The World is a Carpet (20 page)

“Look at this,” repeated Jamshid, and pulled out from the middle of a pile of carpets and spread before me a
yusufi
much like the one Thawra was weaving in Oqa. “The women who weave are illiterate and very poor. But they make this unbelievable beauty.”

Study your carpet. The hands of three generations of illiterate women created it. It is soiled by chicken droppings and stained yellow where the weaver threw her tea dregs at the loom. Its knots fasten wedding songs and women’s murmurs. The metronome of a sickle blade and the buzzing of noon flies. The whistle of a gale in the grass roof. An old woman’s breath as she, at last, sat down on the floor to rest.

•   •   •

The women wove their carpet of whispers. I leaned against the doorway and took notes.

A lizard skittered from underneath the loom and up a clay wall and disappeared. From time to time I would look up from my notebook to watch the women weave. From time to time they would look up from their loom to watch me scribble. Silently, discreetly, we studied one another. To each of us, the other’s craft unknowable, full of mysteries.

Sometimes we would catch one another’s eyes and laugh together without making a sound.

It was mid-afternoon, very hot. The whole village was quiet, stagnant. Everyone was either napping or weaving. No one was outside. The unpeopled landscape of Oqa was so sparse that each object stood out. Bed. Artillery shell casing. Donkey. Dung beetle. Tandoor. Time felt dilated, molten, distilled to its core: a wartime wedding feast for children. Armed nocturnal riders through a desert always on the cusp of bloodshed. Another spring at the loom.

THE FAST

T
he desert flowed over the thin paved band of the Great Silk Road. It slipped, it grabbed on to the tiniest pebbles on the tarmac and built miniature barchans around each one, it cascaded down one gray billow of loess to climb upon the next—always moving, moving, moving, constant, persistent, hypnotic, weaving its own magic carpet ride over Turkestan, rising and falling, rising sometimes all the way to the ocher sky in airborne swirls, smearing the skyline with aurorae borealis of sand, murmuring the hoofbeat plainsongs of caravans of yore, the hourglass breath of the passage of time, the whispered hymns of passage.

Out of such sand issued four motorcycles. They bounced up and down a white unpaved track that approached the highway from the south and dragged behind them four individual mantels of pallid dancing dust. One motorcycle wobbled in front; the others advanced side by side a couple hundred yards farther back. Each carried two riders.

At the asphalt road the lead motorcycle rolled to a stop. A beat-up machine of some former color. Behind the wheel a sandaled man in a checkered turban and dun
shalwar kameez
. Behind him a woman in a blue burqa. She was sitting astride, and the pleats of her veil had bunched around her shins. You could see, beneath the nylon, the pure white openwork lace of the fringes of her pantaloons, the dark bony ankles, the scuffed narrow brown mules. The woman held on to the man’s waist with one hand. Her other hand embraced a tall narrow bundle, taller than her head, that stood upright on the seat between her legs: a carpet, furled pile side in.

Apart from the protean feathers of drifting sand, the highway was empty. The driver turned the steering wheel left and walked the motorcycle onto the blacktop and revved the hiccupping engine, and the carpet and its guardians clanked off along the ancient trade route westward, in the direction of the nearest big town, Andkhoi, the smuggling gateway on the border with Turkmenistan. The Andkhoi bazaar was open for commerce that day, for it was Monday.

A heavy rumble came from the east. Up from a dry ravine climbed a convoy of six or seven enormous and faceless armored machines, futuristic to the point of being extraterrestrial, mutant insects from a science-fiction horror film, also traveling west. Some flew German flags. They overtook the motorcycle and dropped behind the next hill.

The rest of the motorcycles pulled up to the intersection. They did not slow down when they reached the asphalt. They banked right at elegant fifty-degree angles in unison and kept going. Their riders were men in camouflage and dark turbans. The drivers appeared unarmed. The passengers held on one-handed to the waists of the drivers. With their free hands, they gripped Kalashnikov rifles, which they had propped vertically on the seats between their thighs, upright on the guns’ wooden butts, the muzzles taller than the riders’ heads. They sped east, toward Mazar-e-Sharif, and soon disappeared into the ravine. Then only sand eddied along the pitch. One day some of these grains might shape the barchans of Oqa.

The Great Silk Road suffered all travelers, as it had done for centuries.

•   •   •

Once every few days, in the dim sanctum of their shop on Carpet Row, the Bigzada brothers of Mazar-e-Sharif rolled their wares into long and narrow plastic bags stamped with the English words “Afghan Carpet Exporter” and “Gift of the Carpet Association from Zone Shamal (Afghanistan).” These they dispatched in two general directions.

Many went south to Kabul in cargo holds of buses or in flatbeds of trucks. From the capital, some flew to Dubai and then onward, to London, Frankfurt, New York. The rest continued by truck east on the Grand Trunk Road, across the border to Pakistan, to the bazaars of Peshawar and Islamabad.

Others traveled on the Great Silk Road west toward Andkhoi, across the border with Turkmenistan, across the Karakum Desert, and onward to the markets of Istanbul, the world capital of carpet trade.

After squirming out of the earsplitting traffic jams of Mazar-e-Sharif, the road leveled out onto monochrome ashen plains. “Acred cerements,” Robert Byron wrote of this land. Vastitudes of dark defeat. The road sped past Genghis Khan’s slaughter fields of Balkh. It sliced through the blood-soaked expanse of Dasht-e-Leili, where skeletonweed flowers blinked above the unmarked mass graves of some two thousand Taliban prisoners of war. The Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, paid by the CIA to command his illiterate and half-starved army of mujaheddin and farmers and children—the ground troops of the United States’ invasion—massacred these Taliban fighters here in 2001 in the first landmark atrocity in America’s war on terror. The road ran past all the forgotten battlefields in between, past a stately camel caravan and past three boys who squatted in a line to urinate into a ditch. Past herds of fat-tailed sheep whose caudal appendages sometimes grew so large there were tales of shepherds having to hitch carts to the animals to support the weight of their fat. That fat, the seventeenth-century German orientalist Hiob Ludolf reported, was “a medium between tallow and butter, and an excellent substitute for lard . . . and by many preferred to butter, which, in hot weather, is apt to grow rancid.” More camels, more sheep. The Great Silk Road dragged its backdrop along with it across the desert and across centuries like a traveling circus trundling along with its illusory and faded mise-en-scène that was bequeathed down generations and reused over and over.

•   •   •

In Andkhoi the road slowed down to curl around the main town square, named after Mir Alisher Nava’i: Afghan statesman, scholar, poet, patron of the arts and sciences, the father of Turkic literature. Nava’i had lived farther south on the Great Silk Road, in lush and blue-tiled Herat, in the fifteenth century, but he had traveled the road to Balkh at least once, to solve a diplomatic dispute between the Herati emir—the poet’s foster brother and employer—and his rebellious son. “Let me learn by paradox . . . / that the valley is the place of vision,” Nava’i wrote. Which visions did Andkhoi offer a passing traveler, besides the echoes of the olden journeys of others? A lethargic oasis on an ancient caravan route, a dull two-story outpost that some said had been founded by Alexander the Great. Almost treeless, besieged-looking, perpetually umber from frequent sandstorms. “Grey earth, grey camels, grey walls and cubic houses,” the Swiss journalist Ella K. Maillart described the Andkhoi she saw in 1939, when she and Annemarie Schwarzenbach drove through in their Ford. But it was in one of these gray cubes on a cold winter night that I was mothered by a kind woman only two years my senior who pinched my cheek and then kissed her fingertips, who heated water for my bucket shower and made room for me under the heavy blanket she already shared with five of her children, a teenage niece, and a coal stove; and the walls of the room swayed to our communal breath, and the visions I had were of a family that I knew, in that twilight state under Karima’s blanket, I could be part of if only I could resist the diaphragmatic tug of the Great Silk Road, or of a road, any road at all.

The road curled around Nava’i Square. Past the squat whitewashed mosque that also bore the poet’s name (“Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from the deepest wells, / and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine”). Past the cross-legged traders who worried their prayer beads at stalls that sold hand-embroidered dresses and aluminum serving platters and karakul lambskins and rosewater-scented soap labeled “Spacial Soup,” and in shops where restless iridescent flies buzzed and electric lights went on and off, on and off, even more restless than the flies. The men bemoaned the rising price of wool, the unreliable electricity, the daylight kidnappings at checkpoints set up by who knows whom, the suicide bombings that were becoming frequent.

“Life is poor dirt.”

“The price of carpets isn’t worth the trouble.”

“During the day, they attack travelers, merchants carrying goods to market.”

“But overall, security is okay. The government is here during the day, and at night we have the Taliban.”

The road trawled through the square thick with the merchants’ laments and then straightened out again and sped up, jutting northwest toward Aqina, the Turkmen border crossing.

•   •   •

I followed the carpet route to that border twice. Both times a haboob blew.

Afghans call such storms
tufan
. They begin with an eldritch noontime dusk, a buttermilk fog of steaming dust that devours horizons and flaps the tattered streamers on roadside graves like signal flags of distress and turns inside out the silver leaves of poplar trees that grow by the curbs in occasional square groves, to be cut down for roof beams. Then comes an enormous bruise-colored roller of sand, taller than the scarps of the hillocks where magpies nest in narrow hollows, taller than the mountains wrinkled with millennial sheep paths, taller than the sky itself. Then comes a nothingness, a sepia vacuum, a sudden blindness.

Qaqa Satar rolled the car to a stop where he thought the asphalt ended and the desert began, and we waited. Minutes passed. Maybe half an hour. Then we began to see, first the hood of his dilapidated Toyota, then the outline of the road immediately in front. The air remained yellow and muddy, like tea in Oqa. Qaqa Satar turned the ignition key and started west again, slowly. We passed oil tankers with Turkish writing. We passed a truck that implored in red English script:
HOW IS MY DRIVING?
We passed motor-rickshaws that had names: Tiger Zarang. Corzun Asli. Zarang. Almas Hashemi. Armed riders, carpet weavers, NATO invaders, smugglers, merchants, the
tufan
—ultimately they were all the same, all knots in the old rug of the Khorasan.

At the border. A wave train of chain-link fences growing out of the sand and receding into it. Like fishing nets abandoned at low tide by prehistoric fishermen in a vanished antediluvian sea. A grubby bazaar selling Chinese blankets and over-the-counter Korean cigarettes and under-the-counter vodka from Uzbekistan, fiery and vile. Pools of motor oil underfoot. A bored chief of customs with Brezhnev eyebrows and hair dyed blueblack behind a polished, palm-size chunk of lapis lazuli shaped like the map of Afghanistan with his name engraved in it. Border guards outside, hands perpetually extended for a handshake, a cigarette, a bribe.

I was following two men in dirty two-piece suits and plastic flip-flops. The men were carrying toward the border crossing a carpet, or carpets, rolled up into a burlap sack. They carried the sack the way two men might carry a corpse. Each man holding one end of the bundle. Taking tiny sandaled steps toward the coveted gate in the mesh fence. They showed some papers to a border guard, handed him a wad of banknotes, and he let them pass. I had no papers to approach the gate, so I was held up. A small uniformed crowd formed. At last, one of the border guards announced: “No problem. She’s not Pakistani. She won’t blow herself up on the border. She can go.”