The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen Page B

tea party. Reluctant men peeled off to attend the one-o’clock prayer at the neighborhood mosque, returned an hour later singing folk songs about love, and climbed back upon the takht to resume their pagan reverie. The afternoon sun was gentle and flocks of white doves looped, delirious with spring, in air the color of tea. My hosts’ children brought out some colored modeling clay and one of the men, a driver who worked for the United Nations, asked me to make something. I made a green cat. He took it in his hand, studied it for a few beats, then very deftly attached three black stripes to it: one around the cat’s neck, two across its face.
    “That’s a collar,” I pointed. “What are these?”
    “Burqa. This is Afghanistan. Next time don’t make without burqa.”
    No bombs went off in the city that day. There was no gunfire. By six o’clock the first sun of spring softly relayed toward the western hemisphere, and in the caramel evening haze the crest of the Hindu Kush faded into a velvety saffron carpet fringe. Then night erased the mountains altogether and summoned pale stars out of the dark. When the waning moon rose over the eastern stucco wall of the compound, I brought out Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game to read by moonlight.
    A hundred and seventy-nine years ago and less than twenty miles away, by moonlight also, the Great Game player and British political agent in Kabul Sir Alexander Burnes had found Moorcroft’s grave, “unmarked and half covered by a mud wall, outside the town of Balkh.” Moorcroft, the veterinary surgeon–explorer in the employ of the East India Company, the first Englishman to set foot on the banks of the Oxus, the man who had warned of Russia’s wish to occupy Afghanistan and who had urged Britain to annex it first, was believed to have succumbed to fever in romantic pursuit of the golden Akhal-Tekes, the fabled Turkoman horses.
    “Moorcroft,” wrote Hopkirk, “thus lies not far from the spot where, more than a century and a half later, Soviet troops and armour poured southwards across the River Oxus into Afghanistan.” And now the soldiers of yet another empire were warring upon this land. Some of them were scanning my neighborhood that night from two invisible helicopter gunships that whirred low over the low cityscape to the north of the compound, disrupting the peace or keeping it, or both.
    A little blond girl had dozed off on a pillow next to mine. Her name was Avesta, like the mostly lost collection of Zoroastrianism’s sacred texts. Her mouth was sticky with samanak , and her eyelids glittered with the blue eye shadow her mother had allowed her to wear on New Year’s Day. With utmost tenderness, her father scooped her up and carried her to her own thin mattress in the house. Tomorrow would dawn over her eternal war zone a little sunnier, a little warmer.

    A s if on cue, the next day the desert spilled a brilliant green. The almond orchards where dreamy flowers just recently had spumed were suddenly powdery green with minuscule teardrop nuts. Goats everywhere kidded all at once. In the pale light before sunup, the sulfuric and deserted wastelands of winter outside Mazar had come instantaneously and noisily to jubilant life: thousands of downy black and spotted kids scuttled, clanging, across fields that at last promised some kind of a harvest. There still had been no rain near Oqa, but here, too, strange sheeny succulents had sprouted through tough unirrigated soil, like some aberrant greenery from outer space.
    It was very early and still cold. On the southeastern horizon a yet invisible sun had whitened the narrowest strip of sky, and against it the crest of the Hindu Kush had begun to silhouette grand and black. To the still dark northeast, on the border with Uzbekistan, the lights of Khairatan diffracted from beyond the Earth’s curvature, turning the grimy border port into a grandiose city of shimmering skyscrapers. A mirage behooving a historical landmark: in