by Anna Badkhen
• • •
The bored crowd of birdwatchers was thinning. The men left first. Thawra returned to her carpet. A few children hung around to pick up the cranes’ limp wings and let them drop again on the ground. The feathers gathered and unfolded like slats on a Japanese hand fan. On a relatively dung-free mound of hardened clay near her house, Choreh Gul had settled, baby Zakrullah in her arms, to watch the cranes through the legs of Amanullah’s donkey picketed to a rusted artillery shell casing. Mullahs’ prayers were sewn into the bits of cloth on Zakrullah’s hat, coins on his blankets jingled for protection from the jinn. Did they work? Who knew? It could certainly get worse. The baby could get sick again and die. Cranes could stop falling out of the sky.
The sun fell inexorably toward the horizon. The air was pink. In the southern distance the Hindu Kush for the first time that day was becoming three-dimensional, slowly, like a print in a photographer’s darkroom. Veiled by late-afternoon haze. Neither copper nor lavender nor blue. Some uncertain color. Like life and death in Afghanistan.
THE WEDDING
The two-thirty a.m. to Kabul was operated by Bazarak Panjshir International Bus Transport Co. It was a white and scarlet fifty-seven-seat Mercedes-Benz decommissioned from Busverkehr Imfeld, a charter company established in 1946 in Landstuhl, Germany, though the bus itself had been assembled in the eighties. MIT UNS KOMMEN SIE AN! the former owner’s motto proclaimed in firehouse red and gold from the side. Escape hatches were marked NOTAUSSTIEG. Above the driver’s cabin, a sign instructed NO SMOKIN. Cardboard peaches of air freshener dangled from the handrails, and small plastic trashcans, untethered, slid about the floor of the aisle at each turn, each steep incline, each descent. There was no bathroom on board. Passengers had to buy tickets in advance at a kiosk near the Blue Mosque. The seats were numbered, and the seating was assigned.
The bus took on passengers and cargo at the Kabul Bus Terminal in southeastern Mazar-e-Sharif, where the Hindu Kush sloped toward the city in soft pleats of drab shale. The terminal was a vast patch of trampled dirt littered with empty and crushed plastic water bottles, goat droppings, susurrous tinsel of wrappers from Iranian biscuits, rotting peels of miniature Jalalabad bananas, human excrement, strips of cloth. The Mazaris called it “The Harbor.” Subliminal memories of a sixty-thousand-year-old coastal journey out of Africa, pelagic dreams pressed into ephemeral figure eights by bus tires on a landlocked desert floor.
Most buses, like the Bazarak Panjshir International, left Mazar-e-Sharif before dawn. There were no streetlights. Gray dust danced and swallowed the short shafts of light from the bus headlights and the bus windows checkered the dirt into pale rhombi and the cigarette ends of drivers and hucksters carved small arcs in the night. Propane lamps blinked from within the tattered canvas wings of concession stands like dwarf stage lighting, and the stands themselves looked like puppet theaters some eccentric patron had ordered upon this grubby panorama. White pigeons cooed softly over pools of overnight piss. Sandaled porter boys materialized out of the black to grab at passengers’ bags and usher the more tentative and lost-looking travelers into buses past a flock of sheep, maybe twenty head including a suckling lamb that, too, waited for their ride south. Mulberry wind buried the half-moon in smog. From the residential neighborhood to the north, the stuffy night carried the somnolent braying of donkeys, night watchmen’s lonesome whistles, dreams. A boy with a red plastic shopping basket walked through the aisle of the bus calling, “Cake, biscuit, what do you want?” Behind him an old man carried small round flatbreads in a stack almost as tall as himself. The passengers dug in their pockets for change. “Here, jan!” “Come back here, jan!” “Give us those biscuits, jan.” “Do you have any cold soda?”
A few minutes before the scheduled departure, a white minivan rolled up to the bus terminal. The minivan driver swung open the back doors and pulled out a long burlap sack. A name, a telephone number, and a Kabul address were written on the canvas in thick black marker. The man slung the bundle over his shoulder, lugged it to the bus, and heaved it through the open hatch of the baggage compartment. Inside the sack, wound into five tight scrolls, were five carpets.
Once Abdul Shakur, Baba Nazar’s wool-and-carpet dealer in Dawlatabad, buys Thawra’s carpet, he will call one of the carpet merchants in Mazar-e-Sharif to come and pick it up. In Mazar-e-Sharif, the merchant will send the carpet to be washed of bits of dung, particles of straw, and demoiselle crane feathers that might be stuck to the surface. Then he’ll spread it on the floor of his dealership in Carpet Row, which fringes the eastern border of the Blue Mosque’s rose garden like a strip of dark and expensive velvet, fold up a corner, and run his fingernail along the reverse side to evaluate the density of Thawra’s weave. He will study the pile for the woman’s inadvertent mistakes, a deep blue dot missing from a petal, a leaf along the ridge that suddenly blooms burgundy instead of scarlet, the slight deviation of a line—a journal of her months at the loom. An equation will form in his mind, a particular multiplication of knots by errors by square footage, and the carpet will be assigned a new price. If the merchant is preparing a large shipment of carpets that week, a hundred or more, he will fold the carpet pile side out and stack it in the corner of the shop until such a shipment is put together to be carried by truck either south to Kabul or west to Turkmenistan and on to one of the largest carpet bazaars in the world, in Istanbul. But if no truck shipment is on the horizon, he very likely will roll up Thawra’s rug pile side in, stuff it into a burlap sack with four or five others, write the address of a sister dealership in Kabul on the sack, and assign a relative to take it to the bus terminal and get it into the cargo hold of a coach with a fancy English name such as Bazarak Panjshir International, or Kadrat Bus and Travel, or Hesarak Panjsher Bus Transport. For less than twenty-five dollars per bundle—about five dollars a rug—the bus driver will carry Thawra’s carpet out of Bactria.
• • •
Eighteen minutes past schedule, the biscuit boy with the red shopping basket and the old baker disembarked and squatted on the curb to count their earnings by the rectangular lights cast by the bus windows. The passengers—a few women, wraithlike in their burqas, but mostly well-groomed businessmen headed to the capital in good leather shoes—shifted in their seats, muttered prayers. The bus was scheduled to arrive in Kabul at around ten in the morning, but it was always late. Some buses didn’t make it there at all, but that, passengers and drivers agreed, was God’s will.
The driver walked down the aisle to make sure each passenger had the correct seat and handed out thoughtful plastic bags, in case the travelers got carsick on the switchbacks. He was a Kabuli and looked like a washed-up rock star. Graying hair fell below his shoulders in greasy strands from under a brown crocheted skullcap, heavy silver rings shone on both hands, a silver brooch amulet was pinned to his vest. He had been a bus driver for thirty years, shuttling along the same route, Kabul–Mazar–Kabul. He made the journey three or four times a week. Each time he traveled south, he carried in his cargo hold a shipment of carpets.
At two-fifty the Bazarak Panjshir International sighed and pulled out of the terminal. For the next thirty miles it pitched eastward along Highway A76 through an empty steppe. “You traverse a country,” Marco Polo wrote about this stretch of land, “that is destitute of every sign of habitation.” An hour later, the road veered sharply to the south, where the Hindu Kush rose vertical, impenetrable, colossal. It rounded the upsloping pomegranate orchards of Tashqurghan, which at that dark hour trumpeted their scarlet blossoms in secret, and the night-swallowed mound where in the seventh century the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang had described five hundred Buddhist monks living around ten temples. It squeezed almost impossibly through the barren Tashqurghan Gorge, where the layered and towering mountains cleft in a scarce chasm as if pried ajar by a crowbar; bounced past the unseen and gutted Soviet tanks buried in the oozing gravel of a freshet; and leveled onto the highland swells of Samangan, wh
ere dry riverbeds sheened in weak moonlight like ghosts of rivers frozen still in perfect mimicry of some singular moment of the water long gone, like unuttered screams.
At four-thirty the bus pulled over on top of a mountain pass so that the men on board could step outside to urinate and then to pray. They did both facing southwest toward Mecca, having unwound their neckerchiefs and headscarves into makeshift prayer mats, although the driver had brought his own rug. The women remained stoically inside the bus and sat erect in absolute silence. By five in the morning, two-dimensional mountain peaks had begun to push against a murky orangeade sunrise in the east, and the bus was on its way again. Smells of Afghanistan wafted through the open roof hatches: manure, juniper fires, raw lamb fat. A man in the backseat began to sing sotto voce lovelorn Pashtun tunes, and in front, a woman prayed under her breath—“Bismillah, bismillah”—on every turn. There were many turns on the road.
“This road is much infested by highwaymen and it is unsafe to pass without an escort,” Captain John Wood, the nineteenth-century Scottish explorer, reported from his journey here. Nearly two hundred years later, the highwaymen were still about, only they had morphed—into Taliban insurgents, roadside bandits, uniformed officialdom. Every dozen miles, the bus would stop at a checkpoint: a concrete bunker large enough to fit two stools and a propane burner for tea, maybe a boom barrier, or a length of rope pulled taut across the road at windshield height over a stretched-out disembodied tank tread. An officer in a gray fleece suit clutching a Kalashnikov by the barrel would slowly circle the bus and come up to the driver’s window and stick out his free hand, into which the driver would press a couple of soiled banknotes. The exchange was almost always silent.
By six-thirty in the morning, the sun was blasting the highway full on, and the bus had heated up like a greenhouse. At seven fifty-five the heater switched on, unprompted. It would remain on until Kabul, even after the driver powered up the antiquated air conditioner. The broiling bus sped past the openwork lace of the caves of Dara-e-Suf, where Bronze Age men had molded animal figurines and Neolithic men before them had domesticated animals and, thirty-four thousand years ago, the Homo sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic had wielded hand axes made of flint. It overtook a maroon Toyota Corolla with a USMC sticker on the rear window and another Toyota Corolla stenciled with the larger-than-life image of the slain mujaheddin leader Ahmad Shah Massoud firing a Kalashnikov assault rifle at tiny Soviet helicopters. A truck bejeweled with a giant heart of red-painted iron pierced with a giant arrow that dripped enormous, loaf-size drops of metal blood onto the rear fender. A flatbed truck full of stunned-looking cows. A petroleum truck emblazoned with a sign that warned ONE-WAY STREE. It rolled past a pumpkin patch not far from a massive temple built in the second century by the Kushan emperor Kanishka, where an old farmer slowly unbent to study the bus. In his right hand he held a serpentine vine in golden bloom. Past an unsettling scarecrow fashioned from an Adidas rain jacket with straw sticking out of the hood where a face would have been. Past rusting armored personnel carriers and distant armies of diffracted sheep. Rice fields mine fields battlefields. Somewhere below, a dozen inches off the ground, bounced the burlap bag of carpets.
• • •
Eight o’clock. Up nauseating switchbacks. (“Bismillah, bismillah.”) Past chalky rapids and drowned rice paddies that shone cerulean blue like squares of upside-down sky and outcroppings of tank hulls that grew from creases in the mountainsides seamed with white veins of gypsum. Past roadside boys peddling purple and white mulberries from baskets handwoven out of mulberry branches that very morning. By eight-fifteen, from the muggy dustbowl of the Pul-e-Khumri River Valley the passengers spotted at last the black pancake of soot over the Salang Tunnel—the second-highest tunnel in the world, surpassed only by the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel in the Rockies and rimmed with the baker’s sugar of glacial ice.
Swallows danced in the galleries of Salang. The highway was narrow and the air coffee-colored with noxious diesel fog. The elevation was eleven thousand two hundred feet and it was cold, always. The snowdrifts on either side of the road were many winters old and absolutely black with exhaust. Nearly each year since Soviet engineers had bored into the mountains in the 1960s, travelers perished here in fires, in land-mine accidents, in avalanches. The blue coulee below was an ossuary of human remains and mangled metal. Hundreds of carpets that had never made it to Kabul draped the unmarked tombs of these ill-fated pilgrims.
And—down again. “Bismillah, bismillah,” came the burqa-stifled moans, the Pashtun singer retched into his bag, and outside the bus windows, the fast, cool stream of the Salang River, milky with late-spring snowmelt, rushed past the jade terraced fields of Jabal-us-Seraj. Turquoise and crimson dresses fluttered from clotheslines, and on the west bank a granite boulder the size of a farmhouse hung over a bend in the river. The boulder was split in two. I first saw it in 2001, the year of the American invasion, when I journeyed from the Khorasan on a newspaper assignment a few weeks behind the barefoot, vengeful, exalted army of victorious northern Afghan peasants, Washington’s outsourced boots on the ground. The road at the time was an escapee from a Cormac McCarthy novel, a dull November porridge of sludge-filled ruts, a vaguely defined tract pulped into muck by hundreds of aerial bombs and furrowed by thousands of crisscrossing tank treads and kneaded by the feet of these ununiformed soldiers. These men, who would enter the capital and execute people—Taliban functionaries? Random men in dark turbans? Old foes?—and leave their bodies to rot in sludge-gorged gutters, they must have seen the boulder then, too, from the road. Who knows how long it had been there, precarious, huge? Which shudder of Afghanistan’s still-evolving orogeny had hurled it from the mountains and smashed it? Had it been here when Alexander the Great had built his fort, long since gone, in Jabal-us-Seraj? Whose histories hid in that crack, whose memories whispered into its igneous chill? Low stone houses had grown around the rock, and from the bus window the passengers watched sandaled children play with a deflated soccer ball.
The carpets rocked in the belly of the bus as it drove out of the mountains. White cumuli and Black Hawks soared above the Shomali Plain, above a cemetery of several hundred tanks and howitzers, above the luminous tangle of vineyards in the valley horticulturists know as the birthplace of table grapes, where more than a hundred and twenty varietals of the fruit once grew. It was almost noon by the time the Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the Parwan-e-Seh Bus Terminal in Kabul, a paved roundabout where remnants of dirty roses pushed through the litter in the median. After the passengers had disembarked, the rock star driver dialed the local carpet merchant. He wasn’t answering the phone. The driver dialed again, and again. No one picked up. The carpets would sit in the cargo hold maybe for the rest of the day, maybe longer.
Kabul? Ha! He’s never even been to Tashqurghan!” Baba Nazar mocked his son. Baba Nazar himself had served in Tashqurghan in the army for a year. His recruit’s salary had bought him lamb kebab every other day, and while he had not been issued a gun, the switch he had whittled for himself from a weeping willow had been sufficient to police the ancient streets that wound among the famous pomegranate groves. “Sometimes we’d use our belts to whip the people who misbehaved. That was enough to keep them afraid.”
But that had been half a century earlier, way before Amanullah was born, back when Afghanistan had been ruled by a king and there had been plenty of deer to hunt with a bow and arrow right outside the pomegranate orchards, and even mountain lions that would slink down from the sawtooth peaks like shadows.
Neither Amanullah nor Baba Nazar had ever been to Kabul. They had never seen the green-tiled mosaic of rice paddies in Jabal-us-Seraj, the head-spinning abysses of Salang, the rich and warped embroidery of Shomali vineyards. But now the hunter’s son was plotting a grand escape: he would come to Mazar-e-Sharif in Qaqa Satar’s Toyota, ask the driver to drop him off at the bus terminal, and take a bus to Kabul from there. He would buy a fifteen-dolla
r ticket with his savings and ride in a cushioned and assigned seat and gorge his strabismic eyes on the land that would crumple and smooth out and rise vertiginously and drop again outside his window. He would try to not get carsick on the switchbacks. He would draw comfort from the knowledge that the familiar weave of carpets rode in the cargo hold beneath him. He even had figured out an excuse, which he confided in a loud whisper to four-year-old Leila on the namad rug rolled out in the glaring sun.
“I’ll bring you back some shoes from Kabul,” the man promised his daughter. And he pulled the laughing girl down into his lap and wrapped one of his enormous ticklish hands around both her ankles and proceeded to measure her wriggling feet with his thick fingers spread apart and tried to memorize the distance between them, for size.
But Baba Nazar said absolutely not, and once again Amanullah stayed home.
It was May. Mynah birds had returned from a winter in India to hop in and out of open windows and doors, to sidle up to dastarkhans at mealtime and mimic the voices of diners and pry open with their yellow beaks any plastic bags that looked promising. In Zadyan, fat ripe mulberries tugged at the century-old churned branches and plopped softly upon the bone-colored dust, into the upturned shirttails of boys’ shalwar kameez, into the juice-stained palms of girls. In Mazar-e-Sharif, the police were hunting for the six Taliban operatives from the south who a month earlier had instigated the massacre of the twelve United Nations employees. In an unpaved street a few blocks away from my house, four young boys had tripped a piece of Soviet ordnance and died in the explosion. In Pakistan, American special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, though very few villagers in the desert of northern Balkh Province had heard about the killing, certainly no one had in Oqa, where very few had heard anything about bin Laden at all. A few nights later, in Karaghuzhlah, Talibs on motorcycles had woken the village mullah to deliver two identical handwritten letters that announced that from then on the village belonged to the Taliban and had to pay the religious tax, zakat, to underwrite the militia’s holy war effort. A heartfelt rain shower had emptied at last over Oqa, and some new hard greens had thumbed immediately through the salt pan and bloomed into a gossamer carpet of myriad tiny white stars. The rain had woken up diligent scarab beetles that pushed beads of dung the length of the hummock. It had dimpled the dunes and churned up the dust in the two village wells. Tea was cloudy for days. A sparrow had flown into Baba Nazar’s house, and he and Amanullah had caught it and tied a string to its matchstick leg so that Nurullah could fly it around like a tiny live kite. The rip down the front of Boston’s dress had frayed further and now showed her dark and withered right nipple. Amin Bai the Commander had quit smoking cigarettes. And Thawra had knotted about four more inches of the carpet since Nawruz: four more inches of burgundy and carmine geometric trees and angular scarlet and indigo flowers and stylized eagles in shades of red flying through rhombi of cobalt sky. Her progress was slowed, Baba Nazar explained, by all the weddings. Spring was wedding season in the Khorasan.