A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  We ate Kuchi bread-cake, spiced rice, kebab, and thick Kuchi-style yogurt. I could see that my new uncles and cousins were very fond of meat. Amir Khan said a Pashto proverb as his mouth was full of kebab: “Even burnt meat is better than vegetables.” And the rest laughed. After dinner we drank green tea and ate dried melon until midnight. In every sentence they used a proverb. Some of them started their sentences with a verse or two from a famous poet.

  At midnight we went to our tent, which we found full of Kuchi women surrounding my mother and sisters. My mother was telling them about our travels since we had fled Kabul.

  A few minutes later, they all left us to sleep. My mother blew out the lantern that they had given to us, which is called a “hurricane,” though we have never had a hurricane storm in Afghanistan. Some foreigners had brought us that word along with the lanterns. My mother and father slept in one corner with my little brother. My sisters slept in another corner, and I slept in a corner of my own. Before long, though, my whole body began itching, like I was having some kind of reaction to a drug. My father whispered to my mother that something was biting him. My sisters and I shouted that something was biting us, too.

  I lit the hurricane lamp and looked at my legs. An army of tiny grayish insects were all over me, jumping and hopping like they were playing gursai. I hurriedly shook them off. My mother told me to take off my clothes outside of the tent and shake them there. I went outside, tearing off my clothes. A minute later I was naked and shaking my clothes as hard as I could.

  I heard someone giggling. I looked all around me, but I did not see anyone. All the tents were dark and quiet, and the sky was very starry with no moon. I heard the giggling again as I continued shaking my clothes. This time it was more than one person’s voice. I looked to my right, and I saw nobody. Then I looked to my left, and saw a group of kids hiding behind a tent and laughing. I narrowed my eyes to see whether they were really there and took a step toward them; I saw more than twenty kids, including Omar Khan, staring at my naked body. I ran quickly inside our tent without stopping to put on my clothes before I entered.

  “What the hell are you doing?” my father shouted.

  I saw that my mother and my sisters were staring at me. I was deeply embarrassed and quickly ran outside as I heard my sisters laughing. Then the Kuchi kids started giggling and looking at me again.

  I walked toward them, still naked, and stood before them with my clothes slung over my shoulder. I was angry now, and I did not care who looked at me, although it is very shameful to be naked in front of another person.

  “What the hell are you laughing at?” I demanded.

  They became quiet for a second, then ran off laughing very loudly. I put on my clothes. The itching had stopped for the moment, and I went back to our tent, wondering how to face my father, mother, and sisters. I thought about the day that Wakeel and I had seen Haji Noor Sher after his bath and made fun of him. Maybe I was being punished for laughing then.

  “What is wrong with you?” my father said.

  “When I was shaking out my clothes, a lot of kids were looking at me. I panicked, and without thinking I ran inside,” I said.

  “All right, go to your bed and sleep. Be careful next time,” my father said.

  My sisters were still giggling. I looked back at them fiercely, daring them to tease me in the morning, and they started to laugh openly. My father shouted at them to shut up, and this made them laugh even louder.

  I lay on my bed, angry and bitten, but before long I was asleep. I was glad that Grandfather was not there to see me. He would have made jokes about that night for the rest of my life.

  I woke up later than usual. There was no one else in our tent. I found Omar Khan outside giving orders to the other kids. When the kids saw me, they grinned. I greeted them and asked Omar Khan about my family. First, he laughed a little about the night before. Then he told me that my family was in the stream, bathing.

  I asked him about the insects that had been biting me.

  “Those are fleas from the sheep and goats and camels,” he said. “You will soon get used to them.”

  Get used to them? I thought. How does someone get used to fleas?

  I went to the stream nearby. My father was in the water in his underwear. He was splashing around as if he were in a warm bathtub. He told me to jump in. I took off all my clothes except my underpants and jumped in. It was freezing, and I yelped. My father laughed as I ran out of the water, where the wind made me even colder. I started shivering. My feet were muddy and there was no towel to dry myself.

  I looked for my father to ask him for his towel, but he was no longer in the stream. Suddenly, he was behind me, pushing me into the water. It felt even colder than before. My father was standing above me and laughing as I shivered.

  “You are a Kuchi now,” he said. “So you have to learn how to live like a Kuchi.” I slammed my open palm across the top of the water and drove a wave of freezing river water into his face. He laughed and dove for me, while I wriggled out of his way. When I landed a fist against his left shoulder, his eyes lit up.

  “Okay, now we are going to be boxers!” he exclaimed as he started fending off every punch I aimed at him. Sometimes I stumbled backward when one of his blocks hit me squarely. He was laughing. I was laughing. He was my father again, but this time he was not letting me beat him. After I began tiring, he grabbed me to pull me out of the water, and it turned into a big hug like I had not had from him in months.

  An hour later we were back in our tent having our breakfast. We had tea, milk, butter, yogurt, and bread. After breakfast Omar Khan took me to an empty tent. There, to my amazement, was a blackboard and a piece of chalk. When I asked him where he had found these things, he just laughed. He left me there and ran outside and whistled three times. A moment later he came back in with more than twenty other boys. Each had a notebook and a pencil. Once again Omar Khan introduced me to his cousins—my cousins, too—and told them that from today I would be their teacher. Omar Khan ordered everyone to sit in a line on the dusty ground. Then he asked me to write the Dari letters on the blackboard.

  Everything happened so fast that I had no chance to think about it. I did what he asked. The boys became very quiet and started copying what I had written on the blackboard.

  “Teacher, what do these signs mean?” asked a boy who was older than I.

  I felt a strange shyness, because he called me “Teacher.” My father was a teacher. No one had ever called me a teacher before. I cleared my throat with a fake cough, then I said, “These are Dari letters. All together, they make the alphabet. If you learn them, you can read and write.”

  I pronounced each letter. They repeated them after me. Then I checked everyone’s notebook for mistakes. I remembered my teacher had done the same to me and my classmates. But that was in a real class where we sat on chairs and wore clean clothes.

  Their handwriting was straggling, but not large. Most of them wrote very tiny to save space in their notebooks for the next lessons, since they were not given money often to buy books and pens.

  A few hours later our class ended. I thought that if Grandfather were here, he would have been very proud of me. I ran to our tent to tell my mother that I was now a teacher. My mother was sitting outside of the tent, milking a cow. I was shocked. I had never seen my mother milking a cow before. She had been born into a wealthy family who had servants to do this kind of work. I asked when she had learned to do that. She smiled and said, “About twenty minutes ago!”

  She looked sideways at me with her cheek against the side of the cow and asked me, “Am I doing this right?”

  “No, you are squirting the milk onto the ground, not in the pot,” I said.

  She looked down and started laughing. The cow kicked the pot, and the milk spilled onto the ground, where the thirsty earth drank it quickly. The cow walked away as if she did not like to hear us laughing. Maybe she thought she had been insulted.

  A Kuchi woman who was very
beautiful was sitting next to my mother, rocking a large clay pot. It had a small opening at the top and I could not see inside it. Something in the pot was sloshing loudly. I asked the woman what she was doing.

  “It is whey, for lunch, and it is good for putting you to sleep,” she said. “The rest we will eat tonight,” she added, nodding at the pot.

  As I was talking to my mother, I heard a crowd of girls pronouncing “Alef, bey, pey, tey, sey, jem, hey, khey, dal, zal, rey, zey…” These were the first letters of the Dari alphabet. The sound was coming from inside our tent. I entered and saw my older sister in front of a blackboard with ten Dari letters already written on it. She pronounced the letters, and the Kuchi girls repeated them after her. My sister had become a teacher, too.

  From then on, all the Kuchi kids called my sister and me “Teacher,” even though most of them were older than we were.

  A week later, my class and my sister’s class held a reading and writing competition. It was just simple words using the letters everybody knew. My class won, and two days after, we had another. This time, my class lost. Every day, the Kuchi kids were getting better and better. They were very fast learners and drew the letters in the dirt whenever they had a free second during the day. They had their own competitions, one on one, and soon they were writing words we had not yet taught them, though full of spelling errors.

  My father thought it was very funny to have so many new teachers in the family. Every night he asked us what we had done, but he never tried to tell us how to do it. Meanwhile, his beard grew. He always wore a turban now. My mother started wearing Kuchi clothes and jewelry. Sometimes I could not pick her out of a group of women, milking the sheep and the goats as well as the cows, and shearing the sheep’s wool. My father learned how to wash wool in the river and slaughter animals and cut them into pieces for cooking or for sale to the villagers.

  My older sister and I taught the kids, our cousins, for three hours early every morning. Afterward, I went with Omar Khan and other boys to take the flocks to the pastures for grazing on the hillsides. My older sister went to the stream with the other girls to fill their pitchers. She also learned how to make Kuchi embroideries. She already knew how to hold a pot of water on her head without holding it with her hands. She had learned that in Tashkurghan. The Kuchi girls were very surprised to see her doing it like they did.

  * * *

  When my father went with the men, and my mother was with the women, and my older sister had gone off to get water with the Kuchi girls, it was my job to take care of my younger sisters and my brother. One of my sisters was happy with her own company. She would be next to me for hours, but I would hardly know she was there. She did not say much, did not complain about anything, and never cried to have something.

  The next sister, though, cried for hours when she did not get what she wanted. She was afraid of no one, neither my mother nor my father. She would just cry stubbornly until somebody solved her problem. Then she became friendly and did not leave that person’s side.

  My brother would be very quiet until he wanted to eat something sweet. Then he would live up to his nickname. Both of my parents loved him, because he had such soft cheeks. He never went far from my mother.

  * * *

  On the first Friday that we were with the Kuchis, Omar Khan said we should go to the river and catch some fish.

  “Do you have fishhooks?” I asked.

  “We don’t need fishhooks,” he said.

  “Do you use a net?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then how do you catch the fish?” I asked.

  “With a generator,” he said.

  I did not know what he was talking about.

  “It is a Kuchi trick. I will show it to you, but you have to help me carry this generator to the river,” he said.

  The generator was heavy. It was a struggle to get it to the river. Meanwhile, the other Kuchi boys were pasturing the herds on the hillside.

  We put the generator on a flat rock about twenty meters from the river. Omar Khan connected one end of a wire to the generator and put the other end on a tree branch near the river. A few minutes later, all the uncles came. They carried many big stones to the middle of the river. Two hours later the river was dammed.

  Everyone got out of the water. One of the uncles turned on the generator. Another one dropped the end of the wire into the river. The generator made some sputtering noises and stopped. I did not know what was going on until I looked at the river and saw that it was filled with fish floating on the surface. They had all been electrocuted. While some of the kids pulled the wire out of the water, Omar Khan and several of his uncles jumped into the pool and started throwing the fish to the riverside. The rest of us began collecting them. Half an hour later, we had four large bags of fish on the back of a horse and carried them to the tents for a Friday fish party.

  The next Friday we did not have gasoline for the generator, but Omar Khan asked me to go to catch fish with him anyway.

  “How will you catch any fish today?” I asked.

  “Today I will show you another Kuchi trick,” he said.

  We all hid behind a big boulder that was way back from the river. One of the uncles took a grenade from his pocket. He pulled out the fuse and threw the grenade into the river.

  Seconds later, the water splashed all over the riverbank with bits of sand, gravel, and fishes flying into the air. Even where we were hiding, little pieces of fish found us and stuck to my face and in my hair, which was long then. I smelled like fish for hours after. The river turned gray as hundreds came to the surface. We waited there for a few minutes to let the silt in the water settle down. Then Omar Khan and his uncles jumped in to throw the fish onto the riverbank. This time it was five big bags we put on the back of the horse. A few hours later we had another fish feast.

  On the third Friday, there was yet another trick.

  The grenade had completely destroyed our dam from the week before, so it took us about three hours to block the stream. Then the uncles came leading a horse that was carrying a large bag of caustic soda, and another bag full of empty bottles. The uncles and Omar Khan filled the glass bottles with the caustic soda, and then we crouched behind that same big rock and threw those bottles into the river. When the caustic soda in each bottle touched the water, it exploded like a bomb, though not as forcefully as the grenade. Again, we went back to the tents with five bags of fish.

  Everybody had to clean his or her own fish and cook them. The Kuchis used only powdered laundry detergent to wash their hands, and it smelled worse than the fish. I saw Omar Khan rubbing his hands with lemon and orange to kill the fish smell. This was another Kuchi trick, of course.

  * * *

  We spent more than a month camped with the Kuchis in Samangan. The spring rains had ended, and the pastures on the hillsides were starting to brown. There was not enough grass left for the herds. On the Friday night of the fourth week, Amir Khan said that by Monday they would move to Mazar, and then farther west to Andkhoi, where they could find fresh grasses for their flocks.

  Our car had not been fixed yet, and we still had to wait another month. But my father did not have enough money to feed us and rent a room for a month. My father decided that we should go with the Kuchis as far as Mazar. There my mother, my sisters, and I would stay with my aunt, while my father would return to Samangan to get the car fixed. He would rejoin us as soon as it was repaired, then we would go to Kabul together.

  On the Sunday night of our fifth week, the Kuchis collected their stuff. Early the next morning we started our move back toward Mazar. Though we wanted to be heading home to Kabul, we were excited to be traveling with the caravan.

  * * *

  The caravan moved slowly, with huge, shaggy camels lumbering down the rocky slopes followed by sheep, goats, and fierce-eyed watchdogs. The men, tall, lean, and severe looking, walked proudly back and forth among their herds and cattle. They carried rifles on their shoulders. Sometim
es, the silence suddenly was broken by harsh words from the leading camel driver, who spoke in a jargon known only to those of his profession and to his camels.

  At both the head and the rear of the caravan, the women walked openly, contemptuous of veils, as they swung along blithely near their camels. They were as beautiful and ethereal as old romantic paintings. Some of them were black-eyed and tan-skinned with raven hair. Others were fair and blue-eyed with golden or red hair. The sun and wind had given them red cheeks and lips that contrasted sharply with their dresses of somber black.

  The littlest kids, two or three years old, were strapped between the two humps of the Bactrian camels. As the camels joggled along, the kids slept in a sitting posture. Every now and then a child would whimper, but would soon be lulled to sleep by the padding camel feet and the tinkles of bells that hung on the camels’ long necks. Older kids would walk alongside the one-humped camels, but when they got tired, they climbed up on the striding camels’ backs like monkeys. There they settled themselves in front of the hump for a nap.

  Occasionally, a newly born camel walked up from the rear and nuzzled its mother, its woolly body in strange contrast to its long, unsteady, thin legs.

  * * *

  The Kuchis carried all of their possessions with them. They lived very simply, but not poorly, and had many richly colored carpets of their own working, with big traditional geometric patterns; from what I had learned from my teacher in Mazar, I could see they had used many vegetable dyes, and they were as soft as velvet. These carpets were bundled together with the tents and cooking utensils and slung on either side of the camels.