EIGHTEEN

Dear Shauzia:

The man with the broken cart was right. We see a lot of people now, traveling like we are. We beg from everyone we see. We even beg from people who are trying to beg from us. Most people don’t have anything. If they do, they share it with us — sometimes just a mouthful, but it helps us stay alive another day.

People keep telling us to take Hassan to a doctor, but we don’t know any doctors, and we have no money to pay for one.

I wonder if that man ever got his cart out of the river bed. I wonder if their baby will live.

I wonder if we will live.

The children followed a road now, going in the same direction as the other travelers. Sometimes a truck full of soldiers passed them. Once a short line of tanks rumbled by, and everyone had to get off the road to let them pass. Parvana remembered the tank the children had played on in the village where her father died. She wondered if children would play on these tanks one day.

Later they heard the tanks shooting at something.

The planes were bombing in the daytime now, as well as at night. Some of the bombs were so loud that the noise knocked the children to the ground. Asif cut his face when he fell against some rocks. A lot of blood ran from his forehead. He had to keep wiping the cut with his blanket, because they had no bandages.

More bombs fell. One exploded just ahead of them. People scattered, huddling in clumps on each side of the road.

“Get down!” people shouted. “Take cover!”

Parvana ran with the baby to the side of the road. Asif was close behind her. She was face down in the dirt, dust and rocks billowing around her, when she realized Leila wasn’t with her.

She peered out through the falling rubble and saw Leila still standing in the road. The little girl had her hands cupped over her mouth, and she was shouting something into the sky.

Parvana slid Hassan over to Asif and ran into the road. As she got closer, she could hear what Leila was saying.

“Stop!” Leila shouted at the airplanes. “Don’t do this any more!”

The airplanes ignored her. The bombs kept falling.

Parvana would never know how she found the strength. She picked Leila up and ran with her to the side of the road, then lay on top of her to keep her from rushing out again. Her free hand found Asif’s. They stayed like that until the planes finished their bombing.

When everything was quiet except for the crying of people who had lost loved ones, and the screaming of those who had been injured, the children got up and started walking again. They couldn’t help anyone, and no one could help them.

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.