The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (17 page)

Meanwhile, orders for the tailoring business continued to come in, and the living room/workroom remained a hive of activity.

One autumn afternoon Saaman and Laila were hard at work on a large batch of wedding dresses, along with a made-to-measure order for a young woman who was marrying a Sidiqi neighbor. The groom was one of the only other people the girls knew who had ties to the international community; he served as a guard at a foreign agency charged with removing the millions of land mines left behind by the Soviets. The Sidiqi girls had heard that his position--and salary--had been invaluable when his brother was jailed for a week in nearby Taimani for the offense of having taught students to draw at a friend's art school. He had only been substitute teaching, but the Taliban had caught him mid-lesson and hauled him off to jail the moment they found art magazines hidden in an office desk drawer.

As they sewed the green and white dresses, the girls listened on their cassette player to the low and lugubrious notes of Ahmad Zahir, still one of Afghanistan's most famous singers though nearly twenty years had passed since his death. The former teacher and Kabul Times reporter had been assassinated in 1979 at the age of thirty-three, reportedly on the orders of a communist official who was angered by the popular singer's politics.

Zahir's voice filled the workspace:

On the one hand, I want to go, to goOn the other hand, I don't want to goI don't have the strengthWhat can I do without you

Just after 5 P.M., Kamila rushed through the gate and the front door. She was now delivering clothes and food to needy Kabulis for another UN agency, the International Organization for Migration, and she was not expected home from her staff meeting for another half-hour. Her cheeks were red and she was out of breath.

“Have you heard the news?” she asked her sisters. “They've killed Massoud.”

Laila immediately reached for the radio, and a few tense minutes later the static of the medium wave gave way to the clear voice of the BBC Persian news service's anchor, who was broadcasting live from London. Mrs. Sidiqi's face grew even more wan as she listened to the foreign voice that was entering her living room from thousands of miles away. The girls gathered around the radio.

“There has been an attack against Ahmad Shah Massoud at his headquarters in Afghanistan's Takhar province,” the BBC's Daud Qarizadah said, citing a source close to the Northern Alliance leader. “Massoud has been killed along with several others present.” Apparently the men who led the attack had been posing as journalists; they had hidden a bomb in their camera and had been killed themselves in the blast. Mrs. Sidiqi and her daughters knew that Massoud's forces represented the last holdout against the Taliban; for the last few years they were all that had prevented the movement from taking complete control of the country. If Massoud was killed, the Taliban would be rid of their most formidable foe, but the fighting was unlikely to end.

The girls sat stunned and silent. Kamila watched the shock, fear, and despair spread across her mother's face. She refused to believe Massoud was gone; surely he, the Lion of Panjshir, could survive a bomb even if it exploded at close range. He was a veteran of many wars, was he not? He had fought for decades, first against the Russians, then against rival Mujahideen as defense minister, and now against the Taliban. Surely this could not be the end of him?

The next day's reports brought only confusion and more questions. Burhanuddin Rabbani insisted that his former defense minister was still alive, as did Massoud's spokesman, but journalists and officials contradicted them. No one knew what to believe, though everyone suspected the worst.

Sara came to the house at her usual hour and got to work, eager for the distraction from the news. “If the reports are true and he is dead,” she said, “things are likely to get worse. The fighting could be even more vicious than it was during the civil war. You girls may yet need to leave the country. I hope I am wrong, but it's possible that things will descend to a level even we have not yet witnessed.”

Kamila thought for a moment of her father and how badly she missed his wisdom and reassurance. But she refused to give up hope.

The next twenty-four hours saw little work done in the Sidiqi household, and then came more disastrous news: two airliners had flown into the World Trade Center in New York City and thousands were believed dead, though the rescue effort was just beginning. Another plane had crashed into the Pentagon near the American capital of Washington, D.C., and a fourth had failed to reach its target, which many guessed was the White House. The world was off its hinge.

To his mother's relief, Rahim came home early from school, saying that no one was paying any attention to classes; they were only talking about the news of the past two days and wondering what would happen next. Most everyone in the capital had immediately assumed that Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi who had been living in the country as the Taliban's guest, was involved in the attack against America. Years earlier the United States had bombed suspected bin Laden training camps in eastern Afghanistan in retaliation for attacks on two American embassies in Africa. Washington had demanded that the Taliban turn bin Laden over to U.S. authorities, but the regime refused to revoke its hospitality. Their guest should be tried in Afghanistan for whatever offenses the Americans were accusing him of. Hostilities between the United States and the Taliban had worsened ever since. Now the Americans claimed they had evidence that bin Laden was behind the bloody 9/11 plot and they again insisted that the Taliban turn him over. Once more, the Taliban leaders refused.

The Sidiqis, like most Afghans, had only a vague sense of who the Taliban's “Arabs” were. The men were widely thought to be fighters from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chechnya, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere who had come to join the Taliban's cause at the behest of bin Laden. When the Taliban movement first began, its leaders had presented themselves not as enemies of the West but as humble purifiers of their own country, committed to restoring a desperately needed peace. But as the years passed and international recognition eluded them, the leadership adopted increasingly angry rhetoric against the United States and moved ever closer to bin Laden and his organization, which went by the name Al Qaeda, or “the base” in Arabic. This relationship only deepened after the United Nations imposed military and economic sanctions on the Taliban, leaving the regime even more isolated than it had previously been when only three countries in the world had recognized its legitimacy.

Al Qaeda's fighters were thought to be responsible for the attack on Massoud, according to news reports that at last confirmed irrefutably the Northern Alliance leader's death. And now they were rumored to be behind the strikes against the United States.

Mrs. Sidiqi and her girls knew only what they had heard on the BBC and the classroom rumors that Rahim came home with. But that was enough to make it clear that Afghanistan was at the center of the past week's horrors and would certainly be the target of whatever retaliation would follow. The U.S. government was already threatening to strike back if the Taliban did not hand over bin Laden. And no one in Kabul had any reason to think that they would. For years Afghanistan had lived as a pariah nation, utterly forgotten by the rest of world. Now no one on the radio talked of anyplace else.

And so the waiting game began. What little economic life had managed to survive in the capital came to a sudden halt as the citizens of Kabul held their collective breath. Everyone knew their destiny now lay in the hands of men in Kandahar, Washington, London, and other unknown and faraway capitals. Gossip spread like wildfire, as it always did in Kabul, passed along by families, neighbors, and shopkeepers. The city's most seasoned observers believed a military attack by the Americans against the Taliban government was imminent--and unavoidable. The girls heard that the UN was evacuating its staff in anticipation of war; they wondered what the internationals knew that they didn't.

Brace yourself.

Stay indoors.

And pray.

That was all that was left for most Kabulis.

Those who could, however, were determined to get out. The smattering of families still living on Kamila's street were packing up their few belongings and evacuating the city. They would head for Pakistan if they could get that far, or the Afghan countryside if they couldn't, and they urged Mrs. Sidiqi to do the same. This was no place for her and her children; surely the Americans' bombs would soon rain down upon all of them. You had better get out of here as soon as you can, their neighbors warned. Khair Khana is teeming with targets: the airport, the fuel depot, Taliban artillery units. All of them were located within just two or three miles of Kamila's house. Even Sara urged Mrs. Sidiqi and the girls to leave their home; she herself was taking her children to live in another part of Khair Khana, a few miles farther from the airport. The risk of staying put was just too high, she said. What happens if the Americans miss?

As the economy withered in the weeks following the attacks of September 11, the price for passage out of the capital skyrocketed. Trucks, buses, and taxis overflowed with families seeking safer places, with fares reaching as high as five hundred dollars. People rushed to money changers by the Kabul River to exchange savings they held in Pakistani and Iranian currencies into afghani so they could buy food and other supplies. But the rates moved against them by the day. The city's savvy traders were betting American dollars would soon be entering the country once the Taliban government fell. After the war.

Mrs. Sidiqi heard the stories and watched her neighbor's preparations. But she remained convinced that her family was best off staying exactly where it was. There would be no fleeing for them. If something happened to her or her girls while they were in their own home, that was one thing, and she would leave it to God's will. But she would not have her precious daughters made vulnerable to the kidnappers, murderers, and bandits who awaited them once they left the security of their own courtyard. They were better off here, together, off the streets and far from the bedlam outside.

Four weeks after Massoud's death and the attacks of September 11, the barrage began. Just after the girls finished dinner one evening, missiles whizzed across the night sky and the boom of explosions was heard around Kabul. Sitting in her bedroom, Kamila felt the windows shudder and the floors shake while Nasrin and Laila ran to look for their mother and their older sisters, crying out in terror as they ran down the long hall that connected the living room to the family's sleeping chambers. The house turned black in an instant as the Taliban cut the city's power supply in hopes of throwing off the enemy planes that roared overhead. They heard the sharp rat-tat-tat sound of the Taliban's lumbering antiaircraft guns chasing the foreigners' jets around the city in their black trucks, attempting in vain to hit the elusive American aircraft soaring unfazed up above.

And finally, silence.

Kamila sat with fourteen-year-old Nasrin for another hour, cuddling her in her lap. “It's all over,” she whispered. “Everyone's okay. See? We're all here, just fine.” She patted her little sister on the back and hoped the girl wouldn't notice how uncontrollably her own hands were trembling.

Dawn arrived and a new day began as if it were any other. Shops and offices opened and the clear autumn sun shone cheerily. But terror and uncertainty had settled over the capital. Panicked families were clamoring to leave, struggling to find a way out before dark, when the bombs were likely to start pummeling the city once more. Rahim, returning from the market, reported that Khair Khana's streets looked like a graveyard. Finding food was no problem, he said; he had the shops to himself since everyone else was busy planning their escape.

The fighting ground on for one week and then another, with an occasional break on Friday, the Muslim holy day. The family grew accustomed to early dinners followed by a tense, candlelit evening in the windowless bedroom waiting for the night air to fill with the boom of jets and the thud of explosions. Like many Kabulis, Rahim and the girls came to know the distinct sounds that each warplane made. They were fluent in the differences among B-52s, B-2s, F-14s, and AC-130s. They learned about “cluster bombs” and “smart bombs.” And they were now sorrowfully familiar with the stench of sour smoke that steamed up from the ground in the wake of each night's air raids.

Khair Khana reeled under the relentless pounding of the American air blitz, which sometimes began long before nightfall. Sara Jan was right, Kamila thought. No one is safe here. Bombs dropped from the sky sometimes landed so close that Kamila was shocked to open her eyes and see that her house was still standing. She now felt certain that she would not survive. American planes targeted neighborhood Taliban sites night after night, leaving behind deafening explosions and cratered streets. One afternoon a week after the aerial assault began, a bomb demolished two homes in another part of Khair Khana and killed seven people inside. The intended target appeared to be a military garrison a few miles away. Word of the deaths spread swiftly among the few families who were still living in Khair Khana, and with it came even more fear.

“Stay in your houses!” Taliban soldiers shouted on the nights they patrolled the streets of Khair Khana. The government had blocked all of Kabul's main roads and instituted an even earlier curfew now that the Americans had attacked. They needn't bother, Kamila thought, hearing the soldiers' warnings pierce the silence on the street outside her gate. The whole city is under fire. Where are we going to go?

Each evening Kamila and Saaman tuned the battery-powered radio to the BBC's broadcast to hear the latest on the fighting. The news anchors in London now regularly raised the possibility that the Taliban regime would be replaced; the men from Kandahar, they reported, would eventually be forced to retreat before the overwhelming air strikes of the Americans, who were deploying the twenty-first century's most powerful technology against their cars, trucks, bunkers, barracks, radio stations, airports, weapons depots, and trenches. None of the girls dared to discuss out loud what would happen if or when the Taliban government gave up, though the voices on the medium-wave suggested that Zahir Shah, the former king, might possibly return to rule the country. Kamila and her sisters had no way of knowing how much longer the war would go on. Or whether they would live through it.