The World is a Carpet (6 page)

The loom room had been roofed with withered bouquets of desert brush that rested upon four knurled and ancient tree trunks. This was shoddy work even for Oqa. Most roofs in the village were roofs of lath and clay, straw-mat roofs, roofs of solid adobe smeared over poplar beams, which had to be brought by camel from Karaghuzhlah or Khairabad, the nearest settlements where trees grew. Even before it caved in, the roof of Thawra’s loom room had looked like an upside-down desert, tussocked and unreliable. Then, in the fall, termites ate through one of the central rafters. One afternoon straw and sticks and frass poured onto the loom upon which Thawra and Boston were knotting the last inches of a large
yusufi
, nine by eighteen feet. The women ran out of the room before the beam collapsed into it. The carpet was undamaged, and Thawra finished weaving it without a roof. It sold for more than three hundred dollars. The one good thing about the drought, Baba Nazar observed, was that it didn’t rain upon the carpet.

There was always hope that the drought would break, though. The day before Thawra was to start weaving, Amanullah set out to perform roof triage with a length of gray plastic tarp and twenty-five meters of rope.

He climbed upon the wall and spread the tarpaulin over the mutilated loom room and paid out enough rope to string through the metal loops in the edging and then some. He tied the excess rope around the rafters that still lay in place over the corners of the room and tied rocks the size of a sheep’s head to three ends of the rope to weigh down the waterproof sheeting. Then he jumped down and dug out of a pile of kindling a corroded mortar shell casing and filled it with smaller rocks and clods of clay and packed those in with his knuckles. He tied the shell casing to the fourth end of the rope and scrambled up onto the wall again to adjust the tarp.

Amanullah worked and bragged about how hard he worked.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five.” I was on the ground, pulling taut a slack length of rope.

“Ha! You see these wrinkles?”

I saw.

“If you work as hard as me for six months, you will become old like me. It will only take you six months.”

He thought about it.

“By the time I’m thirty-five, I won’t be able to walk, even.”

He thought about it some more, knelt to adjust the shell casing, then straightened up.

“By the time I’m thirty-five, I’ll be dead!”

Satisfied with this awesome augury, he began to fantasize about how he would fix the roof for real one day. He would bring the wood from Mazar-e-Sharif by
zaranj
motor-rickshaw and draw water from the well and mix it with clay and build a new roof. No: he would build a whole new house! No: he would sell the camels and build a new house not in Oqa but in Karaghuzhlah, where there was an irrigation ditch to water the orchards that grew the sweetest peaches you had ever tasted and almonds so milky they melted on your tongue. Amanullah stomped around, juggling bits of rotten beam and coils of rope. A dreaming man aloft in his reverie against a lapis-blue sky. The clay walls gave dangerously underfoot.

Baba Nazar rode his donkey out of the desert. He wore a pair of glasses he had tied to his head with a soiled string because one of the bows was missing, and rubber loafers gray with dust and mud over bare feet, and he had crammed his shotgun barrel-up into one pannier of the saddlebag Boston had woven for him out of scratchy undyed wool. In the other pannier were two dead desert doves. The hunter rode up to the house and sat the donkey and squinted askance at his son balancing on the roof. The ersatz gymnast. A prairie dog popped out of a burrow on the southern slope of the hummock and froze, watching also. On the other side of the house, Amanullah’s daughter, Leila, a four-year-old pixie with a blueblack pixie hairdo, made tinier still by her older brother’s hand-me-down
shalwar kameez
, ran small circles around an electric pole. She held on to the aluminum shaft with one hand and held the other hand outstretched for balance and sang: “I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’mturning i’mturningi’mturning!” And then she sang: “I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy!” An apprentice dervish whirling in an inexpert
zikr
in the desert of Rumi’s own birth. Or any four-year-old girl, anywhere in the world.

I
had planned to spend the night in the loom room. I was staying that year in the working-class residential neighborhood of Mazar-e-Sharif called Dasht-e-Shor, the Salt Flats, a treeless unpaved grid on the northern edge of the city where alkaline soil yielded brackish water and boys’ simple kites and white doves somersaulted with one another at dusk, and where I was renting an echoey room in a new house of poured concrete that belonged to a large Tajik family. Mazar-e-Sharif was the third most populated city in Afghanistan, but the wide sheetmetal gate and the tall concrete fence around the house accorded my hosts and me an illusion of privacy, of confidentiality, of protection from those who believed that a Western woman had no business living in their city and that an Afghan family had no business hosting her. In reality, everybody on the street knew where I lived, and probably everybody in Dasht-e-Shor as well, because in Afghanistan everybody knew everything. There was a south-facing and untiled deck on the second floor where women sometimes slept on the hottest nights of summer, and there I would stand and drink tea and watch the Hindu Kush, ten miles or so to the south, texture fifteen thousand staggered feet out of the blackness before dawn and light up tangerine and coral at sunup and flatten out in the hazy daylight and regain its dizzying dimensions before fading to black again at night. I would watch, between the deck and the mountains, the whole of the city wake, pray, work; watch construction workers lay by hand the pale clay bricks hand-pressed and fired in desert kilns halfway between Mazar and Oqa; watch ragpickers push their wooden barrows through unpaved streets; watch white doves cloud over the Blue Mosque whose domes I could not see behind an enfilade of Communist-era high-rises downtown; watch the children of my hosts hose the patio at noon to keep the dust down. And who watched me?

My rental room faced a neighbor’s cowshed where a single bony milch cow sighed meaningfully in her sleep and whipped her sides with the rope of her tail, and each swish sent into my window the comforting smell of manure and deputations of large flies that shone like new buttons. The room had a tick mattress on the floor overspread wall-to-wall with a factory-made maroon carpet, and it had heavy curtains of beige polyester, and occasionally, it had electricity in a single wall socket. Into this room at all hours of the day filed the hosts’ many children with requests for pencils and offers of impromptu Farsi lessons, women with gifts of dried fruit and laments about men, men with questions about fidelity and sex, the occasional houseguest wishing to greet the awkward foreigner in person. From this room I traveled the Khorasan, sometimes for days at a time.

But when I said I would like to stay in Oqa for the night, Qaqa Satar cried and swore I would be kidnapped by bandits and climbed into the car and started the motor, and although Baba Nazar and Amanullah and Amin Bai promised I would be safe in their village and I believed them, that evening we drove to Karaghuzhlah.

The world was a Nicholas Roerich fantasy. Harsh daylight had softened to a silky orangeade dusk. The desert had turned strawberry and fluffed in the south into the pink wedding cake of the Hindu Kush, and the sky was lavender. A pair of emaciated foxes trotted across the plain, one slightly behind the other. Qaqa Satar leaned out the window and took aim at the animals with a make-believe gun.
“Pau!
Pau!”
The foxes stopped and turned, and the one in the lead sat down and pointed his triangular face at our car and his pale amber eyes watched us pass.

It was night by the time we reached the big village. Invisible roosters screeched farewells to a sun long gone and in the east a chrome perigee moon rose and threw sharp and wicked black shadows upon angled blue streets. The streets were empty and narrow and unlit but for the moon, and after a few labyrinthine turns I lost track of our route.

Our host was Naushir, Qaqa Satar’s cousin, a beautiful man of about fifty with the narrow face of a candle-blackened Byzantine saint. Naushir was a detective in the Afghan border police and the husband of two wives. When his sons dragged open the tall wooden gate of his compound to let Qaqa Satar park his car inside, Naushir stood in the middle of his yard, dressed impeccably in an ivory-colored camelwool
paqul
hat and matching
shalwar kameez
and vest, tall, smiling in the headlights. The men embraced: a slap on the back, three kisses, an excited incantation of Pashto greetings. Naushir shook my hand with both of his, “Welcome, welcome,” and bowed us into the house. A guest from afar was always received warmly because such a guest was a storyteller, a griot, an entertainer to take the host’s mind off the drudgery of life in a war zone.

Upstairs, a single convulsing lightbulb fed by a neighbor’s generator illuminated a long room. In the corner a sheet-iron
bukhari
stove smoked through half a dozen poorly soldered seams, and a giant galvanized kettle boiled on top. Naushir, who had been an army officer for twenty years before joining the police force, reclined on a tick mattress draped with a burgundy and black carpet and exuded martial control. His three teenage sons wore
shalwar kameez
of identical bathroom-tile blue cotton, like uniforms. They hung on his every word, rose when he did, and rose also whenever he entered the room. Wordlessly they knelt before each of us with terrycloth towels, soap, and pewter pitchers of warm water while we washed our hands before dinner over ornate basins they also had brought. Wordlessly they spread a plastic
dastarkhan
on the floor and served us food and tea, then settled by the door in a formation just as silent. They did not eat.

We supped on
lobio
of stewed red beans and nan and chicken thighs Naushir’s wives had deep-fried in canola oil until the tough meat had turned translucent and shrunk almost entirely from the bone. After dinner, one of the boys took me to the women’s half of the house to meet the wives. They had been drinking tea in a very warm room that smelled of babies and profound sadness. One of the wives looked very old, the other very young; they could have been grandmother and granddaughter. Both were extremely thin. They greeted me with earnest kisses and clawed, anguished embraces. As though I had brought with me some salvation, some remedy for heartbreak. But I spoke no Pashto and they spoke no Farsi, and I had nothing to offer except for awkward silence. “Forgive me,” I said. I don’t know if they understood my apology, or even for what I was expressing regret. For intruding upon their unhappiness? A few minutes later the boy escorted me back to the guestroom where the men were sipping tea and talking. I never saw the women again.

Naushir was a good conversationalist. He brought out his AK-74, which, he pointed out with some pride, was Russian-made and not one of the imports from China or Serbia, which were more common in Afghanistan and which were considered inferior rifles. We discussed the history of the automatic weapon and of its Soviet creator, Mikhail Kalashnikov. We talked about how Naushir needed to carry the gun for personal protection when he rode his motorcycle to and from work in Mazar-e-Sharif, because Taliban insurgents were threatening to kill Afghans who worked for the government. We talked about how ten years after American soldiers had entered Afghanistan, things in Afghanistan were not improving.

“We have more of something than ten years ago,” he offered. “Corruption.”

After tea, Naushir and Qaqa Satar took turns praying by the stove. Then they rolled a joint and played a card game I couldn’t follow. Naushir’s brother, who had arrived during tea, joined neither in prayer nor in debauchery. His name was Shir Mohammad. He had been teaching Pashto in Karaghuzhlah’s high school for boys for thirty years. In the Khorasan that seemed both a long time and no time at all. We talked about that. We talked about the conceit that Afghanistan exists outside time. It was true that the rhythm of life here may have remained unchanged for millennia, the seasons doled out in forever-repeating segments of lambing and fasting, of lavish weddings and meager harvests and raids by foreign invaders. All were expected here in equal measure, like the passing of time itself. But the subtlest alterations, barely perceptible and seemingly superficial to an outsider—those were truly significant because they bespoke real, existential changes to the substance of the land. “Take, for example, the high school students,” said the teacher. “They are no longer bringing their Kalashnikovs to class, like they did before the Taliban. And they are worldlier. They watch different TV programs and so are more exposed to the world. Many of them have been to other countries.”

Of course they had. Since the Soviet invasion in 1979, some six million people—a fifth of Afghanistan’s population, and the world’s single largest refugee group for decades—had fled abroad, mostly to shantytowns in Pakistan and Iran. Two generations of Afghans had been born in these refugee camps: embittered, indoctrinated by itinerant mullahs, radicalized by poverty and the rightlessness of exile. Shir Mohammad’s students were the second generation.