A Fort of Nine Towers Read Free Page A

had been carefully following every dive, envious.
    Berar was a few years older than Wakeel, tall, handsome, andhardworking. His family lived in Bamyan, where the big statues of Buddha were carved into the mountains. Berar was not his real name. Berar in Hazaragi dialect means “brother.” We did not know what his real name was, and he did not mind us calling him Berar.
    As the suspense had built between Wakeel and me, Berar could not stop watching us. The old gardener spoke to him impatiently several times: “The weeds are in the ground, not in the sky. Look down.” The gardener was always harsh to Berar.
    “Give the boy a break,” Grandfather told the gardener. They were working together on Grandfather’s beloved rosebushes. I had just sent a second kite into the air. Grandfather nodded at Berar. “Go on,” he said.
    Berar ran up to the rooftop, where I was struggling to gain altitude while avoiding Wakeel’s torpedoing attacks. Berar took the string from me and told me to hold the reel.
    I had never seen Berar fly a kite before. I kept shouting at him,
“Kashko! Kashko!
Pull it in!” But Berar did not need my instructions; he knew exactly what to do. Wakeel shouted at me that I could have a hundred helpers and he would still cut me. Though he was tall and skinny, he was very strong and he was furiously pulling in his kite to circle it around mine.
    Berar was getting our kite very high very fast, until in no time at all it was higher than Wakeel’s. Then he made it dive so quickly that it dropped like a stone through the air. Suddenly, there was Wakeel’s kite, drifting back and forth from left to right, floating off to Kandahar, separated from the now limp string in Wakeel’s hand.
    I climbed on Berar’s shoulders, screaming for joy. I had the string of my kite in my hands. My kite was so high in the sky, it looked like a tiny bird. The neighbor kids on the street were shouting, too. They had not seen Berar doing it, only me on Berar’s strong shoulders, cheering and shouting: “Wakeel, the Cruel Cutter, has been cut!” I kissed Berar many times. He was my hero. He gave me the title of “Cutter of the Cruel Cutter,” even though it was he who had made it happen.
    Wakeel sulked, and did not talk to me for two days.

    We had another cousin who was a few months younger than I. He never really got along with any of the others. Wakeel used to call him a jerk. All the other cousins, everyone, started to call him “Jerk” as well.
    If he bought new clothes, he would walk in front of us to show them off and say something stupid. “We went to a shop in Shahr-e-Naw that opened a few weeks ago. They bring everything they sell from London and Paris. The owner told my parents that I have a good taste for clothes. I don’t think you guys can afford a suit like this.” When I asked how much he paid, he would triple the price.
    Wakeel would ask, “Hey, Jerk, do your clothes do any magic for such a price?”
    Jerk could never see a joke coming, and would ask something witless like, “What kind of magic?”
    “Can they make you look less ugly?” Wakeel replied, his voice cracking into shrieking guffaws.
    We’d all laugh, and Jerk would run toward his house and complain to his parents. We would run to the roof, or outside the courtyard, or hide in the garage inside my father’s car to escape punishment.
    Once when Jerk had on his good clothes and was showing off, Wakeel filled his mouth with water, and I punched him in his stomach. That forced Wakeel to spit it all on Jerk. Poor Jerk looked at us in disbelief and asked with outrage in his voice why we had done that.
    Wakeel told him, “We are practicing to be tough. We punch each other unexpectedly, so we will be prepared if we get into a fight with someone. You should be tough, too.” Then we punched him in his stomach, but avoided his face so we would not leave any bruises, because we knew that would get us spanked by his parents.
    Jerk had one unexpected