The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  But the only transient Turkomans of whom Baba Nazar knew were the families who had fled the Soviet annexation of Central Asia in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had poured into Bactria then, across the desert from the newly created Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and across the Amu Darya from Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. “A lot of them were our ancestors,” the hunter said. “I probably have some distant cousins and aunts in Turkmenistan. Or maybe in Uzbekistan. If I go on Uzbek television and say that I have an ancestor from Uzbekistan, and the Uzbek government finds the rest of my family, then we can move to Uzbekistan. One family in Khairabad went to Uzbekistan that way.”

  A hereditary wanderlust stirred in the hunter, a yearning half-forgotten and now loosened in the way spring loosens pent-up aches.

  “Life in Uzbekistan is very good,” Baba Nazar daydreamed. He had not heard of the poverty on the other side of the border, of prison torture, of villages and towns emptied of men gone to Russia to endure apartheid-style discrimination and beatings in return for menial jobs. “Some people who go there with a visa return. They even cry when the visa expires and they have to come back to Afghanistan.”

  On his mattress, Amanullah held his breath and hung on to every word. Secretly mapping out another possible escape route, smitten already by the lithe and unveiled beauties he would find on the other side of the river. But only the carpets Thawra wove next door would ever travel from this house beyond the familiar boundaries of Balkh. The men’s itinerant fantasies will be that subtle twang that tickles the soles of the carpets’ future owners when they step onto the pile in their bare feet.

  The bukhari had gone out. The men finished their tea, thanked God for breakfast into their upturned palms—“Bismillah, bismillah”—and went outside, where the desert now shone with daylight and the blown-glass sky was translucent and white.

  Many years ago at an abandoned Soviet barracks in the dunes, Baba Nazar had pilfered an old iron spring bed and brought it home on a camel. It was the only bed in Oqa. It wintered in the bedroom Baba Nazar and Boston shared, under the shotgun and beside the niche where the hunter kept his binoculars. On winter afternoons Boston would sit on it spraddle-thighed and stretch skeins of yarn over her knees and roll them into balls.

  In warm months the hunter and his son would drag the bed into the sun and anchor its uneven and hollow rusted legs on three clay bricks. Then the bed would become the village centerpiece, the Oqa equivalent of a town square, or of a mosque. Men would lounge on it as they would on a takht and talk. They would gather around it to listen to newscasts on Baba Nazar’s thirty-year-old transistor radio and discuss dispatches from the world beyond their desert, even beyond the serrated Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. Children would hide under it, run around it in circles chasing one another, and, when Baba Nazar was not looking and when no adults were sitting on it, bounce on the squeaky springs.

  This year, Baba Nazar and Amanullah carried the bed outside just before eight in the morning on the second day of the vernal equinox, after breakfast. They established it near the southeastern corner of Thawra’s loom room, near the dark hieroglyphs of drying urine that wormed in the dust where the night before someone had been too lazy or too rushed to make it to the dunes. Having determined that the bed would not wobble, Amanullah threw a plaid blanket and a hard cushion over the springs, slipped out of his flip-flops, lay down on the bed on his back so that the front loop of his green-gray turban visored the sun from his eyes, pulled a cell phone out of his shirt pocket, and proceeded to call his friends in Khairabad. The cell-phone transmitter on the Karaghuzhlah tower worked well that day, and reception was decent.

  Villagers began to assemble almost immediately.

  First Hazar Gul scurried out of her parents’ house grinning, with Zakrullah in her arms, and squatted in the dirt at the foot of the bed. The infant seemed less pale after three days at the hospital, though it was hard to tell because his mother had swaddled him in several tick blankets and smothered kohl over his eyebrows, eyelids, and forehead, to help Doctor Akbar’s treatment stick. Choreh Gul herself emerged slowly into the sun soon after. Her eyes were filmed over, pupils infinitesimally small. She had just taken her morning opium.

  Then old Sayed Nafas ambled along and sat down cross-legged on the ground a little apart from Hazar Gul to luxuriate in the warm sun and play with some goat turds. He rolled the turds between the palms of his hands like lozenges or prayer beads, molded them with his fingers. It was a peaceful thing to do on such a fine spring morning, and Sayed Nafas was smiling.

  I squatted in the dust and sketched. My doodles no longer attracted the whispering cluster of Oqa’s children, the scrutiny of adults, the way Thawra’s weaving no longer drew a crowd of boys, for they, like boys everywhere, were only interested in watching the beginning of something new. I sketched a woman I could not recognize for the quivering distance between us hauling water from the southern well. An oblique wall of Baba Nazar’s house. A sashless window stuffed with a rolled-up mattress. A chicken. Drawing felt good. It felt as though I, too, was doing something in Oqa rather than observing it; as though, while I was doing it, I belonged. Choreh came stoned and slow, and stood looking at the bed awhile. Deciding whether he should ask to lie on the narrow springs next to Amanullah, or maybe simply feeling the opium caress his body. Then he remembered something. He turned to me and said:

  “Buy me a cell phone.”

  “Sure.” I was sketching a camel, unsuccessfully. “If you give me money for it, I’ll buy it next time I’m in the city.”

  “If I had the money, I’d have bought it myself.”

  Even Hazar Gul laughed at her father’s joke.

  In the packed clay sloping southward from the bed, Nurullah and a handful of other boys were trying to hit a concrete pylon that stuck out of the sand with pebbles from a distance decided upon by the older boys. A toddler naked from the waist down ran loopy circles, driving before him through the dust a white metal jar cap riveted to the end of a wooden stick with a single nail: a push toy, perhaps the oldest toy in the world, in this oldest place. Two teenagers took turns at an electric pole with slingshots, and the air vibrated with the loud ding of stone on aluminum.

  A little after eight Thawra came out of the house carrying Baba Nazar’s transistor radio, put it on the ground by the bed on which her husband was still sprawled out, and turned the dial to a Turkoman channel playing desert music. The rhythm of camel hooves falling on parched earth. Then she returned to the house and soon brought out a green ceramic basin, a green plastic ewer, some faded washrags, and an unlabeled bottle of shampoo. Spring was for spring cleaning.

  “Nurullah, come!”

  Thawra managed to get the boy to strip off the shirt of his shalwar kameez, but the pantaloons he would not take off because only small boys went bare-assed and he was already seven, so she washed him piecemeal over the enamel washbasin. She clasped his scalp with her long fingers and turned it this way and that like a gourd and soaped his short thick black hair and his torso and scoured his ears with a rag. A timeworn ritual. When I was seven, my grandmother used to wash me this way, over a dinged aluminum basin on the creaky and stained kitchen floor of our summer cottage outside Leningrad; it, too, had no plumbing. The morning smelled sweetly of straw, manure, sun, and dust where suds had landed on the ground and were evaporating. Then Boston appeared in the doorway with a broom and proceeded to sweep out the house onto all of this: the young woman, the washbasin, the old towels on the packed clay, the white lather over the boy’s brown naked back shivering and covered with goose bumps, Amanullah chattering away on his cheap prepaid phone. Thawra shook her head but said nothing. All daughters-in-law endure such insidious undoings.

  Thawra was soaping Nurullah for the second time when Hazar Gul jumped up, shifted Zakrullah from one arm to the other, and pointed at the sky.

  “Trrna!” she cried. “Trrna, trrna!” />
  Thawra stood up, white to her elbows with suds and smiling, and Nurullah, free of her grip at last, foam sliding down his back and under the rope belt of his pantaloons, jumped up to see. Amanullah rose from the bed so fast all the springs creaked at once like an accordion dropped open. Boston wheeled around, holding on to her broom, and Baba Nazar hurried out of the house clutching his binoculars. Sayed Nafas released the goat turds and helped himself up from the ground with both hands. Even Choreh Gul got up, swaying and vague. Soon the whole village, it seemed, was outside and calling at the sky: Trrna! Trrna! Trrna!

  And the sky—viscous like glycerin, crystalline over the whitewashed plains, so bright at its apex you could barely discern the sun in the center of that superb irradiance—the slow sky of March quivered with the thinnest ash-blue vein of wings and called back with a song that was fifty million years old.

  Trrna!

  Cranes.

  Omens of everything. Symbols of eternal life and emissaries of death. Whimsical, ephemeral, imperiled, and immortal, the oldest birds on the planet. The only large birds that can wing through indigo nights and over cold water, unfettered to diurnal oscillations of thermals—or soar up, up, up on a current of warm air until they are more than four miles above ground, beyond clouds, beyond sight, in heaven, vanished. Exquisite dancers that have danced into creation myths on five continents. Whose valiant fidelity and Paleocene song have inspired the grandiose Indian epic Ramayana and the quietude of the haiku master . “The mystic crane,” Rumi, Balkh’s own most famous mystic, called them. The day after Nawruz, fulfilling an annual promise, a sedge of demoiselle cranes en route from a winter in India to their breeding grounds in the Caspian steppes glided down to rune with their cuneiform tracks the parched dunes west of Oqa.

  Where Baba Nazar the hunter had been expecting them.

  • • •

  The previous afternoon the old man had spied a handful of crane scouts carve through the sky and descend over a patch of desert where the southernmost barchans licked at the hard-packed clay, the same spot the cranes had picked as a resting spot year after year, migration after migration, millennium after millennium. Demoiselles travel in flocks of up to four hundred, but a few birds usually fly ahead to guide the others to the resting ground. The hunter knew this. He had put on his glasses with the missing bow, adjusted the string that affixed them to his head, unfolded an old burlap sack, poured into it some coarsely milled wheat, mixed in the strychnine he had kept for the occasion, and gone on a short and purposeful hike.

  When Hazar Gul spotted the cranes over Oqa the next day, Baba Nazar dispatched his son to the dunes.

  An hour later Amanullah revved his scooter up the hummock. Nurullah rode pillion. Dust roiled as if the riders had just broken out of purgatory. Boston’s handmade saddlebag hung from the luggage rack behind Nurullah. In each pannier of that saddlebag sat a demoiselle crane.

  Baba Nazar lifted the birds out of the bag by their wings one by one and lowered them on the ground. Two heartrending watercolor brushstrokes of the bluest gray that dimmed to penumbral primaries and tail quills. Two fluid question marks of stark black necks. From behind their eyes—red and small like the tart aphrodisiacal berries of the rowan tree—tufted long plumes so unbelievably white it seemed some flame from heaven had licked them there during their flight.

  “Trrna, baba,” Nurullah bragged to his grandfather. The birds’ onomatopoeic name an echo of their trumpeting call. But not the call of these two cranes. These uttered rusty croaks like heart valves rupturing, the horrible rasps and wheezes of the opiated infant at the Dawlatabad hospital. They, too, had been poisoned by men.

  The cranes could not stand. They crumpled upon the dust. Their wings drooped. One began to convulse, then both. They had stopped croaking and opened their beaks soundlessly now, dripping slime. Their red eyes stuporous, with tiny pupils. Suddenly, one of the birds hissed and struggled halfway up and, gagging, walked several feet backward on the black-iron nodules of its knees and its wings’ dark trailing edges. An unholy travesty of a crane dance, a precursor of some devastation yet unknown, a portent of some unutterable trespass.

  Then the bird fell, wings spread wide, ataxic, and made no noise again.

  “Trrna!” called the sky.

  A long undulating vee sliced the pale blue tile overhead. Was it a call for the two spread-eagled birds to rise and join the formation? Was it a wail of indignation, of sorrow? A farewell? The poisoned cousins on the ground did not stir. Not yet dead but deadened by the grotesque violence committed against them. Like so many upon the warped loom of this land. Like the dozen women and men and children who had gathered now in a tight circle to gape at this spectacle—the people who wove the most beautiful carpets in the world and now were waiting to see if the poisoned cranes would live or die. And why not? Each winter these villagers put a son, a daughter, a grandchild in the ground not far from the birds’ resting spot. (“I ask you, cranes, to warm my child in your wings,” an eighth-century Japanese song went.) Perhaps they possessed some terrible knowledge: that one kind of beauty demanded the sacrifice of another. Perhaps they were protecting the very inner chambers of their hearts.

  “I heard on the radio once that some unknown disease is killing birds and that they fall out of the sky and die within a day,” Baba Nazar said. Smug. Satisfied. “These people on the radio, they didn’t know the reason why. And I thought: I do. The reason is my rat poison!”

  He had come up with the strychnine trick himself. His father used to sling cranes out of the sky.

  Then he turned to Amanullah and said: “There’s got to be more out there. Go back and see.”

  And handed him the shotgun.

  • • •

  Amanullah returned with four more cranes in the saddlebag. One was dead. It had ingested too much strychnine and had been shuddering almost constantly out there in the dunes. Islamic law proscribed eating animals killed by poison, and to keep the bird halal, Amanullah had shot it through the neck. He gave it to his father and laid the other three on the ground.

  Five live cranes now lay in the village dirt almost motionless, no longer shaking, their wings flung open, feathers fanned out upon goat droppings and hardening greenish-white splotches of chicken shit, dark blots of dried urine, particles of hay. Amanullah watched the cranes closely lest they, too, began to die and needed to be butchered. It was preferable that they survived: merchants in Mazar paid twelve dollars per bird for live cranes, which they sold to wealthy families to keep as pets. Amanullah kept the phone numbers of a couple of these merchants saved in the memory of his cell phone. Five cranes would sell for almost a third as much as the carpet Thawra was weaving—although at that particular moment she had to interrupt her work again, because Baba Nazar had leaned into the loom room through the gap left by the missing roof and told the woman to spoon into the cranes’ bills a mixture of sugar and oil, to force the birds to vomit the poison.

  Then he tied the dead crane by the head to the wooden hitching post near Boston’s kitchen, reached into the bullet hole in the crane’s long and silky neck with his right index finger, and ripped through the skin and feathers, and slipped them off the neck from the hole down, the skin and feathers all at once. With a butchering knife, he severed the wide and hollow trachea that had shaped the crane’s immemorial song and smashed off with a hatchet the ulnae and the radii and the tibiotarsi and then slid the skin with its silver-blue plumage off the upper wings and chest and back and thighs. It fell to the ground like a bloodied pearly gown. Boston poured hot tea from an aluminum teapot over the exposed pectorals, granular and dark, stringy with the millions of wingbeats every one of which had carried this crane to its slaughter. Then Baba Nazar untied the dressed bird from the hitching post and laid it on a piece of burlap.

  With the hatchet, the old man chopped the breastplate in two, then chopped off the neck halfway up, then turned the bird around and sp
lit the back along the spine. He handed the entrails to Boston, splashed some hot tea into the chest cavity, put the dressed meat into a plastic bag, and handed it to Qaqa Satar. That night in Mazar-e-Sharif, the driver’s wife will turn it into stew and serve it for dinner. But the strychnine already had contaminated the meat, and everyone in Qaqa Satar’s house will cramp from a violent stomachache.

  Then Baba Nazar walked over to where the five birds lay prostrate in the dirt, scooped up one—flaccid and disoriented with humiliation and poison—and thrust it at me.

  “Take one!”

  A year earlier, another Afghan man had offered me a bird, an old man in a soiled turban on a grimy sidewalk in Mazar-e-Sharif. In his hands he had been cupping a white pigeon.

  “Take her,” the man had said, and lifted the bird for me to see better the wonder he had held captive. The pigeon had fluttered her hollow-boned wings whitely, then settled into his palm again. “Take her.”

  I had touched the pigeon’s neck with my fingertips. “The lunatic clutching a pigeon, stroking it hour after hour / until his fingers and its feathers fuse into a single crumb of tenderness,” Julio Cortázar wrote. The caress had enchanted. I could have gone on and on, my skin against her feathers. Soft, weightless. Divine. When she had unfolded her wings again, I could see the marble of her underbelly. And something else. Something awry. I’d looked again. Her legs had been broken.

  Before the next morning, one more crane will die. Two will go to a merchant from Mazar-e-Sharif, who will come to pick them up in a zaranj motor-rickshaw. Baba Nazar will give them to the merchant for free: “He is a friend,” the old man will explain. In Mazar their wings will be clipped, and they will appear for a few months among the painted life-size replicas of deer and duck decoys and live sheep and geese in a gaudy petting-zoo-cum-sculpture in the middle of a rotary on the main road to the airport. The remaining two Baba Nazar will give, also for free, to Amin Bai. The Commander, in turn, will present them as gifts to an old friend of his in Karaghuzhlah, a minor warlord named Hassan Khan, the father of Qasim the taxi driver. For a few nights later in the year Hassan Khan will be my host. I will see the cranes again in his backyard, and something inside me will shrink.