The World is a Carpet (34 page)

“Afghanistan is our country, Anna. It can be your country, too,” Amanullah called to me across the ditch. And then, out of the blue, caked up to his shins in Khorasan mud, he declaimed a rendition of Rumi’s most famous verse.

“So that you can come, yet again, come, come to our house.”

For his was a country of poets.

It doesn’t matter if you have broken your vow

A thousand times. Come,

Yet again, come, come.

Oqa lay somewhere to the northeast. A village unmapped, unremembered, unaccounted for. We could not see it from the ditch. But it was there, and Amanullah would never escape from it. In the spring, when winter wheat would rise above the knee in the rain-slaked fields of Balkh, Amanullah and Baba Nazar would ride to Dawlatabad and buy skeins of yarn that would smell like sweat and sheep dung and lamb fat and juniper smoke, and bring them to the village. Boston would roll the yarn into balls. Leila would fasten pale warps to the rusty beams, and Thawra would hang Sahra Gul’s woven cradle over her loom and tie the first knot of her next carpet. In a year or two, two or three million knots later, Leila would join her, and then Sahra Gul. They would weave their foremothers’ lotus blossoms and their kinsmen’s wars, the golden eagles of their desert, the music of their village and its silences, its weddings and funerals, their own joys and sorrows. They would sever the yarn with old sweat-stained sickles in time with the sacrosanct rhythm of their hearts. On the edge of a sand-dune sea, on the edge of a war zone, in their crepuscular loom room on the edge of the world, past and present would converge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research in Afghanistan was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The author also thanks Becky Saletan and Felicia Eth for helping to make this book a reality.

She is indebted to generations of storytellers whose wisdom kept her company and lent her compass bearings in the desert. A friend kept track of her on the map and helped replenish her bookshelves. Thank you. You were a muse.

To her Afghan hosts and fellow travelers, who made her family and risked their lives to protect hers, she bows deeply, with profound respect. This book is for you.