A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  After we had gone and the carpets were finished, this same girl would distribute all the looms among my other students, so they could start making their own carpets in their houses. These looms were to be their salaries and bonus for this month. They were very happy about that. But I still had to dye the wool and silk for them for at least one month, since they did not know how to do it. I had been showing a few of my students how to dye wool and silk, but dyeing is very unpredictable since the strength of the dye, the quality of the wool, and the heat of the fire under the dye pot can be slightly different from batch to batch. Learning how to get the same shades of each color in every batch takes time, and they were still making the kinds of mistakes that I had made when I had been teaching myself these things.

  * * *

  It was around seven o’clock in the evening. We were about to have an early supper after a long and tiring day. My mother was cooking kebab on a grill in the courtyard. Every meal now was like a celebration, because we would be leaving on October 15, only a month and five days away. It was also our way of not feeling sad about having to leave our own country, where our family had lived for thousands of years, and where I had lived the first nineteen years of my life.

  My mother gave everyone a stick of kebab. It was lamb, very juicy and delicious. My father said, “Let’s listen to the news.” My mother did not want to hear anything from “the devil box.” That is what she called the radio, because it always broadcast evil news. She said it would ruin our time together in this life.

  My father chuckled and said, “It is all right. We’re leaving this country very soon. Let me hear it while we’re here.” Then he turned on the radio to the BBC World Service. My mother did not want to argue, because she knew that it would not change anything. Instead, she fussed over the food.

  Suddenly, we heard news that made us stop eating.

  “Ahmad Shah Masoud was wounded in a suicide attack today at his stronghold near the Tajikistan border. The attackers were two Arabs who had posed as journalists. While they were interviewing Masoud, a bomb in a belt worn by one of them exploded.

  “That man was killed instantly. The other was captured and shot while trying to escape. Masoud was rushed to the Indian military hospital at Farkhor, Tajikistan.”

  We were completely stunned. We did not know what to think. Should we eat and continue our celebration? Should we start mourning? What did this mean? We did not have suicide bombers in Afghanistan.

  In the morning we heard that Masoud had died during the night in the hospital while they were trying to save him. All around us, our many Panjshiri neighbors wept loudly.

  * * *

  I had not told any of my classmates that I was leaving. I did not want to make them feel bad that I was going and they were staying behind. I was planning to send them gifts and sweet letters from Italy.

  We had all become good friends in the past three years, despite my time away from the university. We even had made those Taliban who had come from the front line our friends. We had taught them how to read and write. We also taught them how to use parallel bars in the gymnasium, how to play basketball, and how to dance. Sometimes we even secretly listened to Indian music with them in our breaks between classes. A few of them quit being Taliban. They were not bad people after all. They were just guys like us who wanted to have a chance at life. They wanted to marry Kabuli girls and to continue living in Kabul.

  We told them that they would have to share all the housework with their wives. At first they thought we were making fun of them. Then they realized that we were serious. But they did not want to go back to their lives in the village. In the end, they accepted that they should work equally as hard as women in their homes.

  The day after Masoud’s death, my classmates and I talked about his assassination. Some expressed deep concern at losing yet one more of our Afghan leaders. Others, who remembered all the rockets that he had thrown at Kabul during the civil war, were happy about his death.

  Some of our classmates chided the others as if we were already journalists, saying, “Our job is not to take sides. Our job is to tell the truth and get all the facts.” We listened to the BBC World Service as a model of how to present news accurately and as soon as it happens. We carried small radios in our pockets and listened to them during our breaks between classes, usually with small earphones.

  One of my classmates was listening to the news while we were talking about Masoud. Suddenly, he shouted, “Quiet! Quiet! Something terrible has happened in New York.”

  He pulled the plug for the earphone out of the radio, and we listened to the news that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. We had seen the World Trade Center in many movies, especially one with a giant monkey who had climbed it like it was a ladder. We could picture its two towers clearly in our minds. Then, as we stood in the late afternoon sun under the trees on the university campus, we heard with disbelief from that tiny radio that a second plane had hit the other tower. Now the horrors that had filled our lives for so many years were happening even in America. We felt as if something had been taken away from us. “What hope can we have for Afghanistan, if this is what is happening in America?” we asked each other.

  The death of Masoud was instantly overshadowed. We completely forgot about him. The BBC World Service said something like:

  “The timing of the Masoud assassination, coming just two days before these attacks on the United States, is now considered significant by observers who believe that Osama bin Laden ordered the assassination to help his Taliban protectors and ensure that he would have their cooperation in Afghanistan. The assassins are also reported to have indicated support for bin Laden in their questions of Masoud.”

  Osama bin Laden. Was that not the name of the Arab they said was living near us in the house of the Pimp of the King?

  Some of my classmates said that soon America would attack Afghanistan. The Americans would be like the Russians. They would drop bombs everywhere, destroying every village and city.

  I was not so sure. I thought America was too far away to attack Afghanistan. It was on another continent. Why would they come to Afghanistan? If they wanted Osama bin Laden, they would send their intelligence services to arrest him. But they would not attack the whole of Afghanistan for just one person.

  “Even if they do,” I told myself, “we will be gone. We will be in Turkey, or maybe even Italy by then. But an attack is not likely.”

  * * *

  We kept listening to the BBC every day after that, almost every hour. They kept saying that America would attack Afghanistan. One month passed. Nothing happened.

  The roads were still open. As each day brought us closer to our departure, we became increasingly hopeful that we would really get away this time, and equally worried that something would happen to stop us.

  One week to the day before we left, some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins were at our house. It was late on a Sunday evening, and we had had a long dinner together. They had come to say goodbye and collect the things that my father had separated out for them.

  It was a cool evening, so we ate in one of the rooms of the Fort of Nine Towers, instead of in the courtyard. It was good to be together like a family, eating around one cloth. We knew it probably would not happen again in Afghanistan. My cousins were asking me whether I would send them nice presents. I promised to send lots of gifts as soon as we arrived.

  In the middle of somebody’s joke, we heard an extremely loud noise, like a bomb exploding. The whole ground shook. Some of our windows shattered, but no one was hurt. For many years now, we had lined all our windows with a sheet of plastic to keep the breaking glass from falling on us. We all rushed out into the courtyard and climbed the stairs to the terrace and then a bamboo ladder up to the roof to see what had happened.

  We saw a large cloud of black smoke that looked like a giant mushroom rising from one peak of the small mountain between the Qala-e-Noborja and my grandfather’s old house, w
hich was topped by TV antennas. Everyone now called it TV Mountain instead of the name it had had for centuries, the Koh-e-Asmai.

  We had not heard any planes. We thought that maybe one of the Taliban weapons on TV Mountain had caught fire. But then there was another bomb, which exploded in another Taliban area very close to our old fort. Again, the whole ground shook. We all held on to each other. My father and his brothers ran along the top of the roof toward the last remaining tower to get a better view. Then we heard an airplane that was very high, “way out in the sky, very close to heaven,” as my older sister said.

  It was too high to be hit by any guns on the ground. Soon there were more of these planes. As we watched, they began to bomb the Taliban camps, and Taliban air defenses, and Taliban training sites. Then they focused on places where the Taliban commanders were and where they had their communications equipment, and their military bases.

  “These are not blind bombers,” my mother said. “They’re not like the Russians or the warlords who just drop their bombs anywhere. Look how carefully they are hitting targets.”

  We still did not know who these bombers were.

  We all tuned our pocket radios to the BBC World Service. By now, everyone had climbed up the ladder to the roof. The BBC World Service was saying something like:

  “American and British forces have begun an aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan, targeting Taliban forces and al-Qaeda. Strikes have been reported in the capital, Kabul, where electricity supplies have been severed at the airport, and in the military nerve center of Kandahar, the home of the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, and also in the city of Jalalabad, which has many Taliban training camps.”

  We saw a large bomb explode out near the airport, where the Taliban had a big camp. We looked at each other in amazement, but said nothing so that we would not miss a word of the BBC news.

  * * *

  We were all suddenly distracted, though, by my mother, who was shaking her hands in the air and shouting at my father.

  “No way! No way!” She was shrieking.

  “What’s wrong?” my older sister asked, sounding uncharacteristically frightened.

  “He says he doesn’t want to leave! Your stubborn father doesn’t want to leave Afghanistan! Everything is all ready to go, and he says we are not going!” she railed.

  I could not believe what I was hearing. So many strange things were happening this night. I had just given away my best kite to my cousin, even though I knew he would lose it the first time he tried to fight with it.

  “He is behaving like a camel again,” my mother said with despair in her voice. “Once he makes up his mind, nobody can change it,” she said as she climbed down the ladder to the terrace below. My aunts went with her.

  “What is going on, Dad?” I asked.

  “Come here, son. Come here, everybody,” he said. Unlike my mother, he was calm and in control. We all sat in front of him in a semicircle. The American warplanes continued firing their rockets at their targets. We saw a flash each time a rocket was released from an invisible plane, and a second flash when it hit its target with a big explosion that shook the ground.

  “Afghans have fought each other for millennia,” my father said as he was looking at each one of us in the eyes. He had become our teacher, and we were his students. “We have a long tradition of raiding and plundering each other. But two things unite us: love for Allah, and hatred for our invaders and enemies. We are not leaving Afghanistan until we find out if these Americans are our real friends, or enemies in the mask of friends.”

  “So, this is it? We’re not leaving after all?!” my older sister asked. She sounded disappointed and irritated.

  “Who cares who invades us?” one of my cousins asked. “I’m sure they’ll be better than the Taliban or the factions.”

  “No, my son,” my father said as he reached to him and drew him closer. “Our land is our mother. We don’t let strangers invade our land. It’s our duty to protect her.”

  “Our duty is to leave this mess you call a country!” my mother shouted insistently from the terrace below. We all turned our heads around to see her. She was standing in the dark, invisible, except when the rockets hit a target and their flash illuminated her for a second. “Our duty is to save our lives.” She strode to the bottom of the ladder that led up to where we sat with my father. She looked my father straight in the eye.

  “Before the Mujahedin came to power, we thought of them as lifesavers. But they turned out to be the life takers of the innocent. The Taliban are the same. These ones will be no different. They all have the same goal, but come with different names. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see the pattern? Don’t you see where it started, and where it’s going?” All the anger of all the years since we had been driven out of Grandfather’s house raged in her voice.

  “You might be correct,” my father replied quietly. “But I’m not leaving until I find out who these people are.”

  We turned our heads around to see what my mother might say in response, but she was gone. She knew my father better than he knew himself. She knew what answer he would have. She had gone even before he opened his mouth.

  * * *

  The day we were supposed to leave came and went. My father said nothing about it. My mother said nothing to him. I sat in my room, deeply disappointed. I wanted to talk to Grandfather more than at any time since he had died. But he was not there for me.

  In the evening, I went and sat under the acacia tree in the courtyard. It had become my habit to sit there when I was feeling badly. In a strange way, I felt close to Wakeel there where he had last been with us. Would I, too, have to die to be able to leave this place?

  The bombing continued night and day. This war was totally different from the one with the Russians. Russian warplanes had come in low, destroying whole villages at a time. American warplanes flew high above their targets, unleashing only small numbers of bombs at one time.

  Calls were growing from the mosques for prayers as the bombs rained down nightly and neatly on the Taliban and other religious fanatics from Pakistan, Chechnya, Punjab, and Saudi Arabia who had joined the Taliban.

  Winter was approaching and the weather was turning cold. Daily life went on. We were so used to war. There was so little left to be disrupted in Afghanistan.

  With all the bombing, no one left home except to try to find whatever food was available. It was hard to get news about what was really happening in Kabul. But we had started to notice changes. As the weeks passed, the Taliban, with their long shalwar kamiz, black and white turbans, and black-rimmed eyes, began to disappear. They did not go all in one night, the way the Mujahedin had done when the Taliban had taken over Kabul. It was more gradual than that.

  From the first day the Taliban had arrived, we had learned quickly never to look them in the eyes, and always to put our heads down and stare at the ground when they passed. Now it was just the opposite. There were fewer and fewer Taliban to be seen, maybe only two or three in our neighborhood. When they saw someone approaching, it was they who looked at the ground and walked past in a hurry, heading to one of the compounds they had seized.

  Other things amazed us. A Talib had always sat on a chair in the middle of the intersection near the large mosque not far from the Qala-e-Noborja. Whenever the muezzin began his call for prayers, the Talib would take off his turban and place it on the chair as a sign that he had gone to take his ablutions. Sometimes he would even leave his whip. Instantly, everything in the streets nearby—in fact, in the whole city—would come to a standstill. Drivers would stop their cars in the road and head for the mosques. Shopkeepers would rush out from behind their artfully arranged piles of pomegranates and grapes without even thinking about locking their doors. They knew that no one would steal anything. Under Taliban justice, a thief would have his hand cut off.

  The day came, though, when there were no turban, no whip, and no Talib on the chair in the intersection. No one knew what to make of it, but j
ust to be safe everyone still followed the Taliban rules.

  * * *

  The American bombings continued week after week, some nights more, some nights less. The planes had no lights; we could hear them for only a few seconds before their bombs hit the ground.

  Two or three times since the bombing had started, my mother, her brother, and I climbed the ladder to the roof, wrapped ourselves in blankets against the autumn chill, and watched the flashes of light where the bombs exploded. A few seconds later, we would feel their impact roll right through us as the whole city shook. We would pass the time by making bets on which Taliban base the bombers would hit next. Sometimes my uncle won, sometimes my mother won, and sometimes I won.

  We had heard that some of the planes dropping the bombs were being flown by women. That astonished us. How could women do such things? we asked. America must be a great country, everyone said, that they could send their women to defeat the Taliban. We had not seen any of their men yet. No soldiers were on the ground, only planes in the sky.

  * * *

  One night, after the mullah had finished the last call to prayers, we went to the roof. The bombing had been going on for more than a month by then. As we sat down near the one last remaining tower, we started hearing music. Real music, not the Taliban’s tuneless singing. It was coming from the house of our neighbor Malem-e-chaq, who lived across the street below the garden. We looked at one another with puzzled smiles. Malem-e-chaq had been brutalized by the Taliban several times because he was rich. Now his sons had placed very large speakers in their windows and music was pouring into the street.

  “Have the Taliban finally gone?” my uncle asked, his voice and eyes full of expectation. We could not answer.