The World is a Carpet
Read The World is a Carpet Online
Authors: Anna Badkhen
A
LSO BY
A
NNA
B
ADKHEN
Afghanistan by Donkey: One Year in a War Zone
Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories
Waiting for the Taliban: A Journey Through Northern Afghanistan
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Copyright © 2013 by Anna Badkhen
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Poetry by Rumi
here
,
here
, and
here
is quoted from
The Essential Rumi
, translated by Coleman Barks and others (HarperOne, 2004), and reprinted with permission from Coleman Barks. Poetry by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh
here
is quoted from
Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry
, edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, translated by Marjolijn de Jager (Other Press, 2010), and reprinted with permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Badkhen, Anna, date.
The world is a carpet : four seasons in an Afghan village / Anna Badkhen.
p. cm
ISBN 978-1-101-61611-6
1. Afghanistan—Social life and customs. 2. Women—Afghanistan—Social conditions—21st century. 3. Women weavers—Afghanistan. 4. Rugs, Oriental—Afghanistan. 5. Carpets—Afghanistan. 6. Weaving—Afghanistan. 7. Badkhen, Anna, 1976– I. Title.
DS354.B3225 2013 2013003827
305.409581—dc23
Map by Meighan Cavanaugh
Illustrations by Anna Badkhen
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
CONTENTS
Unroll your carpets, and I shall see what is written in your heart.
TURKOMAN PROVERB
Every moment and place says, “Put this design in your carpet!”
RUMI (BALKHI)
Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
THE CARPET
A
t four in the morning a phalanx of black silhouettes set out across the desert: three people and a donkey headed west on a sinuous dustbowl trail. The yogurt bow of the moon had slipped behind the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail wound invisibly through thick predawn dark that arced toward the horizon. All was still. To the south, the Big Dipper scooped out the mountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled March night.
Amanullah led the way. He skirted the spines of cousinia and the diaphanous spheres of calligonum only he could pick out, hopped the cape hare burrows he alone knew about, sidestepped the boulders he alone remembered. He never changed pace. He never bent down to check for sheep spoor. He never looked up: he didn’t navigate by stars, didn’t know their names, didn’t recognize the constellations. What for? Stars were unreliable beacons, nomads that moved about the heavens at will, like the Turkoman forefathers. Have you never seen one suddenly tear off from its roost and streak across the black, looking for a new home? Amanullah walked the trail by heart, steering from a memory that wasn’t even his own but had double-helixed down the bloodstream of generations of men who had traveled this footpath perhaps for millennia. A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness.
We walked single file. Amanullah first, then the donkey, then Fahim, who taught English at an evening school in Mazar-e-Sharif and was helping me with translation, then I. At a brisk clip, in dry weather, the eighteen-mile walk across the hummocked loess usually took about five hours. Amanullah had made this journey every two weeks since he was six or seven. Now he was thirty.
“If other people in the world walked as much as we do, and worked as hard as we do, they’d go crazy,” he announced. He paused for effect. Amanullah bragged about the unimaginable hardships of life in the desert fondly and often. In the dark, I pictured him smile in sly satisfaction at the gravity of his own pronouncement. But when he spoke again, he sounded surprised.
“But we don’t.”
It was Thursday, bazaar day in Northern Afghanistan. We were walking to Dawlatabad, the market town nearest Oqa, Amanullah’s village. We were going to Dawlatabad to buy carpet yarn for Amanullah’s wife, Thawra.
For the next seven months, Thawra would squat on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks, and sticks in one of Oqa’s forty cob huts. Day after day, she would knot coarse weft threads over warps of thin, undyed wool, weaving the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.
• • •
If the eastern hemisphere’s carpet-weaving region that extends from China to Morocco were itself a carpet, and one were to fold it in half, Thawra’s loom room would fall slightly to the right of the center fold. Prehistoric artisans upon these plains were spinning wool and plaiting it into mats as early as seven thousand years ago. Since then, people here have been born on carpets, prayed on them, slept on them, draped their tombs with them. Alexander the Great, who marched through the Khorasan in 327
BC
, is said to have sent his mother, Olympias, a carpet as a souvenir from the defeated Balkh, the ancient feudal capital about twenty-five miles southwest of Oqa. For centuries, carpets were a preeminent regional export, a currency, status symbols, attachés. When Tamerlane, who was crowned emperor at Balkh, was absent from his court, visitors were permitted to kiss and pay homage to his carpet, which they were instructed to treat as his deputy.
