The World is a Carpet (23 page)

T
hat Ramadan, the water in Oqa’s wells dropped three feet.

“Oy, Khoda
jan
,” the villagers would sough God’s name after they leaned over the southern well and lowered the yellow plastic ten-liter bucket into the double girdle of concrete well rings on a frayed twisted rope of manila hemp. The bucket once had held cooking oil. It took longer to fall, and it took the villagers three more hand-over-hand heaves to haul the full bucket back up. Then they would pour the water into one of their own yellow jerry cans that still sometimes bore fading and shredded labels with the names of the products they once had contained—motor oil, cooking oil, paint thinner—and lower the bucket into the well again and bring it up again, each time invoking the name of God, seventy-eight feet of cordage burning their palms instead of seventy-five, until their yellow fleet of plastic containers was full of brackish and murky water, and it was time to lug them all the way up the cracked earth of the southern slope of their hummock.

The drought parched the entire Turkestan Plains. It shriveled and dried the harvest of almonds inside their porous hulls, and it withered apricot orchards spectral. It evaporated the tepid ooze from irrigation canals and sent
shamals
whispering through the dikes. It pulverized rice paddies into an ocher shroud that the hot wind of August picked up and hung between the land and the sky. Meteorologists in Europe were reporting that Afghanistan was in the fiftieth year of a continuous decline in rainfall.

In winter and early spring, the rain would linger, frozen, atop the bluest peaks of Bamyan until the warm months, when it would drip-feed Bactria’s north-flowing Balkh River, which, in turn, would irrigate the thirsty fields and pastures through an elaborate and age-old tapestry of surface and underground ditches. But the volume of the water that drained each year into the turquoise headwaters of the Balkh River in Bamyan and gurgled, muddy with alluvium, past the sonorous caverns of the Alborz Gorge and the hot springs of Chishmish Afa and there split off into manmade canals that distributed water throughout the province had shrunk almost by two-thirds over half a century. The meteorologists were predicting that within Amanullah’s and Thawra’s lifetimes a steady, unbroken drought would replace cyclical dry spells in Afghanistan for good.

How deep would the weaver and her husband need to lower the yellow plastic bucket into the diseased well then?

•   •   •

An engineer in Mazar-e-Sharif once drew for me a map of Balkh’s irrigation system on a sheet of letter paper. He drew the map upside down, orienting it toward the south, the way he had been seeing it for twenty-five years out of the south-facing window of his office at the Northern River Basin Office of the Balkh Province Department of Water. The way he would have seen it that day had it not been for the sand that veiled completely the crags of the Hindu Kush, less than ten miles away, and almost everything in front of them as well.

In the top right corner the engineer drew some zigzags.

“Mountains,” he said. “Bamyan.”

He looked at me to check that I was following and then staccatoed the corner with a rash of dots.

“Snow.”

A line sashayed through the dots and the zigzags.

“The Balkh River.”

Two sets of contour lines on either side of the river, downstream.

“The Alborz Gorge. Chishmish Afa.”

From there, the line split up into new lines that meandered north, toward the bottom of the page, and east. The engineer doubled some lines, wrote the names of the canals next to some others; he bit his lip in his effort, consumed entirely by the map, by the dikes that were running dry as he drew.

“To Mazar-e-Sharif.” The engineer pointed at the canals on the paper. “To Balkh. To Shor Teppeh. To Dawlatabad. To Karaghuzhlah and Khairabad.”

At Khairabad the line ended.

“To Oqa?” I asked, and pointed at the tip.

“To Oqa?” the engineer repeated. He held the pen halfway over the page. He frowned. “No. What’s Oqa?”

A
lone warplane circled low over the village. Boston and the men who had gathered to drink her tea in disregard of Ramadan followed its cold glint with their eyes.

“That plane is here to get Karim Jendi,” Amanullah said. Everybody chuckled. Oqa was so far away from everything, so abandoned, so anonymous, so accidentally mapped at the lip of a barchan belt by some deranged cartographer, and Karim Jendi, a poor goatherd from Khairabad, was so insignificant and bedraggled a man, that the idea that the Americans would send a whole plane after him to this forlorn village did seem like a joke.

But privately, the men were worried. They knew from the newscasts that hissed through the speakers of Baba Nazar’s radio that things like that happened. A jealous neighbor would report a man next door as an insurgent, and it would rain bombs. An irate creditor would say a defaulted sharecropper was a guerrilla commander, and soldiers would storm a sleeping compound at night with flashbang grenades. And while there was no place to land a plane near the village, it would have been no surprise, in fact, if Americans had come to Oqa for Karim Jendi because the man who was after him had told the police that the goatherd was a dangerous Talib.

That man’s name was Khan Geldi. He was a wealthy landlord who owned many acres of irrigated farmland and grazing fields in Khairabad and a house in Mazar-e-Sharif, in a neighborhood, just a few blocks from the Blue Mosque, where grape and bougainvillea vines climbed horizontal trellises to shade the neat tiles of secluded courtyards and where residents parked their absurdly clean Japanese cars alongside gutters that were almost never clogged with refuse. Under the Communists, Khan Geldi and his brother Rakhmon had served as Khalq administrators in Khairabad. Now they acted as elders for the village Turkomans. When someone had a family argument, they would separate the man from his wife. When someone had a land dispute, they would decide it.

The rich brothers exerted fairy-tale authority over their tribesmen, and their tribesmen ascribed to them fairy-tale flaws.

“They abuse the weak and steal from the indigent,” said Baba Nazar.

“They take land from the poor people and say it belongs to them,” said Amanullah.

“They wanted to take Karim Jendi’s land, but he refused to give it to them,” said Amin Bai.

After the final harvest of the previous fall, someone shot Rakhmon dead in a field outside Khairabad. Khan Geldi accused Karim Jendi of murdering his brother and told the police that Karim Jendi was an insurgent.

The police came to Khairabad for Karim Jendi four times. One time they brought with them foreign soldiers in two tanks. The foreigners parked their tanks in the cracked sun-fired pottery of the street where Karim Jendi’s house stood and waited while the police searched the house for the goatherd but found only women and children. Another time the police came without foreigners and found Karim Jendi’s father, an old hajji. They took him to Dawlatabad and put him in jail. They said they would release him only if Karim Jendi turned himself in. That was in late winter, seven months before Ramadan.

Karim Jendi, meantime, was on the lam, mostly in Oqa. Oqa seemed a good place to hide from the law.

•   •   •

“No one ever finds anyone in Oqa,” bragged Manon the shopkeeper. He himself had come to the village to hide, seventeen years earlier, from the draft board that had tracked him down in Khairabad where he had been a sharecropper, and ordered him to report for duty in Mazar-e-Sharif. He had rolled his belongings into a carpet, corralled his few goats and sheep, and trekked to Oqa across the lonely wastes worn into bald grooves by shepherds’ slippers. Here he built a cob house that faced south, faced any potential search party, faced the cemetery full of children’s graves, faced the mountains full of graves of invaders, faced the rest of Afghanistan.

From the tiny mercantile he ran out of a narrow side room of his house, Manon sold Korean cigarettes, wooden Russian matches in boxes decorated with drawings of biplanes, Pakistani acetaminophen in tablets, Crown safety razor blades, soap, sugar, dirty black raisins for pilau and dried chickpeas by the kilo, padlocks with keys, some veterinary medicine, hard candy, and condoms. The men of Oqa did not use condoms. These were for the children, who inflated them into long pale balloons.

Now that there was no longer a draft, Manon was free to leave Oqa. He did not. He stocked up in Mazar-e-Sharif once every few days and carried his wares by taxi to Khairabad, where he loaded them onto a camel and walked it to Oqa. He had two sons, three-year-old Azizullah, who still took suck at least twice daily from the full breasts of Manon’s quiet and beautiful wife, and fifteen-year-old Rakhmatullah, whom the shopkeeper was teaching to read with the help of a geographical brochure about Afghanistan that had lost its binding years ago and was now a pile of single pages stacked on the shop floor in no particular order. “The book has nothing about Oqa,” Manon explained. “It is mostly about mines and factories.” He was the only man in the village who knew how to read.

There were other papers in the room. On the floor next to the geographical brochure that did not mention Oqa lay Manon’s voter’s card, punctured four times, one for each time he had gone to the polls. He toed it, smiled at the joke that it seemed to him. “Nothing,” he summed up.

And on the wall, next to the shelf with two glass syringes—Manon had trained as a nurse before he had become a draft dodger and used one of the hypodermics to administer shots to sick livestock, the other to humans, for free—hung Rakhmatullah’s two beautiful drawings in colored pencil on writing paper. In each drawing a pomegranate tree grew in a pot. Each tree was heavy with enormous red fruit.

Pomegranates. They would never grow in Oqa. The boy could have drawn waterfalls. He could have drawn unicorns.

•   •   •

The men of Oqa drank their tea and shook their heads from side to side at the injustice of life that in their experience always favored the rich and always punished the poor.

“All the people who are working for the government know this is not right. But they are just taking Khan Geldi’s orders.”

“Khan Geldi paid the police to arrest Karim Jendi.”

“Five hundred dollars!”

“They eat money!”

“The dreaded Karim Jendi is just a poor goatherd with four goats.”

“He’s a good man. A Turkoman. We are from the same tribe. We are from the same land. We are relatives.”

Qaqa Satar, no kin of Turkomans, clicked his tongue and said that Karim Jendi was a dangerous bandit who would kidnap me and sell me to the Taliban. He said Karim Jendi was the reason he had refused to let me spend the night in Oqa in the spring.

Amin Bai spat out the cigarette butt that had burnt to a rank stub in the corner of his mouth and spat a tiny white speck of saliva after it.

“Karim is my friend,” he said to me. “Don’t worry about Karim. If I don’t give an order, he can’t do anything to you.”

The last sentence made me nervous. I asked Amin Bai why he would ever give anyone an order to do anything to me. He laughed and said nothing.

The plane looped round and round overhead, and we watched and watched until at last the plane was gone.

It had not bombed Oqa.

•   •   •

I did meet Karim Jendi once. He was squatting in the corner of Baba Nazar’s
namad
. He seemed in his forties, fatigued. He wore a tattered brown
shalwar kameez
, a gray vest, a tartan turban. His sandals of molded plastic sat in the dust at the edge of the blanket, heels together, toes facing away from the rug, ready to be slipped on in a hurry: a fugitive’s footwear. His shirt’s elbows had patches. His feet had sores. He looked weak. He owned twenty goats. His first name, Karim, meant “giving, generous.” His second name, Jendi, in Farsi meant “whore.” Uttered together, they sounded funny. Everybody laughed whenever someone would mention Karim Jendi’s full name.

The unfortunate man with the unfortunate name sat on Baba Nazar’s
namad
and reached inside the chest pocket of his vest and pulled out a transparent pink plastic bag and produced out of it a sheaf of creased and finger-soiled papers and unfolded it and handed me the papers one by one.