The World is a Carpet (32 page)

Did I by any chance know, Qasim’s teenage sister asked then, shyly, deferentially, what had happened to the Indian family in the soap opera?

It grew dark and a child was sent for a kerosene lamp. An old aunt snoozed against a floor cushion, attended by a girl. Outside the window purple clouds blew low past the Milky Way. In the eighth century less than ten miles to the southwest of Hassan Khan’s house, a boy named Jafar ibn Muhammad al Balkhi, later known in the West as Abu Ma’shar, watched the same ever-spiraling galaxy. He would grow up, move to Baghdad, become the preeminent astrologer at the Abbasid court, and compile the
Great Introduction to Astrology
, an eight-volume text that drew on the philosophy and astrology of pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, India, and Aristotle, and which, translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, formed the basis of Western scientific astrology.

“Which stories do you tell your children about stars?” I asked the women.

What a silly question. They shook their heads and waved their hands to shoo it away. Golden jewelry shimmered in orange lamplight.

“We are illiterate.”

“All we do all day is work with animals.”

“We have no time to tell our children about the stars.”

I tried again.

“But what were the stories your mothers told you?”

The women laughed.

“Our mothers were the same way. They also had no time.”

Hassan Khan began to list the stars of Libra, which had reached its zenith on the first day of Mizan, one month earlier. Zuben al Shamali. Zuben al Genubi. Zuben al Akrab. Beta Librae, Alpha Librae, Gamma Librae. “When I was young, I knew the names of constellations,” he said. “But now I forget.”

“When Libra first appears, some farmers mate male and female sheep,” offered Rustam Khan. He no longer bothered to open his eyes, and he intoned from his corner of the room dappled in leaping lamp shadows like some entranced necromancer. “Some farmers say that when Mars and another star come close together it will rain and snow soon.

“But I don’t remember which star it is.”

And the Historian retreated into his soporific stupor for the rest of the night and left me to ponder the workings of memory and what it chooses to retain and to leave behind, its capacity to highlight the hurt and eclipse the beauty and alter our perception of time and love and trespass, its profound power to shape and reshape the narrative of its owners’ personal and communal past, and so to configure their future. The lamp on the floor flickered and hissed, and outside in the cold and woozy desert the war ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed.

T
he next day fine and endless rain sieved out of the sky that was white and low and of a piece, and I rented a horse to take me to Oqa. A boy brought it to Hassan Khan’s first courtyard where the outhouse stood. It was a draft horse, liver chestnut, and it was saddled with a burlap sack stuffed with straw that was tied to its midsection with rope and a
patu
folded in half was thrown over the sack. The horse had no intention of traveling across the desert in the rain, with or without a rider. It shied when I spoke to it and crabbed sideways when I took hold of the bridle, and when I laid my hand on its muzzle, it bared its teeth and snarled. It threw me the minute I mounted.

Hassan Khan made me stay again for lunch, of course. We sat in his family room on the second floor of his house, and we ate a hot soup of tender lamb and stale bread and raw onions, and then we drank tea with green raisins, tiny bursts of hot summer sun that made me forget my sprained wrist, bruised kidney, the cold outside. In the wet vines beneath the window a demoiselle crane purred its lonesome song that was as old and as desolate as the rain-veiled peaks of the Hindu Kush, and somewhere a village muezzin chanted about mercy, and compassion, and grace.

T
he red tractor jerked and pitched with each groove of the November fields, and the slat-board wagon hitched to it with a length of frayed yellow nylon rope wobbled and creaked. In the wagon, held more or less in place by granite drags and lashed to the wooden sideboards like a giant trussed scorpion, lay an enormous plough. In the front of the wagon, in the small space left by the plough, seven passengers crouched in silence, draped in dirty
patus
to keep out the skull-size globs of mud the tractor’s immense rear wheels chucked with great accuracy into the wagon bed. Behind this unwieldy train the winter trees of Karaghuzhlah stood inked against a pale yellow firmament. A monotonous nimbostratus beneath which low and massive sudsy clouds rushed eastward like a ghost cavalry unleashed by some jinn of the Occident. Fog rose from a sepia field of unharvested cotton like tufts of cotton itself evaporating into this cold dawn, and by the village walls the fragile green needles of winter wheat were peeking through the mud already, coaxed out by two weeks of rain and snow. In all other directions a flat and trout-colored desert stretched toward the world’s rim in a feathering of coral, pale ocher, and blue-gray where the mud reflected the Michelangelo sky. A wet wind blew.

The tractor was a four-wheel-drive, eighty-horsepower giant made in Soviet Belarus several decades earlier. It weighed four tons. Its rear wheels stood six feet tall. Faded red ribbons streamed from its windshield, to protect from the evil eye its driver and passengers and, most importantly, the engine itself, for this was Karaghuzhlah’s sole tractor, the same tractor that had pulled Qasim’s taxi out of a dune in Oqa that Ramadan. Now it was taking four day laborers and the plough to work a field about five miles north of the village. The day laborers were Uzbek and had stern, exhausted faces and beards all. The other three passengers in the wagon were Ramin, one of my Mazar hosts, who had come along to translate and for the sake of adventure; Qasim the driver, who had come along because he felt it was his responsibility to follow me even when his taxi could not; and I.

•   •   •

It had been raining for two weeks straight, and there was no telling when it would stop long enough for the desert to become passable by car. Before dawn in the middle of November, Ramin, Qasim, and I went to the bazaar in the city, bought three and a half kilos each of onions and rice and apples, drove to Karaghuzhlah, parked Qasim’s taxi by the outhouse in his father’s compound, and set out to Oqa across the soggy barrens on foot. I was going to honor Baba Nazar’s enduring invitation and spend a night in the village at last.

The land underfoot was scoured smooth and supple like a lover’s body. The wind bent the golden organ pipes of dry reeds in the gulches. On the horizon, smoke from shepherds’ fires blew like kisses. A golden eagle rose ahead of us and flew low, a swatch of desert picked up by a gust, leading the way over a purple film of withered cousinia. My nylon burqa flapped after it like a flightless blue bird. We were about two miles out of Karaghuzhlah when we heard a rumble behind us: the red tractor was making its way up north. We hitched a ride. A thousand years ago on this stretch of the Great Silk Road pilgrims would fall in with camel caravans this way.

The tractor pulled the wagon north in wrenching spasms. Each time it would arrive at an irrigation ditch, three of the farmhands would jump off, unhitch the wagon, shovel down the canal, and the tractor would run back and forth over it to make the rut more or less level. The workers then would retie the wagon, and onward the tractor would lurch to the next dike, and the next, and the next. In the steamed-up cabin the driver and the navigator sipped green tea from glass cups. We in the wagon held on to the splintery sideboards, to the plough, to one another. The leather armpit of Ramin’s jacket was warm against my left knee. Someone warned me to keep my feet close or the plough would cut them clean off. Someone threw a blanket over my head to protect me from the projectile mud, and I struggled from under its wet wool that reeked of manure and sheep fat and woodsmoke, and my burqa came off with it, and then everyone was laughing, laughing.

The tractor stopped in the middle of the desert a third of the way to Oqa: the farmers had arrived. We thanked the driver and farewelled the Uzbeks and walked again. Walked on the Earth’s very skin, rose, raw, resonant. It seemed made to be walked, so tempered by the feet of numberless generations of wayfarers like us among which now were our own feet. We leaned into the wind, then against it. Three Magi strapped into bags of onions, of apples, of rice. We walked through untilled fields and then through a land that bore no trace of cultivation. Walked on pottery shards, their glaze washed to a shimmer by the rain and blinking up from the ground like splintered memories of clear sky. Walked on sheep crania and spent shell casings and bones of gerbils and maybe land mines and the unseen bones of armies that had been wasted here.

We had walked for two hours, maybe more, when we saw in a muddy esker a young goatherd. He wore an outsize parka, and he was leaning on a walking stick with his left hand and picking his nose with the forefinger of his right. Thirty or forty mud-spattered goats trotted silently about him. The boy regarded our small procession with polite curiosity. He did not move to greet us, not out of unfriendliness but out of the economy that is the parsimonious habit of men who are rewarded poorly for their hard work. Even the youngest men of the desert knew to be frugal with their movement. As we drew closer, he took the finger out of his nose and wiped his nose with the top of his right hand and studied whatever had rubbed off for a second and at last thrust his hand in his pocket.

“Oqa!” the men called out.

“Oqa?”

“Oqa, Oqa!”

“Ah!” The boy pointed northeast.

“May you never grow tired!” The boy pulled his right hand back out of his pocket and raised it halfway to his face, fingers together, the palm facing sideways, in the thrifty blessing of his austere land. In twenty more minutes, first the billowing barchans and then the lone cemetery marker shaped themselves out of the mist, and finally the blind houses themselves, clinging to their infertile rain-darkened hillock and crowned with thin ribbons of
bukhari
smoke that curled from the holes in oblique clay roofs.

Oqa.

T
hey told me the carpet was beautiful.

Eagles spread their angular wings in the rhombic flakes of its ultramarine sky and rows of pomegranate trees grew along its fringes. Upon its background, dun like the hide of a camel or like the very sands that ruched past Oqa, almonds lay on maroon platters and lotus flowers bloomed. Its weave fastened Thawra’s aches and desires and spells of morning sickness and Hazar Gul’s silliness and Boston’s arthritic sighs. Leila’s hands sticky with candy and her dreams from all the times she had fallen asleep on the loom and drooled on it a little. Choreh Gul’s drugged mornings and Zakrullah’s famished crying. Down from the chickens that danced upon the carpet when Thawra wasn’t looking. Nurullah’s temper tantrums and tea dregs and goat turds and specks of gold from the barchan belt. Two hundred and forty symmetrical knots per square inch. Three hundred seventy-two thousand knots per square meter. One million one hundred and sixteen thousand knots in all.