A Fort of Nine Towers (39 page)

After two months of constant war all over Kabul, once again we had a ceasefire for a few weeks. Grandfather came to our house and spent those days with us. I was so happy to sit next to him, and to put my head on his lap and listen to his breathing when he was reading or eating or talking to others.

The night before he returned to Makroyan, he talked with my father and mother late into the night, long after the rest of us went to sleep. After he left, I went to sit under the acacia tree feeling a deep loneliness. A short while later, my father came and sat down next to me.

“We made a decision last night while you were asleep.” My father paused, and then continued with a deep sigh. “Now while we are
having this ceasefire, you and I are going to Pakistan. We’ll rent a house there, and then come back for the others. We’ll stay there until Kabul gets peaceful again.”

“Isn’t it going to be hard to live in a strange country?” I asked.

“We will all die if we stay here. At least we will survive in Pakistan. I’m sure you’ll get used to it soon. You’ll find good friends, and you will go to school again, I promise you,” my father said. He had a kindly half smile. That made me feel like this was really going to happen.

I asked when we would go.

“Tomorrow,” he said. He put his arm around me and let me fall against his strong chest.

The Dog

T
he next day around five o’clock in the morning, we said goodbye to my mother, brother, and sisters. By six o’clock, I was on the seat next to my father in an old minibus full of people.

Some of the people were sitting on the floor on bags of clothes.

I had a glass of black tea in my hands and was slowly sipping it to wake me up. I enjoyed looking at the mountains and thinking about nature after the months trapped inside the fort. Now Kabul was behind us, and we were heading toward the Khyber Pass. I had heard about the Khyber Pass from my history teacher in school, as I had about the Buddhas in Bamyan, but I had never seen it. I was excited that soon I would be passing through it.

The minibus was quiet, except for the sound of the engine, and the occasional coughing or sneezing of some of the passengers. Some were having a nap. Some were looking out the windows as we twisted our way down the sides of mountains where Kabul was nestled. Sometimes the driver had to slow down because of large holes in the road. Mostly, though, he drove fast despite the steepness of the mountains.

Just as we were approaching the small town of Sarobi and almost out of the mountains, the driver hit the brakes, and my tea spilled all over my clothes. I felt the warmth of it spreading across my lap.
The other passengers shouted at the driver to be careful. The driver turned around in his seat and put his index finger on his lips and hushed us for silence. The bus doors opened, and a man followed by two bodyguards stepped inside our bus.

They eyed us coldly. There was nothing even close to a welcoming smile and no Afghan hospitality in their eyes. We were all quiet as they scanned us, one by one.

The old man who was sitting in the seat in front of us turned around and whispered to my father that the man’s name was Commander Zardad.

Commander Zardad had badly pitted cheeks and the thickest black eyebrows I had ever seen over big, dark, sunken eyes, so black that they demanded full attention. He weighed only about one hundred fifty pounds, all of it bunched tightly into a black leather jacket and
shalwar kamiz
. He selected several men and women from our minibus, including my father, and led them off the bus, then told the driver to continue his journey to Pakistan. The panicked driver started the engine. I jumped off before he could drive away.

Zardad looked me in the eye and said, “You are not invited.”

“You have my father, and I want to stay with him,” I said.

“Then you must come,” he said, and slapped me on my shoulder gently like an old friend.

We walked for ten minutes up the side of the steep mountain to get to his camp. He had more than two hundred men, all armed and resting under the shade of their tents. Some of them were drinking tea, some of them were asleep, and some of them were just staring at us.

We were led into a large tent that was open on one side and told to sit down. None of us did. We stood there frozen. Inside the tent, several corpses were laid out on the ground. They were naked and looked like they had been badly bitten all over.

One was a girl who looked to be in her early twenties. She was petite with yellow hair that streamed all around her head. She had a pretty face and a slender body with long legs. Her shoulders were narrow, hardly more than a dozen inches across. Her breasts were small, but they looked almost like they had been shredded.
There were bite marks up and down her arms and legs, especially around her thighs.

A dead man next to her looked like a statue that had been cut from white stone, as if all his blood had been drained. Like the girl, he seemed more like an American or a European than an Afghan. He was very muscular. But he, too, had been bitten all over. His throat had been slashed, and so had his wrists and thighs and ankles. I could see no bruises on his hands; he had not been able to land any punches on his attackers. There was a cold, desperate horror frozen on his face. His mouth and eyes were wide open.

Some other bodies that lay near them were covered with white sheets that had bloodstains all over them.

“You see these people?” Zardad said. “They avoided giving me their money, and in the end they lost their lives as well as their money. If you guys love your lives, give me your money, and you are free to go.”

My father took out all his money from his pockets and gave it to Commander Zardad.

“Where is your house?” Zardad asked.

“In Kabul,” my father replied without emotion.

“Why are you going to Pakistan?”

“To see if we can live there,” my father said.

“You don’t have a wife and more kids?” Zardad asked.

“Yes,” my father said.

“Why are they not with you?”

“I couldn’t take them with me to Pakistan now. I have no house for them there. After I find a place, I will go back for them,” my father explained matter-of-factly.

“You must be a rich man. Let’s make a deal. I let your son go home and bring more money, then you’re free to go. Does it sound good?” Zardad asked, his big eyebrows raised up.

“We don’t have much money. Just enough for us to live on for a while. If I give it all to you, how will I feed my kids?” my father asked.

“Don’t answer me with a question,” Zardad shot back.

My father lowered his head and said nothing.

Zardad shouted out, “Dog!” I looked around, expecting to see one of his men come with the kind of dog that was used for fighting.
I looked at the corpses with their bite marks and became very frightened. Why did Zardad want a dog?

A man entered the tent. He had big teeth, like long, yellow fangs. He laughed when he saw us.

Zardad rasped an order. “Tie him.”

Two of his men grabbed my father from behind while another one pulled off his
kamiz
shirt, then his
shalwar
trousers. They tied his hands and feet with chains to a large frame made from thick wooden beams. They pulled his wrists upward to the top corners of the frame. His feet were spread apart and chained to the bottom. He looked like one of the carpets I had seen him stretch so many times.

When my father could not move anymore and all eyes were fixed on him, Zardad ordered the man he called Dog to start. Dog opened his mouth wide and sank his teeth into one of my father’s biceps.

My father cried out in pain and shouted that he did not have any money. This time Zardad ordered the man to hang by his teeth from my father’s other arm. He closed his jaws on my father again and raised his feet from the ground as he had been told. My father was screaming now, and turning redder and redder.

I watched in disbelief. I had seen so many things since the fighting had begun, and so much cruelty, but I had never imagined anything as unspeakably strange as this.

The fanged man continued biting my father all over: his arms, shoulders, thighs, chest, underarms, neck, and buttocks. My father continued shouting while Zardad sat casually on a chair, twenty feet away, watching him and sipping his tea. He showed no emotion despite my father’s piercing yells.

I could hardly even breathe. I understood that I was watching my father die, and my mind raced as I thought, “How can I take the responsibility for my family? I’m only thirteen years old.”

And then the shouting grew quieter, as my father began to lose strength. His eyes closed. His body hung limply in the chains. His wounds were bleeding badly.

Zardad finally ordered two other men to release him. They undid the chains, and my father collapsed on the ground. They grabbed him by his wrists and dragged him thirty feet across the gravel, scraping
the skin off his back as they went. He lay there, not moving, just moaning.

Then the two guys came and grabbed me. They pulled off my clothes except for my undershorts and a thin chain around my neck with a picture of Mecca hanging from it. They fastened the chains that they had used on my father around my wrists and ankles. Strangely, as they pulled the chains tight, cutting into my skin, I felt a sense of relief. I had cheated death so many times since the war had started. Today it would all end.

The man with the fangs slowly walked toward me. His mouth was outlined with my father’s blood, but his skin was deathly pale, as if he had no blood of his own in his veins. When he walked, he seemed like he hardly had enough energy to propel himself.

When he bit me the first time, it was like a saw or a sharp piece of metal was sinking into my arms. The pain was so powerful that the light started instantly going from my eyes, and everything around me got darker and darker. I shouted louder than I ever have.

“Don’t touch him,” my father shouted hoarsely. He tried to stand. Two men ran over and held him back. Dried blood covered his whole body, except for his face. “Come and do it to me!”

“No, your son has fresher blood and tender skin,” the man whispered so softly that I hardly heard him. “You’ve got old blood. This is more fun with your son.” Then he bit me on my left leg. This time it was worse than before. Then on my shoulder, and on my back. I could do nothing but howl.

One of Zardad’s soldiers stepped forward. “Please stop for a while, sir. Give them a break.” The soldier spoke in Pashto.

“I’m not taking orders from you. You’re taking orders from me,” Zardad snapped back. Until now he had spoken only in Dari. He did not even look at the soldier. He was still staring at me.

“Yes, sir, I know it, but I just want to have a couple of hours of sleep and these bastards keep screaming and waking me up,” the soldier said.

“Hey, I’m having a good time. Don’t fuck with me,” Zardad said.

My father forced himself up from the ground. “What kind of a Pashtun are you?” he spat hoarsely at Zardad, speaking in Pashto.

“Are you Pashtun?” Zardad asked in amazement.

“Of course I am,” my father said, his voice hardly louder than a whisper.

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” Zardad said. He got up from the chair where he had been watching and walked toward my father, studying him more closely. He stood over my father for a moment, then ordered his men to untie me and give us our clothes back. “I don’t torture my Pashtuns,” Zardad said airily as he walked back to his chair.

My father and I put on our clothes as best we could. Every time I moved, the places where the fanged man had bitten me ached like something was still tearing my skin. I was so stiff with fear, I hardly knew what I was doing. Blood ran out of the wounds and soaked my clothes. All the while, the man with the fangs was looking at me fiercely, angry that he had lost his prey and could do nothing about it.

“What about the others?” my father asked. He could not stand up straight. “Release them, too.”

“You’re free to go,” Zardad said, like he was giving an order.

“You’re not torturing these people for their money, are you? You’re torturing them because you enjoy doing it,” my father said.

“If you say one more word, I will forget you’re a Pashtun. Understood? Go, and don’t ever look back,” Zardad shouted.

My father did not say anything. We left there and walked in small, painful steps along the steep path back down to the road. Ten minutes later we were in a highway taxi coming along the main road from Jalalabad to Kabul, headed toward our home.

“What is all this?” my mother asked, looking at the blood on our clothes. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open, and her face pale.

“We were bitten by a dog,” my father said as he was hugging her. Then he fainted, and his body slumped onto hers.

My mother cried to me to help her with my father. We half carried and half dragged him to his bed. I told my mother what had happened to us but kept it short, because I wanted to lie down as well.

She ran outside and came back with our neighbor who was a night-shift doctor.

A few minutes later, the doctor injected him with something that made him totally numb. The doctor started to wash the wounds, first with alcohol to disinfect them, and then with a few things he mixed all together. He rubbed the wounds gently, then covered them with rolls of bandages.