After the Rain | Page 4

one was looking, Valentine took out her parents' medals and looked at their tiny writing, their shining, unscratchable surfaces, their intricate ribbons.
The woman from the city gave her father a look that said, You see, a child understands, what's your excuse? Valentine couldn't quite feel guilty for taking the woman's side. Leeza's parents fought every day.
"I must leave a note for my wife," he said. Valentine realized that for the first time in her life her parents were going to leave her all on her own and felt a thrill.
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Two weeks and one day after the siege began, her Mata came home, and the city came for Valentine.
Mata was grimy and exhausted, and she favored one leg as she went about the flat, making them cold cereal with water -- all the milk had spoiled -- and dried fruits. Trover looked curiously at her, as though he didn't recognize her, but eventually he got in her way, and she snapped at him to move already, and he pitched a relieved fit, pounding his fists and howling. How that little boy could howl!
She sat down at the table with Valentine, and the two of them ate their cereal together.
"Your father?"
"He said he was digging trenches -- that's what he did all day yesterday."
Her mother's eyes glinted. "Good. We need more trenches. We'll fortify the whole city with them, spread them out all the way to their lines, trenches we can move through without being seen or shot. We'll take the war to those bastards and slip away before they know we've killed them." Mata had apparently forgotten all about not talking to Valentine like a grownup.
The knock at the door came then, and Mata answered it, and it was the woman from the city again. "Your little girl," she said.
"No," Mata said. Her voice was flat and would not brook any contradiction. She'd bossed her nine brothers -- Valentine's uncles, now scattered to the winds -- and then commanded a squadron in the revolution, and no one could win an argument with her. As far as Valentine knew, no one could win an argument with her.
"No?" The woman from the city said. "No is not an option, comrade."
Mata drew herself up. "My husband digs. I fight. My daughter cares for our son. That's enough from this family."
"There are old people in this building who need water brought for them. There's a creche for the boy underground, he'll be happy enough there. Your little girl is strong and the old people are weak."
"No," her mother said. "I'm very sorry, but no." She didn't sound the least bit sorry.
The woman from the city went away. Mata sat down and went back to eating her cereal with water without a word, but there was another knock at the door fifteen minutes later. The woman from the city had brought along an old hero with one arm and one eye. He greeted Mata by name, and Mata gave him a smart salute. He spoke quietly in her ear for a moment. She saluted him again, and he left.
"You'll carry water," Mata said.
Valentine didn't mind, it was a chance to get out of the flat. One day of baby-sitting the human tantrum had convinced her that any chore was preferable to being cooped up with him.
She carried water that day. She'd expected to be balancing buckets over her shoulders like in the schoolbooks, but they fitted her with a bubble-suit that distributed the weight over her whole body and then filled it up with a hose until she weighed nearly twice what she normally did. Other kids were in the stairwells wearing identical bubble-suits, sloshing up the steps to old peoples' flats that smelled funny. The old women and men that Valentine saw that day pinched her cheeks and then emptied out her bubble-suit into their cisterns.
It was exhausting work, and by the end of the day she had stopped making even perfunctory conversation with the other water-carriers. The old people she met at the day's end were bitter about being left alone and thirsty all day, and they snapped at her and didn't thank her at all.
She picked Trover up from the creche, and he demanded that he be carried, and she had half a mind to toss him down the stairs. But she noticed that he had a bruise over his eye and his hands and face were sticky and dirty, and she decided that he'd had a hard day too. Mata and Popa weren't home when they got there, so Valentine made dinner -- more cold cereal and some cabbage with leftover dumplings kept cool in a bag hung out the window -- and then, when they still hadn't returned by bedtime, Valentine tucked Trover in and then fell asleep herself.
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One month after