and wriggled. Parvana put a finger over his lips, but he either didn’t understand or he didn’t care. He kept whining and kicking and making screechy little baby noises.

  Carrying a baby on a journey was different from carrying a bundle. A bundle could be tossed over one shoulder or the other. A bundle could be dropped when her arms were tired, or even thrown to the ground when she was frustrated and didn’t know which way to go next.

  But a baby had to be carried carefully and couldn’t be dropped, tossed or thrown. Hassan was cute, but he could also be heavy and cranky and smelly to carry.

  Parvana’s back and shoulders ached. There was no comfortable way to carry everything she needed, and not even multiplication tables took away the pain.

  The cave, by a small stream, would be a good place to rest for a few days, as long as there were no wolves inside.

  Hassan let out a big squeal, and Parvana gave up any hope of trying to sneak in. She walked up to the entrance and peered in, then stepped inside.

  The cave was more of a low-hanging rock than a real cave. As her eyes began to get used to the dimmer light, she could see bits of the back wall. The cave was tall enough for her to stand up in and wide enough for her to stretch out, with plenty of room left over for her bundles. The rocks rose up around it like a cocoon, creating a cozy shelter where she could sleep safely without the risk of anyone creeping up on her. She would stay here for a while and rest her arms.

  “Get out of my cave!”

  Parvana spun around and was running away before the voice stopped echoing off the cave walls. Fear kept her legs moving long after she was exhausted.

  When she finally slowed down, her brain began to tell her something she had been too scared to hear moments earlier.

  The voice that had yelled at her from the back of the cave was a child’s voice.

  Parvana stopped running and caught her breath. She turned around and looked back at the cave. She wasn’t going to let some child keep her from getting a few days of rest!

  “Let’s go and see who’s in there,” she said to Hassan.

  She went back to the mouth of the cave.

  “Hello,” she called in.

  “I told you to get out of my cave!” the voice shouted. It was definitely a child’s voice.

  “How do I know it’s your cave?” Parvana asked.

  “I’ve got a gun. Go away or I’ll shoot you.”

  Parvana hesitated. Lots of young boys in Afghanistan did have guns. But if he had a gun, why hadn’t he shot at her already?

  “I don’t believe you,” Parvana said. “I don’t think you’re a killer. I think you’re a kid just like me.”

  She took a few more steps forward, trying to see in the dark.

  A stone hit her on the shoulder.

  “Stop that!” she shouted. “I’m carrying a baby.”

  “I warned you to stay away.”

  “All right, you win,” Parvana said. “Hassan and I will leave you alone. We just thought you’d like to share our meal, but I guess you’d rather throw stones.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “Leave the food and go.”

  “I have to cook it first,” Parvana said over her shoulder as she walked away. “If you want it, come out and get it.”

  Parvana put down the baby where she could watch him and kept talking while she gathered dried grasses and stalks from dead weeds for a cook fire. The water in the stream was clear and moving swiftly, so she thought it would be safe to drink without boiling it first.

  She dipped in her pan. “Here’s some lovely cool water to drink, Hassan,” she said. “Tastes good, doesn’t it? Drink it all down, and we’ll have a hot tasty supper.” She gave him a piece of stale nan to keep him quiet until the meal was ready.

  Parvana heard a little shuffling noise. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a small boy peering out from the cave. He was sitting on the ground. She took him some water.

  Dirt covered every inch of him, and he stank like the open sewers that ran through the camp where she had spent the winter. One of his pant legs lay flat against the ground, empty where his leg should have been. He was, Parvana thought, nine or ten years old.

  She put the water down where he could reach it, then went back to her work. She heard him gulping the water.

  “Bring me some food,” the boy ordered, tossing the pot at her.

  “I don’t like having things thrown at me,” Parvana said. “If you want food, come and get it yourself.”

  “I can’t walk!” he yelled. “How stupid you are, not to notice that. Now bring me some food!”

  Parvana walked over with some stale nan. The boy glowered at her with hatred and rage. And fear, she thought. His hair was matted with dirt. His face was scratched and his clothes were torn. She kept the bread out of his reach.

  “Have you really got a gun?” she asked.

  “I’m not telling you.” He reached for the bread.

  “You give me an answer and I’ll give you some food.”

  The boy flew into a furious burst of temper. He cursed and yelled and threw fistfuls of rocks and dust at Parvana. The fit left him panting and coughing. His cough was deep and used up his whole chest, just like her father’s cough had done. Parvana wondered how someone so scrawny found the strength to be so unpleasant.

  I could blow on him and he’d fall over, she thought.

  “No, I don’t have a gun,” the boy finally admitted, “but I can get one any time I want, so just watch what you do!”

  Parvana gave him the bread. It disappeared in a flash. She fetched more water and put it
to boil over the little fire. When the rice was cooked, she put some on a flat rock and took it to the boy.

  “What’s your name?”

  The boy frowned and stared at the rice. “Asif.” Parvana gave him the rice. Then she fed Hassan.

  “My name is Parvana,” she said, putting fingerfuls of rice into Hassan’s mouth. “I’m looking for my family. I found this baby in a village that had been bombed. I call him Hassan.” She ate some rice herself.

  “Why do you have a girl’s name?” Asif asked.

  Parvana turned suddenly cold. How could she have made such a mistake? Quickly she tried to think of something to say to cover up, but she was suddenly too tired to lie.

  “I am a girl,” she said. “I pretended to be a boy in Kabul so I could work. When my father and I started out on this journey, it was easier to keep pretending to be a boy.”

  “Why didn’t your father work? Was he lazy?”

  “No, my father was not lazy, and don’t you dare say another word about him!” Parvana slammed the ground with a rock. The noise startled Hassan and made him cry.

  “I’ll say what I please. I don’t take orders from a girl,” Asif taunted.

  “You’ll take orders from me if you want to eat any more of my food,” Parvana yelled. “Oh, be quiet, Hassan!”

  Yelling at the baby to stop crying only made him cry louder and longer.

  Parvana turned her back on both of them. She tried to ignore them as she watched the flames of her smoky little fire dwindle into embers.

  Finally she was calm. Hassan’s cry had faded to a thin whimper. Parvana picked him up and held him in her lap until he fell asleep. Then she spread out a blanket and wrapped him up against the night chill.

  She had almost forgotten about the cave boy, when he asked her another question.

  “So where is your father now?”

  Parvana put a few stray strands of camel-grass on the coals and watched as they burst into quick flames.

  “He’s dead,” she answered quietly.

  Asif was silent again for a while. Then he said, “I knew you were a girl. You’re far too ugly to be a boy.” His voice was weaker than before, as though all the fight had been drained out of him. Parvana saw that he was lying down. She took him a blanket.

  “What were you doing in that cave?”

  “I’m not answering any more of your stupid questions.”

  “Tell me, and I’ll let you use this blanket.”

  “I don’t want your stinking blanket,” he replied, mumbling into the dirt. Parvana wasn’t sure whether to kick him or cover him.

  Then Asif spoke again, so quietly that she had to lean down to hear him.

  “I was chased into the cave by a monster,” he said. “I mean, I was chasing a monster. It disappeared into a hole in the cave, and it will probably come out tonight and gobble you up, which will make me very happy.”

  Parvana walked away without kicking him or covering him. She left the blanket on the ground just out of his reach.

  She sat down beside Hassan. There was a tiny bit of light left in the sky. She took out her notebook and pen.

  Dear Shauzia:

  I met a strange creature today. He’s part boy and part wild animal. One of his legs is missing, and he’s been hiding in a cave.

  You’d think he’d be grateful to me for taking care of him, but he just gets ruder and ruder. How can someone that small be so awful?

  Doesn’t matter. He’s not my problem. In the morning I’ll leave him behind. I’ve got to find my family, and he will just slow me down.

  Maybe I should leave the baby behind, too. These boys are not my brothers. They are not my problem.

  The evening was too dark to write any more. Parvana put her writing things away. She looked up at the sky for a while, remembering her father’s astronomy lessons.

  She got to her feet again and walked back to Asif. He was sleeping flat against the earth, almost hugging the hard ground. She picked up the nearby blanket. She covered him up, then went to sleep beside Hassan.

  FIVE

  “You need a bath,” Parvana said to Asif. “Don’t tell me what to do,” Asif snapped.

  “You stink.”

  “So do you.”

  “No, I don’t,” Parvana said, although she probably did, at least a little. Not as bad as Asif, though.

  “If you don’t wash, you don’t eat,” she declared.

  “I don’t need your lousy food. I’ve got lots of food in the cave. Good food, too. Not the swill you cook.”

  “All right, rot away in your stink. I don’t care. We’re leaving you today anyway, although we’ll have to walk miles and miles to get away from your smell. We’ll probably have to walk all the way to France.”

  “France? There’s no such place as France.”

  “You’ve never heard of France? And you call me stupid?”

  Asif threw the blanket at her. It didn’t go very far, because in mid-throw he started coughing. His shirt was ripped in the middle, and Parvana could see his ribs straining with the effort of trying to breathe between coughs.

  She spun on her heels and snapped the blanket in the air to shake the dirt out of it. The dust made her sneeze, which only made her more angry.

  “You made my blanket stink,” she accused Asif, who was too busy coughing to take any notice of her. She spread the blanket out in the sun to make it smell better. It was something her father had taught her.

  “You stink, too,” she snarled at Hassan. At least there was someone who had to do what she said. She snatched him away from the stones he was happily bumping together and began undressing him roughly.

  Hassan screamed with rage.

  “You’re doing that all wrong.”

  Parvana jumped at the suddenness of Asif’s voice and turned to see that he had slithered over to the stream on his backside.

  “How dare you sneak up on me!”

  “You’re doing that all wrong,” he said again.

  “I know exactly what I’m doing. I have a younger brother and sister.”

  “They must hate you.”

  “They love me. I’m the best big sister in the whole world.”

  “They’re probably jumping for joy that you’re lost out here, because they’ll never have to see you again.”

  Parvana plopped the howling Hassan into Asif’s lap. “You think you can do better? Go ahead and try.”

  Hassan immediately stopped crying. Parvana stared, open-mouthed, as the rage disappeared from Asif’s face when Hassan’s little fingers reached up and grabbed his nose.

  “Go find my crutches,” he said to Parvana.

  She was about to yell at him for ordering her about, but the crutches seemed like a good idea.

  “Where are they?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you to go and look for them,” he said with annoying logic.

  She found them a little ways from the mouth of the cave. They were not together.

  He must have dropped them while he was escaping from whatever was chasing him, she thought. She took the crutches down to the stream.

  Asif was sitting in the stream in his clothes, holding onto Hassan. The baby gurgled as Asif rubbed him clean.

  She put the crutches down and opened a bundle to take out clean clothes for Hassan. Under the baby’s clothes was her spare shalwar kameez. She took that out, too, then got the bar of rose soap from her father’s shoulder bag. She unwrapped the soap and put the wrapping back in the bag. It smelled nice.

  “You might want this,” she said, putting the soap and clothes on the edge of the stream. She added a clean diaper for Hassan. “Don’t eat the soap,” she couldn’t help adding in a slightly nasty tone.

  Asif took the soap from her, but ignored her comment. He was too busy playing with the baby.

&n
bsp; Parvana went downstream a little ways and scrubbed Hassan’s clothes with sand. She was spreading clean wet diapers in the sun to dry when Asif called out, “He’s clean. Take him.”

  She waited for Asif to hand the baby over to her, then realized he didn’t have the strength to do so. She waded into the stream and picked Hassan up.

  “Now go away, so I can wash in private.”

  She took Hassan to the mouth of the cave and dressed him there. He looked rosy and cheerful from his bath. There was still some stale bread left, and she gave him a small piece to chew on.

  “Hey, stupid one. Get over here!”

  I don’t have to answer him, she thought.

  “I said, get over here.”

  Parvana played a little clapping game with Hassan and ignored the boy in the stream.

  “I can’t remember your name,” Asif said in a tone that wasn’t quite so nasty.

  Parvana picked up Hassan and went down to the stream. Asif had taken off his shirt and tossed it on the shore. He was slumped over, almost as though he couldn’t hold himself up any more. His hair was full of soap.

  Parvana fetched one of the drinking cups and waded into the stream. He turned his face away from her when she came up behind him.

  She gasped when she saw the scars that criss-crossed his back. Some were old and were now a permanent part of his body. Some were fresh, still scabby and infected.

  He really was being chased by a monster, Parvana thought.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he growled.

  “Put your head back.” She dipped the cup into the stream. “Close your eyes,” she ordered, “and your mouth.” Then, doing for Asif what her mother used to do for her, she rinsed the soap out of his hair.

  The effort of washing wore Asif out. He fell asleep in the sun soon after putting on Parvana’s spare shalwar kameez.

  With the laundry done and spread on the rocks to dry, Parvana put Hassan down on a blanket and took out her notebook and pen.

  Dear Shauzia:

  It’s getting harder and harder to remember what you look like. Sometimes when I think of you, I can only picture you in your blue school uniform with the white chador, back when we were students in Kabul. You had long hair then. So did I.