Times of War Collection by Michael Morpurgo
“If you wait for my legs to get better, you will never go,” Grandmother would argue back. “I am your mother. But your father would say the same if he was still with us. I am only asking you to do what I say, because it is what he would say. I am old. I have had my time. I know this. I feel it inside me. These legs will never walk again like they did. You and Aman must go. There is nothing for you in the place except hunger and cold and danger. You know what will happen if you stay. You know the police will come again. Go to England, to Mir. You will be safe there. He will look after you. There you will be far from danger, far from the police. Listen to what Mir is telling us. There, the police will not put you in prison and beat you. There, you will not have to live in a cave like an animal.”
Mother often tried to interrupt her, and Grandmother hated that. One day, I remember, she became really angry, as angry as I had ever seen her.
“You should have some respect for your old mother,” she cried. “You expect Aman to do as you say, don’t you? Don’t you? Well, now you must do as I say. I tell you, I will be in God’s hands soon enough. I do not need you to stay. God will look after me, as he will look after you on your journey to England.”
She reached in under her dress, and brought out an envelope, which she emptied out on to the blanket beside her. I had never seen so much money in all my life. “Last week, Mir’s friend came again with another card, and this time with some money too, enough, he says, to get you out of Afghanistan, through Iran, and Turkey, and all the way to England. And on the outside of the envelope here, he has written the phone numbers of people he says you must contact, in Kabul, in Teheran, in Istanbul. They will help you. And you must take these too.”
She was taking off her necklace, pulling the rings from her fingers. “Take these, and I shall give you also all the jewels I have been keeping for you all this time. Sell them well in Kabul, and they will help to buy you your freedom. They will take you away from all this fear and ignorance. It is fear and ignorance that kills people in their hearts, that makes them cruel. Take Father’s donkey too. It’s what he would have wanted. You can sell him when you do not need him any more. Do not argue with me. Take them, take the envelope and the money, take the jewels, take my beloved grandson, and just go. And God willing, you will get to England safely.”
In the end, Grandmother managed to persuade Mother that we should at least speak to Uncle Mir on the phone. So the next time we went into town, to the market, we phoned him from the public phone. Mother let me talk to him when she had finished. In my ear, Uncle Mir sounded very close by, I remember that. He talked to me in a very friendly way, as if he had known me all my life. Best of all, he told me he supported Manchester United, and that was my team. And he had even seen Ryan Giggs, and my best hero too, David Beckham! He said he’d take me to a match, and that he’d let us stay with him and Mina as long as we needed to, until we could find a place of our own. After I talked to him, I was so excited. All I wanted to do was to go to England, go right away.
After the phone call Mother stopped to buy some flour in the market, and I walked on. When I turned round after a while, to see if she was coming, I saw one of the stallholders was shouting at her, waving his hands angrily. I thought it was an argument about money, that maybe she’d been short-changed. They were always doing that in the market.
But it wasn’t that.
She caught me up and hurried me away. I could see the fear in her eyes. “Don’t look round, Aman,” she said. “I know this man. He is Taliban. He is very dangerous.”
“Taliban?” I said. “Are they still here?” I thought the Taliban had been defeated long ago by the Americans, and driven into the mountains. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“The Taliban, they are still here, Aman,” she said, and she could not stop herself from crying now. “They are everywhere, in the police, in the army, like wolves in sheep’s clothing. Everyone knows who they are, and everyone is too frightened to speak. That man in the market, he was one of those who came to the cave and took your father away, and killed him.”
I turned around to look. I wanted to run back and tell him face to face he was a killer. I wanted to look him in the eye and accuse him. I wanted to show him I was not afraid. “Don’t look,” Mother said, dragging me on. “Don’t do anything, Aman, please. You’ll only make it worse.”
She waited till we were safely out of town before telling me more. “He was cheating me in the market,” she said, “and when I argued, he told me that if I do not leave the valley, he will tell his brother, and he will have me taken to prison again. And I know his brother only too well. He was the policeman who put me in prison before. He was the one who beat me, and tortured me. It wasn’t because of the apple you stole, Aman. It was so that I would not tell anyone about what his brother had done to your father, so that I would not say he was Taliban. What can I do? I cannot leave Grandmother. She cannot look after herself. What can I do?” I held her hand to try to comfort her, but she cried all the way home. I kept telling her it would be all right, that I would look after her.
That night I heard Mother and Grandmother whispering to each other in the cave, and crying together too. When they finally went to sleep, the dog crept into the cave and lay down beside me. I buried my face in her fur and held her tight. “It will be all right, won’t it?” I said to her.
But I knew it wasn’t going to be. I knew something terrible was going to happen. I could feel it.
arly the next day the police came to the cave. Mother had gone down to the stream for water, so I was there alone with Grandmother when they came, three of them. The stallholder from the market was with them. They said they had come to search the place.
When Grandmother struggled to her feet and tried to stop them, they pushed her to the ground. Then they turned on me and started to beat me and kick me. That was when I saw the dog come bounding into the cave. She didn’t hesitate. She leaped up at them, barking and snarling. But they lashed out at her with their feet and their sticks and drove her out.
After that they seemed to forget about me, and just broke everything they could in the cave, kicked our things all over the place, stamped on our cooking pot, and one of them peed on the mattress before they left.
I didn’t realise at first how badly Grandmother had been hurt, not till I rolled her over on to her back. Her eyes were closed. She was unconscious. She must have hit her head when she fell. There was a great cut across her forehead. I tried to wash the blood away, kept trying to wake her. But the blood kept coming, and she wouldn’t open her eyes.
When Mother came back some time later, she did all she could to revive her, but it was no good. Grandmother died that evening. Sometimes I think she died because she just didn’t want to wake up, because she knew it was the only way to make Mother and me leave, the only way to save us. So maybe Grandmother won her argument with Mother, in her own way, the only way she could.
We left Bamiyan the next day, the day Grandmother was buried. We did as Grandmother had told us. We took Father’s donkey with us, to carry the few belongings we had, the cooking things, the blankets and the mattress, with Grandmother’s jewels and Uncle Mir’s money hidden inside it. We took some bread and apples with us, gifts from our friends for the journey, and walked out of the valley. I tried not to look back, but I did. I could not help myself.
Because of everything that had happened, I think, I had almost forgotten about the dog, which hardly seems fair when I think about it. After all, only the day before, she had tried to save my life in the cave. Anyway, she just appeared, suddenly, from out of nowhere. She was just there, walking alongside us for a while, then running on ahead, as if she was leading us, as if she knew where she was going. Every now and then, she would stop, and start sniffing at the ground busily, then turn to look back at us. I wasn’t sure whether it was to check we were coming, or to tell us everything was all right, that this was the road to Kabul, that all we had to do was follow her.
Mother said it was going to take us many days of walking to reach Kabul, but we managed to find shelter somewhere each night. People were kind to us and hospitable. The country people in Afghanistan haven’t much, but what they have, they share.
At the end of each day’s walk, we were always tired out. I wasn’t exactly happy. I couldn’t be. But I was excited. I knew I was setting out on the biggest adventure of my life. I was going to see the world beyond the mountains, like Uncle Mir.
I was going to England.
As we came closer to Kabul, the road was busier than it had been, with lorries and army trucks and carts. The donkey was nervous in the traffic, so Mother and I were walking. Then we saw ahead of us the police checkpoint. I could tell at once that Mother was terrified. She reached for my hand, clutched it and did not let go. She kept telling me not to be frightened, that it would be all right, God willing. But I knew she was telling herself that, more than she was telling me.
As we reached the barrier the police started shouting at the dog, swearing at her, then throwing stones. One of the stones hit her and she ran off, yelping in pain. That made me really angry, angry enough to be brave. I found myself swearing back at them, telling them exactly what I thought of them, what everyone thought of the police. They were all around us then, like angry bees, shouting at us, calling us filthy Hazara dogs, threatening us with their rifles.
Then – and I couldn’t believe it at first – the dog came back. She was so brave. She just went for them, snarling and barking, and she managed to bite one of them on the leg too, before they kicked her away. Then they were shooting at her. This time when she ran away, she did not come back. After that, they took us off behind their hut, pushed us up against the wall, and demanded to see our ID papers. I thought they were going to shoot us, they were that angry.
They told Mother our papers were like us, no good, that we couldn’t have them back, unless we handed over our money. Mother refused. So they searched us both, roughly, and disrespectfully too. They found nothing, of course.
But then they searched the mattress.
They cut it open, and found the money and Grandmother’s jewellery. The policemen shared out Uncle Mir’s money and Grandmother’s jewellery there and then, right in front of our eyes. They took what food we had left, even our water.
One of them, the officer in charge I think he was, handed me back the empty envelope, and our papers. Then, with a sarcastic grin all over his horrible face, he dropped a couple of coins into my hand. “You see how generous we are,” he said. “Even if you are Hazara, we wouldn’t want you to starve, would we?”
Before we left, they decided to take Father’s donkey too. All we had in the world as we walked away from that checkpoint, with their laughter and their jeering ringing in our ears, were a couple of coins and the clothes we stood up in. Mother’s hand grasped mine tightly. “Walk tall, Aman. Do not bow your head,” she said. “We are Hazara. We will not cry. We will not let them see us cry. God will look after us.”
We both held back our tears. I was proud of her for doing that, and I was proud of me too.
An hour or so later we were sitting there by the side of the road. Mother was wailing and crying, her head in her hands. She seemed to have lost all heart, all hope. I think I was too angry to cry. I was nursing a blister on my heel, I remember, when I looked up and saw the dog come running towards us out of the desert. She leaped all over me, and then all over Mother too, wagging everything.
To my surprise, Mother did not seem to mind at all. In fact she was laughing now through her tears. “At least,” said Mother, “at least, we have one friend left in this world. She has great courage, this dog. I was wrong about her. I think maybe this dog is not like other dogs. She may be a stranger, but as such we should welcome her, and look after her. She may be a dog, but I think she is more like a friend than a dog, like a friendly shadow that does not want to leave us. You never lose your shadow.”
“That is what we should call her then,” I told her. “Shadow. We’ll call her Shadow.” The dog seemed pleased with that as she looked up at me. She was smiling. She was really smiling. Soon she was bounding on ahead of us, sniffing along the side of the road, her tail waving us on.
It was strange. We had just lost all we had in the world, and only minutes before everything had seemed completely hopeless, but now that waving tail of hers gave us new hope. And I could see Mother felt the same. I knew at that moment, that somehow we were going find a way to get to England. Shadow was going to get us there. I had no idea how. But together, we were going to do it. Some way, somehow.
e had to sit there for a long while, until it was dark. We had only the stars for company. Every truck that went by covered us in dust. But we got a lift in the end, in the back of a pick-up truck full of melons, hundreds of them.
We were so hungry by now that we ate several of them between us, chucking the melon skins out of the back as we went along so that the driver wouldn’t find out. Then we slept. It wasn’t comfortable. But we were too tired to care. It was morning before we reached Kabul.
Mother had never in her life been to Kabul, and neither had I. We were pinning all our hopes now on the contact telephone numbers Uncle Mir had written on the back of that envelope.
The first thing we had to do was to look for a public phone. The driver dropped us off in the marketplace. It was the first time in my life I had ever been into a city. There were so many people, so many streets and shops and buildings, so many cars and trucks and carts and bicycles, and there were police and soldiers everywhere. They all had rifles, but there was nothing new or frightening for me about that. Everyone back home in Bamiyan had rifles too. I think just about every man in Afghanistan has a rifle. It was their eyes I was frightened of. Every policeman or soldier seemed to be looking right at us and only at us as we passed.
But then I did notice that it wasn’t us they were interested in so much. It was Shadow. She was skulking along beside us, much closer to us than usual, her nose touching my leg from time to time. I could tell she wasn’t liking all the noise and bustle of the place any more than we were.
It took a while to find a public phone. Mother arranged to meet Uncle Mir’s contact, and at first he was quite welcoming. He gave us a hot meal, and I thought everything was going to be fine now. But when Mother told him we had lost all the money Uncle Mir had sent us for the journey to England, that it had been stolen from us, he was suddenly no longer so friendly.
Mother pleaded with him to help. She told him we had nowhere to go, nowhere to spend the night. That was when I began to notice that, like the police and the soldiers in the street, he too seemed to be more interested in Shadow than in us. He agreed then to let us have a room to stay in, but only for one night. It was a bare room with a bed and a carpet, but after living my whole life in a cave, this was like a palace to me.
All we wanted was to sleep, but this man hung around and wouldn’t leave us alone. He kept asking questions about Shadow, about where we had got her from, about what sort of dog she was. “This dog,” he said, “she is a foreign-looking dog, I think. Does she bite? Is she a good guard dog?”
The more I saw of the man, the more I did not trust him. Shadow didn’t much like him either, and kept her distance. He had darting eyes, and a mean and treacherous look about him. That’s why I said what I did. “Yes, she bites,” I told him. “And if anyone attacks us, she goes mad, like a wolf.”
“A good fighter then?” he asked.
“The best,” I said. “Once she bites, she never lets go.”
“Good, that’s good,” he said. The man thought for a momen
It was Mother who understood at once what this man was after. “You want her for a fighting dog, don’t you?” she asked him.
“That’s right,” he told her. “She’s a bit on the small side. And a proper Afghan fighting dog will tear a foreign dog like her to bits. But so long as she puts up a good fight, that’s all that counts. It’s not just about size. It’s the show they come to see. Have we got a deal?”
“No, no deal. We are not selling her, are we, Aman?” Mother replied, crouching down, and putting her arm around Shadow. “Not for anything. She’s stuck by us, and we’re going to stick by her.”
That’s when the man lost his temper. He started yelling at us. “Who do you think you are? You Hazara, you’re all the same, so high and mighty. You’d better think about it. You sell me that dog, or else! I’ll be back in the morning.”
He slammed the door behind him as he left, and we heard the key turn in the lock. When I tried the door moments later, it wouldn’t budge. We were prisoners.
he window was high up, but Mother thought if we turned the bed on its side, and climbed up, we might just be able to get out. So that’s what we did. It was a small window, and there’d be a big drop on the other side, but we had no choice, we had to try. It was our only hope.
I went first, and Mother handed Shadow up to me. I dropped Shadow to the ground, saw her land safely, and then followed her. It was more difficult for Mother, and it took some time, but in the end she managed to squeeze herself out of the window and jump down.