A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  I asked her why she was getting married to someone she didn’t like. He was the son of her father’s good friend and everything was already arranged, so why make a fuss? Toychi knew her fiancé, who was a notorious drunk and good-for-nothing.

  After the wedding, Kamolat took the usual couple of weeks off. She returned having aged at least a decade in the process, her skin pallid, large rings under her eyes and a vacant, dead expression where once there had been such animation and life. Everyone noticed but said nothing. Soon she came to work bruised. Of course, the weavers agreed, it was permissible for a man to beat his wife occasionally, but Kamolat was being thrashed on a regular basis.

  I insisted that we do something but was told quite clearly that my interference would only make the problem worse. Her loom-mates wove more on her behalf and tried to lift her spirits. She developed a steely streak that had not been there before, declaring that she would attend a birthday party despite the fact that her husband had forbidden it.

  ‘What can he do? He can only beat me. If he does a good enough job then I won’t be able to work and then we’ll see what his mother has to say.’

  I was away when Kamolat’s husband turned up at the workshop in a drunken rage. He began shouting at her to come home and she refused. He hit her, dragging her screaming by the hair. Madrim had been at the bazaar with Toychi at the time, and the other dyers hadn’t known what to do. I hoped that the husband would try something similar again on workshop property when we were around, so we could press charges – wife-beating being unacceptable if done in public.

  Kamolat’s main aim was to get pregnant, which she managed within eight months of marriage.

  ‘Of course, he doesn’t care about me,’ she explained, ‘but he’s not going to risk hurting the baby. It might be a son.’

  Kamolat begged us to keep a place for her at the workshop, her refuge, after she had the baby, and so we gave her six months’ maternity leave. A few years later, she finally divorced her husband, able to provide for herself with her weaving wages.

  Women also endured the unspoken reality of their husbands’ infidelities. Most were more angry at the money wasted than heartbroken that their husbands would seek another woman’s arms, or so they said. At least they had the status and security of being the official wife. Women who had lost their reputation often became ‘second wives’ and were kept as mistresses. They had no rights, relying on enticement to keep their man, and were shared with other men if their lover hadn’t the means to keep them.

  Most women accepted their husband’s passions, but were unwilling to endure anything more whimsical. Jeanette’s house-help complained over a cup of tea that her husband wanted her to try ‘positions’.

  ‘There was none of this nonsense during the Soviet times,’ she declared. ‘Now they have all these films that give them silly ideas. I told my husband, “If you want to try acrobatics, then go and pay some young girl. I’m too old for it.”’

  * * *

  Spring turned to summer and Khiva quietly simmered. Streets were deserted from midday until late afternoon as a white heat pervaded everything, hurting the eyes and sapping energy. Those unbound by office hours woke well before sunrise, retiring to a darkened room after lunch for a siesta. In the evenings we didn’t eat until eight or nine, enjoying an after-dinner melon outside with our neighbours, trading gossip.

  Baking bread in this weather was an unpleasant task, to be attempted only in the cool of the evening. Malika was responsible for stamping circular patterns onto the dough; Zulhamar then slapped them against the inner walls of the mud-brick oven, a headscarf low on her forehead to keep her eyebrows from singeing, Koranbeg’s old army jacket protecting her arms. The walls of the oven rippled with heat as the dough puffed and baked, and Zulhamar deftly peeled each piece off, placing them in a large steaming stack. I tried my hand at this once, succeeding only in burning myself and dropping the dough into the flames.

  A carpet-seller had given me a ginger kitten as a gift, which was now fully grown. He flopped dramatically anywhere shaded, rousing himself only at mealtimes to beg for food. The family taught me that cats in Khiva were fed on mouthfuls of masticated bread, which the cat would bolt down hungrily. What mine really wanted was meat, and I fed him surreptitiously with chunks of mutton until caught by Koranbeg’s mother who had come to live with us for the summer. She hated the cat, who seemed completely oblivious, approaching her for food only to scamper away yelping as she doused him with a bowlful of scalding tea. When the cat wasn’t available, she did as all Khorezm grannies still do, and lifted the corner of a carpet to deposit the dregs of her tea beneath it.

  There were other animal encounters. The roof of our madrassah was the perfect place for snakes to bask peacefully in the summer sun. A snake once managed to slip through the ventilation hole in the centre of the domed ceiling, bounce off my head and drop into my lap. I shrieked in surprise, as did Safargul, who hadn’t seen the snake but was startled by my sudden outburst. The snake – also startled – shot into a corner looking for a place to hide. Toychi grabbed it, ignoring the bites, and threw it outside, waving it in the faces of a few weavers en route. I was concerned that he might swell up and die, but Toychi assured me that this one wasn’t poisonous, giving the neat puncture holes on his wrist a cursory rub and spit before returning to work.

  Summer was proving a trying time for most of the weavers. They were used to a domestic routine that allowed for siestas in summer, and would often nod off during lunch breaks, which became more and more extended. We discussed the possibility of having proper breaks after lunch and working later into the evening, but most women were expected home promptly to prepare the evening meal. Some of the girls were still industrious but some were getting downright lazy. Ulugbibi the usta also decided that summer was a time to put one’s feet up and snooze. She was careful not to do this in my presence, but on mornings when I was at the Operation Mercy office she would intersperse napping with tirades at the weavers to work harder. I heard about this from dark Nazokat – never far from trouble – who had challenged Ulugbibi to do some work herself. Now they were no longer on speaking terms. Clearly there needed to be some kind of working incentive for the weavers, and the obvious one was financial.

  I discussed the matter with Madrim, inviting Matthias to join us. We worked out a new wage system that paid by the length of carpet woven each month. This would provide an incentive to weave more, and also meant that the wages could increase above the measly apprentice rate we had started with. I wanted the wages to be fair but our carpets to be competitively priced.

  It was difficult to know what a fair wage was. We were paying more than a teacher or nurse received, but then their wages weren’t enough to live on and they supplemented their income with bribes. Hospital workers simply filched medicine and equipment, while teachers arranged a more elaborate system. Each class elected a go-between, and this student then haggled with the teacher over how much the class needed to pay communally to receive favourable marks. It removed the teacher from the unsavoury business of extorting money, leaving this for the students themselves to work out.

  Our new wage system proved an effective motivator, and soon a race was on as two of the looms neared completion of their first carpets. Whenever I talked about the carpets being cut from the loom, I unconsciously sliced at the tip of my forefinger, the way Khivans did when referring to circumcision. Soon the weavers were joking about our first surnat toy or circumcision party, wondering which loom would be given the honour. I asked Madrim how we should celebrate our first carpet circumcision, but he was preoccupied with his own preparation for the real circumcision of his youngest son, Husnaddin.

  I’d been made to watch the video of Jalaladdin’s circumcision along with that of his two cousins. The young boys first paraded around the walled city wearing mini-robes and polyester turbans. Back at the house, a jester entertained them, present
ing each boy with a chiman – a mobile of sorts, hung with sweets and small toys. Once these were removed, the chiman hung outside for all to know that a circumcision had taken place. I had assumed that the video would tail off at this point, but no. Each boy was shown being brought into a room and held down on a corpuche, writhing as the barber approached. The camera lens narrowly avoided a spattering of blood, the whole procedure filmed from close range. I blanched at the howls of each of the boys as my Uzbek family guffawed at my squeamishness. ‘This is the best bit! Jalaladdin cries like a girl. Look at him wailing!’ yelled Malika as Jalaladdin launched himself at her. Madrim asked if I would come and take photos of Husnaddin’s circumcision and to give him moral support. He had struggled to hold back the tears watching his first son under the knife.

  The following Saturday I arrived at Madrim’s house to find corpuches laid out against every available wall space. I was ushered into a room of male relatives, where the status of my own foreskin became the chief topic of discussion until I managed to extricate myself and help serving tea.

  Husnaddin seemed a little shy at all the attention he was receiving, wandering around in his little robe and turban. The barber arrived and Madrim looked nervously at me. Mehribon retired to a different room with the women, where she was given a bowl of oil in which she immersed her forefinger to assuage her son’s pain. Meanwhile, Husnaddin’s trousers were removed and Madrim’s relatives pinned him down as he began to sob. The barber prepared his kit, clamping the penis with a bamboo peg, leaving only the foreskin exposed. Husnaddin wailed loudly and with a lightning guillotine motion the barber swooped his knife across the bamboo peg, cleanly severing the foreskin.

  Husnaddin shrieked, Madrim left the room, and I took photos. Men waved banknotes in Husnaddin’s face, congratulating him on becoming a man as he sobbed inconsolably. A toy tractor appeared, and a new school bag. The barber propped cushions around the mattress and draped a large blanket over them, careful not to touch the freshly tinctured wound. Mehribon was allowed in, prompting a fresh bout of sobbing, and relatives filed past, congratulating Husnaddin and depositing banknotes around his pillow. It was Mehribon who paid the barber and, in return, was given a seeping red piece of cloth containing her son’s foreskin. She would let the foreskin dry and keep it until Husnaddin was grown up, one day sewing it into the stuffing of his wedding mattress.

  * * *

  A week or so later we celebrated our first carpet circumcision. After a race between the Benaki and Shirin weavers, the Benaki design was finished just a few days earlier. Fatima finished weaving the last few lines of the kilim fringe as we piled into her cell to watch. ‘Jacob Bai Hoja workshop, Khiva’, helpfully written out in Dari Persian script by the Afghan embassy in Tashkent, had been woven in as our signature. Later we were told that we’d written ‘beaver’ or ‘weaver’ instead of ‘Khiva’.

  Safargul pointed to the place where Fatima should make the first cut, leaving enough of the warps to make a generous fringe. The severed warp threads pinged, shooting into the air and sending up plumes of dust as we cheered and applauded. Dragging the completed carpet outside, we were able to examine it in greater detail. It was lumpy and dirty and needed a good wash, but the colours were good and the design stunning. It wasn’t perfect, being wider at one end, and there were a number of mistakes running down the side where Sharafat had worked. For a first attempt, though, I was really pleased. We dipped into our ice-cream fund as Fatima and her fellow weavers knotted the fringe.

  Madrim flipped the rug over and lit a nozzle attached to a rubber hose and the nearest gas outlet. Running the flame over the underside, he scorched away the excess fluff to leave a clean, smooth finish. During the warmer months we were able to wash the rugs in the nearest canal, issuing a strict ration of shampoo and conditioner, as the girls used it to wash their hair on the sly. In winter, the washing process was more unpleasant, pouring buckets of icy water over each rug and then scrubbing on top of it.

  Our first rug was now ready for trimming, just as the second rug was cut from the loom. It was a horrible job, leaving blistered fingers no matter how many rags were wrapped around them. The girls sat on top of the rug with a pole underneath one segment, trimming the excess pile and working their way steadily from one end to the other. The rug needed a final wash in cream of tartar and, once dry, lay glossy and lustrous in the courtyard. I circled it, watching the colours darken. As with all hand-woven carpets, the pile stood at an angle, reflecting light on one side and absorbing it on the other. Picking it up and shaking a corner, I sent shimmering ripples down the rug, relishing the luxuriant, supple feel of the silk. It was beautiful – but could we sell it?

  9

  A carpet called Shirin

  When you see with the eyes of your head, you are no different from an animal. When you see with the eyes of your heart, all spaces are open to you.

  —Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet

  Our third carpet, named Shirin, lay washed and gleaming in the sun. Shirin told many stories, not all of them revealed at a glance or even on closer inspection. Admiring tourists could know little of Shirin’s complex journey: its silk warp and weft produced by villagers paid a pittance for their labours under the oppressive state monopoly; the warm brown of its border created from walnut husks, collected by farm children in a village near Shakrisabz; the yellow scrolling vines dyed with dried pomegranate skins; the bright red diamonds at its centre coloured from the roots of the scrawny-looking madder plant grown in Afghanistan; and the rich indigo of the field design, produced from crushed and fermented leaves harvested in southern India.

  Even the name Shirin held secrets of its own. Some might have thought we dedicated the carpet to the tall, fiercely loyal weaver who had laboured for more than four months with her sister Zamireh and her deaf friend Iroda – squabbling, gossiping and joking as nimble fingers flew. They wouldn’t know that the name referred to a different Shirin, a tragic heroine of Persian literature, pictured in an exquisitely detailed miniature as she sat on a richly coloured carpet, awaiting her beloved Husrov. The design gave no indication that it had lain dormant for half a millennium on a sheet of burnished vellum, painstakingly painted in ground lapis, white lead and minium; nor the changing hands through which the book had passed on its journey from Herat to London. A simple glance revealed little of the efforts that Zamireh had made to transcribe the Tumurid design onto graph paper, or her sense of outrage when she discovered it stolen by Ulugbeg, our rival from the Bukharan workshop.

  None of these stories, woven into the very fabric of the carpet, was evident to a casual observer. Yet there was one story that played itself out quite clearly: row by row the florets became increasingly elongated, distorting the original design. It was this story I was most concerned with.

  Shirin and her sister Zamireh squatted beside the carpet with Iroda as I scrabbled over it with a tape measure.

  ‘Here’ – I pointed to a place in the second row of florets – ‘this is where everything starts going wrong. Exactly when we introduced the new wage system.’

  It was my fault. Originally we had intended to count the number of vertical knots on the carpet each month and then subtract last month’s total, multiplying this by the number of horizontal knots to arrive at an accurate total from which we could work out a fair wage. I had crawled under one of the looms, trying to count each knot, which appeared on the reverse of the carpet as a rough square. Emerging dusty and with a crick in my neck, I had decided that maybe we could cut corners and simply measure the length of the carpet and multiply this by the number of horizontal knots.

  The crafty weavers soon realised that larger twists of silk woven into chunky rectangular knots beefed up the length of the carpet, increasing their wages and stretching the design in the process.

  Zamireh protested that the problem was with the graph paper, but was silenced once the carpet was flipped over and t
he rectangular knots were plain to see. Other carpets still on the loom were similarly stretched; the only solution was to squeeze under the looms each month, counting the total of vertical knots and working out wages from there.

  I planned to introduce the concept of a fixed price for our rugs, knowing how trying many uninitiated tourists found the process of haggling. Zafar the wood-carver offered wildly differing prices to tourists, which I felt was unfair until he pointed out how easy it was to distinguish between a backpacker on a tight budget and a member of a tour group with all the latest camera paraphernalia. Surely it was fairer, he argued, to fix the price according to the affluence of the buyer?

  As news of our finished rugs spread, the attitude of local guides changed considerably. Before, they’d been happy to sit and smoke while I gave their group a free tour of the workshop; now that there was the potential for money to be made, they were keen for us to make a sale – expecting a 10 per cent cut.

  Ulugbeg told me how the system worked in Bukhara. Guides released their groups for an afternoon of shopping, gathering again before dinner. At this point the guides feigned interest in everyone’s purchases, noting prices and where each item had been bought, before surreptitiously doing the rounds, demanding 20 per cent from each stallholder. The woodwork shop installed in the madrassah next to ours paid hefty commission to the guides and received all the tour groups as a result, which left the better artisans struggling, the tourists with mediocre products and the guides making a small fortune.

  Considering we were adding only 25 per cent profit, I had no intention of giving 10 per cent away. Nor was I stuck behind the language barrier like most sellers – a point not lost on many of the guides, who often resented my presence. After making it clear that there would be no commissions, we received such vitriol from the guides, with threats of boycott, that we capitulated, giving $10 to $20 commission, depending on the carpet size. This worked well with the Khiva guides, but those from Bukhara and Samarkand were used to their 10 or 20 per cent cut. They would still bring their groups to our workshop for a free tour, but would inform them that carpets in Samarkand were much better and cheaper. Catching a French-speaking guide in the act, I butted in, explaining to his group that the Afghan factory in Samarkand paid all guides 10 per cent for every purchase. He never returned.