Parvana's Journey Read Online Free Page A

parents. The gardens had all been destroyed by bombs before she was born.
    She emptied the dusty water outside the door of the house, spread out her cleaning cloth to dry, and realized that she was very tired. She stretched out beside Hassan and soon fell asleep.
    She woke up in the middle of the night. Everything was dark, and for a moment she couldn’t remember where she was. She began to panic. Then Hassan moved a bit in his sleep. She curled around him, closed her eyes to keep the darkness out, and fell back asleep.
    She built a cook fire the next morning down by the stream and decided to fry all five of the eggs she’d found. Too late, she realized she should have put some oil in the cook-pot, because the eggs stuck to the bottom and didn’t hold their shape the way fried eggs did when her mother made them. Still, they tasted very good, and she and Hassan ate every scrap. She even scraped the bottom of the pot with a stick to get the last bits.
    Eggs made Parvana think of chickens.
    “How hard can it be to kill a chicken?” she asked Hassan.
    She carried him to the little barn and they drank more fresh goat’s milk. Then she propped the baby up against some straw and turned her attention to the chickens.
    “One of you is going to be our dinner,” she announced. “Any volunteers?”
    No chicken stepped forward.
    “I’m bigger than you are,” she reminded them, turning toward the fattest one. It stared back at her as she crept closer and closer. Then, just as she was about to grab it, it flew out of her way.
    Hassan laughed.
    “You’re not helping,” Parvana said, but she was laughing, too.
    None of the chickens felt like being caught, and they made Parvana chase them all over the little barn, to Hassan’s great delight.
    She was just getting ready to make a final great leap on a chicken she had cornered, when something outside the barn window caught her eye.
    In the next instant she had grabbed Hassan and was running madly back to the house where they had slept. She scooped up their bundles of belongings and ran in a panic out of the village.
    She had seen, in the distance, the black turbans of Taliban soldiers. They were heading toward her village. If they found her and thought she was a boy, they might force her into their army. If they found her and discovered she was a girl…
    That was too horrible to think about.
    Parvana didn’t think. She just ran, up and over the hill away from the village.
    Why Hassan didn’t cry out, why the Taliban didn’t see her scurrying over the hill, why she didn’t stumble under the weight of all she carried, Parvana never knew. She ran and kept running. When she finally stopped, there were three hills between her and the Taliban.
    Hassan wasn’t at all disturbed at being jostled about. He thought it was great fun and gave her a big grin.
    “It must be nice to be young,” Parvana said, catching her breath and wiping the drool from Hassan’s face.
    She knew she could not keep carrying everything. The weight of her bundle would wear her out before she got anywhere. But she dared not get rid of any food.
    “We don’t know when we’ll get more,” she said to Hassan.
    She opened the other bundles and decided they would probably need everything in them, as well.
    That left her father’s books.
    She opened up that bundle. Four big books with thick hard covers and one small book with a paper cover lay on the cloth. There was also a copy of the secret women’s magazine her mother had written articles for back in Kabul. It had been smuggled into Afghanistan by women who had printed it in Pakistan. Parvana was supposed to give it to her mother when they saw each other again.
    “I’ll bury the biggest three books,” she said, “and come back some day and dig them up again.”
    Using a rock to help her dig through the hard ground, she made a hole big enough for the books. One book was about science, one was about history, and the third was a book of Persian poetry.