A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  My older sister became very busy, helping my mother with all the cooking. They spent many hours together talking about things. Other times, she asked my father to climb the mountains and see the view. My father was always happy to take her and our next sister on long walks in the fresh air. He loved the exercise and their company.

  When my mother took her nap in the afternoon while my little brother was sleeping, my older sister took my younger sisters to the river to get drinking water with Hamza’s sisters. They learned from the village girls how to carry a clay water pot on their heads without holding it with their hands, or at other times how to embroider hats. My older sister told them stories about life in Kabul, and what it was like to go to school. None of Hamza’s sisters had ever been to school, though they knew how to read.

  Since I had never seen my older sister act so pleasantly before, I decided to be nice to her. But when it came to me, she had not changed. She always found some way of making fun of me. She and I were supposed to eat from one plate. Afghans believe that sharing a plate improves the appetite. She would say things like, “He finishes everything on the plate before I take three bites. And he makes noises while he eats, like a cow.” I stopped being nice to her.

  Late one afternoon after hunting ducks, Hamza and I climbed up to the highest mountain to look down on the whole village. The sun was setting in the west. There were no clouds, just the gold of the sun and the deep blue of the sky.

  “Have you ever talked to nature?” Hamza said.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Do you hear when it talks back to you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows what I mean. Anytime I tell anyone what I can see and hear, they think I’m crazy. But you have to know that everything talks to you if you are very honest with them,” Hamza said.

  “You mean like mountains, and trees, and rivers, and the wind, and things like that?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And to learn how to be honest, you have to start thinking about who the architect of the skies and earth is.” Hamza was quiet for a moment. “When you build a building, you have to put pillars and walls to hold up the roof. But the sky has no pillars or walls. Only God can make architecture like that.”

  “Does God talk to you?” I asked, very surprised.

  “No, He talks to us through his creatures,” Hamza said.

  “How?” I asked.

  “The moon floats in a dark blue space, and shames billions of stars by its light. She has things to tell you; in fact she is talking to you,” Hamza said, then we looked at the moon, which was just rising behind us. He had a funny way of speaking poetically, even when he was not with Sarah. At first I had found this strange. But after a couple of weeks I was beginning to enjoy it. The moon was perfectly round, and as the last of the daylight faded, it spread its softening glow across the land so we could see the whole village below.

  “How did you learn all these things?” I asked.

  “Open your eyes and ears, and you can learn anything you want,” he said in his sweet voice. “The rose has given its power away to its thorns for its protection. But the nightingales never give their voices to crows. The moth flies around a candle until it burns its wings. But a deer runs away from hunters as far as it can.”

  “You are a poet,” I said.

  “No, I have eyes that are open, and I use them well,” he said.

  The wind started blowing. A few small clouds edged over the horizon, and the moon took control of the sky. We carefully climbed down.

  I opened the garden gate. The dogs jumped playfully at me as I was thinking about what Hamza had told me. What he said has stayed with me from then until now. He made me think about things I had never thought much about before, like how God had created the stars, moon, sun, sky, the universe, and all of nature, and for what reason, why we are here, what is our mission in life, and how one can take pleasure from all these things we have been given.

  * * *

  That night, our families ate dinner together. Afterward, when my father and Hamza’s went to listen to the BBC World Service, we heard that the fighting in Mazar was coming toward Tashkurghan.

  My father made his decision right away. He said to the old man, “It sounds as if we must leave Tashkurghan tomorrow morning.” Hamza’s father nodded.

  My father had been going to mosque early in the morning with the other village men to say their morning prayers together. After prayers the next day, he shared what he had heard the previous night from the BBC. Then, in the way that Afghan people always do when they must leave the company of those who have welcomed them, he asked their permission to go.

  When he came back from the mosque, we were having breakfast. He sat down and took a cup of tea from my mother, then told us, “We cannot now go to Mazar. I don’t think it is safe to go back to Kabul. So we will head for Bamyan. We have heard no reports of fighting there, and I believe that we will be safe there. I have received the mullah’s and the village men’s permission to leave here today. They say that they will leave their homes, too. The war will reach this place in two days, maybe sooner. As soon as we finish eating, we will pack,” my father said.

  My older sister looked at him and said, “But, Father, Bamyan is in the middle of Afghanistan. We are supposed to be going to another country where there is no war.”

  My father looked at her and said very kindly, “We will. But not today.”

  * * *

  After breakfast we went to the old man’s house on the other side of the garden to say goodbye and to thank them. The old man was again listening to the BBC; his sons were playing chess; his wife and daughters were embroidering a tablecloth together. Each daughter had a corner in her hand.

  Hamza’s father rose and embraced my father. “This is your home, and its doors are always open to you.” Then his sons hugged my father and me, and his wife and daughters hugged my mother and sisters.

  “Are you staying or leaving?” my father asked.

  “I think we are leaving as well,” Hamza’s father said. “We will go to Pakistan, to my brother’s home; he has been living there for ten years. I received his letter yesterday. He is very worried. He wants to send Hamza to America to live with his son.”

  “What about your garden? Will you leave it just like this?” my father said.

  “Yes, I cannot do anything about it. We all know that these holy warriors don’t fight to drive out foreign troops from our country. They fight to loot us. This factional fighting is just an excuse to steal from us, and even to steal our wives and daughters.”

  “Alas, alas,” said my father, nodding his head.

  His wife wrapped two fried chickens in newspaper and put some fresh beans in a pot, along with two pumpkins, some potatoes, and a few cabbages in bags. My mother did not want to take them, but the woman kept insisting. Finally, my mother accepted the food and thanked them for their hospitality and all their help.

  Just as we started to drive off, Hamza’s father ran toward our car with a big bag on his shoulders. He stood in front of our car, panting. He winked at me to come out. He gave me the big bag and asked me to lift it. I tried but I could not. It was very heavy.

  “Can you eat them all?” he asked me.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Pomegranates!” Hamza’s father said.

  He was smiling, but I felt very small. “No, I can’t eat them all,” I said with a renewed sense of shame that not even the kindness of the old man could dismiss.

  “I’m sure you can, and I know you’ll share them with others. Remember me and my dogs when you eat these pomegranates. That is all I want,” Hamza’s father said. I felt a little bit better when he bent over and kissed me on my forehead.

  He helped me put the bag into the trunk and waved us off toward Bamyan.

  The town’s mullah was standing on the roadside and signaled for us to stop. My father halted in front of him and rolled down his window. After greeting the mullah, he
introduced him to us.

  The mullah wore a white shalwar kamiz and a long green-and-blue-striped chapan coat on top of it. He had a black turban, and the rims of his eyes were darkened with kohl, as men do who are religious. His mustache was shaved, but his beard was long, almost to his belly. When he talked, his beard waved, though he was a calm talker.

  He gave my father a tasbeh, a string of prayer beads, and said, “I can’t give you more than this. I should have invited you to my house so we could eat together, but I didn’t know that the war would come here and separate us.”

  “Your tasbeh will always remind me of you and God,” my father told him. “If God is willing, one day we will see each other again, and we’ll talk about these days.”

  “I’m waiting for that day, if not in this world, maybe in the next one,” the mullah said.

  “Are you staying or leaving?” my father asked.

  “I’m staying here. You know I can escape from my country, but I can’t escape from my death. I’m breathing the last days of my life anyway. I’m seventy-five years old. If death comes tomorrow to me, I’m happy to welcome it. There is no difference between today and tomorrow,” the mullah said.

  “You are a brave man,” my father said.

  “I wouldn’t call it bravery. Death is part of life, and whoever takes it earlier, he or she will be at the head of the caravan for the next world. Either today or tomorrow we will join that caravan, so why not sooner rather than later?” the mullah said.

  “Let me tell you something,” he added, “a story of Mullah Nasruddin:

  “Mullah Nasruddin was awakened in the middle of the night by the cries of two men quarreling in front of his house. Nasruddin waited, but they continued to argue. He was unable to sleep. He wrapped his quilt tightly around his shoulders and rushed outside to separate the men, who had come to blows. But when he tried to reason with them, one of them snatched the quilt off Mullah Nasruddin’s shoulders, and then both men ran away. Mullah Nasruddin, very weary and perplexed, went inside.

  “‘What was the quarrel about?’ his wife asked him.

  “‘It must be about our quilt,’ replied the mullah. ‘The quilt is gone, the dispute is over.’

  “You see what I mean? Our country has become a Mullah Nasruddin story. This war is all about what we have in this country, not about you or me. Once they get what they want, then they won’t care about anything else,” the mullah said. “Almighty God protect you and your family from all dangers.”

  They hugged, and my father got back in the car and began driving quickly toward Bamyan before the mullah could tell another story, or anyone else showed up.

  9

  Inside the Head of Buddha

  The Kuchi nomads follow their goats, sheep, and camels through the mountains in search of new pastures. They never settle anywhere for long. Though my grandmother was born a Kuchi and my grandfather had come from herders who spent long seasons in the mountains with their flocks, my family and I did not think of ourselves as nomads. Yet we were enjoying our new life on hillsides, in the gardens of strangers, a few days here and a few days there, never in the same place for long. I knew we were looking for a quiet place to hide from the rockets while we found a way to leave Afghanistan. But despite rockslides, floods, and biting dogs, we had found a way of pushing the everyday threat of war from our minds as we thought about where we were going next, or where we had just been.

  * * *

  Bamyan is at the very center of Afghanistan, high in the mountains. We had to go back across the Hindu Kush to get there, but this time we took an unpaved road through a mountain pass to avoid any fighting along the main road. It took fifteen hours of slow, rough driving over deeply rutted roads to reach the Bamyan Valley. It had been an endless day; our bodies were longing for rest. It was well after dark when we were finally on a better road approaching the town.

  The car jerked to a halt, waking those of us who were falling asleep. A blue plastic rope was stretched across the road between two wooden poles. It was called the Bamyan Door. It did not look like a door to me.

  A man rushed from a mud house next to one of the wooden poles. He had a Kalashnikov hanging from his shoulder. He asked my father where we were going. My father explained that we were heading to Bamyan City. The man said we were not allowed to go in this late at night, and we must park somewhere along the river and come back tomorrow.

  My father did not try to argue; the man had a gun. He drove back in the direction from which we had come for a few hundred yards, and parked the car on a level spot next to the river. My mother gave us some of the food that Hamza’s family had shared with us.

  It was a beautiful night, but much cooler than in Tashkurghan. In the crisp air, the sky was like a dark piece of silk studded with tiny diamonds. The silence was dense, with only the quiet sound of the river and the twittering of some night birds to challenge it. We squeezed ourselves into the car’s seats to stay close together and keep warm as we slept. Though it was crowded, I felt as if I were on a soft bed after the hours of bumpy roads.

  We set out a picnic breakfast along the river the next morning and took our time over it. After all, we were nomads now; we moved when we wanted to. When we finished eating and had packed everything back into our car, we headed once more to Bamyan City. The guy who had stopped us the night before at the “door” was sitting in front of the mud house with his friends. They all had Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders.

  They stopped us again and my father explained that we were refugees from Kabul, looking for a safe place to live for a while. They silently searched our luggage piece by piece, though there was not much, then to our relief lowered the blue plastic rope and let us drive through.

  My father slowly drove toward the main Bamyan bazaar. The town was small and filled with the smell of wood fires and horse manure mixed with saffron, pepper, cardamon, and dust.

  He pulled into a car serai, an enclosed parking area. We walked up and down Bamyan’s one main street for a while. It was full of donkeys, goats, and people dressed very poorly. Then we went to a chai khana, a teahouse, for lunch. We climbed a bamboo ladder to the second floor, though a few of the rungs were missing. My father went first, with my mother and my baby brother behind him. My little sisters had a hard time climbing up. I had to help them, since I had been appointed to look after them. Another bamboo ladder led up to the third and fourth floors. There were no proper stairs.

  The chai khana was a large room filled with kebab smoke. A tiny TV was in the corner of the room; I could hardly see it through the smoke. The men were sitting on platforms two feet high, their shoes left behind on the floor. The plates in front of them, whether filled with food or only scraps, were alive with flies. Some of the men were eating, some were drinking tea while watching an Indian movie, and some were snoring while hundreds of flies had parties on their hands and feet and around their mouths.

  My mother was the only woman there, and my sisters the only girls. The men who had been chewing kebab stopped chewing. Their mouths hung half-open as they stared. The ones who had been drinking tea and watching TV put their glasses on the floor and turned where they sat to get a better view of us. My mother pulled her headscarf forward an inch and pretended she was there alone with my father and her children.

  All the men’s faces were furrowed like plowed earth. Deep wrinkles cut into the corners of their Asiatic eyes and along their foreheads. They watched us for the most part in silence, and when they did speak they whispered.

  All of them were Hazaras. I remembered Grandfather having told me that most of the Hazaras lived in central Afghanistan. He said that when he was still traveling with his father and uncles, driving their flocks to Bamyan to find high mountain pastures that stayed lush all summer from the last of the melting snow, they had been treated very warmly by the Hazara people there. Though they were not Kuchi nomads like my grandmother’s family, who traveled in regular routes around the country, my grandfather’s people also we
re herders, who left their home with their flocks each summer to search for pastures. Often, they had spent summers in the green Bamyan Valley, which was only a week’s walk from their village in Maidan.

  They traded some of their sheep, goats, or cows with the Hazaras in return for grazing rights and a place to set up their tents for a couple of months. I hoped the Hazaras would treat us well, too, even though we did not have any animals to trade with them, and we were not real nomads anymore but modern nomads in a beat-up old car.

  Berar used to tell me good stories about Bamyan, where he was born. When he worked for our family, he used to leave all his money with Grandfather. After several months he would ask for it, and then send it all home to his parents. Grandfather always made jokes with him, telling him to spend some money on women while he was a young man.

  Berar used to say, “If you build a house, a lot of people can use it, but a woman can be used only by a husband. A house is more efficient than a wife.”

  I looked through the smoke in that chai khana to see whether he was among those men, but he was not. I was disappointed. Since that morning on the roof of the silo, I had never seen or heard of him again.

  We ordered kebab, which is about the only lunch you can get, not just in Bamyan but in restaurants all over Afghanistan. On the wall was a photograph of the two enormous Buddha statues that had been carved into the cliffs at Bamyan almost two thousand years before. They looked very strange to me. They did not have faces.

  After we had finished eating, my father suggested that we go see the Buddhas and their caves cut out of the cliffs behind them. They were just a short walk from the chai khana. We climbed down the bamboo ladder, with me passing first my hesitant younger sister to my father and then a very happy crying machine who kept smiling and pointing at all the donkeys. There were no cars on the road, so my sisters and I could run ahead of my parents, shrieking as we went, feeling free and lighthearted in a way we had not been for a couple of years.