A Fort of Nine Towers (46 page)

There were more than thirty builders. Instantly, they panicked and scattered like a flock of frightened pigeons. People on the sidewalks also started running to get away from that Taliban car. The Talib who had been in the driver’s seat was equally frightened. He raced toward the new mosque with some of the builders.

I ran in the opposite direction, toward a bakery. When I entered, the baker asked me what was happening outside. He could see the panicked people through his window. It was real chaos. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. Everywhere, people were yelling “Bomb! Bomb! Bomb!” They were all trying to hide. I saw a few middle-aged men who had stuck their heads under a pushcart with the rest of their bodies hanging out.

“They think there is a bomb,” I answered, breathing hard. “But there is no bomb. I shouted, ‘Bomb! Bomb!,’ so I could jump from that Talib’s car. They arrested me for nothing. So, they could use me in the prison,” I told him.

The baker looked at me in bewilderment, then terror.

“Get out of here! Get out of my shop!” he shouted at me.

“If I were your son, would you let them take me to prison and use me for days and nights? Are you a stonehearted man?”

“You can see I’m a Hazara. You know that they hate us. If they find you in my shop, they’ll kill me,” he said. I tried to stay where I was, standing inside the shop. But he was a strong man with big arms and broad shoulders and was a head taller than I, and he pushed me out the door.

Now I was outside on the street again. The people were still running up and down. I did not know where to go or where to run. I felt very desperate and lonely. Suddenly, I felt myself being pulled back inside the shop. It was the baker. He practically picked me up and carried me all the way to a room at the back of his shop. He was gripping my left arm very tightly. I tried to speak, but in my terror I could not think of anything to say.

The back room was huge, almost twice as big as his shop. It was full of very large sacks filled with wheat flour, corn flour, and sugar. The baker brought me to a corner where there was a mountain of flour sacks. They were put one on top of another, all the way to the ceiling. He told me to climb over those sacks and jump in behind them.

I did what I was told. There was hardly enough space between the sacks and the wall to squeeze myself in. My nose filled with flour. I sneezed several times, one after another. The baker shouted at me to shut up. I tried my best to hold my sneezes back, but it was very hard.

My nostrils kept itching, and I had to sneeze. The man shouted again with his thick voice.

I stayed there for four hours until it was completely dark and there was no sign of any Taliban outside. By then, people were hurriedly walking toward their homes, as they always did. The pushcart men were pushing their carts slowly, as they always did.

The baker called for me to come out from my hiding place. A boy who was younger than I brought me a pot of water to wash my face. I was powdered white with flour.

Some moments later, I was standing near the window and peering outside, still afraid that if I stepped out, the Talib would grab my wrist.

“I’m not letting you go out by yourself. That is even more dangerous for me. I’ll take you to your house. I have a car. If someone asks you anything, tell them you’re my son,” the man said.

I looked at him, not knowing how to express how grateful I felt. All I could say in a shaking voice was, “You are a hero.”

Half an hour later, I was sitting in the backseat of the baker’s car along with his son as he drove toward my house. He dropped me in front of the main gate. I insisted they come inside and eat dinner with my family. He said that he had to go, otherwise his wife would get frightened if he came home late.

I watched as he drove down the dirt road away from Noborja, then stepped through the gate feeling a weakness that was now replacing my fear.

When I went into our house, everybody was angry at me for being so late. I told them what had happened. I do not know whether my father and mother believed me. But my sisters did not believe me, and they were unhappy that I had not brought them the clothes they had asked for. If what I said were true, they taunted, then I would have been imprisoned for a month at least. I was probably at a friend’s house, or playing volleyball in the park, or using the parallel bars, because I was addicted to parallel bars in those days, and won every bet I made when I swung on them.

But that night, I shaved my armpits and also between my legs in case any more Taliban wanted to see them.

The Secret of the Pigeons

T
he next day, I never even left our rooms to go into the courtyard. I tried to sleep, but I could not sleep in daylight. I thought about the baker. I had never asked him his name. I arranged some pillows in one corner near a window where I liked to read, and sat down with a copy of the Bible that had been translated into Dari. My mother’s brother had brought it to me from Pakistan, where he had to go sometimes. He had a job in the Ministry of Interior Affairs drafting official papers, because he had very clear handwriting. He had held a similar position under some previous governments, and had simply kept his old job. In the third year of the Taliban, he came to live with us at the Qala-e-Noborja. Though he worked for the Taliban, he was not one of them, and he hated their decrees. But he kept that to himself. He needed to use his skills to support his family, who was in Pakistan.

Every morning a car came to pick him up at the fort and dropped him off at the end of the day. That gave us some protection from the Taliban assigned to control our neighborhood.

He brought other books, too, by Maxim Gorky, Aristotle, and one called
Plato Selections
. It was his way of defying the regime. All such books had been banned by the Taliban. Philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were infidels as well as foreigners. So,
their books should not be read in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Furthermore, since they were written before Islam, they were full of non-Islamic thoughts.

That, of course, made me more curious to read them.

At noon prayers on Fridays, the mullahs in the mosque would say that the Holy Koran was the only true book that was sent by God. But I wanted to read other books that other people believed were sent by God. I had heard that these books had helped solve the problems of millions of people for hundreds of generations before me.

I had already read this Dari translation of the Bible once when my uncle first brought it. I found that it was filled with poetic stories about the prophets who came before the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him.

Having recently read the Holy Koran in Dari in prison and now understanding it for the first time, I wanted to understand the Bible better, so I could compare it to the Holy Koran. The mullahs, however, said that the Bible had ceased to be the word of God a long time ago, because it had been rewritten and translated many times by different people. The Holy Koran, they said, has never been rewritten, nor will anybody ever rewrite it, nor can anyone rewrite it. Whoever rewrites the book of God is an infidel. He is in battle with God, like Shaitan.

Suddenly, I heard an unfamiliar voice calling my father’s name: “Basir, Basir, Basir …” I looked through the window to see who was out there. My father was taking a nap, as most of my family did after lunch in the July heat. There were more than twenty Taliban in the middle of the courtyard, looking all around. One of them was tall and thin, dirty as the others with a long beard and a big, black turban. He kept shouting, “Basir, Basir, Abdul Basir!”

I hurriedly woke my father.

“Who let them in?” my father asked as he was rubbing his eyes.

“I don’t know,” I replied. I heard anxiety in my voice.

“Did they knock on the door?” My father was rising from the
toshak
where he had been lying.

“I didn’t hear any knocking. I didn’t open the door for them,” I answered, my voice now shaking. “Are they looking for me? Did they come to arrest me?”

“I don’t know. Let me go and talk to them. You stay here, and don’t come out,” he replied.

I woke my mother, my sisters, and my mother’s brother. When my uncle heard the word “Taliban,” he hurriedly went out to talk with them.

We stood back from our windows and looked at the Taliban through the little holes in the curtains. My father was surrounded by them, just inside the passageway into the courtyard. He was talking with the tall, thin one. My uncle showed them his ID card from the Ministry of Interior Affairs. A few of them kissed my uncle’s hand as a sign of respect and honor.

They moved toward our rooms at the other end of the courtyard, looking searchingly at the niches high in the wall where my pigeons nested and laid their eggs.

“They’re looking at your pigeons,” my mother said. “Didn’t I tell you a hundred times to take them to a shrine or a mosque somewhere? But you are so stubborn like your father, you never listen to me.”

The pigeons had been living in the Qala-e-Noborja long before we moved there, in holes made for them in the mud-brick walls above our rooms.

I had always wanted to keep pigeons, as many Afghans do, even when we were still living in Grandfather’s house. My father would not let me, though, saying, “You’ll waste all your time on pigeons and not spend it on your lessons. When you have finished nine grades, I’ll let you keep some.” But I did not have to wait that long.

When we were living in Grandfather’s house, one of our next-door neighbors had some pigeons. I used to go to his roof and watch him cutting the extra feathers from their wings and putting rings around their legs. They were of many breeds and colors, and each breed had its own name. I loved it when he held seeds in his hands and they came and sat on his hands, his arms, his shoulders, and his head.

I helped my neighbor keep two large pots filled with water for the
pigeons to wash themselves, and two other large pots filled with sand for them to rub the insects out of their feathers.

When we moved to the Qala-e-Noborja, Haji Noor Sher already had many pigeons there. After a while, the pigeons knew me. As soon as I walked into the courtyard, many of them flew to me. Even when I just stood at our windows, they all came.

Most of the time I did not have enough money to buy them seeds. So, I cut hard pieces of stale
naan
into smaller bits for them. I purposely did not eat all my rice, so I could give some to my pigeons. Sometimes even my parents did the same.

The only one who did not like them was my older sister, because it was her job to keep our section of the courtyard swept. She complained that the pigeons left their droppings everywhere, but she liked when they chortled to one another in the early morning. She said the noise helped her sleep better.

“Will they kill my pigeons?” I asked my mother plaintively.

“No, no, I won’t let that happen,” my mother said, and she pulled me toward her and kissed the top of my head.

“I don’t think they’ll listen to you. They hate women. Why would they listen to you?”

“But I’ll still try,” my mother said.

“Are they here because I escaped yesterday and created panic?” I asked my mother.

“I don’t know,” my mother said.

My older sister was looking at me with one of her evil looks. Everyone said she was pretty; and she was. But she saved certain looks only for me, and this one was not so pretty. “If they arrest you, and send you to prison for a few weeks, then I’ll believe that you were not lying yesterday,” she said.

“You just shut up!” I hissed at her, and she giggled.

From out in the courtyard, we could hear the tall, thin Talib talking to my father. Most people spoke to my father with respect, because he was a
malem
, a teacher. But the Talib spoke very insultingly.

“You keep pigeons, too?” the tall, thin Talib asked. “Don’t you know about Decree Number Nine that was issued by the Department
for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice about pigeons and fighting birds? It was released almost two years ago.”

My father’s face went pale. He did not know what to say. My uncle hurriedly interjected, “Nobody is keeping these pigeons. They’re wild pigeons. They came here by themselves.”

“Yes, that is right,” I heard my father confirm.

“Let me read Decree Number Nine about pigeons and fighting birds for you once again,” the Talib said as he took a paper from his pocket.

“ ‘Prevent keeping pigeons and fighting birds! This habit should stop. After ten days this matter should be monitored, and the monitors should go house to house to find the fighting birds. The pigeons and any other fighting birds should be killed by the monitors, and the bird fighters should be punished and imprisoned.’ ”

The Talib folded his paper. “Now I want to know who the bird fighter in this house is. He needs to be punished and imprisoned.”

I was seized with fear. I loved my pigeons. And I knew that if they took me to prison, the Talib who had tried to arrest me the day before would recognize me, and I would have no hope of coming home soon, or of not being shamed.