A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (19 page)

Summer was proving a trying time for most of the weavers. They were used to a domestic routine that allowed for siestas in summer, and would often nod off during lunch breaks, which became more and more extended. We discussed the possibility of having proper breaks after lunch and working later into the evening,
but most women were expected home promptly to prepare the evening meal. Some of the girls were still industrious but some were getting downright lazy. Ulugbibi the usta also decided that summer was a time to put one’s feet up and snooze. She was careful not to do this in my presence, but on mornings when I was at the Operation Mercy office she would intersperse napping with tirades at the weavers
to work harder. I heard about this from dark Nazokat – never far from trouble – who had challenged Ulugbibi to do some work herself. Now they were no longer on speaking terms. Clearly there needed to be some kind of working incentive for the weavers, and the obvious one was financial.

I discussed the matter with Madrim, inviting Matthias to join us. We worked out a new wage system that paid
by the length of carpet woven each month. This would provide an incentive to weave more, and also meant that the wages could increase above the measly apprentice rate we had started with. I wanted the wages to be fair but our carpets to be competitively priced.

It was difficult to know what a fair wage was. We were paying more than a teacher or nurse received, but then their wages weren’t
enough to live on and they supplemented their income with bribes. Hospital workers simply filched medicine and equipment, while teachers arranged a more elaborate system. Each class elected a go-between, and this student then haggled with the teacher over how much the class needed to pay communally to receive favourable marks. It removed the teacher from the unsavoury business of extorting money,
leaving this for the students themselves to work out.

Our new wage system proved an effective motivator, and soon a race was on as two of the looms neared completion of their first carpets. Whenever I talked about the carpets being cut from the loom, I unconsciously sliced at the tip of my forefinger, the way Khivans did when referring to circumcision. Soon the weavers were joking about
our first
surnat toy
or circumcision party, wondering which loom would be given the honour. I asked Madrim how we should celebrate our first carpet circumcision, but he was preoccupied with his own preparation for the real circumcision of his youngest son, Husnaddin.

I’d been made to watch the video of Jalaladdin’s circumcision along with that of his two cousins. The young boys first paraded
around the walled city wearing mini-robes and polyester turbans. Back at the house, a jester entertained them, presenting each boy with a
chiman
– a mobile of sorts, hung with sweets and small toys. Once these were removed, the chiman hung outside for all to know that a circumcision had taken place. I had assumed that the video would tail off at this point, but no. Each boy was shown being brought
into a room and held down on a corpuche, writhing as the barber approached. The camera lens narrowly avoided a spattering of blood, the whole procedure filmed from close range. I blanched at the howls of each of the boys as my Uzbek family guffawed at my squeamishness. ‘This is the best bit! Jalaladdin cries like a girl. Look at him wailing!’ yelled Malika as Jalaladdin launched himself at her.
Madrim asked if I would come and take photos of Husnaddin’s circumcision and to give him moral support. He had struggled to hold back the tears watching his first son under the knife.

The following Saturday I arrived at Madrim’s house to find corpuches laid out against every available wall space. I was ushered into a room of male relatives, where the status of my own foreskin became the
chief topic of discussion until I managed to extricate myself and help serving tea.

Husnaddin seemed a little shy at all the attention he was receiving, wandering around in his little robe and turban. The barber arrived and Madrim looked nervously at me. Mehribon retired to a different room with the women, where she was given a bowl of oil in which she immersed her forefinger to assuage
her son’s pain. Meanwhile, Husnaddin’s trousers were removed and Madrim’s relatives pinned him down as he began to sob. The barber prepared his kit, clamping the penis with a bamboo peg, leaving only the foreskin exposed. Husnaddin wailed loudly and with a lightning guillotine motion the barber swooped his knife across the bamboo peg, cleanly severing the foreskin.

Husnaddin shrieked, Madrim
left the room, and I took photos. Men waved banknotes in Husnaddin’s face, congratulating him on becoming a man as he sobbed inconsolably. A toy tractor appeared, and a new school bag. The barber propped cushions around the mattress and draped a large blanket over them, careful not to touch the freshly tinctured wound. Mehribon was allowed in, prompting a fresh bout of sobbing, and relatives
filed past, congratulating Husnaddin and depositing banknotes around his pillow. It was Mehribon who paid the barber and, in return, was given a seeping red piece of cloth containing her son’s foreskin. She would let the foreskin dry and keep it until Husnaddin was grown up, one day sewing it into the stuffing of his wedding mattress.

* * *

A week or so later we celebrated our first
carpet circumcision. After a race between the Benaki and Shirin weavers, the Benaki design was finished just a few days earlier. Fatima finished weaving the last few lines of the kilim fringe as we piled into her cell to watch. ‘Jacob Bai Hoja workshop, Khiva’, helpfully written out in Dari Persian script by the Afghan embassy in Tashkent, had been woven in as our signature. Later we were told that
we’d written ‘beaver’ or ‘weaver’ instead of ‘Khiva’.

Safargul pointed to the place where Fatima should make the first cut, leaving enough of the warps to make a generous fringe. The severed warp threads pinged, shooting into the air and sending up plumes of dust as we cheered and applauded. Dragging the completed carpet outside, we were able to examine it in greater detail. It was lumpy
and dirty and needed a good wash, but the colours were good and the design stunning. It wasn’t perfect, being wider at one end, and there were a number of mistakes running down the side where Sharafat had worked. For a first attempt, though, I was really pleased. We dipped into our ice-cream fund as Fatima and her fellow weavers knotted the fringe.

Madrim flipped the rug over and lit a nozzle
attached to a rubber hose and the nearest gas outlet. Running the flame over the underside, he scorched away the excess fluff to leave a clean, smooth finish. During the warmer months we were able to wash the rugs in the nearest canal, issuing a strict ration of shampoo and conditioner, as the girls used it to wash their hair on the sly. In winter, the washing process was more unpleasant, pouring
buckets of icy water over each rug and then scrubbing on top of it.

Our first rug was now ready for trimming, just as the second rug was cut from the loom. It was a horrible job, leaving blistered fingers no matter how many rags were wrapped around them. The girls sat on top of the rug with a pole underneath one segment, trimming the excess pile and working their way steadily from one end
to the other. The rug needed a final wash in cream of tartar and, once dry, lay glossy and lustrous in the courtyard. I circled it, watching the colours darken. As with all hand-woven carpets, the pile stood at an angle, reflecting light on one side and absorbing it on the other. Picking it up and shaking a corner, I sent shimmering ripples down the rug, relishing the luxuriant, supple feel of the
silk. It was beautiful – but could we sell it?

9

A carpet called Shirin

When you see with the eyes of your head, you are no different from an animal. When you see with the eyes of your heart, all spaces are open to you.

—Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet

Our third carpet, named Shirin, lay washed and gleaming in the sun. Shirin told many stories, not all of them revealed at a glance or even on closer inspection.
Admiring tourists could know little of Shirin’s complex journey: its silk warp and weft produced by villagers paid a pittance for their labours under the oppressive state monopoly; the warm brown of its border created from walnut husks, collected by farm children in a village near Shakrisabz; the yellow scrolling vines dyed with dried pomegranate skins; the bright red diamonds at its centre
coloured from the roots of the scrawny-looking madder plant grown in Afghanistan; and the rich indigo of the field design, produced from crushed and fermented leaves harvested in southern India.

Even the name Shirin held secrets of its own. Some might have thought we dedicated the carpet to the tall, fiercely loyal weaver who had laboured for more than four months with her sister Zamireh
and her deaf friend Iroda – squabbling, gossiping and joking as nimble fingers flew. They wouldn’t know that the name referred to a different Shirin, a tragic heroine of Persian literature, pictured in an exquisitely detailed miniature as she sat on a richly coloured carpet, awaiting her beloved Husrov. The design gave no indication that it had lain dormant for half a millennium on a sheet of burnished
vellum, painstakingly painted in ground lapis, white lead and minium; nor the changing hands through which the book had passed on its journey from Herat to London. A simple glance revealed little of the efforts that Zamireh had made to transcribe the Tumurid design onto graph paper, or her sense of outrage when she discovered it stolen by Ulugbeg, our rival from the Bukharan workshop.

None
of these stories, woven into the very fabric of the carpet, was evident to a casual observer. Yet there was one story that played itself out quite clearly: row by row the florets became increasingly elongated, distorting the original design. It was this story I was most concerned with.

Shirin and her sister Zamireh squatted beside the carpet with Iroda as I scrabbled over it with a tape
measure.

‘Here’ – I pointed to a place in the second row of florets – ‘this is where everything starts going wrong. Exactly when we introduced the new wage system.’

It was my fault. Originally we had intended to count the number of vertical knots on the carpet each month and then subtract last month’s total, multiplying this by the number of horizontal knots to arrive at an accurate
total from which we could work out a fair wage. I had crawled under one of the looms, trying to count each knot, which appeared on the reverse of the carpet as a rough square. Emerging dusty and with a crick in my neck, I had decided that maybe we could cut corners and simply measure the length of the carpet and multiply this by the number of horizontal knots.

The crafty weavers soon realised
that larger twists of silk woven into chunky rectangular knots beefed up the length of the carpet, increasing their wages and stretching the design in the process.

Zamireh protested that the problem was with the graph paper, but was silenced once the carpet was flipped over and the rectangular knots were plain to see. Other carpets still on the loom were similarly stretched; the only solution
was to squeeze under the looms each month, counting the total of vertical knots and working out wages from there.

I planned to introduce the concept of a fixed price for our rugs, knowing how trying many uninitiated tourists found the process of haggling. Zafar the wood-carver offered wildly differing prices to tourists, which I felt was unfair until he pointed out how easy it was to distinguish
between a backpacker on a tight budget and a member of a tour group with all the latest camera paraphernalia. Surely it was fairer, he argued, to fix the price according to the affluence of the buyer?

As news of our finished rugs spread, the attitude of local guides changed considerably. Before, they’d been happy to sit and smoke while I gave their group a free tour of the workshop; now
that there was the potential for money to be made, they were keen for us to make a sale – expecting a 10 per cent cut.

Ulugbeg told me how the system worked in Bukhara. Guides released their groups for an afternoon of shopping, gathering again before dinner. At this point the guides feigned interest in everyone’s purchases, noting prices and where each item had been bought, before surreptitiously
doing the rounds, demanding 20 per cent from each stallholder. The woodwork shop installed in the madrassah next to ours paid hefty commission to the guides and received all the tour groups as a result, which left the better artisans struggling, the tourists with mediocre products and the guides making a small fortune.

Considering we were adding only 25 per cent profit, I had no intention
of giving 10 per cent away. Nor was I stuck behind the language barrier like most sellers – a point not lost on many of the guides, who often resented my presence. After making it clear that there would be no commissions, we received such vitriol from the guides, with threats of boycott, that we capitulated, giving $10 to $20 commission, depending on the carpet size. This worked well with the Khiva
guides, but those from Bukhara and Samarkand were used to their 10 or 20 per cent cut. They would still bring their groups to our workshop for a free tour, but would inform them that carpets in Samarkand were much better and cheaper. Catching a French-speaking guide in the act, I butted in, explaining to his group that the Afghan factory in Samarkand paid all guides 10 per cent for every purchase.
He never returned.

A group of Belgians arrived at the workshop, without a guide, and decided to buy the carpet called Shirin. They were the first of many customers who desperately wanted a rug without ready cash to pay for it. I explained that we couldn’t take credit cards, as this would entail a time-consuming attempt to extract our money from the bank – impossible without paying a hefty
bribe. Instead, we asked customers to pay what they could and take the carpet on trust, completing their payment in Tashkent – where larger hotels had cashpoints – by leaving the money at the Operation Mercy office. It wasn’t a very professional way of doing things, but no one ever abused the honour system – extended only to those we deemed trustworthy.

Toychi bundled the carpet into a bazaar
bag while Madrim wrote out export documents. I handed the rug over with a sudden rush of mixed emotions. This was our first sale and a cause for celebration, but I felt as if I were giving away one of my babies, thinking of all it had taken to bring this carpet into existence.

‘You will take good care of it, won’t you?’ I implored. ‘Remember, silk doesn’t have the bounce that wool does,
so make sure you don’t leave furniture on it. You should walk on it, though, as the friction of your feet polishes it and fluffs open the knots.’

I was sure there was more I could have said, but the Belgians just nodded indulgently and assured me that the carpet was in good hands. They took photos of themselves with the weavers and promised to send back a picture of the rug in its new home.
The whole workshop came out to see them go. Madrim gave my shoulder a squeeze and I felt stupid for getting emotional.

* * *

September and October were the most popular months for tourism, and a time when small hills of melons were on sale in the bazaar. The days were warm and the nights crisp. This pleasant weather ended abruptly in late October when a few days of rain and cloud sent
the temperature plummeting. The flimsy wooden doors of each madrassah cell were no match for the icy draughts, and we needed some form of insulation. I set off with Madrim to enlist the help of Khiva’s last felt-maker.

We were greeted by the felt-maker himself – a diminutive old man with a flowing white beard, stooping heavily. I shook his extended hand and he yanked mine sharply, knocking
me off balance.

‘You see!’ he cackled, ‘I may be 80 but I’m still strong as an ox! Just you ask my wife. Every night I’m ready and she doesn’t have the strength to fight me off anymore!’

We smiled weakly at this revelation as he beckoned us in. His wife had positioned herself over a beshik cradle and was breast-feeding her grandchild. Many village grandmothers still lactated, and grandchildren
as old as ten or eleven often came for a cuddle and comfort feed.

‘I’m the last felt usta, you know,’ the old man explained. ‘My sons, they’re all lazy. None of them want to make felt when they can run off to Russia every summer. What will happen when God takes me? Who will you go to then?’

In his workshop behind the house, tufts of wool were laid out on the floor on top of a large
sheet. Most of the wool was a natural cream or dark grey, but some had been dyed a lurid magenta, to which the usta proudly drew our attention. He explained that the clumps of raw wool, laid out in a rough pattern, were rolled up in the sheet and covered in boiling water. The sheet, folded into a reed mat, was then rolled continually for a couple of hours as the shrinking wool fibre matted, creating
felt. This would keep the draughts out nicely, and we ordered enough mats to cover each cell door.

Once nailed in place, the felt insulated the cells effectively but left a pervading odour of sheep. Now I understood why felt alone was enough to wall the yurts used by nomads in winter, keeping out the sharpest wind and cold. According to Gustav Krist, the infamous
kara kurt
or black widow
spider never ventured onto felt, making it the ideal ground-sheet for camping.

It was now the end of 2002, and Barry emailed announcing his return to Uzbekistan and plans to visit the workshop. I wondered how he’d react to our ‘rebel rug’, now one third complete. We would just have to let him rant and then get on with life as normal.

On his arrival he wanted a tour of the premises,
and surprised us all by complimenting us on our progress and admiring the finished carpets. Assuming that his approval would be short-lived, I reluctantly led him into the weaving cell where the ‘rebel rug’ was taking shape.

‘Please, ask the girls to leave,’ said Barry, his eyes glued to the rebel rug.

Galvanising myself for a huge row, I asked the weavers, who were nervously exchanging
glances, to step outside.

‘That’s better,’ Barry continued. ‘I just needed some space and quiet to really enjoy this magnificent design.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. Barry was transfixed, examining the borders and then the field and comparing it with the laminated graph-paper pattern. He asked me to inform the workers how pleased he was with our progress, so much better than the Bukhara
workshop. This last comment was particularly well received, marking a turning point in my relationship with Barry. We still had occasional disagreements, but a little praise had gone a long way to improving our working relationship.

* * *

A few weeks later the first really cold snap arrived, with temperatures down to –15°C at night. In timely fashion, there was also a gas cut for the
whole town. Uzbekistan curiously managed to export gas but never seemed to have enough for its own population, who shivered as the fat cats running the state gas company disappeared to Thailand for some winter sun. My Uzbek family colonised one room, where two electric heaters took the edge off the cold. Here, they ate, slept, bickered and watched TV. I was invited to join them, but opted for peace
over warmth. Sleep was possible only if I wore a woolly hat and snuggled under two duvets with a hot-water bottle. Each morning I began my winter routine, lifting weights to warm up a bit before jumping under the freezing cold shower just enough to lather up. As I’d discovered, most Uzbeks were unwilling to brave the perils of cold water – fearing immediate death – which meant the sickly-sweet
smell of unwashed bodies pervaded every crowded bus, train or building.

Our house wasn’t equipped for the cold at all, having been built in the Soviet heyday of cheap and plentiful gas supplies when women would leave their stoves on all day in order to economise on matches. Before the arrival of gas pipes in the 1960s, charcoal – scarce and expensive – was the main source of fuel. Houses
were built with a small living room in which everyone huddled together in winter. A small pile of burning charcoal kept the samovar brewing for hot bowls of green tea. In the centre of the floor was a depression in which a brazier of coals was placed. A low table stood over it, covered by a large quilt. Family members sat around the table wearing layers of robes, their nether regions covered by the
quilt and warmed by the brazier’s heat. At night, during particularly cold winters, it wasn’t unknown for whole families to freeze to death in their beds.

The gas cut meant that progress at the workshop ground to a halt. Madrim tried to coax a tiny flame under one of the cauldrons, but after a brief flicker there was nothing. The price of firewood rocketed. We had no choice but to buy a
donkey-cart’s-worth. While the weavers sat huddled at their looms, bundled in woollen shawls, gloves and headscarves, fogging the air with their breath, the expensive gas heaters that Barry had insisted on stood cold and redundant. We bought some simple electric heaters and promptly overloaded the electric circuits.

Power cuts were a fixture of life, although the walled city was generally
spared – tourism requiring a facade of development. Too many people trying to use electricity to heat rooms and cook, however, meant long cuts even in the walled city, so we gave everyone a week off while we looked for alternatives. The weavers were grateful, as Ramazan – the Uzbek pronunciation of Ramadan – was approaching, and they would be expected to cook huge evening banquets for their extended
families.