A Fort of Nine Towers (8 page)

Were we leaving all our things for thieves and looters? What was going to happen to my kites and my marbles? I started filling my pockets with my best marbles.

“Qais! The car! Now!” my father said. From the way he spoke, I
knew not to argue. Several marbles slipped out of my hands and went rolling around on the floor. I left them and ran out the door.

We walked quickly across the courtyard to the garage. I looked under the tree where my father had been digging a hole last night. But there was no hole anymore. The green cucumber vine was there, just as it had been before. I wanted to ask him what happened to that hole, but I thought he might shout at me again like last night.

We got into the car while he opened the garage door to the street. As he started the engine, one of my uncles burst into the garage from the courtyard.

“Where are you going?” asked my uncle, who was a year younger than my father.

“I told you last night,” my father replied, “to my friend’s house in Kart-e-Parwan.”

“Where are the rest of us going to go?” my uncle asked plaintively.

“You have had weeks to think about that,” my father replied. There was an ache in his voice.

“Take our kids and wives with you; they want to live, too, like your own,” my uncle pleaded.

“This is a small car, not a bus or truck,” my father said. “It can only take four people at a time, and we are six already, plus a baby.”

“Leave that part to me. I know how to do it. I’m a good packer,” my uncle said.

Hardly a minute later, all six of my uncles with all of their kids and wives arrived in the garage and tried to fit themselves into our car. Two of my uncles’ wives sat on the front seat, and seven of my cousins sat in the backseat. There was no space left for us. My father slammed the door near the driver’s seat. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said angrily.

My uncles started to argue with my father. He walked into the courtyard and kept walking slowly around the trees. I had never seen him behaving like this, or talking to his brothers like this before. It reminded me of Indian movies in which the bad brothers did not get along.

Everybody got out of the car and stared at one another. There was a deep silence.

My father came back after a few minutes and told my mother and my three sisters to take the baby and sit in the backseat. Then he ordered four of my cousins to squeeze in there, too. He asked me and three of my other cousins, including Wakeel, to sit in the trunk. Two of my uncles’ wives sat in the front seat with my father. The rest would have to stay at the house and wait for him to come get them later.

He backed the car out onto the street. The bottom scraped the road from the weight of so many passengers. My father drove slowly for the four blocks through our neighborhood until we got out to the main road.

What we saw, I will never forget. Thousands of people like us were taking advantage of the ceasefire to flee from our part of the city. Thousands and thousands of people, all walking in near silence. When they spoke, they whispered as if they had been forbidden to talk normally. They were strung along each side of the roadway, moving along like lines of ants. All of them had two or three bags in their hands.

Ours was the only car on the road. When they saw our car, they all rushed toward us, asking us to give them a lift, even though they could see that our car was already fully packed. The crowd that gathered around us was so huge that my father could not move the car forward, not even one inch. Some were trying to pull my cousins and me out of the trunk so they could take our place. My father shouted back to us, “Hold on to each other, and lock your fingers together tightly.”

We did what we were told, and my father rolled up his window, pressed the horn, turned on the lights, and drove slowly, then faster until one by one the people let go of us.

For the first time in the two months since the fighting had started, all of us were seeing the destruction it had caused. Things we had heard about, but had not wanted to believe, we were now seeing for ourselves.

The block-long, eight-story yellow grain silo that the Russians had built was full of holes where rockets had hit it. Small mountains of wheat lay at the base of the silo where it had flowed out through the holes.

There were big craters in the road where rockets had fallen. This had been the best road in Kabul. There were still many half-exploded rockets standing in the middle of the road, like nails that had been banged halfway through a piece of wood.

Hundreds of dead bodies were scattered all over the pavement, on the sidewalks, and in the park in the middle of the road. Some looked like they had been there for a long time. Blood was matted all over their clothes. Most were on the main road. Maybe they had been hit by a rocket when they were trying to cross the road. But many of them had been shot with bullets to the head, chest, or back. This was the work of the snipers. I could not believe my eyes; I thought I was seeing an American horror movie, especially when I saw parts of bodies, like arms or legs or even heads, lying by themselves.

My father had no choice but to drive over the ones in our path. Some of the dead bodies were on their backs as if they were sleeping. When our car drove over them, the speed of the car turned their faces toward the road, and the car rose up off the pavement.

To avoid hitting a man who was running toward us, my father drove the wrong way around the roundabout in front of the Polytechnic, then gunned the car up the hill toward the Intercontinental Hotel.

Beyond the top of the hill, everything looked different. The unimaginable scene through which we had just driven suddenly vanished. In its place, we saw real life.

People were buying bread from bakeries for their breakfast. Little kids were holding their parents’ hands as they were walking to their school. The dogs were not howling. The roads were not empty. People’s windows were not slamming, and their doors were not banging. There was no war. None.

I saw smiles on the faces of people who showed no signs of worry. But they could not stop staring at us; they had never seen a car packed like ours before. The lines of refugees had only just begun to reach that area, and they had no idea how many thousands more were coming. The small mountain that rose between our house and this neighborhood had protected these people from the fighting. Not even the
snipers had come around to their side of the mountain, though they could have. But they were fighting over our neighborhood, which lay between two factions. The people we saw acted as if they did not even know that vicious combat was going on less than two miles away, though they would have to have heard the rockets and the shooting.

We came down the hill from the Intercontinental Hotel into the Kart-e-Parwan neighborhood. There were only a few cars on the road, but many people walking. Most of them were Indians going barefoot to their temples, carrying brass bowls filled with milk. Their men were dressed in white or orange. The women wore bright-colored saris. The kids walked behind. The boys’ heads were shaved except for one braid. Some of the men had stripes painted on their foreheads.

My cousin Wakeel was sitting next to me in the trunk. He laughed at the kids with no hair, but said he wished he could have one of their bowls of milk.

At the bottom of the hill, we turned sharply to the left a couple of times and drove through a pretty, small park I had never seen. All the flowers were carefully tended.

We passed a large white building that stood behind a high wall. There were guards in strange uniforms with guns out in front of its fancy gate. They stood like statues. Big dogs from Russia were next to them. A sign said “British Embassy” in Dari under big letters in some other language.

We followed a dirt road that ran for two hundred meters beside the wall. That was the bumpiest road in Kabul. It took us down into a deep ravine and then up again as loose rocks slid underneath the wheels of the car. The top of the trunk bounced down on our heads with every bump. The dust stirred up by the car rolled in on us and made us choke. All of our eyebrows and eyelashes got covered with it. We looked like the clowns that used to perform on the stage of our school for Teacher’s Day.

My father stopped the car in front of a tall, rusted metal gate in a high mud wall. He blew the horn a few times. Finally, with a scraping sound, an elderly
chowkidar
, the gatekeeper, drew open a small
door next to the gate, saw that it was my father, then opened the gates wide. My father drove inside. The
chowkidar
rubbed his eyes to see whether he was dreaming. He closed the metal gates behind us and rushed toward us to help us get out of the trunk. He whispered to himself, “I have never seen so many people in a Volga before.”

“I bet you haven’t,” I said back to him with a grin.

He got red and tried to hide his embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to be rude; I’m just shocked.” He had not expected to be heard.

We climbed out of the car. Some of my aunts had to be pulled. But the kids were all jumping out and looking around at where we had stopped, hardly four miles from the war zone we had just left.

In front of us rose a massive wall more than two stories high. It had one small opening in its dun-colored expanse, and that was filled with a thick, unpainted wooden door studded with the flattened heads of thick spikes. At the far end of the wall was a tower with eight sides that loomed above the high walls and the tops of some very big trees. We had seen another tower like it just outside the gate, but it was damaged, and half of it was missing.

A few moments later, the thick wooden door opened with the clank of a thick chain that must have been attached to it. A man whom I recognized as my father’s business partner came through it, with two house servants close behind. I had seen the man many times in his carpet shop. He had always been impeccably dressed in a silk necktie and tailored jacket, with bright eyes that poured a good feeling into his customers. But this morning, he was wearing only his pajamas and holding a cup of tea in his hand. His eyes were sleepy. He greeted my father, gave
salaams
to the other adults, and welcomed all of us.

His name was Haji Noor Sher. Whenever my father took Wakeel, my older sister, and me to the shop, Haji Noor Sher gave us candy and put some small money in crumpled bills in our pockets. He always had foreign customers in his shop looking at carpets, but he would put his business affairs aside when we came in and give all his attention to us. He never used our real names; instead, he called us “nephew” and “niece,” and he told us to call him “uncle.”

If he was surprised to see us all at that early hour that morning, he did not show it. We had had no way to get a message to him to tell
him that we were coming. But he and my father were close friends, and close friends help each other in times such as those.

My father took him to one side, and they talked quietly for a moment. Haji Noor Sher spoke to one of the house servants, who always stood behind him like bodyguards. The servant ran back into the house to get us some tea and something to eat. Haji Noor Sher acted as if he were accustomed to having visitors every day at this time, and to keeping those words for his servants ready in his mouth.

“Hey, everybody, welcome to my house. Do you like it?”

We really had not seen anything yet except big walls and the towers, but we nodded because we were relieved to be away from the fighting.

“This place is called the Qala-e-Noborja. Did you know that?” He held himself like a famous actor whom everybody knows, but none of my aunts and uncles had ever seen him before. “The reason we call it the ‘Fort of Nine Towers’ is because when it was built more than a hundred years ago, it had nine towers. It’s antique, like me.” He had a big smile that was contagious, so we all smiled at him.

I interrupted him: “Uncle Noor Sher, but I only see one tower.” I pointed to the one full tower, ignoring the stub of the other one outside the gate.

He looked at my father, winked, and said, “Oh, he is smart.” I liked hearing him say that, especially in front of all my cousins. “The other towers,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “are invisible. Just because we cannot see something does not mean that it is not there.”

Even though the Qala-e-Noborja had only one tower still standing, it made me feel safe, especially since it had been there for more than a hundred years. Maybe the rockets could not hurt us here.

He handed his teacup to the other house servant and led us away from the door and down a steep, rose-lined path between the old fort and the one-story house to a terrace on the slope below the house. He and my father walked in front, and my cousins and I followed behind them, my mother and my aunts after us. The terrace was covered by a canopy of grapes. The bees were humming around them.

The sky was completely clear, and the sun was floating in a
lapis-blue space shining down at everything through the leaves. The wind gave no rest to the leaves and rustled them. I wondered whether there was still war on the other side of the mountain, or whether everything there had changed, too.

When I turned and looked behind me, I saw the old fort’s one last tower rising above me. It looked even higher from where we were standing below it on the terrace. I was curious what was inside those high walls, but was too busy seeing all the new things in this large garden that surrounded them to wonder about that for long. On the terraces—there were four of them cut into the steep slope—rosebushes and vegetable gardens were laid out in neatly tended rows.

On one of the terraces a fountain shot water into the air. Near the fountain were two massive trees. Two of my cousins tried to hold hands with me around one of the trunks. We could just barely reach one another’s fingertips.

Down another level, in a flat area at the lowest point in the garden, was a stream. As he led us to it, Haji Noor Sher told us that its cold water came from the Hindu Kush mountains sixty miles away. It was flowing into a pool cut into the rock. More than ten types of colorful fish were swimming in the pool.