A Fort of Nine Towers (15 page)

That street had once been full of joy. I watched as two stray dogs went into the house where only a few minutes ago we had been held captive. One of them came back with a forearm in his mouth. Our neighborhood had become a fast food restaurant for dogs.

The commander insisted that we have lunch with him, but Grandfather wanted to go.

“You seem to be a good man,” Grandfather said. “Did you really kill all those people whose heads were in that ditch?” His voice was very calm, like he was talking to one of his sons.

“No, Uncle. I’m not a good man anymore. I am a killer. I used to be a good man, but that seems like a very long time ago.”

“What happened?” Grandfather asked.

“I used to be a student in Habibia High School. I always got the highest scores in the class. I was preparing for the university. You can ask my teacher, your son, Malem Abdul Basir. I was also one of the best boxers in the school gym. But this war has destroyed
everything good in my life. It has taken everything from me.” He sighed and looked at the mountain.

“It is not just you,” Grandfather said. “It is everybody in Afghanistan.”

“No. It is not true. For centuries we Hazaras have been treated like slaves in this country. Pashtuns and other tribes always thought of us as outsiders, and treated us like dogs. A few months ago, one of my cousins was captured. He had an air hose put in his ass, the kind you use for tires. They pumped him full of air until he exploded. Do you know who did that? Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. And who is he? A Pashtun, who hates Hazaras. Then one of my brothers had a nail hammered into his head by one of Masoud’s commanders. They laughed while he screamed. Do you know who Masoud is? A Panjshiri who hates Hazaras. Everybody in this country looks down on us. What have we done to this country to be treated so badly? Name me one Hazara who is working in a high position in this government. I assure you there is none.” His face was getting red with anger.

“But what you are doing is not good either. You cannot clean blood with blood,” Grandfather said.

“I want revenge.” He said those words very slowly. His voice was getting higher and louder. “I want revenge! My whole family has been killed by Gulbuddin, Masoud, and Sayyaf. Their commanders raped my mother and my sisters before they killed them. Do you want to know how I know that? They made me watch them! One of my sisters was only seven years old. I am the only one who survived, and I know that sooner or later I will be killed, too. But before I die, I’ll kill as many of their people as I can. I will rob them, rape them, and murder them,” he said, getting even louder.

“This is not a very smart way to solve the problem,” Grandfather said.

“I think this is a very smart way. Other tribes should count Hazaras as Afghans, as one of them. If they think they can do all these bad things to us, now they should learn that we can do bad things, too. We tolerated too much for too long, for centuries. Now the bowl of our patience is overflowing.”

Grandfather did not say anything and the commander was silent,
too. The commander was looking at the mountain. Grandfather was looking at his house. The commander broke the silence. “I am sorry that you cannot visit your house today.”

“Thank you,” Grandfather said.

As we walked around the corner, I automatically looked for my good friend Muhammad Ali, as I always did at that place. He had lived in a nice house across the street from ours, but it looked empty now. He and Wakeel were the same age and were friends in school together. He was one of several Hazara neighbors we had. He taught me how to ride a bicycle, and he was very good with kites. I wondered where Muhammad Ali was now. Many of his relatives had gone to Germany. Was he there safely with them? Or had the Hazara-hating warlords done terrible things to him and his family?

“I can drive you halfway back from where you came,” the commander offered.

Grandfather nodded. The commander walked ahead of us, and we followed him to a Russian jeep that was parked along the road. The commander climbed in, and we did, too. We sat in the car and the commander drove us along the road past the yellow silo where we had walked an hour and a lifetime before. He stopped near the bus stop, where no bus had stopped since the fighting had begun. He stepped outside. “I cannot go farther than this. This is the front line between Hazaras and Panjshiris. They will kill me if I go past here,” he said.

We climbed out of the jeep. The commander did, too. He came around to our side of the vehicle. He kissed me on my cheeks and urged me to give my father his warm regards. He told us his name. His breath smelled so bad that again I nearly threw up. Once more, he kissed Grandfather’s hand. He stood watching us for a long time as we walked away.

When I got home, my mother was cooking dinner. As soon as she saw me, she ran and kissed me on my cheeks. Her hands smelled of onions, and that scent meant everything that is good in the world.

She kept asking me how our house was, but I could not talk. I
thought of the pile of skulls, and the dogs. My grandfather went into his room without saying anything. My uncles and aunts quickly started gathering there to hear about what he had seen. My cousins stood outside the door, watching me but saying nothing, waiting for me to say something.

My mother insisted that I tell her what we had seen, but instead I started to cry, sobbing uncontrollably and I could not stop. My mother cried, too, but without knowing what had happened to me. My sisters cried softly also, except my older sister, who had a wicked gleam in her eyes.

My mother was one minute shaking my shoulders and the next hugging me. “What’s wrong?” she asked me forcefully. I sobbed even louder to try to release the grief in my soul.

I do not remember when I stopped, but I do remember falling asleep with my mother holding my head on her chest and rubbing my back, while my older sister was smiling at me. I knew why she was smiling at me. She was planning to tease me with “fountain eyes” for the rest of my life.

The next day when I woke up, I felt so ashamed that I had cried in front of everybody that I did not want to see anyone. I tried not to look them in the eye, but everyone was nice, even my older sister. By now they all must have heard about what had happened to us.

I went to Grandfather’s room, where he was reading a book. He smiled at me and continued reading. I just sat there in front of his stretched-out feet and took a book for myself. I looked at it for a long time, but I could not concentrate.

After a while, Grandfather took an apple from a dish next to him and made a few little jokes as he peeled it with his knife. He offered some of the pieces to me and talked about a few things that were of no importance. But he never mentioned what had happened to us. When we had eaten a couple of apples he said, “Okay, Gorbachev, it’s time for you to go out and play while I do some writing.”

“Gorbachev” was one of his nicknames for me, though I never knew why.

As I left his room, my older sister ran to me and gave me a big hug, holding me in her arms for several minutes. Then she looked at me with her eyes full of tears and kissed me several times. Taking my arms in her hands, she said, “You know I love you very much.” I nodded, unable to say a word.

I went up on the roof, where Wakeel was already flying a kite, and Jerk was holding his reel. When Wakeel saw me, he took the reel from Jerk and gave it to me and told me to do a good job, because he was in a fight.

Surrounded by those who I knew loved me, I felt the pain from the day before begin to ease, at least for a time.

Under the Earth

N
ow everything was different. Now we knew we would not be going back to our home. Now we understood that the fighting would not end soon. Now my father and my uncles were more open in their discussions about fleeing the country. Grandfather listened to them, but said nothing.

We had been at the Qala-e-Noborja for half a year, longer than any of us had expected. After Haji Noor Sher left, some other people who were either Haji Noor Sher’s distant family or close friends moved into the fort. That made us more aware than ever that we were not living in our own home. We had lots of room at Noborja, but no Afghan wants to live in someone else’s house.

A school near the Qala-e-Noborja opened sometime in the late summer but closed two weeks later, when the principal heard a report on the BBC that a faction was threatening to attack our neighborhood that afternoon. We were sent home.

The principal told us to listen to the radio. “As soon as the radio announces that the schools are open again,” he said, “you must come.” Some of my classmates were very happy, because they did not like school. I found their attitude very strange. I had had so much fun in our old school. What do these new classmates like, then? I asked myself.

I thought that the school would be closed for no more than a few days. But we did not go back to school for two years.

Our parents started teaching us at home. It was not fun; there was no one to compete with. I could not compete with my older sister. She knew all my lessons much better than I did, because she was two classes ahead of me.

My father often taught us. He was very strict. Sometimes in school we had joked with one another when our teachers were writing things on the blackboard. I could not do that at home. I started to lose interest in all subjects, except for astronomy, which was not then taught in our schools. I read the textbook all the way through a couple of times. At night I went out in the courtyard and stared at the sky for hours, drowned in strange thoughts. But my father emphasized math, and the more pressure he put on me to learn, the more I lost interest.

Wakeel and my older cousins, who were in upper grades, often just read novels, or magazines, or books on subjects that interested them. I felt envious of them. Nobody pressured them to study boring school subjects. Wakeel read poetry for hours and could recite line after line of Hafiz by heart. Hafiz was his favorite.

As children we had our own world. We went to the garden every day after breakfast, played with the animals that were still there, or swung from the branches of the trees. We found new friends among the kids in the neighborhood.

After lunch we flew kites. The roof of the fort was even higher than the one at home. With enough string, we could almost float our kites over the top of the twin-peaked mountain that separated us from our house. Wakeel was cutting all the other kites nearby, but nobody in our neighborhood knew it was he. For some reason, they thought it was I. Soon my name was famous, and all the kids called me “Qais the Kite Cutter.”

Wakeel just smiled at me when he heard them. That made me feel a little bit small. But, still, I never told anybody that it was Wakeel who had cut them. Wakeel was my closest friend, but we were very competitive when it came to kites.

Then, strange things started to happen with my kites. I would put
them up very high and look for somebody to cut. Usually, once one kid had a kite up, others would quickly rise to challenge him. But before another kite even had a chance to appear in the sky, my kite was suddenly floating free, as if somebody had cut it. Wakeel came running over to see what had happened.

“Did you cut your own kite?” he asked. He was laughing, of course.

I did not know what to say to him and just shrugged.

About two days later, the same thing happened. I told myself that the wind must have been very strong up high where the kite was, and maybe it had ripped the kite from its string. That had never happened before. But I was looking for an explanation.

I had been using the string for two years. Wakeel and I had prepared it very carefully. It had taken weeks. First we had collected old light bulbs and ground up their glass into a fine powder. Then we mixed the powdered glass into the paste we made from boiling rice down to a soggy mess. We rubbed the paste and glass into the string to make it like a razor when it went into the sky. My string had cut every kite it fought, except Wakeel’s. Now it was cutting itself.

What was worse, after my kites were cut, they floated into the grounds of the old British Embassy, which had been abandoned when the Russians came, and whose walls were topped with barbed wire. There was no way to get over those walls and bring back the kites that had fallen inside them.

The next week it happened again. And then five more times. It was very mysterious. Now the kids in the neighborhood were all laughing and calling me “Qais Who Cuts His Own Kites.”

At the Qala-e-Noborja, we did not often eat together as we had at Grandfather’s house. There was no room large enough to hold us all. Sometimes, though, we squeezed ourselves into a couple of adjoining rooms, especially when my mother made a special meal and invited my grandfather, my uncles, and their families to join us.

The grown-ups sat at the upper end of the tablecloth, and my cousins and I sat at the bottom. Sometimes we would throw bones at
one another, or rub hot peppers on bread and leave it for someone to eat without knowing. Mostly the grown-ups were silent; they were always unhappy. Whenever any of them talked, it was about how to leave Afghanistan.