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“Five. Six. Seven. Eight.” Reshmina counted in English as she picked up sticks for firewood. “Nine. Eleven.” No—she had missed a number. Ten.
Reshmina stood and straightened her back. It was early morning, crisp and cool. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue, and Reshmina could see all the way to the towering mountain range that separated her home in Afghanistan from its neighboring country, Pakistan. The mountains were arid and brown, with snowcapped peaks. Down below, a green-and-gold patchwork of rice paddies and wheat fields and vegetable gardens lined a lazy brown river.
It was September. Soon, Reshmina realized with a pang of sadness, it would be time for the harvest. Reshmina’s parents would keep her home from school to help. Reshmina hated missing school.
“Taliban attack!” her twin brother, Pasoon, cried, leaping out from behind the bush where he’d been hiding.
Reshmina screamed in surprise, and the stack of firewood in her arms went flying.
Pasoon held a stick like a rifle and pretended to shoot at her. “Pakow pakow pakow!”
Reshmina shoved her brother with both hands. “Pasoon, you snake! Look what you made me do! Now I have to start all over.”
Pasoon cackled at his own joke. “I was just trying to help.
See?” He offered her his fake rifle. “I brought you a stick.”
Reshmina snatched the stick from him. “Some help,” she said. “How long were you waiting behind that bush?”
“All morning!” Pasoon said, pleased with himself. “You took forever to get here.”
Reshmina and Pasoon were both thin, with round faces, brown skin, big brown eyes, and black hair. Pasoon’s hair was short and unkempt while Reshmina’s was long, carefully combed, and tucked under a black headscarf. Pasoon was a little taller than Reshmina, but they looked more alike than different.
How they lived was another matter entirely.
As a boy, Pasoon had time for games and practical jokes. His only chore was to take the goats up into the mountains to graze for a few hours. As a girl, Reshmina worked from the moment she woke up until she went to sleep at night. While Pasoon had been lying in wait for her, Reshmina had been hauling water up from the river. There were also clothes to be washed, rugs to be beaten and stacked, floors to be swept, animals to be fed, food to be cooked—and, every afternoon, the two-kilometer walk back and forth to school. Pasoon didn’t even do that anymore. He’d quit going to school a year ago.
Pasoon bent down and began collecting some of the sticks he’d made Reshmina drop.
“I heard you practicing your English,” he told her. Their native language was Pashto, the language of the Afghan mountains. They both knew some Dari too—the language
spoken in much of the rest of Afghanistan. Of the two of them, only Reshmina had kept up with her English lessons.
“Why?” Pasoon asked. “What do you mean why?”
“I mean why bother?” said Pasoon.
“I’m learning English because I’m going to be a teacher,” Reshmina told him.
“Be a teacher?” Pasoon cried. “The man you marry is never going to let you work!”
Reshmina frowned. Pasoon was probably right. In Afghanistan, women had to do what their husbands told them to, and most men told their wives they had to stay home and take care of the house and raise a family. Reshmina’s schoolteacher was a woman, but she was from Australia and unmarried.
“I’ll teach until I’m married, then,” Reshmina said. But she knew that was a fantasy. Reshmina’s parents had just arranged for her sister Marzia to be married to an older man when she turned sixteen next year. When Reshmina turned sixteen five years from now, she’d be married off too. She would go right from school to her new home.
Reshmina’s parents had planned the same fate for Reshmina’s eldest sister, Hila. But Hila had died before she could be married.
Reshmina felt a rush of sadness at the thought of her sister. Hila, who’d been like a second mother to Reshmina and Pasoon. Who’d made up stories for them, and taught them to read. Who loved jumping out and scaring them and chasing them all around the house pretending to be a mountain lion.
Reshmina fought off the pain of remembering.
“Besides,” she said now, turning back to Pasoon, “it’s 2019. Everyone speaks English.”
Pasoon scoffed. “Darwesh and Amaan say that when the Taliban win and the Americans leave, nobody will care about speaking English anymore.”
Reshmina shook her head. Darwesh and Amaan were two foolish boys who were three years older than Pasoon, and he followed them around like a baby chick. Darwesh and Amaan had left home last month, and everyone knew where they had gone. The same place all the young men went, eventually. Up into the mountains to join the Taliban.
Talib meant “student” in Pashto, and the Taliban had
begun as a group of men who had studied at traditional Islamic schools. The Taliban followed a very strict interpretation of religious law, and during Afghanistan’s last civil war in the 1990s, they’d fought their way to power.
Reshmina’s mother and grandmother had told Reshmina horror stories about life under Taliban rule: how the Taliban beat men for not growing beards, massacred families, burned down schools, and put on public executions in the soccer stadium in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. It had been even worse for women. The Taliban banned girls from going to school or having jobs, beat women who left their houses without a male family member, and sold girls into slavery. The American army had driven the Taliban out of power twenty years ago, but the Taliban were still around, hiding out in the mountains, right where Reshmina lived. And the American army was still here too, fighting the Taliban alongside the Afghan National Army.
The Taliban had changed though. They were far less organized now. Some of their fighters were still motivated by the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam. Others welcomed any excuse to drive the foreign invaders from Afghanistan. Some of them were just poor boys from mountain villages who were hungry and needed a job. But they all shared a hatred of the Americans and the American-
supported Afghan government, and fought them both whenever and however they could.
Pasoon turned his back to Reshmina to pick up another stick, and Reshmina saw her chance for revenge. She worked little sticks between the fingers of each hand like claws and snuck up on Pasoon.
“Snow leopard attack!” she cried, and jumped on his back.
Pasoon screamed and dropped all the sticks he’d been collecting. Reshmina scratched at his neck with her makeshift claws, and Pasoon fell to the ground. In seconds they were tumbling and wrestling and laughing like they had when they were little, before Hila had died and Marzia had been promised in marriage and Pasoon had started talking about joining the Taliban.
At last Pasoon swept her knees out from under her, and Reshmina fell to the dirt beside him. They lay on their backs, panting and staring up into the cloudless blue sky, and Reshmina’s hand found Pasoon’s. He didn’t pull away, and Reshmina smiled. This, right here, right now, was what Reshmina wanted most in the world. What had been slipping away from her, bit by bit, as she and her brother got older. If only she could go back in time, to those days when she and Pasoon had chased each other in the hills and gone swimming in the deepest part of the river and played hide- and-seek in the caves beneath their village.
Reshmina wished she could capture this moment in a jar. Preserve it in amber. Hila was lost to her, and soon Marzia would be married and gone, and Pasoon would follow Darwesh and Amaan into the mountains, and Reshmina …
From their village around the mountain came the sudden sound of a woman’s cry. Then Reshmina heard a man yell, “Open up!”
Reshmina felt goose bumps on her skin. Pasoon pulled his hand from hers, and they both sat up quickly. Something was happening in their village.
Something bad.
Pasoon hopped to his feet and ran down the hill, and Reshmina hurried to follow him. They rounded the mountain and slid to a stop at the edge of the river.
Afghan men wearing green camouflage uniforms and carrying automatic rifles—soldiers from the Afghan National Army—were pounding on doors in Reshmina’s village, demanding to be let inside homes. And there were American soldiers with them, directing their movements.
Reshmina gasped. Her village was being raided!
