“Shall I come, too?” Wakeel asked, as if he had not heard what my father had just told him. My father always bought him whatever he bought for us and took him wherever he took us, and he could not understand why he was being left behind.
“No, there is just not enough space in the car for all of us,” my father said.
“There is plenty of space in the car,” Wakeel said insistently. “There were fifteen of us and the baby when we came from our house to this place. Don’t you remember?” He looked at me and my sister for confirmation. We were afraid to say anything, because my father was in one of those moods where we could not tell whether he was angry. We nodded, but tried to avoid looking at our father’s eyes.
“That was a short distance,” my father said. “Now we are going to the other side of Afghanistan, easily ten hours of driving.” His voice was getting a little bit hard.
“That is okay,” I said, “we can squeeze in the backseat.”
“No more discussion,” my father said with a loud voice that startled us all. “I said ‘No,’ and it stays that way. No more discussions.”
After Wakeel’s father had disappeared, all my uncles had done their best to help him. But he was closest to my father, who had always included him in everything my immediate family had done, as if Wakeel were his own son. I did not understand how he could even think of leaving Wakeel behind.
This was the first time I was going to be really separated from Wakeel. With all the uncertainty that had contorted our lives since the day his father had disappeared, the one thing that each of us could count on was the other.
One day about a year before, I had searched for him everywhere, but I could not find him. I climbed the ladder to the roof of the Qala-e-Noborja to look in the hiding place that we always used when we played hide-and-seek. He was sitting there, alone, staring into space. When I tapped him on the shoulder, he acted startled and looked at me. I asked him what he was thinking about. He said it was nothing. He sounded sad. I asked him whether something was wrong. He said “No.”
Wakeel was always cheerful and happy. Is he hiding something from me? I asked myself.
I sat down next to him and said nothing. I started staring at where he had been looking. For a few minutes we remained silent. He glanced at me several times, and I kept staring into space. He waved his hand in front of my eyes, and I pretended that I did not notice. He tapped on my shoulder and asked me what I was looking at. I told him I was imitating him. He smiled.
He said, “You are lucky that you’re Qais, and not Wakeel.”
“Why?” I asked. “I wish I were Wakeel, who is very good at flying kites, and having lots of friends, and being very popular at school, and climbing trees, and being the oldest child of his mother and the older brother to his sisters so he can order them around to polish his shoes and bring his tea and water. Who in the world doesn’t want to be Wakeel?
“Look at me,” I went on. “My friends are the little kids. I am no good at flying kites. I’m not as popular as you are in school, and not all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles love me like they do you. I can’t order my older sister to do anything for me. She always bosses me around. Who in the world wants to be Qais?”
“I do,” Wakeel said.
“Why?” I asked, very surprised.
“Because you have a dad, and I don’t,” he said, his voice shaking. “Every day when you wake up, your father kisses you on the cheek. Every day you exercise with your father, he lets you beat him, he plays with you, he teases you, he sits on your bedside when you are sick, he wakes up in the middle of the night to check on you when you’re having nightmares or you mumble in your dreams, he warns you when you do something bad, he points out your mistakes, he tries to fix them with you, he wants you to climb higher on the ladder of your life, he is with you all the time. You can let yourself fall back, and you know there is your father, who will hold you.” The words were coming out in a rush. “Who will hold me when I fall back? When I tumble and break into bits and pieces, there is no one to collect me. I have to collect myself and get back with my life. I want my dad. I want him to hold me when I fall back.” He burst into tears and rushed out of the hiding place, tripping as he climbed down.
I did not know what to do. Should I run after him and give him a hug? No, I was younger than he; I cannot do that, I told myself. His dad should give him that kind of a hug.
An hour later, Wakeel had his cheerful glow on his face again and was making jokes that made everyone laugh. But suddenly I understood that for all these years his jokes had been chasing a shadow from his soul.
“Only a dad can fill the space of a dad, not your uncles nor your grandfather, only your own dad,” he told me. Then he recited a couplet from his favorite poem by Hafiz: “To make one heart happy can be greater than making a thousand sacred journeys.”
Once, when we were sitting in the lowest part of the garden of the Qala-e-Noborja near the pool, Wakeel told me that he was worried what would happen if his father came home; he would not know where to look for us. He would go to Grandfather’s house and not find us there.
“I think he is still alive,” Wakeel said. “If he had died, he would have sent a sign.”
“What kind of sign?”
“I don’t know. I will know it when I see it.”
* * *
An hour later, we were ready to go. We did not have much to take. Our few clothes quickly went into our two suitcases and then into the trunk of the car. My mother gathered up whatever food we had in the house and put it in large sacks. Grandfather and my uncles and aunts and cousins all stood around the car to say goodbye to us as we drove away from Noborja.
Wakeel ran after our car. The car was faster than he was and left a track of dust in the air. I popped my head out of the front seat and waved at him, trying to smile. My sisters were looking back at everyone from the rear window and were waving as well. When we disappeared around the corner near the British Embassy, Wakeel stood in the middle of the street, despair all over his face, shoulders drooped, breathing hard and lost in the dust.
* * *
I felt very sad. I was very angry at my father for leaving Wakeel behind, and did not talk to him as we drove out of Kabul and up the steep hill at Khair Khana that leads north. I put on a frowning face, and my sisters did the same. My father made some jokes. And though they were new and funny, I did not laugh and my sisters did not either.
“Look, we could have taken Wakeel, but what would his mother do?” He was looking straight ahead, but we knew he was talking to us. “She has no one else. I will come back for him and the rest of them in two weeks.” Then he turned on the car radio to the BBC World Service.
My sisters and I wanted to hear Afghan or Indian songs, but my father only wanted to listen to the news, especially for any information about Mazar. We did not tell him to change the station, since we were determined to maintain our anger with him.
As we left Kabul behind and started driving north across the Shamali Plain, I looked out through my window and saw the remains of Russian military trucks everywhere. Some lay sideways or upside down. Most of them were broken into bits. Almost every field had one, and people farmed around them. A burnt-out tank lay in a river; water was rushing through it and little kids with wet clothes were sitting on it, watching the passing cars. Years of rain had rusted the hulks; the sun and dust had bleached their paint. Some of the kids were pulling on their steering wheels, taking long journeys across their fantasies. A Russian jeep hung halfway down a steep valley wall, as if it were held by some kind of superpower.
I started counting them. I quickly reached one hundred. After a while, counting became boring, and I stopped.
We climbed up the side of the Hindu Kush mountains next to a fast-moving river that twisted back and forth around tiny villages perched high on its banks. Near the top, we reached the Salang Tunnel, which cut through the high peaks. Many of the lights in the tunnel were broken. Some were very yellow and gave a little
light. The tunnel was filled with exhaust from other cars and big trucks. We raised the windows. My father drove very slowly to get around the holes in the road.
* * *
The hours rolled by faster than our car could go on the badly damaged road. As we drove down the north side of the mountains, we started following another river, this one much wider. On either side, fields were green with growing things even though it was early autumn. But beyond the fields, where the sides of the valley rose up, everything was bare rock. I looked at all these things very carefully, because I knew we were soon going to a different country and I might never see them again.
By midafternoon, we were driving through a beautiful valley on a narrow gravel road, toward a high gorge between two steep mountains. As we passed through the gorge, my sisters and I popped our heads out of the windows to see the birds flying from one hole in the cliffs above to the next. We could hear a fast-moving river as it crashed over the rocks at the bottom of the gorge and echoed between the high walls above.
We passed through the gorge and out onto the flatlands that stretch north to Russia. Suddenly, my father pulled the car over to the side of the road and stepped out. He stood in front of the car and took a deep breath. He looked at the blue sky and gazed at the mountains. A smile appeared on his face, as if something unknown were revealing itself only to him.
“Is something wrong with the engine?” my mother asked, as she stretched her head out the window.
Without turning around my father shouted, “This is Tashkurghan!” Ahead of us we could see many walled gardens and a small town a mile beyond. Crowning a hill between us and the town was a very large mosque with a high dome. My father started walking across a field toward where all the water in the broad river we had been following was rushing through the narrow gorge.
I leaped out of the car and followed him. He kept walking with big strides, looking up the wall of the gorge at the mountains, until he reached the riverbank. He splashed some clear water on his face and did not care that it dripped on his clothes.
“I have been dreaming about this place for months,” he said. “I used to camp here with my friends for weeks at a time.”
“When was that?” I asked. By now we were friends again, even though I had not forgotten my anger. I had realized that if I stayed openly angry because Wakeel and Grandfather were not with us, everyone would be very miserable. So, I was friendly to him. But I did not tell him my secret thoughts, which were still wrapped in bitterness.
“Oh, it was a long time ago. Before I married your mother,” he sighed. “Well, not very long. It just seems like a long time ago. It seems like ages. All of those friends are living in Europe now, and I’m still here.”
He reached over and ran his wet hand through my hair. “Come on, let’s camp here for a few days.” He walked toward the car, and I followed quickly after him.
It sounded great to me. Sometimes we had camped for a night next to Qargha Lake near our home or in a neighbor’s garden, but never in a wide-open place like this.
By now, everybody was out of the car. My father took a large sheet of blue plastic out of the trunk. In each corner was printed “UN” in big letters. “We will use this as a tent,” he said. He led the way down across some stony places to a flat field near the river, which flowed away from the road once it had escaped the gorge.
My sisters started helping my father and me to set up the plastic over some straight tree branches we found along the road. My mother was quiet, and my father looked at her several times to see whether she liked the idea. She just seemed happy to see us happy again.
A village man on a mule approached, sitting on a load of carrots piled in handwoven bags on the mule’s back. As he came closer he asked, “What are you doing here?”
“We’re camping,” my father said.
“Be careful, this place has wolves. They come out at night,” he warned us.
“I’m not afraid of wolves. But thank you for telling us,” my father said, and the man rode on. Then my father drove the car down the gentle slope from the road into the field and parked it near our tent.
* * *
It was the middle days of autumn, sometimes windy, warm during the day and cool at night.
Each day, we swam in the river after breakfast and fished there in the afternoon. At night we made a fire in front of our tent and listened to my father’s jokes and my mother’s folktales, which sometimes frightened us. Some nights we just gazed at the sky, sparkling with millions of stars.
After all the bad things I had seen in Kabul, especially in the past couple of months, I felt like these were the best days of my life. I wanted to stay there forever, away from Kabul, away from the war. But then I would think about Grandfather and Wakeel, and wonder what they were doing while we were enjoying ourselves surrounded by such beautiful nature.
After a week, my father was ready to move on to Mazar, to my aunt’s house. But we urged him to stay next to that river for one more week.
We continued our swimming and fishing. Sometimes we climbed in the mountains.
One morning after breakfast, the sky was very cloudy, and we stayed in our tent to study our schoolbooks, which we had brought. A gentle wind was blowing through our tent, occasionally turning the pages of my book. The wind was coming from the north. It grew stronger, and the sky got darker. Low clouds were bearing down on us.
My father gathered us in the corner of our tent. I wanted to go out and feel the wind blow against me, but he did not let me. “Stay here,” he commanded in his I-am-the-father voice. The wind grew stronger by the minute. Then rain started falling, driven hard by the wind, and then harder and harder, and louder and louder. It was almost screaming, with lightning occasionally shrieking across the sky. We almost never had storms like this in Kabul. It was very exciting for me.
My father clutched my little sisters to his chest, as if the wind might take them away. My mother held on to my little brother so tightly that nothing in the world could separate them. My brother was crying most of the time because his teeth were starting to come in. We called him “the crying machine.” We all had nicknames. Mine was “Dizzy,” because sometimes for several minutes I would stare at nothing while I was thinking about something. When someone called me, I did not notice. I do not know what that had to do with being dizzy, but that is what they called me.
Now the rain beat our tent in waves. It was so loud that we could not hear one another speak. Lightning cracked again, each time getting much closer. The thunder was so close that it hurt our ears. This was no longer any fun. We were in the middle of nowhere under a makeshift tent.
The rain stopped as quickly as it had started, but the sky grew even darker, almost like a black night, though it was only midmorning.
Suddenly the ground started shaking like a small earthquake. We heard huge crashing noises above us in the gorge that were louder than the wind. When we looked out from underneath our piece of blue plastic, we saw a massive stone bouncing down the side of the mountain behind us at a furious speed. My father yelled at us to get out of the tent. We all rushed out, not knowing where we were headed, and scattered in three directions.
I had escaped death twice in Kabul in the past year. Now it looked like I would be killed in this place that had seemed like paradise. I thought of Prophet Noah and the storm and the rain for forty days, and how he survived and saved others’ lives. But he had no problem with stones roaring off a mountain and shaking the earth.
The stone rolled right through our tent. It smashed the center pole, snapping it like straw, and kept going down to the river. Our food and clothes were crushed into the ground. Not knowing what else to do, we went and sat in the car, still very frightened.
We were stunned. The stone could have rolled so many other places. My older sister said, “Maybe the stone did not like our tent.” For the first time ever, I thought she was right.
Half an hour later, the sky was perfectly clear. The sun was a bright orange
ball. The wind was fragrant. The birds started singing again. It seemed that nature thought nothing had ever happened, but we had lost our tent and everything we had in it.
We spent the rest of the day in our car. Before dark, my father and I walked around the area to see whether it was safe to spend another night there. He was carrying a heavy stick in his hand, and I was carrying a thin one. We had not seen any wolves or any other wild animals. But the evidence of the storm was all around us. We found a branch of a tree to use as a new center pole. It was not straight.
Night came. Through the many holes the rock had made in our tent, we could see clouds passing quickly in front of a half-moon. We ate smashed bread with squashed mulberries for dinner. The crying machine was quiet now, and his mouth was half-open as he slept next to my mother on the one pillow that only he had.
My father listened to the BBC World Service on the car radio. They were saying something about a fight in Mazar between two factions. When I asked my father what they meant, he told me things about a man named Dostum. I had seen Dostum on television, sitting on a tank with his trousers rolled up to his knees. But I had not paid much attention to who he was.
For seven more days we stayed there, a bit shaken, but not sure what to do next. In the mornings the sun was not so bright as when we first came. We could feel the seasons changing, as the days grew shorter and the nights longer and cooler.
After a week we heard from BBC World Service that Mazar was safe again. The fighting between factions there had ended, at least for now.
My father told my mother at breakfast that after lunch we would leave for Mazar. All this time we had been in Tashkurghan, we had been only one hour away from Mazar, had the road not been broken by the fighting. It had rained hard again during the night. We were all a little cold and damp. That made it easier to leave this place that we had come to love. Also, our supply of food was low. Breakfast did not take long to eat. All we had was some apples we had found on trees that had planted themselves near our camp. My father had caught some wild ducks by the river early that morning using long, sharpened sticks, but he had not had time to cook them yet. He had learned to hunt as a young man, when Kabul still had wetlands. He never let me go with him, though, because he said he needed total concentration, and the slightest noise would frighten the birds and we would go off hungry.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 13
