A Fort of Nine Towers (7 page)

Within weeks, fighting between some of the Mujahedin factions broke out in certain areas of Kabul, small incidents at first. People said, “There must be some misunderstandings. In a family, there are always squabbles. They will solve it.”

But those small fights became big fights. Chaos started spreading all over Afghanistan. Afghans who had a little money or relatives in other countries quickly left. Others who stayed were beaten up, or had their property stolen. We heard about women who were raped by the soldiers of the same commanders who had talked about Islam and its importance to Muslims and Afghans only a few months before.

My father wanted to leave Afghanistan for Turkey or Russia, where he had many friends from his days as a boxer, but my grandfather would not give him permission to go. “The borders are still open,” my father said. “We should go while we can. We will come back when things quiet down.”

“Afghanistan is in good hands now. We are with our own now, and we can decide what we want. Give them time,” Grandfather urged. Besides, he needed my father’s help. My father was the son on whom my grandfather most depended.

Slowly, one Mujahedin faction took over a part of Kabul City, and another faction took another part. They started by seizing control of a neighborhood where many people of their tribe lived, then tried to take other areas around them. Soon, each faction had its own territory. As spring turned into summer, we started hearing about “checkpoints” and the “front lines.” The factions started firing rockets at each other. Now innocent people were being killed, especially in our neighborhood, which by sad chance was about as far as the rockets from each side could fly before they fell.

First it was a dozen people who were killed. Then it was a hundred.
Then a thousand. It was like when a forest catches fire, both the dry and the wet burn.

One faction overran Pul-e-Charkhi prison and freed not just the political prisoners, but even those who had committed inhumane deeds against common ordinary people.

One day while two factions were firing rockets at each other over our heads, there was loud knocking on our courtyard door. I had just come out of Grandfather’s room, where he was starting his prayers, and I ran to the door.

When I opened it, I saw some guys with guns, grenades, and bullets tucked into special belts and in their waistcoat pockets. The hooks of the grenades were hanging out.

One of them walked through the door without being invited and pushed me against the wall. He had an ugly scar on his face. Two others followed.

“Where is the owner of this house?” he asked loudly.

“He is inside praying,” I told him.

“Where?” he asked gruffly. I pointed to Grandfather’s room. He kicked open the door. Grandfather was on his prayer rug, with his head touching the ground.

“Give me the key to your carpet warehouse!” the man with the scar shouted at Grandfather, but Grandfather ignored him, and kept on praying. The man shouted again and pointed his gun at Grandfather’s head. I started to cry.

My grandfather ignored him until he had finished his prayers. He quietly rose to his feet and folded his prayer rug as if he were the only person in the room. Finally, he looked at the gunman, who had been shouting the whole time.

“If you think I will be scared by your loud voice, you are stupid.” Grandfather spoke calmly, like he was talking to one of his clients at the bank.

The shouting had attracted the attention of my father and my uncles. I could hear them running toward Grandfather’s room. They
were shouting, too, asking what was happening. The thieves took positions in the corners of the room. As my father and his brothers came rushing in, the thieves put their guns to the backs of their necks. Everyone froze where he stood.

My cousins had come running down the long corridor that led to my grandfather’s room, their mothers behind them. When they saw the thieves and the guns, there was a moment of horrified silence.

Then Grandfather spoke softly. “Go ahead, kill me, and then you will get the key. Whatever I have earned in life came from the calluses of my hands. I will not give it to a bunch of cowardly thieves.”

The one in charge, with the scar, grinned at my grandfather and said, “You stupid old man, I won’t even waste a bullet on you.” Then he shouted at my uncles, cousins, and their mothers to move back. Everyone did. The thieves braced the butts of their Kalashnikovs against their stomachs, pointed the barrels toward us, and walked backward out the courtyard gate.

When they had gone, my father locked the door after them. My father and my uncles went to Grandfather’s room. Their wives were whispering to one another in the courtyard.

My cousins came to me to ask me what had happened. I stood with them all around me and told what I had seen. They paid close attention to everything I said, even the ones who did not get along with me. Now that I had become so important, I told them, “You have to wait until I finish my explanations, then I will answer your questions.”

A moment later, we heard three gunshots in the street. My father and two of my uncles ran from Grandfather’s room toward the courtyard door. My mother and my uncles’ wives cried to them not to go out. But they did not listen.

Grandfather came out of his room and ran after them. Nobody dared to tell him what to do. As he hurried toward the courtyard gate, he nodded at me to follow him. Grandfather always wanted me to see life as it is and not hide from it. I followed him, and my cousins followed me. Outside our courtyard gate, we found my father and my two uncles handcuffed in front of Grandfather’s warehouse. Several more robbers were in the street. Two of them were again pointing
guns at the backs of their necks. One of the locks to the warehouse had been shot open. One of the thieves was positioned as a lookout at one end of our short street; another one was at the far end. One more was standing in the middle of the road in front of our warehouse.

Two others were still trying to break the second lock. Sweat was dropping from their chins, though it was cold and a light cover of snow had whitened the ground. One of them wanted to blow the lock open with a grenade, but his friend did not let him.

“No!” he said. “They’ll hear it. We’ll have to share the carpets with the commander.” Suddenly, I understood that these guys were ordinary thieves who had joined one of the factions. They were not true Mujahedin who defend their country and faith against the invaders and heretics.

The one who had suggested using the grenade stepped back and shot three bullets at the lock. On the third shot, it shattered and the door opened. The one who was standing in the middle of the road called the two others at the ends of the road to join them. They all went inside.

The warehouse was dark. The carpets were piled one on top of another, all the way to the ceiling. Over the past sixteen years, since my grandfather had retired from the bank, he and my father had gathered more than six thousand carpets. One of the thieves drew the curtains, and sunlight rushed in.

The warehouse was a treasury. Every carpet spoke through its colors and its designs. Many were very old. Each one had been selected carefully by Grandfather and my father, but we could do nothing to stop the thieves from taking them away from us.

Working quickly, three of them loaded as many carpets as they could into their old Russian jeep. Three others stood guard outside with their fingers on the triggers, ready to shoot anyone who bothered them. I saw the carpet that I had helped wash in the courtyard with the washers we hired once a month. They cleaned the old carpets that my father brought back from the villages. That was my favorite carpet, but I could not tell these thieves to not take that one because I liked it.

It took them two days to steal all the carpets. The war had now come to us, as it had to so many.

We were not the only ones who were robbed. Our part of Kabul was almost empty. Most of our neighbors had fled, some in such a hurry they took nothing with them. Soon their houses were stripped bare.

The women were no longer at their windows with their elbows on the ledges, chatting. Now, instead, unfed cats leapt from the ledges and hissed at each other.

Every time the wind blew, the doors of the empty houses started banging, windows slammed, curtains blew in and out. When there were no sounds of rockets exploding or guns being fired, the neighborhood was filled with the howling of the hungry dogs who had been abandoned.

Only a madman would try to go out in the street. Snipers had taken up positions on the small mountain behind us and might take a shot, just for fun. The twin peaks had lost their old names of Koh-e-Asmai and Koh-e-Aliabad and had become known as Sniper Mountain.

As spring brought warm days back to Kabul, it became too dangerous to move around in our courtyard. Some snipers even used Grandfather’s high roof where we flew kites to shoot at those on the mountain; the snipers on the mountain shot back. Sometimes they fired rockets. A few landed in our courtyard. The rest fell in the streets around us, on our neighbors’ houses, in our park, where they destroyed the trees, and on our small neighborhood school, which had been our joy until it was blasted into dust.

The grass in the courtyard began to die as the weather grew warmer, because no one dared to go outside to water it. In the end, it became too dangerous even to stay in our rooms. We had to move to a large room in the basement under the apartments, where we hoped we would be safer.

It had never been wired for electricity, and both day and night we lit oil lamps and candles. We slept on the cement floor.

We ate together, more than fifty of us sitting on the floor around
one tablecloth. Each day’s meal was like a little party, but a sad one. Nobody talked, nobody laughed. In fact, we were waiting for a rocket to land on us and kill us all.

All the uncles had radios with tiny earphones. They spent all day listening to news from the Dari-language broadcasts on the BBC World Service and other stations. I wanted to listen to Indian songs. Worry will not change my destiny, I thought; worry brings more worries.

One Sunday night around nine o’clock, the uncles all started telling everyone to be quiet. The BBC announced that the next day there would be a ceasefire in our Kot-e-Sangi neighborhood. It would last for ten hours starting from eight in the morning. This meant we could leave our house. Everyone began to talk at once. What should we do? Where should we go? Who would help us?

As I was falling asleep that night, I could hear rockets whining in flight; when they landed, they made the ground rock like a cradle.

Around three or four in the morning, I woke up needing to use the bathroom. We did not have one in the basement. I walked to the courtyard to pee under a tree as I had done on other nights since we had been forced from our rooms. It was very quiet, but I heard the sound of shoveling. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. In different parts of the garden, all of my uncles were digging narrow, deep holes. They dug in the dark. No one dared light a lantern. It would have been a target for the snipers.

I went to one of my uncles and asked him why he was digging a hole at this time of the night. He did not answer me. I went to another uncle and asked him the same question. He did not answer either.

I went back to the basement to ask my father. He was not there next to my mother. My mother, sisters, and little brother were all sound asleep. I quietly rushed to the corner of the courtyard where our part of the house stood. There was my father digging a hole beneath the mulberry tree we liked to climb.

“Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.

He stopped and looked at me. “Go and sleep,” he said. He sounded harsh.

“Why is everybody digging holes?” I asked determinedly.

“I said, go and sleep,” he almost shouted at me, but very softly as if he did not want anyone to hear. His voice made me frightened. I did not ask any more questions. But I was angry.

Instead of going back down to the safety of the basement, I went to our own rooms, and I slept in my own bed. It was so good to sleep in my own bed after so many weeks on the hard cement floor of the basement. I did not care if a rocket fell on me. A few minutes later, I was sound asleep, and had no idea of the strange new life that would start for my family and me in the morning.

The Other Side of the Mountain

I
woke up just before dawn. My father and mother were running all around our rooms, putting clothes into suitcases. My little brother was asleep on a pile of blankets in a corner.

My three sisters came in from our corner of the basement. They were rubbing their eyes and stretching their arms and yawning. Their hair was tangled. My father sat them next to me on the edge of my bed. He crouched in front of us and spoke very seriously.

“We have to leave here today. It is the only chance we may have,” he said.

In about half an hour, we were ready to go. It was the first time I had seen our rooms so messy. I told my mother that if she wanted to tidy a bit, I would help her. She nodded and began picking up things that had been scattered in the hurry to pack. My father spoke sharply to her: “What are you doing? Who are you tidying for? Thieves and looters? We are leaving, for God’s sake. Get into the car, everybody!”