A Fort of Nine Towers (24 page)

“Alas, alas,” said my father, nodding his head.

His wife wrapped two fried chickens in newspaper and put some fresh beans in a pot, along with two pumpkins, some potatoes, and a few cabbages in bags. My mother did not want to take them, but the woman kept insisting. Finally, my mother accepted the food and thanked them for their hospitality and all their help.

Just as we started to drive off, Hamza’s father ran toward our car with a big bag on his shoulders. He stood in front of our car, panting. He winked at me to come out. He gave me the big bag and asked me to lift it. I tried but I could not. It was very heavy.

“Can you eat them all?” he asked me.

“What is it?” I said.

“Pomegranates!” Hamza’s father said.

He was smiling, but I felt very small. “No, I can’t eat them all,” I said with a renewed sense of shame that not even the kindness of the old man could dismiss.

“I’m sure you can, and I know you’ll share them with others. Remember me and my dogs when you eat these pomegranates. That is all I want,” Hamza’s father said. I felt a little bit better when he bent over and kissed me on my forehead.

He helped me put the bag into the trunk and waved us off toward Bamyan.

The town’s mullah was standing on the roadside and signaled for us to stop. My father halted in front of him and rolled down his window. After greeting the mullah, he introduced him to us.

The mullah wore a white
shalwar kamiz
and a long green-and-blue-striped
chapan
coat on top of it. He had a black turban, and the rims
of his eyes were darkened with kohl, as men do who are religious. His mustache was shaved, but his beard was long, almost to his belly. When he talked, his beard waved, though he was a calm talker.

He gave my father a
tasbeh
, a string of prayer beads, and said, “I can’t give you more than this. I should have invited you to my house so we could eat together, but I didn’t know that the war would come here and separate us.”

“Your
tasbeh
will always remind me of you and God,” my father told him. “If God is willing, one day we will see each other again, and we’ll talk about these days.”

“I’m waiting for that day, if not in this world, maybe in the next one,” the mullah said.

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

“I’m staying here. You know I can escape from my country, but I can’t escape from my death. I’m breathing the last days of my life anyway. I’m seventy-five years old. If death comes tomorrow to me, I’m happy to welcome it. There is no difference between today and tomorrow,” the mullah said.

“You are a brave man,” my father said.

“I wouldn’t call it bravery. Death is part of life, and whoever takes it earlier, he or she will be at the head of the caravan for the next world. Either today or tomorrow we will join that caravan, so why not sooner rather than later?” the mullah said.

“Let me tell you something,” he added, “a story of Mullah Nasruddin:

“Mullah Nasruddin was awakened in the middle of the night by the cries of two men quarreling in front of his house. Nasruddin waited, but they continued to argue. He was unable to sleep. He wrapped his quilt tightly around his shoulders and rushed outside to separate the men, who had come to blows. But when he tried to reason with them, one of them snatched the quilt off Mullah Nasruddin’s shoulders, and then both men ran away. Mullah Nasruddin, very weary and perplexed, went inside.

“ ‘What was the quarrel about?’ his wife asked him.

“ ‘It must be about our quilt,’ replied the mullah. ‘The quilt is gone, the dispute is over.’

“You see what I mean? Our country has become a Mullah Nasruddin story. This war is all about what we have in this country, not about you or me. Once they get what they want, then they won’t care about anything else,” the mullah said. “Almighty God protect you and your family from all dangers.”

They hugged, and my father got back in the car and began driving quickly toward Bamyan before the mullah could tell another story, or anyone else showed up.

Inside the Head of Buddha

T
he Kuchi nomads follow their goats, sheep, and camels through the mountains in search of new pastures. They never settle anywhere for long. Though my grandmother was born a Kuchi and my grandfather had come from herders who spent long seasons in the mountains with their flocks, my family and I did not think of ourselves as nomads. Yet we were enjoying our new life on hillsides, in the gardens of strangers, a few days here and a few days there, never in the same place for long. I knew we were looking for a quiet place to hide from the rockets while we found a way to leave Afghanistan. But despite rockslides, floods, and biting dogs, we had found a way of pushing the everyday threat of war from our minds as we thought about where we were going next, or where we had just been.

Bamyan is at the very center of Afghanistan, high in the mountains. We had to go back across the Hindu Kush to get there, but this time we took an unpaved road through a mountain pass to avoid any fighting along the main road. It took fifteen hours of slow, rough driving over deeply rutted roads to reach the Bamyan Valley. It had been an endless day; our bodies were longing for rest. It was well after dark when we were finally on a better road approaching the town.

The car jerked to a halt, waking those of us who were falling asleep. A blue plastic rope was stretched across the road between two wooden poles. It was called the Bamyan Door. It did not look like a door to me.

A man rushed from a mud house next to one of the wooden poles. He had a Kalashnikov hanging from his shoulder. He asked my father where we were going. My father explained that we were heading to Bamyan City. The man said we were not allowed to go in this late at night, and we must park somewhere along the river and come back tomorrow.

My father did not try to argue; the man had a gun. He drove back in the direction from which we had come for a few hundred yards, and parked the car on a level spot next to the river. My mother gave us some of the food that Hamza’s family had shared with us.

It was a beautiful night, but much cooler than in Tashkurghan. In the crisp air, the sky was like a dark piece of silk studded with tiny diamonds. The silence was dense, with only the quiet sound of the river and the twittering of some night birds to challenge it. We squeezed ourselves into the car’s seats to stay close together and keep warm as we slept. Though it was crowded, I felt as if I were on a soft bed after the hours of bumpy roads.

We set out a picnic breakfast along the river the next morning and took our time over it. After all, we were nomads now; we moved when we wanted to. When we finished eating and had packed everything back into our car, we headed once more to Bamyan City. The guy who had stopped us the night before at the “door” was sitting in front of the mud house with his friends. They all had Kalashnikovs hanging from their shoulders.

They stopped us again and my father explained that we were refugees from Kabul, looking for a safe place to live for a while. They silently searched our luggage piece by piece, though there was not much, then to our relief lowered the blue plastic rope and let us drive through.

My father slowly drove toward the main Bamyan bazaar. The town was small and filled with the smell of wood fires and horse manure mixed with saffron, pepper, cardamon, and dust.

He pulled into a car
serai
, an enclosed parking area. We walked up and down Bamyan’s one main street for a while. It was full of donkeys, goats, and people dressed very poorly. Then we went to a
chai khana
, a teahouse, for lunch. We climbed a bamboo ladder to the second floor, though a few of the rungs were missing. My father went first, with my mother and my baby brother behind him. My little sisters had a hard time climbing up. I had to help them, since I had been appointed to look after them. Another bamboo ladder led up to the third and fourth floors. There were no proper stairs.

The
chai khana
was a large room filled with kebab smoke. A tiny TV was in the corner of the room; I could hardly see it through the smoke. The men were sitting on platforms two feet high, their shoes left behind on the floor. The plates in front of them, whether filled with food or only scraps, were alive with flies. Some of the men were eating, some were drinking tea while watching an Indian movie, and some were snoring while hundreds of flies had parties on their hands and feet and around their mouths.

My mother was the only woman there, and my sisters the only girls. The men who had been chewing kebab stopped chewing. Their mouths hung half-open as they stared. The ones who had been drinking tea and watching TV put their glasses on the floor and turned where they sat to get a better view of us. My mother pulled her headscarf forward an inch and pretended she was there alone with my father and her children.

All the men’s faces were furrowed like plowed earth. Deep wrinkles cut into the corners of their Asiatic eyes and along their foreheads. They watched us for the most part in silence, and when they did speak they whispered.

All of them were Hazaras. I remembered Grandfather having told me that most of the Hazaras lived in central Afghanistan. He said that when he was still traveling with his father and uncles, driving their flocks to Bamyan to find high mountain pastures that stayed lush all summer from the last of the melting snow, they had been treated very warmly by the Hazara people there. Though they were not Kuchi nomads like my grandmother’s family, who traveled in regular routes around the country, my grandfather’s people also were
herders, who left their home with their flocks each summer to search for pastures. Often, they had spent summers in the green Bamyan Valley, which was only a week’s walk from their village in Maidan.

They traded some of their sheep, goats, or cows with the Hazaras in return for grazing rights and a place to set up their tents for a couple of months. I hoped the Hazaras would treat us well, too, even though we did not have any animals to trade with them, and we were not real nomads anymore but modern nomads in a beat-up old car.

Berar used to tell me good stories about Bamyan, where he was born. When he worked for our family, he used to leave all his money with Grandfather. After several months he would ask for it, and then send it all home to his parents. Grandfather always made jokes with him, telling him to spend some money on women while he was a young man.

Berar used to say, “If you build a house, a lot of people can use it, but a woman can be used only by a husband. A house is more efficient than a wife.”

I looked through the smoke in that
chai khana
to see whether he was among those men, but he was not. I was disappointed. Since that morning on the roof of the silo, I had never seen or heard of him again.

We ordered kebab, which is about the only lunch you can get, not just in Bamyan but in restaurants all over Afghanistan. On the wall was a photograph of the two enormous Buddha statues that had been carved into the cliffs at Bamyan almost two thousand years before. They looked very strange to me. They did not have faces.

After we had finished eating, my father suggested that we go see the Buddhas and their caves cut out of the cliffs behind them. They were just a short walk from the
chai khana
. We climbed down the bamboo ladder, with me passing first my hesitant younger sister to my father and then a very happy crying machine who kept smiling and pointing at all the donkeys. There were no cars on the road, so my sisters and I could run ahead of my parents, shrieking as we went, feeling free and lighthearted in a way we had not been for a couple of years.

As we approached the smaller Buddha, though, we all became
very quiet. He towered over us, and I found myself holding my breath. I had seen a photo of him in my schoolbook, but there he looked as flat as the page. Here, I felt that Buddha could walk right out of the mountain. How could a statue be so tall? I asked myself.

I had never seen a statue before, not even a small one. In Islam, statues are
haram
, forbidden, and have been since the time of the second law of the Prophet Musa, or Moses. Only God can make a living creature and breathe life into it, we are taught, and men should not make statues and try to be like God. Nothing had prepared me for the sense of awe that filled me.

Grandfather once told me that he had climbed to the top of the statues with his stepfather. The statues had been carved from the soft stone of the cliffs, their backs merging with the hill. He had told me about all the caves in the cliffs behind the Buddhas, and of all the paintings on their walls. He said that Bamyan had once been a place filled with holy men.

“Buddha lived six hundred years before Prophet Issa [Jesus]. And Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, came six hundred and thirty years after Prophet Issa. If you learn about Christianity and Buddhism, you will value Islam even more than you already do.”

My father found the opening to the stairs that led to the top of the smaller Buddha. I had never seen stairs like those before. They were cut from the stone right inside the cliff. Each step was at a different height and angle, just as Grandfather had said.