by Anna Badkhen
“What about Karaghuzhlah?”
“No, no Taliban here. The security is good.”
“But they were here during Ramadan. Where did they go?”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Anna. You’re my guest. If you’d like to walk around at night, I can give you a gun.”
A helicopter gunship rumbled in the low wet sky above the compound. The rain quieted. My host added, in English: “No problem.”
The other men in the room chuckled at that. Rustam Khan reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a folded piece of lined paper and unfolded it and tweezed off with his fingernails a small crumb of black opium resin that was contained within and placed it on his tongue and folded back the package and put it away. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.
Janni spoke: “The Taliban elder of Karaghuzhlah, Gul Ahmad, who now calls himself Mullah Zamir, is not here. He is in Pakistan for the winter. When he goes to Pakistan in the winter, the other Taliban also go. When he comes back, next summer, the Taliban will also come back and we’ll fight them.”
Janni took a drag from a cigarette. He held it between his long and sensuous middle finger and forefinger, and as he smoked, he held his palm turned up delicately as if receiving some benediction. An exquisite palm. The palm of a killer.
“He goes to Pakistan because his motorcycle doesn’t work here in the winter. It gets stuck. In the summer they come with twenty or forty motorcycles and fight with us. Every winter we have peace and every summer we have war.”
Janni’s bodyguards nodded: yes, yes, the warfare was seasonal, like farmwork. You flooded the paddies for rice in May and you fought. You sowed winter wheat in the fall and then you rested till spring. The cycles of violence were just another timeless way of measuring time in the Khorasan.
“Pah!” Hassan Khan exclaimed. “This is not good war. I’ve seen lots of war. I fought a lot. This is not good war. This is like a dogfight. People in this war shoot at the sky. They shoot from the sky. They make bombs and leave them to blow one another up. We shot at one another, up close. In Kabul we fought up close, we killed fifty people in one day and watched them die right next to us. Now that was war.”
Like all warriors since Odysseus, Hassan Khan was trussed forever to the memories of his exploits, defined and inspired and haunted by them.
Suddenly he leaned over the dastarkhan.
“Anna! Do you want to go with me and fight the Taliban some night?”
“When?”
“Whenever you want.”
“But wait, I thought you said there were no Taliban in your village.”
“If we don’t find Taliban, we’ll just fight Pashtuns,” Hassan Khan said. “There’s a village, Alozai, they are all Taliban but very weak. We wouldn’t fight in the village—we would fight on the road.”
At this, Rustam Khan opened his eyes, awakening from an opiate dream.
“All Pashtuns are Taliban,” he said. “Their women are Taliban. Their dogs are Taliban. Their donkeys are also Taliban.”
• • •
The jaz was gone and some boys brought in thermoses of green tea and pewter plates of fresh yogurt and some unshucked almonds and Rustam Khan tore off some more opium to chew. For a time we sat without talking, shucking and eating almonds and smoking and sipping tea. After a while, Janni and his bodyguards left; and my hosts’ wives and sisters and daughters and aunts filed into the room and squatted and shucked more almonds and drank more tea and made small talk. They talked about the weather. They talked about the children. They talked about the Indian soap opera all the women had liked to watch five years earlier, when for a whole year and for the first time in anyone’s life Karaghuzhlah had a powerful village generator that went on from seven until nine at night. They talked about how after a year the village elders had decided that the generator had to go. They talked about the arbitrariness of the powerful and the unavailing and neverending struggles of the weak, about the discrepancy between the rich and the poor and the hypocrisy of the pious, reciting over and over the parables that have been rehashing themselves on every inhabited landmass on Earth since the beginning of time, until there was nothing more to add. A silence fell.
Did I by any chance know, Qasim’s teenage sister asked then, shyly, deferentially, what had happened to the Indian family in the soap opera?
It grew dark and a child was sent for a kerosene lamp. An old aunt snoozed against a floor cushion, attended by a girl. Outside the window purple clouds blew low past the Milky Way. In the eighth century less than ten miles to the southwest of Hassan Khan’s house, a boy named Jafar ibn Muhammad al Balkhi, later known in the West as Abu Ma’shar, watched the same ever-spiraling galaxy. He would grow up, move to Baghdad, become the preeminent astrologer at the Abbasid court, and compile the Great Introduction to Astrology, an eight-volume text that drew on the philosophy and astrology of pre-Islamic Mesopotamia, India, and Aristotle, and which, translated into Latin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, formed the basis of Western scientific astrology.
“Which stories do you tell your children about stars?” I asked the women.
What a silly question. They shook their heads and waved their hands to shoo it away. Golden jewelry shimmered in orange lamplight.
“We are illiterate.”
“All we do all day is work with animals.”
“We have no time to tell our children about the stars.”
I tried again.
“But what were the stories your mothers told you?”
The women laughed.
“Our mothers were the same way. They also had no time.”
Hassan Khan began to list the stars of Libra, which had reached its zenith on the first day of Mizan, one month earlier. Zuben al Shamali. Zuben al Genubi. Zuben al Akrab. Beta Librae, Alpha Librae, Gamma Librae. “When I was young, I knew the names of constellations,” he said. “But now I forget.”
“When Libra first appears, some farmers mate male and female sheep,” offered Rustam Khan. He no longer bothered to open his eyes, and he intoned from his corner of the room dappled in leaping lamp shadows like some entranced necromancer. “Some farmers say that when Mars and another star come close together it will rain and snow soon.
“But I don’t remember which star it is.”
And the Historian retreated into his soporific stupor for the rest of the night and left me to ponder the workings of memory and what it chooses to retain and to leave behind, its capacity to highlight the hurt and eclipse the beauty and alter our perception of time and love and trespass, its profound power to shape and reshape the narrative of its owners’ personal and communal past, and so to configure their future. The lamp on the floor flickered and hissed, and outside in the cold and woozy desert the war ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed.
The next day fine and endless rain sieved out of the sky that was white and low and of a piece, and I rented a horse to take me to Oqa. A boy brought it to Hassan Khan’s first courtyard where the outhouse stood. It was a draft horse, liver chestnut, and it was saddled with a burlap sack stuffed with straw that was tied to its midsection with rope and a patu folded in half was thrown over the sack. The horse had no intention of traveling across the desert in the rain, with or without a rider. It shied when I spoke to it and crabbed sideways when I took hold of the bridle, and when I laid my hand on its muzzle, it bared its teeth and snarled. It threw me the minute I mounted.
Hassan Khan made me stay again for lunch, of course. We sat in his family room on the second floor of his house, and we ate a hot soup of tender lamb and stale bread and raw onions, and then we drank tea with green raisins, tiny bursts of hot summer sun that made me forget my sprained wrist, bruised kidney, the cold outside. In the wet vines beneath the window a demoiselle crane purred its lonesome song that was as old and as desolate as the rain-veiled peaks of the Hindu Kush, and somewher
e a village muezzin chanted about mercy, and compassion, and grace.
The red tractor jerked and pitched with each groove of the November fields, and the slat-board wagon hitched to it with a length of frayed yellow nylon rope wobbled and creaked. In the wagon, held more or less in place by granite drags and lashed to the wooden sideboards like a giant trussed scorpion, lay an enormous plough. In the front of the wagon, in the small space left by the plough, seven passengers crouched in silence, draped in dirty patus to keep out the skull-size globs of mud the tractor’s immense rear wheels chucked with great accuracy into the wagon bed. Behind this unwieldy train the winter trees of Karaghuzhlah stood inked against a pale yellow firmament. A monotonous nimbostratus beneath which low and massive sudsy clouds rushed eastward like a ghost cavalry unleashed by some jinn of the Occident. Fog rose from a sepia field of unharvested cotton like tufts of cotton itself evaporating into this cold dawn, and by the village walls the fragile green needles of winter wheat were peeking through the mud already, coaxed out by two weeks of rain and snow. In all other directions a flat and trout-colored desert stretched toward the world’s rim in a feathering of coral, pale ocher, and blue-gray where the mud reflected the Michelangelo sky. A wet wind blew.
The tractor was a four-wheel-drive, eighty-horsepower giant made in Soviet Belarus several decades earlier. It weighed four tons. Its rear wheels stood six feet tall. Faded red ribbons streamed from its windshield, to protect from the evil eye its driver and passengers and, most importantly, the engine itself, for this was Karaghuzhlah’s sole tractor, the same tractor that had pulled Qasim’s taxi out of a dune in Oqa that Ramadan. Now it was taking four day laborers and the plough to work a field about five miles north of the village. The day laborers were Uzbek and had stern, exhausted faces and beards all. The other three passengers in the wagon were Ramin, one of my Mazar hosts, who had come along to translate and for the sake of adventure; Qasim the driver, who had come along because he felt it was his responsibility to follow me even when his taxi could not; and I.
• • •
It had been raining for two weeks straight, and there was no telling when it would stop long enough for the desert to become passable by car. Before dawn in the middle of November, Ramin, Qasim, and I went to the bazaar in the city, bought three and a half kilos each of onions and rice and apples, drove to Karaghuzhlah, parked Qasim’s taxi by the outhouse in his father’s compound, and set out to Oqa across the soggy barrens on foot. I was going to honor Baba Nazar’s enduring invitation and spend a night in the village at last.
The land underfoot was scoured smooth and supple like a lover’s body. The wind bent the golden organ pipes of dry reeds in the gulches. On the horizon, smoke from shepherds’ fires blew like kisses. A golden eagle rose ahead of us and flew low, a swatch of desert picked up by a gust, leading the way over a purple film of withered cousinia. My nylon burqa flapped after it like a flightless blue bird. We were about two miles out of Karaghuzhlah when we heard a rumble behind us: the red tractor was making its way up north. We hitched a ride. A thousand years ago on this stretch of the Great Silk Road pilgrims would fall in with camel caravans this way.
The tractor pulled the wagon north in wrenching spasms. Each time it would arrive at an irrigation ditch, three of the farmhands would jump off, unhitch the wagon, shovel down the canal, and the tractor would run back and forth over it to make the rut more or less level. The workers then would retie the wagon, and onward the tractor would lurch to the next dike, and the next, and the next. In the steamed-up cabin the driver and the navigator sipped green tea from glass cups. We in the wagon held on to the splintery sideboards, to the plough, to one another. The leather armpit of Ramin’s jacket was warm against my left knee. Someone warned me to keep my feet close or the plough would cut them clean off. Someone threw a blanket over my head to protect me from the projectile mud, and I struggled from under its wet wool that reeked of manure and sheep fat and woodsmoke, and my burqa came off with it, and then everyone was laughing, laughing.
The tractor stopped in the middle of the desert a third of the way to Oqa: the farmers had arrived. We thanked the driver and farewelled the Uzbeks and walked again. Walked on the Earth’s very skin, rose, raw, resonant. It seemed made to be walked, so tempered by the feet of numberless generations of wayfarers like us among which now were our own feet. We leaned into the wind, then against it. Three Magi strapped into bags of onions, of apples, of rice. We walked through untilled fields and then through a land that bore no trace of cultivation. Walked on pottery shards, their glaze washed to a shimmer by the rain and blinking up from the ground like splintered memories of clear sky. Walked on sheep crania and spent shell casings and bones of gerbils and maybe land mines and the unseen bones of armies that had been wasted here.
We had walked for two hours, maybe more, when we saw in a muddy esker a young goatherd. He wore an outsize parka, and he was leaning on a walking stick with his left hand and picking his nose with the forefinger of his right. Thirty or forty mud-spattered goats trotted silently about him. The boy regarded our small procession with polite curiosity. He did not move to greet us, not out of unfriendliness but out of the economy that is the parsimonious habit of men who are rewarded poorly for their hard work. Even the youngest men of the desert knew to be frugal with their movement. As we drew closer, he took the finger out of his nose and wiped his nose with the top of his right hand and studied whatever had rubbed off for a second and at last thrust his hand in his pocket.
“Oqa!” the men called out.
“Oqa?”
“Oqa, Oqa!”
“Ah!” The boy pointed northeast.
“May you never grow tired!” The boy pulled his right hand back out of his pocket and raised it halfway to his face, fingers together, the palm facing sideways, in the thrifty blessing of his austere land. In twenty more minutes, first the billowing barchans and then the lone cemetery marker shaped themselves out of the mist, and finally the blind houses themselves, clinging to their infertile rain-darkened hillock and crowned with thin ribbons of bukhari smoke that curled from the holes in oblique clay roofs.
Oqa.
They told me the carpet was beautiful.
Eagles spread their angular wings in the rhombic flakes of its ultramarine sky and rows of pomegranate trees grew along its fringes. Upon its background, dun like the hide of a camel or like the very sands that ruched past Oqa, almonds lay on maroon platters and lotus flowers bloomed. Its weave fastened Thawra’s aches and desires and spells of morning sickness and Hazar Gul’s silliness and Boston’s arthritic sighs. Leila’s hands sticky with candy and her dreams from all the times she had fallen asleep on the loom and drooled on it a little. Choreh Gul’s drugged mornings and Zakrullah’s famished crying. Down from the chickens that danced upon the carpet when Thawra wasn’t looking. Nurullah’s temper tantrums and tea dregs and goat turds and specks of gold from the barchan belt. Two hundred and forty symmetrical knots per square inch. Three hundred seventy-two thousand knots per square meter. One million one hundred and sixteen thousand knots in all.
All of that had fit into the pannier of Baba Nazar’s donkey perfectly. In Dawlatabad, Abdul Shakur the yarn dealer had run his fingernail against the back of the carpet and studied the pile for mistakes and bought it for two hundred dollars, and then turned around and sold it to a dealer from Mazar for two-twenty.
That was about three weeks after Ramadan. By the time Qasim and Ramin and I hiked up the hummock in the drizzle of November, the loom had been dismantled and the beams put away and the loom room was stocked with dusty pyramids of large burlap sacks stuffed with hay, animal feed for the winter. The carpet was gone.
In its place was a little girl.
Her name was Sahra Gul: Desert Flower. Her face was pink and fat and smooth, and she was healthy, and her eyes were dark and vatic pools. She was born in the month of Mizan, two weeks after Thawra had finished her carpet.
Boston midwifed. It was an easy evening birth by lamplight, and the moon had stared away the dust, and the sky was gold-speckled ultramarine. Amanullah was hanging out with some friends at the far side of the village that night. When he returned home, his third child was waiting for him.
He said to his wife: “Oh! You are two people now!”
When I met Sahra Gul, Thawra was holding her against her chest. She had swaddled her daughter in blankets and scarves and old adult clothes ripped into sheets. The weaver herself wore a sweater over her calico dress. Yet through all that cloth she could feel her daughter’s little heart go thk-thk-thk. Barely visible dimples of affection blossomed on the woman’s sunken cheeks.
“Are you going to have more children, Amanullah?” I asked.
“Inshallah. I’ll accept more.”
And he smiled his sly mustachioed smile and his strabismic eyes narrowed with mischief.
Villagers crowded Amanullah’s bedroom. They squatted and sat and reclined, and their level of comfort and geography in the room as always corresponded to their status in it. Amin Bai sprawled by the old trousseau at the upper end, catlike and much pleased with my gift of Bushnell binoculars with twelve-power magnification and coated antiglare optics. They were sleek and black and the object of instant admiration by the men, most of all Choreh, who had stridden into the room urgent and high, and clasped my hand hard and slightly threateningly, and held it so for a long time and then said: “Next time, bring me binoculars as well.” And he looked me straight in the eye with his tiny frozen pupils, unblinking.
The Oqans were there to trade stories and to drink tea—because it was always good to drink someone else’s tea, because there was little else to do, and because their communality offered the villagers a sanctuary, however make-believe, from their stunning and stunningly malign land. Yet an ineffable brokenness blew through the room the way sand blew up the stoss slopes of the lunate dunes outside.