The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  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.

  The 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.

  Later 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.

  In 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 cri
nkles, 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?”

  Why not? That year, Nigeria was sitting on thirty-seven billion barrels of proven oil reserves and eight out of ten Nigerians were living on less than two dollars a day.

  “If we had special machines, we could get gold out of this and get rich. But we are too poor to buy such machines.”

  And again Amanullah schemed a breakout. He would sift the dunes for gold and become a millionaire and buy a nice house and a car somewhere far away, where water and girls were plenty. He would join the army and learn to read and write. He would find a job as a day laborer in Mazar, learn to sleep through city din. He would get away. He would. He would.

  This man, whose dreamy wanderlust echoed my own, whose rough and earnest embraces greeted me each time I arrived in his village, whose love of corporeal life was as exuberant as his living was meager. I liked him immensely. I took off my shoes and skidded to where he sat and lay down beneath a dune and listened. The gale had risen to thirty knots and effaced the anvil clouds from the sky and effaced the history of violence from the dunes, or at least ploughed it under. It carried sand, children’s voices, the rustle of desert grass. It carried echoes of wars ancient and recent. It carried terrible and inexplicable yearnings, for a future that was improbable and a past that never had been. It carried nostalgia. Time fell away.

  Then Amanullah said: “Anna! Let’s wrestle.”

  One time, in Qaqa Satar’s car in Mazar-e-Sharif, Amanullah had turned around in the passenger seat and plunked his hand on my knee. I remembered that hand. It was broad and fleshy. His wrist was as thick as my thigh. He probably could snap my neck with two fingers.

  I played the gender card.

  “You can’t wrestle with me,” I said. “I’m a woman.”

  “But you can wrestle with me!” And with a roar, Asad leapt to his feet and pounced upon Amanullah, and the men spun on the ground, kicking up sand and aurum dust and growling and panting and laughing, and now the wind carried their laughter as well.

  On the walk back to Oqa, we caught up with some boys who were molesting a Horsfield’s tortoise. It was about eight inches long, and it had retreated into its shell of nut-brown scutes that blanched at the edges to a sickly yellow. The boys took turns stepping on it with their rubber-sandaled feet. Then one of the boys kicked it with gusto. A little gratuitous act of sadism, of an innate viciousness each of us carries within. Horsfield’s tortoises are native to Afghanistan and live up to one hundred years. How old was this one? Which other depravities, grand and small, had it witnessed? Soon the boys lost interest in the tortoise and followed us into the village, spitting and giggling, holding hands, hopping over thorny shrubs and lumps of dried and drying human excrement and a rusted mortar shell. I looked back and the reptile was gone.

  That night I went to bed in my rental room in Mazar-e-Sharif. My scalp was full of sand and maybe—I liked to believe—some gold. The gale outside had become a storm. Half asleep, I imagined dunes marching past Oqa in a macabre and biblical cavalcade. Then I imagined that I would wake up the next morning and see the Hindu Kush upside down, or rearranged into a circle. But no. Nothing external ever budged these cold mountains, neither wind nor blood nor grief, nor even a call to prayer under a smoky sunrise.

  When I returned to Oqa, I couldn’t tell whether the dunes had shifted at all.

  The village slacked through its forenoons.

  After the goats had been dispatched to pasture and the boys had been dispatched to pick kindling and the dough had been kneaded in large blue-glazed ceramic basins and set under old blankets to rise for paltry lunches of nan and tea, a lassitude spilled over Oqa. A hard-earned lethargy that sagged like translucent cling wrap between the sun-bleached wasteland and the faded stratum of the sky.

  During these hours, women would drift from house to house to ask for a quarter cup of salt or to gossip. Men would drift from house to house to smoke cigarettes or opium. Oqans of both genders would gather into small congregations and migrate slowly through the village to gather fodder for the next day’s yarn, or simply to squat and gaze, unblinking, at the desert. Neighbors would stray into Thawra’s loom room to squat on her loom for a few minutes and tie some knots together.

  There was Juma Gul, whose name meant “Friday flower,” and who was always smiling and chewing gum. She never stayed very long. Her own carpet was stretched beneath a clothesline onto which she had pinned a drawing she had made, with soot on lined paper, of some primeval god, each of its stick arms and legs ending in three long talons. She said it was to explain human anatomy to her youngest daughter, who was three.

  Jahan Gul, World Flower, whose house was taken up almost entirely by a twenty-four-foot-long loom so old the gargantuan unfinished carpet upon it had overgrown with goat vertebrae sucked clean, skeins of thread, drying lozenges of donkey dung, blankets.

  Choreh Gul, Resolution Flower, gaunt and bird-faced and heavy-lidded with opium, would come by with or without her jovial ten-year-old daughter, Hazar Gul, One Thousand Flowers. These two wove with Thawra often and for the longest stretches, in exchange for a fraction of the proceeds from the carpet. Choreh Gul did not have a loom of her own because her husband, Choreh, couldn’t afford the yarn, and because there was no place to put a loom in her single-room house anyway. She had six children in various stages of infirmity. When her family unrolled their flimsy mattresses at night upon the thin bazaar-bought blankets that kept the dust down on the earthen floor, the only space not taken was the small bare square around an old and poorly soldered bukhari, which belched more smoke than heat. On a windowsill of their house, the tangled heap of wires that were intended to connect the generator to the power line, wires the villagers had entrusted Choreh to keep, shone with silver dust like a severed umbilical cord of some imagined better life.

  It took a village to weave a carpet. Thk, thk, thk, the sickles counted out the long, sluggish mornings of
poverty.

  Sometimes something uncommon would take place. An event. For example, Qaqa Satar would spread Baba Nazar’s Pakistani rug on the ground, and double and triple over his long frame impressively in prayer: that was an event. The villagers would come to watch that. Or I would pull out my sketchbook to draw. For a few turns that was an event, and the villagers would come to watch that, too. They would click their tongues and nod and giggle in appreciation when they recognized in my messy pen drawings a particular rooster, a neighbor’s house.

  After a while, my sketching ceased to be an event. The rooster and the house were old things the villagers had already seen and would see again every day, inshallah. I wasn’t telling them anything new.

  A few mornings before the vernal equinox, a man from Toqai, a village half a day’s walk through the dunes, brought his she-camel to be serviced by Naim’s bull. The men drove the camels, first the female, then the male, to the northern edge of the village, where a soot-blackened ellipsis of tandoor ovens trailed off toward the dunes, signaling to the heavens some unformulated or unfinished wish, some hint not taken. By the time the bull had been brought, lolling out a narrow purple tongue and perfuming himself in anticipation with a bristly, urine-soaked tail, all the village men had gathered to squat in a wide circle in fascinated hush. This was as close to porn as it ever got in Oqa.

  The animals faced the dunes. She knelt and flared her slanted nostrils, and the narrow veined velvet of her nose trembled. He, delirious, ground his teeth with a pleading high-pitched squeak and dribbled long strings of white foamy saliva libidinously onto the convulsing hump of his mate. For half an hour the entire hummock shuddered with the tremendous throaty grunts of her astonishing desire. Beneath eyelashes long and sparse and hard like cousinia petals, the wide-open dark glassy eyes of the camels reflected the aquamarine sky upon which filamentous cirri gathered and dispersed.