Reshmina stared at her brother in horror. He knew the Taliban planned to attack? Did other people in the village know?
“Pasoon, the ANA are Afghans! Our own people! And I have no more love for the Americans than you do,” she went on before her brother could speak, “but this betrayal will only make things worse for our village. The Americans will blame us for the attack.”
“The Afghan soldiers made their choice when they agreed to do the Americans’ dirty work for them,” Pasoon said. “Besides, it’s not like we’re the ones carrying out the attack.”
“No, we’re just the ones not telling anyone about it,” Reshmina said. “And if you won’t, I will!”
“No! You can’t!” Pasoon said. He grabbed for her again, but Reshmina was too quick. She broke free and ran up the steps, Pasoon close on her heels.
Pop-pop! Pakoom. Pakoom.
The familiar sounds of gunfire and explosions made Reshmina duck and pull up short, her heart racing.
“It’s started already!” Pasoon cried. Reshmina heard shouting and saw ANA soldiers scrambling down the steps for cover.
Pasoon grabbed Reshmina’s hand and pulled her back toward their house. “Run, Reshmina!”
Reshmina raced back down the stairs and into their home, where her family was gathering in the front room. Baba wasn’t there, and Reshmina realized Pasoon hadn’t come inside with her.
THOOM. The ground rocked from a nearby explosion, and dirt rained down from the ceiling.
“It’s safer in the back,” Anaa said, leading them into the women’s room. Mor disappeared into the kitchen.
PAK! PAK! PAK!
Gunfire erupted close enough nearby to rattle the dishes, and Reshmina and Marzia huddled together against the wall. Anaa pulled Zahir into her lap to sing to him, but the shooting and explosions didn’t seem to bother the baby. He was already used to it. Reshmina didn’t know if she would ever stop flinching at the sounds.
The earth shook again, and Marzia squeezed Reshmina’s arm.
Dear God, please keep Baba and Pasoon safe out there, Reshmina prayed. And Mariam, she added, remembering the translator.
Even as the fighting continued outside, Reshmina found herself wondering what it would be like to go to Kabul someday and study to become a translator. She might be able to work for the Americans, like Mariam did. That had to pay well and would be worth more to her parents than bartering her off as a bride. Reshmina could put her English skills to work and support her entire family. It was an almost-impossible dream, but if Mariam could do it, so could Reshmina.
And without a dream, without ambition, what point was there to living?
Rifles and rockets boomed outside. Reshmina slid away from Marzia and pulled her blue English notebook from between the sleeping mats stacked in the corner. If becoming a translator was her way out, she wouldn’t waste a second when she could be studying.
Reshmina’s mother came into the room carrying a broom. “Oh no, none of that now,” she said, spying Reshmina’s notebook. She snatched it away and put the broom in Reshmina’s hands. “You focus on your housework, not your schoolwork. And you get back to sorting that rice,” she told Marzia. “Keep your heads down and learn how to be good wives. That’s how a woman survives.”
Mor left for the kitchen again, and Reshmina threw the broom down in frustration.
“Forgive your mother, Mina-jan,” her grandmother told her. Zahir had fallen asleep in her lap, and Anaa took up her needlework again while Marzia returned to the rice.
“Why?” asked Reshmina. “All she wants is for me to learn how to be a good wife and marry a successful man. She has no dreams in her heart. No hope for something more!”
“You must understand, Mina-jan,” Anaa said. “Your mother has never been allowed to dream. Me, I was born in Kabul long before the Americans came, or the Taliban. Before the Soviet invasion even. It was a golden time in Afghanistan,” Anaa continued dreamily. “Women went to school and got jobs. One of my sisters became the principal of a school. Another woman I knew became a poet. We dressed differently too, like they do in Europe and America. I once wore a skirt that didn’t even reach my knees. They called it a miniskirt.”
“Outside?” Reshmina asked. She shared an astonished look with Marzia. Reshmina couldn’t imagine wearing such a thing in the house, let alone out.
“Oh yes,” their anaa said, laughing. “The boys rather liked it. And I did too.”
Marzia blushed, and Reshmina got up and started sweeping. The sounds of fighting still filtered in from outside.
“Some women wore the chador, but only if they wanted to,” Anaa told them. A chador was a robe that covered a woman from head to toe, with only her face visible. “We were all Muslims, but in those days no one tried to force their beliefs on anyone else. There was real tolerance of others. We were brothers and sisters, working toward a better future. A better Afghanistan.” Her face fell. “Then, forty years ago, the Russians invaded, and I fled to the mountains with your grandfather, God shower blessings on his grave.” Anaa closed her eyes. “Afghanistan has known nothing but war ever since. That is the world your mother was born into.”
“But so were we,” Reshmina said, glancing at Marzia and Zahir.
As if to prove it, there came the thump thump thump of an American helicopter, and an even louder BOOM that made Reshmina flinch.
Anaa shook her head.
“When your mother was six, her father was killed by a missile while he was praying in his backyard,” she said softly. “When she was your age, her older brother was killed by the Taliban for no reason that has ever been explained to her. Her husband—your father and my son—had his leg mangled by an old Soviet mine right after they were married. Two of her children died before they reached their fifth birthday, and her eldest daughter, your sister Hila, was killed by an American bomb.”
Anaa closed her eyes again and sighed. She wore her sadness like a chador.
Reshmina swallowed. She knew about her sister and her father, of course, but her mother had never spoken about the rest.
“Is it any wonder your mother wishes only for you to be a good wife and married to a good husband?” Anaa asked Reshmina. “She has never known a better Afghanistan, as I have, and cannot trust in the promise of a brighter Afghanistan, as you do. She expects your life will be just as hard as hers, and she would protect you from anything so dangerous and painful as hope.”
Reshmina suddenly felt sorry for her mother. Not only because of all the awful things she had lived through, but because she had never had anybody in her youth like Anaa or Reshmina’s teacher—or even Mariam—to show her things could be better.
“When you’re done sweeping, you can get back to gathering firewood, which you still haven’t finished,” Reshmina’s mother said, making her jump. Mor had come back into the room while Reshmina was lost in thought. “They’re done with their shooting,” Mor said. “For now.”
Reshmina realized her mother was right—there were no more shots or explosions. The battle was over.
“Yes, Mor,” Reshmina said meekly.
I will try to be nicer to my mother in the future, she thought. But I will not give up on my dreams.
When Mor was gone, Reshmina picked up her English notebook and tucked it under her tunic before ducking out the back door to go collect firewood. As she made her way around the mountain, she read her English lessons aloud.
“Palwasha uses a computer to write an email. She talks to her friends on Facebook.”
Reshmina had never used a computer, but she knew what one looked like. Some of the older girls at school practiced for when they would finally get a computer by tapping letters drawn on a piece of cardboard and reading books about the Windows operating system. Reshmina didn’t know what Facebook was, but apparently it was very important.
Reshmina picked up a dry twig. “There is a party on the beach,” she read aloud from her notebook. “Palwasha drives her mother to the party in her car.”
“Nnnnnnnn,” someone groaned.
Reshmina froze and looked around for the source of the sound. A few meters away, lying on his stomach among dried leaves and dirt, was an American soldier. His face was charred like a scorched pot, and there were dark, wet spots on his uniform. Blood, Reshmina realized. He must have been injured in the battle.
The soldier groaned again and dragged himself forward. Where was he going? He twisted his head this way and that, as though he was looking for something, but there were only scrub trees as far as Reshmina could see.
The soldier’s head turned toward Reshmina, and she held her breath—but his eyes swept past her like he hadn’t even seen her.
He’s lost his eyesight, Reshmina realized. The black marks on his face—he had been wounded and couldn’t see. If someone didn’t help him, he would die out here in these woods. Or the Taliban would find him, and his death would be far more painful.
Reshmina frowned. Why should she care? The Americans had killed her sister, after all. Pashtunwali, the way of the Pashtun people, said that it was right and just to seek revenge against someone who had done you wrong. In Pashto, that revenge was called badal, and it never ran out. Reshmina could wait a dozen years—a thousand—and still take her revenge on someone who had wronged her.
Why not just slip away, then, and let this man die?
Reshmina flipped her notebook shut to leave, but she fumbled it. Her notebook hit the ground with a flump, and the soldier’s head turned in her direction again.
“Is someone there?” he asked in English. “Hello? I can’t see, and my ears are ringing. I’m hurt. Hello? Can you help me? Please?”
Reshmina silently cursed her clumsiness. If she had been able to slip away without him hearing, she could have left the soldier to die and been done with it. But now he had heard her and had specifically asked her for help. Just as Pashtunwali gave her the right to revenge, it also said that when a person asked for help or protection, no Pashtun could refuse—no matter who was asking, friend or foe. That was nanawatai. What the Americans would call “refuge.”
Reshmina sagged. She could still slip away and have her revenge, but now it would mean denying aid to someone who had asked for it.
“Hello?” the American soldier asked again, his voice weak. “Please,” he begged. “Whoever you are, will you help me?”
A motion sensor picked up Brandon climbing out of the hole in the wall, and fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered on.
He had landed in the middle of a bathroom. A ladies’ bathroom. But Brandon didn’t have time to be embarrassed. He scrambled to his feet and peered back through the hole at the people still trapped in the elevator.
“I’ll bring help!” he promised, and ran for the bathroom door.
Brandon burst out into a corridor. He ran past a fire extinguisher and fire hose box hanging on the wall and into the first office he came to—a company with the name HYAKUGO BANK printed on the door. He saw a reception desk and a couple of chairs for visitors, but no one was around.
“Hello?” Brandon called. There was no smoke here. He pulled down the wet napkin he’d tied around his face and took a deep breath of fresh air. “Is anybody here? We need help!”
Brandon ran past the reception desk. A small group of people stood together at the far wall, staring out the window at something.
“Hey!” Brandon said, running toward them. “Hey, we need—”
Brandon stopped short, mesmerized by what he saw out the window.
Paper. The sky was filled with thousands and thousands of sheets of paper, flipping and falling like the ticker tape parade when the Yankees had won the World Series last year. But this wasn’t right. No one could have thrown these papers out a window on purpose. The World Trade Center windows didn’t open.
Large chunks of glass and metal sliced through the paper blizzard, and some kind of liquid poured down the side of the building, even though it wasn’t raining.
Brandon’s stomach twisted. Something very bad had happened above them in the North Tower. But what? And how high up? All the way up at Windows on the World? Was Brandon’s dad all right?
“Gas explosion,” one of the bankers said. “Has to be.”
“No way,” said another banker. “The World Trade Center doesn’t have gas lines in it.”
“Please, we need help,” Brandon cut in, making them jump. “Four people. Trapped in an elevator. There’s a lot of smoke—”
“Where, kid?” a man asked.
“I’ll show you!”
Two men and one woman from the group followed Brandon back down the hall and into the bathroom. Brandon was almost afraid to look through the hole. What if the elevator had fallen while he was gone? What if everyone inside was dead? Dark black smoke poured from the hole, making it hard to see, but Brandon heard Stephen cough, and he sagged with relief. His friends were still there!
“Oh my God,” said one of the men who’d come with Brandon.
“Here, get back,” the other banker said. The two men took turns kicking at the drywall, and the woman ran back to the office to call 911.
Brandon heard the elevator car drop suddenly. Dishes clattered, and everybody inside cried out in surprise and terror. The car jerked to a stop a foot lower, and Brandon held his breath. If the car dropped too much farther, the passengers wouldn’t be able to reach the hole.
And if it fell down all the way …
“Hurry!” Brandon told the two men. “We have to get them out!”
The bankers were kicking at the drywall as hard and fast as they could, but they were already panting hard and sweating through their dress shirts. The smoke was getting worse too. Brandon coughed and looked around frantically. He had to do something. The help he’d brought wasn’t enough, and they didn’t have time to wait for building security or firemen.
Firemen, Brandon thought, and he had a sudden inspiration. He ran back out into the hall. There—the fire hose box! Brandon didn’t want the hose curled up inside it. He wanted what was in front of the hose, right behind the glass.
A fire ax!
The instructions on the window said IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. Well, thought Brandon, if ever there was an emergency, this is it. He yanked the fire extinguisher from its cradle and used the heavy thing like a battering ram.
Krissh!
The glass shattered, and Brandon cleared out the rest of the shards enough to reach inside. He grazed his wrist on a piece of glass and pulled his arm away with a hiss, but he’d be all right. He’d had worse injuries wiping out on his skateboard.
The important thing was, he had the ax.
Brandon ran back to the bathroom, where the two bankers were standing bent over, their hands on their knees. They were out of breath, and the smoke was even thicker than before.
“Look out!” Brandon cried. Shaking from panic and fear, Brandon lifted the big ax over his head and swung it down hard on the ragged break in the drywall.
Whack!
The ax knocked off a chunk of Sheetrock, but Brandon didn’t hit it square on. The ax kicked away from the wall and slammed into the floor below the hole—chank!—shattering the bathroom’s tiles.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” one of the bankers said, taking the ax from Brandon. “Good job, kid, but I got it from here.”
Brandon stood back as the man swung the ax at the wall. He was stronger, and his aim was better. In less than a minute, he had opened up a hole big enough for Marni to squeeze through. When she could stand again, she wrapped Brandon in an I-can’t-believe-we’re-alive hug. Ordinarily, Brandon would have felt funny hugging a stranger, but now he hugged her back with relief.
Mike and Shavinder were able to help Stephen get through the hole next. He was still having trouble breathing, and Marni went to get him water. Finally Mike and Shavinder squeezed through the hole, and then everyone was out of the horrible elevator.
Shavinder gave Brandon a tight hug. “You saved us, Brandon,” he said.
Brandon pointed to the men from the bank. “They did the work.”
The banker with the ax wiped the sweat from his brow and smiled. “I guess chopping all that wood as a kid back in Wisconsin paid off,” he said.
Marni tried her cell phone again, and this time she got a signal. She stepped to the corner of the bathroom with a finger to one ear and her phone to the other.
“Does anyone know what happened?” Shavinder asked the bankers.
“Felt like an earthquake to me,” one of them replied.
“Yes, yes, I’m all right!” Marni told someone on the phone. “The signal’s bad, hon, I can’t … Yes, we were trapped in an elevator, but …” She was quiet for a moment. “Oh my God,” she said. She turned to face the rest of them. “My husband says an airplane hit the building. A passenger jet. It’s all over the news!”
“My God,” Stephen said. “That must be why the building tilted! We were in the elevator when the plane hit.”
A plane? Hit the building? Brandon felt a jolt go through him. That didn’t make sense. How could you fly a plane into one of the Twin Towers by accident? They were the biggest, tallest buildings in the city, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. No pilot in his right mind would—
Screeeeech!
Brandon heard the sound of metal grinding against metal, and he flinched. He and the others glanced back at the hole just in time to see the elevator car plummet down the shaft.
Nobody moved, and nobody spoke. Everyone was waiting and listening for the elevator car to hit bottom, but the crash never came.
Or maybe it was just so far down they couldn’t hear it.
Brandon exhaled and slumped forward. Mike cursed underneath his breath, and Stephen let out a single sob. They had come that close to plummeting to their deaths.
“Hon? I’ll call you back when I get out,” Marni said into her phone, and flipped it closed.
In a daze, Brandon followed everyone out of the bathroom. The two bankers went back to their office, and the elevator survivors stood in a huddle.
“The plane must have hit somewhere high up,” Mike said quietly. “Cut through the elevator cables.”
“My dad!” Brandon said suddenly. “He’s in Windows on the World! What if the plane hit the 107th floor?” He exchanged a frantic glance with Shavinder.
Stephen’s eyes searched the ceiling. “My company is spread out over five floors. What if it hit one of those?”
Marni put a hand to her mouth. “My company covers eight floors, right above us. And there were half a dozen people at work already this morning!”
“I’m sure they’re all right,” Mike said.
But there was no way he could know that, Brandon thought. There was no way any of them could know what floor the plane had hit.
One of the bankers came back from his office. “Claudia got 911 on the phone,” he reported. “They said to stay put and wait for the firemen.”
Mike shook his head. “Not me. I’m done. I think escaping that elevator deserves taking the rest of the day off.”
The other elevator survivors nodded.
“I am not getting into another elevator. Maybe ever,” Shavinder said. He gestured to the door that led to a stairwell. “It’s eighty-five flights of stairs down, or twenty-two flights up.”
“Up? Why would we go up if that’s where the plane hit?” asked Mike.
“The stairs might still be clear, and they can take us off the roof in helicopters,” Shavinder explained. “They did it once before, in ’93. And it’s a lot shorter trip.”
“I left my purse and things in my office” said Marni.
“You can come back and get them tomorrow,” Shavinder told her.
Stephen coughed. “I can’t go up,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m still having trouble breathing.”
“I’ll help you go down, no worries,” said Mike.
“So will I,” Shavinder said.
Stephen nodded gratefully, and each man took one of Stephen’s arms over their shoulders. Marni followed them. The bankers decided to stay.
Nobody asked Brandon what he wanted to do. Maybe they all just assumed he would go along with the group from the elevator. But when they entered the stairwell and everybody else started going down, Brandon knew he couldn’t go with them. He kept hearing his dad’s voice in his head.
Brandon, what do we say about us? About you and me?
“We’re a team,” Brandon said aloud. “That’s how we survive. Together.”
Brandon tied the wet napkin back around his face and started to climb the stairs up to Windows on the World.
newspaperman’s fascination that prevailed—or at least predominated—and left me dissatisfied with every analysis of Nazism. I wanted to see this monstrous man, the Nazi. I wanted to talk to him and to listen to him. I wanted to try to understand him. We were both men, he and I. In rejecting the Nazi doctrine of racial superiority, I had to concede that what he had been I might be; what led him along the course he took might lead me.