A Fort of Nine Towers (51 page)

We stayed in his village for three days to be with the people there who wanted to say their condolences. Every day, several hundred people came. Sometimes, we had to keep all his close friends and relatives for lunch. After the three days we went home.

Several nights later, I saw Grandfather in my dreams, very happy in a field of roses. I called him, but he did not seem to hear me. I called him several more times, but he never answered. The next morning I stopped crying.

I went through all of Grandfather’s papers and books. I gave some of his books to my cousins, but I kept all his papers. He had written the story of his life in those papers. On the first page he wrote, “The richer you get, the more you lose your respect, love, and closeness to poor people around you. Don’t forget that once you were one of them, and that your ancestors were among them.”

One Knot at a Time

A
fter going to Kabul University for only three months, I stopped. I did not have enough money to fix my tire punctures every day, or to pay for the bus. We had spent all our savings on Grandfather’s funeral, feeding people in his village. This is how it works in Afghanistan. People come to your house offering their condolences and expecting a lunch or dinner.

My father made barely enough money to feed us poorly three times a day. We could not afford milk, butter, or jam for breakfast anymore. We ate bread and tea with a little sugar. Sometimes we boiled the same tea leaves for several days until there was no color or taste left in them. For lunch, we ate beans and cheap Afghan rice. Most of the time, we ate the leftovers from lunch for dinner, and from dinner for lunch. My uncles and aunts were in the same situation.

I stayed at home for a few days after I stopped going to the university. I did not know what to do with my life. Most of the young men were going to Pakistan or Iran for work. When they came back after several months or years, they brought money and gifts and told about eating good food while they were away. But some of them had also been kicked out of those countries with no money in their pockets. Their money was left behind with their employers. Some of the honest employers sent their money, many did not.

Several times I made plans to go to one of those countries. But my father never gave me permission to go. He was still buying and selling flour and oil. Sometimes we did not see him for weeks. We knew that he had been home only from the rumples we saw in his bed in the morning. Sometimes, I think he was so discouraged, he did not want us to see him.

Once when I tried to talk to him about buying carpets again, he just shook his head. “Carpets are a cursed business,” he said, and he would not say anything else.

I was looking for advice, for someone who could guide me in the right direction. Grandfather was not there to help me anymore. Every now and then I saw him in my dreams, always wearing white clothes and a big smile, but he never talked to me. He never told me what to do to help my family. But I was still so happy to see him, to feel that he was in some way still with me. Sometimes I saw him with Wakeel. Wakeel always had his kite and reel with him, and looked as if he had just won a kite battle.

One day when I felt completely desperate, I went running for a couple of hours without stopping. As long as I was running, watching carefully where I placed each step on the broken pavements and roadways, my mind stopped thinking about the poverty that we were suffering, or about my father, who was working so hard and was losing weight from lack of food, or the loss of Grandfather and Wakeel.

I ran so hard that sweat was pouring from all over my body in a way that it rarely does in the dry air of Kabul. Finally, breathing deeply, I sat under a tree on the slope of the Bagh-e-Bala, the very formal High Garden built by the Moguls four hundred years ago at the top of a steep hill just west of the Qala-e-Noborja. I was exhausted. But as soon as I leaned back against the tree to rest, the distraction that the running had brought went away. Once again, all I could think about was our problems. From the Bagh-e-Bala, I could look down and see Noborja with its one last tower. I closed my eyes.

My carpet teacher came into my mind. I had not thought about her for a long time, and when I had, it had always seemed as if she were very far away from me. Now I felt that she was close to me, sitting
right next to me. I opened my eyes and looked around. There was no one, only the trees and sparrows making their
chuk-chuk
noises.

I closed my eyes again and thought about the last time I had seen her, when she had said goodbye. “Use your mind skillfully, for you could be a brilliant weaver and seller of carpets one day.” She said this with her hand gestures.

As I sat there against the tree, her message rang through my mind very loudly, as if she were saying it forcefully into my ears. I opened my eyes again and looked around to see whether anyone else had heard. But there was no one around. I was alone, but I was not alone. A feeling of peace came over me, and I felt very relaxed and fresh, except the muscles of my legs, which began to cramp and hurt when I got up to walk home.

At home, I looked at the carpet that we had in our sitting room. I thought, I can make a carpet, too. I had learned that from my teacher.

A sudden idea sang in my mind: why not draw a design for a carpet? I took a piece of paper and roughly sketched a design that had been circling in my mind for several months. A few hours later, it had begun to really look like a carpet.

That night I stayed awake until my father came at midnight. He asked me why I was not asleep. I asked him for some money to buy graph paper for drawing my carpet design properly. He did not like the idea. He asked me what I would do with the design. I said that I would be able to sell it and make some money.

“Maybe that is my career,” I told him.

“Stay away from carpets,” he said with a sad voice. “They will only disappoint you.”

The next morning when I woke up, I found the money that I needed next to my bed.

I went to one of the stationery shops in the Shahr-e-Naw business district and bought some sheets of graph paper. As soon as I got home, I started working on my design for a carpet about six feet long and four feet wide. Every day I could see mistakes from the day before, and I had to correct them. Also, the longer I worked, the more
ideas kept streaming through my imagination, and I wanted to include many of them. It took me four months to finish it.

When I was finally satisfied with it, I took my design to several carpet factories to sell it, but none of them were interested. Some of them did not even look at it. They said that they received their designs from buyers overseas and worked only according to their customers’ orders.

As the weeks passed, I became very discouraged. I nearly tore the design into little pieces. But then I thought about how much of my father’s money had been spent on the paper and the pencils, though we hardly had enough to eat, never mind the time I had wasted on it.

“I am not going to university anymore. If I go, I will not learn anything new,” I told myself. “I am getting like a stray dog. I should not be like a dog. I eat and shit, that is all I do. I must be like a human, and do something. But what?” I asked myself. “I don’t know,” I answered myself, despairingly.

“You have to make your own carpet with your design,” a voice inside me exclaimed.

“What if nobody likes that carpet?” I asked the voice inside me.

“You don’t know that yet,” the voice replied.

“Yes, I don’t know that yet. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow,” I said back. It was several days later when I suddenly realized that the voice I had heard was like that of my teacher when she had spoken to me in my dreams.

I told my father that I was going to make my own carpet. At first he thought I was joking. But I insisted until he understood that I was serious. He gave me some money to buy wood for a loom. I went to a wood market and bought three long beams. I took them to a carpenter who was my father’s friend and asked him to make me a carpet loom.

A week later the loom was ready. I did not have money to pay the carpenter, and I did not want to ask my father for more money. I told the carpenter that I had forgotten to bring the money, and he said that it was all right, that I could bring it the next day. I said I would. But that particular tomorrow never came, or at least not the next day. After four weeks he came to our house for his money. I told him that
I spent the money on something else, and that my father did not know that. I promised him that I would give him his money within a month. I begged him to please not tell my father about it. In fact, I had already told my father about it. He was not happy that I had not been truthful to the carpenter.

The loom had been in my house for two weeks before I had wool, a comb, or any of the other materials I needed, or the money to buy them. I still had the hook that my teacher had given me, but that was too precious to use.

I asked my neighbors to lend me some money, but they said they were in the same situation as we were. I asked my friends and they said the same thing.

I went to the street where the wool shops are located and asked the owner of one of them to give me six kilos of different-colored wool. The shopkeeper weighed the wool, put it in plastic bags, and told me the price. I searched all my pockets, but there was no money in any of them. The wool seller thought somebody had robbed me on the bus. I said, “No. I must have left my money at home.” I told him that, if he did not mind, I would bring it the next day. He said that was okay.

I told him, “I am the owner of a carpet factory, and this carpet is an experiment. If it works, and my customers like the new design, I will buy tons of wool from you.” He said that he would provide all that I needed. I said that I would buy it only from him, because he was a good man. This is what we say in Afghanistan when we are doing business. And, because we are desperate and poor, we believe it.

My mother gave me all her tiny savings to buy the hooks, comb, and the other tools. The next day I started my work. I had never set up a loom before and did not know how to wrap the yarn around the top and bottom of the loom to create the warp on which I would tie knots. No one in my family had ever made a carpet; we had only sold them. I looked at the book that had pictures of Turkmen people making carpets. I read the book several times. But it was still hard for me to understand. I only knew how to make knots. Not even my carpet teacher had taught me how to set the warp on the loom.

After many days of seeing my warp suddenly sag where it should
have been tight, I gave up. I had no idea how I would pay the carpenter and wool seller.

I went back to that same tree in Bagh-e-Bala and sat under it. I closed my eyes, but did not see or hear anything. I sat there for several hours, but nothing happened. Darkness came. I became very hungry. But I did not want to leave without an answer to what I should do. I was pleading in my heart for my carpet teacher to tell me what to do.

Finally, I had to leave. I walked home slowly. By the time I got there, everybody was asleep, except my father, who was not home yet. I went to my bed but just lay there. I was staring at the ceiling. Some hours later, I heard my father come in and fall into his bed. I do not remember ever falling asleep. But that night I dreamed of my carpet teacher. She said, “A carpet cannot be woven in one day. It causes pain, and demands patience. If you let the pain poison you, you will never get to the fringes.”

I woke up the next morning. I decided that the time had truly come to follow Grandfather’s advice to make patience my companion. It took me two more days to find the right way to do the warping, and then to weave my weft yarn back and forth through the warp threads, as my people have been doing for thousands of years, to create a few inches of the flat-woven
kilim
needed to anchor the beginning of a carpet. Uncertainty filled my every move. Finally, I had reached the place where the knots started and my design began.

Once I started tying the knots, my mother and sisters sometimes came upstairs to see how far I had gone. Two of my sisters wanted to learn, too. But I did not have time to teach them. Anyway, who was I to be a teacher? Every day I was teaching myself new things. I worked from early in the morning until my father came home at midnight.