A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story

by Qais Akbar Omar

  * * *

  It was two hundred dollars. I thought he was making fun of me again. I gave him back his money and almost said a bad word to match the hard look in my eyes.

  He asked me how much more I wanted. I told him to stop mocking me, but he told me that he had found an Afghan who was selling carpets in Germany and who was very excited about my design. He had asked for one hundred more like it. Could I make them? He extended his hand with the money again, but this time he gave me three hundred. I took it and counted it as if I were concerned that it was all there. But, really, all I wanted to do was to touch it and to feel it moving through my fingers. I felt him watching me, and suddenly I realized I was being very rude. I quickly invited him to come into our house, and I asked my mother to please make us some tea.

  Inside, I was thanking God and my carpet teacher. I so much wanted her to be there to hear what the shopkeeper had just said. My eyes filled for a moment, and I told the voice inside me that it seemed what she had said those years ago was really beginning to happen.

  When he noticed my wet eyes, the shopkeeper asked me whether anything was wrong. I wiped them with the back of my sleeve and said I would make more carpets if he gave me money to buy more wool and looms. He gave me a thousand dollars. I had never once touched an American dollar. The edge of the paper was so stiff and so sharp, so different from our small and tired afghanis. I looked at it and told him, “I could kill sparrows with this sharp edge.” In those days, you could buy a good car for a thousand dollars. You could even buy a visa to Italy for that. Here I was holding it in my hand. But I did not want to go to Italy by myself. I wanted all my family to go with me. So, I spent every penny of it on wool and looms and started making more carpets.

  * * *

  I went to the carpenter and gave him his money. He grabbed the money from my hand without saying a word and looked at me sideways. I asked him whether he could make me a few more looms.

  “I will never make a loom for you in my life ever again,” he spat with disgust.

  “What if I give you the money for them in advance?”

  “You don’t have money even to buy yourself a naan,” he said derisively. “How can you give me the money for a few looms in advance?”

  I gave him the money for five looms, and told him that I would collect the looms in a week. He looked at me, a little startled, and even though he had my money in his hand, he remained a little unconvinced. I walked out of his shop without listening to what he had to say.

  “All right! Don’t worry! They will be ready next week! Thank you!” he shouted behind me.

  I lifted up my right hand without turning around and made the sign of bye-bye. Money was making me arrogant.

  I went to the wool shop and apologized for keeping him waiting for so long for his money. He said not to worry, that all carpet factories were like that, and he was used to it. He did not know that I had lied to him about my factory. But my lie had turned to truth. I bought a couple of hundred kilos of wool.

  “I can provide you any kind of wool you need,” he said. “I will deliver it to your factory.”

  My factory. I liked the sound of that. I was beginning to believe it myself. I had not really thought about it yet, but if I was going to be able to make all the carpets that the man in Germany wanted, I would need a factory.

  “Okay,” I said as I left. “Thank you.” My factory, I thought.

  That night my father came home very late as always. Everybody was asleep, but I was waiting for him.

  “It is midnight. Go to bed,” he said. Then he asked me for a glass of water.

  When he finished drinking it, I gave him the three hundred dollars. He looked at the money and asked me whether they were forgeries, or some kind of joke.

  “No. They are the result of my seven months’ hard work,” I said very proudly.

  He studied them all very carefully, then smiled in a way he had not done for months and said, “Wonderful! Now you are making more money than I do.” Then he opened his arms and gave me a big, long hug.

  I told him about the shopkeeper, about the thousand dollars, the five looms, the several hundred kilos of wool, and my plans for opening a carpet factory. He looked at me in amazement. But I knew he was pleased.

  * * *

  I taught two of my younger sisters and my brother how to make knots. My brother was still very young, but he had become a very helpful member of our family. He and my sisters and I took turns working on our one loom.

  My younger sisters had been spending time with our neighbor’s girls in the garden every afternoon. Since they were banned by the Taliban from going to school, all they did was chat or read Iranian novels. When my sisters failed to appear in the garden after lunch for several days, the other girls became worried. At first, my sisters were very secretive about making carpets. They thought they were doing something special, and they did not want anyone to know. But they could not keep secrets from their friends. After about a week, they finally told the other girls about it.

  The neighbor’s girls came to me and asked me to hire them for no salary. They just wanted to learn how to make carpets. We were Pashtuns. They were Hazaras. Weaving carpets was something that Turkmen did. But we all worked at it together.

  * * *

  Within a few days, most of the other girls in our neighborhood were coming to our house to ask me to teach them how to make carpets. Somehow they had heard about what we were doing. They had all been at home doing nothing and were very bored.

  My first reaction was to be worried. If the girls had heard about what I was doing, maybe the Taliban would as well. But I needed weavers, and all the girls were willing to learn.

  * * *

  In a couple of months, my one loom had turned into a carpet factory. My father and I had rebuilt the walls of the storeroom where his carpets had been destroyed by the rocket. We made all the bricks ourselves, filling more than a hundred molds every day with mud that had been mixed with straw, then letting them dry enough to empty the molds and fill them again. We did not have the money to buy cooked bricks, and besides, the whole of the Qala-e-Noborja had been built this way from sun-dried mud bricks. For privacy I blocked the large windows facing the street with bricks, but kept a little space at the top to let some air come through.

  I had twenty-five looms and about forty girls, including my sisters, making carpets. As soon as I could get new looms made, new girls would start. From early in the morning until four o’clock, all those girls tied knots except for one hour when they stopped to have lunch.

  From four o’clock until six o’clock, we had classes. My father taught them basic mathematics, my mother showed them how to do accounting, and my older sister taught Dari grammar and literature. Though she had no interest in making carpets and never learned how, my older sister was a very good teacher, as she had been when we had taught our Kuchi cousins. I was very happy that she was teaching my weavers, though I never told her that. Even though we were now at peace, I never knew when, like with the rest of Afghanistan, the fighting would start again.

  Hanging over us every minute was the fear that the Taliban might find out what we were doing. It was against the Taliban laws for the girls to be working outside their homes, or to be getting an education. Had the Taliban known, terrible things would have happened to all of us. In the end, we probably would have been killed, but that would have been easier for us than what they would do to us first. Even though it was dangerous, my parents and older sister stood with me at every step.

  My rule was that the girls should be present at the factory by eight o’clock. But they were not allowed to enter through the same door at one time. The spies of the Taliban would have noticed that. Instead, they had to come a few at a time from six o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock.

  Two of them came in the main gate of the fort. Three of them came in from another door at the bottom of the garden. Four of them came in from a different door at the far corner of the garden that w
as hidden from the street. The neighbor’s girls climbed over the walls between their house and our courtyard on a ladder. At eight o’clock, all the girls were present at the factory. The ones who came earlier did their homework until starting time.

  * * *

  Once my factory started to be successful, so many girls were coming every morning to work for me that Jerk decided to become friendly. He begged me to accept him as one of my students and teach him how to make carpets. I agreed, though a little bit reluctantly. But I did not have any friends, and in those times when he chose to be intelligent, I enjoyed his company. He had a good sense of humor. He was still a jerk sometimes. But that was not his fault; he was just being himself.

  He was a fast learner. He learned everything about making a carpet in two months. All his life he had been very competitive with me, but somehow he never learned how to get ahead. He always remained one step behind. Maybe he had been smart all along, though, letting me take the risk first, then doing it better by imitating and improving on what I did.

  Soon he bought his own looms and wool and started his own factory on the other side of the courtyard in the rooms his family used. He taught all his brothers how to make carpets and organized a factory like mine. He began hiring all the boys of our neighborhood, paying them more than I paid the girls, feeding them better food and making lots of jokes with them.

  Soon I started hiring boys, too, especially some younger ones whose big sisters would have been looking after them, except they were now working for me. But after a while, some of my boy weavers joined his factory for better food, more wages, and funnier jokes. Then all of them went.

  Jerk started making fun of me to my face, pointing out that all my boy weavers had come to work for him.

  I soon found some older ones who could work faster, but I wanted back some of the first crew, because I had trained them well. For a while, I did not know what to do. Then I had an idea. With the help of a friend who was deeply committed to education, I rented a building with five rooms near the old fort. We bought some chairs and blackboards. We hired a few Dari and English teachers. At the end of each day, I sent all my boy weavers, many of whom had never once been to school, to a course for two hours to learn to read and write Dari and English.

  Soon, all the rest of the boy weavers came back to me. Before long, most of Jerk’s own weavers wanted to work for me as well. After a month, there was no room on any of my looms and I had to buy more looms so I could hire them.

  Jerk was really annoyed. When he saw me, he spat on the ground with disgust. But he could not afford to be disgusted forever. A few months later, he came to me and begged for his weavers, because he could not manage to run a factory with the few who remained.

  I told him to stop being a jerk, and he promised he would. But a jerk is a jerk. Even if he lives on the moon, he will still be a jerk.

  I sent his weavers back, though they did not want to work for him. But I had promised. I told the boys to come to the course afterward for free lessons, as if they were still working for me. And they did.

  * * *

  A year after I had started the factory, I graduated the first group of girls. They started making their own carpets in their own homes, hiring their relatives and neighbors. Some of them asked me for looms and wool. I had to lend them some since they could not afford to buy them. A few months later, though, after they had sold the carpets they had made, they returned my looms and paid me for the wool. Some of them made carpets for me in their own houses. I paid them for their work. I started paying regular salaries to all the students in my factory. Sometimes I gave them bonuses for very good work.

  Soon my neighborhood turned into a carpet-making area. We were making the best carpets in Kabul. Some of the girls had great ideas about colors and were bringing in new patterns. I gave them complete freedom to make what they wanted.

  * * *

  After I had shown that I could make and sell carpets, my father started taking me seriously. He listened to what I had to say. When he saw that we might have some money again, he revived the idea of leaving Afghanistan. I told him that I would make enough money to take everybody out. I told him that we were Kuchis and wanderers by nature, that I would take care of the money, and that he should look for smugglers. He was doubtful at first, but after long discussions in which I wrote out all the numbers on paper of my costs, my production, and my profits, he finally agreed. He was a physics teacher, and he understood numbers.

  He started listening to the BBC World Service again to find out what was happening in different parts of Afghanistan, so he could decide which route to take to get us out of the country safely. We made lots of plans. Then we would go over our plans and see what was missing.

  The final plan was to go to Iran first, then to Turkey and, eventually, to Italy. Once we were there, we would try to get one of my uncles and his family out. We would work hard and make more money, and then invite another uncle. Slowly, slowly we would get everybody out. None of us had ever been to Italy, and had only a vague idea of where it was. But we were determined to go there.

  * * *

  While my father was looking for smugglers, I went back to university. Though the university taught me only what I had already learned in the Taliban’s prison, nevertheless it would provide me with a degree after graduation. That could help me get a job somewhere, and the Taliban’s prison could not.

  With the money that came from carpets I had sold, I bought a new bicycle. I could even have afforded a motorbike or a car, but I did not want to flash my money around. Most of my classmates were poor, and I wanted to look like I was the same as they.

  “When there is danger, conform to the crowd,” Grandfather used to tell me. So I conformed. Grandfather was gone, but I carried his good words and advice in my heart.

  For the next two years, I studied hard and worked hard. The credits I needed for my degree slowly accumulated, as did the profits from my carpet factory. The strange peace brought by the Taliban made it safe for foreign buyers to return to Kabul, and my sales increased. A woman might be beaten for leaving her home alone, but in other ways the Taliban regime provided a sense of security. Many things worked. The banks. The mail delivery. Offices. Safe transportation all over the country. My father began going out to the villages again to look for older rugs, and to find customers for them among the foreign rug buyers who had started to come back to the Taliban’s strange but stable Kabul.

  We never lost our desire to leave, though. My mother quietly but insistently reminded us to focus all our energies on getting out. Ironically, the Taliban were making it possible for us to do so.

  Then, as so often happens with Afghanistan, events on the other side of the world changed everything for us.

  25

  A Change in the Air

  In the summer of 2001, we started hearing from the BBC World Service that Ahmad Shah Masoud was planning to challenge the Taliban. Masoud was a very intelligent man who had attacked the Russians relentlessly for many years and had prevented them from ever capturing the Panjshir Valley, which controlled the main pass across the Hindu Kush mountains.

  After the Russians were driven out, Masoud had served as defense minister of Afghanistan at a time when the fighting between many factions to control Kabul caused thousands of deaths and terrible destruction. He was the leader of one of those factions who were driven out of power by the Taliban.

  Everyone was terrified that if he tried to retake Kabul, the mindless war would start all over again, and all our gains of the past few years of stability under the Taliban would be lost. The Taliban were cruel and ignorant, but they had brought order to Afghanistan. We lived in constant fear that the brutal fighting among the factions would start up again. Even the Taliban’s strangest laws were easier to survive than the chaos of the commanders.

  Masoud had been born in the Panjshir Valley, an hour’s drive north of Kabul. Neither the Russians nor the Taliban had been able to capture him. Now he was serving as the
military leader of the Panjshiris who bitterly opposed the Taliban. If he attacked Kabul, all the roads would be closed, and we would not be able to get out. Everyone would be hiding in their houses. The streets would fill with bodies, and the gutters would fill with innocent blood. Again.

  Only a few weeks before, my father had finally found a smuggler who seemed to be the right one for us. He came to our house several times. We all met him and felt we could trust him. He seemed to be an honest man, not one of those smugglers who take your money and leave you in the middle of nowhere. We had met him through my uncle’s friend, whom we had known for many years and trusted.

  The plan was that after we arrived in Turkey, my uncle would give his friend in Kabul the money he wanted for getting us there. Then he would hook us up with another smuggler who would take us to Italy.

  We were all very relieved that soon we would be making a peaceful life in another country, the rest of our relatives following soon after. We never thought for one minute about the dangers and the hardships that we would face. Nothing frightened us except staying in Afghanistan, despite the calm brought by the Taliban.

  * * *

  The smuggler gave my father a date when we would leave. We had about six weeks to prepare. My mother had already started packing. We could not take much, so she was very carefully choosing the things we could carry. My father was sorting out our belongings. He made several piles. Each pile was intended for a different uncle.

  My sisters were going through their clothes, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. They all knew that they could get better clothes in any of those countries where we were planning to go, but they were very sentimental and kept some of their favorites from childhood even though they did not fit. The whole house was a mess, with piles of clothes everywhere in all the rooms.

  I was going through all my looms upstairs in my factory. Some of my looms had carpets on them that could be finished before the date we were scheduled to leave. Some of them had carpets that were half-made, and others that were only just started. I put the best weavers to work on finishing the ones that were nearly done and placed one of my better students in charge of the rest of my factory. It was her responsibility to finish all the carpets after we left. She would then contact my uncle, who would take them to my buyer on Chicken Street. These carpets were part of the money we would be paying the smugglers once we arrived in Italy.