THREE

Later that afternoon, Parvana lay on her belly at the top of a small ridge, peering into the clearing below.

A small group of mud huts — a tiny village — was in ruins. Parvana recognized the sort of damage that came from bombs. There had been a war going on in Afghanistan for more than twenty years. Someone was always bombing someone else. Lots of bombs had fallen on Kabul. Bombs had fallen everywhere.

Nothing was moving below except for a piece of cloth fluttering in a doorway.

Parvana knew that sometimes soldiers would move into a village after bombing it and live in the houses people had abandoned. She had seen them do this in her travels with her father.

She watched the village for a long time but saw no other movement. Slowly she went down the hill. Much of the wall around the village had been destroyed, but there were still many places where soldiers could be hiding.

Parvana walked into the little settlement, stepping carefully through the rubble. She peered into what was left of the one-room houses. Mattresses, rugs, cook-pots and tea cups were scattered everywhere.

She recognized the look. It was the run-for-your-life look. She had seen her own houses look like this as her family grabbed a few possessions and ran out just ahead of the bombs.

She wondered where the people from these houses had gone. They would probably come back to rebuild when they thought it was safe.

It was eerie standing by herself in the deserted village. She felt as though she were being watched, but there was no one left to see.

A thin wail drifted on the breeze. It sounded like a kitten. Parvana followed the sound.

The cry came from the last house. Parvana stood at the doorway. Part of the ceiling had fallen in, and she looked over the rubble for the source of the sound.

Then she saw it. It wasn’t a kitten.

In a corner of the room was a baby, lying on its back. A piece of dirty cloth barely covered it, as if it had been blown there by the wind. The baby cried without energy. It cried as if it had been crying for a long time and no longer expected anyone to come.

Parvana went to it.

“Did they leave you all alone? Come on, you poor thing.” She lifted the little creature into her arms. “Did your people get scared and forget about you?”

Then she heard the flies and saw the dead woman crushed under the rubble.

Parvana quickly took the child outside, shading its eyes from the bright sun.

“You weren’t forgotten,” she said. “Your mother would have taken you if she could.”

In the light, Parvana could see that the child was a boy, half naked and filthy.

“We’ll have to get you clean,” she said. “But first we’ll feed you. There must be some food around here somewhere.”

Parvana took the baby to the least damaged of the houses. She tried to put him down so she could search for things he needed, but the child clung to her and screeched. He wasn’t about to be left alone again!

“It’s all right, baby. I won’t leave you.” She put her father’s books and her other things down instead.

The house she was in only had one room. In a corner was a pot with some rice in it. The rice was moldy, but she could scrape off the mold. There was also a small pile of nan, very hard and stale, but what did that matter? It was food.

“We’ll have a feast, baby,” Parvana said. She had noticed a stream at the edge of the village. She took a pot off the shelf in the house and went to fetch water.

The baby wasn’t very good at drinking from a cup. Most of the water went down his front, but Parvana was sure he must have swallowed some. She soaked some stale nan in a bit of water and fed that to the baby, too. He ate everything she gave him, keeping his eyes locked onto hers.

“You’re the size my brother Ali was when I last saw him,” she said. “No, I’m wrong. You’re smaller. Anyway, I know all about the messes babies make. I’ll get you clean, and then I’ll get myself clean. Then we’ll have some more to eat.”

She had to go back into the baby’s house to see whether there were any clean clothes for him. She found a little knitted suit, some cloths to use for diapers and a little hat for his head. The house was too damaged to hunt for more things, and Parvana didn’t like being around the body of the baby’s mother.

I should bury her, Parvana thought, but I can’t. I just can’t.

She tossed a bit of cloth over the woman’s face, which might at least keep the flies away. She didn’t want to have to come back here again.

Then she took the baby and the clean clothes down to the stream.

“You’re such a good boy,” she said as she took off his filthy clothes and washed him. She used the silly sing-song voice that people used to talk to babies. “You’ll be easy to take care of. No trouble at all. It will be like having a puppy.” Parvana had always wanted a puppy.

The water was cold, but the little boy didn’t complain. He just kept looking at Parvana. There was a rash on his body from being in dirty diapers for so long, and he was very thin, but otherwise he seemed unhurt.

Parvana dressed him in clean clothes.

“Doesn’t that feel better?”

Parvana didn’t know whether the boy’s family had spoken Dari or not. Maybe they were Pashtun speakers, and he didn’t understand a word she was saying. She decided it didn’t matter. It was just nice to have someone to talk to.

She propped the baby up between some rocks with a blanket behind him for padding, so he could see that she wasn’t going away. Laying her spare shalwar kameez close by, she took off her own filthy clothes and jumped into the water.

“Yes, I know I’m a girl,” she said to the baby. “But that will be our secret, all right?” The baby gurgled.

She used sand to scrub the grime off her skin and clothes, which she spread in the sun to dry.

Back in the least damaged house, she shared some more stale bread with the baby. With a full belly, the little boy fell asleep.

Parvana gently put him down on a toshak and covered him up. She sat down beside him and watched him sleep. He was clean and beautiful, and when she touched his little palm, his tiny fingers curled around her bigger one. She could see no war in his sleeping face, or in the way his breathing made his little chest rise and fall.

“I’ll call you Hassan,” she said, “because everybody has to have a name.”

She stretched out beside him. “Pleasant dreams,” she whispered. Then she fell asleep herself.

Parvana stretched herself awake the next morning, enjoying the softness of the mattress underneath her. She usually slept on the hard ground. Sleepily, she wondered whether she could roll the mattress into a small enough bundle to carry with her.

Hassan made a noise, and Parvana became fully awake. He was watching her, and when he saw that she saw him, he gave her a goofy little grin and waved his arms around.

“Good morning, Hassan,” Parvana said. It was wonderful to have company.

She picked him up and carefully looked outside. Everything was quiet. No army had come into the village while they had been sleeping.

“Are you hungry, Hassan?” she asked. “How about some golden rice pilaf, with extra raisins, and huge chunks of roasted lamb buried in it? Then we’ll have some bolani dumplings, and some tomatoes and onions, and lots of sweet noodle pudding. Doesn’t that sound good?”

While she described the menu, Parvana settled Hassan onto her hip. He clung there like a monkey she had once seen in her school geography book clutching a tree branch. She scraped the fuzzy green mold off the cold rice in the pot and shared it with him.

After breakfast, they explored the rest of the little settlement for things they could use. Parvana stayed away from the baby’s house, and they saw no more bodies.

A tiny building behind the houses turned out to be a small barn with two goats and a few chickens. Parvana had a vague idea how to milk a goat, and she was thrilled when all her squeezing actually resulted in milk spurting into a bowl. She gave a lot of it to Hassan and drank some herself. It was warm and sweet.

The hens didn’t want her taking their eggs, and they kept pecking at her hands whenever she got close to them.

“I need those eggs more than you do,” she said, finally picking up a bit of old board and swatting at the chickens until they hopped out of their nests, squawking with annoyance. She put the eggs high on a shelf in the house where she slept. She didn’t want to step on them by accident.

As long as Hassan could see her, he didn’t fuss, so Parvana made sure they were always close together.

She went from house to house, pulling out of the rubble anything that could still be used. She put everything on a long piece of plastic sheeting and dragged it from house to house. When she was finished, everything was spread out before her.

“I don’t like taking other people’s things,” she said to Hassan, “but if I’m going to take care of you, your village will have to help me.”

Parvana looked at everything she had scavenged and carefully chose what she could carry with her. She already had a small cook-pot, but she did take a sharp knife, an extra blanket, some candles, a few boxes of matches, a small pair of scissors and a length of rope. She added a long-handled spoon and two drinking cups. The cups were small, and maybe she could teach Hassan to hold one. He looked smart enough.

She made a food bundle, too, with flour, rice, onions, carrots and some dried apricots — all the food she could find. She put a small tin jug of cooking oil into the bundle.

Finally she added a wonderful find — a bar of soap wrapped in paper with roses on it. The wrapping looked old. Parvana wondered where the people had got it and what special occasion they were saving it for.

She placed both bundles by the door of the least-damaged house, next to her other belongings.

“Now we’re ready to continue our journey,” she said to Hassan. “We’re going to find my mother. I’ll let her help me take care of you, but I’m going to be your boss, not her, all right? Nooria — that’s my older sister — will definitely try to boss you. She can’t help it. She’s naturally bossy. But I won’t let her.”

She was ready to leave but didn’t want to.

“I’ll just tidy up the house first,” she said to Hassan, who was watching her sleepily from the toshak.

With a small whisk broom she found hanging on a nail, Parvana gave the floor a good sweeping. There was a lot of dust, and it took her a long time, but the floor looked better when she was finished. The rest of the little house looked dusty now compared to the clean floor, so she left Hassan sleeping on the mattress and ran down to the stream to fill a pot with water. She wiped down all the walls and shelves, going back to the stream twice for clean water. The whole house soon looked much better.

“I could plant some rose bushes outside,” she said quietly, so as not to wake the baby. Afghanistan used to have beautiful gardens. She’d heard about them from her parents. The gardens had all been destroyed by bombs before she was born.

She emptied the dusty water outside the door of the house, spread out her cleaning cloth to dry, and realized that she was very tired. She stretched out beside Hassan and soon fell asleep.

She woke up in the middle of the night. Everything was dark, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where she was. She began to panic. Then Hassan moved a bit in his sleep. She curled around him, closed her eyes to keep the darkness out, and fell back asleep.

She built a cook fire the next morning down by the stream and decided to fry all five of the eggs she’d found. Too late, she realized she should have put some oil in the cook-pot, because the eggs stuck to the bottom and didn’t hold their shape the way fried eggs did when her mother made them. Still, they tasted very good, and she and Hassan ate every scrap. She even scraped the bottom of the pot with a stick to get the last bits.

Eggs made Parvana think of chickens.

“How hard can it be to kill a chicken?” she asked Hassan.

She carried him to the little barn and they drank more fresh goat’s milk. Then she propped the baby up against some straw and turned her attention to the chickens.

“One of you is going to be our dinner,” she announced. “Any volunteers?”

No chicken stepped forward.

“I’m bigger than you are,” she reminded them, turning toward the fattest one. It stared back at her as she crept closer and closer. Then, just as she was about to grab it, it flew out of her way.

Hassan laughed.

“You’re not helping,” Parvana said, but she was laughing, too.

None of the chickens felt like being caught, and they made Parvana chase them all over the little barn, to Hassan’s great delight.

She was just getting ready to make a final great leap on a chicken she had cornered, when something outside the barn window caught her eye.

In the next instant she had grabbed Hassan and was running madly back to the house where they had slept. She scooped up their bundles of belongings and ran in a panic out of the village.

She had seen, in the distance, the black turbans of Taliban soldiers. They were heading toward her village. If they found her and thought she was a boy, they might force her into their army. If they found her and discovered she was a girl…

That was too horrible to think about.

Parvana didn’t think. She just ran, up and over the hill away from the village.

Why Hassan didn’t cry out, why the Taliban didn’t see her scurrying over the hill, why she didn’t stumble under the weight of all she carried, Parvana never knew. She ran and kept running. When she finally stopped, there were three hills between her and the Taliban.

Hassan wasn’t at all disturbed at being jostled about. He thought it was great fun and gave her a big grin.

“It must be nice to be young,” Parvana said, catching her breath and wiping the drool from Hassan’s face.

She knew she could not keep carrying everything. The weight of her bundle would wear her out before she got anywhere. But she dared not get rid of any food.

“We don’t know when we’ll get more,” she said to Hassan.

She opened the other bundles and decided they would probably need everything in them, as well.

That left her father’s books.

She opened up that bundle. Four big books with thick hard covers and one small book with a paper cover lay on the cloth. There was also a copy of the secret women’s magazine her mother had written articles for back in Kabul. It had been smuggled into Afghanistan by women who had printed it in Pakistan. Parvana was supposed to give it to her mother when they saw each other again.

“I’ll bury the biggest three books,” she said, “and come back some day and dig them up again.”

Using a rock to help her dig through the hard ground, she made a hole big enough for the books. One book was about science, one was about history, and the third was a book of Persian poetry. She couldn’t spare a cloth to wrap them in, so the red dirt was plopped right on top of the covers.

She patted down the soil, then kicked some rocks and pebbles on top so no one would be able to tell something was buried there. She thought of her father being underground with his books. Now he would have something to read.

With a heavy heart, Parvana picked up her bundles and the baby, and walked on.