by Anna Badkhen
Anamingli was there as well, in a pinkish gown embroidered with silver beads and tiny flecks of tin that looked like fish scales. She did not dance. Perhaps she felt resentful about marrying a grimy boy three years her junior. Perhaps she was pleased. It was hard to say. Custom demanded that she look solemn on the day she left her parents’ house no matter how she felt about it, and she did. She did not speak and did not smile and nodded at visitors with an air of profound importance. Her cheeks and forehead were talced and rouged and there were sparkles on her forehead and her eyes were contoured with kohl and shadowed pink that faded inexpertly into turquoise blue like some wild sunset, and beneath that makeup her teenage face was already lined with desert hardship. She had painted her lips bloodred.
Amanullah peeked into his mother’s room and the bright maquillage of the women stung him deeply.
“For a wedding they’d do this!” he complained in a loud whisper. “But for their own husbands—never! Our women stay at home all day and still they don’t wear makeup or jewelry for us. Several times I have bought lipstick for my wife, because I want her to be sexy, but she doesn’t use it. I think they are just lazy.”
Amanullah and I walked toward the pilau vat. Boys, as boys are wont to do, dashed everywhere. Among them, in his pink skullcap and his tan shalwar kameez, slingshot in sweaty hand as always, ran Ozyr Khul.
Halfway across the village, Choreh intercepted us. He nodded to Amanullah and slapped me very hard on my shoulder and kept his hand there awhile.
“I have no money,” he announced. His tone accusing. His hand squeezing my shoulder with great force. His eyes wild, restless, leaning into mine.
“I know,” I said. “You said you’d get a job after the wedding.”
“That’s right, that’s right.” And he let go of me and ambled away.
• • •
At seven-thirty, the chef and his apprentices stood at the lip of the fire pit and leaned over the vat and stirred the wedding pilau with shovels. They scooped it up from the bottom of the vat and turned it the way farmers would turn soil for sowing season and picked out bladefuls of burned rice and dropped them into an aluminum bowl to feed to the livestock later. When the rice and the meat and the onions were mixed together to Jan Mohammad’s liking, the cook invited Baba Nazar to season the pot. With ceremony, the old man reached into a white plastic bag with both his hands and brought up a mound of powdery salt and tossed it in all at once. The apprentices then laid serving trays upside down to cover the rice, spread the bedsheet on top of that, covered it with the patu blankets, and then with the black tarp. They tucked in the blankets with their fingertips and patted them down with the flats of their palms. Gently. The way a mother might tuck in a child. There may have been no love in the nuptials that day, but the cooking was done with love.
• • •
Hair-dryer wind blew. Men sat outside on straw mats and namad rugs, perspiring and squinting against airborne dust, sipping tea from glass cups, refilling them, passing them around, talking. On a rug nearest the pilau vat, a group of men led by Naim was bidding on camels. They leaned into one another and shouted and threw fists in the air and swore—“Bismillah!”—and brought their fists down upon their friends’ shoulders both to congratulate them on deals well made and to chide them for lousy sales. On the mat where I was sitting with Baba Nazar, a young man from Khairabad named Hasadullah was pondering a second marriage and making inquiries that, in his mind, could help slash the bride price before such a price was even announced. A kind of preliminary bargaining. The object of his interest was I.
“She doesn’t work, that’s why she’s so thin,” Hasadullah said.
“She says she works.”
“Yeah, she’s always writing something down.”
“Then she only works with her brain.”
He studied me, critical, appraising.
“Can she at least run?”
Hasadullah had a tattoo of two crossed scimitars on his right wrist (“I got it before I knew that tattoos were un-Islamic”), a wife, and three daughters—six, four, and two years old. “He is a future rich man,” the other men joked. “God willing, he marries them well.” Now he was silent again, making some calculations. He considered my city clothes: a knee-length shirt, trousers, a large headscarf. At last he asked: “What does she do when she wants to pee in the desert? Here, women have long skirts.”
“We don’t know.”
“We’ve never seen her pee.”
“She probably has to walk farther away than most.”
Hasadullah pressed on.
“In America,” he said, “in America, do you also pay money to marry?”
“No.”
“Ah. Then if I come to America, I can marry for free?”
“Yes, but you’ll run into a different problem. In America, people aren’t allowed to have more than one wife, and you’re already married.”
“You could get a divorce,” someone offered.
“No way! I paid almost ten thousand dollars for my wife!”
“How can anyone afford to marry here?” I whispered to Abdurrakhman, the young man pouring my tea. He had come to the wedding on foot from Karaghuzhlah, where he volunteered as a nurse at a Red Crescent clinic. When he had been a refugee in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, he had decided to join the jihad and enrolled in a training camp for mujaheddin—a camp that probably had been sponsored by the CIA, and maybe by Osama bin Laden as well. He had attended long enough to learn how to administer injections. Then the Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the camp shut down, and Abdurrakhman never became a mujahed. He was still single.
“We can’t,” he whispered back. “That’s why we swap brides.”
An old mullah who had slumped against a mud wall overheard us and pursed his lips. The thick white turban of a hajji shaded his rheumy eyes, and sweat beaded on his shaved upper lip and sparkled in his sparse white beard. The mullah was a learned man and disapproved of the whole badaal business. Naim had paid him to come from Khairabad in a motor-rickshaw to bless two marriages that in the mullah’s mind were barely legitimate.
“These people live in the desert,” muttered the cleric. “They don’t go to the mosque. They do whatever they want. They don’t follow Shariah.”
And without looking, he reached behind his shoulder and with long and manicured fingers flicked a little pale lizard off the wall.
• • •
The warlord who was reclining next to Baba Nazar was chewing naswar. He had ridden a motorcycle from Karaghuzhlah. His full name was Jan Mohammad, like the chef’s, but everyone called him Janni. He was half Uzbek and half Tajik, in his thirties, tall, dark, bearded, and incredibly beautiful. Like a prince from a Mogul miniature. He traveled with bodyguards.
“Are you guys weaving a carpet?” he asked the hunter.
“Yes.”
“How big?”
“Three meters.”
“Three by two?”
“Three by one.”
“So, like a runner?”
“Yes.”
“When do you think it will be finished?”
“I don’t know, the women haven’t woven for fifteen days. At this rate, they may not be finished until fall.”
Choreh stumbled up and Janni rose to his feet to greet him. As they embraced, Choreh felt the warlord’s vest pockets for cash.
The wedding pilau was done, and the chef and his apprentices set about to undress the vat. They lifted the tarp gently and laid it on the ground first. They laid the hot and soggy blankets on top of the tarp, then the muslin cloth on top of the blankets, then the scalding serving trays on top of the cloth. The rice was pellucid and golden, and seemed to glow. Jan Mohammad the chef patted it with the flat of his shovel blade and the pilau quivered like the breast of a young bride. Then he stabbed it deep and hoed and raked it
for a few minutes until he had picked out all the meat, which he heaped onto a separate tray. At least one chunk of tender veal would rest upon a cushion of rice on each serving platter, and at every mat or carpet or mattress, the eldest diner would strip the meat apart with his or her hands into gelatinous strands no thicker than a pinkie so that each wedding guest got a bite. When there was nothing in the vat but rice and pulpy onions, the chef nodded to the elders. Baba Nazar approached, and the mullah from Khairabad, and Amin Bai, and Sayed Nafas, and several others. They stood in a semicircle, and the wind whipped their loose clothes around their knees and ankles, and tore tongues of steam off the rice and the meat, and stretched and balled the fragrant steam, and carried it off to the lowing dunes where it blurred into the runnels of sand forever drifting eastward. On the mats and blankets around the vat, all conversation and bargaining ceased. The elders stood very still and formal, and opened their palms to the heavens and lowered their heads to the ground overlaid with animal dung and pottery shards and feathers and in silence asked that God bless the food and the day and the two marriages. When they were finished, they passed their hands over their faces in benediction and uttered “Bismillah” and beckoned some young boys who would bus the food to the male guests first, then to the women. The chef and his helpers began to shovel the pilau onto the serving trays. It was nine-thirty in the morning on a Sunday in late May in Afghanistan.
The young groom, Ozyr Khul, was nowhere to be found.
The musicians never showed up.
“They were afraid,” said Amin Bai. He paused, and added, to clarify: “Of the Taliban.”
Six months earlier, in Toqai, Taliban gunmen had opened fire during a wedding because there had been live music and dancing. Now musicians avoided traveling to weddings in villages they did not know well, whose security they could not vouch for. No one came to strum the twangy goat-gut strings of a rubab at the wedding of Naim and Ozyr Khul to Mastura and Anamingli. No one came to amuse their guests with the alternating lonesome wails and shrill cheer of the apricot-wood tuiduk, the flute Archangel Gabriel once had used to breathe soul into the clay body of Adam.
“No one wants to come here,” the Commander said. To underline the severity of his proclamation, he fished a harsh Korean cigarette from the chest pocket of his vest, stuck it between his teeth, and lit a match to it. He had started smoking cigarettes again. His abstinence from tobacco had lasted five days. He counted them out on his chapped fingers and held up the fingers to the diaphanous Khorasan sky as if calling upon the sky’s witness. Five.
And so it fell to the women to make music that wedding day. Modesty and custom demanded that the women party separately from the men, and to protect their dignity, no cell phones were allowed in Oqa during the wedding. It had become common for Afghan men to record videos of wedding dances on their cell phones and send them to one another by text, but some people considered such videos indecent. Several years earlier in Toqai, relatives of a bride shot to death two male guests for videotaping the wedding party. In Kabul, wedding photographers were receiving death threats.
The women had staked out the south-facing bank of the hummock that sloped down from the homes of Baba Nazar and Choreh and the new house of Ozyr Khul and Anamingli, and had strung some blankets and bedsheets between the adobes to fence off themselves from the ogling of the men. Within that provisional enclosure, they were in constant motion. Like a cageful of restless firebirds. They had dialed up the volume on Baba Nazar’s radio to the maximum setting and clapped their hands and ululated and sang and laughed and banged out a syncopated, urgent rhythm on goatskin tambourines called doyra. They held the tambourines over their heads and in front of their sequined breasts and at their glittering hips, and turned in an undulating circle, tossing their bare heads and letting their unbraided hair cascade like mountain rivers unimagined in this desert, each girl and woman an explosion of all the dreams and all the stars that would draw across the sky that night. Hot wind whirled their music through the village and past the ears of the men and out into the dunes, which had fallen silent in the face of such extravagant reverie.
• • •
The men were swatting at wasps and picking at deep-fried pancakes of slightly sweet dough shaped like shoe soles and nodding their heads to the beat of the women’s doyra when a group of dusty children led by Hazar Gul, Choreh’s daughter, stormed into their midst and prodded Ozyr Khul forward. He was deep red in the face and very small in his fuchsia skullcap.
Busted.
Three older men rose from their mats and stood above him. Like guardians or vultures or maybe a little bit of both. Each two heads taller than the boy. The men held him gently by the shoulders, and one of them took from his sweaty hand his only prized possession: the slingshot with which he and the boys had competed with such fervor over who could hit more accurately the spot on an electric pole where it should have been connected to something but wasn’t.
Then they wheeled him around and led him into one of the houses where his portion of wedding pilau was waiting for him. Sticky opalescent rice to seal his fate. A fate not so different from the fate of most men in Oqa, scripted by centuries of life and war in the desert: he would draw murky water by rope out of an open well seventy-five feet deep. He would never have enough to eat, and his teenage wife would grow old by her second child. God willing, the children would live past the age of five. His wife would weave carpets and support his family. He would smoke opium to take his mind off his tribulations. He never would learn to read and write. His honeymoon would last three days, and then Ozyr Khul would return to collecting calligonum thorns under agonizing sun to barter in Zadyan or Khairabad or Karaghuzhlah for oil and rice and wheat.
“The boy is very young,” said Amanullah. “He won’t know what to do with the bride. He may just end up smelling her, that’s all.”
“Nowadays, they grow up so quickly,” replied Janni the warlord. “I’m sure he knows everything there’s to know already.”
And that was the last time anyone ever would make any jokes about Ozyr Khul’s age or male prowess. After all, the whole village and the whole desert and really the whole world were complicit in his marriage. It was they who had decided that it was time for the boy to become a man.
The forward-moving rhythm of the women’s songs egged the sun up, up, up into the sky, and on, on, on across the flat world until the wedding day turned into the wedding night. Across the tiny and at once immense world where Ozyr Khul now was the head of a household and Naim at last was no longer a bachelor. Then a fast and technicolor sunset flashed over the village, and it was dark, and the epicanthic moon rose out of the eastern haze to blot out the Big Dipper star by star.
A few days after the wedding, after most of the guests had gone back to their own villages and towns and the west wind had caked with a film of fine golden moon dust the large home-stitched triangular amulets that hung above the doors of the two newlywed couples to protect their marriages from the evil eye, Thawra returned to her loom room with a chipped glass cup of hot green tea in one hand and the green thermos with three fading tulips in the other.
She leaned over the loom and set the cup in an alcove next to a pair of her husband’s black rubber shoes shaped like sneakers and turned the cup so that its handle faced the room. She placed the thermos on the floor. She straightened up and, as she did each time before setting to work, adjusted her headscarf where it tied at the nape. She shook off her rubber flip-flops—thwack, thwack—and stepped in bare feet upon the foot-long section of the rug she had already woven. The tight and springy pile of the world’s most beautiful carpet pushed against the callus of her indigent soles.
The woman squatted facing north. She glanced at the unfinished design of her handiwork, the flowers unbloomed, the lines uncrossed. Then she picked up the end of an indigo thread and ran it around two warps and pulled on it and cut it off with a sickle.
Thk.
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nbsp; In the bedroom across the hallway, Baba Nazar, Amanullah, and Nurullah slouched together on a mattress, half asleep. On the namad in front of them stood the old transistor radio that had blared Turkoman songs during the first wedding in Oqa in a decade. Now it was crackling war news. In the province of Helmand, said the radio, NATO troops fired from the air on two houses raised with clay and straw, just like Baba Nazar’s own house. The air strike killed twelve children and two women . . . In the city of Taloqan, at the eastern end of the barchan belt that stretched past Oqa, a Taliban suicide bomber killed an important mujaheddin commander who had supervised all Afghan security forces north of the Hindu Kush. Several other people, Afghan and German, died in the explosion . . . American troops near the city of Jalalabad stormed a compound of a sleeping family and killed a twelve-year-old girl and her uncle, a married man who had two little girls of his own. NATO said the soldiers had raided the wrong house and apologized for the mistake . . . A suicide bomber blew up in a tent at a hospital in Kabul where medical students were eating a poor man’s lunch of rice and tea. There were many dead . . . Four Taliban gunmen stormed and held for ten bloody hours a government building in the city of Khost. There were many dead . . . A roadside bomb ripped through a truck that was carrying two score penniless day laborers to dredge irrigation canals somewhere in Kandahar. There were many dead . . .