A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar Read Free Book Online

said. “It can only take four people at a time, and we are six already, plus a baby.”
    “Leave that part to me. I know how to do it. I’m a good packer,” my uncle said.
    Hardly a minute later, all six of my uncles with all of their kids and wives arrived in the garage and tried to fit themselves into our car. Two of my uncles’ wives sat on the front seat, and seven of my cousins sat in the backseat. There was no space left for us. My father slammed the door near the driver’s seat. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said angrily.
    My uncles started to argue with my father. He walked into the courtyard and kept walking slowly around the trees. I had never seen him behaving like this, or talking to his brothers like this before. It reminded me of Indian movies in which the bad brothers did not get along.
    Everybody got out of the car and stared at one another. There was a deep silence.
    My father came back after a few minutes and told my mother and my three sisters to take the baby and sit in the backseat. Then he ordered four of my cousins to squeeze in there, too. He asked me and three of my other cousins, including Wakeel, to sit in the trunk. Two of my uncles’ wives sat in the front seat with my father. The rest would have to stay at the house and wait for him to come get them later.
    He backed the car out onto the street. The bottom scraped the road from the weight of so many passengers. My father drove slowly for the four blocks through our neighborhood until we got out to the main road.
    What we saw, I will never forget. Thousands of people like us were taking advantage of the ceasefire to flee from our part of the city. Thousands and thousands of people, all walking in near silence. When they spoke, they whispered as if they had been forbidden to talk normally. They were strung along each side of the roadway, moving along like lines of ants. All of them had two or three bags in their hands.
    Ours was the only car on the road. When they saw our car, they all rushed toward us, asking us to give them a lift, even though they could see that our car was already fully packed. The crowd that gathered around us was so huge that my father could not move the car forward, not even one inch. Some were trying to pull my cousins and me out of the trunk so they could take our place. My father shouted back to us, “Hold on to each other, and lock your fingers together tightly.”
    We did what we were told, and my father rolled up his window, pressed the horn, turned on the lights, and drove slowly, then faster until one by one the people let go of us.
    For the first time in the two months since the fighting had started, all of us were seeing the destruction it had caused. Things we had heard about, but had not wanted to believe, we were now seeing for ourselves.
    The block-long, eight-story yellow grain silo that the Russians had built was full of holes where rockets had hit it. Small mountains of wheat lay at the base of the silo where it had flowed out through the holes.
    There were big craters in the road where rockets had fallen. This had been the best road in Kabul. There were still many half-exploded rockets standing in the middle of the road, like nails that had been banged halfway through a piece of wood.
    Hundreds of dead bodies were scattered all over the pavement, on the sidewalks, and in the park in the middle of the road. Some looked like they had been there for a long time. Blood was matted all over their clothes. Most were on the main road. Maybe they had been hit by a rocket when they were trying to cross the road. But many of them had been shot with bullets to the head, chest, or back. This was the work of the snipers. I could not believe my eyes; I thought I was seeing an American horror movie, especially when I saw parts of bodies, like arms or legs or even heads, lying by themselves.
    My father had no choice but to drive over the ones in our path. Some of the dead bodies were on their backs as if they