My Name Is Parvana (10 page)

NINETEEN

T
he cell door banged open.

In shock, Parvana looked up to see several guards, the major and the interpreting woman standing in the doorway, looking at her.

The major approached the bed where she was seated. He picked up
Jane Eyre
, keeping it open to where she was reading, looked at it and returned it to her.

“You got farther than I did,” he said in English. The interpreting woman remained silent. “My wife tried to get me to read it for her book club on the base back home.”

He stood and looked at her.

“Did you have anything to do with the attack on this base a few days ago?”

Parvana felt sad and heavy.

“It looks like the attack was staged to give you the chance to escape. Some guy on a bicycle blew himself up. Killed two of our people and put a whole lot of others on the injury list. What is so valuable about you that they would send one of their men to his death in order to rescue you?”

Parvana, of course, did not answer.

“It’s all starting to come together. We are methodical, and we are going over everything in that school. We have found the remains of munition parts. We are now convinced that materials for building roadside bombs were being stored there. We know you lived there. We have to find out what you know.”

He paused, then said, “Enjoy the book.”

He started to leave, then turned back.

“Our investigators discovered the body of a woman on the school grounds. It looked like she had been tortured to death. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Odd thing was, she was buried with respect, in the Islamic tradition, facing Mecca. We found her under the rose garden.”

TWENTY

“
Mr. Fahir quit.”

It was the day after the festival. Parvana went into Mother’s office to report that none of the staff and very few students had shown up for school that morning. It was the last day of class before the weekend. Parvana figured they all just wanted an early start to their time off after working so hard.

“He quit?” Parvana asked. “What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He slipped this note under my office door and snuck away in the middle of the night. No notice! And he’s got two weeks’ pay coming to him!”

Parvana picked up Mr. Fahir’s note. The words were clear.
I must quit. I am sorry
.

“We’ll manage,” she said.

“Maybe one of the teachers has a family member we could hire,” Mother said. She stuffed some papers and files in her briefcase. “I’ll be back by this evening. Ask Asif to spend the day in the guardhouse. In fact, he’d better move in there until we get a replacement for Mr. Fahir. We don’t want people to think we have no man to guard us.”

“Mama, take Asif with you.”

Her mother would be safer if she wasn’t traveling alone.

“And leave you in charge on your own? Goodness knows what you’d get into.”

Parvana didn’t respond. Ever since Nooria left, she’d been trying not to answer back as much. It seemed immature.

“Then take me,” she said. “Leave Asif in charge here.”

“You’re not getting out of studying. You have a physics exam coming up. Where’s my phone?”

Parvana helped her look for it. A car horn sounded.

“There’s the taxi,” Mother said. “Forget the phone. It’s only a meeting of the college planning committee.”

She hurried out of the office. Parvana stayed right behind her.

“Are we really going to have a college for women around here?” Parvana asked.

“That’s what we’re working for,” Mother said as they crossed the yard. “We tell our students to study hard and finish high school, but then what? Are they just supposed to stop learning? That’s not good enough. We need a college.”

Mother unlatched the door in the metal gate. Parvana followed her through it and watched her get into the taxi.

“Keep an eye on Maryam,” Mother said from the back seat. “Don’t let her run off to Kabul to be on TV.”

Parvana waved as the taxi drove off.

“You’re in charge,” her mother said. “Look after everyone.”

Then Parvana realized that Asif was standing just behind her, waving goodbye, too. Mother could just as easily have been talking to him.

She told him about Mr. Fahir. “Mother wants you to move into the guardhouse until she hires a replacement.”

“I’ll get some projects to work on in there,” Asif said. “Any teachers show up yet?”

“We’re on our own.”

“Not the first time,” Asif said. Then he left to fetch his things.

Parvana went inside the guardhouse. She wanted to find the key to the lock on the storage shed.

The guardhouse was small. It had a table and chair by the window, a narrow mat on the floor and a couple of crude shelves with nothing on them. She went over every inch of the room, even lifting up the mat and looking underneath the shelves.

No key.

She didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed.

Then the school day began and she was too busy to think about it.

To make it easier to keep track of everyone, Parvana had all the students stay in the dining hall, each in their own corners. She sat in the middle, listening to the murmured lessons. She was a little afraid of what might happen if the students realized that she and Asif were the only teachers in the school.

“The teachers are in a meeting,” Parvana said whenever she was asked. She nodded vaguely in the direction of Mother’s office. “They are discussing the reports they’ll be writing for your parents.”

So far, it was working. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to.

The standard of behavior was pretty high at the school. The girls had waited so long to get here, and they knew that life without school would be boring and difficult.

Ava wandered from group to group, listening in, not bothering anyone.

Parvana wished she knew what to do with Ava. She tried to keep her busy with little jobs like helping in the kitchen and sweeping the courtyard. And she loved to dig in the garden. It was a better life than she had before, but Parvana thought they could make it better for her still. She just didn’t know how.

Badria was doing fine. She had totally refused to say who or where her uncle was.

“He has a new wife and she doesn’t want to be bothered with me,” she said. “So I am here to stay. And if you keep asking me, I’ll just stop talking.”

And she did. Whenever the question came up, she clamped her lips together and refused to speak.

“I guess she’s staying with us,” Mother said.

“I guess she is,” Parvana agreed.

To Parvana’s surprise, Maryam took Badria under her wing, showing her around the school. They spent the whole afternoon and evening together after the festival, wandering from room to room. Badria learned fast. Most of the time, Parvana forgot she couldn’t see.

Maryam was the student most likely to get into mischief, so Parvana had her sister and Badria sit near her. Maryam was supposed to be memorizing a poem. Badria repeated every line she said, so they were both learning it.

It was a relief when the school day ended and the students went home. The weekend was about to start. Parvana was looking forward to a couple of days off — although she never had a day that was completely off. There was always work to do.

“We learned the poem,” Maryam said, interrupting Parvana’s thoughts. “You want to hear it?”

“Of course,” Parvana said, then watched in amazement as the two girls performed the poem as a dance, reciting and moving to the rhythm of the words.

“Wonderful!” Parvana applauded. “How do you know what movements to do?” she asked Badria.

“We plan it out while we are learning the poem. Then I have to trust that Maryam doesn’t change them while we’re reciting.”

“Where’s Mama?” Maryam asked. “I want to show her. She’ll let me go on TV if it’s poetry.”

“Mother’s not back yet.” Parvana realized how late it was. “The meeting must be going well. You might be able to go to college one day, Maryam.”

“I’d rather go to Hollywood.”

“Could I go to college?” asked Badria.

Parvana was in a hopeful mood.

“Absolutely,” she said. Why not? Afghanistan was capable of wonderful things. Sending a blind girl to college could be just another one.

“What would you like to be?” she asked Badria.

“A pilot.”

Parvana’s jaw dropped. Her brain was still trying to find a reply when Badria and Maryam burst out laughing and skipped off down the hall.

Parvana shook her head. “Save me from little girls,” she said. Then she went back to work.

She decided to clean her mother’s office. She dusted the shelves. When she swept under the desk, her mother’s cell phone came out with the dust.

Parvana pressed buttons here and there. Her mother had promised to show her how to use it after Nooria left, but she never got around to it.

She almost dropped the phone when she heard her mother’s voice.

“Hello? Parvana? Anyone there?”

“It’s me, Mama! I’m here!” Parvana yelled, then shut up when she realized her mother was continuing to talk.

“Of course you’re not there. You are all at lessons. I don’t know what’s happening here. There’s no meeting and no one seems to know anything about it. I’m borrowing this phone from a shopkeeper. What a big waste of the day. And I’m probably leaving this message to myself.”

The phone went silent.

Parvana shook it, not knowing what else to do.

She started going through the desk, looking for information about where her mother had gone — an address, an organization’s name, a phone number —anything. She found a government phone book, lesson plans, teacher-training guides and blank writing paper.

But no clues about where her mother was.

“Why didn’t I ask more questions?” Parvana cried. “Why didn’t I pay more attention to what she was doing?”

The only drawer left to explore was the bottom one. Parvana opened it. It held just one thick file. She put the file on the desk and looked inside.

It was full of letters.

Each letter was a threat.

Parvana counted seventeen of them. All were nasty.

She read as many as she could stand, then closed up the file and put it back where she had found it.

At supper time, Parvana and Asif kept the conversation going around the table, quizzing the younger ones on their lessons and working hard not to look at Mother’s empty chair.

For the rest of the evening, Parvana strained her ears for the sound of the returning taxi. She wanted to open the gate and stand in the road, watching for headlights, but she couldn’t make the others worry.

Finally, the children were asleep. Parvana left the school grounds and stood in the middle of the narrow dirt road.

She could see tiny lights from faraway lanterns and cook fires. The sky was lit up with a billion stars.

But no car lights and no Mother.

“This is familiar,” Asif said from the open window of the guardhouse. “Watching you wait for your mother.”

Parvana leaned against the guardhouse wall.

“I was thinking the same thing,” she said. “I keep losing her.”

“What will we do if …”

“Her meeting is running long, that’s all.”

“If it’s a long meeting, it’s probably a good one.”

“Yeah. Probably planning a really big college.”

“Go to bed,” Asif said. “I’ll watch for her.”

But Parvana couldn’t do that. She sat in the dirt with her back against the wall.

She heard Asif sigh and draw back from the window. A moment later he handed her a blanket and sat down beside her, his own blanket shawl around his shoulders.

He started to sing and Parvana joined in — one of the songs they had sung together years before when they wandered in the wilderness, looking for someone who could look after them. They sang just loud enough to keep their voices busy and not afraid.

Long after Asif curled up on his side and fell asleep, Parvana remained awake and watchful as the constellations traveled across the sky, then faded into gray.

She could not remember a time when she did not believe she was on the edge of a disaster. Her life had gone from battle to battle, and she was never, ever sure that the future would not be terrifying.

And just when it started to look like things were getting quiet and back to normal, her mother had to go to a meeting and not come home on time.

TWENTY-ONE

M
orning arrived without Mother.

“You said she’d be back by now,” Maryam whined when Parvana and Asif walked into the dining hall after their night on the cold ground.

Parvana looked at the four children lined up on the bench looking angry and scared. Even Badria, who could not see, and Ava, who loved Parvana with her whole heart, were joining in the group glare.

Parvana controlled her face. As hard as this situation was, it would be harder if everyone got upset.

“Why are you all just sitting there?” she asked. “Asif and I are cold. And we’re hungry. We want a fire in that wood stove, hot tea in our mugs and breakfast on that table. Now! Move!”

She clapped her hands to get them busy. She held Ava back a moment to give her a hug. She wasn’t sure how many words Ava understood, and she didn’t want the little girl to think she was mad at her. Ava gave Parvana one of her bright smiles, then skipped into the kitchen to help the others.

A short while later they all sat down in a warm dining hall to hot tea, boiled eggs and leftover nan.

“Where’s Mama?” Maryam asked, chewing on nan drizzled with honey.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Parvana told her.

Maryam swallowed. “Did something happen to her?”

“Mama did not come back last night and it’s a good thing she didn’t,” she said, sternly. “Do you not see what a mess this school is in? Dust everywhere, laundry to be done, a filthy kitchen. Today is going to be a cleaning day!”

She barked out work orders and the kids hustled off.

“You sound just like Nooria,” Asif teased.

Parvana threw a piece of bread at him. He had the good grace not to throw it back.

In truth, the school was already clean, and by the time the sun was ready to set, Parvana had run out of made-up chores. She declared a study hall, but no one was studying. They sat in silence at their books, straining their ears for the sound of Mother’s taxi.

It was a night without wind, so every sound could be clearly heard inside.

“She’s home!” Maryam said, but when they all rushed to open the gate, “Mother” turned out to be a small flock of flat-tailed sheep herded by a lone shepherd.

The next time they heard a noise it was a pick-up truck full of melons, on its way to the next village. When Maryam said, the third time, “Someone’s coming,” Parvana told them to stay in their seats. All this dashing to the door wasn’t doing them any good.

Then she heard a vehicle pull up to the gate and honk its horn to be let in. They all jumped up.

But it wasn’t Mother. It was the police.

Parvana pushed the younger ones back behind the gate and stayed back there with them. She peered out to watch as Asif greeted the two policemen with a respectful “Salaam alaikum” as they got out of the car.

“Can we help you?” Asif asked.

“This man has reported that his wife is missing,” the officer said. “He thinks she may have come here.”

“There’s no one here but us,” Asif said. “We are only young. The head of the school is at a meeting and will be back soon. Perhaps you could return tomorrow.”

“She has to be here,” came a voice from the back seat. “She’s not in the house and there’s nowhere else she knows of to go.”

Out of the back seat came a very tall, very old man.

Parvana gasped. It was the old man from the market.

“I am sorry to hear about your missing wife,” Asif said. “She is not here. I swear to you. I have been keeping watch all day at this gate, and no one has come here.”

“She went missing two days ago,” the tall man said. “Her name is Kinnah.”

“She is not here,” Asif repeated firmly.

“Are you going to take the word of a crippled boy?” said the man. “I should have gone to the Taliban. They know how to deal with wives who don’t behave.”

“That’s enough,” the officer said. “We can handle this.” He turned to Asif. “We need to come in and look.”

“Of course,” said Asif. “You are welcome.”

Asif fumbled with the gate latch, giving Parvana time to get everyone out of the way and into the shadows.

Finally, out of frustration, the old man knocked Asif into the dirt — Parvana heard him fall — and yanked the gate open.

“Tear the place apart!” the old man roared.

The police and the tall old man went from room to room in the school. They moved fast. Asif, on his crutches, had to hustle to keep up. Parvana was afraid of what the old man might do to Asif, so she followed at a little distance. She kept her face covered by her chador so the old man would not recognize her.

“This is your liberation?” the old man said, as they left another empty room. “Where girls are allowed to do as they please? She belongs to me. Her father gave her to me to pay off his debt. If she does not come back to me, I will go to the Taliban and her father will pay me — one way or another.”

He turned on Asif again. “Have you hidden her? Has she become your wife now? I will kill you both!”

“No one is here but us,” Parvana said, stepping forward. She wanted to take his attention off Asif.

“Who is this? Another one of your girlfriends?”

“She is my sister,” Asif said. “Our mother runs this school.”

“You should teach her to keep silent. Women with big mouths. This is what Afghanistan has come to.” He looked beyond Parvana to the children behind her. In steps he was at Hassan’s side and had scooped the little boy into his arms.

Hassan screamed.

“My wife has my child. It’s a girl. Either I get my wife and daughter back or I will come back here and take this boy. One boy is easily worth the two of them. One healthy boy, that is,” he added, sneering at Asif.

“But your wife is not here!” Asif said, reaching for Hassan. The old man held the little boy too high for Asif to grab him.

“I’m talking to the police,” the man said. “I’m letting them know what I will do. And they will be responsible, not me.”

He gently put Hassan back on the ground. “One week! Then I will be back for you.”

Hassan ran to Asif and buried his face in Asif’s remaining leg.

One of the policemen moved the beam of his flashlight across the yard.

“What’s in that shed back there?” he asked, shining his flashlight.

“Nothing,” Parvana replied. “School supplies. I mean, cleaning supplies. Brooms. Nothing.”

The men were already walking toward it.

“Unlock it,” they ordered Parvana.

“I don’t know where the key is,” she said. “Our old chowkidar kept it, but he quit and took the key with him.”

“What is his name? Where does he live?”

“I … I don’t know,” Parvana said.

One of the police officers took his gun out of its holster.

“Hey!” Asif shouted. Hassan and Maryam screamed.

But the officer didn’t shoot Parvana. Instead, he shot off the padlock.

We should all run, Parvana thought, as the men entered the shed, flashlights blazing.

“Nothing but boxes of pencils and notebooks,” Parvana heard them say.

In a moment they came out again.

“We will be watching,” the police said. “If we find out that you are hiding her, the school will be closed and you will be arrested. Do you understand?”

They got into the police car.

“We will be back,” one of the officers said.

Then they drove away.

Parvana grabbed a lantern from the dining room and went out to the shed. At first all she saw were boxes stacked neatly against one wall. She opened one up. Pencils. She put that box on the floor and opened the next one.

Grenades.

“Parvana?”

Asif was calling to her.

“I think we have a problem,” she called back out to him.

“I know we do,” he replied.

She stuck her head out. “My problem is in here.”

“Mine is out here,” he said. “And I guarantee mine is bigger.”

And then Parvana heard a baby crying.

She held up her lantern. From behind the latrine came the girl Parvana had talked to in the market. Her face bore the signs of a vicious beating. In one hand she held a baby. In the other she held a can of kerosene.

“Let me stay or I’ll set us both on fire,” the girl said. “I’m not scared to die. I’d rather die than go back to him.”

No one moved a muscle. Parvana drew a slow, deep breath.

“What did you find in the shed?” Asif asked.

Parvana shook her head.

The grenades could wait.

She knew what to do with scared girls and babies.

“Hello, Kinnah,” she said softly. “My name is Parvana. Of course you can stay with us. This is where you belong. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

She talked quietly until the fear slipped from the girl’s face.

As the exhausted girl put down the kerosene and handed over the baby, Parvana wondered again when her mother would return.