A Fort of Nine Towers by Qais Akbar Omar

Kot-e-Sangi, after the nearby neighborhood, it was actually in Dehnaw Dehbori. He was busy for ten years constructing it and planting his courtyard. Meanwhile, his wife was giving him children. In the end, there were sixteen, though two sets of twins died before they reached six months.
    Grandfather had one promotion after another at the bank until he became the head of its Accounts Reconciliation Department. It was his responsibility to review the papers of every deal the bank made. Everybody respected him highly, and after a few years they started calling him “President,” even though that was not his title, because he stepped in and ran the bank when the president of the bank and his assistant went to other countries.
    With his knowledge of banking and transportation, Grandfather was asked to come work as the head accountant for the Afghanistan Customs Bureau in the Ministry of Commerce. A few years after he went there, though, he uncovered a serious fraud by one of his colleagues. Grandfather went to the minister of commerce to report what was happening, but the minister defended the man who was stealing the funds. Grandfather walked away from the ministry that day and never worked in a government office ever again.
    Several high-ranking officials came to him in the weeks that followed, apologized to him, and asked him to come back to his job. But he did not go back. He had lost his faith in the government.
    To earn money, he started dealing in carpets he bought from weavers he had met when he was traveling as a boy with his father, who had sold them wool.
    Over the years, he bought and sold thousands. Every spring and summer, Grandfather would travel to the villages. Often, he took my father with him, just as his own father had taken him as they followed their herds. It was Grandfather’s way of reliving his old nomadic life.
    As they went from house to house buying new carpets, Grandfather trained my father to recognize beautifully woven old carpets and
kilims
—flat woven rugs without a knotted pile—that had been made with natural dyes. He also taught my father how to bargain until the last moment to get the best price. They would sit and drink tea for hours and tell jokes and learn the names of all the sons of their hosts.
    By the time I was born, Grandfather was not traveling as much. He sent my father to look for carpets while he stayed in Kabul and carefully picked the best times to buy and to sell, quietly amassing a fortune and an inventory of valuable rugs without anyone knowing how he was doing it. And then, of course, he had seen them all stolen from him by those who falsely used the word “Mujahedin.”
    A pack of stray dogs came in our direction, then stopped and ran away. We turned into the street that led to our house, and a few minutes later we could see the yellow apartments at the end of our courtyard that rose above the surrounding one-story houses. At least that part of the building was still there. Grandfather stopped for a moment when he saw it.
    “Life is a gamble,” he said as if he were speaking mostly to himself. “You may lose, or you may win. If you search for its meaning, you may never find it, and lose. But maybe you will find it, and win.”
    He looked at the sad evidence of war all around us. Nearly all the houses on our street had been reduced to jagged, broken walls.
    As we got closer to our house he started humming something in the whispery voice he used when trimming his roses. Grandfather was happy to be back in our own neighborhood, even with so much destruction around us. Then a strange voice behind us shouted, “
Stop! Stop! Stop!
”
    We turned around and saw two men pointing Kalashnikovs at us. Their faces were covered with the bandannas. I could only see theireyes, which looked like cracks in a grain of wheat. They came toward us and one of them asked my grandfather, “What are you doing here?”
    “Visiting my house!” Grandfather said.
    “Where is your house?”