The World is a Carpet (3 page)

I could have told him what Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer, wrote in one account of his years with the Beduin of Arabia: that anyone who has stayed in places like this “will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature.” Once upon a time, we all were walking across the desert. We all carry that brand, the mark of Cain. I had been returning forever.

I could have told him all of that. Instead I told him that as a foreign correspondent I was accustomed to being away because I had been traveling, to Afghanistan and other places, since I had become an adult; that my son, who was thirteen, was used to my absences; and that he, Baba Nazar, was very kind to ask.

And all of it was true.

Baba Nazar spooned a glob of fat-pearled bread into his mouth and sucked on it for a while and pronounced: “That trail you just walked on? Even a police car cannot go there because of the Taliban. And you went on foot!”

I thought of the men we had seen in the field of winter wheat. Of Amanullah, who made the trek every fortnight to stock up on flour, and sometimes, money permitting, on oil and rice. Of millions of Afghans who journeyed on such foot-worn paths—to market; to clinics where jaded and unqualified nurses prescribed acetaminophen for any and every ailment because acetaminophen was all their pharmacies carried; to school, walking or riding their pack animals through a perpetual war that threatened the slower rhythm of their movement and dictated it at the same time.

It was possible to romanticize this land, this temporal Grand Canyon where millennia condensed in valleys between the crescents of dunes and unfurled again out of carpet knots, this seemingly organic realm where every movement was meaningful with endurance, and every step was an immense journey toward survival. It was possible to exoticize it. Then a newborn overdosed on opium. Women wailed over the slight body of a six-year-old boy mangled by a thirty-year-old land mine. Men squatted against hand-slapped mud walls and smoked cheap Korean cigarettes elaborately, as though smoking were itself an act consequential and profound, and pondered life and death in a country where war was not a marquee but a hideous and continuous sideshow that picked its victims at random.

•   •   •

After breakfast, Amanullah and his donkey remained in Zadyan, and Baba Nazar continued to Dawlatabad in the dark gray Toyota Corolla of the man who was working with me at the time as a driver. The hunter would have taken a taxi, one of the yellow and white jalopies that rattled villagers from Zadyan to Dawlatabad on bazaar mornings for seventy cents a person, but we had been eating
shir roghan
and had missed the last taxi out of the village.

The owner of the Corolla was a tall and lean Pashtun in his mid-forties, with a long, very black beard and long, very black hair that he combed with great and deliberate elegance into his brown
paqul
hat. He kept a wad of dip tucked under his lower lip most of the time, and he kept an ancient Luger Parabellum wrapped in a cut of brown camel wool and stashed next to the hand brake. The pistol, a German museum piece of World War I vintage, had been his grandfather’s. I never saw him fire it, though I did see him cock it a few times. Everyone I knew called the man Qaqa Satar: Uncle Satar. Qaqa Satar called himself, interchangeably, Talib and bin Laden. He smoked a lot of hashish, prayed five times a day, and panicked easily and often.

There was no road, and the car rocked over tussocks and shallow dry rills scooped out by some improbable bygone rain. After about twenty minutes, a great rectangular skeleton of a fortress apparitioned out of the plains. This was Kafir Qaleh, the Castle of Infidels, built more than two thousand years ago by the Kushans—the Central Asian Buddhist nomads who had come from the east, pushed out the Greco-Bactrian descendants of Alexander the Great’s army, and ruled the Khorasan for five hundred years, until the Persian Sassanid dynasty in turn overtook them in the third century. Rows of broken and sagged hemispheric roofs filled the quadrature of the castle’s massive bulwark, some thirty steep feet tall, the way rows of cracked skulls fill a mass grave: dwellings, perhaps, or maybe stupas, abandoned centuries ago. Upon the wall a translucent enfilade of ancient clay battlements tapered into wind-worn stalagmitic lace that bespoke long-forgotten offensives and defeats.

Baba Nazar pointed at the crumbled crenellations with his goateed chin.

“Their enemies would come from the desert. They would fire arrows at their enemies through these slits.” Deference resonated in his voice, a kind of awe that must come with having been born and grown old in perpetual crossfire. He thought awhile. “Yes. We had fighting in the past as well.”

Outside Kafir Qaleh in all directions unscrolled a country where history was a progression of savageries inflicted by men with ever-evolving weapons upon the same mud-brick landscape. Archaic warriors lay in ambush here for the first time some forty thousand years ago. A few months after our pit stop, before Thawra will have woven half of her carpet, the Taliban will claim dominion over these plains. After that, who knows?

Qaqa Satar killed the engine, and the men dispersed to relieve themselves upon the millennial ruins and oxidized bits of sheep crania and shards of clay pottery: the neck of a ewer some Buddhist monk must have used to wash his hands, a wisp of discolored glaze. Their figures immediately became as small in this landscape as ants. The sun stood high now and rebated off the alkaline desert, and the whole world was white. Stiff wind smeared the domed ceramic sky with milky clouds. We reconvened atop the castle’s southern wall. In the bleached plains beneath it nothing stirred.

“What do you think about this place?” I asked Baba Nazar. “Do you like it?”

I may as well have asked if he had loved his mother. For a few beats he studied me, to make sure he had heard me correctly, or else wondering what kind of a creature I was, displaced, tribeless, uncouth.

But Baba Nazar was a gracious man, and with me he was patient. He said:

“This is my country. It is beautiful.”

M
ost of the week Dawlatabad was a drab provincial grid of straight gray streets that shrank away behind shuttered and padlocked storefronts. But on bazaar days, Mondays and Thursdays, the whole town transformed into a great market. Men hawked pumice and dusty shriveled raisins and hubcaps and molded rubber shoes from shops and from pyramids piled on sidewalks and on the muddy medians. Men lounged on wooden platforms of
chai khanas
and kebab restaurants shrouded in veils of blue coal smoke from the grilling meat, and jumped gutters that ran green-black with rotting food to embrace one another in the ancient and ornate ceremonies of an Afghan greeting. Women in soiled white or blue burqas stopped to examine fresh lamb carcasses and cow sides, and to poke at live chickens that butchers pulled out of wire cages and slaughtered and skinned in a handful of swift strokes, as prescribed by the Koran. Men and women haggled over the price of hard pancakes of sesame-seed halwah and purplish carrots and imported children’s clothes and lengths of synthetic velvet printed with fuchsia and silver flowers. Rheumy boys in flip-flops no matter the weather pushed metal carts for customers come to stock up on provisions, and amputees stared blankly from the pavement over their suppurating stumps. Donkey carts wobbled and stalled in putrid puddles. Camel caravan drivers strode down the middle of the road oblivious to the exasperated motorists who leaned and leaned on their horns, and when other motorists stepped out of their cars to watch this spectacle bad Bollywood disco gushed out of open car doors and fused all of the day’s disjointed clamor into one glorious and flawless cacophony.

Baba Nazar strode with great purpose through this pandemonium. He circumnavigated a row of metal hooks displaying beef he could never afford; bounded lightly over a pile of rusty unmatched bolts arranged for sale on a piece of tarp; cut diagonally under a canvas awning stamped
UNHCR,
beneath which vegetable farmers were selling their produce; and ducked into a short alley. Along the western wall of the alley all the wooden double doors had been thrown open. In storage niches behind them giant skeins of yarn hung from ceilings and walls and spilled from languid piles onto earthen floors like seaweed cast up by some unknown ebbed sea. Thousands and thousands of yards of yarn: hundreds of meters of future carpets. Late-morning sun beat bright-white and sharp upon the yarn row, and the vegetable market around the corner hummed with the chatter of bargainers, but the wooly velvet of the browns and reds absorbed all light and sound. Behind each open door a quiet crepuscule reigned, as though the doors were portals to another world altogether. In the doorways men in turbans sat beside enormous sets of balance scales, each man a guard and guardian of that hushed world.

Baba Nazar’s savings added up to seventy dollars in afghanis frayed with use and the sweat of many previous handlers, and he carried the money in the chest pocket of his gray cotton vest. He stood by the scale of a yarn dealer named Abdul Shakur and discussed the price of wool. Abdul Shakur sat on an old wooden trunk draped with a folded camelwool
patu
blanket and Baba Nazar stood to his left. The conversation went on for several minutes. Abdul Shakur did not offer the old man tea, a common gesture to honor a customer. Nor did he offer him a seat. There were extensive silences after each man spoke. The longer they talked, the more erect Baba Nazar stood and the smaller he appeared, more timid, vulnerable, a venerable elder shrunk to the stature of a schoolboy.

Abdul Shakur had been Baba Nazar’s dealer for years. The last time Baba Nazar had purchased yarn from him, he had ended up owing Abdul Shakur some money. That had been almost a year earlier. Since then, the price of yarn had gone up by more than a third. If Baba Nazar bought enough wool for a three-by-six-meter carpet—nine feet by eighteen feet, the standard carpet size—he would end up penniless and still owing about thirty dollars. And Boston had asked him to bring back from the bazaar some carrots, onions, and potatoes.

The men conversed some more and suddenly both laughed and Baba Nazar’s posture relaxed. They had come up with a solution: Thawra would weave a narrower carpet this time, a runner, only one meter wide. It takes about five and a half kilos of wool to weave one square meter of carpet; the yarn for the whole carpet would cost Baba Nazar a little more than sixty dollars. Baba Nazar reached into his vest pocket and began to count out banknotes while one of Abdul Shakur’s teenage sons heaped skeins of cobalt yarn onto one dinged cup of the dealer’s large scale. Upon the other cup the dealer placed two spark plugs; two smooth granite rocks, each the size of a child’s head; and a rusted iron cylinder. The exact combination, the salesman and his customer agreed, that amounted to five and four-tenths of a kilo. Baba Nazar nodded, and the boy moved the yarn off the scale, dropped it on the floor, and reached back for the next color.

Over the next quarter of an hour Thawra’s future carpet assembled on the floor of Abdul Shakur’s shop: coils of terracotta, burgundy, beige, ocher, green, blue, asphalt. Seventeen kilos and two hundred grams in total. The dealer’s boys helped stuff the yarn into a burlap sack Baba Nazar had brought in the side shirt pocket of his home-stitched corduroy
shalwar kameez
. The old man handed the dealer the money, and the two bowed to each other lightly—Abdul Shakur still seated—and wished each other that God keep them both.

In the fall, when Thawra finishes the carpet she will have woven with this yarn, Baba Nazar will bring it here, and the dealer will buy it for two hundred dollars.

Baba Nazar turned his back on the shop, twisted his black-and-white neckerchief into a rope, wrapped it around the neck of the bag, took the loose ends into both hands, and hoisted the bag onto his back. Then he shook his head once, and said:

“Expensive.”

He carried the bag to Qaqa Satar’s car, threw it in the trunk, untied the neckerchief, and returned to the produce row to bargain over vegetables. He was in a foul mood and bargained rudely. A few vendors shrugged at him and waved him away. At last, he bought seven kilos each of onions and carrots, piled the vegetables into the neckerchief, and tied up the four corners into a simple knot.

He didn’t have any money left to buy potatoes.