The Favored Daughter

by Fawzia Koofi

  Coming to terms with the death of a loved one is always hard. The sense of loss is enormous, and the hole their absence leaves in your life feels like it will never be filled. The ache of knowing you will never see that person again throbs like a bad tooth. Except there’s no painkiller you can take to relieve the pain.

  The fighting between the mujahideen forces and the government meant the police were unable to mount much of an investigation. Even my elder brother’s status as a senior police commander could do little to bring Muqim’s killer to justice. The only evidence the killer left was a sandal abandoned by the wall as he fled. But it was the type of sandal worn by men all over Afghanistan and this was long before the days of DNA testing and forensic evidence. Afghanistan was in a state of war, and people die during war. The fact that Muqim’s death was murder meant little under the circumstances. Hundreds of people were being murdered every day, women were being raped, and homes were being looted and destroyed. Food and water were scarce. Justice was in even shorter supply.

  Mirshakay blamed himself for Muqim’s death. Not only had he failed him as a policeman, by not capturing his killers, but he felt personally responsible for his murder. As a police general he had a team of bodyguards. They would travel with him everywhere, and at night their job was to guard the house as he and his family slept inside. But because it was Friday, a day of prayer, observance, and family, and also such a horrible wet night, my brother had felt sorry for his bodyguards and dismissed them early, telling them to go home and be with their families. Muqim got home about 10 p.m., having been to the gym. He was soaked to the skin in the rain and was complaining about an eye infection. My sister-in-law fetched her kohl from her makeup bag. In my home province of Badakhshan women often use a type of kohl eyeliner made from herbs found in the mountains, and one of the benefits of the herbs is that they are very good for treating eye infections. So she put some on his eye, and then he went to bed. That was the last time anyone saw Muqim alive. If the bodyguards had been on duty, there’s no way the gunman could have entered the house, and he’d still be alive. Mirshakay’s rage ate at him, and he felt it was his fault his brother had been killed.

  One of the great questions we ask ourselves in life is “Why?” Why does anything happen? As a Muslim I have my beliefs. I believe them to be true, and they are a large part of me. I believe God alone decides our fate. He chooses when we live and when we die. But even that certainty doesn’t make the painful events and losses of my life easier to bear.

  With Muqim’s death we simply didn’t have any answers.

  Why would somebody kill such a kind, intelligent, gentle young man as my brother? He was a brilliant young student trying to make a life for himself. He wanted a career and a wife and a family. He wasn’t a threat to anybody. But his life was taken away in an instant. In Islam a dying person is supposed to recite the name of Allah three times before passing away. Poor Muqim didn’t have time to do that.

  And not having time to say a proper goodbye was something I was also becoming used to.

  Dear Shuhra and Shaharzad,

  As you grow older you will learn about loyalty. Loyalty to your faith, to family, to friends, to your neighbors, and to your country. In times of war our loyalty can be sorely tested.

  You must be loyal to the true and good nature of your Islamic faith, helping and loving those around you even when you might feel you cannot.

  It is important to be loyal to your family, both those alive and dead. Our bonds of family do not cease at the grave, but we must also be careful not to remember the dead at the expense of the living.

  You must be loyal to your friends, because it is the action of a true friend. And if they are true friends then they will also be loyal to you, and ready to act when you need their help.

  You must be loyal to your fellow Afghans. There are many of us and we are not all the same. But you must be able to see past those ethnic and cultural differences and remember the thing that unites us together—Afghanistan.

  And you must be loyal to your country. Without loyalty to our country we have nothing as a nation. We must work hard and wisely to improve our country for your children and their children.

  Loyalty can be a hard lesson to learn sometimes, but there are few lessons more valuable.

  With love,

  Your mother

  SEVEN

  THE WAR WITHIN

  I was glad to be back in Kabul and was eager to resume my old life, or what little of it remained under what was now becoming full-blown civil war.

  We were still living in my brother’s apartment in Makrorian. (The word makrorian roughly translates as “living space.”) The apartments had been built by the Russians using the latest technological advances, such as a communal hot water system serving over ten apartment blocks, each housing up to 50 apartments. Despite being shelled countless times, many of the Makrorian blocks have survived even today, and the hot water system even still works. Today it is still a sought-after neighborhood.

  During this time, Kabul was divided into different sectors. The central parts, Khair Khana, Makrorian, and around the King’s Palace, were controlled by the mujahideen government, which was then headed by President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former general from Badakhshan and a man my family knew well—hence my brother’s senior position at the Interior Ministry. The famous “lion of the Panjshir,” Ahmed Shah Massoud, was his minister of defense.

  The west of Kabul was controlled by a man named Mazary, the leader of an ethnic group called the Hazaras. (Said to be the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the Hazaras are identifiable by their classic Mongol looks, round faces and large almond-shaped eyes. They are unusual in being Shia Muslims; the majority of Muslim ethnic groups in the country are Sunni.) An area on the outskirts of Kabul, Paghman, was controlled by a man named Sayyaf and his people. Yet another area was controlled by the fearsome Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of the ethnic Uzbeks. Just outside the city walls, towards the south, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of a group called Hizbi Islami; a second Hizbi Islami leader, Abdul Sabur Farid Kohistani, was the prime minister.

  Essentially, despite having a shared government and having been allies when fighting the Russians (during which time they were given the name “Northern Alliance,” as most of them originated from the north of Afghanistan), these commanders were now fighting each other for power. As the civil war grew more brutal, short-term allegiances shifted and changed with the weather.

  The fiercest opponent of the mujahideen government was Hekmatyar, who was unhappy with his role in the government and wanted more power and seniority. Every day, his men fired scores of rockets into Kabul from their base in the higher ground at the edge of the city. The rockets exploded in marketplaces, schools, hospitals, and gardens, and scores of people were killed or injured. Sometimes the situation changed overnight. A group that had previously supported the government might suddenly turn against it and start fighting. A few days later, with hundreds of civilians dead, the group might use the national TV station to announce it had all been a misunderstanding and it was now supporting the shared government again. The public had no idea what would happen from one day to the next. Probably our leaders didn’t either.

  Despite the turmoil happening around me, I insisted on resuming my English lessons. They were too important to me to give up, even though that meant regular journeys through the streets, which was now the battleground for the mujahideen commanders to play out their deadly power struggle.

  It should have been a simple, short taxi ride to class, except the journey to my lessons took me through some of the areas of the fiercest fighting. Some neighborhoods and streets had to be avoided entirely, while others had to be crossed whatever the risk. I would take a convoluted route that changed depending on which side held the upper hand. Gathering intelligence from people on the street was as essential to successfully navigating the route as was the driver’s ever-present search for the scarce supplies of petrol. Packs of gunmen
would roam the streets and the danger of snipers was constant—their choice of target indiscriminate. A crack from a rifle accompanied by the dull thump of the bullet would often send some poor soul toppling to the ground, their desperate search for food, water, or medicine brought to a premature end. Machine gunners set up in the damaged homes around key intersections, their positions carefully chosen to both conceal themselves and give the maximum field of fire—all the better to catch your enemy in the open. They were often little more than the tops of heads among the gloom of their cover, but it was understood that from among the rubble they were peering over their steel gun sights for any sign of movement. Vehicles often drew the deadliest attention, but they were still the fastest and safest way to travel. On more than one occasion my car was targeted by rocket artillery. Some roads were pre-targeted by the artillery commanders. When their spotters signaled an approaching car, all they needed to do was open fire and chances were the car, or truck, or possibly even a tank would be blown off the road. I remember once the rockets came rushing down toward me. But over our heads, the boughs of trees struck upward like fingers waiting to catch the projectiles. The rockets hit the branches and exploded, filling the street with shrapnel and shards of splintered wood as we sped along the road and out of range. If it were not for the trees, the rockets would have ripped the flimsy car apart, and both me and the driver with it.

  Few taxi drivers would risk going out in the fighting for the meager price of a fare. Those who were brave enough to do so were motivated by the threat of starvation. No fares meant no food, for them or their families, and that would spell a death even more certain than the bullets that hummed through the air. Often it was impossible to find a taxi to take me to class.

  So on those days I would have to walk, darting from cover to cover, avoiding the areas where I knew the gunmen were and praying I didn’t unknowingly stumble into others. And after class I would have to walk back, too, sneaking along alone in the dark. Sometimes it took me as long as two hours. It was very dangerous for anybody to be on the streets at night, but especially a young girl by herself. Aside from bullets, I ran the risk of being raped. When night fell the shooting became more unpredictable. Nervous in the dark, the gunmen’s fingers would curl a little tighter around their triggers, and even a loud footstep or the tumble of rubble could attract a burst of bullets.

  Often my mother would be waiting nervously outside our apartment, keeping watch for me. She would be standing at the bottom of our apartment building dressed in her burqa, peering out into the night and scanning the shadows. The occasional clatter of gunfire echoing across the sky would send her heart jumping into her mouth. Her imagination must have tormented her as she waited for her daughter to reappear from her journey through the war zone. Her relief at my return was obvious, but she never showed it by hugging me. Instead, she would be quick to scold me, saying: “Even if this course makes you president, I don’t care. I don’t want you to be president. I want you to be alive.”

  My brothers and sisters didn’t like me taking such great risks either, but they would never tell me directly. Instead they would nag my mother and ask her to stop me from going.

  But my mother would probably have thrown herself headfirst into machine gun fire if it meant I could still go to school. She was illiterate but fiercely intelligent. By watching me become educated she was somehow educating herself, too. She took genuine delight in talking to me about my classes and her commitment to me never wavered. She just ignored my siblings’ pleas and nagging, placating them with her winning smile. But I am sure she felt a wave of fear every time I disappeared into the night. A fear that must have been made more acute by the recent loss of her son, my brother Muqim. His death affected the whole family, but none more so than my mother. Every morning she would visit his grave and put fresh flowers on it. But this simple loving act of a bereaved mother soon gave way to more erratic and, for the family, more worrying behavior.

  By now the city was turning into a killing zone. In the neighborhoods where the fighting was worst, we heard reports of hundreds of civilians being killed each night. We could hear the crackle of gunfire ripple across the city. On still nights it would echo off the hills and mountains that surround Kabul, making the whole city feel haunted by the terrible events it witnessed.

  Rocket fire was very common. The rockets would land without warning, sometimes destroying a family home, leaving its residents buried beneath the earth walls; other times destroying a shop, a school, or a group of women buying vegetables for the evening meal at a market stand. All you would hear was the whizz as they flew through the air, then the whizz stopping suddenly as seconds later they fell and detonated. You never knew where or on whom they would land.

  One night I was cooking the family meal of rice and meat when I realized my mother wasn’t home. It was 7 o’clock in the evening and normally she would be in the kitchen or organizing other aspects of household life. I had a nasty feeling I knew where she had gone, and if I was right, I knew I had to go in search of her. I was still in my mourning period for Muqim, so I put my black head scarf on and slipped out the door. A guard near our apartment building told me he had seen which direction she left in, and I knew my worst suspicions were right. She was on her way to visit my brother’s grave.

  There weren’t any taxis about and buses weren’t running at all, so I set off on foot toward the center of the city. At first the streets were eerily quiet. The Kabul I knew was bustling in the evening with cars and motorbikes and people walking to visit friends. Now it was deserted, cleared by the rattle of gunfire that lay between me and my brother’s grave.

  I kept walking nervously, aware that somewhere ahead was my mother. I began to see bodies in the street, freshly shot or torn to pieces by explosions, the corpses not yet beginning to bloat. I was so terrified. But I realized I wasn’t afraid of dying as much as I was scared of the knowledge that these dead bodies were someone’s family. And that tomorrow, it could be my family lying here.

  When I got to an area called Dehmazang I came across a taxi. The driver had removed the back seat and he was piling it with bodies. He was covered in blood; his white shirt now streaked crimson, with darker flecks congealing around the pockets and buttons. His car looked like a slaughterhouse as the victims of the fighting, men and women with twisted limbs and shattered heads and torsos, oozed their blood into the footwell, where it formed thick pools that dribbled through the rusted holes in the floor and onto the dusty road beneath. The driver, clearly in shock, was lathered in sweat as he tried to stuff another corpse into his car. In Islam, a swift burial is very important, and I’m not sure it even occurred to him that his life was in danger. He simply worked at his grim task like he was loading sacks of rice. I just stood and stared at the strange sight for a moment. He and I were the only people on the street that warm summer night. The only sound was the crackle of gunfire and the grunts of a middle-aged taxi driver risking his life to ensure a group of people he’d never met got a fitting burial.

  When he was satisfied he could fit no more bodies in his car he started the engine with a cloud of blue exhaust smoke and drove toward the hospital, the back doors still open, the passengers’ dead limbs dancing as the suspension sagged over every bump and pothole. The sight of the dead and dying made me think of my family and I had to battle with my mind, as it kept imposing their faces onto these nameless victims. I wasn’t far from the graveyard now, and I knew I had to keep going and find my mother.

  It was getting dark and I was walking past Kabul University when a group of uniformed men shouted at me. They wanted to know were I was going.

  I didn’t answer them and instead just lowered my head and walked faster. One of the men raised his gun and asked me again, “Where are you going?”

  I stopped.

  I turned, looking into the gun.

  I lied.

  “I’m looking for my brother. Somebody said they had seen his body just around the corner. I need to go and check
,” I said.

  He thought about it for a moment before lowering his gun: “OK, go.”

  I hurried off, heart pounding. For a moment I had thought they were going to do something worse than shoot me.

  The cemetery was a dusty spread of earth covering several football fields. Years of war and fighting had preempted life’s inevitable consequence and the newest graves were cramped together—oblong piles of small rocks with a roughly hewn gravestone pushed into the ground for support. On the higher ground, where the more prestigious plots lay, graves were often fenced with iron palings, now silently rusting in this lonely place. Tattered green flags, a sign of mourning, flew over them.

  My mother was hunched over the grave. I could see her gently organizing the bright bunches of yellow silk roses. She didn’t hear my footsteps as I approached, completely immersed in her thoughts. She was shaking as she cried and caressing a photograph of my brother. He looked so young and handsome. She turned and looked at me. I stood there in tears of relief at having found her and sadness at the scene. I felt overwhelmed and I knelt beside her. For a long time the two of us were holding each other and crying. For a while we just sat there, talking about my brother and how much we missed him. I asked her why she risked her life coming out here at night—did she not see all the dead people and the men with guns, and did she not realize how worried I was? She just gave me a sad, tearstained look as if to say, “You know why,” before turning back to the photograph.

  We sat there so long I didn’t realize how dark it was getting. There were few working street lights because of the battle. I started to get very scared. We were still crouched over the grave, collecting our thoughts. We were now in a great deal of danger. We couldn’t risk going back the same way we came. It was too far and too dangerous to even attempt. So we resolved to wait another hour until it was completely dark, and then sneak out of the graveyard. We made for a shortcut we knew well—it led to a house that my father had lived in when he was a member of Parliament. The house was on the edge of the city, in an area called Bagh-e-bala. Some relatives had been living there to keep the house safe for us. We wouldn’t be able to get home that night, but at least we would be out of danger if we could get there.