by Anna Badkhen
“If you have a cough and you smoke it, the cough is gone,” Baba Nazar chimed in. He himself did not smoke because—opium’s medicinal properties aside—he believed it was unhealthy. “I have smoked only once, and I threw up. It is very strong. If you eat a small amount, you’ll be dizzy for twenty-four hours. I’m seventy, and I can walk and work. I’m stronger than these people”—he swept his arm toward his guests—“because I don’t use it.”
Once upon a time, Baba Nazar had been a champion wrestler in Oqa, Karaghuzhlah, and Khairabad, a crown he still gloated about, and he took his health seriously.
Amanullah didn’t smoke because his father had forbidden it. Instead, he squatted by the door amid the shoes and the children, and busied himself with replacing a piece of rabbit skin on Baba Nazar’s tupcha with a fresher one. Nurullah and some older boys knelt quietly at his elbows, reverential, silent. Their eyes darted between Amanullah’s handiwork and the men who were passing the pipe back and forth. All of them had tasted opium. In a few years they would be old enough to smoke it, too.
• • •
The men listened carefully to the story of the infant Abdul Bashir.
The baby had thrashed against the soiled Dawlatabad hospital cot and gurgled the deep, horrible, rhythmic wheezes of the dying. He had begun to convulse when the nurses had pressed his tiny face, blue from asphyxiation, into an adult oxygen mask larger than his head. They tourniqueted his spasming limbs one by one to find a threadlike vein that could fit a needle so that they could resuscitate him with a milliliter of the opiate blocker naloxone, and seconds dragged like hours until the antidote kicked in and the baby cried at last.
Doctor Akbar, the pediatrician, said that every single one of the approximately one thousand child patients his hospital received each year, Choreh’s son Zakrullah included, had some degree of opium poisoning when they arrived, even if they had been brought in to be treated for other ailments—meningitis, say, or cholera. He said also that each year a handful were brought to the hospital already dead from overdose. But for a few minutes’ delay Abdul Bashir would have been one of those.
Abdul Bashir’s statuesque and stunning mother fixed her child with a drugged stare. Twenty-four years old, fair-skinned, and lissome in her white sheepskin coat, her high cheekbones flushed from running from the outskirts of Dawlatabad with the baby in her arms, wringing her long, silver-ringed and hennaed fingers: a would-be infanticidal pietà who herself had been born addicted. It was she who had given Abdul Bashir the opium that morning, to hush his crying, but she must have miscalculated the dose. After he stopped breathing, she brought him to the hospital.
At this part of the story, Baba Nazar laughed and the rest of the men in his house laughed as well.
Why? Could this not have happened with one of their own babies, here in Oqa?
“No-ho-ho,” the Commander said, coughing as he guffawed. “Here, we know the trick, how much opium to give a baby.”
The men chuckled some more at the young mother’s incompetence, and Nurullah and the other boys grinned, happy for the occasion to express their camaraderie with important grown men of such expertise. Outside, the wind had died down. The desert swelled with the enormous silences of a carpet-shaped world that was chockfull of vital mistakes and whose pain threshold was limitless.
A flotilla of perfectly round and cartoonish clouds sailed over my walled compound in Mazar-e-Sharif. It was the morning of the vernal equinox, the first morning of spring and, according to the Zoroastrian calendar by which Afghanistan fixed its time, the morning of Nawruz: New Year’s Day. That year, the holiday fell on a Tuesday.
“Sal-e-Nau mubarak!” Happy New Year! Men leaned out past heavy gates of red and turquoise sheetmetal, cranking them open just a tad wider than usual to usher in a little extra of the year’s first sunshine. The holiday’s name, Nawruz, meant “new day,” or “new light,” in Farsi.
“Wa shoma ham Sal-e-Nau mubarak.” And a happy New Year to you, as well. Women greeted early guests with haft mewa, a heady compote of dried fruit and nuts drowned in giant vats of boiling water and steeped overnight, and samanak, a sweet paste of wheat germ, sugar, and walnuts. Only women were allowed to prepare samanak, and a few days before the holiday they had taken turns stirring it for twenty-four hours over wood fires in their walled yards and singing and trading vulgar jokes and braiding one another’s hair and trying on one another’s lipstick. Traditionally, had a man glimpsed the preparation, the dessert would have had to be thrown out, and the man derided.
A twelve-year-old boy in my house inscribed on graph paper the nascent year’s name: 1390, per a countdown formally begun in the last decade of the Sassanid rule of the Khorasan. The holiday itself was so old its origins were lost. As old as man’s Manichaean desire to simplify the world into manageable opposites, light and dark, good and evil.
On city roundabouts, papier-mâché tulips bloomed. At the Blue Mosque, Zoroaster’s reputed burial place, thousands of white doves cooed in satiated unison, and mullahs prepared to welcome pilgrims descending upon the city from all over Central Asia. This was Mazar-e-Sharif, the city of mystics, and both the mullahs and the visitors were eager to forsake Islam for a day of pre-Mohammedan hedonism that culminated with the raising of a ribboned and beaded maypole in the mosque’s vast yard tiled with black-and-white marble. For a week already, hunched dervishes from Iran in swags of rosaries had been pounding sidewalk dust with their walking staffs, entranced, declaiming fervently and at random to passing cars and horse-drawn buggies and motorcycles snippets of decadent verse by Omar Khayyam and Hafez, and drawing stares. Domestic and international politicians and luminaries were also expected. Ten thousand policemen and soldiers in armored vests blotted the sun-gorged streets because city officials anticipated a major terrorist act. The terrorist act would rend the city ten days later, when six Taliban would lead an enraged Friday mob from the Blue Mosque to the United Nations offices to topple guard towers, set walls ablaze, and, beneath the alluvial slopes bloodred with wild spring poppies, slaughter twelve of the agency’s employees, mostly Westerners. On Nawruz, though, war seemed to be elsewhere—on the other side of the Hindu Kush, where most of the hundred and forty thousand foreign troops and elusive and sandaled guerrillas were fighting one another and killing and maiming in the process farmers and day laborers and their families with roadside bombs and missiles and small artillery, or at the very least outside the city limits, where insurgency was quietly gathering steam, uncontested, unstoppable.
The day passed in comings and goings of guests, in exchanges of kisses and the euphonious singsong of greetings. The family in whose house I was renting a room did not go to the Blue Mosque to watch the maypole ceremony—too dangerous, they said, not worth the risk. Instead, they celebrated the New Year indulging in the discreet domestic pleasures of Afghanistan’s wannabe bourgeoisie, taking in the sun and telling jokes and smoking a mint-flavored waterpipe on a takht, a carpeted and pillowed wooden platform they had established in the center of the yard. Guests and family members of both genders and all ages took turns shaking off their slippers and climbing on, dragging on the pipe, sipping tea and haft mewa from glass cups, shucking sunflower seeds into cupped palms, squinting at the tall sky, moving around the dial of the takht to make room for newcomers, and talking, talking. Like guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Reluctant men peeled off to attend the one-o’clock prayer at the neighborhood mosque, returned an hour later singing folk songs about love, and climbed back upon the takht to resume their pagan reverie. The afternoon sun was gentle and flocks of white doves looped, delirious with spring, in air the color of tea. My hosts’ children brought out some colored modeling clay and one of the men, a driver who worked for the United Nations, asked me to make something. I made a green cat. He took it in his hand, studied it for a few beats, then very deftly attached three black stripes to it: one around the cat’s neck, two across its face.
“That’s a collar,” I pointed. “What are these?”
“Burqa. This is Afghanistan. Next time don’t make without burqa.”
No bombs went off in the city that day. There was no gunfire. By six o’clock the first sun of spring softly relayed toward the western hemisphere, and in the caramel evening haze the crest of the Hindu Kush faded into a velvety saffron carpet fringe. Then night erased the mountains altogether and summoned pale stars out of the dark. When the waning moon rose over the eastern stucco wall of the compound, I brought out Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game to read by moonlight.
A hundred and seventy-nine years ago and less than twenty miles away, by moonlight also, the Great Game player and British political agent in Kabul Sir Alexander Burnes had found Moorcroft’s grave, “unmarked and half covered by a mud wall, outside the town of Balkh.” Moorcroft, the veterinary surgeon–explorer in the employ of the East India Company, the first Englishman to set foot on the banks of the Oxus, the man who had warned of Russia’s wish to occupy Afghanistan and who had urged Britain to annex it first, was believed to have succumbed to fever in romantic pursuit of the golden Akhal-Tekes, the fabled Turkoman horses.
“Moorcroft,” wrote Hopkirk, “thus lies not far from the spot where, more than a century and a half later, Soviet troops and armour poured southwards across the River Oxus into Afghanistan.” And now the soldiers of yet another empire were warring upon this land. Some of them were scanning my neighborhood that night from two invisible helicopter gunships that whirred low over the low cityscape to the north of the compound, disrupting the peace or keeping it, or both.
A little blond girl had dozed off on a pillow next to mine. Her name was Avesta, like the mostly lost collection of Zoroastrianism’s sacred texts. Her mouth was sticky with samanak, and her eyelids glittered with the blue eye shadow her mother had allowed her to wear on New Year’s Day. With utmost tenderness, her father scooped her up and carried her to her own thin mattress in the house. Tomorrow would dawn over her eternal war zone a little sunnier, a little warmer.
As if on cue, the next day the desert spilled a brilliant green. The almond orchards where dreamy flowers just recently had spumed were suddenly powdery green with minuscule teardrop nuts. Goats everywhere kidded all at once. In the pale light before sunup, the sulfuric and deserted wastelands of winter outside Mazar had come instantaneously and noisily to jubilant life: thousands of downy black and spotted kids scuttled, clanging, across fields that at last promised some kind of a harvest. There still had been no rain near Oqa, but here, too, strange sheeny succulents had sprouted through tough unirrigated soil, like some aberrant greenery from outer space.
It was very early and still cold. On the southeastern horizon a yet invisible sun had whitened the narrowest strip of sky, and against it the crest of the Hindu Kush had begun to silhouette grand and black. To the still dark northeast, on the border with Uzbekistan, the lights of Khairatan diffracted from beyond the Earth’s curvature, turning the grimy border port into a grandiose city of shimmering skyscrapers. A mirage behooving a historical landmark: in 1989 the last Soviet soldiers had marched across Khairatan’s Friendship Bridge and out of Afghanistan after a decade of occupation, leaving behind more than one million dead Afghans and Russians, ten million land mines, and an intractable internecine war that bled into all the wars that came before and after. Then again, everywhere in the Khorasan there were such landmarks. Some glowed, like Khairatan. Others seemed to absorb all light around them. Most just were. Which vanquished army had made its last stand on the land now buried under Oqa’s dunes? Whose oblique former castle a half-hour walk west from the village had eroded into a mound of clay? Amanullah told me it was very old. How old? “It was built in 3890,” he said.
What difference did a date make? “Time costs nothing in these parts,” the Swiss journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach wrote of the Afghan plains many wars ago, in the 1930s. Dates were just a patina on an overeducated brain. There was no Nawruz celebration in Oqa, no samanak parties, no compote of dried fruit to offer guests. The only time that mattered in the village was the tempo of the planet’s dual revolutions, the eternal repetition that brought the changing of the seasons, the night and the day, and the magical twilight in between.
Twilight in Oqa. The stars extinguished one by one, leaving Venus to greet the sun alone. In the spectral predawn blue on the western edge of the village, Amanullah, Boston, and Baba Nazar were running jackknifed at the waist with outstretched arms in a farcical bourrée after a black-and-white scatter of day-old kid goats. The kids had to be gathered up and stuffed into one of Baba Nazar’s shacks so that Shareh and Hafez, the village herders, could take the family’s half-dozen nannies to distant pasture without the newborns following. The dusky hollow south of the hummock stirred with the goatherds’ short whoops and the bells and musty bleating of a herd already on its way to the desert. The boy Hafez, named with the honorific reserved for someone who has memorized the Koran, the book this unschooled child will never read. Named also after the fourteenth-century Sufi poet whose verses Afghan men recited apothegmatically, unprompted. Hafez the goatherd, bowlegged and weatherworn from having spent his whole short life in relentless dry wind and flinty sun. Whose beauty fanned his secret ecstasies? Which lonesome ghazals did he compose to the scattershot tinkling of his flock as his heart swelled with spring?
Boston threw the last kid into the shed, drew a large wooden latch over the door of unevenly nailed boards, pressed her back against it in mock exhaustion, and stood there giggling. A gold-pink cloud spilled in the east where the sun would soon crown, and in that glow the wrinkles on Boston’s face rearranged themselves, and for a second on that morning in late March this old woman was a little girl who had just had the luck of sinking her fingers into the silken fleece of newborn goats.
• • •
Work finished for now, Boston and the men sauntered back to the main house, and Amanullah lit the bukhari in one of the rooms. The dry grass took to flame at once, and Boston balanced on the stove a blackened pitcher with water to boil for tea. Amanullah plopped onto a mattress and assumed his favorite position, horizontal. Lying down could mean falling asleep, and sleep sometimes brought Amanullah dreams vivid and almost as wonderful as the forbidden journeys he would never take.
“Sometimes I have dreams so good they make me happy for several days. Even for a month!” The mere memories of these dreams transported him to some other spring. “For example, if I dream of a young girl, maybe twenty years old, who comes up to me and hugs me and kisses me—that can make me happy for a long time.”
Baba Nazar unstoppered the plastic-wrapped cork of his old Chinese thermos, poured hot stove-boiled water over a handful of green tea leaves, replaced the cork, and set the tea to brew for a spell. He unfolded on the floor a dastarkhan of white and lavender houndstooth plastic in which his wife had wrapped a hardening loaf of yesterday’s nan. He unstoppered the thermos again and poured the tea. It was time for breakfast, and stories.
“There are seven stars,” Baba Nazar said. He crumbled the tough bread into his tea and sucked at the rim of the glass cup. “Four brothers and three sisters. Brothers in the front and sisters in the back. Their parents are dead, and when these stars die, they will see their parents in paradise.
“But some say,” he continued, “the three stars are children, and the four stars are the bed on which the children are carrying their dead parents.”
The Pleiades, a constellation of orphans four hundred light-years away. Somehow Baba Nazar’s story seemed sadder than the Greek myth of seven distraught sister-nymphs who had plunged to their deaths, then ascended to the sky to shine. Perhaps because in Oqa death always seemed just a breath away. Thawra flitted past the door, taciturn and sequined like an echo of a shooting star, and disappeared into the loom room. Thk, thk, thk. Baba Nazar crumbled some more bread in time with the subtle pulse of the weaver’s sickle.
Wh
at about dragons, the stylized, angular dragons that sometimes slinked along the borders of Oqa’s carpets? The old man could not think of any, though I have been told, by a young Hazara taxi driver from Karaghuzhlah, that until just two years earlier, a big monster dragon had lived in a fallow field south of his village.
“It was like a snake, but it would sometimes turn into something bigger, like a lizard,” said the driver, whose name was Qasim. “Then it disappeared. For forty years people couldn’t cross the field. It probably died, because people said the field smelled funny two years ago.” Qasim had never seen the monster, nor did he know anyone who had. But his grandfather and uncles had told him it had been there.
Once, not far from Oqa’s cemetery, I saw a desert monitor lizard turn its five-foot-long Mesozoic body slowly in the dust.
What about nomad warriors, then, I asked Baba Nazar—the ancient horsemen of the Pazyryk? The belligerence of the Turkomans once had been the stuff of the legends that nurtured the Europeans’ image of an Afghanistan entrenched, implacable, hostile. Descendants of an orphan and a she-wolf, inventors of the stirrupped saddle, who had written in runes and buried their horses with their men. Francis Skrine and Edward Denison Ross, in their 1899 tome The Heart of Asia, had called the Turkomans “a race with whom no peace or truce was possible,” “untamed tribes” who possessed “some at least of the traits of the noble savage of fiction.” “‘He who puts his hand to his sword-hilt,’” the Englishmen cited a Turkoman proverb, “‘hath no need to ask for a good reason.’”