Home Is Beyond the Mountains (6 page)

Helping Elias settle in kept
Samira and Anna very busy for several days. He didn't talk much but he had a
way of deciding what he wanted to do and simply setting out to do it. The
girls had to keep up with him or he would try to climb the tent poles or
unroll all the sleeping mats. To keep him busy they marched around the
outdoor area counting and singing songs with him. They all slept very well
at night.

But as another winter began,
Elias settled into a routine, just like everyone else in the Orphan Section.
He even learned to let Samira and Anna do their lessons in the school tent
and the chilly days went by, one very much like the others.

ONE MORNING SAMIRA
opened
her eyes and noticed that the light was brighter and the air had a warm feel
to it.

“I think it's spring,” she
said to Anna.

Still, she was surprised
when the woman who came to check the height and weight of all the children
in the Orphan Section said, “You'll be turning twelve one of these days.
When you came here in summer of 1918 you had turned nine in the spring. Now
it's the spring of 1921. Do you know exactly when your birthday
is?”

“I don't know the day but
it's at the time when the storks come back to their nests in the tower of
the church,” said Samira. She suddenly remembered the big long-necked birds
sitting on their untidy nests waiting for their eggs to hatch, and Mama
laughing at how funny they looked.

“The storks,” said Samira.
“I want to see them again.”

But the woman had gone on to
measure another girl and didn't hear her. Samira caught up with her as she
was leaving the tent.

“If I'm twelve that means I
have been here for three years,” she said. “Will I be here
forever?”

“Of course not,” said the
woman. “The camp won't be here forever. It will close one of these
days.”

“But if the camp isn't here
where will we go?” Samira thought of the storks again. “Home. We should go
home.”

“I know,” said the woman.
She looked sad. “It is not always easy to go home after a war. Things have
changed. I'm sorry. I don't know what will happen.”

Samira began to listen
carefully to the talk around her. But she only heard questions. “When…?”
“Where…?” “How long…?”

Rumors spread through the
camp. Benyamin and his friend Ashur reported a new one every day when they
came in from delivering laundry. Samira began to get a picture of what was
going to happen.

The camp would soon be
closed but the people in the camp would not be allowed to return to the
villages they had left behind in Persia. Instead they would be sent to
villages up north, in country that had been part of Turkey before the war.
And boys just a little older than Benyamin would go into an army to defend
those villages.

No one knew what would
happen to the orphans.

“What can we say if they
just send us somewhere?” asked Samira.

“Well, I won't go without
you and Elias,” said Anna.

Elias came and stood between
the two girls. He had been with them nearly a year and now he wanted to talk
as much as he had wanted to run when they first knew him.

He looked up and said,
“Where? Going where?”

“We don't know where we'll
go but we'll all go together,” Samira said, picking him up. He was heavy now
but she could still give him a squeeze before she put him down.

The very next day a man came
into the tent before breakfast. They had never seen him before. He waited
until all the children noticed him and became quiet. Then he
spoke.

“This camp will be closing
soon, and everyone in it will have to go and live somewhere else. The
Assyrian men and women who are in the camp have been offered the chance to
settle in villages not far from here. They have refused this offer because
they want to return to the villages they came from. They will have to find
their own way back. It will be hard but they have chosen. You are children
and you can't find your own way so you'll be sent to another orphanage. You
don't have to worry. You will be looked after.”

Samira stared at the man.
How could he tell her not to worry?

The man must have felt the
questions in the eyes of all the children because he said, “That's all I can
tell you now. I'm sorry.” He turned and left the tent.

Samira turned to Anna.
“First our villages are gone. Now the camp will be gone. We have been here
for almost three years of our lives. Where will we go next?”

Life in the camp changed
quickly. One after another the big tents outside the Orphan Section were
taken down. The teacher stopped coming to the school tent. Garbage piled up
as group after group of men, women and families were sent away.

“They have to walk all the
way to Mosul,” said Benyamin. “There they have to sign a paper saying that
they are leaving the camp because they want to. Then they'll camp somewhere
along the Tigris River until they can cross over and walk to Persia and,
maybe, back to their villages.”

There was nothing for the
orphans to do but wait. The girls still swept the tent every day, but the
laundry was closed so the children's clothes got dirtier and dirtier.
Benyamin's shirt was torn and there was no thread to mend it. Bean soup and
bread arrived every day but the bread was not fresh. The bakers had
gone.

When at last news came that
the orphans should prepare to leave for Baghdad, Samira was relieved. The
Baqubah refugee camp was not a place to be anymore.

She made a bundle of her
extra blouse and skirt and the books she had stitched together. Elias's
clothes made a smaller bundle. Anna unraveled some thread from a worn-out
blanket and sewed a special pocket into her skirt for the paper about Elias.
Then she bundled her things. They were ready to go.

Everyone stood in the hot
sun while the soldiers took the big tents down. Six tents where one hundred
and fifty children had lived. The older boys were put to work loading the
cooking pots and other equipment into big canvas bags.

When everything was packed,
the soldiers led them through the orphans' gate, past the dusty squares
where hundreds of tents had stood, and out of the camp.

Outside the gates were two
big wagons and oxen to pull them. The soldiers and the older boys loaded the
tents and the canvas bags into the wagons. Samira could see that the wagons
were getting filled up.

“There's no room for us,”
she said to Anna.

“You'll have to walk,” said
one of the soldiers. “We've been ordered to take all this equipment, and it
certainly can't walk.”

Benyamin came over. “If the
small children have to walk it will be a very slow trip and hard for them,
too.”

The soldier looked at the
crowd of children.

“They only gave us these two
wagons,” he said.

“I have an idea,” said
Samira. “The boys can make a place on top of the tents where the little ones
can ride. The rest of us can walk.”

“Go ahead,” said the
soldier, and he watched while Benyamin and Ashur and other big boys climbed
to the top of the wagons. They jumped and punched to make nests in the
canvas. Then they lifted the small children up into the nests and said, “Now
you must sit still or you'll fall out and have to walk.”

Samira could see the
children peering down. Elias waved to her.

“We'll be right behind you,”
she called.

It was hard for the children
who were walking to keep up with the wagons. The road was hot under their
bare feet, and the sun beat down. Sometimes the wagons stopped and they
rested for a few minutes. The soldiers gave them water and dried fruit, but
they were soon back on the road.

The journey took two days.
At night they slept beside the road on bedrolls. The soldiers kept watch,
and Samira wondered what they were watching for.

In the middle of the night
she woke up, looking for someone. Mama. Where was Mama?

Samira stared at the
darkness. No. This was a different walk. Three years had passed. Mama was
gone.

She put her hand on the lump
that was Elias under his blanket and waited until the soldier came by, dark
against the stars. Then she could sleep again.

The second day they started
out before the sun had risen.

“It's going to be a hot
day,” one of the soldiers explained. “We want to get to Baghdad before the
sun is high.”

Before noon they came to an
army encampment near the river on the edge of the city.

“This is as far as we go,”
said the soldiers. They lifted the small children down from the wagons.
“Someone from the orphanage will come to get you. They'll take you into the
city by truck. Wait here under these trees.” And they went away.

The trees offered only
scattered shade, and Samira was worrying that the sun might burn them to
cinders when several army trucks arrived and a big woman with brown hair
that curled all over her head climbed out of one of them. Her blue eyes
reminded Samira of the teacher in the Baqubah camp.

“I'm Mrs. McDowell,” she
said. “I've come to take you to the orphanage in Baghdad but I hope you
won't be staying long.” She smiled. “We want to get you back to Persia
soon.”

Persia. The word rippled
through the crowd of children and then the word “home” and the word
“villages.”

Mrs. McDowell shook her
head.

“My dears,” she said. “We
can only go one step at a time. That step is Baghdad. The next step is
Persia. After that, we can only hope and pray. Now come. Get yourselves into
the trucks.”

As she struggled to keep her
balance in the bouncing truck, Samira thought of those words. Baghdad was
the next step. Maybe the first step on the journey home.

Later, Samira could only
remember three things about Baghdad. One was the heat. It was so hot that it
was impossible to walk out of the orphanage building in bare feet. The very
earth felt as hot as an iron pot over a fire.

Another was clothes. Mrs.
McDowell was horrified at the shabby clothes the children were wearing. She
brought some refugee women to teach the oldest girls to make shirts and
trousers for the boys and dresses for the girls.

The dresses were all made of
green cloth with little yellow flowers. Samira looked at Anna and thought,
“That is what I look like. How strange.”

Mrs. McDowell seemed to read
her mind. “I wish we had more colors, but we're lucky to get enough cloth to
cover you all.”

Samira was glad to have a
dress that was bright and the right size, but she was even happier with her
new shoes. They had thick rubber soles and soft tops that tied around her
ankles. In those shoes she could walk on burning hot tile or stony roads.
She could go anywhere.

But the orphans were not
going anywhere.

They were waiting. That was
the third thing Samira remembered about Baghdad. Everyone was waiting. She
saw crowds of people by the river, camped out and waiting to be allowed to
cross over and walk to Persia. She saw men and women waiting in long lines
to get passage to India or America. She heard people talking about where
they could go if they had permission, if they had money, if they could make
contact with their relatives.

Mrs. McDowell said, “It's
the war. So many people had to leave their homes. Now they need to find
somewhere in this world where they can be safe and happy.”

Then, suddenly, the orphans
weren't waiting anymore. Mrs. McDowell came to the schoolroom right in the
middle of a lesson, waving a paper.

“Children,” she said. “This
says that the Assyrian orphans, all of you, can cross the border. You won't
be going to your own villages but you will be in Persia, near the city of
Kermanshah. Oh, my dear children. It's the next step.”

They went by train. It was
exciting and frightening, climbing up the high iron steps into a narrow
space with rows of seats covered with scratchy cloth. The strangeness made
some of the little ones cry. Elias didn't cry but his eyes were wide with
wonder and fear. Comforting him made Samira and Anna brave. They didn't
really notice the jerk and rattle of the train as it moved out of the
station. They were busy talking to Elias.

“Look,” said Samira. “Look
at all those people waving goodbye. They think we are very lucky to be on
this train. Only us. Only the orphans can go now. Everyone else has to
wait.”

Mrs. McDowell sat down in
the seat facing the children. She was fanning herself with her handkerchief.

“It's been such a rush,” she
said. “When we heard that we could take you to Kermanshah we had to move
quickly. You never know when the permit might be revoked.”

“Revoked?” said Samira.
“What does that mean?”