The World is a Carpet (10 page)

Afghanistan’s opium habit was more than two thousand years old, introduced, it is believed, by Alexander the Great, whose troops had used it as a palliative. Dating individual addiction was trickier. Amin Bai could not remember the first time he had tasted opium, probably because he had been an infant then. Choreh, who was forty-one, said he had started smoking in his early thirties, after a land-mine incident. He had ventured a hundred yards or so into the sand dunes to collect some calligonum kindling in order to boil water for tea and had been chopping at a tough, gnarled stem with a pick when the pick struck a mine. He supposed the Soviets had placed the mine when their soldiers had been stationed at a barracks on the north side of the dunes in the 1980s. The shrapnel had torn a palm-size chunk of flesh out of his right thigh and lacerated his calf with a web of zigzagging and vermiform scars and strange runic indentations that still chafed against the trouser leg of his brown
shalwar kameez
. He said opium helped dull the pain. He also said his wife had started taking opium just before she became pregnant with Zakrullah, to stop the aches in her legs and neck and shoulders.

“But after the New Year, I will join the police,” Choreh announced. “They offer a good salary, ten thousand afghanis. And they also have a program to treat opium addiction.”

Choreh’s neighbors shifted on their mattresses and coughed in scoffing protest at this version of history. They said Choreh Gul had been drinking opium at least since Choreh had brought her to Oqa from Khairabad as a fifteen-year-old bride, and that had been more than twenty years back. They also said Choreh himself had been smoking since his teens. Boys in Oqa were allowed to start smoking opium when they turned fifteen, or when they got married, whichever came first.

As for his New Year’s resolution, it was as good as any they’d ever heard, and they had heard them many times, from many men in Oqa, for Oqa was a village of dreamers.

Choreh shrugged, slowly, groggily. What was it to them? They and their own wives were smoking and drinking opium, too. He didn’t see any of them quitting or joining the police, either.

At that the men nodded with the solemn approval they granted any truth, no matter how disagreeable. Almost everyone in Oqa was using opium, they said, that was true—except for the children who weren’t sick. Children seemed to be sick all the time.

Amin Bai stoked up the oil lamp again, and Qaqa Satar checked the pipe, inhaled with his eyes skewed, and sang out: “It’s very nice. It’s very sweet. If you smoke it and you want to have sex with your wife, you’ll go for a whole hour. It makes your whole body feel warm. You feel like you are in a garden in London. Women who weave add a tiny bit to a cup of tea and it allows them to work long hours. They don’t feel muscle cramps, no pain.”

“If you have a cough and you smoke it, the cough is gone,” Baba Nazar chimed in. He himself did not smoke because—opium’s medicinal properties aside—he believed it was unhealthy. “I have smoked only once, and I threw up. It is very strong. If you eat a small amount, you’ll be dizzy for twenty-four hours. I’m seventy, and I can walk and work. I’m stronger than these people”—he swept his arm toward his guests—“because I don’t use it.”

Once upon a time, Baba Nazar had been a champion wrestler in Oqa, Karaghuzhlah, and Khairabad, a crown he still gloated about, and he took his health seriously.

Amanullah didn’t smoke because his father had forbidden it. Instead, he squatted by the door amid the shoes and the children, and busied himself with replacing a piece of rabbit skin on Baba Nazar’s
tupcha
with a fresher one. Nurullah and some older boys knelt quietly at his elbows, reverential, silent. Their eyes darted between Amanullah’s handiwork and the men who were passing the pipe back and forth. All of them had tasted opium. In a few years they would be old enough to smoke it, too.

•   •   •

The men listened carefully to the story of the infant Abdul Bashir.

The baby had thrashed against the soiled Dawlatabad hospital cot and gurgled the deep, horrible, rhythmic wheezes of the dying. He had begun to convulse when the nurses had pressed his tiny face, blue from asphyxiation, into an adult oxygen mask larger than his head. They tourniqueted his spasming limbs one by one to find a threadlike vein that could fit a needle so that they could resuscitate him with a milliliter of the opiate blocker naloxone, and seconds dragged like hours until the antidote kicked in and the baby cried at last.

Doctor Akbar, the pediatrician, said that every single one of the approximately one thousand child patients his hospital received each year, Choreh’s son Zakrullah included, had some degree of opium poisoning when they arrived, even if they had been brought in to be treated for other ailments—meningitis, say, or cholera. He said also that each year a handful were brought to the hospital already dead from overdose. But for a few minutes’ delay Abdul Bashir would have been one of those.

Abdul Bashir’s statuesque and stunning mother fixed her child with a drugged stare. Twenty-four years old, fair-skinned, and lissome in her white sheepskin coat, her high cheekbones flushed from running from the outskirts of Dawlatabad with the baby in her arms, wringing her long, silver-ringed and hennaed fingers: a would-be infanticidal pietà who herself had been born addicted. It was she who had given Abdul Bashir the opium that morning, to hush his crying, but she must have miscalculated the dose. After he stopped breathing, she brought him to the hospital.

At this part of the story, Baba Nazar laughed and the rest of the men in his house laughed as well.

Why? Could this not have happened with one of their own babies, here in Oqa?

“No-ho-ho,” the Commander said, coughing as he guffawed. “Here, we know the trick, how much opium to give a baby.”

The men chuckled some more at the young mother’s incompetence, and Nurullah and the other boys grinned, happy for the occasion to express their camaraderie with important grown men of such expertise. Outside, the wind had died down. The desert swelled with the enormous silences of a carpet-shaped world that was chockfull of vital mistakes and whose pain threshold was limitless.

A
flotilla of perfectly round and cartoonish clouds sailed over my walled compound in Mazar-e-Sharif. It was the morning of the vernal equinox, the first morning of spring and, according to the Zoroastrian calendar by which Afghanistan fixed its time, the morning of Nawruz: New Year’s Day. That year, the holiday fell on a Tuesday.

“Sal-e-Nau mubarak!”
Happy New Year! Men leaned out past heavy gates of red and turquoise sheetmetal, cranking them open just a tad wider than usual to usher in a little extra of the year’s first sunshine. The holiday’s name, Nawruz, meant “new day,” or “new light,” in Farsi.

“Wa shoma ham Sal-e-Nau mubarak.”
And a happy New Year to you, as well. Women greeted early guests with
haft mewa
, a heady compote of dried fruit and nuts drowned in giant vats of boiling water and steeped overnight, and
samanak
, a sweet paste of wheat germ, sugar, and walnuts. Only women were allowed to prepare
samanak
, and a few days before the holiday they had taken turns stirring it for twenty-four hours over wood fires in their walled yards and singing and trading vulgar jokes and braiding one another’s hair and trying on one another’s lipstick. Traditionally, had a man glimpsed the preparation, the dessert would have had to be thrown out, and the man derided.

A twelve-year-old boy in my house inscribed on graph paper the nascent year’s name: 1390, per a countdown formally begun in the last decade of the Sassanid rule of the Khorasan. The holiday itself was so old its origins were lost. As old as man’s Manichaean desire to simplify the world into manageable opposites, light and dark, good and evil.

On city roundabouts, papier-mâché tulips bloomed. At the Blue Mosque, Zoroaster’s reputed burial place, thousands of white doves cooed in satiated unison, and mullahs prepared to welcome pilgrims descending upon the city from all over Central Asia. This was Mazar-e-Sharif, the city of mystics, and both the mullahs and the visitors were eager to forsake Islam for a day of pre-Mohammedan hedonism that culminated with the raising of a ribboned and beaded maypole in the mosque’s vast yard tiled with black-and-white marble. For a week already, hunched dervishes from Iran in swags of rosaries had been pounding sidewalk dust with their walking staffs, entranced, declaiming fervently and at random to passing cars and horse-drawn buggies and motorcycles snippets of decadent verse by Omar Khayyam and Hafez, and drawing stares. Domestic and international politicians and luminaries were also expected. Ten thousand policemen and soldiers in armored vests blotted the sun-gorged streets because city officials anticipated a major terrorist act. The terrorist act would rend the city ten days later, when six Taliban would lead an enraged Friday mob from the Blue Mosque to the United Nations offices to topple guard towers, set walls ablaze, and, beneath the alluvial slopes bloodred with wild spring poppies, slaughter twelve of the agency’s employees, mostly Westerners. On Nawruz, though, war seemed to be elsewhere—on the other side of the Hindu Kush, where most of the hundred and forty thousand foreign troops and elusive and sandaled guerrillas were fighting one another and killing and maiming in the process farmers and day laborers and their families with roadside bombs and missiles and small artillery, or at the very least outside the city limits, where insurgency was quietly gathering steam, uncontested, unstoppable.

The day passed in comings and goings of guests, in exchanges of kisses and the euphonious singsong of greetings. The family in whose house I was renting a room did not go to the Blue Mosque to watch the maypole ceremony—too dangerous, they said, not worth the risk. Instead, they celebrated the New Year indulging in the discreet domestic pleasures of Afghanistan’s wannabe bourgeoisie, taking in the sun and telling jokes and smoking a mint-flavored waterpipe on a
takht
, a carpeted and pillowed wooden platform they had established in the center of the yard. Guests and family members of both genders and all ages took turns shaking off their slippers and climbing on, dragging on the pipe, sipping tea and
haft mewa
from glass cups, shucking sunflower seeds into cupped palms, squinting at the tall sky, moving around the dial of the
takht
to make room for newcomers, and talking, talking. Like guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Reluctant men peeled off to attend the one-o’clock prayer at the neighborhood mosque, returned an hour later singing folk songs about love, and climbed back upon the
takht
to resume their pagan reverie. The afternoon sun was gentle and flocks of white doves looped, delirious with spring, in air the color of tea. My hosts’ children brought out some colored modeling clay and one of the men, a driver who worked for the United Nations, asked me to make something. I made a green cat. He took it in his hand, studied it for a few beats, then very deftly attached three black stripes to it: one around the cat’s neck, two across its face.

“That’s a collar,” I pointed. “What are these?”

“Burqa. This is Afghanistan. Next time don’t make without burqa.”

No bombs went off in the city that day. There was no gunfire. By six o’clock the first sun of spring softly relayed toward the western hemisphere, and in the caramel evening haze the crest of the Hindu Kush faded into a velvety saffron carpet fringe. Then night erased the mountains altogether and summoned pale stars out of the dark. When the waning moon rose over the eastern stucco wall of the compound, I brought out Peter Hopkirk’s
The Great Game
to read by moonlight.

A hundred and seventy-nine years ago and less than twenty miles away, by moonlight also, the Great Game player and British political agent in Kabul Sir Alexander Burnes had found Moorcroft’s grave, “unmarked and half covered by a mud wall, outside the town of Balkh.” Moorcroft, the veterinary surgeon–explorer in the employ of the East India Company, the first Englishman to set foot on the banks of the Oxus, the man who had warned of Russia’s wish to occupy Afghanistan and who had urged Britain to annex it first, was believed to have succumbed to fever in romantic pursuit of the golden Akhal-Tekes, the fabled Turkoman horses.