The World is a Carpet (15 page)

And now another wedding was coming up. On Sunday, Naim, the forty-year-old bachelor, would take at last into his small adobe his bride, the beautiful Mastura, the niece of Choreh. They had become betrothed three years earlier, when she was fourteen. He had paid her father, Choreh’s brother, all of his savings for her hand—more than a thousand dollars. That was only a tenth of what Turkoman brides normally cost.

In patriarchal Afghanistan, marriages were always arranged and the birth of a son was always welcome. A daughter would grow up and marry and move to her in-laws’ home, whereas a boy would ensure that his father’s wealth remained within the family, and his wife and children would spare his aging parents from the hardest chores. In Turkoman families, the birth of a girl was almost equally embraced. In the calculated financial exchange that was marriage, a Turkoman girl fetched the highest bride price of all Afghan maidens because she could do more than keep house and raise children. She possessed a particular virtue. She could weave.

Lucky was the boy who had an older sister; she would wed first and he would use her bride price to marry his own wife. Naim, by far the oldest in his family, was not lucky. To defray the bride price, he turned to
badaal
—the poor man’s practice of a bridal swap. In return for Mastura’s hand he was giving away in marriage his little sister, Anamingli, to Mastura’s brother, Ozyr Khul.

Anamingli was sixteen years old, graceful and tall. Two thick braids framed her moon-white face and ran past her marble neck fluid and glossy like a pair of mink. She had assembled a dowry of several
namad
rugs to line her floor in winter, a couple of
yusufi
carpets of burgundy and indigo wool to absorb the hungry cries of her future babies, several pillowcases embroidered with emerald and fuchsia blossoms and gold thread to gladden the eye of her guests, and two heavy flowered polyester blankets imported from China.

Ozyr Khul was slight and stood barely five feet off the ground. He always wore a pink skullcap and a dirty ecru
shalwar kameez
, the only set of clothes he owned. He didn’t always wipe his nose. His best friends were twelve, eleven, and eight years old. When an adult addressed any one of them, the four boys would stand together in a mismatched row, arms draped over one another’s shoulders. His favorite pastime was to run, alone and with his friends and in larger flocks of boys that dashed about Oqa like hosts of sparrows, like peppercorn scatterings, slingshots in hand. He was an expert shot at speckled desert birds, at distant rocks, at the amaranthine sky. A few days before his wedding, he had gotten into a wrestling match with a nine-year-old girl. He won.

Ozyr Khul himself did not know how old he was. One of his friends said he was thirteen, another suggested fifteen. His parents insisted he was sixteen, the legal marrying age in Afghanistan. Ozyr Khul’s age and maturity were the subjects of animated discussions in the village during the long forenoons before the wedding, the butts of crude and unsparing ridicule.

“Do you like your fiancée, Ozyr Khul?”

“Ozyr Khul! When you are alone with your bride for the first time, what will you do?”

“He’s too young to know how a woman is built—he’ll end up doing it in the ass!”

“Well, let’s find out. Hey, come here, Ozyr Khul! Tell us where you’ll touch her on your wedding night!”

And the boy ran, ran, ran from his tormentors, dirty heels flashing over the hard-packed clay, sweaty palm clasping the trusted slingshot, his only ally in the whole wide world, the soiled pink skullcap blinking at the sun with all the
taweez
charms that his mother had sewn onto it over the years but that did nothing to protect him from having to grow up, suddenly, cruelly, this beautiful spring of the Afghan year 1390.

F
unerals were frequent in Oqa. Several times each year men trudged down to the gray cemetery south of the village to lean into the lonesome wind and stab the clay with their spades for a fresh grave. Just a few months earlier, Amin Bai the Commander had buried his two-year-old daughter there, under the brittle earth scaly with miniature drifts of hard gray dust. Over the nine unlucky years of their marriage, his neighbors, Abdul Khuddus and Oraz Gul, had buried all five of their girls—Fatma Gul, Gul Jamal, Najia Gul, Nuria Gul, and the infant who had been born dead and so had not been named. Who knew why the baby had been stillborn, why the others had wasted away? There was no doctor to ask for help, or for a postmortem.

But for many seasons now, weddings had bypassed this tiny and forgotten hamlet. The men of Oqa married girls in Khairabad and Karaghuzhlah, in Toqai and Zadyan, and brought them home after the nuptials. Oqa’s girls married men from other villages and stayed there. Naim and Ozyr Khul’s wedding to Mastura and Anamingli was going to be the first in Oqa in a decade. The whole village was getting ready.

Naim’s family had invited musicians to come from Shor Teppeh and a mullah to come from Khairabad and was making arrangements with a Khairabad chef to cook veal pilau for all the guests. In the west of the village, where Ozyr Khul’s family lived next to Amanullah and Choreh, women shifted their infants from one hip to another as they strung a sheet of dark-green cloth under the wattle-and-daub ceiling of the single-room house that was to become the younger couple’s honeymoon suite. Girls knotted garlands out of tinfoil candy wrappers and hung them from the roof beams. They made a curtain for the doorless entryway out of lurex headscarves. They built a pillow-size heart of red, silver, green, orange, and blue papier-mâché and nailed it to the western wall of the room to mark the spot where the newlyweds would lie together atop a narrow tick mattress.

Everything in the room sparkled. Even the pillows were embroidered with things shiny and sharp. Women and girls came and went, came and went past the shimmering silver-threaded door curtain to adjust a garland ring here, a tassel of a wool runner there. Men, too, ambled into the room to watch the decoration in progress, to click their tongues, to remark once again on the young groom’s manhood.

“Looks nice, but it will be years before he knows what to do with her in it,” said some.

“How pretty. What a waste,” said the others.

Choreh stopped by. He surveyed the newlyweds’ room and nodded his approval. Then he planted a sloppy mustachioed kiss on my cheek, and asked:

“Well? Have you found any aid for me in America?”

Hypotheses about my purpose in Oqa and my abilities and limitations wafted across the desert like sand, windblown and unreliable. In Khairabad they said that I was doing surveys (that was not true) and always writing something in my notebook (that was). In Karaghuzhlah, that I drank lots and lots of tea (true) and also that I was so strong I could kill two men with one arm. The latest apocrypha had come courtesy of Qaqa Satar, who had been telling people that I was a champion boxer—to discourage potential attackers, and also to justify the fact that I traveled unarmed. (Amanullah’s invitation to wrestle in the dunes now had an explanation: he had wanted to test his physical prowess against my rumored superhuman strength.) Amanullah told a cousin from Zadyan that I was going to tell the story of Oqa on the radio, like the journalists in Japan who were telling stories of the latest devastating tsunami. Occasionally, a visitor to Oqa would ask: “Is she building something here?” and Baba Nazar would respond: “No. She only takes notes and tells stories.” And, to preempt potential requests for aid, he would add: “This woman can’t do anything for us.”

He was right. I was of no practical use whatsoever. I was an inadequate raconteur, a collector of other people’s joys and hardships. A mockingbird. A mynah bird. An echo. That I was welcome in the village, month after famished month, was entirely a measure of my hosts’ inexhaustible magnanimity. Ultimately, this was what drew me: that I could show up burdened with deadlines, with the need to fill my notebook and with nothing to offer my hosts in return, and the next thing I knew, I was adopted into the family, mothered, fathered, fed, and loved with the kind of unconditional love that wrapped its tired hands tirelessly around me just because I was there, just because I had come, because in war and sorrow, love was the quintessence of defiance.

And if Choreh refused to see it that way, it was because he was a junkie in Oqa—the most incorrigible kind of a dreamer.

“Well?” I asked him, in turn. “Have you joined the army?”

“After the wedding, after the wedding,” he replied, and waved me away with both his hands.

•   •   •

“I don’t like this custom, exchanging brides,” grumbled Baba Nazar. “It means that if Ozyr Khul hits his wife, Naim will have to hit his, tit for tat. Ozyr Khul isn’t mature enough, he’s too young to understand that getting married is a big responsibility.”

But two of the hunter’s children—his second daughter, Jamal, and his son, Amanullah—had married in a similar bridal swap, because Amanullah had spent most of whatever little money he had inherited from the marriage of his crippled older sister, Zarifshah Bibi, on whores in Mazar-e-Sharif.

Baba Nazar himself had been twenty-eight when he had married Boston. Boston had been eighteen. They were cousins. Like all marriages in Oqa, theirs had been arranged by their parents and focused on the merger of two estates, ensuring that the inheritance of both man and wife—a handful of goats, a couple of camels, some sheep long since eaten or sold—didn’t go to strangers. It had not taken into consideration the wishes of the bride or the groom, though as far as the couple could recall, they had not found each other particularly repulsive at the time.

More than forty years had passed since. The same sun and dust had dried their skin, the same hungry months had shrunk their stomachs, the same progression of winters had gnawed at their bones. They had borne three children: Zarifshah Bibi, the oldest, who lived in Zadyan; Amanullah, who lived with them; and Jamal, who became Thawra’s brother’s second wife and lived with her husband, his first wife, and their children in a one-room house on the eastern edge of Oqa. Arthritis had cinched Boston’s spine, and now she moved around unnaturally straight-backed. Baba Nazar had lost most of his teeth and much of his eyesight. The desert had weathered the old couple to look like siblings, and they chaffed like siblings as well.

“I’m broke, that’s the problem. If I had money, I’d get married again,” Baba Nazar would say. “My wife is too old for me now.”

And Boston would laugh with her entire small body, and her gray braids would dance about her shoulders. Her wrinkles would fold and refold. Her necklace of keys would rip her old dress a little farther. And she would flick at her man with her smart old hands and say right in front of everyone: “Go! Shoo! Go! Go marry another woman! I’m tired of you, you old goat!”

But in the rare minutes when Boston was not mending an old homemade
chapan
coat or kneading dough or baking bread or helping Thawra weave or trying to rein in her grandchildren, and when Baba Nazar was not hunting rabbits in the desert or riding his donkey to market or poisoning cranes or entertaining guests, the two would sit next to each other on Baba Nazar’s bed, the only bed in Oqa. Their bony buttocks would sag with the old springs. Their elbows would touch just barely. Their eyes would water together at the patient horizon in the kind of quietude that sometimes happens after a long marriage.

B
actria’s most famous nuptials also took place in late spring. That marriage, too, was arranged and focused on acquisition of wealth: Alexander the Great, at twenty-nine the king of Macedon,
shahanshah
of Persia, lord of Asia, pharaoh of Egypt, and still a bachelor, defeated Oxyartes, the prosperous ruler of Balkh, and took his daughter, Roxane, to be his wife. She was sixteen years old and, in the words of the Greek historian Arrian of Nicomedia, “the loveliest woman in Asia, with the exception of the wife of Darius,” the former king of Persia, another of Alexander’s vanquished foes.

The year was 327
BC
. The wedding took place in the majestic city-state of Balkh—the Avesta’s “beautiful Bakhdhi with high-lifted banner,” the fourth creation of the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and the home of Zoroaster; the Bakhtri of the Achaemenids; the Baktra of the Greeks.