I heard a loud knocking on the large gate that opened to the street. My father sent me to see who was there. I had nearly been asleep. Resentfully, I went out of the courtyard and across the open space where Haji Noor Sher had always parked his large Chevrolet with the canvas roof that was a twin to the one owned by the king.
I opened the gate and found my uncle with his face and clothes drenched with blood. We looked at each other, but he said nothing. It was several moments before I realized that the blood-soaked body on his shoulder was Wakeel, and then only as my uncle was already walking past me. He carried Wakeel’s lifeless body to the courtyard.
I wanted to follow him, but my legs were shaking. There was no strength in them to carry me. I held tight to the handle on the gate, then tried to walk again, but I felt that my stomach was falling down. Somehow I managed to close the gate. My uncle disappeared through the archway that led into the courtyard. No! I could not let him take Wakeel from me. No! Suddenly, I was running after them. No!
My uncle laid Wakeel on the ground in front of our windows beneath the tall acacia tree.
My father came out and saw his beloved nephew wrapped in blood. He was shaking his head from side to side, not willing to believe what he was seeing.
He took a deep breath and screamed at heaven, “Oh God, why are you doing this to us?” His voice echoed throughout the courtyard.
Immediately, all of our neighbors in the courtyard were at their windows. A minute later they had surrounded the body, staring at Wakeel, whom they all loved so much.
My only uncle who was still living in the old fort came running out of his rooms holding a book. When he saw Wakeel on the grass, he dropped the book and started slamming the palms of his hands against his head, moaning, and calling out the name of God. His wife tried to make him stop, but he could not.
Wakeel was remarkably long. I had never thought of him that way. His toes were strangely widespread, and his hands were quietly crossed on his chest. I looked at him and looked at him and looked at him. Why was he lying like that? What was I seeing? Nothing was real. A light breeze stirred the carpet of yellow leaves from the acacia tree that had woven itself on the grass. A few of them brushed across Wakeel’s immobile face.
A loud cry burst from me, and I wept. I wept for Wakeel. I wept for me. I wept for everything that had happened since the Holy Warriors had destroyed our country and our lives. I do not know how long I cried, but after a while I found myself folded in my mother’s arms. She was crying, too.
A few hours later, Wakeel’s mother arrived from her brother’s house. She had been at her nephew’s engagement party. She knelt beside Wakeel and kept muttering things in a deep, hoarse voice. Her eyes were larger than I had ever seen them.
She spent the entire night on the ground next to her son, crying and laughing, like a crazy woman, and sometimes muttering things that we could not hear. I lay in my bed, letting the tears roll silently down my face.
More than at any time in my life, I wanted to be with my grandfather. But it was too dangerous to cross Kabul at night.
* * *
Early in the morning, Grandfather and my uncles arrived to take Wakeel for burial. I wanted to help carry him, but though I was thirteen years old, I was too short. I walked next to my father as he and my uncles carried Wakeel out of the courtyard on their shoulders. They carried him on a bamboo litter, still wearing his bloody clothes. His body had not been washed, since he was a martyr.
His mother ran after us, trying to stop us from taking her only son away, but her feet would not let her. She stumbled and collapsed on the ground. She stood again briefly, but then fell down again and rolled onto her back. The other women came and tried to help her. Her hair streamed over the ground, her unseeing eyes gazing into some other world, her teeth clenched. She cried out loud. Slowly they helped her get up.
The other women knew they should try to hold her back, but they let her go, though there is no place for a woman at a Muslim burial. She stood yet again to run after us, but again she fell down, and for a time she went unconscious.
* * *
We finished the rituals and put the body in the grave. We had not been able to go to our family cemetery since it was near Grandfather’s house on the other side of the Koh-e-Aliabad, and we had no way of knowing whether the snipers on the mountain would respect us as we carried Wakeel’s body. So we left him with strangers in a small, old cemetery called Nawabad that was protected from the snipers by the spur of a low, steep hill.
A butterfly appeared over the loose earth of the grave and fluttered around for a few moments before settling on it. The undersides of its wings were powdery white. When it opened them, the tops were such a dark red that it looked like an open wound.
It was lifted by a breeze and borne away. I watched it go. It grew smaller and smaller. I knew it was Wakeel’s soul leaving his body, and us, and I knew he was trying to tell me that he was all right. He had always believed in signs. I wanted to be flying away with him, too. I wept again, but a strange, warm feeling filled me that brought a sense of peace of a kind that I had never known before and never have since. The butterfly disappeared from sight as it drifted across the top of the steep cemetery hill.
All around me, Grandfather, my father and my uncles, and all my other male relatives stood frozen in grief. Jerk stood next to his father, looking down and not trying to hide his tears. Though he had been the target of Wakeel’s relentless jests, he loved Wakeel, as we all did. Jerk had no one to protect him anymore, or to tease him, or to help him fly kites, or to make him run faster when we played football, or to help him with his homework.
* * *
Shortly after we finished the prayers, Wakeel’s mother arrived with the other women. She was crying as if she herself were dying. She lowered herself to the ground and knelt next to the grave, arranging and rearranging the stones on the loose earth. We all started weeping with her, but there was nothing we could do for her. I was very grateful that Wakeel had shown me his soul in that butterfly, and that Grandfather was there with me, too.
Though we had finished what we had come to do, we knew we could not leave until Wakeel’s mother was ready to come with us. After half an hour or so, she rose and quietly started walking away. The other women, who had been waiting at a distance, quickly surrounded her and let her lean on them as they picked their way down the cemetery’s rocky slope.
We walked slowly all the way home. I walked next to Grandfather, but he was so upset that he hardly noticed me. I tried to talk to him, so he would not feel so sad. He did not seem to listen. Then he spoke.
“I have always thought that people’s sorrows come from three reasons,” Grandfather said. “They always want everything immediately, without effort. They want more than they need. And they are not happy with what they have. But now I realize that the greatest sorrow of the world is to lose a gift from God.”
I did not understand.
“Wakeel was the gift of God to us, but we hardly noticed its worth. So, God took it back,” Grandfather said.
I told him about the butterfly. He crouched down on one knee, then opened his arms and embraced me. “You always find something that makes me feel better.”
His face was level with mine, and for the first time I could see that even his eyes were red and wet. “Do you know what happens to people when they die?” Grandfather asked with a sad smile.
“Yes, of course I do. That is the first lesson the mullah taught me and the other boys on our first day at the mosque,” I replied.
“Right. When we die, we believe we go to heaven, or we rest forever, or we turn into angels, or we go to paradise. That’s probably all true. But let me tell you something: I believe that when we die at least a small part of our soul enters the one whom we loved the most, and makes that person wiser.”
Grandfather had said things like this to me many times. I always understood the words, but sometimes it took me weeks to know what real meaning lay behind them, and wh
at lesson lay in them for me.
* * *
Grandfather spent a week with us, then he said he must go to be with Wakeel’s mother. I understood. I loved Wakeel’s mother and could not imagine how lost she was feeling. She was like a second mother to us. That is why we called her Abbo, which in Pashto means “mother.” When we were little, she often looked after us when my mother was at the bank and my father at his school and for some reason they could not come home to prepare our lunch. Abbo fed us, washed us, put us in bed for our naps, woke us up, and took us to the other side of the courtyard to play with her children and our other cousins.
Abbo was always a good storyteller. She knows many stories, funny and sad ones, but now she tells her son’s story more than any other. Every time she tells it, her eyes get red, tears roll out of them, and her voice shakes, but she continues until she finishes. Even though it is painful to hear, no one can leave in the middle, because she always tells it as if she had just heard all the details a short while before. She always says the same words, as though reciting something from a holy book. Once I left the room when she started telling a distant relative what had happened. But though I did not want to hear it, I found I could not stay outside and leave her alone with Wakeel. I went back in and sat next to her.
She had asked hard questions of all of Wakeel’s friends and others who had been there that evening. She knows every detail as if she had seen them with her own eyes. I cannot imagine how painful that has been for her. It is even painful to listen to her, but we listen to her because we love her.
* * *
When Grandfather left to go back to Makroyan, I felt more alone than I ever had before. I had so many things to ask him.
Some days I sat under the acacia tree in the courtyard where Wakeel’s body had lain. I was waiting for the butterfly. But it never came back.
15
Inferno
A rocket landed in the room upstairs where my father stored his carpets. It was late on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the summer, when everything was dry and the weather was windy and dusty.
When it hit, my father was drinking tea with the next-door neighbors and trying to buy their carpets, along with an old silver vessel from the twelfth-century Ghaznawi dynasty. It had two hundred pounds of rice in it. The neighbor was moving to Pakistan, and from there to Canada to stay with relatives who had made arrangements through the United Nations.
My father wanted to buy their carpets, because they were at least a hundred years old and still in good condition. He could sell them for twice what he paid. He also wanted to buy the old silver vessel, because he knew that the guys who took those old pieces to Pakistan paid good money. He was trying to buy their rice as well since it came from Kunduz, and was a bit cheaper than the market price for imported rice.
I was just coming back into the courtyard, carrying water in buckets from the tap at the mosque below the garden. In those days, all the neighborhood water pumps installed around Kabul by the municipal government had dried because of a drought, and most of the pipes had been destroyed. Now we had to go long distances to find a working well. The mosque had one in its garden. I had just made my fourth trip. I was tired and was trying to catch my breath.
The noise of the rocket exploding was so loud that in actual fact I heard nothing. I could only feel a heavy and deep wave that shook the entire fort. Smoke mixed with dust started pouring out first one, and then another of the three large windows that faced the courtyard. I was stunned and confused. What should I do with such smoke? How could I turn it off? I was afraid to get close to that room. But I did not want all of my father’s carpets to burn while I watched and did nothing. But I could not think of anything. I was very dizzy, and completely deaf.
I saw the mouth of my neighbor’s son was opening and closing, but I could not hear a word he was saying. He began touching my entire body, starting from my legs and going up and up. He was looking to see whether I was injured. He nodded at me that I was all right, and we turned and looked upstairs.
My father had rushed back from the neighbors’ house when he had heard the explosion. He met me just inside the gate of the courtyard, where I still held my buckets full of water.
I read horror and fear on his face. He asked me something. I could not hear him, but I instinctively knew he was asking whether my mother and the rest of the family were okay.
My mother and sisters had been watching a Bollywood movie downstairs, directly under the room that was hit. When the rocket exploded, it shook the whole fort, and the dust puffed out of the ceiling and cracks in the old mud walls.
Now my mother came running out into the courtyard with my sisters. She was almost dragging my little brother, even though he could walk now. In her arms, she had my newest little sister, who was only a few months old. From head to toe they were all covered with dust. They looked lost and confused and were probably deaf like me.
My father could see that they were not injured, and so he looked up at the storeroom, where all his hard work and our hope of ever fleeing Afghanistan were turning into smoke.
He grabbed my two heavy buckets full of water as if there were nothing in them and rushed up the outside stairs to the terrace in front of the burning room. I followed him. He jumped inside the room through the one window clear of smoke, holding one bucket. Then he gestured to me for the other.
Now he was inside. Lost in the thick, black smoke, he threw the water from the first bucket, unsure of where it was going. Where it hit, the smoke turned to fire, as if he had poured gasoline on it. He threw the second bucket, but he was suddenly surrounded by fire; he was in the heart of it. I could see he was shouting for help.
I shouted at him to run out through the fire before it got stronger and even more uncontrollable. I heard myself in my head louder than I actually sounded, and it was painful. Perhaps he heard me, or perhaps it was just his instincts. He leaped through the fire and jumped out the window. His shoes and trousers were in flames. The fire quickly rose to his chest and back.
Someone screamed at him to roll on the ground, probably my mother. The fire on his back appeared to go out when he rolled on it. But when he rolled onto his chest, the flames on his back flared up again. He kept rolling back and forth. My mother brought a bucket of water from our bathroom inside the house and poured it on him. Smoke mixed with steam rose over my father as he kept rolling back and forth on the earthen, now muddy terrace.
He stood up, surrounded by steam with smoke rising up all around him. We could hardly see his face. His clothes were badly singed, but somehow he was unharmed.
He grabbed another bucket of water that my sister brought from the house and rushed toward the windows. By now the fire was pouring out all three of the big windows. There was no doubt now that my father’s carpets were fueling that fire.
My mother raced after him, yelling, and held his shoulder to stop him from going into the blaze again with his small bucket of water. It was like spitting on such a fire.
My father shouted back at her as she tried to drag him away by one arm, but he shook her off and stood there as every second the fire grew bigger. I watched it all like a silent movie, as I could still hear nothing. The roof beams by then were burning, and one of them collapsed onto his carpets. Slowly, his head fell down on his chest in despair. He put the bucket full of water by his feet.
* * *
One hour later, when the fire had already consumed the thick beams of the ceiling and what was left of the carpets, the firefighters arrived. None of their equipment fit through that one very small door into the courtyard and the angled passageway within. The fort with its high walls was like a large open box, and the firefighters had no ladders long enough to climb over and get inside it.
Our neighbors brought their narrow bamboo ladders, and eventually three firefighters climbed up the walls from the garden side and started pouring water into the heart of the fire. The blaze sent shadows of the dark and bitter-smelling smoke of burning wool over
the whole neighborhood. The sky choked on it.
More neighbors arrived. But when they heard the muffled, defiant roar of the fire, they knew there was nothing they could do.
* * *
There was now thick, white smoke in place of the orange flames, and the black smoke lessened. The firefighters were finally able to go into the room and check for hot spots. The fire still smoldered in crevices in the walls.
After a couple of hours, it appeared to have died down. But the firefighters did not let us go in. The mud bricks in the walls had a lot of straw in them, with wooden posts and beams buried within. It could all flare up and start burning again at any time.
The courtyard was still full of our neighborhood people. Slowly, one by one they left, as night came, shaking their heads sadly, and talking about how big the fire had become in such a short time.
My father and I walked inside the burned-out room. The ceiling had fallen in, and everything was hot and steaming. He started looking for his carpets under the tons of mud that had been the earthen roof. He was breathing very hard.
He tried to dig the hot earth with his hands. It singed his fingers, and he shouted at me to bring him a shovel instead of staring at him like a nutcase. I was now beginning to hear again, but with a loud ringing in my ears.
I brought him a shovel. He shoveled for half an hour without stop. He was soaked in sweat. His burned clothes clung to his back, and I could see every muscle straining. With each minute, his shoveling got faster and faster. Finally, he reached the floor and found nothing except a layer of ashes where his carpets had been.
“Oh God, why have you done this to me? Do I deserve this?” he cried out. It scared me. Such heavy grief from the depth of his soul.
A strong wind started to blow. Some of the half-burned wood caught fire again. My father cried for water. I brought him two buckets from the storage tank in our bathroom, and he poured them where the fire had blazed up. A minute later another crevice in the wall caught fire. We threw water there as well. Then another place flared up, and another, until seven o’clock the next morning. My father and I did not sleep that night, or eat either.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 26