The Favored Daughter (6 page)

I ran into the street barefoot. I stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of my mother weeping and grabbing at her clothes in horror. I darted past her and saw my father's dead body. The top part of his skull, where the bullets had entered, was missing.

I began to cry. I didn't yet fully understand the enormity of what had happened but I knew that our life would never be the same.

The body was brought into the hooli and laid out in the Paris Suite before burial. My mother alone went to see the body and prepare it for the funeral. Only she of the wives said her final goodbyes to him. In the room where her children were conceived, the room where husband and wife had, in all too rare moments, lain and talked and created their own private world together, she endured this task, as she had endured everything else in her harsh life: with dignity and duty. She didn't scream or wail out loud; she washed and prepared the body in accordance with God. In his death, just as in his life, she did not fail my father.

In the morning thousands of local people poured into Koof to say a final goodbye to him. Their sadness and fear for their own futures created an atmosphere so heavy that it felt like the very sky was falling down on our heads.

Gray-haired old men with beards, white turbans, and green coats sat in the garden crying like babies. My father was buried on a peak behind the hooli, facing Mecca and the valley of Koof he so loved.

For the villagers, losing the man who had championed their causes and supported their needs was a turning point. It marked the beginning of the political upheaval that was about to become full-blown war in Afghanistan.

For my family, losing my father meant losing everything: our lives, our wealth, our figurehead, our reason for being.

 

FOUR

RUNNING

Although she grieved for the man she loved, my father's death was in many ways the making of my mother.

In those first few months, her natural leadership abilities and skills came to the fore. It was she who took control of the family, organizing resources, deciding the fate of children. Her years of practice as my father's right hand, of political organizing and efficient home management, of keeping the peace within our extended family, allowed her to lead our family out of this dark period. Her priorities were keeping the children together and safe. She received many offers of marriage, but for the same reasons she had once refused to divorce my father—the fear of losing her children—she refused all suitors.

Not all of the wives fared so well.

Ennayat's mother—still young and somewhat flighty—married a handsome young man who had worked for my father as a shepherd guarding the family cattle. He had gone to Iran to find work and recently returned, bringing with him exciting consumer goods, including a tape recorder, not found in our little village. He wooed her with his tales of the sophisticated life in Iran and with that tape recorder.

But as is normal in our culture, a stepfather has no obligation to take the children from a previous marriage, and he refused to care for them. Aside from Ennayat, she had borne my father three other children: Ennayat's brother Hedayat, sister Nazi, and a six-month-old son, Safiullah. She insisted on taking the children with her to her new home, but the new husband refused to feed or clothe them. When my mother visited a few weeks later, she found Ennayat and his two older siblings crying in the yard. They were not allowed in the warmth of the house and were hungry and dirty. She took them home with her immediately. But the young woman refused to give up her baby. My mother, who was sympathetic to her, left without baby Safiullah. It was something my mother regretted forever, because a few days later he got a fever and was left to die without food or comfort. We heard that he cried alone for hours, his little face covered with flies, while this man would not allow his mother to even pick him up. He died a lonely, horrible death. Ennayat has never gotten over it and named his own first-born son Safiullah in his memory.

Khal bibi, who had been so dear to my mother, was luckier. She married a local leader, a kindly man who had no previous children. In a gesture almost unheard of in our culture, he raised her two sons like his own, even leaving his property to them when he died.

Niaz bibi, the wife who didn't get on with my mother, married a teacher and remained in Koof. Despite her and my mother's disagreements, years later, when I was campaigning for parliament, this man helped me enormously, arranging transport for me and accompanying me on the campaign trail. The extended family structure is hard for people in the western world to understand, but in my view it is a wonderful thing. Those ties transcend generations, petty arguments, and geography. Family is family.

Zulmaishah, the Khalifa's child and my father's eldest son, inherited the hooli. He was later killed, and Nadir, the child of my fifth mother—one of the wives my father divorced—inherited it and still lives in it to this day.

But in those first days and weeks after my father was killed we didn't have much time to grieve, because the world beyond the mountains was getting closer, and the rapidly disintegrating political situation was about to come crashing down on us.

A few days after his death, the commanders who had killed my father came looking for us. We ran up to the fields where our cattle were and hid behind a large rock ledge. We watched as they looted the house, stealing all they could carry—the radio, the furniture, the pots and pans, they took it all.

Then, a few weeks later, we were all sleeping on the roof of my uncle's house when they came back in the middle of the night. They awoke us by hitting us all with their rifles. They were yelling and screaming, demanding to know where the sons of Abdul Rahman were. My brother Muqim was just six years old, but if they had found him they would have killed him. Somehow my mother managed to pass him to a neighbor on the next roof, who hid him underneath her skirts. In some parts of Afghanistan shalwar kameez are the norm for women, but village women in Badakhshan wear loose pantaloons covered by long, full skirts. Those skirts saved my brother's life that night. The mujahideen took my sister and my sister-in-law, my elder brother's wife. Both girls had just turned 16. They started to beat them. My uncle tried to stop them but he was beaten back. They took the girls off the roof and down toward the hooli. My uncles and male cousins were screaming at them, telling them this was against Islam, that this was
haram,
forbidden, and that no Muslim should touch a woman who is not his blood relative or his wife.

We were forced to watch from the roof as they beat the girls all night long, pistol whipping them and hitting them with rifle butts. They kept demanding to know where the weapons were hidden, but no one claimed to know. My mother was white as a sheet and grim-faced, but she said nothing. We all watched as they put the bayonet of the gun to my sister's chest and pressed it until she began to bleed. We had a guard dog called Chamber who was chained near the gate of the hooli. So desperate was he to protect his family that he tugged until his chains broke free; he ran toward the men, barking and snarling, ready to bite, but they simply turned and shot him dead. They beat the two girls until dawn, when the call to prayer was heard over the mountain. They left, presumably to go pray.

Two days later they came again and threatened to kill us all. This time they forced Nadir, who was a teenager, to show them where the guns were. My mother had known all along and had even watched as her daughter and daughter-in-law were beaten without betraying the whereabouts of the weapons. My mother knew that with the guns gone, our last method of protection was gone. They had taken everything we had; the next time, they would kill us.

The men of the village were so horrified by what had happened to the girls that night that they sent a message to the mujahideen, saying that if they came back to our village they would meet resistance. They would take up shovels, pick axes, and staffs, whatever they had, and use it to protect their women. The mujahideen agreed not to terrify the village, but they wanted the family of Abdul Rahman dead. Their commander gave permission for his men to execute us. This was the second time I stared death in the face.

They came early the following morning. By now the Khalifa and her children had moved to another village, so my mother was the only wife left in the hooli. Fortunately most of the children were out playing and were able to hide in neighbor's houses. My mother grabbed me and the two of us ran into the cattle house. Our neighbors frantically started to pile up pieces of dung in front of us to give us cover. I remember the smell and the choking bitter taste of the dung. It felt like I was being buried alive. I clung tightly to my mother's hand, too afraid to cough for fear they would find us. We were there for hours, silent, terrified. The only sense of security was my mother's fingers wrapped around mine. We could hear them searching for us, and at one point they came right up to our hiding place. If they had prodded the dung pile it would have tumbled down, revealing our positions, but for reasons only God knows, they didn't.

After they finally left, we came out of our hiding place to find the world had turned to terror: our hooli had been completely ransacked. My mother grabbed me, my two brothers, and my elder sister. She didn't waste time gathering our clothes, and we ran. We ran down past the garden, through the hay fields, and onto the river banks. We were leaving all we had behind and we didn't dare even to glance back. For my mother, it was as though her life was collapsing with each step she took. All the beatings, all the pain, all the years of drudgery and work, it was all to build a home and a life. A life that ended as we ran for our very survival along the river bank.

As expected, the men returned to search again, and they looked down into the valley and saw us running away. They started to give chase. They were stronger, faster. I was getting tired and was beginning to stumble and slow the others down. My sister started to scream at my mother to throw me into the river to save the others: “If you don't throw her they'll catch us and we'll all die. Just throw her.”

She almost did. My mother picked me up and lifted me into the air as if to throw me, but she looked into my eyes and recalled her promise at my birth that no more harm would ever come my way. From somewhere deep inside her she gathered reserves of strength and instead of throwing me to my death put me on her back, where I clung on as she ran with me. We were the last of the group and I could hear the footsteps of the men getting closer. I thought that at any second they'd be upon us and would tear me from my mother's back and kill me. If I close my eyes today I still feel the clammy, cold, awful fear of that moment.

Then, suddenly, we saw a Russian.

WE'D REACHED THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VALLEY, which was government-controlled land. Our would-be assassins turned and ran back. We collapsed with exhaustion and relief. My mother started to weep.

That Russian was the first of many I would see in the following years. They were foreign invaders in Afghan land, and although they would bring education and development in some areas, they would commit many atrocities on innocent Afghans. This one, though, was kind to me. He was tall and blond, in army uniform, and he called me over. Hesitantly, I walked toward him. He handed me a bag of sugar, which I ran back to my mother with. It was the first, but not the last, time my mother would be forced to accept charity.

First the five of us stayed close to the river, in the home of a teacher named Rahmullah. He was just about one of the kindest people I ever met, with warm eyes that crinkled when he smiled and a neat gray beard. The family was poor and couldn't really afford the extra mouths to feed, but he had been one of my father's political supporters and he was honored to have the Wakil's family in his simple two-room home.

His garden backed directly onto the river, and I remember playing happily, splashing about with his daughters. It was a relationship that would endure. Years later he came to me for support because his daughter needed to escape a forced marriage. The family had arranged the match when she was a child, but the man in question had grown up to be notoriously violent and the girl wanted to refuse him. His family insisted the match go ahead, but Rahmullah supported his daughter's right to say no. I negotiated between the two families, eventually getting the other side to agree to break the engagement. The girl was then free to follow her dream and train as a teacher like her father. In gratitude, Rahmullah gave me all the help he could in my political campaigns. Today, if I visit the area I love nothing more than to take a simple lunch of rice and chicken by the river with this lovely family.