The World is a Carpet (27 page)

A low wall separated this from the inner yard planted with rows of mulberry trees and poplars and twisted grapevines that sagged under unripe fruit. A two-story house with large wooden sashes painted blue. A lacy flutter of white curtains. A porch of whitewashed mud. In the back, a tandoor
sunken into a clay platform for Qasim’s worried mother, Khanum, to squat upon when she baked bread. Hassan Khan himself, his beard indigo black and his skin darkened from fieldwork, smiling his son’s smile from the doorway: “Welcome, welcome.” A couple of fat-tailed sheep. A crop-eared sheepdog asleep in the shade of a water tank. Some thin and bossy chickens on long legs. A duck. And, beneath a trellis,
en pointe
on fowl down and animal refuse, two tragic silver question marks, two ideograms of heaven, as if their presence somehow could sanctify things: two demoiselle cranes.

I stopped to stare. The cranes were preening. Their wings had been clipped.

“These were a present from Oqa,” the warlord said. “My friend Amin Bai gave them to me.”

The poisoned cranes.

I said: “I know. I know these birds. I have seen them in Oqa.”

“You like them?”

“They are very beautiful.”

I felt violated.

“Here.” The man started toward the cranes. “Take one. Take it to America.”

But I thanked him for his kindness, and thanked him also for sending the tractor to rescue us the other day, and told him I would not be allowed to bring a crane on the airplane with me.

T
he melon season arrived in the Khorasan that month as always, heedless of Ramadan or violence or hardship, the fruit’s cool pulpy fragrance a timepiece that denoted August. In the ocher fields that canted from the Hindu Kush, the melons, where the heat had cleft their pale green and golden skins, looked like severed heads discarded by war.

In the early ninth century, “the crisp, deliciously refreshing melons of Balkh Province . . . were placed in leaden molds packed with ice and thus sent to grace the table of the Caliph in Baghdad,” the historian Nancy Dupree wrote in her 1967 guidebook to Northern Afghanistan. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan’s Khitan advisor Yelu Ch’u-Ts’ai marveled at melons “as big as a horse’s head.”

Eight hundred years later, the melons were just as big, gourdfuls of condensed sunshine. In the evenings, when Mazar-e-Sharif cooled off and orange smog hung in the streets almost solid like unfiltered honey, melon vendors arranged their fruit in roadside pyramids and illuminated them with kerosene lanterns and single-bulb lamps fed by small generators, and shoppers looking for a sweet finish to their iftar dinners picked them up one by one and held them to their ears and tapped them with their fingertips and listened with solemn attention for the precise hollow pitch that promised the sweetest pulp, and above this ancient epicurean ritual, the melon slice of the waning moon slid down the dusty sky.

In such cinnamon dark one night, I stumbled home along the unpaved and unlit Dasht-e-Shor Road with one of my Mazari hosts, the driver who worked for the United Nations. We had just had dinner at the house of his oldest brother, who lived three blocks away. The Taliban had been calling my host’s cell phone with death threats all month, but he was in high spirits that evening because the meal had been grand: potato and pumpkin
bolani
and mountains of rice with carrots and raisins and a huge wok of tender goat he had stewed with onions himself, feeding the cooking fire with dry grass that may have come from Oqa and hawking dry spittle on the ground about him for he had not had anything to drink since three-thirty that morning.

During Ramadan, city mullahs made dinner rounds and sat down for iftar with different members of their congregations each night. That night had been the turn of my hosts’ oldest brother; the rest of the family had come along as well and brought me with them. The meal had been served in the yard. Because the mullahs were not related to them by blood, the women had to wear headscarves and eat with the children separately from the men, at a
dastarkhan
set on a concrete stoop behind a small copse of poplars and a water tank. And because Ramadan was the month for introspection and piety and the mullahs were supposed to engage the men in a dignified and solemn conversation on divine subjects, the women, even in purdah, had been expected to maintain the formal spirit of the gathering by keeping quiet and not telling jokes.

That imposition itself was enough to send the women into paroxysms of laughter. “These mullahs are like the Taliban,” one of the women whispered, and instantly someone squirted chilled Sprite through her nose trying not to crack up, and that foolishness in turn set off a new round of barely controllable giggles that turned to hiccups when someone threw in a racy quip as she reached for
bolani
. I did not understand most of the jokes, but the sniggering they prompted was contagious. We would regain composure and then start laughing again despite ourselves, and we would try to hush one another by slapping one another on the lips and on the thighs, and that was funnier still, and then somebody’s baby would crawl into a pool of melon juice and splash it on everyone, and that was slapstick, that was downright hilarious, and mostly we laughed because it felt good to be alive, to eat stewed goat and ignore the stuck-up mullahs, to be together, to be hot, to drink at last under the stars.

Satiated and relaxed on the walk home along the rows of melon vendors, I asked my companion what he had wanted to become when he was a little boy. He and I were almost the same age, and both of us had been children under communism: he, at Bagram Airport outside Kabul, where his father had served as a political officer during the Khalq rule and the Soviet occupation, and I, in Soviet Leningrad, where my parents had been disenfranchised, quasi-dissident intelligentsia.

“I wanted to be a pilot,” said my friend. I tripped on an invisible pothole, and he caught me by the elbow.

“I really wanted to be a pilot.” His voice was suddenly so lonesome, so earnest, almost begging. I wanted to give him a hug. “But then there was fighting, fighting, fighting. I became a driver.”

Our footsteps scraped on the gravel.

“Now I am a land pilot.”

We walked on. The golden fingernail of the Ramadan moon scratched the chamois sky. The last prayer of the night, intricate, gauzy, evanescent, swung the city to sleep like a hammock, and the air around us was cloying and sticky with the juice of melons and the residue of millions of sweet and broken dreams.

N
o melons made it to Oqa, no mullahs came to freeload on the villagers’ dinners, and even if they had come, there would have been nothing with which to feed them.

A Turkoman proverb says “If we have rice for dinner, life is good.” It had been days since the last time Boston and Thawra had cooked rice. Ramadan fast or not, the villagers were going without. The wells from which they drank were running out of water. The fugitives they harbored were running out of luck. The looms on which they wove were running out of thread.

Why did they stay? Which knots tied them to their faded desert, flattened by pitiless heat that had swallowed the mountains and cut the horizons true like a spirit compass? Inertia? Tradition? Laziness? Fear? Knowledge that nowhere else in Afghanistan was better—or that nowhere else in Afghanistan were they welcome? Baba Nazar could think of one who had broken away: Abed Nazar, his nephew, had joined the army and was fighting in the Kashmund Range, a terraced sierra very far away, maybe a month-long walk from Oqa, in Kunar Province—and how was such emigration any good, especially if the boy, God forbid, got hurt?

The rest just hung on, clung to their misweave of a village like clumps of thistle brush as the fickle and difficult soil eroded from under them grain by grain. Amin Bai commanded his invisible troop and entertained opium addicts in his guestroom. Manon the shopkeeper kept his country store and taught his son literacy in the quieter hours of the day. Even Choreh hung around, despite his promises to join the army or the police in exchange for a steady paycheck and government-paid rehab.

One afternoon Choreh and I were ambling about the village, and he took me to visit Abdul Rashid, the blueskinned heroin addict, the younger brother of Jan Mohammad the wedding chef and the son of the ancient Qul Nazar and Kizil Gul, an asthmatic woman with a face so umbered by the sun and so grotesquely disproportionate it possessed the counterintuitive, primeval beauty of a stone idol. Qul Nazar had been a sharecropper in Khairabad until the Taliban had diverted the water away from the fields of his landlords. After that, there were no more crops to tend, no more work. The family sold their animals and moved to Oqa where Kizil Gul could weave. Except there never seemed to be any money for wool, and the two warped poplar beams of a disassembled loom stood idle in the corner of the family’s single-room house in which the woman passed her days wheezing at her wayward son between chores.

“You spend all your money on drugs!” she would yell as she squatted by a ceramic basin and covered the dough she had just finished kneading with a tin plate and a folded-up length of tarp.

“We can’t afford it!” And she would reach for the tall stack of mattresses, blankets, and clothes festooned with coins and protective charms and motley strips of cloth that loomed like some dull and ancient treasure in the corner of the house and pick off the top of that pile a grimy green
chapan
coat and throw that on top of the tarp, to help the dough rise.

“If it weren’t for you, we’d have had rice for dinner tonight!”

If we have rice for dinner, life is good.

At this point Kizil Gul would gulp for air, hyperventilating, exasperated. Choreh and I had walked into the house in the middle of one such dressing-down, but she paid us no attention. Choreh had heard it all before; everyone in the village had—everyone on Earth had, for mothers of addicts around the world repeated the same lament.

And like all addicted sons around the world, Abdul Rashid avoided looking at his mother. He was squatting five paces away in front of a small uneven cat’s-tongue flame from an oil lamp. With his left hand he held over the lamp a strip of tinfoil, and he was looking very intently at the tinfoil. On it sizzled a single black speck of heroin. In his right hand Abdul Rashid held a thin metal pipe, like a drinking straw.

“If I quit this,” he said to his mother, never taking his eyes off the narcotic he was cooking, “I will die.”

He leaned over and placed the pipe so that one end almost touched the heroin, and wrapped his lips around the other end and inhaled. A thin ribbon of brown smoke rushed from the tinfoil into the pipe. He held his breath. He exhaled. No smoke came out of his broad lips. He had collected kindling in the desert for three days and had earned about four dollars for it in Karaghuzhlah and had spent a dollar on heroin. It would last him less than a week.

He noticed me.

“Can you take me to a clinic?”

Kizil Gul looked up from her cooking. She saw me now.

“Oh, yes. I pray to God that you take him to a clinic,” she said.

“Take him to the clinic,” said Choreh, and grasped my shoulder really hard. Choreh, with pupils barely visible. Stoned since morning. Was he pleading for Abdul Rashid, or for himself, too—for a hope, perhaps, that a treatment was possible, a cure, a solution, that an escape was not just the fantasy of an addled mind?