The World is a Carpet (16 page)

For fifteen hundred years, Balkh dominated Central Asia from a valley that dropped away from the bajadas of the Hindu Kush in swirls of fecund color. “The ornament of all Ariana,” Strabo, the first-century Greek philosopher and historian, wrote in
Geographica
, his seventeen-volume opus. “Plentiful trees and vines provide abundant crops of succulent fruits,” wrote his Roman contemporary Quintus Curtius Rufus in
Historiae Alexandri Magni
. “The rich soil here is irrigated by numerous springs and the more fertile parts are sown with wheat . . . After that a large area of the country is engulfed by desert sands.”

Two thousand years later, a knoll in that “desolate and arid region,” about thirty miles northeast of Balkh, would become Oqa.

After the Kushans had annexed it in 128
BC
, Balkh developed into a major crossroads on the Great Silk Road. Merchants from China arrived to trade rubies and furs and aromatic gums and silk with Indian traders of spices and cosmetics and ivory, with Roman salesmen of gold and silver vessels and wine. Carpets woven by local women traveled in every direction. Three hundred monks prayed at a hundred monasteries and temples before Buddha statues adorned with precious stones. “This is a country truly privileged,” marveled the Chinese monk-scholar Hsuan-tsang. When the Arabs invaded in
AD
645, they called Balkh the Mother of All Cities, Umm al Belaad. “It was in the Eastern lands as Mecca is in the West,” wrote Ala ad Din Ata Malik Juvaini, the Persian-born annalist of the Mongol Empire. In the tenth century, Rabia Balkhi, the first woman known to compose poetry in both Arabic and Persian, compared her city to a garden abrim with flowers. Eleven hundred years later, women still came to weep and pray beside her tomb in the heart of the city.

Then, in 1220, Genghis Khan led one hundred thousand horsemen on Balkh.

The slaughter was mythical, the devastation absolute. Helmed by a psychopathic leader who at the age of ten had killed his half brother, the nomads sat their mounts like centaurs and fought like death incarnate. They smothered horses with grease rendered from the bodies of prisoners and lit them afire and set them upon enemy lines. They carried bubonic plague and put to the sword any city-state that refused to submit to slavery. They slaughtered a tenth of the world’s population. Within two centuries, the Mongols would rule a khanate that stretched from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and was poised to engulf Western Europe. By the mid–thirteenth century, when, in the words of Sir Winston Churchill, “Germany and Austria at least lay at their mercy,” court intrigue and divisions within their own massive imperium would halt their advance. The Golden Horde would turn around and rush to the Mongolian capital at Karakorum to elect a new khan in place of Ogedei, Genghis Khan’s third son and successor to his rule, who had either drunk himself to death or had been poisoned with fermented horse milk. The Horde would leave behind wreckage, the Black Death, and gunpowder.

In Balkh the Mongols spared no woman, man, or child. There was no one to bury the dead. “For a long time the wild beasts feasted on their flesh, and lions consorted without contention with wolves, and vultures ate without quarreling from the same table with eagles,” Juvaini wrote. “And they cast fire into the gardens of the city and devoted their whole attention to the destruction of the outworks and walls and mansions and palaces . . . And wherever a wall was left standing, the Mongols pulled it down and . . . wiped all the traces of culture from the region.” Fifty years after the massacre, Marco Polo reported that “Balach, a large and magnificent city” had “sustained much injury from the Tartars, who in their frequent attacks have partly demolished the buildings.” A century after Genghis Khan had sacked Balkh, the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta described it so: “It is now in ruins, and without society.”

The city never recovered. In 1832, Sir Alexander Burnes, advisor to the British ambassador in Kabul, saw “fallen mosques and decayed tombs, which have been built of sun-dried brick . . . The city itself, like Babylon, has become a perfect mine of bricks for the surrounding country.”

•   •   •

On a Friday before Ozyr Khul and Naim married each other’s sisters, a friend invited me to ride horses in Balkh.

We drove from Mazar. A police checkpoint and a tank-tread speed bump beneath a gnawed stump of a bimillenary wall denoted the southern gate. From it, a paved road ran straight for a mile or so to a dingy park in the city center. In the northeastern corner of the park, a lofty arch still plastered in spots with tiles of turquoise and indigo glaze was all that remained of the madrassa of Sayed Subhan Quli Khan, a seventeenth-century college. Directly to its west, minarets corkscrewed above the tattered and defaced domed octagon of Masjid-e-Sabz, the Green Mosque, built five or six centuries earlier in memory of the Balkh theologian Khojah Abu Nasr Parsa. “Unsubstantial and romantic,” Robert Byron wrote of the mosque in May of 1934; it stood in disrepair already then. “An unknown force seems to be squeezing it upwards. The result is fantasy, and in some lights, an unearthly beauty.”

From the simple iron fence that girdled the park, some carpets hung. Patinated with road dust like the severe faces of the dealers who squatted in the dirt beneath them. These were the rejects: the thicker-wooled, fewer-knotted, simpler cousins of Thawra’s
yusufi
, the carpets Mazari dealers would not buy. Their clumsy threads were echoes of greatness, their pile the shadows of the carpet King Alexander was said to have sent to his mother from this conquered city. But their reds were just as rich as the blood that had nourished Balkh to its former majesty, that had plunged it into its present demise.

Eroded stubs of the despoiled and ancient walls protruded like the exposed ribs of a giant carcass among nondescript streets of partly shuttered storefronts and simple mud homes that rayed from the park. Few people walked those streets. Oxyartes, the Balkh ruler who had yielded the city to Alexander the Great, had had under his command thirty thousand cavalrymen when about two hundred million people had lived on Earth. Now, in the world of seven billion souls, the entire population of Balkh was fewer than eight thousand people.

A citadel unimaginatively called Bala Hissar, the Citadel, marked the city’s northern boundary. The fort’s thick crenellated fifteenth-century ramparts melted like candle wax onto the first-century foundation that draped over substructures of clay and mud brick laid here three hundred years before Alexander’s wedding. Below the walls, fields and orchards fanned out in all directions: puffs of apricot trees already gray with dust, drowned rice paddies like spalls of glass, fields of yellow-black okra flowers unblinking at the sun. Girls in long scarlet shawls squatted among the miniature silver fireworks of onion blossoms. To the north, fields blued into the distant desert. To the south, the shorn Hindu Kush slept, smoky and still.

Who is the fourth that rejoices the Earth with greatest joy? Ahura Mazda answered: “It is he who sows most corn, grass, and fruit, O Spitama Zarathushtra! who waters ground that is dry, or drains ground that is too wet. Unhappy is the land that has long lain unsown with the seed of the sower and wants a good husbandman, like a well-shapen maiden who has long gone childless and wants a good husband.”

—
Vendidad

This was the land the itinerant monk Hsuan-tsang had beheld, and King Alexander before him, and Zarathushtra before them both. The manmade glory of the city may have vanished under the sword of men. But the people of Balkh, barefoot, unbeaten, with wooden hand ploughs, rejoiced their land, forever.

The horse drivers waited for Friday customers inside Bala Hissar. They were Uzbek—the descendants, some scholars believed, of Genghis Khan’s son Juchi. They stood inside the fort’s walls smoking and shucking sunflower seeds. Their horses, the fluid and slim Akhal-Tekes, like Alexander’s Bucephalus and the warrior-horses of Genghis Khan, were grazing on some chamomiles. Fifty paces away, in a niche by a mulberry tree contorted over a hand pump, veiled women prostrated themselves beneath the harlequin flags of the shrine of Pahlawan Ahmad Zimchi, a heroic warrior whose story no one any longer could remember precisely other than that he had been preternaturally strong. The pilgrims prayed to the
pahlawan
to impart some of his strength to their sons and took off their hair bands and ribbons and the cheap bangles of painted aluminum that bazaar Gypsies sold for a penny and kissed them and whispered prayers to them and kissed them again and placed them on the pale bricks of the shrine. The shrine glittered with trinkets. The horse drivers kept their backs to the women, out of modesty.

I rented a bay gelding from a man without a leg.

“A small circle around the water pump or a big circle around the ramparts?”

“A big circle.”

“Seven hundred afghanis.”

“You’re kidding! It’s less than a kilometer around. One hundred.” Haggling was always expected, but I felt badly about bargaining with a man with a peg leg. He said he had lost his own in war. Which war, he did not specify. War in general.

“Two-fifty.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want me to walk in front of you and lead the horse?”

“Oh, no, thank you.”

“Well, suit yourself.”

We ambled. Slow. Hooffall to hooffall with Genghis Khan’s horsemen above the green plains. Riding atop the land where the Golden Horde had sacked the Mother of All Cities. The walls of Balkh, those ancient sepultures, keened under the bay’s small hooves with the trampled laments of all the dead. Indian rollers tumbled bluely out of the heavens like swatches torn out of the sky and somersaulted over the fields of onions in cloudlike bloom.

But the horses of Bala Hissar had been trained not to walk farther than a hundred and fifty meters away from their owners, like circus ponies. After a minute, my gelding—it had no name and had responded, up to this point, to
“prrrr-prrrr”
and
“ch’k-ch’k-ch’k”
—stopped irresolute for a few beats, then turned around and trudged at a slow gait back to its master, who was now laughing openly at my foolhardy assumption that for five dollars he would let me ride away on his beautiful steed.

W
hen I was leaving, the one-legged jockey shouted: “Hey, foreign lady!”

I turned. He flew up into the saddle in one liquid motion and raised his sweaty leather crop and grinned and leaned forward and whispered something to his horse and the horse reared, and for a moment that seemed to last centuries they stood like that in the bronze May light, sparkling and vertical against the long horizons of Bactria, the man and his mount as one, their thickly veined necks straining together for the heavens, the rider no longer a seed-shucking cripple whoring out his horse to weekend tourists but a mischievous demiurge, a ghost of Genghis Khan, perhaps, or Tengri the Sky God himself, awesome and magnificent, a monument to the countless cavalries that had slaughtered and been slaughtered upon this very land.

Then he brought the horse back down and whooped once, and they loped over the battlements and out of sight into the haze-choked valleys, the horse and its eternal rider picking their way past the pendular swings of immemorial, internecine violence.