Taliban, they are still here, Aman,” she said, and she could not stop herself from crying now. “They are everywhere, in the police, in the army, like wolves in sheep’s clothing. Everyone knows who they are, and everyone is too frightened to speak. That man in the market, he was one of those who came to the cave and took your father away, and killed him.”
I turned around to look. I wanted to run back and tell him face to face he was a killer. I wanted to look him in the eye and accuse him. I wanted to show him I was not afraid. “Don’t look,” Mother said, dragging me on. “Don’t do anything, Aman, please. You’ll only make it worse.”
She waited till we were safely out of town before telling me more. “He was cheating me in the market,” she said, “and when I argued, he told me that if I do not leave the valley, he will tell his brother, and he will have me taken to prison again. And I know his brother only too well. He was the policeman who put me in prison before. He was the one who beat me, and tortured me. It wasn’t because of the apple you stole, Aman. It was so that I would not tell anyone about what his brother had done to your father, so that I would not say he was Taliban. What can I do? I cannot leave Grandmother. She cannot look after herself. What can I do?” I held her hand to try to comfort her, but she cried all the way home. I kept telling her it would be all right, that I would look after her.
That night I heard Mother and Grandmother whispering to each other in the cave, and crying together too. When they finally went to sleep, the dog crept into the cave and lay down beside me. I buried my face in her fur and held her tight. “It will be all right, won’t it?” I said to her.
But I knew it wasn’t going to be. I knew something terrible was going to happen. I could feel it.
“Walk Tall, Aman.”
Aman
Early the next day the police came to the cave. Mother had gone down to the stream for water, so I was there alone with Grandmother when they came, three of them. The stallholder from the market was with them. They said they had come to search the place.
When Grandmother struggled to her feet and tried to stop them, they pushed her to the ground. Then they turned on me and started to beat me and kick me. That was when I saw the dog come bounding into the cave. She didn’t hesitate. She leaped up at them, barking and snarling. But they lashed out at her with their feet and their sticks and drove her out.
After that they seemed to forget about me, and just broke everything they could in the cave, kicked our things all over the place, stamped on our cooking pot, and one of them peed on the mattress before they left.
I didn’t realise at first how badly Grandmother had been hurt, not till I rolled her over on to her back. Her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. She must have hit her head when she fell. There was a great cut across her forehead. I tried to wash the blood away, kept trying to wake her. But the blood kept coming, and she wouldn’t open her eyes.
When Mother came back some time later, she did all she could to revive her, but it was no good. Grandmother died that evening. Sometimes I think she died because she just didn’t want to wake up, because she knew it was the only way to make Mother and me leave, the only way to save us. So maybe Grandmother won her argument with Mother, in her own way, the only way she could.
We left Bamiyan the next day, the day Grandmother was buried. We did as Grandmother had told us. We took Father’s donkey with us, to carry the few belongings we had, the cooking things, the blankets and the mattress, with Grandmother’s jewels and Uncle Mir’s money hidden inside it. We took some bread and apples with us, gifts from our friends for the journey, and walked out of the valley. I tried not to look back, but I did. I could not help myself.
Because of everything that had happened, I think, I had almost forgotten about the dog, which hardly seems fair when I think about it. After all, only the day before, she had tried to save my life in the cave. Anyway, she just appeared, suddenly, from out of nowhere. She was just there, walking alongside us for a while, then running on ahead, as if she was leading us, as if she knew where she was going. Every now and then, she would stop, and start sniffing at the ground busily, then turn to look back at us. I wasn’t sure whether it was to check we were coming, or to tell us everything was all right, that this was the road to Kabul, that all we had to do was follow her.
Mother and I took it in turns to ride up on the donkey. We did not talk much. We were both too sad, about Grandmother’s death, about leaving, and too tired as well. But to begin with the journey went well enough. We had plenty of food and water to keep us going. The donkey kept plodding on, and the dog stayed with us, still going on ahead of us, nose to the ground, tail wagging wildly.
Mother said it was going to take us many days of walking to reach Kabul, but we managed to find shelter somewhere each night. People were kind to us and hospitable. The country people in Afghanistan haven’t much, but what they have, they share.
At the end of each day’s walk, we were always tired out. I wasn’t exactly happy. I couldn’t be. But I was excited. I knew I was setting out on the biggest adventure of my life. I was going to see the world beyond the mountains, like Uncle Mir.
I was going to England.
As we came closer to Kabul, the road was busier than it had been, with lorries and army trucks and carts. The donkey was nervous in the traffic, so Mother and I were walking. Then we saw ahead of us the police checkpoint. I could tell at once that Mother was terrified. She reached for my hand, clutched it and did not let go. She kept telling me not to be frightened, that it would be all right, God willing. But I knew she was telling herself that, more than she was telling me.
As we reached the barrier the police started shouting at the dog, swearing at her, then throwing stones. One of the stones hit her and she ran off, yelping in pain. That made me really angry, angry enough to be brave. I found myself swearing back at them, telling them exactly what I thought of them, what everyone thought of the police. They were all around us then, like angry bees, shouting at us, calling us filthy Hazara dogs, threatening us with their rifles.
Then – and I couldn’t believe it at first – the dog came back. She was so brave. She just went for them, snarling and barking, and she managed to bite one of them on the leg too, before they kicked her away. Then they were shooting at her. This time when she ran away, she did not come back. After that, they took us off behind their hut, pushed us up against the wall, and demanded to see our ID papers. I thought they were going to shoot us, they were that angry.
They told Mother our papers were like us, no good, that we couldn’t have them back, unless we handed over our money. Mother refused. So they searched us both, roughly, and disrespectfully too. They found nothing, of course.
But then they searched the mattress.
They cut it open, and found the money and Grandmother’s jewellery. The policemen shared out Uncle Mir’s money and Grandmother’s jewellery there and then, right in front of our eyes. They took what food we had left, even our water.
One of them, the officer in charge I think he was, handed me back the empty envelope, and our papers. Then, with a sarcastic grin all over his horrible face, he dropped a couple of coins into my hand. “You see how generous we are,” he said. “Even if you are Hazara, we wouldn’t want you to starve, would we?”
Before we left, they decided to take Father’s donkey too. All we had in the world as we walked away from that checkpoint, with their laughter and their jeering ringing in our ears, were a couple of coins and the clothes we stood up in. Mother’s hand grasped mine tightly. “Walk tall, Aman. Do not bow your head,” she said. “We are Hazara. We will not cry. We will not let them see us cry. God will look after us.”
We both held back our tears. I was proud of her for doing that, and I was proud of me too.
An hour or so later we were sitting there by the side of the road. Mother was wailing and crying, her head in her hands. She seemed to have lost all heart, all hope. I think I was too