The Breadwinner – by Deborah Ellis

TEN

Bones. They were going to dig up bones.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea," Parvana said to Shauzia the next morning. She had her blanket and her father's writing things with her. She hadn't been able to tell her mother about going bone-digging, so she didn't have a reason to leave her usual work things behind.

"I'm glad you brought the blanket. We can use it to haul away the bones." Shauzia ignored Parvana's objections. "Come on. We'd better hurry or we'll get left behind."

Getting left behind did not sound so terrible to Parvana, but with a quick look across the market to the painted-in window with her secret friend, she obediently fell in behind Shauzia as they ran to catch up with the group.

The sky was dark with clouds. They walked for almost an hour, down streets Parvana didn't recognize, until they came to one of the areas of Kabul most heavily destroyed by rockets. There wasn't a single intact building in the whole area, just piles of bricks, dust and rubble.

Bombs had fallen on the cemetery, too. The explosions had shaken up the graves in the ground. Here and there, white bones of the long-dead stuck up out of the rusty-brown earth. Flocks of large black and gray crows cawed and pecked at the ground around the ruined graves of the newer section of the graveyard. The slight breeze carried a rotting stench to where Parvana and Shauzia were standing, on the edge of the cemetery's older section. They watched the boys fan out across the graveyard and start digging.

Parvana noticed a man setting up a large weigh scale next to the partially destroyed wall of a building. "Who's that?"

"That's the bone broker. He buys the bones from us."

"What does he do with them?"

"He sells them to someone else."

"Why would anyone want to buy bones?"

"What do we care, as long as we get paid." Shauzia handed Parvana one of the rough boards she'd brought along to use as a shovel. "Come on, let's get busy."

They walked over to the nearest grave. "What if...what if there's still a body there?" Parvana began. "I mean, what if it's not bones yet?"

"We'll find one with a bone sticking out of it."

They walked around for a moment, looking. It didn't take long.

"Spread out the blanket," Shauzia directed. "We'll pile the bones onto it, then make a bundle out of it."

Parvana spread the blanket, wishing she were back in the market, sitting under the window where her secret friend lived.

The two girls looked at each other, each hoping the other would make the first move.

"We're here to make money, right?" Shauzia said. Parvana nodded. "Then let's make money." She grabbed hold of the bone that was sticking out of the ground and pulled. It came out of the dirt as if it were a carrot being pulled up from a garden. Shauzia tossed it on the blanket.

Not willing to let Shauzia get the better of her, Parvana took up her board and started scraping away the soil. The bombs had done much of the work for them. Many bones were barely covered by dirt and were easy to get at.

"Do you think they'd mind us doing this?" Parvana asked.

"Who?"

"The people who are buried here. Do you think they'd mind us digging them up?"

Shauzia leaned on her board. "Depends on the type of people they were. If they were nasty, stingy people, they wouldn't like it. If they were kind and generous people, they wouldn't mind."

"Would you mind?"

Shauzia looked at her, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again and returned to her digging. Parvana didn't ask her again.

A few minutes later, Parvana unearthed a skull. "Hey, look at this!" She used the board to loosen the ground around it, then dug the rest of it up with her fingers so she wouldn't break it. She held it up to Shauzia as though it were a trophy.

"It's grinning."

"Of course it's grinning. He's glad to be out in the sunshine after being in the dark ground for so long. Aren't you glad, Mr. Skull?" She made the skull nod. "See? I told you."

"Prop him up on the gravestone. He'll be our mascot."

Parvana placed him carefully on the broken headstone. "He'll be like our boss, watching us to make sure we do it right."

They cleaned out the first grave and moved on to the next, taking Mr. Skull with them. He was joined in a little while by another skull. By the time their blanket was full of bones, there were five skulls perched in a row, grinning down at the girls.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Parvana said. "What am I going to do?"

"I have to go, too." Shauzia looked around. "There's a doorway over there," she said, pointing toward a nearby ruined building. "You go first. I'll keep watch."

"Over me?"

"Over our bones."

"I should go right out here?"

"No one is paying attention to you. It's either that or hold it."

Parvana nodded and put down her board shovel. She'd been holding it for a while already.

Checking to make sure no one was looking, she headed over to the sheltered doorway.

"Hey, Kaseem."

Parvana looked back at her friend.

"Watch out for land mines," Shauzia said. Then she grinned. Parvana grinned back. Shauzia was probably joking, but she kept her eyes open anyway.

"Kabul has more land mines than flowers," her father used to say. "Land mines are as common as rocks and can blow you up without warning. Remember your brother."

Parvana remembered the time someone from the United Nations had come to her class with a chart showing the different kinds of land mines. She tried to remember what they looked like. All she could remember was that some were disguised as toys — special mines to blow up children.

Parvana peered into the darkness of the doorway. Sometimes armies would plant mines in buildings as they left an area. Could someone have planted a land mine there? Would she blow up if she stepped inside?

She knew she was faced with three choices. One choice was to not go to the bathroom until she got home. That was not possible — she really couldn't hold it much longer. Another choice was to go to the bathroom outside the doorway, where people might see her and figure out she was a girl. The third was to step into the darkness, go to the bathroom in private, and hope she didn't explode.

She picked the third choice. Taking a deep breath and uttering a quick prayer, she stepped through the doorway. She did not explode.

"No land mines?" Shauzia asked when Parvana returned.

"I kicked them out of the way," Parvana joked, but she was still shaking.

When Shauzia came back from her trip to the doorway, they made a bundle of the bones in the blanket, with the skulls thrown in, and carried it together over to the bone broker and his scales. He had to fill the bucket on the scales three times to accommodate all their bones. He added up the weight, named an amount, and counted up the money.

Parvana and Shauzia didn't say anything until they were well away from the bone broker's stall. They were afraid he might have made a mistake and given them too much.

"This is as much as I made in three days last week," Parvana said.

"I told you we'd make money!" Shauzia said as she handed half the cash to Parvana. "Shall we quit for the day or keep digging?"

"Keep digging, of course." Mother expected her for lunch, but she'd think of something to tell her.

In the middle of the afternoon, there was a small break in the clouds. A stream of bright sunlight hit the graveyard.

Parvana gave Shauzia a nudge, and they looked out over the mounds of dug-up graves, at the boys, sweaty and smudged with dirt, at the piles of bones beside them, gleaming white in the sudden sunshine.

"We have to remember this," Parvana said. "When things get better and we grow up, we have to remember that there was a day when we were kids when we stood in a graveyard and dug up bones to sell so that our families could eat."

"Will anyone believe us?"

"No. But we will know it happened."

"When we're rich old ladies, we'll drink tea together and talk about this day."

The girls leaned on their board shovels, watching the other children work. Then the sun went back in, and they got back to work themselves. They filled their blanket again before stopping for the day.

"If we turn all this money over to our families, they'll find things to spend it on, and we'll never get our trays," Shauzia said. "I think we should keep something back, not turn it all over to them."

"Are you going to tell your family what you were doing today?"

"No," Shauzia said.

"Neither will I," Parvana said. "I'm just going to turn over my regular amount, maybe a little bit more. I'll tell them some day, but not just now."

They parted, arranging to meet again early the next morning for another day of bone digging.

Before going home, Parvana went to the water tap. Her clothes were dirty. She washed them off as best she could while they were still on her. She took the money out of her pocket and divided it in two. Some she put back in her pocket to give to her mother. The rest she hid in the bottom of her shoulder bag, next to her father's writing paper.

Finally, she stuck her whole head under the tap, hoping the cold water would wash the images of what she had done all day out of her head. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Mr. Skull and his companions lined up on the gravestones, grinning at her.