The World is a Carpet (4 page)

W
here is she from?”

“America.”

“Where is America?”

“This is the first time I see anyone from America. In which direction is it?”

“It’s on the other side of the world.”

It was late morning in March and the men of Oqa had gathered on a
namad
rug of camelwool felt that Baba Nazar had brought from his house and spread on the ground outside. The goats and sheep had gone to pasture with the herder at dawn, and the camels had gone to collect calligonum for kindling with the older boys soon thereafter. There was nothing to do and the men were getting some sun. They sucked on harsh filtered cigarettes and took turns pouring hot and brackish green tea into glass cups from Baba Nazar’s thermos. The thermos had been made in China many years ago and was painted with three tulips, two red and one blue. The cork was friable; Baba Nazar had wrapped it in clouded plastic to keep it from crumbling into the tea. He also had brought out a synthetic Pakistani prayer rug, should anyone feel like praying, but no one did. A slight warm breeze came from the west, blowing grains of cream-colored sand and large sleepy flies and slow coils of cigarette smoke and bits of digested thorns weathered out of camel dung.

The men had settled on the
namad
in an accustomed and age-honed sequence commensurate not so much with their age as with their stature in relation to one another. At the foot of the carpet, facing the sun, sat Amanullah, because he was the host’s son. When the tea ran out, he would be the one to go to the kitchen and ask his mother or wife to refill the thermos. Next to him squatted Naim, who was forty and still single, though in a couple of months, when his bride of three years finally turned seventeen, he at last would get married. Sayed Nafas, an old man with a beard so thin you almost could count the hairs in it, lounged between Naim and Baba Nazar. Baba Nazar himself sat at the head of the carpet near Amin Bai, whom everyone in Oqa called the Commander. Amin Bai lay on his side and chain-smoked. He was younger than Baba Nazar by a decade or two and emaciated from years of opium use and perpetual hunger. He looked like a man who did not trust others and who was not to be trusted, a man predisposed to violence. His toddler son, Amrullah, in a bonnet of green and fuchsia felt and in layers of shirts and vests home-stitched with tattered swatches of cotton and velvet and naked from the waist down, had crawled atop his father and was playing with the Commander’s face, squeezing shut the man’s eyes and pinching at his wrinkled forehead with translucent fingers.

Tidings of other village children ebbed and flowed. The tiny mirrors their mothers had sewn into the skullcaps of the boys and the beaded
taweez
amulets they had pinned to the lapels of the girls sparkled in the sun. The children yelled and laughed and their laughter deteriorated into the dark, sinister cough of the condemned and then rebounded again to laughter. Like a tape recording being forcibly slowed down and allowed to speed up again. Sometimes a child would run up to the rug for the men to either pinch her cheek or swat at her the way one swats at flies or simply ignore her. The men sipped their tea. Unhurried. Serene. Late mornings in Oqa could be like this.

Baba Nazar waved vaguely to the west, where the village ended and the rest of the world began. For my benefit, he and his friends spoke Farsi, not the throaty Turkoman the villagers commonly used among themselves.

“I think America is in that direction. If I know where it is, I can walk there. But I can’t walk farther than Turkmenistan.”

“Have you ever been inside Turkmenistan?”

“No, I only went up to the border once, when I went hunting. But never to Turkmenistan itself.”

“Do you know how far Turkmenistan is?”

“No. Only that it’s four days by donkey.”

“You couldn’t get from here to America by donkey.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is an ocean between here and there.”

“What’s an ocean?”

“A very big river.”

“If I go to Turkmenistan, there is no river, only a wall.”

“How far is America?”

“Do you know how many kilometers from here to Zadyan?”

“No. About three hours.”

“It’s twenty-five kilometers.”

“Okay.”

“To America it is about ten thousand kilometers.”

“So how do their soldiers get to Afghanistan?”

“They come by plane.”

There was a long silence while the men considered the magnitude of such a journey. Around them the desert was laid out in late-morning haze like a boundless sheet of mother-of-pearl.

“The world is round, like a ball,” I offered. “So if you go from here either way, west or east, and then get across the ocean, you’ll eventually reach America.”

“No,” protested Baba Nazar. “America cannot be in two places at once. It has to be in only one place.”

Then Amin Bai giggled and slapped his thigh with his free hand. He had been silent throughout the discourse, thinking something over or maybe lost in an opiate dream. Now he lifted baby Amrullah off his chest and gently placed him on the felt and pronounced, still laughing:

“The world is not round. It is rectangular! There is Pakistan on one end. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan on the other end. Iran over there. The world has four corners.”

The world is a carpet.

A
ny rug merchant in the Khorasan will tell you: two factors determine the beauty of a carpet.

One is the density of its knots. An experienced carpet dealer will count the knots by ear, running his fingernail across the hard ridges on the reverse side of the rug. The higher the pitch of the scraping sound, the finer the yarn, the closer together the knots, the longer the carpet will retain the luscious bounce of its pile. (The dealer also might fold the carpet and press on the fold. The wool of a tightly woven carpet will spring back after the rug is unfolded, leaving no sign of a crease.) Designs are plenty but which design a customer finds attractive is only a matter of taste, of subjective preference. True beauty, on the other hand, is indisputable.

The density that makes for a beautiful carpet is approximately two hundred and forty knots per square inch. This gold standard is at least as old as the oldest known carpet in the world.

It is called the Pazyryk Carpet. The Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko discovered it in the late 1940s inside an Iron Age kurgan burial of Scythian nomads, where it lay encased in the Siberian permafrost of the Pazyryk Valley, which tips away from Russia’s Altai Mountains toward the borders of modern Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan. It is a pile rug two meters long and almost two meters wide. Scientists have carbon-dated it to between 500 and 400
BC
.

The Pazyryk—woven with two hundred and thirty-two symmetrical knots per square inch—is indisputably beautiful. Processions of griffins, fallow deer, and horsemen in blue, red, yellow, and green wool fringe a field of lotus blossoms. The horsemen, rendered in bearded profile, closely resemble those sculpted by artisans in Achaemenid Persia, which the Scythians raided and traded with—except that in Achaemenid bas-reliefs horsemen usually walk alongside their mounts, while many of the Pazyryk equestrians sit their animals. Some anthropologists say the mounted riders indicate that the carpet had been woven not in the heart of the Achaemenid Empire but on its periphery, possibly closer to where the carpet was discovered.

Perhaps it came from the Khorasan.

Twenty-five hundred years later, in a country ransacked by the big mechanized wars of the preceding decades, a million Afghans—one out of thirty—were believed to be weaving, buying, and selling carpets; raising sheep for them; spinning and dying and trading wool for them. A timeless people in a timeless landscape keeping alive a timeless craft. Thawra in her homemade shift dress could have been squatting over the warps and wefts in any century, preserving her heritage knot by knot. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was the ancient art itself that was the guardian of life in the Khorasan and its people’s keeper. Maybe, in the threadbare loom rooms of their birth, these magic carpets promised their weavers some untold salvation.

The second criterion of a carpet’s beauty is as elusive and whimsical as the first is concrete. Once a dealer is done scratching and mauling the carpet to determine the density of its weave, he will flip it over and inspect the pile itself. He will not be appraising the elegance of the design. No. He will be looking for proofs of human fallibility, the prized idiosyncrasies that make each rug impossible to replicate, unique. He will be looking for mistakes.

A devout Muslim will tie a few errant knots on purpose, for a flawless design would challenge the perfection of God. Most often, however, the mistakes are unintended, accidental. They are the artisans’ personal diaries.

Here the weaver ran out of burgundy yarn and switched to the cerise left over from some older weaving: the depth of color in the border changes suddenly. Here a goat ambled into the loom room and the weaver jumped up to shoo it away: the lotus flower grew an extra petal where she had forgotten the count of the knots she had already tied before she settled back to work. An ailing infant cried: a blossom is left half-finished. A neighbor walked in with the latest sex gossip from a newlyweds’ bedroom—the whole village knew the groom was just a boy, so what did you expect?—and the border runs doubly thick for a centimeter or two, so busy was the weaver laughing.

The merchant will find the unfinished petal, the too-wide line along the selvage, the rhombus almost imperceptibly askew, and smack his lips, and nod, perhaps imagining for an instant which mishap could be responsible for it. He will say: “Good.”

There are mistakes. The carpet truly is beautiful.

Slouched on Baba Nazar’s
namad
, I thought: If the world were a carpet, then Oqa was such a mistake.

•   •   •

Oqa’s forty doorless huts gaped at the world in a kind of hungry supplication from a low clay hummock. The hummock was shaped like a horseshoe with the heel pointing east-northeast. A convex emptiness unfurled around the village for infinite miles and curved toward the ends of the Earth. They said people had first settled on this hummock two or three hundred years ago. They said back then the desert had been a jungle of nodular black saxaul and scaly dwarf juniper and tribulus, and some Turkoman herders from Karaghuzhlah and Khairabad, the large farming villages four hours to the south, had decided to make camp here because there had been plenty of grazing for their single-humped camels, sheep, and goats.

Perhaps this was so. But if you walked to Oqa from any direction in Amanullah’s lifetime, all you saw was a dusty phantasm rising out of limitless sere plains and sand dunes beneath unending sky. If there ever had been a jungle it was long gone and there remained no trace of it. Not a single tree grew in Oqa and no trees were visible from it. The Oqans, like their nomadic ancestors, farmed nothing. The only vegetation was the thorny and nearly leafless desert shrubs and, in early spring, strange and dark glossy succulents that looked like salamanders and that seemed to appear overnight and disappear as quickly. The predominant west wind, born somewhere by the Caspian Sea and blowing almost constantly and uninterrupted across hundreds of miles of the Karakum Desert, roughed a vast sea of dunes to the north of the village and heaped drifts of sand against the western walls of Oqa’s oblique adobes, as if to anchor them to the ridge, or else a sandstorm might gust them clear off the edge of the world. When the wind was strong, it blew clouds of sand and sticks and the village became an island floating in a moving sea of dust.

The few people who knew about the village called it Oq, Oqa, or Oqan. It was not on any map. Government officials in Mazar-e-Sharif told me the village didn’t exist at all, under any name.

I once searched for Oqa on Google Earth, an online database that combines constantly updated satellite imagery and photographs to imitate a look at our planet from space. With a resolution of fifteen meters or fewer per pixel, it allows you to zoom in on any place in the world. You can see the taxicabs parked outside the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan. You can see the memorial in 3-D. I typed “Oqa” in the search window and the website zoomed in on the offices of Oqa! Serviços de Comunicação in Barretos, Brazil. I typed “Mazar-e-Sharif.” The virtual globe on the computer screen spun, and the dark vertebrae of the Hindu Kush fanned northward in alluvial scallops and smoothed into the cauterized Khorasan plains—and there it was, a large pointillist blotch of glaucous and gray and pale yellow against the dun backdrop the British travel writer Robert Byron had described seventy-four years earlier as “the metallic drabness of the plain.” Mazar-e-Sharif, Tomb of the Saint, the capital of Northern Afghanistan. The fifteenth-century Blue Mosque looked from space like a stylized lotus flower in the center of a geometric carpet. I closed in on the treeless residential matrix of the northern working-class neighborhood where I had lived while researching this book. There was the unpaved intersection, a few blocks south of my house, where a man on a bicycle had detonated a bomb and killed three children and a grocer, leaving the septic wound of the crater to overflow forever with putrid water and rotting refuse and heartache. The grocer was the father of a teenage boy from whom I had often bought pomegranate juice. The boy had green eyes. I scrolled north a bit. There was the ivory T of my house.