Ground Zero(19)

The boys cackled with delight and got up to do it all over again.

“Do you boys know my brother Pasoon?” Reshmina called to them. “Did he come by here recently?”

“Yes!” one of the boys told her. He grunted as he and his friends leaned into the turret. “And he wouldn’t help us push the gun!”

Reshmina sighed. So Pasoon had come this way. And there was nothing else in this direction except the Taliban.

The boys squealed as their Soviet tank ride clanged and threw them off again, and Reshmina climbed the next hill.

Away from the river, Kunar Province was dusty and brown, the ground rocky and hard. The few plants here were scratchy and dry. Reshmina spied a boy herding his goats up a mountain in the distance and wondered if they had found anything better to eat. She doubted it.

That should be Pasoon up there, Reshmina thought. A young boy loping along, singing a song to his goats as they climbed into the mountains. Not running off to join the Taliban and fight a war that had begun a decade before he was born.

Reshmina stopped to catch her breath, stepping up onto a boulder and loosening her headscarf to let in more air.

She had begun to lose her twin brother in school. Their first textbooks, the ones they had used to learn their letters in Pashto, were old anti-Soviet primers printed by the United States and smuggled in from Pakistan. The books taught the alphabet, but they also taught the children of Afghanistan to fight back against their Soviet captors. Reshmina could still remember some of the lessons.

K is for Kabul, the capital of our dear country, the primer said. No one can invade our country. Only Muslim Afghans can rule over this country.

J is for Jihad. Jihad is the kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims and Muslim lands from the enemies of Islam. If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim.

T is for Topak. “Topak” was the Pashto word for “gun.” My uncle has a gun. He does jihad with the gun.

Another picture book followed the adventures of two boys named Maqbool and Basheer, who eventually helped the mujahideen clean and carry their weapons before an attack on the Soviet army.

Even their math textbooks encouraged them to fight. A Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second. A mujahid has the forehead of a Russian in his sights 3,200 meters away. How many seconds will it take the bullet to hit the Russian?

Reshmina knew that the Americans had made those textbooks in order to hurt their enemy at the time, the Soviet Union. What the United States hadn’t expected was that they themselves would one day invade Afghanistan. Now the Americans were the infidels they had trained the mujahideen to fight.

Reshmina had managed to ignore the calls to war in their textbooks and used the books to learn her letters and numbers instead. But the pictures of tanks and planes and guns had been far more interesting to Pasoon. And it didn’t help when boys like Darwesh and Amaan kept coming back to tell him how great things were in the Taliban. Then Hila had been killed in that airstrike two years ago, and Reshmina had brought a wounded American soldier into their home, and now Pasoon was gone. Unless she could catch him.

Reshmina squinted into the bright sun and thought she saw movement on a ridge across the valley. She put a hand up to block the sun. Yes—it was Pasoon! She would recognize that round head and those skinny legs anywhere. Reshmina’s heart leaped. She still loved her twin brother, even if she wanted to punch him in the face.

Pasoon was waving his arms like he was trying to get her attention, and she called out to him.

The tiny figure stopped waving and turned. Reshmina saw now that her brother hadn’t been waving to her at all, but to someone up on the next ridge. She scanned the top of the hill.

There, among the rocks, she saw the shapes of four men silhouetted against the light. Four men wearing baggy pants and turbans and carrying rifles.

Reshmina was too late. Pasoon had found the Taliban.





Brandon stood on the broken edge of the World Trade Center, looking straight out into the bright blue September sky. Strong winds whipped his hair around his face, and burning papers fluttered down from somewhere above him. Exposed electric wires sparked in the sheared-off walls.

Brandon backed up against the stairwell door, his breath hitching in his throat. To his left and right, what was once an interior wall was now the outside wall of the North Tower. Below him, the Brooklyn Bridge stretched across the East River, as tiny as a model train set. He was almost a thousand feet in the air. But this time, there was no window between him and the open sky.

The wet napkin Brandon had tied around his face whipped away into the sky. One long stride and he would join it, falling forever and ever and ever.

Brandon’s brain couldn’t handle what he was seeing, and he sank, shaking, to what was left of the floor. He knew he should move. Get back inside. But he was paralyzed with fear.

The ledge he sat on followed the wall in both directions, but it was only three feet deep. He stared, horrified, at the emptiness around him. There should have been walls here. Cubicles. Desks. Copiers. Fax machines. Water fountains.

People.

But there was no one. Nothing.

In his mind, Brandon kept seeing himself sliding off the edge and falling eighty-nine stories to the ground. He tried not to think about it, but it was all he could think about. First his feet would go over, then his legs. He imagined himself clawing and grabbing at the carpet, sobbing, desperate not to go over the side. He couldn’t fall. But the pull of gravity was too much. He was too high up to resist. Over the ledge he would go, and then that terrible, awful sinking feeling as he fell backward, arms flailing, legs churning. There was nothing to grab onto, nowhere left to stand. He was disconnected from the earth. From everything he’d ever known. And then the ground would come rushing up toward him, closer, closer, closer until—