A Fort of Nine Towers (23 page)

He stopped and smiled at me. “I’m talking about my girlfriend. I’ll show her to you, but you must promise not to fall in love with her, because she is mine. Okay?”

“Yeah, all right!” I said.

“If her beauty enslaves the heart of any man, I’ll tear out that heart,” he said with a suddenly serious, almost harsh voice, despite his poetic words. “Be careful, okay?” he said. I nodded my head, but I was a little afraid of him now.

We got off the tractor and walked for ten minutes without talking. He took me to the end of the village, where a very large courtyard with a garden stretched as far as I could see along the base of the low mountains that rise up behind Tashkurghan.

“That is her house,” he said. His voice was soft now, and I relaxed. “We really love each other, but nobody knows, except for my mother. Please don’t say anything about it to anybody.”

“I can keep a secret,” I said.

“Now, I’ll make you my reason to get into the house to see her,” he said. He sounded excited.

“How?” I said.

“I’ll knock on the door. She or her brother will open it, and I’ll introduce you as my guest. I’ll say that you would like to see the garden. If she opens the door, she will know everything, but her parents won’t. Your job is to tell them that you are my cousin, and you came from Kabul to visit us, and you would like to see the garden. The rest of the talking is up to me. Do you understand everything?”

“Yes,” I said. This was an adventure, and I was enjoying it.

He knocked on the door, and a young girl opened it. She was a real beauty.

She instantly lowered her eyes and hurriedly said “
Salaam
.”

“I dreamed about you last night, and now I’m here to kiss you,” the old man’s son teasingly said.

“Get out of sight! My parents are at home, and my brothers are watering the flowers in the courtyard,” she said in a panicky voice.

“Today I’ll ask your parents for your hand. I’ll ask them to make you my bride and sharer of my life,” the old man’s son said sweetly, with a smile as gentle as his father’s.

“Don’t make a fool of yourself. My brothers will beat you to death if they hear this. Go away before someone sees you,” she whispered, and looked behind her.

One of her brothers suddenly appeared behind her like a mushroom after the rain.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Oh, it is me,” the son said. “This is my guest, Qais. I mean, my cousin. He came from Kabul with his family. I was showing him around, and he asked me if it was possible to see this garden. I told him it is my father’s friend’s garden. So, if you don’t mind, I want to show him inside.”

The brother welcomed us in.

“Sarah, show them around, and make them some pomegranate juice,” he said to his sister. “You guys feel at home. I have some work to finish. We’ll talk later.”

Sarah took us to the garden. I could see almost every kind of fruit tree there is, with ripe fruit hanging from the branches. When we got to the end of the garden, Sarah turned to me and said, “If you don’t mind, we want to talk in private for a few minutes. You just walk around, and eat whatever you like. Meet us here in ten minutes. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure, it’s not a problem,” I said. She gave me a grateful smile.

I walked all around for almost half an hour, until I got tired of being alone. I snuck behind a tree to see what kind of private talks they were having that were lasting so long.

But not a word was being spoken. They were just sitting face-to-face. The old man’s son was looking right into the girl’s eyes, and she was beaming at him. When he broke the silence, he spoke in a strange, poetic way.

“Do not forsake me,” he beseeched her. Maybe he was making a joke. But the girl did not laugh.

“How could I forsake you?” she replied tenderly. “For you are all my life.”

“You are mine, for I love you and must die if you forsake me,” he said.

“I feel the same for you,” she replied.

Do all the men in this village talk like that to their girlfriends? I wondered. Maybe they had seen too many Afghan movies where both lovers die before they get to see each other a second time. I eased out of my hiding place and ate another pomegranate.

An hour later we were ready to leave the garden.

“You can come anytime you want,” Sarah said to me. “Next time, introduce me to your sisters. I want to meet them. Hamza will drive you here.” It was the first time our eyes met. I felt warm inside, but nobody else saw it. I felt guilty, because I had promised not to fall in love, but what could I do? It was not up to me. It was up to my heart, and the heart cannot be controlled when it comes to love. I knew this from the Indian movies.

“Who is Hamza?” I asked her.

“I am Hamza,” the old man’s son said.

“Oh, I am sorry. I never asked your name. It is good to know your name,” I said.

Sarah looked at both of us as she was standing at the threshold of the garden gate and holding the doorknob. “I thought you two were cousins,” she said sharply, and waited for a reply.

“Yes, that is right. He is my cousin, but he didn’t know my name. I think he never asked,” the old man’s son said.

“Hamza, what is going on? Is he your cousin, or someone you don’t know? My brother will talk about it in the mosque tonight. If they find out that you lied to them, it will be dangerous for both of us,” she said with great worry.

“Oh, relax, relax. It is not a problem. He is my cousin, I mean my guest. He will explain everything to you the next time he and I come. Sometimes cousins forget their cousin’s name,” Hamza teasingly said.

“Tell me one thing. Is he your cousin or guest?” she asked.

“The truth is, we didn’t know each other until this morning. He is my guest.”

She looked at him angrily. Someone called her from inside; it was an old woman’s voice, probably her mother.

“Do you trust me?” Hamza asked.

“Yes, I trust you,” she said with forgiveness edged with concern. The calling became louder, and she shouted back that she was coming.

“This is not a problem for us. You just have to relax. Everybody in the mosque knows him and his family. They are our guests, and they’ll be with us for a few weeks at least. And I call him cousin. We are a family now,” Hamza said.

“I trust you,” she said with a beautiful smile, and closed the door after us as we left.

We spent three weeks in the garden of Hamza’s father while we waited to hear that the road to Mazar was safe. The dogs did indeed become my friends. I took them for walks to the mountains and wished that Wakeel were there to go with us. I showed Palang the sign of the wounds that he had given me. He did not know what I was talking about, and he licked them.

Hamza taught me how to hunt. Every other day we went to his beloved’s garden. She always had pomegranate juice waiting for me, and while I drank it, they had their private talks. The first day it was for a short while, but after a week it seemed like hours. One day I sneaked behind a tree again. They were not having those stupid movie dialogues that day. It was more interesting than that. I felt guilty, and never watched them again. I walked all around until Hamza called me to go home.

My family was happy, too. My mother sang old Indian songs when she cooked. Everything came from the garden and tasted better than anything we had eaten since we had fled Grandfather’s house. In the mornings, my job was to take two straw baskets into the garden and fill them with tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, peppers, pomegranates, apples, walnuts, and almonds, and then give them to my mother. Some days I could hardly carry the baskets by the time they were filled, we had so much to choose from.

My older sister became very busy, helping my mother with all the cooking. They spent many hours together talking about things. Other times, she asked my father to climb the mountains and see the view. My father was always happy to take her and our next sister on long walks in the fresh air. He loved the exercise and their company.

When my mother took her nap in the afternoon while my little brother was sleeping, my older sister took my younger sisters to the river to get drinking water with Hamza’s sisters. They learned from the village girls how to carry a clay water pot on their heads without holding it with their hands, or at other times how to embroider hats. My older sister told them stories about life in Kabul, and what it was like to go to school. None of Hamza’s sisters had ever been to school, though they knew how to read.

Since I had never seen my older sister act so pleasantly before, I decided to be nice to her. But when it came to me, she had not changed. She always found some way of making fun of me. She and I were supposed to eat from one plate. Afghans believe that sharing a plate improves the appetite. She would say things like, “He finishes everything on the plate before I take three bites. And he makes noises while he eats, like a cow.” I stopped being nice to her.

Late one afternoon after hunting ducks, Hamza and I climbed up to the highest mountain to look down on the whole village. The sun was setting in the west. There were no clouds, just the gold of the sun and the deep blue of the sky.

“Have you ever talked to nature?” Hamza said.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“Do you hear when it talks back to you?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nobody knows what I mean. Anytime I tell anyone what I can see and hear, they think I’m crazy. But you have to know that everything talks to you if you are very honest with them,” Hamza said.

“You mean like mountains, and trees, and rivers, and the wind, and things like that?” I asked.

He nodded. “And to learn how to be honest, you have to start thinking about who the architect of the skies and earth is.” Hamza was quiet for a moment. “When you build a building, you have to put
pillars and walls to hold up the roof. But the sky has no pillars or walls. Only God can make architecture like that.”

“Does God talk to you?” I asked, very surprised.

“No, He talks to us through his creatures,” Hamza said.

“How?” I asked.

“The moon floats in a dark blue space, and shames billions of stars by its light. She has things to tell you; in fact she is talking to you,” Hamza said, then we looked at the moon, which was just rising behind us. He had a funny way of speaking poetically, even when he was not with Sarah. At first I had found this strange. But after a couple of weeks I was beginning to enjoy it. The moon was perfectly round, and as the last of the daylight faded, it spread its softening glow across the land so we could see the whole village below.

“How did you learn all these things?” I asked.

“Open your eyes and ears, and you can learn anything you want,” he said in his sweet voice. “The rose has given its power away to its thorns for its protection. But the nightingales never give their voices to crows. The moth flies around a candle until it burns its wings. But a deer runs away from hunters as far as it can.”

“You are a poet,” I said.

“No, I have eyes that are open, and I use them well,” he said.

The wind started blowing. A few small clouds edged over the horizon, and the moon took control of the sky. We carefully climbed down.

I opened the garden gate. The dogs jumped playfully at me as I was thinking about what Hamza had told me. What he said has stayed with me from then until now. He made me think about things I had never thought much about before, like how God had created the stars, moon, sun, sky, the universe, and all of nature, and for what reason, why we are here, what is our mission in life, and how one can take pleasure from all these things we have been given.

That night, our families ate dinner together. Afterward, when my father and Hamza’s went to listen to the BBC World Service, we heard that the fighting in Mazar was coming toward Tashkurghan.

My father made his decision right away. He said to the old man,
“It sounds as if we must leave Tashkurghan tomorrow morning.” Hamza’s father nodded.

My father had been going to mosque early in the morning with the other village men to say their morning prayers together. After prayers the next day, he shared what he had heard the previous night from the BBC. Then, in the way that Afghan people always do when they must leave the company of those who have welcomed them, he asked their permission to go.

When he came back from the mosque, we were having breakfast. He sat down and took a cup of tea from my mother, then told us, “We cannot now go to Mazar. I don’t think it is safe to go back to Kabul. So we will head for Bamyan. We have heard no reports of fighting there, and I believe that we will be safe there. I have received the mullah’s and the village men’s permission to leave here today. They say that they will leave their homes, too. The war will reach this place in two days, maybe sooner. As soon as we finish eating, we will pack,” my father said.

My older sister looked at him and said, “But, Father, Bamyan is in the middle of Afghanistan. We are supposed to be going to another country where there is no war.”

My father looked at her and said very kindly, “We will. But not today.”

After breakfast we went to the old man’s house on the other side of the garden to say goodbye and to thank them. The old man was again listening to the BBC; his sons were playing chess; his wife and daughters were embroidering a tablecloth together. Each daughter had a corner in her hand.

Hamza’s father rose and embraced my father. “This is your home, and its doors are always open to you.” Then his sons hugged my father and me, and his wife and daughters hugged my mother and sisters.

“Are you staying or leaving?” my father asked.

“I think we are leaving as well,” Hamza’s father said. “We will go to Pakistan, to my brother’s home; he has been living there for ten
years. I received his letter yesterday. He is very worried. He wants to send Hamza to America to live with his son.”

“What about your garden? Will you leave it just like this?” my father said.

“Yes, I cannot do anything about it. We all know that these holy warriors don’t fight to drive out foreign troops from our country. They fight to loot us. This factional fighting is just an excuse to steal from us, and even to steal our wives and daughters.”