Home Is Beyond the Mountains (23 page)

“Goodbye, goodbye,” they
said and watched Miss Shedd ride away.

THE DAY DID SEEM
long, and
Samira was on the verge of dozing in spite of the bumpy road when the sight
of the lake roused her. It stretched away, a sheet of blue water moving up
and down gently as if the lake was sleeping and quietly
breathing.

They slept on the shore of
the lake that night. When they woke a boat with black smoke puffing from its
smokestack was waiting at the dock. In no time Samira found herself standing
on its wooden deck holding tight to the rail. The boat was going up and down
on the gently rolling water. It was terrible.

“I'd rather be on our
caravan journey in a dust storm,” she managed to say to Anna. Then she kept
her mouth shut tight, determined to keep her breakfast down, and closed her
eyes.

Someone came and unclenched
her fingers from the railing and laid her down on a pile of canvas. When she
woke up the boat was still and all the people were rushing around gathering
up their things.

“You missed the whole
crossing,” said Anna. “I threw up once but after that I could see
everything. The birds and the islands and the other boats.”

Samira didn't care. She was
just waiting to put her feet on solid ground.

“I guess I'll never go back
to Tabriz,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you will,” said
Miss Sabat. “You'll forget about being seasick and you'll want to see
Benyamin and Elias. You're a traveler, remember.”

Samira smiled but she
wondered. To be a traveler you surely had to want to travel. She had never
wanted to leave home at all. But she had made a great journey. She
remembered the lake at Kermanshah and the view of the mountains from the
Hamadan orphanage and the river at Sain Kala. There would be other things to
see if she traveled farther. Maybe some day.

Right now she was busy
carrying ashore the things she and Anna were taking to Ayna. Their clothes
and schoolbooks, of course, but gifts for Aunt Sahra and Ester, too. A
bundle of fabric, a bag of rice, a box of dried fruit, and seeds for the
garden they would plant.

Miss Sabat couldn't take
Samira and Anna to Ayna. She was traveling with the other children to
villages that lay in another direction. Instead, Miss Grant from the Near
East Relief office in the city came and camped with them beside the lake. She
brought a donkey to carry the bundles and a man to take care of the donkey.

They started out early in
the morning when the stars had faded away and the sun was just rising over
the lake.

Samira said to Anna, “I'm
glad we waited for the morning star to come and go before we started on our
journey.”

The road went across a flat
plain and then began to climb into the hills. Miss Grant asked them many
questions about their journey from Hamadan to Tabriz.

“Everyone was amazed that
Miss Shedd would undertake such a journey with so little help,” she said.
“It was a miracle that you all made it safely.”

Samira and Anna tried to
explain about the caravan families and how they had all helped, but Miss
Grant kept on being amazed so the girls just smiled and nodded.

Samira thought it probably
was a miracle that all the children arrived safely in Tabriz. But it was a
miracle that had taken a lot of hard work. She remembered Malik running up
and down the line of Rooftop children, making sure they were all
there.

“I wonder how Malik is,” she
said to Anna. “Do you think he's happy with his grandmother?”

“We'll never know,” said
Anna. “He certainly won't write us a letter.”

“You're right,” said Samira.
“But I can't help wondering.”

They walked for a long time
in silence. Miss Grant had run out of questions but she kindly offered them
dried fruit and water she carried in a bottle.

It was dusk when they got to
Ayna, making Samira's first look at the village seem a little like a dream.
She saw a shadowed street and she remembered it well. But it was not quite
right. The houses were still standing but many of them were clearly uncared
for, with clay bricks crumbling and doors hanging on their hinges.

Which was her house? There
should be a roof over a terrace and a pot of flowers on a stone by the
doorstep, but every house seemed to have the same blank face.

Then one of the doors opened
and a woman came out. Behind her came a girl. Miss Grant stepped forward to
speak to them but the woman looked past her and straight at Samira. She ran
forward with her arms open.

“Oh, my dear, dear Samira.
You have come home.”

When she stood back Samira
knew that this really was Aunt Sahra. Her face was familiar but it was thin,
not round as she remembered. And she was so short.

But, no, of course, she was
the one who was taller.

Ester was taller, too, not
the little girl Samira remembered. She came shyly to Samira and Samira put
her arms around her and Aunt Sahra hugged them both. Then she took Samira's
hand as if Samira might suddenly run off, and looked at Anna.

“Aunt Sahra,” said Samira.
Her voice trembled. “This is my friend Anna. She has been with me this whole
time. Now she has no home to go to. Her family did not survive and her
village is destroyed. She has been my family all these years and we
wondered…”

Aunt Sahra went to Anna,
still holding Samira's hand.

“You must stay with us. I
have only Ester and now Samira. I will be so glad to have you.” And she let
go of Samira's hand and put her arms around Anna.

It was nearly dark.

“We must unload the donkey
and this man and I will need to stay here tonight,” said Miss
Grant.

Aunt Sahra went over to her.

“Forgive me for not greeting
you and offering you the small hospitality of my house. The man will eat
with us and sleep in the stable with the donkey and you, dear lady, are
welcome in my poor house.”

“I've brought bread and
cheese from the city,” said Miss Grant. “And some honey for your household.
And I thank you for offering me the warmth of your house.”

Suddenly Samira knew she was
home. Hospitality and gifts and honoring a guest. All those things had been
missing for five years. There had been kindness but not this.

She was home and Anna was
home. She took Anna's hand and led her into the house.

IT WAS SUMMER
. Samira
stood on the roof of the house and looked over the wall up to the hill where
she and Anna had planted their garden. She didn't have to stand on tiptoe
now to see the rows of tomatoes and squash and melons, and the almond tree
Aunt Sahra had planted to replace the one cut down during the troubles. Soon
there would good things to gather and eat, and to preserve for the winter.

She walked to the other side
of the roof, noticing how smooth the clay surface was under her feet. She
and Anna had spread that clay so the roof wouldn't leak anymore.

Aunt Sahra had returned to
find her house damaged by water and stripped of everything that could be used
for fuel. Window frames, the carved chest and even baskets were gone.
Samira's house was bare, too, and part of the ceiling had fallen.

But the umbar under the
terrace had not been touched.

“Most of the food was too
dried out to be used,” Aunt Sahra told Samira. “But your beautiful rugs are
here for you.”

The rugs were in Aunt
Sahra's house for now, but Samira hoped that one day she could take them
with her when she went to live in her family's house again.

Now she looked down into the
street where she used to watch Benyamin and his friends run to school. It
made her sad to think that most of those boys were gone. If they were alive,
no one knew where they were. But Benyamin was fine. She had received a letter
from him just the other day. His studies were going well but he and his
friends found that keeping house and preparing food was hard work. Miss
Shedd made sure they had the supplies they needed but they had to do all the
work themselves.

When she read that part of
the letter to Anna they both laughed, remembering how the boys hated kitchen
duty.

In the letter there was a
drawing Elias had made for her and Anna. It showed a boy with a big smile on
his face waving one hand in greeting and holding a large red ball under his
other arm. Aunt Sahra had pinned the drawing to the wall so the girls could
look at it and smile.

Now Samira saw Anna come out
the front door with Ester. They were going to clean up the old schoolroom
beside the church. It was a solid stone building with a good tile roof, but
inside, the floor was covered with bat droppings and broken plaster. When the
place was clean and they had whitewashed the walls, Anna and Samira planned
to start a school for the little children.

The priest who came to Ayna
once a month was pleased with their plans.

“I'm trying to find a teacher
for the older children,” he said. “It's going to take some time because so
many Assyrians have not come back. Or they're busy rebuilding their
villages. But I won't give up.”

Samira knew it was time to
leave the roof and help Aunt Sahra with the bread baking, but something drew
her to look at the garden again. For a moment she thought of the night she
had seen the soldiers, but there were no soldiers now.

Then she did see something
coming over the far hill. A fox? No, it was bigger. And it had two legs, not
four. It looked like a boy or a man moving very fast. He disappeared behind
the near hill. Then suddenly he was coming down past the garden.

No one ran like that
except…

Malik! It was
Malik.

Samira called out, “Malik,
Malik, I'm here. On the roof.”

Malik stopped. He looked up
at her.

“Come down,” he said. “Come
down.”

Samira had never climbed
down the ladder so fast. Malik was standing at the bottom.

“I'm so glad to see you,”
she said. “But why are you here? You went home to your grandmother, didn't
you?”

“Yes,” said Malik. “She
wanted to see me. To see that I was alive. She wanted me to see that she had
gotten through the war. But she didn't want me to stay. She said the same
thing she said when she sent me off before the soldiers came. She said,
‘Malik, go. It will be better for you somewhere else.' So I came here to see
whether you had come home.”

“Will she be all right
without you?” asked Samira.

“She's strong. She's managed
all these years.”

“So you came to Ayna. Will
you stay? Anna is here, too, and I know my aunt will welcome you.”

He was listening to her but
his eyes were skipping from the house to the garden and through the gap
between the houses to the village street. She knew he was thinking of the
next thing he would do.

“I want to stay,” he
said.

“But what will you do? Could
we get some sheep?”

“No more sheep,” said Malik.
“I'll build. I learned in trade school.”

“No more sheep,” agreed
Samira. “But building! We need a builder and I know exactly where you can
start. In my very own house. Will you come inside and look?” She was filled
with joy.

“Show me,” said Malik.

MY MOTHER, LOUISE SHEDD BARKER,
was born in Persia, the country now called Iran, in 1906. Her family
lived near the city of Urmieh where her father, William Shedd, was an
American missionary to the Assyrians, a people who have lived in
northwestern Iran for thousands of years. The Assyrians speak an ancient
language called Syriac or Assyrian. They have been Christians since the very
early history of Christianity.

When I was growing up, my
mother told me many stories about her childhood in Persia — her family's
house, the food she ate, the people she knew and the games she played —
until she went to live in California with relatives at the age of nine
because of danger during the First World War.

She also told me about her
oldest sister, Susan, who went back to Persia in 1922, after the war was
over, to be the director of an orphanage for Assyrian refugee children in
Hamadan. The story of how Susan ran the orphanage and how she managed to
help the children return to their own part of Persia was one of my
favorites, and I thought that it should be made into a book.

I had a few letters written
by Susan, by her stepmother who visited the orphanage, and by Mrs. McDowell,
who worked with the Assyrian orphans when they were in Baghdad. And I had
the stories that Susan had told my mother. There were also some newspaper
articles about the journey made by the children. These gave me information
about the orphanage and about the journey itself.

As I worked on
Home Is Beyond the Mountains
, I
learned about the history and geography that had shaped the lives of the
children before my Aunt Susan came to know them.