Mud City (11 page)

“Stop it!” the older woman said sharply.
“You’re scaring the patients. Take a break and calm down. You’re no
use to me like this.”

The young woman started to cry and ran off. The older nurse headed back to
work.

Shauzia turned her head away. She didn’t want to look at the empty
bed.

The next day, she was given a pair of crutches. “Practice walking
with them,” the nurse told her, “but don’t go far. Several other
people have to use them today.”

It felt great to be moving again, even though using the crutches was
awkward. She walked a little bit away from the clinic and turned around to go back.

Then she stopped and looked at it instead.

The clinic was just one big tent, with the flaps open to allow what little
breeze there was to flow through the tent. Cloth screens gave the patients in the beds
some privacy, although not much, and kept some of the dust off them. On the edges of the
clinic, families of the sick people sat on the ground, waiting for them to get well.
Children cried. Nurses and doctors were busy with the line-up of people who had come to
see them, cleaning and bandaging wounds
and trying to comfort
people crying with pain and sorrow.

No one was watching Shauzia to make sure she returned the crutches. She
turned into a narrow, mud-walled street, and the clinic slipped out of sight behind her.
She was getting out of this place.

First, though, she needed to find Jasper, who hadn’t been allowed in
the clinic. She’d make one last trip to the Widows’ Compound, get her dog,
and then leave without speaking to anyone.

No more Mrs. Weera. No more sick, desperate, crazy people. Just her, her
dog and the great blue sea.

Shauzia made slow progress. Walking with crutches was hard. Sweat ran
down the inside of her cast, making her leg itch and hurt at the same time. She half
wanted to go back to her bed in the clinic, but she kept on.

“Boy, where are you walking to in this heat?” one of the men
sitting at the side of the road called out as she walked by.

“Old man, what are you waiting for in this heat?” she asked in
return.

“I am just waiting,” the old man replied. “It is what I
do. I don’t remember what I am waiting for, but still, I wait. One day, you will
wait like I do.”

“Never!” Shauzia exclaimed.

“Already you are walking in the heat to get somewhere, but where can
you go? There is nowhere but here. This street or that street, it is all the same. One
day you will know this, and you will sit down and wait.”

Shauzia walked away while the man was still
talking.

She passed a lot of men like that, sitting and waiting, their eyes
following her as she made her slow and awkward way down the road. The crutches were too
short for her, and her back hurt as she stooped over to use them. She didn’t speak
to any more of the men. They didn’t speak to her. They just watched, and
waited.

Her leg was hurting very badly. She was hot and tired. She needed to get
out of the sun and put her leg up.

She turned around to go back to the clinic, and realized she was totally
lost.

She had been walking without noticing where she was going. The roads and
pathways in the camp went in all sorts of directions. She hadn’t been to this
section when she’d run errands for Mrs. Weera. She had no idea where she was or
how to get back.

She asked one of the sitting-and-waiting men where the Widows’
Compound was. The man chewed the question over in his mind while Shauzia leaned
impatiently on her crutches.

Another man came along. “What is happening?” he asked the
first man.

“Boy wants to get to the Widows’
Compound.”

“Why do you want to do that, boy?”

The two men talking drew the attention of a third. Three men drew the
attention of three more, and soon there were a dozen men in the little dirt street,
debating the direction of the Widows’ Compound, and even questioning whether there
was a Widows’ Compound.

“Why do you want to go there, boy?” someone asked her again.
“Don’t you know they started the food riot? You keep away from them. Women
living together like that, they get up to no good.”

The discussion switched to the food riot. The men said the widows had used
a bomb to blow open the storehouse doors.

Shauzia used the opportunity to slip down a pathway, away from the men and
their crazy stories.

She kept walking, turning this way and that, hoping to come upon something
that looked familiar.

The mud walls came to an abrupt end, and Shauzia found herself looking out
at an endless sea of tents.

It was the camp for new arrivals. Mrs. Weera had told
her about it, but she had never seen it.

“There is no room for them in this camp, but they still come. Where
else will they go? They arrive with nothing,” Mrs. Weera said. “Some of them
wait six months or more for a tent.”

Shauzia turned around. This was neither the Widows’ Compound, nor
the way out of the camp.

The thought of heading back into the maze of mud walls made her turn
around again. Maybe she could walk through the camp for new arrivals and find a faster
way back to the Widows’ Compound. The compass in her head told her that would be
the right thing to do.

She waded into the new camp.

There were no roads or pathways that she could see. There was barely room
to walk between the tents and, in some places, there was no room at all.

Some people had proper tents made of white canvas with UNHCR stamped on
the side in big black letters. Some people had tents made out of rags stitched together.
Some people had
tents made from sheets of thin plastic stretched
over sticks.

Shauzia poked her head into some of the tents. “Do you know where
the Widows’ Compound is?” she asked.

The people inside stared back at her with vacant eyes. The temperature
inside the tents was even hotter than the temperature outside, but people were still
crammed inside them. There wasn’t really anyplace else to sit.

“Give me your crutches,” a voice called out from a tent.
Shauzia bent down and saw an old woman sitting inside. She was missing a leg.
“Give me your crutches, so I can go away from here. I do not like this terrible
place.”

Shauzia hurried away. In her rush, she tripped on a tent peg and went
sprawling onto the hard ground.

Children standing nearby laughed at her. Shauzia knew they were bored, and
she was entertainment, but she was not in the mood to entertain anybody. She struck out
at them with one of her crutches.

“That is no way to behave,” a man said, helping her to her
feet. “You are older than they are. You should show them how to be
kind.”

Shauzia hobbled away without thanking him.

She heard the noise of a truck and saw people rushing around carrying jugs
and pans. Shauzia followed the crowd.

It was a water truck. The guards around it tried to get the people to line
up, to wait their turn, but everyone was too thirsty. They crowded in around the
truck.

Shauzia stayed on the edge of the crowd on top of a small rise in the
ground and watched the scene below.

People who managed to fill their jugs with the precious water often saw
most of it spill to the ground as they tried to get back through the crowd. One man had
his whole jug knocked out of his hands, but when he tried to go back to the truck to
have it refilled, he couldn’t make his way through the mass of people. He waved
his jug in frustration, hitting someone on the head. That man hit back, and soon a huge
fight was underway.

Shauzia turned and walked away. She didn’t want her other leg
broken.

She found her way to the edge of the tents, to a rough bit of road. A
white van, like the one
aid agencies used, was coming toward her,
so she stood in the middle of the road to stop it.

“I’m lost,” she called out.

The aid worker got out of the van. “Where do you belong?” he
asked.

“I belong at the sea!” Shauzia started to cry. “I belong
in France! I belong in a field of purple flowers, where nothing smells bad, with no one
screaming or pushing around me. That’s where I belong.”

The aid worker helped Shauzia into the passenger seat of the van and
waited until she had stopped crying before he asked, “Where do you live
now?”

Shauzia wiped the tears off her cheeks. “The Widows’
Compound,” she said.

They started to drive. The sea of tents and sad people seemed to go on
forever.

“Who are they?” Shauzia asked.

“They’ve just left Afghanistan,” the aid worker told
her. “People are rushing to get across the border before the Americans
attack.”

“The Americans are going to attack?”

“They’re angry about what happened in New York
City.”

“What happened?”

The aid worker kept one hand on the steering wheel while he fished around
on the floor with his other.

“Here it is.” He handed Shauzia a piece of newspaper he had
found.

Shauzia looked at the photograph. Smoke poured out of the mangled remains
of a building.

“Looks like Kabul,” she said, letting the paper drop back to
the floor.

She leaned her head against the window. The people they drove past did not
look strong enough to blow up anything.

Then she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again until they
arrived at the Widows’ Compound.

Her bed in the clinic had been given to someone else, Mrs. Weera told her.
She set up a charpoy in some shade for Shauzia to rest on. Jasper sat on the ground
below her, and the compound’s children gathered around begging for stories until
they were shooed away by Mrs. Weera so Shauzia could rest.

The next day there was an attack on the Widows’ Compound. Half a
dozen men tried
to get over the walls, yelling that the women
inside were immoral and should not be allowed to live together without men to watch over
them.

Mrs. Weera and the other women beat the men back over the walls with
brooms and anything else they could grab. Shauzia was stuck on the charpoy. Her crutches
had been returned to the clinic, so she could do nothing but watch and yell at the men.
Jasper, with his bark and his bared teeth, helped scare the intruders away.

Mrs. Weera had to hire extra guards. She didn’t say so, but Shauzia
knew she was worried about how she was going to pay for them.

Shauzia spent the next few weeks sitting with the women from the
embroidery project. She hemmed napkins and tablecloths and waited for her leg to
heal.

The Red Crescent nurse put down her cast cutters and pulled apart the
cast.

Shauzia’s leg looked scrawny and weak.

“Try to stand,” the nurse said.

Shauzia carefully put some weight on the leg. It twinged a bit, but
otherwise it felt all right. Jasper gave her newly freed leg a big sniff and a gentle
lick.

“It was a simple break,” the nurse said. “You were
lucky. Stay away from riots from now on.”

Shauzia took some more steps, trying out her mended leg.

“We’ll have your first-aid kits ready this afternoon,”
the nurse said to Mrs. Weera, who had brought Shauzia to the clinic. “When are you
leaving?”

“Tomorrow, I think. Or maybe tonight. I can’t decide whether
it’s safer for us to travel after dark, or if we should wait until
daylight.”

“Both have risks,” the nurse agreed.

“Where are you going?” Shauzia asked. Was she really about to
be free of Mrs. Weera?

“Mrs. Weera is a very brave woman,” the nurse said. “I
hope you treat her with respect. She is taking several nurses back into
Afghanistan.”

“You’re going back?” Shauzia almost yelled. “Why
would you want to do that?”

“Our people are being bombed,” Mrs. Weera replied quietly.
“Thousands have gathered at the border, trying to get out, but the border has been
closed. Nurses are needed.”

“If the border is closed, how will you get in?”

“We’ll have to sneak in, probably across the
mountains.”

“Just you women? You’ll never get away with it. The Taliban
will arrest you.”

“We’ll have to take that chance,” Mrs. Weera told her.
“People need us, and they’ll help us as best as they can. We should get back
to the compound now. I have lots to do.”

The compound had been full of activity for the past week, but Shauzia
hadn’t paid too much attention to it. The embroidery group
had switched from fancy needlework to cutting strips of material for bandages and
patching the worn spots in old blankets. Shauzia had noticed all the rushing around, but
she had not cared to ask about it.

That evening she sat on the ground, her back against the hut where she
slept, and where the women’s organization had their office. Women kept going in
and coming out again. They paid no attention to her.

Farzana sat down beside her. Jasper thumped his tail and put his head in
Farzana’s lap.

“It’s going to be awfully quiet without Mrs. Weera
here,” Farzana said.

“We’ll still be able to hear her snoring at night. Even if
she’s on the other side of the world, her snores will reach us. She’ll
probably shatter the eardrums of all the Taliban soldiers, then take their place as
ruler of Afghanistan.”

“She’d have a whole country to boss around then,”
Farzana said with a giggle. “She’d like that.”

“You think the Taliban has crazy laws? Mrs. Weera’s would be
even crazier. She’ll force everyone to spend every afternoon playing field
hockey.”

Farzana laughed again. “She’ll even make
old people play, and the people on crutches.”

“She’s crazy!” Shauzia was angry now. She threw a stone
across the courtyard, narrowly missing one of the busy women. “She’s
absolutely crazy to be going back into Afghanistan, especially without a man. She thinks
she can make anything happen just because she wants it to happen. She’s
crazy!”