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.

She didn’t think about the mines planted in the ground. She didn’t think about the crowd yelling at her from behind the barrier. All she could think of was Leila.

She finally reached the little girl. Leila was covered with blood. The mine had damaged her belly as well as her legs. She looked up at Parvana and whimpered.

Parvana knelt down beside her and stroked her hair. “Don’t be afraid, little sister,” Parvana said. Then she gathered Leila up in her arms and walked back across the mine field to the camp.

Their nurse friend was waiting for them at the barrier. People helped Parvana put Leila gently on the ground. Parvana sat down and held Leila’s head in her lap. She was dimly aware of Asif kneeling beside her, and of the nurse trying to help.

Leila was trying to say something. Parvana leaned down so she could hear.

The little girl’s voice was thin with pain. “They were so pretty,” she said. And then she died.

A great deal of activity began to swirl around Parvana, but none of it touched her. She knew Asif was crying beside her. She knew the crowd was talking and that people were pushing in to see what had happened, but the grief inside Parvana was a solid blackness that kept everything away. She kept her head down, looking into Leila’s face. She closed Leila’s eyes and smoothed down her hair.

“Another dead child!” a woman cried out. “How many dead Afghan children does the world need? Why is the world so hungry for the lives of our children?”

The woman knelt beside Leila’s body.

“Whose child is this?” she asked.

“She is the sister of these two children,” someone said.

“Where are her parents? Does she have parents? What have we come to, that a girl can die without her mother?”

Something in the woman’s voice reached through Parvana’s blackness.

Parvana raised her head. The woman was wearing a burqa. Parvana reached out her hand and raised the front of the burqa.

Her mother’s face looked back at her.

Parvana started to cry. She cried and cried and did not think she ever would be able to stop.