After shopping for several hours, we had lunch in a restaurant and invited the old woman to join us as our guest, which she was happy to do. She had many funny stories, and we laughed like we were having a picnic with an old friend.
My mother gave her our home address and asked her to come and visit us sometime. She said she would, but she never did.
23
Grandfather
We all came home from our shopping trip very happy. When we got there, we found Grandfather sipping tea in our sitting room. I ran to him and kissed his hands, and he kissed my forehead and congratulated me for starting university. I was so happy having my grandfather next to me, sipping tea and patting my head like in the old days.
He had brought some gifts for me to celebrate my first day. He gave me three expensive notebooks and his collection of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. I have no idea how he had saved those books all those years, or where he had been keeping them. Perhaps years ago he had lent them to a friend who lived where the fighting or the Taliban had never reached. I was too happy when I saw them to ask. “Now is the right time for you to have them, Gorbachev,” he said.
“Tashekur, Baba,” I replied, as I gave him a long, heartfelt hug, upsetting his tea onto the carpet. I was thankful not just for the books, but to have him with us. It pushed my disappointment with the university to the back of my mind.
It was only forty minutes by bike to Makroyan, where he lived with my aunt, but I was not allowed to go. My father was afraid to let me go anywhere alone. Whenever I walked out of the courtyard, somebody called after me, either my mother or my father, asking me where I was going. Nobody was worried about my sisters, because it was not possible for them to go anywhere; but after all the things that had happened to me, they were always worried about me.
Grandfather was slowly becoming an old man. It was hard for him to walk all the way from Makroyan the way he once had, and he found the bus tiring. Sometimes he wanted to visit us, but he had no money for a taxi. He was too proud to ask anybody for any. We did not have a phone to call him. Afghanistan did not have much of a phone system anymore. It had all been destroyed in the fighting between the factions. Now, whenever he came to visit us, one of my uncles would accompany him.
One of my sisters brought me a cup, and I poured more tea for Grandfather and some for myself. It felt like the old days, but I could read a deep sadness in Grandfather’s eyes, though he tried to hide it.
I knew he did not want to ruin my first day of university. He did not know that I was already bitterly disappointed, and I did not want to spoil his happiness for me by showing it.
I was looking for a right and quiet moment to ask him what was troubling him, but nobody wanted to leave us alone. It had been a month since we had last seen him, and everybody had been missing him.
Night fell and covered everything with its black coat. My grandfather went out to the courtyard and sat on one of the low, wooden platforms scattered around where my father had once washed carpets. He was gazing at the star-filled, moonless sky. He did not notice me at first when I came out and sat next to him. He was lost in his thoughts. I sat there for a long time before I spoke.
“You are hiding something from me,” I said finally. “What is it inside that keeps burning you? Why don’t you take it out and share it with me?” I asked.
He looked into my eyes for a full minute. I could feel his discomfort through his eyes, which got watery. Then he looked at the stars again.
“I have kept that fire for a month inside me. If I take that fire out, its flames will burn everyone,” he said with his head pointed toward the sky. “It will make you sadder than others,” he said. He got up and walked back into the house.
* * *
We ate dinner together. My father made some of his jokes, and everyone laughed. I kept looking at Grandfather. His mouth made the gesture of a smile, but not his eyes.
After dinner as we were drinking tea, Grandfather said, “I have unpleasant news for everyone.” We all looked at him. He was quiet for a moment and then said, “I have been receiving a letter every morning since a month ago. In the letter someone is threatening me and my sons with death if I don’t sell my house to him. He is working with the government, and he is a powerful Talib.”
We were all very quiet. Nobody knew how to break the silence as we tried to understand what might happen to our home, the place where we expected to return. Finally my father said, “How do you receive these letters?”
“Somebody is sliding them under the door around three in the morning. When I wake up for morning prayers, I find them. Each one is the same, the same writing, the same words. It has come every day for a month,” Grandfather calmly said.
“Have you told anyone else yet?” my father asked.
“No, not yet,” Grandfather said.
“While you are here tonight, will he slip another letter under the door?” I asked, deeply concerned about my aunt alone in the apartment in Makroyan without Grandfather with her.
“No. Two days ago I wrote him a letter, and left it for him under the door before morning prayers. I asked him to show me his face. Yesterday I met him. He is a dangerous man. He likes our house, what is left of it, and he wants to buy the land and rebuild. He will choose a price for it. He said he would tell me the price tomorrow,” Grandfather said.
“We are definitely not going to sell him the house,” my father said. “Let him dream about it. I’m sure he can do nothing.”
“He can do anything he wants. He is not afraid of anyone. He would destroy whatever comes into his path. He may kill one of us if I say ‘No,’” Grandfather said.
I noticed that my uncle’s face had gone pale.
“May I go with you and see him tomorrow?” my father asked forcefully.
“No, he doesn’t want to see any of you. He said that if I tell any of my sons, he will kill me. But I’m telling you, and you’ll all keep your father’s secret,” he said as he looked into everybody’s eyes. We did not know what to say.
“Do you want to sell him the house, then?” my father asked, more quietly.
“I want to talk to him and solve this problem peacefully, but if he gets serious and stubborn, then I don’t know. He is one of those Taliban from the border. They capture a village and torture people and club them to death, then afterward ask the young boys to do the same to their parents. They tell the young boys that this will make a man of them.
“I don’t want the same thing to happen to my sons, my grandsons, and my granddaughters. I don’t want to see my daughters-in-law in widows’ clothes. I don’t want to ruin my family. Money is the dirt on our hands; it comes and goes. We may have some money again, and we will buy a better house,” Grandfather said. He said all this with a calm voice.
No one talked after him and there were several minutes of silence. He asked for a blanket, which he wrapped around himself, then went back out into the courtyard and lay down; he fell asleep on the platform where we had been sitting earlier, even though the night had turned cool.
The rest of us sat inside; no one said anything for a long time. Finally, my uncle spoke.
“I went to the old house about six weeks ago. I had to know if any of my wife’s gold was still there. I mean, how long are we going to go on living like this?” His voice was filled with frustration.
Nobody answered him. My uncle had gone to the house without telling any of his brothers or his father. Grandfather did not want anyone to go there.
“The garden was full of sacks of potatoes. It looked like they are using it for storage. They saw me and chased me all the way to Makroyan,” he said sorrowfully.
Somehow they figured out that he was part of the family who owned the place. This was how they found Grandfather. The Taliban could have just taken the house, but even they knew they could never claim to own it without the papers.
* * *
Early in the morning, Grandfather left our house without telling us where h
e was going. While we had our breakfast my father said, “If Dad sells the house, the gold is gone with it. But I don’t know how to stop him. If I did, we might face bad consequences. I don’t want to be blamed for the rest of my life by the others.”
“So, are we just going to lose all our gold?” my mother said. “We’ll never get to another country.” The gold was the only wealth we had left. The belief that we would one day get it back had made it possible for us to think that somehow someday we could leave Afghanistan and have something like a normal life.
“What do you want me to do, then?” my father said. “It is not just your gold; others have theirs, too.”
“Can you not just go and get the gold, before Father sells the house?” my mother asked. My mother always called my grandfather “Father.”
“You heard what my brother said last night. The whole courtyard is full of potato sacks. Thousands of them. We would have to shift all those first. Then, if they see us taking it from the ground, they’ll think we have a lot more somewhere else. Then we’ll be in worse trouble. They may kidnap us, and ask us for money we don’t have. How will I be able to convince these illiterate Taliban thieves of that?”
My mother did not say anything.
All I could think about was having seen Grandfather’s spirit so broken.
* * *
A few days later, we heard that Grandfather had sold the house for less than half of what it was worth. A few days after he received the money for it, he was threatened by the buyer and forced to give half of it back. Grandfather did what he was told.
From the time he sold the house, he became a quiet man, a man who spoke only two or three words a day.
He bought a new house. It was on our side of Kabul, only a thirty-minute walk from Noborja, about halfway to his old house. It had two floors and a nice courtyard, but it was tiny compared to what we had had before. Two of my uncles lived downstairs with their families. Grandfather lived on the second floor and stayed in his rooms for months without leaving the house. He never talked to anyone. He read and read and read. That was all.
Sometimes I visited him, but he hardly noticed me. We said “Salaam” to each other, and a few minutes later he said “Salaam” again, and a few minutes later he said “Salaam” again. He never said anything more. He just kept reading for hours, occasionally gazing at the blue sky.
Other times, he talked about whatever book he had open. But the two thick volumes of his favorite book, Afghanistan in the Path of History by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar, were always on his top shelf. They were never opened now, and were covered with dust.
After a while, he even stopped reading, and he became gloomier. Dark circles appeared under his eyes, and he neglected his appearance, going about the whole day in a wrinkled shalwar kamiz with an unbuttoned collar without combing his hair. It hurt me to see him so uncaring about all the things he had told me were important.
* * *
One day in late winter, Grandfather woke up before dawn to take ablution for morning prayers. He still did not like his new house, especially his bathroom with its floor covered with blue tiles. They were very slippery. He liked white marble from our mountains, as he had had in his bathroom in his old house. He always said that Afghan marble is the best in the world. “The rest of the world will notice it one day, and it’ll have great value. It will be exported everywhere,” he would tell us.
That day, he took ablution as always with cold water and was shivering from the cold. As he hurried to get to his bedroom to get under his blanket, he slipped. His head hit the edge of the sink. He went unconscious and lay there for several hours.
When he came to, the sun was already flooding into the bathroom through a small window. He had missed his morning prayers. He did not remember what had happened to him and did not know why he was lying on the bathroom floor. He wanted to stand up and go to his room, but he could not. He called for my uncle who lived downstairs with his kids, but his voice was not loud enough to wake anybody up.
* * *
My uncle came upstairs around seven o’clock as always to ask his father about his breakfast. Sometimes Grandfather wanted his eggs boiled, and sometimes fried. Some days he wanted milk with sugar, and some days he wanted green tea with honey. But this morning my uncle could not find him in his room reading a book, as Grandfather usually did.
My uncle opened the bathroom door and saw Grandfather lying on the ground with blood pooled under his head. He carried Grandfather to his room and asked him what had happened. But Grandfather could barely talk. His face was blue from cold. My uncle covered him with blankets and lit a blazing fire in his tin bokhari heating stove. The room was warm after a few minutes, but Grandfather could not feel anything, neither cold nor heat. He fell asleep.
My uncle quickly came to Noborja to tell us about Grandfather. He and my father and I went to several private clinics to look for a doctor. But it was too early, and the clinics were still closed. It was not like the old days, when we could call an ambulance any time of the day or night.
Nobody wanted to take his sick relatives to public hospitals, either. They were filthy. A person would get sicker there instead of getting cured. Besides, the hospitals did not accept patients unless they had been injured on the front line, or had stepped on a land mine, or had been wounded by a rocket.
We waited for more than an hour in front of a private clinic. Finally, the doctor arrived. He was a close friend of my uncle. We took him to Grandfather’s house. By now all my other uncles and their wives and my cousins had arrived there, as well as my mother and my sisters and my little brother. There were too many people for that small house.
The doctor examined Grandfather and said, “Some blood vessels burst inside his brain. He needs to have an operation within twenty-four hours. Nobody can do this operation in Afghanistan. We don’t have the surgical tools for it. You’ll have to take him to India.”
“Is there no alternative?” my father asked.
“No. I’m afraid not,” the doctor said.
“That will take three or four days!” my uncle protested. “His passport is expired. We have to renew it first. Then we have to apply for Indian visas. God knows if they’ll give them to us.”
“The best I can do is to take him to my clinic, but I cannot promise anything. Without an operation, he will lose his ability to speak in twelve hours or sooner. If he talks, his words will be loose, and he won’t be able to pronounce them properly. In twenty-four hours, he will start losing his memory. In thirty hours he will not recognize anyone. And after that, he will go into a coma. God knows how long he will stay alive after that,” the doctor said with a sigh.
Grandfather was listening to all that the doctor was saying. “Will I be able to walk before I start losing my memory?” Grandfather said.
“No, I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Your brain will not help you control your body. You won’t be able to lift your arms, or your feet, and you won’t feel anything unless we get you operated on.”
“So, I will die like this?” Grandfather said as if he were hearing a joke.
“Not if we get you to the operating table on time,” the doctor said.
“Otherwise, yes,” Grandfather said.
The doctor nodded his head as he was looking at his hands.
There was a moment of silence, a bitter silence. Nobody knew how to break it. My father ordered my uncle to start working on passport renewal.
Grandfather said, “Let’s have a good qabli for lunch, and celebrate the last hours of my life, and enjoy eating and talking while I can. You don’t go anywhere for lunch, Doctor. You stay with us.”
The doctor nodded.
Grandfather tried to sound cheerful. We all had cold smiles on our faces to make Grandfather feel good, but inside we had flames of sorrow burning us, and we did not know how to cool them.
“I know I can’t bring a real smile to your lips,” Grandfather said, “but maybe my joke will. Mullah Nasruddin said, ‘When my
wife died, half of the world died for me. When I die, the whole world will die with me.’”
Everybody laughed.
“You see, I can still do it,” Grandfather said with a trace of pride.
My aunts started wiping tears and blowing their noses.
“Hey, hey, I don’t want to see you crying and wiping your noses for me,” Grandfather said cheerfully.
We all smiled with tears in our eyes.
My uncle left the room to start working on Grandfather’s passport renewal. My father went to find out about whether an Indian visa would be possible. My aunts started cooking the rice and the meat for the qabli pelau and shredding the carrots they would mix with it. The doctor wrote a prescription, which he handed to me, and I ran off to the pharmacy. The room was full of my cousins, and Grandfather told them to sit in a circle around him and joked with them.
I came back with the medicine in a plastic bag. In the short time that I had been gone, Grandfather’s face had become noticeably paler. But he tried to sound happy and full of energy.
Several hours later we had lunch around one long tablecloth in Grandfather’s room. My father had to feed Grandfather, like a little baby, as he was lying on his toshak in the corner near the woodstove. Grandfather made some jokes about old people, and we laughed, quietly.
After lunch, the doctor injected him with some painkillers since his head was hurting, and he fell asleep. We did not let the doctor go. Late in the afternoon my uncle returned with a new passport for Grandfather. Early that evening Grandfather woke up. His saliva started coming out of the corners of his mouth without his noticing it, and he was saying things that did not make sense.
My uncles tried to talk to him, but he could not focus on what they said to him. My aunts wept, but he did not object anymore.
“I should take him to my clinic,” the doctor said. “It is happening faster than I thought. He may need oxygen very soon.”
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 35