The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  A letter from a lawyer to the provincial prosecutor’s office in Mazar-e-Sharif requesting the release of the goatherd’s father.

  Three letters from the provincial governor to the police chief in Dawlatabad demanding the immediate release of the goatherd’s father, dated spring and summer.

  A deed to the farmland Karim Jendi said was his property and Khan Geldi was said to claim as his.

  The goatherd could not read, but he knew what the papers said. He also knew what they were worth. Nothing.

  Swallows streaked through the blue. Karim Jendi, the fugitive murderer, the dangerous insurgent, the savage bandit, the slandered pauper, the generous whore, wept on Baba Nazar’s felt rug.

  “My father is almost seventy years old. A long time ago he was a wheat and rice farmer, and had a hundred and fifty goats, but now he doesn’t do much. I’m afraid he will die in jail.”

  He looked at the barchans full of inaccessible gold, at the opal sky full of freedom and birds, at the landscape that had stayed the same since the mythical times when wealthy landlords who had tyrannized poor villagers were always punished and reprieve for the destitute always hinged on magic.

  “Ever since I went into hiding, I have not earned anything. I would have sold all my animals, but because of the drought, the price of animals is low. I’d only get about a thousand dollars. I owe relatives and friends two thousand dollars already. I keep asking my friends for money. If I’m in jail, who will look after my animals?”

  • • •

  That Ramadan, the police did arrest Karim Jendi at last. They cornered him in Khairabad one day when he came to check on his house. He put up no resistance, made no effort to run. He must have been too tired. Or maybe his plastic sandals gave out. The police took him to jail in Dawlatabad. They did not release his father.

  “Do you feel better about spending a night in Oqa now that Karim Jendi is in jail?” I asked Qaqa Satar. We were on our way to Oqa and, as usual, Baba Nazar had invited me to stay. I should have been able to predict the answer. The driver had grown more skittish about leaving Mazar-e-Sharif as the year had waxed. On many days when I wanted to hit the road, he would need to visit with a relative from out of town, or attend an important meeting at his mosque in the city, or suggest we hire a police escort. Maybe he was protecting me from some dangers I had no way of knowing about. Maybe he was protecting himself from the anger of his own Pashtun clansmen, many of whom either supported or belonged to the strengthening insurgency and probably frowned upon his employment by a foreigner, a Westerner, a woman. Maybe both. His Luger had migrated from its spot behind the hand brake to a nook in his lap. A couple of times, on country roads that wound past patches of drought-shriveled cotton fields, he had cocked it at motorcycle riders who quivered, miragelike, on the blanched and speckled plains.

  Qaqa Satar was observing the fast with piety. On the first day of Ramadan, he had stopped smoking opium and even hashish. Opioid withdrawal gave him terrible muscle cramps, nausea, and chills. Not being able to toke accelerated his anxieties. Going cold turkey on an empty stomach and with a tongue sandpapered by thirst made him glum and ill-tempered. He snapped: “Is there no more war now that Osama bin Laden is dead?”

  Then he drove me to Dawlatabad, and there, at the piss-fouled concrete gate of the district police headquarters behind which Karim Jendi and his father were interned, he pulled over, killed the engine, and quit.

  And who could blame him? Now even Oqa was feeling the tremors of war. Village boys and men left for the desert to collect thistle and returned heaped with troublesome rumors of skulking gunmen, of roadside bombings, of some other new and inarticulable threats. Relatives came to visit from other villages, trailing a kind of limbic angst. The men of Oqa roosted on Baba Nazar’s bed four in a row and made the old springs sink almost to where the hunter’s skinny kid goat trussed to one of the bed legs was lying in the shade of the rusty frame, and more men squatted in the goat droppings next to the bed, and all of them took turns listing to one another the latest worrisome news they had heard. The men clicked their tongues. Like timepieces in some baleful clockmaker’s store ticking out the approach of trouble.

  “Thk, thk, thk.” Thawra’s sickle echoed from inside the loom room, where the woman was knotting carmine and burgundy wool into lotuses and flying eagles, lacing the yarn around the warp of worries and hopes, weaving around the shortage of tan thread.

  “Security is getting bad. There are lots of Taliban.”

  “Not inside the village, but outside, yes, plenty of them.”

  “Here in our village, the people are united. If any strangers come, they won’t let them enter.”

  “But they are coming to the villages near us.”

  “They killed a teacher in Siogert.”

  “They shot at the village militia checkpoint in Shahrak. Taliban came at night, the men fired at one another, but no one was hurt. No one knows where they came from.”

  “This place is safe, and Karaghuzhlah. Other places are not safe.”

  “People say that travelers on the road are attacked by the Taliban. I have never seen them. But I hear that the road is not safe.”

  That the war was escalating and that thousands of people were dying in it all over the country were indisputable facts. But in Afghanistan each fact was multifaceted and truth was never simple. What the Oqans considered safe or dangerous hinged upon their individual histories and the village history as a whole, upon their tribal relations and social status, their ethnic prejudices, upon the mythicized narrative of real and perceived transgressions and kindnesses committed by them and by others that went back years and decades and centuries. Karaghuzhlah was safe for Amin Bai but not Khairabad because during the Soviet occupation, Amin Bai had been in charge of a troop of mujaheddin and had ordered that troop to assassinate a wealthy and influential Khairabad landlord, and the landlord’s family wanted requital. Karaghuzhlah was safe for Amin Bai, but it was no longer safe for Qaqa Satar’s cousin Naushir, who had been born and raised in that village, because he worked as a detective in the Afghan border police and was therefore a collaborator with the government the insurgency had vouched to topple, a traitor to the guerrillas’ sense of national pride. Qaqa Satar, who still was working with me at the time of this conversation, would in a day or two define the boundaries of his own safety and decide that his car was off-limits to me. And when whichever of the sides fighting this particular phase of the Khorasan’s everlasting war would come out the winner, the war would not end but merely shift course to accommodate all the intricacies of the newly accumulated panoply of offenses and invite the slighted to get their redress and trespass against someone else. And so on.

  The only danger the Oqans could not rationalize or predict came from the foreign invaders who flew their planes and helicopters over the desert for no reason the Oqans could justify, and from men who strapped bombs to their bicycles or belts or hid them in their turbans or in their vests and took lives wholesale and at random, without regard for family ties or political allegiances or ethnic affiliations. Suicide bombers were this particular war’s great equalizers.

  I was sitting before the men on Baba Nazar’s butchering block, taking notes, listening. My history in the desert was different from the Oqans’. It was nonexistent: I had no tribal enemies, no old-time allies. Yet it was also the millennial communal history of foreigners who had come here and who often had perished here, even when their pilgrimages were well intentioned, as was rarely the case. Qul Nazar, a slat-ribbed elder who grew a dozen sparse white chin hairs on the vertex of his triangular face, nodded at me.

  “When you come here, don’t the Taliban say anything to you?”

  I said they did not. I said that if the Taliban had met me on the road long enough to say anything to me, they probably would not let me go to Oqa. If the Taliban had met me on the road, they probably would not let me go anywhere but where they
wanted me to go, because the Taliban were kidnapping foreigners those days for ransom. Not only that, bandits who had nothing to do with the insurgency also were kidnapping foreigners and selling them to the Taliban.

  In silence, Qul Nazar and I considered my vulnerability. Measured my chances against the chances of the village boys who tramped through treacherous vastnesses daily. Of baby Zakrullah whose parents were too intoxicated to notice his latest deterioration. Of all the Oqans, including those not yet born upon this horseshoe-shaped rise in the plains, who will dream of long and exquisite journeys and beautiful life elsewhere and who probably will spend their whole lives toiling on the cruel hummock the way their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had toiled. I had a ticket for an airplane, a magic carpet ride that would carry me out of Afghanistan, beyond the rectangular borders of Oqa’s world. They did not.

  The elder chewed his gums for a spell, then said: “It would be good if you at least had a gun.”

  Amin Bai rose from the bed and the bedsprings readjusted with a groan. All the men watched him. The kid goat raised its head at the noise and lowered it again.

  “When there’s fighting,” the Commander said, “there is no law. The law is your Kalashnikov. Wherever you shoot, there you rule.”

  He took a soft pack of cigarettes out of his vest pocket and shook a cigarette upward and stuck it between his teeth and nodded at Amanullah for a matchbox. I held out a lighter, but he refused it with a stopping motion of his hand. He took out a wooden match from the matchbox Amanullah handed to him and struck it and cupped the small flame up to his cigarette and inhaled and blew white smoke through his nose in two long white echelons and said to me: “At the time of the Communists, it was better. You knew who was your friend and who was your enemy. Now you can’t tell enemy from friend.”

  His eyes tapered into two tiny black grains.

  “At the time of the Russians, we didn’t have suicide bombings. It’s you foreigners who came and brought with you all this terrorism.”

  And he stomped off.

  Was Amin Bai enemy or friend? His extensive yet vaguely defined power perturbed me. Whom did the Commander command? There were no men under arms in Oqa. How did he make a living? What paid for the gas for his Iranian motorbike, the rice for his family’s dinners, his cigarettes, his children’s plastic shoes, his opium? All other families in Oqa earned the bulk of their income by selling the carpets the women wove. I never met Amin Bai’s wife, but I knew that she did not weave—not in her house, not in anyone else’s. Nor did his sole surviving daughter, Mahsad Gul, who often flitted through the village with her friend Hazar Gul, the daughter of Choreh Gul and Choreh, and with a covey of other girls their age—or else dallied barefoot, carrying on her hip the Commander’s toddler, Amrullah, who always wore layers of home-stitched green and purple quilted shirts and vests on his back and almost never wore any clothes below his waist no matter the weather and who often urinated down the side and front of Mahsad Gul’s dress, but she paid that no attention. Amin Bai’s teenage son, Ismatullah, harvested calligonum to barter for rice and oil, but not very often. Mostly he spent days ambling about the village, aiming his slingshot at pale desert larks that danced up from the dunes like airborne sand clumps, or else playing with his cell phone. His cell phone. Few Oqa households had cell phones; Baba Nazar and Amanullah shared one. But Ismatullah, at fourteen, had his own, and so did Amin Bai. What paid for those? In the past the Commander had owned some goats and sheep, but two years earlier he had sold his livestock, and now only a couple of pack camels remained.

  “Our expenses were not paid by the animals,” he explained.

  “By what, then?” I asked.

  Amin Bai’s smile curved around his cigarette.

  “I buy and sell things.”

  “Which things?”

  He did not answer. He rarely answered personal questions. But many times I saw men lie on their sides in the guestroom of his house, smoking opium on soiled mattresses. I figured he was the village dealer.

  And one more thing. A police detective in Dawlatabad—the very department that had arrested first Karim Jendi’s elderly father then the fugitive goatherd himself—told me that Amin Bai called him every day. “To report on the security situation in the village,” the officer said.

  The Commander, the village snitch.

  This man who cradled his Korean cigarettes in a crooked thin smile may have been the one tenuous link between his hamlet and the rest of Afghanistan—the Afghanistan beyond the visible desert, beyond the familiar villages full of Turkoman relatives, beyond Dawlatabad’s Carpet Row where merchants sold the Oqans their wool and bought their carpets, the Afghanistan of ever-changing and forever-indifferent officialdom that seemed to know little about Oqa and care even less. He chose what to report and whom to inform on, whose visits to the village to keep secret (Karim Jendi’s) and whose to disclose (at least some of mine, according to the officer in Dawlatabad). In the Khorasan, where law and villainy were concepts obscure and frequently interchangeable, knowing when and which information to withhold could mean survival; it could also mean death. Was he responsible for Oqa’s isolation because it suited him, preserved his importance, kept the peace, at least for now? Or was he its victim, the same as all the other Oqa fathers who had buried their young children in unmarked graves in the village cemetery? Maybe, I thought, he was both.

  Two nights after Qaqa Satar quit, an earthquake shook, shook, shook the carpeted concrete floor under my tick mattress in Mazar-e-Sharif like some subterranean giant trying to rock me to sleep. Shook the glass in the window and the pewter dishes left unwashed in the kitchen after a Ramadan breakfast of reheated leftover rice and okra, shook the moon, shook the desert. Northern Afghanistan was a land of extreme seismicity, laced with tectonic faults and balanced on two plates—the Arabian and the Indian—that were shifting northward constantly and at different speeds and forever subducting under Eurasia: an allegory furnished by the universe itself.

  But in the morning, the sun rose over the Khorasan as though nothing at all had happened, white-hot. In that chalky glare in an unpaved Mazar-e-Sharif street three riders climbed into a white and yellow Toyota Corolla and started on a two-hour journey north to Oqa.

  Over the steering wheel wrapped in a faux sheepskin cover that occasionally shed dirty white wisps of polyester into his lap hunched Qasim, the twenty-two-year-old driver who smiled most of the time and bathed rarely and always wore the same ecru shalwar kameez and soiled gray waistcoat.

  Straight-backed in the backseat because women in Afghanistan did not ride in front sat the young and unflappable Hakima, who was translating for me that day. Hakima had grown up in exile in Iran, held a brand-new bachelor’s degree in business administration from the American University in Kyrgyzstan, and was a city girl; she had sass and she had style. Whenever she and I strolled through Mazar-e-Sharif together, the men who squatted in the shade of their shops would follow her with greedy eyes and whisper to one another that she surely must be a foreigner. For her first trip to one of the world’s most impoverished villages in one of the world’s oldest war zones, Hakima wore a lilac headscarf, a hip-length belted purple trench coat, skinny blue jeans, a leather purse, and strappy white heels.

  I huddled next to her, sweating already in dark and spreading blotches through my gray cotton shalwar kameez and plain beige veil and cheap rubber sandals, an outfit that I told myself made me inconspicuous but that in reality was a mismatch only the most destitute Afghan woman would have stooped to, someone who picked her clothes out of garbage heaps that rotted on street corners—for beneath their burqas, Afghan women took great care to coordinate the colors of their headscarves and their dress, particularly in Mazar, the Milan of Afghanistan. My hosts were of the unanimous opinion that most of my clothes were ugly and told me so, even the men. The women sometimes added that my breasts were no good.

  Squeezed into the taxi
that flew one sooty and shredded red ribbon from the radio antenna and another from the grille to protect the passengers against evil spirits, the three of us looked an outlandish and misplaced carnival, an ill-assorted troupe of circus freaks, a band of castoffs from three separate eras that the Earth’s nocturnal rumblings had loosened all at once upon this corner of Central Asia. That was all right. These plains had witnessed stranger spectacles before. King Alexander’s Hellenic cavalry in purple tunics and plumed helmets. The Golden Horde, flying yak-tail banners and swilling fermented horse milk and reeking of fire smoke and wearing armor of cured yak hide. The Hindu pundits deployed by British India to map mountain passes, dressed as Muslim holy men, their compasses and sextants concealed in beads and walking staffs. A succession of Europeans pretending not to be: Lieutenant Arthur Connolly, the British spy who had coined the phrase the “Great Game,” traveled across Afghanistan in 1830 disguised as an Indian merchant; Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, who had snooped around Transoxiana for the crown twenty years before Connolly, passed himself off as a Tatar horse dealer; Sir Alexander Burnes, who believed that “no European traveler has ever journeyed in such countries without suspicion,” during his trip from Punjab to Kabul in 1832 wore Afghan clothes and made his four Indian companions do the same. And to what avail the masquerade? A mob in Kabul eventually hacked Burnes to death. The emir of Bukhara beheaded Connolly in a public square. I took comfort in knowing that Pottinger died in retirement in Malta. Lately, jumpy and haunted NATO soldiers scuttled across the long-suffering landscape like some postapocalyptic alien warriors, with every bit of their skin and even much of their pixelated camouflage uniforms invisible behind body armor, reflective sunglasses, gloves, helmets, chin guards, neck guards, knee guards, ballistic groin protectors, boots, and more often than not their entire bodies entombed in outsize armored apparatuses stubbled with gun barrels and antennae and tinted electronic gadgets whose unchaste purpose, many Afghans believed, was to X-ray through women’s clothes.