A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (13 page)

We watched, transfixed by the industry around us, concentrating on the efforts of one worm, then getting distracted by the progress of its neighbours. The silk was liquid in secretion and then hardened in the air, coated with sericin, a gum that enabled the cocoon to stick together.

‘An interesting
thing about the cocoons is that the shape varies depending on the weather,’ Nuraddin explained. ‘If it’s been a cold spring then the cocoons are longer and thinner, and if it’s been a hot spring then they’re shorter and fatter.’

‘Which shape gives better silk?’ I asked.

Nuraddin shrugged. It didn’t make much difference.

I watched the shadow of a working worm, visible inside its
translucent cocoon. Nuraddin described how the cocoons, once collected, were steamed to kill the pupae. After that they could be stored in dry conditions indefinitely, until needed. If the moths were allowed to emerge they would destroy the cocoon in the process, secreting a brown acid that dissolved the fibres. A small proportion were allowed to hatch and lay eggs for the following year. Silkmoths,
after 4,500 years of pampering, had lost their ability to fly, so now it was only the sericulture process that kept the species going. An equally large number of worms were probably eaten in the wild before ever reaching pupa stage. This partnership of sericulture allowed one species free food and the other to look more beautiful.

Just before we left, Nuraddin presented me with a bouquet:
a couple of bushes bound together, covered in gossamer silk and studded with cocoons.

‘So you can show the foreign guests our hard work,’ he explained.

Back at the workshop, I perched the bouquet in my office cell and a few weeks later watched as the first cocoon grew brown at one end. A plump, flightless moth emerged, and then another. They mated, laid clusters of bright yellow eggs
that darkened, and then died. All those weeks of frenetic feeding and spinning for such a short lifespan seemed a bit of an anti-climax.

Wanting to chart the whole process of sericulture, I was keen to see the next step in silk production. Madrim straight away ruled out a visit to the main Urgench silk factory, notorious for being both inept and corrupt. Instead we arranged to see a smaller
silk factory run by deaf people, also in Urgench. Having negotiated our way past a suspicious gate-keeper we headed for a large factory building. Inside were rows of vats full of steaming water and bobbing cocoons that were unwinding onto spindles. The humid air had a sharp, sour smell, distinctive of all silk-reeling factories.

The assistant director arrived, introducing himself above the
din of machinery, and took us over to a nearby vat where a woman signed a greeting to us. We watched as she dropped a handful of cocoons into the hot water and massaged them, deftly locating the ends and hooking them onto spindles. They then bobbed around in the water unravelling until the remains of the steamed larvae could be seen. The larvae were fed to chickens, although I’d heard that in China
they were popular with young women for aiding breast development.

‘How many silk fibres get woven together to make up one thread?’ I asked.

‘Eight to ten,’ the assistant director explained. ‘ And you can see that the fibres are quite strong. Over here is where the silk threads are wound together.’

I recognised the familiar skeins of silk that we used in the workshop. Madrim asked
about prices, as this could be a useful source of pile-thread silk. Unfortunately they hadn’t got the machinery to wind these tiny threads together to make the thicker threads we needed for the warp and weft of our carpets. For these, we would have to look elsewhere.

* * *

Skeins of silk when they first arrived at our workshop looked slightly yellow and had the consistency of horse-hair.
This always surprised visiting groups of tourists, as the silk was totally lacking in the lustre and sheen they expected. This was because it was still coated in sericin – the natural gum released to hold the cocoons together. In order to strip this sericin away we needed
ishkor
. A scrubby bush in the desert with small catkins was our main ingredient for this, and Madrim, the dyers and I collected
a large pile of this, covered it in earth and then burnt it. The resulting ash, ishkor, looked like pumice. Once powdered and heated with water it gave a strong alkaline solution that stripped away the sericin as we dunked the skeins up and down in it. Each skein was then dropped into a steaming cauldron of grated soap solution and left there overnight.

Next day the skeins were hung to dry,
sparkling white with all the lustre and luminescence expected of silk. They were now ready for weaving if we wanted white, or for dyeing if we wanted indigo blue or walnut husk silver, as these dyes required no mordants. For the other natural dyes, though, the silk needed to be mordanted in a bath of alum solution.

The term ‘mordant’ comes from the Latin
mordere
, ‘to bite’, and most natural
dyes need the mordanting process in order for their colour to penetrate the fibre and hold there. We used only one type of mordant, called
achik tosh
or ‘spicy stone’, tasting bitter on the tongue. Reputed to cure most ailments, alum, as it’s known in English, was never hard to come by in the bazaar. The translucent crystals were crushed and then added to hot water, in which the skeins of silk
were left overnight.

Madrim and Fatoulah talked me through our colour palette. Hoshnaut the dyer was pounding dried pomegranate skins which yielded a deep gold that looked great on silk. Barry had obtained natural indigo from India which we were already using. The blue bricks of this dye were made from crushed and fermented leaves of the indigo plant. I hoped that we would one day grow our
own indigo, undeterred by the complicated process required to turn the leaves into a useable dye or the significant role that stale urine played in this. Toychi was already mastering the art of dyeing with indigo. He removed skeins from a murky cauldron, squeezing them out and shaking them in the air. As the indigo oxidised it transformed the skeins from peacock green to a vivid blue. Seeing as
there was no natural source of vivid greens, we would first dye silk pomegranate yellow and then indigo, giving us mottled and variegated shades of turquoise and green.

Dried walnut husks yielded a delicate shade of silver, leaving the dyers with stained hands. A blend of onion skins, quince, apple, vine and mulberry leaves gave us a cheerful buttercup yellow, the bits of dried leaves and
onion skins beaten out of each skein against the courtyard wall.

We were satisfied with our yellows, blues, greens and greys, but the other colours were proving more problematic. The shades of colour varied wildly from bath to bath, and we weren’t sure why. I wasn’t too worried about this, knowing that we would master the art in time and that the varying shades produced a pleasing mottled
effect known as
abrash
, typical of natural dyes.

More worrying was our inability to achieve some shades at all. I peered into a bath of what appeared to be diluted ox blood where skeins of silk gleamed a coral pink, like skinned salmon. This was a bath of madder root and was giving us delicate shades of coral and salmon but not the vivid reds that we needed.

‘I thought that when you
added oak gall to the crushed madder root it would change the dye bath from pink to red,’ I said as Fatoulah removed the dripping skeins and wrung them out. ‘You’re sure you used the right quantities, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe it’s this madder root that you brought from Tashkent,’ mused Fatoulah. ‘I haven’t used madder in these big chunks before. The stuff we bought from the Afghan merchant was
a fine powder, like red clay.’

‘Maybe we should try to grind it up,’ I suggested.

We spent the rest of the day visiting flour mills, but no one was willing to try grinding our chunky roots. We were also struggling to find a colour dark enough to use as a contrast. I thought that walnut husks would give us a chocolatey brown colour instead of the light silver. There were dyes like Brazil
wood which yield a strong black, but we were in a desert oasis thousands of miles from the nearest rainforest. If it was any consolation, I knew that black was a challenge for wool-dyers too. Despite the profusion of black sheep, their natural black colouring isn’t light-resistant and quickly fades, leaving black sheep looking grey by the end of a sunny summer. In the 19th century Turks used
an iron sulphate compound to make black, but this corroded the wool, leaving surviving carpets from that period with bare snaking lines where once there was black.

Increasing the quantity of walnut husks in each dye-bath made little difference. Jim had mentioned a mysterious substance called
zok
, found in Afghanistan, which when mixed with oak gall and pomegranate skins produced a strong
black colour. I also knew that Fatoulah’s superior powdered madder root had come from Afghanistan. If we were going to complete our colour palette, it looked as if I’d need to make a trip there.

Andrea had taken over as Operation Mercy director and wasn’t happy with the idea of me travelling alone to Afghanistan, particularly as the Taliban had only just been defeated. Nor was it possible
for Madrim to come, as Uzbeks were still not allowed across the border for fear that they might become radicalised in the process. I was also meant to be orientating Matthias, a new volunteer from Germany who had just arrived and was completing his language course in Tashkent. We decided that Matthias would travel with me, receiving basic orientation on the way. He was thrilled at the prospect,
keen for adventure.

* * *

A week later at the Afghan embassy I received my passport with a new visa stamped in upside down. I asked if this would be a problem, and the official grinned, apologised, and stuck in another one. I watched him writing backwards in swirling Dari, like Arabic, and asked him to write down the name of our workshop and Khiva, as we wanted to repeat this on graph
paper, producing a signature that could be woven into each of our carpets. Happy to help, he wished me a safe journey.

‘It is safe to travel there now, isn’t it?’ I asked, getting up to leave.

‘Safe? Of course it is safe!’ he assured me. ‘Afghanistan has always been safe!’

6

Madder from Mazar

Synthetic dyes contain just one colour. But in madder there is red, of course, but also blue and yellow are in there as well. It makes it softer and at the same time more interesting.

—Natural dye specialist Harald Boehmer

Everything was organised. We’d asked the UN to put our names on the list of personnel allowed across the border and
flew to Termez, the southernmost city in Uzbekistan, just a few miles from the Afghan frontier.

Termez had a typically Soviet feel to it, with large, spacious roads, ordered flower beds, parks, ugly high-rise blocks of flats and an unattractive, modernist clock tower – mandatory for all aspirational Soviet cities. Despite the innate shabbiness of Soviet-era cities, Termez was prosperous
and the infrastructure laid down during the Soviet/Afghan war was still largely intact. During the war, convoys of tanks and lorries trundled across the ironically-named ‘Bridge of Friendship’ into northern Afghanistan. The war had dragged on, and more and more Soviet top brass were relocated to Termez from Moscow, ensuring that the city rose above the average standard of Uzbek provincial towns and
provided amenities for the swelling number of Russian skilled workers and army personnel.

While the upper echelons of the Soviet army were largely Russian, many of the soldiers were Muslim Tajiks, Turkmens and Uzbeks. Despite their common ethnicity and religion with the people of northern Afghanistan, most cultivated a passionate hatred for Afghans, having experienced the terror of guerrilla
warfare. I met a veteran once in a shared taxi from Urgench to Khiva and hoped he might regale me with stories from the war. Instead his eyes welled with unspoken pain. ‘I will not talk of these things. I cannot,’ he said.

* * *

Driving through the streets of Termez, we noticed how much hotter it was than Tashkent.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Matthias. ‘You said that wearing shorts
would be culturally insensitive, but everyone’s wearing them.’

We passed three burly European men in shorts and then another a bit further along, hand clamped to his Russian girlfriend’s bottom. They were Germans and the city was full of them.

‘All soldiers, here for Afghanistan,’ the taxi driver explained, pointing out the hotel where they stayed. Each morning, a squadron of planes
took off for northern Afghanistan, leaving off-duty soldiers to hang around, bored, in the tea houses and brothels. Their business had caused some prostitutes from Tashkent to relocate.

We left the wide streets of Termez behind us for the Bridge of Friendship, twenty minutes’ drive from the city centre. At the first checkpoint we could see the Amu River a mile or so ahead of us. It was much
larger here than in Khorezm, where its waters had already been leeched by the Turkmen canal and wasteful irrigation. This was the mighty Oxus immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold. The lush irrigated fields on the Uzbek side contrasted with the barren desert just over the river – our first view of Afghanistan. Although it was only ten o’clock, the sun was already beating down and Matthias
was turning pink.

‘You did remember to bring a hat with you?’ I asked. ‘I know I reminded you.’

Matthias contradicted all German stereotypes; he was disorganised, laid-back and always happy to stop for a chat with whoever he happened to meet. Having forgotten to bring a hat, he improvised with a paper one made from a newspaper, before approaching the first checkpoint, smiling. The
guard looked dubiously at Matthias and his paper hat. Clearly we had not made a professional first impression.

‘Your visas are in order, but you are not on the list. You cannot come further,’ was the guard’s clipped response.

‘But we must be on the list,’ I replied. ‘We spoke to Anvar from the UN earlier this week and informed him of our trip. He said that he would put us on the list.’

‘You are not on the list.’

‘So, what does that mean? Who do we need to speak to about this? Where is Anvar? Can you call him?’

He shook his head.

‘OK, how do we get to Anvar’s office? Where does he work?’ I asked.

The guard gestured vaguely back in the direction of Termez and then turned his attention to a large convoy of SUVs speeding across the Bridge of Friendship
in the distance and rapidly approaching the checkpoint. The windows were all reflective glass and the vehicles had no number plates. The guard waved them on as we leapt out of their way. They hadn’t been stopped once on their way into the country; rumours abounded of the Uzbek government’s involvement with the warlord General Dostum’s sideline in heroin-trafficking. It seemed typical of Uzbekistan
that a large convoy of mafia-like vehicles could be waved through unchecked while two NGO workers – one of them sporting a paper hat – were treated as a potentially menacing threat.

An hour or so later we found the UN office and Anvar. He was dealing with a Danish cyclist who had assumed that he could cross the Bridge of Friendship, having obtained an Afghan visa. The crestfallen cyclist
was gradually accepting that he would have to change his route, as only journalists and NGO workers on the UN list were allowed across the bridge at that point. Anvar had forgotten to add our names to his list and called through to the checkpoint informing them.

We returned, delayed but triumphant, and presented our passports. This time the problem was with a different list.

‘Operation
Mercy, Operation Mercy,’ murmured the guard as he scanned down the list. ‘No, it is not here.’

‘But we must be. We’re part of the NGO consortium.’

The guard was losing patience. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘Mercy Corps.’

‘But we’re not with Mercy Corps, we’re with Operation Mercy.’

‘Do you want to go to Afghanistan?’ he asked irritably and wrote us down as Mercy Corps.

We continued
to the next checkpoint, passing two Western women coming in the other direction who were removing their headscarves with an air of newly acquired freedom. Here we were accosted by a large, Soviet-looking matriarch in a lab coat: ‘Do you have AIDS? No? Do you have a temperature? No? Do you feel sick? No? Then you may proceed.’

We finally arrived at the bridge itself, hot and hungry. There
was a slight breeze from the river, taking the edge off the heat, and under the bridge was a large expanse of emerald-green reeds filled with bee-eaters and other birds. There were no vehicles crossing, and in the tranquillity it was hard to believe the role this bridge had played in the horrors of the Soviet/Afghan war. We ate some sandwiches, walked across the bridge and surreptitiously took photos
in the middle.

On the Afghan side there was no one around, but after some meandering through empty customs rooms we found a customs officer enjoying a lunchtime nap. We coughed politely, announcing ourselves. He woke, sized me up, and without a word took my water bottle and started to drink from it. We handed him our passports, which he stamped, and we were ushered out. After three hours
of bureaucracy on the Uzbek side, the Afghan side took us less than ten minutes. My water bottle, kept by the guard, seemed a small price to pay.

Leaving the customs office, we found ourselves in the sleepy little town of Hairatan. Matthias watched our luggage while I went in search of taxis. Passing men of varying ages wore long beards, turbans and
shelwar kamiz
, baggy cotton pants covered
with a knee-length top; and a woman – I presumed – walked by, shrouded in a dirty blue burka. A mere river and checkpoints separated two very different worlds.

Above me was a large, hand-painted poster of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous Tajik warlord who had organised resistance to the Soviet occupation. Revered by the people of northern Afghanistan, his assassination by Al Qaeda operatives
posing as journalists had made him into a modern-day martyr. Underneath, written in English: ‘Masud was the unique man that we cannot find him anymore.’

A little further on was a group of taxi drivers and we soon set off, passing a long caravan of camels – our Turkmen driver bemused at our excitement. The town gave way to huge swirling dunes that engulfed the road in places, forcing us off.
An elderly man in a ragged shelwar kamiz, painfully thin, dug half-heartedly at one of the larger dunes with a tiny spade.

The taxi driver offered to take us to a nearby hot spring, perhaps noting our generally dishevelled appearance, and veered sharply off the road and down a dust track. A bubbling pool of chemical-green, sulphurous water was siphoned in rusting pipes to mud-brick cubicles.
The water was a little too hot, but we stripped off and washed ourselves and our clothes, the arid air sure to dry them quickly. We continued refreshed and smelling powerfully of bad eggs, the driver explaining that this had once been a popular spot with a larger pool nearby that was now booby-trapped and in ruins.

A checkpoint bristling with weapons gave way to a vast tent city. Refugees
ran to the road pleading for alms, but our driver sped up. I asked him to stop but he said we would be mobbed if we did. Matthias opened the window and threw out the remains of our food bag. It was fought over in the cloud of dust we left behind. A year later, the same site was completely empty and I wondered if I’d imagined the endless rows of UNHCR tents that had stood there before.

We
stopped for a pee next to a large sand dune which Matthias began to climb until the driver made a sweeping gesture over the area and mimed mines exploding. Half an hour later we reached the outskirts of Mazar. Each passing vehicle was part of a daring competition to fit as many passengers in, on, or around it as possible. We passed a car, the same make as ours, with a group of men huddled on the
roof rack, the boot open, filled with more men and two sheep, and the inside a mass of burkas pressed up against the windows. I looked guiltily at our back seat, empty apart from Matthias and a small bag.

A van drove by blaring music, something banned during Taliban rule. Its roof was crammed with men in their shelwar kamiz, singing, clapping and shimmying their shoulders. Two of them played
along to the music with round, hand-held drums and the women below smiled and sang, gazing out of the window, their burkas thrown back. They were on their way to or from a wedding. I smiled and they waved at me, singing more raucously. They didn’t seem to notice or resent our near-empty back-seat.

The pot-holed roads of Uzbekistan felt silken compared to the craters we juddered around and
occasionally through in Mazar. Horses and traps, covered in pompoms and bells, managed to negotiate the craters with ease. SUVs muscled past them, property of drug barons and foreign NGOs. Open sewers swarming with flies ran down each road, flanked by concrete walls, pock-marked with battle scars. The air was thick with dust, muting the colours, until a shaft of evening sun through the pines transformed
everything to shimmering bronze.

Most of the foreign staff at the NGO compound we were staying in were away, although Helga – a German who’d lived in Samarkand previously – was waiting to welcome us. We were greeted at the gate by a
chowkidor
– ubiquitous in Afghanistan and Pakistan and acting as a watchman, caretaker and general dogsbody. I knew three of the foreign staff who had previously
worked in Uzbekistan. Helga came to the door, adjusting her veil, and welcomed us inside.

‘I shouldn’t really entertain you by myself as you’re men, but Rob and the others are away, so our chowkidors will just have to understand!’ she said.

Helga was thrilled to have another German staying and happily welcomed me as a non-American, feeling the cultural strain within their operations
as the only European. The foreign staff spent a lot of time together and all had to live in compounds, which Helga was finding a challenge.

‘Of course, I knew about the restriction of freedom for women here, even Western women, so I was expecting that. But you know, what I really miss is being part of the community. Why do I have to have a driver, and these chowkidors, and live and work
in this compound which is like a prison for me now? Before, in Samarkand, I lived with an Uzbek family and I felt as if I was really living in Uzbekistan and not in this foreigner bubble. You know what I really miss too? It’s just sitting outside under the persimmon tree in our garden in Samarkand, maybe reading a book or watching television with my host-family. Here, we are in Afghanistan, but at
the same time we are not in Afghanistan at all. We live in our own gated little world!’

There were few foreigners who managed to escape their compounds and integrate with the community, though families with children found compounds particularly claustrophobic and often became more relaxed about security risks. One family who’d lived in Kabul during the civil war allowed their teenage children
to play in the walled garden if shooting and shelling could be heard, but they had to come inside when bullets actually whizzed overhead. I expect they had other house rules as well, such as whose turn it was to help with the washing-up.

That night we enjoyed a delicious Afghan meal cooked by one of the chowkidors and eaten sitting on the floor around a plastic picnic cloth. The lights were
on, but as dim as candle-light as the wattage all over the city was low. We were to sleep in the compound basement, which was the coolest part of the building. No one had ever really used their basements for anything other than storage until heavy gunfire made them the safest part of the house to sleep. Soon people realised how much cooler they were, and often moved their bedrooms down. We fell
asleep to the sound of distant gunfire.