The World is a Carpet (26 page)

M
any Ramadans ago in Shor Teppeh, on the northern edge of the barchan belt that separated Oqa from the Oxus, there lived carpenters who carved out of juniper and tamarisk amazing things. Filigreed chests with complex mortise-and-tenon locks. Chairs with long backs whittled into interlacing openwork octagons that rested upon stout legs just tall enough to elevate the chairs’ occupants above the floor so that they could sit comfortably cross-legged as if they were sitting on cushions or tick mattresses. Doors chip-carved into precious multitudes of leaves and flowers.

The Shor Teppeh craftsmen preserved an artisanal tradition that in Transoxiana dated back to Tamerlane—Emir Timur, the Father of the Turks, the crippled sociopath who was crowned emperor in Balkh in 1370, who designated his carpet as his royal surrogate, and who combined a savage, maniacal bloodlust with singular love for and patronage of the arts. For thirty-five years he expanded his domain from the Mediterranean and Black seas to the Persian Gulf to India, fighting wars at whim with a bandy-legged army of mercenaries who were paid exclusively in spoils and who slaughtered prisoners by the hundred thousand and mixed their skulls with clay and erected from that abominable amalgam enormous pyramids; who stampeded enemy lines with camels set aflame; and who, at least on one occasion, at Smyrna, catapulted the severed heads of the defeated Knights Hospitaller into the fleet that had sailed up to the city to rescue the crusaders. Tamerlane did not decimate the human race the way Genghis Khan had, but he did kill seventeen million people in a world of four hundred million. During the same thirty-five years, having moved the Mongol capital to Samarkand, Tamerlane meticulously imported from the different lands he had conquered assorted craftsmen who built Samarkand’s grand mosques bedecked with polychrome tiles and initiated one of the most glorious periods in Islamic art. Because beauty is blind to bloodshed and is, in fact, often sustained by it, or else the world as we know it would not be.

Six hundred years later, the Khorasan still embraced indescribable beauty and ruthless violence and ruinous penury at once. Bulbous-domed mosques blinked impassively in the sun at street bombings that hurled a mess of charred and shredded human flesh at their lapis tiles. Tinsmiths rumbaed sheets of aluminum into ornamented trunks and strongboxes to the syncopation of firefights. And on the edge of a war zone, the pauperized Oqans wove the world’s handsomest carpets and counted among their few possessions the gorgeous Shor Teppeh xyloglyphy.

The mortise-and-tenon chests were the most common. Every other house in the village seemed to have one. Amanullah had one in his room: an imposing hexahedron of dark wood that had been Boston’s trousseau when she had married Baba Nazar. Interweaving scallops connected into hexagons that in their turn were linked by low-relief balusters fretted with yet more tiny runeations. Inside the chest, which they kept padlocked, Baba Nazar and Boston kept their money, the hunter’s disintegrated and frasslike birth certificate that had been issued by a government long gone and that was no longer valid, and an American zinc-alloy military challenge coin that read “Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense” on one side and “The United States of America, Department of Defense” on the other. Baba Nazar believed the challenge coin was a medal. He said American troops had awarded it to his brother Ala Nazar, a police officer who had served in Jalalabad, for risking his life when he had helped capture a low-level Taliban commander. I did not have the heart to tell him that American troops used such coins mostly to elicit free drinks from their buddies. A handheld mirror for a gold nugget. A worthless trinket for a lifetime of worry. The hunter showed it occasionally to his guests, and they passed it from hand to hand with great care and nodded and said it was a beautiful and precious thing indeed.

It was possible that the woodworkers still lived in Shor Teppeh. But no one I met in Oqa had ever seen one, and everyone assured me that the chests in their possession were a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years old. These were probably uninformed estimates, but they were easy to believe. The blackened wood on the chests looked antiquated. The trees that once had been abundant in the oases along the river had been cut down for cooking fires or swallowed up by the ever-encroaching sand. Boston had no opinion regarding the age of her trousseau other than that her mother had owned it forever before giving it to her; Baba Nazar said it was more than a century old. It was the only piece of furniture the couple owned save for the looted bed.

The door Amin Bai was carrying had come from Shor Teppeh as well. It was the descendant of the cypress panel the carpenters’ Timurid ancestors had hewn in fifteenth-century Samarkand that was on display, more than half a millennium later, in Gallery 455 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The same delicate and fluid tendrils that wove into symmetrical bas-relief gardens. The same calligraphic clusters of flowers and fruit. It was a treasure, an objet d’art. It had been painted pale blue to thwart jinxes. Securing it with his left armpit and elbow, the Commander shook hands with me, with Qasim, with Hakima, murmured the polite chant of a greeting, and then slid down the side of the hummock on his heels, parting the fine sand in two parallel ruts the way the ducks Baba Nazar would very rarely hunt on the Amu Darya peeled the surface of the water with their webbed feet at touchdown, and with all the momentum gathered from such a descent he wedged the door under the taxi’s right front wheel. Six hundred years of art history, echoes of pyramids of skulls, legends of unbelievable and unbelievably gory conquests, jammed under the radial tire of a 1997 Toyota Corolla. Except the door was too thick. It wouldn’t quite fit.

Amin Bai turned to Qasim.

“Got a jack, son?” he asked.

•   •   •

The door didn’t help. Nor did the tarp on which Boston shucked almonds, nor the armloads of calligonum the children had brought at Amin Bai’s orders, nor Amin Bai’s and my shoveling. (“You work like a man! Good!”) Some boys came over to help push the car, but it just rocked. I suggested deflating the tires, but Qasim said no because he didn’t have a pump. He had stopped smiling and kept stepping on the gas, and the tires spun and dislodged from the scalding sand browned shreds of the old cloth village women used to catch their menstrual blood and shards of blue-glazed pots. The shards looked ancient, but they could have come from crockery of any age—a year old, a thousand years old, a hundred. Like malnourished babies born old-looking. The car now rested on its undercarriage.

At last Amin Bai stabbed the shovel into a small dune next to the car and came over to me, hand extended for the shaking. He reached for his Korean cigarettes, shook one out of the soft pack, offered it to me. I took it, fished a lighter out of my purse, offered the Commander a light in cupped hands. He took it. Friend, then, at least for now, I thought.

A hot gale blew from the northwest across a desert lepered with thistle tufts. We sat on our haunches next to the taxi and watched the dunes in the satisfied silence of laborers who had done all they could for a cause. The dunes had won. Then we shimmied up the hummock and went to sit in Baba Nazar’s house because inside it was somewhat cool, while Qasim walked to the westernmost end of the village where the cell phone signal was stronger, dialed his father in Karaghuzhlah, and asked him to send over a tractor.

•   •   •

The earthen floor in Boston’s bedroom was covered with a straw mat and there we sat. We rested our backs on hard corduroy pillows and squinted at one another across the beams of dusty light that thrust through the windows and crisscrossed the room like trip wire. Above us, from the rafters, the couple’s domestic things hung. An unfinished slingshot. A plate of something wrapped in a green and fuchsia homespun headscarf. A sieve holding three loaves of fresh nan. A stick driven into the wall pierced a piece of paper with five sewing needles stuck in it. The surviving bow of Baba Nazar’s prescription glasses hooked over a nail. On a shelf built into an alcove, next to the case holding the hunter’s Soviet binoculars, a golden handful of onions. Some girls had squeezed past one another into the room and stood by the door, giggling in shy whispers. They were watching Hakima. A city lady. Her clothes so fine, her eyebrows tweezed to such perfect narrow arches, her skin so white. At last, Mahsad Gul, the Commander’s daughter, moved forward and, full of sudden courage, stepped into my sweaty sandals, then into Hakima’s heels. The other girls watched us. Had we noticed? Was it all right? When we said nothing, the rest of the girls tried on Hakima’s nice shoes, too.

Ismatullah, the Commander’s firstborn, wandered in, pushed past his sister, bowed to the adults. Once, in the winter, the boy had given me a blue glass bead shaped like a teardrop, or a human heart. His friend Hairullah gave me a bead as well, a flat dark-red circle with the name of the Prophet inscribed on both sides. Gifts, the boys had explained, trinkets they had found in the desert. I had strung them on a thread and wore that around my neck until the thread ripped, many months later. Now Ismatullah wanted something in return.

“Auntie.”

“Yes?”

“Can you bring me from the city a SIM card for my cell phone with Turkoman songs on it?” he asked, in Farsi.

“A what? A SIM card?”

“Doo jee bee.”

I thought he had switched to Turkoman, which I did not understand.

“
Which
kind?”

Amin Bai cut in. My obtuseness irritated him.

“Mem-ree card,” he said, in English. “Two GB.”

Father and son. Unlettered, thin, fatigued-looking in their dirty
shalwar kameez
and soiled white skullcaps, their feet dark and seamy from always being bare in molded rubber sandals, explaining electronics to me, in English. Their lives forever pincered between ageless privation and advanced modernity. Not until then had I heard of two-gigabyte memory cards for cell phones that could store songs.

Boston meantime had unfolded a corner of her houndstooth tablecloth and placed upon it a loaf of bread and a saucer of fresh yogurt: one of her camels was in milk. Chipped glass teacups came out, and the pale green thermos painted with tulips. Hakima, hand on heart, refused the elevenses. Ramadan, she said.

Boston wouldn’t hear of it.

“Eat.” And she pushed the saucer closer to the translator. “God knows you have to eat something. No one can fast in this.” Amin Bai and I were already ripping bits of nan crust and dipping them into the yogurt. It tasted like liquid moonlight.

And then Qasim returned and reported that the tractor carrying four laborers and many meters of heavy-duty rope would be in Oqa to fetch us in an hour—and also that his father, Hassan Khan, the Hazara commander from Karaghuzhlah, was sending his salaams to Amin Bai, the Turkoman commander from Oqa, his dear old friend.

The Commander, who had been lying propped up on his left elbow and eating with his right hand, sat up with an ornate litany of a Farsi greeting, this time heartfelt. And suddenly, unexpectedly, I had a history in the desert beyond the ignoble history of foreigners, a reason to be present in Oqa beyond squibbling notes and sketching: I had, through the young taxi driver I had hired, acquired an ally, a confederate, a Hazara warlord who had been Amin Bai’s war buddy.

That afternoon, before the tractor pulled Qasim’s taxi out of the dune, Amin Bai asked me to bring him binoculars from America, “to see far in the desert.” To hunt with Baba Nazar, or maybe to watch for intruders, he did not say.

T
wo days later, Qasim took me to Karaghuzhlah to meet his father. We drove past Naushir’s house, past the pale green mosque to which Taliban riders had delivered their letters instructing the villagers to pay the ten percent religious tax to the militia, past a water pump where two small girls were loading yellow jerry cans that once had held cooking oil and now held well water onto a wooden cart pulled by a balding donkey. In the Hazara quarter of Karaghuzhlah, in the northwest corner of the village, Qasim steered the taxi across a short land bridge barely wide enough for his car. The bridge spanned an irrigation ditch dry and cracked like broken stoneware, and it ended at a sheetmetal gate. A teenage farmhand opened the gate for us, and we parked in a small courtyard next to an outhouse. A cloud of flies rose in furious and restless scarves from a stinking mottle of sheep offal left to rot on some withered grass.