Home Is Beyond the Mountains (8 page)

She jumped back. Her voice
was a squeak.

“Benyamin? Is it
you?”

“What are you doing out
here?” Benyamin almost shouted.

Samira found her voice. “I'm
here because you ran away! I've been so worried and you expect me to just
sleep as usual?”

“I decided to come back,”
said Benyamin. “I've been walking all night.”

“You don't sound very happy
about it,” said Samira. He was damp from the mist and looked as if he was
awake by willpower alone. She felt herself shaking with relief. Benyamin was
back.

“I'm not happy about it,” he
said, “but this is where I must be now. Samira, we walked to the mountains
yesterday. Just before it got dark we came to a narrow valley. Papa and I
came to a valley like that when we ran from the soldiers. Just before we
went in Papa looked back to where you and Mama were far behind us and said,
‘We should have stayed together.' That's what came into my mind and I knew I
had to come back. No one was chasing me but I couldn't go on without you. I
had to come back. Papa would say that we should stay together.”

“I'm glad you thought of
Papa,” said Samira. “But what about Simon and Yakob?”

“They wanted to go on. They
said that they were with each other and that was enough for them. They were
angry with me but I thought of Papa and I knew he was right.”

Samira said, “If we stay
together we'll get somewhere. Maybe home. But somewhere. Now come and have
some tea. It's nearly breakfast time and the cook will have water boiling.
You must be very hungry.”

When Mr. Edwards saw
Benyamin, he asked him a few questions and then sent him to the tent to
sleep. By suppertime everybody knew he was back. He could hardly eat because
they were all asking him questions, mostly about Yakob and Simon.

“They went on,” said
Benyamin. “That's all I know. I gave them all my food and my knife so they'd
have a spare. That was all I could do.”

There was no news of the
boys that night or the next day. A week passed, and talk died down but the
thought of them was in everyone's mind.

Anna said, “We will never
know what happened to those two. I think they will be lost in the mountains
forever.”

But Anna was wrong.

When Yakob and Simon had
been gone for eleven days, Mr. Edwards called all the children together.
Samira came into the building hardly able to breathe. She was sure that she
was about to hear terrible news, but when she saw Mr. Edwards' face she
began to hope.

“Our two runaways were very
lucky,” he said. “Simon fell into a crevasse and broke his leg. It was
impossible for Yakob to get him up the steep wall of rock so he stayed with
him. They ran out of food and they wouldn't have lasted much longer but some
Kurdish hunters found them and took them to their village. The Kurds took
care of the boys until they could get them to the camp of one of the road
crews. So Simon and Yakob are safe. Yakob will come back here. Simon will be
in the town of Kermanshah where there's a doctor who can try to set his leg.
After so many days I don't know how that will go. But they are both alive.
We can thank God for that.”

Three days later Yakob
returned to the camp. Mr. Edwards told the children not to bother him with
questions. The result was that everyone fell strangely silent when Yakob was
near. Then they realized that Yakob wanted to talk.

“Benyamin has probably told
you how foolish we were,” he said. “We didn't have enough food or equipment
for sleeping and cooking. When Simon fell I thought we were going to die and
then the Kurds came. When we saw them we were frightened.” He looked around
at his friends. “Remember how afraid we were of the Kurds?”

“Of course,” said Benyamin.
“They did many terrible things to our people.”

“I thought they would kill
us,” said Yakob. “But they took us to their village and fed us and took care
of us. We were lucky that they found us. So that's our story. Thanks to the
Kurds we're alive, but we didn't get home.”

“We have to find another
way,” said Benyamin.

Summer came. One hot day
when the children were all waiting for permission to go into the lake, a
lady named Miss Watson came from Baghdad. She was thin and neat. None of the
children had seen her before.

Samira and Anna, who were
sitting in the shade of the schoolroom, heard her say to Mr. Edwards,
“Shouldn't these children be in school on a Wednesday morning?”

“We have no teachers at the
moment, Miss Watson. You people in Baghdad should know this. We've been
waiting for a new teacher for the girls and then the boys' teacher got sick
two weeks ago and left.”

Miss Watson said, “I wasn't
aware of the situation but it doesn't matter. I bring very good news. Read
this document and call the children in. I'll tell them about it.”

“What can it be?” Samira
whispered to Anna. “Could they possibly be taking us back to our
villages?”

Anna looked up at the
mountains.

“Of course not,” she said.
“You know what they always say. The roads are still bad from the war. Travel
is dangerous. There is still fighting. No, that's not the good news.” Still,
she followed Samira into the school building to hear the important
announcement.

“Children,” Miss Watson
said. “I have come to tell you that this camp will be closing immediately.
You are all going to Hamadan to live in a permanent orphanage. The British
army has turned over a group of buildings to the Near East Relief. You won't
live in tents anymore.” She paused and looked at the rows of children.

Samira whispered to Anna,
“Does she want us to cheer?”

Miss Watson went on quickly,
“Your job now is to get everything packed and ready for the trucks when they
come in a few days.”

It was easy to see that Miss
Watson thought they should all be very happy and grateful, but Samira didn't
know what she felt. She said to Benyamin after the meeting, “Will this be a
step in the right direction? Are you happy to go to Hamadan?”

“Hamadan is closer to the
places all of us came from,” said Benyamin. “So I guess it's the right
direction. But she said it would be a permanent orphanage. That means it
will be there forever. I hope they remember that we don't want to stay there
forever.”

Still, Samira began to look
forward to being somewhere that was not a camp.

Days passed and no trucks
came. Miss Watson had to agree with the children that they couldn't pack in
advance. The cooking pots and dishes had to be used at every meal, and each
child had only one change of clothes. There was nothing to do but wait.

Then, at last, on a morning
at the very end of August, Miss Watson gathered all one hundred and fifty
children on the playing field.

“A message has come from the
city,” she said. “The trucks will be here by noon. Pack your things now.
Girls, you are in charge of the smaller children. Boys, it's your job to
take down the tents.”

Now that they were really
leaving, the children were filled with energy. Maybe they would not be left
in the Hamadan Orphanage and forgotten. Right now Samira almost believed
it.

It took the girls no more
than ten minutes to pack their belongings. Samira stuffed her extra dress —
too short, of course — her underwear and her books into a cotton bag. She
rolled up her sleeping mat and the quilt that had not kept her warm in the
winter.

When she looked around, all
the other girls were packed, too.

Elias sat on his sleeping
mat watching her, and she realized that he wasn't sure what was happening.

“Where are we going?” he
asked. “Will we go on the train again?”

Samira sat down beside him.
“Do you remember the train?”

He nodded. “Very loud.”

“Yes, it was,” said Samira.
“Well, this time we'll go in trucks like the ones they bring supplies in. We
get to ride in the back. It'll be fun. Lots of bouncing.” She wasn't sure it
would be fun, but it would be better than walking.

“But where are we going?”

“We are going to a city
called Hamadan. We'll live in real buildings with walls and a roof. Like the
schoolroom. No tents. And we'll eat and go to school and play just the way
we do here. But it will be better.” Anna looked at Samira from where she was
helping the little girls pack and shook her head a little.

“It will be better,” said
Samira again.

Elias nodded and Samira
smiled. At least he believed her.

Not Just Orphans

September 1922

BEFORE THE
CHILDREN
climbed into the backs of the heavy army trucks, Miss
Watson came around.

“It's not far to Hamadan,
but we must go over the Assadabad Pass. The road is very steep and you'll
have to walk so that the trucks can make it to the top. We'll camp one night
along the way.” She suddenly smiled a real smile. “You children certainly
know how to do that!”

The road was very rough. It
seemed to Samira that the truck was leaping over the bumps. The older girls
sat as firmly as they could on the benches, each one tightly holding on to a
smaller child. They all swayed and bounced as the truck jolted along,
churning up dust. Samira covered her mouth with her scarf and squinted to
keep as much dust as possible out of her eyes, but she had to keep looking
around, too.

The road went along a valley
at the bottom of brown mountains. Nothing was green. The grass was dried
golden, and the few bushes and trees were as dusty brown as the road. Every
now and then they passed a village, but most of the houses were half fallen
in, and Samira saw no people in the fields. The war had been here.

Samira had asked one of the
teachers at Kermanshah why so many of the villages were ruined.

“Everywhere there was a real
road the armies came and villages were fought over,” he told her. “People
had no choice but to run away, and now they have nothing to come home to.
Some of the villages far from roads were not so damaged.”

Now Samira thought of Ayna,
her village. No one ever drove there in a truck, and it was a long day's
walk from the city. Was her house still standing? What would she and
Benyamin do if they got to Ayna and the roofs of the houses were caved in
and the walls were crumbling?

The truck slowed down. The
sound of the motor changed, grinding and struggling. Samira leaned out to
see around the cab of the truck. The road ahead was very steep.

The truck stopped and Samira
stood up.

“It's time to walk,” she
said, and all the children jumped down and began to walk beside the road.

It felt good not to be
bouncing on a hard bench, and at first they ran and skipped ahead of the
trucks. But then the mountain seemed to be holding them back. They began to
trudge up the steep slope, and the trucks slowly passed them.

As the last one ground its
way past the panting children, Miss Watson waved to them from the window,
pointing up ahead.

“We'll wait for you at the
top,” she called.

Benyamin came and walked
beside Samira.

“We're going east,” he said.
“But if we went north and just a little west and kept going we would come to
Ayna.”

“Benyamin, don't think about
it. We can't do it.”

“I know that even better
than you,” said Benyamin. “But don't forget. We did walk all the way
once.”

Samira's eyes opened wide.
Benyamin was right. They had walked all the way from Ayna to Hamadan that
long time ago.

Benyamin reached out to
touch her shoulder.

“I can't help thinking about
it,” he said. “But you don't have to. We'll be safe in Hamadan and we'll see
what happens next.”

When the children arrived,
panting, at the top of the pass, Miss Watson said, “Our documents have been
checked and we can go on to our camping place. Tomorrow will be downhill
almost all the way.”

The next morning the
travelers woke very early. They ate bread and hard-boiled eggs and were on
their way as the sun rose.

Samira ached all over from
the bouncing. Anna wouldn't talk and Elias complained about having to sit
down as the truck rolled along. But before the sun was overhead they began
to pass houses along the road. They were almost there.

Suddenly there was a shout
from the truck ahead. “We have arrived!”

The trucks slowed down and
all the children stood up to get a look at their new home. They were
approaching a high wall made of mud bricks. There was a wide wooden gate in
the wall, and a man appeared and opened it to let the trucks bump into the
yard.

Most of the children sat
down so they wouldn't fall, but Samira kept a firm hand on Elias's shoulder
to steady herself. She had a good view of the orphanage before the truck
lurched to a stop.

She saw a group of low gray
buildings with small windows like little blind eyes. The earth around the
buildings was bare and trampled. The whole place looked lonely and empty of
spirit.

The moment the trucks
stopped moving, the children jumped out, and suddenly the space was filled
with life. The older children stood and looked at the buildings that would
be their home, but the younger ones ran and jumped and called to each other.

Miss Watson appeared with a
key in her hand and unlocked the door at the end of the nearest building.
She turned to Samira and Anna who were standing close by and said, “You can
go in if you like.”

“We might as well see the
worst,” said Anna.

Elias came and took Samira's
hand and they walked through the door. Before them was a hallway that
stretched to the end of the building, with open doors on either side. Elias
let go of Samira and ran the whole length of the hall. Then he ran into
every room, zigzagging back and forth. She followed slowly.

There wasn't much to see.
Every room was exactly the same, square with mud brick walls and one small
window that gave a glimpse of the bare yard and the wall with the tops of
the mountains beyond it, far away.

Elias ran up to her. “There
is a roof and windows just like you said. It's a house for us.”

Samira looked at his grubby,
shining face and thought, “He can't remember a house with rugs on the floor
and cushions and an oven to make it warm. He only remembers tents.”

When they were back outside
she looked around the empty yard and asked Miss Watson, “Why is everything
so bare? People lived here, didn't they?”

“During the war these were
barracks where soldiers from India lived. They were part of the British army
and they went home when the war ended. The buildings have stood empty for
the past four years. Finally the army has decided to give them to us to use
for the orphanage.”

She sighed. “We would have
liked to have the orphanage inside the city walls where there's a school and
a hospital, but Hamadan is crowded with thousands of refugees. They ran away
from the war, too, and they're still stuck here. There is simply no place in
the city to put all of you. We're lucky to have these buildings, and it only
takes half an hour to walk into the city.”

“The camp was better than
this ugly place,” Anna said stubbornly.

Miss Watson frowned a
little. “When I come back to visit I'm sure everything will look very
different.”

“You aren't going to stay?”

“Oh, no,” said Miss Watson
briskly. “I have to go back to Baghdad. I came to help you make the journey.
But I'll leave you in good hands. The new director will arrive soon and get
things fixed up. In the meantime, Mr. Edwards will be here.”

As the children sat on the
ground eating their noon meal, Miss Watson told them that five buildings
would be used as dormitories. The girls would have three buildings because
some of the smallest boys would stay with them.

“Two or three to a room,”
she said. “I'll assign the rooms after you eat and then you can get
yourselves settled. I'll come by later to see that everything is in
order.”

Getting settled took only a
few minutes. Samira and Anna unrolled the sleeping mats, spread out the
quilts and arranged the clothes bundles against the wall, as usual.

When Miss Watson came in she
looked at the three beds. “I suppose that soon Elias will go and live with
the boys. Do you know how old he is?”

“He was a tiny baby when he
came to the camp at Baqubah,” said Samira. “He was there for three years,
like us, and then he was at Kermanshah.”

“So he's about four years
old,” said Anna.

“Of course,” said Miss
Watson. “All of you have been in camps for four years. I knew that but I
never thought of a child spending his whole life in camps. And you girls
were quite young when you had to leave your villages. You must remember very
little of your lives before you came to Baqubah.”

Samira and Anna didn't say
anything. Why should they tell her what they remembered?

Miss Watson glanced around
the room again. “You've made it very neat but that floor will need more
sweeping. I know the relief people tried to clean this place before you came
but it really is disgracefully dusty.” She shook her head and went off to
check the room next door.

Samira made sure that Miss
Watson couldn't hear her before she said, “Miss Watson doesn't know anything
about dirt floors, does she?”

“Always dusty,” said Anna.
“We need rugs, not sweeping.”

“I guess we remember
something about our lives before Baqubah,” said Samira. “Now let's find
Elias. It's bedtime.”

The next morning Miss Watson
left and Mr. Edwards arrived.

“I'm your director again,”
he said. “But this time it's definitely temporary. You'll be getting a
permanent director before long. But we'll get things started as best we
can.”

Samira and Anna looked at
each other. They could tell he was hoping the new director would arrive
soon.

“Mr. Edwards doesn't know
what needs to be done for winter,” Anna said later. “It's going to be cold
and nothing is ready. Not even our feet!”

Samira looked down at her
own brown, dirty feet and nodded. The shoes made so long ago in Baghdad had
worn out on the stony fields at Kermanshah.

“We just have to wait for
the real director,” she said. “I hope he knows what to do.”

Mr. Edwards did have plans.
He asked Benyamin and Ashur to explore and make a list of all the orphanage
buildings and what was in them.

“We don't really know what's
here except for ten barracks we can use as dormitories,” he told them. “I'll
tell the caretaker to unlock everything. You take a look and report back to
me. I have to get busy organizing supplies.” And off he went.

When Samira heard what the
boys were doing, she said to Benyamin, “Anna and I will come along. We might
see something you miss.”

After opening one heavy door
after another and walking through dust that hadn't been disturbed for years,
they made a list. There was a kitchen with stoves and shelves, a big
building that was completely empty, another big building with broken
furniture heaped at one end, and two small buildings that looked like houses
in a village. One of them had two rooms and the other only one.

When Mr. Edwards read the
list he said, “Good. We've got a kitchen and a big room for eating. The
other big building will be the schoolroom and recreation room combined. That
building with two rooms can be used for the director's office and a place for
the doctor and nurse to work. The other can be a store room.”

“All these buildings are
empty,” said Anna. “There's no furniture that isn't broken and we have no
rugs or cushions.”

“I have a plan about
furniture,” said Mr. Edwards. “Rugs and cushions will have to
wait.”

He told the boys to take all
the broken furniture into the yard and spread it out. There were banged-up
tabletops, chairs with broken legs and many oddly shaped pieces of
wood.

“Just junk,” said Benyamin,
but Mr. Edwards reached into the pile and pulled out a large flat piece of
wood.

“We'll make a table out of
this,” he said. “If there's one thing I know, it's how to build furniture. I
used to teach carpentry back home, and now I'll teach you.”

He brought back some tools
the next time he went into the city, and soon the boys were busy making
table legs out of scraps of wood.

“We'll need cupboards for
the schoolroom and a few chairs for the teachers,” said Mr. Edwards.
“Luckily you kids sit on the floor.”

September passed, but except
for the new furniture Samira saw that most jobs were still being put off
until the director came.

“It's October,” said Anna
one day. “At home we would be almost ready for winter by now. The wheat
would be stored and the grapes would be drying. And the grape syrup would be
made.”

“I know,” said Samira. “My
father said that a full umbar meant a happy winter. We always had plenty to
eat.”

She thought of the cellar
under the terrace in Ayna. The door was set into the ground and it was too
heavy for her to lift, so she never went down without her mother. But when
they went down the steep stairs with a lantern to light their way, she was
in a magic place. There were bags of wheat and dried beans, oil in jars as
tall as she was, dried fruits and pickled vegetables in crocks. It smelled
wonderful.