A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  When they had gone, my father locked the door after them. My father and my uncles went to Grandfather’s room. Their wives were whispering to one another in the courtyard.

  My cousins came to me to ask me what had happened. I stood with them all around me and told what I had seen. They paid close attention to everything I said, even the ones who did not get along with me. Now that I had become so important, I told them, “You have to wait until I finish my explanations, then I will answer your questions.”

  A moment later, we heard three gunshots in the street. My father and two of my uncles ran from Grandfather’s room toward the courtyard door. My mother and my uncles’ wives cried to them not to go out. But they did not listen.

  Grandfather came out of his room and ran after them. Nobody dared to tell him what to do. As he hurried toward the courtyard gate, he nodded at me to follow him. Grandfather always wanted me to see life as it is and not hide from it. I followed him, and my cousins followed me. Outside our courtyard gate, we found my father and my two uncles handcuffed in front of Grandfather’s warehouse. Several more robbers were in the street. Two of them were again pointing guns at the backs of their necks. One of the locks to the warehouse had been shot open. One of the thieves was positioned as a lookout at one end of our short street; another one was at the far end. One more was standing in the middle of the road in front of our warehouse.

  Two others were still trying to break the second lock. Sweat was dropping from their chins, though it was cold and a light cover of snow had whitened the ground. One of them wanted to blow the lock open with a grenade, but his friend did not let him.

  “No!” he said. “They’ll hear it. We’ll have to share the carpets with the commander.” Suddenly, I understood that these guys were ordinary thieves who had joined one of the factions. They were not true Mujahedin who defend their country and faith against the invaders and heretics.

  The one who had suggested using the grenade stepped back and shot three bullets at the lock. On the third shot, it shattered and the door opened. The one who was standing in the middle of the road called the two others at the ends of the road to join them. They all went inside.

  The warehouse was dark. The carpets were piled one on top of another, all the way to the ceiling. Over the past sixteen years, since my grandfather had retired from the bank, he and my father had gathered more than six thousand carpets. One of the thieves drew the curtains, and sunlight rushed in.

  The warehouse was a treasury. Every carpet spoke through its colors and its designs. Many were very old. Each one had been selected carefully by Grandfather and my father, but we could do nothing to stop the thieves from taking them away from us.

  Working quickly, three of them loaded as many carpets as they could into their old Russian jeep. Three others stood guard outside with their fingers on the triggers, ready to shoot anyone who bothered them. I saw the carpet that I had helped wash in the courtyard with the washers we hired once a month. They cleaned the old carpets that my father brought back from the villages. That was my favorite carpet, but I could not tell these thieves to not take that one because I liked it.

  It took them two days to steal all the carpets. The war had now come to us, as it had to so many.

  * * *

  We were not the only ones who were robbed. Our part of Kabul was almost empty. Most of our neighbors had fled, some in such a hurry they took nothing with them. Soon their houses were stripped bare.

  The women were no longer at their windows with their elbows on the ledges, chatting. Now, instead, unfed cats leapt from the ledges and hissed at each other.

  Every time the wind blew, the doors of the empty houses started banging, windows slammed, curtains blew in and out. When there were no sounds of rockets exploding or guns being fired, the neighborhood was filled with the howling of the hungry dogs who had been abandoned.

  Only a madman would try to go out in the street. Snipers had taken up positions on the small mountain behind us and might take a shot, just for fun. The twin peaks had lost their old names of Koh-e-Asmai and Koh-e-Aliabad and had become known as Sniper Mountain.

  As spring brought warm days back to Kabul, it became too dangerous to move around in our courtyard. Some snipers even used Grandfather’s high roof where we flew kites to shoot at those on the mountain; the snipers on the mountain shot back. Sometimes they fired rockets. A few landed in our courtyard. The rest fell in the streets around us, on our neighbors’ houses, in our park, where they destroyed the trees, and on our small neighborhood school, which had been our joy until it was blasted into dust.

  The grass in the courtyard began to die as the weather grew warmer, because no one dared to go outside to water it. In the end, it became too dangerous even to stay in our rooms. We had to move to a large room in the basement under the apartments, where we hoped we would be safer.

  It had never been wired for electricity, and both day and night we lit oil lamps and candles. We slept on the cement floor.

  We ate together, more than fifty of us sitting on the floor around one tablecloth. Each day’s meal was like a little party, but a sad one. Nobody talked, nobody laughed. In fact, we were waiting for a rocket to land on us and kill us all.

  All the uncles had radios with tiny earphones. They spent all day listening to news from the Dari-language broadcasts on the BBC World Service and other stations. I wanted to listen to Indian songs. Worry will not change my destiny, I thought; worry brings more worries.

  * * *

  One Sunday night around nine o’clock, the uncles all started telling everyone to be quiet. The BBC announced that the next day there would be a ceasefire in our Kot-e-Sangi neighborhood. It would last for ten hours starting from eight in the morning. This meant we could leave our house. Everyone began to talk at once. What should we do? Where should we go? Who would help us?

  As I was falling asleep that night, I could hear rockets whining in flight; when they landed, they made the ground rock like a cradle.

  * * *

  Around three or four in the morning, I woke up needing to use the bathroom. We did not have one in the basement. I walked to the courtyard to pee under a tree as I had done on other nights since we had been forced from our rooms. It was very quiet, but I heard the sound of shoveling. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. In different parts of the garden, all of my uncles were digging narrow, deep holes. They dug in the dark. No one dared light a lantern. It would have been a target for the snipers.

  I went to one of my uncles and asked him why he was digging a hole at this time of the night. He did not answer me. I went to another uncle and asked him the same question. He did not answer either.

  I went back to the basement to ask my father. He was not there next to my mother. My mother, sisters, and little brother were all sound asleep. I quietly rushed to the corner of the courtyard where our part of the house stood. There was my father digging a hole beneath the mulberry tree we liked to climb.

  “Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.

  He stopped and looked at me. “Go and sleep,” he said. He sounded harsh.

  “Why is everybody digging holes?” I asked determinedly.

  “I said, go and sleep,” he almost shouted at me, but very softly as if he did not want anyone to hear. His voice made me frightened. I did not ask any more questions. But I was angry.

  Instead of going back down to the safety of the basement, I went to our own rooms, and I slept in my own bed. It was so good to sleep in my own bed after so many weeks on the hard cement floor of the basement. I did not care if a rocket fell on me. A few minutes later, I was sound asleep, and had no idea of the strange new life that would start for my family and me in the morning.

  3

  The Other Side of the Mountain

  I woke up just before dawn. My father and mother were running all around our rooms, putting clothes into suitcases. My little brother was asleep on a pile of blankets in a corner.

  My three sisters came in from our cor
ner of the basement. They were rubbing their eyes and stretching their arms and yawning. Their hair was tangled. My father sat them next to me on the edge of my bed. He crouched in front of us and spoke very seriously.

  “We have to leave here today. It is the only chance we may have,” he said.

  In about half an hour, we were ready to go. It was the first time I had seen our rooms so messy. I told my mother that if she wanted to tidy a bit, I would help her. She nodded and began picking up things that had been scattered in the hurry to pack. My father spoke sharply to her: “What are you doing? Who are you tidying for? Thieves and looters? We are leaving, for God’s sake. Get into the car, everybody!”

  Were we leaving all our things for thieves and looters? What was going to happen to my kites and my marbles? I started filling my pockets with my best marbles.

  “Qais! The car! Now!” my father said. From the way he spoke, I knew not to argue. Several marbles slipped out of my hands and went rolling around on the floor. I left them and ran out the door.

  We walked quickly across the courtyard to the garage. I looked under the tree where my father had been digging a hole last night. But there was no hole anymore. The green cucumber vine was there, just as it had been before. I wanted to ask him what happened to that hole, but I thought he might shout at me again like last night.

  We got into the car while he opened the garage door to the street. As he started the engine, one of my uncles burst into the garage from the courtyard.

  “Where are you going?” asked my uncle, who was a year younger than my father.

  “I told you last night,” my father replied, “to my friend’s house in Kart-e-Parwan.”

  “Where are the rest of us going to go?” my uncle asked plaintively.

  “You have had weeks to think about that,” my father replied. There was an ache in his voice.

  “Take our kids and wives with you; they want to live, too, like your own,” my uncle pleaded.

  “This is a small car, not a bus or truck,” my father said. “It can only take four people at a time, and we are six already, plus a baby.”

  “Leave that part to me. I know how to do it. I’m a good packer,” my uncle said.

  Hardly a minute later, all six of my uncles with all of their kids and wives arrived in the garage and tried to fit themselves into our car. Two of my uncles’ wives sat on the front seat, and seven of my cousins sat in the backseat. There was no space left for us. My father slammed the door near the driver’s seat. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said angrily.

  My uncles started to argue with my father. He walked into the courtyard and kept walking slowly around the trees. I had never seen him behaving like this, or talking to his brothers like this before. It reminded me of Indian movies in which the bad brothers did not get along.

  Everybody got out of the car and stared at one another. There was a deep silence.

  My father came back after a few minutes and told my mother and my three sisters to take the baby and sit in the backseat. Then he ordered four of my cousins to squeeze in there, too. He asked me and three of my other cousins, including Wakeel, to sit in the trunk. Two of my uncles’ wives sat in the front seat with my father. The rest would have to stay at the house and wait for him to come get them later.

  He backed the car out onto the street. The bottom scraped the road from the weight of so many passengers. My father drove slowly for the four blocks through our neighborhood until we got out to the main road.

  * * *

  What we saw, I will never forget. Thousands of people like us were taking advantage of the ceasefire to flee from our part of the city. Thousands and thousands of people, all walking in near silence. When they spoke, they whispered as if they had been forbidden to talk normally. They were strung along each side of the roadway, moving along like lines of ants. All of them had two or three bags in their hands.

  Ours was the only car on the road. When they saw our car, they all rushed toward us, asking us to give them a lift, even though they could see that our car was already fully packed. The crowd that gathered around us was so huge that my father could not move the car forward, not even one inch. Some were trying to pull my cousins and me out of the trunk so they could take our place. My father shouted back to us, “Hold on to each other, and lock your fingers together tightly.”

  We did what we were told, and my father rolled up his window, pressed the horn, turned on the lights, and drove slowly, then faster until one by one the people let go of us.

  For the first time in the two months since the fighting had started, all of us were seeing the destruction it had caused. Things we had heard about, but had not wanted to believe, we were now seeing for ourselves.

  The block-long, eight-story yellow grain silo that the Russians had built was full of holes where rockets had hit it. Small mountains of wheat lay at the base of the silo where it had flowed out through the holes.

  There were big craters in the road where rockets had fallen. This had been the best road in Kabul. There were still many half-exploded rockets standing in the middle of the road, like nails that had been banged halfway through a piece of wood.

  Hundreds of dead bodies were scattered all over the pavement, on the sidewalks, and in the park in the middle of the road. Some looked like they had been there for a long time. Blood was matted all over their clothes. Most were on the main road. Maybe they had been hit by a rocket when they were trying to cross the road. But many of them had been shot with bullets to the head, chest, or back. This was the work of the snipers. I could not believe my eyes; I thought I was seeing an American horror movie, especially when I saw parts of bodies, like arms or legs or even heads, lying by themselves.

  My father had no choice but to drive over the ones in our path. Some of the dead bodies were on their backs as if they were sleeping. When our car drove over them, the speed of the car turned their faces toward the road, and the car rose up off the pavement.

  To avoid hitting a man who was running toward us, my father drove the wrong way around the roundabout in front of the Polytechnic, then gunned the car up the hill toward the Intercontinental Hotel.

  * * *

  Beyond the top of the hill, everything looked different. The unimaginable scene through which we had just driven suddenly vanished. In its place, we saw real life.

  People were buying bread from bakeries for their breakfast. Little kids were holding their parents’ hands as they were walking to their school. The dogs were not howling. The roads were not empty. People’s windows were not slamming, and their doors were not banging. There was no war. None.

  I saw smiles on the faces of people who showed no signs of worry. But they could not stop staring at us; they had never seen a car packed like ours before. The lines of refugees had only just begun to reach that area, and they had no idea how many thousands more were coming. The small mountain that rose between our house and this neighborhood had protected these people from the fighting. Not even the snipers had come around to their side of the mountain, though they could have. But they were fighting over our neighborhood, which lay between two factions. The people we saw acted as if they did not even know that vicious combat was going on less than two miles away, though they would have to have heard the rockets and the shooting.

  We came down the hill from the Intercontinental Hotel into the Kart-e-Parwan neighborhood. There were only a few cars on the road, but many people walking. Most of them were Indians going barefoot to their temples, carrying brass bowls filled with milk. Their men were dressed in white or orange. The women wore bright-colored saris. The kids walked behind. The boys’ heads were shaved except for one braid. Some of the men had stripes painted on their foreheads.

  My cousin Wakeel was sitting next to me in the trunk. He laughed at the kids with no hair, but said he wished he could have one of their bowls of milk.

  At the bottom of the hill, we turned sharply to the left a couple of times and drove through a pretty, small park I had never se
en. All the flowers were carefully tended.

  We passed a large white building that stood behind a high wall. There were guards in strange uniforms with guns out in front of its fancy gate. They stood like statues. Big dogs from Russia were next to them. A sign said “British Embassy” in Dari under big letters in some other language.

  We followed a dirt road that ran for two hundred meters beside the wall. That was the bumpiest road in Kabul. It took us down into a deep ravine and then up again as loose rocks slid underneath the wheels of the car. The top of the trunk bounced down on our heads with every bump. The dust stirred up by the car rolled in on us and made us choke. All of our eyebrows and eyelashes got covered with it. We looked like the clowns that used to perform on the stage of our school for Teacher’s Day.

  * * *

  My father stopped the car in front of a tall, rusted metal gate in a high mud wall. He blew the horn a few times. Finally, with a scraping sound, an elderly chowkidar, the gatekeeper, drew open a small door next to the gate, saw that it was my father, then opened the gates wide. My father drove inside. The chowkidar rubbed his eyes to see whether he was dreaming. He closed the metal gates behind us and rushed toward us to help us get out of the trunk. He whispered to himself, “I have never seen so many people in a Volga before.”

  “I bet you haven’t,” I said back to him with a grin.

  He got red and tried to hide his embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to be rude; I’m just shocked.” He had not expected to be heard.

  We climbed out of the car. Some of my aunts had to be pulled. But the kids were all jumping out and looking around at where we had stopped, hardly four miles from the war zone we had just left.

  In front of us rose a massive wall more than two stories high. It had one small opening in its dun-colored expanse, and that was filled with a thick, unpainted wooden door studded with the flattened heads of thick spikes. At the far end of the wall was a tower with eight sides that loomed above the high walls and the tops of some very big trees. We had seen another tower like it just outside the gate, but it was damaged, and half of it was missing.