A Fort of Nine Towers (47 page)

My mother put a shawl over her head and covered her face. She went to the doorway. She stood behind the curtain that was spread across the door and said in Pashto so the Talib could understand her, “I’m feeding those pigeons.”

“Who is that?” the tall, thin Talib said.

“I’m the wife of that man who is standing next to you, and I’m feeding these pigeons. I have one question to ask you: Do you think it is a bad thing, or a sin, to feed a hungry, living being?” my mother asked him.

“No, not at all. In fact, it is a good thing,” the tall, thin Talib said. He was suddenly almost polite. It was impossible to know why, except perhaps her Pashto was of a very high form and revealed her as a woman whose sense of dignity demanded respect from others, even Taliban.

“As you say, I am doing a good thing. Then, you don’t have to punish and imprison me, do you?” my mother said.

“No, no, not at all. The pigeons will stay here, and there will be no punishment and imprisonment for the keeper,” the tall, thin Talib said.

My mother came back into the room with a triumphant smile on her face. We all looked at her with adulation. I kissed her hands. Then I walked outside and greeted all those Taliban as the laws of hospitality demanded, and stood next to my uncle.

The Talib asked my father for an ax and a ladder. My father brought them without asking why.

The Talib ordered one of his men to climb the ladder to one of those holes where my pigeons were nesting. He gave him that ax and asked him to chop a hole near the top of the dried mud wall.

“I think we agreed that we should not hurt the pigeons, right?” my father asked.

“Yes, that is right. But we are here to look for a weapon in this house. I was informed that there is a rifle with a bag of bullets in that pigeonhole,” the Talib said.

“We have been living in this house for almost seven years, and I haven’t seen any kind of weapon,” my father said.

“You don’t mind if we dig that hole?”

“No, I don’t mind, but if you don’t find anything, then you have to fix the mess,” my father said confidently.

“Agreed,” the tall, thin Talib said.

His man took out a pigeon with her week-old babies and put them carefully in another hole. The other pigeons in that hole started to fight with her; they did not want her there. She did not know where to go. She was worried about her babies and kept struggling and fighting with the other pigeons to protect her little ones. A minute later, the father pigeon flew down and walked near the babies to defend them, but the fighting never stopped.

The Talib kept chopping away. We were all watching him as he made a big mess of the wall. A few minutes later he pulled a rifle from deep inside the pigeonhole. With it was a bag of bullets, just as the tall, thin Talib had predicted. My father’s face went ashen.

“You choose a very good place for hiding your weapons. But don’t you know that we have better spies?” the tall, thin Talib said.

“It is not my weapon. I have no idea who put it there,” my father said. His voice trembled.

“Every criminal says the same thing, but after some beatings they confess. So, now, tell me where the other boxes of weapons are.” He paused as he was looking into my father’s eyes. “Or I will beat you until you confess.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. There are not any weapons in this place.”

“Is that right? But you said that there is no rifle in that pigeon’s hole, yet there was. We are going to search all these rooms. If we don’t find them, then you have to show them to us, or you will die under interrogation,” he said viciously. He pressed the button of his walkie-talkie and said, “Send us fifty more Taliban to surround the courtyard and the garden. Don’t let anyone out of this place.”

Thanks to my uncle’s work in the Ministry of Interior Affairs, he had a walkie-talkie, too. He could have asked for help, but if any more weapons were found, he would be implicated as well. He stayed silent. He grabbed my left arm and half dragged, half carried me just inside the doorway to our rooms and ordered me to destroy all those books that he had brought me from Pakistan.

“I’m not going to destroy any of my books. They’re not looking for books. They are looking for weapons,” I said.

“You idiot, just do what I tell you. If they see the Bible or any of those philosophy books, they will hang us all,” my uncle said with a rasp.

“Why?” I asked, confused.

“They will think we all have converted to Christianity or Communism or paganism,” my uncle said.

“But that is stupid,” I told him. “It is nonsense!”

“What is not stupid and nonsense about them?” he replied. He went back outside to find ways to delay the Taliban from coming into the house.

Now I was afraid. I ran toward our rooms. I put all of my books in front of me. I kissed them one by one. I loved Socrates’s dialogues. I still did not want to tear them. But I had to.

I took the Old Testament first. I had only ten more pages left before
I finished it for the second time. But there was no chance for that now. I tore out the first page, then the second and third. Then I started tearing bunches of pages at a time, as the sound of the coarse voices of the Taliban outside gave me extra strength and speed. A few minutes later, there was a pile of pages in front of me. Then I took the
Plato Selections
and tore out all of its pages. My mother and sisters helped me to tear apart the other books.

A short while later, my uncle came back in. We could hear the Taliban still at work in the courtyard, breaking down the pigeon roost. He said we must burn all the torn pages. My mother started a fire in a back room we never used that had no windows and no way for the Taliban to see any smoke. They probably would not have come into the house anyway, knowing that there were women inside.

I separated the pieces of the Old Testament and
Plato Selections
and burnt them separately in a metal bucket. I am not even sure why I did that.

My uncle told my mother to bring all our photo albums. He said we had to burn all our family pictures, like my parents’ wedding pictures and the pictures that they took on their honeymoon to the Central Asian countries.

In most of those pictures, my mother and father wore Western clothes. If the Taliban saw such photos, they would imprison my parents, or maybe even kill them. These things happened often, and were announced from the backs of their pickups as the Taliban drove from one street to the next, shouting over loudspeakers.

My uncle and my mother started tearing up all those pictures. Tears streamed down from my mother’s eyes, and this time she made no effort to hide them.

They put all the torn photographs in the fire with the torn books. The flames rose up, and a few minutes later every image of our family had turned to ashes.

There were pictures of my grandfather receiving a medal from his bank, and standing in front of our old house when it was new, and dedicating the school he had built. There was another one of him with the king, Zahir Shah. One showed him with all of his fourteen children. Several showed him dressed as a pilgrim from the time he had
walked most of the way from Afghanistan to Mecca. In moments, his whole life as we had known it from those photos became ashes.

Everybody was coughing from the smoke, which had nowhere to go. I took a deep breath, determined to hold the smoke in my lungs even if I could not keep the books. I put the bucket full of ashes into a
bokhari
stove that we were storing in the back room.

“What about videocassettes and the video player?” my older sister asked my uncle.

“Break them all. Hurry up, quick, quick,” my uncle said.

We had more than fifty Indian and American films on video. We had watched them all more than twenty times each. My favorite was the one called
Conan the Destroyer
. I had seen it at least fifty times, even though I did not know a word of what they were saying, because it was in English. Still, I loved to watch it again and again.

I grabbed that cassette and looked at the picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover. He wore underwear with boots and was holding a sword. Every muscle of his body stood out. I wished he could have been here with us now with his sword to beat all those Taliban. But he was not.

I said goodbye to Arnold Schwarzenegger and tore the cover first. I did not know how to break the cassette. I did not want to put it on the floor and break it with my feet as my uncle was doing to other cassettes. Instead, I took a decorative sword that was hanging above the door to the courtyard. It had been given to my father by the Indian government as an award for winning a boxing competition.

I put the cassette on the floor and held the sword over my head. I looked at my arms and chest. They were not as big and full of muscles as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Though I had spent a lot of time in the gym, we never had enough to eat. But I decided that he would not mind if his cassette got broken by a person like me and with a sword used only for decoration, not with a real sword like the one he had used in the movie.

My uncle broke the video player into small pieces. He dropped the jagged bits down a hole in the floor where the toilet was supposed to go when we got running water. We threw the broken cassettes after it and burned their covers.

In the hour or so that it took for the Taliban to make sure that no pigeon would ever live in our courtyard again, every one of those so-called infidel books, videocassettes, and photographs had disappeared from our house. And that was a good thing.

As soon as the Taliban had finished tearing up the pigeon roost, they started searching through every room around that courtyard. Even though they did not find any more weapons, they wanted to take my father and me for interrogating. My uncle talked on his walkie-talkie to some people in the Ministry of Interior Affairs who told the Taliban in the courtyard not to bring us in after all. That outraged the head Talib. He was determined to find a picture or a book or anything to use as evidence against us, but nothing remained for him to find.

They did find a picture of a cow that my little sister had drawn in her drawing book with unusual colors. One of the Taliban tore it from my sister’s drawing book, held it against my father’s face, and said, “I can put you in prison for months for this drawing, but I will stay calm, because I am known as being kind.”

“I can see you are a kind man with a soft heart. Your eyes tell me that,” my father said, even though the Talib had eyes that were hooded like a cobra.

The tall, thin Talib raised his brows, then winked at the other Taliban to follow him, and they headed toward the door. My father asked them to drink tea with us. The tall, thin Talib declined, saying he was fasting. And they left.

The pigeons stayed for a couple of days, trying to make sense of this madness that was affecting them. But in ones and twos, they flew away to some other roost where they could build a nest and have a life of simple expectations.

Every time I looked at the ruins of where they had lived, I felt that far more than pigeons had been taken from me. Before the last of them left, I buried the ashes of my beloved books under a mulberry tree in the garden.

The next day my father used the public pay telephone, which we called the PCO, and which was very expensive, to reach his friend Haji Noor
Sher, who had never returned to Kabul since the night of his last party and remained in India with his family. There were two PCOs in our Kart-e-Parwan neighborhood. My father and I went to the closer one on the Bagh-e-Bala road. It was very busy, though, and we would have had to wait a couple of hours to make a call. We went to the other one in Baharistan, but the line there was even longer. So, we went home and got my father’s bicycle and went to a larger PCO in Da Afghanan, a ten-minute ride from the Qala-e-Noborja if the streets are not too crowded with cars. My father pedaled while I sat on the back.

Noor Sher wanted to know about everything that was happening in Kabul. My father asked him about that rifle. At first he did not know what my father was talking about. He had completely forgotten about it. After a while he said, “That was my father’s rifle, and when he died, it disappeared. How did it end up with the pigeons?”

“The pigeons must have taken it there,” my father said, trying to make a joke.

“It could be true. Things like that happen from time to time,” Haji Noor Sher replied, missing the joke, perhaps because of a poor connection. He asked my father to please go to the Taliban and get the rifle back. But my father never did. Even now, we still do not know how that rifle got there.

My father talked for longer than he could afford with the money in his pocket, and when he finished, the PCO owner told him the cost. I searched my pockets and gave my father all the money I had. It was still not enough, only half. My father gave the man his watch, which he had worn for many years and liked very much. It was a good Russian watch and worth more than the money my father owed the man. But the man agreed that if my father brought the rest of the money we owed, he would give back the watch. For two weeks my father was unable to make enough money to pay the man and get his watch back. When he finally did go to pay after three weeks, the PCO had moved from that place and the watch had gone with it. My father never saw it again.

Before long, we bought another video player on the black market. You could find anything you wanted during the Taliban time if you knew where to look in the back streets of the bazaar. Even porn videos,
if that was what you wanted. Owning one was a form of rebellion and a source of personal pride. I found another cassette of
Conan the Destroyer
. One by one, I located copies of Socrates and the other books.

But my parents’ photographs of their wedding and honeymoon now lived only in our hearts. They had become ashes, and would remain ashes forever.

University of Taliban