The Favored Daughter (11 page)

Often my mother would be waiting nervously outside our apartment, keeping watch for me. She would be standing at the bottom of our apartment building dressed in her burqa, peering out into the night and scanning the shadows. The occasional clatter of gunfire echoing across the sky would send her heart jumping into her mouth. Her imagination must have tormented her as she waited for her daughter to reappear from her journey through the war zone. Her relief at my return was obvious, but she never showed it by hugging me. Instead, she would be quick to scold me, saying: “Even if this course makes you president, I don't care. I don't want you to be president. I want you to be alive.”

My brothers and sisters didn't like me taking such great risks either, but they would never tell me directly. Instead they would nag my mother and ask her to stop me from going.

But my mother would probably have thrown herself headfirst into machine gun fire if it meant I could still go to school. She was illiterate but fiercely intelligent. By watching me become educated she was somehow educating herself, too. She took genuine delight in talking to me about my classes and her commitment to me never wavered. She just ignored my siblings' pleas and nagging, placating them with her winning smile. But I am sure she felt a wave of fear every time I disappeared into the night. A fear that must have been made more acute by the recent loss of her son, my brother Muqim. His death affected the whole family, but none more so than my mother. Every morning she would visit his grave and put fresh flowers on it. But this simple loving act of a bereaved mother soon gave way to more erratic and, for the family, more worrying behavior.

By now the city was turning into a killing zone. In the neighborhoods where the fighting was worst, we heard reports of hundreds of civilians being killed each night. We could hear the crackle of gunfire ripple across the city. On still nights it would echo off the hills and mountains that surround Kabul, making the whole city feel haunted by the terrible events it witnessed.

Rocket fire was very common. The rockets would land without warning, sometimes destroying a family home, leaving its residents buried beneath the earth walls; other times destroying a shop, a school, or a group of women buying vegetables for the evening meal at a market stand. All you would hear was the whizz as they flew through the air, then the whizz stopping suddenly as seconds later they fell and detonated. You never knew where or on whom they would land.

One night I was cooking the family meal of rice and meat when I realized my mother wasn't home. It was 7 o'clock in the evening and normally she would be in the kitchen or organizing other aspects of household life. I had a nasty feeling I knew where she had gone, and if I was right, I knew I had to go in search of her. I was still in my mourning period for Muqim, so I put my black head scarf on and slipped out the door. A guard near our apartment building told me he had seen which direction she left in, and I knew my worst suspicions were right. She was on her way to visit my brother's grave.

There weren't any taxis about and buses weren't running at all, so I set off on foot toward the center of the city. At first the streets were eerily quiet. The Kabul I knew was bustling in the evening with cars and motorbikes and people walking to visit friends. Now it was deserted, cleared by the rattle of gunfire that lay between me and my brother's grave.

I kept walking nervously, aware that somewhere ahead was my mother. I began to see bodies in the street, freshly shot or torn to pieces by explosions, the corpses not yet beginning to bloat. I was so terrified. But I realized I wasn't afraid of dying as much as I was scared of the knowledge that these dead bodies were someone's family. And that tomorrow, it could be my family lying here.

When I got to an area called Dehmazang I came across a taxi. The driver had removed the back seat and he was piling it with bodies. He was covered in blood; his white shirt now streaked crimson, with darker flecks congealing around the pockets and buttons. His car looked like a slaughterhouse as the victims of the fighting, men and women with twisted limbs and shattered heads and torsos, oozed their blood into the footwell, where it formed thick pools that dribbled through the rusted holes in the floor and onto the dusty road beneath. The driver, clearly in shock, was lathered in sweat as he tried to stuff another corpse into his car. In Islam, a swift burial is very important, and I'm not sure it even occurred to him that his life was in danger. He simply worked at his grim task like he was loading sacks of rice. I just stood and stared at the strange sight for a moment. He and I were the only people on the street that warm summer night. The only sound was the crackle of gunfire and the grunts of a middle-aged taxi driver risking his life to ensure a group of people he'd never met got a fitting burial.

When he was satisfied he could fit no more bodies in his car he started the engine with a cloud of blue exhaust smoke and drove toward the hospital, the back doors still open, the passengers' dead limbs dancing as the suspension sagged over every bump and pothole. The sight of the dead and dying made me think of my family and I had to battle with my mind, as it kept imposing their faces onto these nameless victims. I wasn't far from the graveyard now, and I knew I had to keep going and find my mother.

It was getting dark and I was walking past Kabul University when a group of uniformed men shouted at me. They wanted to know were I was going.

I didn't answer them and instead just lowered my head and walked faster. One of the men raised his gun and asked me again, “Where are you going?”

I stopped.

I turned, looking into the gun.

I lied.

“I'm looking for my brother. Somebody said they had seen his body just around the corner. I need to go and check,” I said.

He thought about it for a moment before lowering his gun: “OK, go.”

I hurried off, heart pounding. For a moment I had thought they were going to do something worse than shoot me.

The cemetery was a dusty spread of earth covering several football fields. Years of war and fighting had preempted life's inevitable consequence and the newest graves were cramped together—oblong piles of small rocks with a roughly hewn gravestone pushed into the ground for support. On the higher ground, where the more prestigious plots lay, graves were often fenced with iron palings, now silently rusting in this lonely place. Tattered green flags, a sign of mourning, flew over them.

My mother was hunched over the grave. I could see her gently organizing the bright bunches of yellow silk roses. She didn't hear my footsteps as I approached, completely immersed in her thoughts. She was shaking as she cried and caressing a photograph of my brother. He looked so young and handsome. She turned and looked at me. I stood there in tears of relief at having found her and sadness at the scene. I felt overwhelmed and I knelt beside her. For a long time the two of us were holding each other and crying. For a while we just sat there, talking about my brother and how much we missed him. I asked her why she risked her life coming out here at night—did she not see all the dead people and the men with guns, and did she not realize how worried I was? She just gave me a sad, tearstained look as if to say, “You know why,” before turning back to the photograph.

We sat there so long I didn't realize how dark it was getting. There were few working street lights because of the battle. I started to get very scared. We were still crouched over the grave, collecting our thoughts. We were now in a great deal of danger. We couldn't risk going back the same way we came. It was too far and too dangerous to even attempt. So we resolved to wait another hour until it was completely dark, and then sneak out of the graveyard. We made for a shortcut we knew well—it led to a house that my father had lived in when he was a member of Parliament. The house was on the edge of the city, in an area called Bagh-e-bala. Some relatives had been living there to keep the house safe for us. We wouldn't be able to get home that night, but at least we would be out of danger if we could get there.

We crept through the tiny alleyways that separated the houses. Any noise or panicked movement could draw attention in the form of bullets. My mother and I inched our way forward, up the hill and toward safety.

The house was built in traditional Kabuli style, made from large graybrown bricks and very square, with small windows to keep the heat out in summer and the warmth in during the freezing winters. A sloping roof of curved tiles ran parallel to the hill. At the back was a courtyard with fruit trees and flowers. As we hammered on the door I wondered if the trees were still there. My relatives answered the door. They were visibly scared. They thought we were mujahideen coming to rob or kill them. When they realized it was us they dragged us inside and shut the door. I was so relieved to be safe, but I felt very sad to be back in this house so unexpectedly. This was actually the house my brother was living in when he was murdered. My mother knew this too, and she started crying again. We were both so physically and emotionally exhausted it was all we could do. My relatives brought us tea and some food, but neither of us could take anything aside from a little tea. Blankets were fetched and we went to bed, on my mother's insistence, in my brother's room.

Neither of us slept that night. I lay wrapped in a blanket thinking about my brother and the terrible things I had seen that day. How it felt to watch my country implode. How a taxi driver loading bodies into his car was the most decent, civilized thing I had seen all day. How a woman will walk through rocket fire to mourn a beloved son, and why men with guns who fought to free Afghanistan from the Soviets were now destroying this country to satisfy their own personal lust for power. My mother wept all night, her knees pulled to her chest, lamenting her loss. That night seemed to drag on forever. In some ways I wish it had. By dawn there was enough light in the room to see the bullet holes from the rounds that had sprayed from the gunman's Kalashnikov and killed Muqim.

That terrible sight only seemed to strengthen my mother's resolve. Her determination and pragmatism were returning. That morning she made hot green tea for me, and then staunchly announced we would be moving out of the apartment at Makrorian and moving here, closer to the cemetery. My mother's logic was impeccable as always—if you must walk in a war zone, better to make it a short walk.

My father's house had spectacular views over the city. The neighborhood was home to many affluent Kabulis. Instead of being able to enjoy the cityscape that tumbled out toward the mountains, we were now forced to witness the fighting that was raging beneath us as if the city were a horror movie. Machine guns chattered, and rockets hissed and roared as they exploded into buildings. From our high lookout we could see the two sides exchanging fire, tracers from the explosives lighting up the darkness. I watched the fighters as they organized themselves and directed fresh attacks on enemy positions. Some of the homes there had been built using colored plaster. I was watching the battle one day when an artillery rocket landed directly on top of a pretty pink house. The blast made the earth tremble and sent chunks of masonry flying more than a hundred yards into the air. Where the house stood just a few seconds previously was now a cloud of pink dust, almost a mist, settling over the surrounding houses. I saw the same thing happen to a blue house, too—there was nothing left of the house when it exploded like a ghastly firework, fading out with a trail of blue fog rolling through the streets. The tragic inhabitants inside were blown to smithereens along with their house.

For me, one of the saddest moments was when the polytechnic school got hit in the fighting. It had been built by the Russians and was a very good institution. During their time in Afghanistan the Russians had built a lot of institutions. We wanted the Russians gone because they were invaders in our land, but at the same time we had been thankful for some of the infrastructure and building they brought with them. A lot of young high school graduates continued their studies there, learning computer science, architecture, and engineering. Even Ahmed Shah Massoud had studied there. For a long time as a little girl I aspired to attend one day, too. That dream ended the day the library was destroyed. It was late in the day and the fighting was beginning to die down. I don't know if whoever fired the rocket intended to hit the polytechnic. Neither side were using it as a base, so perhaps it was an accident. Or maybe they just wanted to destroy it and what it represented. Either way, the result was the same. When the rocket exploded in the side of the polytechnic library I gave a little gasp of shock. Then, in the way one watches a horror movie, not wanting to see the end but unable to turn away from the inevitable, I watched, growing more and more sickened, as the smoke gave way to flames, licking at the gaping wound. Inside were thousands of books that had helped educate many young Afghans. Now those books were fueling an increasingly large fire. There was no fire brigade, of course. Nobody rushed to save all this knowledge that could help improve our country and educate our people. Nobody except me really even seemed to notice. I watched it burn until it was time to go to bed. I went to bed numb with the idea that so many words, so much literature and learning, had perished. But I also felt guilty for caring about books when people were burning in flames, too.

My mother quickly settled into her routine in that house.

Every morning she would wake, eat a simple breakfast of traditional Afghan naan bread and green tea, and make the dangerous journey to change the flowers on my brother's grave. She would take the shortcut down the hill, weaving through the alleys and rocky tracks that made up the hillside before creeping across the open ground to the cemetery. She would return a little later, puffy around the eyes from crying. It upset her but it also seemed to strengthen her, despite the risks. The routine seemed to galvanize her, and her return to the house was usually marked by a flurry of domestic activity. My relatives had been living there and guarding the property, but they hadn't turned it into a home. My mother set about this job, organizing, cleaning, and decorating. Furniture was cleaned and aired, rugs beaten, pots and pans cleaned and buffed until they gleamed black or copper. The yard was emptied of rubbish and swept.