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“Give that back!” Pasoon cried, and he lunged for his plastic airplane.
Reshmina was too fast for him. She held it above her head and twisted away when Pasoon made another grab for it.
“Give it to me!” Pasoon commanded. “You’re just a girl!
You have to do what I tell you!”
“I’m not a girl, I’m your sister,” Reshmina shot back, which somehow made sense.
Pasoon swiped for the plane again, and Reshmina danced out of the way.
“You can’t tell the Taliban about Taz,” Reshmina told her brother. “We gave him asylum!”
“Taz?” Pasoon said.
Reshmina blushed. “That’s his name. The American soldier. And you can’t give him refuge and take revenge on
him at the same time!”
“See if I can’t,” Pasoon told her. “Badal is as Pashtunwali as nanawatai.”
Pasoon grabbed for the airplane, but Reshmina was too quick for him again.
“The Taliban don’t respect Pashtunwali,” Reshmina said. “They’ve killed just as many Afghans as the Americans have!”
“When was the last time we had peace?” Pasoon asked. “Under the Taliban, that’s when. They ended the civil war.”
“The Taliban killed whole families for no reason!” Reshmina told him, feeling a flash of frustration. “They made women wear burqas and locked them away in their houses!”
“They give people jobs,” Pasoon argued. “Darwesh and Amaan told me.”
“Darwesh and Amaan, Darwesh and Amaan!” Reshmina taunted in a singsong voice. “ ‘Darwesh and Amaan told me to jump off a mountain, so I did it!’ Do you ever have a thought that Darwesh and Amaan didn’t give you first?”
Pasoon’s expression turned stormy. “All right. Here’s my own thoughts, Reshmina. Do you think I’m going to be able to afford to get married herding goats that have nothing to eat and growing crops in a never-ending drought? No,” he said. “Why should I starve when the Taliban pay twenty times what I can make working for myself?”
“They’re killers, Pasoon. If you join them, you’ll become one too,” Reshmina said flatly.
“Have you forgotten who killed the person who gave me that plane?” Pasoon said, pointing at the toy. He sounded calmer now. More resolute. As though arguing with Reshmina had talked him into joining the Taliban, not out of it. “The Americans dropped a bomb on our sister,” Reshmina said. “On her wedding day.”
Reshmina tried to fight off that awful memory, but it came flooding back to her, overwhelming her.
The day had started as one of the happiest days of Reshmina’s life. Her sister Hila had been sixteen and promised in marriage to a boy from a neighboring village. It was tradition to escort the bride-to-be to the house of her new family, where the wedding would take place, and the procession was always a party. Reshmina’s whole village had turned out for the parade. Married couples walked arm in arm, and young people sang and danced and fired rifles in the air. Reshmina and Pasoon had been nine years old. They’d chased each other around the adults, laughing and squealing at the top of their lungs. Reshmina had finally caught Pasoon and paused to catch her breath.
That’s when Reshmina heard it. An angry buzz, like a hornet’s nest. She and Pasoon had looked up at the same time, searching the sky for the source of the sound.
Reshmina saw it now in her mind’s eye, as clear and sharp as she had seen it that day. An American drone, high in the sky. It was sleek and gray, with wide wings like an eagle and a tail like a fish. She and Pasoon had watched as it flew closer, closer, coming up behind the wedding procession. Something small and black detached from the drone and streaked out toward the front of the parade. Toward her sister in her beautiful wedding dress, surrounded by all her friends. Reshmina remembered the whoosh of the missile, the gray trail of smoke behind it, and then—
Reshmina turned away, feeling the heat of the blast on her face all over again as she stood here in the mountains with Pasoon, two years later.
Now that she was older, she understood what had happened. The happy gunshots of the wedding procession had registered as an attack on an American airplane flying so high up that none of them had even seen it or heard it.
But that had been enough for an American soldier in some tent miles away somewhere to fire a missile at them with a drone.
“If the Americans can’t be here without killing innocent people, they must leave the valley,” Pasoon told her now. “Otherwise, there will be jihad.”
Reshmina understood her brother’s anger. She felt it too.
But a holy war wasn’t the answer.
“So you’re going to leave our family and join the Taliban,” Reshmina said. “Leave me.”
Pasoon swallowed. “Yes. And not because Darwesh and Amaan told me to. Because I want to.”
Reshmina nodded. She had known this day was coming, but a part of her wanted to pretend that things would never change. That she and Pasoon could be young and happy and carefree forever. But they were both growing up fast. Too fast.
A chill went through her, like the winter wind cutting through her shawl.
Pasoon chose that moment to dive forward, not for the toy plane but for Reshmina. He tackled her to the ground and tried to pin her to take the plane away. Reshmina kicked and grunted, but where she was quick, Pasoon was strong. She tossed the plane away instead.
Pasoon scrambled over her, trying to get at the toy, and Reshmina grabbed his foot. Pasoon fell flat on his face in the dirt, and Reshmina ran and snatched up the plane before he could get to it.
“Ha!” Reshmina crowed, and she held the little plane in the air triumphantly.
Pasoon stood, and Reshmina was shocked to see tears in his eyes. She’d wanted to make him mad, not sad. She suddenly felt terrible for taking the toy from him.
“Keep it, then,” Pasoon said. He kicked a rock in Reshmina’s direction, a little of the old anger overriding his sadness, and then he turned and walked away.
Reshmina’s heart broke. As twins, she and Pasoon knew exactly how to hurt each other. But they had always known where the line was, and when they’d crossed it.
“Pasoon,” Reshmina called, following behind him. “Pasoon, I’m sorry.”
Pasoon didn’t want to listen, and Reshmina trailed along behind him in silence.
There was a graveyard on the other side of the mountain, and it matched their quiet mood as they walked through it. Hundreds of stone mounds dotted the hillside. The larger ones were for men and women. The smaller mounds belonged to children and babies. Some of the rock piles had colorful blankets on them—mementos left by loved ones for the recently buried. Over others bent tall wooden poles with ragged green flags on top, marking the graves of people who had died fighting the jihad against the Soviet Union when Reshmina’s parents were children. In some places, the stones were scattered and low, and it was hard to tell there had been a grave there at all.
“So many dead Afghans,” Reshmina said quietly. “Pasoon, if you join the Taliban, you’re just going to end up dead and buried under a pile of rocks somewhere.”
“So I should wait around to die in our village, like our sister?” Pasoon said without looking at her. Without stopping. “Like Barlas? Like old Nazanina? Like Uncle Mehtar? Baba’s leg was torn up by a land mine just clearing a field for planting. If I’m going to die one way or another, I might as well die fighting.”
“For revenge,” Reshmina said bitterly.
“For freedom,” Pasoon told her. “Everybody invades and tries to tell us how to live our lives. The Greeks, the
Mongols, the British, the Soviets, the Americans.” “The Taliban,” Reshmina added.
“The Taliban are Afghans.”
“Yes, but they only became powerful because they were supported by foreigners,” Reshmina said. She had learned about it in school. “People from Pakistan and from Saudi Arabia who wanted to tell us how to live. And invaders always beat us so easily because they have better weapons than we do. Greek shields, Mongol bows, British cannons, Soviet gunships, Taliban rockets.”
“American drones,” Pasoon added.
“Yes, American drones,” Reshmina said, feeling a pang of sorrow for Hila all over again. “But you know why we’re always behind? Because while everybody else in the world is making things, we’re fighting wars. We never get to move ahead, Pasoon. We’re stuck in the past.”
“Infidels and outsiders may conquer us,” Pasoon said, still looking ahead. “But they can never rule us. Conquering Afghanistan and keeping it are two different things.”
Reshmina huffed. Pasoon wasn’t listening to her.
“Why would anybody want to rule Afghanistan?” she asked, frustrated. “There’s nothing left to rule.”
Reshmina saw a dried-up old cedar cone on the ground and picked it up. Once, their father had told them, giant cedars towered over every kilometer of these mountains. Anaa told stories of streets in the capital, Kabul, lined with cedar trees. Now those trees were all but gone. Each invading army had cut down more and more of them, and the Afghans had cut down still more to pay for weapons to drive the invaders out again. Now Afghanistan was brown and rocky and dead. The only cedars left survived in the most inhospitable mountains, places where even armies feared to go.
Is there some life left in this old cedar cone? Reshmina wondered. Something dormant inside, ready to sprout if given the room and resources to grow?
Reshmina broke open the cone. There were still seeds inside. She took one, leaned over, and pushed the seed deep into the ground. That seed would grow to be a cedar tree fifty meters tall and stand for a thousand years—if only everyone would let it.
“Pasoon,” Reshmina said, “what if there was another way? What if—”
But when she looked up, Pasoon was gone.
