The World is a Carpet (14 page)

At two-fifty the Bazarak Panjshir International sighed and pulled out of the terminal. For the next thirty miles it pitched eastward along Highway A76 through an empty steppe. “You traverse a country,” Marco Polo wrote about this stretch of land, “that is destitute of every sign of habitation.” An hour later, the road veered sharply to the south, where the Hindu Kush rose vertical, impenetrable, colossal. It rounded the upsloping pomegranate orchards of Tashqurghan, which at that dark hour trumpeted their scarlet blossoms in secret, and the night-swallowed mound where in the seventh century the Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang had described five hundred Buddhist monks living around ten temples. It squeezed almost impossibly through the barren Tashqurghan Gorge, where the layered and towering mountains cleft in a scarce chasm as if pried ajar by a crowbar; bounced past the unseen and gutted Soviet tanks buried in the oozing gravel of a freshet; and leveled onto the highland swells of Samangan, where dry riverbeds sheened in weak moonlight like ghosts of rivers frozen still in perfect mimicry of some singular moment of the water long gone, like unuttered screams.

At four-thirty the bus pulled over on top of a mountain pass so that the men on board could step outside to urinate and then to pray. They did both facing southwest toward Mecca, having unwound their neckerchiefs and headscarves into makeshift prayer mats, although the driver had brought his own rug. The women remained stoically inside the bus and sat erect in absolute silence. By five in the morning, two-dimensional mountain peaks had begun to push against a murky orangeade sunrise in the east, and the bus was on its way again. Smells of Afghanistan wafted through the open roof hatches: manure, juniper fires, raw lamb fat. A man in the backseat began to sing sotto voce lovelorn Pashtun tunes, and in front, a woman prayed under her breath—
“Bismillah
,
bismillah”
—on every turn. There were many turns on the road.

“This road is much infested by highwaymen and it is unsafe to pass without an escort,” Captain John Wood, the nineteenth-century Scottish explorer, reported from his journey here. Nearly two hundred years later, the highwaymen were still about, only they had morphed—into Taliban insurgents, roadside bandits, uniformed officialdom. Every dozen miles, the bus would stop at a checkpoint: a concrete bunker large enough to fit two stools and a propane burner for tea, maybe a boom barrier, or a length of rope pulled taut across the road at windshield height over a stretched-out disembodied tank tread. An officer in a gray fleece suit clutching a Kalashnikov by the barrel would slowly circle the bus and come up to the driver’s window and stick out his free hand, into which the driver would press a couple of soiled banknotes. The exchange was almost always silent.

By six-thirty in the morning, the sun was blasting the highway full on, and the bus had heated up like a greenhouse. At seven fifty-five the heater switched on, unprompted. It would remain on until Kabul, even after the driver powered up the antiquated air conditioner. The broiling bus sped past the openwork lace of the caves of Dara-e-Suf, where Bronze Age men had molded animal figurines and Neolithic men before them had domesticated animals and, thirty-four thousand years ago, the
Homo sapiens
of the Upper Paleolithic had wielded hand axes made of flint. It overtook a maroon Toyota Corolla with a USMC sticker on the rear window and another Toyota Corolla stenciled with the larger-than-life image of the slain mujaheddin leader Ahmad Shah Massoud firing a Kalashnikov assault rifle at tiny Soviet helicopters. A truck bejeweled with a giant heart of red-painted iron pierced with a giant arrow that dripped enormous, loaf-size drops of metal blood onto the rear fender. A flatbed truck full of stunned-looking cows. A petroleum truck emblazoned with a sign that warned
ONE-WAY STREE
. It rolled past a pumpkin patch not far from a massive temple built in the second century by the Kushan emperor Kanishka, where an old farmer slowly unbent to study the bus. In his right hand he held a serpentine vine in golden bloom. Past an unsettling scarecrow fashioned from an Adidas rain jacket with straw sticking out of the hood where a face would have been. Past rusting armored personnel carriers and distant armies of diffracted sheep. Rice fields mine fields battlefields. Somewhere below, a dozen inches off the ground, bounced the burlap bag of carpets.

•   •   •

Eight o’clock. Up nauseating switchbacks. (
“Bismillah, bismillah.”
) Past chalky rapids and drowned rice paddies that shone cerulean blue like squares of upside-down sky and outcroppings of tank hulls that grew from creases in the mountainsides seamed with white veins of gypsum. Past roadside boys peddling purple and white mulberries from baskets handwoven out of mulberry branches that very morning. By eight-fifteen, from the muggy dustbowl of the Pul-e-Khumri River Valley the passengers spotted at last the black pancake of soot over the Salang Tunnel—the second-highest tunnel in the world, surpassed only by the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel in the Rockies and rimmed with the baker’s sugar of glacial ice.

Swallows danced in the galleries of Salang. The highway was narrow and the air coffee-colored with noxious diesel fog. The elevation was eleven thousand two hundred feet and it was cold, always. The snowdrifts on either side of the road were many winters old and absolutely black with exhaust. Nearly each year since Soviet engineers had bored into the mountains in the 1960s, travelers perished here in fires, in land-mine accidents, in avalanches. The blue coulee below was an ossuary of human remains and mangled metal. Hundreds of carpets that had never made it to Kabul draped the unmarked tombs of these ill-fated pilgrims.

And—down again.
“Bismillah,
bismillah,”
came the burqa-stifled moans, the Pashtun singer retched into his bag, and outside the bus windows, the fast, cool stream of the Salang River, milky with late-spring snowmelt, rushed past the jade terraced fields of Jabal-us-Seraj. Turquoise and crimson dresses fluttered from clotheslines, and on the west bank a granite boulder the size of a farmhouse hung over a bend in the river. The boulder was split in two. I first saw it in 2001, the year of the American invasion, when I journeyed from the Khorasan on a newspaper assignment a few weeks behind the barefoot, vengeful, exalted army of victorious northern Afghan peasants, Washington’s outsourced boots on the ground. The road at the time was an escapee from a Cormac McCarthy novel, a dull November porridge of sludge-filled ruts, a vaguely defined tract pulped into muck by hundreds of aerial bombs and furrowed by thousands of crisscrossing tank treads and kneaded by the feet of these ununiformed soldiers. These men, who would enter the capital and execute people—Taliban functionaries? Random men in dark turbans? Old foes?—and leave their bodies to rot in sludge-gorged gutters, they must have seen the boulder then, too, from the road. Who knows how long it had been there, precarious, huge? Which shudder of Afghanistan’s still-evolving orogeny had hurled it from the mountains and smashed it? Had it been here when Alexander the Great had built his fort, long since gone, in Jabal-us-Seraj? Whose histories hid in that crack, whose memories whispered into its igneous chill? Low stone houses had grown around the rock, and from the bus window the passengers watched sandaled children play with a deflated soccer ball.

The carpets rocked in the belly of the bus as it drove out of the mountains. White cumuli and Black Hawks soared above the Shomali Plain, above a cemetery of several hundred tanks and howitzers, above the luminous tangle of vineyards in the valley horticulturists know as the birthplace of table grapes, where more than a hundred and twenty varietals of the fruit once grew. It was almost noon by the time the Mercedes-Benz pulled up to the Parwan-e-Seh Bus Terminal in Kabul, a paved roundabout where remnants of dirty roses pushed through the litter in the median. After the passengers had disembarked, the rock star driver dialed the local carpet merchant. He wasn’t answering the phone. The driver dialed again, and again. No one picked up. The carpets would sit in the cargo hold maybe for the rest of the day, maybe longer.

K
abul? Ha! He’s never even been to Tashqurghan!” Baba Nazar mocked his son. Baba Nazar himself had served in Tashqurghan in the army for a year. His recruit’s salary had bought him lamb kebab every other day, and while he had not been issued a gun, the switch he had whittled for himself from a weeping willow had been sufficient to police the ancient streets that wound among the famous pomegranate groves. “Sometimes we’d use our belts to whip the people who misbehaved. That was enough to keep them afraid.”

But that had been half a century earlier, way before Amanullah was born, back when Afghanistan had been ruled by a king and there had been plenty of deer to hunt with a bow and arrow right outside the pomegranate orchards, and even mountain lions that would slink down from the sawtooth peaks like shadows.

Neither Amanullah nor Baba Nazar had ever been to Kabul. They had never seen the green-tiled mosaic of rice paddies in Jabal-us-Seraj, the head-spinning abysses of Salang, the rich and warped embroidery of Shomali vineyards. But now the hunter’s son was plotting a grand escape: he would come to Mazar-e-Sharif in Qaqa Satar’s Toyota, ask the driver to drop him off at the bus terminal, and take a bus to Kabul from there. He would buy a fifteen-dollar ticket with his savings and ride in a cushioned and assigned seat and gorge his strabismic eyes on the land that would crumple and smooth out and rise vertiginously and drop again outside his window. He would try to not get carsick on the switchbacks. He would draw comfort from the knowledge that the familiar weave of carpets rode in the cargo hold beneath him. He even had figured out an excuse, which he confided in a loud whisper to four-year-old Leila on the
namad
rug rolled out in the glaring sun.

“I’ll bring you back some shoes from Kabul,” the man promised his daughter. And he pulled the laughing girl down into his lap and wrapped one of his enormous ticklish hands around both her ankles and proceeded to measure her wriggling feet with his thick fingers spread apart and tried to memorize the distance between them, for size.

But Baba Nazar said absolutely not, and once again Amanullah stayed home.

I
t was May. Mynah birds had returned from a winter in India to hop in and out of open windows and doors, to sidle up to
dastarkhans
at mealtime and mimic the voices of diners and pry open with their yellow beaks any plastic bags that looked promising. In Zadyan, fat ripe mulberries tugged at the century-old churned branches and plopped softly upon the bone-colored dust, into the upturned shirttails of boys’
shalwar kameez
, into the juice-stained palms of girls. In Mazar-e-Sharif, the police were hunting for the six Taliban operatives from the south who a month earlier had instigated the massacre of the twelve United Nations employees. In an unpaved street a few blocks away from my house, four young boys had tripped a piece of Soviet ordnance and died in the explosion. In Pakistan, American special forces had killed Osama bin Laden, though very few villagers in the desert of northern Balkh Province had heard about the killing, certainly no one had in Oqa, where very few had heard anything about bin Laden at all. A few nights later, in Karaghuzhlah, Talibs on motorcycles had woken the village mullah to deliver two identical handwritten letters that announced that from then on the village belonged to the Taliban and had to pay the religious tax,
zakat
, to underwrite the militia’s holy war effort. A heartfelt rain shower had emptied at last over Oqa, and some new hard greens had thumbed immediately through the salt pan and bloomed into a gossamer carpet of myriad tiny white stars. The rain had woken up diligent scarab beetles that pushed beads of dung the length of the hummock. It had dimpled the dunes and churned up the dust in the two village wells. Tea was cloudy for days. A sparrow had flown into Baba Nazar’s house, and he and Amanullah had caught it and tied a string to its matchstick leg so that Nurullah could fly it around like a tiny live kite. The rip down the front of Boston’s dress had frayed further and now showed her dark and withered right nipple. Amin Bai the Commander had quit smoking cigarettes. And Thawra had knotted about four more inches of the carpet since Nawruz: four more inches of burgundy and carmine geometric trees and angular scarlet and indigo flowers and stylized eagles in shades of red flying through rhombi of cobalt sky. Her progress was slowed, Baba Nazar explained, by all the weddings. Spring was wedding season in the Khorasan.