A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  My cousins and I climbed hills, while the elders reclined against huge pillows in the shade of willow trees or under the broad leafy branches of a panj chinar tree. My unmarried aunts were kept busy boiling water for the others who drank one cup of tea after another. In these long afternoons they took turns spinning some small event into a big story that made everybody laugh. They all tried to outdo one another, of course. They are Afghans. Of them all, my mother was the best.

  My uncles were tabla drummers, and my father played the wooden flute, though he had never had lessons. We stayed until late into the evenings, singing, dancing, and cooking over an open fire.

  Sometimes on these outings, the cousins held a school lessons competition. Whoever got the highest score could demand that the other cousins buy whatever he or she liked, no matter the cost. We, too, were very competitive. Our parents were the judges, and cheered loudly every time one of us got a correct answer. Sometimes the competition ended in a tie. We hated that.

  Occasionally, some of the cousins fought and did not talk to each other for a day or two. But we could not maintain that for very long. Our games were more important, and never ended, whether we were playing hide-and-seek in the garden, or shooting marbles, or racing our bicycles in the park near our house, or especially when we were flying kites from the roof.

  Every afternoon in the spring and autumn, when the weather brought a gentle breeze, hundreds of kites would fill the sky above Kabul and stay there until dark. Kite flying was more than a game; it was a matter of the greatest personal pride to cut the string of your rival’s kite. The trick was to draw your kite string against your opponent’s with speed and force, and slice through his string.

  Wakeel was the kite master, the kite-flying teacher to us all. The kids on the street had given him the title of “Wakeel, the Cruel Cutter,” because he had cut so many of their kites.

  One afternoon, Wakeel looked at me as we were heading to the roof with our kites and said, “Let’s have a fight!” As usual, his long, dark hair fell over his forehead, brushing his thick eyebrows. And below them were his deep-set, dark eyes that sparkled, always.

  I said okay, though I knew he would cut me right away. But from the earliest age we are taught never to run away from a fight, even if we think we cannot win.

  The roof of Grandfather’s apartment block was ideal for kite flying. Rising high above the trees that grew along the street, it was like a stage. People below—adults as well as kids—would see the kites going into the air, and stop everything that they were doing to watch the outcome. A good fight would be talked about for days after.

  After we had had our kites in the air for half an hour, taunting and feinting, Wakeel called from the far end of the roof in amazement, “You have learned a lot! It used to take me only five minutes to cut you. Now it has been more than half an hour, and you are still in the sky.”

  Suddenly, he used a trick that he had not yet shown me. He let his kite loop around mine as if he were trying to choke it. I felt the string in my hand go slack, and there was my kite, flat on its back, wafting back and forth like a leaf in autumn, drifting off across the sky away from me.

  Wakeel laughed and made a big show of letting his kite fly higher so everybody in the street could see he had yet again been the victor. I ran downstairs to get another kite.

  Berar, a Hazara teenager who worked with our gardener, loved kite fighting. All the time I had been battling Wakeel, he had been carefully following every dive, envious.

  Berar was a few years older than Wakeel, tall, handsome, and hardworking. His family lived in Bamyan, where the big statues of Buddha were carved into the mountains. Berar was not his real name. Berar in Hazaragi dialect means “brother.” We did not know what his real name was, and he did not mind us calling him Berar.

  As the suspense had built between Wakeel and me, Berar could not stop watching us. The old gardener spoke to him impatiently several times: “The weeds are in the ground, not in the sky. Look down.” The gardener was always harsh to Berar.

  “Give the boy a break,” Grandfather told the gardener. They were working together on Grandfather’s beloved rosebushes. I had just sent a second kite into the air. Grandfather nodded at Berar. “Go on,” he said.

  Berar ran up to the rooftop, where I was struggling to gain altitude while avoiding Wakeel’s torpedoing attacks. Berar took the string from me and told me to hold the reel.

  I had never seen Berar fly a kite before. I kept shouting at him, “Kashko! Kashko! Pull it in!” But Berar did not need my instructions; he knew exactly what to do. Wakeel shouted at me that I could have a hundred helpers and he would still cut me. Though he was tall and skinny, he was very strong and he was furiously pulling in his kite to circle it around mine.

  Berar was getting our kite very high very fast, until in no time at all it was higher than Wakeel’s. Then he made it dive so quickly that it dropped like a stone through the air. Suddenly, there was Wakeel’s kite, drifting back and forth from left to right, floating off to Kandahar, separated from the now limp string in Wakeel’s hand.

  I climbed on Berar’s shoulders, screaming for joy. I had the string of my kite in my hands. My kite was so high in the sky, it looked like a tiny bird. The neighbor kids on the street were shouting, too. They had not seen Berar doing it, only me on Berar’s strong shoulders, cheering and shouting: “Wakeel, the Cruel Cutter, has been cut!” I kissed Berar many times. He was my hero. He gave me the title of “Cutter of the Cruel Cutter,” even though it was he who had made it happen.

  Wakeel sulked, and did not talk to me for two days.

  * * *

  We had another cousin who was a few months younger than I. He never really got along with any of the others. Wakeel used to call him a jerk. All the other cousins, everyone, started to call him “Jerk” as well.

  If he bought new clothes, he would walk in front of us to show them off and say something stupid. “We went to a shop in Shahr-e-Naw that opened a few weeks ago. They bring everything they sell from London and Paris. The owner told my parents that I have a good taste for clothes. I don’t think you guys can afford a suit like this.” When I asked how much he paid, he would triple the price.

  Wakeel would ask, “Hey, Jerk, do your clothes do any magic for such a price?”

  Jerk could never see a joke coming, and would ask something witless like, “What kind of magic?”

  “Can they make you look less ugly?” Wakeel replied, his voice cracking into shrieking guffaws.

  We’d all laugh, and Jerk would run toward his house and complain to his parents. We would run to the roof, or outside the courtyard, or hide in the garage inside my father’s car to escape punishment.

  Once when Jerk had on his good clothes and was showing off, Wakeel filled his mouth with water, and I punched him in his stomach. That forced Wakeel to spit it all on Jerk. Poor Jerk looked at us in disbelief and asked with outrage in his voice why we had done that.

  Wakeel told him, “We are practicing to be tough. We punch each other unexpectedly, so we will be prepared if we get into a fight with someone. You should be tough, too.” Then we punched him in his stomach, but avoided his face so we would not leave any bruises, because we knew that would get us spanked by his parents.

  Jerk had one unexpected strength: he was always a reader. For his age, he had more information than he needed. He had a good mind for memorizing, too. That turned us even more against him.

  * * *

  Wakeel teased Jerk all the time when we were at home playing with our cousins. Outside, though, Wakeel would not let anybody bother him. Wakeel was like an older brother to all of us. When Jerk got into fights with the neighbor boys, which happened a lot, Wakeel defended him. When we were playing football in the park, Wakeel always made sure that Jerk and I were on his team, so he could protect us.

  Our neighbors were like us, quiet and educated people. When there was a wedding or engagement party in one of their houses, everyone in the neighborhood wa
s invited, along with their kids and servants.

  Every week my grandfather talked for ten minutes in the mosque after Friday prayers about how to keep our neighborhood clean, or how to solve water and electricity problems, or how to take care of the public park and create more facilities where the kids could play together. He had never been elected to any position, but people listened to him.

  When a family was having financial problems, one of its older men would quietly speak to Grandfather and ask for the community’s help. Then, after Friday prayers, Grandfather would explain to the other men in the mosque that some money was needed without ever saying by whom. It was important to protect the dignity of the family in need.

  One Friday after the others had left the mosque, I saw my grandfather giving the money he had collected to a neighbor whose wife had been sick for many months. The man kissed Grandfather’s hands, and said, “You always live up to our expectations. May God grant you long life, health, and strength.” When Grandfather noticed that I was watching him, he scowled at me, and I quickly turned away. This was something I was not meant to see.

  * * *

  Grandfather’s house was his great pride, and the McIntosh apple trees were his great joy. He was in his late sixties when I was born, and soon after became a widower. By then he had retired from the bank, and busied himself in the courtyard, planting roses, geraniums, and hollyhocks or watering his McIntosh apple trees, always singing in a whispery voice under his teeth, or quietly reciting the ninety-nine names of God.

  And for hours he would sit reading, surrounded by his books. His favorite, in two beautiful leather-bound volumes, was Afghanistan in the Path of History by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar. The title was embossed on the cover in gold. Sometimes he read to me from it.

  He also had the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, which had beautiful covers as well; but he did not read those to me. When I asked about them, he said he would give them to me when I was old enough.

  In winter, he studied the poets Rumi, Shams Tabrizi, Hafiz, Sa’adi, and Omar-e-Khayyam. Sometimes he invited his friends to discuss the political affairs of Afghanistan and the world. But before long, the talk would turn to poetry. He always wanted me and my boy cousins to listen to what was being said, and to ask questions.

  My sisters and girl cousins were never part of those discussions. Their lives moved on a different path from those of the boys, but they were always allowed to read Grandfather’s books. Indeed, Grandfather always encouraged them to do so. “Education,” he would say, stressing the word, “is the key to the future.” They read lots of poetry, as well as novels by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and some Afghan and Iranian novelists whose names no one knows in the rest of the world. All these books were in Dari.

  Some of the older girls, including Wakeel’s sisters, read Grandfather’s books by Sigmund Freud long before I did. We could hear them whispering about something called “the Oedipus complex,” and then laughing. As soon as any of the younger cousins got too close to them, though, they stopped talking and looked at us in a way to make us understand that we were not welcome.

  One day during one of Grandfather’s discussions, Wakeel raised his hand and asked what politics was all about.

  One of Grandfather’s friends answered, “In fact, politics is really just a bunch of lies, and politicians are very gifted liars who use their skill to control power and money and land.”

  “They must be devious people, then,” Wakeel said.

  “That’s true.”

  “Which country has the most devious politicians?” Wakeel asked.

  “Let me tell you a story, my son,” Grandfather’s friend said, clearing his throat. “Someone asked Shaitan, the devil, ‘Since there is such a large number of countries in the world, how do you manage to keep so many of them in turmoil all the time, like Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Palestine? You must be very busy.’”

  “Shaitan laughed and said, ‘That is no problem. Not for me.’ He leaned back on his cushion and raised the mouthpiece of his chillum to his scaly lips. He drew in a sour-smelling smoke that made the water in the pipe turn black with oily bubbles, then let the smoke drain out of the corners of his mouth. ‘There is one country on the earth that does a better job than me in creating problems everywhere.’”

  “Really?” Wakeel asked. “Which country is more devious than Shaitan?”

  “‘It is called England,’ Shaitan said.”

  My grandfather and his friends all laughed, and then they talked about poetry again.

  It would be years before I understood the bad feelings that many Afghans have for England, which three times invaded Afghanistan and three times was driven out. For nearly three centuries, the English used Afghanistan like a playing field to challenge the Russians in a very ugly game. Neither side won, and neither side cared how many Afghans they killed or how much suffering they inflicted on Afghan people.

  * * *

  Those days were long in the past, like the battles between the ancient kings who had fought to rule our country. Life was smooth, and easy, and full of joy, except maybe for Jerk when we played tricks on him. Time moved graciously with the pace of the seasons, and nudged us gently through the stages of life. But then one night the air was filled with the unexpected cries of “Allah-hu-Akbar,” and nothing has ever been the same since.

  2

  Allah-hu-Akbar

  Chill winds from the high mountains around Kabul had begun to blow down on the city. Autumn was coming. It had been especially cold the past two nights. Now my parents and my aunts and uncles were using this Friday afternoon to set up the wood-burning tin stoves called bokhari in every room. When flakes of last winter’s soot fell out of the pipes, some of the uncles said bad words. The cousins laughed and raced to tell one another what they had heard.

  Just as night fell, the electricity suddenly went out. I looked outside. It was not just our house. The whole city was completely dark. I had never seen that before. Kabul always had electricity.

  My mother said, “Oh, it’s as dark as a grave.”

  I thought for a moment. How did my mother know how dark a grave is?

  “Have you ever been in a grave?” I asked her.

  “Stop being silly,” she chided as she went to find candles.

  My older sister had been doing her homework. “There is no electricity in a grave, idiot,” she said. “Of course it is dark.” She went to help my mother.

  I looked out the window again into the darkness. No one was in the street. Could a grave be as big as a whole city?

  I could hear voices in the distance. It was like the murmurings of a thousand people from the far side of Kabul. At first, I thought that it must be muezzins calling people to prayer. But the prayer time had been twenty minutes ago, and the voices were not familiar like the muezzins’. Nor were they coming over a loudspeaker, nor from the direction of the nearby mosques. The voices kept getting louder. Now I could hear them shouting “Allah-hu-Akbar, Allah-hu-Akbar.” God is great.

  I ran to find my mother to ask her why they were saying that. She was searching through all the drawers for candles; my older sister was looking for matches.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You’re even more than four times older than I am,” I told her insistently, “but still you don’t know more than me.” She finally located a candle and lit it. She held it in her right hand and cupped her left palm around it. The soft light made her look very beautiful.

  She kissed me on my cheek, which made me smile, and said, “Go and ask your father. Then you will know more than I know.” The wax dripped on her thin, delicate fingers. She flinched and put the candle on the table. The wind blew in through the windows, making the curtains dance and the candle flutter; the voices outside grew louder.

  * * *

  I found my father in the courtyard, up on a ledge of the thick mud-brick wall that separated us from the street. He was leaning over, hoping someone would pass who
could tell him what was going on.

  The sound grew, like a wind rising. Now we could hear people in many places yelling. They were not organized. Everybody seemed to be saying their own “Allah-hu-Akbar,” some louder and some softer.

  Suddenly, the man across the street who owned the shop at the corner started calling “Allah-hu-Akbar” inside his courtyard. Then I heard his two brothers join him. A couple of more courtyards down the street began having their own voices.

  My father jumped down from the ledge. He landed on one of the low wooden platforms where we sometimes spread carpets and ate dinner. He, too, started shouting, “Allah-hu-Akbar!”

  I was very surprised. I wanted to shout, too. But I did not hear any kids’ voices. It was all men, and I was a little bit frightened. I hugged my father’s leg.

  I put my head against his leg and heard a different voice coming from inside it. Then I pulled my head away and heard his usual voice. I did this several times, then called my older sister and told her to do the same. She grabbed his other leg and put her ear to it. We were fascinated by our new discovery. My father paid no attention to us. He was shouting louder now, and that made it more exciting for us. We were putting our ears to his legs and pulling away, giggling.

  I heard some more familiar voices joining in, and even some women. I pulled my head away from my father’s leg. All my uncles and my aunts were standing behind my father and shouting, “Allah-hu-Akbar.”

  “Why are they all saying that?” I asked no one in particular.

  “It is doomsday,” my sister said. “The sun will rise from the west during the night, and the moon and stars will disappear. The mountains will become smooth, and the whole earth will become flat.” I was now eight years old and almost as tall as she, but she was frightening me. She was very good at scaring us younger kids whenever she told stories.