The World is a Carpet (2 page)

Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, lauded Turkoman weavers for producing “the best and handsomest carpets in the world.” Six hundred years later, Francis Henry Bennett Skrine, a retired commissioner of the Indian Civil Service, and the London linguist Sir Edward Denison Ross wrote that Turkoman carpets were “unrivalled in Asia for beauty and durability.” For their rich palette of reds—mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent of the fratricidal blood that soaks their land—the Turkomans are called the Rembrandts of weaving.

•   •   •

Fine clay dust will filter into Thawra’s mud-and-dung loom room as she weaves. Through the scrub-brush lath ceiling there will seep into the room particles of manure, infinitesimal flecks of gold from nearby barchans, the terrible black cough of her neighbors’ famished children, echoes of the war that jolts the plains and contorts the Cretaceous massifs of her land. A roadside bomb will go off, and the desert outside her doorless entryway will groan in response with the phantom footfalls of past invaders: Achaemenid and Greek, Mughal and Arab, Ottoman and Russian, British and Soviet. A speck of an American Navy F/A-18 strike fighter will catch a sudden sunray on its wing and for the instant it pierces the incredibly high azure it will become a ghost of a different glint: on Genghis Khan’s sword before it split the skull of a Bactrian housewife, on the barrel of a guerrilla’s
jezail
matchlock before it discharged at some subaltern of the Raj. Taliban scouts will appear on the path where Amanullah and I walked for yarn, then vanish again, the way all raiders come and vanish upon this eternal battleground.

Thawra’s will be a
yusufi
carpet, a diamond pattern her mother and her mother’s mother wove before her, on the backdrop of wars past. Under her thin fingers, almond-size flowers with ogival petals will shine in a field of ocher and deep maroon. Each flower will bloom from two hundred and forty knots she will tie by hand the way her foremothers did; each knot will be a temporal Möbius strip that ties past and present.

Once the carpet is finished it will take flight from this fantastically brutalized land that clings to the violent tectonics at the thirty-fourth parallel. Amanullah will roll it up and cram it into his donkey saddlebag, and his father will take the familiar footpath across the desert to deliver it to Dawlatabad. A middleman there will sell it to a dealer from Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in Northern Afghanistan, the modern capital of Balkh. After that, perhaps, Thawra’s carpet will be jabbed into the back of a beat-up taxicab, then tossed into the bed of a truck painted with dreamy pastorals, in which it will journey across Afghanistan’s war-racked landscape and over the border, through Pakistan’s implacable tribal areas, to the rug markets of Peshawar and Islamabad. Or maybe it will travel west, past the mass graves of Dasht-e-Leili, across the Karakum Desert, to the bazaars of Istanbul. Or else it will trundle in the trunk of a bus bound for Kabul, from where it will fly to Dubai, and from there, across the Atlantic Ocean until it alights at a dealership in the United States, the single largest purchaser of carpets on the world market at the time of this story. A wealthy patron will pay between five and twenty thousand dollars for it. Wherever her carpet ends up, for her work Thawra will be paid less than a dollar a day.

But first, she will weave. After each knot, she will cut weft yarn from its ball with a small, sweat-darkened sickle.
Thk, thk, thk,
the sickle will go, measuring time between dawn and dusk, birth and death, peace and war, measuring life immemorial.

•   •   •

By quarter to six the wind had picked up. The night faded to a phantom blue, and I could see the vapor of our breath silver into pale puffs and blow away, dispersing into the hazy distances of the plains. The land turned pewter gray, dappled and tufted like a camel’s hide. Warblers and larks chirped unseen on the ground. Moisture rose cold from ultramarine creases in the desert floor, and Amanullah mounted the donkey and tucked his hands into the sleeves of his faux sheepskin coat for warmth. The eastern sky blanched and stars began to blink out one by one until only Venus still pulsed, globular and dilated over the southeast. Beneath it, the Hindu Kush rose flat like an enormous theater backdrop, devoid of depth definition. A narrow, unbroken circle of pale red cirri frothed just above the horizon, as though the Earth were a furnace lid trying to contain some ineffable flame. Northwest of us, the decaying dragon’s teeth of a long-vanquished, two-thousand-year-old Kushan castle mawed at the world. We passed a shepherds’ shelter molded out of clay. The frassy cutbank of the Hazara Ditch that had been dry since who knows when. A tank berm from some former misbegotten war. A chunk of mortar shrapnel dinged under the donkey’s hoof. From time to time, furrows crisscrossed the land where farmers from one of the bigger villages had chartered a field a long time ago, back when there had been water to irrigate the land. Amanullah rode sidesaddle across this grid and plotted his escape.

“I’m thirty years old and the only fun I’ve known has been fucking my wife. At least that’s good. But I would like to travel someplace else before I die. Someplace more fun. I asked my father for permission to go to the city and join the army or the police. He said no. He said: ‘Stay here, this is life.’ After that, my father took all my money, because he doesn’t trust me.”

I looked at the rider. A broad man. Broomlike mustache. To keep the cold out, Amanullah had wrapped the loose end of his striped turban round his neck. Under his coat he wore a white cotton
shalwar kameez
. On his feet, a pair of slip-on shoes molded out of black rubber to look like sneakers. Even the shoelaces were molded. You got shoes like that from a heap at an Afghan bazaar, a dollar a pair; when summer came, you switched to a pair of molded rubber sandals. When he was an eight-year-old grazing his camels in the sand scrub half a day’s walk from Oqa, Amanullah found a rocket-propelled grenade in the barrens and put it on his campfire to see what would happen. The grenade blew up. A bit of shrapnel lodged in his left eye, and he developed a cataract and a pronounced convergent strabismus. The squint and the blemish gave him a mischievous look.

Now he was squinting northward. There, on the other side of the distant Oxus, pink tinsel of snow ribboned upon the Kugitang Mountains in Turkmenistan. Fantasies of flight welled in the waxing day.

“Once, I wanted to run away from the village and move to Turkmenistan,” Amanullah mused. “The plan was to go to Turkmenistan, earn a lot of money, and spend it on the girls.”

He closed his eyes.

“Girls in Turkmenistan sing beautifully.”

We walked on. The donkey ambled at a four-beat gait. The earth rang hollow like a taut belly under its hooves and Amanullah began to sing to the beat. He sang sad, chromatic songs in Turkoman about the world beyond his desert, about make-believe girls who weren’t his wife. He made up the words as he went. Flat quarter-tone tremolos spilled from deep inside his throat and bounced off tussocks that bristled with dry, frozen grass. Fahim whispered translations. Then the first sunray flashed tangerine above the Hindu Kush, blessing us all—humans and animals, weavers and wanderers, sinners and yet worse sinners. The planet turned to the oldest rhythm: moving and yearning.

A
fghanistan’s oldest surviving minaret rose sixty stocky feet out of the plains, a stern watchman over the waking world. In the early twelfth century, Seljuk invaders had braided its tower out of pale narrow brick in the village of Zadyan, two-thirds of the way between Oqa and Dawlatabad. The clay bubble wrap of Zadyan’s domed roofs stretched a mile or so to the south of the minaret, and almond groves at its foot foamed the same pink as the snowy crest of the Kugitang, as though the trees had scrounged their color from the dawn-stroked mountain range.

It was seven in the morning. Tawny arid desert yielded to swatches of startling emerald where farmers from Zadyan grew ankle-high winter wheat. On an earthwork some hundred yards to the south of the trail, three men who had been squatting now stood up and watched our procession, turning slowly with their entire torsos as we passed. Who were these men? Villagers tending their fields? Taliban scouts spying out who came and went? Bandits waiting to waylay traders headed to market with money or goods? The men did not salaam us. Amanullah heeled the donkey twice and we quickened our pace.

Amanullah steered toward the minaret. There, in the trampled clay of a large and empty square, his father, Baba Nazar, was waiting on his haunches in the slanted rays of morning.

Baba Nazar was seventy years old. I had met him a year earlier. He had been seventy years old already then. Nine months later I would ask again and he still would be seventy. Few Afghans knew how old they were: Who wanted to count the seasons of privation? When he was young, Baba Nazar’s mother would tell him each year: “Now you’re fifteen. Now you’re sixteen. Now you’re seventeen.” But his mother had been dead a long time, and there was no one to instruct Baba Nazar about his age anymore. When there was no black left in his heart-shaped goatee, he settled on seventy. Baba Nazar was a respected elder in Oqa and seventy seemed a good, respectable number. He stuck with it.

Baba Nazar was a hunter. In a special niche of his bedroom, near the old shotgun hanging from a nail driven into the mud wall, he kept a pair of Soviet army binoculars with one working telescope and a
tupcha
—a weightless, plum-size percussion he had fashioned by hand from bird cartilage and wood and hare skin. A
tupcha
imitates impeccably a quail’s call that lures a covey to the hunter, but only when it is built with the elastic skin of a freshly killed hare. The old man had to stretch the wood-and-cartilage frame anew before each quail hunt, which meant that a hare hunt always came first. Baba Nazar hunted and trapped anything warm-blooded except for the scavenger birds that wheeled over the desert in unchallenged windblown loops. Like everyone in his starved village, he did not always have enough money to buy rice and oil. But no other family in Oqa ate meat of any kind as often as the six people under Baba Nazar’s roof: the old man and his wife, the quick-faced Boston; Amanullah and Thawra; and Amanullah’s small children, son Nurullah and daughter Leila.

Because Baba Nazar knew well of Amanullah’s Odyssean longings, he did not trust him with the money to buy yarn for Thawra’s next carpet. He was going to the market himself. But first he had to stop at a nephew’s large and messy compound in Zadyan for a late breakfast of
shir roghan
, hot milk boiled with melted butter and colored pale yellow with tea leaves.

Cross-legged on a broad straw mat that covered the entire floor of a small guestroom, we crumbled fresh, hot nan into bowls of the brew and ate it, soggy, with aluminum spoons. Humus in late autumn must taste like this, I thought: mouthfuls of rich decay. A half dozen of our host’s many children crowded just outside the entrance. They hid their bodies behind the wall so that only their backlit heads leaned through the door, and studied us in silence. From time to time, one of them suddenly would begin to giggle, then another, and an older child would shush and slap them, and the sniggering children would peel off from the group and disappear entirely behind the wall, then reappear moments later, still shaking with soundless laughter.

Baba Nazar and I shared a bowl. He caught me looking at the children and asked me about mine and said that it must be difficult for me to be this far away from home.

I could have told him that I did not have a home. That I was afflicted with “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed,” to borrow the description of nostalgia from the Harvard scholar Svetlana Boym—a longing not for a geography but a state of mind; for what Bruce Chatwin, on a quest to rationalize his wanderlust, had explained as our primordial need to remain in motion. That I had spent my adult life in motion of one sort or another in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, Africa. That I had been coming to Afghanistan since before American warplanes dropped their first payload on Kabul in 2001. That on my first visit, on assignment for a San Francisco newspaper, I had blacked out from malaria or dysentery or both in a dried-out tidal freshwater marsh just south of the Amu Darya, the Oxus of modern maps, of recent conflicts, of land mines and opium smugglers. When I awoke in a fluted forest of reeds, on gray sand runed by ibisbills and migrating cranes, alone, thirsty, lost, I heard, beneath the vault of the staticky stillness of a sun-scorched wasteland, the shouts of children gathering the bitter leaves of the orach plant for dinner, the crackling of a radio promising a new war, women’s laughter. I heard life unyielding. And then someone, a child, was handing me a plastic water bottle. Perhaps I had come back for this: the unobstructed sky, the resilient candor of my hosts who wove joy out of sorrow, the seductive contrast between the ancient and the modern, between the unspeakable violence and the inexpressible beauty—even some dubious personal vastation that made me more alert to the intricacies of life shaped within such precarious balancing. This was the friction that pierced me the first time I saw Oqa, in 2010, when I met Baba Nazar and his family, and watched for the first time his daughter-in-law squat upon the loom. That visit had lasted an afternoon. I had to return. I had to return and spend more time here—the time it took to weave a carpet.