A Fort of Nine Towers (27 page)

Now we had another ten hours of driving ahead of us. We had wanted to get to Kunduz before dark, because of the robbers. My father started driving as if he were in a race. He hit every bump of that very bumpy road with too much speed, and the car jumped off the ground, squashing us against the ceiling. In the wild ride, we forgot our thirst and hunger. As we flew along, my father kept one eye on the road, and the other on the gas gauge. We had not seen a gas pump in hours, not even a village. About an hour after leaving the old man, we saw a little boy with a few gallons of petrol standing along the road. There was no pump station in sight, just the boy. We were afraid to stop, thinking he might himself be a robber. But we had no choice.

My father told us to stay in the car with the doors and windows locked, and be ready to go in an instant if anybody else came along. Even my father did not get out of the car, he just rolled down the window and spoke to the boy. The boy charged my father twice as much as we usually paid, and he was very slow about putting the petrol in the tank. Every set of eyes in that car swept the landscape around us as he did so, looking for the first sign of trouble. But no one came to bother us, and my father gladly gave him the money.

That was the only stop we made. In several other places small kids waved at us to give them a ride to the next town. We sped past as the old man had told us to do. As we did, my sisters and I saw men come out from behind big rocks nearby with their Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders. That was how it worked in those places. If you stopped to help a little kid who looked poor and desperate with torn clothes, guys with guns would jump out from hiding places and rob you, and maybe rape the women, too.

It took us two hours longer than the old man had predicted for us to get to Kunduz. We arrived long after dark, exhausted, hungry, and very, very thirsty.

We went straight to the home of my mother’s brothers. They were extremely surprised to see us at one in the morning, but woke everyone and welcomed us to their compound. Their wives and daughters quickly set about making a meal for us, and bringing us jugs of water and pots of tea. The men and the boys showed us their houses, which were each surrounded by good-size courtyards that had doors connecting one to the other. Quickly, they arranged spaces for us to sleep, and some of the older boys carried our belongings from the car.

There were so many cousins I had never met before. They looked a lot different from my cousins on my father’s side in Kabul, whom I knew well. They had bigger eyes with darker eyebrows and crinkly hair. They were a little shorter, and had narrow shoulders.

As late as it was, my aunts quickly prepared rice with chunks of meat and carrots, and a big plate of salad and roasted aubergine with some apple juice. We ate while my cousins, uncles, and aunts watched
us. There were so many of them. They did not all fit in one room. Some of them were peeping in through the window at the back.

They were very talkative, all speaking at the same time, like sparrows. There were no rules like those my grandfather had established for us in our house. He used to say, “When someone talks, you listen until he finishes, then you talk. If someone older than you talks, you don’t talk.” But no one knew about that in Kunduz. I could not hear who was saying what. I ate and wished Grandfather were there to teach them the rules.

Some of them talked to me in Pashto. I found this very strange. My sisters and cousins and I in Kabul always spoke Dari at home, even though we are Pashtuns and can speak Pashto fluently. Sometimes when we had guests who could not speak Dari, we spoke Pashto among ourselves to put the guests at ease. But here everyone spoke Pashto. Maybe they thought I could not speak Dari, as I was a guest.

A few days later I found out that they could not speak Dari properly. When they used Dari, it was as if they were translating Pashto expressions into Dari. It sounded funny, and they had a strange accent. My sisters and I found that very entertaining. A few times we caught them laughing at our accent. But it did not take us very long to become good friends. We had discovered twenty new cousins our own ages.

We spent three weeks with them, enjoying living in a house again, though I missed our cave sometimes. We could go out walking in the street. My father finally bought me the ice cream that he had promised me in Bamyan. My cousins went to school, and we helped them do their homework and read their books. Maybe we could live here now, I thought. We will find a way to tell Grandfather and Wakeel where we are. Maybe they were in Mazar-e-Sharif now, waiting for us.

I saw how happy my mother was. With the restrictions on travel imposed by the Russians, and then dangers from the factions, she had not been home to Kunduz for many years. She spent hours every day greeting old friends and distant relatives whom she had not seen in a long time. Her brothers’ wives did not allow her to do any housework. They gave her some of their very best clothes and treated her like a queen, bringing her tea and fruit. My father had known
several of my mother’s brothers when they had been in Kabul studying or working for the government. He went to see their businesses and talked with them all night, with lots of laughing about old times.

But war never stopped chasing us. Now it came to Kunduz. Small groups started fighting to control each neighborhood, exactly as had happened in Kabul. Both day and night, we heard gunfire, especially Kalashnikovs, as well as rockets and bombs. Kunduz is a very small city; gunfire at one end is easily heard at the other. We knew about war, and we guessed that these fights between factions would soon get out of control as they had in Kabul. Then it would be hard for us to leave. We had never planned to be in Kunduz anyway; our real destination was Mazar. So we decided to leave while we could. Some of our cousins did, too, after they heard our stories of how the war had trapped us in our basement in Kabul while many horrible things happened around us.

The grown-ups knew the names of all the commanders and the factions, but to me they were all the same, and I shut them out. They were the guys who were keeping me separated from Grandfather and Wakeel. That was all I needed to know about them.

Now they were about to separate me from my new cousins as well.

One morning we all got up early to say goodbye to two of my Kunduz uncles and their wives and kids, who were leaving to go over the mountain passes to northern Pakistan. It was a difficult journey, with no certainty of what they would find when they reached Pakistan. They would drive as far as they could, but they knew that they would have to leave the road at some point and go over the mountain pass on foot. They took very little with them, mostly food. We gave them some of our warm clothes from Bamyan. They would need them, along with very good shoes.

Some of my uncles decided to stay in Kunduz, hoping for the best. Some others were planning to head to Wakhan, the little finger of Afghanistan that points east, toward China, where it is very cold in all four seasons. They had summer houses there. War rarely reached Wakhan even when there was fighting in all the rest of Afghanistan.

“Let’s go there,” I said. “We can all go together.”

My uncle was sitting on a
toshak
cushion, drinking tea. He put
down his cup, leaned forward, and gave me a gentle hug. I knew that meant “no,” but I wriggled free from him, though I was very fond of him, because I did not want to hear “no.” But we could not go to Wakhan, my mother said, because we were not used to such cold weather.

My father had been looking for smugglers from the day we had arrived in Kunduz. Perhaps, if he had had more time, he would have been able to find one. But with the fighting coming to Kunduz, the border crossing to Tajikistan was being closed more tightly than ever, and even the smugglers would have had problems getting us out. The largest bribes that the smugglers paid to the border guards would not be enough with the war raging so near.

In the end, instead of trying to go north across the mile-wide, swift-flowing Amu Darya River, which separates Afghanistan from Tajikistan, we fled west to Mazar, where my mother had a sister, and which we had been trying to reach since we had left home six months before. We had heard on the BBC that things there had settled down for the time being. We had to travel on a small road that was usually full of bandits. But even they had fled.

My father drove very fast. I held on to the padded armrest on the door. My mother held on to the little ones but did not say anything, because she, too, wanted us to finally get to Mazar.

The fighting did not get fierce in Kunduz right away, but in the end Kunduz was destroyed as thoroughly as Kabul. We lost six of our relatives before it ended.

In Mazar, my mother’s sister was very relieved to see us. My mother had sent her a letter from Kabul a week before we left, explaining that we would be coming to Mazar. Then we had been stuck in Tashkurghan and had gone to Bamyan and Kunduz. She had no idea what had happened to us. No one did. She told us that she had written a couple of letters to Kabul, but that she had no idea whether they ever got there. No one had answered her.

Like my mother, she is a very calm person. Once she got over the excitement of seeing us, she quickly found room for us. We had visited
her many times in the past and enjoyed her large house near the edge of the city, where the streets end and the open fields stretch a mile southward to a line of blue mountains that rise with no warning.

There was no sign of Wakeel. Why had he not come? I was very worried about him and Grandfather. We had had no news from anyone in Kabul in all these months of travel. I asked my aunt, hoping she had had a letter, or maybe even a phone call. But nothing.

Every day we went to the shrine of Hazrat Ali and prayed for peace in our country and to keep Mazar safe. Hazrat Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him. Some people believe that Ali is buried in Mazar. In fact, the very name of the city—Mazar-e-Sharif—means “the very important grave.” Other people say that Zoroaster, the great Aryan prophet, is buried there, too. For all these reasons, people go there to pray.

Hazrat Ali is my ancestor, so when I came to the shrine I had a special feeling of visiting an important relative, and being in a place where other relatives had done important things.

My grandfather’s grandfather, Mullah Abdul Ghafor, had come to Mazar during the holy month of Ramazan for several years, and had copied the entire Holy Koran in great swirls of calligraphic script as he sat in silence for forty days in a special building next to the shrine called the Chila Khana. His Koran is now in the National Archives in Kabul. It is one of the largest ever copied. When he was getting old, he said goodbye to his sons and walked to Mecca. As he left, he told them to celebrate his death rituals when they saw an unusual white bird at the top of the minaret of the mosque near his home.

Many years later my grandfather—Mullah Abdul Ghafor’s grandson—went to Mecca. According to people he met there, Mullah Abdul Ghafor was well remembered as a man of great humility, who for many years had been the cleaner of the area around the Holy Ka’bah, the House of God. The people in Mecca spoke highly of him, though years had passed since his death. In his honor, they treated my grandfather with great respect.

My grandfather told them about the white bird that had come one day to the top of the minaret, and mentioned the year and the season.
The people in Mecca said that that was when Mullah Abdul Ghafor had died.

I thought about my grandfather’s grandfather and the white bird, wondering how such miraculous things could happen in this same world where we had had to flee our home to survive.

The shrine became my life. As long as I was there, my parents knew that I was safe. Some days I would study its blue and yellow tiles for hours, looking for patterns. Each one did not mean much by itself. Together, they had a big meaning and looked very beautiful. During these weeks in Mazar, though, I began to feel that my life was only a set of loose tiles and nothing more, and a deep feeling of loneliness settled over me.

I had been sure that when I reached Mazar, Wakeel would be there.

When I tried to talk with my father, he did not want to talk with me. He left the house early in the morning and came back late at night, always in a bad mood. He stopped trying to teach us school lessons.

My mother was busy either doing housework for my aunt, who went to work every day, or visiting cousins and friends. She had relatives in more than one hundred houses in Mazar, and they all wanted to see her.

There was no school. It was winter, and school would not be open until the second day of spring. Even if there had been school, we would have had to spend weeks to get our records transferred from Kabul. Our schools there, though, were closed because of the fighting, and there was no one who could send us anything.

My older sister spent most of her time with two girl cousins who were a few years older than she and a couple of other girls from the neighborhood. They spent hours together, whispering. Whenever I came close to them, they stopped talking and looked at me strangely, and asked with their eyes, “Why are you here?” If I stayed even for a minute, they would start to say things like “Hey, what do you want here? This is for girls only. Go about your own business.” I tried my best not to be near her when she did not want me around, which was pretty much all the time. One day, though, I saw her in the neighbors’ house when she and the other girls were putting on makeup.
They had lots of cosmetics in front of them. One was shaping her eyebrows with a pencil, another was darkening the area under her eyes, another was putting something on her eyelashes. Each one had a different color of lipstick. I was very excited, because I knew I could get my sister in trouble. But when she came home to eat, her face was scrubbed clean.

At the shrine, I asked the mullahs many questions. They always invited me to say prayers to the throne of God Almighty and told me that prayers are the key to every earthly problem. They also said that destiny shapes human life; whatsoever is written in man’s destiny, that is what comes. Our complaints cannot change anything. We must embrace life happily with all its sorrows and joys.