Parvana's Journey

by Deborah Ellis

  Parvana saw a man cradling a dead boy, an injured woman with her burqa flipped back from her face, gasping for air, a child shaking a woman on the ground who was not responding.

  The children had to walk around dead pack animals and broken wagons and bits of people’s belongings scattered in the road — shoes, pots, a green water jug, a broken shovel. There was smoke and the smell of gasoline, and the sounds of agony and madness. It all made Parvana feel as if she were walking through a wide-awake nightmare.

  “Do you suppose we’re all dead?” Asif asked.

  Parvana didn’t even try to answer. She just kept walking.

  The children walked for the rest of the day. They were just four more bodies in a long line of people moving forward only because there was nothing to go back to.

  “I don’t even feel like me any more,” Parvana said, talking more to herself than to anyone else. “The part of me that’s me is gone. I’m just part of this line of people. There’s no me left. I’m nothing.”

  “You’re not nothing,” Asif said.

  Parvana stopped walking and looked at him.

  “You’re not nothing,” he said again. Then he grinned a little. “You’re an idiot. That’s not nothing.”

  Before he could stop her, Parvana wrapped his frail body in a gigantic hug. To her great surprise, he hugged her back before pushing her away with mock disgust.

  They kept walking.

  As the sky grew darker, mountains and hills became balls of fire and pillars of smoke from the bombs dropped on them. Parvana’s eyes stung from the thick smoke in the air. Her throat, already parched from thirst, burned when she tried to swallow.

  Night was almost upon them when they reached the top of a small ridge and looked down.

  Spread out below them, as far as they could see, was a mass of tents and people.

  Parvana knew what they were looking at. She had stayed in a place much like it, with her father, last winter.

  It was a camp for Internally Displaced Persons. It was a camp for internal refugees.

  It was a home for four tired and hungry children.

  NINETEEN

  “We have hundreds of people a day flooding in here,” the nurse in the Red Crescent Clinic said to Parvana and the others as she took charge of Hassan. “Things were bad enough already. Then someone dropped a bomb on our supply depot. Tents, blankets, food and medicine all went up in smoke before — ”

  “Will Hassan be all right?” Asif asked.

  The nurse had Hassan stripped, washed and diapered with a few quick, practiced movements.

  “He’s suffering from severe malnutrition and dehydration,” she said, putting a needle into Hassan’s arm and taping it down.

  “What does that mean?” Asif asked.

  “It means he’s hungry and thirsty,” the nurse said.

  “I know that,” Asif almost yelled. “I asked you if he’s going to be all right.”

  “We’ll do the best we can,” she said, and she began to head off to another patient.

  “That’s no answer.” Asif stuck out his crutch to block her way, and for once Parvana was glad for his rudeness.

  The nurse stopped and turned around.

  “He’s in very bad shape,” she said. “I don’t know if he’ll be all right or not. I’ve seen sick babies like him recover, though, so don’t lose hope. Now, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave.”

  Asif lowered himself to the floor beside Hassan’s crib. Parvana and Leila sat down beside Asif.

  “Where’s the rest of your family?” the nurse asked.

  “We’re it,” Parvana said.

  The nurse nodded. “Don’t get in the way,” she said, but gently.

  The clinic was just a big tent. They had stood in line for hours to get in. From her spot on the floor, Parvana couldn’t see much of what was going on, but she could hear the moans and the weeping, and the sounds from the camp that filtered in under the tent canvas.

  Asif and Leila stretched out on the floor under Hassan’s crib and were soon asleep, but Parvana was quite content to sit. She felt as though she could sit for the rest of her life.

  The nurse came back after a while. “Here’s another blanket for you. Don’t tell anyone you got it here. There aren’t enough to go around, and we don’t want a riot on our hands.” She also gave Parvana some bread and mugs of tea. “You won’t be able to stay here all the time,” she said, “but you can for now.”

  For now sounded fine to Parvana. “You’re not Afghan,” she said to the nurse, who spoke Dari with a foreign accent.

  “I am from France,” the nurse said. “I am here in Afghanistan with a French relief agency.”

  “Do you know the fields of purple flowers?” Parvana asked, so excited that she gripped the nurse’s arm. “My friend Shauzia is going there. Do they really exist?”

  “Yes, I have seen the fields,” the nurse said. “The flowers are called lavender. They are made into perfume. Your friend picked a beautiful spot to go to. Now, drink your tea while it’s hot. Wake up your brother and sister. They should have a hot drink. They can sleep later.”

  Parvana woke them up. They drank the tea and went back to sleep.

  Parvana spent the night hovering between sleeping and waking. She would start to drift off, then bombs would explode in the distance. Or she would start to dream that they were still walking, walking, walking, and she would wake up again. Every time she did, she checked on Hassan. He looked so small in the crib with a tube sticking out of him. Sometimes when she got up, Asif was already standing there watching the baby.

  After a couple of days, the hospital was so crowded that the nurse had to ask the children to leave.

  “I’m sure we can find some families who will take you in with them.”

  “We’ll stay just outside the clinic,” Parvana said. “We want to stay near our brother.”

  The nurse gave them a letter. “The World Food Programme has set up a bakery on the other side of the camp,” she said. “Give them this letter, and you’ll be able to get some bread every day... well, almost every day. I’ll get food to you when I can, but it won’t be very much or very often.”

  As a final parting gift, she also gave them a piece of plastic sheeting. Parvana was grateful. She knew how to build a shelter with that.

  Outside the clinic, Parvana draped the plastic against the barrier separating the clinic from the rest of the camp. She made a little tent, with enough plastic left over to line the floor.

  “We’ve only been here a few days, and already we have food, shelter and an extra blanket, and Hassan has seen a nurse,” Parvana said, forcing her voice to sound cheerful.

  “I don’t like it here,” Leila said. “It’s noisy and crowded and it smells bad. Can’t we go back to Green Valley? Maybe Grandmother is all right now. Maybe she’s sitting on top of the hill waiting for us to come home.”

  “We’re here for the winter,” Parvana said firmly. She didn’t remind Leila that Grandmother was dead. “We’re a family. We stick together. I’m the oldest, so you have to do what I say.”

  She didn’t add that her legs had no more steps in them. As bad as this place was, at least it was somewhere. There were grownups around, and the possibility of regular food. Besides, she wouldn’t know where to go from here.

  “I’ll go and get our bread,” Asif offered. He was already lying down in the lean-to, coughing. Both he and Leila were coughing all the time now.

  “No, it’s all right, I’ll go,” Parvana said.

  She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to wade into the sea of desperate people. She knew from her experience at the other camps that going for bread or anything else meant standing in line for hours. She couldn’t let Asif do it.

  “We need you here to guard our belongings,” she told him. To Leila, she said, “You should
stay here, too, so that one of you can sleep while the other stands guard.”

  She told them not to expect her back until the end of the day. Then she put her bag over her shoulder and headed off in the direction the nurse had shown them.

  Parvana’s days fell into a pattern. She began to move through them as though she were dreaming.

  Dear Shauzia:

  I can’t sleep at night. I doze off for a bit, then Asif coughs, or Leila coughs, or they cry out in nightmares, or the neighbors yell, and I wake up again. I can’t sleep during the day because I have to spend my time standing in lines.

  Often my time in lines is wasted. Three times I’ve lined up for bread only to have the bakery run out before I got there.

  Two days ago there was a rumor that someone was in the camp to choose people to go to Canada. I stood in that line all day, but nothing happened. The line fell apart, and I never found out if the Canada people were really here or not. Either way, I missed lining up for bread that day.

  When we first set up our lean-to we were alone on that patch of ground. By the end of the day, when I got back with our bread, there was barely an inch of bare ground around our shelter. I couldn’t find our place at first, and ran around in a panic before finally getting home.

  Asif’s cough is worse. Leila’s cough is worse, and we are very cold at night. Hassan is getting better, though. Asif goes to see him every day, leaving Leila to guard our few things. He said yesterday that Hassan was able to grip his fingers, and that he laughed when Asif made funny faces. He said there is another baby sleeping on a mat under Hassan’s crib, so the nurse wasn’t lying when she said there was no room for us.

  Everywhere I go, I look for my mother. I should do a proper search, tent to tent, but I spend all my time standing in lines. I’m not even going to hope that I’ll find her. Hope is a waste of time.

  The nurse told me the purple fields of France really do exist. I hope you’re there. I wish I was.

  Parvana put her notebook away and shuffled forward a few inches with the rest of the line. She really should be more grateful, she thought. After all, they weren’t alone any more, and a proper adult was caring for Hassan. She tried to make herself feel grateful as she stared out over the tents made of rags, stretching all the way to the horizon.

  “Excuse me, what is this line for?” a boy asked her.

  For a long moment Parvana couldn’t remember. She had been standing in the line for such a long time. “Water,” she recalled, and held up the empty cooking oil can she had begged from someone else.

  Eventually it was her turn at the water truck, and she lugged the full can back to the lean-to.

  The bombing was still going on, and refugees kept pushing their way into the camp, squeezing into every square inch of land.

  “Why do they have to squash in here?” Parvana complained, as new arrivals threatened to take over the children’s lean-to. “There’s a whole field on the other side of the clinic. Why don’t they go there?”

  “It’s a mine field,” Asif said.

  “How do you know?”

  He looked at her with his usual scorn. “I know lots of things you don’t.”

  Parvana felt as if she were back in the tiny one-room apartment she had shared with her family in Kabul. Whenever she got angry with Nooria, there was nowhere to go to get away from her. Now with all the bare ground being taken up with tents and shelters, there was nowhere to go to get away from Asif.

  She looked out the flap of the lean-to. Inches away was the neighbor’s tent. The man and his wife were arguing loudly in a language Parvana didn’t understand.

  Is this it? she wondered. Have I come so far, just to be here? Is this really my life?

  TWENTY

  Weeks went by. The weather grew colder. There were days without any bread because a convoy of food trucks had been bombed.

  “Maybe the mine field will give us something to eat,” Leila said.

  “Oh, sure, and what will we cook it with,” Parvana said roughly. “Stop dreaming and grow up.”

  Leila started to cry. Parvana left her alone in the tent. Asif was visiting Hassan, who was much better but was being kept in the clinic because it was warmer there. Parvana was glad she didn’t have to worry about him.

  She stomped between the tents, pretending to look for her mother, but really just trying to get rid of her anger.

  The camp stank of unwashed bodies. There was no place to wash, and it was too cold to get wet, anyway. Parvana didn’t have a sweater or a shawl, and the cold made her mood worse.

  “Cover up!” a man spat at her. “You are a woman. You should cover up!”

  Mind your own business, Parvana thought. He wasn’t the first man in the camp to say that to her. She would cover up if she had something to cover up with, preferably something warm. She changed direction and walked away from him.

  Most of the women stayed inside the tents. The men and boys stood outside wherever there was room to stand, watching and waiting because there was nothing else to do. Everywhere Parvana went she heard coughing and crying, saw children with ugly sores and runny noses, saw people without limbs and people who seemed to have lost their minds. Some of these people talked to themselves. Some of them did a strange dance, rocking and weeping.

  Even after being there for weeks, Parvana hadn’t seen the whole camp. Maybe it didn’t end. Maybe it just went on and on — an endless sea of crying, stinking, hungry people.

  A man walked by carrying a baby. “Someone please buy my baby so I can feed my family,” he pleaded. “My other children are starving. Someone please buy my baby!”

  A loud, desperate cry reached Parvana’s ears, and she realized it was coming from her own mouth.

  A woman in a burqa, her face hidden, came up to Parvana and put her arms around her. She spoke softly in Pashtu. Parvana couldn’t understand the words, but she leaned against the woman’s comforting shoulders, returning the hug. Then the woman hurried off to catch up with her husband.

  Nothing had changed, but Parvana suddenly felt calmer and stronger. She went back to the lean-to to apologize to Leila and pass the hug along.

  Later that day, they heard a plane overhead.

  “It’s going to bomb us!” Leila cried, hiding herself under a blanket.

  “It doesn’t sound like a bombing plane,” Asif said. “Let’s go and see.”

  He and Parvana left the lean-to. A lot of little yellow things were falling from the sky.

  “Leila, come out and see,” Parvana called, as one fell not far from where they were standing. “It’s all right. There’s no bomb.”

  The people in the camp stared at the bright yellow package for a long minute, wondering if it would explode. A teenaged boy finally walked right up to it, kicked it a bit and then picked it up. He turned it around in his hands and tore open the yellow plastic covering.

  “It’s food!” he exclaimed. Then he slammed the parcel close to his chest and ran off.

  Food! Parvana could see a few other parcels on the ground, and she ran toward them, but so did a lot of other people. Fights broke out as a hundred people dived for one package. Parvana was jostled by the crowd. She kept a firm grip on Leila and Asif.

  “We might as well go back to our lean-to,” she told them. “There’s nothing for us here.”

  “There’s lots more parcels over there,” Leila said, pointing toward the mine field. “They look like flowers.”

  Parvana looked. The field was dotted with bright yellow.

  The children were jostled again as the frustrated crowd surged on the edge of the mine field. Parvana and the others were pushed near the front of the flimsy barrier that separated the safe place from the dangerous place.

  “Get back!” Some men with sticks tried to bring order. “Stay out of the field! It’s dangerous!”

  But people kept pushing
.

  “We need that food!”

  “My family is starving!”

  Parvana heard bits of cries from others, all saying the same thing.

  Parvana felt a tug on her arm. She bent down.

  “I can get the food parcels,” Leila said into Parvana’s ear. “The land mines won’t hurt me.”

  “You stay with me.” People kept shoving and shouting around them. “Do you hear me?” Parvana yelled at Leila. “You stay with me.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Leila said, and she darted away.

  Parvana reached through the crowd and grabbed Leila’s arm. She held on, even though the little girl kept pulling to get away.

  “We should get Leila out of here before she does something stupid,” Parvana shouted to Asif, but her words were lost in the noise of the mob.

  Asif shook his head. He couldn’t hear her.

  Parvana took a deep breath and was just about to shout her message out again when there was an explosion in the mine field.

  Horrified, Parvana gave a great yank on the arm she was clutching, and a child came crashing against her. Parvana stared at the girl in shock.

  It was not Leila.

  “Leila!” she screamed, pushing her way to the barrier. She saw her sister lying in a heap on the mine field.

  The crowd was now silent. Parvana could hear Leila moaning.

  “She’s still alive!” Parvana cried. “We have to go and get her!”

  “We must wait until the mine-clearing team gets here,” one of the men guarding the field told her.

  “When will that be?”

  “We expected them two days ago.”

  “I have to go and get her!” Parvana started to duck under the string barrier. The guard grabbed her around the waist and held her back.

  “You cannot help her! You, too, will be killed.”

  “She’s our sister!” Asif started hitting the man with his crutch. “Let her go!”

  When the guard raised his arms to protect himself from Asif’s crutch, Parvana broke away and slipped under the barrier.