A Fort of Nine Towers (12 page)

That was the last party that Haji Noor Sher ever gave in that courtyard. A few weeks later, a rocket landed in the street in front of his shop. He had seen what had happened to my grandfather and his carpets. He was one of the last carpet dealers still in Kabul. Now he knew it was time to go. The next day, he closed his shop and shipped all of his best carpets to Delhi, where he would go to join his family in the apartment he hated.

Early the next Friday, while we were still eating our breakfast, we were told that some men had come to take the leopard to a new home. All the kids wanted to go watch, but Haji Noor Sher had already ordered his house servants to chain the courtyard gate so we would not get hurt if the leopard somehow escaped. Haji Noor Sher watched it all happen from the safety of his bedroom, which overlooked the garden from the window on one side, and the courtyard from the other.

Later he told us how the men had put a small cage on wheels in front of the leopard’s home at the bottom of the one tower that was still standing. Being a cat, the leopard had to see what this new cage on wheels was all about. He sniffed it for a minute, walked into it, sat down, and started licking himself as the door was dropped closed and he was rolled slowly down the hill and out a rarely used gate that led through the high wall to a small street that ran beside it.

Haji Noor Sher then called out to Wakeel, my other cousins, and me from his window that faced the courtyard: “Now you can go to the garden.” We ran out through the right-angled passageway in the high walls as if we, too, were being released from a cage. We jostled one another against the heavy wooden door with its clanking chain and down the hill to the leopard’s cage. It now had one of the large dogs in it. It had been his cage before the leopard came, we had been told. Maybe he was happy to be home. We looked at the dog and at each other, and were not sure why we had run so fast to see what was no longer there.

Over the next few days, Haji Noor Sher gave away all his birds to different friends, except for the pigeons, which you could not give to
anyone because they would only come back to their roost that rose at the far end of the courtyard. He made his funny noises at his peacocks one last time as they were being taken away.

As for the deer, as things worsened for us in the weeks ahead, they became food for us, and we threw their bones to the dogs in the cages.

Then the day came for Haji Noor Sher himself to leave. My father, my grandfather, and my uncles all lined up outside the courtyard gate to see him off, and to thank him for having saved us by giving us a place to stay. They all shook his hand and hugged him. All the cousins stood around, watching silently.

He asked my father to take care of the Qala-e-Noborja as he took a long look at the last remaining tower. Then he got into his car. As his driver pulled off, he waved at us kids.

His two house servants watched him being driven out the gate to the airport, and had no idea what to do next.

The Long Road Home

E
very morning before sunrise, I was awakened by the sound of water splashing in the bathroom next to the room where I slept. It was Grandfather taking ablutions before he prayed.

When the splashing stopped and I knew he had finished, I went to the bathroom and took ablutions myself. Then I went to Grandfather’s room and put my prayer rug next to his while he was still praying. Before I started my prayers, I looked up at him. A smile appeared on his face and soon transferred to mine; but he continued his prayers without looking at me, and I started mine feeling his smile all around me.

After Grandfather finished his prayers, he sat cross-legged on the prayer rug. He kept his eyes closed, his
tasbeh
prayer beads in his hands, softly reciting verses from the Holy Koran. I still remember the sweet sound of his mumbling. Whenever I think of it, it brings my grandfather back to me.

After I finished my prayers, I sat cross-legged on my prayer rug, exactly like he did, kept my eyes closed with a
tasbeh
in my hands, audibly reciting the verses of the Holy Koran that I knew by heart.

Sometimes I looked at Grandfather and wondered what he thought about when he was meditating. Twice he had gone to Mecca, and as
with all pilgrims to that holy city everyone called him “Haji,” except for his children, who called him
Agha
, Dad. We called him
Baba
, Grandfather.

After breakfast, Grandfather usually went to the large garden outside the courtyard with a book in his hand. Haji Noor Sher had a large collection of books and he was happy to have Grandfather read them. He sat under the grapevine, but he could not read like in the old days, with full concentration. After a short while, he put the book aside and started walking back and forth under the trees, making a path in the grass of one of the long terraces below the tower. He seemed to me the way the leopard had been in the cage, restless. The sight of him made me sad.

Sometimes I went to walk with him. When he saw me approaching, he would smile, but I could see that this was a forced smile. I walked with him back and forth under the trees, without uttering a word. All we could hear was the sound of the dry leaves under our feet.

Every now and again, I looked up at him and saw a deep sorrow on his face. His face was like a mirror, accurately reflecting everything he was thinking.

Sometimes he talked to me of his business, and how hard he had tried to accomplish so many things in life. Sometimes he talked with regret of things he had not achieved. Sometimes he talked of soul, or heart, or essence, or spirit. But most of the time he talked of his carpets that had been stolen, his house that lay in ruins, his apple trees and his rosebushes that had been destroyed, and his lost peace of mind.

Grandfather hated idleness. For three months now, he had been at the Qala-e-Noborja doing nothing. Finally, he could sit there no longer. His house had been his life, and he had to go see it. He asked my youngest uncle to join him.

“With all respect, no, I don’t want to go. You shouldn’t go either. The house is there, no one can take it. The looters have probably plundered everything else. They might even have taken the windows and beams and cut the trees for firewood. But the land will always stay there,” my uncle said.

“I brought you up for such a day to tell me ‘No’? Huh? Huh?” my grandfather asked, as he stared at my uncle.

“You know I have never said ‘No’ to you in my entire life, Agha. Please, at least once in your life, listen to me. Let’s not go today,” my uncle politely said.

“If you don’t want to go, just say you are a coward,” Grandfather retorted.

My uncle grinned to hide his embarrassment. “I’m not a coward, but I am afraid of being killed by a coward. Those who kill thousands of innocents to make themselves rich are cowards. If we go there, they will smell money on us, even though you have lost everything. We have a little money left, we can survive for a while. Who knows what is going to happen next? They have been fighting for months; it cannot last much longer. Let’s not risk the things that we buried there!”

I did not know what he meant. What things were buried there? But I knew I should not ask.

Grandfather turned away from my uncle. He looked at me, and for a moment, he did not say anything. Then, very coldly, he said to me, “Prepare yourself. We will leave in ten minutes.”

I looked at my father. From his eyes, I could see that he was not happy. Grandfather looked at my father. I looked at Grandfather. My father looked at me.

“Do what your grandfather says,” my father said quietly. My mother’s face went pale. But it was not her place to challenge Grandfather.

I knew from my father’s tone of voice that he was not pleased with Grandfather’s idea. But he was too respectful to say “No.”

“Are you a coward like your uncle?” Grandfather asked me.

I looked at my uncle, who was only a couple of years older than Wakeel. His face was full of hurt at having been called a coward by his father.

“I will do what my father and you say,” I replied softly. But I did not want to go.

Grandfather smiled, but sadly. “You are a good boy.”

We left home in midmorning. We got a bus that took us halfway. The bus had to stop before it reached the front line between the Panjshiris and the Hazaras. The front line moved from time to time as one side gained a temporary advantage over the other. No one ever knew for sure where it was.

We got off the bus and started walking. The road was empty. This was the same road that had been crowded with lines of refugees on the morning we had fled our home. It was the widest road in Kabul, so wide it had a park with big trees running down the middle. Before the fighting, young men met young women there to sit under the trees. Sometimes we saw them kissing and laughed at them. Wakeel called them pigeons.

Now the pavement was all broken. Everywhere there were holes where rockets had exploded, and craters made by bombs dropped from planes by some of the factions. Some of them were so deep that they had filled with groundwater from far below. All around us were pieces of twisted metal. It was so quiet, we could hear the sound of the bees humming.

As we were walking, my grandfather asked me whether I had ever been in love with someone. I was too shy to say “Yes,” so I said “No.” I desperately wanted to say, “I am in love with my classmate, Yaldda.” But I was only ten years old, and boys that age are not supposed to have girlfriends.

My grandfather looked into my eyes. His voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “The person who doesn’t have love in life has emptiness. I’m sure you are in love, but I know you don’t want to tell me.”

I had never kept anything from Grandfather. He had always advised me on everything important. Whenever I told him my secrets, I felt very light and happy.

“I love a girl in my old school,” I confided to him. “She is my age, her name is Yaldda, and she is very beautiful!”

My grandfather laughed very loudly. “A woman can keep you warm like wine, or turn cold like ice. Be patient, little man. A person without patience is like a candle without wax. Sometimes love makes you very impatient. Keep control of your feelings.”

We said nothing more for a while as I thought about what he told me. And I thought about Yaldda. I had never seen her again after the fighting started. I wondered where she was, and whether she was safe. Had her family left in time, or had they waited too long? Sometimes I wrote poems about Yaldda in my diary, where I kept all the important things that Grandfather told me.

Our steps were surprisingly loud as we walked down the middle of the road with not a single creature in sight, except for some sparrows occasionally flying past, making their
chuk-chuk
noises. The sky was completely blue. Had it not been for the destruction around us, it could have felt like we were going on a picnic.

“Were you impatient, too, to marry Grandmother?” I asked.

“I was in love with her. I was very lucky to have a wife like her, but I didn’t know until many years later that marriage has three stages,” he said, and sighed as he gazed up at the mountain with two peaks. Its bare rock rose up steeply behind the large yellow grain silo that the Russians had built.

“The first stage is that you talk, and your wife listens. The second stage is, she talks and you listen. And the third stage is, both of you talk, and your neighbors listen,” he said with a grin growing wide at the corners of his mouth until it became a big and loud laugh. “The first stage is the best,” he said. Grandfather had not told a joke in months. I laughed to hear the happiness in his voice.

But there was more to Grandfather’s story than that. His greatgrandfather, Khaja Noor Mohammad, had come from a village near Herat in western Afghanistan and had settled in the Maidan Valley about thirty miles from Kabul, where he built a large mud-brick fort with high walls, as was common all over Afghanistan. Though it was large enough to hold his extended family, it was much smaller than the Qala-e-Noborja.

From their base in Maidan, several generations of his descendants have followed the seasons with their herds. They raised sheep and camels for their wool, which they sold to carpet weavers and cloth makers.