Solomon Khan remained a Kuchi. He has two beautiful wives. He has three beautiful daughters from his first wife, and two handsome sons from his second wife. He still does not talk very much, but he taught his wives and kids how to read and write.
Many of my classmates, including those with whom I celebrated our graduation by punching one another, are still in touch with me. A few of them went to India for a couple of years for education. A couple of them got visas to European countries by marrying their cousins who were already there. Five of them are in Kabul, running good businesses. Three of them died in suicide bombings, two while they were walking toward their houses with bags of fruit for dinner. We carry their memories in our hearts.
One night at a party in Kabul, I heard that Zardad, the sadist, is in jail in England. He was hiding in London, but a journalist from the BBC found him, and he was arrested for crimes against humanity. A foreigner, one of the few who truly has helped Afghanistan, told me in a garden full of music being performed by masters that he had been asked to testify against Zardad. It had taken two trials to convict him. The foreigner also said that Dog is dead, executed at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Before that night, I had once tried to find out about Zardad and Dog using the Internet, but doing so made me feel violently sick. It reminded me too clearly of those days. I do not care whether they are dead or alive. If they are dead, I pray they are in the depths of hell.
For Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose rocket killed Wakeel, hell is too good a place, and eternity too short a time. He is still alive, still doing evil.
* * *
When the foreigners began to come to Kabul after the Taliban were driven out, Haji Noor Sher returned from India and reopened his carpet business at the heart of the Shahr-e-Naw shopping district. He came back to live in his rooms in the Qala-e-Noborja. No one had used them in all the years he had been away. One day he just appeared in the courtyard and yelled “Malem,” the Dari word for “teacher,” meaning my father. We had just finished lunch and my father was about to have his nap, but when we heard that familiar voice, we all quickly ran outside and were overjoyed to see him.
For the next couple of years he lived at Noborja, while his family remained in India. Sometimes he went to visit them, but he was happiest in Kabul among his carpets and his friends. He and my father spent hours together gathering and selling carpets again, and just enjoying each other’s company after so many years apart.
He began to show signs of health problems, though he never said what they were. He went to India a couple of times to see doctors, and seemed to be sicker when he came back to Kabul. Then a few weeks after he had gone there again, we got a call telling us that he had died. A part of ourselves died with him. His kindness and generosity had made it possible for our whole family to survive the fighting.
* * *
Recently, I went to visit that Hazara baker, to thank him for saving me from the Talib rapist.
Three times I went to the baker’s shop. Each time I could not bring myself to mention these things. There was no one else in the shop. He was always just sitting behind the counter, looking at the pedestrians and traffic on the road.
Somehow, for no particular reason, I felt weak, though I wanted very much to talk to him and tell him who I was. Instead, each time I got a plastic bag, went through trays of cookies, and filled it. Then I gave him the bag to weigh it. He did not look at me while he was putting it on the scale, even though I kept staring at his face, wanting to say something, but nothing came out. Then I would pay and walk out.
He was a little heavier than all those years ago, but otherwise he looked much the same. His shop was the same, too, except that the back room where he had hidden me was now filled by a large, modern oven. His son had become a tall man, with broad shoulders. He operated the oven with several other workers.
The fourth time I went, I said, “I’m not here to buy anything.” I ran out of breath, and my heart was beating very fast. He could tell I was nervous about something.
“Slow down, young man,” the baker said. He had a calm voice, very different from that afternoon, years before, but still deep. “What do you want, then?”
“I’m here to thank you,” I said, still with no breath left, as if I had run for miles.
“Thank you to you!” he said with a smile. “I’m glad you like our cakes and cookies.”
“Yes, they are delicious, but I want to thank you for saving my life several years ago,” I said.
Suddenly, the smile disappeared from his round, Asiatic face, and he looked into my eyes with no expression. He narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I was arrested just across the road there by a Talib. To escape from them, I shouted ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb under the Taliban car.’ People ran everywhere to—”
He interrupted me: “And you came here, stood behind this window, and you said, ‘There is no bomb. I created this chaos, because a Talib arrested me for no good reason.’ And I pushed you out, because I was afraid for myself.” He stopped for a moment. “Then I saw a look of despair in your eyes…” His voice trailed off.
“You pulled me back inside, and hid me behind the flour bags—”
He interrupted me again: “And you kept sneezing…”
The baker came out from behind his counter and gave me a long and big hug. Now we were the same height. His chest was soft and fleshy, and he smelled of bread and ovens. We held each other very tightly.
“I have thought about you many, many times. I didn’t know what happened to you. You never came back,” the baker said.
“I was very scared,” I said.
“After that night when I dropped you off in front of your house, several months later I was arrested three times for no reason. But you know they hated us. What wild animals they were! I was a good prey for them. The bastards got all my money. The third time I had nothing left to give them. They beat me like a dusting machine beats a carpet,” he said.
He had a broad smile on his face, as if he were telling a funny joke. That is what I love the most about my countrymen. He should have been scarred for life after experiencing so many horrible things, but he was talking about his past as if it were funny.
“Are you still living in that old fort?” he asked.
“We lived there for sixteen years, but not anymore,” I said. “After the Taliban were driven out of Kabul, one of the widows of the owner, Haji Noor Sher, came back from India and wanted to rent the old fort to the foreigners to earn big money. She asked us to leave. We did not mind. We wanted to have a home of our own without a lot of other families sharing our courtyard. But we had no home to go to. The Taliban had forced us to sell our own house in Kot-e-Sangi to them, to give it to them, really. We could not afford to buy any property on the flat land. A squatter who had lived for a long time up on the Koh-e-Aliabad—what we used to call Sniper Mountain—across from Kabul University sold my father a small plot at a good price. We have built a house there. I hope you will come and meet my family.”
“I shall,” he said.
I wrote my address on a piece of paper. He wrote his address and gave it to me. It was lunchtime, but he could not serve me anything because it was Ramazan. He made me promise to visit him in Eid days, when we celebrated the end of our month of fasting with three days of visits to the homes of all our relatives and friends. We talked about other things. He was a great talker and a good storyteller, sophisticated and full of funny jokes.
He was not just a baker, I discovered. He had graduated from the Literature Faculty of Kabul University and had taught at Kabul University for two years. But he did not earn enough money there to support his big family. He stopped teaching and took over his family’s baking business. He built up the business and now has three shops. He has three sons and two daughters. All of them are married and have their own kids, but they all live with him in one big courtyard, the way we did with Grandfather.
“Do you still have to be home on time for dinner, otherwise you
r wife will be worried?” I asked him.
“Oh, of course! She is the boss after all!” he said with a huge smile.
* * *
My older sister accomplished her dream: she finished her education and became an architect and an engineer. Then she got married, and has a sweet son, who was given the name I had chosen: Suleiman. It was a name I always liked. Suleiman was an important man in many folktales as well as in the Holy Koran and the Bible. More practically, it is a name that people rarely mispronounce. And when I was little, I often dreamed of Suleiman’s magic carpet, on which I could fly to interesting places, and cut the most beautiful kites along the way.
Now my older sister can tease her husband instead of me. Her husband is a good man. He teases her right back. She complains about that. I smile and tell her, “What goes around comes around.”
These days, she has become my best friend, even though sometimes she still says that when I eat I make noises like a cow. Maybe I do. But I do not think I do. These words bring memories of our time in the garden of Hamza’s father, and the stealing of the pomegranates.
One night about six months after their wedding, her husband asked her, “Tell me a few things about your brothers and sisters. I don’t know much about them.” He had been living in other countries for several years before they were married.
She told him about our childhood at Grandfather’s house in Kot-e-Sangi, and how everything changed when the civil war started, how we took shelter at the Qala-e-Noborja as refugees, then tried so hard to get away from the madness that was destroying our country. Later he told me that as she started telling him how hard I had tried to help my father support us, her voice began to shake. She burst out sobbing and could not stop, though her husband held her in his arms.
Around midnight, I heard knocking on our door and I opened the window to see who had come at that late hour. I was very surprised to see my older sister and her husband. I went down the long flight of stairs to the door and opened it for them. Before I had a chance to greet them, my sister hugged me and kissed me many times, her face soaked with tears.
“What is wrong?” I asked with alarm.
“Nothing,” her husband said. “She got talking about you, and suddenly said she needed to see you.”
I led them upstairs. The rest of the family were asleep, except for my mother. She was surprised to see my sister, who by then had calmed down a little. Her husband found a blanket and a toshak and went to sleep, but my sister, my mother, and I stayed awake for hours while the muted TV flickered at us, having an unexpected tea party and talking about things of the past. We almost never do that. The wounds from those days are deep and can easily be opened. It is better to leave them in the past.
* * *
The crying machine is a big man now, handsomer than I am, taller than I am, stronger than I am. He is full of muscles and can beat me when we arm wrestle. He has not cried since he was a baby. In fact, he is like my father, and can always tell good jokes. But I like to remember his old name. It reminds me of the time when we were with the Kuchis. Now he studies law, and hopes to bring order to our country.
My four younger sisters are all being educated, even though some people in Afghanistan still say that educating girls is a bad thing. They have high ambitions. One of them studies management, another agriculture. Another wants to be a writer and reads any book she can find. The youngest says she will be a nurse. Afghanistan will benefit from having good managers, agriculturists who can plant trees, writers to record the joys and sorrows of our people, and nurses to cure our wounded hearts. The older two have married very good men.
My mother had never really quit her job at the bank. She just stopped going during the civil war when the fighting made it too dangerous. And then she was prevented from working by the Taliban. But after they were driven out, she went one day to see what was going on at the bank, and then the next day she started back at her old job. No one had been hired to fill it, because no one had been there to do any hiring. After a few years, she finally left the bank and took a job with the Afghanistan Disaster Management Authority, where she feels she can be more useful. She works very hard to get government assistance quickly to communities that suffer earthquakes or blizzards or other calamities.
My father is still teaching physics at Habibia High School. He is the only teacher from before the war who was not killed or did not flee the country. All the younger teachers respect him like they do their own fathers. The school has a gym, but no equipment. He is trying to find money to buy what is needed and to start training again. He is still in great shape, and very strong, except for the arthritis that is creeping into his knees.
After so many years of trying, my father did finally manage to leave Afghanistan, though only briefly. He achieved his lifelong ambition to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Now we are proud to call him “Haji.”
My cousin Jerk can still be a jerk sometimes, but despite that he has done very well for himself. He has always been kind to his siblings and parents, and has willingly shouldered his family’s burdens, as I tried to do with mine.
After not having seen him for a couple of years, I went to his house one day to deliver my second sister’s wedding invitation card. He had put on a little weight, and had a few white hairs on his temples, which made him look distinguished. I pointed those out to him, and said, “You are getting old.” Suddenly I felt I was being a jerk, since he is the same age as I am.
He ran his right hand over his temple and said, “Well, that’s the story of life. As Grandfather said, ‘We are raw, we get cooked, and finally burned.’ I’m in the process of being cooked.”
“Will you stay in this country until you get burned?” I asked, trying to be funny.
“Yes, I will stay in this country and will do my best to fix things,” he said, sounding serious. “Things that my father and his generation could not fix. I believe that there is a future for this country, but only if we do something about it now. If we don’t do it, then who will?
“Somebody has to have the guts to step in. We know that no country is here to help us. They are here to help themselves. We have to tell the world that Afghanistan has a new owner, and that owner is our generation.”
I gave him a big hug for the first time in many years—a lifetime—because I was so moved by what he said. I admire him for his determination.
* * *
A few years before Wakeel was killed, we received a letter from Russia. Who knows how it found us. But some friend of my grandfather’s brought it to him. It was on a scrap of a Russian newspaper, stating, “I’m still alive. I can’t write more. We’re living in a dark hole. I’ll come home one day.” The handwriting belonged to Wakeel’s father who had mysteriously disappeared all those years before. But we have never heard any more from him.
If he goes to look for us at Grandfather’s house, he will not find us, or even the house. Most of it is completely destroyed. The part where my father and mother had our rooms is only a mound of dirt. Every one of Grandfather’s beloved McIntosh apple trees is gone. There is no sign that once we had a good life there. Perhaps someday somebody will build a new house in Grandfather’s garden. Perhaps they will find our gold.
* * *
There is one person I have never seen again, but I am determined to find her, because she has given my life its purpose. I now have my own carpet company called Kabul Carpets & Kilims. It is still small, but it will grow. Grandfather used to say, “Small streams make an ocean.”
A few years ago, when I had a chance to go to Holland, I visited a Dutch woman who had once come to Kabul and has become my good friend. In her house in Haarlem, I saw one of my carpets that I had made in my factory in the worst days of the Taliban.
There is no way to describe the feelings I had when I saw that carpet again. It reminded me of my good memories, my hardships, my eagerness for a future, my factory, and eating lunch with my weavers around one cloth with everyone laughing, even though we knew terrible thi
ngs would happen if the Taliban caught us. Now all of that history, my history, is being preserved in that faraway country.
None of this could have happened without my teacher.
I think she might be in Tajikistan. Maybe in a city. Maybe in a village. I have not dreamed about her in a long time. There is too much noise in my life now. But soon the time is coming when I shall set out to look for her.
I am sure she will know when I am coming. And, with her help and Allah’s, I shall find her.
I have long carried this load of griefs in the cage of my heart.
Now I have given them to you. I hope you are strong enough to hold them.
Qais Akbar Omar
Author’s Note
A Fort of Nine Towers chronicles the past three tumultuous decades in Afghanistan. For part of that time, I was very young. Many things happened to my family and me, and for the first years of the fighting I cannot say exactly when they occurred—only that they did. I have included specific dates when I can be sure of them, and done my best to reconstruct them when I cannot.
Readers from outside Afghanistan may wonder why I have rarely included the names of my family in this account of our lives together. Afghans, however, will understand.
While this book focuses on my family’s experience, every Afghan family has stories similar to ours. They all need to be told. They need to be heard. They must not happen again.
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to Afghanistan and its people, to the spirit of Grandfather, who still leads me in good and bad times like a guardian angel, to Wakeel, who visits me every three or four years in my dreams, to my parents, who mean everything in the world to me, to my sisters and brother, who will make their own families soon in Afghanistan or in other countries, to my uncles and aunts and cousins with whom I shared so much and whom I deeply love.
A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Page 40
