Times of War Collection (32 page)

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.

We were in an alleyway. No one was about. I wanted us to run, but Mother said that would attract attention. So we walked out of the alley, and into the crowded streets of Kabul.

With lots of other people about, I thought we were safe enough, but Mother said we'd be better off out of Kabul altogether, as far away from that man as we could get. We had no money for food, no money for a bus fare. So we started walking, Shadow leading the way again. We just followed her through the city streets, weaving our way through the bustle of people and traffic, too exhausted to care which way she was taking us. North, south, east or west, it really did not bother us. We were leaving danger behind us, and that was all that mattered.

By the time it got dark, we were already well outside the city. The stars and the moon were out over the mountains, but it was a cold night, and we knew we'd have to find shelter soon.

We had been trying to hitch a ride for hours, but nothing had stopped. Then we got lucky. A lorry was parked up ahead of us, at the side of the road. I knocked on the window of the cab and asked the driver if we could have a ride. He asked where we came from. When I told him we were from Bamiyan and we were going to England, he laughed, and told us he was from a village down the valley, that he was Hazara like us. He wasn't going as far as England, only to Kandahar, but he was happy to take us if that would help. Mother said we would go wherever he was going, that we were hungry and tired, and just needed to rest.

He turned out to be the kindest man we could have hoped to meet. He gave us water to drink and shared his supper with us. In the warm fug of his cab, we soon shivered the cold out of us. He asked us a few questions, mostly about Shadow. He said he had only once before seen a foreign-looking dog like that, with the American soldiers or the British, he wasn't sure which.

“They use dogs like this to find the roadside bombs, to sniff them out,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “Those soldiers, the foreign soldiers, they all look much the same in their helmets, and some of them are so young. Just boys most of them, far from home, and too young to die.” After that he stopped talking, and just hummed along with the music on his radio. We were asleep before we knew it.

I don't know how many hours later, the driver woke us up. “Kandahar,” he said. He pointed out the way to the Iranian frontier on his map. “South and West. But you'll need papers to get across. The Iranians are very strict. Have you got any papers? You haven't, have you? Money?”

“No,” Mother told him.

“Papers I can't help you with,” the driver said. “But I have a little money. It's not much, but you are Hazara, you are like family, and your need is greater than mine.”

Mother didn't like to take it, but he insisted. So thanks to this stranger, we were at least able to eat, and to find a room to stay, while we worked out what to do and where to go next. I don't know how much money the driver gave us, but I do know that by the time Mother had paid for the meal and the room for the night, there was very little left, enough only to buy us the bus fare out of town the next morning. But as it turned out, that didn't get us very far.

The bus that we had taken, that was supposed to take us all the way to the frontier, broke down out in the middle of the countryside. But it was now a countryside very different from the gentle valley of Bamiyan that I was used to. There were no orchards, no fields here, just desert and rocks, as far as you could see, so hot and dusty by day that you could hardly breathe; and cold at night, sometimes too cold to sleep.

But there were always the stars. Father used to tell me you only had to try counting the stars, and you always went to sleep in the end. He was right most nights. Night or day we were always thirsty, always hungry. And the blister on my heel was getting a lot worse all the time, and was hurting me more and more.

After walking for many days – I don't know how many – we came at last to a small village, where we had a drink from the well, and rested for a bit while Mother bathed my foot. The people there stood at their doors and looked at us warily, almost as if we were from outer space.

When Mother asked the way to the frontier, they shrugged and turned away. Again it was Shadow who seemed to interest them, not us, and she was doing what she always did, running around, exploring everywhere with her nose. As we left I saw that some of the children were following us, watching us from a distance. Just outside the village we saw a crossroads ahead of us. “Now what?” I asked Mother. “Which way?”

That was when I noticed that Shadow had suddenly stopped. She was standing stock still at the crossroads, head down, staring at the ground at the side of the road. I called out to her, and she didn't even turn round. I knew something was wrong right away.

I looked behind me. The village children had stopped too, and one or two of them were pointing, not at Shadow, but at something further away, further down the road.

I saw then what they had seen, foreign soldiers, several of them, coming slowly towards us. The one in front had a detector – I'd seen them before in Bamiyan, and I knew what they were for. He was sweeping the road ahead of him for bombs. I think it was only then that I put two and two together and realised what Shadow was doing. She had discovered a bomb. She was pointing to it. She was showing us. And I knew somehow that she was showing the soldiers too.

But they still couldn't see her. She was hidden from them by a boulder at the side of the road. So I just ran. I never even thought about it. I just ran, towards the soldiers, towards Shadow, towards the bomb.

was running and running, waving at the soldiers to warn them, screaming and yelling at them that there was a bomb, pointing to where it was, to where Shadow was.

All the soldiers had stopped by now, and were crouching down, taking aim at me.

At that moment the whole world seemed to be standing still. I remember one of the soldiers standing up and shouting at me to stop where I was. I didn't understand any English then, of course, but he was making it quite clear what he wanted me to do. He was telling me to move back, and to do it fast.

So I did.

I backed away till I found Mother's arms around me, holding me. She was sobbing with terror, and it was only then that I began to be frightened myself, to realise at all how much danger we were in.

The soldier was walking now towards Shadow, calling out one word over and over again, but not to us, to Shadow. “Polly? Polly? Polly?”

Shadow turned, looked at him, wagged her tail just once, and then she was back to being a statue again, head down, nose pointing. Shadow never wagged her tail at anyone unless it was a friend. She knew this soldier, and he knew her.

They were old friends. They had to be.

But how? I couldn't work it out at all. It was a weird moment. I knew the bomb might go off any time, but all I could think about was how that soldier and Shadow could possibly have known one another.

The soldier was still shouting at us to move further away, then waving at us to get down. Mother was pulling me backwards all the time, almost dragging me, until I found myself lying down with her in the bottom of a ditch. Her arm was tight around me, her hand on top of my head, holding me down.

“Don't move, Aman,” she whispered in my ear. “Don't move.” All the time we were lying there she did not stop praying.

I don't know how long we were lying there in the ditch, only that I was wet through, and that my foot was throbbing with pain. All the time I wanted to get up on my knees and have a look at what was going on, but Mother wouldn't let me.

We could hear the soldiers talking, but had no idea what was happening until we heard footsteps coming towards us along the road. We looked up to see two soldiers standing over us, one of them a foreigner, one in an Afghan uniform. Shadow was there too, panting hard, and looking very pleased with herself. The two soldiers helped us up out of the ditch, and Shadow jumped up and down at us, greeting us as if she hadn't seen us for a month.

“It's all right,” the Afghan soldier told us. “The bomb is safe now.” He spoke in Pashto, but then at once repeated it in Dari. He seemed to know almost immediately that we were Hazara, that we spoke Dari.

The foreign soldier was shaking Mother's hand, then mine, and he was talking excitedly all the time, the Afghan soldier interpreting for him. “This is Sergeant Brodie. He's with the British army. He says you were very brave to do what you did. You may have saved many lives today, and he wants to thank you. He wants to tell you something else too, about the dog. He couldn't believe his eyes when he first saw this dog, none of us could. He knew it was Polly at once. We all did. I knew it too. There's no other dog in the world like Polly. He says that Polly was always excited like this after she discovered a bomb. It's because she knows she has done her job well, and it makes her really happy. But Sergeant Brodie wants to know, how come she seems to know you so well?”

“Of course she knows me,” I told them. “She's our dog, isn't she?”

They looked at one another, not seeming to understand what I was telling them.

“Your dog?” the British soldier asked me, through the interpreter again. “I'm still trying to work this out. I mean, how long have you had her? Where did you find her?”

“Bamiyan,” I said. “She came to our home. It was months ago, nearly a year maybe.”

“
Bamiyan
?” The interpreter was amazed. They both were. “Sergeant Brodie says that is impossible,” said the Afghan soldier. “Bamiyan is hundreds of miles away, up north. This whole thing is impossible.”

As the interpreter was talking, the soldier seemed suddenly to be looking about him nervously. “Sergeant Brodie says we can't stand here chatting out in the open,” the interpreter went on. “The Taliban could be watching us. They have eyes everywhere. They have ambushed us on this road before. But he has to find out more about all this, about you and Polly. We must go into the village, he says. We can be safer there.”

So with Sergeant Brodie holding my hand, the soldiers behind us, and Shadow running on ahead, showing us the way as usual, we walked back into the village, the village children all around us.