The World is a Carpet (31 page)

Tenderness spilled through my abdomen and down my arms, and my fingertips felt warm for the first time in days. I pictured Thawra’s weaving hands eaten raw by the weather under her improbable thistle roof. Then Amin Bai took the cell phone from Amanullah and said there was no road to come on and told me to wait for the rain to abate.

Two weeks would pass before anyone could leave or enter Oqa.

•   •   •

That night I wore two sweaters over two pairs of
shalwar kameez
and slept poorly under a heavy polyester blanket and a sheepskin coat, and when I did sleep I had a neverending nightmare. In it, my laptop, my notebooks, my pens were all washed away by a flood, vanished in an umber gruel that had come from all directions.

S
ee this corner? In the time of the Taliban they hanged a young man in this place.”

“See this shrine? Seven brothers were killed here. They were Uzbek. They were fleeing the Taliban, in 1997. We were all fleeing then.”

“See this flag? One brother killed another brother here over land. It was after the fall of the Taliban. Then someone killed the killer; I’m not sure who.”

“See this poplar grove? There was a bloody fight between the mujaheddin and the Pashtuns here, in the second year of the Taliban’s rule. It went on for days.”

“See this crater? A Talib on a bicycle blew up here and killed a storekeeper before Nawruz. I was at a café down the block, finishing my lunch.”

“Anna! See this?”

Mnemonics of gore charted young Qasim’s world. See what now? What was I looking at? The frosted jags of the Hindu Kush against the cold blush of dawn. A golden eagle lifting up heavily from a limestone outcrop to hunt for breakfast. The taxi driver saw a crime scene. He said: “There was a mullah five years ago, Mullah Ghafur. He was Baluch, from Karaghuzhlah. A man called Shir killed him. I think it was over money. Shir was Uzbek.”

Another bloody knot on the loom of the Khorasan, where war was one of the weavers. Its sickle went
clack clack clack
, like the rattling of dry bones.

Whom to blame for the unhealed scar tissue of fratricidal violence that blemished this terrain indelibly, irredeemably, conditioning people’s memories and yearnings? The Pashtun Taliban who had mutilated, shot, and slit the throats of some six thousand Hazara in Balkh in 1998? The Hazara and Uzbek militiamen who had joined forces to slaughter three thousand Pashtun Taliban soldiers the year before? Or the perpetrators of the smaller, village-scale genocides—the Hazara who had supposedly killed twenty-two Pashtuns from Shingilabad the year before the Taliban took power; their Pashtun neighbors who had ostensibly murdered five Hazara from Karaghuzhlah around the same time? The strips of colorful cloth that whiffled from knobbly wooden poles over their graves a decade and a half later were mnemonics for the scores that never seemed to be settled. What about, then, King Abdur Rahman, whose genocidal unification campaign forcibly resettled ten thousand rebellious Ghilzai Pashtun families to this high desert from their ancestral lands south of the Hindu Kush in the 1890s, diluting the tribal structures of the disloyal Pashtuns and weakening the bastion of the other minorities?

Perhaps the violence was a constant replay, a caroming echo of much earlier wars. A limbic memory of some unresolved skirmish between a common ancestor of the Hazara and Uzbeks, who carried the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan, and an antecedent of the Tajiks and Pashtuns and Turkomans, whose haplogroup possibly had been pushed to the Khorasan out of somewhere in modern-day Ukraine by the last glaciation. Or older still, of Cain and Abel arguing in the Great Rift Valley. And maybe it was even older than that, older than our common African ancestors, geomorphic, forged in the tens of millions of years of incessant smashing of the Eurasian plate and the Gondwanaland supercontinent, during a whole era of thrusting and kneading like dough the rock that had made this land.

•   •   •

We had started for Oqa early that morning. The road soaked in blood old and new squished under the tires. In the gullies—“See this, Anna? Taliban killed a teacher from Siogert here, then the villagers killed two Pashtuns in revenge”—snow lay in ultramarine shadows. On the car stereo Shamsuddin Masrur sang about a maiden sweet like a Sistani pomegranate to the lacy twang of a two-stringed
dutar
lute.

“He was from Mazar,” Qasim said. “The Taliban shot him in his home because he was a musician. He was an old man then.”

Fifteen miles south of Oqa, just past the turnoff to Karaghuzhlah, the tires veered and locked and fistfuls of mud pelted the car windows. The engine muttered and stalled. There was no more road ahead, just a sea of brown muck. Qasim opened his door and tried the surface with his foot. His foot sank to the talus.

“Oqa is closed today,” Qasim said. He turned in his seat, beaming. “Let’s have lunch at my father’s house.”

•   •   •

Hassan Khan—warlord, farmer, Qasim’s father, Amin Bai’s friend, keeper of demoiselle cranes—was in good spirits. He had lost twenty of his ninety sheep in the Eid blizzard, but all the rain and snowmelt promised a plentiful almond harvest next year. When we arrived, he was presiding over a small gathering of male neighbors and relatives in a long narrow guestroom. On the mattress next to Hassan Khan reclined Jan Mohammad, the beautiful warlord whom everyone called Janni and whom I had met at Ozyr Khul’s wedding in Oqa. Janni’s bodyguards sat or stood by the door; one was feeding the lone
bukhari
that loosed smoke into the room in long opaque scarves. Across the room slumped Hassan Khan’s older brother, Rustam Khan, who kept scrapbooks of events and phenomena he considered important—the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai, the electric storm years back during which two villagers died of fright in the desert, the wedding of a neighbor’s son and niece, the map of Italy he had drawn and colored by hand. Rustam Khan had a long gray beard and a collection of books he stored under lock and key in a tin chest. The villagers called him the Historian. He chewed opium for his arthritis and often was stoned.

It had begun to rain again. Cold silver needles pricked at the dirt in the courtyard, streaked in quick transparent veins down the glass of the guestroom’s sole window. All this water boring through the clay to quench the tree roots in Hassan Khan’s almond and apricot orchards. He smiled. The rain and the
bukhari
heat and the presence of guests impelled him to reminisce. Over rice and a dish of fried sheep fat called
jaz
, he recounted fondly the sacking of nearby Pashtun villages after the retreat of the Taliban ten years earlier. He had commanded a troop of a hundred men then, sometimes two hundred. “In Shahrak, in one garden, seventeen of my men were killed in one day. But we won.” He said there had been “many Taliban” in those villages then, and that they once again were “full of Taliban.”

“What about Karaghuzhlah?”

“No, no Taliban here. The security is good.”

“But they were here during Ramadan. Where did they go?”

“There’s nothing to worry about, Anna. You’re my guest. If you’d like to walk around at night, I can give you a gun.”

A helicopter gunship rumbled in the low wet sky above the compound. The rain quieted. My host added, in English: “No problem.”

The other men in the room chuckled at that. Rustam Khan reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a folded piece of lined paper and unfolded it and tweezed off with his fingernails a small crumb of black opium resin that was contained within and placed it on his tongue and folded back the package and put it away. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.

Janni spoke: “The Taliban elder of Karaghuzhlah, Gul Ahmad, who now calls himself Mullah Zamir, is not here. He is in Pakistan for the winter. When he goes to Pakistan in the winter, the other Taliban also go. When he comes back, next summer, the Taliban will also come back and we’ll fight them.”

Janni took a drag from a cigarette. He held it between his long and sensuous middle finger and forefinger, and as he smoked, he held his palm turned up delicately as if receiving some benediction. An exquisite palm. The palm of a killer.

“He goes to Pakistan because his motorcycle doesn’t work here in the winter. It gets stuck. In the summer they come with twenty or forty motorcycles and fight with us. Every winter we have peace and every summer we have war.”

Janni’s bodyguards nodded: yes, yes, the warfare was seasonal, like farmwork. You flooded the paddies for rice in May and you fought. You sowed winter wheat in the fall and then you rested till spring. The cycles of violence were just another timeless way of measuring time in the Khorasan.

“Pah!”
Hassan Khan exclaimed. “This is not good war. I’ve seen lots of war. I fought a lot. This is not good war. This is like a dogfight. People in this war shoot at the sky. They shoot from the sky. They make bombs and leave them to blow one another up. We shot at one another, up close. In Kabul we fought up close, we killed fifty people in one day and watched them die right next to us. Now
that
was war.”

Like all warriors since Odysseus, Hassan Khan was trussed forever to the memories of his exploits, defined and inspired and haunted by them.

Suddenly he leaned over the
dastarkhan
.

“Anna! Do you want to go with me and fight the Taliban some night?”

“When?”

“Whenever you want.”

“But wait, I thought you said there were no Taliban in your village.”

“If we don’t find Taliban, we’ll just fight Pashtuns,” Hassan Khan said. “There’s a village, Alozai, they are all Taliban but very weak. We wouldn’t fight in the village—we would fight on the road.”

At this, Rustam Khan opened his eyes, awakening from an opiate dream.

“All Pashtuns are Taliban,” he said. “Their women are Taliban. Their dogs are Taliban. Their donkeys are also Taliban.”

•   •   •

The
jaz
was gone and some boys brought in thermoses of green tea and pewter plates of fresh yogurt and some unshucked almonds and Rustam Khan tore off some more opium to chew. For a time we sat without talking, shucking and eating almonds and smoking and sipping tea. After a while, Janni and his bodyguards left; and my hosts’ wives and sisters and daughters and aunts filed into the room and squatted and shucked more almonds and drank more tea and made small talk. They talked about the weather. They talked about the children. They talked about the Indian soap opera all the women had liked to watch five years earlier, when for a whole year and for the first time in anyone’s life Karaghuzhlah had a powerful village generator that went on from seven until nine at night. They talked about how after a year the village elders had decided that the generator had to go. They talked about the arbitrariness of the powerful and the unavailing and neverending struggles of the weak, about the discrepancy between the rich and the poor and the hypocrisy of the pious, reciting over and over the parables that have been rehashing themselves on every inhabited landmass on Earth since the beginning of time, until there was nothing more to add. A silence fell.