The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  “Once a year only!” Amanullah exclaimed in a deferential whisper. Qaqa Satar snapped a photograph with his cell phone.

  On the periphery of that gathering, next to a tandoor lit with dry grass, Choreh Gul and Hazar Gul had come out to bend over a stack of large uncooked sundials of nan and pies stuffed with bitter orach. On her right hand Choreh Gul wore a soiled quilted mitt, and between her teeth she clenched a large nail. She took the nail, pierced each loaf four times so that the bread wouldn’t billow from the heat too much, and bit the nail again. One by one, she placed the loaves onto the mitt, slathered them with the opaque well water her daughter had brought in a dinged aluminum basin, then slapped them onto the inside wall of the oven. Tatters of kindling fire ran in the wind and black smoke curled out and drifted over the squatting men and the mating animals. With her unmittened hand, Choreh Gul scooped palmfuls of water and threw them at the cooking loaves. The oven sibilated. A satisfied and benevolent god hissing at a woman and a girl at the edge of the world. Behind them bread-colored dunes rose.

  The men who were watching the camels took no interest in this mundane magic. Someone in Oqa was baking bread every day. In thirty minutes, the she-camel’s owner, who would get to keep the single calf when it was born after fifteen months of gestation, would take her back to Toqai. The villagers would talk about those thirty minutes for days.

  Later that week, the villagers stood next to Baba Nazar’s house with their faces upturned. An American B-52 Stratofortress was refueling in the blue blue sky above Oqa.

  The bomber rendezvoused with a KC-135 Stratotanker at an altitude of more than five miles somewhere beyond the citadel of ancient Balkh and drifted eastward. The planes at first a palm apart, then a thumb, then a pinkie. Until the bomber slid behind and slightly underneath the tanker. The Oqans could just make out the gossamer refueling boom that extended from the tanker’s rear to the unseen receptacle above the B-52’s cockpit. For a few minutes, the two silver machines glided together. They banked slightly, they straightened out, all in unison. Locked in an unearthly rendition of the most important of all earthly rituals, absolutely alone above these camel-colored plains.

  One tanker could carry thirty-one thousand gallons of fuel—enough to run Oqa’s generator to power the village every night for more than fourteen years. One B-52 could carry eighteen two-thousand-pound “smart” bombs, fifty-one five-hundred-pound bombs, almost thirty thousand cluster bomblets, and twelve nuclear cruise missiles. Enough to erase Oqa from the face of the Earth and pulverize the Hindu Kush into a barchan colony, or not even that. The Oqans did not make such calculations. They held their breath and watched and watched, and still they could not decide whether this bizarre, bellicose erotica at twenty-seven thousand feet was proof of the Americans’ vulnerability or omnipotence.

  In a few minutes, the bomber pulled back and banked north and scythed the ice-blue sky and vanished over Uzbekistan’s airspace. Soon the tanker was also gone.

  The villagers talked about that for a few days, too.

  One bleak cold morning, on a quest for diversion, a small deputation of men and women crammed into Choreh Gul’s threadbare house. She was sitting on her haunches by the bukhari, trying to keep warm. Her youngest son, Zakrullah, squirmed next to her on a blanket quilted from old rags.

  The neighbors watched Choreh Gul reach inside her dress of blue and white rayon and pull out a pendulous right breast. Barren. No milk at all. Sucked dry by life on this loess ridge that jutted out of a desert just as barren. By days of dividing up pittances of rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner among her family. By her five other children. You see? Choreh Gul pitched forward and, kneeling now, lifted her deflated breast by a pinch of pale skin. She dangled it like a white flag of defeat. She looked down at it accusingly. As though she hoped to shame it into lactating. Then she tucked it inside the dress again, sat back on her haunches, shrugged.

  A pathetic thing, this breast.

  The neighbors murmurously agreed.

  Zakrullah, for whom this useless breast was intended, writhed soundlessly, naked from the waist down. Forty days old and hungry. Loose and wrinkled and spookily old skin drooped from his angular pelvis. His shirt and two quilt coats tinkled with the coins Choreh Gul had sewn onto his clothes to ward off evil spirits. His scalp and forehead glowed a fluorescent fuchsia from the permanganate solution with which she had slathered his head. She thought maybe it would help with his headaches. She thought maybe he had headaches. And even if he didn’t, the permanganate solution and the amulets were the best she could do for Zakrullah. Since she had no milk.

  Zakrullah coughed once.

  The neighbors nodded at the baby in a kind of unsurprised resignation. They agreed that he, indeed, was quite ill. They agreed that nothing could be done for him: no woman in Oqa had enough milk to spare for someone else’s infant, and no one had the time or the means to take him to the free doctor in Dawlatabad. They also agreed that most newborns in Oqa looked like that after a few weeks, and many of them survived.

  Late-winter wind blew merciless and raw, and drew a gunmetal sheet of clouds over the melancholy plains. Half a dozen dust devils moored the gray land to the gray sky. The wind had brought a biting drizzle like myriad glass shards to Mazar-e-Sharif, bleached the city of color, slathered it with ankle-deep mud. The Hindu Kush floated above low clouds like brushstroke mountains in a Japanese ink miniature.

  But in Oqa, not a drop fell. Not even to spot the slate dust, let alone coax new plants out of it, and the village goats had just about denuded whatever forage was left in the threadbare wasteland.

  “I don’t know,” Amanullah had said that morning, screwing up his strabismic eyes. As though his squinting could have squeezed some green out of the cold, sheet-iron plains. “Must be something wrong with us.”

  Qaqa Satar’s Toyota jerked and squeaked over tussocks and ruts in this bleak desert. In the backseat Choreh Gul was carsick. She had never been in a car before. From time to time, Qaqa Satar would stop the car, and she would get out and vomit discreetly, as only a woman in a burqa could. Then she would gather up the wind-whipped and billowing nylon ruches of her veil and climb back into the car and take Zakrullah from her husband’s lap, and Qaqa Satar would slowly depress the gas pedal again. Another half a mile conquered. Zakrullah was going to the doctor after all.

  Choreh Gul had greeted my idea that Zakrullah should travel to the government hospital in Dawlatabad in Qaqa Satar’s car with little enthusiasm. It seemed like a chore. It seemed like a very long journey for just one child—and what to do with the other five, two girls and three boys, while she was away? Also, her husband Choreh would have to come with her because for a woman to travel outside the village without a grown male relative was dangerous and improper even in a burqa, and that would mean that for the day of the drive Choreh would not be able to scavenge the dunes for ancient coins and jewelry that he usually huckstered to middlemen in town. Losing a day of such work could mean losing more than a day of sustenance. Choreh Gul had been dubious the trip to the hospital would be worth all the hassle.

  It was additionally possible, though she had not said any such thing out loud, that Choreh Gul also had harbored the common anxiety of an addict: that at the hospital she would not be allowed to take the minuscule nuggets of opium she, like most of Oqa’s women, diluted in her morning tea. Opium was much cheaper than rice and it helped stave off hunger and woe. Choreh Gul and her husband spent between two and four dollars a month on the drug. Food—flour for bread, rice and the oil to cook it with, and tea—could cost five times as much.

  In any case, in her room reeking of urine, dust, manure, and straw, of the acrid smoke from the bukhari and of Choreh’s opium pipe, the woman had contemplated the offer that Qaqa Satar drive her and Zakrullah to see a doctor at the free government clinic, and the responsibility that her accepting this offer had entailed, and had responded: “I have to ask my husband.
”

  • • •

  When her husband had returned from the desert two days later, he said the idea of taking his youngest to see a doctor was just fine. Late the next morning, Qaqa Satar and I delivered the couple and their infant son inside the metal gate of Dawlatabad District Hospital.

  • • •

  Flip-flopped and tentative, Choreh Gul and Choreh shuffled into the unheated pediatric ward. Choreh Gul had pulled back the front flap of her burqa and carried her swaddled child past unoccupied cots that sagged under the hard memory of untold repetitions of ailing weight. Brown smears of old blood or old excrement or both stained the blue-green dado like auxiliary wainscoting from hell.

  A German relief agency had built the hospital with concrete several years earlier, and construction workers had skimped on insulation. Maybe there had been none available. The wind leaked cold and damp through cracks in the windowpanes. A doctor and three nurses worked here but only one of that team was present, a stout and stern young nurse named Faruza. Nurse Faruza wore her white doctor’s coat as a pro forma afterthought between a floor-length wool skirt and a down jacket, and she had tucked each hand inside the opposite sleeve of her jacket, using the sleeves as a muff. She looked fatigued. She puckered her lipsticked mouth in disdain at the pauperized and bedraggled trinity that had shambled into her domain, then unpuckered it and ordered Choreh Gul to lay her son on a desk draped with a plastic tablecloth and unwrap him. The skeletal and wincing baby emerged into the cold, naked on top of his quilted tatters. The nurse took in the anorexic thighs, the slat-board ribcage, the wrinkled skin wilting on the pelvic bones, nodded, and said: “He’s fine.”

  She did not remove her hands from her jacket sleeves, did not touch the infant. It was too cold. “He does not look malnourished.”

  Overwhelmed by Nurse Faruza’s glacial authority, Choreh Gul and Choreh said nothing and stood still. The nurse mistook their silence for mulishness. She sighed, took her hands out of their sleeve muff, fished a cell phone from the right thigh pocket of her uniform coat, and dialed the doctor.

  “He does not have a problem with malnutrition,” said Doctor Mohammed Akbar when he arrived a few minutes later wearing jeans and a leather jacket and the battered look of someone resigned to not ameliorating the tragedies of this world.

  “My son is very thin. Could you give him some drugs, please?” Choreh said.

  The doctor studied very carefully and with great sadness the excreta-smeared wall. Perhaps he expected some help from there. He tried again: “If they are under six months old, we cannot accept them.”

  But he reached over the desk and over the infant lying upon the desk anyway and opened a drawer and removed a stethoscope from it. He closed his eyes and listened to Zakrullah’s chest with his eyes closed. Then he opened his eyes and said: “I suppose we can send him to the lab to check for giardiasis and dysentery.”

  He turned to Choreh. His eyes welled with accusation.

  “Do you give opium to the baby? Don’t lie to me, because I will check and see.” He folded the stethoscope and put it back in the drawer and for the first time spoke to me. The guileless foreign benefactor who had to be set straight. “It is very common for people in this area to give opium to children when they cry. They are either giving opium to them or he is ingesting it with her milk.”

  Even so, the doctor was getting worked up. Was it something he heard in Zakrullah’s chest? Or in his own—some once-upon-a-time aspiration not yet completely expunged by toil at a shitty district hospital in Northern Afghanistan? He scrutinized Zakrullah now, as though he had never noticed the baby before. The rib bones, the withered face, the slack-skin sacks of thighs. Then he straightened his shoulders and pronounced in a voice suddenly sonorous and grave: “He is deteriorating. The baby must stay at the hospital for three days. His mother must stay with him. She will be fed three meals a day and the baby will be given medicine for free. Ampicillin and gentamicin. He was in danger when you brought him in. We will begin treatment immediately.”

  Nurse Faruza pointed to a cot, and Choreh Gul wrapped the blankets over her son and slipped out of her plastic sandals and climbed onto the cot and sat there with her legs tucked in. Almost inaudibly, Zakrullah began to cry. His mother reached inside her dress and pulled out her thin left breast and gave him the empty nipple. Emotionless. Slow. A strung-out Madonna in a filthy district hospital. Then she looked up and called: “I also need some drugs.”

  But the doctor did not hear her request. He was already out the door and shouting out orders for naloxone for a new patient who had just arrived in the grubby anteroom of the pediatric ward. The patient’s name was Abdul Bashir. He was fifteen days old and dying of an opium overdose.

  The next morning it was still overcast. Oyster light sifted through the windows into Thawra’s loom room, where in this dull glow she worked the warps and wefts alone in patient silence. Next door, in Amanullah’s bedroom, Choreh and a few neighbors, men and boys, had taken shelter from the weather. The boys squatted on the uncarpeted section of the floor by the door, where the dusty rows of the men’s shoes and flip-flops attended like antediluvian witnesses in their own right, talced and venerable. Their owners reclined on mattresses and shared an opium pipe and stories of addiction.

  The pipe was soldered of sooty iron and shaped like a poppy seedpod on a thick stem, and belonged to Amin Bai, the Commander. He had dispatched Amanullah’s seven-year-old son, Nurullah, to fetch it from his house. The opium was Amin Bai’s also, a brown-black disk weighing about a fifth of an ounce that he kept wrapped in a folded sheet of lined paper ripped out of some notebook and tucked into the chest pocket of his shalwar kameez. A quarter-size gobbet and in Oqa worth probably a quarter of a dollar. Not thirty miles to the northeast, men more adventurous than the Commander carried the precious narcotic resin across the Amu Darya to Uzbekistan, where it was worth hundreds of times more. The previous year their cargo had amounted to ninety metric tons—approximately four hundred and fifty million disks such as the one Amin Bai kept in his pocket—and, together with the three hundred tons of the drug smuggled out of Afghanistan through Iran and Pakistan, supplied nearly all of the world’s opium. At four billion dollars a year, opium trade in Afghanistan was the second-largest source of revenue after international aid and made up approximately half the budget of the Taliban. Baba Nazar knew a couple of men from Toqai who had carried opium to Uzbekistan and returned rich. He also knew a couple of men from Toqai who had carried opium to Uzbekistan and were shot crossing the border.

  “And sent back,” he said, and punctuated the smoky air with a gnarled forefinger. “Their dead bodies.”

  Amin Bai, Choreh, and Qaqa Satar took turns heating the resin over a low conical oil lamp, which they had set in the center of the namad-covered floor. Prostrate mendicants before a fickle deity that enslaved and granted analgesia both. Opium smoke filled the room quickly and pearled by the low windows beyond which an indifferent and ageless desert sheened under a flat gray sky. Halfway to the ceiling the vapor, chilled, smoothed out into a pale and opaque film. It smelled slightly sour, like burning yeast.

  Afghanistan’s opium habit was more than two thousand years old, introduced, it is believed, by Alexander the Great, whose troops had used it as a palliative. Dating individual addiction was trickier. Amin Bai could not remember the first time he had tasted opium, probably because he had been an infant then. Choreh, who was forty-one, said he had started smoking in his early thirties, after a land-mine incident. He had ventured a hundred yards or so into the sand dunes to collect some calligonum kindling in order to boil water for tea and had been chopping at a tough, gnarled stem with a pick when the pick struck a mine. He supposed the Soviets had placed the mine when their soldiers had been stationed at a barracks on the north side of the dunes in the 1980s. The shrapnel had torn a palm-size chunk of flesh out of his right thigh and lacerated his calf with a web of zigzagging and ver
miform scars and strange runic indentations that still chafed against the trouser leg of his brown shalwar kameez. He said opium helped dull the pain. He also said his wife had started taking opium just before she became pregnant with Zakrullah, to stop the aches in her legs and neck and shoulders.

  “But after the New Year, I will join the police,” Choreh announced. “They offer a good salary, ten thousand afghanis. And they also have a program to treat opium addiction.”

  Choreh’s neighbors shifted on their mattresses and coughed in scoffing protest at this version of history. They said Choreh Gul had been drinking opium at least since Choreh had brought her to Oqa from Khairabad as a fifteen-year-old bride, and that had been more than twenty years back. They also said Choreh himself had been smoking since his teens. Boys in Oqa were allowed to start smoking opium when they turned fifteen, or when they got married, whichever came first.

  As for his New Year’s resolution, it was as good as any they’d ever heard, and they had heard them many times, from many men in Oqa, for Oqa was a village of dreamers.

  Choreh shrugged, slowly, groggily. What was it to them? They and their own wives were smoking and drinking opium, too. He didn’t see any of them quitting or joining the police, either.

  At that the men nodded with the solemn approval they granted any truth, no matter how disagreeable. Almost everyone in Oqa was using opium, they said, that was true—except for the children who weren’t sick. Children seemed to be sick all the time.

  Amin Bai stoked up the oil lamp again, and Qaqa Satar checked the pipe, inhaled with his eyes skewed, and sang out: “It’s very nice. It’s very sweet. If you smoke it and you want to have sex with your wife, you’ll go for a whole hour. It makes your whole body feel warm. You feel like you are in a garden in London. Women who weave add a tiny bit to a cup of tea and it allows them to work long hours. They don’t feel muscle cramps, no pain.”