The city that stayed - The story of Bamyan

My name is Amir. I am sixteen years old, and in the second week of February 2001 they put a Kalashnikov in my hands and sent me north from Kandahar to Bamyan. I was small for sixteen—the kind of narrow-shouldered boy who still looked as if a strong gust off the desert could tip him into an irrigation ditch. The wool military coat they issued me at the depot in Kandahar had belonged to a taller man before me; its hem brushed my calves, its sleeves swallowed my thumbs unless I rolled the cuffs three times, and the left shoulder smelled faintly of mutton tallow and old gun oil. Worse than the coat were the boots. They were two sizes too large, made of stiff black leather whose stitching had rotted along the front welt. Whenever I took a step on frozen ground, the split soles gaped open and slapped shut against the mud like the bills of two hungry ducks.

Before the truck left Kandahar, my mother stood behind the mud wall of our courtyard by the dry pomegranate trees. She did not come out into the lane where the other recruits were climbing onto the flatbed, because my father's older brother—who had joined the movement in ninety-six—was watching from the gate. Instead, she pressed a folded square of unbleached cotton into my palm through the wooden lattice of the side door. "Keep your face clean, Amir," she whispered, her fingers rough from spinning wool. "And do not let them make your hands heavy. Come back to me when the mulberries ripen."

It took four days for our convoy to grind up out of the southern plains, through the icy wind of Ghazni, and over the white teeth of the mountain passes into the central highlands. In Kandahar, winter is dry and yellow; the wind carries sand that stings your eyelids and settles in the folds of your turban. In Bamyan, winter is another country altogether. The mountains do not sit on the horizon like distant guests; they crowd right up to the edges of the fields, white-maned and silent, trapping the cold air in the valley floor until every breath tastes of iron and snow.

On my first morning at the garrison post, Commander Naseer called me out of the mud-brick barracks before the sun had cleared the eastern ridge. He was thirty-eight, broad-chested, with a beard streaked grey at the corners of his chin and eyes that looked as though they had not slept a full night since the Soviet war. He looked down at my rolled-up sleeves and at the split toes of my boots.

"You are the boy from District Three in Kandahar," he said. It was not a question."Yahya's son."

"Yes, Commander," I said, trying to stand straight while my rifle barrel knocked awkwardly against my hip. Naseer turned and pointed his chin toward the northern wall of the valley."Amir, you will guard the Buddhas." "Yes, Commander," I repeated immediately, because a sixteen-year-old recruit does not ask questions. Truthfully, I did not know what a Buddha was. In our madrasa in Kandahar, the mullahs spoke of idols in the old stories of Abraham, and I had imagined small figures of brass or painted wood that could sit on a shelf. I had never imagined that an idol could be a mountain.

I walked up the stony track toward the red sandstone cliff, my boots going clack-slap, clack-slap against the frost-heaved gravel. As the morning mist thinned, the cliff face rose above me like a wall built by giants at the beginning of time. Honeycombed across its surface were hundreds of dark, smoke-blackened caves cut into the rock, connected by narrow ledges and broken staircases. And carved deep into two vast arched recesses in the cliff stood two figures of stone.

I stopped in the middle of the path and tilted my head back until my black turban nearly slid off my skull into the dirt.

The larger statue stood fifty-five meters tall. He was carved straight out of the living red rock, his broad shoulders squared to the valley, the deep pleats of his stone robe falling in quiet waves toward his feet. The smaller statue, set in a second arched niche a short walk to the east, was thirty-eight meters high. Later that week I would learn their names from the people of the valley: the tall one was Salsal, a male figure whose name meant light shines through the universe, and the smaller one was Shamama, the Queen Mother. They had stood in those two niches for fifteen hundred years, watching empires ride through the gorge below with spears, then muskets, then tanks, and now pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.

Commander Naseer had told me that the low dry-stone wall at the base of the great niche had crumbled during the January snows, and that I was to spend my morning watch stacking the fallen river cobbles back into a neat barrier. I laid my heavy wool blanket on top of the intact section of the wall, slung my rifle across my back, and bent to lift a flat grey stone the size of a bread loaf.

The stone was frozen to the earth. I wrenched it free, my fingers numb in the biting air, and took two steps toward the gap in the wall. Just as I lifted it waist-high, a sharp, musical whistle rang out from the frost-stiff pasture grass behind me, followed by the brassy clatter of twenty-three little bells. Startled, I turned my head. The rifle strap slipped off my narrow coat shoulder, the barrel banged against my elbow, and the heavy grey stone slipped straight through my stiff fingers.

It landed squarely on the split leather toe of my right boot.

"Ow!" I yelped, dropping to one knee and clutching my foot with both hands while my rifle clattered into the gravel. Tears of pure pain sprang into my eyes.

Someone laughed. It was not a cruel laugh; it was clear and bright, like ice breaking on a shallow stream. I looked up through watering eyes.

Standing ten paces away among a flock of twenty-three fat-tailed sheep was a girl. She was about fifteen, wrapped in a faded green wool shawl mended at the hem with brown thread. Her cheeks were chapped a fierce, healthy red by the highland wind, and her dark Hazara eyes studied me without a trace of the terror I had seen on the faces of shopkeepers when our trucks rolled through the bazaar.

"You dropped a stone on your own foot," she said, resting her chin on the top of her wooden shepherd's staff, "like a boy who has never carried anything heavier than a teacup. And your shoes have mouths at the front. When you walked up the path just now, you looked like a duck."

My ears burned hotter than my bruised toe. I sat in the gravel, rubbing my foot through the gaping leather welt. "I am a boy who cannot carry a stone," I admitted, too miserable to pretend to be a fierce soldier. "And these are the only boots the quartermaster had left in Kandahar."

"I am Marzia," she said simply, as if dropping a stone on my foot had been a proper introduction. She nodded toward a massive, thick-necked ram with a crooked left horn who had already detached himself from the flock and was trotting purposefully toward the low wall. "And that is Commander. Watch your blanket. He eats blankets."

Before I could limp to my feet, the big ram reached the wall, stretched his neck out, and clamped his yellow teeth onto the fringed corner of my Kandahar wool blanket. He gave a satisfied tug and let out a low, rumbling baa around a mouthful of wool.

"Peace be upon you, Commander," I said, taking hold of the other end of the blanket and pulling gently so I wouldn't tear the weave."Please do not eat my house. It is very cold in your valley at night." Marzia laughed again, louder this time, stepping forward to rap the ram lightly on his crooked horn with her knuckles until he released the fringe. "Amir—that is your name, isn't it? I heard the tall officer call you Amir. Why are you talking to a sheep as if he were a mullah?"

"Because sheep listen better than commanders," I said. "And a sheep only wants to eat your blanket. He does not want to send you up a mountain with a gun you do not know how to shoot."

Behind me, a heavy boot crunched on the frozen shale. The laughter vanished from Marzia's face, though she did not step back. I froze with my blanket half-balled in my fists.

Commander Naseer stood at the corner of the niche wall. He had come up the path without a sound. His dark eyes moved from my unstacked pile of stones, to the rifle lying in the dirt by my knee, to the fat ram still chewing a stray thread of my wool.

"Amir," Naseer said, his voice flat and low, "you are a soldier of the Emirate who sits on the ground and talks to sheep."

My heart hammered against my ribs. In Kandahar, the training instructors beat boys with a stripped pomegranate branch for letting a rifle barrel touch the dirt. I picked up my gun, brushed the frost from the stock, and looked down at my split boots. "Commander," I said in a small voice, "sheep listen better than men. They do not shout."

Silence stretched across the pasture. The cold wind whistled through the high caves of the cliff. I braced myself for the blow of his hand. Instead, when I dared to glance up, I saw a strange tightness around Commander Naseer's eyes—not anger, but the tired look of a man reminded of a house he had lived in long ago. He reached into the deep pocket of his coat, pulled out a square of rough grey cotton, and tossed it against my chest.

"The soldiers who held this post in January built their night fires against the inside of the eastern niche," Naseer said curtly. "They left black grease all over the lower stone. If your feet are too clumsy for carrying rocks, take that wooden bucket by the well, fill it at the stream, and scrub the soot off the wall. And keep your rifle off the ground."

He turned on his heel and strode back down the path toward the garrison yard. I let out the breath I had been holding and looked at Marzia. I expected her to hurry her flock away now that an officer had seen us speaking. Instead, she sat down on a flat grey boulder twenty paces from the niche arch and tucked her cold hands under her shawl.

"Aren't you afraid of him?" I asked, picking up the wooden bucket.

"I have seen men with rifles in Bamyan since I was ten years old," Marzia said, watching her white ewe Barfi nose through the dry snow for grass roots. "First one faction, then another, then the men from Kandahar. Soldiers come and go like the winter clouds, duck-boy. The sheep stay. The cliff stays."

I carried the bucket down to the stream, broke the thin crust of ice at the bank with my heel, and carried the freezing water back to Salsal's niche. For three hours I knelt on the stone floor, dipping my cloth into the icy water and scrubbing the greasy black smoke-stains left by the winter guards. My knuckles turned red, then purple, then numb, but slowly the dark crust dissolved into grey foam, revealing the warm, rose-red grain of the ancient sandstone underneath.

Just before noon, an older woman came walking up the path from the edge of the bazaar. Her name was Bibi Gul, the wife of the old mason Baba Sadiq. She carried a blackened tin kettle in one hand, its spout plugged with atwist of clean cloth to keep the blowing valley dust out of the tea, and a bundle of warm flatbread tucked under her arm. Trailing two steps behind her was her youngest child, an eight-year-old boy named Ali, who

walked with his tongue stuck out between his teeth because he was carrying a river stone nearly as big as his head.

Bibi Gul set two chipped porcelain cups on the flat grey boulder beside Marzia and poured steaming green tea into both. Then she looked over at me, kneeling by the niche wall with my wet rag and my bruised foot.

"Come sit on the rock before your fingers freeze to the stone, Kandahar boy," she called out. When I limped over in my flapping boots, she handed me a piece of warm bread and a cup with two white lumps of Haji Yusuf's sugar resting on the saucer."Marzia told me you dropped a stone on your toe this morning."

"I did, Auntie," I said, wrapping my stiff, aching hands around the hot porcelain. "I am a boy who drops stones. But tomorrow I will learn how to carry them without looking at the sheep."

Bibi Gul glanced past my shoulder at the three-foot square of red cliff wall I had scrubbed clean of soot. Her weathered face softened around the eyes."Good," she said quietly, nodding once."You are learning." That was the first morning I heard those four words in Bamyan. I did not know then that Marzia would say them to me every dawn when we washed the cliff, or that she would shout them through the dust behind a prison truck from Kabul, or that I would whisper them to myself in the dark when my life was over. All I knew on that first morning was that the tea had no dust in it, the sugar was sweet, and the wind coming off the valley smelled of cold stone and Marzia's sheep.