A Fort of Nine Towers (41 page)

“Do you know Fahim?” the same guy asked me.

“Everybody knows him,” I said. Marshal Fahim was a Tajik and one of Masoud’s close allies.

Another one of them pushed the two others back and grabbed me by my collar. His hands smelled like shit.

“Are you Fahim’s son?” he yelled.

“No!”
I shouted back.

“Where is his house?” he asked me as he held my collar tightly. I pointed toward the Bagh-e-Bala, a tree-covered slope that rises up steeply half a mile west of Noborja, where there used to be a garden built by the Moguls.

He was still holding me and said, “Show us his house.”

I took them to Fahim’s street, and from the far end pointed out to them where his house stood. The guy who had held my collar let me go.

I raced home and told my family what had happened. But they thought I was making it all up, except for my mother. I could tell by the way she listened to me that she believed me.

As he always did on Fridays when guests might come, my father
had shaved very carefully that morning, and was wearing his best trousers and a neatly pressed, white short-sleeve shirt. He decided to go out to see what I was talking about.

My mother did not want him to leave the house until we heard some more news. But my father, always practical, said, “There’s no fighting going on. If there is a new faction in town, I want to make them my friends.”

My father came back in half an hour looking angry. There were stains of fingerprints on his face and the mark of a whip on the back of his white shirt.

“What happened to you?” my mother asked, her voice high with worry.

He did not answer. He walked across the room, sat on the floor in the corner, and put his head on his knees and his arms around his legs.

My three little sisters stopped jumping on my parents’
toshak
and throwing pillows at one another. My mother sat in front of my father and raised his head up. “What is wrong?”

“They whipped me,” my father said.

“Why?” my mother asked in amazement.

“Because I had shaved my beard. They called me an infidel and a Communist,” my father said, incredulously. “They said that the beard is the symbol of Islam.”

“Islam is about what is in your heart, not what is on your face,” my mother stated.

“I told them that if the beard is a symbol of Islam, then a goat must be a Muslim since it is born with one,” my father said, looking slightly dazed as he spoke. “Then they whipped me.”

“What kind of people are they?” my mother asked with disgust.

My father put his head back on his knees, and my mother kissed his head. She beckoned for us to leave the room with her and let him alone.

My mother covered her head with a scarf and went to find out for herself what she could about this new faction.

She came back after fifteen minutes. Her eyes were full of fury, and she was limping.

“Some guy with a big black turban and torn clothes and a long beard whipped me on my legs,” my mother exclaimed.

“Why?” my father asked, angered and bewildered. He jumped up from where he was sitting, prepared for a fight.

“Because I was not wearing a
burqa
,” my mother said. We could all see that she was suffering from the lashes.

“What the hell is going on today? Where did these weird people come from?” my father asked.

All of my sisters had come to see what was going on. “I don’t want any of you to step outside of this house today,” my mother said to them firmly.

“Who are these people?” my oldest sister asked my father.

“I don’t know.” He gazed at the ceiling and murmured, “I never had a chance to ask them.”

My mother asked my older sister for a bandage and alcohol to disinfect the whip wounds on her legs. One of my little sisters turned on the radio to hear the Friday drama. Instead, we heard a strange kind of singing. We thought it must be a part of the drama, but it continued for hours. From that day, we did not hear the radio drama again for five years.

All the songs were in Pashto with no instruments, no soft background music. We heard the same type of songs from outside, from cars going from one street to the next with loudspeakers at high volume. They were songs, but they were without music.

None of our relatives would be coming for lunch that day, I was sure. And I had no appetite. I went earlier than usual to the garden to sit under the grapevine and to read and to put these new guys out of my mind. As I was settling into my usual place, I saw something shining on the ground next to the garden wall. I left my book on the ground and went to see what was there. A Kalashnikov with several boxes of bullets next to it lay in the tall grass by the wall. Nearby was a plastic bag with thirteen grenades in it.

I did not touch any of them. I was afraid that they might be wired to a mine somewhere. I called our old
chowkidar
to come see them.

The doorkeeper shuffled toward me, leaning on his stick. The end of his dirty turban hung in front of his face. It was covered with stains from the tobacco juice he was always spitting. He looked at the weapons and spat.

“They must belong to Masoud’s people,” our doorkeeper said. “Masoud escaped from Kabul last night. Zalmai’s wife told me.”

“But why are these weapons here?” I asked.

“Those who couldn’t escape with Masoud had to get rid of their weapons. This new faction is saying that if they find any weapons in anybody’s house, they will put them in prison,” the doorkeeper said.

He knocked at a grenade with his stick. I jumped back.

“We have to hide them somewhere,” he said. He opened his turban and spread it on the ground. With no fear, he gathered the Kalashnikov, the bullets, and the grenades into his turban, then he slung them onto his hunched back. He carried them across the garden to the far side where there was a pit toilet. Carefully, he dropped them one by one down the hole. Then he pressed them with a shovel until they all disappeared under the filth.

I walked all over the garden to see whether there were any more weapons. I found more grenades and some mines that looked like a yellow butterfly, two RPGs, hundreds of bullets, and six guns.

I hid one of those guns under my trousers for myself. It was the kind I had seen many times in James Bond movies. Now that I was fourteen, I understood that I had the responsibilities of a man. A gun felt like a good thing to have. We put the rest in the toilet and pressed them down until they all sank under the mess in the pit.

I continued to walk all around the garden to see whether I had missed any other weapons. While I was pushing aside some bushes, someone from the street threw two bags of grenades over the wall into the garden.

“Who the hell is that? Is our garden your trash ditch?” I shouted. I climbed the wall to see who it was.

He was a tall man with broad shoulders, running like a scared dog, trying to disappear from sight.

I shouted at him several times and cursed him for being a coward, but he did not look back as he disappeared around the corner.

I opened the bags. Each bag had twenty grenades in it. I took them to the toilet and dropped them one by one until they had all sunk out of sight.

For a week, more and more weapons came over our wall. We
collected an armory of guns, grenades, RPGs, bullets, butterfly mines, and things we had never seen before. For a week we kept putting them all in that pit toilet.

By the end of that week, there was no longer enough filth to cover all the weapons. We sent everyone in the fort to use the weapon-toilet to help cover what was in there.

One day, as I was relieving myself, I looked down through the hole to see the barrel of a Kalashnikov pointed up at my bottom. It was too late to stop.

At the beginning, some of our neighbors were afraid to use the weapon-toilet. They thought that they might cause explosions. But my father was a very good convincer.

He said that there was a rumor that if the Taliban—now we knew that was who they were—found anyone with weapons in his house, they would put the suspect in prison and whip him to death.

We all heard, “Once you are in their prison, it is almost impossible to get out, unless you bribe them with a huge amount of money.” I do not know how people knew these things. The Taliban had been in Kabul only a week.

We still did not know much about them. Most of what we had heard came from the BBC. They told us how the Taliban had taken control of Jalalabad, the last city in Afghanistan before the Khyber Pass leads into Pakistan. From there, the Taliban were moving toward Kabul. Other Taliban fighters had taken control of the main road to Kabul that comes from Kandahar and the west. And still more Taliban controlled a smaller road through Logar Province to the south. The only road from Kabul that was still open was the one that went to the north.

The Mujahedin government had become weaker and weaker as the years of civil war had gone on. They could not fight back, because they were so busy fighting each other. When they heard that the Taliban had captured Sarobi, a town halfway between Jalalabad and Kabul and close to where Zardad had his camp, they panicked. They knew that thousands of Taliban would be in Kabul by the next day, showing no mercy.

So the Mujahedin factions raced out of Kabul in the middle of the
night on the last road that was open. They hauled truckloads of guns and ammunition to their bases in the Panjshir Valley and across the Hindu Kush mountains in the north, so the Taliban would not get them. But that did not matter. The Taliban had been given all the weapons they needed by Pakistan.

When the first group of Taliban had arrived in Kabul, they had expected a fierce fight. Instead, they found that the Mujahedin factions were gone and the streets were empty. They were confused to find themselves in such a silent city, but they did not take long to let us know that they were now our rulers.

Every day we heard new decrees from Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, from Radio Sadai Shariat (The Voice of Islamic Law), received from the office of Amer bel Maruf wa Nai As Munkar (Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice).

One day: “Every man in Afghanistan should grow a beard.”

The next day: “Every woman over twelve should wear a
burqa
.”

The next day: “Kite flying is forbidden.”

The next day: “No one should be seen to keep pigeons or fighting birds in his house. Pigeons are for shrines and mosques.”

The next day: “No one anywhere in Afghanistan should watch TV. If anyone is ever found to be watching movies, he will be punished in public and imprisoned for six months.”

The next day: “Every man should go to the mosque five times a day for prayers.”

We could say nothing. Everyone knew, however, that sooner or later a new faction would take over and things would change. This was Afghanistan, after all. This was how things worked.

At the end of the broadcast Maulvi Nazami, the head of Radio Sadai Shariat, said, “We say the right things so that we can be loved.”

A few weeks after the Taliban arrived, I saw one of them hanging out the back of a van with a loudspeaker in his right hand. He was shouting, “We, the Students of God, are bringing justice to this city
and the other cities all over Afghanistan. If anyone has any interest in our justice, come to Kabul Stadium and witness our justice. Today at two o’clock.”

I had been on my way to school and told some of my classmates whom I met about the strange announcement I had heard. I said that I wanted to go to the stadium to see what the Taliban meant by justice.

Some of my classmates said that they wanted to go, too. Afghans are always hungry to learn anything new. So instead of going to our classes, we headed across Kabul, hanging out the doors of an overcrowded bus.

The stadium was filled with men and schoolboys as full of curiosity as we were. A pickup truck drove into the middle of the field. That was surprising. Grass is hard to grow in Kabul, and no sensible person would drive a truck, even a lightweight one, onto a playing field. There was a loudspeaker on the back of the truck. Two Taliban wearing black
shalwar kamiz
, long hair, and white turbans stood on the truck. Even from the seats we could see the black rings of kohl around their eyes.

“We call ourselves Taliban, which means the Students of God. We never do wrong,” one of the men on the back of the truck said into a microphone. “We never do wrong even by mistake. Everything we do is right, so we can be loved. Everything we say is right, so we can be cherished.” As he spoke, he kept rotating so he could address every part of the stadium.

A moment later, two other Taliban brought a man onto the field with chains around his wrists, feet, and neck. The Talib with the microphone said the man was a thief who had stolen a pair of shoes from a shop.

The Talib’s voice got higher and louder, which made the loudspeaker screech. “This guy has stolen a pair of shoes from a Kabul shop. He deserves amputation. Our justice for thieves is amputation. If we don’t have justice toward thieves, they will take control like Genghis Khan, or English people, who are the biggest thieves of our time. Then it will be impossible to control them.”

They stood the thief in the middle of the football field and opened his handcuffs. Two Taliban held his right arm down on a table. A
doctor injected the man’s right arm with anesthetic, then took a saw and cut off the man’s hand while he watched. One of the Taliban took the hand and waved it around to the crowd. The hand was still bleeding, and the pale fingers seemed to our horrified eyes to be moving very slowly. The thief went numb and collapsed. Two other Taliban took him by the arms and dragged him off the football field.

The spectators were shocked. A stunned silence filled the entire stadium. I had been to the stadium many times with my father, but this was the first time I had experienced such total quiet there, though it was packed with thousands of men.

My classmates and I did not want to stay any longer. We stood up to leave. Some other people stood up to leave, too. But Taliban came from all directions, beat us with whips, and ordered us to sit and see the execution.