The World is a Carpet (28 page)

But when I called the rehab in Mazar to ask about bringing in a new patient, they said the wait for a bed in the detoxification unit was two months, and when I relayed that to Abdul Rashid and Choreh and Amin Bai, the men clicked their tongues and shook their heads, and Amin Bai said: “I can’t predict what will happen in two months. I can’t predict what is going to happen even tomorrow!”

No one could plan that far ahead in Oqa, so parlously poised between the ancient and the modern, between the world in which artisans hand-carved wooden doors and the world in which these wooden doors were thrust under car tires, between the world of bartered calligonum and the world of two-gigabyte cell phone SIM cards. This village where time at once stood still and slipped by too swiftly to take measure of it, incalculate and unreliable like sand, like atomized grief itself—no one, except for the weavers of carpets.

•   •   •

“One meter left,” Thawra said, without looking up. Exhausted. In pain. Her voice so quiet. Probably wishing for the opiate relief her husband and father-in-law had forbidden her.

The two men were leaning into the loom room now, appraising her work.

“It may be finished in twenty, twenty-five days,” Amanullah thought out loud.

“I think she’ll be done in a month,” Baba Nazar agreed. “I’ll sell it to a dealer in Dawlatabad or Mazar—whoever will take it.” The year before he had sold Thawra’s carpet for almost four hundred dollars. But that carpet had been twice as wide. The hunter’s lips moved as he worked out the figures in silence. Then he pulled out his ultimate bargaining chip, the one he would offer the merchant to drive up the price, and tried it out on his son, his daughter-in-law, me, the three wobbly chickens that stirred in their down atop the bottom of the carpet.

“It’s hard to follow the design.”

Amanullah studied his wife then. Her bony arms bare from the elbows down, no jewelry apart from the single silver and garnet ring she had traded from me for a hematite bracelet. He shook his head and walked out of the room, preoccupied.

That evening on our way to the city, Qasim and I drove Amanullah out to the desert where he had left his camels to graze. The plain dry and lifeless. The camels slow in the heat. Amanullah turned in the passenger seat.

“Anna, do you think my wife is too skinny?” he asked. “I told her to stop weaving because she’s too thin. I worry about her. That’s why she sometimes weaves and sometimes doesn’t. So it’ll take her a long time. She won’t be finished in twenty days.”

Then he looked past me, looked at his tiny pale village through the dust-smeared rear window of the taxicab.

“Is this a place worth living?” he said. “The one thing it’s got going for it is that it’s safe. We are too far from everything to be remembered. No one from outside comes here.”

•   •   •

Once during Ramadan, Amanullah called me at dawn and said he was in a
zaranj
headed to Mazar-e-Sharif. We agreed to meet outside the Blue Mosque’s north gate. Two hours later from the backseat of Qasim’s taxi, I watched my friend pick his uncertain way through a crowd made up mostly of village daytrippers like him, or else immigrants from distant hamlets looking for city work, nameless contributors to the world’s latest great migration, the largest population shift in human history. That year population experts in the West were predicting that within a century villages like Oqa would disappear, eroded by depravity and privation, dismantled by the globalized pull of modernity. Metropolises would be full of men like Amanullah, seduced into urban living, bewildered by the sweaty chaos of one another’s bodies, humbled by the sparkling blues of the old shrine, confused by the jumble of traffic, shrunken by the awesome speed and volume of the city. There among these selfsame nomads and farmers walked Amanullah, his face pained, haggard, his shoulders drawn, the familiar swing gone from his arms. His strabismus a grimace of suffering. Then he spotted my car and got into the seat next to Qasim and spread his shoulders and stretched out his legs and smiled. Safe again.

We drove around. We drove to a public garden that had a Ferris wheel and two carousels and trampled hard grass behind an iron palisade. The gate was locked. We drove to the hills south of the city and got out of the car and from a dirt road watched the city choke on her own thirsty smog. We drove back into the city and drove to the bazaar, and Amanullah bought shampoo from a stall sticky with last night’s melon juice. Then he announced that the city had worn him out, and he farewelled us and left in another
zaranj
for Oqa to watch Thawra’s belly round out a little more each day under that shapeless calico dress, the rest of her still fishbone-thin, and to watch her carpet inch, knot by knot,
thk, thk, thk,
toward the top beam of her loom, toward completion, toward the chance of another winter not so hungry.

THE BLIZZARD

T
he drought broke on Eid al-Adha: the Festival of Sacrifice, Islam’s most beloved celebration, which salutes the devotion of Abraham and marks the end of the hajj. Cloudfuls of snow emptied onto the vineyards of Shomali and on the Hindu Kush and on the parched Bactrian plains and on the grainy immensity of Dasht-e-Leili. In Kabul each morning for a week, giant white flakes folded out of a purple predawn sky during the four-thirty prayer as if beckoned down by a muezzin’s serenade to rest upon pushcarts abandoned in the frozen brown street mud the night before, upon a little beggar girl in a bloodred dress, upon men cocooned in camelwool blankets slushing to open their shops, upon a boy in a soiled parka riding a donkey bareback and barefoot with his nose running and his mouth open spookily and full of chewed-up straw. The mountains that ranged between the capital and the Khorasan turned completely white like the crimped linen of some ancient god who had risen hastily and left his Cretaceous bed unmade.

Through a pale yellow patina of late-morning clouds and smog, a tentative sun spotlighted islands of brilliant snow on pushcarts and windowsills and flat rooftops. The whole of Kabul Valley was a crinkled primed canvas, and it was impossible to tell where the mountains ended and the clouds began. Hard rock withered into vapor, and more vapor issued from the lips and lids of crockery and plastic ewers for washing and cups of green tea and from the labyrinthine nostrils of downcast pack animals. The capital breathed outside time and smelled forever of onions and lamb grease and juniper roots that burned in the rusty
bukhari
stoves of its residents.

The latticed marble grave of Babur, the first Mughal emperor, presided over this etched monochrome from the large terraced garden the king himself had helped build in the sixteenth century to cascade to the Kabul River. Babur, né Zahiruddin Muhammad of Fergana, descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, was a refined connoisseur of beauty who occasionally ordered his enemies impaled and burned and skinned alive. It was he who exported to India from his beloved Kabul both the luxurious carpets and the art of weaving them. Above Babur Gardens, the vermiform old city wall that outlined the capital’s southern boundary ran from Mount Shir Darwazah to the fifth-century stone bulwarks of Bala Hissar, an Afghan army garrison, the symbol of bygone Afghan might, its tortured masonry gray and gagged with snow. Within these twenty-foot walls in 1832, the Afghan emir Dost Mohammad made fateful friends with the British political agent Alexander Burnes. The two had talked, according to the historian Peter Hopkirk, “cross-legged together on a carpet in a room otherwise devoid of furniture.” Not fifty years later, the British, by then almost unanimously reviled in Afghanistan, erected inside the fort what one officer described as “a long grim row of gallows,” on which they hanged nearly a hundred Afghan men for insurrection.

Downhill from Bala Hissar, Kabul’s largest cemetery opened like a white-gloved palm toward the city’s largest livestock market. Halfway to it, near the hexagonal black-and-white and graffitied marble grave of the 1970s crooner Ahmad Zahir, a housewife had strung a clothesline from a pear tree to a mausoleum. Copper and red dresses and blue cotton underpants waved at all the dead like a more practical rendition of flags on a martyr’s grave. One woman’s unsubtle rebuke to her violent world. The sheep and goats and cows below the cemetery lowed and bleated softly and stomped in frozen dirt and farther downhill from the animals a construction market stretched its palisades of debarked poplar beams and bamboo rods along a road that flowed with the shin-deep slush of cemetery snowmelt and livestock refuse all the way north to Ghazi Stadium. Amanullah Khan, Afghanistan’s westernizing king who was named
ghazi
—hero—for securing his country’s independence from the British in 1919, built the stadium in 1923; in the 1990s, the Taliban used its pitch to carry out public executions of the corrupt and the unchaste. North of the stadium, across the Kabul River that here dwindled to a thin green stream confined in banks of trash, lay Kabul Wa Nangarhar Street, the beginning of Highway A1—the Grand Trunk Road that connected Kabul to Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province, to Peshawar in Pakistan, to West Bengal in India, and ended in Chittagong, Bangladesh. Most carpets that left Afghanistan in the early twenty-first century—Thawra’s carpet possibly among them—traveled out of the country on this road.

•   •   •

The road between Nangarhar and Kabul is tortuous and bad: there are three or four places with very, very narrow passes, and two or three areas with defiles. The Khirilji and Afghans, all of whom are highway robbers, made the road unsafe,” Babur wrote in
The Baburnama
, the first true autobiography in Islamic literature. (He composed it in Chagatai Turkic, the extinct language of the statesman-poet Alisher Nava’i, whose work the great Padishah had read during his conquest of Herat in 1506.) Five centuries later the road was a meandering and suppurating lesion ninety-five miles long. Where did the chronicle of iniquities writ upon it begin to unscroll? At Ghazi Stadium, where athletes once again kicked soccer balls on astroturf spread over the old pitch so blood-soaked from executions that it was said grass wouldn’t grow on it? Or in Khurd Kabul, now the bland and barren badlands of car mechanics’ tin shacks, where in January of 1842 the future emir Wazir Akbar Khan had orchestrated the ambush and slaughter of sixteen thousand British soldiers and camp followers? Engine oil and gasoline and brown snow seeped into the soil to mingle with their remains. Two Black Hawk helicopters hovered over that old boneyard and then nuzzled down, down the Kabul River gorge. Down to where the road wound past charred and blistered and mangled oil tankers and NATO supply trucks incinerated in recent months by the mortars and rockets of the Taliban. Their debris had been pushed off the road and onto narrow shoulders to rest against the brown and black scarps of igneous rock tagged
MOC
and
OMAR
by the sappers of Mine Ordnance Clearance and the Organization for Mine Clearance and Afghan Rehabilitation, who in earlier decades had tried to tweeze out of the cuestas the land mines planted during the war with the Soviets. The helicopters disappeared. The hazel river curved and twisted and thrust onto the steep clint banks shoulder-high heaps of detergent foam. Just before Tangi Mahi Par—the Gorge of Fish Scales—a single aspen and some willows flashed gold and silver, and a banner stretched over the two asphalt lanes bid, in English,
GOOD-BYE
.