A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  As we approached the smaller Buddha, though, we all became very quiet. He towered over us, and I found myself holding my breath. I had seen a photo of him in my schoolbook, but there he looked as flat as the page. Here, I felt that Buddha could walk right out of the mountain. How could a statue be so tall? I asked myself.

  I had never seen a statue before, not even a small one. In Islam, statues are haram, forbidden, and have been since the time of the second law of the Prophet Musa, or Moses. Only God can make a living creature and breathe life into it, we are taught, and men should not make statues and try to be like God. Nothing had prepared me for the sense of awe that filled me.

  Grandfather once told me that he had climbed to the top of the statues with his stepfather. The statues had been carved from the soft stone of the cliffs, their backs merging with the hill. He had told me about all the caves in the cliffs behind the Buddhas, and of all the paintings on their walls. He said that Bamyan had once been a place filled with holy men.

  “Buddha lived six hundred years before Prophet Issa [Jesus]. And Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, came six hundred and thirty years after Prophet Issa. If you learn about Christianity and Buddhism, you will value Islam even more than you already do.”

  My father found the opening to the stairs that led to the top of the smaller Buddha. I had never seen stairs like those before. They were cut from the stone right inside the cliff. Each step was at a different height and angle, just as Grandfather had said.

  Slowly, we all made our way up. The only light came from occasional holes cut in the rock; we had to feel our way along in some places. My father was carrying my little brother, who was enjoying the adventure as much as the rest of us. By the time we got to the level of Buddha’s shoulders, we had all run out of breath, and our faces were red, even my father’s. Through a large opening in the rock wall, we had a spectacular view across the valley with its rows of crops and fruit trees everywhere. We edged one another to get a better look, and to smell the sweetly scented air that rose off the fields below.

  We climbed a few more steps, and just behind the head of Buddha found ourselves in a cave as big as our living room in Kabul. The walls of the cave were twenty or more feet high; the floor was littered with loose rock. The air was still and cool, and the only sound was the wind blowing through the small openings on the stairs, like the finger holes on a flute.

  The cave was connected to other smaller caves beyond it. Just as Grandfather had said, the walls of all the caves were covered with paintings. Even in the dim light, the colors were bright in rich shades of red, white, green, black, blue, and purple. Some showed bare-chested men and nearly naked women in strange poses. Others were of birds and animals of many kinds, like lions, tigers, cats, eagles, and pigeons, and men hunting them with spears or bows and arrows. They were all interlaced with patterns and symbols, some looking like the tracks of the creatures being hunted. Others were more difficult to understand.

  I asked my father what those paintings meant. He was looking at the hunting scene and replied, “Do you see the man hunting the lion with his arrows?” I nodded. “The others are proud of him. So, they painted a picture of him on the walls to remember his courage. That is how people passed history along to the people who came after them. This was the way of telling stories before the alphabets were invented.”

  I pointed to a large wheel with many spokes that looked like a spider. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It meant something to somebody. The archaeologists and historians might know.” Then he looked at my mother and said, “You know, this cave is a perfect size for us. We can stay here for as long as we are in Bamyan.”

  My mother looked at my father the way she did when he was telling jokes. But my father said, “I am serious. It is our home now.” My mother smiled at him. All the rest of us smiled, too. My father always told good jokes.

  “It is impossible,” she said flatly when she realized he had actually meant what he had said.

  My father did not hear her. “You know, even the king used to buy a ticket to visit this place. Tourists from all around the world used to come here.” But tourists had stopped coming years ago, and the local people had no reason to climb up to the caves.

  My mother had a lot of looks. We could tell by her look what she was thinking, and her eyes were disbelieving. But when she saw how excited we were by the idea, she looked at my father again. “Do you know how high this place is?”

  “Yes, and I have never lived in a place like this before.” He walked over to one of the holes in the wall. “Look, you can see the whole world from here,” my father said excitedly. “I think this is the mouth of Buddha, and we can look right through it.” Buddha actually had no mouth; his whole face was missing. But that did not hinder my father’s imagination. The opening was long and low, and it did, in fact, have a great view.

  “You’re just like a little kid,” my mother said.

  “So, you tell me what to do,” my father responded a bit plaintively. “I don’t have money to pay for a hotel, and I have no idea how long we’ll have to stay here.”

  “But what if somebody falls?” my mother said. “What about these babies?” She held up my little brother and gestured with her arm toward my youngest sister. “Do they have wings to fly if they fall out those holes?”

  In Kabul, I was always afraid of being killed by a rocket, but if I fall down from Buddha’s head, I thought, at least I will die happy.

  My father knelt on the ground and asked everybody to come closer. We all stood in a line in front of him, except my mother, who stood behind us holding my little brother, who was gurgling at the paintings on the wall.

  “Do you want to live here?” my father asked us, and we all shouted “Yes,” almost in one voice.

  “But I have rules. If you accept them, we will live here,” he said. “Rule number one: Everybody has to be careful climbing up and down the stairs. Rule number two: Everyone is responsible for the one younger than him or her. Rule number three: Those are all the rules.” He smiled at us, and we smiled back, then he looked at my mother, and we all looked at her. We could not tell whether she was happy with the idea or not. But we stayed, perhaps because there was no place else to go.

  For an hour, my older sister and I kept running up and down the stairs, bringing things up to our mother that our father took out of the car. There were so many stairs, and they were so hard to climb. But I was moving as fast as I could because my father had promised a bigger ice cream to whoever made more trips. She was moving very slowly, and I knew I would win. By the time we had taken everything up, I was soaked with sweat. But I had made almost twice as many trips as she. I told her proudly that I had won. She smiled and said, “You’re a complete idiot! There is no ice cream in Bamyan. These people don’t know what ice cream is. This is not Kabul, stupid!”

  I looked at my father. He had a silly smile on his face. I was furious at him for tricking me.

  “I owe you a huge ice cream,” he said. “A huge one. You show me the shop around here, and I’ll buy it for you.” Now he was making fun of me. My sisters laughed at me. I ran to the next cave, ashamed of having been so stupid. But my curiosity soon led me back to my family when I heard my father banging two big nails he found in the car into a spot on the walls of the cave where there were no paintings. Then he strung up a cradle for my little brother across a corner of the cave. Later, he hung a kilim at the entrance of the cave to make a door.

  My father went to the bazaar to buy some cooking pots, plates, spoons, forks, and other necessities. My mother sent me to get her some water in buckets. I went to a spring not very far from the Buddha. My older sister collected a few bricks and flat stones at its feet. We took the bricks and water to my mother, who built a hearth for cooking in one of the smaller caves next to the large one. That small cave became our kitchen.

  My father brought back some lamb along with some tomatoes, onions, carrots, potatoes, radishes, and parsley
. My mother built a fire, which she was not used to doing. The smoke made her cry. She was wiping her eyes and nose. Soon her face was covered with black smudges from the smoke. My father teased her, but then helped arrange the wood in the fire and put stones around it so my mother could set a pot on them. She cooked the meat with all the vegetables and made a simple stew that was as good as anything we had ever eaten. We ate it in the large cave, where the men with the bows and arrows watched us.

  Soon it was dark, and we had no light. My father had forgotten to buy candles. He always forgot one or two things whenever he went shopping; that is how my father is. If he did not forget something, how could we know he was actually our father?

  Through the opening that my father was calling “Buddha’s mouth,” a ray of moonlight was weaving itself into patterns of white lace on the floor. It was our lightbulb for that night, a huge one, and very far away, but all we needed for our new home.

  I was the first one to fall asleep that night, even though my mattress was not long enough, and my quilt could barely cover me from head to toe. It was cool in the cave. A gentle breeze kept blowing through it all night long. I woke up after a while and had to pee. My father told me to use the ledge of the next cave down. It felt very strange peeing from such a high place. I was already finished before I heard it hit the ground. It was amazingly loud.

  * * *

  The next morning I was up earlier than the others. I looked out through an opening in one of the cave walls. The sun was still halfway behind the bare and sharp rocks of the mountains. But already daylight was flooding in, making patches of bright light amid the darkness. Below me, the valley was full of fields and trees. The leaves on some of the trees were still green; others had already turned yellow in the midautumn chill. A gentle breeze was moving the branches, and some of the yellow leaves were falling down into the white-tipped, fast-running water of the river. Dogs were playing along the banks. Piles of wheat that had been harvested on each plot of land made neat piles at regular intervals. Cows were eating straw as women milked them. There was no sign of war. A warm feeling just from being there swept through me.

  I decided to see what was in the other caves while my family slept. When I pushed aside the kilim door, a burst of cold wind whirled through the opening into the cave. I shivered in my thin cotton shalwar kamiz, but I knew that in these caves, and outside in the valley, adventures were waiting to happen. It was time to start.

  * * *

  As the days passed, the memory of war began to fade, like the image of a bad dream. I wanted the rest of our family to be with us. Especially I wanted Wakeel, so we could explore all the other caves and the secrets of the mountains, like a place called the City of Screams, where another war had happened long ago. A man named Genghis Khan had killed many people there. It was hard to believe that anything like that had ever happened in Bamyan; it was so peaceful now.

  Grandfather had told me that for centuries people from all parts of the world had come to Bamyan to understand the wisdom of Buddha. I wanted to know more about Buddha, but I could not find anybody who could tell me much. Everybody was Muslim. But I noticed that the local people still felt something special for the Buddha statues. They believed that he was taking care of them.

  I discovered that several other families were living in the caves. Most were Hazaras who had fled from Kabul; some came from a neighborhood close to ours. My sisters and I soon had many friends from among their children.

  Early one morning as I was climbing down from behind Buddha’s head to play with some of the other kids, I saw a group of unusual-looking men in one cave walking in a circle around a fire, completely silent. They were dressed in white and reminded me of Gandhi from the movie we had seen; they wore the same kind of clothing.

  One of them looked Hazara; the rest were Asians, but not Afghans. They kept making circles around the fire. I wanted to join them, but then I was afraid that they might push me into the fire. It was not such a big fire, but enough to burn my feet and clothes.

  I waited near the door for them to stop. I wanted to ask them what they were doing. But after they had finished, the short ones bowed to the Hazara-looking man, who bowed back to them, and went out without saying anything. They walked right past me without looking at me, as if I were not there. Only he stayed in the cave.

  I went in and bowed to him the way I had seen the others do. He bowed back to me as he stood next to the fire. I asked him why they had been circling around the fire.

  He said, “Fire has two faces, like woman.” He had a strange accent, unlike anything I had heard before, and when he spoke, he left out some of the words. “If you worship it, it gives you its blessings, and if you insult it, it burns you as it burns itself.” Since then, I have always thought of fire as a woman with two faces. But I did not really understand what he meant, or who these men were. Were they Muslim? I had never seen such a thing in a mosque. I never saw them again, except for the one who looked like a Hazara, though I later learned he was not. In my explorations I discovered that he lived in a cave nearby. Sometimes I would go to visit him. He did not say very much, but his silence made me feel calm.

  I told my mother about him. She said that maybe he was a monk from another country visiting Bamyan.

  My little brother was beginning to walk. He wanted to do it all the time. In the caves this was a problem. We all had to watch him so he did not fall out. He never went far from my mother. When my mother had to feed our youngest sister, he became jealous. She had to give him a small lump of sugar to distract him. He loved sugar and would eat as much as anybody gave him. Sometimes when I wanted to take him out of the caves to go walking with me, I put a little sugar in my palm. He ran to me. I gave him some, and he followed me all the way to the river, or to wherever I wanted to go. He held on to my middle finger. For a time when we first arrived in Bamyan, he was my special friend, though a quiet one, but I had to trick him to be with me.

  * * *

  Autumn showed its face by turning everything completely yellow. The days shrank, but we enjoyed the clear weather and went for long walks through the town. Nearly every day we passed the larger Buddha statue, but we never went into his caves. They were filled with other fleeing families like ours, and we did not want to intrude on their privacy. The larger Buddha was very impressive, but he was not our Buddha, so we did not have such strong feelings for him.

  Winter came unexpectedly early that year. Soon the bumpy roads disappeared under thick snow. Every morning my father had to shovel aside the snow at the bottom of the steps so I could go get our bread fresh from the baker’s clay ovens.

  After a few days the entry to the cave was reduced to a narrow lane between two walls of snow. Our cheeks got red as we slid down the slope that led down from the bottom of the stairs to the road. In front of Buddha, our breaths became small clouds, and we laughed at the sight of them. We had never seen this much snow in Kabul.

  When my father came back from shoveling or shopping, he had to shake the snow from his large felt coat. Under it, he was wearing a jacket with its fur turned inside out. Felt and fur coats were what everyone wore in Bamyan. I could not find anyone who did not have one. It was not like Kabul, where it snowed only for a day or two, and then warmed up. Here it snowed for weeks without any end. When it did not snow, it was sunny, freezing, and windy.

  My mother was always making tea to keep us warm. On days when it was snowing too hard to go out, my father built a fire in a part of the cave that had no paintings, and we all sat around wrapped in our quilts while my mother told stories about all the Afghan kings and heroes. Amazingly, it seems that they had all spent time in our cave, or at least that is how my mother told it.

  One day the snow was too deep for me to go to the bakery. My father went and brought back some extra flatbreads, so we would not have to go out again later. Since there were so many, I asked my mother whether I could bring one to my friend the monk. I never saw him eat, and sometimes I worried about him, since
he was an old man and had no family to take care of him. She gave me a piece that had been on a hot stone by the fire and was still warm.

  I went down the stairs to his cave and found him sitting near his own fire, though it was too small to make much heat. He wore only his light cotton clothes, with his shoulders wrapped in a white woolen patu, the long blanket that for most Afghan men is their only coat in winter. Yet he did not shiver. He was very happy to receive the bread, and offered me some tea that he had made from leaves that he had gathered from the valley.

  We sat together for a long time. When he poured the tea into a very small bowl and passed it to me, his hands moved very precisely, very gracefully. It was only tea in the bowl, but the way he offered it made it seem like something far more valuable. I drank it very slowly, to make it last, and looked at his face as I did. He spoke with his eyes more than with his mouth. I felt very happy to be with him, though I do not think I could have explained why if I had been asked.

  I asked him to tell me about Buddha. For a long time, he said nothing. He just looked at the bowl of tea he was holding. Slowly, he shifted his gaze to me and spoke very softly.

  “The earth will never be without flowers and trees,” he said. “For as one dies another comes to take its place, and it has been like this since the creation. Like a rosebud, the world and its affairs are closed up tight, waiting for a warm spring breeze. We must always be like the warm spring breeze, and open the buds of every kind of flower.”

  The cave felt very warm, despite that small fire.

  In the cave where we were living, though, everyone complained about being cold, especially at night. One day my father found someone selling mattresses that were filled with wool and he bought five of them. These were much better than the thin ones we had brought from Kabul. My mother stitched the new mattresses together, then sewed several of our quilts together, as well.