by Anna Badkhen
From the simple iron fence that girdled the park, some carpets hung. Patinated with road dust like the severe faces of the dealers who squatted in the dirt beneath them. These were the rejects: the thicker-wooled, fewer-knotted, simpler cousins of Thawra’s yusufi, the carpets Mazari dealers would not buy. Their clumsy threads were echoes of greatness, their pile the shadows of the carpet King Alexander was said to have sent to his mother from this conquered city. But their reds were just as rich as the blood that had nourished Balkh to its former majesty, that had plunged it into its present demise.
Eroded stubs of the despoiled and ancient walls protruded like the exposed ribs of a giant carcass among nondescript streets of partly shuttered storefronts and simple mud homes that rayed from the park. Few people walked those streets. Oxyartes, the Balkh ruler who had yielded the city to Alexander the Great, had had under his command thirty thousand cavalrymen when about two hundred million people had lived on Earth. Now, in the world of seven billion souls, the entire population of Balkh was fewer than eight thousand people.
A citadel unimaginatively called Bala Hissar, the Citadel, marked the city’s northern boundary. The fort’s thick crenellated fifteenth-century ramparts melted like candle wax onto the first-century foundation that draped over substructures of clay and mud brick laid here three hundred years before Alexander’s wedding. Below the walls, fields and orchards fanned out in all directions: puffs of apricot trees already gray with dust, drowned rice paddies like spalls of glass, fields of yellow-black okra flowers unblinking at the sun. Girls in long scarlet shawls squatted among the miniature silver fireworks of onion blossoms. To the north, fields blued into the distant desert. To the south, the shorn Hindu Kush slept, smoky and still.
Who is the fourth that rejoices the Earth with greatest joy? Ahura Mazda answered: “It is he who sows most corn, grass, and fruit, O Spitama Zarathushtra! who waters ground that is dry, or drains ground that is too wet. Unhappy is the land that has long lain unsown with the seed of the sower and wants a good husbandman, like a well-shapen maiden who has long gone childless and wants a good husband.”
—Vendidad
This was the land the itinerant monk Hsuan-tsang had beheld, and King Alexander before him, and Zarathushtra before them both. The manmade glory of the city may have vanished under the sword of men. But the people of Balkh, barefoot, unbeaten, with wooden hand ploughs, rejoiced their land, forever.
The horse drivers waited for Friday customers inside Bala Hissar. They were Uzbek—the descendants, some scholars believed, of Genghis Khan’s son Juchi. They stood inside the fort’s walls smoking and shucking sunflower seeds. Their horses, the fluid and slim Akhal-Tekes, like Alexander’s Bucephalus and the warrior-horses of Genghis Khan, were grazing on some chamomiles. Fifty paces away, in a niche by a mulberry tree contorted over a hand pump, veiled women prostrated themselves beneath the harlequin flags of the shrine of Pahlawan Ahmad Zimchi, a heroic warrior whose story no one any longer could remember precisely other than that he had been preternaturally strong. The pilgrims prayed to the pahlawan to impart some of his strength to their sons and took off their hair bands and ribbons and the cheap bangles of painted aluminum that bazaar Gypsies sold for a penny and kissed them and whispered prayers to them and kissed them again and placed them on the pale bricks of the shrine. The shrine glittered with trinkets. The horse drivers kept their backs to the women, out of modesty.
I rented a bay gelding from a man without a leg.
“A small circle around the water pump or a big circle around the ramparts?”
“A big circle.”
“Seven hundred afghanis.”
“You’re kidding! It’s less than a kilometer around. One hundred.” Haggling was always expected, but I felt badly about bargaining with a man with a peg leg. He said he had lost his own in war. Which war, he did not specify. War in general.
“Two-fifty.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want me to walk in front of you and lead the horse?”
“Oh, no, thank you.”
“Well, suit yourself.”
We ambled. Slow. Hooffall to hooffall with Genghis Khan’s horsemen above the green plains. Riding atop the land where the Golden Horde had sacked the Mother of All Cities. The walls of Balkh, those ancient sepultures, keened under the bay’s small hooves with the trampled laments of all the dead. Indian rollers tumbled bluely out of the heavens like swatches torn out of the sky and somersaulted over the fields of onions in cloudlike bloom.
But the horses of Bala Hissar had been trained not to walk farther than a hundred and fifty meters away from their owners, like circus ponies. After a minute, my gelding—it had no name and had responded, up to this point, to “prrrr-prrrr” and “ch’k-ch’k-ch’k”—stopped irresolute for a few beats, then turned around and trudged at a slow gait back to its master, who was now laughing openly at my foolhardy assumption that for five dollars he would let me ride away on his beautiful steed.
When I was leaving, the one-legged jockey shouted: “Hey, foreign lady!”
I turned. He flew up into the saddle in one liquid motion and raised his sweaty leather crop and grinned and leaned forward and whispered something to his horse and the horse reared, and for a moment that seemed to last centuries they stood like that in the bronze May light, sparkling and vertical against the long horizons of Bactria, the man and his mount as one, their thickly veined necks straining together for the heavens, the rider no longer a seed-shucking cripple whoring out his horse to weekend tourists but a mischievous demiurge, a ghost of Genghis Khan, perhaps, or Tengri the Sky God himself, awesome and magnificent, a monument to the countless cavalries that had slaughtered and been slaughtered upon this very land.
Then he brought the horse back down and whooped once, and they loped over the battlements and out of sight into the haze-choked valleys, the horse and its eternal rider picking their way past the pendular swings of immemorial, internecine violence.
• • •
“Ordinary people here treat political cataclysms—coups d’état, military takeovers, revolutions, and wars—as phenomena belonging to the realm of nature,” wrote the Polish journalist Ryszard . He was describing life in Zanzibar during the revolution in 1964. He could have been describing life on the war-littered pan of the Khorasan, any given year.
War itself here aligned with the elements. It climaxed between the blooming of almonds and the harvesting of pomegranates, when the persistent sun of late spring and summer unlocked the subarctic mountain passes and stilled the brown veins of gravelly snowmelt and smoothed the white roadless desert into the widest road imaginable, a salt-caked craquelure that blinded and stung and suffocated by day, but by night exhaled the accumulated heat in soft, windblown caresses upon whichever men bore arms that season. Upon the nineteenth-century guerrillas wielding jezail matchlocks against the British Raj in the romantic crescent light of the moon. Upon the twentieth-century anti-Soviet mujaheddin. And, the year of Ozyr Khul’s wedding, upon the turbaned and masked motorcycle riders of the Taliban.
Methodical and unobstructed, and mostly without a shot, the Taliban laid claim to the villages that spread from Balkh in paisley daubs of fruit gardens and leas. Karaghuzhlah, where two of the demoiselle cranes Baba Nazar had poisoned out of the clouds stood sentinel among wooly sheep and scrawny chickens in the yard of a small-time warlord. Zadyan, where the hunter’s daughter, Zarifshah Bibi, lived with her disfigurements, her ancient husband, and her two small children. Karshigak, where Abdul Shakur the wool dealer colored his yarn with the root of wild madder and synthetic dyes from Pakistan. Khairabad, where Oqa’s boys and men went to barter calligonum for rice and whole-wheat flour. Through a breach in Bala Hissar’s western wall you could see, here and there, a black Taliban flag flutter above an orchard. At least one flew in Khoja Aqa Shah-e-Wali, a village where we stopped on the way from the fort. This village was best known fo
r a mosque engirdled by a vast garden of centennial mulberry trees that in May stood heavy with fruit, pale yellow and purple like coagulated blood.
A hundred trees must have grown there on a grid. Families and groups of young men and separate groups of delicate schoolgirls in inadequate heels lounged under the shady branches on homespun blankets. Slender sapphire coils of smoke curled past the trunks from a kebab grill somewhere and among the leaves a thousand birds sang and the fresh sky above the orchard shone like a vault of polished glass. I bought a small packet of cold mango juice from a vendor’s icebox and picked berries off the trees. Denuding the branches as if I were a goat until my belly felt very sweet, and that made me laugh, and the families I passed smiled and waved and settled back to their picnics because, Taliban or not, it was Friday.
Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.
If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.
—RUMI
• • •
The Taliban came to Oqa that May, as well. They came at night and revved their motorcycles in the moon-blued dust and had a word with Amin Bai the Commander and left. I asked the Commander what they had talked about. “Life,” he said. He would say no more. They brought no flags, took nothing, and staked no land claims.
“We are of no use to them,” Amin Bai would say later. “We are too far from everything.”
The day before the wedding, a sedate stillness fell over the village. Hot sun had wrung all color out of the sky and along the faded horizons whitecap clouds lay static like the white trim of a prayer rug. Across the iambic plains the hours stretched syrupy and swollen by the heat.
Mid-morning, the Prophet Mohammed floated out of the nacreous desert astride the Buraq, the heavenly winged beast.
For a minute the rider and his mythical mount pranced through molten air, huge and diffracted and veering in the rising heat. Then they shrank and touched down, and the rider became Baba Nazar and his ride the hunter’s gray donkey and its wings panniers stuffed to overflowing with skeletonweed, animal feed the old man had picked on his way home from Khairabad, where he had been visiting with a relative and where green and tepid sludge still pooled in irrigation ditches. The hunter unsaddled the burro, hitched it to the artillery shell casing dug into the ground outside the loom room, heaped the feed by the iron bed, and went indoors to sweat in the shade of his house.
Where Boston and Thawra were preparing lunch in the kitchen.
The kitchen stove was a pair of conical clay ovens raised out of the dirt floor next to each other and severed open at the vertexes, each with room inside for a small kindling fire and a side opening through which to feed it. On one of them the quartered leg of a two-month-old kid Baba Nazar had slaughtered the day before hissed in a grimy pressure cooker. The walls above the stove were hung with dusty jerry cans and dusty pitchers and dusty burlap sacks sagging with something, everything dusty and held up by sticks driven into the mud walls. The low ceiling was grass thrown on top of uneven wooden beams. A single phosphorescent ray of sun, like a white and coruscating column, did not beam down through a gap in the roofing but rose upward to it from a blackened water pitcher on the floor. By that alien and solid shaft of light Boston and Thawra squatted, their faces in a Vermeer glow, frying onions in a large black wok, peeling and cutting potatoes over an aluminum basin, working in comfortable silence, in a timeworn synergy much older than their kitchen or their village. A pair of acolytes of an ancient order, the order of hearth keepers.
Lunch was served in Amanullah’s bedroom on the old houndstooth dastarkhan. The steaming lava of Boston’s goat and potato stew, heaped upon a large round pewter tray, drowned in oily onion puree colored scarlet by a dollop of tomato paste from a can I had brought from Mazar-e-Sharif, because tomato paste was a luxury in the village. Two loaves of whole-wheat nan, craggy and misshapen like Oqa’s own hummock, their crusts so hard they rang when tapped with a fingernail, their crumb warm and soft and moist and slightly sour and earthy like a grandmother’s embrace. A small chipped porcelain bowl of fresh camel-milk yogurt, spumy, cloudlike. The green thermos with pale hot tea. We pinched scalding strings of meat out of the stew with burning fingertips and shared a single aluminum spoon to take turns with the yogurt. No one spoke. It was one of those meals that strike you aphasic, that you remember later not with your tongue but with your very diaphragm. Every meal Boston cooked was like that.
“What, this?” Baba Nazar said when, later, I bowed to his wife in gratitude. “Pah! I could have cooked this myself!”
And Boston, who was sitting on the wooden threshold with her elbows on her knees and her palms cupping her cheeks, laughed and waved her hands at him and said: “Great! Go! Go to the kitchen! You’ll be the cook tomorrow!”
But she knew she really couldn’t call his bluff. Because tomorrow was wedding day in Oqa, and someone else was preparing lunch.
The wedding chef came by zaranj at dawn. His name was Jan Mohammad. He was an older brother of Abdul Rashid, Oqa’s most desperate heroin addict, who often weaved through the village with dull bruised eyes, thin and blueskinned, listing under some drug-induced weight. Jan Mohammad was serious, stout, established-looking, and lived in Khairabad, where he had a big family and owned a few fields. With him he had brought to Oqa two young apprentices, three broad shovels with wooden handles, two thin brown patu blankets of fine sheep’s wool, one washed-out muslin bedsheet, one sheet of black tarpaulin, and one five-hundred-gallon cast-iron vat, the same kind wool dyers used to stain carpet yarn. The vat was encrusted with generations of black grease on the outside and came with three dozen dinged pewter serving trays that had been scoured absolutely, surreally spotless. The chef ordered the zaranj driver to deliver all this to the northern edge of the village, not far from where Naim’s bull camel had serviced a Toqai cow that winter—the best spot, all in Oqa agreed, for a morning of industrial-scale cooking.
Jan Mohammad’s assistants dug a shoulder-deep pit, built a calligonum fire in it, and lowered the vat onto the fire. Into the vat they emptied two five-liter jerry cans of oil and, when that came to a smoky boil, a bushel of quartered onions, four kilos of veal in creamy-pink chunks each the size of a fist, seventeen and a half kilos of rice, and enough buckets of well water to cover the lot. By six-thirty in the morning, the scent of stewed onions and meat inundated every corner of Oqa. It twisted and pulled at the stomachs of the villagers and the men began to congregate around the fire pit, though a sense of decorum kept the women from joining. On a fire nearby, ten crane-necked pitchers of water were boiling for tea, and a few steps away, a group of young men were performing the redundant task of washing the impeccably clean serving trays with bunches of straw in a basin of murky well water. Beyond them, dappled with a chain of identical oval cloud shadows, the dunes sang.
Ralph A. Bagnold, the British troubadour of sand, has described the rare hummed canticle as “the great sound which in some remote places startles the silence of the desert.” Bagnold had dedicated years to researching the behavior of desert sand in the ergs of Libya and in a personal wind tunnel he had built in England, and published his observations in 1941 in one elegant volume titled The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. Yet even to this scholar who had scrutinized the anatomy of dunes grain by grain, the mechanics of the song remained a mystery. The chapter on singing dunes is the book’s last. It ends thus: “Much more work will have to be done before the ‘song of the sands’ is understood.”
But in Oqa everyone understood: the dunes were singing a wedding song that morning.
• • •
Meanwhile, wedding guests arrived.
They had come from Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, from Toqai and Zadyan. Warlords. Farmers. Merchants. Drug dealers. All relatives of the Oqans—brothers, sisters, third cousins, nie
ces. Some had arrived by donkey and motorcycle. Most had walked. A few families had rattled across the cracked desert in the flatbeds of zaranj motor-rickshaws. Someone even had hired a taxi from Mazar-e-Sharif. They bore wedding gifts of pewter serving trays, plastic pitchers, aluminum washbasins. By seven in the morning, the village had swelled to six or seven hundred people embracing, exchanging kisses and gossip, laughing, sharing their latest heartaches, pinching the cheeks of babies born since the last time they had seen one another. Men thronged toward the northern slope where the pilau was cooking. Women and girls took over the south and west of the hummock.
The women in their holiday embroidery twinkled like mermaids accidentally cast upon these landlocked sands. Two and a half dozen had crowded into Boston’s room, barefoot and lipsticked and glistening in unimaginable combinations of greens and blues and purples and pinks, and festooned with beads and sequins. All wore rouge. They dabbed sweat off their faces with the fringes of their brilliant scarves and shared two cigarettes, which they passed around clockwise, from one set of lips fuchsia or red or shiny oyster-blue to the next. They inhaled with somber concentration and tapped the ashes with elaborate hand flourishes on the straw mat that covered the earthen floor. Intricate henna flowers vined up their wrists from fingertips stained a deep brown. Most wore silver or gold jewelry in their ears and some in their noses and all on their fingers and wrists and necks. They had tuned Baba Nazar’s radio to an AM music station from Turkmenistan, and a few girls were swaying their hips, and the colored reflections of their sequins rebated off the walls like strobe lights in a disco. Thawra leaned against the wall in a crimson gown. Next to her, Choreh Gul, her beaked smile carmine with lip gloss, clutched the infant Zakrullah. The boy’s translucent thighs were bare and rounded at last with some fat. Little Leila wove around past these scintillating apparitions in loops—“I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning I’m turning!”—and steadied herself against their silken and glittering knees, and Boston, radiant in a shift of lurexed puce, wagged an index finger at her granddaughter and giggled. In the evening, the women said, musicians would come from Shor Teppeh, and the whole village would bloom like a bouquet of thistles into interlocking hoops of circle dances.