A Fort of Nine Towers (37 page)

He was the first to hear the whine of the rocket.

“Get down! Everybody! Down on the ground! Cover your heads. Cover up!” His shout was lost in the explosion of a rocket that landed a few feet behind him. A moment later, another one hit nearby, and then a third.

Then it was so quiet, it was as if the whole world had stopped. The air was laced with the smell of burning cordite, and a cloud of dust rose swiftly to hang above the place where the rockets had landed.

Afterward his friends told us how Wakeel had been the only one standing when the rockets hit. In warning his friends, he did not cover himself in the few seconds that he had. Now he wavered and could not stand anymore. His slender body dropped to the ground. His eyes were wide open, still staring at the sky, at the half-moon. His friends rushed toward him.

Wakeel lay on his side. Springs of crimson spread over his freshly ironed blue clothes. Rocket shrapnel had made dozens of holes in his back. Labored sounds escaped his heaving chest. His mouth quivered. One of his friends sat on the ground and cradled Wakeel’s head on his lap and begged him to talk, even as he cried out for help.

Wakeel whispered something and went silent. He had seen so much death. He understood what was happening. Perhaps he had a last wish that he needed to tell someone. Every breath was a fight for him now.

My youngest uncle, who was barely older than Wakeel, appeared from somewhere and rushed toward him, his nephew, his best friend. My uncle sank to the ground and knelt over Wakeel’s bloodied body. Wakeel was still gazing at the half-moon. My uncle lifted him onto his shoulder and ran to the road. For the longest time, he could not find a taxi, and even when he did, he knew Wakeel had already said his goodbyes to this world.

Still, he took him to a hospital. He had lost Wakeel’s father, his own brother, fifteen years before. He could not accept that he was losing his last connection with his beloved oldest brother.

“He is dead,” the doctor said.

It was around eight o’clock. We already had had our dinner. I was ready to sleep, hoping that image of the sniper’s body would not stay lodged in my mind and keep me awake. My father was watching the news on television, which reported that rockets had landed in Makroyan, despite the ceasefire. They were Gulbuddin’s rockets. Ceasefires meant nothing to him.

I heard a loud knocking on the large gate that opened to the street. My father sent me to see who was there. I had nearly been asleep. Resentfully, I went out of the courtyard and across the open space where Haji Noor Sher had always parked his large Chevrolet with the canvas roof that was a twin to the one owned by the king.

I opened the gate and found my uncle with his face and clothes drenched with blood. We looked at each other, but he said nothing. It was several moments before I realized that the blood-soaked body on his shoulder was Wakeel, and then only as my uncle was already walking past me. He carried Wakeel’s lifeless body to the courtyard.

I wanted to follow him, but my legs were shaking. There was no strength in them to carry me. I held tight to the handle on the gate, then tried to walk again, but I felt that my stomach was falling down. Somehow I managed to close the gate. My uncle disappeared through
the archway that led into the courtyard. No! I could not let him take Wakeel from me. No! Suddenly, I was running after them. No!

My uncle laid Wakeel on the ground in front of our windows beneath the tall acacia tree.

My father came out and saw his beloved nephew wrapped in blood. He was shaking his head from side to side, not willing to believe what he was seeing.

He took a deep breath and screamed at heaven, “Oh God, why are you doing this to us?” His voice echoed throughout the courtyard.

Immediately, all of our neighbors in the courtyard were at their windows. A minute later they had surrounded the body, staring at Wakeel, whom they all loved so much.

My only uncle who was still living in the old fort came running out of his rooms holding a book. When he saw Wakeel on the grass, he dropped the book and started slamming the palms of his hands against his head, moaning, and calling out the name of God. His wife tried to make him stop, but he could not.

Wakeel was remarkably long. I had never thought of him that way. His toes were strangely widespread, and his hands were quietly crossed on his chest. I looked at him and looked at him and looked at him. Why was he lying like that? What was I seeing? Nothing was real. A light breeze stirred the carpet of yellow leaves from the acacia tree that had woven itself on the grass. A few of them brushed across Wakeel’s immobile face.

A loud cry burst from me, and I wept. I wept for Wakeel. I wept for me. I wept for everything that had happened since the Holy Warriors had destroyed our country and our lives. I do not know how long I cried, but after a while I found myself folded in my mother’s arms. She was crying, too.

A few hours later, Wakeel’s mother arrived from her brother’s house. She had been at her nephew’s engagement party. She knelt beside Wakeel and kept muttering things in a deep, hoarse voice. Her eyes were larger than I had ever seen them.

She spent the entire night on the ground next to her son, crying and laughing, like a crazy woman, and sometimes muttering things
that we could not hear. I lay in my bed, letting the tears roll silently down my face.

More than at any time in my life, I wanted to be with my grandfather. But it was too dangerous to cross Kabul at night.

Early in the morning, Grandfather and my uncles arrived to take Wakeel for burial. I wanted to help carry him, but though I was thirteen years old, I was too short. I walked next to my father as he and my uncles carried Wakeel out of the courtyard on their shoulders. They carried him on a bamboo litter, still wearing his bloody clothes. His body had not been washed, since he was a martyr.

His mother ran after us, trying to stop us from taking her only son away, but her feet would not let her. She stumbled and collapsed on the ground. She stood again briefly, but then fell down again and rolled onto her back. The other women came and tried to help her. Her hair streamed over the ground, her unseeing eyes gazing into some other world, her teeth clenched. She cried out loud. Slowly they helped her get up.

The other women knew they should try to hold her back, but they let her go, though there is no place for a woman at a Muslim burial. She stood yet again to run after us, but again she fell down, and for a time she went unconscious.

We finished the rituals and put the body in the grave. We had not been able to go to our family cemetery since it was near Grandfather’s house on the other side of the Koh-e-Aliabad, and we had no way of knowing whether the snipers on the mountain would respect us as we carried Wakeel’s body. So we left him with strangers in a small, old cemetery called Nawabad that was protected from the snipers by the spur of a low, steep hill.

A butterfly appeared over the loose earth of the grave and fluttered around for a few moments before settling on it. The undersides of its wings were powdery white. When it opened them, the tops were such a dark red that it looked like an open wound.

It was lifted by a breeze and borne away. I watched it go. It grew smaller and smaller. I knew it was Wakeel’s soul leaving his body, and us, and I knew he was trying to tell me that he was all right. He had always believed in signs. I wanted to be flying away with him, too. I wept again, but a strange, warm feeling filled me that brought a sense of peace of a kind that I had never known before and never have since. The butterfly disappeared from sight as it drifted across the top of the steep cemetery hill.

All around me, Grandfather, my father and my uncles, and all my other male relatives stood frozen in grief. Jerk stood next to his father, looking down and not trying to hide his tears. Though he had been the target of Wakeel’s relentless jests, he loved Wakeel, as we all did. Jerk had no one to protect him anymore, or to tease him, or to help him fly kites, or to make him run faster when we played football, or to help him with his homework.

Shortly after we finished the prayers, Wakeel’s mother arrived with the other women. She was crying as if she herself were dying. She lowered herself to the ground and knelt next to the grave, arranging and rearranging the stones on the loose earth. We all started weeping with her, but there was nothing we could do for her. I was very grateful that Wakeel had shown me his soul in that butterfly, and that Grandfather was there with me, too.

Though we had finished what we had come to do, we knew we could not leave until Wakeel’s mother was ready to come with us. After half an hour or so, she rose and quietly started walking away. The other women, who had been waiting at a distance, quickly surrounded her and let her lean on them as they picked their way down the cemetery’s rocky slope.

We walked slowly all the way home. I walked next to Grandfather, but he was so upset that he hardly noticed me. I tried to talk to him, so he would not feel so sad. He did not seem to listen. Then he spoke.

“I have always thought that people’s sorrows come from three reasons,” Grandfather said. “They always want everything immediately, without effort. They want more than they need. And they are not
happy with what they have. But now I realize that the greatest sorrow of the world is to lose a gift from God.”

I did not understand.

“Wakeel was the gift of God to us, but we hardly noticed its worth. So, God took it back,” Grandfather said.

I told him about the butterfly. He crouched down on one knee, then opened his arms and embraced me. “You always find something that makes me feel better.”

His face was level with mine, and for the first time I could see that even his eyes were red and wet. “Do you know what happens to people when they die?” Grandfather asked with a sad smile.

“Yes, of course I do. That is the first lesson the mullah taught me and the other boys on our first day at the mosque,” I replied.

“Right. When we die, we believe we go to heaven, or we rest forever, or we turn into angels, or we go to paradise. That’s probably all true. But let me tell you something: I believe that when we die at least a small part of our soul enters the one whom we loved the most, and makes that person wiser.”

Grandfather had said things like this to me many times. I always understood the words, but sometimes it took me weeks to know what real meaning lay behind them, and what lesson lay in them for me.

Grandfather spent a week with us, then he said he must go to be with Wakeel’s mother. I understood. I loved Wakeel’s mother and could not imagine how lost she was feeling. She was like a second mother to us. That is why we called her Abbo, which in Pashto means “mother.” When we were little, she often looked after us when my mother was at the bank and my father at his school and for some reason they could not come home to prepare our lunch. Abbo fed us, washed us, put us in bed for our naps, woke us up, and took us to the other side of the courtyard to play with her children and our other cousins.

Abbo was always a good storyteller. She knows many stories, funny and sad ones, but now she tells her son’s story more than any other. Every time she tells it, her eyes get red, tears roll out of them, and her voice shakes, but she continues until she finishes. Even though
it is painful to hear, no one can leave in the middle, because she always tells it as if she had just heard all the details a short while before. She always says the same words, as though reciting something from a holy book. Once I left the room when she started telling a distant relative what had happened. But though I did not want to hear it, I found I could not stay outside and leave her alone with Wakeel. I went back in and sat next to her.

She had asked hard questions of all of Wakeel’s friends and others who had been there that evening. She knows every detail as if she had seen them with her own eyes. I cannot imagine how painful that has been for her. It is even painful to listen to her, but we listen to her because we love her.

When Grandfather left to go back to Makroyan, I felt more alone than I ever had before. I had so many things to ask him.

Some days I sat under the acacia tree in the courtyard where Wakeel’s body had lain. I was waiting for the butterfly. But it never came back.

Inferno

A
rocket landed in the room upstairs where my father stored his carpets. It was late on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the summer, when everything was dry and the weather was windy and dusty.

When it hit, my father was drinking tea with the next-door neighbors and trying to buy their carpets, along with an old silver vessel from the twelfth-century Ghaznawi dynasty. It had two hundred pounds of rice in it. The neighbor was moving to Pakistan, and from there to Canada to stay with relatives who had made arrangements through the United Nations.

My father wanted to buy their carpets, because they were at least a hundred years old and still in good condition. He could sell them for twice what he paid. He also wanted to buy the old silver vessel, because he knew that the guys who took those old pieces to Pakistan paid good money. He was trying to buy their rice as well since it came from Kunduz, and was a bit cheaper than the market price for imported rice.