The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  “Why is that?” my host asked. “Why do people in America have no time to read long letters?”

  Kamrana cleared away the dinner platters and brought green tea and hot sweetened milk boiled with walnuts. The dim air in the room became scented with cardamom.

  • • •

  After dinner, the uncle and my companions remained in the living room to smoke cigarettes and sleep on mattresses arranged along the walls, and I joined the women and children who crowded for warmth into a single bedroom. We slept fully clothed under Chinese polyester blankets on thin bedrolls laid on the floor side by side in an interlocking mosaic, and we held hands through the night in an astonishing act of faith, as though the mortises and tenons of our linked fingers, our elemental intimacy, could grant us sanctuary against war. Our breath synchronized. I remembered another night of such communal ritual, in Karima’s home in Andkhoi, and my heart swelled. Then I remembered that six months earlier and less than two miles away American soldiers had shot and killed a girl like Kamrana when that girl had been sleeping in her uncle’s house. Whose hand had she been holding that night? I felt for Kamrana’s pulse in her slack fingertips—one, two, three, thk, thk, thk—and I felt against it the beat of my own slower heart that pushed and pushed tenderness and heartbreak together through my bloodstream.

  The premature winter locked away the Khorasan behind its many cold latches of seclusion. Ice crusted mountain passes. Weather delayed planes. The galleries of Salang were snowed in, and motorists on either side of the tunnel idled in frozen smog for days, dancing little shivering stomps next to their taxis and buses and semis and blowing into their cold-raw hands, appointments broken, hospital visits delayed, carpets uncollected and undelivered.

  In the afternoon of the first day of Eid, nearly a meter of snow dumped unexpectedly and almost all at once onto the Bactrian plains. In Karaghuzhlah, a hundred and twenty of the thousand sheep the boys had taken out to pasture that morning got stuck in the drifts and froze to death. The snow melted and fell again and melted again. The snow turned to rain. Great legatos of rain stroked the desert by day, and by night the thinnest membrane of ice shingled the waterlogged wastes. The soggy loess became the color and consistency of a chunk of chocolate melting in a pot, a hard and slippery clay bed coated with three or four inches of viscous and velvety muck that extended to the rim of the world. White flashes of unpicked cotton interrupted the expanse of brown. The eroded adobe of the city walls of Balkh sagged under the rain, and beneath these walls murders of crows sailed over pale green fields of waxlike cauliflower. The shunpike to Asfakhan Shrine sloshed unused through dormant fields, and in the ruts grooved out by mad pilgrims’ buses gossamer ice shone like mica. Beneath the snowcapped minaret of Zadyan, Zarifshah Bibi, Baba Nazar’s mine-crippled daughter, was trapped indoors for days because her prosthesis was of no use in the slush. Unseen in the desert, POMZ-2M fragmentation mines, these afterbirths of the war against the Soviets, shifted loose in their pulpy soil like sinister corncobs, each a latent wound, a time warp waiting to collect a ghastly oblation of limbs from some child or shepherd or farmer not yet born at the time of its emplacement. In Siogert, two long resilient white spills of unmelted snow stared up at the eggshell sky from the spot on the road where in October local vigilantes had killed two Taliban scouts. Or maybe it was where the village teacher had been killed that spring. The weather treated all blood equally. The road was mucoid, and days and days went by when no transport or man or beast traveled on it.

  The Khorasan was shutting down and shutting itself off—for the winter, or a year, or a century. Each village, each hamlet on the plains, was on its own now, fenced off from the rest of the world by sodden land, alone with its history, its anguish, its singular beauty.

  Only Dasht-e-Leili in the west never slaked its thirst and spun its sand into yellow and dense tufans beneath the pillowy low sky as it always had. Smudged by these storms to the point of seeming incorporeal, stern men draped with bright garlands of plastic flowers that clashed absurdly with their mud-splattered brown shalwar kameez waited outside roadside mosques for returning hajjis in stoic silence like ghosts ordered eons ago into ceremonious and grave line formations.

  • • •

  The storms had washed Mazar-e-Sharif like a body for burial. Pale sepulchral sun filtered through fogging slush and stove smoke, and everywhere the gutters oozed with melting snow mixed with black sludge, the blood of sacrificial animals, old grudges, millennial regrets. Sheepskins hung to dry on mud fences slowly rotted. The stoops and storefronts of Mazar’s Dasht-e-Shor neighborhood where I was staying had emptied of the men who in warmer weather would spend afternoons squatting in semicircles in thin strips of shade or else hold on to one another’s handshakes near water pumps for hours and gossip and slaver over the ankles of the veiled women who passed by.

  My hosts’ compound also grew quieter, more somber, that winter. Worn out by Taliban threats that had hounded him all summer, one of the brothers, the one who had been a driver for the United Nations, had fled to Tajikistan soon after Ramadan with his pregnant wife and children. Another, a young unmarried journalist, had fled to Europe and sought political asylum in Scandinavia. Orphaned this way at once of two sons and three grandchildren, her arthritis amplified by the cold, Dear Mother the matriarch sighed deeper and prayed more often and locked herself for hours in her widow’s quarters at the front of the house. The electric water pump below the cement courtyard froze and broke, and the large family washed from batteries of plastic ewers in unheated bathrooms that reeked of unflushed toilets. When they bathed, the brothers who remained in the house sang melancholy love songs, beautifully and in tune, but their voices were muffled by the quilts that hung from bedroom doorframes and window sashes to trap warm air, because bukhari heat tended to draft out through the cracks as soon as the fire went out. The long hallways stood freezing and empty and dark. On a trellis by the garbage heap a single clematis blossom clung to the vine, a dying purple flame preserved in verglas. In the blue predawn, muezzins’ four-o’clock arpeggios clinked through the blanketed windows like distant icicles breaking.

  • • •

  On a drizzly morning, I slogged down Dasht-e-Shor Street to the twin domes of the Blue Mosque. Schoolgirls in black uniforms leaned into a stiff wind that blew frigid mist past enormous fields of refuse. The street was a river of gunge through which men on bicycles and women in galoshes skidded in slow motion, trying to keep upright in the mud. At the southern tip of that foul thoroughfare, the shrine glittered in the morning fog as though encased in ice, so unsoiled it seemed a thing separate from that city, an attestation to some virtue contained within. Men shuffled in reverent quietude past the snowflake-white doves that roosted in the thousands atop its spiral minarets and in the vaulted arch of its mihrab, and drew their patu blankets over their heads and around their shoulders, and in the early-morning cold, the condensation from their breath collected on their beards like tinsel. Pilgrims in search of sanctuary and comfort. Over the years I had been one of them several times and here I was again.

  Worshippers left their shoes heavy with cold mud at the east gate that led to the mosque’s inner yard, and walked across the tiles of white and black marble in stocking feet and entered the shrine. The cold from the tiles bored into their soles. Which invocations did they whisper inside? Which millennial transgressions did they ask to right? The tiles ricocheted with the sharp applause of the pigeons’ flutter, the same indifferent ovation for generations of pilgrims, winter after winter, war after war.

  An old man was selling pewter platefuls of millet seed to feed the pigeons. I bought one. Ten minutes of bliss for ten afghanis, about twenty cents. The birds alighted on my head, shoulders, arms, hands; they walked over my feet. I thought: flying must feel like this. I thought my heart would burst. Then I started laughing. I stood in the middle of a war zone, draped in fluttering white birds, and laughed and laughed. A few dozen yards away
, a girl tossed bits of stale bread in the air and the pigeons pirouetted, collided with one another in bursts of impossible whiteness, dove down to catch the crumbs. The girl was laughing, too. A Mazari journalist once told me: “The West is all about technology. The East is all about the mystical.” He had been drinking bootleg vodka he had hidden in a plastic bag because drinking alcohol in Afghanistan carried the punishment of imprisonment or lashing, and he was not so much mystical as just plain drunk. But I thought of his words among the solace of the pigeons of the Blue Mosque. I knew then that the birds were there to keep us sane, buoyed, somehow, through the extreme blue solitudes of winter and wartime.

  That evening, over a dinner of bread and lobio and stewed cauliflower, I asked one of my hosts if I could take his daughter Lena to the shrine with me someday to feed the pigeons. Lena was ten and had thick braids; and she liked to come into my room to teach me a word or two of Farsi sometimes, or sometimes to insist that I kiss the fat and milky cheek of her baby brother, whom she carried on her hip, or sometimes to give me a quick hug and run away. I was very fond of her. But sometimes she would come in, lipsticked and with her hair undone and carrying a little portable radio so that she could dance before me, and seeing her walk through the door with that radio terrified me because I knew how that dance ended. It ended with her going down on her knees in front of me. There at my feet the ten-year-old girl would close her eyes and quake and ripple her shoulders and gyrate her still-flat chest in the smooth and knowing way of a very grown woman, a way that reached into some forbidden and unnamable darkness inside me and made me absolutely, utterly afraid.

  Lena’s father said she could not go with me to feed the white birds. He said it was too cold and her feet would get wet. He said she only had one pair of shoes, her brother’s Chinese sneakers. It would take ages for them to dry in that cold.

  In that tapestry of isolation, Oqa’s was the most inviolable.

  The village was sequestered behind incalculable acreages of muck. Impounded in this bone-clasping cold beneath a corrugated sky in which no sun or moon or stars any longer appeared. Unattainable, unreachable, hermetic. Fall was hunting season, and hundreds of ducks labored southward between the brown-gray desert and the brown-gray clouds, yet Baba Nazar could not leave the hummock to hunt. Ismatullah and Ozyr Khul could not wander the dunes in search of calligonum to trade for rice and oil. Manon the shopkeeper could not bring in fresh supplies of Crown safety razor blades and Pine cigarettes. The Oqans had reassembled the bukhari stoves they had stashed away for the summer and fed them frugal handfuls of dried grass and huddled around them refilling and refilling and refilling their chipped teacups with murky hot well water from soot-blackened pitchers. Even the camels stayed put, hitched to corroded antiaircraft shell casings driven into the slippery trampled-down clay, or else corralled behind ephemeral enclosures of thistle they slowly chewed out of the walls.

  “When are you coming, Anna?” Amanullah demanded over the phone. “Everyone misses you. Our village is sometimes okay, and sometimes not good. There are always rumors that there are Taliban. But we are the same people you know, and we love you.”

  Tenderness spilled through my abdomen and down my arms, and my fingertips felt warm for the first time in days. I pictured Thawra’s weaving hands eaten raw by the weather under her improbable thistle roof. Then Amin Bai took the cell phone from Amanullah and said there was no road to come on and told me to wait for the rain to abate.

  Two weeks would pass before anyone could leave or enter Oqa.

  • • •

  That night I wore two sweaters over two pairs of shalwar kameez and slept poorly under a heavy polyester blanket and a sheepskin coat, and when I did sleep I had a neverending nightmare. In it, my laptop, my notebooks, my pens were all washed away by a flood, vanished in an umber gruel that had come from all directions.

  See this corner? In the time of the Taliban they hanged a young man in this place.”

  “See this shrine? Seven brothers were killed here. They were Uzbek. They were fleeing the Taliban, in 1997. We were all fleeing then.”

  “See this flag? One brother killed another brother here over land. It was after the fall of the Taliban. Then someone killed the killer; I’m not sure who.”

  “See this poplar grove? There was a bloody fight between the mujaheddin and the Pashtuns here, in the second year of the Taliban’s rule. It went on for days.”

  “See this crater? A Talib on a bicycle blew up here and killed a storekeeper before Nawruz. I was at a café down the block, finishing my lunch.”

  “Anna! See this?”

  Mnemonics of gore charted young Qasim’s world. See what now? What was I looking at? The frosted jags of the Hindu Kush against the cold blush of dawn. A golden eagle lifting up heavily from a limestone outcrop to hunt for breakfast. The taxi driver saw a crime scene. He said: “There was a mullah five years ago, Mullah Ghafur. He was Baluch, from Karaghuzhlah. A man called Shir killed him. I think it was over money. Shir was Uzbek.”

  Another bloody knot on the loom of the Khorasan, where war was one of the weavers. Its sickle went clack clack clack, like the rattling of dry bones.

  Whom to blame for the unhealed scar tissue of fratricidal violence that blemished this terrain indelibly, irredeemably, conditioning people’s memories and yearnings? The Pashtun Taliban who had mutilated, shot, and slit the throats of some six thousand Hazara in Balkh in 1998? The Hazara and Uzbek militiamen who had joined forces to slaughter three thousand Pashtun Taliban soldiers the year before? Or the perpetrators of the smaller, village-scale genocides—the Hazara who had supposedly killed twenty-two Pashtuns from Shingilabad the year before the Taliban took power; their Pashtun neighbors who had ostensibly murdered five Hazara from Karaghuzhlah around the same time? The strips of colorful cloth that whiffled from knobbly wooden poles over their graves a decade and a half later were mnemonics for the scores that never seemed to be settled. What about, then, King Abdur Rahman, whose genocidal unification campaign forcibly resettled ten thousand rebellious Ghilzai Pashtun families to this high desert from their ancestral lands south of the Hindu Kush in the 1890s, diluting the tribal structures of the disloyal Pashtuns and weakening the bastion of the other minorities?

  Perhaps the violence was a constant replay, a caroming echo of much earlier wars. A limbic memory of some unresolved skirmish between a common ancestor of the Hazara and Uzbeks, who carried the Y chromosome of Genghis Khan, and an antecedent of the Tajiks and Pashtuns and Turkomans, whose haplogroup possibly had been pushed to the Khorasan out of somewhere in modern-day Ukraine by the last glaciation. Or older still, of Cain and Abel arguing in the Great Rift Valley. And maybe it was even older than that, older than our common African ancestors, geomorphic, forged in the tens of millions of years of incessant smashing of the Eurasian plate and the Gondwanaland supercontinent, during a whole era of thrusting and kneading like dough the rock that had made this land.

  • • •

  We had started for Oqa early that morning. The road soaked in blood old and new squished under the tires. In the gullies—“See this, Anna? Taliban killed a teacher from Siogert here, then the villagers killed two Pashtuns in revenge”—snow lay in ultramarine shadows. On the car stereo Shamsuddin Masrur sang about a maiden sweet like a Sistani pomegranate to the lacy twang of a two-stringed dutar lute.

  “He was from Mazar,” Qasim said. “The Taliban shot him in his home because he was a musician. He was an old man then.”

  Fifteen miles south of Oqa, just past the turnoff to Karaghuzhlah, the tires veered and locked and fistfuls of mud pelted the car windows. The engine muttered and stalled. There was no more road ahead, just a sea of brown muck. Qasim opened his door and tried the surface with his foot. His foot sank to the talus.

  “Oqa is closed today,” Qasim said. He turned in his seat, beaming. “Let’s have lunch at my father’s house.”

  • •
•

  Hassan Khan—warlord, farmer, Qasim’s father, Amin Bai’s friend, keeper of demoiselle cranes—was in good spirits. He had lost twenty of his ninety sheep in the Eid blizzard, but all the rain and snowmelt promised a plentiful almond harvest next year. When we arrived, he was presiding over a small gathering of male neighbors and relatives in a long narrow guestroom. On the mattress next to Hassan Khan reclined Jan Mohammad, the beautiful warlord whom everyone called Janni and whom I had met at Ozyr Khul’s wedding in Oqa. Janni’s bodyguards sat or stood by the door; one was feeding the lone bukhari that loosed smoke into the room in long opaque scarves. Across the room slumped Hassan Khan’s older brother, Rustam Khan, who kept scrapbooks of events and phenomena he considered important—the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai, the electric storm years back during which two villagers died of fright in the desert, the wedding of a neighbor’s son and niece, the map of Italy he had drawn and colored by hand. Rustam Khan had a long gray beard and a collection of books he stored under lock and key in a tin chest. The villagers called him the Historian. He chewed opium for his arthritis and often was stoned.

  It had begun to rain again. Cold silver needles pricked at the dirt in the courtyard, streaked in quick transparent veins down the glass of the guestroom’s sole window. All this water boring through the clay to quench the tree roots in Hassan Khan’s almond and apricot orchards. He smiled. The rain and the bukhari heat and the presence of guests impelled him to reminisce. Over rice and a dish of fried sheep fat called jaz, he recounted fondly the sacking of nearby Pashtun villages after the retreat of the Taliban ten years earlier. He had commanded a troop of a hundred men then, sometimes two hundred. “In Shahrak, in one garden, seventeen of my men were killed in one day. But we won.” He said there had been “many Taliban” in those villages then, and that they once again were “full of Taliban.”