I had not forgotten what had happened the last time we had gone there. I knew it would be dangerous. But I was willing to take any chance that could end the pretending and the waiting. Maybe there was still some gold in the garden. Maybe we would find it. Maybe we could pay smugglers and actually escape this time.
We went to the crossroads at the Polytechnic. The flashing yellow traffic light was still over the main crossroad. It had not been shot out yet. We took that as a good sign.
The neighborhood was not at all as I remembered, even from our previous visit. Roofs had fallen in; wild house cats were sneering from broken windows. Ration cans and Russian helmets were scattered everywhere.
When we got to our house, my father pushed open the splintered remains of the thick wooden door. Inside, we walked across the garden to our rooms, staying on the stone path, just to be safe. Once when we had been in Mazar and we were speaking about our house, I had asked my father why somebody would put mines in our garden. He said that maybe they had, but maybe they had not.
“Maybe the man who told my father about those mines was only trying to keep you out of there,” my father said. “Did you ever actually see the garden that day?”
“No,” I replied.
There were several large holes in a few places that probably had been made by exploding rockets. But most of the garden looked as if it had not been disturbed. I tried to remember where the cucumber plants had been. But after two years, I could not be sure.
All of a sudden I remembered the folk tale of how Mullah Nasruddin had dug a hole on top of the mountain and had hidden his money there. He came back two years later and started digging along the bottom of the mountain, looking for it. After a while, when he could not find anything there, he started to weep. Somebody who was passing by asked, “Why are you crying, Mullah?”
“Two years ago I dug a hole here and hid my money, and now it is not here anymore,” Mullah Nasruddin said.
“Are you sure you hid it there?” the man asked.
“Yes, I am very sure, because two years ago the cloud was right here in the sky, and it gave me shade while I was digging. And now you see the cloud is here today, too, but not my money,” Mullah Nasruddin said.
The room where I used to sleep was roofless. Dust covered everything. I went inside to look for my bed. The room was empty. It was like no one had ever lived there.
Suddenly, from outside I heard a heavy thud. I looked out and saw five guys in our courtyard, jumping up on the roof of Grandfather’s room across the garden from our rooms. They had bundles of thick rope in their hands. They were surprised to see me. One of them wore dusty and torn clothes. He had narrow blue eyes, a brown bushy beard, broad shoulders, and short legs. My father was in another room. He came out and stood next to me. The man came closer and asked my father, “Who are you?”
“I am the owner of this house,” my father said sharply.
“But it is ours now,” the guy said with a bitter smile. “It is the wheel of life. One day you have everything, and one day I have everything. You enjoyed being in these rooms, and now we are taking the beams to make rooms of our own.” He placed an empty clay pot he was holding on the ground. Maybe he had been planning to steal it.
* * *
Two of the men had climbed up a bamboo ladder to the roof while we were talking. They tied their ropes into the end of one of the roof beams that lay across the tops of the house’s brick walls. One of the others tied the other end of the ropes to a truck that was parked on the road outside. We heard the truck start, and its wheels spin. Black smoke rose over the walls as one of the roof beams was pulled free from its spot and went crashing over the wall into the street.
My father could no longer hold himself back. He was furious. “You bastards! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the guys on the roof, who were tying more ropes to other beams.
“Hey, big man, mind your own business,” the short guy said.
“Fuck you! It is my fucking business. This is my house,” my father shouted. It was the first time I heard words like those from my father.
The short guy climbed down the bamboo ladder. He came over to my father, walking like a lion preparing for a fight. His head hardly reached my father’s chest, but he looked very brave, very sure of himself. He tugged hard on my father’s beard. With his other hand he tried to grab my father’s hair. But my father stopped him with one push and a punch in the nose. The guy’s nose broke, and blood spattered all over his clothes.
The two on the roof, who had by then climbed down the bamboo ladder, saw his face was covered with blood. One of them jumped at my father from the back and tried to choke him with a rope.
My father reached over his head and twisted the guy’s neck. It made a cracking sound like when you break a dry stick. The guy shrieked. He let go of my father and collapsed onto the ground.
Another guy lunged from the front with a knife. But my father punched him full in the face before the blade could get near. The guy dropped his knife. It fell on the ground. He held his face within his two hands as crimson dripped through the cracks of his fingers.
Two others were holding shovels and looked ready to attack my father. But they looked at their friends and hesitated. One was very pale.
My father ran toward them. They dropped their shovels and sped toward the courtyard wall, climbed it like monkeys, and jumped outside into the street.
My father climbed the wall. “You fucking cowards! Run, you sons of bitches,” he shouted.
Two of those in the courtyard were lying on the ground, holding their noses. By now blood was all over their clothes. The other one was still clutching his neck as he walked toward the courtyard gate, groaning.
My father kicked the two guys on the ground. “Leave my house, or I will break every bone you have,” my father shouted.
He stood there, breathing heavily, looking around. He asked me whether I was okay.
“You were great!” I said admiringly.
“Oh, come on, I’ve done sixteen years of boxing. This kind of fighting is like sipping tea,” he said with a satisfied smile.
He picked up the intruders’ shovels and hid them under some leaves.
“We might need these when we come back,” he said.
* * *
We went all over our courtyard and checked each room. There was nothing that we could take home with us. Everything had been stolen. There were holes in the walls and floor of each room. The thieves probably thought we had buried something beneath them.
My father and I walked all around. He saw that the earth had not been disturbed where the cucumbers had grown. I thought he would start digging, but he turned and said, “We better go home now before they come back with some more guys.” I had been thinking the same. “I will come here tomorrow with my brothers.”
My father stepped outside the courtyard with me behind him. Two feet in front of us a strange spray of sparks rose up from the sidewalk accompanied a popping sound. I instantly knew it was bullets. My father ran to the other side of the street and yelled at me, “Move it!” As we ran, a line of bullets followed us, hitting the pavement inches from our feet. We crouched along a shabby wall opposite our courtyard. The shooting stopped.
By now, we had learned that ceasefires did not mean too much. The snipers on the mountain were Panjshiris. But the flat land around our old neighborhood was controlled by the Hazaras. A ceasefire meant that they were supposed to stop launching the rockets at each other that had come from the Americans to be used by the Mujahedin against the Russians. But the Russians were defeated and long gone. However, that did not stop the snipers from shooting people for fun. Sometimes, even in the middle of a ceasefire, there would be a small fight with rockets fired between two factions, and then everything would go quiet again quickly.
My heart was racing, and my clothes clung to my back with cold sweat. I had no time to think about how I had allowed myself, once again, to be drawn into the very heart of the madness
of this war. My eyes were fixed on the next building that would provide some cover. We ran to it, then around a corner wall. Under an overhanging roof, we found four middle-aged men sheltering there who had also come to visit their houses. They were trembling like leaves.
We sat there for a few minutes and had no idea where to go. A guy with a rifle crept slowly toward us. He was a sniper, too, trying to shoot the sniper on the mountain.
He pointed his rifle upward and took aim. High on the mountain, we saw a flash of light, and a second later a bullet hit the leg of our sniper. His clothes erupted in bursts of bright red, and his face showed a terrible pain as he cried out.
We all ran from that hiding place to the opposite building, and again a line of bullets rained down next to our feet. I could feel chips of the pavement hitting my legs, but no bullets hit us. We sat there pressed tight against the wall and stared at our sniper. There was nothing we could do to help him. He stood up and ran toward us to take shelter. When he got to the middle of the road, dragging his leg, three bullets hit him in his back. His body hurtled forward, jerking with each hit. His face showed an agony beyond describing.
He turned around, faced the mountain, and fired three times, with spurts of blood jerking out of the back of his hand. Crimson bursts spattered across his broad chest as more bullets hit him.
A friend of his appeared from another corner of the road, but the sniper on the mountain was very quick and hit the sniper’s friend, too. The force of the bullets knocked him backward. He died right away.
Our sniper had collapsed into a sitting position. He was still in the middle of the road. He gazed at his feet, saw his torn flesh, blinked with a glazed and mystified look. Then he raised his rifle toward the mountain.
“You bastard! You must die, too,” he shouted, and it echoed. We looked where he was pointing. We saw a flash of light like before. Maybe the sniper on the mountain had already squeezed the trigger. The blast thudded into the throat of our sniper. He grunted loudly. His eyes rolled into his head. He never had a chance to pull his trigger. His head slumped onto his arm.
My father stood up, and a bullet hit the wall next to his head. He quickly scrunched down.
“Probably we should just wait here a while,” my father proposed. “Maybe they will get bored and forget about us.” The other men agreed. We sat quietly without saying anything and let an hour pass.
We were beginning to think about moving again when a large dog ambled toward us. He went to lift his leg against the wall on the other side of the street. As he did, a sniper sprayed him with bullets. The dog was flung into the air, howling. The sniper had let us know he had not forgotten us.
We sat there until night fell.
“We have to creep all the way out of this area,” my father finally said.
The other four nodded their heads as a sign of agreement, and then slowly we inched ourselves along the wall all the way to the end of that street and the next one until we got to a roundabout. There we saw trucks with black smoke boiling up from under them, and people running up and down the road.
Hesitantly, we stood up and walked normally. Here on the main road, with so many people, the snipers would probably not shoot at us. This was how war in Kabul was fought. Nothing made sense.
We said goodbye, and we all went our separate ways. Nobody mentioned our sniper who had been killed. But we all knew he had saved us.
* * *
My father and I sat on that roundabout and waited for a taxi. I stared at the park across the road where I used to race bicycles with my cousins and play hide-and-seek with my classmates after school. Now the park was dry and dirty. Bullet casings were everywhere. Our neighborhood is cursed, I thought, as a taxi slowed to a halt in front of us.
We climbed into the backseat and headed toward Kart-e-Parwan. It took almost an hour to get there. Neither of us said anything all the way home. And I did not mind.
14
Wakeel
My father opened the door of our room. My mother had just finished her evening prayers. She folded the prayer rug and put it on a shelf. She turned around to go out and prepare dinner. Then she saw us standing on the threshold of the door. She looked like she had cried a lot in the hours since she had expected us to reach home.
My father hugged her. “It’s okay, it is okay. We’re fine. You see, nothing happened to us. We are the cats with seven lives,” my father whispered as he rubbed her back. My mother opened her arms for me, and the three of us stood clinging to one another as if the world and whatever it might bring would never be allowed to separate us.
I needed to bathe, but I wanted to find Wakeel first. My mother said that he had waited for us, but when we did not show up and it was getting dark, he went back to Makroyan to be with our grandfather.
Ever since his father had disappeared, Wakeel always felt very lonely if Grandfather or I was not nearby. He always had friends. Everyone enjoyed being with him. But he needed to know that either Grandfather or I was somewhere close.
“He said he wanted to get a real bath in a tub,” my mother explained. There were no bathtubs at Noborja. We washed by pouring small amounts of water over us from the buckets I carried from the ancient water channel known as the karuz at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes we heated it first in one of Haji Noor Sher’s large Russian samovars. “He said he will come back tomorrow.”
I wanted to go to Makroyan, too, for a real bath in a tub, and even more to talk to Wakeel, to tell him what I had seen. I felt like I was carrying a terrible weight in my soul. I knew he could help take it from me. He would listen very carefully to everything I told him and ask questions that only good listeners ask.
But I was too exhausted to go anywhere. I would wait and see him the next day. I knew his habits, though, and as I lay half dozing on my bed I could picture in my mind everything he was doing.
* * *
After his bath, he put on the blue shalwar kamiz that he recently had had made. He had outgrown all his clothes in recent months and was getting taller. He stood before the hall mirror after and combed his hair carefully. He carried his other freshly washed clothes to the balcony and hung them on the line. From there he could see some young guys he knew sitting around a fire they had made in the small park between the buildings. They each had a glass of tea in their hands and were talking and laughing.
Wakeel hollered at his friends, and they invited him to come down for tea. He hesitated for a second, trying to decide whether to join them. He turned on the switch to see whether there was electricity to watch TV, but there was not.
He said his evening prayers, and then stood before the hall mirror again and looked at himself. He liked his hairstyle very much. He had found a new barber in Makroyan who could cut hair very stylishly. He was almost twenty now and had begun to think about such things.
He went down the stairs and met his friends where they were sitting around their bonfire. He shook hands with all of them and made a few jokes as he always did. They asked him to sit, but he kept standing.
“Did you come from a city of standing people?” one of his friends asked him.
“No, from the city of people who just took a bath and don’t want their clothes to get smoky,” Wakeel joked back.
Everybody laughed.
“Do you want tea?” another friend asked.
“No, thanks!” Wakeel said, smiling. He was already thinking that he should go back into the apartment. The autumn breezes felt cooler down here than they had on the balcony, and he had recovered from the flu only a few days earlier.
He gazed at the clear sky where the half-moon had started to shine, and daylight was fading to dusk. The sparrows’ chuk-chuk calls were the only sound. They were flying from one branch to the next, from one tree to another, to find their nests and prepare for the night. Wakeel looked around him and took a deep, happy breath.
He was the first to hear the whine of the rocket.
“Get down! Everybody! Down on the ground! Cover your
heads. Cover up!” His shout was lost in the explosion of a rocket that landed a few feet behind him. A moment later, another one hit nearby, and then a third.
Then it was so quiet, it was as if the whole world had stopped. The air was laced with the smell of burning cordite, and a cloud of dust rose swiftly to hang above the place where the rockets had landed.
Afterward his friends told us how Wakeel had been the only one standing when the rockets hit. In warning his friends, he did not cover himself in the few seconds that he had. Now he wavered and could not stand anymore. His slender body dropped to the ground. His eyes were wide open, still staring at the sky, at the half-moon. His friends rushed toward him.
Wakeel lay on his side. Springs of crimson spread over his freshly ironed blue clothes. Rocket shrapnel had made dozens of holes in his back. Labored sounds escaped his heaving chest. His mouth quivered. One of his friends sat on the ground and cradled Wakeel’s head on his lap and begged him to talk, even as he cried out for help.
Wakeel whispered something and went silent. He had seen so much death. He understood what was happening. Perhaps he had a last wish that he needed to tell someone. Every breath was a fight for him now.
My youngest uncle, who was barely older than Wakeel, appeared from somewhere and rushed toward him, his nephew, his best friend. My uncle sank to the ground and knelt over Wakeel’s bloodied body. Wakeel was still gazing at the half-moon. My uncle lifted him onto his shoulder and ran to the road. For the longest time, he could not find a taxi, and even when he did, he knew Wakeel had already said his goodbyes to this world.
Still, he took him to a hospital. He had lost Wakeel’s father, his own brother, fifteen years before. He could not accept that he was losing his last connection with his beloved oldest brother.
“He is dead,” the doctor said.
* * *
It was around eight o’clock. We already had had our dinner. I was ready to sleep, hoping that image of the sniper’s body would not stay lodged in my mind and keep me awake. My father was watching the news on television, which reported that rockets had landed in Makroyan, despite the ceasefire. They were Gulbuddin’s rockets. Ceasefires meant nothing to him.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 25
