The World is a Carpet (17 page)

•   •   •

“Ordinary people here treat political cataclysms—coups d’état, military takeovers, revolutions, and wars—as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature,” wrote the Polish journalist Ryszard
. He was describing life in Zanzibar during the revolution in 1964. He could have been describing life on the war-littered pan of the Khorasan, any given year.

War itself here aligned with the elements. It climaxed between the blooming of almonds and the harvesting of pomegranates, when the persistent sun of late spring and summer unlocked the subarctic mountain passes and stilled the brown veins of gravelly snowmelt and smoothed the white roadless desert into the widest road imaginable, a salt-caked craquelure that blinded and stung and suffocated by day, but by night exhaled the accumulated heat in soft, windblown caresses upon whichever men bore arms that season. Upon the nineteenth-century guerrillas wielding
jezail
matchlocks against the British Raj in the romantic crescent light of the moon. Upon the twentieth-century anti-Soviet mujaheddin. And, the year of Ozyr Khul’s wedding, upon the turbaned and masked motorcycle riders of the Taliban.

Methodical and unobstructed, and mostly without a shot, the Taliban laid claim to the villages that spread from Balkh in paisley daubs of fruit gardens and leas. Karaghuzhlah, where two of the demoiselle cranes Baba Nazar had poisoned out of the clouds stood sentinel among wooly sheep and scrawny chickens in the yard of a small-time warlord. Zadyan, where the hunter’s daughter, Zarifshah Bibi, lived with her disfigurements, her ancient husband, and her two small children. Karshigak, where Abdul Shakur the wool dealer colored his yarn with the root of wild madder and synthetic dyes from Pakistan. Khairabad, where Oqa’s boys and men went to barter calligonum for rice and whole-wheat flour. Through a breach in Bala Hissar’s western wall you could see, here and there, a black Taliban flag flutter above an orchard. At least one flew in Khoja Aqa Shah-e-Wali, a village where we stopped on the way from the fort. This village was best known for a mosque engirdled by a vast garden of centennial mulberry trees that in May stood heavy with fruit, pale yellow and purple like coagulated blood.

A hundred trees must have grown there on a grid. Families and groups of young men and separate groups of delicate schoolgirls in inadequate heels lounged under the shady branches on homespun blankets. Slender sapphire coils of smoke curled past the trunks from a kebab grill somewhere and among the leaves a thousand birds sang and the fresh sky above the orchard shone like a vault of polished glass. I bought a small packet of cold mango juice from a vendor’s icebox and picked berries off the trees. Denuding the branches as if I were a goat until my belly felt very sweet, and that made me laugh, and the families I passed smiled and waved and settled back to their picnics because, Taliban or not, it was Friday.

Come to the orchard in Spring.

There is light and wine, and sweethearts

in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.

If you do come, these do not matter.

—
RUMI

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The Taliban came to Oqa that May, as well. They came at night and revved their motorcycles in the moon-blued dust and had a word with Amin Bai the Commander and left. I asked the Commander what they had talked about. “Life,” he said. He would say no more. They brought no flags, took nothing, and staked no land claims.

“We are of no use to them,” Amin Bai would say later. “We are too far from everything.”

T
he day before the wedding, a sedate stillness fell over the village. Hot sun had wrung all color out of the sky and along the faded horizons whitecap clouds lay static like the white trim of a prayer rug. Across the iambic plains the hours stretched syrupy and swollen by the heat.

Mid-morning, the Prophet Mohammed floated out of the nacreous desert astride the Buraq, the heavenly winged beast.

For a minute the rider and his mythical mount pranced through molten air, huge and diffracted and veering in the rising heat. Then they shrank and touched down, and the rider became Baba Nazar and his ride the hunter’s gray donkey and its wings panniers stuffed to overflowing with skeletonweed, animal feed the old man had picked on his way home from Khairabad, where he had been visiting with a relative and where green and tepid sludge still pooled in irrigation ditches. The hunter unsaddled the burro, hitched it to the artillery shell casing dug into the ground outside the loom room, heaped the feed by the iron bed, and went indoors to sweat in the shade of his house.

Where Boston and Thawra were preparing lunch in the kitchen.

The kitchen stove was a pair of conical clay ovens raised out of the dirt floor next to each other and severed open at the vertexes, each with room inside for a small kindling fire and a side opening through which to feed it. On one of them the quartered leg of a two-month-old kid Baba Nazar had slaughtered the day before hissed in a grimy pressure cooker. The walls above the stove were hung with dusty jerry cans and dusty pitchers and dusty burlap sacks sagging with something, everything dusty and held up by sticks driven into the mud walls. The low ceiling was grass thrown on top of uneven wooden beams. A single phosphorescent ray of sun, like a white and coruscating column, did not beam down through a gap in the roofing but rose upward to it from a blackened water pitcher on the floor. By that alien and solid shaft of light Boston and Thawra squatted, their faces in a Vermeer glow, frying onions in a large black wok, peeling and cutting potatoes over an aluminum basin, working in comfortable silence, in a timeworn synergy much older than their kitchen or their village. A pair of acolytes of an ancient order, the order of hearth keepers.

Lunch was served in Amanullah’s bedroom on the old houndstooth
dastarkhan
. The steaming lava of Boston’s goat and potato stew, heaped upon a large round pewter tray, drowned in oily onion puree colored scarlet by a dollop of tomato paste from a can I had brought from Mazar-e-Sharif, because tomato paste was a luxury in the village. Two loaves of whole-wheat nan, craggy and misshapen like Oqa’s own hummock, their crusts so hard they rang when tapped with a fingernail, their crumb warm and soft and moist and slightly sour and earthy like a grandmother’s embrace. A small chipped porcelain bowl of fresh camel-milk yogurt, spumy, cloudlike. The green thermos with pale hot tea. We pinched scalding strings of meat out of the stew with burning fingertips and shared a single aluminum spoon to take turns with the yogurt. No one spoke. It was one of those meals that strike you aphasic, that you remember later not with your tongue but with your very diaphragm. Every meal Boston cooked was like that.

“What, this?” Baba Nazar said when, later, I bowed to his wife in gratitude. “Pah! I could have cooked this myself!”

And Boston, who was sitting on the wooden threshold with her elbows on her knees and her palms cupping her cheeks, laughed and waved her hands at him and said: “Great! Go! Go to the kitchen! You’ll be the cook tomorrow!”

But she knew she really couldn’t call his bluff. Because tomorrow was wedding day in Oqa, and someone else was preparing lunch.

T
he wedding chef came by
zaranj
at dawn. His name was Jan Mohammad. He was an older brother of Abdul Rashid, Oqa’s most desperate heroin addict, who often weaved through the village with dull bruised eyes, thin and blueskinned, listing under some drug-induced weight. Jan Mohammad was serious, stout, established-looking, and lived in Khairabad, where he had a big family and owned a few fields. With him he had brought to Oqa two young apprentices, three broad shovels with wooden handles, two thin brown
patu
blankets of fine sheep’s wool, one washed-out muslin bedsheet, one sheet of black tarpaulin, and one five-hundred-gallon cast-iron vat, the same kind wool dyers used to stain carpet yarn. The vat was encrusted with generations of black grease on the outside and came with three dozen dinged pewter serving trays that had been scoured absolutely, surreally spotless. The chef ordered the
zaranj
driver to deliver all this to the northern edge of the village, not far from where Naim’s bull camel had serviced a Toqai cow that winter—the best spot, all in Oqa agreed, for a morning of industrial-scale cooking.

Jan Mohammad’s assistants dug a shoulder-deep pit, built a calligonum fire in it, and lowered the vat onto the fire. Into the vat they emptied two five-liter jerry cans of oil and, when that came to a smoky boil, a bushel of quartered onions, four kilos of veal in creamy-pink chunks each the size of a fist, seventeen and a half kilos of rice, and enough buckets of well water to cover the lot. By six-thirty in the morning, the scent of stewed onions and meat inundated every corner of Oqa. It twisted and pulled at the stomachs of the villagers and the men began to congregate around the fire pit, though a sense of decorum kept the women from joining. On a fire nearby, ten crane-necked pitchers of water were boiling for tea, and a few steps away, a group of young men were performing the redundant task of washing the impeccably clean serving trays with bunches of straw in a basin of murky well water. Beyond them, dappled with a chain of identical oval cloud shadows, the dunes sang.

Ralph A. Bagnold, the British troubadour of sand, has described
the rare hummed canticle as “the great sound which in some remote places startles the silence of the desert.” Bagnold had dedicated years to researching the behavior of desert sand in the ergs of Libya and in a personal wind tunnel he had built in England, and published his observations in 1941 in one elegant volume titled
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes
. Yet even to this scholar who had scrutinized the anatomy of dunes grain by grain, the mechanics of the song remained a mystery. The chapter on singing dunes is the book’s last. It ends thus: “Much more work will have to be done before the ‘song of the sands’ is understood.”

But in Oqa everyone understood: the dunes were singing a wedding song that morning.