The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  “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.

  Any 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 r
esolution 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.

  I scrolled farther north, following an ecru hairline through an expanse of ocher: the unpaved track to the Oxus. To get to Oqa, you took this track for approximately forty kilometers, then ditched it at a nameless spot that absolutely no landmark designated and headed west into the desert for another fifteen kilometers or so. The tan background on the screen ran smooth along the paling road, then became reticulated into uneven quilts of sepia, caramel, mocha. Fields of cotton, winter wheat, okra, and tobacco dealt out at random angles like playing cards. A denser scattering of cards around Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, the villages nearest Oqa, Karaghuzhlah itself a khaki and deep green drip painting of clay roofs mingling with aisles of almonds and apricots and centennial mulberry trees. Now west, past some brown veins of irrigation canals, to the long vertical greenish double strip of Zadyan. The minaret a pale pinhead. North of here, a perfect waxen square: Kafir Qaleh. To the east, the hazel squiggle of the Hazara Ditch.

  I triangulated. Oqa had to be right here, in this freckled back of beyond just south of the rippled gray surf of sand dunes and north of the last accidental swatches of desiccated fields. I zoomed in and strained at the pixels. Nothing. I zoomed in some more and the pixels blurred out of focus. Nothing at all.

  If one day Oqa were blown away, or a sandstorm buried it under a barchan, hardly anyone outside would know to notice.

  • • •

  No roads led to the village, only herders’ footpaths that each rain erased anew. Rains were rare. There was no surface water. Oqa’s two hundred and forty people—knots per square inch—drew their water with yellow plastic canisters tied to lengths of rope from the two wells some previous and forgotten generation had dug by hand. The well on the southern slope of the hummock was for humans. The well on the northern slope, where the Oqans went to relieve themselves behind some large tussocks, was for the animals, but most of the villagers watered their livestock by the southern well because it was easier to make the steep downhill trek to a well only once and because anyway the water was diseased in both wells, with typhoid, cholera, and bacterial dysentery. The water in both wells was seventy-five feet beneath the surface and briny.

  If you approached Oqa from the south—say, coming from Mazar or Khairabad or Karaghuzhlah—you first came to the village cemetery. All the graves were unmarked ovoids of dry clay except for one, which was confined by a mud fence. It was the grave of Baba Nazar’s grandfather. Above it dangled a large ceramic jug impaled upside down on a tall wooden staff, and against the fence leaned a plywood board with three lines inscribed upon it in Arabic in dark green paint. The first line read: “In the name of God, the most compassionate and the most merciful.” The second: “There is no God but God. Mohammed is His prophet.” The third line was illegible, but that didn’t matter, because almost no one in Oqa could read anyway—and certainly not Arabic, the language of the mullahs. No one could tell me who had put the board there.

  The graves came in two sizes: big ones, for adults, and small ones, for children. Most of the graves were small. One belonged to the youngest daughter of Amin Bai, the Commander. Five belonged to the daughters of Oraz Gul and Abdul Khuddus. All of their daughters. All the children the couple had ever had.

  “Every winter five or six children die,” Amin Bai explained once, and the men around him echoed, in unison, like a choir in a Greek tragedy: “Every winter, five or six.”

  “Die of what?” I asked.

  Amin Bai pulled a half-chewed Korean cigarette from his mouth, whether to better articulate his response or to think, then returned it to its notch in his thin lips. Who knew? Cold. Cholera. Poverty. Life. All the girls in the village were named Something Gul, “Flower”—Hazar Gul, Fatma Gul, Leila Gul—the dead ones, too. In late spring, the rush skeletonweed plants that grew between the graves and on top of them sprouted bright yellow blossoms that bowed over the mounds like sharp and frigid little suns.

  After the cemetery, the footpath to Oqa crabbed windward, to the northwest, then turned abruptly right, toward the village. As if those who came here were sailboats on their final tack to some spectral mooring and the path were charting their course. Or maybe to give visitors one last chance to reconsider this godforsaken destination. The first three houses at the weather tip of the ridge belonged to Baba Nazar. Two were small, single-room boxes to keep newborn kid goats in early spring and to host the occasional houseguests in all other seasons; the main house was slightly larger, with three rooms and a kitchen and a woozy entryway on the lee side, and sat a bit farther inside the village boundary. There were no fences around Baba Nazar’s houses or, for that matter, around anyone else’s: privacy, vigorously guarded by thick compound walls in most of Afghanistan, meant little here. Oqa’s women walked through the village unveiled, and nursed their children in plain sight.

  Baba Nazar had sculpted his houses out of the desert by hand, and their walls were lumpy, like claymation props. A jerry can with the words TURBO ACTIVE ENGINE OIL fading from its side hung from a knobbly rafter outside the larger house, where the hunter and his family lived. In the late nineties, when Baba Nazar’s older daughter, Zarifshah Bibi, was a teenager, she was playing under this rafter and tripped a Soviet land mine that had been buried in the dust. The explosion tore off her left leg below the knee and her left thumb, index, and middle fingers. Baba Nazar still managed to find a match for her, a sharecropper from Zadyan named Mustafa, who was in his fifties when they married. Mustafa had little money to pay the bride price. His few teeth were stained brown from chewing naswar—a blend of tobacco leaves, calcium oxide, and wood ash—and never brushing. He was the man you married when you had one leg and a hand with fingers missing, a hand that couldn’t weave.

  On the opposite, leeward end of Oqa stood the teetering shanty of the village mosque. The villagers themselves had hand-molded the mosque out of brush and mud. It had no minaret from which to summon the faithful to prayer, no arched mihrab, no calligraphy over the door. It offered no succor. Once, the Oqans had hired a mullah to come by motorcycle from the silty banks of the Amu Darya and lead them in prayer on Fridays. After a few months the mullah quit, no longer satisfied with the two hundred and twenty dollars a year the villagers could scrape together to pay him. The Oqans were left to pray alone, in the crepuscule of their homes or outside, kneeling west-southwest on kerchiefs or prayer rugs they spread over drying goat turds.

  Oqa did have one building with sharp corners and straight walls. It was the shelter for a twenty-three-horsepower generator made in China by Shandong Laidong Internal Combustion Engine Co. Ltd. A few
years after the Americans had come to Afghanistan, some Afghan men showed up at the village in pickup trucks, delivered the generator, filled it with fuel, built the shelter for it, raised twelve aluminum poles, ran a power line between them, and left. The power line sagged from pole to pole the curved length of the village. It was not hooked up to any of the houses or to the generator, and there were no streetlamps or electric outlets anywhere. Just as well. For two nights after the generator arrived, the villagers ran the motor from dusk till sunup, to see how much it would cost to operate it. Then the fuel ran out. The men of Oqa figured that each family would need to pay twenty cents per night for gas. Then they gathered up the wires that would have connected the generator to the power line and gave them to a villager named Choreh for safekeeping, presumably until such a time when the Oqans strike it rich. Village children used the poles for target practice with their slingshots. Whenever they hit one, it pealed magnificently, like a bell.

  Three years after the generator arrived in Oqa, two foreign men came by car every day for twenty days with cameras and filmed something. No one here quite knew who these men were or what they had come to film or why. Some villagers believed they were British. Journalists documenting the opium addiction that plagued the village? Geologists cutting for sign of some rare mineral that could be extricated from the dunes should the war ever abate? Scholars looking for the graves of the fabled Great Game player William Moorcroft and his companions, George Guthrie and George Trebeck, who met their end somewhere in the Bactrian plains? Or the Britons’ latter-day successors, NATO scouts? After twenty days, the men stopped coming. No one in Oqa saw them again.

  “The Soviets were in Afghanistan. They passed through Oqa. The mujaheddin passed through, too—like Ustad Atta, who is now the governor. The Taliban also passed through. Everyone passes through Oqa. No one stays. It’s a forgotten world.”

  Baba Nazar spoke, and on his namad the other men nodded and contemplated in silence a universe that chose to trespass on their village in such warped, distorted ways, as though reflected in a carnival mirror. It was noon. A lustrous morning had temporarily returned shape to the formless objects of the night, but the high sun had flattened them out again into two-dimensional and nebulous apparitions. The Hindu Kush became a long mauve smudge crudely smeared over the southern horizon. Out of refracted desert two enormous camels loaded with mountains of calligonum sailed on stilts without touching the ground, shrinking as they approached. A few minutes later, Amin Bai’s firstborn, Ismatullah, fourteen and solemn, came and knelt quietly on the ground beside his father. The boy had gone with the camels to gather the brush, which he would barter as kindling for rice, salt, flour, tea, and cooking oil in Karaghuzhlah or Khairabad. Until the Americans came to Afghanistan, the Oqans had taken calligonum all the way to Mazar-e-Sharif, a seven-hour walk to the south, where people were wealthier and the brush sold for more. But the American war had made people in cities wealthier still, and now Mazar was full of cars. A few cars would have been okay, but this many cars scared the camels, made them skitter. A city car could hit a camel. It was not worth it to walk all the way down there anymore.