A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  I went to Grandfather’s room, where he was reading a book. He smiled at me and continued reading. I just sat there in front of his stretched-out feet and took a book for myself. I looked at it for a long time, but I could not concentrate.

  After a while, Grandfather took an apple from a dish next to him and made a few little jokes as he peeled it with his knife. He offered some of the pieces to me and talked about a few things that were of no importance. But he never mentioned what had happened to us. When we had eaten a couple of apples he said, “Okay, Gorbachev, it’s time for you to go out and play while I do some writing.”

  “Gorbachev” was one of his nicknames for me, though I never knew why.

  As I left his room, my older sister ran to me and gave me a big hug, holding me in her arms for several minutes. Then she looked at me with her eyes full of tears and kissed me several times. Taking my arms in her hands, she said, “You know I love you very much.” I nodded, unable to say a word.

  I went up on the roof, where Wakeel was already flying a kite, and Jerk was holding his reel. When Wakeel saw me, he took the reel from Jerk and gave it to me and told me to do a good job, because he was in a fight.

  Surrounded by those who I knew loved me, I felt the pain from the day before begin to ease, at least for a time.

  6

  Under the Earth

  Now everything was different. Now we knew we would not be going back to our home. Now we understood that the fighting would not end soon. Now my father and my uncles were more open in their discussions about fleeing the country. Grandfather listened to them, but said nothing.

  We had been at the Qala-e-Noborja for half a year, longer than any of us had expected. After Haji Noor Sher left, some other people who were either Haji Noor Sher’s distant family or close friends moved into the fort. That made us more aware than ever that we were not living in our own home. We had lots of room at Noborja, but no Afghan wants to live in someone else’s house.

  A school near the Qala-e-Noborja opened sometime in the late summer but closed two weeks later, when the principal heard a report on the BBC that a faction was threatening to attack our neighborhood that afternoon. We were sent home.

  The principal told us to listen to the radio. “As soon as the radio announces that the schools are open again,” he said, “you must come.” Some of my classmates were very happy, because they did not like school. I found their attitude very strange. I had had so much fun in our old school. What do these new classmates like, then? I asked myself.

  I thought that the school would be closed for no more than a few days. But we did not go back to school for two years.

  Our parents started teaching us at home. It was not fun; there was no one to compete with. I could not compete with my older sister. She knew all my lessons much better than I did, because she was two classes ahead of me.

  My father often taught us. He was very strict. Sometimes in school we had joked with one another when our teachers were writing things on the blackboard. I could not do that at home. I started to lose interest in all subjects, except for astronomy, which was not then taught in our schools. I read the textbook all the way through a couple of times. At night I went out in the courtyard and stared at the sky for hours, drowned in strange thoughts. But my father emphasized math, and the more pressure he put on me to learn, the more I lost interest.

  Wakeel and my older cousins, who were in upper grades, often just read novels, or magazines, or books on subjects that interested them. I felt envious of them. Nobody pressured them to study boring school subjects. Wakeel read poetry for hours and could recite line after line of Hafiz by heart. Hafiz was his favorite.

  As children we had our own world. We went to the garden every day after breakfast, played with the animals that were still there, or swung from the branches of the trees. We found new friends among the kids in the neighborhood.

  After lunch we flew kites. The roof of the fort was even higher than the one at home. With enough string, we could almost float our kites over the top of the twin-peaked mountain that separated us from our house. Wakeel was cutting all the other kites nearby, but nobody in our neighborhood knew it was he. For some reason, they thought it was I. Soon my name was famous, and all the kids called me “Qais the Kite Cutter.”

  Wakeel just smiled at me when he heard them. That made me feel a little bit small. But, still, I never told anybody that it was Wakeel who had cut them. Wakeel was my closest friend, but we were very competitive when it came to kites.

  Then, strange things started to happen with my kites. I would put them up very high and look for somebody to cut. Usually, once one kid had a kite up, others would quickly rise to challenge him. But before another kite even had a chance to appear in the sky, my kite was suddenly floating free, as if somebody had cut it. Wakeel came running over to see what had happened.

  “Did you cut your own kite?” he asked. He was laughing, of course.

  I did not know what to say to him and just shrugged.

  About two days later, the same thing happened. I told myself that the wind must have been very strong up high where the kite was, and maybe it had ripped the kite from its string. That had never happened before. But I was looking for an explanation.

  I had been using the string for two years. Wakeel and I had prepared it very carefully. It had taken weeks. First we had collected old light bulbs and ground up their glass into a fine powder. Then we mixed the powdered glass into the paste we made from boiling rice down to a soggy mess. We rubbed the paste and glass into the string to make it like a razor when it went into the sky. My string had cut every kite it fought, except Wakeel’s. Now it was cutting itself.

  What was worse, after my kites were cut, they floated into the grounds of the old British Embassy, which had been abandoned when the Russians came, and whose walls were topped with barbed wire. There was no way to get over those walls and bring back the kites that had fallen inside them.

  The next week it happened again. And then five more times. It was very mysterious. Now the kids in the neighborhood were all laughing and calling me “Qais Who Cuts His Own Kites.”

  * * *

  At the Qala-e-Noborja, we did not often eat together as we had at Grandfather’s house. There was no room large enough to hold us all. Sometimes, though, we squeezed ourselves into a couple of adjoining rooms, especially when my mother made a special meal and invited my grandfather, my uncles, and their families to join us.

  The grown-ups sat at the upper end of the tablecloth, and my cousins and I sat at the bottom. Sometimes we would throw bones at one another, or rub hot peppers on bread and leave it for someone to eat without knowing. Mostly the grown-ups were silent; they were always unhappy. Whenever any of them talked, it was about how to leave Afghanistan.

  Every day my father and uncles went out to look for smugglers to get us across the border to one of the nearby Central Asian countries. Most of the smugglers in those days were taking Afghans to Iran and Turkey. Those borders were easier to cross, but the smugglers demanded a lot of money because the trip was long and dangerous. We simply could not afford to go with them.

  One night my father came home very happy. He made a few jokes as he took off his jacket. A few minutes later we were all sitting around the tablecloth. When my cousins and I started throwing bones at one another, my father joined us, throwing bones from the upper end. We all looked at him, wondering what was going on. He made a few more jokes that made everybody laugh. It was the first time in months that I was seeing everybody laughing.

  After dinner we had tea, and my father announced that he had found a smuggler to take us all out of Afghanistan to Russia and, eventually, Germany. He was very expensive, and we did not have enough money to give him. But the smuggler was willing to wait. He knew my father had been a famous boxer and wanted to help him.

  Later, there was quiet talk among the grown-ups about “the garden.” My mother frowned and flatly stated, “No. You are not allowed to go there.”
And then they went back to speaking quietly again.

  * * *

  A month passed. My father tried to call Haji Noor Sher in India several times to ask him for a loan of some money to pay the smugglers, but the Afghan phone system had been completely destroyed.

  Then we heard from the BBC World Service that the opposing factions who were battling for control of Kabul had agreed to a ceasefire for a week.

  That night my father announced that he was going to our house the next day. Grandfather tried to stop him, but my father was the most stubborn of his sons. Once he said he would do something, no one could stop him from doing it. The next morning, he told me to get ready to go with him.

  “No way. You have no idea what I saw there the last time, and I don’t want to see it ever again,” I said as stubbornly as I could. A look of pain crossed Grandfather’s face as I said that. He studied his hands.

  “You will come with me,” my father said firmly. “I expect you to obey me.”

  In the end, I went. I would soon be eleven years old and felt nearly like a man. A Pashtun son obeys his father, no matter what the son’s age. His voice softened a little, and he explained that he thought he would attract less attention if he had me with him than if he were on his own.

  * * *

  We took a bus from Kart-e-Parwan as far as the Polytechnic, where the Panjshiri control stopped. We got out and walked along the wide, empty avenue that led to our side of town. Even though there was a ceasefire, the Panjshiri soldiers were searching people who were coming toward them from the far side of the front line. I was wearing my jeans and a white shirt with a blue sweater on top. My father had a white shalwar kamiz. He was carrying a cloth sack with a shovel in it. He did not explain why.

  I walked next to my father, both of us looking around and not saying anything. The leaves on the trees in the park that runs up the middle of the road had gone yellow, like the big yellow silo we were passing that the Russians had built. A wind moved a cloud of dust from one place to another place. There was no one else besides us, except for fat dogs running up and down.

  We turned into the narrow streets that led to our house. We had been walking for a half hour by then. Silence hung over the neighborhood, except when a dog howled. As always at that time of year in Kabul, the sky was clear and beginning to have the glow that comes with autumn.

  Finally, the high yellow wall of our house was in view. All the windows were broken. The walls had many holes from bullets that had not been there when I had come with Grandfather two months before. Some of the curtains were still in the windows, but they were dirty, and some had been shredded by gunfire. The heavy wooden door that led inside was splintered. It looked like it had been used as a target. My father pushed it gently, as if he were trying not to make it hurt any more than it already did. It swung smoothly on its strong hinges.

  As we stepped into our courtyard, we heard a gunshot at the end of the street. We looked around. Two guys were coming from one end of our street, and four more from the other. One of them pointed a gun at us as he walked.

  “Again!” I thought. I wanted to run into our garden, but I froze instead. My father tried to pretend he knew them. They said nothing when my father told them about the ceasefire. One of them walked up to us and handcuffed us without telling us why.

  “Gentlemen, do you think that we have committed a crime?” my father asked politely. They did not answer. Instead, they kicked him in his back.

  The handcuff rings were too big for my thin wrists. They slid down over my hands. I moved my hands in and out of them several times, but I never let the guys with the guns see that. In fact, I was holding the chains in my hand so they would not fall off.

  They marched us all the way back to the silo. My father and I were in front. Our captors were spread out behind. Like the guys who had threatened Grandfather and me before, they were Hazaras, but not the same ones. I was looking around to see whether I could find my father’s student. The Hazaras continued to control that side of Kabul. But he was not there.

  These guys were wearing Western-style clothes. They had boots that were laced tightly up over their ankles. One with big shoulders wore a red headband showing that he was willing to be a martyr. Their hair was nicely combed. They were clean. If there had been no war, they would have been running shops or doing metalwork, for which Hazaras are famous. These guys did not look like bad people. They seemed like those who had been trained to do bad things.

  When we arrived at the courtyard of the high, yellow Russian grain silo, they made us crouch on our knees in front of a hole in the ground with steep stairs going down almost like a ladder. The guy with the red bandanna unlocked my father’s handcuffs. I slipped mine off and handed them to him. He looked at me holding out the handcuffs to him and laughed. Then he kicked my father down the muddy stairs into the hole, and then me. I rolled down the stairs and dropped onto my father’s chest. My father was breathing heavily. He had a few cuts on his face, but they were not deep wounds. His clothes were streaked with dirt.

  From where we had fallen, we saw that we were at the mouth of a tunnel. We heard footsteps coming toward us from somewhere inside. In a moment a man stood in front of us with a lamp in his hand. I was trying to stop the bleeding on my father’s head with a piece of the toilet paper that my mother had taught us always to carry when we left the house.

  “Get up! Follow me,” the man said.

  I helped my father to stand, then we followed. It was very dark. My father had to walk hunched over because the ceiling was so low. We could barely see our steps. We walked for several minutes. With each step, the air got heavier and damper.

  When we got to the end of the tunnel, we saw in the dim light a few men and women sitting along its wall. The man told my father and me to sit next to them. Then he knotted our hands and feet to the others with rope, like slaves. When any one of us moved, the rest of us were forced to move, too. The guy with the lamp who had brought us there sat on a chair in front of us, pointing a gun at us, his finger on the trigger.

  A few minutes later a couple of other ragged-looking Hazaras with guns and grenades attached to military belts came to inspect us. They were different from the well-dressed guys who had captured us. They counted us. We were eighteen. There were five women among us. One of them was pregnant, and about twenty-five years old. The rest of the women were middle-aged.

  The guards talked among themselves, put a lantern on the ground in front of us, then left.

  None of the captives said anything. Some were staring at their feet, some at the tunnel wall. We were all deep in our thoughts about how to get out. The faces of the women were filled with resentment, the men’s with anger. It was a moment of heavy silence. Then all of a sudden the pregnant woman began screaming. She had her hands on her stomach and was shouting for help, wailing, “My dear mother, come and help me!” And she kept repeating the name Ahmad.

  I asked my father, “What is happening to her?”

  “A labor contraction,” he said. I had no idea what a labor contraction was.

  We were all staring at her, as she was howling in agony, grunting, and occasionally yelling high, piercing shrieks that were made louder by the echoing walls of the tunnel.

  One of the women sawed through another woman’s bindings with a piece of stone, and she in turn untied the other women. The four of them quickly made a circle around the pregnant woman. Then they asked the men to help them. Two of the women started untying our hands and feet. One of the women said to the men, “We need some hot water. She is going to give birth to her child now.”

  My father was freed first since he was on the end of the line, then he untied me. He patted my head and said, “I’m going to ask one of those guards to let that woman go to the hospital. Stay here and don’t move until I come back.” Then, bent over like a cripple, he disappeared down the long, narrow tunnel.

  Ten long minutes later my father returned, followed by the commander, who had his gun at the back of
his head. My father’s hands were tied up with a rope behind his back again. The guy pushed my father hard on his chest against the wall and said, “You don’t move from there, or I’ll shoot you in your head, understood?”

  My father nodded.

  He pressed the button of his walkie-talkie and said, “Hey guys, come here, we have a movie without a ticket.”

  Minutes later, five other guys rushed up the tunnel toward us like wild dogs. They grabbed from behind the four women who were trying to help and dragged them away from the pregnant woman.

  By now her cotton shalwar trousers were off. She was screaming for help. One of the women said, “For God’s sake, she needs to be in a hospital now. She needs a doctor.”

  “I’m a doctor. Don’t you see my Kalashnikov?” One of the men laughed as he held up his battered weapon that had probably passed through a dozen arms dealers before it reached him. “I use this to do my operations.” He was about twenty-five years old, and as thin as a stick. His gun was hanging from his right shoulder, and its weight made his shoulder droop. The rest of them laughed loudly.

  They were all standing around her and one of them invited me to watch. My father looked at me fiercely and whispered, “Don’t go.”

  “No thanks, I’m fine here,” I said.

  “It is an order! I said ‘Come,’ otherwise I’ll shoot you,” he shouted.

  I looked at my father again, and he nodded at me to go. I stood next to those guys and closed my eyes.

  The guy next to me slapped me hard on my head and said, “Open your eyes and watch.”

  When I did, I saw that the woman had a kindly, beautiful face that was twisted by her pain. Her nostrils flared, and her voice shook as she screamed for help. She lay down on her back. Blood was coming from between her legs.

  She kept taking deep breaths. Every time she breathed in, her whole body shook, and her face got redder. I knew that I should do something to help her, but I did not know what.

  She kept screaming for almost an hour until finally the baby came out, and she went numb. One of the women jumped from where the guards had dragged her, grabbed the baby, and held him upside down. The baby screamed, and the woman told the new mother, “It is a boy.”