My Name Is Parvana (11 page)

TWENTY-TWO

M
other returned in a fast-moving car with squealing brakes and spinning tires that sent dust through the open window of the guardhouse into the eyes of Asif, who was keeping watch.

She returned in the company of men with covered faces and big guns.

She sprang from the car as if from a catapult and landed in the dirt with a thud. Asif watched her roll three times before she came to a stop.

He was too scared to move. He stayed in the shadow of the guardhouse until the car had gone, and he could no longer hear the chug of its motor.

Only then did he hobble out to where Mother’s body had come to a stop in the weeds.

He could only stand and look at it and will it to move on its own.

“I heard a car,” Parvana said as she stepped through the gate. “Is Mother …”

Her eyes followed Asif’s.

And she, too, was frozen.

Somehow, she made herself move.

She walked over to the body and drew back the cloth that covered her mother’s head. She stared at the mess the men had made of her mother’s face.

There was a note pinned to her mother’s clothes.

This woman ran a school for evil girls.

Now she is dead. Her school will be closed.

TWENTY-THREE

D
ear Nooria:

Parvana was sitting at her mother’s desk. She hadn’t slept in a long time.

In front of her was Nooria’s most recent letter. Someone in America had offered to pay for her flight home during school vacation, and she had written to ask Mother’s opinion.

Dear Nooria:

I am writing this instead of Mother because …

Parvana scratched that out.

She tried again.

Dear Nooria:

Please come home right away. When you get here, I will have some news for you that I would rather not have to tell you.

That didn’t seem right, either.

Dear Nooria:

Yesterday, before the sun set, we laid Mother to rest in the most beautiful place on the school grounds …

She scribbled through that as well.

The family photos were all in Mother’s office. The taped-up photo of Parvana’s father with the pieces missing, the photo of her dead older brother, killed by a land mine a long time ago, the photo of Mother graduating from university with her degree in journalism. There was no photo of Parvana’s baby brother, Ali, who died during the time of the Taliban.

All these people from one family, all dead.

I’m not dead, Parvana thought. And then she did the bravest thing she could think of.

Dear Nooria:

Mother asked me to write to you because she is very busy trying to set up a new college for women. She says she misses you and is very proud of you, but to please stay in New York for your vacation. She also wants to know if there is any way you can take care of Maryam if we can find a way to send her to you. She says Maryam is getting to be even more trouble than me!

Your sister,

Parvana.

She started to fold up the letter. Then she picked up her pen again and added something at the bottom.

P.S. I’m proud of you, too.

She sealed the letter.

When Maryam goes, I’ll be all alone, she thought.

Asif chose that moment to hobble into the office on his crutches.

“The police will be back,” he said. “And I took a look inside the shed. Did Mr. Fahir do that?”

“I think he was forced to,” Parvana said.

Asif sat down across from her. “Do you think those weapons belong to the Taliban?”

Parvana shrugged. Afghanistan had so many armies now — the foreigners, the Taliban, the people who hated both the Taliban and the foreigners, the drug people and the people who had their own private armies just because they could.

“I’m going to bury them,” Asif said. “Out beside the latrines. And then maybe it’s time to leave. We could leave tonight and get as far away as we can before the sun comes up.”

“But where do we go? Do we just start walking? We could end up in worse trouble.”

“What about going to the foreign army? We’re kids. They might protect us.”

Parvana considered that for a moment, then shook her head.

“They might help us and they might not, but I don’t think they would even let us get close enough to explain ourselves or ask for anything. And even if they helped us, they might make Kinnah go back to her husband.”

“We have to do something.”

Parvana looked past Asif out into the hallway at the Wall of Achievement.

She had an idea.

“I’m calling someone more powerful than the police, and more powerful than the army,” she said, picking up Mother’s cell phone.

“Who’s that?” Asif asked.

“I’m calling Mrs. Weera.”

TWENTY-FOUR

“
It takes us a while,” the major said.

They were all back in Parvana’s cell. She had finished reading Jane Eyre and was fifty pages into reading it a second time. The language was difficult, but the more she read, the easier it got.

The questioning man tossed his Constant Gardener book onto the bed beside her.

“A reward for saving that soldier’s life,” he said. Then he started his speech again.

“It takes us a while. Our communications networks aren’t as reliable as they could be. Power cuts on and off. That’s war for you. But eventually, we always get to the bottom of things. In this case, the explosives and bomb-making equipment buried on the school grounds. Would you like to tell us what that stuff was doing there?”

Parvana concentrated on the cover of the
Constant Gardener
book and wondered if the man had liked it.

“What were you doing at that school?” he shouted.

Parvana could sense him standing beside her, not moving, his frustration coming off him in waves.

“Fine,” he said finally. “I’ve given you every opportunity to talk. Every chance to tell us who you are and what you are up to. Do you understand that I can have you locked away? Locked away without a trial! And you will stay that way for a very long time.”

He moved to the door.

“There really is nothing more I can say. The path you are on is one you chose for yourself.”

He was halfway out the door when he came back in.

“One question — and I’m really curious about this. You have obviously been educated. You have been given opportunities that my countrymen and women are all here fighting and dying to give to everyone in your country. With all the things you could have chosen to destroy, why did you blow up your own school?”

Parvana decided, this one and only time, to break her silence.

She turned her head, looked the man straight in the eye and spoke in perfect English.

“I didn’t blow up my school,” she said. “You did.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“
Is this the office of Mrs. Weera?”

Parvana shouted into the cell phone. The connection was bad, and the war planes that zoomed over the school didn’t help.

“I need to speak to her right now. My name is Parvana. She knows me. I need her help. I’m at the Leila Academy of Hope. My mother has been murdered, all the other adults have run away and the Taliban or someone is coming after us. I’m here with a bunch of little kids and I don’t know what to do. I need her help … well, get her out of her meeting!”

After many phone calls to finally get the number of Mrs. Weera’s parliamentary office, Parvana was in no mood to be polite.

She gave the woman her phone number and the school’s location, then hung up.

“Adults are always in meetings,” she fumed.

Asif stuck his head in the door.

“Did you talk to her?”

“I left a message with someone.” Parvana pushed the hair out of her face.

He sat down in the chair across from the desk.

“How are you feeling?”

“Old,” Parvana said. “And tired. It feels like this is never going to end.”

Three days had passed since they had buried Parvana’s mother. Today would have been a school day, but none of the students showed up. Word must have spread.

At least we don’t have to pretend everything is all right, Parvana thought.

“We weren’t able to keep the school open,” she said. “They won.”

Asif didn’t say anything.

“It was great while it lasted, though, wasn’t it?” Parvana said. “We really started to build something here. It was like Green Valley, only a thousand times better. Green Valley got destroyed, too.”

“What do you mean, too? This school isn’t destroyed.”

“It is! Mother said that as long as we were open, we were winning. The gates were closed the last time I looked.”

“You are such a fool,” Asif said, getting out of the chair. “You are the biggest fool that ever lived.” He left the office.

“What do you mean? I am not!” Parvana stood up and went after him.

She found him in the dining hall, leaning against the door frame. She saw what he was looking at.

Asif was right.

She was a fool.

Seated around a table were Maryam, Badria, Ava, Hassan, Kinnah and her baby. All were bent over books. Maryam was quietly reading to Badria and Badria was repeating it, word for word. Little Hassan was showing Ava and Kinnah how to write the letters he knew. They were copying them down on their own sheets of paper. Kinnah’s baby, cleaned up and fed, was watching everything intently with her big brown eyes.

Everyone was learning.

The school wasn’t closed at all.

TWENTY-SIX

R
ung by rung, Parvana climbed the ladder, one hand grasping the handle of a can of paint left over from when the school was constructed. She climbed with great care, planting each foot firmly before moving herself up. The moon gave just enough light for her to be able to see where she was going.

The foreign army had moved their explosions closer and closer to the school. Each day brought more helicopters, more low-flying jets that roared so loud that they hurt Parvana’s ears, more shooting from the hills. Several missiles had landed on the hill right behind the school.

The shooting was almost constant. Parvana couldn’t tell if someone was shooting at the school or shooting at somebody else and the school was just in the way. At least some of the shooters were either not good shots or they were deliberately trying to scare the children. When Parvana or Maryam went out to the garden for onions, or to the hen-house for eggs, gunfire would land in the dirt near them. Bullets would be shot into the walls behind them.

“Maybe they don’t know we’re a school,” Asif suggested.

Which is when Maryam piped up that they should paint the word SCHOOL on the roof in big English letters, so that the foreigners, if they were the ones shooting, would know it was a school and put their guns away.

When Parvana reached the roof, she had a moment of sheer panic. She couldn’t remember how to spell school! Was there an h or not? Probably not. The h would make no sense, but she was sure she had seen one in there.

She started with the
s
, making it big and wide. She did the
c
because she knew that came next.

Then she sat. She simply could not remember.

What if one of the shooters is also an English teacher, she thought. What if he sees that she spelled such a simple word wrong and decides that either the school is no good and deserves to be destroyed, or it really is a home for the Taliban and they are just trying to disguise it as a school?

Parvana searched her brain and drew a blank.

Then she heard a whisper.

“S-c-h-o-o-l.”

Badria was at the top of the ladder.

“Are you crazy? Get back down!”

“Asif thought you might be having trouble with the spelling,” said Badria. “He told me what to say.”

“You tell him I can outspell him any day of the year!” Parvana whispered back. “Now go back inside. And be careful!”

Badria giggled and went back down the ladder.

Two days had passed since she had left a message with Mrs. Weera’s office, and Parvana was pretty sure she had wasted her time and the last of the cell phone’s power tracking her down.

No help was coming. No one was going to rescue them. They were on their own, and they were running out of time.

They had tallied up their food, and they could last for quite a while on what was in the storeroom. They had a good water supply, thanks to the pump one of the foreign charities had installed, and they had high, thick walls that gave them some protection.

But Parvana knew — they all knew — that it would just take one rocket, one grenade, one bomb, one mean man with a gun, and all the food and water and walls would mean nothing.

And the police could come back at any time.

They would have to leave.

But where would they go?

Parvana had wandered in the wilderness with hungry children before. She wasn’t anxious to do it again. But how could they just wait for the return of Kinnah’s husband — and whoever he might bring with him? Wandering in the wilderness was better than that.

She concentrated on painting, and finished the job.

The valley was quiet. Perhaps all the shooters had gone to sleep. Parvana felt close to the stars up on the roof, and she decided to sit a moment before she went inside. She needed a bit of time to herself. She needed to think about Mother.

She wished her mother had liked her more. She wished she hadn’t given her mother such a hard time. They always seemed to be fighting. They fought when times were good, when they lived in a fancy house and Parvana was in school, before the Taliban. They fought when times were hard, when they lived in one room in Kabul, her mother trapped there by the Taliban while Parvana went out to work. They fought in the refugee camp, as Mother tried to get Parvana to obey her when Parvana had been running her own life quite well for a long time. And they fought in the school, when they were finally living the dream they had worked so hard for.

But I loved her, Parvana thought. Did she love me?

Her mother had taken care of Parvana in the refugee camp, when Parvana was so sad over little Leila’s death. And she had praised Parvana when her class performed well at the festival.

Yes, her mother had loved her.

But she hadn’t always liked her.

And when Parvana really thought about it, she had to admit that she hadn’t really liked her mother, either. Not all the time, anyway. But she had loved her very, very much. And she was going to miss her.

She was so caught up in her thoughts she almost didn’t notice that someone — or something — was slowly coming up the road toward the school. In the darkness she couldn’t make it out. It sounded like an animal and it sounded like bells.

She lay flat on the roof and watched it come out of the night and stop at the front gate of her school.

It was a peddler. Parvana saw a thin man with a long beard sitting on a wagon. Pans and pots hung below — their rattling had been the bells she had heard. She saw chairs, wheels, lumber and other things piled high on the cart. She saw an old, tired horse snuffle in the dirt.

The peddler got down from the wagon and knocked on the gate.

Parvana scrambled down the ladder and crossed the yard before Asif made it out of the guardhouse.

“It’s a strange time of night to be selling things,” Parvana whispered.

“Maybe he’s lost and needs shelter for the night.”

“Maybe it’s a trick.”

“The Taliban doesn’t need to trick us,” Asif said. “They can just blow us up. So can the foreigners.”

Asif opened the little slot in the gate. Parvana heard the man say he was lost and tired and would pay if they would give water to his horse and let him and his cart spend the night inside the gate, away from bandits.

Asif didn’t even look to Parvana for permission. He just opened the gate to let him in.

Tugging on the reins of the horse, the man and his cart came into the yard. He looked shorter on the ground than he had from Parvana’s perch on the roof. He busied himself unhooking the cart. Ava brought a pail of water for the horse.

Only when the horse was drinking did the man look at each of the children, going from one to the other.

I should have grabbed a weapon, Parvana thought. She shifted her eyes from side to side, looking for the nearest stick or shovel.

The man finally came and stood before Parvana. He looked squarely at her, straight in the eyes.

They were exactly the same height.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not exactly the Eiffel Tower, is it?”

Parvana couldn’t take it in. She couldn’t understand what he was saying.

And then, all of a sudden, she did.

She reached out, grabbed the man’s beard, and pulled.

The beard came off.

Underneath it was her old friend, Shauzia.

“Mrs. Weera sent me,” Shauzia said. “How can I help?”