A Fort of Nine Towers (11 page)

In the mornings, as soon as I had woken up and splashed some water on my face, I ran to his rooms, where some mullahs he had known for years were reciting verses from the Holy Koran with melodic voices. I sat in a corner and listened, or took a Koran and followed the lines the mullahs were reciting by heart.

After breakfast the mullahs left, and musicians would come and start singing sweet
ghazals
softly accompanied by a
tambour, sitar, tabla
, and harmonium. The music went on until lunch, when there was a one-hour break for naps. Then some other friends of his, who were the best storytellers I have ever heard, came and told stories about almost anything.

Haji Noor Sher always sat in his chair like a king on his throne while his guests sat on the
toshak
cushions on the floor around the room. His eyes were closed. He fingered his
tasbeh
prayer beads, moving his head gently as if in a trance. If in the middle of a story one of the servants knocked on the door, he opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”

The storyteller immediately halted.

He said, “Come in.”

The servant would come in with a fresh pot of tea in his hands. Haji Noor Sher looked at the glasses on the floor, which was the sign for the servant to fill them up. The servant stepped lightly from one cup to the next, then left the steaming pot on the floor in the middle of the room and softly walked out.

Haji Noor Sher turned to the storyteller and said, “Continue.”

At night, he turned on his generator so that all of the kids could watch an Indian movie with him in his room. He often fell asleep in the middle of the film, half sitting and half lying on his bed. When the movie ended, we pulled his blanket over him, turned off his light, tiptoed out of his room, turned off the generator, and went to our rooms to sleep.

One day, when Wakeel and I were on the roof with our kites, we noticed that below us in the courtyard the house servants and all the other servants, who kept the gardens and looked after the animals, were doing unusual things.

They were shampooing the deer and tying pretty ribbons to their antlers. Later, they strung multicolored lights along the tops of the courtyard walls and hung paper lanterns from the graceful, bending canes of the lilac bushes. Then they hung a very large square of brightly covered cloth from the upper terrace. It draped over the windows of the rooms on the courtyard level until other servants set poles under its lower edge and raised it up to make an awning. Under the awning they built a low platform.

The servants did not stop for lunch but kept on working, washing the large, square paving stones in the courtyard floor. Haji Noor Sher said they had been part of the Buddhist
stupa
that had stood here for centuries before the Qala-e-Noborja had been built by Abdur Rahman, the king, for his
wazir
, his most important minister.

As the evening approached, the courtyard became even busier. Haji Noor Sher was ordering the servants to do this and that. Hurricane lanterns were set up along both sides of the paths around the
courtyard and next to the flowerpots overflowing with blooms. Some of the flowers were bright red and tall, some wound like vines up the walls, and some were orange and gold.

Wakeel and I had long stopped flying our kites for the day, and were watching all the activity, wondering what was going on.

My father had come into the courtyard and was standing next to Haji Noor Sher, discussing something with him. When Haji Noor Sher went upstairs to his room, I ran down from the rooftop to ask my father what was happening. He told me that Haji Noor Sher was having some foreign guests for dinner, people who were working for the United Nations. I ran up and told Wakeel.

Haji Noor Sher loved having guests, especially when he could show off his garden, and his wealth, and how many servants he had.

My father went inside our rooms to take a shower. My mother started ironing his best
shalwar kamiz
. Wakeel and I went down to the courtyard to help the servants.

Two servants carrying shiny silver trays with tea and glasses entered the courtyard. They asked us to carry them upstairs, to Haji Noor Sher’s rooms. I took the tray that had two pots of tea on it. I could smell the strong scent of cardamom coming from their spouts. Wakeel took the tray of glasses and walked ahead of me, climbing the stairs to Haji Noor Sher’s apartment.

When we reached the top, Wakeel carefully pushed the door open with his foot and went in without knocking. Haji Noor Sher had just finished having his shower. He was standing in the middle of the room, drying his head with a small blue towel, but otherwise completely naked.

When he saw us, he gasped and hurriedly looked for something with which to cover himself. I was horrified. It is very shameful to be naked in front of someone else, and even more shameful to look at someone naked. I quickly placed the tray in front of the door on the floor and ran back down the stairs. Wakeel ran after me, laughing, and nearly knocking me over as he raced down. I started to laugh, too.

Haji Noor Sher shouted at us. We did not hear what exactly he
said, but we knew that he was very angry that we had not knocked on the door before we came in. But how could we? Our hands were full.

Wakeel and I ran out of the door, across the courtyard, and back up to the roof terrace. There we collapsed into embarrassed laughter. Wakeel asked, “Did you see them?”

“What?” I asked, still giggling.

“Did you see that he had five testicles?” Wakeel asked.

“Five?” I asked in disbelief. “How could he have five?”

“I counted them very carefully,” Wakeel said seriously, then fell into a heap as he exploded laughing. And each time that the laughter started to ease, we would look at each other and Wakeel would say “Five,” and it started even fiercer than before. When Wakeel laughed, his eyes glowed and his brilliantly white teeth shone.

Several minutes later, we saw Haji Noor Sher, now very nicely dressed, coming out of his door into the courtyard. We peeped from behind a low wall in a corner.

Haji Noor Sher was standing in the middle of the courtyard, in a white
shalwar kamiz
and a black waistcoat, ordering his servants to lay carpets on the paths around the courtyard, and to bring the peacocks from the garden. He wore a small, round red hat with a tassel.

A group of musicians walked in through the low door and greeted him as if he were a prince. He directed them to sit on a platform in the middle of the courtyard that had been covered with an old Bukhara rug made soft and shiny from years of use.

The musicians were dressed very elegantly with beaded black waistcoats. Each wore a brightly colored turban. One started tuning the twenty-two twangy strings of a
rabab
. Another was blowing the Kabul dust out of his flute-like
ney
. The oldest one sat with a
tambour
rising from his lap, running his fingers up and down its long neck, playing silent music that only he could hear in his mind. And the fourth had a shining pair of brass
tabla
drums that he kept tapping on the sides with a small hammer to tune them, and put a snap into their sound. After a few minutes, they finished their preparations, and the courtyard was filled with their soft, sweet music.

When my unmarried aunts and my cousins heard the music, they joined us on the rooftop, watching everything from there. By now, it had become dark, and nobody could see us.

For a few minutes, Haji Noor Sher left the courtyard, then returned with four foreign men. Haji Noor Sher looked too short to be standing next to those people, who were extraordinarily tall and strong, with long, yellow hair, blue eyes, and unusually white skin.

Haji Noor Sher talked to them in a strange language, showing them the carpets on the paths and talking about them. The guests asked questions in the same strange tongue.

I asked one of my aunts what language they were speaking. She said, “English.” I liked the sound of it. It sounded very much like Dari, but even though I paid close attention, I did not understand a word of it.

From time to time, Haji Noor Sher would have one of the servants pick up a rug so one of the guests could inspect it more closely. He would turn it over and show them the knotting on the back side, then rub his hand across the pile as if it were his favorite cat.

Suddenly, I understood what was going on. I had seen him do this many times in his shop. He was trying to sell carpets to these foreigners. As the fighting in Kabul had become worse, Haji Noor Sher’s customers had stopped coming from other countries. He still sent a few carpets to people who phoned him from Berlin or London, and he had taken many carpets to India. But he had not sold any carpets in Kabul for a long time.

My father shared in the profits with Haji Noor Sher, and he spoke about these things with my mother at night. Now the only foreigners in Kabul were the aid workers. If these foreigners bought some carpets, perhaps we would have enough money to pay smugglers to get us out of Afghanistan.

My father came out of our house and shook hands with the visitors. My father talked to them in their language. I was amazed. I did not know that he could speak English.

The servants brought tall glasses of pomegranate juice on trays filled with plates of nuts and dried fruit, as the musicians continued
playing soft music. We watched as if it were all a movie. Haji Noor Sher had the servants bring several very old carpets from inside and lay the carpets out on the carefully cut grass. These were the most expensive pieces, the carpets my father had found when he had gone to the villages and knocked on doors. One of the visitors got down on his knees as he was admiring the old carpets. The discussion about prices would happen after they ate. Haji Noor Sher, like any good rug dealer, wanted the customer’s excitement about a carpet to build until he could not stand the thought of leaving it behind.

Haji Noor Sher led the guests to the awning under which the servants had arranged large cushions and several layers of carpets on the platform so they could sit comfortably while they ate. Some were at ease seated, like Afghans, with one leg folded on top of the other. But one of the guests kept shifting his position, trying to get comfortable. A servant brought a pitcher of water and a bowl. He stepped carefully among the guests as they settled on their cushions and poured warm water over their hands into the bowl so they could wash. Another servant followed him with small towels.

Then the food started to come. The servants, who were now dressed in even nicer clothes, carried big rice platters heaped with
qabli pelau
covered with raisins and grated carrots and set them on the cloth that had been spread in front of Haji Noor Sher, my father, and the guests.

An Uzbek man who usually helped Haji Noor Sher in the shop had been cooking kebabs out in the garden outside the courtyard. The smoke had started curling up to us on the rooftop, making us all feel hungry. A few minutes later, the Uzbek came running into the courtyard with long swords of grilled meats, and set them down in front of the guests, where they sat under the awning. Then other servants brought dishes filled with roasted aubergines and spinach. There were bowls of salads and yogurt and large baskets piled with freshly baked
naan
. It was still warm, and we could smell it. Someone else brought all kinds of drinks.

There were only four guests, plus Haji Noor Sher and my father, but there was enough food for everyone living at the Qala-e-Noborja.
We were happy about that, because we knew that later when the guests had left, the leftovers would be offered to us.

When the guests had all eaten too much, and Haji Noor Sher had insisted that they eat more, they patted their stomachs, while Haji Noor Sher pretended to be offended that they had eaten so little. The servants brought them
chillums
, water pipes, and carefully lit the apple-flavored tobacco using pieces of glowing charcoal.

One of the foreigners sucked a lot of air through the embroidered tube and made the
chillum
’s water bubble. But he did not manage to get any smoke. When he breathed out, expecting to see a blue cloud as when my father had done it, there was nothing. Wakeel laughed; the foreigner heard him and looked up at us. Haji Noor Sher looked up, too, and then the other foreigners looked at us as well.

Wakeel whispered to us, “There is the man with five testicles.” His disheveled hair framed his dark, shining eyes.

I burst out laughing. Wakeel laughed out loud, too. My other cousins who were hiding with us in a doorway on the roof terrace laughed without knowing why. The foreigners laughed out loud. The musicians stopped playing, and they laughed, too. Haji Noor Sher looked at us with sparks in his eyes for a second. But when he saw all his guests laughing, the frown on his face was put away, and it became a big smile with a loud laugh.

“Five,” Wakeel repeated, nodding his head convincingly.

And then, somewhere to the north of us, the first rocket exploded. Perhaps it had hit Khair Khana, a Panjshiri neighborhood about five miles away. Perhaps it had been sent by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Perhaps by Sayyaf. It did not matter. The guests quickly got up from their cushions. They thanked Haji Noor Sher, and said good night to my father. They took lingering looks at the carpets on the grass and carefully stepped around them, as their security man hustled them to their cars without taking any carpets with them.

My father and Haji Noor Sher smiled as they saw them off. If they were feeling disappointed at having sold nothing, they were too polite to show it.