A Fort of Nine Towers (33 page)

I walked in front of the herds with my father and the other Kuchi men. They spoke Pashto very loudly, as if they were all deaf. I asked my father why they were speaking so loud. He said, “This is how Kuchi people talk.”

Then I spent some time with my boy cousins who were lost in the dust among the sheep and goats. They each carried a stick in their hands. Then I went to see my sisters. Their colorful skirts and embroidered jackets were covered with a thick layer of dust, which turned them the dull colors of the men’s clothes. When the Kuchi girls saw me,
they stopped talking and glared at me to let me know that I was not welcome there. I was their cousin, but Kuchis have strict rules about men being with women and boys being with girls, which I was still learning. After I left them, they started talking to one another again.

My mother was always in the back, coughing and sneezing from the chalk-like, powdery dust. She could not walk as fast as the others. She did not have proper shoes, only sandals. The dry air and the dust made her heels crack. Sometimes she rode on one of the one-hump camels. Everybody stared at her as if she were doing something wrong, since usually only little kids and old people did that. Her white skin was becoming tanned by the sun, but the dust made her look as if she had put her head into a bran flour bag.

When the sun dropped behind the mountains, we stopped wherever we were: one day on the skirt of a mountain, one day in a desert, and one day in a green valley near a village. In less than an hour, a few Kuchi men could set up a few tents, while the women began to prepare dinner. Some breast-fed their babies as they cooked. A few hours later darkness covered us, except for where the starry sky with a half-moon dropped light toward us.

We had three huge fires every night, one for the men, one for the women, and another for the kids. Every now and then the fire cracked and a spark broke free. Youngsters were busy boiling water for tea, while the men reclined against huge pillows to drink it. They were as fond of drinking tea as my aunts and uncles, draining several cups, one after another, in minutes.

These were sociable people who enjoyed every meal like it was a feast. The Kuchi women often cooked
shorba
for lunch, a meat soup filled with carrots, potatoes, turnips, spices, and lots of dry or fresh hot pepper. When townspeople came to the encampment to buy animals, skins, or fleeces, the cook just added another few cups of water to the pot, boiled it, and there was enough to serve the guests. To eat it, we tore our
naan
into small pieces and put the pieces in a large bowl. Whichever woman was in charge of cooking that day would then pour the
shorba
over the bread chunks. Five to ten people would then eat from that one bowl. If I did not eat in a hurry, I might eat only one or two bites before the bowl was empty. Then I had to fill
myself with bread and yogurt, whey, or
quroot
, dried yogurt that is hard and sour and always carried by the Kuchis.

At night, the Kuchi women would sometimes make kebab, or rice with lamb. They did not clean the rice before cooking it. Each time I took a bite, sand crunched in my teeth or I would find myself chewing a stone. Several times my father joked, “The sand and pebbles are cooked very well, but why is there so much rice mixed in?” The men laughed and boasted, “Kuchis’ stomachs can digest even iron.”

I was grateful for the food that the Kuchis were giving us, but I did not like eating so much meat. I often cut an onion into small chunks, mixed it with yogurt, and ate it with bread, while the others stretched out their hands to eat their soaked
naan
from one large bowl.

After dinner two men played drums, the deep-sounding
dol
, and other men formed a circle and danced the
attan
. Slowly at first, they raised one foot and spun around, then faster and faster as the
dol
drove them into a spinning fury. One by one, some of the men dropped out when the beats came too quickly and they got too tired. On the last pounding beat, everybody cheered the couple of men still dancing.

The whole night was spent enjoying one another’s company, singing and dancing. Sometimes they hooked up a string of bulbs to the generator and made the desert night come alive with electric light. The women continued cooking until very late.

Finally, we drifted into the tents and slept. The flocks dozed outside, and the fierce-eyed watchdogs stayed vigilant.

Three weeks later, late on a Monday afternoon, we got to Mazar. We left the open country, and our line of camels swayed into the town along the main road. When we reached the shrine of Hazrat Ali, the caravan stopped briefly so the men could go pray. After the prayers, my father told Amir Khan that we could not continue walking with them any longer, and that we had to leave them there.

Amir Khan became very unhappy upon hearing this, but he forced a smile. He and the others had known we would leave them in Mazar, but none of us had wanted to think about it or talk about it.

“We will always carry this great memory of being with you and
your kind family,” my father said as he was hugging Amir Khan goodbye. “And we will be always thankful for your hospitality and sincerity.”

“We also will remember you and your family as one of our good memories,” Amir Khan said. “Don’t forget to visit us in Jalalabad in the wintertime. Please bring your father.”

Jalalabad stays warm all year. That is where the Kuchis had their permanent homes.

Then my father hugged the other Kuchi men one by one and said his goodbyes. I imitated him again, like the first time we had met them. This time, though, we knew all their names. We knew who were the best dancers, who told the best stories, who were the best kebab cooks, and who were poets.

My mother and sisters kissed the Kuchi women. My father and I waved farewell to them from a proper distance.

Then I went to my boy cousins. I hugged Omar Khan first, then the others. Omar Khan held out a handmade envelope to me and asked me not to open it until the next day. I promised I would. Then all the other boys handed me their own envelopes and said their shy goodbyes. They tried to disappear from sight quickly. They were not good at goodbyes at all. My hands were full of their envelopes.

I noticed that my older sister was surrounded by a group of Kuchi girls handing her Kuchi jewelry and kissing her farewell. They hugged her very tenderly, then one by one they disappeared inside the dust of the herd.

We stood on the roadside in front of the shrine and its blue-tiled towers, and watched them as they went farther and farther away until they disappeared from our sight. The farther they went, the closer I felt to them.

My father said wistfully, “They will just go on walking and walking over the same routes that our ancestors have followed for centuries. I wish Dad were here.”

We did not say anything. I put the handmade envelopes into my pockets as we got into a taxi. But the taxi did not feel right, somehow. I wanted to run after my cousins. I wanted to shout at them to take me with them.

A few minutes later, we were in my aunt’s house. She was very happy to see us again, but very surprised. We had had no way of letting her know what had happened to us, or that we would be coming back to her house. Happy as she was, she did not let us go into her rooms, because we were so dusty and dirty and full of fleas. She brought us tea in the courtyard. After we drank a cup, she sent us one by one to the bathroom for a shower, while she found us clean clothes and sent what we had been wearing to be washed in very hot water with strong soap. Then she let us in.

After I had bathed, I ran next door to surprise my carpet teacher. I knocked on the door several times, but nobody opened it. Then I pushed the door and entered the courtyard. All the rooms were empty. No one was there. Frightened, I ran back to our house to ask my aunt about what had happened to them. She told me that they had left for Tajikistan a few weeks before. Tajikistan! I was stunned with disappointment. How would I find my teacher in Tajikistan?

My aunt went to her bedroom and came back with a small package. “She left this for you,” she said.

Even before I unwrapped the plain white cotton, I knew what it was. I looked at it very carefully. It was my teacher’s rug hook. I could see her beauty in that hook, and it reminded me of her smile and her eyes filling with tears when she said goodbye.

I kissed the hook. It smelled of her perfume. I cried without knowing why I was crying. My aunt kissed me on my forehead, hugged my head, and said, “She loved you, too, but it was her decision to go to Tajikistan. She convinced her family to leave Afghanistan, and her family always listens to her. They believe that she is always right about her decisions.”

“She is not an ordinary person,” I murmured, then asked my aunt many questions about why my teacher would have wanted her family to move. But neither my aunt nor anyone in her family knew the answers.

I wrapped the hook in a pure silk handkerchief that I had bought from the Mazar bazaar when we had been there a few months before, and I put it in my suitcase with other special things that I had found in all the different places we had gone.

That night I went to sleep very early, and I saw my carpet teacher in my dreams. I also saw Omar Khan and my monk friend in Bamyan, and Hamza and my other friends in Tashkurghan. Wakeel was there, too. We were all together.

I woke up early in the morning, and everyone else was still asleep. I started reading the letters that I had been given by my Kuchi cousins. I began with Omar Khan’s letter. He was the one who was dearest to me, and the one I most understood. I had learned a lot from his love of life.

I read this letter several times. Omar Khan, I could see, was a poet as well as a herd boy. What he meant by “light” was being able to read and write.

I opened the second letter and it was from Aaron Khan. Aaron Khan was dark and skinny, with bulging eyes like a crab. He spoke in a hurried voice, half swallowing his words, and glancing furtively about as though he was planning to run off and hide. When he was excited his very eyeballs seemed to tremble.

The third letter was from Solomon Khan. He was quiet and had his father’s combination of sad eyes and winning smile, even though
his teeth were very ugly; they protruded from his mouth and grew in a double row in his upper jaw. This kept him busy, as his fingers were constantly in his mouth, trying to loosen and yank out the teeth in the back row. He meekly permitted those who wished to put their fingers in his mouth to feel his teeth. I could find little in common with him that we could talk about. He was always sitting off by himself in some dark corner of a tent, or spending his evenings at the hillside.

Still, it was pleasant to sit close beside him there on a big rock and say nothing for a whole hour, watching the crows wheel around the domes of the tents when they stood out in relief against the red glow of the sunset. The birds soared and plunged, then suddenly spread a black net across the fading sky and disappeared, leaving a vast emptiness behind them. When we watched something like this, we had no desire to speak, for our hearts were full from the joy of seeing it.

One by one, I read them all. The letters had many writing mistakes, many misspelled words, large and straggling, but I could read and understand them. With practice our cousins would get better, my older sister and I agreed. That is how we had learned Dari. What moved me was how creative their writing was, and how full of images. And when I finished reading them, I read them all again, over and over.

The next day, I went to the Hazrat Ali shrine and met my friends with whom I had played
gursai
. They all were amazed by my story of living with the Kuchis. While I was in the shrine, I prayed to ask God to keep my carpet teacher safe wherever she was. My father spent a week with us in Mazar, and then he decided to go to Samangan
to get our car, which should have been fixed by now. He would come back to Mazar and drive us all to Kabul. For the most part, the ceasefire seemed to be holding, according to the reports my father heard on the BBC. There had been no serious fighting during the weeks we had been with the Kuchis. My parents felt it was safe to go home. After nearly a year of wandering, they wanted to be settled again.

There was no more talk, at least for now, of going to another country. I was disappointed; I had thought that perhaps I could look for my teacher. But I was also desperately missing Wakeel. He had not come to Mazar as he had promised he would. But I understood how hard it was to travel.

We waited for my father for three days, but he did not come. On the fourth day, my aunt introduced us to her neighbor who was a helicopter pilot.

He told us that he had a flight to Kabul the next day. If we wanted to go, he would take us. That sounded like a good idea to me, but we wanted to wait for my father, so we could all go together.