The World is a Carpet Read online

  ALSO BY ANNA BADKHEN

  Afghanistan by Donkey: One Year in a War Zone

  Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories

  Waiting for the Taliban: A Journey Through Northern Afghanistan

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2013 by Anna Badkhen

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Poetry by Rumi here, here, and here is quoted from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and others (HarperOne, 2004), and reprinted with permission from Coleman Barks. Poetry by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh here is quoted from Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry, edited by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, translated by Marjolijn de Jager (Other Press, 2010), and reprinted with permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Badkhen, Anna, date.

  The world is a carpet : four seasons in an Afghan village / Anna Badkhen.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-61611-6

  1. Afghanistan—Social life and customs. 2. Women—Afghanistan—Social conditions—21st century. 3. Women weavers—Afghanistan. 4. Rugs, Oriental—Afghanistan. 5. Carpets—Afghanistan. 6. Weaving—Afghanistan. 7. Badkhen, Anna, 1976– I. Title.

  DS354.B3225 2013 2013003827

  305.409581—dc23

  Map by Meighan Cavanaugh

  Illustrations by Anna Badkhen

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Anna Badkhen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map

  The Carpet

  The Wedding

  The Fast

  The Blizzard

  Acknowledgments

  Unroll your carpets, and I shall see what is written in your heart.

  TURKOMAN PROVERB

  Every moment and place says, “Put this design in your carpet!”

  RUMI (BALKHI)

  Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

  CORMAC MCCARTHY

  THE CARPET

  At four in the morning a phalanx of black silhouettes set out across the desert: three people and a donkey headed west on a sinuous dustbowl trail. The yogurt bow of the moon had slipped behind the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail wound invisibly through thick predawn dark that arced toward the horizon. All was still. To the south, the Big Dipper scooped out the mountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled March night.

  Amanullah led the way. He skirted the spines of cousinia and the diaphanous spheres of calligonum only he could pick out, hopped the cape hare burrows he alone knew about, sidestepped the boulders he alone remembered. He never changed pace. He never bent down to check for sheep spoor. He never looked up: he didn’t navigate by stars, didn’t know their names, didn’t recognize the constellations. What for? Stars were unreliable beacons, nomads that moved about the heavens at will, like the Turkoman forefathers. Have you never seen one suddenly tear off from its roost and streak across the black, looking for a new home? Amanullah walked the trail by heart, steering from a memory that wasn’t even his own but had double-helixed down the bloodstream of generations of men who had traveled this footpath perhaps for millennia. A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness.

  We walked single file. Amanullah first, then the donkey, then Fahim, who taught English at an evening school in Mazar-e-Sharif and was helping me with translation, then I. At a brisk clip, in dry weather, the eighteen-mile walk across the hummocked loess usually took about five hours. Amanullah had made this journey every two weeks since he was six or seven. Now he was thirty.

  “If other people in the world walked as much as we do, and worked as hard as we do, they’d go crazy,” he announced. He paused for effect. Amanullah bragged about the unimaginable hardships of life in the desert fondly and often. In the dark, I pictured him smile in sly satisfaction at the gravity of his own pronouncement. But when he spoke again, he sounded surprised.

  “But we don’t.”

  It was Thursday, bazaar day in Northern Afghanistan. We were walking to Dawlatabad, the market town nearest Oqa, Amanullah’s village. We were going to Dawlatabad to buy carpet yarn for Amanullah’s wife, Thawra.

  For the next seven months, Thawra would squat on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks, and sticks in one of Oqa’s forty cob huts. Day after day, she would knot coarse weft threads over warps of thin, undyed wool, weaving the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.

  • • •

  If the eastern hemisphere’s carpet-weaving region that extends from China to Morocco were itself a carpet, and one were to fold it in half, Thawra’s loom room would fall slightly to the right of the center fold. Prehistoric artisans upon these plains were spinning wool and plaiting it into mats as early as seven thousand years ago. Since then, people here have been born on carpets, prayed on them, slept on them, draped their tombs with them. Alexander the Great, who marched through the Khorasan in 327 BC, is said to have sent his mother, Olympias, a carpet as a souvenir from the defeated Balkh, the ancient feudal capital about twenty-five miles southwest of Oqa. For centuries, carpets were a preeminent regional export, a currency, status symbols, attachés. When Tamerlane, who was crowned emperor at Balkh, was absent from his court, visitors were permitted to kiss and pay homage to his carpet, which they were instructed to treat as his deputy.

  Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, lauded Turkoman weavers for producing “the best and handsomest carpets in the world.” Six hundred years later, Francis Henry Bennett Skrine, a retired commissioner of the Indian Civil Service, and the London linguist Sir Edward Denison Ross wrote that Turkoman carpets were “unrivalled in Asia for beauty and durability.” For their rich palette of reds—mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent of the fratricidal blood that soaks their land—the Turkomans are called the Rembrandts of weaving.

  • • •

  Fine clay dust will filter into Thawra’s mud-and-dung loom room as she weaves. Through the scrub-brush lath ceiling there will seep into the room particles of manure, infinitesimal flecks of gold from nearby barchans, the terrible black cough of her neighbors’ famished children, echoes of the war that jolts the plains and contorts the Cretaceous massifs of her land. A roadside bomb will go off, and the desert outside her doorless entryway will groan in response with the phantom footfalls of past invaders: Achaemenid and Greek, Mughal and Arab, Ottoman and Russian, British and Soviet. A speck of an American Navy F/A-18 strike fighter will catch a sudden sunray on its wing and for the instant i
t pierces the incredibly high azure it will become a ghost of a different glint: on Genghis Khan’s sword before it split the skull of a Bactrian housewife, on the barrel of a guerrilla’s jezail matchlock before it discharged at some subaltern of the Raj. Taliban scouts will appear on the path where Amanullah and I walked for yarn, then vanish again, the way all raiders come and vanish upon this eternal battleground.

  Thawra’s will be a yusufi carpet, a diamond pattern her mother and her mother’s mother wove before her, on the backdrop of wars past. Under her thin fingers, almond-size flowers with ogival petals will shine in a field of ocher and deep maroon. Each flower will bloom from two hundred and forty knots she will tie by hand the way her foremothers did; each knot will be a temporal Möbius strip that ties past and present.

  Once the carpet is finished it will take flight from this fantastically brutalized land that clings to the violent tectonics at the thirty-fourth parallel. Amanullah will roll it up and cram it into his donkey saddlebag, and his father will take the familiar footpath across the desert to deliver it to Dawlatabad. A middleman there will sell it to a dealer from Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in Northern Afghanistan, the modern capital of Balkh. After that, perhaps, Thawra’s carpet will be jabbed into the back of a beat-up taxicab, then tossed into the bed of a truck painted with dreamy pastorals, in which it will journey across Afghanistan’s war-racked landscape and over the border, through Pakistan’s implacable tribal areas, to the rug markets of Peshawar and Islamabad. Or maybe it will travel west, past the mass graves of Dasht-e-Leili, across the Karakum Desert, to the bazaars of Istanbul. Or else it will trundle in the trunk of a bus bound for Kabul, from where it will fly to Dubai, and from there, across the Atlantic Ocean until it alights at a dealership in the United States, the single largest purchaser of carpets on the world market at the time of this story. A wealthy patron will pay between five and twenty thousand dollars for it. Wherever her carpet ends up, for her work Thawra will be paid less than a dollar a day.

  But first, she will weave. After each knot, she will cut weft yarn from its ball with a small, sweat-darkened sickle. Thk, thk, thk, the sickle will go, measuring time between dawn and dusk, birth and death, peace and war, measuring life immemorial.

  • • •

  By quarter to six the wind had picked up. The night faded to a phantom blue, and I could see the vapor of our breath silver into pale puffs and blow away, dispersing into the hazy distances of the plains. The land turned pewter gray, dappled and tufted like a camel’s hide. Warblers and larks chirped unseen on the ground. Moisture rose cold from ultramarine creases in the desert floor, and Amanullah mounted the donkey and tucked his hands into the sleeves of his faux sheepskin coat for warmth. The eastern sky blanched and stars began to blink out one by one until only Venus still pulsed, globular and dilated over the southeast. Beneath it, the Hindu Kush rose flat like an enormous theater backdrop, devoid of depth definition. A narrow, unbroken circle of pale red cirri frothed just above the horizon, as though the Earth were a furnace lid trying to contain some ineffable flame. Northwest of us, the decaying dragon’s teeth of a long-vanquished, two-thousand-year-old Kushan castle mawed at the world. We passed a shepherds’ shelter molded out of clay. The frassy cutbank of the Hazara Ditch that had been dry since who knows when. A tank berm from some former misbegotten war. A chunk of mortar shrapnel dinged under the donkey’s hoof. From time to time, furrows crisscrossed the land where farmers from one of the bigger villages had chartered a field a long time ago, back when there had been water to irrigate the land. Amanullah rode sidesaddle across this grid and plotted his escape.

  “I’m thirty years old and the only fun I’ve known has been fucking my wife. At least that’s good. But I would like to travel someplace else before I die. Someplace more fun. I asked my father for permission to go to the city and join the army or the police. He said no. He said: ‘Stay here, this is life.’ After that, my father took all my money, because he doesn’t trust me.”

  I looked at the rider. A broad man. Broomlike mustache. To keep the cold out, Amanullah had wrapped the loose end of his striped turban round his neck. Under his coat he wore a white cotton shalwar kameez. On his feet, a pair of slip-on shoes molded out of black rubber to look like sneakers. Even the shoelaces were molded. You got shoes like that from a heap at an Afghan bazaar, a dollar a pair; when summer came, you switched to a pair of molded rubber sandals. When he was an eight-year-old grazing his camels in the sand scrub half a day’s walk from Oqa, Amanullah found a rocket-propelled grenade in the barrens and put it on his campfire to see what would happen. The grenade blew up. A bit of shrapnel lodged in his left eye, and he developed a cataract and a pronounced convergent strabismus. The squint and the blemish gave him a mischievous look.

  Now he was squinting northward. There, on the other side of the distant Oxus, pink tinsel of snow ribboned upon the Kugitang Mountains in Turkmenistan. Fantasies of flight welled in the waxing day.

  “Once, I wanted to run away from the village and move to Turkmenistan,” Amanullah mused. “The plan was to go to Turkmenistan, earn a lot of money, and spend it on the girls.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Girls in Turkmenistan sing beautifully.”

  We walked on. The donkey ambled at a four-beat gait. The earth rang hollow like a taut belly under its hooves and Amanullah began to sing to the beat. He sang sad, chromatic songs in Turkoman about the world beyond his desert, about make-believe girls who weren’t his wife. He made up the words as he went. Flat quarter-tone tremolos spilled from deep inside his throat and bounced off tussocks that bristled with dry, frozen grass. Fahim whispered translations. Then the first sunray flashed tangerine above the Hindu Kush, blessing us all—humans and animals, weavers and wanderers, sinners and yet worse sinners. The planet turned to the oldest rhythm: moving and yearning.

  Afghanistan’s oldest surviving minaret rose sixty stocky feet out of the plains, a stern watchman over the waking world. In the early twelfth century, Seljuk invaders had braided its tower out of pale narrow brick in the village of Zadyan, two-thirds of the way between Oqa and Dawlatabad. The clay bubble wrap of Zadyan’s domed roofs stretched a mile or so to the south of the minaret, and almond groves at its foot foamed the same pink as the snowy crest of the Kugitang, as though the trees had scrounged their color from the dawn-stroked mountain range.

  It was seven in the morning. Tawny arid desert yielded to swatches of startling emerald where farmers from Zadyan grew ankle-high winter wheat. On an earthwork some hundred yards to the south of the trail, three men who had been squatting now stood up and watched our procession, turning slowly with their entire torsos as we passed. Who were these men? Villagers tending their fields? Taliban scouts spying out who came and went? Bandits waiting to waylay traders headed to market with money or goods? The men did not salaam us. Amanullah heeled the donkey twice and we quickened our pace.

  Amanullah steered toward the minaret. There, in the trampled clay of a large and empty square, his father, Baba Nazar, was waiting on his haunches in the slanted rays of morning.

  Baba Nazar was seventy years old. I had met him a year earlier. He had been seventy years old already then. Nine months later I would ask again and he still would be seventy. Few Afghans knew how old they were: Who wanted to count the seasons of privation? When he was young, Baba Nazar’s mother would tell him each year: “Now you’re fifteen. Now you’re sixteen. Now you’re seventeen.” But his mother had been dead a long time, and there was no one to instruct Baba Nazar about his age anymore. When there was no black left in his heart-shaped goatee, he settled on seventy. Baba Nazar was a respected elder in Oqa and seventy seemed a good, respectable number. He stuck with it.

  Baba Nazar was a hunter. In a special niche of his bedroom, near the old shotgun hanging from a nail driven into the mud wall, he kept a pair of Soviet army binoculars with one working telescope and a tupcha—a weightless, plum-size percussio
n he had fashioned by hand from bird cartilage and wood and hare skin. A tupcha imitates impeccably a quail’s call that lures a covey to the hunter, but only when it is built with the elastic skin of a freshly killed hare. The old man had to stretch the wood-and-cartilage frame anew before each quail hunt, which meant that a hare hunt always came first. Baba Nazar hunted and trapped anything warm-blooded except for the scavenger birds that wheeled over the desert in unchallenged windblown loops. Like everyone in his starved village, he did not always have enough money to buy rice and oil. But no other family in Oqa ate meat of any kind as often as the six people under Baba Nazar’s roof: the old man and his wife, the quick-faced Boston; Amanullah and Thawra; and Amanullah’s small children, son Nurullah and daughter Leila.

  Because Baba Nazar knew well of Amanullah’s Odyssean longings, he did not trust him with the money to buy yarn for Thawra’s next carpet. He was going to the market himself. But first he had to stop at a nephew’s large and messy compound in Zadyan for a late breakfast of shir roghan, hot milk boiled with melted butter and colored pale yellow with tea leaves.

  Cross-legged on a broad straw mat that covered the entire floor of a small guestroom, we crumbled fresh, hot nan into bowls of the brew and ate it, soggy, with aluminum spoons. Humus in late autumn must taste like this, I thought: mouthfuls of rich decay. A half dozen of our host’s many children crowded just outside the entrance. They hid their bodies behind the wall so that only their backlit heads leaned through the door, and studied us in silence. From time to time, one of them suddenly would begin to giggle, then another, and an older child would shush and slap them, and the sniggering children would peel off from the group and disappear entirely behind the wall, then reappear moments later, still shaking with soundless laughter.

  Baba Nazar and I shared a bowl. He caught me looking at the children and asked me about mine and said that it must be difficult for me to be this far away from home.