The World is a Carpet (18 page)

•   •   •

Meanwhile, wedding guests arrived.

They had come from Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, from Toqai and Zadyan. Warlords. Farmers. Merchants. Drug dealers. All relatives of the Oqans—brothers, sisters, third cousins, nieces. Some had arrived by donkey and motorcycle. Most had walked. A few families had rattled across the cracked desert in the flatbeds of
zaranj
motor-rickshaws. Someone even had hired a taxi from Mazar-e-Sharif. They bore wedding gifts of pewter serving trays, plastic pitchers, aluminum washbasins. By seven in the morning, the village had swelled to six or seven hundred people embracing, exchanging kisses and gossip, laughing, sharing their latest heartaches, pinching the cheeks of babies born since the last time they had seen one another. Men thronged toward the northern slope where the pilau was cooking. Women and girls took over the south and west of the hummock.

The women in their holiday embroidery twinkled like mermaids accidentally cast upon these landlocked sands. Two and a half dozen had crowded into Boston’s room, barefoot and lipsticked and glistening in unimaginable combinations of greens and blues and purples and pinks, and festooned with beads and sequins. All wore rouge. They dabbed sweat off their faces with the fringes of their brilliant scarves and shared two cigarettes, which they passed around clockwise, from one set of lips fuchsia or red or shiny oyster-blue to the next. They inhaled with somber concentration and tapped the ashes with elaborate hand flourishes on the straw mat that covered the earthen floor. Intricate henna flowers vined up their wrists from fingertips stained a deep brown. Most wore silver or gold jewelry in their ears and some in their noses and all on their fingers and wrists and necks. They had tuned Baba Nazar’s radio to an AM music station from Turkmenistan, and a few girls were swaying their hips, and the colored reflections of their sequins rebated off the walls like strobe lights in a disco. Thawra leaned against the wall in a crimson gown. Next to her, Choreh Gul, her beaked smile carmine with lip gloss, clutched the infant Zakrullah. The boy’s translucent thighs were bare and rounded at last with some fat. Little Leila wove around past these scintillating apparitions in loops—“I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning!”—and steadied herself against their silken and glittering knees, and Boston, radiant in a shift of lurexed puce, wagged an index finger at her granddaughter and giggled. In the evening, the women said, musicians would come from Shor Teppeh, and the whole village would bloom like a bouquet of thistles into interlocking hoops of circle dances.

Anamingli was there as well, in a pinkish gown embroidered with silver beads and tiny flecks of tin that looked like fish scales. She did not dance. Perhaps she felt resentful about marrying a grimy boy three years her junior. Perhaps she was pleased. It was hard to say. Custom demanded that she look solemn on the day she left her parents’ house no matter how she felt about it, and she did. She did not speak and did not smile and nodded at visitors with an air of profound importance. Her cheeks and forehead were talced and rouged and there were sparkles on her forehead and her eyes were contoured with kohl and shadowed pink that faded inexpertly into turquoise blue like some wild sunset, and beneath that makeup her teenage face was already lined with desert hardship. She had painted her lips bloodred.

Amanullah peeked into his mother’s room and the bright maquillage of the women stung him deeply.

“For a wedding they’d do this!” he complained in a loud whisper. “But for their own husbands—never! Our women stay at home all day and still they don’t wear makeup or jewelry for us. Several times I have bought lipstick for my wife, because I want her to be sexy, but she doesn’t use it. I think they are just lazy.”

Amanullah and I walked toward the pilau vat. Boys, as boys are wont to do, dashed everywhere. Among them, in his pink skullcap and his tan
shalwar kameez
, slingshot in sweaty hand as always, ran Ozyr Khul.

Halfway across the village, Choreh intercepted us. He nodded to Amanullah and slapped me very hard on my shoulder and kept his hand there awhile.

“I have no money,” he announced. His tone accusing. His hand squeezing my shoulder with great force. His eyes wild, restless, leaning into mine.

“I know,” I said. “You said you’d get a job after the wedding.”

“That’s right, that’s right.” And he let go of me and ambled away.

•   •   •

At seven-thirty, the chef and his apprentices stood at the lip of the fire pit and leaned over the vat and stirred the wedding pilau with shovels. They scooped it up from the bottom of the vat and turned it the way farmers would turn soil for sowing season and picked out bladefuls of burned rice and dropped them into an aluminum bowl to feed to the livestock later. When the rice and the meat and the onions were mixed together to Jan Mohammad’s liking, the cook invited Baba Nazar to season the pot. With ceremony, the old man reached into a white plastic bag with both his hands and brought up a mound of powdery salt and tossed it in all at once. The apprentices then laid serving trays upside down to cover the rice, spread the bedsheet on top of that, covered it with the
patu
blankets, and then with the black tarp. They tucked in the blankets with their fingertips and patted them down with the flats of their palms. Gently. The way a mother might tuck in a child. There may have been no love in the nuptials that day, but the cooking was done with love.

•   •   •

Hair-dryer wind blew. Men sat outside on straw mats and
namad
rugs, perspiring and squinting against airborne dust, sipping tea from glass cups, refilling them, passing them around, talking. On a rug nearest the pilau vat, a group of men led by Naim was bidding on camels. They leaned into one another and shouted and threw fists in the air and swore—
“Bismillah!”
—and brought their fists down upon their friends’ shoulders both to congratulate them on deals well made and to chide them for lousy sales. On the mat where I was sitting with Baba Nazar, a young man from Khairabad named Hasadullah was pondering a second marriage and making inquiries that, in his mind, could help slash the bride price before such a price was even announced. A kind of preliminary bargaining. The object of his interest was I.

“She doesn’t work, that’s why she’s so thin,” Hasadullah said.

“She says she works.”

“Yeah, she’s always writing something down.”

“Then she only works with her brain.”

He studied me, critical, appraising.

“Can she at least run?”

Hasadullah had a tattoo of two crossed scimitars on his right wrist (“I got it before I knew that tattoos were un-Islamic”), a wife, and three daughters—six, four, and two years old. “He is a future rich man,” the other men joked. “God willing, he marries them well.” Now he was silent again, making some calculations. He considered my city clothes: a knee-length shirt, trousers, a large headscarf. At last he asked: “What does she do when she wants to pee in the desert? Here, women have long skirts.”

“We don’t know.”

“We’ve never seen her pee.”

“She probably has to walk farther away than most.”

Hasadullah pressed on.

“In America,” he said, “in America, do you also pay money to marry?”

“No.”

“Ah. Then if I come to America, I can marry for free?”

“Yes, but you’ll run into a different problem. In America, people aren’t allowed to have more than one wife, and you’re already married.”

“You could get a divorce,” someone offered.

“No way! I paid almost ten thousand dollars for my wife!”

“How can anyone afford to marry here?” I whispered to Abdurrakhman, the young man pouring my tea. He had come to the wedding on foot from Karaghuzhlah, where he volunteered as a nurse at a Red Crescent clinic. When he had been a refugee in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, he had decided to join the jihad and enrolled in a training camp for mujaheddin—a camp that probably had been sponsored by the CIA, and maybe by Osama bin Laden as well. He had attended long enough to learn how to administer injections. Then the Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the camp shut down, and Abdurrakhman never became a mujahed. He was still single.

“We can’t,” he whispered back. “That’s why we swap brides.”

An old mullah who had slumped against a mud wall overheard us and pursed his lips. The thick white turban of a hajji shaded his rheumy eyes, and sweat beaded on his shaved upper lip and sparkled in his sparse white beard. The mullah was a learned man and disapproved of the whole
badaal
business. Naim had paid him to come from Khairabad in a motor-rickshaw to bless two marriages that in the mullah’s mind were barely legitimate.

“These people live in the desert,” muttered the cleric. “They don’t go to the mosque. They do whatever they want. They don’t follow Shariah.”

And without looking, he reached behind his shoulder and with long and manicured fingers flicked a little pale lizard off the wall.

•   •   •

The warlord who was reclining next to Baba Nazar was chewing
naswar
. He had ridden a motorcycle from Karaghuzhlah. His full name was Jan Mohammad, like the chef’s, but everyone called him Janni. He was half Uzbek and half Tajik, in his thirties, tall, dark, bearded, and incredibly beautiful. Like a prince from a Mogul miniature. He traveled with bodyguards.

“Are you guys weaving a carpet?” he asked the hunter.

“Yes.”

“How big?”

“Three meters.”

“Three by two?”

“Three by one.”

“So, like a runner?”

“Yes.”

“When do you think it will be finished?”

“I don’t know, the women haven’t woven for fifteen days. At this rate, they may not be finished until fall.”

Choreh stumbled up and Janni rose to his feet to greet him. As they embraced, Choreh felt the warlord’s vest pockets for cash.

T
he wedding pilau was done, and the chef and his apprentices set about to undress the vat. They lifted the tarp gently and laid it on the ground first. They laid the hot and soggy blankets on top of the tarp, then the muslin cloth on top of the blankets, then the scalding serving trays on top of the cloth. The rice was pellucid and golden, and seemed to glow. Jan Mohammad the chef patted it with the flat of his shovel blade and the pilau quivered like the breast of a young bride. Then he stabbed it deep and hoed and raked it for a few minutes until he had picked out all the meat, which he heaped onto a separate tray. At least one chunk of tender veal would rest upon a cushion of rice on each serving platter, and at every mat or carpet or mattress, the eldest diner would strip the meat apart with his or her hands into gelatinous strands no thicker than a pinkie so that each wedding guest got a bite. When there was nothing in the vat but rice and pulpy onions, the chef nodded to the elders. Baba Nazar approached, and the mullah from Khairabad, and Amin Bai, and Sayed Nafas, and several others. They stood in a semicircle, and the wind whipped their loose clothes around their knees and ankles, and tore tongues of steam off the rice and the meat, and stretched and balled the fragrant steam, and carried it off to the lowing dunes where it blurred into the runnels of sand forever drifting eastward. On the mats and blankets around the vat, all conversation and bargaining ceased. The elders stood very still and formal, and opened their palms to the heavens and lowered their heads to the ground overlaid with animal dung and pottery shards and feathers and in silence asked that God bless the food and the day and the two marriages. When they were finished, they passed their hands over their faces in benediction and uttered
“Bismillah”
and beckoned some young boys who would bus the food to the male guests first, then to the women. The chef and his helpers began to shovel the pilau onto the serving trays. It was nine-thirty in the morning on a Sunday in late May in Afghanistan.

The young groom, Ozyr Khul, was nowhere to be found.

T
he musicians never showed up.

“They were afraid,” said Amin Bai. He paused, and added, to clarify: “Of the Taliban.”