by Anna Badkhen
That afternoon, before the tractor pulled Qasim’s taxi out of the dune, Amin Bai asked me to bring him binoculars from America, “to see far in the desert.” To hunt with Baba Nazar, or maybe to watch for intruders, he did not say.
Two days later, Qasim took me to Karaghuzhlah to meet his father. We drove past Naushir’s house, past the pale green mosque to which Taliban riders had delivered their letters instructing the villagers to pay the ten percent religious tax to the militia, past a water pump where two small girls were loading yellow jerry cans that once had held cooking oil and now held well water onto a wooden cart pulled by a balding donkey. In the Hazara quarter of Karaghuzhlah, in the northwest corner of the village, Qasim steered the taxi across a short land bridge barely wide enough for his car. The bridge spanned an irrigation ditch dry and cracked like broken stoneware, and it ended at a sheetmetal gate. A teenage farmhand opened the gate for us, and we parked in a small courtyard next to an outhouse. A cloud of flies rose in furious and restless scarves from a stinking mottle of sheep offal left to rot on some withered grass.
A low wall separated this from the inner yard planted with rows of mulberry trees and poplars and twisted grapevines that sagged under unripe fruit. A two-story house with large wooden sashes painted blue. A lacy flutter of white curtains. A porch of whitewashed mud. In the back, a tandoor sunken into a clay platform for Qasim’s worried mother, Khanum, to squat upon when she baked bread. Hassan Khan himself, his beard indigo black and his skin darkened from fieldwork, smiling his son’s smile from the doorway: “Welcome, welcome.” A couple of fat-tailed sheep. A crop-eared sheepdog asleep in the shade of a water tank. Some thin and bossy chickens on long legs. A duck. And, beneath a trellis, en pointe on fowl down and animal refuse, two tragic silver question marks, two ideograms of heaven, as if their presence somehow could sanctify things: two demoiselle cranes.
I stopped to stare. The cranes were preening. Their wings had been clipped.
“These were a present from Oqa,” the warlord said. “My friend Amin Bai gave them to me.”
The poisoned cranes.
I said: “I know. I know these birds. I have seen them in Oqa.”
“You like them?”
“They are very beautiful.”
I felt violated.
“Here.” The man started toward the cranes. “Take one. Take it to America.”
But I thanked him for his kindness, and thanked him also for sending the tractor to rescue us the other day, and told him I would not be allowed to bring a crane on the airplane with me.
The melon season arrived in the Khorasan that month as always, heedless of Ramadan or violence or hardship, the fruit’s cool pulpy fragrance a timepiece that denoted August. In the ocher fields that canted from the Hindu Kush, the melons, where the heat had cleft their pale green and golden skins, looked like severed heads discarded by war.
In the early ninth century, “the crisp, deliciously refreshing melons of Balkh Province . . . were placed in leaden molds packed with ice and thus sent to grace the table of the Caliph in Baghdad,” the historian Nancy Dupree wrote in her 1967 guidebook to Northern Afghanistan. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan’s Khitan advisor Yelu Ch’u-Ts’ai marveled at melons “as big as a horse’s head.”
Eight hundred years later, the melons were just as big, gourdfuls of condensed sunshine. In the evenings, when Mazar-e-Sharif cooled off and orange smog hung in the streets almost solid like unfiltered honey, melon vendors arranged their fruit in roadside pyramids and illuminated them with kerosene lanterns and single-bulb lamps fed by small generators, and shoppers looking for a sweet finish to their iftar dinners picked them up one by one and held them to their ears and tapped them with their fingertips and listened with solemn attention for the precise hollow pitch that promised the sweetest pulp, and above this ancient epicurean ritual, the melon slice of the waning moon slid down the dusty sky.
In such cinnamon dark one night, I stumbled home along the unpaved and unlit Dasht-e-Shor Road with one of my Mazari hosts, the driver who worked for the United Nations. We had just had dinner at the house of his oldest brother, who lived three blocks away. The Taliban had been calling my host’s cell phone with death threats all month, but he was in high spirits that evening because the meal had been grand: potato and pumpkin bolani and mountains of rice with carrots and raisins and a huge wok of tender goat he had stewed with onions himself, feeding the cooking fire with dry grass that may have come from Oqa and hawking dry spittle on the ground about him for he had not had anything to drink since three-thirty that morning.
During Ramadan, city mullahs made dinner rounds and sat down for iftar with different members of their congregations each night. That night had been the turn of my hosts’ oldest brother; the rest of the family had come along as well and brought me with them. The meal had been served in the yard. Because the mullahs were not related to them by blood, the women had to wear headscarves and eat with the children separately from the men, at a dastarkhan set on a concrete stoop behind a small copse of poplars and a water tank. And because Ramadan was the month for introspection and piety and the mullahs were supposed to engage the men in a dignified and solemn conversation on divine subjects, the women, even in purdah, had been expected to maintain the formal spirit of the gathering by keeping quiet and not telling jokes.
That imposition itself was enough to send the women into paroxysms of laughter. “These mullahs are like the Taliban,” one of the women whispered, and instantly someone squirted chilled Sprite through her nose trying not to crack up, and that foolishness in turn set off a new round of barely controllable giggles that turned to hiccups when someone threw in a racy quip as she reached for bolani. I did not understand most of the jokes, but the sniggering they prompted was contagious. We would regain composure and then start laughing again despite ourselves, and we would try to hush one another by slapping one another on the lips and on the thighs, and that was funnier still, and then somebody’s baby would crawl into a pool of melon juice and splash it on everyone, and that was slapstick, that was downright hilarious, and mostly we laughed because it felt good to be alive, to eat stewed goat and ignore the stuck-up mullahs, to be together, to be hot, to drink at last under the stars.
Satiated and relaxed on the walk home along the rows of melon vendors, I asked my companion what he had wanted to become when he was a little boy. He and I were almost the same age, and both of us had been children under communism: he, at Bagram Airport outside Kabul, where his father had served as a political officer during the Khalq rule and the Soviet occupation, and I, in Soviet Leningrad, where my parents had been disenfranchised, quasi-dissident intelligentsia.
“I wanted to be a pilot,” said my friend. I tripped on an invisible pothole, and he caught me by the elbow.
“I really wanted to be a pilot.” His voice was suddenly so lonesome, so earnest, almost begging. I wanted to give him a hug. “But then there was fighting, fighting, fighting. I became a driver.”
Our footsteps scraped on the gravel.
“Now I am a land pilot.”
We walked on. The golden fingernail of the Ramadan moon scratched the chamois sky. The last prayer of the night, intricate, gauzy, evanescent, swung the city to sleep like a hammock, and the air around us was cloying and sticky with the juice of melons and the residue of millions of sweet and broken dreams.
No melons made it to Oqa, no mullahs came to freeload on the villagers’ dinners, and even if they had come, there would have been nothing with which to feed them.
A Turkoman proverb says “If we have rice for dinner, life is good.” It had been days since the last time Boston and Thawra had cooked rice. Ramadan fast or not, the villagers were going without. The wells from which they drank were running out of water. The fugitives they harbored were running out of luck. The looms on which they wove were running out of thread.
Why did they stay? Whic
h knots tied them to their faded desert, flattened by pitiless heat that had swallowed the mountains and cut the horizons true like a spirit compass? Inertia? Tradition? Laziness? Fear? Knowledge that nowhere else in Afghanistan was better—or that nowhere else in Afghanistan were they welcome? Baba Nazar could think of one who had broken away: Abed Nazar, his nephew, had joined the army and was fighting in the Kashmund Range, a terraced sierra very far away, maybe a month-long walk from Oqa, in Kunar Province—and how was such emigration any good, especially if the boy, God forbid, got hurt?
The rest just hung on, clung to their misweave of a village like clumps of thistle brush as the fickle and difficult soil eroded from under them grain by grain. Amin Bai commanded his invisible troop and entertained opium addicts in his guestroom. Manon the shopkeeper kept his country store and taught his son literacy in the quieter hours of the day. Even Choreh hung around, despite his promises to join the army or the police in exchange for a steady paycheck and government-paid rehab.
One afternoon Choreh and I were ambling about the village, and he took me to visit Abdul Rashid, the blueskinned heroin addict, the younger brother of Jan Mohammad the wedding chef and the son of the ancient Qul Nazar and Kizil Gul, an asthmatic woman with a face so umbered by the sun and so grotesquely disproportionate it possessed the counterintuitive, primeval beauty of a stone idol. Qul Nazar had been a sharecropper in Khairabad until the Taliban had diverted the water away from the fields of his landlords. After that, there were no more crops to tend, no more work. The family sold their animals and moved to Oqa where Kizil Gul could weave. Except there never seemed to be any money for wool, and the two warped poplar beams of a disassembled loom stood idle in the corner of the family’s single-room house in which the woman passed her days wheezing at her wayward son between chores.
“You spend all your money on drugs!” she would yell as she squatted by a ceramic basin and covered the dough she had just finished kneading with a tin plate and a folded-up length of tarp.
“We can’t afford it!” And she would reach for the tall stack of mattresses, blankets, and clothes festooned with coins and protective charms and motley strips of cloth that loomed like some dull and ancient treasure in the corner of the house and pick off the top of that pile a grimy green chapan coat and throw that on top of the tarp, to help the dough rise.
“If it weren’t for you, we’d have had rice for dinner tonight!”
If we have rice for dinner, life is good.
At this point Kizil Gul would gulp for air, hyperventilating, exasperated. Choreh and I had walked into the house in the middle of one such dressing-down, but she paid us no attention. Choreh had heard it all before; everyone in the village had—everyone on Earth had, for mothers of addicts around the world repeated the same lament.
And like all addicted sons around the world, Abdul Rashid avoided looking at his mother. He was squatting five paces away in front of a small uneven cat’s-tongue flame from an oil lamp. With his left hand he held over the lamp a strip of tinfoil, and he was looking very intently at the tinfoil. On it sizzled a single black speck of heroin. In his right hand Abdul Rashid held a thin metal pipe, like a drinking straw.
“If I quit this,” he said to his mother, never taking his eyes off the narcotic he was cooking, “I will die.”
He leaned over and placed the pipe so that one end almost touched the heroin, and wrapped his lips around the other end and inhaled. A thin ribbon of brown smoke rushed from the tinfoil into the pipe. He held his breath. He exhaled. No smoke came out of his broad lips. He had collected kindling in the desert for three days and had earned about four dollars for it in Karaghuzhlah and had spent a dollar on heroin. It would last him less than a week.
He noticed me.
“Can you take me to a clinic?”
Kizil Gul looked up from her cooking. She saw me now.
“Oh, yes. I pray to God that you take him to a clinic,” she said.
“Take him to the clinic,” said Choreh, and grasped my shoulder really hard. Choreh, with pupils barely visible. Stoned since morning. Was he pleading for Abdul Rashid, or for himself, too—for a hope, perhaps, that a treatment was possible, a cure, a solution, that an escape was not just the fantasy of an addled mind?
But when I called the rehab in Mazar to ask about bringing in a new patient, they said the wait for a bed in the detoxification unit was two months, and when I relayed that to Abdul Rashid and Choreh and Amin Bai, the men clicked their tongues and shook their heads, and Amin Bai said: “I can’t predict what will happen in two months. I can’t predict what is going to happen even tomorrow!”
No one could plan that far ahead in Oqa, so parlously poised between the ancient and the modern, between the world in which artisans hand-carved wooden doors and the world in which these wooden doors were thrust under car tires, between the world of bartered calligonum and the world of two-gigabyte cell phone SIM cards. This village where time at once stood still and slipped by too swiftly to take measure of it, incalculate and unreliable like sand, like atomized grief itself—no one, except for the weavers of carpets.
• • •
“One meter left,” Thawra said, without looking up. Exhausted. In pain. Her voice so quiet. Probably wishing for the opiate relief her husband and father-in-law had forbidden her.
The two men were leaning into the loom room now, appraising her work.
“It may be finished in twenty, twenty-five days,” Amanullah thought out loud.
“I think she’ll be done in a month,” Baba Nazar agreed. “I’ll sell it to a dealer in Dawlatabad or Mazar—whoever will take it.” The year before he had sold Thawra’s carpet for almost four hundred dollars. But that carpet had been twice as wide. The hunter’s lips moved as he worked out the figures in silence. Then he pulled out his ultimate bargaining chip, the one he would offer the merchant to drive up the price, and tried it out on his son, his daughter-in-law, me, the three wobbly chickens that stirred in their down atop the bottom of the carpet.
“It’s hard to follow the design.”
Amanullah studied his wife then. Her bony arms bare from the elbows down, no jewelry apart from the single silver and garnet ring she had traded from me for a hematite bracelet. He shook his head and walked out of the room, preoccupied.
That evening on our way to the city, Qasim and I drove Amanullah out to the desert where he had left his camels to graze. The plain dry and lifeless. The camels slow in the heat. Amanullah turned in the passenger seat.
“Anna, do you think my wife is too skinny?” he asked. “I told her to stop weaving because she’s too thin. I worry about her. That’s why she sometimes weaves and sometimes doesn’t. So it’ll take her a long time. She won’t be finished in twenty days.”
Then he looked past me, looked at his tiny pale village through the dust-smeared rear window of the taxicab.
“Is this a place worth living?” he said. “The one thing it’s got going for it is that it’s safe. We are too far from everything to be remembered. No one from outside comes here.”
• • •
Once during Ramadan, Amanullah called me at dawn and said he was in a zaranj headed to Mazar-e-Sharif. We agreed to meet outside the Blue Mosque’s north gate. Two hours later from the backseat of Qasim’s taxi, I watched my friend pick his uncertain way through a crowd made up mostly of village daytrippers like him, or else immigrants from distant hamlets looking for city work, nameless contributors to the world’s latest great migration, the largest population shift in human history. That year population experts in the West were predicting that within a century villages like Oqa would disappear, eroded by depravity and privation, dismantled by the globalized pull of modernity. Metropolises would be full of men like Amanullah, seduced into urban living, bewildered by the sweaty chaos of one another’s bodies, humbled by the sparkling blues of the old shrine, confused by the jumble of traffic, shrunken by
the awesome speed and volume of the city. There among these selfsame nomads and farmers walked Amanullah, his face pained, haggard, his shoulders drawn, the familiar swing gone from his arms. His strabismus a grimace of suffering. Then he spotted my car and got into the seat next to Qasim and spread his shoulders and stretched out his legs and smiled. Safe again.
We drove around. We drove to a public garden that had a Ferris wheel and two carousels and trampled hard grass behind an iron palisade. The gate was locked. We drove to the hills south of the city and got out of the car and from a dirt road watched the city choke on her own thirsty smog. We drove back into the city and drove to the bazaar, and Amanullah bought shampoo from a stall sticky with last night’s melon juice. Then he announced that the city had worn him out, and he farewelled us and left in another zaranj for Oqa to watch Thawra’s belly round out a little more each day under that shapeless calico dress, the rest of her still fishbone-thin, and to watch her carpet inch, knot by knot, thk, thk, thk, toward the top beam of her loom, toward completion, toward the chance of another winter not so hungry.
THE BLIZZARD
The drought broke on Eid al-Adha: the Festival of Sacrifice, Islam’s most beloved celebration, which salutes the devotion of Abraham and marks the end of the hajj. Cloudfuls of snow emptied onto the vineyards of Shomali and on the Hindu Kush and on the parched Bactrian plains and on the grainy immensity of Dasht-e-Leili. In Kabul each morning for a week, giant white flakes folded out of a purple predawn sky during the four-thirty prayer as if beckoned down by a muezzin’s serenade to rest upon pushcarts abandoned in the frozen brown street mud the night before, upon a little beggar girl in a bloodred dress, upon men cocooned in camelwool blankets slushing to open their shops, upon a boy in a soiled parka riding a donkey bareback and barefoot with his nose running and his mouth open spookily and full of chewed-up straw. The mountains that ranged between the capital and the Khorasan turned completely white like the crimped linen of some ancient god who had risen hastily and left his Cretaceous bed unmade.