Home Is Beyond the Mountains (5 page)

“My parents wanted me to be
able to read,” she said. “The teacher gave me a place to sit right by his
desk. It was hard with all those boys staring at my back.”

The other girl, Naomi, had
gone to the girls' school run by the mission in the city.

“My uncle went to work in
America,” she said. “When he came back he told my mother that girls there
study just the way boys do. She decided that I should have a chance to be
educated. So I lived at the school and learned. But then the war
came.”

Everyone knew what had
happened then. After all, here Naomi was, with the other orphans.

The teacher said, “You two
girls can read stories to the little ones and help them learn their letters.
You will be assistant teachers.”

Samira hardly heard. She was
remembering how her mother had spoken to the priest in Ayna about getting a
teacher for the girls. Now she had a teacher. Now she could learn to read.

Not every girl was so
enthusiastic. Some found that trying to make sense of the markings in the
books made them tired. They were glad when each day's lesson was over. But
Samira loved it. Once she understood that each mark should make a sound in
her head, the words seemed to jump off the paper into her mind.

But the teacher only had a
few books, and it was not many weeks before Samira was reading them for the
second time.

“You can help me,” said the
teacher. “I have no way to get more books in Syriac so I want you to write
something for the little girls to read. Something they can understand. I
have colored pencils. Maybe someone will draw pictures.”

Samira said she would try,
but lying in bed that night she thought, “I don't know what to write.
There's nothing here that makes me think of a story.”

She said to the teacher, “I
can write letters and words but a book is not just letters and words. What
can I write about?”

“Before you came here you
lived in your village,” said the teacher. “Write about something you
remember.” She looked at Samira's face. “Something happy, before the bad
things happened. It's good to remember something happy.”

For many days Samira
couldn't write any words about her village. She practiced the letters and
wrote her name over and over until it looked perfect. But every story she
could think of ended up with everybody running away, and she didn't want to
write about that.

Then one suppertime the rice
and vegetable stew had a new warm and spicy taste. Some of the little girls
made faces, but Samira sat with her spoon in her hand, remembering.

It was the taste of peppers,
small red ones that her mother dried and put in stews. Just a little
because, as she said to Samira, “These are hot hot hot! If you eat one by
itself it will burn your mouth! Remember, a small pepper goes a long
way.”

Samira sat in the eating
tent with that taste in her mouth. She could hear Mama's voice in her head
and she almost cried, but she remembered something else, too. Something that
could be a story for the little girls.

It was hard work writing a
story. Samira had to write it over and over before she was satisfied. It
needed pictures, too, but she had a plan about the pictures. She had noticed
that Anna drew curling vines and flowers, donkeys and sheep instead of
practicing her letters.

One day after a long writing
lesson she told Samira, “When we go home I'll get married and have a house
and a garden and some children. I won't write.”

“I don't know what will
happen when I go home,” said Samira. “But I've written a story about
something that happened when I was small. I know you can draw the right
pictures for my story. Will you do it?”

“I'll try,” said Anna.
“What's the story about?”

“Listen,” said
Samira.

Zena was a little girl who
lived in a house that looked like this.

The story told about how
Zena and her family slept on the roof in hot weather and how Zena and her
friends played on the roof. And Zena's mother spread fruit and vegetables on
the roof to dry in the sun.

Anna drew a picture of a
little house with a flat roof and a ladder that went up to the
roof.

Zena's mother said, “These
fruits and vegetables are for winter. Do not touch them. Do not eat them.”
Zena always obeyed her mother, but one day she was playing with her friend
on the roof and they saw berries drying there. Delicious red berries, and
only half dry so they would be juicy.

Zena could not help it. She
ran over and picked up one bright berry and popped it in her mouth.

But it was not a berry. It
was a tiny hot pepper. Very very hot in Zena's mouth. It made her cry. It
made her face turn red. It hurt her mouth.

She could not tell her
mother. Never. But her mother knew. She looked at Zena's red face and her
teary eyes. She shook her head.

“You disobeyed me,” she
said. “You will see. In the winter we need every piece of fruit and every
pepper.” Then she smiled. “But I will not punish you. The pepper has done
that. You will always remember.” Zena nodded and she never did
forget.

Anna finished the pictures.
Looking at them Samira knew that Anna's village was just like hers.

She thought of Maryam and
said softly, “Your sisters would like these pictures.”

Anna nodded but she didn't
say anything.

Samira stitched the pages
together to make a book. The girls in the class loved to read it. Many of
them could remember sleeping up on the roofs with their families. They grew
quiet, remembering, but they laughed when Zena bit into the hot
pepper.

“Will you write a book for
the boys, too?” asked Benyamin. “One about playing games in the street or
banging on pans to keep the foxes from eating the grapes.”

“You have to tell me about
it,” said Samira. “I never did any of those things.”

After supper that evening
Benyamin sat with Samira and told her how it was to stay in the vineyard
watchtower all night, on the lookout for foxes.

“When there was no moon it
was very dark,” he said. “If foxes got in and ate the grapes, our fathers
beat us so we wouldn't let it happen again.”

“How terrible,” said
Samira.

“Not so terrible,” said
Benyamin. “Just a little, so we would be more careful. And our father?” He
stopped for a minute. “Once he crept into the vineyard just to test us. We
heard him and thought it was a wolf, it sounded so big. We were afraid to
come out so we threw down the iron pot that was empty after dinner and hit
him, but not where it hurt too much.” He smiled, remembering. “Papa just
laughed and said we were good watchmen.”

That story made a good book
for the little boys. Anna had trouble drawing the foxes, and Benyamin said
they looked too much like dogs. But the boys didn't care. They wanted to
read the story again and again.

Samira always collected both
books each time they were used and put them carefully in the bottom of her
clothes box. It felt as if she had saved a piece of Ayna on those pages, and
she wanted to keep them safe.

The teacher liked the
stories, too.

“They remind me of villages
I've visited,” she said. “I remember the fruit, how delicious it is. And I
remember seeing children looking at me over the walls at the edges of the
roofs.”

“Not anymore,” said Samira.
“There is no one to look after the houses. Every year my father put more
clay on the roof. Every year he whitewashed the walls. Now our house will
crumble away.”

“The war is over but it
takes time for things to settle down,” said the teacher. “Little by little
people will return.”

“When I came here I was
nine,” said Samira. “Now I've been here more than a year so I must be ten.
How old will I be when I can go home?”

But the teacher didn't
know.

FALL AND WINTER PASSED
.
Then another summer was nearly over. Samira knew that she must be eleven
years old. She could read any book the teacher could find and was using a
slate to work on adding and subtracting, but in the Orphan Section life did
not change.

Then one day after class the
teacher said to Samira and Anna, “Stay here for a minute, please. Nurse
MacDonald is coming to talk with you. She's in charge of the babies who are
too young to be in the Orphan Section.”

“Maybe she wants us to leave
the Orphan Section and work in the nursery,” Anna whispered to Samira.

“What if she only wants
you?” asked Samira. “You're the one who is good with babies.”

But there was no time to
talk. A small woman in a nurse's uniform was greeting them.

“I've heard that you two
girls are very good with the little children,” she said.

Anna looked quickly at
Samira and raised her eyebrows. Then she said, “We both looked after
children before we came to this place. Do you want to give us a
job?”

“Not a job,” said Nurse
MacDonald. “A little boy. He was a tiny baby when he came here with his
mother soon after the camp opened. She was so weak from the journey that she
died before she could tell us her name or his. We named him Elias. He's
strong and healthy and now he's nearly two. We thought he could come to your
tent and be a kind of little brother to you two girls.”

Samira thought of Maryam. “A
little brother would be a big responsibility.” She stepped closer to Anna.
“The three of us would have to stay together. Like a family. They couldn't
send one of us away from the others.”

The nurse looked surprised.
“We don't send people away.”

“But you could,” said Anna.
“We're orphans. There's no one to say a word if you decide I'm old enough to
live with the women and work in the nursery and never see Samira. Or Elias.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Samira wondered what she was thinking.

Finally Anna said, “Samira
and I know what it's like to have little sisters. We want to keep this
little brother with us. Not lose him. So you must write down that Anna and
Samira and Elias will stay together. And it must be signed by a British
officer.”

“I'm an officer in the
medical corps,” said Nurse Macdonald. “If it will make you feel better I'll
write you a letter. It will be in English, of course.”

She took paper from her bag
and began to write. As she wrote she smiled, and Samira knew that she was
thinking, “What will these girls ever do with this letter? I might as well
give it to them.”

Samira moved close to Anna.

“What good is this paper to
us? We can't read it and we have nowhere to keep it.”

“I've seen how the British
want everything written down. The paper might help if they ever wanted to
separate us. I'll put it in the bottom of my clothes box and keep it
safe.”

Elias arrived with Nurse
MacDonald the next afternoon. He had curly black hair and round dark eyes.
He walked into the tent and looked quickly from Anna to Samira and then all
around his new home. When he saw that there was plenty of space for running,
he ran. Samira darted to the door so he wouldn't go outside, and Anna
managed to keep him from racing through a group of girls who were sitting on
the floor sewing. He was very fast.

When he finally stopped, Anna
picked him up and said, “Elias, I'm Anna, your new sister, and this is
Samira, your other sister. You're going to live here with us.”

Elias cocked his head as if
he liked the sound of her voice. Then he wiggled to show that he wanted to
get down. This time he walked from one end of the tent to the other, looking
at everything. Then he began to run again.

Nurse MacDonald quickly said
goodbye. When she was gone, Anna and Samira looked at each other and
laughed. They could see why she needed to get this boy out of the
nursery.

“He'll be a full-time
responsibility for a while,” Anna said.

Samira nodded. “For once I'm
glad there's a fence around the Orphan Section. At least we can't lose him
completely.”

By suppertime Elias was
tired of running. He came straight to Samira and leaned against her.

“He needs something to eat
before he falls asleep,” said Anna. She got some bread and milk from the
eating tent, and Elias ate it with his eyes nearly closed.

“I don't think he'll have
any trouble sleeping tonight,” said Samira, and she laid him on his sleeping
mat between her mat and Anna's and covered him up.

When she woke the next
morning she was relieved to see that the little boy was still there. He
opened his eyes and looked at her for a long time. Then he turned his head
and looked at Anna. And then he sat up, ready to start running.

“I think he's made up his
mind,” said Samira. “He's willing to stay with us.”