Parvana's Journey

by Deborah Ellis

  Parvana had an image of Leila as a spider, waiting for a fly to become trapped in her web.

  Asif had joined them in time to hear the last part. “You actually go into the mine field? That’s stupid.”

  Parvana frowned at him.

  “He means it’s dangerous.”

  “Not for me,” Leila said. “The ground likes me. Every time I eat, I put a few crumbs in the ground to feed it. That’s what keeps me safe. Oh, no, it’s not dangerous for me. Do what I do, and it won’t be dangerous for you, either.”

  “You’re a little bit crazy, aren’t you?” Asif said.

  “Pay no attention to him,” Parvana said, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulder. “He’s always in a bad mood.”

  “You two belong together,” Asif said over his shoulder as he hobbled away to answer Hassan’s call from inside the house. “You’re both dreamers.”

  Leila smiled at Parvana.

  “Let’s be sisters,” she said.

  Being sisters sounded fine to Parvana.

  “All right. We’ll be sisters.”

  “Can your brothers be my brothers?”

  “You mean Asif and Hassan? They’re not my brothers. We just sort of found each other.”

  “That makes them your brothers,” Leila said.

  “Yes, I guess it does,” Parvana agreed, and she wondered how Asif would feel about having her for a sister.

  “And that makes them my brothers, and my grandmother is your grandmother.”

  Parvana didn’t say how she felt about having a lump on a mattress for a grandmother. It didn’t matter. A grandmother was a grandmother, and it was nice to have one.

  “Who taught you to cook and take care of things?” Parvana asked.

  “I used to watch my brother and father do things before they went off to the war. My grandmother and my mother taught me other things, and some things I just made up.” Leila skipped off to build the fire up to make the morning tea.

  Parvana found Asif shuffling through a pile of broken bits of board by the pigeon house.

  “I think I’d like to stay here for a while,” she told him.

  “If you think I’m going to stay here with that crazy girl and her crazy grandmother, you’re as crazy as they are.”

  “I didn’t ask you to stay,” Parvana said. “I just said I’m staying. Hassan, too,” she added.

  “You’re probably hoping I’ll go,” Asif said. “It will probably make you miserable if I stay.”

  Parvana knew what was coming. She kept quiet.

  “So I will stay,” Asif decided, “but only because it will annoy you.” He poked a crutch at the rubble one more time before walking away.

  Parvana sighed. He really was a tiresome boy.

  Dear Shauzia:

  We’ve found a real Green Valley. It’s a little rough still, and it will take a lot of work to make it beautiful, but we can do it.

  This is a place where children are safe. No one is hurt or beaten or taken away in the night. Everyone is kind to everyone else, and no one is afraid.

  We won’t let the war in here. We’ll build a place that is happy and free, and if any war people come they will feel too good to keep on killing.

  Parvana looked around the clearing. There was so much work to do. She smiled.

  They would begin by cleaning up the yard.

  THIRTEEN

  Parvana kept her plan to herself for the first few days. She and Asif needed to rest and take care of Hassan, and she wanted Leila to get used to them before she started changing things.

  She did use an old board to scoop dirt over the animal carcasses. They’d have to be properly buried, but she didn’t have the strength to do that just yet.

  “The dirt might help keep the flies away,” she explained to Leila, who had taken to following her everywhere.

  “I never thought of that,” Leila said. “Nobody told me.” She looked down at her feet. “I try to do things right.”

  Parvana bent down so she could look Leila in the eye. “You do all kinds of things right,” she said. “If you don’t know, you don’t know. No shame in that.”

  Parvana brushed some hair out of the little girl’s face so Leila could see her smile. She suddenly drew back and then forced herself to look again.

  Underneath the hair that fell over Leila’s forehead was a large sore, like the smaller ones on the lower part of her face. But this one had small white worms wiggling in it.

  “Come with me,” she said, and she led Leila to a sunny place in the yard.

  “What are you up to?” Asif asked.

  Parvana showed him the sore.

  “Let me take care of it,” he said. “I’ve got more patience than you do.”

  Parvana was about to argue, but she realized that he was right. He was more patient. She went to heat up some water to wash the wound. That was what her mother always did.

  “Do you realize you’ve got worms crawling in your face?” she heard Asif ask Leila.

  “Sometimes I feel them and I try to brush them away, but I can’t always feel them.”

  Parvana fetched a bit of soap from the treasure house and built up the fire under a pot of water. She cut some strips of cloth and carried everything over to Leila and Asif. On her way, she checked on Hassan. He was napping in the little house, not far from Grandmother.

  “You’ll need these,” Parvana said to Asif and Leila. But they didn’t even hear her. Leila was talking a mile a minute while Asif patiently pulled the tiny worms from her wound.

  “It’s the flies,” he said. “They lay eggs in the sore, and the eggs grow into worms.”

  “How did you get to be so smart?” Leila asked.

  Anyone knows that, Parvana was about to say, then bit her words back. Asif was actually smiling.

  “I can take over,” Parvana said.

  “Why? We don’t need you.” Asif finished with the worms and gently dabbed at the wound with a cloth soaked in hot water. “You need to keep your face clean,” he said to Leila. “In fact, you need to keep your whole self clean.”

  “I know I should,” she said. “Now that you’re all here, I will. When it was just Grandmother and me, I forgot.”

  Parvana left them to it. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Was she jealous? Of what? Mentally, she gave herself a kick. Here they were, finally safe, with food to eat and water to drink, and she was getting all moody. What was wrong with her?

  Whatever it was, she couldn’t understand it yet. What she could understand was work. She changed into her old boy-clothes so she wouldn’t get the girl-clothes dirty, and got busy.

  Bit by bit, Green Valley took shape. The worst job was hauling the animal carcasses out of the clearing and burying them outside the canyon. Asif attached ropes to them, Parvana and Leila pulled them out, and all three children dug the holes. Then they dug a proper latrine and cleaned up the yard of everything that attracted flies. There was a lot less buzzing after that.

  “How do you know how to do all this?” Leila asked after every new thing they did.

  Parvana wasn’t sure. “My mother liked everything to be clean, and she always made me help her. I also saw how people did things in the camps and villages I traveled through with my father. And some things are just common sense.”

  “You? Common sense?” Asif laughed.

  Parvana ignored him. She had come to the conclusion that Asif could be pleasant to everyone but her.

  “We need to keep the mice out of the rice and flour,” he said. He rummaged through the junk in the yard until he came up with enough boards and plastic sheeting to build some mouse-proof containers. He used rope to bind them together when he couldn’t find enough nails.

  “You girls clean out the rest of the rice and flour,” he ordered, “and I’ll make plastic pouches for the f
ood that’s still good.”

  Parvana noticed that Asif was always cheerful when he was giving orders.

  Parvana and Leila hauled the mouse-tunneled sacks up to the top of the look-out hill.

  “We can watch for my mother while we clean the rice,” Leila said. “We can watch for your mother at the same time.”

  “Why not?” Parvana replied, flicking a mouse turd down the hill.

  “Maybe your mother and my mother will meet each other, and they’ll come walking across the field together. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “It would be great, but it’s not likely to happen.”

  “But it could happen,” Leila insisted. “Don’t you think so? Don’t you think it could happen?”

  “All right,” Parvana relented. “It could happen.”

  This set Leila off on a long, detailed fantasy about how their mothers would meet and mysteriously know their children were together and decide it was time to come back to them. By the time she stopped to catch a breath, Parvana almost believed her.

  “Asif’s mother is dead,” Leila said. “So is his father. So is everyone else.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. He was living with an uncle who beat him, so he ran away.”

  “Why did he tell you? He never told me,” Parvana said, but Leila was already talking about something else. Parvana stopped listening. She was too busy being annoyed at Asif.

  As the days went by, Green Valley began to look better, and so did the children. Leila’s sores started to heal, and one day Parvana washed and combed out the little girl’s long hair. She didn’t have a real comb and had to use her fingers, but Leila’s hair looked much better when she was finished. Parvana tied it in two long braids and laughed as Leila swung her head from side to side, feeling the braids move.

  Hassan lost the floppy-baby look.

  “He’s like a plant,” Parvana said. “If you don’t water a plant, it wilts, but then when you start watering it again, it bounces back.” He started crawling. “You were much easier to look after when you stayed where we put you,” Parvana told him. They had to watch him carefully, as he put everything he found into his mouth, whether it was good for him or not.

  Hassan would allow himself to be fed by anybody, but he clearly prefered Asif. When he got bored with Asif, he crawled around looking for other fun things. He loved to watch the pigeons, and when the children couldn’t find him, that’s usually where he was.

  “Hassan is standing up!” Asif yelled one day. The others came running. Hassan had hauled himself up by holding onto the wires of the pigeon cage. He grinned and laughed as he reached for the pigeons, but when he let go of the cage, he fell back on his rump. He looked surprised, then reached out and hauled himself back up again.

  Then one morning, the children couldn’t find Hassan. He wasn’t at the pigeon cage or inside the house. Parvana got a cold feeling in her stomach.

  “He can’t be in the mine field!”

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Run after him!” Asif yelled.

  Leila was faster. Hassan had crawled through the little canyon and was right on the edge of the mine field. Leila snatched him up.

  “You can’t go there,” she said, as Hassan screeched. “You’re not protected yet.” She handed him over to Parvana as he squirmed and fussed.

  The children discussed the problem. “We can’t let him crawl into the mine field,” Parvana said, “but we don’t want to chase after him all day, either.”

  Asif came up with a solution.

  “Tie a long rope around his waist. Then he can crawl around without going anywhere he shouldn’t.” They tried this, and it worked fine.

  As long as he had something to lean against, Asif found that he was very good at patching mud walls. He fashioned a device with long boards that let him reach the high spots. Soon the house looked stronger.

  Leila and Parvana dug up some wildflowers from the edge of the mine field and replanted them in the yard. Leila edged the little flowerbed with rocks. Parvana remembered the flowers she had once planted in the marketplace in Kabul. She wondered whether they were blooming.

  None of the children knew anything about growing vegetables, but when Parvana pulled the weeds and dead plants out of the garden, she found some things growing there already.

  “Maybe seeds fell from last year’s vegetables,” she said to Leila, who was helping her.

  “Maybe it’s magic,” Leila said. “I told you, the ground likes me.”

  Leila started burying bits of Hassan’s food along with hers at the start of each meal. After some prodding, Parvana began to do the same thing. She felt foolish at first, but then it became a habit.

  Asif refused. “There’s no protection against land mines,” he insisted. “You two are idiots.”

  “Is that how you lost your leg?” Parvana asked. She had never dared ask him before, but if he was willing to tell Leila about his family, maybe he was prepared to talk about his leg, too.

  She was wrong.

  “No, it wasn’t a land mine,” he said, glaring at her. “It was…a wolf who ate my leg, but I ate the wolf, so I won that battle.”

  “You’re very brave,” Leila said. Asif smiled at her and stuck his thin chest out a little.

  Parvana just rolled her eyes.

  Every afternoon, Parvana went to a shady spot in the yard and wrote to her friend.

  Dear Shauzia:

  We patched up the pigeon cage this morning and cleaned it out. I wish we had some vegetable seeds. With all the fertilizer from the pigeons, we could have a wonderful vegetable patch.

  Some chickens would be nice, too. Pigeons are good to eat, but I prefer chicken.

  Maybe another peddler will get caught in the mine field, a peddler with chickens and seeds and lanterns and lantern oil, and toys for Hassan, books for me, a false leg for Asif, real jewelry for Leila and some new toshaks. Fluffy ones without bugs in them.

  Until then, we’ll have to make do with what we have.

  Parvana read back over what she had written, thinking how lovely it would be to have all those things. Then she realized that for her wishes to come true, some peddler would have to die.

  For a moment she wondered what she was becoming. Then she dismissed the question. “I didn’t create this world,” she said to herself. “I only have to live in it.”

  FOURTEEN

  Leila and Parvana took turns taking care of Grandmother. She didn’t need much attention. She just stayed in her corner, eating and sleeping. A few times a day Parvana or Leila would take her a pan, give her some privacy while she used it, and then they would take the pan away again to empty it in the latrine.

  At first the children were careful to be quiet around Grandmother, but they soon forgot to worry about her and chattered as much inside the house as they did outside. Sometimes Hassan would use her as a prop when he worked on his standing skills. If Grandmother minded any of this, she gave no sign.

  Parvana found some needles and thread in the treasure house.

  “Let me fix your dress,” she said to Leila. “What you’ve done is pretty, but I think I can make it even prettier.”

  Although the dress Parvana made for Leila had sleeves that weren’t even — she wasn’t very good at sewing — it did look a little more normal than what Leila had been wearing, and the material she used brought out the blue in the little girl’s eyes.

  One day, weeks after they had arrived, Parvana decided to wash the dust off the shelves in the little house. She remembered how her mother and Nooria had endlessly washed out the cupboard in the tiny room the family shared in Kabul, using up the water she’d had to walk so far to fetch.

  Maybe they could add a room to their Green Valley house, or even two rooms. Her mother, Grandmother and Nooria could sleep in one room. Hassan would make a great li
ttle brother for her brother, Ali, and Asif could share a room with them and watch out for them. She could sleep in the third room with her little sister Maryam and Leila. It would be so wonderful to have everyone together.

  A pang of missing her family shot through her.

  She dropped the cloth back in the bucket and dashed up the hill to the look-out point. Leila was already up there.

  “See anything today?”

  “I saw some tanks drive by,” Leila said, “but I don’t think they saw me, because they didn’t shoot me.”

  “The war won’t find us here,” Parvana said, stroking Leila’s hair. “The road is far away. See any mothers yet?”

  Leila peered out at the landscape again.

  “No, no mothers today.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Parvana said.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  Parvana squatted down beside her new sister. “If they don’t show up soon, I’ll have to go looking for them again.”

  “We could take turns sitting up here,” Leila said. “If one of us was always here, they wouldn’t be able to slip by without us spotting them.”

  I have to continue my journey, Parvana thought. She remembered the long months of being hungry and tired, walking through the countryside. She would be alone this time, too. She couldn’t ask Asif to go with her. He was making this place his home. And it would be wrong to take Hassan away from where he was fed and happy.

  “You’re going to stay here forever, aren’t you?” Leila asked, entwining her fingers with Parvana’s. “We’re sisters. You have to stay.”

  “I’ll stay,” Parvana said, but she did not say forever. She gave Leila’s hand a squeeze, then went back to her house cleaning.

  “I will continue my search,” she vowed out loud as she finished scrubbing the shelves. “I will. Just…not quite yet.”

  That decided, she felt much better, and she took a deep, satisfied breath. Then she looked around the tiny one-room house for something else to do.

  She had already swept the floor mat with a leafy branch, but she wasn’t pleased with the result. It really ought to be taken outside to have the dust beaten out of it. The toshaks should all be aired out, too. Maybe the warm sun would drive the bed bugs and lice out of them.