The World is a Carpet Read Online Free PDF Page A

ambled into the loom room and the weaver jumped up to shoo it away: the lotus flower grew an extra petal where she had forgotten the count of the knots she had already tied before she settled back to work. An ailing infant cried: a blossom is left half-finished. A neighbor walked in with the latest sex gossip from a newlyweds’ bedroom—the whole village knew the groom was just a boy, so what did you expect?—and the border runs doubly thick for a centimeter or two, so busy was the weaver laughing.
    The merchant will find the unfinished petal, the too-wide line along the selvage, the rhombus almost imperceptibly askew, and smack his lips, and nod, perhaps imagining for an instant which mishap could be responsible for it. He will say: “Good.”
    There are mistakes. The carpet truly is beautiful.
    Slouched on Baba Nazar’s namad , I thought: If the world were a carpet, then Oqa was such a mistake.
    •   •   •
    Oqa’s forty doorless huts gaped at the world in a kind of hungry supplication from a low clay hummock. The hummock was shaped like a horseshoe with the heel pointing east-northeast. A convex emptiness unfurled around the village for infinite miles and curved toward the ends of the Earth. They said people had first settled on this hummock two or three hundred years ago. They said back then the desert had been a jungle of nodular black saxaul and scaly dwarf juniper and tribulus, and some Turkoman herders from Karaghuzhlah and Khairabad, the large farming villages four hours to the south, had decided to make camp here because there had been plenty of grazing for their single-humped camels, sheep, and goats.
    Perhaps this was so. But if you walked to Oqa from any direction in Amanullah’s lifetime, all you saw was a dusty phantasm rising out of limitless sere plains and sand dunes beneath unending sky. If there ever had been a jungle it was long gone and there remained no trace of it. Not a single tree grew in Oqa and no trees were visible from it. The Oqans, like their nomadic ancestors, farmed nothing. The only vegetation was the thorny and nearly leafless desert shrubs and, in early spring, strange and dark glossy succulents that looked like salamanders and that seemed to appear overnight and disappear as quickly. The predominant west wind, born somewhere by the Caspian Sea and blowing almost constantly and uninterrupted across hundreds of miles of the Karakum Desert, roughed a vast sea of dunes to the north of the village and heaped drifts of sand against the western walls of Oqa’s oblique adobes, as if to anchor them to the ridge, or else a sandstorm might gust them clear off the edge of the world. When the wind was strong, it blew clouds of sand and sticks and the village became an island floating in a moving sea of dust.
    The few people who knew about the village called it Oq, Oqa, or Oqan. It was not on any map. Government officials in Mazar-e-Sharif told me the village didn’t exist at all, under any name.
    I once searched for Oqa on Google Earth, an online database that combines constantly updated satellite imagery and photographs to imitate a look at our planet from space. With a resolution of fifteen meters or fewer per pixel, it allows you to zoom in on any place in the world. You can see the taxicabs parked outside the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan. You can see the memorial in 3-D. I typed “Oqa” in the search window and the website zoomed in on the offices of Oqa! Serviços de Comunicação in Barretos, Brazil. I typed “Mazar-e-Sharif.” The virtual globe on the computer screen spun, and the dark vertebrae of the Hindu Kush fanned northward in alluvial scallops and smoothed into the cauterized Khorasan plains—and there it was, a large pointillist blotch of glaucous and gray and pale yellow against the dun backdrop the British travel writer Robert Byron had described seventy-four years earlier as “the metallic drabness of the plain.” Mazar-e-Sharif, Tomb of the