The World is a Carpet (30 page)

After sundown, the men and I dined on rice and okra and chicken, and Isan’s uncle told me the story of his life, a life of crossing the border again and again as war came and went from his city. He asked me about my life of crossing borders and tramping through wars. He asked me about life in America. He said: “I have a brother. He has been living in America for fifty-six years. I wrote him a long letter, and instead of writing me back, he called me and said: ‘I don’t have the time to read this. Why don’t you just summarize? You should just get to the main point.’

“Why is that?” my host asked. “Why do people in America have no time to read long letters?”

Kamrana cleared away the dinner platters and brought green tea and hot sweetened milk boiled with walnuts. The dim air in the room became scented with cardamom.

•   •   •

After dinner, the uncle and my companions remained in the living room to smoke cigarettes and sleep on mattresses arranged along the walls, and I joined the women and children who crowded for warmth into a single bedroom. We slept fully clothed under Chinese polyester blankets on thin bedrolls laid on the floor side by side in an interlocking mosaic, and we held hands through the night in an astonishing act of faith, as though the mortises and tenons of our linked fingers, our elemental intimacy, could grant us sanctuary against war. Our breath synchronized. I remembered another night of such communal ritual, in Karima’s home in Andkhoi, and my heart swelled. Then I remembered that six months earlier and less than two miles away American soldiers had shot and killed a girl like Kamrana when that girl had been sleeping in her uncle’s house. Whose hand had she been holding that night? I felt for Kamrana’s pulse in her slack fingertips—one, two, three,
thk,
thk,
thk
—and I felt against it the beat of my own slower heart that pushed and pushed tenderness and heartbreak together through my bloodstream.

T
he premature winter locked away the Khorasan behind its many cold latches of seclusion. Ice crusted mountain passes. Weather delayed planes. The galleries of Salang were snowed in, and motorists on either side of the tunnel idled in frozen smog for days, dancing little shivering stomps next to their taxis and buses and semis and blowing into their cold-raw hands, appointments broken, hospital visits delayed, carpets uncollected and undelivered.

In the afternoon of the first day of Eid, nearly a meter of snow dumped unexpectedly and almost all at once onto the Bactrian plains. In Karaghuzhlah, a hundred and twenty of the thousand sheep the boys had taken out to pasture that morning got stuck in the drifts and froze to death. The snow melted and fell again and melted again. The snow turned to rain. Great legatos of rain stroked the desert by day, and by night the thinnest membrane of ice shingled the waterlogged wastes. The soggy loess became the color and consistency of a chunk of chocolate melting in a pot, a hard and slippery clay bed coated with three or four inches of viscous and velvety muck that extended to the rim of the world. White flashes of unpicked cotton interrupted the expanse of brown. The eroded adobe of the city walls of Balkh sagged under the rain, and beneath these walls murders of crows sailed over pale green fields of waxlike cauliflower. The shunpike to Asfakhan Shrine sloshed unused through dormant fields, and in the ruts grooved out by mad pilgrims’ buses gossamer ice shone like mica. Beneath the snowcapped minaret of Zadyan, Zarifshah Bibi, Baba Nazar’s mine-crippled daughter, was trapped indoors for days because her prosthesis was of no use in the slush. Unseen in the desert, POMZ-2M fragmentation mines, these afterbirths of the war against the Soviets, shifted loose in their pulpy soil like sinister corncobs, each a latent wound, a time warp waiting to collect a ghastly oblation of limbs from some child or shepherd or farmer not yet born at the time of its emplacement. In Siogert, two long resilient white spills of unmelted snow stared up at the eggshell sky from the spot on the road where in October local vigilantes had killed two Taliban scouts. Or maybe it was where the village teacher had been killed that spring. The weather treated all blood equally. The road was mucoid, and days and days went by when no transport or man or beast traveled on it.

The Khorasan was shutting down and shutting itself off—for the winter, or a year, or a century. Each village, each hamlet on the plains, was on its own now, fenced off from the rest of the world by sodden land, alone with its history, its anguish, its singular beauty.

Only Dasht-e-Leili in the west never slaked its thirst and spun its sand into yellow and dense
tufans
beneath the pillowy low sky as it always had. Smudged by these storms to the point of seeming incorporeal, stern men draped with bright garlands of plastic flowers that clashed absurdly with their mud-splattered brown
shalwar kameez
waited outside roadside mosques for returning hajjis in stoic silence like ghosts ordered eons ago into ceremonious and grave line formations.

•   •   •

The storms had washed Mazar-e-Sharif like a body for burial. Pale sepulchral sun filtered through fogging slush and stove smoke, and everywhere the gutters oozed with melting snow mixed with black sludge, the blood of sacrificial animals, old grudges, millennial regrets. Sheepskins hung to dry on mud fences slowly rotted. The stoops and storefronts of Mazar’s Dasht-e-Shor neighborhood where I was staying had emptied of the men who in warmer weather would spend afternoons squatting in semicircles in thin strips of shade or else hold on to one another’s handshakes near water pumps for hours and gossip and slaver over the ankles of the veiled women who passed by.

My hosts’ compound also grew quieter, more somber, that winter. Worn out by Taliban threats that had hounded him all summer, one of the brothers, the one who had been a driver for the United Nations, had fled to Tajikistan soon after Ramadan with his pregnant wife and children. Another, a young unmarried journalist, had fled to Europe and sought political asylum in Scandinavia. Orphaned this way at once of two sons and three grandchildren, her arthritis amplified by the cold, Dear Mother the matriarch sighed deeper and prayed more often and locked herself for hours in her widow’s quarters at the front of the house. The electric water pump below the cement courtyard froze and broke, and the large family washed from batteries of plastic ewers in unheated bathrooms that reeked of unflushed toilets. When they bathed, the brothers who remained in the house sang melancholy love songs, beautifully and in tune, but their voices were muffled by the quilts that hung from bedroom doorframes and window sashes to trap warm air, because
bukhari
heat tended to draft out through the cracks as soon as the fire went out. The long hallways stood freezing and empty and dark. On a trellis by the garbage heap a single clematis blossom clung to the vine, a dying purple flame preserved in verglas. In the blue predawn, muezzins’ four-o’clock arpeggios clinked through the blanketed windows like distant icicles breaking.

•   •   •

On a drizzly morning, I slogged down Dasht-e-Shor Street to the twin domes of the Blue Mosque. Schoolgirls in black uniforms leaned into a stiff wind that blew frigid mist past enormous fields of refuse. The street was a river of gunge through which men on bicycles and women in galoshes skidded in slow motion, trying to keep upright in the mud. At the southern tip of that foul thoroughfare, the shrine glittered in the morning fog as though encased in ice, so unsoiled it seemed a thing separate from that city, an attestation to some virtue contained within. Men shuffled in reverent quietude past the snowflake-white doves that roosted in the thousands atop its spiral minarets and in the vaulted arch of its mihrab, and drew their
patu
blankets over their heads and around their shoulders, and in the early-morning cold, the condensation from their breath collected on their beards like tinsel. Pilgrims in search of sanctuary and comfort. Over the years I had been one of them several times and here I was again.

Worshippers left their shoes heavy with cold mud at the east gate that led to the mosque’s inner yard, and walked across the tiles of white and black marble in stocking feet and entered the shrine. The cold from the tiles bored into their soles. Which invocations did they whisper inside? Which millennial transgressions did they ask to right? The tiles ricocheted with the sharp applause of the pigeons’ flutter, the same indifferent ovation for generations of pilgrims, winter after winter, war after war.

An old man was selling pewter platefuls of millet seed to feed the pigeons. I bought one. Ten minutes of bliss for ten afghanis, about twenty cents. The birds alighted on my head, shoulders, arms, hands; they walked over my feet. I thought: flying must feel like this. I thought my heart would burst. Then I started laughing. I stood in the middle of a war zone, draped in fluttering white birds, and laughed and laughed. A few dozen yards away, a girl tossed bits of stale bread in the air and the pigeons pirouetted, collided with one another in bursts of impossible whiteness, dove down to catch the crumbs. The girl was laughing, too. A Mazari journalist once told me: “The West is all about technology. The East is all about the mystical.” He had been drinking bootleg vodka he had hidden in a plastic bag because drinking alcohol in Afghanistan carried the punishment of imprisonment or lashing, and he was not so much mystical as just plain drunk. But I thought of his words among the solace of the pigeons of the Blue Mosque. I knew then that the birds were there to keep us sane, buoyed, somehow, through the extreme blue solitudes of winter and wartime.

That evening, over a dinner of bread and
lobio
and stewed cauliflower, I asked one of my hosts if I could take his daughter Lena to the shrine with me someday to feed the pigeons. Lena was ten and had thick braids; and she liked to come into my room to teach me a word or two of Farsi sometimes, or sometimes to insist that I kiss the fat and milky cheek of her baby brother, whom she carried on her hip, or sometimes to give me a quick hug and run away. I was very fond of her. But sometimes she would come in, lipsticked and with her hair undone and carrying a little portable radio so that she could dance before me, and seeing her walk through the door with that radio terrified me because I knew how that dance ended. It ended with her going down on her knees in front of me. There at my feet the ten-year-old girl would close her eyes and quake and ripple her shoulders and gyrate her still-flat chest in the smooth and knowing way of a very grown woman, a way that reached into some forbidden and unnamable darkness inside me and made me absolutely, utterly afraid.

Lena’s father said she could not go with me to feed the white birds. He said it was too cold and her feet would get wet. He said she only had one pair of shoes, her brother’s Chinese sneakers. It would take ages for them to dry in that cold.

I
n that tapestry of isolation, Oqa’s was the most inviolable.

The village was sequestered behind incalculable acreages of muck. Impounded in this bone-clasping cold beneath a corrugated sky in which no sun or moon or stars any longer appeared. Unattainable, unreachable, hermetic. Fall was hunting season, and hundreds of ducks labored southward between the brown-gray desert and the brown-gray clouds, yet Baba Nazar could not leave the hummock to hunt. Ismatullah and Ozyr Khul could not wander the dunes in search of calligonum to trade for rice and oil. Manon the shopkeeper could not bring in fresh supplies of Crown safety razor blades and Pine cigarettes. The Oqans had reassembled the
bukhari
stoves they had stashed away for the summer and fed them frugal handfuls of dried grass and huddled around them refilling and refilling and refilling their chipped teacups with murky hot well water from soot-blackened pitchers. Even the camels stayed put, hitched to corroded antiaircraft shell casings driven into the slippery trampled-down clay, or else corralled behind ephemeral enclosures of thistle they slowly chewed out of the walls.

“When are you coming, Anna?” Amanullah demanded over the phone. “Everyone misses you. Our village is sometimes okay, and sometimes not good. There are always rumors that there are Taliban. But we are the same people you know, and we love you.”