The World is a Carpet (11 page)

“Moorcroft,” wrote Hopkirk, “thus lies not far from the spot where, more than a century and a half later, Soviet troops and armour poured southwards across the River Oxus into Afghanistan.” And now the soldiers of yet another empire were warring upon this land. Some of them were scanning my neighborhood that night from two invisible helicopter gunships that whirred low over the low cityscape to the north of the compound, disrupting the peace or keeping it, or both.

A little blond girl had dozed off on a pillow next to mine. Her name was Avesta, like the mostly lost collection of Zoroastrianism’s sacred texts. Her mouth was sticky with
samanak
, and her eyelids glittered with the blue eye shadow her mother had allowed her to wear on New Year’s Day. With utmost tenderness, her father scooped her up and carried her to her own thin mattress in the house. Tomorrow would dawn over her eternal war zone a little sunnier, a little warmer.

A
s if on cue, the next day the desert spilled a brilliant green. The almond orchards where dreamy flowers just recently had spumed were suddenly powdery green with minuscule teardrop nuts. Goats everywhere kidded all at once. In the pale light before sunup, the sulfuric and deserted wastelands of winter outside Mazar had come instantaneously and noisily to jubilant life: thousands of downy black and spotted kids scuttled, clanging, across fields that at last promised some kind of a harvest. There still had been no rain near Oqa, but here, too, strange sheeny succulents had sprouted through tough unirrigated soil, like some aberrant greenery from outer space.

It was very early and still cold. On the southeastern horizon a yet invisible sun had whitened the narrowest strip of sky, and against it the crest of the Hindu Kush had begun to silhouette grand and black. To the still dark northeast, on the border with Uzbekistan, the lights of Khairatan diffracted from beyond the Earth’s curvature, turning the grimy border port into a grandiose city of shimmering skyscrapers. A mirage behooving a historical landmark: in 1989 the last Soviet soldiers had marched across Khairatan’s Friendship Bridge and out of Afghanistan after a decade of occupation, leaving behind more than one million dead Afghans and Russians, ten million land mines, and an intractable internecine war that bled into all the wars that came before and after. Then again, everywhere in the Khorasan there were such landmarks. Some glowed, like Khairatan. Others seemed to absorb all light around them. Most just were. Which vanquished army had made its last stand on the land now buried under Oqa’s dunes? Whose oblique former castle a half-hour walk west from the village had eroded into a mound of clay? Amanullah told me it was very old. How old? “It was built in 3890,” he said.

What difference did a date make? “Time costs nothing in these parts,” the Swiss journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote of the Afghan plains many wars ago, in the 1930s. Dates were just a patina on an overeducated brain. There was no Nawruz celebration in Oqa, no
samanak
parties, no compote of dried fruit to offer guests. The only time that mattered in the village was the tempo of the planet’s dual revolutions, the eternal repetition that brought the changing of the seasons, the night and the day, and the magical twilight in between.

Twilight in Oqa. The stars extinguished one by one, leaving Venus to greet the sun alone. In the spectral predawn blue on the western edge of the village, Amanullah, Boston, and Baba Nazar were running jackknifed at the waist with outstretched arms in a farcical bourrée after a black-and-white scatter of day-old kid goats. The kids had to be gathered up and stuffed into one of Baba Nazar’s shacks so that Shareh and Hafez, the village herders, could take the family’s half-dozen nannies to distant pasture without the newborns following. The dusky hollow south of the hummock stirred with the goatherds’ short whoops and the bells and musty bleating of a herd already on its way to the desert. The boy Hafez, named with the honorific reserved for someone who has memorized the Koran, the book this unschooled child will never read. Named also after the fourteenth-century Sufi poet whose verses Afghan men recited apothegmatically, unprompted. Hafez the goatherd, bowlegged and weatherworn from having spent his whole short life in relentless dry wind and flinty sun. Whose beauty fanned his secret ecstasies? Which lonesome ghazals did he compose to the scattershot tinkling of his flock as his heart swelled with spring?

Boston threw the last kid into the shed, drew a large wooden latch over the door of unevenly nailed boards, pressed her back against it in mock exhaustion, and stood there giggling. A gold-pink cloud spilled in the east where the sun would soon crown, and in that glow the wrinkles on Boston’s face rearranged themselves, and for a second on that morning in late March this old woman was a little girl who had just had the luck of sinking her fingers into the silken fleece of newborn goats.

•   •   •

Work finished for now, Boston and the men sauntered back to the main house, and Amanullah lit the
bukhari
in one of the rooms. The dry grass took to flame at once, and Boston balanced on the stove a blackened pitcher with water to boil for tea. Amanullah plopped onto a mattress and assumed his favorite position, horizontal. Lying down could mean falling asleep, and sleep sometimes brought Amanullah dreams vivid and almost as wonderful as the forbidden journeys he would never take.

“Sometimes I have dreams so good they make me happy for several days. Even for a month!” The mere memories of these dreams transported him to some other spring. “For example, if I dream of a young girl, maybe twenty years old, who comes up to me and hugs me and kisses me—that can make me happy for a long time.”

Baba Nazar unstoppered the plastic-wrapped cork of his old Chinese thermos, poured hot stove-boiled water over a handful of green tea leaves, replaced the cork, and set the tea to brew for a spell. He unfolded on the floor a
dastarkhan
of white and lavender houndstooth plastic in which his wife had wrapped a hardening loaf of yesterday’s nan
.
He unstoppered the thermos again and poured the tea. It was time for breakfast, and stories.

“There are seven stars,” Baba Nazar said. He crumbled the tough bread into his tea and sucked at the rim of the glass cup. “Four brothers and three sisters. Brothers in the front and sisters in the back. Their parents are dead, and when these stars die, they will see their parents in paradise.

“But some say,” he continued, “the three stars are children, and the four stars are the bed on which the children are carrying their dead parents.”

The Pleiades, a constellation of orphans four hundred light-years away. Somehow Baba Nazar’s story seemed sadder than the Greek myth of seven distraught sister-nymphs who had plunged to their deaths, then ascended to the sky to shine. Perhaps because in Oqa death always seemed just a breath away. Thawra flitted past the door, taciturn and sequined like an echo of a shooting star, and disappeared into the loom room.
Thk, thk, thk
. Baba Nazar crumbled some more bread in time with the subtle pulse of the weaver’s sickle.

What about dragons, the stylized, angular dragons that sometimes slinked along the borders of Oqa’s carpets? The old man could not think of any, though I have been told, by a young Hazara taxi driver from Karaghuzhlah, that until just two years earlier, a big monster dragon had lived in a fallow field south of his village.

“It was like a snake, but it would sometimes turn into something bigger, like a lizard,” said the driver, whose name was Qasim. “Then it disappeared. For forty years people couldn’t cross the field. It probably died, because people said the field smelled funny two years ago.” Qasim had never seen the monster, nor did he know anyone who had. But his grandfather and uncles had told him it had been there.

Once, not far from Oqa’s cemetery, I saw a desert monitor lizard turn its five-foot-long Mesozoic body slowly in the dust.

What about nomad warriors, then, I asked Baba Nazar—the ancient horsemen of the Pazyryk? The belligerence of the Turkomans once had been the stuff of the legends that nurtured the Europeans’ image of an Afghanistan entrenched, implacable, hostile. Descendants of an orphan and a she-wolf, inventors of the stirrupped saddle, who had written in runes and buried their horses with their men. Francis Skrine and Edward Denison Ross, in their 1899 tome
The Heart of Asia
, had called the Turkomans “a race with whom no peace or truce was possible,” “untamed tribes” who possessed “some at least of the traits of the noble savage of fiction.” “‘He who puts his hand to his sword-hilt,’” the Englishmen cited a Turkoman proverb, “‘hath no need to ask for a good reason.’”

But the only transient Turkomans of whom Baba Nazar knew were the families who had fled the Soviet annexation of Central Asia in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had poured into Bactria then, across the desert from the newly created Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and across the Amu Darya from Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. “A lot of them were our ancestors,” the hunter said. “I probably have some distant cousins and aunts in Turkmenistan. Or maybe in Uzbekistan. If I go on Uzbek television and say that I have an ancestor from Uzbekistan, and the Uzbek government finds the rest of my family, then we can move to Uzbekistan. One family in Khairabad went to Uzbekistan that way.”

A hereditary wanderlust stirred in the hunter, a yearning half-forgotten and now loosened in the way spring loosens pent-up aches.

“Life in Uzbekistan is very good,” Baba Nazar daydreamed. He had not heard of the poverty on the other side of the border, of prison torture, of villages and towns emptied of men gone to Russia to endure apartheid-style discrimination and beatings in return for menial jobs. “Some people who go there with a visa return. They even cry when the visa expires and they have to come back to Afghanistan.”

On his mattress, Amanullah held his breath and hung on to every word. Secretly mapping out another possible escape route, smitten already by the lithe and unveiled beauties he would find on the other side of the river. But only the carpets Thawra wove next door would ever travel from this house beyond the familiar boundaries of Balkh. The men’s itinerant fantasies will be that subtle twang that tickles the soles of the carpets’ future owners when they step onto the pile in their bare feet.

The
bukhari
had gone out. The men finished their tea, thanked God for breakfast into their upturned palms—
“Bismillah, bismillah”
—and went outside, where the desert now shone with daylight and the blown-glass sky was translucent and white.

M
any years ago at an abandoned Soviet barracks in the dunes, Baba Nazar had pilfered an old iron spring bed and brought it home on a camel. It was the only bed in Oqa. It wintered in the bedroom Baba Nazar and Boston shared, under the shotgun and beside the niche where the hunter kept his binoculars. On winter afternoons Boston would sit on it spraddle-thighed and stretch skeins of yarn over her knees and roll them into balls.

In warm months the hunter and his son would drag the bed into the sun and anchor its uneven and hollow rusted legs on three clay bricks. Then the bed would become the village centerpiece, the Oqa equivalent of a town square, or of a mosque. Men would lounge on it as they would on a
takht
and talk. They would gather around it to listen to newscasts on Baba Nazar’s thirty-year-old transistor radio and discuss dispatches from the world beyond their desert, even beyond the serrated Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. Children would hide under it, run around it in circles chasing one another, and, when Baba Nazar was not looking and when no adults were sitting on it, bounce on the squeaky springs.

This year, Baba Nazar and Amanullah carried the bed outside just before eight in the morning on the second day of the vernal equinox, after breakfast. They established it near the southeastern corner of Thawra’s loom room, near the dark hieroglyphs of drying urine that wormed in the dust where the night before someone had been too lazy or too rushed to make it to the dunes. Having determined that the bed would not wobble, Amanullah threw a plaid blanket and a hard cushion over the springs, slipped out of his flip-flops, lay down on the bed on his back so that the front loop of his green-gray turban visored the sun from his eyes, pulled a cell phone out of his shirt pocket, and proceeded to call his friends in Khairabad. The cell-phone transmitter on the Karaghuzhlah tower worked well that day, and reception was decent.