No one talked, not even my littlest sister, whom we called “the chatterbox.” And the crying machine was silent, too. The truth is, it had been a long time since he had been a crying machine, but somehow the name stuck to him even though he had a nice row of teeth now. That morning he was looking out the window and smiling at everything he saw.
Mazar was soon behind us. The road had bumps now. Holes were everywhere from the rockets, but the earth was damp from the spring rains, and in some places we could see grass where there was only desert the rest of the year.
Two hours later, we passed through Tashkurghan. The road goes around the village, on the side of the hill. We all looked down as we passed to see if we could spot the garden where I had stolen the pomegranates. We wondered what had happened to that kind family in the months since we had seen them, but we were too much in a hurry to return to our own home to stop and visit theirs.
For another hour or more we moved across the low, sandy hills of Samangan Province toward the Hindu Kush. Suddenly my father was shouting, “Hold on! Everybody hold on!”
My mother grabbed the little ones. “What’s wrong?”
“The brakes are not working. Something’s broken.”
He kept pumping the brake pedal, but the car kept moving at high speed.
“Relax, relax,” my mother said. “Let the car slow down on its own.”
A few minutes later the road leveled out, and the car began to slow down. My father eased it over to the side of the road, where it stopped. He let out a sigh of relief and jumped out and checked under the hood.
“The brake fluid box is empty,” my father said. “We can’t go anywhere without brakes, but they won’t work unless we find some brake fluid.”
My mother looked around at the empty land and asked in her usual practical way, “Where will you find brake fluid?”
“We should wait for a car to pass by, and I’ll borrow some. Just enough to take us to the next town,” my father said.
We waited on the roadside for two hours, but no car passed, only a group of Kuchi nomads who stirred up a huge cloud of dust as they drove their cattle across the unpaved road and moved on up the hillside to pasture their herds. Every time we saw nomads, they reminded me of Grandfather. I have always thought that being a nomad is the best way to live, constantly moving from place to place, away from city troubles.
My father took his teacup from the dashboard and told us that he would be back in a few minutes, and then headed toward the Kuchis. We watched him as he went farther and farther off until he stood in front of a herd boy who was sitting on a big rock, blowing his flute. We watched as the herd boy got up from the rock, milked one of his sheep, and filled my father’s cup. My father came back with a cup of milk in his hand and a funny smile on his face.
“What are you going to do with a cup of milk? It is not enough for all of us,” my mother said.
“But it is enough for our car to quench its thirst. This time, our car will drink milk,” my father said.
He poured the cup of milk into the brake fluid box, then he started the car. He drove a short distance and braked.
“Our problem is solved,” he shouted excitedly from his window. He put the car in reverse and backed up very fast to where we were standing, then hit the brakes. The car threw up a plume of dust.
We all climbed back in the car and headed for the town of Samangan up ahead, where we would get lunch. We went to a local restaurant in the heart of town with beautiful views on all sides. We ate kebabs and drank tea, then headed back to the car to continue our journey toward Kabul. I was still thinking about my carpet teacher, and the unexpected combinations of many bright colors that she used in her carpets, instead of only the deep reds and dark blues that most other Turkmen carpet weavers used.
My father tried to start the car, but it sounded broken. He checked the engine but could find no problem. He did not know very much about cars, anyway. Maybe the car did not like the taste of milk, I thought.
I asked the owner of the restaurant whether there was a mechanic shop around. He told me that there was one a quarter mile to the south.
My mother and my sisters went back inside the restaurant while my father and I pushed the car all the way to the mechanic shop. It was a small, shabby place with old tires and used spare parts all around. There were more than fifty cars and trucks in a long line waiting to be fixed.
A guy whose face was completely blackened with oil shouted at us. “Hey, hey, hey, stop, stop! Where the hell are you putting that car?”
“Our car is broken,” my father said.
“Are you blind? Can’t you see these other cars and trucks?” the mechanic said.
“No, I’m not blind, I can see them, but what is that supposed to mean?” my father asked.
“It means your car will be fixed after I finish fixing these cars,” the mechanic said.
“You must be joking,” my father said.
“I don’t make jokes with my work, and I don’t have time for talking. Either park your car at the end of the line over there, and come back in two months, or get your car out of my sight,” the mechanic said. My father shifted from one foot to the other, as he did when he was about to enter a boxing ring. He looked directly at the mechanic and spoke softly and urgently.
“I’m with my wife and kids. We have been on the road for almost eight months. You have no idea what we have been through. Now we’re finally able to go home to Kabul. Please fix my car. It worked perfectly well until an hour ago. We don’t have any house here, and we don’t have relatives to stay with. I don’t have enough money to pay for a hotel for two months,” my father said.
“Look, I don’t know you. My job is to fix people’s cars. It doesn’t matter whose car I’m fixing. But I have to fix these cars first, then it is your turn. Some of them have been here for months. If I spend all day today fixing your Russian Volga, tomorrow my other customers will kick my ass,” the mechanic said.
“So I have to wait for two months for my car to be fixed?” my father said.
“Exactly,” the mechanic said.
“It is not possible,” my father said. His voice was tight in a way I had rarely heard it.
“Look, I understand your problem, but you should understand my problem, too. Most of these cars belong to warlords. If I don’t fix their cars by exact dates, they’ll put their guns up my ass and shoot. I have a wife and kids, too, and they need me.”
“Is there any other mechanic around?” my father said.
“There were five in this town, but the bastards ran away because of this fucking civil war,” the mechanic said.
“If you’re the only mechanic in this town, you must be making a lot of money then,” my father said, trying to tell a joke and make the mechanic his friend.
“Oh, fuck the kind of money that comes with threats from warlords,” the mechanic said.
“Oh, this is very sad,” my father sighed.
“Yeah, it is really fucking sad,” the mechanic said. “Excuse my language, young man.” He pointed to me. I did not answer, and just smiled at him. I found it very entertaining the way he talked. I had not heard many people in Kabul talking that way.
“Can you just take a look at my car, and see if it is anything that I can fix?” my father asked.
“Yeah, let’s see,” the mechanic said, relenting a little.
The mechanic opened the hood, climbed up on top of the grille, and squatted over the engine block. He spent ten minutes probing the engine, checking dipsticks, pulling on belts.
“It needs a few days’ work,” he said as he climbed down. “So, in this case it has to wait its turn, and that’s going to be two months, at least.”
“What is the problem?” my father asked, very surprised.
“You used bad gasoline that was full of sand. Now the sand is all through the engine. I will have to open even the smallest parts to clean them,” the mechanic said.
My father sighed deeply, and with the mecha
nic’s help we pushed the car to the end of the line. As my father and I walked unhappily back to the restaurant, his face was once again drowned in worries; a cloud of sorrows surrounded him.
We rented a room above the restaurant and spent the night there. My father could not sleep at all. Every ten minutes I heard him sighing until I fell asleep. I woke up early in the morning and saw big brown bags under his eyes. He looked very tired as he gazed at the mountains through the window.
As we were eating breakfast my father said, “I have enough money to feed us for a week, and after that God knows what is next.”
“Let God take care of things. He can see us. He will help us, as always,” my mother said.
“Maybe you’re right, I should not worry so much,” my father said with a heavy sigh. But he remained deeply anxious.
After breakfast my father went to the mechanic’s shop to see whether he could find a solution. My mother and my sisters stayed in the second-floor room. But I wanted to get away from the smoke that filled the room from the restaurant below, where they cooked kebab from early in the morning until late at night. The restaurant always had customers.
I took one of my younger sisters and walked up the slope behind the restaurant. We sat on a large rock surrounded by mountain grass near the road. We had a sweeping view of the rounded hills that stretched for several miles until they became mountains in the distance. Everything was green in those early days of spring. I counted more than twenty shades of green and wondered how to capture them in a carpet.
I could hear the songs of a donkey driver from the bazaar and the flute of a herd boy from the hillsides. The whole land seemed ready to burst into song. I saw the girls from the town going down to a stream to fill their pitchers with water. They wore their best clothes. Young men stole glances at the girls as they walked past with their pitchers on their heads.
When the villagers passed us, they saw that we were strangers. They made salaams to me, and some of them shook our hands. They all invited us to their houses. They all seemed very hospitable and sincere. No one seemed to be in a hurry, and their deep peace created an air of timelessness. They had a world of their own, calm, serene, and indifferent to what was going on anywhere else.
The next day I went again to the same spot. I found the herd boy there with his sheep and goats pasturing around him. He looked about my age. He was sitting on the big, round rock where we had been sitting the day before, blowing his flute. I said “Salaam,” and sat next to him. He said “Salaam alaikum,” somewhat formally, and hurriedly hid his flute under his shirt.
“I heard the sound of your flute yesterday. I tried to find you. You play very beautifully, like the masters on the radio,” I said.
“You liked it?” he shyly asked. He lowered his eyes.
“Oh, yes. I love the sound of a flute, especially when I am hearing someone who plays as well as you,” I said.
He spoke to me in Pashto, and I replied in Dari, but we could understand each other.
He took his flute out from under his shirt and started playing again. His hands were shaking a little. He played a few traditional Afghan songs.
“I only know these four or five songs. If you know better songs, play them for me. I want to hear them from you,” he said.
“No thanks, I can’t play,” I said. “My father plays well, but I never learned.”
“It is very easy to play,” he said. “Sing me any song, then I can play it for you,” he said.
I sang an Indian song. We laughed, and then he played it. We did that several times until we got tired of it.
As we sat there, he started making letters in the sand with his shepherd stick. After a few moments, I could read “Omar Khan.”
“Who is Omar Khan?” I asked.
“It is my name,” he said. “Can you read and write?”
“Of course I can,” I said, surprised by his question.
“I know how to write my name only,” Omar Khan said. “Can you teach me how to read and write?”
“Yeah, it is not a big deal. I’ll teach you how to read and write, and you teach me how to play the flute,” I said.
“Done!” he said as we shook hands.
I wrote five Dari letters in the sand. I pronounced them and he repeated them after me. Then he wrote them again, several times. By then it was midday, and I had to go to the restaurant to eat lunch with my family. As I said goodbye, he asked me to come back after my lunch. I did, and he was there waiting for me, with his sheep and goats quietly grazing around him. I taught him five more Dari letters. By the end of the day he had learned them all.
The next day we met again, and I asked him about his life. He told me that he was a Kuchi boy. I told him that my grandmother was a Kuchi long ago, and that my grandfather had been a shepherd when he was young, had lived with my grandmother’s Kuchi family for a year after he married her, and had traveled with them all over Afghanistan.
A broad smile appeared on his face. He looked at me for a few seconds without saying anything, and then he said, “We are cousins!”
He jumped up from his stone, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me after him. “Let me introduce you to your other cousins over there,” he said, pointing toward several long black tents hung with colorful bands down by the river. The tents were surrounded by children, goats, sheep, and camels, along with some donkeys and horses. The children and the baby goats were running in and out between the legs of the camels as if they were pillars carved from stone.
As soon as I walked into the Kuchi camp, I was overwhelmed by the strong smell of animals, which were all over the place. Girls my age and older, dressed in bright red, blue, and green, rushed inside their black and gray tents as soon as they saw me. I knew I was not supposed to look at them, but I could not help looking at the long woven bands strung across the tents.
Then I saw the men, all staring at me. They were tall and muscular, with dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and long hair. They were dressed in khaki-colored shalwar kamiz. All wore turbans or hats. Some had long daggers hanging from their waists that looked like swords. There were several men near a tent cutting large chunks from a cow they had just slaughtered. Their clothes were bloody. They stopped when they saw me. Boys my age came out of their tents as Omar Khan and I walked farther into the camp.
About a hundred pairs of eyes were staring at me. I began to feel a little nervous and somewhat shy. Old women slowly emerged from their tents and added their curious eyes to my discomfort. Apart from them, I did not see any other women anywhere, as they all remained inside their tents. I was only eleven, but because we had not had very much to eat for many months, I was very thin, which made me look taller. The women could see that I was a stranger, and they must have thought I was a man.
All around me, I was surrounded by Kuchis. Nobody spoke. The only sounds were kids crying inside some of the tents, and some sheep that were baaing and cows that were mooing. The baby goats kept jumping and running after one another, paying no attention to the people as they played with the chickens and the cats.
I looked at Omar Khan. Unlike the others, he had a big smile on his face and was completely at ease. He introduced me to his father, Amir Khan. His father looked at me sternly for a long moment, then gave me a big, welcoming hug. As he wrapped his arms around me, I could see over his shoulder that all the faces in the camp were growing big smiles. Now I did not feel like a stranger anymore. I felt like I was at home. Their smiles had the warmth of my grandfather’s smile. The men all looked like they were my uncles.
After hugging Amir Khan, I had to do the same with all the other men and boys my age and older. Then I kissed the old women’s hands as a sign of respect. They kissed me on the head in return, and rubbed their right hands on my head in blessing.
I was filled with excitement and wished I had known these people all my life. I had very unexpectedly entered the world of my grandmother, whom I had never known but had always wondered about. I wanted to tell Grandfather everything that
was happening.
Omar Khan’s father asked me to introduce him to my father, and I took him to the restaurant. My father talked to him in Pashto in the Kuchi manner, which is very loud, like you are shouting at each other instead of speaking. The boy’s father was very happy to hear my father talk as he did. He asked my father about his ancestors and figured out that my father’s great-grandfathers and the man’s great-grandfathers truly were distant cousins. So that meant we were all part of the same family.
My father and the man hugged each other warmly. Then the man kissed me and my sisters and told us to call him uncle, and he called my mother “sister.” Straightaway, he invited us to his tent. He would not let us stay in that restaurant for one more minute. He helped us collect our stuff. An hour later we were in a Kuchi tent, drinking green tea, with more than a hundred men, women, and kids watching us.
Their tents were dark inside. They were made from black goat hair that had been pounded into long, wide strips of felt and stretched across a wooden framework that could be taken down easily, folded, and carried on the backs of camels. A single tent could shelter a very big family. During the day it furnished shade; at night its sides could be lowered to give protection from the cold and wind. From a distance, an encampment of Kuchi tents stretched long, black, and low across the dry land.
Their life was measured in their herds of camels, sheep, and goats, and in the passage of the seasons and the years as they moved their herds from one grazing place to the next, from one end of Afghanistan to the other.
Omar Khan introduced my older sister and me to more than forty kids. They wore ragged, dirty clothes. They looked like they had not washed for months. He told the other kids that we were their cousins. I wondered how many more cousins I had whom I did not know. Finding so many cousins from my mother’s family in Kunduz had been a big surprise. Now here were all these Kuchi cousins from my father’s family who looked at us with wide eyes, but said nothing.
Omar Khan’s father, Amir Khan, set up a new tent and put all our belongings inside. Like on many of the other tents, colorful, long woven bands were hung on the outside of ours. Then he invited my father and me to another big tent, where we found all the Kuchi men. My father said “Salaam” and embraced them all. I imitated him. They tied a turban on my father’s head and gave him handmade slippers. Amir Khan put an embroidered hat on my head and called me Qais Khan. And a few hours later we ate with the Kuchi men while my mother and sisters ate with the Kuchi women in another tent.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 21