A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story by Qais Akbar Omar

Author:Qais Akbar Omar [Omar, Qais Akbar]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, War, Biography
ISBN: 9780307362681
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2013-04-16T07:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

IN THE TIME OF SHAITAN

13

The Gold

Now we began the time of pretending. The signs of war were all around us, but we pretended that we did not see them. All but one of my uncles and their families had moved to different parts of the city, but we pretended that we would not be apart for long. We missed sitting around one tablecloth, but we pretended that eating by ourselves was the same as eating all together.

Once or twice everyone came back to the Qala-e-Noborja on a Friday. The grown-ups sat and talked inside, while my cousins and I played in the garden as before, or flew kites. We pretended that we were still living in one courtyard like in the old days. But the grown-ups did not make jokes as they always had. And they never talked about rebuilding Grandfather’s house.

When they all left at dusk, we pretended that we would see each other again the next day. Instead, we met after a month or two, because as the weeks passed and the ceasefires came and went, it was still not safe to move around the city.

The war started again in full force five months after we had arrived back in Kabul, even though the leaders of all the factions had gone to Mecca and had sworn that they would never fight again. We pretended that their broken oaths were normal, though every Afghan knows that to break an oath is a serious offense, especially one made in Mecca in the House of God.

The war between the oath breakers locked us all in one room for days and weeks. Sometimes we could not even go to the kitchen across the courtyard, afraid that a sniper might hit us, or a rocket might land as we ran to get some rice, which was often the only food we had left as the days passed and our meat and vegetables were all eaten. We slept night after night with empty stomachs, but we pretended we were practicing for Ramazan.

Once, after several days of eating nothing, I had no choice but to go to the kitchen to get flour so my mother could at least cook us some bread on the woodstove we used for heating the room where we spent our days and nights. My father took me aside and apologized with tears in his eyes for asking me to go, but he explained that if he were killed, there was no one to look out for the rest of the family. I understood. But it took me hours to gather the courage to run the twenty steps there. I ran in zigzags to the kitchen, pretending I was playing hide-and-seek with the snipers on the mountain. They often shot anything they saw that moved. It was their game. But they did not see me. I won the game that day.

Rockets fell by the hundreds. First they made a whistling noise in the air, and then a huge blast that shook the earth when they landed.

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