A Fort of Nine Towers (16 page)

Every day my father and uncles went out to look for smugglers to get us across the border to one of the nearby Central Asian countries. Most of the smugglers in those days were taking Afghans to Iran and Turkey. Those borders were easier to cross, but the smugglers demanded a lot of money because the trip was long and dangerous. We simply could not afford to go with them.

One night my father came home very happy. He made a few jokes as he took off his jacket. A few minutes later we were all sitting around the tablecloth. When my cousins and I started throwing bones at one another, my father joined us, throwing bones from the upper end. We all looked at him, wondering what was going on. He made a few more jokes that made everybody laugh. It was the first time in months that I was seeing everybody laughing.

After dinner we had tea, and my father announced that he had found a smuggler to take us all out of Afghanistan to Russia and, eventually, Germany. He was very expensive, and we did not have enough money to give him. But the smuggler was willing to wait. He knew my father had been a famous boxer and wanted to help him.

Later, there was quiet talk among the grown-ups about “the garden.” My mother frowned and flatly stated, “No. You are not allowed to go there.” And then they went back to speaking quietly again.

A month passed. My father tried to call Haji Noor Sher in India several times to ask him for a loan of some money to pay the smugglers, but the Afghan phone system had been completely destroyed.

Then we heard from the BBC World Service that the opposing factions who were battling for control of Kabul had agreed to a ceasefire for a week.

That night my father announced that he was going to our house the next day. Grandfather tried to stop him, but my father was the most
stubborn of his sons. Once he said he would do something, no one could stop him from doing it. The next morning, he told me to get ready to go with him.

“No way. You have no idea what I saw there the last time, and I don’t want to see it ever again,” I said as stubbornly as I could. A look of pain crossed Grandfather’s face as I said that. He studied his hands.

“You will come with me,” my father said firmly. “I expect you to obey me.”

In the end, I went. I would soon be eleven years old and felt nearly like a man. A Pashtun son obeys his father, no matter what the son’s age. His voice softened a little, and he explained that he thought he would attract less attention if he had me with him than if he were on his own.

We took a bus from Kart-e-Parwan as far as the Polytechnic, where the Panjshiri control stopped. We got out and walked along the wide, empty avenue that led to our side of town. Even though there was a ceasefire, the Panjshiri soldiers were searching people who were coming toward them from the far side of the front line. I was wearing my jeans and a white shirt with a blue sweater on top. My father had a white
shalwar kamiz
. He was carrying a cloth sack with a shovel in it. He did not explain why.

I walked next to my father, both of us looking around and not saying anything. The leaves on the trees in the park that runs up the middle of the road had gone yellow, like the big yellow silo we were passing that the Russians had built. A wind moved a cloud of dust from one place to another place. There was no one else besides us, except for fat dogs running up and down.

We turned into the narrow streets that led to our house. We had been walking for a half hour by then. Silence hung over the neighborhood, except when a dog howled. As always at that time of year in Kabul, the sky was clear and beginning to have the glow that comes with autumn.

Finally, the high yellow wall of our house was in view. All the
windows were broken. The walls had many holes from bullets that had not been there when I had come with Grandfather two months before. Some of the curtains were still in the windows, but they were dirty, and some had been shredded by gunfire. The heavy wooden door that led inside was splintered. It looked like it had been used as a target. My father pushed it gently, as if he were trying not to make it hurt any more than it already did. It swung smoothly on its strong hinges.

As we stepped into our courtyard, we heard a gunshot at the end of the street. We looked around. Two guys were coming from one end of our street, and four more from the other. One of them pointed a gun at us as he walked.

“Again!” I thought. I wanted to run into our garden, but I froze instead. My father tried to pretend he knew them. They said nothing when my father told them about the ceasefire. One of them walked up to us and handcuffed us without telling us why.

“Gentlemen, do you think that we have committed a crime?” my father asked politely. They did not answer. Instead, they kicked him in his back.

The handcuff rings were too big for my thin wrists. They slid down over my hands. I moved my hands in and out of them several times, but I never let the guys with the guns see that. In fact, I was holding the chains in my hand so they would not fall off.

They marched us all the way back to the silo. My father and I were in front. Our captors were spread out behind. Like the guys who had threatened Grandfather and me before, they were Hazaras, but not the same ones. I was looking around to see whether I could find my father’s student. The Hazaras continued to control that side of Kabul. But he was not there.

These guys were wearing Western-style clothes. They had boots that were laced tightly up over their ankles. One with big shoulders wore a red headband showing that he was willing to be a martyr. Their hair was nicely combed. They were clean. If there had been no war, they would have been running shops or doing metalwork, for which Hazaras are famous. These guys did not look like bad people. They seemed like those who had been trained to do bad things.

When we arrived at the courtyard of the high, yellow Russian grain silo, they made us crouch on our knees in front of a hole in the ground with steep stairs going down almost like a ladder. The guy with the red bandanna unlocked my father’s handcuffs. I slipped mine off and handed them to him. He looked at me holding out the handcuffs to him and laughed. Then he kicked my father down the muddy stairs into the hole, and then me. I rolled down the stairs and dropped onto my father’s chest. My father was breathing heavily. He had a few cuts on his face, but they were not deep wounds. His clothes were streaked with dirt.

From where we had fallen, we saw that we were at the mouth of a tunnel. We heard footsteps coming toward us from somewhere inside. In a moment a man stood in front of us with a lamp in his hand. I was trying to stop the bleeding on my father’s head with a piece of the toilet paper that my mother had taught us always to carry when we left the house.

“Get up! Follow me,” the man said.

I helped my father to stand, then we followed. It was very dark. My father had to walk hunched over because the ceiling was so low. We could barely see our steps. We walked for several minutes. With each step, the air got heavier and damper.

When we got to the end of the tunnel, we saw in the dim light a few men and women sitting along its wall. The man told my father and me to sit next to them. Then he knotted our hands and feet to the others with rope, like slaves. When any one of us moved, the rest of us were forced to move, too. The guy with the lamp who had brought us there sat on a chair in front of us, pointing a gun at us, his finger on the trigger.

A few minutes later a couple of other ragged-looking Hazaras with guns and grenades attached to military belts came to inspect us. They were different from the well-dressed guys who had captured us. They counted us. We were eighteen. There were five women among us. One of them was pregnant, and about twenty-five years old. The rest of the women were middle-aged.

The guards talked among themselves, put a lantern on the ground in front of us, then left.

None of the captives said anything. Some were staring at their feet, some at the tunnel wall. We were all deep in our thoughts about how to get out. The faces of the women were filled with resentment, the men’s with anger. It was a moment of heavy silence. Then all of a sudden the pregnant woman began screaming. She had her hands on her stomach and was shouting for help, wailing, “My dear mother, come and help me!” And she kept repeating the name Ahmad.

I asked my father, “What is happening to her?”

“A labor contraction,” he said. I had no idea what a labor contraction was.

We were all staring at her, as she was howling in agony, grunting, and occasionally yelling high, piercing shrieks that were made louder by the echoing walls of the tunnel.

One of the women sawed through another woman’s bindings with a piece of stone, and she in turn untied the other women. The four of them quickly made a circle around the pregnant woman. Then they asked the men to help them. Two of the women started untying our hands and feet. One of the women said to the men, “We need some hot water. She is going to give birth to her child now.”

My father was freed first since he was on the end of the line, then he untied me. He patted my head and said, “I’m going to ask one of those guards to let that woman go to the hospital. Stay here and don’t move until I come back.” Then, bent over like a cripple, he disappeared down the long, narrow tunnel.

Ten long minutes later my father returned, followed by the commander, who had his gun at the back of his head. My father’s hands were tied up with a rope behind his back again. The guy pushed my father hard on his chest against the wall and said, “You don’t move from there, or I’ll shoot you in your head, understood?”

My father nodded.

He pressed the button of his walkie-talkie and said, “Hey guys, come here, we have a movie without a ticket.”

Minutes later, five other guys rushed up the tunnel toward us like wild dogs. They grabbed from behind the four women who were trying to help and dragged them away from the pregnant woman.

By now her cotton
shalwar
trousers were off. She was screaming
for help. One of the women said, “For God’s sake, she needs to be in a hospital now. She needs a doctor.”

“I’m a doctor. Don’t you see my Kalashnikov?” One of the men laughed as he held up his battered weapon that had probably passed through a dozen arms dealers before it reached him. “I use this to do my operations.” He was about twenty-five years old, and as thin as a stick. His gun was hanging from his right shoulder, and its weight made his shoulder droop. The rest of them laughed loudly.

They were all standing around her and one of them invited me to watch. My father looked at me fiercely and whispered, “Don’t go.”

“No thanks, I’m fine here,” I said.

“It is an order! I said ‘Come,’ otherwise I’ll shoot you,” he shouted.

I looked at my father again, and he nodded at me to go. I stood next to those guys and closed my eyes.

The guy next to me slapped me hard on my head and said, “Open your eyes and watch.”

When I did, I saw that the woman had a kindly, beautiful face that was twisted by her pain. Her nostrils flared, and her voice shook as she screamed for help. She lay down on her back. Blood was coming from between her legs.

She kept taking deep breaths. Every time she breathed in, her whole body shook, and her face got redder. I knew that I should do something to help her, but I did not know what.

She kept screaming for almost an hour until finally the baby came out, and she went numb. One of the women jumped from where the guards had dragged her, grabbed the baby, and held him upside down. The baby screamed, and the woman told the new mother, “It is a boy.”

The guys with guns cheered and said, “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” as if he were their nephew. Then one of them said, “Let’s go, the movie is finished.” They all left.

The other women made a circle again around the new mother and did what they could to help her. The men, sitting shoulder to shoulder, were deeply embarrassed.

The young mother woke up after half an hour. When she opened her eyes she started saying “Ahmad! Ahmad!” again.

We did not know who Ahmad was. We all looked at one another to find whether there was an Ahmad among us. But there was no Ahmad there. A woman who had torn her scarf in two, and wrapped the baby in half of it and tied the other half around the young mother’s head so she would not feel ashamed at being uncovered, asked her gently, “Who is Ahmad?”

“Ahmad is my husband. Who are you? Why am I here? Why is it so dark here?” She sounded confused, as if she did not remember what had happened to her. She asked all those questions in one breath.

The men and women all looked at one another and did not know what to say.

She repeated, “Why am I here? Where is my husband? Who tied up my head with this cloth? Oh, I’m feeling dizzy. What is wrong? Why is everyone staring at me?”

“Calm down, calm down, sister! You just gave birth to this child. He is a boy. We are here because we are in the captivity of those warlords, and we don’t know what is going to happen to us next. Don’t you remember anything?”

The new mother touched her stomach, then looked up at the woman next to her, not really understanding what she had just heard. She grabbed her child from the woman and started kissing his bloody face. Then she looked around her once again and asked, “Did I give birth in the presence of all of you in here?” She was looking at everybody’s eyes, one by one, to hear an answer. Then she fainted. The woman next to her caught the baby just before he hit the ground. He cried from the shock.

The men and women looked wearily at one another. There was no water to give her.

The woman who had torn her scarf left us and disappeared up the dark space of the tunnel. She came back in ten minutes with a bucket. She sprinkled some water on the young mother’s face and gently tapped at her cheeks. Slowly, the mother regained consciousness and drank some water from the woman’s hand.

We all drank from that bucket, too. We had not eaten lunch, and a minute later our stomachs began making noises.