A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” Zardad said. He got up from the chair where he had been watching and walked toward my father, studying him more closely. He stood over my father for a moment, then ordered his men to untie me and give us our clothes back. “I don’t torture my Pashtuns,” Zardad said airily as he walked back to his chair.

  My father and I put on our clothes as best we could. Every time I moved, the places where the fanged man had bitten me ached like something was still tearing my skin. I was so stiff with fear, I hardly knew what I was doing. Blood ran out of the wounds and soaked my clothes. All the while, the man with the fangs was looking at me fiercely, angry that he had lost his prey and could do nothing about it.

  “What about the others?” my father asked. He could not stand up straight. “Release them, too.”

  “You’re free to go,” Zardad said, like he was giving an order.

  “You’re not torturing these people for their money, are you? You’re torturing them because you enjoy doing it,” my father said.

  “If you say one more word, I will forget you’re a Pashtun. Understood? Go, and don’t ever look back,” Zardad shouted.

  My father did not say anything. We left there and walked in small, painful steps along the steep path back down to the road. Ten minutes later we were in a highway taxi coming along the main road from Jalalabad to Kabul, headed toward our home.

  * * *

  “What is all this?” my mother asked, looking at the blood on our clothes. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open, and her face pale.

  “We were bitten by a dog,” my father said as he was hugging her. Then he fainted, and his body slumped onto hers.

  My mother cried to me to help her with my father. We half carried and half dragged him to his bed. I told my mother what had happened to us but kept it short, because I wanted to lie down as well.

  She ran outside and came back with our neighbor who was a night-shift doctor.

  A few minutes later, the doctor injected him with something that made him totally numb. The doctor started to wash the wounds, first with alcohol to disinfect them, and then with a few things he mixed all together. He rubbed the wounds gently, then covered them with rolls of bandages.

  When the doctor had finished my father’s wounds, I showed him mine. My shoulders and arms had begun to itch and then ache. The puncture wounds of the bites were still bleeding a little, especially those on my right arm, which were the deepest. He did for me the same things that he had done for my father. He was amazed how I had endured the pain so far. But pain was our way of life now.

  I woke up early the next morning and was still in bad shape. There was a blotchy redness and intense heat around each bite wound. Each one throbbed. I noticed a nasty drainage from the bites on my left leg. All the wounds were swollen to nearly twice the size they had been the night before. When I moved, I felt like something was tearing my skin.

  It took us two weeks to recover. My mother would not let my father even speak of going to Pakistan again. She said that what had happened to us was a bad sign. She said that if we lived in Pakistan, it would be worse than Kabul.

  “You are superstitious,” my father said.

  “Yes,” my mother said bluntly. She was pacing the bedroom like the leopard that had been in the garden. My father watched her for a few minutes, and then told her he would like some tea.

  She stopped, looked at him, and raised her finger like she was pointing to me or my sisters. “I am not going to Pakistan,” she said very firmly. “I’m going to stay in Kabul. And if I die, so be it. But I’m going to die on my own piece of earth, not in some strange country.”

  My father knew argument would not change her mind. She walked silently from the room to get him his tea.

  PART FOUR

  THE TRIUMPH OF MADNESS

  17

  A New Kind of Justice

  We entered a time of waiting. The fighting would end, we said, if we waited. Our lives would come back to us, if we waited. Or we would find a way out, if we waited. If our gold was still in Grandfather’s garden, then it would wait there for now, just as we would wait at Noborja.

  * * *

  The fighting in Kabul eased, and a school near Noborja reopened. After so much thirst to go back to school, I was now disappointed by it. The school was shabby, not like the well-maintained building that the educated families in our old neighborhood had supported. There, all the teachers had known my name and my family. I was treated well and was excited by every new thing I was taught.

  In this new school, many of the students came from rural areas north of Kabul, like Shamali, Parwan, and Panjshir. They spoke Dari with accents from those places that sounded strange to me. Some of their families had come to Kabul with the Mujahedin. Some of them liked to fight more than to study. In Dari we say, “If you sit with good people, you will become a good person. If you sit with bad people, you will become a bad person.” The students were not really bad people, but I picked up a lot of bad habits from them.

  I went every day, though, mostly because there was nothing else to do. I had missed more than two full years of school, but so had most of my classmates. We were all behind, even though some of them, like me, had been educated at home by their parents. Living in a war had also taught us many things.

  Somehow I had ended up in the eighth grade. Perhaps that was because I was thirteen and looked like I should be there. I went for four hours every afternoon. The kids in the first six grades came in the morning, including my younger sisters. My older sister went to a girls’ high school not far away. For as long as the ceasefires held, we could go every day.

  Most of the teachers were as discouraged about life in Afghanistan as the students. The teachers tried hard to convince us that what they were teaching was important for us to learn. Maybe it was.

  Sometimes in our classes we talked about the various factions, and which one was good and which one was bad. In the end, we agreed that none of them were good. Rockets still fell on Kabul sometimes, though we were never sure which faction sent them. Meanwhile, we were hearing about a new faction called the Taliban that was taking control of the cities in the south and was slowly moving into the east. Many people said they would make a circle around Kabul and drive all the other factions away. We did not know much about them. We were sick of commanders and factions.

  We were more worried by our principal, who had eyes that were red like fireballs. Every day he slapped students who had been fighting until they started to cry in front of all the other students. He was a stupid man who told us to fix a faucet that was dripping precious water by jamming a stick up inside it. We did that, and we got very wet when the water squirted all over us. Then he slapped us for getting ourselves wet.

  Nobody slapped him, though, when somebody discovered a dead cat in the cistern. It had been there for at least a week, and we had been drinking the water.

  The one class that I did enjoy was taught by our Dari language and literature teacher. She was pretty and always cheerful. She helped me understand for the first time that there is more to a story than its plot. She told us that images created by words can have hidden meanings. I started rereading all the books that we had at home, like a detective, looking for hidden meanings that other people who were not as smart as I was could not see.

  The textbooks that the school gave us had very little literature in them. Some poetry, some short stories with hard and fancy words, and some history about famous poets and writers. So, our teacher assigned us other books to read, mostly novels. A lot of the boys hated reading, and they sulked. But there were a few of us who found that every book that our teacher asked us to read was better than the one before.

  Our teacher recommended novels she thought would help us understand things that are not taught in school textbooks. Mostly they were novels by Iranian authors such as Amir Ashiri, Parwiz Qazi Sayed, Aroniqi Karmani, and Jawad Fazil. She also suggested a few Western authors as well, such as Maxim Gorky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo To
lstoy, Anton Chekhov, Jack London, and Thomas Mann. Crime and Punishment was too much about hardship, misery, and pain. I read the first few pages, but then put the book back in its place in my cabinet and told myself that I would read it when I was no longer living in Afghanistan.

  She spoke to us softly in a low voice, but in a way that everyone could hear her. When she came into the classroom, everybody stopped talking immediately, and nobody teased anyone during her lesson as we did during other classes.

  One day she told us that she had received her degree in Russia, and she would have liked to have been a professor at Kabul University. But she had three sons, the oldest four years younger than we were, and she had to be home most of the time. I do not think she taught for money, because her husband had a good business in an electronics shop he owned. I think she taught because she loved literature. I was only beginning to understand what literature was, and I was excited to learn from somebody who loved it as much as she did.

  * * *

  As the months sifted into years, I began to notice hair on my body where it had never grown before. At first I was frightened that all the tension of the war was turning me into a monkey. I remembered the pictures in my schoolbook from all those years ago. Could it be possible that war turned humans back into monkeys?

  Then, new kinds of dreams, especially about women, left me excited and self-conscious. Whenever I looked at a picture of a pretty girl in a magazine, I felt something strange.

  It was not like in the old days, when a young Afghan guy could take a girl on a date. Since the Mujahedin had come, a young man had to get married to have a girlfriend. I did not want to get married at that early age.

  Instead, I spent hours and hours in the gym lifting weights and training as a boxer. My arms were getting thick, and my chest began to look like a man’s. Sometimes when I stood before a mirror without my shirt, I saw a body full of muscles, like those statues in the books about Plato and Socrates.

  One day I pretended I was the statue of Apollo. I was posing like that with my left arm raised for a couple of minutes without knowing that my father was at the door watching me. He made fun of me for several weeks afterward. He would look at me, then hold up his left arm. I did not like him making fun of me, but at least I got to hear him laugh.

  My father told jokes when we ate, but he was not happy, except when he put on his boxing gloves and was showing me how to fake a right jab, or come back with a left hook. He would not allow anyone to mention carpets, or smugglers, or Grandfather’s house.

  A day came when I felt like I had been living at Noborja longer than in our own home. But it had been only four years.

  * * *

  On a Thursday night in September 1996, we heard lots of cars running up and down the roads. There was no shooting, and no rockets. But all the roads all over Kabul were unusually busy all night.

  The next morning, like other Fridays, I planned to eat my breakfast late with my family, and then, if no factions were firing at us from the mountain, go watch our neighbors playing football for an hour in the road in front of the fort. Afterward, I would come home and listen to the radio drama before we ate a big lunch with my grandfather or any of my uncles who had been able to come. While they sat and drank tea for the rest of the afternoon, I would go to the garden and sit in the shade of the grapevines to listen to sparrows make chuk-chuk calls and read one of my Iranian novels.

  But on that Friday as I approached the gate, I could not hear any football noises from outside. Only silence.

  Our front gate of corrugated steel had been shot full of holes like a colander when a rocket had landed in front of it five years before. The rocket also killed a little boy who had been feeding his donkey from a pile of trash nearby. We never had money to replace the gate and used it the way it was.

  I looked through one of the holes outside to see why no one was kicking a football where the dirt road widened between the gate and the wall of the old British Embassy to make a broad playing area. But there were no footballers. Instead, I saw men who were strangers. I had never before seen such people, not even in my dreams, or in movies, or in any novel or history books.

  They looked like Afghans, but were dressed strangely in long black and white turbans and very long kamiz that hung down over their shalwar trousers way below their knees. They were carrying whips.

  All of them had outlined their eyes in kohl. Their beards were untrimmed and long. None had proper shoes. Instead, they wore slippers, and their feet were dusty. Most of them had snuff in their mouths. A few of them spat brown saliva into the dust in front of them, and then cleaned their mouths with the ends of their turbans.

  None of them spoke. They looked lost, like men who had come from a forest or caves and had never seen buildings before.

  I thought at first they might be vampires. I knew that vampires did not exist, except in stories to scare kids. But what else could I be seeing?

  I could not see even one of my neighbors around. Not one. A fear rushed through me. Perhaps they had all left the town the night before without telling us. Or maybe these vampires had eaten them and were now staring at each house to see whether anyone was still inside to prey on.

  “It is not possible,” I reassured myself, while not being sure of anything.

  Ever since the conflict between the factions had started, it usually took months for one to overcome another and take control of a neighborhood. Now this new faction seemed to have taken over the whole town with no fighting and no casualties. I had to know what was going on.

  I opened the door as quietly as I could and stepped outside. Three of them heard the squeak of the gate and ran toward me. Their faces were fierce. They raised their whips.

  One of them came close and asked me whether I knew where Ahmad Shah Masoud was. They were all speaking Pashto with the Kandahari accent, which has more ups and downs than the Pashto we speak in Kabul. Maybe they were part of this new Taliban faction that we had been hearing about.

  “I don’t know,” I said fearfully in Pashto. They softened when they heard me speak their language.

  “Do you know Fahim?” the same guy asked me.

  “Everybody knows him,” I said. Marshal Fahim was a Tajik and one of Masoud’s close allies.

  Another one of them pushed the two others back and grabbed me by my collar. His hands smelled like shit.

  “Are you Fahim’s son?” he yelled.

  “No!” I shouted back.

  “Where is his house?” he asked me as he held my collar tightly. I pointed toward the Bagh-e-Bala, a tree-covered slope that rises up steeply half a mile west of Noborja, where there used to be a garden built by the Moguls.

  He was still holding me and said, “Show us his house.”

  I took them to Fahim’s street, and from the far end pointed out to them where his house stood. The guy who had held my collar let me go.

  I raced home and told my family what had happened. But they thought I was making it all up, except for my mother. I could tell by the way she listened to me that she believed me.

  As he always did on Fridays when guests might come, my father had shaved very carefully that morning, and was wearing his best trousers and a neatly pressed, white short-sleeve shirt. He decided to go out to see what I was talking about.

  My mother did not want him to leave the house until we heard some more news. But my father, always practical, said, “There’s no fighting going on. If there is a new faction in town, I want to make them my friends.”

  My father came back in half an hour looking angry. There were stains of fingerprints on his face and the mark of a whip on the back of his white shirt.

  “What happened to you?” my mother asked, her voice high with worry.

  He did not answer. He walked across the room, sat on the floor in the corner, and put his head on his knees and his arms around his legs.

  My three little sisters stopped jumping on my parents’ toshak and throwing pillows at one another. My mother sat in fro
nt of my father and raised his head up. “What is wrong?”

  “They whipped me,” my father said.

  “Why?” my mother asked in amazement.

  “Because I had shaved my beard. They called me an infidel and a Communist,” my father said, incredulously. “They said that the beard is the symbol of Islam.”

  “Islam is about what is in your heart, not what is on your face,” my mother stated.

  “I told them that if the beard is a symbol of Islam, then a goat must be a Muslim since it is born with one,” my father said, looking slightly dazed as he spoke. “Then they whipped me.”

  “What kind of people are they?” my mother asked with disgust.

  My father put his head back on his knees, and my mother kissed his head. She beckoned for us to leave the room with her and let him alone.

  My mother covered her head with a scarf and went to find out for herself what she could about this new faction.

  She came back after fifteen minutes. Her eyes were full of fury, and she was limping.

  “Some guy with a big black turban and torn clothes and a long beard whipped me on my legs,” my mother exclaimed.

  “Why?” my father asked, angered and bewildered. He jumped up from where he was sitting, prepared for a fight.

  “Because I was not wearing a burqa,” my mother said. We could all see that she was suffering from the lashes.

  “What the hell is going on today? Where did these weird people come from?” my father asked.

  All of my sisters had come to see what was going on. “I don’t want any of you to step outside of this house today,” my mother said to them firmly.

  “Who are these people?” my oldest sister asked my father.

  “I don’t know.” He gazed at the ceiling and murmured, “I never had a chance to ask them.”

  My mother asked my older sister for a bandage and alcohol to disinfect the whip wounds on her legs. One of my little sisters turned on the radio to hear the Friday drama. Instead, we heard a strange kind of singing. We thought it must be a part of the drama, but it continued for hours. From that day, we did not hear the radio drama again for five years.