The World is a Carpet (25 page)

And one more thing. A police detective in Dawlatabad—the very department that had arrested first Karim Jendi’s elderly father then the fugitive goatherd himself—told me that Amin Bai called him every day. “To report on the security situation in the village,” the officer said.

The Commander, the village snitch.

This man who cradled his Korean cigarettes in a crooked thin smile may have been the one tenuous link between his hamlet and the rest of Afghanistan—the Afghanistan beyond the visible desert, beyond the familiar villages full of Turkoman relatives, beyond Dawlatabad’s Carpet Row where merchants sold the Oqans their wool and bought their carpets, the Afghanistan of ever-changing and forever-indifferent officialdom that seemed to know little about Oqa and care even less. He chose what to report and whom to inform on, whose visits to the village to keep secret (Karim Jendi’s) and whose to disclose (at least some of mine, according to the officer in Dawlatabad). In the Khorasan, where law and villainy were concepts obscure and frequently interchangeable, knowing when and which information to withhold could mean survival; it could also mean death. Was he responsible for Oqa’s isolation because it suited him, preserved his importance, kept the peace, at least for now? Or was he its victim, the same as all the other Oqa fathers who had buried their young children in unmarked graves in the village cemetery? Maybe, I thought, he was both.

T
wo nights after Qaqa Satar quit, an earthquake shook, shook, shook the carpeted concrete floor under my tick mattress in Mazar-e-Sharif like some subterranean giant trying to rock me to sleep. Shook the glass in the window and the pewter dishes left unwashed in the kitchen after a Ramadan breakfast of reheated leftover rice and okra, shook the moon, shook the desert. Northern Afghanistan was a land of extreme seismicity, laced with tectonic faults and balanced on two plates—the Arabian and the Indian—that were shifting northward constantly and at different speeds and forever subducting under Eurasia: an allegory furnished by the universe itself.

But in the morning, the sun rose over the Khorasan as though nothing at all had happened, white-hot. In that chalky glare in an unpaved Mazar-e-Sharif street three riders climbed into a white and yellow Toyota Corolla and started on a two-hour journey north to Oqa.

Over the steering wheel wrapped in a faux sheepskin cover that occasionally shed dirty white wisps of polyester into his lap hunched Qasim, the twenty-two-year-old driver who smiled most of the time and bathed rarely and always wore the same ecru
shalwar kameez
and soiled gray waistcoat.

Straight-backed in the backseat because women in Afghanistan did not ride in front sat the young and unflappable Hakima, who was translating for me that day. Hakima had grown up in exile in Iran, held a brand-new bachelor’s degree in business administration from the American University in Kyrgyzstan, and was a city girl; she had sass and she had style. Whenever she and I strolled through Mazar-e-Sharif together, the men who squatted in the shade of their shops would follow her with greedy eyes and whisper to one another that she surely must be a foreigner. For her first trip to one of the world’s most impoverished villages in one of the world’s oldest war zones, Hakima wore a lilac headscarf, a hip-length belted purple trench coat, skinny blue jeans, a leather purse, and strappy white heels.

I huddled next to her, sweating already in dark and spreading blotches through my gray cotton
shalwar kameez
and plain beige veil and cheap rubber sandals, an outfit that I told myself made me inconspicuous but that in reality was a mismatch only the most destitute Afghan woman would have stooped to, someone who picked her clothes out of garbage heaps that rotted on street corners—for beneath their burqas, Afghan women took great care to coordinate the colors of their headscarves and their dress, particularly in Mazar, the Milan of Afghanistan. My hosts were of the unanimous opinion that most of my clothes were ugly and told me so, even the men. The women sometimes added that my breasts were no good.

Squeezed into the taxi that flew one sooty and shredded red ribbon from the radio antenna and another from the grille to protect the passengers against evil spirits, the three of us looked an outlandish and misplaced carnival, an ill-assorted troupe of circus freaks, a band of castoffs from three separate eras that the Earth’s nocturnal rumblings had loosened all at once upon this corner of Central Asia. That was all right. These plains had witnessed stranger spectacles before. King Alexander’s Hellenic cavalry in purple tunics and plumed helmets. The Golden Horde, flying yak-tail banners and swilling fermented horse milk and reeking of fire smoke and wearing armor of cured yak hide. The Hindu pundits deployed by British India to map mountain passes, dressed as Muslim holy men, their compasses and sextants concealed in beads and walking staffs. A succession of Europeans pretending not to be: Lieutenant Arthur Connolly, the British spy who had coined the phrase the “Great Game,” traveled across Afghanistan in 1830 disguised as an Indian merchant; Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, who had snooped around Transoxiana for the crown twenty years before Connolly, passed himself off as a Tatar horse dealer; Sir Alexander Burnes, who believed that “no European traveler has ever journeyed in such countries without suspicion,” during his trip from Punjab to Kabul in 1832 wore Afghan clothes and made his four Indian companions do the same. And to what avail the masquerade? A mob in Kabul eventually hacked Burnes to death. The emir of Bukhara beheaded Connolly in a public square. I took comfort in knowing that Pottinger died in retirement in Malta. Lately, jumpy and haunted NATO soldiers scuttled across the long-suffering landscape like some postapocalyptic alien warriors, with every bit of their skin and even much of their pixelated camouflage uniforms invisible behind body armor, reflective sunglasses, gloves, helmets, chin guards, neck guards, knee guards, ballistic groin protectors, boots, and more often than not their entire bodies entombed in outsize armored apparatuses stubbled with gun barrels and antennae and tinted electronic gadgets whose unchaste purpose, many Afghans believed, was to X-ray through women’s clothes.

Onward, then. Qasim bent over his furry wheel. Road gravel sang Bollywood tunes under the tires of his taxi. Behind us, to the south, mountaintops flounced with a thin glacial smear faded into the haze. The car rattled past the sandbagged northern boundary of Mazar-e-Sharif where a police officer in a gray fleece uniform dozed behind a concrete blast wall, past the lowlands where the city dumped her refuse into black-rimmed lakes of stunning turquoise putrefaction, past the dirt track that dead-ended at the adobe beehive of the Asfakhan Shrine beneath which in a low ziggurat painted pea green lay buried a Muslim holy man named Mir Sangin. The tomb of this saint, who had died more than eight centuries earlier, was said to cure mental ailments. Worshippers pilgrimed to the shrine each Wednesday. They knelt and prostrated before the tomb and chained themselves to the metal railing that surrounded it and wept and moaned and prayed and sometimes urinated upon themselves while their desperate relatives suffered the stench in set-jaw silence and hoped for a miracle. When we passed the turnoff to the shrine, Qasim let go of the wheel and closed his eyes and drew both hands over his clean-shaven face in blessing. Soon after that, our road became barely discernible in the flat and empty desert that gazed blankly at a sky just as blank. A falcon freewheeled in hot air.

•   •   •

Qasim was living with his wife and toddler daughter across the street from my rental room in Mazar, but he had grown up in Karaghuzhlah where his parents and siblings still lived, and he drove there often. He said he knew the desert well. About an hour north of Mazar-e-Sharif, he turned in his seat and beamed at me.

“Anna!”

“Yes?”

“Where is the road to Oqa?”

Where, indeed? There was no road. Only, in a certain light, at a certain angle, lustrous furrows upon the parched alkali where herders’ sandals had worn the dust to a gloss, and sometimes, depending on the strength of the wind and on the recent traffic patterns through the desert, some motorcycle tracks. Forty minutes of that, jolting west-northwest, and then to the north there would appear the dunes and the cemetery of children and elders and the hillock of Oqa. Then another twenty minutes of crossing corduroy fallows from there to the village. To reach the village by car from Mazar-e-Sharif you bounced on the gravel road north for an hour or so and then turned west. Where?

“How about . . . here!”

Qasim swerved left.

“Here?”

I squinted at the land, the funereal whiteness of it. There were absolutely no landmarks. The morning glare was eating away at the horizon the way a slow fire eats at the corners of a burning page, almost imperceptible, consuming the edges in a barely visible radiant hairline border. It flattened everything, leveled whichever hillocks or distant cob ruins were sometimes, not on this day, amplified by diffraction. The hard-packed dust before the taxi shone like polished chalk. I was lost.

Stories about getting lost in deserts, in cars. Of draining and drinking radiator fluid. Gasoline. Urine. Of setting cars on fire so that someone—here, in these plains, who? NATO helicopter gunships? Taliban raiders?—would notice and come to the rescue. Of parents killing their young son to spare him the final agonies. He had become so dehydrated his tongue had swelled, and he could no longer swallow even if there had been anything to drink. In the August heat of the Khorasan, with no shelter, in the sun, we would dehydrate through sweat and through breathing beyond recovery within four or five hours—or less, because we had not had anything to drink since before dawn, since Qasim and Hakima were fasting and so was I, for the sake of collegial austerity, for the attraction of living within limits, the nonbinding seduction of the rituals of others. We had an almost full tank of gas and some bottled water in the trunk.

“Sure,” I said.

Then I asked Qasim to drive in a line as straight as possible and shut my eyes against the glare, and for the next forty minutes I tried to will Oqa into existence.

And there it was.

The cemetery with the sole plywood marker buckled to our south. The pronounced footpath tacked from it, northwest and then east, to the white wasp’s nest of clay homes. The undulating gold-specked dunes behind it, the ever-encroaching sea. But there was something unfamiliar about the approach. There was new sand everywhere—new miniature barchans and new flawless sheets of sand like iced-over ponds and corrugated patches like furrowed sand fields, new sand dimples and new rippled sand hummocks where before there had been none, blown in by the wind over the previous two days, or else joggled loose by the earthquake the night before. Sand blocked the climb up the hillock of Oqa. Qasim revved the engine once, twice. And then the yellow and white taxi, with its red good-luck ribbons and its hairy steering wheel, was stuck.

We flung open the car doors and stepped out into the sand that billowed about our feet and clicked our tongues. The car was tilted into the side of the knoll like a prairie dog frozen halfway into its burrowing act. Stuck in shit, for this was the north slope of the hummock, the slope the Oqans used as an outhouse. Stuck also in gold. Bored two feet nose-first into the untapped riches that teased Amanullah’s imagination and stoked his hopes of flight. Already a small crowd of children had tumbled down the hillside and assembled around us, tinkling with their shiny amulets and waving and laughing and pointing and beckoning:
“Khola jan, khola jan, salaam!”
Auntie, they called me, and my heart quavered. And to their urgings and giggles, we the three hapless and incongruously wardrobed jesters hiked the short rise to Baba Nazar’s house. Boston rushed out of the loom room where she had been sorting through old skeins and balls of carpet wool left over from some past carpets to see if she could salvage enough tan thread for Thawra to finish her
yusufi
. She clenched me in her skeletal embrace. Most of the villagers were gone, she said. Amanullah had taken the family camels to a far pasture because all the grazing nearby had been devoured by animals or burnt by the drought. Baba Nazar had gone to the dunes to see if the desert would yield a rabbit or two for dinner. Thawra had gone with the children to visit her family in Khairabad.

“Everyone, everyone,” the old woman said; everyone had gone to look for food, for kindling, for animal feed, or to crash the iftar dinners of wealthier relatives in other villages—because not observing the fast did not exclude the Oqans from partaking in the ritual reward for the long hours of abstinence since abstinence was how they lived every month, holy or not.

Everyone was gone, Boston said, and no one to help us out of the sand except the Commander, the only able-bodied man who had stayed in the village that day and had not gone to forage for food because the Commander never foraged for anything.

“There he comes!” Boston pointed, and grinned.

Amin Bai was shuffling across the village to greet us. Contrails of fine dust danced behind his rubber slippers. In his arms he was carrying a wooden door.