1There was a country with a river through the middle of it, and the people of the north bank and the people of the south bank had gone to war. Each bank had its own tongue and its own account of the wrong, and each account was true in parts.
2A woman named Leyla had lived on the south bank, in a town with a blue-tiled school where she taught children their numbers. She was thirty-four. In the second spring of the war, soldiers of the north bank took the town. Her husband went out to speak with them about the school, and they shot him in the street.
3She did not have time to bury him. She took her son Karim, who was eight, and her husband's father Haroun, who was seventy and walked with a stick. She locked the door of her house out of habit. At the bridge she saw what she was doing, and she threw the key into the river.
4There was one way out of that country that was not watched, over the mountains by a pass that only shepherds used. On the ninth evening Leyla and her two came to a ruined sheepfold below the pass, a ring of stones with half a roof. By dark there were fourteen people in that ring who had never seen one another before.
5There was a lorry driver named Bashir with his wife and his wife's mother. There were two brothers who had been bakers. There was a family of hill people, a man and woman with three small children, and they spoke the north-bank tongue, though they said they had no part in the war. And there was a young man who sat apart against the wall and said nothing at all.
6They made one fire, for there was wood enough only for one. They sat round it in three knots, not looking at one another. Each knot ate its own bread with its back turned.
7The children would not have it. Children do not know which bank they are from until they are told. Karim and the three hill children were soon crouched together in the firelight, and Karim was drawing in the dirt with a stick.
8Leyla watched him. He was drawing numbers. He drew a one and said its name in his tongue. The eldest hill girl said its name in hers. He drew a two. She was a teacher, and she could not help herself. She moved over and took the stick.
9"Here is a thing my husband showed me," she said, once in each tongue, for like many on that river she had some of both. She drew the numbers from one to nine. "These signs are not ours, and they are not yours. They came to both of us from far in the east, long ago, through people of a third tongue. When you count, you count in the handwriting of strangers."
10The hill children looked at the signs, and at her. The eldest said the nine numbers back in Leyla's tongue. Karim said them in hers and got the seven wrong, and all four of them fell over laughing. The grown people round the fire looked up at the sound as if they had forgotten what it was.
11It was the lorry driver's wife who looked hard at the young man by the wall. He wore a shepherd's coat, but his boots were soldier's boots, and under the coat was the grey collar of a north-bank tunic turned inside out.
12Bashir stood up. "You," he said. "Open your coat."
13The young man opened it. He was perhaps nineteen. He said, in the north-bank tongue and then badly in the other, that his name was Idris. He had been taken for the army at seventeen, and eleven days ago he had walked away from his post in the night. He wanted only to get over the pass.
14"His own people," said Bashir. "His own people shot my cousins in a ditch." He turned to the others. "I say he goes back down the road tonight. Or else he does not go anywhere."
15The bakers agreed. The hill family looked at the ground. Old Haroun said nothing, and looked at Leyla. Of all of them she had the most right to speak.
16She looked at the boy. She did not see a boy. She saw a grey collar. She saw the street outside the blue school, and something lying in it that she had not been allowed to go to.
17"Do as you like," she said. "It is nothing to me."
18"In the morning, then," said Bashir. "When there is light to see him go." And he sat down facing the young man, with a stone beside his hand.
19The fire burned low and the others slept. Leyla sat awake with Karim's head in her lap. Late in the night she heard a small bell, and feet on the stones. Someone came into the sheepfold out of the dark.
20It was a girl. She was perhaps twelve years old and she was alone. She had a milk goat on a rope, and the bell was on the goat. And she had come down from the pass, not up from the valley. She was walking toward the war that everyone else was walking away from.
21"May I sit at your fire?" said the girl. Leyla could not tell which bank her voice was from. It seemed to have some of each.
22"It is everyone's fire," said Leyla. "Sit."
23The girl sat. She looked at the sleepers, and the thin faces of the children. Then without a word she took the cooking pot from beside the fire and knelt and milked the goat into it. She warmed the milk at the coals. From her bag she took a round of hard white cheese and broke it, and gave half to Leyla.
24"For the small ones when they wake," she said of the milk. "It is not much."
25Leyla had bread left, the heel of a loaf. She broke it and gave half to the girl. So they ate together, the woman and the child, bread and cheese, and the goat lay down between them.
26"Where are your people?" Leyla asked.
27"Ahead of me," said the girl. "I have a long way to go to reach them."
28"You are going the wrong way. There is nothing down there but soldiers."
29The girl did not answer that. She looked into the fire a while. Then she looked at Leyla, and her eyes were steady, as some children's are. She asked, "What have you left open?"
30It was a strange thing to be asked. Leyla laughed, and it was not a good laugh.
31"Open? Nothing. I have left nothing open. I locked my door and gave the key to the river. My husband is lying in a street. I have a child and an old man and half a loaf. Whoever you are, look somewhere else. Everything I had is shut."
32The girl nodded as if this were a fair answer. She said nothing more. She finished her bread, and after a time she curled up against the goat and seemed to sleep.
33Leyla sat on. The question would not leave her. She said to herself again, nothing, and each time her eyes went to the same place. Against the far wall the young man in the shepherd's coat sat awake, with his arms round his knees, waiting for the morning.
34She had said do as you like, and had thought the words did nothing. But thirteen people had been waiting for her to speak, and she had spoken. She had shut a door on that boy as surely as she had locked her house.
35She thought: I did not choose the war, or the road, or the half loaf. Every one of those doors was shut by other hands. In all this month there is one door that is mine, and I have shut it myself and called it nothing.
36Toward dawn she slept a little. When she woke, the girl and the goat were gone. There was no bell to be heard on the mountain, above or below. Only the pot of milk stood by the ashes, with a flat stone laid over it to keep it clean.
37Karim woke and drank, and asked who had brought it. "A girl with a goat," said Leyla. "She came in the night and she has gone on."
38"Whose girl?"
39Old Haroun answered him, from his blanket. "Somebody's," he said. "Everyone is somebody's child. Drink your milk."
40When it was light, Bashir stood up with the bakers behind him. Before he could speak, Leyla stood too.
41"He walks with us," she said.
42Bashir stared at her. "You, of all of us?"
43"I, of all of us. I said last night it was nothing to me. That was false, and I take it back. Men with guns decided who in my town would see the next day. I will not do the same with a stone, on a mountain, to a boy. If I do, they have taken my husband, and they have made me one of them besides. He walks with us." She broke her last bread in two and walked across the ring of stones, and she held half out to the soldier.
44Bashir spat. But he did not pick up the stone. They went up toward the pass, fourteen together, with the boy last.
45The pass was a wide saddle of grass and old snow between two peaks. The path ran over it plain as a ribbon, and beyond it the land fell away blue into another country. Karim saw it and whooped, and he ran ahead with the hill children, as children do when they can see the end.
46"Stop!"
47It was the soldier. He had shouted in both tongues, and his voice cracked like a branch. "Stop! Tell them! Do not move your feet!"
48The children stopped, and looked back. Karim was thirty paces out on the grass.
49Idris had gone white. He spoke fast, to Leyla, to all of them. "In the autumn my company came up here. We were ordered to close the pass. I carried the boxes. I dug. I am sorry. I did not say it last night because you would have killed me. But I know where they are. Do you see the stones with red on top, the painted ones? Never walk between two red stones. Never. Three paces to the left of each one, there the ground is clean."
50"Karim," she said. Her voice came out quite calm. She never knew how. "Stand still, my heart. Do not move at all. It is a game."
51"I will go," said Idris. He was already taking off his pack. He walked out onto the pass slowly, counting, and looked at each red stone as a man looks at a page he has written himself. He reached the hill children first, and turned them, and sent them back along his own footprints in the old snow, one at a time. Then he went on to Karim. He picked him up, eight years old and heavy, and carried him back on his hip, placing his boots in the marks they had already made.
52He set the boy down in front of his mother. Leyla held her son so hard that he complained.
53Then Idris turned round and went out again. "Walk where I walk," he said. "Put your foot in my foot."
54And they did. Fourteen people crossed that pass in a single line, each stepping in the footprints of a soldier of the other bank. Bashir carried his wife's mother on his back, and he put his feet most carefully of all. On the far side, where the last painted stone stood, Idris sat down in the snow and was sick.
55Bashir stood over him a while. Then he took out his water bottle and gave it to him. It was all he could manage, and it was a great deal.
56At the bottom of the mountain there was a border post and a fence. The guards there looked at Idris's boots, and they opened his coat. Two of them took him by the arms.
57Leyla stepped out of her line. It would have been easy to say, he is my brother's son. The words were ready in her mouth. But a lie would be found out, and then nothing she said after would be believed.
58"Write this down," she said to the officer. "He was a soldier of the north bank. He left them. Yesterday he took fourteen people across a field of mines that he had been made to lay. He went first. My son is alive because of it. My name is Leyla. I was a teacher in the river town. My husband was killed by men in that tunic, and I am telling you to write it down. I will put my name under it."
59The officer looked at her. He wrote it down. She signed. Then Haroun signed, and the bakers, and the hill man made his mark. Last of all Bashir took the pen. He held it a long time. Then he signed too.
60They led the boy away to another tent, and for a month she did not know what had become of him.
61That first evening, women came down from the village beyond the fence. They were strangers and they spoke a third tongue, and they carried flat bread still hot in cloths. They went along the line putting it into people's hands. They did not ask which bank anyone was from. They could not have understood the answer.
62Within the week Leyla had a strip of canvas between two poles, and thirty children under it, and a stick. She drew the nine signs in the dust. Idris, when he was let out, sat at the back among the small ones and learned to read.
63The children of that camp told the tale of the girl with the goat. Leyla told only what the girl had asked, and that she had given the wrong answer first. The tale went north with those who went north. Years later it was told in a grey house by a cold harbour, by a mother to a daughter. You will hear of that.