A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  Every feature was twice as big as normal. I did not know what to do. I thought I must have had some kind of reaction, maybe from the bite of some insect or a large scorpion. I called my mother. She came and stood at the threshold of the bathroom door. I turned around, and she screamed as if she were being attacked by a wild animal. She began crying and murmuring, “What did you do to yourself? What happened to my son? It wasn’t like this yesterday.”

  Everybody heard my mother’s shouts, and they all rushed to the bathroom. My father stood at the door next to my mother. I looked at him with my left eye, which I was holding open with my fingers.

  He said, “Who is he?”

  “He is Qais, your son,” my mother wailed.

  I tried to speak but it was painful to open my mouth.

  “Hey, watermelon head, what happened to you?” he asked. There was no sympathy in his voice. “Shame on you for letting somebody beat you up like this,” my father said.

  “Nobody beat me up. I boxed with five of my classmates, and I couldn’t defend myself against them all. But I made sure I hit them as hard as they hit me,” I said, not knowing whether to laugh or be angry.

  “Five? Are you crazy? Are you talking about your friends who have had professional training?” The best I could do was to nod my head.

  “Oh my God, he is crazy! He is mad! He is brainless! He is fighting his ass with an ox horn. This is complete stupidity. I haven’t heard of such a thing in the history of boxing,” my father said. He was looking first in one direction, and then another, but never losing sight of me. He was boxing with his words.

  “Now I have become a part of boxing history,” I said with a smile that stung all across my face.

  My father came closer and slapped me. I shouted very loudly. It really hurt. Even opening my mouth to shout was painful.

  “You ninny,” my father said, and left, and then my mother and sisters left and I was alone again. I began laughing at myself, though it hurt.

  I did not go out for a full week. My parents did not bring me a doctor either. They said it was my punishment. I did not mind. It is hard to explain, but that pain was in its own way a relief from the frustration of not being free to challenge the Taliban. My friends and I are Afghans. We had been trained never to allow anyone to do to us what the Taliban were doing. Our genetic code screamed for revenge. Suffering helped us forget that, at least for a while.

  Every morning I washed my face with warm water and salt. It stung like hell, but it was the only way to keep my wounds disinfected. A week later when I was starting to feel better, I went to my classmates’ homes. Each one looked at me shyly; some of them were in even worse condition than I.

  * * *

  Three weeks after school graduation, we had recovered enough to sit for the CONCOR examination required for admission to the University of Kabul. It is a very competitive exam. Far more students want to study at the university than there are places.

  Most of my classmates had studied mathematics, biology, and chemistry in special private courses to get high scores so they could be admitted to the engineering or medical faculty. None of them had studied religious subjects, at least not the way the Taliban taught them.

  I did not go to any of those special courses and was nervous going into the test. I still do not know how I had passed twelve years of school. I was extremely bad in mathematics. My classmates always solved the problems on my math exams for me, because they were afraid that I would break their noses if they did not.

  We had four hours to answer the CONCOR’s 210 questions. I finished them all in just under two hours. There were almost no mathematics questions, and nothing on physics or biology. They were all about Talibanism.

  * * *

  I gave the answer sheet to the teacher. He looked at it for a moment, then looked at me and asked in disbelief, “How do you know so much about these things? All your answers are correct.”

  “I took a special course,” I told him with a wise-looking smile. I decided it was better not to mention the prison where I had studied.

  * * *

  I was admitted to the Kabul University, Journalism Faculty. This was where I had most wanted to study, though with my high score on the CONCOR, I could have done medicine if I had wanted.

  On the first day of classes, I ironed a white shalwar kamiz very carefully and wore my new Afghan-made leather sandals. The Taliban did not allow students to wear shoes, but only to make the point that they were in charge. They said shoes stink. But they never said that about themselves, though they did not wash for weeks and always smelled of dried sweat. After a few weeks, when we saw them wearing shoes, we did, too.

  I also put kohl on my eyes with a small stick, like a toothpick. I looked at myself in the mirror. Each year at Great Eid, Muslims slaughter a sheep, goat, cow, or camel when we remember the Prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael when God asked him to. My family always slaughtered a sheep. And before slaughtering it, we put some salt in its mouth and kohl around its eyes. I thought, “Somebody is going to slaughter me now.”

  I took my new notebooks and some old journalism books we had been assigned, tied them on the back of my bicycle, and excitedly headed around the twin-peaked mountain toward the university. It was not far from our old house.

  I had wanted to go to university since I was in the third grade. My father had promised to buy me a car on my first day there. Now, here I was with a used bicycle that I had bought on the black market. In the three months since I had been admitted, I had dreamed of sitting behind a microphone with a pressed suit and tie and asking difficult questions of presidents, ministers, and high-ranking officials.

  Not far from the looming yellow silo where my father and I had been forced to dig the tunnel, one of my tires had a puncture. As a result, I was five minutes late for my first class.

  The class was full of students of different ages from all over Afghanistan. There were about three hundred of them. Most were older than I, with long, unkempt beards, long shalwar kamiz, big turbans, and dusty sandals. They all smelled like chicken sheds. “These are the classmates with whom I will have to spend four years,” I thought.

  The professor was standing before the blackboard, dressed like the students and equally dirty as they. His clothes were full of wrinkles, as if he had worn them for days and slept in them, too. I felt shy for having worn clean clothes that were carefully pressed.

  I sat in the third row next to a man about thirty years old who had thick eyebrows, sunken eyes, a bony face, and a slender body. I soon learned that he could not speak Dari. He could not read or write either. I had no idea how he had ended up in the Faculty of Journalism.

  But a few days later we found out that ten more people like him were in our class. They had come from the front line after two years of fighting the Northern Alliance, factions that had once fought one another and had now joined forces to drive out the Taliban. They had not passed any exams. They were introduced by the Ministry of Higher Education as “special students.”

  The professor banged his fist on the desk in front of the blackboard, demanding quiet. We all stopped talking and looked at him. He took his snuffbox from his pocket and put some snuff under his tongue. For a full minute he looked at all of us, then he spat the snuff into the corner of the room. It was the color of chicken shit. He wiped his lips with his turban and spat again. He opened a thick book, read a few lines, and began lecturing about the Taliban version of Islam. He was pacing from one corner of the room to another, and we all wrote down what he was saying in our new notebooks.

  The special student next to me was looking unblinkingly at the professor. After one hour of lecturing, the professor asked a few questions about what he had said. The special student next to me raised his hand at every question. He answered nearly all of them.

  “How do you know so much?” I asked him after the professor had left and we were having a fifteen-minute break before the next subject.

  “I was b
orn in a Muslim family and brought up Muslim, then learned a lot more with my fellow Taliban before I joined them,” he said.

  “I was also born in a Muslim family, but I don’t know as much as you do,” I said.

  “Then you are half Muslim, and half something else,” he said.

  “What could that other half be?” I asked curiously.

  “I don’t know. I guess Communist, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or something else that I would hate to be,” he said disgustedly as he walked away.

  I wanted to make some friends, and it seemed that was not going to happen with this special student who could not read or write but knew all the answers for our Talib professor.

  Fifteen minutes later, a real professor came and lectured us on the use of microphones in studios. He sounded like he had had real journalism training. Though he was dressed in the style of a Talib, his clothes were clean and his appearance tidy. While other students were busily writing what he was saying in their notebooks, the special student next to me stared blankly at him.

  Suddenly, we heard loud beeps, and everybody looked at the special student next to me. It was his walkie-talkie. He pressed the bottom and talked loudly in Pashto, then he went out without asking the professor’s permission. Twenty minutes later he came back and sat next to me, again without asking permission. The professor stopped lecturing.

  “Who let you in?” the professor asked the special student.

  “Who is supposed to not let me in?” the special student asked.

  “I have the right to say who can stay in my class, and who cannot,” the professor said.

  “In my village, that is not how it works,” the special student said. From his accent we could guess that he was from somewhere in the south, where most people are very poor.

  “This is not your village; this is Kabul University. No one in the ten years that I have been teaching here has ever entered my class without my permission,” the professor said.

  “It shouldn’t matter if it is Kabul University or my village. It is the same land under the same sky,” the special student said, and the rest of the class laughed.

  “Then why are you here and not in your village?” the professor asked. “It is the same land and the same sky there.”

  “It is up to me to decide where to be. It is none of your business where I should be, or not. If you go to my village, nobody would ask you why you’re there. They may even feed you, and treat you like a guest, like a friend of God,” the special student said.

  “You are my student, not my guest,” the professor said.

  “In my village, we go to the madrassa to learn the Holy Koran, and the mullah says that the mosque is the home of God and anyone can go there. Now I’m here to learn something. To me there is no difference between the madrassa and the university,” the special student said. “We gain knowledge in both places.”

  His walkie-talkie beeped several more times, and he ran outside and talked into it. When he came back, he sat next to me again. This time the professor ignored him.

  * * *

  After ninety minutes, the next professor came. He was a Talib. He taught us more about the way Taliban thought Islam should be.

  Later, I asked one of the real journalism professors why we had been taught journalism in only one class in the whole day.

  “I cannot give you an answer to this question. We do what we are told,” he said.

  * * *

  I came home. My mother wanted me to do some clothes shopping for her and my sisters. I told her that shopping for her and my sisters had brought me bad luck the last time. “I am not going to do any clothes shopping for anyone anymore,” I said. Besides, I was feeling very discouraged by my first day of university.

  She put on her burqa and asked me to accompany her, since women were not allowed to walk out without a male relative. Two of my sisters quickly joined us. They had just been invited to a wedding party that night and needed some things to wear. Wedding parties in Afghanistan usually are announced only a day or two in advance, and sometimes on the same day.

  In the two and a half years since the Taliban had come, it was the first time that my mother and sisters had gone out to the bazaar. I had bought those burqas a long time ago in case some emergency forced them to go out, but they had never once worn them, preferring to stay inside the walls of Noborja. The burqas were brand-new, and bright blue, the color favored in Kabul.

  We walked all the way to the main road to take a taxi. My sisters were complaining that they could not see through the small netted peepholes of their burqas. But there was nothing that I could do for them except try to keep them from walking into other people or falling into holes in the pavement. We took a taxi to Mandawee, the main bazaar in Kabul.

  There you can find anything. It is always crowded. Before the Taliban came to Kabul, it was full of all kinds of people: men, women, children, poor, rich, young, and old from all over Afghanistan. Now there were mostly men with turbans and long shalwar kamiz. They all looked like they were Taliban, but they were only normal people who just dressed like Taliban. It was safer that way. Occasionally, I could see some women with bright blue burqas.

  My mother and sisters went into a shop that sold women’s underwear. I never liked buying those kinds of things for them. One of my sisters tripped going up the steps into the shop when her burqa got caught under her foot. My other sister walked into her, and they both fell sideways onto a pile of underclothes. It was hard for them to get up, because they could not see what they were doing.

  The shop was dark. There was no electricity, and only a faint light filtered through the overhanging roofs of the bazaar. A few other women were in the shop already. My mother could not see what was for sale. She pulled up the front of her burqa. My sisters did the same. Three other women who were already there did the same as well, once they saw my mother do it.

  When the other women heard my mother talking Pashto to my sisters, they started speaking to her in Pashto as well. They were from southern Afghanistan, talking in a way that was loud and a little bit coarse.

  The shopkeeper respectfully asked my mother and the others to cover their faces. He seemed a very nice and educated man. But women were not allowed to show their faces to an unknown man. If the Taliban saw that, they would beat the women on their ankles with the cables or whips they always carried with them and slap the shopkeeper.

  One of the other women, who was older, said, “Don’t worry. My son is a Talib. He will protect us.” We all thought she was joking. My mother, sisters, and the other women smiled.

  Not even five minutes later, a Talib came along the narrow street of the bazaar, looking into all the shops. When he saw my mother and the others with their burqa fronts raised, he marched into the dark shop and started whipping the women’s ankles with a thick cable. The women yelled and tried to jump out of the way.

  The Talib was shouting in Pashto, “Cover your faces, you silly women,” as he swung the whip.

  My mother and sisters followed his orders. The others did the same, except for the older one who had spoken to my mother.

  Instead, she picked up a teacup from the shopkeeper’s table and threw it at the Talib. The cup hit the ground and smashed into pieces. She picked another cup and threw it at him. This one hit him in the chest. The Talib was stunned. So was I, as I wondered whether any woman had ever hit a Talib or thrown anything at one before.

  Then the old woman picked up a teapot and threw that at the Talib, too. The tea had been made only a few minutes earlier. It was very hot. The pot shattered, and the fresh-boiled tea scalded him. He began shrieking and holding his clothes out from his skin to lessen the pain.

  The shopkeeper quickly started collecting all the other cups from the table. He could see that the older woman was looking for something else to throw. He was afraid all his cups would be smashed. In a harsh voice the woman barked at the Talib, “Go home and behave yourself. Have I brought you up for such a day to whip me on the ankles with a
cable? You son of a dog!” she yelled, making a bad reference to his father.

  “Mother! What are you doing here?” the Talib asked as he was still holding his sopping kamiz away from his chest. He gazed at her with wide eyes.

  The shopkeeper, who was fearfully holding the tray of cups, slowly put them back on the table.

  She picked up another cup and threw it at her son. The cup hit him on his right arm as he turned around to avoid it, then fell on the ground in pieces.

  “Don’t you see what I’m doing?” the woman said. She picked up an extralarge red bra and showed it to her son. She was a solidly built village woman. “I’m buying this. Could you buy this for me if I sent you?” she said.

  “Put it away, Mother,” the Talib said. He was shy and covered his eyes with his right hand.

  She reached for another cup, but the shopkeeper had picked up the tray again before she could get one. Instead, she grabbed a package of bras and threw it at her son. It was heavy and landed at her son’s feet.

  “Get out of here,” the woman said. “I’ll teach you tonight how to behave.”

  The Talib turned around to walk out. The shopkeeper said, “Excuse me. Excuse me.” The Talib turned around to see what the shopkeeper wanted.

  “Your mother has broken three cups and a teapot,” the shopkeeper said. “Somebody has to pay for them.”

  “How much?” the Talib said, annoyed.

  The shopkeeper told him the price, and the Talib paid without any bargaining. He did not even look at his mother or the other women. All the women’s burqas were pulled up again as he walked out. He did not tell them to cover their faces.

  The old woman apologized for the inconvenience that was caused by her son. The other women told her that she was a brave woman, and she was very happy to hear that.

  My mother quickly became very good friends with her. For the rest of that day, my mother followed her around to all the other shops so nobody could beat her or my sisters if they needed to pull up their burqas while they were buying things.