A Fort of Nine Towers (56 page)

One said, “I don’t want this. Give me real candy.”

“This is real candy, and it is very good,” I said, trying to sound innocent as I took out the bag and showed it to him. “Look, it comes all the way from Poland. And the ingredients are all healthy and organic. They used honey instead of sugar, and real milk. It tastes delicious!” Then I ate one, and yum-yummed.

“Idiot! I want money,” he said sharply.

“Money? For what?” I asked, trying to sound surprised.

“For processing your papers,” he said, somewhere between a shout and a whisper.

“But that is a bribe,” I replied with my eyes wide with amazement. “And a bribe is a sin! In Islam it is forbidden! Are you trying to make us both sinners?”

“Are you stupid?” He looked at me in disbelief.

“Nobody has ever called me stupid before!” Then, more kindly, I added, “I’m just trying to explain to you the basic principles of Islam.”

Soon he decided not to waste any more time on me, knowing he could get a bribe from the next person. He processed my papers and pressed the bell on the desk. A guard came bustling in and was told, “Get this psychopath out of here!”

“I’m not a psychopath! I’m not a sinner, either. I’m not a bribe taker, or angry all the time. Now, tell me who is a psychopath?” Then I walked out, smiling, without waiting to hear the answer.

More than ten years have passed since that night on the roof when we saw the first American bombs. From time to time, I think about some of the people—good and bad—whom I had known during the worst years, and I wonder what has become of them.

I have never seen Berar again, though I have looked for him in many places. If he is dead, please, God, keep his soul at peace. If he is alive, I pray to God to make us meet again one day.

The garden where Grandfather and I saw the skulls now has three houses covering the place where the fountain was.

Sometimes when I am riding in a taxi, the driver might take a shortcut on a street where a horrific memory comes back to life. I lean forward and ask him please to go another way, as being there reminds me of something from the war that I want to forget. Every driver understands this, and they always turn around and find another route.

I never again saw the young teacher who was forced to sell herself. I hope she earned enough money to go to another country and start a new life. I will always think of her with deep respect, despite the circumstances in which we met.

I have never seen the family in Tashkurghan from whom I stole the
five pomegranates. Maybe they are living in America by now. I heard the garden was in ruins until five years ago, when somebody replanted it. I went there once, but the people living there said they had never heard of Hamza or his family. I wonder how Hamza can be happy anywhere else.

Sometimes our Kuchi cousins call my father when they are passing near Kabul with their sheep and camels in late spring, heading from their winter homes in Jalalabad to the central highlands. They are still Kuchis, but they all have cell phones now.

Omar Khan, once a herd boy with a flute, is now in Germany. He became a car mechanic. He is running a garage with another Afghan who was born there. He speaks German fluently. He has not returned to Afghanistan in the years since he left. He is waiting for the German government to give him a German passport, so he can travel to Afghanistan to visit his family.

Aaron Khan is living in Greece. He became a tailor. He got married to a pretty Greek woman. His parents are unhappy with him for marrying a Greek, because a Kuchi should marry another Kuchi and produce more Kuchis. They are not in touch with him, but know about him through Omar Khan.

Solomon Khan remained a Kuchi. He has two beautiful wives. He has three beautiful daughters from his first wife, and two handsome sons from his second wife. He still does not talk very much, but he taught his wives and kids how to read and write.

Many of my classmates, including those with whom I celebrated our graduation by punching one another, are still in touch with me. A few of them went to India for a couple of years for education. A couple of them got visas to European countries by marrying their cousins who were already there. Five of them are in Kabul, running good businesses. Three of them died in suicide bombings, two while they were walking toward their houses with bags of fruit for dinner. We carry their memories in our hearts.

One night at a party in Kabul, I heard that Zardad, the sadist, is in jail in England. He was hiding in London, but a journalist from the BBC found him, and he was arrested for crimes against humanity.
A foreigner, one of the few who truly has helped Afghanistan, told me in a garden full of music being performed by masters that he had been asked to testify against Zardad. It had taken two trials to convict him. The foreigner also said that Dog is dead, executed at Pul-e-Charkhi prison. Before that night, I had once tried to find out about Zardad and Dog using the Internet, but doing so made me feel violently sick. It reminded me too clearly of those days. I do not care whether they are dead or alive. If they are dead, I pray they are in the depths of hell.

For Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose rocket killed Wakeel, hell is too good a place, and eternity too short a time. He is still alive, still doing evil.

When the foreigners began to come to Kabul after the Taliban were driven out, Haji Noor Sher returned from India and reopened his carpet business at the heart of the Shahr-e-Naw shopping district. He came back to live in his rooms in the Qala-e-Noborja. No one had used them in all the years he had been away. One day he just appeared in the courtyard and yelled “Malem,” the Dari word for “teacher,” meaning my father. We had just finished lunch and my father was about to have his nap, but when we heard that familiar voice, we all quickly ran outside and were overjoyed to see him.

For the next couple of years he lived at Noborja, while his family remained in India. Sometimes he went to visit them, but he was happiest in Kabul among his carpets and his friends. He and my father spent hours together gathering and selling carpets again, and just enjoying each other’s company after so many years apart.

He began to show signs of health problems, though he never said what they were. He went to India a couple of times to see doctors, and seemed to be sicker when he came back to Kabul. Then a few weeks after he had gone there again, we got a call telling us that he had died. A part of ourselves died with him. His kindness and generosity had made it possible for our whole family to survive the fighting.

Recently, I went to visit that Hazara baker, to thank him for saving me from the Talib rapist.

Three times I went to the baker’s shop. Each time I could not bring myself to mention these things. There was no one else in the shop. He was always just sitting behind the counter, looking at the pedestrians and traffic on the road.

Somehow, for no particular reason, I felt weak, though I wanted very much to talk to him and tell him who I was. Instead, each time I got a plastic bag, went through trays of cookies, and filled it. Then I gave him the bag to weigh it. He did not look at me while he was putting it on the scale, even though I kept staring at his face, wanting to say something, but nothing came out. Then I would pay and walk out.

He was a little heavier than all those years ago, but otherwise he looked much the same. His shop was the same, too, except that the back room where he had hidden me was now filled by a large, modern oven. His son had become a tall man, with broad shoulders. He operated the oven with several other workers.

The fourth time I went, I said, “I’m not here to buy anything.” I ran out of breath, and my heart was beating very fast. He could tell I was nervous about something.

“Slow down, young man,” the baker said. He had a calm voice, very different from that afternoon, years before, but still deep. “What do you want, then?”

“I’m here to thank you,” I said, still with no breath left, as if I had run for miles.

“Thank you to you!” he said with a smile. “I’m glad you like our cakes and cookies.”

“Yes, they are delicious, but I want to thank you for saving my life several years ago,” I said.

Suddenly, the smile disappeared from his round, Asiatic face, and he looked into my eyes with no expression. He narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“I was arrested just across the road there by a Talib. To escape from them, I shouted ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb under the Taliban car.’ People ran everywhere to—”

He interrupted me: “And you came here, stood behind this window,
and you said, ‘There is no bomb. I created this chaos, because a Talib arrested me for no good reason.’ And I pushed you out, because I was afraid for myself.” He stopped for a moment. “Then I saw a look of despair in your eyes …” His voice trailed off.

“You pulled me back inside, and hid me behind the flour bags—”

He interrupted me again: “And you kept sneezing …”

The baker came out from behind his counter and gave me a long and big hug. Now we were the same height. His chest was soft and fleshy, and he smelled of bread and ovens. We held each other very tightly.

“I have thought about you many, many times. I didn’t know what happened to you. You never came back,” the baker said.

“I was very scared,” I said.

“After that night when I dropped you off in front of your house, several months later I was arrested three times for no reason. But you know they hated us. What wild animals they were! I was a good prey for them. The bastards got all my money. The third time I had nothing left to give them. They beat me like a dusting machine beats a carpet,” he said.

He had a broad smile on his face, as if he were telling a funny joke. That is what I love the most about my countrymen. He should have been scarred for life after experiencing so many horrible things, but he was talking about his past as if it were funny.

“Are you still living in that old fort?” he asked.

“We lived there for sixteen years, but not anymore,” I said. “After the Taliban were driven out of Kabul, one of the widows of the owner, Haji Noor Sher, came back from India and wanted to rent the old fort to the foreigners to earn big money. She asked us to leave. We did not mind. We wanted to have a home of our own without a lot of other families sharing our courtyard. But we had no home to go to. The Taliban had forced us to sell our own house in Kot-e-Sangi to them, to give it to them, really. We could not afford to buy any property on the flat land. A squatter who had lived for a long time up on the Koh-e-Aliabad—what we used to call Sniper Mountain—across from Kabul University sold my father a small plot at a good price. We have built a house there. I hope you will come and meet my family.”

“I shall,” he said.

I wrote my address on a piece of paper. He wrote his address and gave it to me. It was lunchtime, but he could not serve me anything because it was Ramazan. He made me promise to visit him in Eid days, when we celebrated the end of our month of fasting with three days of visits to the homes of all our relatives and friends. We talked about other things. He was a great talker and a good storyteller, sophisticated and full of funny jokes.

He was not just a baker, I discovered. He had graduated from the Literature Faculty of Kabul University and had taught at Kabul University for two years. But he did not earn enough money there to support his big family. He stopped teaching and took over his family’s baking business. He built up the business and now has three shops. He has three sons and two daughters. All of them are married and have their own kids, but they all live with him in one big courtyard, the way we did with Grandfather.

“Do you still have to be home on time for dinner, otherwise your wife will be worried?” I asked him.

“Oh, of course! She is the boss after all!” he said with a huge smile.

My older sister accomplished her dream: she finished her education and became an architect and an engineer. Then she got married, and has a sweet son, who was given the name I had chosen: Suleiman. It was a name I always liked. Suleiman was an important man in many folktales as well as in the Holy Koran and the Bible. More practically, it is a name that people rarely mispronounce. And when I was little, I often dreamed of Suleiman’s magic carpet, on which I could fly to interesting places, and cut the most beautiful kites along the way.

Now my older sister can tease her husband instead of me. Her husband is a good man. He teases her right back. She complains about that. I smile and tell her, “What goes around comes around.”

These days, she has become my best friend, even though sometimes she still says that when I eat I make noises like a cow. Maybe I do.
But I do not think I do. These words bring memories of our time in the garden of Hamza’s father, and the stealing of the pomegranates.

One night about six months after their wedding, her husband asked her, “Tell me a few things about your brothers and sisters. I don’t know much about them.” He had been living in other countries for several years before they were married.

She told him about our childhood at Grandfather’s house in Kot-e-Sangi, and how everything changed when the civil war started, how we took shelter at the Qala-e-Noborja as refugees, then tried so hard to get away from the madness that was destroying our country. Later he told me that as she started telling him how hard I had tried to help my father support us, her voice began to shake. She burst out sobbing and could not stop, though her husband held her in his arms.