A Fort of Nine Towers (57 page)

Around midnight, I heard knocking on our door and I opened the window to see who had come at that late hour. I was very surprised to see my older sister and her husband. I went down the long flight of stairs to the door and opened it for them. Before I had a chance to greet them, my sister hugged me and kissed me many times, her face soaked with tears.

“What is wrong?” I asked with alarm.

“Nothing,” her husband said. “She got talking about you, and suddenly said she needed to see you.”

I led them upstairs. The rest of the family were asleep, except for my mother. She was surprised to see my sister, who by then had calmed down a little. Her husband found a blanket and a
toshak
and went to sleep, but my sister, my mother, and I stayed awake for hours while the muted TV flickered at us, having an unexpected tea party and talking about things of the past. We almost never do that. The wounds from those days are deep and can easily be opened. It is better to leave them in the past.

The crying machine is a big man now, handsomer than I am, taller than I am, stronger than I am. He is full of muscles and can beat me when we arm wrestle. He has not cried since he was a baby. In fact,
he is like my father, and can always tell good jokes. But I like to remember his old name. It reminds me of the time when we were with the Kuchis. Now he studies law, and hopes to bring order to our country.

My four younger sisters are all being educated, even though some people in Afghanistan still say that educating girls is a bad thing. They have high ambitions. One of them studies management, another agriculture. Another wants to be a writer and reads any book she can find. The youngest says she will be a nurse. Afghanistan will benefit from having good managers, agriculturists who can plant trees, writers to record the joys and sorrows of our people, and nurses to cure our wounded hearts. The older two have married very good men.

My mother had never really quit her job at the bank. She just stopped going during the civil war when the fighting made it too dangerous. And then she was prevented from working by the Taliban. But after they were driven out, she went one day to see what was going on at the bank, and then the next day she started back at her old job. No one had been hired to fill it, because no one had been there to do any hiring. After a few years, she finally left the bank and took a job with the Afghanistan Disaster Management Authority, where she feels she can be more useful. She works very hard to get government assistance quickly to communities that suffer earthquakes or blizzards or other calamities.

My father is still teaching physics at Habibia High School. He is the only teacher from before the war who was not killed or did not flee the country. All the younger teachers respect him like they do their own fathers. The school has a gym, but no equipment. He is trying to find money to buy what is needed and to start training again. He is still in great shape, and very strong, except for the arthritis that is creeping into his knees.

After so many years of trying, my father did finally manage to leave Afghanistan, though only briefly. He achieved his lifelong ambition to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Now we are proud to call him “Haji.”

My cousin Jerk can still be a jerk sometimes, but despite that he has done very well for himself. He has always been kind to his siblings
and parents, and has willingly shouldered his family’s burdens, as I tried to do with mine.

After not having seen him for a couple of years, I went to his house one day to deliver my second sister’s wedding invitation card. He had put on a little weight, and had a few white hairs on his temples, which made him look distinguished. I pointed those out to him, and said, “You are getting old.” Suddenly I felt
I
was being a jerk, since he is the same age as I am.

He ran his right hand over his temple and said, “Well, that’s the story of life. As Grandfather said, ‘We are raw, we get cooked, and finally burned.’ I’m in the process of being cooked.”

“Will you stay in this country until you get burned?” I asked, trying to be funny.

“Yes, I will stay in this country and will do my best to fix things,” he said, sounding serious. “Things that my father and his generation could not fix. I believe that there is a future for this country, but only if we do something about it now. If we don’t do it, then who will?

“Somebody has to have the guts to step in. We know that no country is here to help us. They are here to help themselves. We have to tell the world that Afghanistan has a new owner, and that owner is our generation.”

I gave him a big hug for the first time in many years—a lifetime—because I was so moved by what he said. I admire him for his determination.

A few years before Wakeel was killed, we received a letter from Russia. Who knows how it found us. But some friend of my grandfather’s brought it to him. It was on a scrap of a Russian newspaper, stating, “I’m still alive. I can’t write more. We’re living in a dark hole. I’ll come home one day.” The handwriting belonged to Wakeel’s father who had mysteriously disappeared all those years before. But we have never heard any more from him.

If he goes to look for us at Grandfather’s house, he will not find us, or even the house. Most of it is completely destroyed. The part where
my father and mother had our rooms is only a mound of dirt. Every one of Grandfather’s beloved McIntosh apple trees is gone. There is no sign that once we had a good life there. Perhaps someday somebody will build a new house in Grandfather’s garden. Perhaps they will find our gold.

There is one person I have never seen again, but I am determined to find her, because she has given my life its purpose. I now have my own carpet company called Kabul Carpets & Kilims. It is still small, but it will grow. Grandfather used to say, “Small streams make an ocean.”

A few years ago, when I had a chance to go to Holland, I visited a Dutch woman who had once come to Kabul and has become my good friend. In her house in Haarlem, I saw one of my carpets that I had made in my factory in the worst days of the Taliban.

There is no way to describe the feelings I had when I saw that carpet again. It reminded me of my good memories, my hardships, my eagerness for a future, my factory, and eating lunch with my weavers around one cloth with everyone laughing, even though we knew terrible things would happen if the Taliban caught us. Now all of that history, my history, is being preserved in that faraway country.

None of this could have happened without my teacher.

I think she might be in Tajikistan. Maybe in a city. Maybe in a village. I have not dreamed about her in a long time. There is too much noise in my life now. But soon the time is coming when I shall set out to look for her.

I am sure she will know when I am coming. And, with her help and Allah’s, I shall find her.

A Fort of Nine Towers
chronicles the past three tumultuous decades in Afghanistan. For part of that time, I was very young. Many things happened to my family and me, and for the first years of the fighting I cannot say exactly when they occurred—only that they did. I have included specific dates when I can be sure of them, and done my best to reconstruct them when I cannot.

Readers from outside Afghanistan may wonder why I have rarely included the names of my family in this account of our lives together. Afghans, however, will understand.

While this book focuses on my family’s experience, every Afghan family has stories similar to ours. They all need to be told. They need to be heard. They must not happen again.

This book is dedicated to Afghanistan and its people, to the spirit of Grandfather, who still leads me in good and bad times like a guardian angel, to Wakeel, who visits me every three or four years in my dreams, to my parents, who mean everything in the world to me, to my sisters and brother, who will make their own families soon in Afghanistan or in other countries, to my uncles and aunts and cousins with whom I shared so much and whom I deeply love.

This book would not have been written if Stephen Landrigan had not come to Afghanistan, and I had not met him. He listened quietly when I spoke of the memories that haunted me, and encouraged me to write about them to ease their grip on my soul. His guidance helped me discover a love for writing. Someday I will write a book about all the good things he has done for Afghanistan. It will be a thick book.

A profound thanks to J. Garcia and Linda Nicita of Colorado, who read an early draft before I knew so much about the English language, and who cleaned up all the grammatical errors and misspelled words. Thanks also to Laurence E. Landrigan, whose careful reading and editing of my manuscript provided many helpful insights. Their generosity has been deeply impressed on me, and I welcome the obligation of passing it on.

Khaled Hosseini and Michael Patrick MacDonald not only inspired me by their own writing, they were helpful in opening doors to agents and publishers, and to them I am grateful.

I am especially appreciative of the professionalism and kindness extended by Courtney Hodell, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who nurtured this book through many drafts. Also, a big thanks to Jessica Papin, my agent with Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, for her positive energy and hard work that led me to the team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where Marion Duvert and Devon Maz-zone helped this book find publishers in many other countries and languages and Lottchen Shivers spread the word as its publicist.

And finally, thanks to Janie Harris, who gave me the first review long before
A Fort of Nine Towers
was even published. It was deeply moving to have somebody who lives on the other side of the world so excited by what I had written.

I hope this book will lead others to become curious about the many layers of Afghan culture that so unexpectedly and for so many of the wrong reasons have become the focus of the world’s attention.

Qais Akbar Omar (whose first name rhymes with “rice”) manages his family’s carpet business in Kabul and writes books. In 2007, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado. He has studied business at Brandeis University and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at Boston University. Omar has lectured on Afghan carpets in Afghanistan, Europe, and the United States. He is the coauthor, with Stephen Landrigan, of
Shakespeare in Kabul
.