A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  “I counted them very carefully,” Wakeel said seriously, then fell into a heap as he exploded laughing. And each time that the laughter started to ease, we would look at each other and Wakeel would say “Five,” and it started even fiercer than before. When Wakeel laughed, his eyes glowed and his brilliantly white teeth shone.

  Several minutes later, we saw Haji Noor Sher, now very nicely dressed, coming out of his door into the courtyard. We peeped from behind a low wall in a corner.

  Haji Noor Sher was standing in the middle of the courtyard, in a white shalwar kamiz and a black waistcoat, ordering his servants to lay carpets on the paths around the courtyard, and to bring the peacocks from the garden. He wore a small, round red hat with a tassel.

  A group of musicians walked in through the low door and greeted him as if he were a prince. He directed them to sit on a platform in the middle of the courtyard that had been covered with an old Bukhara rug made soft and shiny from years of use.

  The musicians were dressed very elegantly with beaded black waistcoats. Each wore a brightly colored turban. One started tuning the twenty-two twangy strings of a rabab. Another was blowing the Kabul dust out of his flute-like ney. The oldest one sat with a tambour rising from his lap, running his fingers up and down its long neck, playing silent music that only he could hear in his mind. And the fourth had a shining pair of brass tabla drums that he kept tapping on the sides with a small hammer to tune them, and put a snap into their sound. After a few minutes, they finished their preparations, and the courtyard was filled with their soft, sweet music.

  When my unmarried aunts and my cousins heard the music, they joined us on the rooftop, watching everything from there. By now, it had become dark, and nobody could see us.

  For a few minutes, Haji Noor Sher left the courtyard, then returned with four foreign men. Haji Noor Sher looked too short to be standing next to those people, who were extraordinarily tall and strong, with long, yellow hair, blue eyes, and unusually white skin.

  Haji Noor Sher talked to them in a strange language, showing them the carpets on the paths and talking about them. The guests asked questions in the same strange tongue.

  I asked one of my aunts what language they were speaking. She said, “English.” I liked the sound of it. It sounded very much like Dari, but even though I paid close attention, I did not understand a word of it.

  From time to time, Haji Noor Sher would have one of the servants pick up a rug so one of the guests could inspect it more closely. He would turn it over and show them the knotting on the back side, then rub his hand across the pile as if it were his favorite cat.

  Suddenly, I understood what was going on. I had seen him do this many times in his shop. He was trying to sell carpets to these foreigners. As the fighting in Kabul had become worse, Haji Noor Sher’s customers had stopped coming from other countries. He still sent a few carpets to people who phoned him from Berlin or London, and he had taken many carpets to India. But he had not sold any carpets in Kabul for a long time.

  My father shared in the profits with Haji Noor Sher, and he spoke about these things with my mother at night. Now the only foreigners in Kabul were the aid workers. If these foreigners bought some carpets, perhaps we would have enough money to pay smugglers to get us out of Afghanistan.

  My father came out of our house and shook hands with the visitors. My father talked to them in their language. I was amazed. I did not know that he could speak English.

  The servants brought tall glasses of pomegranate juice on trays filled with plates of nuts and dried fruit, as the musicians continued playing soft music. We watched as if it were all a movie. Haji Noor Sher had the servants bring several very old carpets from inside and lay the carpets out on the carefully cut grass. These were the most expensive pieces, the carpets my father had found when he had gone to the villages and knocked on doors. One of the visitors got down on his knees as he was admiring the old carpets. The discussion about prices would happen after they ate. Haji Noor Sher, like any good rug dealer, wanted the customer’s excitement about a carpet to build until he could not stand the thought of leaving it behind.

  Haji Noor Sher led the guests to the awning under which the servants had arranged large cushions and several layers of carpets on the platform so they could sit comfortably while they ate. Some were at ease seated, like Afghans, with one leg folded on top of the other. But one of the guests kept shifting his position, trying to get comfortable. A servant brought a pitcher of water and a bowl. He stepped carefully among the guests as they settled on their cushions and poured warm water over their hands into the bowl so they could wash. Another servant followed him with small towels.

  Then the food started to come. The servants, who were now dressed in even nicer clothes, carried big rice platters heaped with qabli pelau covered with raisins and grated carrots and set them on the cloth that had been spread in front of Haji Noor Sher, my father, and the guests.

  An Uzbek man who usually helped Haji Noor Sher in the shop had been cooking kebabs out in the garden outside the courtyard. The smoke had started curling up to us on the rooftop, making us all feel hungry. A few minutes later, the Uzbek came running into the courtyard with long swords of grilled meats, and set them down in front of the guests, where they sat under the awning. Then other servants brought dishes filled with roasted aubergines and spinach. There were bowls of salads and yogurt and large baskets piled with freshly baked naan. It was still warm, and we could smell it. Someone else brought all kinds of drinks.

  There were only four guests, plus Haji Noor Sher and my father, but there was enough food for everyone living at the Qala-e-Noborja. We were happy about that, because we knew that later when the guests had left, the leftovers would be offered to us.

  * * *

  When the guests had all eaten too much, and Haji Noor Sher had insisted that they eat more, they patted their stomachs, while Haji Noor Sher pretended to be offended that they had eaten so little. The servants brought them chillums, water pipes, and carefully lit the apple-flavored tobacco using pieces of glowing charcoal.

  One of the foreigners sucked a lot of air through the embroidered tube and made the chillum’s water bubble. But he did not manage to get any smoke. When he breathed out, expecting to see a blue cloud as when my father had done it, there was nothing. Wakeel laughed; the foreigner heard him and looked up at us. Haji Noor Sher looked up, too, and then the other foreigners looked at us as well.

  Wakeel whispered to us, “There is the man with five testicles.” His disheveled hair framed his dark, shining eyes.

  I burst out laughing. Wakeel laughed out loud, too. My other cousins who were hiding with us in a doorway on the roof terrace laughed without knowing why. The foreigners laughed out loud. The musicians stopped playing, and they laughed, too. Haji Noor Sher looked at us with sparks in his eyes for a second. But when he saw all his guests laughing, the frown on his face was put away, and it became a big smile with a loud laugh.

  “Five,” Wakeel repeated, nodding his head convincingly.

  And then, somewhere to the north of us, the first rocket exploded. Perhaps it had hit Khair Khana, a Panjshiri neighborhood about five miles away. Perhaps it had been sent by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Perhaps by Sayyaf. It did not matter. The guests quickly got up from their cushions. They thanked Haji Noor Sher, and said good night to my father. They took lingering looks at the carpets on the grass and carefully stepped around them, as their security man hustled them to their cars without taking any carpets with them.

  My father and Haji Noor Sher smiled as they saw them off. If they were feeling disappointed at having sold nothing, they were too polite to show it.

  * * *

  That was the last party that Haji Noor Sher ever gave in that courtyard. A few weeks later, a rocket landed in the street in front of his shop. He had seen what had happened to my grandfather and his carpets. He was one of the last carpet dealers still in Kabul. Now he knew it was time to go. The next day, he closed his shop a
nd shipped all of his best carpets to Delhi, where he would go to join his family in the apartment he hated.

  Early the next Friday, while we were still eating our breakfast, we were told that some men had come to take the leopard to a new home. All the kids wanted to go watch, but Haji Noor Sher had already ordered his house servants to chain the courtyard gate so we would not get hurt if the leopard somehow escaped. Haji Noor Sher watched it all happen from the safety of his bedroom, which overlooked the garden from the window on one side, and the courtyard from the other.

  Later he told us how the men had put a small cage on wheels in front of the leopard’s home at the bottom of the one tower that was still standing. Being a cat, the leopard had to see what this new cage on wheels was all about. He sniffed it for a minute, walked into it, sat down, and started licking himself as the door was dropped closed and he was rolled slowly down the hill and out a rarely used gate that led through the high wall to a small street that ran beside it.

  Haji Noor Sher then called out to Wakeel, my other cousins, and me from his window that faced the courtyard: “Now you can go to the garden.” We ran out through the right-angled passageway in the high walls as if we, too, were being released from a cage. We jostled one another against the heavy wooden door with its clanking chain and down the hill to the leopard’s cage. It now had one of the large dogs in it. It had been his cage before the leopard came, we had been told. Maybe he was happy to be home. We looked at the dog and at each other, and were not sure why we had run so fast to see what was no longer there.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Haji Noor Sher gave away all his birds to different friends, except for the pigeons, which you could not give to anyone because they would only come back to their roost that rose at the far end of the courtyard. He made his funny noises at his peacocks one last time as they were being taken away.

  As for the deer, as things worsened for us in the weeks ahead, they became food for us, and we threw their bones to the dogs in the cages.

  Then the day came for Haji Noor Sher himself to leave. My father, my grandfather, and my uncles all lined up outside the courtyard gate to see him off, and to thank him for having saved us by giving us a place to stay. They all shook his hand and hugged him. All the cousins stood around, watching silently.

  He asked my father to take care of the Qala-e-Noborja as he took a long look at the last remaining tower. Then he got into his car. As his driver pulled off, he waved at us kids.

  His two house servants watched him being driven out the gate to the airport, and had no idea what to do next.

  5

  The Long Road Home

  Every morning before sunrise, I was awakened by the sound of water splashing in the bathroom next to the room where I slept. It was Grandfather taking ablutions before he prayed.

  When the splashing stopped and I knew he had finished, I went to the bathroom and took ablutions myself. Then I went to Grandfather’s room and put my prayer rug next to his while he was still praying. Before I started my prayers, I looked up at him. A smile appeared on his face and soon transferred to mine; but he continued his prayers without looking at me, and I started mine feeling his smile all around me.

  After Grandfather finished his prayers, he sat cross-legged on the prayer rug. He kept his eyes closed, his tasbeh prayer beads in his hands, softly reciting verses from the Holy Koran. I still remember the sweet sound of his mumbling. Whenever I think of it, it brings my grandfather back to me.

  After I finished my prayers, I sat cross-legged on my prayer rug, exactly like he did, kept my eyes closed with a tasbeh in my hands, audibly reciting the verses of the Holy Koran that I knew by heart.

  Sometimes I looked at Grandfather and wondered what he thought about when he was meditating. Twice he had gone to Mecca, and as with all pilgrims to that holy city everyone called him “Haji,” except for his children, who called him Agha, Dad. We called him Baba, Grandfather.

  After breakfast, Grandfather usually went to the large garden outside the courtyard with a book in his hand. Haji Noor Sher had a large collection of books and he was happy to have Grandfather read them. He sat under the grapevine, but he could not read like in the old days, with full concentration. After a short while, he put the book aside and started walking back and forth under the trees, making a path in the grass of one of the long terraces below the tower. He seemed to me the way the leopard had been in the cage, restless. The sight of him made me sad.

  Sometimes I went to walk with him. When he saw me approaching, he would smile, but I could see that this was a forced smile. I walked with him back and forth under the trees, without uttering a word. All we could hear was the sound of the dry leaves under our feet.

  Every now and again, I looked up at him and saw a deep sorrow on his face. His face was like a mirror, accurately reflecting everything he was thinking.

  Sometimes he talked to me of his business, and how hard he had tried to accomplish so many things in life. Sometimes he talked with regret of things he had not achieved. Sometimes he talked of soul, or heart, or essence, or spirit. But most of the time he talked of his carpets that had been stolen, his house that lay in ruins, his apple trees and his rosebushes that had been destroyed, and his lost peace of mind.

  * * *

  Grandfather hated idleness. For three months now, he had been at the Qala-e-Noborja doing nothing. Finally, he could sit there no longer. His house had been his life, and he had to go see it. He asked my youngest uncle to join him.

  “With all respect, no, I don’t want to go. You shouldn’t go either. The house is there, no one can take it. The looters have probably plundered everything else. They might even have taken the windows and beams and cut the trees for firewood. But the land will always stay there,” my uncle said.

  “I brought you up for such a day to tell me ‘No’? Huh? Huh?” my grandfather asked, as he stared at my uncle.

  “You know I have never said ‘No’ to you in my entire life, Agha. Please, at least once in your life, listen to me. Let’s not go today,” my uncle politely said.

  “If you don’t want to go, just say you are a coward,” Grandfather retorted.

  My uncle grinned to hide his embarrassment. “I’m not a coward, but I am afraid of being killed by a coward. Those who kill thousands of innocents to make themselves rich are cowards. If we go there, they will smell money on us, even though you have lost everything. We have a little money left, we can survive for a while. Who knows what is going to happen next? They have been fighting for months; it cannot last much longer. Let’s not risk the things that we buried there!”

  I did not know what he meant. What things were buried there? But I knew I should not ask.

  Grandfather turned away from my uncle. He looked at me, and for a moment, he did not say anything. Then, very coldly, he said to me, “Prepare yourself. We will leave in ten minutes.”

  I looked at my father. From his eyes, I could see that he was not happy. Grandfather looked at my father. I looked at Grandfather. My father looked at me.

  “Do what your grandfather says,” my father said quietly. My mother’s face went pale. But it was not her place to challenge Grandfather.

  I knew from my father’s tone of voice that he was not pleased with Grandfather’s idea. But he was too respectful to say “No.”

  “Are you a coward like your uncle?” Grandfather asked me.

  I looked at my uncle, who was only a couple of years older than Wakeel. His face was full of hurt at having been called a coward by his father.

  “I will do what my father and you say,” I replied softly. But I did not want to go.

  Grandfather smiled, but sadly. “You are a good boy.”

  * * *

  We left home in midmorning. We got a bus that took us halfway. The bus had to stop before it reached the front line between the Panjshiris and the Hazaras. The front line moved from time to time as one side gained a temporary advantage over the other. No one ever knew for s
ure where it was.

  We got off the bus and started walking. The road was empty. This was the same road that had been crowded with lines of refugees on the morning we had fled our home. It was the widest road in Kabul, so wide it had a park with big trees running down the middle. Before the fighting, young men met young women there to sit under the trees. Sometimes we saw them kissing and laughed at them. Wakeel called them pigeons.

  Now the pavement was all broken. Everywhere there were holes where rockets had exploded, and craters made by bombs dropped from planes by some of the factions. Some of them were so deep that they had filled with groundwater from far below. All around us were pieces of twisted metal. It was so quiet, we could hear the sound of the bees humming.

  As we were walking, my grandfather asked me whether I had ever been in love with someone. I was too shy to say “Yes,” so I said “No.” I desperately wanted to say, “I am in love with my classmate, Yaldda.” But I was only ten years old, and boys that age are not supposed to have girlfriends.

  My grandfather looked into my eyes. His voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “The person who doesn’t have love in life has emptiness. I’m sure you are in love, but I know you don’t want to tell me.”

  I had never kept anything from Grandfather. He had always advised me on everything important. Whenever I told him my secrets, I felt very light and happy.

  “I love a girl in my old school,” I confided to him. “She is my age, her name is Yaldda, and she is very beautiful!”

  My grandfather laughed very loudly. “A woman can keep you warm like wine, or turn cold like ice. Be patient, little man. A person without patience is like a candle without wax. Sometimes love makes you very impatient. Keep control of your feelings.”

  We said nothing more for a while as I thought about what he told me. And I thought about Yaldda. I had never seen her again after the fighting started. I wondered where she was, and whether she was safe. Had her family left in time, or had they waited too long? Sometimes I wrote poems about Yaldda in my diary, where I kept all the important things that Grandfather told me.