A Fort of Nine Towers (53 page)

I told him to stop being a jerk, and he promised he would. But a jerk is a jerk. Even if he lives on the moon, he will still be a jerk.

I sent his weavers back, though they did not want to work for him. But I had promised. I told the boys to come to the course afterward for free lessons, as if they were still working for me. And they did.

A year after I had started the factory, I graduated the first group of girls. They started making their own carpets in their own homes, hiring their relatives and neighbors. Some of them asked me for looms and wool. I had to lend them some since they could not afford to buy them. A few months later, though, after they had sold the carpets they had made, they returned my looms and paid me for the wool. Some of them made carpets for me in their own houses. I paid them for their work. I started paying regular salaries to all the students in my factory. Sometimes I gave them bonuses for very good work.

Soon my neighborhood turned into a carpet-making area. We were making the best carpets in Kabul. Some of the girls had great ideas about colors and were bringing in new patterns. I gave them complete freedom to make what they wanted.

After I had shown that I could make and sell carpets, my father started taking me seriously. He listened to what I had to say. When he saw that we might have some money again, he revived the idea of leaving Afghanistan. I told him that I would make enough money to take everybody out. I told him that we were Kuchis and wanderers by nature, that I would take care of the money, and that he should look for smugglers. He was doubtful at first, but after long discussions in which I wrote out all the numbers on paper of my costs, my production, and my profits, he finally agreed. He was a physics teacher, and he understood numbers.

He started listening to the BBC World Service again to find out what was happening in different parts of Afghanistan, so he could decide which route to take to get us out of the country safely. We made lots of plans. Then we would go over our plans and see what was missing.

The final plan was to go to Iran first, then to Turkey and, eventually, to Italy. Once we were there, we would try to get one of my uncles and his family out. We would work hard and make more money, and then invite another uncle. Slowly, slowly we would get everybody out. None of us had ever been to Italy, and had only a vague idea of where it was. But we were determined to go there.

While my father was looking for smugglers, I went back to university. Though the university taught me only what I had already learned in the Taliban’s prison, nevertheless it would provide me with a degree after graduation. That could help me get a job somewhere, and the Taliban’s prison could not.

With the money that came from carpets I had sold, I bought a new bicycle. I could even have afforded a motorbike or a car, but I did not want to flash my money around. Most of my classmates were poor, and I wanted to look like I was the same as they.

“When there is danger, conform to the crowd,” Grandfather used
to tell me. So I conformed. Grandfather was gone, but I carried his good words and advice in my heart.

For the next two years, I studied hard and worked hard. The credits I needed for my degree slowly accumulated, as did the profits from my carpet factory. The strange peace brought by the Taliban made it safe for foreign buyers to return to Kabul, and my sales increased. A woman might be beaten for leaving her home alone, but in other ways the Taliban regime provided a sense of security. Many things worked. The banks. The mail delivery. Offices. Safe transportation all over the country. My father began going out to the villages again to look for older rugs, and to find customers for them among the foreign rug buyers who had started to come back to the Taliban’s strange but stable Kabul.

We never lost our desire to leave, though. My mother quietly but insistently reminded us to focus all our energies on getting out. Ironically, the Taliban were making it possible for us to do so.

Then, as so often happens with Afghanistan, events on the other side of the world changed everything for us.

A Change in the Air

I
n the summer of 2001, we started hearing from the BBC World Service that Ahmad Shah Masoud was planning to challenge the Taliban. Masoud was a very intelligent man who had attacked the Russians relentlessly for many years and had prevented them from ever capturing the Panjshir Valley, which controlled the main pass across the Hindu Kush mountains.

After the Russians were driven out, Masoud had served as defense minister of Afghanistan at a time when the fighting between many factions to control Kabul caused thousands of deaths and terrible destruction. He was the leader of one of those factions who were driven out of power by the Taliban.

Everyone was terrified that if he tried to retake Kabul, the mindless war would start all over again, and all our gains of the past few years of stability under the Taliban would be lost. The Taliban were cruel and ignorant, but they had brought order to Afghanistan. We lived in constant fear that the brutal fighting among the factions would start up again. Even the Taliban’s strangest laws were easier to survive than the chaos of the commanders.

Masoud had been born in the Panjshir Valley, an hour’s drive north of Kabul. Neither the Russians nor the Taliban had been able to capture him. Now he was serving as the military leader of the Panjshiris
who bitterly opposed the Taliban. If he attacked Kabul, all the roads would be closed, and we would not be able to get out. Everyone would be hiding in their houses. The streets would fill with bodies, and the gutters would fill with innocent blood. Again.

Only a few weeks before, my father had finally found a smuggler who seemed to be the right one for us. He came to our house several times. We all met him and felt we could trust him. He seemed to be an honest man, not one of those smugglers who take your money and leave you in the middle of nowhere. We had met him through my uncle’s friend, whom we had known for many years and trusted.

The plan was that after we arrived in Turkey, my uncle would give his friend in Kabul the money he wanted for getting us there. Then he would hook us up with another smuggler who would take us to Italy.

We were all very relieved that soon we would be making a peaceful life in another country, the rest of our relatives following soon after. We never thought for one minute about the dangers and the hardships that we would face. Nothing frightened us except staying in Afghanistan, despite the calm brought by the Taliban.

The smuggler gave my father a date when we would leave. We had about six weeks to prepare. My mother had already started packing. We could not take much, so she was very carefully choosing the things we could carry. My father was sorting out our belongings. He made several piles. Each pile was intended for a different uncle.

My sisters were going through their clothes, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. They all knew that they could get better clothes in any of those countries where we were planning to go, but they were very sentimental and kept some of their favorites from childhood even though they did not fit. The whole house was a mess, with piles of clothes everywhere in all the rooms.

I was going through all my looms upstairs in my factory. Some of my looms had carpets on them that could be finished before the date we were scheduled to leave. Some of them had carpets that were half-made, and others that were only just started. I put the best weavers to
work on finishing the ones that were nearly done and placed one of my better students in charge of the rest of my factory. It was her responsibility to finish all the carpets after we left. She would then contact my uncle, who would take them to my buyer on Chicken Street. These carpets were part of the money we would be paying the smugglers once we arrived in Italy.

After we had gone and the carpets were finished, this same girl would distribute all the looms among my other students, so they could start making their own carpets in their houses. These looms were to be their salaries and bonus for this month. They were very happy about that. But I still had to dye the wool and silk for them for at least one month, since they did not know how to do it. I had been showing a few of my students how to dye wool and silk, but dyeing is very unpredictable since the strength of the dye, the quality of the wool, and the heat of the fire under the dye pot can be slightly different from batch to batch. Learning how to get the same shades of each color in every batch takes time, and they were still making the kinds of mistakes that I had made when I had been teaching myself these things.

It was around seven o’clock in the evening. We were about to have an early supper after a long and tiring day. My mother was cooking kebab on a grill in the courtyard. Every meal now was like a celebration, because we would be leaving on October 15, only a month and five days away. It was also our way of not feeling sad about having to leave our own country, where our family had lived for thousands of years, and where I had lived the first nineteen years of my life.

My mother gave everyone a stick of kebab. It was lamb, very juicy and delicious. My father said, “Let’s listen to the news.” My mother did not want to hear anything from “the devil box.” That is what she called the radio, because it always broadcast evil news. She said it would ruin our time together in this life.

My father chuckled and said, “It is all right. We’re leaving this country very soon. Let me hear it while we’re here.” Then he turned
on the radio to the BBC World Service. My mother did not want to argue, because she knew that it would not change anything. Instead, she fussed over the food.

Suddenly, we heard news that made us stop eating.

“Ahmad Shah Masoud was wounded in a suicide attack today at his stronghold near the Tajikistan border. The attackers were two Arabs who had posed as journalists. While they were interviewing Masoud, a bomb in a belt worn by one of them exploded.

“That man was killed instantly. The other was captured and shot while trying to escape. Masoud was rushed to the Indian military hospital at Farkhor, Tajikistan.”

We were completely stunned. We did not know what to think. Should we eat and continue our celebration? Should we start mourning? What did this mean? We did not have suicide bombers in Afghanistan.

In the morning we heard that Masoud had died during the night in the hospital while they were trying to save him. All around us, our many Panjshiri neighbors wept loudly.

I had not told any of my classmates that I was leaving. I did not want to make them feel bad that I was going and they were staying behind. I was planning to send them gifts and sweet letters from Italy.

We had all become good friends in the past three years, despite my time away from the university. We even had made those Taliban who had come from the front line our friends. We had taught them how to read and write. We also taught them how to use parallel bars in the gymnasium, how to play basketball, and how to dance. Sometimes we even secretly listened to Indian music with them in our breaks between classes. A few of them quit being Taliban. They were not bad people after all. They were just guys like us who wanted to have a chance at life. They wanted to marry Kabuli girls and to continue living in Kabul.

We told them that they would have to share all the housework with their wives. At first they thought we were making fun of them. Then they realized that we were serious. But they did not want to go
back to their lives in the village. In the end, they accepted that they should work equally as hard as women in their homes.

The day after Masoud’s death, my classmates and I talked about his assassination. Some expressed deep concern at losing yet one more of our Afghan leaders. Others, who remembered all the rockets that he had thrown at Kabul during the civil war, were happy about his death.

Some of our classmates chided the others as if we were already journalists, saying, “Our job is not to take sides. Our job is to tell the truth and get all the facts.” We listened to the BBC World Service as a model of how to present news accurately and as soon as it happens. We carried small radios in our pockets and listened to them during our breaks between classes, usually with small earphones.