A Fort of Nine Towers (28 page)

At first, I enjoyed listening to them, but after a while, they just said the same things over and over with different words, and I got tired of it. Nothing they said could stop the war.

I never got tired, though, of being at the shrine of Hazrat Ali. I loved everything about it: the tiles that caught the sunlight and looked like gems, the towers all around it, the white pigeons outside, and especially the place where Hazrat Ali is said to be buried, under a monument full of precious stones and surrounded by a gold railing with the Holy Koran carved on it in great vines of sweeping letters.

Every day after breakfast I went there to see the pilgrims who had come from all over the country, despite the dangers of traveling in wartime. They spoke in many languages and with many accents. I liked to imitate the sounds that they made and let them roll around inside my mouth until I could turn them into words.

Later, I joined the young boys who came each afternoon to the shrine’s garden to play a game called
gursai
. I remembered Grandfather’s telling me how he had played in there when he was little. It was probably the same game. A boy takes his left foot in his right hand and hops about on his right leg, and using his right shoulder tries to knock down his opponent, who is advancing in the same way from the opposite direction.

I made so many new friends while playing
gursai
that I decided
I was never going to leave Mazar, even if the war came there. I had never had so many friends outside my own family before. I just wanted Wakeel and Grandfather to come soon, and I prayed for that every day. I knew that Wakeel could beat all the other boys at
gursai
.

In many ways, our life had become like a game of
gursai
, as we went hopping from one place to the next, hoping nobody would knock us down.

My Teacher

O
ne day when it had snowed overnight and I was not able to go to the shrine, I stayed home. All day long, I could hear thuds coming from next door. The following day it snowed again, and the thuds continued. In fact, I had been hearing this sound from the first day we had arrived in Mazar, but I had not been home enough to pay attention to it. Finally, I asked my aunt about it.

“Those people are carpet weavers,” she said. “They moved in a few months ago. They are good people, except for this noise they make.”

I had learned how to make a simple carpet knot in school two years before and had made a small carpet, which I’d given to the principal of my school. He put it in a green frame in the hallway. Whenever I passed it, I felt very proud to see my name under it, even though it was not very well made. I had long wanted to learn how to weave a complicated pattern in a carpet, but I had never had anyone to teach me.

“Do they make big carpets?” I asked my aunt. “They make so much noise.” When I had made my little carpet, I had not made thuds like the ones I was hearing here.

“Go and see for yourself, if you like,” my aunt said.

I borrowed my aunt’s sandals to walk the short distance from our gate to theirs. The snow stung my feet and went halfway up my legs
inside my cotton
shalwar
pants. I began to run and was happy to see their door was open. Nobody invited me, but I ran inside anyway. In the courtyard, the snow had been shoveled away, and a warm sun was drying up the puddles left behind.

The house had big rooms. Each one held a large, flat loom that stretched out only a few inches above the floor, like a Chinese table. In the first room, about seven people were making a big carpet on a very wide loom, men and women together. They sat on the part they had already woven and leaned forward to tie the next row of knots.

They stopped when I came in, some in the middle of tying a knot. I told them I lived in my aunt’s house next door. None of them said anything. I was too curious about what they were doing to feel uncomfortable.

At first, they were shy, and no one spoke to me. But when I sat next to them and tied a few knots, they relaxed when they saw that I could tie a knot correctly. They spoke softly in Turkmeni, and I did not know what they were saying. The kids were working with their parents. Everything was very different from my aunt’s house, where my cousins and I spent most of our time playing games, and my older sister tried to boss me around, when she was not watching one of the Russian television channels that we did not have in Kabul. Here the kids looked at me quickly when they were speaking. Even though I did not know their language, I knew they were talking about me. Slowly, they tried speaking Dari with me, and we found a way to understand one another.

The women wore lots of jewelry. Their bracelets and bangles made music when they were pounding the weft threads tightly into place with a heavy metal comb. Their earrings hung low each time they bent forward to tie their knots. They wore rubies, pearls, and emeralds, and their clothes had these same bright colors.

I spent time tying some knots at each loom—nobody told me to stop—and I ate lunch with them, too. It would have been impolite to leave at lunchtime. They all sat around one tablecloth; it looked like they were having a party, like the dinners we had eaten in Grandfather’s
courtyard. At least sixty members of the Turkmen family were crowded into that house.

After lunch I went to the far end of the courtyard where I could hear a single person’s combing. I opened the door and I saw a woman seated at a loom that, unlike all the others in the house, rose up in front of her. It was much smaller than the others. Though her loom had space for two people, she was alone. The other weavers in that house used ten to fifteen colors of wool. She used more than fifty. Her wool was a better quality, and her knots were much smaller than the others. She was making small geometric patterns; the others made big traditional patterns that were easy to weave.

She was a woman of unusual beauty, probably in her early twenties, with very dark and expressive eyes. When a Pashtun man sees such a beautiful woman, he becomes a poet. It is what we have been doing for thousands of years. I was far from being a man, but I quickly made a poem in my heart about her. She was paradise, and music, and charm. And she was making a magic carpet.

I said “
Salaam
,” and she smiled in reply. I said “
Salaam
” again. And again she did not answer.

I took the extra hook and sat next to her. I made my first knot. She looked at me. She opened my knot and redid it. There was nothing wrong with my knot. Why did she open it, I asked myself. I made a few more knots. She continued to look at me with a silent smile. When I looked at her, she lowered her eyes, then opened my knots once again and redid them. I was a little bit annoyed, but I said nothing. After all, I was a guest. I continued making more knots, and when I finished, she opened them all and redid them.

“What is wrong with my knots? Why are they not acceptable to you?” I asked.

She smiled at me and continued tying her own knots. She was very fast. She could make sixty knots in a minute.

“It is very rude not to answer someone’s question,” I said in a joking kind of voice to be polite, but I meant what I said.

This time she ignored me and did not even look at me.

“What, do you think I am stupid?” I asked her. The joking voice had gone.

She smiled at me again and began combing. She slipped the teeth of the comb through the threads of the warp, and pounded the knots she had just tied with surprising force for such a delicate hand until they were snug against the row below.

“Say something, please!” I said.

But she never talked to me, and she never accepted my knots. I felt very insulted.

I got up from her loom and went to an old woman whom everyone called Mother, and I told her what had happened. She laughed at me, and I began to dislike her, too. Maybe they are all insulters, I thought.

“No, my son, she doesn’t hate you, and she doesn’t aim to insult you either.” She spoke Dari, but with a strong Turkmeni accent, and I had to listen very carefully to understand what she was saying.

Mother sighed. “She is the sweetest of all among my children.”

“But she never talked to me. She didn’t even say ‘
Salaam
,’ ” I said.

“Because she can’t hear you,” Mother said. “She is deaf. And she is mute. She is pure love, and her thoughts are even more beautiful than she is. She has never had any bad feeling for anyone. She is the happiest creature, I think.”

“Is she your child?” I said.

“Yes, my youngest child,” she said.

“I didn’t see her at lunch,” I said.

“She eats when she is hungry, not at regular times like the others. She has her own strange habits. Sometimes she sleeps for twenty-four hours, and sometimes she is awake for twenty-four hours. She never uses the same wool as we do, and she has never woven the same patterns we weave,” she said.

“What kind of wool does she use?” I asked.

“Only the wool from the back of the sheep, which is finer and softer than any other. She spins her wool much finer, and she colors it with her own dyes. She makes all the dyes from plants. When we dye wool with such dyes, we often have to use some chemicals to get the right color. Not her. She uses only vegetable dyes,” she said.

“Where did she learn all these things?” I asked. Mother shook her head and shrugged.

“It is her special talent. She was born with it,” she replied.

“It would be very interesting to watch her make dyes from plants. My grandfather says that the best carpets have vegetable dyes,” I told her.

“She doesn’t let anyone watch her when she dyes. Not even me. She is very private. We want her happy, so we do not interfere,” Mother said.

“Her designs are prettier than yours, and much finer,” I said.

“We draw our designs on paper and have two of the boys put them on graphs. Then we work according to the graphs. But sometimes she doesn’t sleep for a couple of nights, and all that time she is making a new design in her mind, as if she were drawing it on paper,” Mother said.

“What are you asking my mother?” A handsome man who looked about twenty-five came out to the courtyard and knelt before his mother. In his hands was some wet wool. He was the first person I had met in that house who spoke Dari easily.

“We are speaking of your youngest sister,” she replied.

“Oh, she is a real mystery,” he said. “She is an unanswered question, an unsolved puzzle.” He handed the wet wool to his mother and asked her something in Turkmeni. They spoke for a few minutes, then he walked to some pots nearby with fires below them and threw the wool into the pots.

He stoked the fires below the pots until they were blazing and made the dye in the pot boil. Then he took a batch of light-colored wool and dipped it in what looked like black water. It came out dark blue. Then he rinsed some gray wool in reddish water until it was a deep red, like mulberry.

The old woman took her water pipe from the shelf of the cupboard behind her. She packed it with tobacco and lit it. She sucked the smoke, and the water pipe made a bubbling noise.

“Does she read and write, your daughter?” I asked.

“How can she read or write, since she can’t hear or talk? You tell me,” Mother said.

“Well, because she is special and unusual,” I said.

“She is special in many ways, but she doesn’t read or write. She writes numbers only. To be frank with you, none of us can read and write; we are all illiterate, but we are the best carpet weavers.”

I was always surprised when adults said they were illiterate. Grandfather had taught himself how to read and write both Dari and Pashto, and even Arabic. I wondered why other people could not do that.

“When she finishes her carpet, she writes the price in sand with a stick. First we thought they were very high, but later we discovered that she chose correct prices,” Mother said. “When she made her first small carpet, we sold it to one of our dealers. He kept it in his shop for a year, happy to have such an unusual piece. Soon it became famous, and people who saw it in the shop started calling it Suleiman’s magic carpet. That dealer became my daughter’s special customer. But he does not sell her carpets to anyone. He thinks her carpets are holy,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“It sounds strange, doesn’t it? First we didn’t believe it either, but his wife told us that he spends at least one hour of every morning in a room where he keeps them. He does not allow anyone else to go into that room,” she said, puffing some smoke out of the pipe.

“Can I buy one of your daughter’s carpets?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me. Go and talk to her yourself. We have never interfered in her business. You should also talk to her customer. He says they are beyond value. That is why he never sells them,” she said.

“So that means he has never used them either,” I said with amazement.

“Exactly. He says they are not for use. They are made to be worshipped,” she said, and breathed out another plume of smoke.

“Do you think he is right?” I said.

“No, not for a minute. It is all delusions,” she said. “He says she is another sun in the earth, and his eyes sting when he looks at her. My daughter is only my daughter, not the sun. But I have seen that his eyes hurt when he looks at her. Tears start dropping after two minutes only.”