A Fort of Nine Towers (34 page)

My mother, my aunt, and her husband talked about it late into the night, while I listened from my bed.

My aunt said, “If you wait for him to come back to go to Kabul together, maybe on the way the car will break down again. It may take days to fix. Then the poor man has to drag you all with him to somewhere, and you know he has no money left. But if the car does break, he will find a way to fix it, or just leave it behind, and make his own way to Kabul.”

Finally, around midnight my mother agreed, though reluctantly. Before she could change her mind, my aunt immediately went to her neighbor who had offered to fly us. She took me with her, while my mother started gathering what few belongings we had, and knocked on the neighbor’s door, waking him up. My aunt apologized and told him that tomorrow he should pick us up before going to the airport. He smiled sleepily, nodded, and closed the door.

The next morning, my mother, sisters, brother, and I climbed into
the helicopter without my father. The cockpit was full of pomegranates in big bags. We ate them as we looked down through little windows to the Hindu Kush mountains that we had already crossed three times, so slowly, in fear and in hope. In only fifty minutes we were at the Kabul airport. We took a taxi, and a half hour later we were at Noborja. Nobody knew we were coming. We had not known ourselves.

As we walked through the outer gate into the garden and then past the heavy wooden door with the clanking chain into the courtyard, a couple of my cousins saw us and then their mothers, and then my uncles. They started shouting and running toward us. We got only as far as the tall acacia tree before we were totally surrounded by them.

Then I saw Wakeel. He came out of one of the rooms on the upper floor to see what was happening. For a moment or two, he stood very still, watching us as we were being hugged and kissed by many of our relatives, while still others were running out of their rooms as they got the news. Then he bolted toward the stairs and sped down them like a kite dropping for a kill, and raced across the courtyard to us.

I was so happy to see Wakeel again. In the months since I had seen him, he had lost some weight and looked skinny and a little taller, but his face glowed with happiness. I could sense that he was feeling waves of relief, like a dry land after the rain. But he could not find words for his emotions.

He hugged my sisters and my mother, but when he reached me, he tagged me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, where the hell were you?” Everybody was watching both of us.

“That is all you can say?” I asked disappointedly as emotions were racing inside me.

He could not hold his tears anymore, and I was not ashamed to let mine go. He hugged me as I shook silently with sobs and squeezed me tighter in his arms. Finally he got back enough breath to say, “I was so worried that something had happened to you guys. You said you
would be gone for one month. But it was almost a year.” He wiped his eyes.

I could not answer him. My throat was still blocked. I wanted to see my grandfather. He was inside the house and had not come out. Wakeel took me to the upstairs room where he was seated with two of his friends. When I saw him through the door, I ran to him and kissed him on the face over and over, and hugged him for several minutes without saying anything. I did not want to look in his face, because my eyes were full of tears, and I did not want him to see them. My heart was pounding, and I was trying very hard not to cry out loud. Grandfather did not say anything, but simply held me in his large arms.

After a while, Grandfather said, “Hey, Gorbachev, how did you get here?”

I pulled myself away from him enough to look him in the face. I kissed his hands formally and managed to say, “We all came in a helicopter. The others are downstairs.” I felt like I was choking when I spoke, and I could not say more.

Grandfather’s eyes were now as full of tears as mine. “Give me another hug,” he said, maybe because he did not want me to see this.

Trying to make a joke, he said, “You didn’t say hello to my friends. Did you forget all your good manners?” I unwrapped my arms from around his neck and said “
Salaam
” to them, but it came out with a squeak. One of them was drying his tears with the end of his turban.

At that moment, my mother and the others walked in. For the first time ever I was glad everyone was there with us. Usually, I wanted to be the one talking to Grandfather for hours without any interruption. But that day I could not. My mother kissed Grandfather’s hands as he kissed her head. Then my grandfather asked about my father.

She sat near him and told him everything, as my aunts brought us tea and my mother gave everybody presents, which were only round Mazar flatbread and candies that we had taken to the shrine to be blessed. After an hour, as the grown-ups kept talking, I walked out of the room and found Wakeel in the corridor all by himself, weeping. That made me start again. Then we were both laughing. This was one day when nobody was feeling any shame about crying. We would have broken the noses of anybody who had said anything.

Before the day ended, everything was like it always had been. We both had a lot of stories to tell each other. He had five good kites for me. One had my name on it. He had made that for me himself. He told me that he had flown that one and cut lots of other kites with it. He said that the neighborhood kids were afraid of that kite.

That is how he made me famous in Kart-e-Parwan. Every kid in the town thought that I was the one flying that kite and cutting them all. But it was Wakeel. It had been very mysterious for the kids in our neighborhood that they never saw me outside, but saw my kite every afternoon high in the sky as it proudly roared around, cutting other kites that tried to rise a little higher than mine.

The next day when I walked outside to buy some bread for breakfast, all the kids were looking at me from the corners of their eyes and whispering to one another, “There he is, there he is. ‘Qais, the Cruel Cutter.’ ” I pretended that I did not hear them. I walked past them, holding my head up like a tyrant.

I gave Wakeel some rocks that I had collected from the Buddha in Bamyan. I had to explain everything about Buddha, and why I thought those rocks were precious. He thought I was joking when I gave them to him, but after I told him about the Buddha, and living in a cave behind his head, and meeting the monk, he did not want to take those stones. He thought they were part of my adventure memories and I should keep them. I told him that he was the
padshah
, the king, of all my memories and that he should have them.

Five days later, my father arrived home with our car, which was now running well. Once again we were all together. We all tried to lead a good life. The war seemed to have ended in Kabul. But we were not living in our own house, which lay in ruins on the other side of the mountain. We were still refugees in Haji Noor Sher’s Fort of Nine Towers, which had only one tower left.

While we were away, Grandfather had the idea to scatter his sons, so that if the war started again, we would not all be stuck in one place
and could look to one another for help in another part of the city. My uncles had been wanting to leave for some time, but they were waiting for my father to come back before they did. Now, one by one, they left the old fort.

One took his wife and children and moved in with his father-in-law in the Taimaskan blocks in the northwest corner of Kabul. Another uncle shared a house with his brother-in-law in Parwan-e-Seh, not very far from Kart-e-Parwan. Another went to live in Khair Khana with a friend.

A week after we returned, Grandfather himself moved to Makroyan to live with his eldest daughter, who was now a widow. The ceasefire had been going on for more than a month by then, and people were beginning to be hopeful that it would be permanent.

Makroyan was a neighborhood of five- and six-story apartment blocks built by the Russians back when they had come as friends. It was now controlled by one of the factions whose soldiers were raping many young girls there, along with looting people’s houses and sometimes killing people. My father’s sister had lived there for many years but had become afraid of being there alone.

Her husband had been executed during the short-lived Communist presidency of Hafiz’allah Amin, whom no one remembers now. But he had held power long enough to kill many of the best-educated Afghans. One day, my aunt heard her husband’s name announced on the radio as being among those who had been purged. No reason was ever given.

Though she subsequently had many suitors, she never remarried and lived with her daughter and her brother, my youngest uncle. He was only a little older than Wakeel, so we thought of him more as our cousin. Grandfather wanted to be with his eldest daughter as long as things remained bad in Makroyan.

Wherever Grandfather lived, that is where Wakeel’s mother wanted to be. Grandfather told her to remain at the Qala-e-Noborja with the rest of us, even though he especially loved her cooking. But she insisted on going to Makroyan with him. And so did my unmarried aunts. They wanted to be with their oldest sister, who was like a second mother to them.

Now, for the first time in Kabul, we were living without Grandfather and without Wakeel. Since the fighting had started, nothing had made sense. I could never have imagined that we would ever have left my grandfather’s house. And now after so many months away, living without Wakeel or Grandfather made the least sense of all.

The big mud fort felt very empty. At night when the wind hit the large trees and lilac bushes in the courtyard, it made a lonely and even sometimes frightening sound. The dogs outside howled in the rutted road. The Qala-e-Noborja no longer felt like the magical place it had been the day we first arrived.

I thought about my friends in Tashkurghan, and about the Kuchis, and the monk in Bamyan, and my teacher in Mazar, and the kids at the shrine. And most of all, I thought about Wakeel. I had waited so long to be with him again, and now he was on the other side of the city.

Because he was older, he was allowed to come from Makroyan to the Qala-e-Noborja on Fridays by himself. Over the next couple of months the ceasefire held, and he came almost every Friday around midmorning. For an hour, he would sit with my parents and talk with them. Then he and I would fly kites for the rest of the day. He always had to be home before dark, though, which meant he missed the best kite winds at dusk.

Sometimes he spent the night with us, but most of the time he returned home since he was the youngest boy among all the family now in Makroyan, and it was his job to run to the bazaar anytime his mother or one of the aunts needed vegetables or herbs, or had
naan
dough ready to be taken to the bakery.

I wanted to tell all my adventures to Grandfather. But he was not there. Makroyan was on the other side of Kabul. It was only a couple of miles away, but it felt like the far side of the world.

The Gold