‘What do you think I am?’ Shauzia yelled back.
He was bigger and stronger. He raised his arm and slammed his fist into Shauzia’s head. She dropped to the ground. Her head hit the dirt with a thud, and she watched the man run off with her flour.
She wanted to get up off the ground and run after him. She wanted to hit him the same way he had hit her, and grab back the flour that she needed to feed herself and her friends. But that message was not making the journey from her brain to her body. All she could do was lie on the ground and watch the legs of the rioters run around and around.
Many of the flour bags broke in the struggle. The ground around Shauzia soon looked like Kabul in the winter, as the flour swirled in the air and settled on the dirt.
The rioters paid no attention to Shauzia. Her body rolled this way and that as people rushed around her and over her, often stepping right on her as if she was a log, rather than a person.
Someone big and heavy stepped on her leg. Shauzia felt a snap. She cried out in pain. Her cries were lost among the yelling of the rioters.
Another blow landed on her head, and then everything went black.
She was unconscious when Jasper finally found her. He stood over her, barking furiously at everyone who came close, protecting her from the raging crowd.
TWELVE
Shauzia’s head felt like it was buried under a load of rocks. The noises around her were unfamiliar, and she struggled to open her eyes. The best she could do was open one eye a teeny bit, but not enough to see through. The effort was too much for her, and she dropped into darkness once again.
Some time later, she was able to stay awake long enough to make a sound. Her chest and her head hurt terribly, and what was the matter with her leg? She opened her mouth just wide enough to moan. Then she passed out.
‘Shauzia.’
Shauzia heard someone calling for her at the end of a long, long tunnel.
‘Shauzia.’
Bit by bit, the tunnel grew shorter.
‘All right, Shauzia. It’s time to wake up.’
Something was familiar about the voice, but Shauzia’s brain was working too slowly to be able to pinpoint what it was.
‘Shauzia! Wake up! No more nonsense!’
That did the trick. Some of the darkness lifted from Shauzia’s brain. She managed to open one eye long enough to see Mrs Weera’s face hovering over her.
‘What . . . ’
‘You’re in the clinic,’ Mrs Weera said. ‘You’ve been banged up a bit, but nothing to be frightened of. You’ll soon be back in the game.’
Mrs Weera’s brash cheerfulness was hard on Shauzia’s ears. She waved her arm slightly, telling Mrs Weera to go.
‘No, no need to thank me,’ Mrs Weera said, taking hold of Shauzia’s hand and putting it between her two strong ones. For a moment Shauzia felt safer than she had ever felt before.
Then Mrs Weera spoke again.
‘And I know you’re sorry for causing so much trouble. We’ll take care of all that later. Right now, just rest and recover. We’ll have you back in shape before you know it.’
Shauzia felt the bed shift as Mrs Weera stood up. She closed her eye. She was glad Mrs Weera was keeping her visit short.
‘Since you have Shauzia for a while, why not get her started on her nurse’s training?’ Mrs Weera boomed out to the clinic staff.
Shauzia didn’t have the strength to protest. Did Mrs Weera always get her own way?
The next day, Shauzia’s head felt a little better, and she could open her eye wide enough to see the large cast on her leg.
‘You’ve cracked some ribs,’ one of the nurses told her. ‘Your chest will be sore for awhile, but you’ll mend. We were worried about your head, but you must have a thick skull. Nothing there seems damaged. You should see your face. It’s all bruised.’
‘I hurt all over,’ Shauzia said. Since she didn’t have a mirror, she didn’t care what she looked like. ‘Can you give me something for the pain?’
‘You’ll have to live with it,’ the nurse said. ‘We’re short of painkillers. We’re short of everything. The pain will pass with time.’
‘Is my leg going to be all right?’ Shauzia was almost afraid to hear the answer.
‘You have a simple fracture. Six weeks in a cast and your leg will be mended.’
‘Six weeks!’
‘Lower your voice, please. Do you have someplace else to be?’
‘Of course I do. Do you think I want to be here?’
‘I don’t think any of us want to be here, yet here we are.’
‘Well, I don’t have to stay here,’ Shauzia said flatly.
‘No one’s holding you prisoner,’ the nurse said, checking the bandages of the woman in the bed next to Shauzia.
‘How can I walk with this bad leg?’
‘Your leg is merely broken, not blown off. Stop complaining. You are luckier than most.’
The nurse walked away then, so Shauzia couldn’t talk back without yelling across the clinic. She would have done that if she hadn’t felt too weak to shout.
‘She must have been trained by Mrs Weera,’ she mumbled.
‘Try to be patient,’ the woman in the next bed said. She was more bandages than she was woman. They covered all of her face except for one eye. Her voice was old and raspy. ‘All things heal with patience.’
‘Patience just gets you more of what you’ve already got,’ replied Shauzia. ‘Patience never heals anything. All patience does is make you forget you ever wanted anything better. Patience will turn you to stone.’
‘When all you have to choose between is patience or impatience, you’ll find patience much easier on the mind.’
‘That’s fine for you. You’re old. You probably wouldn’t do anything even if you could. I’m young. I have plans.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘I’m sixteen,’ the woman said.
For a long while, Shauzia didn’t speak. Then she asked, ‘What happened to you?’
‘A man threw acid in my face.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘He didn’t like what I was doing. I thought I would be safe in a refugee camp, but I don’t think there is a safe place for me anywhere.’
‘What were you doing that he didn’t like?’
‘I was teaching his daughter how to read.’
‘Was he Taliban?’
‘Does it matter? Not all men with bad ideas belong to the Taliban. It hurts me to talk. Let me rest now.’
Shauzia let her rest, and then she fell asleep herself.
When she woke up, the bed beside her was empty.
She grabbed the arm of a passing nurse.
‘Where is she?’ she asked, nodding at the bed.
‘She didn’t make it.’
‘You mean she died?’
‘Let go of me.’
‘You don’t care, do you? You don’t even look sad that she died. You didn’t do anything to help her!’
The nurse yanked herself free. ‘Do you know how many deaths we see here? How am I supposed to cry over all of them? All you do is lie there and complain. How dare you criticise me!’
‘That’s enough.’ An older nurse came over.
‘What does she expect of us? There aren’t enough bandages, not enough food, and not enough water.’ The nurse’s voice rose in desperation. ‘Three more children died today. What sort of place is this? Farm animals are treated better.’
‘Stop it!’ the older woman said sharply. ‘You’re scaring the patients. Take a break and calm down. You’re no use to me like this.’
The young woman started to cry and ran off. The older nurse headed back to work.
Shauzia turned her head away. She didn’t want to look at the empty bed.
The next day, she was given a pair of crutches. ‘Practice walking with them,’ the nurse told her, ‘but don’t go far. Several other people have to use them today.’
It f
elt great to be moving again, even though using the crutches was awkward. She walked a little bit away from the clinic and turned around to go back.
Then she stopped and looked at it instead.
The clinic was just one big tent, with the flaps open to allow what little breeze there was to flow through the tent. Cloth screens gave the patients in the beds some privacy, although not much, and kept some of the dust off them. On the edges of the clinic, families of the sick people sat on the ground, waiting for them to get well. Children cried. Nurses and doctors were busy with the line-up of people who had come to see them, cleaning and bandaging wounds and trying to comfort people crying with pain and sorrow.
No one was watching Shauzia to make sure she returned the crutches. She turned into a narrow, mud-walled street, and the clinic slipped out of sight behind her. She was getting out of this place.
First, though, she needed to find Jasper, who hadn’t been allowed in the clinic. She’d make one last trip to the Widows’ Compound, get her dog, and then leave without speaking to anyone.
No more Mrs Weera. No more sick, desperate, crazy people. Just her, her dog and the great blue sea.
THIRTEEN
Shauzia made slow progress. Walking with crutches was hard. Sweat ran down the inside of her cast, making her leg itch and hurt at the same time. She half wanted to go back to her bed in the clinic, but she kept on.
‘Boy, where are you walking to in this heat?’ one of the men sitting at the side of the road called out as she walked by.
‘Old man, what are you waiting for in this heat?’ she asked in return.
‘I am just waiting,’ the old man replied. ‘It is what I do. I don’t remember what I am waiting for, but still, I wait. One day, you will wait like I do.’
‘Never!’ Shauzia exclaimed.
‘Already you are walking in the heat to get somewhere, but where can you go? There is nowhere but here. This street or that street, it is all the same. One day you will know this, and you will sit down and wait.’
Shauzia walked away while the man was still talking.
She passed a lot of men like that, sitting and waiting, their eyes following her as she made her slow and awkward way down the road. The crutches were too short for her, and her back hurt as she stooped over to use them. She didn’t speak to any more of the men. They didn’t speak to her. They just watched, and waited.
Her leg was hurting very badly. She was hot and tired. She needed to get out of the sun and put her leg up.
She turned around to go back to the clinic, and realised she was totally lost.
She had been walking without noticing where she was going. The roads and pathways in the camp went in all sorts of directions. She hadn’t been to this section when she’d run errands for Mrs Weera. She had no idea where she was or how to get back.
She asked one of the sitting-and-waiting men where the Widows’ Compound was. The man chewed the question over in his mind while Shauzia leaned impatiently on her crutches.
Another man came along. ‘What is happening?’ he asked the first man.
‘Boy wants to get to the Widows’ Compound.’
‘Why do you want to do that, boy?’
The two men talking drew the attention of a third. Three men drew the attention of three more, and soon there were a dozen men in the little dirt street, debating the direction of the Widows’ Compound, and even questioning whether there was a Widows’ Compound.
‘Why do you want to go there, boy?’ someone asked her again. ‘Don’t you know they started the food riot? You keep away from them. Women living together like that, they get up to no good.’
The discussion switched to the food riot. The men said the widows had used a bomb to blow open the storehouse doors.
Shauzia used the opportunity to slip down a pathway, away from the men and their crazy stories.
She kept walking, turning this way and that, hoping to come upon something that looked familiar.
The mud walls came to an abrupt end, and Shauzia found herself looking out at an endless sea of tents.
It was the camp for new arrivals. Mrs Weera had told her about it, but she had never seen it.
‘There is no room for them in this camp, but they still come. Where else will they go? They arrive with nothing,’ Mrs Weera said. ‘Some of them wait six months or more for a tent.’
Shauzia turned around. This was neither the Widows’ Compound, nor the way out of the camp.
The thought of heading back into the maze of mud walls made her turn around again. Maybe she could walk through the camp for new arrivals and find a faster way back to the Widows’ Compound. The compass in her head told her that would be the right thing to do.
She waded into the new camp.
There were no roads or pathways that she could see. There was barely room to walk between the tents and, in some places, there was no room at all.
Some people had proper tents made of white canvas with UNHCR stamped on the side in big black letters. Some people had tents made out of rags stitched together. Some people had tents made from sheets of thin plastic stretched over sticks.
Shauzia poked her head into some of the tents. ‘Do you know where the Widows’ Compound is?’ she asked.
The people inside stared back at her with vacant eyes. The temperature inside the tents was even hotter than the temperature outside, but people were still crammed inside them. There wasn’t really anyplace else to sit.
‘Give me your crutches,’ a voice called out from a tent. Shauzia bent down and saw an old woman sitting inside. She was missing a leg. ‘Give me your crutches, so I can go away from here. I do not like this terrible place.’
Shauzia hurried away. In her rush, she tripped on a tent peg and went sprawling onto the hard ground.
Children standing nearby laughed at her. Shauzia knew they were bored, and she was entertainment, but she was not in the mood to entertain anybody. She struck out at them with one of her crutches.
‘That is no way to behave,’ a man said, helping her to her feet. ‘You are older than they are. You should show them how to be kind.’
Shauzia hobbled away without thanking him.
She heard the noise of a truck and saw people rushing around carrying jugs and pans. Shauzia followed the crowd.
It was a water truck. The guards around it tried to get the people to line up, to wait their turn, but everyone was too thirsty. They crowded in around the truck.
Shauzia stayed on the edge of the crowd on top of a small rise in the ground and watched the scene below.
People who managed to fill their jugs with the precious water often saw most of it spill to the ground as they tried to get back through the crowd. One man had his whole jug knocked out of his hands, but when he tried to go back to the truck to have it refilled, he couldn’t make his way through the mass of people. He waved his jug in frustration, hitting someone on the head. That man hit back, and soon a huge fight was underway.
Shauzia turned and walked away. She didn’t want her other leg broken.
She found her way to the edge of the tents, to a rough bit of road. A white van, like the one aid agencies used, was coming toward her, so she stood in the middle of the road to stop it.
‘I’m lost,’ she called out.
The aid worker got out of the van. ‘Where do you belong?’ he asked.
‘I belong at the sea!’ Shauzia started to cry. ‘I belong in France! I belong in a field of purple flowers, where nothing smells bad, with no one screaming or pushing around me. That’s where I belong.’
The aid worker helped Shauzia into the passenger seat of the van and waited until she had stopped crying before he asked, ‘Where do you live now?’
Shauzia wiped the tears off her cheeks. ‘The Widows’ Compound,’ she said.
They started to drive. The sea of tents and sad people seemed to go on forever.
‘Who are they?’ Shauzia asked.
‘They’ve just left Afghanistan,’ the aid work
er told her. ‘People are rushing to get across the border before the Americans attack.’
‘The Americans are going to attack?’
‘They’re angry about what happened in New York City.’
‘What happened?’
The aid worker kept one hand on the steering wheel while he fished around on the floor with his other.
‘Here it is.’ He handed Shauzia a piece of newspaper he had found.
Shauzia looked at the photograph. Smoke poured out of the mangled remains of a building.
‘Looks like Kabul,’ she said, letting the paper drop back to the floor.
She leaned her head against the window. The people they drove past did not look strong enough to blow up anything.
Then she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until they arrived at the Widows’ Compound.
Her bed in the clinic had been given to someone else, Mrs Weera told her. She set up a charpoy in some shade for Shauzia to rest on. Jasper sat on the ground below her, and the compound’s children gathered around begging for stories until they were shooed away by Mrs Weera so Shauzia could rest.
The next day there was an attack on the Widows’ Compound. Half a dozen men tried to get over the walls, yelling that the women inside were immoral and should not be allowed to live together without men to watch over them.
Mrs Weera and the other women beat the men back over the walls with brooms and anything else they could grab. Shauzia was stuck on the charpoy. Her crutches had been returned to the clinic, so she could do nothing but watch and yell at the men. Jasper, with his bark and his bared teeth, helped scare the intruders away.
Mrs Weera had to hire extra guards. She didn’t say so, but Shauzia knew she was worried about how she was going to pay for them.
Shauzia spent the next few weeks sitting with the women from the embroidery project. She hemmed napkins and tablecloths and waited for her leg to heal.
FOURTEEN
The Red Crescent nurse put down her cast cutters and pulled apart the cast.
Shauzia’s leg looked scrawny and weak.
‘Try to stand,’ the nurse said.
Shauzia carefully put some weight on the leg. It twinged a bit, but otherwise it felt all right. Jasper gave her newly freed leg a big sniff and a gentle lick.
Shauzia Page 8
