A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story Read online

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  If sorrow settles in your heart, then where is the home of joy?

  The sorrows and joys of life are all mixed together.

  No one can separate them, except the One who created them.

  Real men do not die of death; death finds its death in man.

  Real men do not die of death; death finds its name in man.

  When a man’s name is respected, then death has no name.

  My grandfather said

  Contents

  Tiltle Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue

  PART ONE: THE HOLY WARRIORS

  1 In the Time Before

  2 Allah-hu-Akbar

  3 The Other Side of the Mountain

  4 To Be a Family Again

  5 The Long Road Home

  6 Under the Earth

  PART TWO: FLIGHT

  7 The North

  8 The Garden of Hamza’s Father

  9 Inside the Head of Buddha

  10 Borderlands

  11 My Teacher

  12 Caravan

  PART THREE: IN THE TIME OF SHAITAN

  13 The Gold

  14 Wakeel

  15 Inferno

  16 The Dog

  PART FOUR: THE TRIUMPH OF MADNESS

  17 A New Kind of Justice

  18 The Prison

  19 A Precious Jewel

  20 The Length of a Hair

  21 The Secret of the Pigeons

  22 University of Taliban

  23 Grandfather

  24 One Knot at a Time

  25 A Change in the Air

  Epilogue: A Journey Still

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Qais Akbar Omar

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  MAPS

  Prologue

  The calls always come early in the morning. Sometimes I am still praying when I hear my mother’s phone ring upstairs. I lean forward and touch my head to the carpet and make an extra effort to focus on the ancient verses streaming through my mind.

  Alla-hu-Akbar. Subhanna rabbiyal A’ala …

  Even before my mother answers it, I know who is calling.

  It is my aunt, in Canada. She has just come home from a wedding party where she met a family with a daughter, a beautiful girl, very intelligent, and funny. A very good family. They are from Kabul, or Kandahar, or Mazar-e-Sharif, and our grandfather knew their uncle, or her father went to Habibia High School with the cousin of our neighbor who used to manage the Ariana Hotel before it was destroyed, or …

  Qul Huwa Allāhu 'Aĥadun, Allāhu Aş-Şamadu, Lam Yalid Wa Lam Yūlad, Walam Yakun Lahu Kufūan 'Aĥadun.

  My aunt has been in Canada for thirty years. I think she knows all the other Afghans there. She helped many of them when they first arrived, even though she herself was a young widow with a small daughter in a strange land whose language she struggled to master. Afghans never forget a kindness, though. Now, everywhere she goes, she is welcomed by those she helped and respected for the kindness in her heart. Almost every week, except during Ramazan, she is invited to a wedding.

  Weddings are where my aunt tracks the young women whom she has known since they were babies. She has watched them become young women, and seen them taking full advantage of opportunities they would never have had in Kabul had their families stayed there over the past three decades. Through it all, she has kept a list of future husbands for them in her mind—nephews, neighbors, sons of former students from her days as a teacher—always waiting for the day when she can be of help.

  Innā a‘ṭaynāka al-kawthar, Fa-şalli li-Rabbika wanḥar, Innā shaani-aka huwal abtar.

  I am twenty-nine years old. I have a university degree. I run my own carpet business and sometimes work with the foreigners. I have both arms and legs, which is an issue in mine-ridden Afghanistan. I come from a good family and am not yet married. I am a Pashtun with Hazara eyes thanks to a great-great-grandmother whose name no one remembers because she was a woman, and who was from some Central Asian tribe with Mongolian roots. I am the embodiment of this world-spanning mixture of peoples we call Afghan.

  I give my aunt a reason to go to weddings on the nights she is tired, or when the snow is deep. I give her something to talk about, and someone to boast about. I sell carpets. She sells me. Her great hope is that I can live someplace where I can prosper and be safe.

  How do I tell her, then, that though it sounds mad, I love Afghanistan? That I love being an Afghan? That I want to help rebuild what so many others destroyed? I know it will take a long time. I understand that. I am a carpet weaver. I know how, slowly, one knot follows another until a pattern appears.

  Oh, God, can you not weave my destiny to keep me close to these people who mean more to me than any others in the world?

  Ameen.

  * * *

  When I finish my prayers, I sit near the tall windows that look down over Kabul University and to the mountains beyond. The dust is so thick even at this early hour that I can hardly make out the outlines of the jagged peaks against the dawn.

  Kabul has become a very dusty place. How many million people live here now? No one knows. When I was young, there were only eighty thousand of us. A big town with big houses that had big gardens. Now we live on the side of a mountain, like goats, on land sold to us by a squatter.

  The sun rises from behind the mountains and burns through the dust with a greasy glare. I lean back on a cushion that was made by nomads who travel each year across miles of arid land in search of a patch of grass for their flocks. My people were nomads until my grandfather settled in Kabul. We have no livestock now, unless you count the cat on the roof.

  My youngest sister brings me a thermos of green tea and the news that our aunt has called from Canada. I do not let on that I had already guessed that. I do not want to spoil her excitement at telling me. She has a devilish glint in her eye. I know she wants to make a joke about the girl my aunt was describing. By now, of course, my mother has given all the details to my four sisters who still live at home. My older sister, who is married, will hear everything before long. Marriage discussions in Afghanistan are a family matter, and a major source of entertainment. My youngest sister is trying to decide whether I am in the mood for jokes, or whether I will just send her away.

  In the end, she walks off giggling to herself. If I ever leave this place, I will miss her more than I can bear to think about.

  Sometimes I wonder whether it was difficult for Grandfather to leave the open lands of his nomad days for the confining walls of the city. I think of my teacher, Maulana Jalaluddin Mohammad Balkhi, known to the world as Rumi. He had to flee our country when the greatest teacher of our warlords, Genghis Khan, swept across our land, destroying everything.

  * * *

  It is time to go upstairs for breakfast. My father has already ridden off on his bicycle to teach his high school physics classes. My mother is preparing to go to her office where they coordinate relief for natural disasters. My two youngest sisters are leaving for school, adjusting their white headscarves over their black uniforms as they go out the door and head down the hill.

  One of my other sisters has laid out some yogurt and fruit for me in the kitchen. She is studying agriculture at
Kabul University and will soon go for her classes. My only brother, who is eight years younger than I am, is doing exercises in the room above me, sending down tiny clouds of dust as he skips a rope.

  These are the things that happen every day. These are the rhythms of my family in the morning. These simple things will stay with me always; that is the one thing of which I am sure.

  * * *

  Uncertainty hangs thick like the dust in the air. I cannot see where the path of life will lead me. It is not my nature to sit and wait for something to happen. For the moment, though, unable to look forward, I have settled for gazing backward, to chronicle what I have witnessed in these few strange and turbulent years I have known.

  Perhaps someday I will understand all these things better. Perhaps others will, as well. Perhaps this book will help.

  Insh’allah.

  PART ONE

  THE HOLY WARRIORS

  1

  In the Time Before

  In the time before the fighting, before the rockets, before the warlords and their false promises, before the sudden disappearance of so many people we knew to graves or foreign lands, before the Taliban and their madness, before the smell of death hung daily in the air and the ground was soaked in blood, we lived well.

  * * *

  We have no photos. It was too dangerous to keep them during the time of the Taliban, so we destroyed them. But the images of our lives before all hope fled Afghanistan remain sharp and clear.

  My mother is wearing her short skirt, sitting in her office in a bank, tending to a long line of customers. She is respected for her knowledge of banking, and her ability to solve people’s problems.

  My father looks like a movie star in his bell-bottom trousers, speeding through the Kabul streets on his motorcycle. Sometimes he ties me to his back with a tight belt. His long hair catches the wind as we ride off. When he turns the corners sharply, the metal guards he wears on his knees shoot sparks into the air as they scrape the pavement. The next day I tell my classmates about that, and make them envious.

  One of my uncles goes on business trips to other countries. The other uncles and aunts study at universities in Kabul. All of them wear the latest styles. Grandfather, his thick white hair neatly combed, is elegantly dressed in finely tailored suits from Italy that emphasize his affluence. When he enters a room, he dominates it.

  Grandfather is an impressive man, tall, with broad shoulders. Unlike many other Afghans, he keeps his well-tanned face freshly shaved. It is his wide, black eyes that you notice most. So deep. So commanding. So gentle.

  * * *

  The images come in a rush. Sometimes they play out in little scenes.

  * * *

  My father is calling me to get ready for school. I open my eyes and look at the clock above my bed. It is too early, but what can I say to him? He is my father. I am his son. Pashtun sons must obey their fathers.

  But I am not ready to wake up. I rub my eyes. My father keeps calling, “Get up! Put on your gloves. I’m waiting for you in the ring.” He wants me to exercise with him before breakfast. He has started training me to become a famous boxer like himself, and fight as he has in international competitions.

  I hate waking up early, but I love exercising with my father. He always lets me beat him, even though I am seven years old.

  * * *

  I love school, too. I have perfect attendance. I am smart and popular. Sometimes the boys complain to the headmaster about me when I punch them in their faces. The headmaster covers for me, because he is Grandfather’s best friend. But he never smiles at me.

  My sister and I are in the same school. She is a year and a half older than I, and even smarter and more popular, but she never punches any girls, even though she is the daughter of a well-known boxer.

  * * *

  The heart of our world is my grandfather’s house.

  Grandfather had built it in the late 1960s, when he was the senior accounting officer in the Bank-e-Millie, the National Bank of Afghanistan. The country was prosperous, and he could see that Kabul would outgrow its twisted thousand-year-old streets along the Kabul River.

  He bought about five acres on the far side of the small, steep mountain with the two peaks that for centuries had protected Kabul on its south and west sides. The land beyond them was then all farms with mud-brick villages, but not for long.

  Grandfather had studied the land, talked to the farmers who knew it, and carefully chose the piece that had the best well. We had always had water even in the driest months, even when our neighbors had shortages. He enclosed most of his land with a sturdy cement wall, but set part of it aside for a school for all the kids whose families he knew would transform the farmlands into a neighborhood.

  My father and six of his seven brothers, along with their wives and kids, all lived comfortably within Grandfather’s wall. I had more than twenty-five cousins to play with, most of them around my age. Every family had two large rooms of its own. The rooms were clustered in a single-story building on one side of the garden. Grandfather’s rooms were on the other side. Between us were sixty McIntosh apple trees. Grandfather’s cousin had brought them from America as little branches that he had grafted onto Afghan apple tree roots. They were very rare in Afghanistan, and Grandfather was proud of having them.

  At one end of the property was a block-long building with two floors of apartments above the shops on the street level. Grandfather rented out the apartments to people who were not relatives. All the windows in the apartments faced the street. No Afghan allows strangers to look into his family’s garden.

  My father set up a gym in one of the shops. Every day after school, dozens of young men would come there to train as boxers. My cousin Wakeel and I would watch them from the sidewalk pounding the punching bag, or doing push-ups, or skipping rope, while my father sparred with one or sometimes two at a time inside the ring he had built.

  Wakeel was seven years older than I was. He was the older brother I never had. I was the younger brother he always wanted. He let me use him as a punching bag when I imitated the boxers. Every time I hit him, he laughed.

  Grandfather, by then retired from the bank, used one of the larger shops as a warehouse for his carpets. It had a thick door with a strong lock and was filled with the sweet, lanolin-rich smell of wool. He had thousands of carpets in there. My boy cousins and I liked to jump from one high pile of folded carpets to another.

  * * *

  All of my uncles had their own businesses, except Wakeel’s father. He was a major in the National Army of Afghanistan. He always said, “Business is too risky. Most of these businessmen have heart attacks, or die at an early age.” He was my grandfather’s oldest son, and thus had a special place in the family. He and his wife enjoyed a relaxed life on his army salary with Wakeel, my favorite cousin, and their two daughters.

  One day he went to his office and never came back. We still do not know whether he is alive or dead. It was in the time when I first heard the word “Communists,” but I did not know what it meant then. For more than twenty-five years, his wife has been waiting for him to come home. Even now, she runs to the door whenever someone knocks.

  * * *

  My father was the third son. Like all my uncles, he had only one wife. It was not our family’s custom to have more than one.

  Our neighbors respected my father like a holy man. They came to see him and talked with him about their businesses and their problems. They called him Lala, “older brother,” even though some of them were older than he was. They told him, “Your thoughts are older than your age.” He was a man willing to try everything. He had no use for the word “no.”

  He was also the only one of his father’s sons who was involved in carpets. His five younger brothers saw carpets as something from the past. They were looking to the future, making money in new ways.

  One was importing goods from Russia. Two others were still in university but looking into importing medicine to sell to pharmacies all over A
fghanistan.

  * * *

  Often, we all ate dinner together, more than fifty of us sitting on cushions around one cloth spread on the well-trimmed lawn that Grandfather had sown at one corner of our courtyard. Colorful little lightbulbs hung above us. After dinner, my grandfather and his sons sat in a circle talking about their businesses, or to which universities in Europe or America they should send my boy cousins and me.

  The women made a separate circle to talk about their own things. It was the responsibility of the older women to find good husbands for the younger ones, such as my father’s two unmarried sisters, who lived with us. His two older sisters were already married, and had moved away to the homes of their husbands’ families in other parts of Kabul. Discussions on suitors could go on for months and involve the whole family until a choice was made.

  My cousins and I sat in another circle, boys and girls together, telling one another scary tales, and staring at Kabul’s clear night sky with the moon and stars scattered across it. When we got tired of stories, we shaped animals from the stars and laughed.

  Sometimes after we had finished eating, my father or one of my uncles would take the kids around the mountain to buy us ice cream at Shahr-e-Naw Park, or to one of the Kabul movie theaters for an Indian or American film.

  * * *

  Kabul was like a huge garden then. Trees lined the wide streets and touched each other overhead in tall, leafy arches. The city was full of well-tended parks, in which tall pink hollyhocks competed for attention with bright orange marigolds and hundreds of shades of roses. Every house had a garden with pomegranate, almond, or apricot trees. Even the mountain with the two peaks was covered in low-growing weeds and grasses that came to life with the spring rains. In both spring and fall, the sky filled with the brightly colored water birds that rested in the wetlands around the city as they flew between the Russian steppes and India. Ancient underground channels brought water from the mountains, and kept our gardens green.

  * * *

  Every Friday, the Muslim holy day when schools and businesses closed, we carried a large lunch to one of the gardens of our neighbors, or to picnic spots nearby at Qargha Lake or in the Paghman Valley, or sometimes even as far as the Salang Pass, high in the mountains of the Hindu Kush an hour’s drive north of Kabul. This was a day for extended families to spend together, visiting and joking and gossiping.