The World is a Carpet

by Anna Badkhen

  Something was askew about the greenish pallor of Zakrullah’s skin, his cavernous cough, his apathetic limbs hanging thin and limp from the left hip of Choreh Gul where she stood in the doorway. About the way Baba Nazar rummaged in his memory for a full minute before thinking of the name of his youngest, seventh grandchild. About the way Leila pranced past the squatting boys and men, and plopped down next to her grandfather, and tucked in her feet, and put a condom in her mouth, and blew it up into a balloon, let the air out, blew it up again, deflated it again, blew it up, repeated. “I’m dizzy I’m dizzy I’m dizzy,” she said. No one laughed. A boy maybe twice as old as Leila lit a cigarette in the corner. Baba Nazar shook his head and looked away. Children nowadays.

  Next to Baba Nazar sat his nephew, Abed Nazar the soldier, home on leave from deployment in Kunar and trapped in the village by the weather for more than a fortnight. He had brought war to Oqa, on his cell phone. A video of an ambush that killed two American and four Afghan soldiers. A photo of Abed Nazar himself, with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on the shoulder of his black uniform sweater, posing against the backdrop of the glaucous folds of a distant mountain ridge. A photo of an “American soldier, my friend,” squatting over a tin bowl of some kind of frontier chow, his camouflage sleeves rolled up to display colorful tattoos, of which the largest was a red and blue five-point star. Photos of another American soldier eating rice, smiling at the camera, his face sprinkled with acne, and of a third, at rest on a foldout cot under the large camouflage flap of a tent. I had seen such photos. I had been in such tents, in Iraq, in Chechnya. No one got out of them with his soul intact.

  “Where do you like it better, Abed jan, Oqa or Kunar?”

  “Kunar.”

  “Why?”

  “I like war.”

  The young boys in the room listened with admiration, their mouths half open. Leila had let the air out of the condom and was now chewing on it.

  “Every day war, every day war,” grumbled Baba Nazar from his spot by the stove.

  “What do you think about it, Baba Nazar?” I asked.

  “Nothing to think about. It’s war. Is war good?”

  He opened the door of the bukhari and stared at the small hot fire in it and said that three days earlier an airplane had flown over Oqa without a sound. He said it had flown very low.

  “Maybe it was a drone,” said Abed Nazar, who had seen such things. “Maybe they think Oqa is a Taliban village.”

  “Well,” said Baba Nazar, and closed the stove door again. For a long time he said nothing more. Next to him, the frail and bony Sayed Nafas quietly rolled and rolled between his thumb and forefinger someone’s cigarette butt, and the stinking dregs of tobacco from the cartridge flaked down onto Amanullah’s bedroom floor.

  • • •

  Baba Nazar asked me to step outside with him. The wind was gusting fifty knots. Thistle skeletons hissed in the desert. From the northern wall of the house flapped the pelt of a desert fox the old hunter had trapped just beneath the hummock the day before. We slipped on wet clay.

  “Anna,” Baba Nazar said. “We love you. We are glad you came from America to see us. But we have no weapons. We are worried about your security here, and I am worried about my security after you leave.”

  I thanked him for his kindness and waited for more. A rooster crowed. A couple hundred yards away, the asthmatic Kizil Gul and her heroin-addict son, Abdul Rashid, were pitchforking thornbrush in tandem into a lacy wall of fodder. Boston shuffled by with her back straight like a cane. In outstretched hands she carried two loaves of freshly baked sharbi, bread kneaded with onions and sheep fat. Steam from her cooking pulsated in the wind like something alive, like a heart.

  At length Baba Nazar said: “Anna, I know in the past I have invited you to stay. But I don’t think you should spend the night here.”

  A deep breath, and suddenly I pictured us the way a bird would see us, a white dove cast off course, or a demoiselle crane perhaps halfway on its hallowed and time-and-again desecrated migration across the big slate sky: two people working, a woman carrying food, an importunate visitor, and an old man barefoot in his black galoshes, his glasses held on his head by string, his Soviet shotgun a poor match for the war around him. Five tiny and fragile figures in the sodden desert, a poor man’s carpet decocted out of an eternity of violence and generosity and grace. Each of us flawed, and so, complete. All of us woven into a time warp named Oqa.

  The weather cleared that afternoon. Wispy cirri slid about the pale and brittle autumn skin of the sky like half-formed afterthoughts. In the west, a cold lusterless sun gilded the Bactrian plains in an antique and tarnished glow.

  Amanullah steered his motorcycle into that slanted light. He drove maniacally. He jumped over russet hassocks and charged rusty boulders and skidded on wet smears of ocher clay. He blazed through pink morass and blue puddles where once there had been paths, caromed through patches of slough. He sped up, took narrow irrigation ditches flying, slowed down, sped up again, zigzagged. The wheels of his motorcycle lost traction and regained it and touched off canted fountains of mud that bore bits of human and animal bone and flakes of pottery and fragments of metal and shreds of plastic, and this protean exhibit of Anthropocene specimens propelled past the subdued sunset and splotched back down in rapid-fire arches. I sat astride behind him, clinging to his waist with my one good arm, too scared by our mad flight to do anything but laugh. So I laughed. Amanullah had adjusted his two rearview mirrors to watch my face, and each time I gripped him tighter he would beam and lean back against me as if to lie down on me and go faster still.

  Amanullah was fleeing Oqa.

  “I will take you to Kabul!” he shouted. “I will take you to Kandahar!”

  Two other motorcycles debauched across the desert. Amanullah’s friend Asad, who had wrestled with him in the dunes the previous winter, drove Ramin. Qasim rode with Paidi, who was known mostly for having kidnapped a woman from Khairabad betrothed to someone else and marrying her—an immoral thing to have done, everyone agreed, though no one demanded that Paidi be punished for it. It was unclear whether the woman had had any preference one way or another.

  The three drivers drag raced over gulches and gloppy fields and barren pastures, and whooped and careened into the wind. Loud and twitching psychotic circus riders reenacting the millennial bacchanal reckless men had performed upon this land since time immemorial, horseback and camelback and in tanks.

  We could barely skylight in the south the quiet calligraphy of Karaghuzhlah’s naked orchards and breast-shaped clay roofs when the riders rumbled to a halt. An irrigation canal too deep and too wide for motorcycles to cross. A moat around Amanullah’s vagabond dreams.

  We dismounted. Ramin and Qasim and I would walk the last two miles to Karaghuzhlah, spend the night, drive on south. But not Amanullah. Amanullah would have to ride back to Oqa.

  Stuck, again.

  “Well,” he said, and the rest of us shuffled in the slippery mud and repeated: “Well.”

  Amanullah took a couple of long steps through the muck and stood astride the ditch, one foot on each loamy bank, facing west. Between his legs slow murky bubbles formed and burst upon a mocha-colored current that carried humus to thirsty fields. He beckoned to me. Then he grabbed me by the waist and lifted me up into the air and held me there long enough to give me three wet kisses on the cheeks and placed me on the southern side of the dike. Qasim and Ramin jumped across. Amanullah pushed himself off with his left foot and scrambled up the northern bank.

  We stood on either side of the ditch and held our cold right hands to our hearts in the age-old gesture of gratitude and affection, of greeting and farewell. The sun had pitched its scarlet yurt in the west, where beyond Dawlatabad and Andkhoi and Turkmenistan and Iran, beyond an unfordable ocean, unreachable by donkey, lay America. To the south, evening dogs were barking, and boys were whipping the las
t sheep home from pasture through the clanging sheetmetal gates of Karaghuzhlah, and the wind carried ribbons of muezzins’ amplified calls like a salve to the desert. To the east, a purple darkness was spreading above the snow-streaked copper mountains. In a few hours a lidded waning moon would rise upon that dark curtain, and the Milky Way would follow, bisecting the sky, resplendent.

  “Afghanistan is our country, Anna. It can be your country, too,” Amanullah called to me across the ditch. And then, out of the blue, caked up to his shins in Khorasan mud, he declaimed a rendition of Rumi’s most famous verse.

  “So that you can come, yet again, come, come to our house.”

  For his was a country of poets.

  It doesn’t matter if you have broken your vow

  A thousand times. Come,

  Yet again, come, come.

  Oqa lay somewhere to the northeast. A village unmapped, unremembered, unaccounted for. We could not see it from the ditch. But it was there, and Amanullah would never escape from it. In the spring, when winter wheat would rise above the knee in the rain-slaked fields of Balkh, Amanullah and Baba Nazar would ride to Dawlatabad and buy skeins of yarn that would smell like sweat and sheep dung and lamb fat and juniper smoke, and bring them to the village. Boston would roll the yarn into balls. Leila would fasten pale warps to the rusty beams, and Thawra would hang Sahra Gul’s woven cradle over her loom and tie the first knot of her next carpet. In a year or two, two or three million knots later, Leila would join her, and then Sahra Gul. They would weave their foremothers’ lotus blossoms and their kinsmen’s wars, the golden eagles of their desert, the music of their village and its silences, its weddings and funerals, their own joys and sorrows. They would sever the yarn with old sweat-stained sickles in time with the sacrosanct rhythm of their hearts. On the edge of a sand-dune sea, on the edge of a war zone, in their crepuscular loom room on the edge of the world, past and present would converge.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Research in Afghanistan was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The author also thanks Becky Saletan and Felicia Eth for helping to make this book a reality.

  She is indebted to generations of storytellers whose wisdom kept her company and lent her compass bearings in the desert. A friend kept track of her on the map and helped replenish her bookshelves. Thank you. You were a muse.

  To her Afghan hosts and fellow travelers, who made her family and risked their lives to protect hers, she bows deeply, with profound respect. This book is for you.