by Anna Badkhen
Onward, then. Qasim bent over his furry wheel. Road gravel sang Bollywood tunes under the tires of his taxi. Behind us, to the south, mountaintops flounced with a thin glacial smear faded into the haze. The car rattled past the sandbagged northern boundary of Mazar-e-Sharif where a police officer in a gray fleece uniform dozed behind a concrete blast wall, past the lowlands where the city dumped her refuse into black-rimmed lakes of stunning turquoise putrefaction, past the dirt track that dead-ended at the adobe beehive of the Asfakhan Shrine beneath which in a low ziggurat painted pea green lay buried a Muslim holy man named Mir Sangin. The tomb of this saint, who had died more than eight centuries earlier, was said to cure mental ailments. Worshippers pilgrimed to the shrine each Wednesday. They knelt and prostrated before the tomb and chained themselves to the metal railing that surrounded it and wept and moaned and prayed and sometimes urinated upon themselves while their desperate relatives suffered the stench in set-jaw silence and hoped for a miracle. When we passed the turnoff to the shrine, Qasim let go of the wheel and closed his eyes and drew both hands over his clean-shaven face in blessing. Soon after that, our road became barely discernible in the flat and empty desert that gazed blankly at a sky just as blank. A falcon freewheeled in hot air.
• • •
Qasim was living with his wife and toddler daughter across the street from my rental room in Mazar, but he had grown up in Karaghuzhlah where his parents and siblings still lived, and he drove there often. He said he knew the desert well. About an hour north of Mazar-e-Sharif, he turned in his seat and beamed at me.
“Anna!”
“Yes?”
“Where is the road to Oqa?”
Where, indeed? There was no road. Only, in a certain light, at a certain angle, lustrous furrows upon the parched alkali where herders’ sandals had worn the dust to a gloss, and sometimes, depending on the strength of the wind and on the recent traffic patterns through the desert, some motorcycle tracks. Forty minutes of that, jolting west-northwest, and then to the north there would appear the dunes and the cemetery of children and elders and the hillock of Oqa. Then another twenty minutes of crossing corduroy fallows from there to the village. To reach the village by car from Mazar-e-Sharif you bounced on the gravel road north for an hour or so and then turned west. Where?
“How about . . . here!”
Qasim swerved left.
“Here?”
I squinted at the land, the funereal whiteness of it. There were absolutely no landmarks. The morning glare was eating away at the horizon the way a slow fire eats at the corners of a burning page, almost imperceptible, consuming the edges in a barely visible radiant hairline border. It flattened everything, leveled whichever hillocks or distant cob ruins were sometimes, not on this day, amplified by diffraction. The hard-packed dust before the taxi shone like polished chalk. I was lost.
Stories about getting lost in deserts, in cars. Of draining and drinking radiator fluid. Gasoline. Urine. Of setting cars on fire so that someone—here, in these plains, who? NATO helicopter gunships? Taliban raiders?—would notice and come to the rescue. Of parents killing their young son to spare him the final agonies. He had become so dehydrated his tongue had swelled, and he could no longer swallow even if there had been anything to drink. In the August heat of the Khorasan, with no shelter, in the sun, we would dehydrate through sweat and through breathing beyond recovery within four or five hours—or less, because we had not had anything to drink since before dawn, since Qasim and Hakima were fasting and so was I, for the sake of collegial austerity, for the attraction of living within limits, the nonbinding seduction of the rituals of others. We had an almost full tank of gas and some bottled water in the trunk.
“Sure,” I said.
Then I asked Qasim to drive in a line as straight as possible and shut my eyes against the glare, and for the next forty minutes I tried to will Oqa into existence.
And there it was.
The cemetery with the sole plywood marker buckled to our south. The pronounced footpath tacked from it, northwest and then east, to the white wasp’s nest of clay homes. The undulating gold-specked dunes behind it, the ever-encroaching sea. But there was something unfamiliar about the approach. There was new sand everywhere—new miniature barchans and new flawless sheets of sand like iced-over ponds and corrugated patches like furrowed sand fields, new sand dimples and new rippled sand hummocks where before there had been none, blown in by the wind over the previous two days, or else joggled loose by the earthquake the night before. Sand blocked the climb up the hillock of Oqa. Qasim revved the engine once, twice. And then the yellow and white taxi, with its red good-luck ribbons and its hairy steering wheel, was stuck.
We flung open the car doors and stepped out into the sand that billowed about our feet and clicked our tongues. The car was tilted into the side of the knoll like a prairie dog frozen halfway into its burrowing act. Stuck in shit, for this was the north slope of the hummock, the slope the Oqans used as an outhouse. Stuck also in gold. Bored two feet nose-first into the untapped riches that teased Amanullah’s imagination and stoked his hopes of flight. Already a small crowd of children had tumbled down the hillside and assembled around us, tinkling with their shiny amulets and waving and laughing and pointing and beckoning: “Khola jan, khola jan, salaam!” Auntie, they called me, and my heart quavered. And to their urgings and giggles, we the three hapless and incongruously wardrobed jesters hiked the short rise to Baba Nazar’s house. Boston rushed out of the loom room where she had been sorting through old skeins and balls of carpet wool left over from some past carpets to see if she could salvage enough tan thread for Thawra to finish her yusufi. She clenched me in her skeletal embrace. Most of the villagers were gone, she said. Amanullah had taken the family camels to a far pasture because all the grazing nearby had been devoured by animals or burnt by the drought. Baba Nazar had gone to the dunes to see if the desert would yield a rabbit or two for dinner. Thawra had gone with the children to visit her family in Khairabad.
“Everyone, everyone,” the old woman said; everyone had gone to look for food, for kindling, for animal feed, or to crash the iftar dinners of wealthier relatives in other villages—because not observing the fast did not exclude the Oqans from partaking in the ritual reward for the long hours of abstinence since abstinence was how they lived every month, holy or not.
Everyone was gone, Boston said, and no one to help us out of the sand except the Commander, the only able-bodied man who had stayed in the village that day and had not gone to forage for food because the Commander never foraged for anything.
“There he comes!” Boston pointed, and grinned.
Amin Bai was shuffling across the village to greet us. Contrails of fine dust danced behind his rubber slippers. In his arms he was carrying a wooden door.
Many Ramadans ago in Shor Teppeh, on the northern edge of the barchan belt that separated Oqa from the Oxus, there lived carpenters who carved out of juniper and tamarisk amazing things. Filigreed chests with complex mortise-and-tenon locks. Chairs with long backs whittled into interlacing openwork octagons that rested upon stout legs just tall enough to elevate the chairs’ occupants above the floor so that they could sit comfortably cross-legged as if they were sitting on cushions or tick mattresses. Doors chip-carved into precious multitudes of leaves and flowers.
The Shor Teppeh craftsmen preserved an artisanal tradition that in Transoxiana dated back to Tamerlane—Emir Timur, the Father of the Turks, the crippled sociopath who was crowned emperor in Balkh in 1370, who designated his carpet as his royal surrogate, and who combined a savage, maniacal bloodlust with singular love for and patronage of the arts. For thirty-five years he expanded his domain from the Mediterranean and Black seas to the Persian Gulf to India, fighting wars at whim with a bandy-legged army of mercenaries who were paid exclusively in spoils and who slaughtered prisoners by the hundred thousand and mixed their skulls with clay and erect
ed from that abominable amalgam enormous pyramids; who stampeded enemy lines with camels set aflame; and who, at least on one occasion, at Smyrna, catapulted the severed heads of the defeated Knights Hospitaller into the fleet that had sailed up to the city to rescue the crusaders. Tamerlane did not decimate the human race the way Genghis Khan had, but he did kill seventeen million people in a world of four hundred million. During the same thirty-five years, having moved the Mongol capital to Samarkand, Tamerlane meticulously imported from the different lands he had conquered assorted craftsmen who built Samarkand’s grand mosques bedecked with polychrome tiles and initiated one of the most glorious periods in Islamic art. Because beauty is blind to bloodshed and is, in fact, often sustained by it, or else the world as we know it would not be.
Six hundred years later, the Khorasan still embraced indescribable beauty and ruthless violence and ruinous penury at once. Bulbous-domed mosques blinked impassively in the sun at street bombings that hurled a mess of charred and shredded human flesh at their lapis tiles. Tinsmiths rumbaed sheets of aluminum into ornamented trunks and strongboxes to the syncopation of firefights. And on the edge of a war zone, the pauperized Oqans wove the world’s handsomest carpets and counted among their few possessions the gorgeous Shor Teppeh xyloglyphy.
The mortise-and-tenon chests were the most common. Every other house in the village seemed to have one. Amanullah had one in his room: an imposing hexahedron of dark wood that had been Boston’s trousseau when she had married Baba Nazar. Interweaving scallops connected into hexagons that in their turn were linked by low-relief balusters fretted with yet more tiny runeations. Inside the chest, which they kept padlocked, Baba Nazar and Boston kept their money, the hunter’s disintegrated and frasslike birth certificate that had been issued by a government long gone and that was no longer valid, and an American zinc-alloy military challenge coin that read “Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense” on one side and “The United States of America, Department of Defense” on the other. Baba Nazar believed the challenge coin was a medal. He said American troops had awarded it to his brother Ala Nazar, a police officer who had served in Jalalabad, for risking his life when he had helped capture a low-level Taliban commander. I did not have the heart to tell him that American troops used such coins mostly to elicit free drinks from their buddies. A handheld mirror for a gold nugget. A worthless trinket for a lifetime of worry. The hunter showed it occasionally to his guests, and they passed it from hand to hand with great care and nodded and said it was a beautiful and precious thing indeed.
It was possible that the woodworkers still lived in Shor Teppeh. But no one I met in Oqa had ever seen one, and everyone assured me that the chests in their possession were a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years old. These were probably uninformed estimates, but they were easy to believe. The blackened wood on the chests looked antiquated. The trees that once had been abundant in the oases along the river had been cut down for cooking fires or swallowed up by the ever-encroaching sand. Boston had no opinion regarding the age of her trousseau other than that her mother had owned it forever before giving it to her; Baba Nazar said it was more than a century old. It was the only piece of furniture the couple owned save for the looted bed.
The door Amin Bai was carrying had come from Shor Teppeh as well. It was the descendant of the cypress panel the carpenters’ Timurid ancestors had hewn in fifteenth-century Samarkand that was on display, more than half a millennium later, in Gallery 455 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The same delicate and fluid tendrils that wove into symmetrical bas-relief gardens. The same calligraphic clusters of flowers and fruit. It was a treasure, an objet d’art. It had been painted pale blue to thwart jinxes. Securing it with his left armpit and elbow, the Commander shook hands with me, with Qasim, with Hakima, murmured the polite chant of a greeting, and then slid down the side of the hummock on his heels, parting the fine sand in two parallel ruts the way the ducks Baba Nazar would very rarely hunt on the Amu Darya peeled the surface of the water with their webbed feet at touchdown, and with all the momentum gathered from such a descent he wedged the door under the taxi’s right front wheel. Six hundred years of art history, echoes of pyramids of skulls, legends of unbelievable and unbelievably gory conquests, jammed under the radial tire of a 1997 Toyota Corolla. Except the door was too thick. It wouldn’t quite fit.
Amin Bai turned to Qasim.
“Got a jack, son?” he asked.
• • •
The door didn’t help. Nor did the tarp on which Boston shucked almonds, nor the armloads of calligonum the children had brought at Amin Bai’s orders, nor Amin Bai’s and my shoveling. (“You work like a man! Good!”) Some boys came over to help push the car, but it just rocked. I suggested deflating the tires, but Qasim said no because he didn’t have a pump. He had stopped smiling and kept stepping on the gas, and the tires spun and dislodged from the scalding sand browned shreds of the old cloth village women used to catch their menstrual blood and shards of blue-glazed pots. The shards looked ancient, but they could have come from crockery of any age—a year old, a thousand years old, a hundred. Like malnourished babies born old-looking. The car now rested on its undercarriage.
At last Amin Bai stabbed the shovel into a small dune next to the car and came over to me, hand extended for the shaking. He reached for his Korean cigarettes, shook one out of the soft pack, offered it to me. I took it, fished a lighter out of my purse, offered the Commander a light in cupped hands. He took it. Friend, then, at least for now, I thought.
A hot gale blew from the northwest across a desert lepered with thistle tufts. We sat on our haunches next to the taxi and watched the dunes in the satisfied silence of laborers who had done all they could for a cause. The dunes had won. Then we shimmied up the hummock and went to sit in Baba Nazar’s house because inside it was somewhat cool, while Qasim walked to the westernmost end of the village where the cell phone signal was stronger, dialed his father in Karaghuzhlah, and asked him to send over a tractor.
• • •
The earthen floor in Boston’s bedroom was covered with a straw mat and there we sat. We rested our backs on hard corduroy pillows and squinted at one another across the beams of dusty light that thrust through the windows and crisscrossed the room like trip wire. Above us, from the rafters, the couple’s domestic things hung. An unfinished slingshot. A plate of something wrapped in a green and fuchsia homespun headscarf. A sieve holding three loaves of fresh nan. A stick driven into the wall pierced a piece of paper with five sewing needles stuck in it. The surviving bow of Baba Nazar’s prescription glasses hooked over a nail. On a shelf built into an alcove, next to the case holding the hunter’s Soviet binoculars, a golden handful of onions. Some girls had squeezed past one another into the room and stood by the door, giggling in shy whispers. They were watching Hakima. A city lady. Her clothes so fine, her eyebrows tweezed to such perfect narrow arches, her skin so white. At last, Mahsad Gul, the Commander’s daughter, moved forward and, full of sudden courage, stepped into my sweaty sandals, then into Hakima’s heels. The other girls watched us. Had we noticed? Was it all right? When we said nothing, the rest of the girls tried on Hakima’s nice shoes, too.
Ismatullah, the Commander’s firstborn, wandered in, pushed past his sister, bowed to the adults. Once, in the winter, the boy had given me a blue glass bead shaped like a teardrop, or a human heart. His friend Hairullah gave me a bead as well, a flat dark-red circle with the name of the Prophet inscribed on both sides. Gifts, the boys had explained, trinkets they had found in the desert. I had strung them on a thread and wore that around my neck until the thread ripped, many months later. Now Ismatullah wanted something in return.
“Auntie.”
“Yes?”
“Can you bring me from the city a SIM card for my cell phone with Turkoman songs on it?” he asked, in Farsi.
“A what? A SIM card?”
“Doo jee bee.”
“Which kind?”
Amin Bai cut in. My obtuseness irritated him.
“Mem-ree card,” he said, in English. “Two GB.”
Father and son. Unlettered, thin, fatigued-looking in their dirty shalwar kameez and soiled white skullcaps, their feet dark and seamy from always being bare in molded rubber sandals, explaining electronics to me, in English. Their lives forever pincered between ageless privation and advanced modernity. Not until then had I heard of two-gigabyte memory cards for cell phones that could store songs.
Boston meantime had unfolded a corner of her houndstooth tablecloth and placed upon it a loaf of bread and a saucer of fresh yogurt: one of her camels was in milk. Chipped glass teacups came out, and the pale green thermos painted with tulips. Hakima, hand on heart, refused the elevenses. Ramadan, she said.
Boston wouldn’t hear of it.
“Eat.” And she pushed the saucer closer to the translator. “God knows you have to eat something. No one can fast in this.” Amin Bai and I were already ripping bits of nan crust and dipping them into the yogurt. It tasted like liquid moonlight.
And then Qasim returned and reported that the tractor carrying four laborers and many meters of heavy-duty rope would be in Oqa to fetch us in an hour—and also that his father, Hassan Khan, the Hazara commander from Karaghuzhlah, was sending his salaams to Amin Bai, the Turkoman commander from Oqa, his dear old friend.
The Commander, who had been lying propped up on his left elbow and eating with his right hand, sat up with an ornate litany of a Farsi greeting, this time heartfelt. And suddenly, unexpectedly, I had a history in the desert beyond the ignoble history of foreigners, a reason to be present in Oqa beyond squibbling notes and sketching: I had, through the young taxi driver I had hired, acquired an ally, a confederate, a Hazara warlord who had been Amin Bai’s war buddy.