One Half from the East (9 page)

R
ahim and I have been trying to figure out how we're going to get under a rainbow. We've come across a few problems.

First of all, it rains only about once a month in our village.

We did actually spot rainbows twice since we started looking—once on the far end of a pond and another time behind our school. We were feeling pretty gutsy and went after them, but it was useless. As much as we ran, the rainbow was never any closer. It might as well have been on the moon.

That's why I'm excited to tell Rahim my idea.

“A waterfall,” I announce with a sly grin. I am early
for school and find him in the yard, leaning against a tree. He's trying to finish a homework assignment before classes start and is too distracted to hear me.

“Rahim, are you listening? A waterfall. That's what we need.”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm listening. A waterfall. What are you talking about?”

When I tell Rahim about the waterfall, he puts down his pencil. He's not excited, but there's urgency in his voice.

“We'll leave right after we're dismissed,” he plans. “We can't waste any time.”

I walk into my classroom feeling like there's something my friend is not sharing with me.

We set out right after school. There are four mountains that separate our village from the province on the other side. I stare at the slopes, my hand over my eyes to block the bright sun.

“Which one do you think it is?” Rahim asks.

“My father said it was so big that he couldn't climb to the top. He said it was loud enough that they could hear it way before they reached it.”

We are walking through an open, dusty plain. There are patches of tall, yellow-green grasses along the way but not much else. There isn't much water around here, and plants don't survive.

We walk really carefully and keep our eyes on the ground. We don't want anything slithering out from under the rocks and catching us by surprise. There are snakes and scorpions in these parts, and we all learn to watch out for them. They're poisonous and sometimes deadly. I don't want to lose my leg. I feel bad thinking it, but I don't want to end up like my father.

I try to retrace my father's childhood footsteps. Which way would he have gone? The mountain range runs along the eastern edge of our village. In the mornings, you can see the sun rise up from behind the peaks. Kabul is on the other side of those mountains. Not right on the other side, but a few days' travel. There are spots of green on the mountainside where trees have managed to take root.

“How are we ever going to find the waterfall?” Rahim wonders out loud.

Looking at the peaks in front of me, I'm thinking the same thing.

We walk on, glancing over our shoulders every few minutes and hoping we'll be able to find our way back.

“You see those trees over there? There are five of them together in a bunch. There might be a trail to the left of them, between those two mountains. Maybe that's the path your father took. Did he tell you anything else about how they found the waterfall?”

“No, he didn't, but I think that might be it,” I say
hopefully. “He said there was a footpath. And if there are trees, there might be water, right?”

We're reassured by our bit of science and decide to go for the path we've spotted. We walk for an hour. We're too worried to talk much. I've made a list in my head of what could go wrong: we might have picked the wrong path, we might not find our way home, and the waterfall might not be there anymore. It's not a very encouraging list.

“How much farther do you think it is?” Rahim is getting impatient.

“I don't know,” I mumble. “I thought we would have been there already.”

I almost feel like the mountain is moving away from us. We don't seem to be getting any closer, and we've been walking for nearly two hours. Thankfully, it is spring and the days are getting longer again. The sun warms us. Even though it's not that hot outside, we've been walking for a while and my shirt sticks to my skin.

“You're not wearing your Wizards hat,” I say, noticing.

“Yeah, wrong day to forget my hat,” Rahim says. “You know, I got it right after I changed. I wear it almost every day.”

I know by “changed,” my friend means when he became a boy.

“I didn't believe you at first but I know it really is a
lucky hat. Because the way you were acting when I first met you, you're lucky I agreed to be your friend!”

Rahim gives me a playful shove. “Sometimes you can be pretty funny, Obayd.
Sometimes
.”

We reach the footpath at sunset. Our stomachs are growling; our legs are achy. Our sandals are cheap plastic things that don't do much for a rocky walk like this. I can already feel the blisters bubbling.

“I'm thirsty.” I only mean to say it, but it comes out as a whine.

“I am too,” Rahim agrees. “When we get to the waterfall, there'll be plenty to drink.”

If
we get to the waterfall.

We start along the trail, a little nervous to be this far from home. The sky is more purple than blue now, and it's completely quiet.

“Are you sure about this?” I ask Rahim.

“It's got to be close. It just has to,” he insists, but I'm not sure. I know that being sure is his thing, even when he's not right. “Do you hear any water?”

We both stop walking and listen really carefully for the wet roar my father told me about.

Shhhh
.

I put my hands on my hips. I wasn't making a sound and don't appreciate Rahim shushing me.

“You're the one making noise,” I whisper. “Tell yourself to shush.”

Shhhh.

“Obayd, that wasn't me,” Rahim whispers back.

We're both frozen in place. My heart starts to pound, and I feel my palms get sweaty. We hear it again. I'm looking at the ground around me. Rahim's doing the same. There are big rocks on either side of the trail and smaller rocks everywhere. It's starting to get dark enough that it's hard to see in the shadows.

I'm about to say we should leave when I feel a tickle on my ankle. It feels like a leather belt, sliding against my foot. I'm already tense because it's dark and we hear something and there's no food in my belly to settle my nerves.

My leg reacts with lightning speed, kicking into the air to get whatever it is as far away from me as possible. It takes my brain a second to realize what happened. When it registers, my scream breaks the evening quiet.

“Snaaaake!”

Rahim grabs my hand.

“Is it on you? Did it bite you?”

“No, no, but I felt it! I kicked it off!”

“Where is it?”

“I don't know. Maybe over there somewhere!”

We are more silent than we've ever been. I don't hear anything.

A shiver runs down my spine.

“I want to go back.”

“We're so close,” Rahim says. “The waterfall could be just on the other side of this hill.”

“Or it could be on another mountain,” I whisper. It's like we've decided, without talking about it, that whispering is smarter than speaking out loud. “We can't see where we're going, and we're hungry. We're not going to make it very far.”

“We've come all this way.” Rahim sounds really disappointed. “We need to be brave.”

This makes me angry. Easy for Rahim to say we should be brave when he's not the one who had a snake on his foot.

“I
am
brave,” I say sharply. “I'm just not stupid.”

“If you didn't want to come here, you should have said so. I could have come on my own.”

“Rahim, I'm the one who had the idea to find this waterfall, remember? Don't be like that. Let's come back another day—in the morning, so we can see where we're going.”

Rahim stares at the ground. His shoulders are slumped. I try to touch him, but he pulls back sharply—like I'm the snake.

“Fine. You do whatever you want, but I'm going back.”

I say it, but neither of us budges. The truth is we're
both just as scared of moving as we are of staying in one place. Being trapped by something we can't see is an awful feeling.

Rahim takes a couple of big breaths.

“Fine,” he says with defeat. “We'll go back.”

We turn around. We don't talk at all. I'm pretty annoyed with Rahim for telling me I should be brave. That's the same thing as calling me a coward, which I'm not. He's not acting like himself, and I don't know why.

“I can't believe you kicked that snake off you. That was pretty brave, Obayd.”

“Thanks,” I say like it was no big deal. Rahim is still quiet, but at least we're not mad at each other anymore.

“Hey, Rahim,” I say. I really want to change his mood. “Maybe we can try again on Friday when there's no school? We can leave really early in the morning so we have plenty of time to get here. And I'll see if my dad remembers anything else about the waterfall. Maybe I can get a better idea of which way to go.”

Rahim is a few steps ahead of me.

“Yeah, that's probably a good idea,” he says. “Maybe today wasn't meant to be the day we find the waterfall.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, destiny and fate and all that.”

“Do you believe in that destiny stuff?”

Rahim slows his step and lets me catch up. We are
walking side by side, our elbows bumping against each other in the darkness. It's not annoying, though. It feels like an arm around my shoulders. Rahim gives my question about fate some thought before answering.

“Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I guess if something good happens to me, I'd rather not believe destiny had anything to do with it. I'd rather believe it was something I did.”

“And what if something bad happens to you? Then would you believe in destiny?”

Rahim's voice turns cold and hard.

“Then I'd wish destiny was a person so I could kick him in the face.”

A
t the schoolyard, I wait for Rahim. It is early, and he should be here soon. I see Ashraf and Abdullah walking together.

Rahim and I got home late last night, and I wonder if he got into as much trouble as I did. My mother was so furious with me that she refused to unlock the gate and let me in. When I started to apologize to her (which involved pleading at the top of my lungs), she opened the gate really fast, grabbed me by my elbow, and practically threw me into our courtyard.

She said all the things I knew she would say. I'd known I'd get in trouble for coming home so late, but it might have been worth it if we'd actually made it to the waterfall
or a rainbow. It also occurred to me that even if we had made it to the waterfall, the sky had already gone from oranges and violets to dark blues and grays. There wasn't enough light to even make a rainbow. I wanted to kick myself for being so dumb.

My mother was so mad that all her thoughts came out in one long string of
Where were you?
and
Are you trying to make me crazy?
and
What was I supposed to think happened to you?
Her voice went from a slow, angry pace to a fast, hurt one. I couldn't argue with her so I kept my head down and mumbled a slow, stream of
I'm really sorry, Mother
and
I promise I'll never do it again
.

We never actually did talk about where I had gone or why.

School starts and Rahim is still not here. I sit through classes, my restless foot tapping out the seconds until recess. I am the first one in the yard. I search through the groups of boys, but there is no one wearing a blue Wizards hat.

Rahim is not there.

“Hey, Ashraf . . . Abdullah,” I call out. Ashraf turns around. He's toeing a soccer ball and is about to pass it to Abdullah when I interrupt.

“Little guy,” he says with a nod. “What's up?”

Ashraf and Abdullah treat me like there are way more than three years between us. But they don't tease me too much more than that, so I don't complain. Abdullah takes a step closer.

“Have you guys seen Rahim?”

They shake their heads. Rahim was not in class today.

“We got home late last night, and I wanted to see if he got in trouble. I sure did.”

The boys chuckle.

“What were you doing out so late?”

“Oh . . . we were just . . .” I look at the ball under Ashraf's foot. “We were playing soccer.”

“That late?”

“Yeah, we do that sometimes.”

Abdullah looks at me like he senses something's up. I leave Rahim's friends and join up with a couple of boys from my own class. They're playing a game of tag. My legs are still sore from yesterday's hike, so they catch me right away. And I'm too tired to catch them back.

Three more days go by. Then the weekend. A new school week starts and Rahim is nowhere to be found.

“Still nothing?” Abdullah asks. We're all pretty concerned at this point.

“I bet I know what happened,” Ashraf says. We wait for his theory. “I bet his mother and father were upset that he came home late that night. I think they're keeping him home as punishment.”

“Not even letting him go to school?” I ask. That's the part that doesn't make sense to me.

“Sure,” Ashraf says. “I've heard his father is kind of rough.”

“What do you mean?” I feel uncomfortable. Why don't I know anything about Rahim's father?

“You know he was in the war. And I hear he's a drug addict—a pretty bad one.” Ashraf tells us this in a half whisper, which is the nicer way to say something like that about a friend's father.

“Where'd you hear that?” Abdullah asks.

“From my father. Rahim's father still goes off and fights sometimes with the warlord Abdul Khaliq. And I know some people have seen him going up and down their street. He talks to himself. He stumbles around and he can't even answer a simple
How are you?
most days.”

How could Rahim's father be such a brute and Rahim not even mention this to me once? I am feeling like my best friend is a stranger to me. I realize I know he has a mother, father, and four sisters. I've heard him mention his aunt, the one with the hunchback, who came up with the idea to change Rahim into a
bacha posh
. Other than that, I don't know much about his life away from school.

“That bad, huh?” Abdullah shakes his head.

“That bad.” We all know people addicted to opium. People use it to relax or kill the pain and then they get addicted and can't let it go. I know because my father told us about it. He swore to my mother that he would never
be hooked the way he'd seen some people get hooked. He told us about the people begging and dying for opium. He said he'd ask God to help him manage, since we can't afford to keep him numb with pills.

I feel really bad for Rahim. And I think I'm better off with a one-legged father than an opium-addicted one. It occurs to me that it's a really weird thing to think and I should probably never say it out loud.

I make up my mind to stop by his home after school this week if he doesn't come back. I know where he lives though I've never been inside. When Rahim doesn't show up for the next two days, I stick with my plan. I follow the path he's shown me and find the bright green door, metal rusting on the edges. I consider knocking but am too afraid Rahim's father will answer. I stand there feeling foolish and wondering if my friend is just a few feet away from me. I listen closely. What am I expecting to hear? Yelling? Crying? Laughing? I cannot imagine.

I turn my back to the door. If I'm not going to knock, I should just leave. I hesitate because I know if the tables were turned, Rahim would knock on my door. My best friend wouldn't be so scared. I bet he would—

I hear the footsteps too late to move away.

The door creaks open and a hand clamps down on my shoulder.