Our steps were surprisingly loud as we walked down the middle of the road with not a single creature in sight, except for some sparrows occasionally flying past, making their chuk-chuk noises. The sky was completely blue. Had it not been for the destruction around us, it could have felt like we were going on a picnic.
“Were you impatient, too, to marry Grandmother?” I asked.
“I was in love with her. I was very lucky to have a wife like her, but I didn’t know until many years later that marriage has three stages,” he said, and sighed as he gazed up at the mountain with two peaks. Its bare rock rose up steeply behind the large yellow grain silo that the Russians had built.
“The first stage is that you talk, and your wife listens. The second stage is, she talks and you listen. And the third stage is, both of you talk, and your neighbors listen,” he said with a grin growing wide at the corners of his mouth until it became a big and loud laugh. “The first stage is the best,” he said. Grandfather had not told a joke in months. I laughed to hear the happiness in his voice.
But there was more to Grandfather’s story than that. His great-grandfather, Khaja Noor Mohammad, had come from a village near Herat in western Afghanistan and had settled in the Maidan Valley about thirty miles from Kabul, where he built a large mud-brick fort with high walls, as was common all over Afghanistan. Though it was large enough to hold his extended family, it was much smaller than the Qala-e-Noborja.
From their base in Maidan, several generations of his descendants have followed the seasons with their herds. They raised sheep and camels for their wool, which they sold to carpet weavers and cloth makers.
Grandfather’s father was the third youngest among his six brothers, yet he was to die before his older brothers. Grandfather was only four years old when he lost his father. His younger brother was born two months after their father’s death.
Two years later, Grandfather’s mother was married, but not, as was the custom, to one of Grandfather’s uncles, but instead to one of his cousins, who was closer to her age. Though he was now his stepfather, Grandfather still called his cousin Lala, older brother, as he always had.
Grandfather’s father had not left much for him and his brother, except for some livestock, a bit of land, and part of the old fort. Grandfather wanted to do more in life than raise sheep and goats. His own grandfather, Mullah Abdul Ghafor, had been a very holy man. And his oldest uncle for several years had been the district governor in Kandahar, where he had become a rich and respected man.
* * *
Grandfather wanted to earn respect like his grandfather and wealth like his uncle. He taught himself how to read and write, and told us that he always had a book in his hands. He was determined to educate himself. When he was twelve, he decided to go to Kabul. But when he first arrived, he had nowhere to live. He slept in mosques and shrines for several days until he finally got a job as a clerk in a branch of the Ministry of Transportation called Inhisarat, which transported wood and government goods to other countries.
The job became his school, though he had never gone to one. He studied other people around him very carefully and learned what they did. He learned how to dress well and never forgot the practical things of life his mother had taught him. Soon he had his first promotion and moved to an office where he became an accountant.
He got a job as a clerk in the National Bank of Afghanistan, where he continued to teach himself new things. He studied the law, and how the courts worked. He learned how to look after other people’s money and talk to the king.
Despite his success, he told us, he had never felt more lonely, though he had been alone for many years. He kept looking for someone to give color to his life of carefully written columns of numbers.
One spring day, as he was coming out of a restaurant after lunch, he saw a caravan of Kuchis crossing through Kabul. The Kuchis are the Pashtuns who live as nomads. In fact, the word “Kuchi” in Pashto means “nomads.” They were coming from their winter quarters near Jalalabad and heading toward their summer pastures in the high mountains at the center of Afghanistan in Bamyan. He saw a beautiful girl among them walking next to a camel.
He recognized her, because he had seen her many times years before when he was young, when the nomads had come to Maidan and stayed there for several weeks in early spring. He told us that he fell in love with her instantly. They had one brief moment of eye contact that afternoon, and that glance became the first link in the chain that connected their lives for the next fifty years.
He went back to the bank and explained to his boss that he would have to be absent for a few weeks, then he followed the Kuchis as they made their way along their usual route to Maidan, where they stopped for a month to let their herds graze. Finally, after a couple of weeks of indecision and fear, he went to the uncle of the girl, who was the lord of that caravan. He expressed his love for the man’s niece. The uncle threatened to kill Grandfather, because Kuchis marry only Kuchis to bring more Kuchis.
My grandfather was frightened and almost went back to Kabul. But after a few days of thinking about his situation, he asked his mother to go and broker the deal.
His mother, a very courageous woman, explained to the uncle that our family came from a background similar to his. We, too, had been herders for generations. She told him how we were descended from the Arabs who had come to Afghanistan more than a thousand years before, and who were related to the family of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him. She recited the names of the twenty-nine generations between the Prophet’s family and her son, Khaja Ghulam Jallani.
The girl’s uncle listened, but said nothing. Grandfather’s mother was happy with his silence, because that meant “Yes.” There were no threats this time. Grandfather now understood that he was engaged to his beloved, though he would not be able to see her again until their marriage.
The nomads left Maidan soon after to move on to their summer pastures in Bamyan. But in early autumn when they came back, Grandfather had made all the preparations for the wedding ceremony and was waiting for them.
He had the grandest marriage ceremony in the valley of Maidan. It went on for days. When the nomads left to go back to their winter quarters in Jalalabad, their daughter stayed behind with Grandfather and his mother.
Grandfather returned to his job at the bank and started building his house on the land he had bought in Kabul. Though we always called the place Kot-e-Sangi, after the nearby neighborhood, it was actually in Dehnaw Dehbori. He was busy for ten years constructing it and planting his courtyard. Meanwhile, his wife was giving him children. In the end, there were sixteen, though two sets of twins died before they reached six months.
Grandfather had one promotion after another at the bank until he became the head of its Accounts Reconciliation Department. It was his responsibility to review the papers of every deal the bank made. Everybody respected him highly, and after a few years they started calling him “President,” even though that was not his title, because he stepped in and ran the bank when the president of the bank and his assistant went to other countries.
With his knowledge of banking and transportation, Grandfather was asked to come work as the head accountant for the Afghanistan Customs Bureau in the Ministry of Commerce. A few years after he went there, though, he uncovered a serious fraud by one of his colleagues. Grandfather went to the minister of commerce to report what was happening, but the minister defended the man who was stealing the funds. Grandfather walked away from the ministry that day and never worked in a government office ever again.
Several high-ranking officials came to him in the weeks that followed, apologized to him, and asked him to come back to his job. But he did not go back. He had lost his faith in the government.
To earn money, he started dealing in carpets he bought from weavers he had met when he was traveling as a boy with his father, who had sold them wool.
Over the years, he bought and sold thousands. Every spring and summer, Grandfather would travel t
o the villages. Often, he took my father with him, just as his own father had taken him as they followed their herds. It was Grandfather’s way of reliving his old nomadic life.
As they went from house to house buying new carpets, Grandfather trained my father to recognize beautifully woven old carpets and kilims—flat woven rugs without a knotted pile—that had been made with natural dyes. He also taught my father how to bargain until the last moment to get the best price. They would sit and drink tea for hours and tell jokes and learn the names of all the sons of their hosts.
By the time I was born, Grandfather was not traveling as much. He sent my father to look for carpets while he stayed in Kabul and carefully picked the best times to buy and to sell, quietly amassing a fortune and an inventory of valuable rugs without anyone knowing how he was doing it. And then, of course, he had seen them all stolen from him by those who falsely used the word “Mujahedin.”
* * *
A pack of stray dogs came in our direction, then stopped and ran away. We turned into the street that led to our house, and a few minutes later we could see the yellow apartments at the end of our courtyard that rose above the surrounding one-story houses. At least that part of the building was still there. Grandfather stopped for a moment when he saw it.
“Life is a gamble,” he said as if he were speaking mostly to himself. “You may lose, or you may win. If you search for its meaning, you may never find it, and lose. But maybe you will find it, and win.”
He looked at the sad evidence of war all around us. Nearly all the houses on our street had been reduced to jagged, broken walls.
As we got closer to our house he started humming something in the whispery voice he used when trimming his roses. Grandfather was happy to be back in our own neighborhood, even with so much destruction around us. Then a strange voice behind us shouted, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
We turned around and saw two men pointing Kalashnikovs at us. Their faces were covered with the bandannas. I could only see their eyes, which looked like cracks in a grain of wheat. They came toward us and one of them asked my grandfather, “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting my house!” Grandfather said.
“Where is your house?” he asked.
Grandfather pointed with his right hand.
“You must be a rich old man to have such a big house!” one of the guys said. He was tall and thin. His voice was harsh. “Let’s talk for a minute,” he said, and then pointed his gun toward our neighbor’s house.
The gunmen were Hazaras; they were in their late twenties and part of one of the factions who were trying to control that area of Kabul. They wore black shalwar kamiz. Each had grenades in his belt, and a knife strapped tightly to his right leg.
“I will come talk to you later, after I see my house,” Grandfather said.
“Do what I said,” the tall one shouted. He shoved his gun at Grandfather’s chest. I heard evil in his voice.
We had no choice but to go with them to our neighbor’s house. He had been a successful importer, and had built one of the most beautiful houses in our street. When one of our captors opened the door of the courtyard, I smelled blood like a butcher’s shop. There was also a stink of something that had been rotting for days.
The first gate opened onto a twenty-foot corridor that led to a door into the courtyard. I remembered having been there two years earlier with my father for an engagement party. That night the grass in the courtyard had been neatly trimmed, making a green carpet. Roses were in bloom all around. A few McIntosh apple trees in the center, a gift from Grandfather, had big apples hanging from their slender branches. There were some pear, apricot, and pine trees, too. Every path around the courtyard was lined with flowerpots. The rooms around the courtyard had beautiful lamps in them that sent a glow over their fine furniture. The owner often went to London and other places, and brought back fancy things that no one else had.
Musicians had played from a low platform covered with deep red Afghan carpets. Men and women sat together around the courtyard, chatting. Some were on chairs around small tables, others on cushions spread on the grass. They all had a drink in their hands as they talked and laughed. The man’s son had just come home from Harvard to meet the bride his parents had selected for him.
My father and I stayed until one in the morning. When we left, some of the guests were still listening to the soft music and talking to one another about their lives, their businesses, their families, their futures.
In those days, grown-ups were always talking about these things. The Afghan Communists were still in control even though the Russian soldiers had left, but they were being challenged fiercely by the Mujahedin in many places. I listened to them out of curiosity, but never understood why they sounded so worried. The only thing that they knew for sure was that no one could know for sure what would happen.
Now here I was standing in that place again, and finally understanding exactly what they had been talking about. These beautiful rooms had no glass in their windows, and it looked as if it had been centuries since anybody had been living in them. There was no sign of any tree in the courtyard. They had all been cut down for firewood.
In the center of the courtyard where the platform for the musicians had been, there was now a ditch filled with the heads of men and women. Dozens of them. I looked at them with their eyes open, staring at me with their shabby hair matted with blood. I started to vomit, but controlled myself.
I did not know who they were. I did not know how they had ended their days on this earth in this place. But I have never been able to forget them, though I have tried many times.
The two men pushed Grandfather and me along a pathway that ran between rosebushes that needed to be pruned. Thorns grabbed my sleeve as I brushed past. I remembered the time I had cut a rose from one of these bushes. The owner told me, “A flower looks happiest on its bush. That is where it belongs.” Since then, I have never cut a flower, because he was right. But I could not imagine how anyone had cut the heads off these men and women. They belonged on their bodies, I thought.
The stench in the heat was unbearable. I did not want to be there for even a minute. I felt tears coming from my eyes, and a tightening in my throat was cutting off the air flow. Even though I closed my eyes, the pile of heads, legs, and hands with no fingers was still there in my brain, sending pictures to my eyes.
I looked at those two guys with their faces behind their bandannas. Those who carry a gun are the most cowardly of all, I thought, because they cannot protect themselves without it.
I did not have a gun for killing them. I had no shovel to cover those lost souls with earth. And I had no ability to ask for any of those things.
The two guys pushed us into a room at the end of the courtyard. It was damp and smelled of blood. He locked the door after us. The walls were covered with writing in chalk and charcoal. Someone had written, “Once you come to this room, you will not leave alive. This was my brother’s fate, and it will be mine.”
On one side of a wall was written, “Don’t be afraid of death. You were born one day, and you will die one day.”
Another person had written, “No matter how much you have prepared yourself, there is no guarantee for the future.” I closed my eyes so I would not have to read any more of them.
An eerie feeling inside me was getting stronger and stronger. I wanted to scream, “If you kill me, I will be one of these heads, but it is unkind to show me these hundreds of innocents whom I did not know.” I was too afraid to scream, though. My voice hid inside my chest. I did not dare to say a word.
I kept my eyes tightly closed, trying to force what I had seen from my mind. Silence filled the room until Grandfather spoke in a strange voice.
“You have to find a way to survive. And the secret of survival is to open your eyes. Closed eyes can never see the path.” I slowly opened my eyes to see Grandfather down on one knee in front of me so that his face was level with mine. He looked very shaken. “If they kill me
and keep you, you have to promise me to find your way home.”
“Why will they keep me and kill you, and why are you saying all these things? I’m not going anywhere without you,” I said defiantly.
“I’m old, and they don’t need me. But they will need you for work, or for their sexual pleasure,” my grandfather said.
He could see the confusion in my eyes. “I don’t have to tell you what that is, but when the time comes you’ll know it. They may use you for a while, but you must find an opportunity to escape. I’m sure you can do that. Don’t show them that you are smart. Always act stupid.”
“No, no, don’t tell me that you can’t come with me. Please stop,” I said. I never liked crying but was afraid I might start, and I did not want Grandfather to see that, because maybe he would call me “fountain eyes,” the way my older sister did to get back at me for saying the same thing about her.
“Just listen to me. We may not have another chance to talk again. If these people here make you very unhappy with your life, you may think that killing yourself is the best way to overcome all your sorrows. But believe me, it is not,” Grandfather sternly said. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me like that.
“You have to be a brave boy, and if they do kill you, accept the death with open arms, and never beg for your life, because in the end death gets us all one way or another.”
“Before they kill me, I want to see my family once more, I want to say goodbyes to them, and I want to tell them I love them,” I said. My voice choked as I spoke.
I started remembering my father’s jokes, my mother’s smile, and my sisters’ innocent looks. I remembered sitting around one tablecloth with my parents and sisters, eating breakfast and laughing.
He stared into my eyes for a moment, then said, “The past is like water that flows in a river, you can’t bring it back with a shovel. Let the past be in the past, and move on; you won’t lose anything. Remember all that I told you. Okay?”
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 8
