“I want to drink milk, too,” she said.
“Yes, of course. How can he drink it without you?” my mother said.
Later I found out that my cousin Wakeel had gone with my father. I felt very alone. Why had he gone to Grandfather’s house and not taken me with him? Maybe he would bring our kites and marbles when he came back.
4
To Be a Family Again
My father was supposed to come back that same day, but he did not. We had no idea what had happened to him. My littlest sister kept asking my mother, “Why is it taking Father so long to buy milk?”
“Maybe it is not easy to find milk in this part of town,” my mother replied again and again. She tried very hard to be busy, and kept doing things that did not need to be done.
Since the civil war had started, I had seen my mother crying many, many times, though she always tried to hide her tears from us. Now, every night since my father had left, she cried in the dead of night. Mostly she went outside in the courtyard, and cried very softly. Sometimes she just sat on the bottom step of the stairs outside our rooms, and the tears started coming. One of those nights, my littlest sister saw her, and the next day she imitated her by sprinkling water under her eyes and pretending to be the little mother.
On the third day, my father returned with my uncles, their wives, their kids, and my unmarried aunts. Like us, they all had crammed into the Volga with the kids in the trunk, about twelve of them. They looked really dirty, so we made jokes about them. They laughed. Then we sent them one by one to bathe.
The only ones who had stayed behind at our home were Grandfather and Wakeel, my two best friends and the two people for whom I cared most. Grandfather was refusing to leave his house to the thieves and the warlords, but what could he do to protect it?
My father told us that four rockets had landed in Grandfather’s courtyard on the day after he had arrived there. A day later, two more rockets had destroyed some of my grandfather’s McIntosh apple trees and most of his flowers. Grandfather’s heart was broken. He had been so optimistic about the Mujahedin.
“A broken hand can work, but a broken heart cannot,” was what Grandfather had told me one day when I did not want to be with my parents, because my father had shouted at me after I had received bad scores in arithmetic at school.
At night I would think about Grandfather on the other side of the mountain, without his carpets, his beloved trees now only stumps and splinters.
* * *
A week later, early on a Friday morning when it was still dark, I heard a loud knocking on the front gate. It went on for almost ten minutes, but nobody opened the door.
The chowkidar was an old man, and when he slept it was as if he were dead. Someone had to sprinkle water on his face to wake him up.
The knocking continued, followed by low arguments that became louder. I slowly recognized the voices.
I woke up my father. He hurriedly put on his clothes and ran outside. I followed him. A moment later, we saw Grandfather and Wakeel and the chowkidar arguing. By now they were shouting. The gatekeeper would not let them in. He kept saying, “If you need some food, come back in two hours, but now everybody is asleep, go, go…”
The gatekeeper thought my grandfather and my cousin were desperate beggars looking for a place to stay, or a meal. He was half-deaf. They did not know that they had to shout into his ears.
Haji Noor Sher was not home either. He had gone to visit his family in India, and to check on his shop in Delhi. His chowkidar never let any strangers come in when he was away. He was an honest and strict man.
My father rushed and hugged his father and Wakeel, and the gatekeeper stopped talking. My father shouted very loudly in the doorkeeper’s left ear, which worked a little: “This is my father and my nephew.” He apologized and shuffled away with his stick.
My father brought us all into the room where the rest of the family was sleeping in rows of little mattresses on the floor. He turned on the lights and shouted at everybody to wake up and say hello to Grandfather. My grandfather and Wakeel were covered in dust. Their clothes were very dirty, as if they had not changed them for months. We surrounded them and were all waiting for them to say something.
I read a great sorrow on my grandfather’s face; I had never seen him so sad, or so dirty before. He had always worn expensive suits with silk ties, his shoes polished to a blinding shine. But that day, his feet and head and even his eyelashes were covered with dust. He did not talk to anyone. He asked my mother for a blanket. When she brought it, he lay on the floor and covered himself from head to toe without washing or saying a word. In five minutes, he started snoring.
We all left the room quietly, tiptoeing outside to let him sleep. We took Wakeel with us into the next room. We asked him to tell us how he had gotten there. He did not want to talk. He was tired and hungry and thirsty, but when we insisted and he had been given a glass of water, he took a deep breath and started.
“We left home around one o’clock in the morning. We stayed in the shadows of the buildings in case there were snipers on the mountain. After we started walking out on the main road, we were stopped in two places,” he said, and took a sip from his glass. “At the first place, there were some guys whose faces were all covered. They spoke with a Hazaragi accent. They all had guns and all kinds of other weapons hanging on their chests, backs, even their legs.
Wakeel’s voice was deep. Like Grandfather’s, it was always calm. He always spoke very clearly in a way that made even grown-ups pay attention to what he said. And he always chose his words very carefully. His face was like a fast-changing sky and revealed his thoughts even before he expressed them in words. His eyes would grow large one moment and tight the next. His mouth changed shape with his emotions.
“They put us in a dark room with no windows. They stood outside talking. We could not hear what they were saying very well, but I think they were worried that we belonged to another faction, and were spying on them. After about half an hour, they came back in. They whispered to one another for a minute or so, then let us go without asking us anything.
“That was near the silo. Then we started walking toward the Polytechnic, but the Panjshiris had a checkpoint there, only we could not see it in the dark.”
We had been hearing about checkpoints on the BBC, but this was the first time that they had entered our lives directly.
“Some guy shouted at us, ‘Stop! Stop!’ Grandfather said to keep moving, but the guy fired at the sky and cried again, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’
“He wore military clothes and searched us from head to toe. He and his friend put their guns to the back of my head and Grandfather’s head, and commanded us to walk forward. They led us to a small room. Another guy was there sitting on a bed with dirty sheets.
“He asked Grandfather a few questions, like why we were coming this direction, and who we work for. But Grandfather didn’t answer him. He told the commander, ‘You guys call yourselves holy warriors, but you are just killers and thieves.’
“The commander smiled at Grandfather and said, ‘Behave yourself!’
“Grandfather didn’t say anything. He just stared at the commander, and the commander stared back for a few moments, then ordered one of the other guys to search our bags. But all we had was Grandfather’s books, so they let us pass.”
I looked into the large cotton bag near my foot and saw the two volumes of Afghanistan in the Path of History by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar. Grandfather had to leave his house, but he would not leave his books.
When Wakeel finished speaking, he asked for a blanket and went to the room where Grandfather was sleeping. A minute later, he was asleep, too.
* * *
The months passed. We stayed in Haji Noor Sher’s house, eating the good food cooked by his servants, enjoying fresh fruits from the garden, and playing with the dogs. By then, all the dogs had become friendly. The leopard was not friendly. So we left him alone.
Every night we listened to the
BBC World Service and other broadcasts, but there was no good news. Our country was being destroyed more every hour, by factions whose leaders slaughtered thousands during the day, then talked like holy men on their broadcasts during the night. They always introduced themselves as the holy warriors and said that they were fighting against evil. Day killers; night liars.
I started to hate the broadcasts. None of them gave us any good news; they were all the same. They made my grandfather, uncles, and father unhappy, which made us feel sorry for them. I decided to break all the radios. Then I thought that it would make them even sadder. The BBC was the only thing they had to look forward to all day.
Now, for the first time, there was serious talk among my father and my uncles of leaving Afghanistan. My grandfather did not say anything this time. Sometimes late at night when they thought I was asleep, I would hear my father telling my mother what the men had been discussing.
My father again wanted to go to Russia, as he had proposed the year before when we were still at home. He had been in touch with his friends there from his boxing days. They had offered to help us get settled once we arrived. But now the borders were tightly closed, so we would need a lot of money to pay smugglers to get all of us across.
My father’s only income in those days came from the carpets that he had gathered from the villages before the fighting had started, and which Haji Noor Sher still sold in his shop in India.
He had not been paid in several months for his job teaching physics at Habibia High School. Though the fighting had closed the school, which had been hit by rockets, he was still supposed to be receiving his government salary.
Some Kuchi nomads had been trapped in the building during one of the times when a ceasefire had suddenly ended. They had been passing through Kabul on their way from their summer grazing lands in the mountains near Bamyan to their winter base in the lowlands near Jalalabad, but had to hide their sheep, donkeys, camels, cows, and horses in the basement of the school. Some of the local factions discovered them and took the sheep to feed their soldiers. For months after the Kuchis left, the whole school smelled like a barn.
* * *
Every morning when I woke, I was still confused for a moment until I looked around and saw my family sleeping on the floor nearby and remembered where we were. But in other ways, our lives had settled into routines.
My uncles still went to their jobs in the city when there seemed to be a break in the fighting. Sometimes it would suddenly end, and things would be quiet for weeks. Then, without anybody knowing why, it would start up again as fiercely as before.
My mother stopped going to the bank. She did not feel safe traveling across the city. Also, she was much busier than before going to the bazaars to buy food, which was sometimes hard to find—mostly rice and whatever vegetables the farmers could bring to the market, and not the meat that Afghans love. At Grandfather’s house, she had had a lot of help from my uncles’ wives, my father’s unmarried sisters, and even my older sister and my girl cousins. At Noborja, my grandfather’s family was still living together, but we had been shattered into small parts as we tried to survive.
* * *
Though his family was in Delhi and he had shops in both Kabul and Delhi, Haji Noor Sher preferred to be in Kabul. In Delhi, he had rented an apartment for his family in the Lajpat Nagar area, but hated living in it, he told us. He had grown up in a large house with a big garden, and the apartment felt like a prison cell to him. Even worse, he did not know many people in India and felt very lonely there.
During his stays in Kabul, his wife often called from Delhi and begged him to come there. He would put off going as long as he could, and then left only when the fighting heated up. As soon as he heard that there was a ceasefire in Kabul, though, he was back with us in the fort.
Each time he returned, his friends would start showing up at Noborja that same day. Somehow they knew he was back. Though we could sometimes hear the sounds of rockets, bombs, and rifles being fired on the other side of the mountain, they laughed and enjoyed one another’s company, my father among them. Hearing the sound of their laughter made us hopeful.
Often Haji Noor Sher asked his cook to prepare special food, such as a big qabli pelau, with its mountains of rice mixed with shredded carrots, raisins, and nuts heaped over big pieces of meat. Or there were lamb kebabs, or lamb soup. He asked my mother to cook her famous corn bread for dessert. Every day felt like a holiday when he was at Noborja.
* * *
In the mornings, as soon as I had woken up and splashed some water on my face, I ran to his rooms, where some mullahs he had known for years were reciting verses from the Holy Koran with melodic voices. I sat in a corner and listened, or took a Koran and followed the lines the mullahs were reciting by heart.
After breakfast the mullahs left, and musicians would come and start singing sweet ghazals softly accompanied by a tambour, sitar, tabla, and harmonium. The music went on until lunch, when there was a one-hour break for naps. Then some other friends of his, who were the best storytellers I have ever heard, came and told stories about almost anything.
Haji Noor Sher always sat in his chair like a king on his throne while his guests sat on the toshak cushions on the floor around the room. His eyes were closed. He fingered his tasbeh prayer beads, moving his head gently as if in a trance. If in the middle of a story one of the servants knocked on the door, he opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”
The storyteller immediately halted.
He said, “Come in.”
The servant would come in with a fresh pot of tea in his hands. Haji Noor Sher looked at the glasses on the floor, which was the sign for the servant to fill them up. The servant stepped lightly from one cup to the next, then left the steaming pot on the floor in the middle of the room and softly walked out.
Haji Noor Sher turned to the storyteller and said, “Continue.”
At night, he turned on his generator so that all of the kids could watch an Indian movie with him in his room. He often fell asleep in the middle of the film, half sitting and half lying on his bed. When the movie ended, we pulled his blanket over him, turned off his light, tiptoed out of his room, turned off the generator, and went to our rooms to sleep.
* * *
One day, when Wakeel and I were on the roof with our kites, we noticed that below us in the courtyard the house servants and all the other servants, who kept the gardens and looked after the animals, were doing unusual things.
They were shampooing the deer and tying pretty ribbons to their antlers. Later, they strung multicolored lights along the tops of the courtyard walls and hung paper lanterns from the graceful, bending canes of the lilac bushes. Then they hung a very large square of brightly covered cloth from the upper terrace. It draped over the windows of the rooms on the courtyard level until other servants set poles under its lower edge and raised it up to make an awning. Under the awning they built a low platform.
The servants did not stop for lunch but kept on working, washing the large, square paving stones in the courtyard floor. Haji Noor Sher said they had been part of the Buddhist stupa that had stood here for centuries before the Qala-e-Noborja had been built by Abdur Rahman, the king, for his wazir, his most important minister.
As the evening approached, the courtyard became even busier. Haji Noor Sher was ordering the servants to do this and that. Hurricane lanterns were set up along both sides of the paths around the courtyard and next to the flowerpots overflowing with blooms. Some of the flowers were bright red and tall, some wound like vines up the walls, and some were orange and gold.
Wakeel and I had long stopped flying our kites for the day, and were watching all the activity, wondering what was going on.
My father had come into the courtyard and was standing next to Haji Noor Sher, discussing something with him. When Haji Noor Sher went upstairs to his room, I ran down from the rooftop to ask my father what was happening. He told me that Haji Noor Sher was having some foreign guests for dinner
, people who were working for the United Nations. I ran up and told Wakeel.
Haji Noor Sher loved having guests, especially when he could show off his garden, and his wealth, and how many servants he had.
My father went inside our rooms to take a shower. My mother started ironing his best shalwar kamiz. Wakeel and I went down to the courtyard to help the servants.
* * *
Two servants carrying shiny silver trays with tea and glasses entered the courtyard. They asked us to carry them upstairs, to Haji Noor Sher’s rooms. I took the tray that had two pots of tea on it. I could smell the strong scent of cardamom coming from their spouts. Wakeel took the tray of glasses and walked ahead of me, climbing the stairs to Haji Noor Sher’s apartment.
When we reached the top, Wakeel carefully pushed the door open with his foot and went in without knocking. Haji Noor Sher had just finished having his shower. He was standing in the middle of the room, drying his head with a small blue towel, but otherwise completely naked.
When he saw us, he gasped and hurriedly looked for something with which to cover himself. I was horrified. It is very shameful to be naked in front of someone else, and even more shameful to look at someone naked. I quickly placed the tray in front of the door on the floor and ran back down the stairs. Wakeel ran after me, laughing, and nearly knocking me over as he raced down. I started to laugh, too.
Haji Noor Sher shouted at us. We did not hear what exactly he said, but we knew that he was very angry that we had not knocked on the door before we came in. But how could we? Our hands were full.
Wakeel and I ran out of the door, across the courtyard, and back up to the roof terrace. There we collapsed into embarrassed laughter. Wakeel asked, “Did you see them?”
“What?” I asked, still giggling.
“Did you see that he had five testicles?” Wakeel asked.
“Five?” I asked in disbelief. “How could he have five?”
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 6
