A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (14 page)

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The next day at breakfast, Helga introduced us to one of their Uzbek chowkidors. A small, sprightly man with a well-groomed toothbrush moustache, he proved invaluable as we set off on our dye quest. I was concerned that our whole trip might turn into a wild-goose chase. I had never seen decent madder root – only powdered madder and the
large chunks we were using in Khiva. I also had no idea about zok – what it looked like, whether it was available or, indeed, what it actually was.

The chowkidor seemed confident, though, and we drove to the bazaar in the centre of Mazar. Passing nondescript, bullet-holed buildings, we were suddenly confronted by a dazzling display of tiles, domes and cupolas. This was the tomb of Ali (or
one of several sites making this claim). We walked over to it, enjoying the fabulous green, blue and yellow tiles, the turquoise domes and cupolas and the azure blue doorways. An array of small spires pointed from the corners of each building. The complex stood in a lake of gleaming marble, impervious to the general squalor surrounding it. Large bundles of rags scattered around the marble turned
out, on closer inspection, to be women in burkas sitting on the ground begging. Near them, a gaggle of filthy men and children, many missing a limb or an eye, also begged for alms.

The white pigeons that lived in a nearby bunker provided a stark contrast: fat and sleek and fed by pilgrims who came to the tomb. The pigeons were said to be souls of the martyrs, perhaps explaining their profusion,
and even black pigeons that came to roost near the tomb were reputed to turn white. Around the pool of marble were dusty gardens where a few families picnicked, the women ferrying handfuls of food up inside their burkas for consumption. The gardens were encircled by a busy road from which the different sections of the bazaar radiated. We wove our way past the cloth market, around the fruit-sellers
(joyfully noting that they sold mangos, unavailable in Uzbekistan) towards the money-changers. We exchanged dollars for Afghanis, counting up the greasy, crumbling notes. The chowkidor checked each note to make sure it was the right type of Afghani, as different factions had printed their own currencies.

We passed the copperware section and entered a small alleyway full of kite-sellers to
reach the dye bazaar. Here a row of open-fronted shops brimmed with sacks of things exotic-looking but unidentifiable and lined with jars whose mysterious contents would satisfy the most demanding subject on the Hogwarts curriculum.

One large jar caught my eye and I pointed it out to the chowkidor. ‘That jar there, what do you call the contents in Dari?’ It was oak gall, which was a good
start. We’d need more than the fourteen kilos which was all I’d managed to find in Uzbekistan, and the price here was less than half what I had previously paid. As a concentrated source of tannin, oak galls dramatically affected the shades of colour available from madder, transforming dusky pinks to vibrant reds. There were two different types available, both spherical with knobbly surfaces. All
had tell-tale holes in them, drilled by the emerging wasp larvae which had caused the oak trees to produce these growths in the first place. We bought their entire stock and did the same at neighbouring stalls.

‘Do you have this thing, er, it’s a dye and it’s called something like zok?’ I asked our chowkidor to translate into Dari. The turbaned merchant reached into a nearby sack and pulled
out a small piece of what looked like crumbly white chalk. ‘This is zok,’ he said, as I looked at it unconvinced.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Zok is meant to give a black colour, but this is white.’

He looked at me and grinned before spitting onto a piece of scrap leather, smearing some zok into the spittle. As he rubbed it into the leather, a black stain emerged. I found myself grinning
back. This must be it. We now had an important dye to add to our palette.

We bought enough zok and oak gall to last us for at least a year. The merchants were surprised that we would want to use natural dyes, beckoning us to lurid heaps of chemical powders. On a later trip to buy dyes in Mazar, we were delayed because no one sold zok any more. It just wasn’t used, and they had to send someone
on a two-day journey to a mountain where zok – possibly a sulphuric chalk or iron ore – could be dug up.

Flushed with our success, I started to relax, taking more notice of the open sacks around me. One was filled with yellow roots. ‘Is this also a dye?’ I asked.

The merchant shook his head and pointed at his mouth. Another sack, full of dried rose petals, released a wonderful scent.
I bought some for Zulhamar. Next to this was a sack filled with what at first glance looked like small, dried grey pomegranates. They would make an attractive potpourri with the rose petals and I was about to buy some when I noticed the lines of razor-slash markings and realised that this was a sack of opium poppy-heads. They had been milked for opiates already and were now openly on sale for anyone
who fancied growing their own.

‘Are these really opium poppy heads?’ I asked, just to make sure. The merchant, amused at my expression of shock, grinned back and nodded.

‘But how can you just sell them in the open like this?’ I asked incredulously. ‘How much is a kilo?’ The price was less than a dollar, and the merchant playfully cracked one open, offering me some seeds, before pouring
them into his mouth and crunching contentedly.

We continued our search for madder root, finding only one shop with a small sack of the spindly dried roots. I still hadn’t seen a live madder plant, although later we found some growing wild in Khiva – a scraggy weed with tiny hooks on its stem and leaves that made it cling to passing traffic. I knew that madder roots yielded colour only if
they were at least two or three years old, and broke a few of these ones open, pleased to see a strong salmon-pink inner root. However, the asking price for this small sack seemed exorbitant. I thought about the merchants I had encountered in Samarkand, offering naive tourists boxes of cheap safflower stamens that looked vaguely like saffron, with cries of ‘Pure saffron from Silk Road!’ With no sample
of what good madder looked like in root form, I could easily be cheated.

‘If you want buy madder you must go Abdullah Hoja caravanserai,’ explained one of the merchants in broken English. ‘He has too much of madder root.’ Our chowkidor asked for directions and we worked our way back to the central
maidan
or square, heading up a different street to the small caravanserai belonging to Abdullah
Hoja.

Khiva, too, boasted a beautiful caravanserai. It was built by Allah Kuli Khan in the 1840s with two storeys, the upper acting as an inn and the lower as storage for goods. Caravans of camels would arrive from Orenburg or Bukhara and leave for Isfahan, Merv or Tashkent, laden with bales of silks, melons, and Karakul lamb pelts. Sadly, the Khiva caravanserai was roofed over by the Soviets
and transformed into a drab, sanitised indoor department store, selling rows of pickled vegetables and sweets and with the best selection of candy-pink polyester wedding dresses in town.

Yet here in Mazar was a real caravanserai, tiny by comparison, but full of sacks of produce, with dusty carpets strewn on the floors and mini stalls containing sleeping merchants, their sons arriving with
stacked trays of home-cooked lunch. Although there were no camels, a donkey and cart gave a vague sense of the bustle of the Silk Road.

The Hoja had been napping in his cubby-hole that doubled as a shop. He leapt to his feet on our arrival, calling for a grandson to fetch tea and beckoning us to sit beside him. He looked like an Old Testament patriarch in his flowing robe, sporting a long
beard and a large turban. We explained our mission and another grandson was swiftly dispatched, tottering back with a huge bale of madder root on his back.

‘Tell us about the quality of your madder,’ I said, trying to sound authoritative. ‘We need to be sure it will yield a good colour.’

The Hoja explained that the madder had been harvested the previous October. Recent droughts meant
that madder was hard to come by. This came from the north-eastern region, which still had good supplies of water from the nearby mountains.

We discussed the price and I asked where we could have the roots ground. The Hoja offered to take us to the mill he used. We purchased 60 kilos in impossibly long sacks and, having loaded these onto the donkey cart, pitched our way towards the mill.

The miller flicked a switch and the air filled with red dust, smelling of custard. Lacking turbans to adjust over nose and mouth, Matthias and I left them to it. Passing a listing balcony housing two cramped-looking urban cows, we discovered an alleyway where anything from sickles to cattle bells could be purchased. The third stall down sold a large bundle of comb-beaters that we would need
for banging down the weft thread after each horizontal row of carpet knots. They were impressively heavy with large wooden handles and simple engravings on the metal body. I bought ten. A stall down I discovered rows of hook-knives hanging on strings and purchased several.

As we returned to the mill, a sandstorm broke out. Dust that had been shat on and spat on was whipped into the air and
into our eyes, hair and mouths. We hauled sacks onto the donkey cart as fast as possible and lurched our way back to the compound, desperate for showers and keen to buy turbans as soon as possible.

The following morning we drove to the outskirts of the city, where the chowkidor lived in a squat mud-brick house. We were left outside while he alerted his wife; she hid herself around a corner
and, though we could sense her presence, we politely ignored it. His daughter sat on top of a horizontal loom laid out on the floor, weaving in the Turkmen style. The colours were darker than rugs made in Turkmenistan, but many of the designs were similar and reds still predominated.

‘The wool, do you know where it is from?’ asked the chowkidor proudly. We had no idea, but I hazarded a guess.

‘Is it from Kandahar or Ghazni?’ I asked.

‘No, it is from Belgium,’ he replied, savouring the sound of this exotic place where flocks of sheep roamed every hill. ‘Because of the drought there is no good wool now in Afghanistan. Before, we had such good wool but now we must buy from elsewhere.’

We thanked the chowkidor for his hospitality and set out to explore the bazaar by ourselves.
We had been in the country less than a week but already referred to passing women as burkas, their contents de-humanised in our minds. They looked more like birds than anything else, arching and craning their necks to see oncoming traffic or to look around, lacking all peripheral vision.

Interacting with a burka-clad woman felt strange, hearing a voice but unable to see even a pair of eyes.
At one stall I stopped to buy some woven reed fans, which made excellent presents. I had tried English and Uzbek to no avail, when a well-spoken voice behind me enquired whether I needed help. I turned to a white burka and thanked the woman within, speculating as she turned, with a flash of ankle, about what she might look like.

Heading for the carpet section of the bazaar, we passed a group
of Swedish UN soldiers at one shop and some other foreigners at another. ‘Business is really good, thanks be to God,’ declared one of the shopkeepers in broken English. ‘My brother in Peshawar sends me his stock. So many foreigners here now. They like to buying too much carpets!’

There were lots of carpets depicting maps of Afghanistan or portraits of Massoud. A number of the more tribal
rugs featured tank, helicopter and bomb motifs, and there was even one with exploding aeroplanes slamming into the World Trade Center.

Matthias wanted to know more about the rugs piled up in each shop. I pointed out the ones from Turkmenistan in fire-engine red, and how the designs varied according to tribal preference. Some guls
or motifs had clear meaning, like the flotilla of boat pendants,
bristling with anchors, found in the Yomut rugs woven near the shores of the Caspian Sea. Others incorporated symbols such as rams’ horns to ward off the evil eye. I unrolled some Tekke rugs which looked, at first glance, to be all the same, pointing out the minor cruciform guls in each, which were all different.

‘Ah, you like to buying Bukhara rug, sir,’ chimed in the stallholder. Like
Astrakhan wool, Bukhara rugs referred to their main trading outlet and not to their place of origin. The octagonal lozenges contained three cross-like figures in each corner, symbolic (depending on who you asked) of three men on horseback or a Nestorian Christian symbol of Calvary.

Carpet-weaving among the Turkmen was done exclusively by women, who also wove camel bags, storage bags to hang
on their yurt walls and decorative door coverings. As the Turkmens were absorbed into the Soviet Union, a few clever weavers, realising that their art was under threat from mass-producing textile factories, began to include woven homilies to Father Lenin at the end of each rug. This transformed them into artistic and ethnic acts of devotion to the Communist cause, and soon huge portrait carpets
of Lenin, Stalin and other Soviet leaders were commissioned, woven on traditional horizontal looms and keeping the art alive. In the carpet museum in Ashkhabad there was even a fetching rendition of Castro, complete with cigar.

Rummaging through the piles of rugs, I found a Turkmen one that perfectly illustrated why we were in Mazar looking for madder. The weave was excellent, as was the
knot count, and the rug was around 50 years old. Most of the synthetic colours used had faded but there was one orange dye which stubbornly and garishly refused to do so, ruining the whole rug as a result.

Other rugs in the stack were beautifully woven with tiny knots in a blend of wool with patches of silk. The designs were Turkmen but the palette pastel to appeal to Westerners. They were
let down by the silk warps, which had not been de-gummed and crinkled like new grey hairs, refusing to lie and jarring with the overall fluidity. These rugs were woven in Afghanistan and were largely the product of child labour. I felt ambivalent towards this issue. On the one hand, the cries of Westerners calling for children to play and study seemed naively removed from the harsh realities of
families making ends meet, and smacked rather of a ‘Let them eat cake’ mindset. On the other hand, many of the children were not simply learning the craft within the home but being exploited in workshops where their nimble fingers were barely recompensed. They worked long hours in appalling conditions and earned almost nothing. I had set the minimum age in our workshop at seventeen.