A Fort of Nine Towers (35 page)

N
ow we began the time of pretending. The signs of war were all around us, but we pretended that we did not see them. All but one of my uncles and their families had moved to different parts of the city, but we pretended that we would not be apart for long. We missed sitting around one tablecloth, but we pretended that eating by ourselves was the same as eating all together.

Once or twice everyone came back to the Qala-e-Noborja on a Friday. The grown-ups sat and talked inside, while my cousins and I played in the garden as before, or flew kites. We pretended that we were still living in one courtyard like in the old days. But the grown-ups did not make jokes as they always had. And they never talked about rebuilding Grandfather’s house.

When they all left at dusk, we pretended that we would see each other again the next day. Instead, we met after a month or two, because as the weeks passed and the ceasefires came and went, it was still not safe to move around the city.

The war started again in full force five months after we had arrived back in Kabul, even though the leaders of all the factions had gone to Mecca and had sworn that they would never fight again. We pretended that their broken oaths were normal, though every Afghan
knows that to break an oath is a serious offense, especially one made in Mecca in the House of God.

The war between the oath breakers locked us all in one room for days and weeks. Sometimes we could not even go to the kitchen across the courtyard, afraid that a sniper might hit us, or a rocket might land as we ran to get some rice, which was often the only food we had left as the days passed and our meat and vegetables were all eaten. We slept night after night with empty stomachs, but we pretended we were practicing for Ramazan.

Once, after several days of eating nothing, I had no choice but to go to the kitchen to get flour so my mother could at least cook us some bread on the woodstove we used for heating the room where we spent our days and nights. My father took me aside and apologized with tears in his eyes for asking me to go, but he explained that if he were killed, there was no one to look out for the rest of the family. I understood. But it took me hours to gather the courage to run the twenty steps there. I ran in zigzags to the kitchen, pretending I was playing hide-and-seek with the snipers on the mountain. They often shot anything they saw that moved. It was their game. But they did not see me. I won the game that day.

Rockets fell by the hundreds. First they made a whistling noise in the air, and then a huge blast that shook the earth when they landed. Bits of rocket and anything they hit rained all around. We pretended that it was fun. We made a whistling noise along with the rockets when we heard them; sometimes we ran out of breath before they landed, and sometimes we did not. When they struck, we made an explosion noise with our mouths and shook our bodies, and pretended we were the earth. Some nights it was hard to sleep because so many rockets were exploding over the city. We pretended it was fireworks on holidays like Great Eid, which honors Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael, or Naw Ruz, our new year on the first day of spring.

Sitting every day in one room nearly drove me and the others crazy, but we pretended it would end soon. For days and weeks we did not see the sky, so we pretended that our ceiling was our sky. We read the same books over and over, until we could almost recite them. Sometimes when the stress became too much, I went to another room
where I had hung my punching bag from the ceiling. I punched that bag for hours until sweat was running all over me. I pretended that I was getting myself prepared for a match.

A lot of people did go crazy. They walked out of their houses and were hunted down by snipers, who shot them just for the joy of shooting.

As one strange event followed another, we understood—even if we did not say it—that we were living in the time of Shaitan, the devil. Pretending that we were leading normal lives was the only thing that allowed us to survive.

I did not know how to start this new life. Every day I woke up and breathed in and out, and waited for the times to change. I learned that waiting is a skill that must be mastered.

I told myself that my past was finished, and that I had to do something new now. But every day in the cage of my heart, I felt the weight of the memories of the time before.

Many times, I thought about the mother of my carpet teacher, who had told me many old stories that always included a wise lesson. I thought about the bright sky, and snow around us as she spoke in her quiet, mysterious voice. Her face was always close to mine, her wide eyes gazing into mine. Sometimes it felt like she was pouring strength into my heart. She sang rather than spoke. The longer the story went on, the more musical she became. It was an inexpressible joy to listen to her.

I had never known my grandmother. She had died before I was a year old. Sometimes when I was with my teacher’s mother, I wished she could be married to my grandfather. When I was with her, it was like she was holding me when I was falling backward.

Grandfather came back to visit and spent several days with us. I would sit next to him while he was reading. It was not important to me that he did not say anything. I was just happy to be there, and, though I was now getting too old for it, I liked to put my head on his lap, to look up and watch him eat an apple and listen to the crunch as
he bit it. Sometimes, he would read aloud a poem by Rumi or Hafiz and he would ask me what it meant. I would try very hard to say something wise, to please him. He would smile and tell me, “You learned a lot on your travels.”

I told him about our time with the Kuchis. He loved to hear how they ate and made jokes in front of the bonfire until late at night. He asked so many questions about the way they made music, danced, slaughtered their animals, bargained with the people in the towns where they passed and extended their hospitality. As I told him, I relived it all for myself.

He told me that his wife, my grandmother, would always have a strange feeling when she saw a Kuchi caravan passing through Kabul. A part of her wanted to run out of the house when she saw a line of camels plodding through the streets and follow along with everybody else.

One day when my grandfather was reading his favorite book,
Afghanistan in the Path of History
by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar, my father came in. He had a tray with tea, but only two cups. When he saw me, he told me to go out, but my grandfather put his arm around my shoulder.

My father said, “At least go get a cup for yourself.”

When I came back, my father was talking about some man in Hayratan, a town that was on the border with the Soviet Union, which we always just called Russia, about an hour’s drive from Mazar-e-Sharif. I listened, though I did not understand what he was talking about at first. Slowly, however, I understood that all those days in Mazar when he had left the house so early and had come home so tired, he had been going back and forth to Hayratan, trying to arrange to have our family smuggled across the border.

Suddenly, I felt stupid for having been so unhappy with my father in those days. I had not known what he was trying to do.

He had been doing the same thing when we were in Kunduz. He had gone north to the border many times but had never been successful. Being smuggled is expensive. We had had enough money when the fighting had first started. But as time passed, we had had to use most of it just to live on. Now there was very little left.

I looked at my father as he was telling these things to his father, and I felt a kind of respect for him in a way that I never had before. I had blamed him for not having enough money to get us out of the country, for not taking us someplace where nobody could tell us what to do or how to be. Many times I had wanted to ask him why all his friends were living in America or Europe, but we were still in Afghanistan. I had never dared to say that. But I had been resentful.

Now I felt ashamed.

I understood as I never had before what a tough man my father was. I thought of how he had carried us from one place to another to save our lives, like a cat carrying its kittens in its mouth.

My father now had to start his life again. Once, he and Grandfather had been important carpet sellers. Now he had no carpets to sell, and no money to buy new ones. He borrowed some money from a friend and bought one carpet from a shop in Chicken Street, a small one. Then he sold it to another dealer for a tiny bit of profit. That was the start of his new business.

Every day, he carried a carpet on his shoulder all over Kabul to sell it for a few afghanis more than he paid for it. Slowly, slowly one carpet became two, and two became four, and four became eight, until one day after five months he had eighty carpets and owned them all. As he sold them, he built up a small cash reserve to pay smugglers. To get to Russia, though, he would need to sell hundreds of carpets.

He never stopped worrying.

Perhaps on that night, now more than two years before, I knew what my father and my uncles were doing when I discovered them silently digging holes in the garden. Or perhaps I just pieced together the bits of talk I had overheard whenever there was any mention of smugglers. Someone would mutter something about “the gold” that would pay for them. And “the garden.”

My mother and my uncles’ wives all had had boxes and boxes of gold jewelry. My father was very much in love with my mother. When
they got married, he spent everything he had to buy her gold. Every year at Eid, he would buy her so many new gold bangles that they stretched from her wrists to her elbows.

Whenever my father bought gold for my mother, his brothers had to do the same for their wives, too. Everyone wanted to show off. One uncle’s wife wore gold anklets; another had a thick belt, all gold; my mother had a crown of gold. I had seen her wear it only once, at a wedding, and then just for a couple of hours, because too many people were staring at her and wanted to touch it.

At night, when we had gone back to our rooms after a big party, my mother would comment on all the other women’s gold. She enjoyed pointing out that her bangles and necklaces were always thicker and heavier than theirs. Probably my uncle’s wives were saying similar things about their gold, too. Afghans are competitive about everything.

One afternoon when I was alone with my father, and he was talking about trying to get smuggled to Turkey, I asked him whether he thought all the gold that he and his brothers had buried in Grandfather’s garden had been found by thieves. He looked at me with his head tilted slightly to one side, trying to decide how much I really knew.

“It is a big garden,” was all he said. I could tell he believed there must still be some gold there.

Now I understood that this was why we had gone before and been captured and sent down into the tunnel. I also understood why he was now insisting on going back, even though we all knew the house had been destroyed.

My mother tried hard to stop him. They argued about it for weeks, but my father is stubborn, possibly the most stubborn man that I know. The ceasefires were irregular and ended unpredictably. But on the days when the guns had gone quiet, my father became profoundly impatient. I could see his thoughts of our old courtyard on his face.

One Friday as we were finishing breakfast, my father asked me to get ready to accompany him. He spoke in a distant tone. I looked at my mother. She was staring at her plate.

I had not forgotten what had happened the last time we had gone there. I knew it would be dangerous. But I was willing to take any chance that could end the pretending and the waiting. Maybe there was still some gold in the garden. Maybe we would find it. Maybe we could pay smugglers and actually escape this time.

We went to the crossroads at the Polytechnic. The flashing yellow traffic light was still over the main crossroad. It had not been shot out yet. We took that as a good sign.

The neighborhood was not at all as I remembered, even from our previous visit. Roofs had fallen in; wild house cats were sneering from broken windows. Ration cans and Russian helmets were scattered everywhere.

When we got to our house, my father pushed open the splintered remains of the thick wooden door. Inside, we walked across the garden to our rooms, staying on the stone path, just to be safe. Once when we had been in Mazar and we were speaking about our house, I had asked my father why somebody would put mines in our garden. He said that maybe they had, but maybe they had not.

“Maybe the man who told my father about those mines was only trying to keep you out of there,” my father said. “Did you ever actually see the garden that day?”

“No,” I replied.

There were several large holes in a few places that probably had been made by exploding rockets. But most of the garden looked as if it had not been disturbed. I tried to remember where the cucumber plants had been. But after two years, I could not be sure.

All of a sudden I remembered the folk tale of how Mullah Nasruddin had dug a hole on top of the mountain and had hidden his money there. He came back two years later and started digging along the bottom of the mountain, looking for it. After a while, when he could not find anything there, he started to weep. Somebody who was passing by asked, “Why are you crying, Mullah?”

“Two years ago I dug a hole here and hid my money, and now it is not here anymore,” Mullah Nasruddin said.

“Are you sure you hid it there?” the man asked.

“Yes, I am very sure, because two years ago the cloud was right
here in the sky, and it gave me shade while I was digging. And now you see the cloud is here today, too, but not my money,” Mullah Nasruddin said.

The room where I used to sleep was roofless. Dust covered everything. I went inside to look for my bed. The room was empty. It was like no one had ever lived there.

Suddenly, from outside I heard a heavy thud. I looked out and saw five guys in our courtyard, jumping up on the roof of Grandfather’s room across the garden from our rooms. They had bundles of thick rope in their hands. They were surprised to see me. One of them wore dusty and torn clothes. He had narrow blue eyes, a brown bushy beard, broad shoulders, and short legs. My father was in another room. He came out and stood next to me. The man came closer and asked my father, “Who are you?”