The World is a Carpet (13 page)

Then he turned to Amanullah and said: “There’s got to be more out there. Go back and see.”

And handed him the shotgun.

•   •   •

Amanullah returned with four more cranes in the saddlebag. One was dead. It had ingested too much strychnine and had been shuddering almost constantly out there in the dunes. Islamic law proscribed eating animals killed by poison, and to keep the bird halal, Amanullah had shot it through the neck. He gave it to his father and laid the other three on the ground.

Five live cranes now lay in the village dirt almost motionless, no longer shaking, their wings flung open, feathers fanned out upon goat droppings and hardening greenish-white splotches of chicken shit, dark blots of dried urine, particles of hay. Amanullah watched the cranes closely lest they, too, began to die and needed to be butchered. It was preferable that they survived: merchants in Mazar paid twelve dollars per bird for live cranes, which they sold to wealthy families to keep as pets. Amanullah kept the phone numbers of a couple of these merchants saved in the memory of his cell phone. Five cranes would sell for almost a third as much as the carpet Thawra was weaving—although at that particular moment she had to interrupt her work again, because Baba Nazar had leaned into the loom room through the gap left by the missing roof and told the woman to spoon into the cranes’ bills a mixture of sugar and oil, to force the birds to vomit the poison.

Then he tied the dead crane by the head to the wooden hitching post near Boston’s kitchen, reached into the bullet hole in the crane’s long and silky neck with his right index finger, and ripped through the skin and feathers, and slipped them off the neck from the hole down, the skin and feathers all at once. With a butchering knife, he severed the wide and hollow trachea that had shaped the crane’s immemorial song and smashed off with a hatchet the ulnae and the radii and the tibiotarsi and then slid the skin with its silver-blue plumage off the upper wings and chest and back and thighs. It fell to the ground like a bloodied pearly gown. Boston poured hot tea from an aluminum teapot over the exposed pectorals, granular and dark, stringy with the millions of wingbeats every one of which had carried this crane to its slaughter. Then Baba Nazar untied the dressed bird from the hitching post and laid it on a piece of burlap.

With the hatchet, the old man chopped the breastplate in two, then chopped off the neck halfway up, then turned the bird around and split the back along the spine. He handed the entrails to Boston, splashed some hot tea into the chest cavity, put the dressed meat into a plastic bag, and handed it to Qaqa Satar. That night in Mazar-e-Sharif, the driver’s wife will turn it into stew and serve it for dinner. But the strychnine already had contaminated the meat, and everyone in Qaqa Satar’s house will cramp from a violent stomachache.

Then Baba Nazar walked over to where the five birds lay prostrate in the dirt, scooped up one—flaccid and disoriented with humiliation and poison—and thrust it at me.

“Take one!”

A year earlier, another Afghan man had offered me a bird, an old man in a soiled turban on a grimy sidewalk in Mazar-e-Sharif. In his hands he had been cupping a white pigeon.

“Take her,” the man had said, and lifted the bird for me to see better the wonder he had held captive. The pigeon had fluttered her hollow-boned wings whitely, then settled into his palm again. “Take her.”

I had touched the pigeon’s neck with my fingertips. “The lunatic clutching a pigeon, stroking it hour after hour / until his fingers and its feathers fuse into a single crumb of tenderness,” Julio Cortázar wrote. The caress had enchanted. I could have gone on and on, my skin against her feathers. Soft, weightless. Divine. When she had unfolded her wings again, I could see the marble of her underbelly. And something else. Something awry. I’d looked again. Her legs had been broken.

Before the next morning, one more crane will die. Two will go to a merchant from Mazar-e-Sharif, who will come to pick them up in a
zaranj
motor-rickshaw. Baba Nazar will give them to the merchant for free: “He is a friend,” the old man will explain. In Mazar their wings will be clipped, and they will appear for a few months among the painted life-size replicas of deer and duck decoys and live sheep and geese in a gaudy petting-zoo-cum-sculpture in the middle of a rotary on the main road to the airport. The remaining two Baba Nazar will give, also for free, to Amin Bai. The Commander, in turn, will present them as gifts to an old friend of his in Karaghuzhlah, a minor warlord named Hassan Khan, the father of Qasim the taxi driver. For a few nights later in the year Hassan Khan will be my host. I will see the cranes again in his backyard, and something inside me will shrink.

•   •   •

The bored crowd of birdwatchers was thinning. The men left first. Thawra returned to her carpet. A few children hung around to pick up the cranes’ limp wings and let them drop again on the ground. The feathers gathered and unfolded like slats on a Japanese hand fan. On a relatively dung-free mound of hardened clay near her house, Choreh Gul had settled, baby Zakrullah in her arms, to watch the cranes through the legs of Amanullah’s donkey picketed to a rusted artillery shell casing. Mullahs’ prayers were sewn into the bits of cloth on Zakrullah’s hat, coins on his blankets jingled for protection from the jinn. Did they work? Who knew? It could certainly get worse. The baby could get sick again and die. Cranes could stop falling out of the sky.

The sun fell inexorably toward the horizon. The air was pink. In the southern distance the Hindu Kush for the first time that day was becoming three-dimensional, slowly, like a print in a photographer’s darkroom. Veiled by late-afternoon haze. Neither copper nor lavender nor blue. Some uncertain color. Like life and death in Afghanistan.

THE WEDDING

T
he two-thirty a.m. to Kabul was operated by Bazarak Panjshir International Bus Transport Co. It was a white and scarlet fifty-seven-seat Mercedes-Benz decommissioned from Busverkehr Imfeld, a charter company established in 1946 in Landstuhl, Germany, though the bus itself had been assembled in the eighties.
MIT UNS KOMMEN SIE AN
! the former owner’s motto proclaimed in firehouse red and gold from the side. Escape hatches were marked
NOTAUSSTIEG
. Above the driver’s cabin, a sign instructed
NO SMOKIN
. Cardboard peaches of air freshener dangled from the handrails, and small plastic trashcans, untethered, slid about the floor of the aisle at each turn, each steep incline, each descent. There was no bathroom on board. Passengers had to buy tickets in advance at a kiosk near the Blue Mosque. The seats were numbered, and the seating was assigned.

The bus took on passengers and cargo at the Kabul Bus Terminal in southeastern Mazar-e-Sharif, where the Hindu Kush sloped toward the city in soft pleats of drab shale. The terminal was a vast patch of trampled dirt littered with empty and crushed plastic water bottles, goat droppings, susurrous tinsel of wrappers from Iranian biscuits, rotting peels of miniature Jalalabad bananas, human excrement, strips of cloth. The Mazaris called it “The Harbor.” Subliminal memories of a sixty-thousand-year-old coastal journey out of Africa, pelagic dreams pressed into ephemeral figure eights by bus tires on a landlocked desert floor.

Most buses, like the Bazarak Panjshir International, left Mazar-e-Sharif before dawn. There were no streetlights. Gray dust danced and swallowed the short shafts of light from the bus headlights and the bus windows checkered the dirt into pale rhombi and the cigarette ends of drivers and hucksters carved small arcs in the night. Propane lamps blinked from within the tattered canvas wings of concession stands like dwarf stage lighting, and the stands themselves looked like puppet theaters some eccentric patron had ordered upon this grubby panorama. White pigeons cooed softly over pools of overnight piss. Sandaled porter boys materialized out of the black to grab at passengers’ bags and usher the more tentative and lost-looking travelers into buses past a flock of sheep, maybe twenty head including a suckling lamb that, too, waited for their ride south. Mulberry wind buried the half-moon in smog. From the residential neighborhood to the north, the stuffy night carried the somnolent braying of donkeys, night watchmen’s lonesome whistles, dreams. A boy with a red plastic shopping basket walked through the aisle of the bus calling, “Cake, biscuit, what do you want?” Behind him an old man carried small round flatbreads in a stack almost as tall as himself. The passengers dug in their pockets for change. “Here,
jan
!” “Come back here,
jan
!” “Give us those biscuits,
jan
.” “Do you have any cold soda?”

A few minutes before the scheduled departure, a white minivan rolled up to the bus terminal. The minivan driver swung open the back doors and pulled out a long burlap sack. A name, a telephone number, and a Kabul address were written on the canvas in thick black marker. The man slung the bundle over his shoulder, lugged it to the bus, and heaved it through the open hatch of the baggage compartment. Inside the sack, wound into five tight scrolls, were five carpets.

Once Abdul Shakur, Baba Nazar’s wool-and-carpet dealer in Dawlatabad, buys Thawra’s carpet, he will call one of the carpet merchants in Mazar-e-Sharif to come and pick it up. In Mazar-e-Sharif, the merchant will send the carpet to be washed of bits of dung, particles of straw, and demoiselle crane feathers that might be stuck to the surface. Then he’ll spread it on the floor of his dealership in Carpet Row, which fringes the eastern border of the Blue Mosque’s rose garden like a strip of dark and expensive velvet, fold up a corner, and run his fingernail along the reverse side to evaluate the density of Thawra’s weave. He will study the pile for the woman’s inadvertent mistakes, a deep blue dot missing from a petal, a leaf along the ridge that suddenly blooms burgundy instead of scarlet, the slight deviation of a line—a journal of her months at the loom. An equation will form in his mind, a particular multiplication of knots by errors by square footage, and the carpet will be assigned a new price. If the merchant is preparing a large shipment of carpets that week, a hundred or more, he will fold the carpet pile side out and stack it in the corner of the shop until such a shipment is put together to be carried by truck either south to Kabul or west to Turkmenistan and on to one of the largest carpet bazaars in the world, in Istanbul. But if no truck shipment is on the horizon, he very likely will roll up Thawra’s rug pile side in, stuff it into a burlap sack with four or five others, write the address of a sister dealership in Kabul on the sack, and assign a relative to take it to the bus terminal and get it into the cargo hold of a coach with a fancy English name such as Bazarak Panjshir International, or Kadrat Bus and Travel, or Hesarak Panjsher Bus Transport. For less than twenty-five dollars per bundle—about five dollars a rug—the bus driver will carry Thawra’s carpet out of Bactria.

•   •   •

Eighteen minutes past schedule, the biscuit boy with the red shopping basket and the old baker disembarked and squatted on the curb to count their earnings by the rectangular lights cast by the bus windows. The passengers—a few women, wraithlike in their burqas, but mostly well-groomed businessmen headed to the capital in good leather shoes—shifted in their seats, muttered prayers. The bus was scheduled to arrive in Kabul at around ten in the morning, but it was always late. Some buses didn’t make it there at all, but that, passengers and drivers agreed, was God’s will.

The driver walked down the aisle to make sure each passenger had the correct seat and handed out thoughtful plastic bags, in case the travelers got carsick on the switchbacks. He was a Kabuli and looked like a washed-up rock star. Graying hair fell below his shoulders in greasy strands from under a brown crocheted skullcap, heavy silver rings shone on both hands, a silver brooch amulet was pinned to his vest. He had been a bus driver for thirty years, shuttling along the same route, Kabul–Mazar–Kabul. He made the journey three or four times a week. Each time he traveled south, he carried in his cargo hold a shipment of carpets.