A Fort of Nine Towers (50 page)

Nobody answered him. My uncle had gone to the house without telling any of his brothers or his father. Grandfather did not want anyone to go there.

“The garden was full of sacks of potatoes. It looked like they are using it for storage. They saw me and chased me all the way to Makroyan,” he said sorrowfully.

Somehow they figured out that he was part of the family who owned the place. This was how they found Grandfather. The Taliban could have just taken the house, but even they knew they could never claim to own it without the papers.

Early in the morning, Grandfather left our house without telling us where he was going. While we had our breakfast my father said, “If Dad sells the house, the gold is gone with it. But I don’t know how to stop him. If I did, we might face bad consequences. I don’t want to be blamed for the rest of my life by the others.”

“So, are we just going to lose all our gold?” my mother said. “We’ll never get to another country.” The gold was the only wealth we had left. The belief that we would one day get it back had made it possible for us to think that somehow someday we could leave Afghanistan and have something like a normal life.

“What do you want me to do, then?” my father said. “It is not just your gold; others have theirs, too.”

“Can you not just go and get the gold, before Father sells the house?” my mother asked. My mother always called my grandfather “Father.”

“You heard what my brother said last night. The whole courtyard is full of potato sacks. Thousands of them. We would have to shift all those first. Then, if they see us taking it from the ground, they’ll think we have a lot more somewhere else. Then we’ll be in worse trouble. They may kidnap us, and ask us for money we don’t have. How will I be able to convince these illiterate Taliban thieves of that?”

My mother did not say anything.

All I could think about was having seen Grandfather’s spirit so broken.

A few days later, we heard that Grandfather had sold the house for less than half of what it was worth. A few days after he received the
money for it, he was threatened by the buyer and forced to give half of it back. Grandfather did what he was told.

From the time he sold the house, he became a quiet man, a man who spoke only two or three words a day.

He bought a new house. It was on our side of Kabul, only a thirty-minute walk from Noborja, about halfway to his old house. It had two floors and a nice courtyard, but it was tiny compared to what we had had before. Two of my uncles lived downstairs with their families. Grandfather lived on the second floor and stayed in his rooms for months without leaving the house. He never talked to anyone. He read and read and read. That was all.

Sometimes I visited him, but he hardly noticed me. We said “
Salaam
” to each other, and a few minutes later he said “
Salaam
” again, and a few minutes later he said “
Salaam
” again. He never said anything more. He just kept reading for hours, occasionally gazing at the blue sky.

Other times, he talked about whatever book he had open. But the two thick volumes of his favorite book,
Afghanistan in the Path of History
by Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar, were always on his top shelf. They were never opened now, and were covered with dust.

After a while, he even stopped reading, and he became gloomier. Dark circles appeared under his eyes, and he neglected his appearance, going about the whole day in a wrinkled
shalwar kamiz
with an unbuttoned collar without combing his hair. It hurt me to see him so uncaring about all the things he had told me were important.

One day in late winter, Grandfather woke up before dawn to take ablution for morning prayers. He still did not like his new house, especially his bathroom with its floor covered with blue tiles. They were very slippery. He liked white marble from our mountains, as he had had in his bathroom in his old house. He always said that Afghan marble is the best in the world. “The rest of the world will notice it one day, and it’ll have great value. It will be exported everywhere,” he would tell us.

That day, he took ablution as always with cold water and was
shivering from the cold. As he hurried to get to his bedroom to get under his blanket, he slipped. His head hit the edge of the sink. He went unconscious and lay there for several hours.

When he came to, the sun was already flooding into the bathroom through a small window. He had missed his morning prayers. He did not remember what had happened to him and did not know why he was lying on the bathroom floor. He wanted to stand up and go to his room, but he could not. He called for my uncle who lived downstairs with his kids, but his voice was not loud enough to wake anybody up.

My uncle came upstairs around seven o’clock as always to ask his father about his breakfast. Sometimes Grandfather wanted his eggs boiled, and sometimes fried. Some days he wanted milk with sugar, and some days he wanted green tea with honey. But this morning my uncle could not find him in his room reading a book, as Grandfather usually did.

My uncle opened the bathroom door and saw Grandfather lying on the ground with blood pooled under his head. He carried Grandfather to his room and asked him what had happened. But Grandfather could barely talk. His face was blue from cold. My uncle covered him with blankets and lit a blazing fire in his tin
bokhari
heating stove. The room was warm after a few minutes, but Grandfather could not feel anything, neither cold nor heat. He fell asleep.

My uncle quickly came to Noborja to tell us about Grandfather. He and my father and I went to several private clinics to look for a doctor. But it was too early, and the clinics were still closed. It was not like the old days, when we could call an ambulance any time of the day or night.

Nobody wanted to take his sick relatives to public hospitals, either. They were filthy. A person would get sicker there instead of getting cured. Besides, the hospitals did not accept patients unless they had been injured on the front line, or had stepped on a land mine, or had been wounded by a rocket.

We waited for more than an hour in front of a private clinic. Finally, the doctor arrived. He was a close friend of my uncle. We
took him to Grandfather’s house. By now all my other uncles and their wives and my cousins had arrived there, as well as my mother and my sisters and my little brother. There were too many people for that small house.

The doctor examined Grandfather and said, “Some blood vessels burst inside his brain. He needs to have an operation within twenty-four hours. Nobody can do this operation in Afghanistan. We don’t have the surgical tools for it. You’ll have to take him to India.”

“Is there no alternative?” my father asked.

“No. I’m afraid not,” the doctor said.

“That will take three or four days!” my uncle protested. “His passport is expired. We have to renew it first. Then we have to apply for Indian visas. God knows if they’ll give them to us.”

“The best I can do is to take him to my clinic, but I cannot promise anything. Without an operation, he will lose his ability to speak in twelve hours or sooner. If he talks, his words will be loose, and he won’t be able to pronounce them properly. In twenty-four hours, he will start losing his memory. In thirty hours he will not recognize anyone. And after that, he will go into a coma. God knows how long he will stay alive after that,” the doctor said with a sigh.

Grandfather was listening to all that the doctor was saying. “Will I be able to walk before I start losing my memory?” Grandfather said.

“No, I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Your brain will not help you control your body. You won’t be able to lift your arms, or your feet, and you won’t feel anything unless we get you operated on.”

“So, I will die like this?” Grandfather said as if he were hearing a joke.

“Not if we get you to the operating table on time,” the doctor said. “Otherwise, yes,” Grandfather said.

The doctor nodded his head as he was looking at his hands.

There was a moment of silence, a bitter silence. Nobody knew how to break it. My father ordered my uncle to start working on passport renewal.

Grandfather said, “Let’s have a good
qabli
for lunch, and celebrate the last hours of my life, and enjoy eating and talking while I can. You don’t go anywhere for lunch, Doctor. You stay with us.”

The doctor nodded.

Grandfather tried to sound cheerful. We all had cold smiles on our faces to make Grandfather feel good, but inside we had flames of sorrow burning us, and we did not know how to cool them.

“I know I can’t bring a real smile to your lips,” Grandfather said, “but maybe my joke will. Mullah Nasruddin said, ‘When my wife died, half of the world died for me. When I die, the whole world will die with me.’ ”

Everybody laughed.

“You see, I can still do it,” Grandfather said with a trace of pride.

My aunts started wiping tears and blowing their noses.

“Hey, hey, I don’t want to see you crying and wiping your noses for me,” Grandfather said cheerfully.

We all smiled with tears in our eyes.

My uncle left the room to start working on Grandfather’s passport renewal. My father went to find out about whether an Indian visa would be possible. My aunts started cooking the rice and the meat for the
qabli pelau
and shredding the carrots they would mix with it. The doctor wrote a prescription, which he handed to me, and I ran off to the pharmacy. The room was full of my cousins, and Grandfather told them to sit in a circle around him and joked with them.

I came back with the medicine in a plastic bag. In the short time that I had been gone, Grandfather’s face had become noticeably paler. But he tried to sound happy and full of energy.

Several hours later we had lunch around one long tablecloth in Grandfather’s room. My father had to feed Grandfather, like a little baby, as he was lying on his
toshak
in the corner near the woodstove. Grandfather made some jokes about old people, and we laughed, quietly.

After lunch, the doctor injected him with some painkillers since his head was hurting, and he fell asleep. We did not let the doctor go. Late in the afternoon my uncle returned with a new passport for Grandfather. Early that evening Grandfather woke up. His saliva started coming out of the corners of his mouth without his noticing it, and he was saying things that did not make sense.

My uncles tried to talk to him, but he could not focus on what they said to him. My aunts wept, but he did not object anymore.

“I should take him to my clinic,” the doctor said. “It is happening faster than I thought. He may need oxygen very soon.”

My uncle stayed with him in the clinic that night; the next day we busied ourselves trying to get visas. The next night I stayed with him. I sat all night long on a chair in front of his bed, looking at him as he was breathing softly. Occasionally, he opened his eyes, looked at me, and then closed them again.

Early in the morning he opened his eyes. This time he did not close them. He wanted to say something. I lifted the oxygen mask so he could speak. He called my name, and I said “Yes.” He called my name again, and again I said “Yes.” His voice gave out, but his lips still moved a little. And then they stopped. His eyes remained open, seeing the invisible.

We brought the body to his new house. I did not cry at all. I could not tell whether it was nighttime or daytime. They seemed to me the same. I was not feeling hungry or thirsty. I did not know whether I was walking or sitting. Everything seemed like it had stopped.

Meanwhile the little house was filling up with people from all over Kabul who had somehow heard the news.

My father took charge of organizing cars to take us all to Grandfather’s village. Though he had left the village many years ago, Grandfather had always kept in touch with many of our relatives there, and had helped many of them without telling anybody.

That same day, we carried him to his village, about thirty miles from Kabul. Even before we arrived, Grandfather’s friends and relatives had heard the news. The high-walled house where he had grown up was full of people.

Once we reached there, the news quickly spread all over the village, and thousands of people came. No one there had ever seen so many people at a funeral before. Our family had lived in that village for several generations. The village people used to call my grandfather “President” from the time he was working at the National
Bank of Afghanistan. My grandfather had brought my grandmother there for the first five years of their marriage to live with his mother, and would visit her once every three months while he was working in Kabul. He had fixed up many of the rooms in the old house and had made its walls higher and stronger, but they offered no protection during a war fought with rockets.

One of my uncles, whose wife is from that area, had wanted to go to the village instead of staying in the Qala-e-Noborja. He decided to go with his wife’s brother to see whether it was safe. On the way there, they were robbed by one faction who took all their money. On the way back, they took a different route to avoid the robbers and were beaten badly by another faction, because they had no money left to be stolen. We heard worse stories about those roads from other, distant relatives. So, we never tried to take refuge there. Yet the village was a beautiful place, filled with the apple orchards that Grandfather had planted.

When the time came to take Grandfather from the house to the place for his burial about a mile away, my father and his brothers tried to carry his coffin, but everybody there wanted to help carry it. So, they passed Grandfather’s coffin over their heads to the next person in front of them.

When they put the body in the grave, and I saw the earth taking Grandfather away from me forever, I could no longer hold back the feelings I had been carrying inside me. I broke down and cried loudly. I could not stop, though I remembered Grandfather’s long-ago admonition: “Brave boys don’t cry.” But I was not brave anymore. I knew that my bravery had been buried with Grandfather.

Many people rubbed my back and hugged me. But it had no effect on me. I would stop only when I was asleep.