“I have children here!” Masood called out over and over. All of that cool calm in his voice he’d had every day since we first met evaporated. “I have women and children.”
We ran right past the freedom fighters, who stood in the open, firing, their eyes glazed with the rage of warfare.
“I have children. Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”
One bearded man wearing a pakol cap and brandishing a rifle yelled at us from the rocks above. He waved for us to come toward him. Masood led us through the rocks to an opening. He pushed us inside as we passed him.
The cave wasn’t very deep, so we pressed back as far as we could, hiding behind rocks or bundled up on the ground. I squatted against the hard rock wall, breathing rapidly, trying to slow down my speeding heart. My forehead was damp from sweat, and my legs weak and tired. My body ached from the fear. I labored to breathe normally.
“Masood,” I whispered after a while, “are we safe?”
He only held a finger to his lips. The fighting went on outside for most of the day. We didn’t move until well after the shooting had stopped. Then only Masood went out to speak to the freedom fighters. From the mouth of the cave, I overheard their conversation. They told him the country would be destroyed unless the Afghan army joined the fight against the Russians. We were all warriors, they said, and we must all fight to protect our country. I remembered Padar telling me how important it was to fight for our country. These countrymen had a difficult time understanding why the Afghan army wasn’t helping their fight. I had seen firsthand in Kabul that the Afghan and Russian armies were on the same side. The defense of the true Afghanistan had been left to civilians.
We stayed with the freedom fighters for several weeks in the caves. A few other families settled down near us. A couple of mothers with young children, and old women bent over with years, carried their meager belongings in baskets and in cloth bundles slung over their backs. The rest of their belongings had been lost in the bombing of their homes. The stories that filtered in with the refugees were of constant dangers and destruction. “The Russians are bombing the villages,” one mother said in a matter-of-fact way. “They don’t know about these caves, so we’re safe here.”
“Our whole village is gone,” one of the women said. She told me about her young son, barely Zia’s age, who went off to the war with the other men in her village. She hadn’t seen him in months.
“They are fighting like these men,” an old woman told me, as she tended a small fire built with twigs and roots she’d scrounged from the ground.
Other mothers told the same stories. Their sons and husbands were off at war, probably hiding in another cave somewhere else in these barren mountains, cold, tired, but determined to expel these foreign soldiers. The sadness on their faces, the droops in their shoulders, as they went about their duties, caring for the children and cooking, appeared to be too deep to overcome. But they carried on, dwelling on stories of hope. “We will return and build our homes again when these men go away,” a young mother said.
“And what about you?” another woman asked me. “Will you return to Kabul?”
We had risked everything to escape. Yet I had no idea what my life would be like if we didn’t return. “Someday. I think we will.” Even as I spoke those words, I had the sense that I had spoken more wish than fact. Families all over the country were splintered.
My family was hardly the only one fractured by war—Mommy and my sisters were in New Delhi, Padar still in Kabul, and here we four were in an unlit mountain cave, eating over a crude cook fire, steps away from the horror of death. My family’s strife was but a drop in the flood of countrymen fleeing for their lives.
In another place and time, I would have wept at the staggering loss all around me. But weeping was of no use here. In these caves, the women’s only goal was to survive so they could rebuild their lives. Crying got no one closer to that end.
“There are many brave Afghans,” a wizened old man told me one night around the campfire, “who have already died.” His rifle leaned against the rock wall beside him. “I don’t know how long we can hold out against this army with tanks and jet bombers.”
“As long as there is one Afghan in this country,” said another old man at the campfire, “there will be an Afghanistan.” My padar had said that same thing so many times. When we didn’t have any electricity in Kabul or we sat around by candlelight, and he read to us or recited poetry, he’d always end the session by saying that to us. As if he were trying to give us some hope that our country and our people would survive these troubling times. And now sitting up here in this rocky cave, a village man in traditional dress, with a full beard and rustic ways, said the same thing. It was more than a saying but a deep belief that lived everywhere in this rugged country. If I were a boy, if I were older, I would not hesitate to defend my country.
At night, the freedom fighters snuck out and gathered food for all of us. Masood paid them, but I believed they would have brought us food regardless of our money. When they came back, they told us they had buried dead fighters and villagers. I often stood in the mouth of the cave, watching the beams of their flashlights, marveling at how brave and determined they were. Not one of them was willing to back down in the face of overwhelming odds that they would not win this war. Their adversaries had jet fighters, helicopters that spit bullets, and tanks and machine guns. These men had their rifles, RPG launchers, and their skill in living in the mountains. And their courage. It didn’t seem like enough.
One night I stood at the entrance watching them file out, and one of the bearded men stopped and patted me on the head. He must have seen the questions in my eyes. “I hope for the freedom of Afghanistan,” he said. “I am not afraid, even to die.” I watched them march single file into the night. They went willingly into the darkness with only the hope that their sacrifice would mean something more than spilled blood alone—freedom for their children and for me.
Like a bad storm on the other side of the mountains, we could hear the sounds of bombing and gunfire move away from us. One day Masood said it was time to leave. We packed and went back on the road. Men from the village helped us with some donkeys but would only allow us to take them to the next village. The donkeys knew the trails well, and we moved quickly along the rocky trails to the village.
I sat behind Zia, holding on to him tight as we made our way over the bumpy and rutted road. It took all of my energy to not fall off the donkey’s swaying back as it made its way up the treacherous path.
After a long climb, we reached another village. Masood spoke to one of the men, who said we were very close to Pakistan. The man advised us to stay there for the night as we still had a long climb ahead of us. I was excited about the thought of finally getting away from the fighting and death and seeing Padar. Yet I was also sad at what I would leave behind—my country, my home.
On the last night in Afghanistan, we were all asleep in a small camp of escaping refugees. Masood had us huddle together in a tight circle with our belongings beside us. I awoke to the rustling of a rucksack. I propped myself up on my elbows, peering into the darkness, wondering if someone was sick or hurt. The silhouette of someone leaning over Zulaikha’s belongings, wearing a pakol cap and a tunic, made my heart bang against my ribs. Someone was robbing us. I reached over as quietly as I could and just nudged Masood without saying a word.