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Reshmina woke to the sound of singing.
We are Afghan people
We are Afghans of the mountains
It was pitch-black and Reshmina couldn’t see, but she would know the sound of her grandmother’s voice anywhere. The song she was singing, “Momardene Afghane,” was one of Anaa’s favorites.
Ears ringing, dust clogging her mouth and throat, Reshmina crawled toward the sound. She found her grandmother lying on the ground, half-covered by the door of an old Soviet truck.
“I figured if I kept singing, someone would find me,” her grandmother rasped.
Reshmina pulled the door off her. “Are you all right, Anaa?”
“I may have a broken bone or two,” she admitted. “Just let me lie here, Mina-jan.”
Reshmina’s heart skipped a beat. Her grandmother was as stubborn as a donkey when it came to doctors. She claimed she’d never been sick in her life, but Reshmina knew she just didn’t like to make trouble. She might be lying there without a leg right now and not even admit it.
Reshmina patted her grandmother’s body just to be sure. “Stop fussing,” Anaa groused.
Reshmina heard whining and crying in the darkness—her brother! Zahir was alive!
“Hush,” Reshmina’s mother said, her voice heavy. “Anaa, keep singing.”
“Mor!” Reshmina cried. She wanted to go to her mother, but where was she?
Reshmina’s grandmother sang “Momardene Afghane” again, and Reshmina heard the sound of people crawling to them through the scraps of old Soviet metal that had been scattered by the blast. First came her mother and Zahir. Then Marzia. As Reshmina hugged her family, more people found them: an old couple from next door, a young girl from farther up the steps. Taz too.
For a little while, everyone was too dazed to move or speak. Anaa finished her song, and things grew deathly, oppressively quiet. They couldn’t even feel vibrations anymore from the fighting up above.
“Is everyone all right?” Taz asked at last. “What’s happened? I still can’t see.”
“I don’t know,” Reshmina told him. “We can’t see either. It’s completely dark. Wait,” she remembered. “The flashlight!”
Thank God she had put it in her pocket before the explosion. She put her hand in her pocket, but when she touched the flashlight, a sharp pain shot through her palm and she gasped.
“What is it, Mina-jan?” Mor asked in Pashto.
“What’s wrong?” Taz asked in English.
Reshmina pulled the flashlight out with her other hand and clicked it on. Everyone squinted again in the bright light. Even Taz, a little.
“Hey—I can see that!” Taz said. “Not great, but I can see a dull glow! I think my eyes are getting better.”
Reshmina shined the light on her hand. There was a deep gash across her right palm. It must have happened when part of the ceiling caved in.
“I have a bad cut. On my hand,” Reshmina told her mother, then translated for Taz.
Reshmina’s mother started to tear a piece of cloth from her tunic for a bandage.
“Wait. I have some Kerlix,” Taz told them.
Reshmina didn’t know that word, but it was some kind of bandage Taz carried in his pockets. He told her how to use it, and she pushed the gauze into her cut with a hiss of pain. “Sorry,” he told her. “This stuff is good, but if the cut’s deep, you may still end up with a scar. See? I’ve got one too.” He held out his hand to show her. He had a long, dirty scar in almost the same place on his palm. “It still aches every now and then, when it’s cold and gloomy outside,” he
told her. “But most of the time …”
Taz paused, as though what he was saying brought back a painful memory for him.
“But most of the time you just forget it’s there,” he finished.
Some of the others in the cave had injuries too.Reshmina did what she could to help them with the bandages Taz had given her.
“Where are all the other people?” Reshmina’s mother asked. “There were a lot more of us before.”
Reshmina turned the flashlight toward the front of the cave. Where there had once been a large, open cavern filled
with old Soviet equipment, now there was just a pile of rocks.
The whole front half of the ceiling had caved in.
Reshmina explored the rockfall, looking for a way through. She stopped when she saw the legs of some poor soul sticking out from under a boulder, the rest of the woman’s body crushed in the cave-in.
Crushed like all the other people who’d been with them in the cave.
And there was no way through. The fallen rocks covered everything.
I’ve killed us, Reshmina thought. Everyone we know and love. Mor was right. I brought death to our village when I brought Taz into our home. She cried silently. She had chosen what was right over what was easy. She had dared to be someone new, someone better, to carve a path for herself. And look at where it had gotten her: buried with her family in a grave of her own making.
Reshmina quickly swept the light away, so no one else could see the body.
“Is it bad?” Taz asked.
Reshmina felt the anger of a hundred souls well up inside her, and she turned on the American soldier.
“Is it bad?” she said. “Yes, it’s bad! There was only one entrance to this cave, and now we’re trapped! We’re trapped, and all those other people who were in here with us are dead!”
Reshmina picked up a rock from the ground and hurled it at Taz. He still couldn’t see well, but he heard the rock strike the wall behind him and flinched. Reshmina picked up another stone and threw it at him, hitting him in the arm.
“Hey, what—?” he started to ask.
“We’re trapped and they’re dead and it’s all your fault!” Reshmina yelled at him. It wasn’t her fault for dreaming. It
was his fault for being here. “But I didn’t—”
“You and all the other Americans!” Reshmina told him. She threw another rock that clanged off an old Soviet hubcap. “Why don’t you get out of Afghanistan? All you’re doing is killing us!”
“We’re trying to fix things!” Taz argued.
“Things you broke to begin with!” Reshmina told him. “We’re building wells. Roads. Schools!” Taz said.
“Probably the school you go to.”
“You killed my sister!” Reshmina cried.
Taz looked horrified. “I what? How? When?”
“Not you. Your country,” Reshmina said. She was crying now, big wet tears fed by the horrible things that had happened two years ago, and today. “You bombed my sister! She died. So many of our friends did too.”
“I’m sorry,” Taz told her. “Really, I am. But we’re fighting a war against the Taliban. Sometimes innocent people get hurt. We’re trying to help.”
Reshmina burned inside. Was this anger what Pasoon felt all the time? The fury that had pushed him to join the Taliban?
“You can help us by leaving,” Reshmina told Taz. “My village was never bombed until the Americans came!”
“We have to be here,” Taz argued. “Do you know the first thing that will happen if the US leaves Afghanistan? There will be another civil war, and the Taliban will take over again. You’re too young to remember, Reshmina, but they did awful things. They are bad, bad people.”
“I know all about the Taliban!” Reshmina told him. “I know how awful they are.”
“Well, if we leave, you’ll be right back where you started before we got here.”
“But your drones kill as many of us as them,” Reshmina said. She held up her injured hand. “You bandage our wounds and want us to say thank you, but you’re the reason we were hurt.”
Taz was quiet for a moment. “If we can just beat the Taliban. Get Afghanistan back on its feet. Give you a chance to grow …”
Reshmina remembered the cedar cone in the graveyard— and the graves from the previous wars. All those invaders who had swept to victory with their superior weapons, only to be driven out again by Afghan fighters.
“You say you have been here for ten years,” Reshmina said. “Your country has been here nearly twice that long. And still you haven’t won. You never will. Nobody can rule Afghanistan. Not even Afghans. So I ask you again: Why are you still here?”
Taz looked away without answering.
“Zahir! Come away from there!” Reshmina’s mother called.
Reshmina shined the flashlight in her little brother’s direction. All she could see was his legs, sticking out from under a rock. For a horrible moment, she thought Zahir had been buried like the lady at the front of the cave. But Zahir just had his head in a hole in the wall—a crack that had opened up during the cave-in. Marzia and their mother were able to drag the curious two-year-old out by his ankles.
Reshmina examined the hole with her flashlight, and she gasped.
“What is it? What’s under there?” asked a woman standing nearby.
Reshmina felt a tiny spark of hope rekindle in her chest, and she turned excitedly to the others.
“It might be another way out!”
