A Fort of Nine Towers (42 page)

They brought another man with cuffs on his hands and chains on his feet.

The eerie silence was broken by the Taliban announcer: “This man killed his neighbor four years ago, then he escaped to Iran. When he came back, we arrested him. Now someone from the victim’s family will shoot the killer in the head, and you will be witnesses.”

Then a Talib handed the victim’s relative a gun and asked him to shoot. The relative fired the gun and shot the murderer through the head. The bullet hit his forehead and came through the back of his head. His body shook for a few moments on the ground.

At the end, the announcer said, “We will conduct two more acts of justice on Friday. Now you can go, and you will come back next Friday. No tickets needed.”

I ran out of the stadium, determined never to go back there ever again. But in the weeks that followed, a new principal who was a Talib was appointed to our school. He ordered us to go several more times, to see more of the Taliban justice. We saw women whom the Taliban said were prostitutes stoned to death. We saw men who were accused of being homosexuals killed by having a mud brick wall toppled on them. Since the Taliban left Kabul, I have never gone there again.
At the front gate of the stadium, a few Taliban gave every passerby a paper with a big headline in large black type at the top:

Be aware! We bring in action the second punishment.

We beat the sinners with whips for the minor offences. If they die under the whipping, it means they were the sinner of sinners and he or she died clean
.

Whoever had written the announcement was somebody who did not know correct grammar. When we turned the paper over, we saw
a headline about the Taliban’s rights for women. Below it was a long list of things that women could and could not do. My friends and I read it. I turned to my friends and said, “Wow, women are in cages.” The list was long. Some of the rules were strange.

I took that paper home and showed it to my mother and sisters. They showed it to our neighbors. Soon everybody had read it or had a photocopy of it.

At first, people made fun of the incorrect grammar and bad spelling. But soon, women understood that these things were serious.

When the Mujahedin factions had arrived and had issued their version of Islamic laws, women were forced to cover up, but they could still go anywhere and do anything they wanted, if the fighting allowed. Now that the Taliban were in control, females mostly disappeared from Kabul’s streets.

The men faced their own strict set of rules, as well. One of the strictest was having to go to the mosque five times a day rather than praying wherever they found themselves. The mullah there had an attendance sheet. He called out our names to find out who was present and who was not. He would put a cross before the name of an absent man and report him to the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. The next day a Talib might come and imprison that man for a week or so.

For the first few weeks, every day someone was imprisoned for being absent. But as the months passed, the decree was not enforced so strictly, unless one of the mullahs disliked someone.

In our neighborhood, there was a man we used to call
Malem-e-chaq
, the chubby teacher. He had six sons and was extremely rich. He even had a swimming pool in his garden. The mullah did not like him at all, though I do not know why.
Malem-e-chaq
was a good man. Yet, the mullah kept a strict account of when he came to the mosque, so the poor man had to be there five times a day, except when he went to other countries for his import-export business. But before he left on a trip, he had to tell the mullah where he was going, and how long he would be away. So did his sons, who had shops to run in other parts of Kabul. A few times my father did the same thing when he had to go somewhere.

Before prayers, the mullah talked about Islam and religion for ten or fifteen minutes and asked people in the mosque basic questions about Islam. In these new days, the mullahs in charge were either all Taliban or had become Taliban, or acted like them, except for one
old mullah who had seen his entire family—wives, sons, daughters, brothers, and his mother—wiped out by a Russian bombing raid. He was then a farmer. One day he had stayed a bit longer in the fields after the others had gone to the house to eat. A Russian plane roared overhead. Bombs exploded and threw him to the ground. When the dirt that was swept up into the sky by the blasts had settled, there was no sign that there had ever been a house, or that he had ever had a family. The Taliban were told these things about him and left him alone.

One evening before prayers, our mullah asked the first line of people in the mosque, “If you fill two buckets, one with alcohol and another one with water, and take them both to a thirsty donkey, which one will the donkey drink?”

A guy from the first line said, “Of course the water.”

“Since the donkey avoids drinking alcohol, then you have to hate it yourselves and not even touch it,” our mullah said.

A guy raised his hand from the second line and asked, “If there are a few drops of alcohol in a glass of water, is it still as bad as pure alcohol?”

“If I piss a few drops in your glass of water, will you drink your water?” our mullah said.

“Of course not,” the guy answered.

“The alcohol is a million times worse than my piss,” our mullah said.

In my family, now only I could go to school to study, and my sisters had to stay at home. The women teachers in my school also were told to stay at home. I missed my literature teacher’s lessons, but I never stopped looking for hidden meanings in my books.

The school year ended for the winter a few weeks after the Taliban arrived. When we got the results sheet for our exams, I had the highest grade for Dari literature. I wanted to tell my teacher, but I did not know where to find her. I never saw her again.

When the schools reopened for the new school year on the second day of spring, it was time for me to start high school. I had wanted to go
to the school where my father taught, Habibia. It was the best school in Afghanistan. But it was about five miles from the Qala-e-Noborja, and my parents were afraid to have me travel so far with so much uncertainty.

Instead, I went to a school nearby. It was named for a king who was dead. Our king who was alive was in Italy and had not come back to save us. We had stopped waiting for him.

For all my life, except when we were fleeing or the fighting was too heavy, I had seen my father go to his school. I had watched him prepare for his classes the night before. I had seen him thumb through his well-worn books with the eagerness of somebody discovering something new. I had heard his enthusiasm when he spoke about his students. I thought high school must be an important and exciting place. But the Taliban took from me all the joy I had expected to feel.

The boys were told to wear
shalwar kamiz
, a long one according to Taliban standards—tunic below the knees, trousers above the ankle, with a black turban and slippers instead of proper shoes. We were prohibited from wearing shoes in school, because we were told that shoes get stinky easily. The Taliban did not like to wash.

Most of the teachers had taught at that school for years wearing suits and ties, but now they all wore turbans and
shalwar kamiz
, except for the academic dean, who wore a suit and a necktie every day for nearly a year before he, too, found a
shalwar kamiz
. A Talib was appointed as the principal of the school and told the teachers to stress religion in all our subjects. We were taught that the history of humankind began with religion, and we were born with religion, and we had to die with religion. Religion was involved in the sciences, history, philosophy, psychology, arts, everything. If we know our religion, the Taliban principal said, we will know ourselves.

At the beginning, it was interesting to learn about Islam, because in the time of the Communists, we had no religious studies at all. All we were taught was how to respect Communism. They told us that it was our duty to invite others to be Communist to enlarge the wheel of Communism, because only Communism could help mankind.

My formal schooling seemed to have had two subjects only: Communism and Islam. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that I was
happiest at school when I was wrestling with my classmates in the classroom, breaking their noses in boxing competitions or flexing our arm muscles for one another to show our strength. We talked a lot about sex and played card games with cards that had sex pictures on them, which we passed around in school.

My head was always shaved now; I looked like a bald man. I could no longer wear my choice of clothes. I could not watch movies. I could not fly kites. In short, I could no longer be myself.

We heard that some Taliban were now living in what was left of our old house. Our former neighbor told us. He had gone to visit his own house nearby. He was asked by the Taliban in our place who the owner of the house was. He told them that we were not in Afghanistan. The Taliban instructed him to inform them if he heard that we had come back to Kabul. They told him that they would get money from us and split it with him. The next day he came to the Qala-e-Noborja and told us all this.

With the Taliban living there, there was even less reason for anybody to talk about the gold in Grandfather’s garden.

We heard rumors that if the Taliban knew that you had a lot of money, they would put you in prison until you gave it all to them. So, in my family everyone became silent about the gold, and we were told never to talk about it to anyone.

On the streets I noticed that people were now wearing dirty clothes. Even people whom I knew had money wore clothes that were dirty, trying to look poor. One of our neighbors was imprisoned. A few months later we heard that his brother had come from Pakistan and given the Taliban a lot of money, and then they both left quickly for Iran.

Sometimes we heard talk about a rich Arab named bin Laden. We were not sure who he was. One of our neighbors said he was living nearby in the big house that had been owned by the man everyone called the Pimp of the King. We went by that place many times, but we never saw him. And we were careful not to look directly. There were always many Taliban at the gate. They used the place for big meetings, and their black Land Cruisers were always going in and out.

Grandfather came from Makroyan twice in a month and stayed with us for a night or two. Now that I was in high school, he talked to me like I was a grown-up man. He talked about things that made me feel shy at first. Sometimes he would ask me questions about these strange feelings I had when I thought about pretty girls. Sometimes he would ask me philosophical questions about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Sometimes we would talk about Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Communism.