The World is a Carpet Read Online Free PDF Page B

children. Most of the graves were small. One belonged to the youngest daughter of Amin Bai, the Commander. Five belonged to the daughters of Oraz Gul and Abdul Khuddus. All of their daughters. All the children the couple had ever had.
    “Every winter five or six children die,” Amin Bai explained once, and the men around him echoed, in unison, like a choir in a Greek tragedy: “Every winter, five or six.”
    “Die of what?” I asked.
    Amin Bai pulled a half-chewed Korean cigarette from his mouth, whether to better articulate his response or to think, then returned it to its notch in his thin lips. Who knew? Cold. Cholera. Poverty. Life. All the girls in the village were named Something Gul, “Flower”—Hazar Gul, Fatma Gul, Leila Gul—the dead ones, too. In late spring, the rush skeletonweed plants that grew between the graves and on top of them sprouted bright yellow blossoms that bowed over the mounds like sharp and frigid little suns.
    After the cemetery, the footpath to Oqa crabbed windward, to the northwest, then turned abruptly right, toward the village. As if those who came here were sailboats on their final tack to some spectral mooring and the path were charting their course. Or maybe to give visitors one last chance to reconsider this godforsaken destination. The first three houses at the weather tip of the ridge belonged to Baba Nazar. Two were small, single-room boxes to keep newborn kid goats in early spring and to host the occasional houseguests in all other seasons; the main house was slightly larger, with three rooms and a kitchen and a woozy entryway on the lee side, and sat a bit farther inside the village boundary. There were no fences around Baba Nazar’s houses or, for that matter, around anyone else’s: privacy, vigorously guarded by thick compound walls in most of Afghanistan, meant little here. Oqa’s women walked through the village unveiled, and nursed their children in plain sight.
    Baba Nazar had sculpted his houses out of the desert by hand, and their walls were lumpy, like claymation props. A jerry can with the words TURBO ACTIVE ENGINE OIL fading from its side hung from a knobbly rafter outside the larger house, where the hunter and his family lived. In the late nineties, when Baba Nazar’s older daughter, Zarifshah Bibi, was a teenager, she was playing under this rafter and tripped a Soviet land mine that had been buried in the dust. The explosion tore off her left leg below the knee and her left thumb, index, and middle fingers. Baba Nazar still managed to find a match for her, a sharecropper from Zadyan named Mustafa, who was in his fifties when they married. Mustafa had little money to pay the bride price. His few teeth were stained brown from chewing naswar —a blend of tobacco leaves, calcium oxide, and wood ash—and never brushing. He was the man you married when you had one leg and a hand with fingers missing, a hand that couldn’t weave.
    On the opposite, leeward end of Oqa stood the teetering shanty of the village mosque. The villagers themselves had hand-molded the mosque out of brush and mud. It had no minaret from which to summon the faithful to prayer, no arched mihrab, no calligraphy over the door. It offered no succor. Once, the Oqans had hired a mullah to come by motorcycle from the silty banks of the Amu Darya and lead them in prayer on Fridays. After a few months the mullah quit, no longer satisfied with the two hundred and twenty dollars a year the villagers could scrape together to pay him. The Oqans were left to pray alone, in the crepuscule of their homes or outside, kneeling west-southwest on kerchiefs or prayer rugs they spread over drying goat turds.
    Oqa did have one building with sharp corners and straight walls. It was the shelter for a twenty-three-horsepower generator made in China by Shandong Laidong Internal Combustion Engine Co. Ltd. A few years after the Americans had come to Afghanistan, some Afghan men showed up at the village in pickup trucks,