I spent many days up in the pear tree, watching the tanks and jeeps and soldiers passing by. Planes streaked low across the sky; the rumble of their engines made my legs shake.
The government wanted to turn Afghan society into a socialist state overnight, wiping away centuries of religious thinking and tradition. They had already changed the textbooks in all the schools, taking out any reference to Muslim faith. They even changed the national pledge that each child recited every morning to include loyalty to the socialist state of Afghanistan. They arrested the popular teachers, administrators, and professors who refused to change. These purges and demands only fueled the discontent of the people, which spilled over into protest. Kabul settled into a state of unrest, with its citizens constantly taking to the street in active revolt. Kabuli students passed out flyers about the planned marches, and people from outlying villages poured into the city to show their solidarity. Shopkeepers closed their stores. The marches were meant to be peaceful, Padar told us at dinnertime. But they were shouting slogans denouncing the Parcham and their socialist agenda, so the soldiers fired on the crowds. People were being killed. After the violence escalated, the protests spread to the high schools.
Early in the new year of 1980, students at Ahmad Shah’s high school marched to the police barricades, shouting slogans against the new regime. When they wouldn’t disperse, the guards fired at them. One of the girls from Shahnaz’s high school who was shouting the loudest was shot dead by a soldier. Ahmad Shah talked about her all the time. She was a hero, and her name became a battle cry to the other students. They would shout, “Miss Nahid!”
Shortly after high school students joined the protests, truckloads of Afghan and Soviet soldiers began rolling through the neighborhood. They were searching for teenage boys in order to force them into joining the army. When the truck stopped in front of the gate to our house, soldiers dismounted with rifles in their hands. One of the maids went to warn Padar, who was in the living room. He quickly found Ahmad Shah and told him to cross over the back fence and hide on the neighbor’s roof until the soldiers were gone. The soldiers barged through our front door. Padar met them in the entryway; he was very cool and calm. All of us watched from the hall as the soldiers dispersed and went room to room searching for my brother.
“We have no teenagers,” he kept telling them nicely. “I don’t know why you are coming in here.”
The soldiers kept searching, brushing past Laila, Zulaikha, and me in the hall. I watched one of them following the others. He looked no older than Ahmad Shah, who was only sixteen. He moved along, unsure of himself as he pointed his rifle at the ceiling. With a sad droop to his eyes, he poked his rifle into the rooms that had already been searched by other soldiers. They must have forced him into the army just as they wanted to do to my brother. They opened every room and closet, even the maids’ quarters outside, anywhere a person could hide. I felt sorry for him and for what was happening to all the boys.
When they left, they piled into the truck and moved around the corner to the next street; Ahmad Shah crossed back through the yards and hid on our roof until the soldiers cleared out of the neighborhood.
That night, we were all mostly quiet as we ate around a kerosene lamp in the center of the dining room table, except for Ahmad Shah, who talked with his chest puffed out about how he had outwitted the army. He was too smart for the new government; they would never catch him.
Padar didn’t say much except, “Tomorrow they will come for Zia.”
We all grew quiet and finished our dinner.
The next morning when we awoke, Ahmad Shah had disappeared. Padar told us he had gone to join Mommy in India. As much as I missed him, I knew he would be safe there. I wanted to be with him. We didn’t need to ask Padar how he had been able to escape the country or whether we could go too. We knew that eventually we’d join our brother and our neighbors, who were disappearing from our street nearly every day. When we were alone with our friends, we often asked them, “When are you leaving?” or “Where is your family going?”
Looking back, I can say it was constantly in the back of my mind that someday in the middle of the night, just like Ahmad Shah, we’d be whisked away to somewhere safe. But we also knew it wasn’t a topic Padar wanted to talk about, so this conversation was always among ourselves.
Now there were five huddled around the lantern at family dinners, but it felt like there were only four of us—Zia, Laila, Zulaikha, and me. Every night, Padar drank more until he became incoherent, often raving about what was happening to Kabul and cursing out the Soviet soldiers. When he wasn’t drinking, he withdrew into himself, deep in thought, as if he were engaged in some internal debate.
Once Ahmad Shah was gone, the rest of us children decided that we didn’t want to be alone at night, so we moved into his room. His was the largest, with a stereo and a king-size bed and a huge closet full of clothes. We took turns sleeping on it or on the floor. I felt safe there with my other siblings, and except to eat or go to the bathroom or to change clothes, we seldom left the room.
“Enjeela,” Padar called from far down the hall one evening. “Come here now, I need you.”
It was late; we were sitting in Ahmad Shah’s closet playing cards and telling stories. My sisters looked at me and nodded for me to go. We had been telling ghost stories, trying to outdo each other and not act scared.
“Go see what he wants,” Zia said, “before he comes in here and bothers all of us.”
He called me again, this time more urgent. I rose and left the closet. When I found him near the entryway, he was leaning against the wall. His suit pants were wrinkled, his white shirt looked like he had been sleeping in it, and his hair hadn’t been combed in days. He had a wild look in his eyes.
“Call Uncle for me,” he demanded. “I have to talk to him now.”
He followed me, shuffling his feet as I walked to the hall phone and dialed his brother. The phone rang, and when my uncle said hello, I returned the greeting and handed Padar the receiver before walking back to Ahmad Shah’s room. They talked for hours, Padar sometimes arguing, sometimes listening. I had never heard him fight with his brother before. They talked often about what to do with the farmland. The two of them had spent a lot of their money to make those farms prosperous and hire the workers. Now the war threatened to take it away. Padar ran his fingers through his long black hair, brushing it back while he talked. The government wanted them to surrender the land for redistribution. Uncle wanted to find a way to sell it before that happened. Padar wanted to turn it over to the farmers who had worked it all the years he and his brother had owned it. If they didn’t do something, the government would take it anyway. They went back and forth on the phone, trying to figure out what to do with it. I sat in Ahmad Shah’s room, my ear to the door, with my sisters and Zia listening to one side of the debate.
Padar argued that he would die first before he let the government have the land. The Parcham would give it to someone who didn’t know how to take care of it. This was the first of many arguments between them about the farmland. The conflict outside our gates that Padar tried to guard us from had now seeped in.
Because of the turmoil in the schools, the government closed them down for a few months. When they reopened in late March, Zia, Zulaikha, and Laila began attending again. Other than Padar and the household staff, I was alone at the house for the first time since the Soviets arrived. I had returned to my perch in the pear tree by the gate, waiting for my sisters to come home so we could play. I had become so accustomed to the tanks that lined the street in front of our house that I hardly noticed them anymore.