The World is a Carpet (7 page)

Hashish smoke mingled with smoke from the dying
bukhari
. The men switched to Pashto and the world became woozy. Qaqa Satar interrupted the game and took me up some steps to the flat clay rooftop of his cousin’s house. It was very cold and very quiet. A lidded moon branded the night. Below, beneath the pewter sheen of moonlit rooftops quaked a few lights from gas lamps and electric lamps fed by unsteady generator current. Mostly, the village was dark. The Milky Way trawled her dazzling entourage east to west. A few months later, at a conference in faraway Austin, Texas, astronomers would announce that they had deduced the exact color of our galaxy. It was, they said, the color of new spring snow an hour after dawn.

I shivered and swayed uncertainly in this vast and gelid universe.

“Aim for the waterspout,” instructed Qaqa Satar. Then he went inside and left me to squat between the village and the sky.

When I returned to the room, the
bukhari
had stopped burning, the light had gone out, and the card game was over. The men were talking in whispers and I went to sleep fully dressed. The last thing I saw as I drifted off was Naushir standing above my mattress by the window. He was gently spreading an extra blanket over me: an impromptu act of kindness, simple and immense.

T
he first thread was white. A four-year-old girl strung it on a Friday.

Holding a ball of undyed yarn with both hands, Leila stood over a corroded iron pipe that rested on a pair of cinder blocks along the southern wall of the loom room. She bent down and, switching the ball from one hand to the other, hooked the yarn under the pipe. Simple sorcery: just like that, the pipe became the bottom beam of a horizontal loom. The weaving will begin here. Leila pivoted around elaborately and ran across the earthen floor strewn with goat droppings and chicken feathers and straw. She stopped at the pipe in the opposite end of the room—the top beam—and looped the yarn over it. With the great ceremony four-year-old girls can be so good at. Her face solemn. Her palms sticky and pinkstained with sugar candy. She ran back: under the beam the thread went. Up again: over the beam. The yarn crisscrossed halfway between the two pipes, marking the center of the future carpet. Back again. Up again, and then back, and up, and back, and up, and oops—she dropped the ball and it rolled askew on the floor and the yarn dragged through drying bird shit and dust and God knows what else and Leila dashed to pick it up and kept running, from the bottom of the loom to the top, eighteen feet there and eighteen feet back, up and down, back and forth, I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy!

“Good girl!”

“Don’t you drop that thread again!”

“A bit tighter here, Leila
jan
!”

“Keep going!”

Amanullah and Boston squatted at either end of the loom and slid plywood chips between the pipes and the cinder blocks to adjust the beams’ height and level while Leila shuttled between them. Boston cheered on her granddaughter and laughed and uttered instructions and pushed the warps on the upper beam closer together with her fingertips. I asked her how many warp threads there had to be to weave a meter-wide carpet, how many times Leila had to shuttle between the beams. She said she never had counted them. She only knew what the warps must look like, feel like, remembered the density of them on the loom.

Even when Boston was at rest she never was completely still. The small dark stars of her eyes leapt from one object to the next constantly to assess what else needed to be done. As if not just her spartan household and her rambunctious grandchildren but the entire world required her looking after it. Her face was an ever-revised cuneiform tablet of deep lines that wrinkled and smoothed out and refolded in a new direction every instant like the surface of a windswept lake. Her thin gray braids, which fell to where her threadbare cotton dress was beginning to rip over her saggy chest, trembled lightly with each heartbeat. Around her neck she wore a ring of keys on a thin rope, like a necklace. Her name, in Turkoman, meant “garden.” She was in her sixties. She called me her older sister.

Amanullah’s roof sutures hadn’t lasted and the tarp was gone. Some boys perched on the eastern wall of the loom room, looking in, and rained granules of clay onto the warp. From time to time Amanullah would look up—“Scram!”—and the boys would duck halfheartedly in response and more clay would fall. Somewhere outside a hysterical donkey brayed. Above the boys a light gale blew tight white cumuli across a hard winter sky, and the light in the room flickered as the clouds raced past the sun. I wondered what the room must have looked like from up there. Leila’s bone-white loom itself a tiny floccus cloud gathering in the middle of a dun desert. A pale open palm offering up her singsong, her father’s ineffective scolding, her grandmother’s quick chuckles, the room marbled with shadows and light, the donkey’s bellows, the goat droppings, the clay dust—all that out of which a carpet was becoming.

•   •   •

Do you own a carpet? Touch it. Feel for the sticky palm prints of a little girl on the warp.

L
ater that morning Thawra stood up from a ceramic basinful of laundry in Boston’s bedroom, stretched, wiped her hands on the sequined and sun-faded front of her frock, and entered the roofless loom room.

At the bottom beam, the woman, tall and reedthin in her shapeless calico, paused to adjust her flowered headscarf where it tied at the nape. Then she shook off her rubber flip-flops one by one and stepped in her bare feet upon the wefts her daughter had strung taut like zither strings. In a loose and single downward motion like a marionette collapsing, she squatted, facing north. Facing the top of the loom. Facing the end of a carpet not yet begun but already richly complete in her prescient mind’s eye:
maida gul
, little flowers, liver red and blue of the utmost dusk strewn around the tawny field. An unintentional stylization of Oqa with its harlequin children dashing about the dusty hummock outside in frenzied tintinnabulations.

Thawra leaned forward and reached for a ball of weft. Plucking the strung wool like a harpist, she ran the end of a burgundy pile thread all the way around two warps, pulled on it, and, with a sickle, cut the weft an inch from the warp. Textile experts call this type of knot “Turkish,” “symmetrical,” or “double.” Thawra knew no such appellations. She just tied thread over thread, making the first of one million one hundred and sixteen thousand knots. Each one protozoan, irreplaceable. And again. And again. And again. Deft, precise, rhythmical, re-creating a design that had been passed on for generations unnumbered. Yet Thawra’s carpet, like each carpet ever woven by a woman’s hand, will be subtly different. It will be hers alone: her future autobiography, her diary of a year, her winter count, with its sorrowful zigzags, its daydreamy curlicues, loops of melancholy, knots of joy.

There was something else, too. (This was a secret, and the weaver’s thin lips curved thinner still with a discreet and private smile. Not even Amanullah knew.) The bottom sixth of her carpet will be almost imperceptibly queasy, a two-foot-long chronicle of morning sickness. Thawra was two months pregnant with her third child.

Thk,
thk,
thk,
Thawra’s sickle kept time with not one heartbeat, but two.

I
n the afternoon Amanullah joined his friend Asad for a walk in the dunes.

The dunes lapped at Oqa’s northern slope. They were the southernmost margin of a barchan belt that extended two hundred miles west to east along the left bank of the Amu Darya and covered an area about the size of Connecticut. At Oqa, which marked roughly the middle of this vast colony, the sands were approximately twenty miles wide and the color of tea with milk. If one were to cross the dunes here—it would take three days by camel, and there would be no wells along the way—one would come to a village called Dali. You couldn’t see even half that far in the dunes, of course. You couldn’t see even half a mile. But what you saw was enough to get the feeling that the sands were neverending.

They had no formal name. International relief agencies called them the sand dunes in the Amu Darya Valley, the Amu Darya Desert, or the Shor Teppeh Desert. The Oqans called the dunes
dasht
, desert. They called everything around the village
dasht
. In a way, everything was.
Dasht
was the ultimate life-force that giveth and taketh away, a modus operandi, a state of mind.

The barchans were made of billions of tons of sand the wind constantly herded east from the Karakum Desert. Some of the grains had journeyed through these plains at least once already, when the Amu Darya had carried them west from the Pamir and the Himalayas through the Hindu Kush. Dust from the roof of the world. Central Asia’s last true nomads. Now they were returning, slow but indomitable, curved into enormous and infinitely precise swords and crescents, caressed into minute ripples and crinkles, razored into perfect crystal-thin crest lines. A surrealist masterpiece of sand. Splayed out and aquiver like a lover of some epic and unknowable god in a phantasmagorical foreplay. Sand slithered over itself in airborne slipstreams that drifted several inches off the ground, continuous, serpentine, defying gravity. Defying everything. Weightless and leaden at once. Grain by unstoppable grain it crept up windward slopes fifty feet high and then cascaded down concave slip faces like tendrils or tentacles forever reaching eastward. The slow-motion undulation triggered vertigo. If you sat on a dune for a long time you could feel the desert move. In some parts of the belt, the dunes migrated three feet a day, smothering oases, roads, villages. The jungle that had seduced Oqa’s founding fathers lay buried somewhere below.

Amanullah removed his shoes and walked along the crest lines. Wind blew sand against his bare ankles and he sang guttural songs that had no words but had everything else: the spilled-yogurt moon, the donkey ride across the hollow tabla of the desert, the neon explosion of sunrise, his little daughter building the perfect and simple geometry of a carpet loom. An ageless man tracing the liminal with his bare feet beneath that Georgia O’Keeffe sky. Then he winked at me, plopped down on the sand, and slid down the slip side of a dune on his ass, shoes in hand. When he landed at the ruffled bottom he laughed and informed me that the dunes were made of gold.

And they probably were.

A year earlier, the United States had announced that a team of Pentagon officials and American geologists had discovered nearly a trillion dollars in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan—including, potentially, twenty-five billion dollars in gold. It would take years, maybe decades, to establish proper quarries to mine these resources on an industrial level, war permitting. But I had seen years before, in the muddy and cold rapids of the Amu Darya, men in rolled-up pantaloons sifting the sand through pans, bedraggled and desperate prospectors. Amanullah sat down and held forth a handful of sand and I saw, in his palm, golden specks.

“Can you imagine that we might be literally living on gold?”