A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

* * *

  In my family, now only I could go to school to study, and my sisters had to stay at home. The women teachers in my school also were told to stay at home. I missed my literature teacher’s lessons, but I never stopped looking for hidden meanings in my books.

  The school year ended for the winter a few weeks after the Taliban arrived. When we got the results sheet for our exams, I had the highest grade for Dari literature. I wanted to tell my teacher, but I did not know where to find her. I never saw her again.

  * * *

  When the schools reopened for the new school year on the second day of spring, it was time for me to start high school. I had wanted to go to the school where my father taught, Habibia. It was the best school in Afghanistan. But it was about five miles from the Qala-e-Noborja, and my parents were afraid to have me travel so far with so much uncertainty.

  Instead, I went to a school nearby. It was named for a king who was dead. Our king who was alive was in Italy and had not come back to save us. We had stopped waiting for him.

  For all my life, except when we were fleeing or the fighting was too heavy, I had seen my father go to his school. I had watched him prepare for his classes the night before. I had seen him thumb through his well-worn books with the eagerness of somebody discovering something new. I had heard his enthusiasm when he spoke about his students. I thought high school must be an important and exciting place. But the Taliban took from me all the joy I had expected to feel.

  The boys were told to wear shalwar kamiz, a long one according to Taliban standards—tunic below the knees, trousers above the ankle, with a black turban and slippers instead of proper shoes. We were prohibited from wearing shoes in school, because we were told that shoes get stinky easily. The Taliban did not like to wash.

  Most of the teachers had taught at that school for years wearing suits and ties, but now they all wore turbans and shalwar kamiz, except for the academic dean, who wore a suit and a necktie every day for nearly a year before he, too, found a shalwar kamiz. A Talib was appointed as the principal of the school and told the teachers to stress religion in all our subjects. We were taught that the history of humankind began with religion, and we were born with religion, and we had to die with religion. Religion was involved in the sciences, history, philosophy, psychology, arts, everything. If we know our religion, the Taliban principal said, we will know ourselves.

  At the beginning, it was interesting to learn about Islam, because in the time of the Communists, we had no religious studies at all. All we were taught was how to respect Communism. They told us that it was our duty to invite others to be Communist to enlarge the wheel of Communism, because only Communism could help mankind.

  My formal schooling seemed to have had two subjects only: Communism and Islam. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that I was happiest at school when I was wrestling with my classmates in the classroom, breaking their noses in boxing competitions or flexing our arm muscles for one another to show our strength. We talked a lot about sex and played card games with cards that had sex pictures on them, which we passed around in school.

  My head was always shaved now; I looked like a bald man. I could no longer wear my choice of clothes. I could not watch movies. I could not fly kites. In short, I could no longer be myself.

  We heard that some Taliban were now living in what was left of our old house. Our former neighbor told us. He had gone to visit his own house nearby. He was asked by the Taliban in our place who the owner of the house was. He told them that we were not in Afghanistan. The Taliban instructed him to inform them if he heard that we had come back to Kabul. They told him that they would get money from us and split it with him. The next day he came to the Qala-e-Noborja and told us all this.

  With the Taliban living there, there was even less reason for anybody to talk about the gold in Grandfather’s garden.

  We heard rumors that if the Taliban knew that you had a lot of money, they would put you in prison until you gave it all to them. So, in my family everyone became silent about the gold, and we were told never to talk about it to anyone.

  On the streets I noticed that people were now wearing dirty clothes. Even people whom I knew had money wore clothes that were dirty, trying to look poor. One of our neighbors was imprisoned. A few months later we heard that his brother had come from Pakistan and given the Taliban a lot of money, and then they both left quickly for Iran.

  Sometimes we heard talk about a rich Arab named bin Laden. We were not sure who he was. One of our neighbors said he was living nearby in the big house that had been owned by the man everyone called the Pimp of the King. We went by that place many times, but we never saw him. And we were careful not to look directly. There were always many Taliban at the gate. They used the place for big meetings, and their black Land Cruisers were always going in and out.

  * * *

  Grandfather came from Makroyan twice in a month and stayed with us for a night or two. Now that I was in high school, he talked to me like I was a grown-up man. He talked about things that made me feel shy at first. Sometimes he would ask me questions about these strange feelings I had when I thought about pretty girls. Sometimes he would ask me philosophical questions about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Sometimes we would talk about Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Communism.

  I think he wanted to see how much I grasped from life, how much I had learned from school, from the books he had given me to read, and from the things he had told me.

  Since he knew I was very interested in Socrates and liked to read Plato, he asked me questions exactly the way Socrates asked them of Callicles, Chaerephon, Gorgias, and Polus when they met in Callicles’s home. It was very much as if I had found myself with Socrates, whom I revere, and he was present in the body of Grandfather, whom I loved more than anyone in the world. It was a pleasure beyond description, to be with two such people at the same time.

  These conversations lasted for hours; we hardly noticed how time passed.

  I did not feel that I had to go out or entertain myself when he was with us. But when he was not there, I felt imprisoned sitting at home, with little to distract me but reading or doing push-ups. And any time I did go out, it was uncomfortably quiet. The streets should have been filled with kids playing, and vendors pushing carts, and donkeys. Instead, all I saw were Taliban, everywhere. They always acted so strangely.

  People looked nervous all the time, too. They were not afraid of rockets anymore. Now we had peace in Kabul, and we did not see blood and corpses and body parts on the streets anymore. But it was an unhappy peace, a frightened peace. We did not know what was going to happen next.

  We waited.

  18

  The Prison

  In the second year of the Taliban, I got fed up with their rules, and I began breaking a few of them: growing my hair out, sometimes not wearing my hat or turban, and dressing in jeans and T-shirt—but only in our neighborhood. I did not go beyond half a kilometer from our house.

  One day before going to school, I bathed and did not have enough time to wait until my hair got dry. I slung my unwound turban on my shoulder, took my books, and walked toward school, letting the sun dry my hair as I went. The weather was balmy, and it felt good to be without a turban for once.

  All of a sudden, a black Land Cruiser filled with Taliban popped up from nowhere and stopped in front of me. A black pickup truck with more Taliban followed. One of the Talibs stepped out of the car and started beating me on my back with a heavy whip. I did not know what my crime was, and he did not give me a chance to ask him. Everything happened very fast.

  After beating me for almost five minutes, he pushed me toward their vehicles. I asked them what this was all about. But none of them answered or even talked to me. They kept whipping me.

  I stopped asking questions and punched one of them in his face. He fell on the ground like something heavy that someone had dropped. All those hours in the gym practicing boxing had taught me some things.

  Now there were
ten of them, jumping out of the Land Cruiser and the truck, running toward me. They began beating me again with three heavy whips, and kicking me as I lay coiled on the ground. Every time a whip or a foot landed on my head, I saw stars in the daylight. I forgot about being so strong and looking like the statue of Apollo.

  Finally, they carried me to their pickup and dropped me into the back. As they handcuffed me to the side rail, I lost consciousness. Sometime later, I found myself in a barber shop, sitting on a chair in front of a mirror. I hardly recognized myself. My face was covered with wounds and marked with dried blood. My hands and feet were still handcuffed, and all of my body ached like I had a severe fever.

  The barber shaved my hair, then the Taliban drove me to the Shahr-e-Naw prison in central Kabul, right across from Zajanton hospital, where I had been born. They still had not told me what I had done, and they did not let me contact my family.

  In the prison, they put me in a dark room, alone. For the first few days, usually early in the morning, someone came and tied my hands to chains that were hanging from the ceiling and beat me with a whip. Each minute passed like hours. Whenever I demanded to know why I was in prison, he remained silent. When I insisted on an answer, he said that he was told to say nothing.

  The beatings left me with a dislocated shoulder and lots of whip welts all over my body, especially my back and chest. For those first few days the pain was intense, and the heat was stifling. There were no doctors to treat my shoulder. Flies swarmed around the cuts on my face, hands, and feet and drove me crazy; after a while I did not have the energy to brush them off.

  They slid me a piece of hard bread and a glass of water under the door. A bucket in the corner of the room was for me to use as a toilet. It took all my strength to crawl to it.

  From time to time, I could hear jeeps coming and going in the yard outside. Each time, the guards made noise unlocking the padlock on the slatted gate to the street. Every time the gate swung open, I squinted out the tiny window to see the Talib commander lounging in the driver’s seat of one of the jeeps, and leering at all the little windows like mine where about twenty other prisoners were being held.

  Later, when he came to my cell, he thwacked his whip against his boot tops while he accused me of blasphemy against Islam and beating a Student of God. He was the only to wear boots.

  When I asked him what my blasphemy was, he beat me. After that, I decided that silence was my only course. It reminded me of my Kuchi cousins, who had taught me how to use silence to step back from the world around me and let the answers to my problems form in my mind.

  The only company I had was the Holy Koran, which they left for me and the other prisoners on a shelf in each cell. At the mosque, the other boys and I had already read it several times in Arabic. We had been taught how to make the sounds of the Arabic words, because we used their alphabet for our language, Dari. But we had never been taught what the words meant, except for sometimes when my grandfather translated some of the verses for me. So, we had no way of understanding what we were reading, even though we held competitions to see who could finish memorizing his verses first.

  * * *

  This copy of the Holy Koran had a translation in Dari under each line. It was like I was reading the Koran for the first time. I could finally understand what these Arabic words that I had recited for years actually meant. I discovered what a treasure trove of tales the Koran is, filled with good advice, a real guidebook to the human experience.

  At night in my cell, after I had put down the Holy Koran, I played those tales and their wisdom over and over in my head like movies. And I thought for hours about their meaning and what lessons lay in them for my own life.

  For example, Sura 29 begins: “Do people think that when they say: ‘We are believers,’ they will be left alone and not be tested? We tested those who have gone before them. God surely knows which of them are truthful, and He surely knows which are liars. Or do the evildoers think they will escape Our reach? How poorly they judge.”

  I read this in less than a minute, but I thought about it for hours, searching for the deeper meanings, in the same way that our Dari language and literature teacher had taught us to look for what we could not see even in books that were not the Holy Koran.

  I thought about the Taliban. They said they were believers, but a lot of what they were doing was not in the Holy Koran. The Koran says that “God surely knows which of them are truthful, and He surely knows which are liars.” Did the Taliban and the other factions and all the other evildoers think that they would escape God’s reach? “How poorly they judge.”

  But what about me? I began to think about the evil things I had done, like when I had broken our neighbor’s window and then denied it, or had rung people’s doorbells and run away, or made fun of the weak boys in our neighborhood, or called people names behind their backs, or beaten up guys in school for no reason but to show that I could. These are all haram in Islam, forbidden. But I had done them all. Before I could think about what the Taliban were doing, I felt I must first repent for all these things I had done. I promised to myself never to do them again.

  I read the whole of the Holy Koran as fast as I could. Then, after a couple of days, I decided to read this Dari translation again, to understand it better, and to savor the stories. Reading also kept my mind from the physical pain I was experiencing.

  But the lessons I was drawing from the Holy Koran slowly worked through my mind and made the emotional pain inside me even worse.

  I lay on the cement floor, staring at the ceiling with the Holy Koran open next to me. Tears rolled out of my eyes as I recalled one wrong thing after another that I had done. I kept thinking about my parents, sisters, and brother, and how I had been so mischievous toward my parents, and how I had bossed my sisters and made them do things for me, because I was a boy, such as ordering them to polish my shoes or iron my clothes, then criticizing them for not doing it the way I wanted, or complaining when the food they cooked was a little salty or oily. I had used my position for the wrong reason. And I easily could have done those things for myself.

  I thought about my mother and how worried she would be, not knowing where I was. I began to think about how much pain I had caused her. Carrying me for nine months. Feeding me, washing me, clothing me, taking care of me day and night. And what did I give back to her? Always pain and worries. The same with my father. He had worked day and night to make life possible for us, sometimes under the worst conditions, and what did I do for him besides give him anxiety? What was he feeling now? And as the older brother to my sisters, what had I done for them? Slapped them when my parents were not home, knowing they had no one to whom to complain? Called them names? Why?

  For hours I would ask myself what made life worth living. Is there only pain that you give to others, or pain they give to you? Why do we misuse our power? I in my way, and the Taliban in their ways. What good does this bring to humanity? I’m no better than the Taliban, I thought. Maybe I deserve this treatment. But what about my parents? How can I send them a message that I am in the right place, being punished for all the wrong things I have done, and they must not worry?

  “Maybe I should kill myself,” I thought several times, especially when the ache in my shoulder felt like a piece of hot steel being pushed into my bone. But I did not want to give my parents even more pain. They would blame themselves. I could not do it, though there were many times in that stinking cell when I had stopped caring about this world, this life, or my feelings, desires, and wishes.

  After a week, the Taliban took me out of that small, dark room and put me in a larger one with other prisoners. We had to pray five times a day and study religious subjects in the prison mosque. After prayers, we had to carry heavy stones from one room to the next, and then carry them back.

  During the night, we did not have enough blankets to keep ourselves warm. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, shivering, and did push-ups. I remembered that my father had done the sam
e thing in that tunnel four years before. Some people ran around the room to keep the blood in their veins circulating. We could not exercise for more than about ten minutes at a time, though, because we did not have enough energy.

  I did push-ups with the right arm only, which is very painful to do. For a few seconds it made the pain in my left shoulder go away. I learned then how to cheat my brain; a temporary pain in one part of the body makes you forget the permanent pain in another part of your body, at least for a few moments. I felt I was triumphing over the Taliban by overcoming my pain. I could do four push-ups at the most. Sometimes I laughed, though only for a second as sweat clustered over my forehead. Laughter in the depth of pain is an uplifting feeling, though a short-lived one. I suddenly understood what Socrates meant by “Pleasure can also come from pain.” Suddenly, something I had never understood made sense. I felt as if my head were illuminated with millions of lightbulbs.

  * * *

  Over the next ten days, I lost twenty pounds. I could hardly move my body or talk.

  One day, after I had been in the prison for nearly two weeks, I saw a piece of broken mirror on the ground, about the size of a hand.When I looked in it, I saw a face that was not mine. I laughed at myself, but that exposed my teeth. Even in the times when we had had very little to eat, I had never seen myself so toothy and skinny. I still had a few muscles left on my arms and chest, but only very tight ones.

  At the end of two weeks two of the jailers asked me some basic questions about Islam. I answered them all. They took me into a room that was cleaner than the rest and asked me some more simple questions about Islam, like how to take ablutions, whose answers I had known since I was a child. Then they told me to recite the verses from the Holy Koran that are used every time we pray. I kept waiting for something more difficult.

  The older jailer, who was in his forties, kept nodding his head as I responded. His sandy-colored beard moved up and down in time to the rhythm of the prayers that I was reciting. For every answer I gave, he smiled and said “Very good, son!” in a calm voice, as he rubbed his left hand on the large belly beneath his gray shalwar kamiz.