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

were sleeping. When our car drove over them, the speed of the car turned their faces toward the road, and the car rose up off the pavement.
    To avoid hitting a man who was running toward us, my father drove the wrong way around the roundabout in front of the Polytechnic, then gunned the car up the hill toward the Intercontinental Hotel.
    Beyond the top of the hill, everything looked different. The unimaginable scene through which we had just driven suddenly vanished. In its place, we saw real life.
    People were buying bread from bakeries for their breakfast. Little kids were holding their parents’ hands as they were walking to their school. The dogs were not howling. The roads were not empty. People’s windows were not slamming, and their doors were not banging. There was no war. None.
    I saw smiles on the faces of people who showed no signs of worry. But they could not stop staring at us; they had never seen a car packed like ours before. The lines of refugees had only just begun to reach that area, and they had no idea how many thousands more were coming. The small mountain that rose between our house and this neighborhood had protected these people from the fighting. Not even thesnipers had come around to their side of the mountain, though they could have. But they were fighting over our neighborhood, which lay between two factions. The people we saw acted as if they did not even know that vicious combat was going on less than two miles away, though they would have to have heard the rockets and the shooting.
    We came down the hill from the Intercontinental Hotel into the Kart-e-Parwan neighborhood. There were only a few cars on the road, but many people walking. Most of them were Indians going barefoot to their temples, carrying brass bowls filled with milk. Their men were dressed in white or orange. The women wore bright-colored saris. The kids walked behind. The boys’ heads were shaved except for one braid. Some of the men had stripes painted on their foreheads.
    My cousin Wakeel was sitting next to me in the trunk. He laughed at the kids with no hair, but said he wished he could have one of their bowls of milk.
    At the bottom of the hill, we turned sharply to the left a couple of times and drove through a pretty, small park I had never seen. All the flowers were carefully tended.
    We passed a large white building that stood behind a high wall. There were guards in strange uniforms with guns out in front of its fancy gate. They stood like statues. Big dogs from Russia were next to them. A sign said “British Embassy” in Dari under big letters in some other language.
    We followed a dirt road that ran for two hundred meters beside the wall. That was the bumpiest road in Kabul. It took us down into a deep ravine and then up again as loose rocks slid underneath the wheels of the car. The top of the trunk bounced down on our heads with every bump. The dust stirred up by the car rolled in on us and made us choke. All of our eyebrows and eyelashes got covered with it. We looked like the clowns that used to perform on the stage of our school for Teacher’s Day.
    My father stopped the car in front of a tall, rusted metal gate in a high mud wall. He blew the horn a few times. Finally, with a scraping sound, an elderly
chowkidar
, the gatekeeper, drew open a smalldoor next to the gate, saw that it was my father, then opened the gates wide. My father drove inside. The
chowkidar
rubbed his eyes to see whether he was dreaming. He closed the metal gates behind us and rushed toward us to help us get out of the trunk. He whispered to himself, “I have never seen so many people in a Volga before.”
    “I bet you haven’t,” I said back to him with a grin.
    He got red and tried to hide his embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to be rude; I’m just shocked.” He had not expected to be heard.
    We climbed out of the car. Some of my aunts had to be pulled. But the kids were all jumping out and looking around at where we had stopped,