SEVENTEEN

The bombing continued night after night. Sometimes it was far away, sometimes a little closer, but always, when darkness fell, thunder sounds rolled across the sky.

“Who is under the bombs?” Leila asked one night. All four children were huddled together under the one blanket. The two youngest ones were in the middle where it was warmer. Parvana had the old rocks-in-the-back problem, but moving herself would have meant moving all four of them. Asif and Hassan were sleeping.

“Parvana, who’s under the bombs?” Leila asked again.

“I don’t know,” Parvana whispered back. “People like us, I guess.”

“Why do the bombs want to kill them?”

“Bombs are just machines,” Parvana said. “They don’t know who they kill.”

“Who does?”

Parvana wasn’t sure. “Since the bombs come from airplanes, someone must have put them there, but I don’t know who, or why they want to kill the people they’re killing tonight.”

“Why did they want to kill Grandmother? She never knew anyone who put things on planes, so how would they even know her to kill her?”

“I don’t know,” Parvana said. She took hold of Leila’s hand under the blanket. “We’re sisters, right?”

“Yes, we’re sisters.”

“As your big sister, it’s my job to protect you,” she said. “That’s why I had to keep you from going to your grandmother that night. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Leila said. “You were doing your job. I was angry at you, but I’m not any more.”

“When my father died, it made me feel better to remember things about him. Why don’t you tell me something you remember about your grandmother?”

“She used to sing,” Leila said, after thinking for a moment. “She taught me a song about a bird. Would you like to hear it?”

Parvana said she would. Leila sang the song.

“It’s like she’s still here when I remember her like that,” she said. “Do you think she’s happy now? What do you think she’s doing?”

“I think people get to do what they want after they die,” Parvana said. “Your grandmother wanted to read, so she’s probably sitting in the warm sun surrounded by books, reading and smiling.”

“I’d like to be surrounded by pretty things,” Leila said.

“You are a pretty thing,” Parvana told her.

“So are you. We’re both pretty things,” Leila giggled.

“Can’t you girls ever stop talking?” Asif complained. He turned his back to them, yanking the blanket with him.

Parvana didn’t yank it back. Asif’s cough had returned. She moved in closer to Leila for warmth against the cold, dark night.

For the next few days the children stuck close to the stream as it got thinner and thinner. The water made them all sick, but they kept drinking it anyway. They ate leaves and grass and some more pages from the mockingbird book.

Hassan stopped crying. He barely whimpered now, and he wouldn’t eat any of the leaves they tried to put in his mouth. He didn’t turn his head away or spit them out. They would just fall from his lips because he couldn’t hold them there.

The ground by the stream was rocky and hard to walk on. They had to move slowly so Asif wouldn’t fall. Sometimes they saw people in the distance, but they had no energy to rush over to them for help, and their voices would not carry that far.

They had been walking for four days when Leila suddenly spotted something up ahead.

“Look,” she said.

Parvana had been keeping her eyes on the ground, looking for the smoothest way for Asif’s crutches. She looked up. Not too far in front of them were some people on a cart. They didn’t appear to be soldiers.

“Maybe they’ll give us a ride,” Parvana said.

“I’ll run ahead and see,” Leila said.

As they got closer, Parvana could see a woman in a burqa and children in the cart, and a man standing beside it.

They caught up with Leila. She looked up at them and shook her head, then nodded at the broken cart wheel.

“We cannot help you,” the man said. “We cannot even help ourselves.”

“Can you at least give us food for the baby?” Parvana asked, holding Hassan out to show them what bad shape he was in.

The woman in the cart uncovered the baby she was carrying. It looked like Hassan. Parvana noticed the other children also had dull eyes and sores on their faces like Leila used to have.

“Our baby will soon die,” the man said. “Yours will, too.”

“He won’t,” Asif said.

The man went on as if Asif hadn’t spoken.

“I am a farmer, but the bombs made holes in my land. There has been so little rain — nothing to help the land recover from the bombs. This stream used to be a river. I caught fish here as a boy. The water was good to drink. Now there are only rocks. Can we drink rocks? Can we eat rocks?” He touched the broken cart wheel gently, too worn out for anger.

“Where do we go now?” Parvana asked him.

“We have heard there is a camp in that direction.” He pointed across the river. “I don’t know exactly where. Go that way. You will meet others. There are many people trying to get away from the bombing.”

Parvana reached out and took hold of the hand of the woman under the burqa. The woman squeezed her hand back. Then the children went on their way.

“This must be the river bank,” Parvana said when they got to the edge of the rocky surface. “See where the water cut through the soil?”

The river bank was steep. Asif had to go up backwards on his bottom while Leila carried his crutches. It was slow going, and the effort made him cough a lot. They had to rest before they could go on.

“I smell smoke,” Leila said later that afternoon. “Maybe there are people ahead cooking supper. Maybe they have lots of food and will share some with us.”

“I don’t think anyone around here has lots of food,” Parvana said. She could smell the smoke, too. “But we might as well go and see.”

They headed toward the smell. They found it at the bottom of a small hill.

The children stood on the hill and looked down at a forest of blackened trees. Some of them were still smoking.

“What is it?” Leila asked.

“It’s an orchard,” Asif said. “See how the trees are in rows? It’s a place to grow fruit.”

The trees would grow nothing now.

“My uncle had an orchard,” Asif said. “He grew peaches, mostly, and rows of berry bushes. He accused me of stealing berries from him. Is it stealing to take food when you’re hungry? I worked and worked for him, and he didn’t give me enough food.”

“Is that why he whipped you?” Parvana asked. If Asif wanted to talk, she wanted to listen.

“He never told me why he whipped me. I don’t think he needed a reason. When he caught me eating the berries, he locked me in the shed. He said he was going to get the Taliban to cut off my hands.”

“How did you get out?”

“Crutches are good for breaking locks,” Asif said. Then he headed down the hill into the burnt-out orchard. The others followed him. They soon came across bomb craters in the ground.

Parvana didn’t like it in the orchard. She kept thinking she saw things moving among the silent black tree trunks. She wondered what sort of trees they had been. Peach? Apricot? Cherry?

There were no birds singing. That’s why it was so quiet.

“Leila, teach us the bird song your grandmother sang to you.”

“I don’t feel like singing.”

“But I do. It will help me to not be afraid.”

Leila taught them the song. They sang it until they were out of the orchard. It was a place of death, and Parvana was glad to leave it behind.