A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  Trying to make a joke, he said, “You didn’t say hello to my friends. Did you forget all your good manners?” I unwrapped my arms from around his neck and said “Salaam” to them, but it came out with a squeak. One of them was drying his tears with the end of his turban.

  At that moment, my mother and the others walked in. For the first time ever I was glad everyone was there with us. Usually, I wanted to be the one talking to Grandfather for hours without any interruption. But that day I could not. My mother kissed Grandfather’s hands as he kissed her head. Then my grandfather asked about my father.

  She sat near him and told him everything, as my aunts brought us tea and my mother gave everybody presents, which were only round Mazar flatbread and candies that we had taken to the shrine to be blessed. After an hour, as the grown-ups kept talking, I walked out of the room and found Wakeel in the corridor all by himself, weeping. That made me start again. Then we were both laughing. This was one day when nobody was feeling any shame about crying. We would have broken the noses of anybody who had said anything.

  * * *

  Before the day ended, everything was like it always had been. We both had a lot of stories to tell each other. He had five good kites for me. One had my name on it. He had made that for me himself. He told me that he had flown that one and cut lots of other kites with it. He said that the neighborhood kids were afraid of that kite.

  That is how he made me famous in Kart-e-Parwan. Every kid in the town thought that I was the one flying that kite and cutting them all. But it was Wakeel. It had been very mysterious for the kids in our neighborhood that they never saw me outside, but saw my kite every afternoon high in the sky as it proudly roared around, cutting other kites that tried to rise a little higher than mine.

  The next day when I walked outside to buy some bread for breakfast, all the kids were looking at me from the corners of their eyes and whispering to one another, “There he is, there he is. ‘Qais, the Cruel Cutter.’” I pretended that I did not hear them. I walked past them, holding my head up like a tyrant.

  I gave Wakeel some rocks that I had collected from the Buddha in Bamyan. I had to explain everything about Buddha, and why I thought those rocks were precious. He thought I was joking when I gave them to him, but after I told him about the Buddha, and living in a cave behind his head, and meeting the monk, he did not want to take those stones. He thought they were part of my adventure memories and I should keep them. I told him that he was the padshah, the king, of all my memories and that he should have them.

  Five days later, my father arrived home with our car, which was now running well. Once again we were all together. We all tried to lead a good life. The war seemed to have ended in Kabul. But we were not living in our own house, which lay in ruins on the other side of the mountain. We were still refugees in Haji Noor Sher’s Fort of Nine Towers, which had only one tower left.

  * * *

  While we were away, Grandfather had the idea to scatter his sons, so that if the war started again, we would not all be stuck in one place and could look to one another for help in another part of the city. My uncles had been wanting to leave for some time, but they were waiting for my father to come back before they did. Now, one by one, they left the old fort.

  One took his wife and children and moved in with his father-in-law in the Taimaskan blocks in the northwest corner of Kabul. Another uncle shared a house with his brother-in-law in Parwan-e-Seh, not very far from Kart-e-Parwan. Another went to live in Khair Khana with a friend.

  A week after we returned, Grandfather himself moved to Makroyan to live with his eldest daughter, who was now a widow. The ceasefire had been going on for more than a month by then, and people were beginning to be hopeful that it would be permanent.

  Makroyan was a neighborhood of five- and six-story apartment blocks built by the Russians back when they had come as friends. It was now controlled by one of the factions whose soldiers were raping many young girls there, along with looting people’s houses and sometimes killing people. My father’s sister had lived there for many years but had become afraid of being there alone.

  Her husband had been executed during the short-lived Communist presidency of Hafiz’allah Amin, whom no one remembers now. But he had held power long enough to kill many of the best-educated Afghans. One day, my aunt heard her husband’s name announced on the radio as being among those who had been purged. No reason was ever given.

  Though she subsequently had many suitors, she never remarried and lived with her daughter and her brother, my youngest uncle. He was only a little older than Wakeel, so we thought of him more as our cousin. Grandfather wanted to be with his eldest daughter as long as things remained bad in Makroyan.

  Wherever Grandfather lived, that is where Wakeel’s mother wanted to be. Grandfather told her to remain at the Qala-e-Noborja with the rest of us, even though he especially loved her cooking. But she insisted on going to Makroyan with him. And so did my unmarried aunts. They wanted to be with their oldest sister, who was like a second mother to them.

  * * *

  Now, for the first time in Kabul, we were living without Grandfather and without Wakeel. Since the fighting had started, nothing had made sense. I could never have imagined that we would ever have left my grandfather’s house. And now after so many months away, living without Wakeel or Grandfather made the least sense of all.

  The big mud fort felt very empty. At night when the wind hit the large trees and lilac bushes in the courtyard, it made a lonely and even sometimes frightening sound. The dogs outside howled in the rutted road. The Qala-e-Noborja no longer felt like the magical place it had been the day we first arrived.

  I thought about my friends in Tashkurghan, and about the Kuchis, and the monk in Bamyan, and my teacher in Mazar, and the kids at the shrine. And most of all, I thought about Wakeel. I had waited so long to be with him again, and now he was on the other side of the city.

  Because he was older, he was allowed to come from Makroyan to the Qala-e-Noborja on Fridays by himself. Over the next couple of months the ceasefire held, and he came almost every Friday around midmorning. For an hour, he would sit with my parents and talk with them. Then he and I would fly kites for the rest of the day. He always had to be home before dark, though, which meant he missed the best kite winds at dusk.

  Sometimes he spent the night with us, but most of the time he returned home since he was the youngest boy among all the family now in Makroyan, and it was his job to run to the bazaar anytime his mother or one of the aunts needed vegetables or herbs, or had naan dough ready to be taken to the bakery.

  I wanted to tell all my adventures to Grandfather. But he was not there. Makroyan was on the other side of Kabul. It was only a couple of miles away, but it felt like the far side of the world.

  PART THREE

  IN THE TIME OF SHAITAN

  13

  The Gold

  Now we began the time of pretending. The signs of war were all around us, but we pretended that we did not see them. All but one of my uncles and their families had moved to different parts of the city, but we pretended that we would not be apart for long. We missed sitting around one tablecloth, but we pretended that eating by ourselves was the same as eating all together.

  Once or twice everyone came back to the Qala-e-Noborja on a Friday. The grown-ups sat and talked inside, while my cousins and I played in the garden as before, or flew kites. We pretended that we were still living in one courtyard like in the old days. But the grown-ups did not make jokes as they always had. And they never talked about rebuilding Grandfather’s house.

  When they all left at dusk, we pretended that we would see each other again the next day. Instead, we met after a month or two, because as the weeks passed and the ceasefires came and went, it was still not safe to move around the city.

  The war started again in full force five months after we had arrived back in Kabul, even though the leaders of all the factions had gone to Mecca and had sworn that they would ne
ver fight again. We pretended that their broken oaths were normal, though every Afghan knows that to break an oath is a serious offense, especially one made in Mecca in the House of God.

  The war between the oath breakers locked us all in one room for days and weeks. Sometimes we could not even go to the kitchen across the courtyard, afraid that a sniper might hit us, or a rocket might land as we ran to get some rice, which was often the only food we had left as the days passed and our meat and vegetables were all eaten. We slept night after night with empty stomachs, but we pretended we were practicing for Ramazan.

  Once, after several days of eating nothing, I had no choice but to go to the kitchen to get flour so my mother could at least cook us some bread on the woodstove we used for heating the room where we spent our days and nights. My father took me aside and apologized with tears in his eyes for asking me to go, but he explained that if he were killed, there was no one to look out for the rest of the family. I understood. But it took me hours to gather the courage to run the twenty steps there. I ran in zigzags to the kitchen, pretending I was playing hide-and-seek with the snipers on the mountain. They often shot anything they saw that moved. It was their game. But they did not see me. I won the game that day.

  Rockets fell by the hundreds. First they made a whistling noise in the air, and then a huge blast that shook the earth when they landed. Bits of rocket and anything they hit rained all around. We pretended that it was fun. We made a whistling noise along with the rockets when we heard them; sometimes we ran out of breath before they landed, and sometimes we did not. When they struck, we made an explosion noise with our mouths and shook our bodies, and pretended we were the earth. Some nights it was hard to sleep because so many rockets were exploding over the city. We pretended it was fireworks on holidays like Great Eid, which honors Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael, or Naw Ruz, our new year on the first day of spring.

  Sitting every day in one room nearly drove me and the others crazy, but we pretended it would end soon. For days and weeks we did not see the sky, so we pretended that our ceiling was our sky. We read the same books over and over, until we could almost recite them. Sometimes when the stress became too much, I went to another room where I had hung my punching bag from the ceiling. I punched that bag for hours until sweat was running all over me. I pretended that I was getting myself prepared for a match.

  A lot of people did go crazy. They walked out of their houses and were hunted down by snipers, who shot them just for the joy of shooting.

  As one strange event followed another, we understood—even if we did not say it—that we were living in the time of Shaitan, the devil. Pretending that we were leading normal lives was the only thing that allowed us to survive.

  * * *

  I did not know how to start this new life. Every day I woke up and breathed in and out, and waited for the times to change. I learned that waiting is a skill that must be mastered.

  I told myself that my past was finished, and that I had to do something new now. But every day in the cage of my heart, I felt the weight of the memories of the time before.

  Many times, I thought about the mother of my carpet teacher, who had told me many old stories that always included a wise lesson. I thought about the bright sky, and snow around us as she spoke in her quiet, mysterious voice. Her face was always close to mine, her wide eyes gazing into mine. Sometimes it felt like she was pouring strength into my heart. She sang rather than spoke. The longer the story went on, the more musical she became. It was an inexpressible joy to listen to her.

  I had never known my grandmother. She had died before I was a year old. Sometimes when I was with my teacher’s mother, I wished she could be married to my grandfather. When I was with her, it was like she was holding me when I was falling backward.

  * * *

  Grandfather came back to visit and spent several days with us. I would sit next to him while he was reading. It was not important to me that he did not say anything. I was just happy to be there, and, though I was now getting too old for it, I liked to put my head on his lap, to look up and watch him eat an apple and listen to the crunch as he bit it. Sometimes, he would read aloud a poem by Rumi or Hafiz and he would ask me what it meant. I would try very hard to say something wise, to please him. He would smile and tell me, “You learned a lot on your travels.”

  I told him about our time with the Kuchis. He loved to hear how they ate and made jokes in front of the bonfire until late at night. He asked so many questions about the way they made music, danced, slaughtered their animals, bargained with the people in the towns where they passed and extended their hospitality. As I told him, I relived it all for myself.

  He told me that his wife, my grandmother, would always have a strange feeling when she saw a Kuchi caravan passing through Kabul. A part of her wanted to run out of the house when she saw a line of camels plodding through the streets and follow along with everybody else.

  One day when my grandfather was reading his favorite book, Afghanistan in the Path of History by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar, my father came in. He had a tray with tea, but only two cups. When he saw me, he told me to go out, but my grandfather put his arm around my shoulder.

  My father said, “At least go get a cup for yourself.”

  When I came back, my father was talking about some man in Hayratan, a town that was on the border with the Soviet Union, which we always just called Russia, about an hour’s drive from Mazar-e-Sharif. I listened, though I did not understand what he was talking about at first. Slowly, however, I understood that all those days in Mazar when he had left the house so early and had come home so tired, he had been going back and forth to Hayratan, trying to arrange to have our family smuggled across the border.

  Suddenly, I felt stupid for having been so unhappy with my father in those days. I had not known what he was trying to do.

  He had been doing the same thing when we were in Kunduz. He had gone north to the border many times but had never been successful. Being smuggled is expensive. We had had enough money when the fighting had first started. But as time passed, we had had to use most of it just to live on. Now there was very little left.

  I looked at my father as he was telling these things to his father, and I felt a kind of respect for him in a way that I never had before. I had blamed him for not having enough money to get us out of the country, for not taking us someplace where nobody could tell us what to do or how to be. Many times I had wanted to ask him why all his friends were living in America or Europe, but we were still in Afghanistan. I had never dared to say that. But I had been resentful. Now I felt ashamed.

  I understood as I never had before what a tough man my father was. I thought of how he had carried us from one place to another to save our lives, like a cat carrying its kittens in its mouth.

  * * *

  My father now had to start his life again. Once, he and Grandfather had been important carpet sellers. Now he had no carpets to sell, and no money to buy new ones. He borrowed some money from a friend and bought one carpet from a shop in Chicken Street, a small one. Then he sold it to another dealer for a tiny bit of profit. That was the start of his new business.

  Every day, he carried a carpet on his shoulder all over Kabul to sell it for a few afghanis more than he paid for it. Slowly, slowly one carpet became two, and two became four, and four became eight, until one day after five months he had eighty carpets and owned them all. As he sold them, he built up a small cash reserve to pay smugglers. To get to Russia, though, he would need to sell hundreds of carpets.

  He never stopped worrying.

  * * *

  Perhaps on that night, now more than two years before, I knew what my father and my uncles were doing when I discovered them silently digging holes in the garden. Or perhaps I just pieced together the bits of talk I had overheard whenever there was any mention of smugglers. Someone would mutter something about “the gold” that would pay for them. And “the garden.”

  My m
other and my uncles’ wives all had had boxes and boxes of gold jewelry. My father was very much in love with my mother. When they got married, he spent everything he had to buy her gold. Every year at Eid, he would buy her so many new gold bangles that they stretched from her wrists to her elbows.

  Whenever my father bought gold for my mother, his brothers had to do the same for their wives, too. Everyone wanted to show off. One uncle’s wife wore gold anklets; another had a thick belt, all gold; my mother had a crown of gold. I had seen her wear it only once, at a wedding, and then just for a couple of hours, because too many people were staring at her and wanted to touch it.

  At night, when we had gone back to our rooms after a big party, my mother would comment on all the other women’s gold. She enjoyed pointing out that her bangles and necklaces were always thicker and heavier than theirs. Probably my uncle’s wives were saying similar things about their gold, too. Afghans are competitive about everything.

  One afternoon when I was alone with my father, and he was talking about trying to get smuggled to Turkey, I asked him whether he thought all the gold that he and his brothers had buried in Grandfather’s garden had been found by thieves. He looked at me with his head tilted slightly to one side, trying to decide how much I really knew.

  “It is a big garden,” was all he said. I could tell he believed there must still be some gold there.

  Now I understood that this was why we had gone before and been captured and sent down into the tunnel. I also understood why he was now insisting on going back, even though we all knew the house had been destroyed.

  * * *

  My mother tried hard to stop him. They argued about it for weeks, but my father is stubborn, possibly the most stubborn man that I know. The ceasefires were irregular and ended unpredictably. But on the days when the guns had gone quiet, my father became profoundly impatient. I could see his thoughts of our old courtyard on his face.

  One Friday as we were finishing breakfast, my father asked me to get ready to accompany him. He spoke in a distant tone. I looked at my mother. She was staring at her plate.