There was no escaping the sound of Mrs. Weera’s snoring, and by now Shauzia knew better than to try. She used to put a pillow over her ears, or toss and turn and make loud sighing noises, hoping to wake Mrs. Weera, but nothing worked. Mrs. Weera slept the way she did everything – full out – and she didn’t waste time worrying about whether she was bothering anyone else.
Shauzia sometimes went to another hut to sleep, but Mrs. Weera’s hut gave her something no other place did – a little bit of privacy. Shauzia slept on a toshak spread out under the table. A blanket hung over the side of the table created a tiny, private space.
“It doesn’t keep the snoring out,” she said to Jasper, who usually slept with her. “But it does make me feel like there is some place in the world that is mine.”
Shauzia lay awake in her little room late on the night after Mrs. Weera left her in the courtyard. The rest of the day had gone from bad to worse.
At Shauzia’s goodbye party that evening, everyone in the compound ate together around the cook fire in the courtyard. Mrs. Weera made a speech about how much she had appreciated all of Shauzia’s hard work.
“I know Shauzia will be successful in reaching her goal of getting to the sea, and of building a fine new life for herself in France.” She went on to talk about how beautiful she had heard France was, and how she was sure Shauzia would have a marvelous time wandering through the cornfields.
All the time she spoke, Shauzia’s fists were tightly clenched in anger.
After Mrs. Weera had finished talking, the other women also said nice things about Shauzia. How helpful she was, how clever, how they knew she had a brilliant future ahead of her.
And then the children piped up.
“Don’t go, Shauzia!” they cried, the little ones sobbing and crowding in on her. “Stay and tell us stories!”
Shauzia was furious. She knew Mrs. Weera had staged this party to make her want to stay in the refugee camp.
Then Mrs. Weera said, “I have good news, Shauzia. I’ve arranged a job for you in Peshawar. You will be a housemaid in a women’s needlework project and daycare center. You can live at the center, and the job will pay enough that you’ll have a bit of money to save even after you pay for your rent and food. Isn’t that wonderful? Plus, I’ll be able to come and visit you every week when I meet with the project. I’ll take you there tomorrow and help you get settled.”
The other women applauded and talked about how lucky Shauzia was, but Shauzia was seething.
She was still seething as she lay on her mat, with Mrs. Weera’s snores all around her.
“She thinks she can control everything,” she whispered to Jasper. “She thinks she can control me.”
She remembered her first day at the Widows’ Compound. She had been wandering around the camp after being dropped off there by the shepherds, and was directed to the compound by an aid worker.
As soon as she walked through the door in the compound wall and saw Mrs. Weera, she wanted to back out, but it was too late.
“I know you!” Mrs. Weera exclaimed in her loud, booming voice. Everyone in the compound stopped what they were doing and stared at Shauzia. “You’re Parvana’s little friend.”
Mrs. Weera had been a physical education teacher and field hockey coach before the Taliban closed all the schools for girls and made the female teachers leave their jobs. She had lived with Parvana’s family in Kabul for awhile. Shauzia remembered how bossy she had been then, and wasn’t surprised that she was still bossy.
In a few strides, Mrs. Weera’s long legs crossed the courtyard. She stood in front of Shauzia. Shauzia could imagine what the older woman saw – a skinny girl whose face carried on it months of living out in the sun and the wind, clothes filthy and tattered, but with her back straight and her head up high.
“You stink of sheep,” Mrs. Weera said, “but we can fix that. And I see you still look like a boy. We can fix that, too.” She hollered out an order for hot water and girls’ clothes.
“I’d rather keep looking like a boy,” Shauzia said. “If I look like a girl, I can’t do anything.”
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Weera said. It was a word Shauzia was to hear her use many times. “The Taliban are not in charge here. I am. Oh, you have a dog, too.” She bent down and peered intently at Jasper, who wisely took two steps back. “A most adequate dog,” was her verdict.
She turned away, and Shauzia allowed herself a small smile of relief. Mrs. Weera obviously didn’t remember how angry she had been with her the last time they had met in Kabul.
The smile came too soon.
“You left Kabul without a thought to how your family would survive without you.”
“They didn’t like me!” Shauzia yelled. “They were always shooting, and they were going to marry me off to some old man I didn’t even know, just to get some money. I meant nothing to them!”
“You don’t abandon your team just because the game isn’t going your way,” Mrs. Weera replied. “Now then, before you get settled, I have a little job for you.”
Shauzia had been doing Mrs. Weera’s little jobs ever since.
“No more,” she told Jasper. “And I won’t be a housemaid for her, either. I don’t need a house to sleep in. I slept outside with the shepherds. I can sleep outside in the city. Then all the money I make can go toward getting to the sea.”
She reached under her pillow, where she kept her most valuable possession – a magazine photo of a lavender field in France. She couldn’t see the picture in the darkness, but she felt better with it in her hand.
That was where she needed to be, in a field of purple flowers, where no one could bother her. She would sit there until the confusion left her head and the stink of the camp left her nostrils. When she had had enough of that, she would go to Paris and sit at the top of the Eiffel Tower until her friend Parvana joined her there, the way they had promised each other. They would spend the rest of their days drinking tea and eating oranges and making fun of Mrs. Weera.
She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Let’s leave tonight,” she said to Jasper. He thumped his tail, and that was all the encouragement she needed.
She got up and groped around in the corner until she found the bundle of her old boy clothes. She changed into them. Then she grabbed a fistful of hair and, using the scissors from the table top, cut and cut until the hair on her head felt short again. She put on her cap, tossed the blanket shawl around her neck and picked up her shoulder bag. She didn’t have any other belongings.
Resisting the urge to yell “Goodbye!” in Mrs. Weera’s ear, Shauzia quietly left the hut with Jasper right behind her.
They passed the hut used for embroidery training, and the one used to teach older women how to read. They doubled as sleeping huts for some of the families.
Shauzia went into the food storage hut. There wasn’t much there, but she took the few pieces of nan left over from the day’s meals and wrapped some cold cooked rice in a bit of cloth. She put the food and a small plastic bottle for water in her shoulder bag.
Back out in the courtyard, she looked around the compound one last time. Everything was quiet except for the sound of Mrs. Weera’s snoring and, farther away, the sound of someone crying outside the Widows’ Compound.
There was no reason to stay. The camp was dark. Shauzia began to regret her decision to go off in the middle of the night. But before she could talk herself out of it, she turned and walked through the compound door and continued on her journey to the sea.