The World is a Carpet (8 page)

Why not? That year, Nigeria was sitting on thirty-seven billion barrels of proven oil reserves and eight out of ten Nigerians were living on less than two dollars a day.

“If we had special machines, we could get gold out of this and get rich. But we are too poor to buy such machines.”

And again Amanullah schemed a breakout. He would sift the dunes for gold and become a millionaire and buy a nice house and a car somewhere far away, where water and girls were plenty. He would join the army and learn to read and write. He would find a job as a day laborer in Mazar, learn to sleep through city din. He would get away. He would. He would.

This man, whose dreamy wanderlust echoed my own, whose rough and earnest embraces greeted me each time I arrived in his village, whose love of corporeal life was as exuberant as his living was meager. I liked him immensely. I took off my shoes and skidded to where he sat and lay down beneath a dune and listened. The gale had risen to thirty knots and effaced the anvil clouds from the sky and effaced the history of violence from the dunes, or at least ploughed it under. It carried sand, children’s voices, the rustle of desert grass. It carried echoes of wars ancient and recent. It carried terrible and inexplicable yearnings, for a future that was improbable and a past that never had been. It carried nostalgia. Time fell away.

Then Amanullah said: “Anna! Let’s wrestle.”

One time, in Qaqa Satar’s car in Mazar-e-Sharif, Amanullah had turned around in the passenger seat and plunked his hand on my knee. I remembered that hand. It was broad and fleshy. His wrist was as thick as my thigh. He probably could snap my neck with two fingers.

I played the gender card.

“You can’t wrestle with me,” I said. “I’m a woman.”

“But you can wrestle with
me
!” And with a roar, Asad leapt to his feet and pounced upon Amanullah, and the men spun on the ground, kicking up sand and aurum dust and growling and panting and laughing, and now the wind carried their laughter as well.

On the walk back to Oqa, we caught up with some boys who were molesting a Horsfield’s tortoise. It was about eight inches long, and it had retreated into its shell of nut-brown scutes that blanched at the edges to a sickly yellow. The boys took turns stepping on it with their rubber-sandaled feet. Then one of the boys kicked it with gusto. A little gratuitous act of sadism, of an innate viciousness each of us carries within. Horsfield’s tortoises are native to Afghanistan and live up to one hundred years. How old was this one? Which other depravities, grand and small, had it witnessed? Soon the boys lost interest in the tortoise and followed us into the village, spitting and giggling, holding hands, hopping over thorny shrubs and lumps of dried and drying human excrement and a rusted mortar shell. I looked back and the reptile was gone.

That night I went to bed in my rental room in Mazar-e-Sharif. My scalp was full of sand and maybe—I liked to believe—some gold. The gale outside had become a storm. Half asleep, I imagined dunes marching past Oqa in a macabre and biblical cavalcade. Then I imagined that I would wake up the next morning and see the Hindu Kush upside down, or rearranged into a circle. But no. Nothing external ever budged these cold mountains, neither wind nor blood nor grief, nor even a call to prayer under a smoky sunrise.

When I returned to Oqa, I couldn’t tell whether the dunes had shifted at all.

T
he village slacked through its forenoons.

After the goats had been dispatched to pasture and the boys had been dispatched to pick kindling and the dough had been kneaded in large blue-glazed ceramic basins and set under old blankets to rise for paltry lunches of nan and tea, a lassitude spilled over Oqa. A hard-earned lethargy that sagged like translucent cling wrap between the sun-bleached wasteland and the faded stratum of the sky.

During these hours, women would drift from house to house to ask for a quarter cup of salt or to gossip. Men would drift from house to house to smoke cigarettes or opium. Oqans of both genders would gather into small congregations and migrate slowly through the village to gather fodder for the next day’s yarn, or simply to squat and gaze, unblinking, at the desert. Neighbors would stray into Thawra’s loom room to squat on her loom for a few minutes and tie some knots together.

There was Juma Gul, whose name meant “Friday flower,” and who was always smiling and chewing gum. She never stayed very long. Her own carpet was stretched beneath a clothesline onto which she had pinned a drawing she had made, with soot on lined paper, of some primeval god, each of its stick arms and legs ending in three long talons. She said it was to explain human anatomy to her youngest daughter, who was three.

Jahan Gul, World Flower, whose house was taken up almost entirely by a twenty-four-foot-long loom so old the gargantuan unfinished carpet upon it had overgrown with goat vertebrae sucked clean, skeins of thread, drying lozenges of donkey dung, blankets.

Choreh Gul, Resolution Flower, gaunt and bird-faced and heavy-lidded with opium, would come by with or without her jovial ten-year-old daughter, Hazar Gul, One Thousand Flowers. These two wove with Thawra often and for the longest stretches, in exchange for a fraction of the proceeds from the carpet. Choreh Gul did not have a loom of her own because her husband, Choreh, couldn’t afford the yarn, and because there was no place to put a loom in her single-room house anyway. She had six children in various stages of infirmity. When her family unrolled their flimsy mattresses at night upon the thin bazaar-bought blankets that kept the dust down on the earthen floor, the only space not taken was the small bare square around an old and poorly soldered
bukhari
, which belched more smoke than heat. On a windowsill of their house, the tangled heap of wires that were intended to connect the generator to the power line, wires the villagers had entrusted Choreh to keep, shone with silver dust like a severed umbilical cord of some imagined better life.

It took a village to weave a carpet.
Thk, thk, thk,
the sickles counted out the long, sluggish mornings of poverty.

Sometimes something uncommon would take place. An event. For example, Qaqa Satar would spread Baba Nazar’s Pakistani rug on the ground, and double and triple over his long frame impressively in prayer: that was an event. The villagers would come to watch that. Or I would pull out my sketchbook to draw. For a few turns that was an event, and the villagers would come to watch that, too. They would click their tongues and nod and giggle in appreciation when they recognized in my messy pen drawings a particular rooster, a neighbor’s house.

After a while, my sketching ceased to be an event. The rooster and the house were old things the villagers had already seen and would see again every day,
inshallah
. I wasn’t telling them anything new.

A few mornings before the vernal equinox, a man from Toqai, a village half a day’s walk through the dunes, brought his she-camel to be serviced by Naim’s bull. The men drove the camels, first the female, then the male, to the northern edge of the village, where a soot-blackened ellipsis of tandoor ovens trailed off toward the dunes, signaling to the heavens some unformulated or unfinished wish, some hint not taken. By the time the bull had been brought, lolling out a narrow purple tongue and perfuming himself in anticipation with a bristly, urine-soaked tail, all the village men had gathered to squat in a wide circle in fascinated hush. This was as close to porn as it ever got in Oqa.

The animals faced the dunes. She knelt and flared her slanted nostrils, and the narrow veined velvet of her nose trembled. He, delirious, ground his teeth with a pleading high-pitched squeak and dribbled long strings of white foamy saliva libidinously onto the convulsing hump of his mate. For half an hour the entire hummock shuddered with the tremendous throaty grunts of her astonishing desire. Beneath eyelashes long and sparse and hard like cousinia petals, the wide-open dark glassy eyes of the camels reflected the aquamarine sky upon which filamentous cirri gathered and dispersed.

“Once a year only!” Amanullah exclaimed in a deferential whisper. Qaqa Satar snapped a photograph with his cell phone.

On the periphery of that gathering, next to a tandoor lit with dry grass, Choreh Gul and Hazar Gul had come out to bend over a stack of large uncooked sundials of nan and pies stuffed with bitter orach. On her right hand Choreh Gul wore a soiled quilted mitt, and between her teeth she clenched a large nail. She took the nail, pierced each loaf four times so that the bread wouldn’t billow from the heat too much, and bit the nail again. One by one, she placed the loaves onto the mitt, slathered them with the opaque well water her daughter had brought in a dinged aluminum basin, then slapped them onto the inside wall of the oven. Tatters of kindling fire ran in the wind and black smoke curled out and drifted over the squatting men and the mating animals. With her unmittened hand, Choreh Gul scooped palmfuls of water and threw them at the cooking loaves. The oven sibilated. A satisfied and benevolent god hissing at a woman and a girl at the edge of the world. Behind them bread-colored dunes rose.

The men who were watching the camels took no interest in this mundane magic. Someone in Oqa was baking bread every day. In thirty minutes, the she-camel’s owner, who would get to keep the single calf when it was born after fifteen months of gestation, would take her back to Toqai. The villagers would talk about those thirty minutes for days.

Later that week, the villagers stood next to Baba Nazar’s house with their faces upturned. An American B-52 Stratofortress was refueling in the blue blue sky above Oqa.

The bomber rendezvoused with a KC-135 Stratotanker at an altitude of more than five miles somewhere beyond the citadel of ancient Balkh and drifted eastward. The planes at first a palm apart, then a thumb, then a pinkie. Until the bomber slid behind and slightly underneath the tanker. The Oqans could just make out the gossamer refueling boom that extended from the tanker’s rear to the unseen receptacle above the B-52’s cockpit. For a few minutes, the two silver machines glided together. They banked slightly, they straightened out, all in unison. Locked in an unearthly rendition of the most important of all earthly rituals, absolutely alone above these camel-colored plains.

One tanker could carry thirty-one thousand gallons of fuel—enough to run Oqa’s generator to power the village every night for more than fourteen years. One B-52 could carry eighteen two-thousand-pound “smart” bombs, fifty-one five-hundred-pound bombs, almost thirty thousand cluster bomblets, and twelve nuclear cruise missiles. Enough to erase Oqa from the face of the Earth and pulverize the Hindu Kush into a barchan colony, or not even that. The Oqans did not make such calculations. They held their breath and watched and watched, and still they could not decide whether this bizarre, bellicose erotica at twenty-seven thousand feet was proof of the Americans’ vulnerability or omnipotence.

In a few minutes, the bomber pulled back and banked north and scythed the ice-blue sky and vanished over Uzbekistan’s airspace. Soon the tanker was also gone.

The villagers talked about that for a few days, too.