The World is a Carpet (29 page)

For months I had tried to journey down this road in a truck that carried carpets to Pakistan. No truck driver would take me. Explanations were many: the road was unsafe for me and the drivers did not want to be responsible for my life; a female passenger, even one in a burqa, would attract attention and make the road unsafe for them; they did not intend to pay export duties on their cargo and worried that I might rat them out. I ended up traveling the carpet route without carpets, in an old Mercedes sedan with Zubair and Isan, two young Kabuli men who were close friends and made the trip frequently to visit relatives in Peshawar. We left Kabul in late morning because trucks were not allowed to enter the capital past sunrise, which meant that later in the day there were fewer NATO supply trucks on the highway. NATO supply trucks on this stretch of the Grand Trunk Road tended to blow up.

We drove past Ghazi Stadium and through Khurd Kabul and down the mountains past brown Kuchi tents anchored alongside the Kabul River that looked like ancient and wise simurgh birds resting with outstretched wings. Past listing flagpoles aflutter with strips of gold and pink and green and purple cloth that canted out of merestones, mementos of some nameless pilgrims who now were remembered only by their deaths on this road. Past two men asleep on a gryke covered with a straw mat, in the shadow of a tractor-trailer that idled on the shoulder. Through an enfilade of coulees that the river had whittled out in a succession of strange and sinister shapes, some of which ran so narrow and deep that even with the November sun near zenith you could not see the stream. Then the rims of the escarpment parted again. In the dark gulley below, a harrier swooped over argent fields of cauliflower.

At Surobi, a town of rifted rimland commanded that year mostly by the powerful and megalomaniac insurgent chieftain Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the gorge broadened into a wide valley to make room for the Panjshir River to join the Kabul, and all that water stilled before a hydroelectric dam into a mirror of blue. Tiny fingerlike streams rimmed with yellowing poplars combed through quilted fields of potato and cabbage and winter wheat. The town itself clasped on to granite and marl at an elevation nearly three thousand feet lower than the capital’s. Snow had not reached here; it rarely did. On the high south bank of the dammed river, mortars sandbagged on the watchtowers of an Afghan army outpost pointed at a lavender comb ridge across the valley. At the town bazaar, pomegranates sat in cannonball piles beneath sparkling scarves for women and bolts of brown corduroy for men’s winter
shalwar kameez
and plastic window sheeting. Three or four men leaned out of the rolled-down windows of two pickup trucks and shucked sunflower seeds and spat the shells upon the ground. They were waiting for a busload of Surobi pilgrims scheduled to return from the hajj that afternoon and had bedecked their trucks with garlands of fluorescent plastic flowers in celebration. They watched with stony faces a caravan of eighteen-wheelers loaded with armored Humvees as it chugged uphill, toward Kabul, past the spot where in November of 2001 a group of gunmen had ambushed four Western journalists riding in a convoy, ordered them out of their cars, and shot them dead. Their blood, too, absorbed by the road that knew no heartsink. On a switchback beside a Soviet T-52 tank mounted on a stone pedestal—a celebration of whose bloody victory, whose decimation?—three boys stood holding leis of fresh-caught carp for sale. Their eyes impassive. They had been standing there forever.

The road narrowed again, rushing east, downhill. There were signs, in Pashto and English.
SHALA KAMAR. MOHAMMAD ALI KAS. KA KAS
. More tiny settlements along the river road, safeguarding more unnamed bloody memories. The mountains flattened out, their shadowfolds softened, the silty river running through them widened and slowed down once more, flanked now by low ribbonlike escarpments on the north side and tamarisk and saxaul groves to the south. At a speed bump fashioned from a tank tread and a length of rope, a handful of old men chewed their gums and collected alms for the construction of a mosque. At Khairo Khel the river split briefly into several sashaying streams, then pooled again. Black-and-white Kunari cows grazed on feldspar banks and bougainvillaea gushed bright pink from the mud walls of compounds. Sun beat through the car windows. We took off our sweaters.

Near the Darunta Dam, which the Soviets had built outside Jalalabad in the 1960s, the road ducked into a tunnel and emerged inside an emerald city. Vines climbed up and down date palms and swung from tamarisks and pines. In the clearings, boys who were wealthy enough not to have to work played cricket on lawns. Men napped on charpoy beds beneath eucalyptus trees, and the pieced green sunlight rebated from the mirrors sewn into their skullcaps and vests. Water buffalo in their ancient indigo skin waded through paddies of sugarcane, and children thrust plastic bags of chopped cane into the windows of cars stuck in traffic jams at intersections that suffocated with exhaust from all manner of trucks—pug-nosed pre–World War II Bedfords, fifty-year-old Volvos, Soviet Kamazes, all bejeweled with elephantine carcanets and torsades the width of a human thigh and braided tow chains, and painted with pointillist swans and waterfalls and sun-drenched pastorals and doe-eyed maidens and turbaned horsemen ascending turquoise and fuchsia mountains on white stallions.

“Maybe some carpets in these,” Zubair said.

“Maybe opium,” Isan responded.

•   •   •

The Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan lay fifty tamarisk-lined miles east of Jalalabad. The smoggy Spin Ghar Range friezed the valley. To the east lay the entrance to the Khyber Pass—Kipling’s “sword cut through the mountains,” or, in the words of the American traveler-journalist Lowell Thomas, “the funnel through which India’s ravishers have poured ever since history began,” though, in fact, many conquerors of India had preferred, like Alexander the Great, the more manageable albeit more circuitous southern routes until Babur’s grandson Akbar built the first road through the Khyber Pass in 1581. Thomas journeyed through the pass in 1922, three years after Afghan independence, which the British border guards on the eastern side of the border, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on India’s North-West Frontier, observed by planting a sign that proclaimed:
IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO CROSS THIS BORDER INTO AFGHAN TERRITORY
.

The border crossing on the Afghan side was grimy and cluttered, and sprawled for miles. It offered everything and nothing, the way borders do: cheap nylon prayer rugs and counterfeit alcohol, pyramids of apples white with road dust and stacked directly on the ground upon black veins of engine oil and pyramids of soda cans stacked on plywood shelves next to ghetto blasters pumping out Hindi pop, auto parts new and wrested out of cars lost to unmentioned accidents. Cliques of stubbled taxi drivers with sour breath called, “To Jalalabad—to Jalalabad—to Jalalabad—to Jalalabad!” There were women in burqas and high heels, and women in dark embroidered veils and many layers of mirrored and laced Kuchi skirts, and matrons in long beige headscarves that trailed on the ground, and there was one woman in skinny jeans and knee-high high-heeled boots and a stiff perm. Sooty lace bras for sale lay on display on patches of gravel, and cattle and some camels grazed on petrol-soaked grass slow and oblivious because animals know no abstract boundaries drawn by men. Coteries of American soldiers in body armor and with rifles at the ready surveyed pilgrims from behind reflective sunglasses, and some of them stopped male pedestrians and scanned their retinae with handheld contraptions that looked like cell phones. Boys with angry jaws zigzagged in sandals or barefoot through the crowd and pushed low wooden and metal wheelbarrows loaded with vegetables, or with blackened and moldy palms of tiny Jalalabad bananas, or with old men or women of all ages with and without infants who crouched on thin mattresses thrown on the bottoms of the carts; and whole families inched on foot toward the border crossing, toward the promise of medical treatment or reunion or comfort or simply of something other than this, other than Afghanistan—for above all else, this frontier, like most frontiers in the world, offered promises, promises often inarticulate and distorted, shiny and improbable baubles, hopes of respite from war and disease, half-clandestine and barely contained expectations of sudden and semilicit enrichment, possibilities of journeys taken and not taken, of journeys taken in dreams only, journeys that have turned or would yet turn to nightmares. Promises hung over the Khyber Pass so thick they obfuscated and warped the very nature of the border itself, and if everybody’s eyes watered, it was from the density of chance and hope and desire in the air as much as from the soot and diesel fumes disgorged by scores and scores of trucks.

The trucks idled on road shoulders for almost a mile in ranks of three and four in both directions. During the day, the border was open for pedestrian traffic only; the trucks crossed only at night; no other vehicles were allowed across. On the northern shoulder of the road, facing west, a convoy of twenty or thirty oil tankers that had crossed from Pakistan at night was getting ready to pull out toward Kabul that afternoon. Cross-legged on top of each tanker sat a man, a sentry on the suicide mission to watch the mountains for terrorists once the convoy began to move.

“And if he sees someone?”

“Then he bangs on the tanker and maybe the driver hears the banging.”

“And then what?”

Zubair shrugged.

“Nothing. These men on top are going to be the first to die.”

On the southern shoulder of the road, the Volvos and the Kamazes and the Bedfords stood mostly cargoless. Two hundred of them, maybe three, waiting for the border crossing to open for truck traffic. Their drivers sat in the cabins or squatted in the shade of the massive tires or stood smoking cigarettes with other drivers or slept atop the trailers. We walked the length of the line bound for Pakistan twice and asked all the awake drivers we saw whether they were carrying carpets. No luck.

In an air-conditioned room that smelled like chocolate, an Afghan customs press officer said eight or ten trucks that carried carpets passed through his border each month. Each paid a five-dollar processing fee to customs, plus a tax that equaled two percent of the carpets’ estimated worth. The tax, the officer explained, was a mandatory charitable donation to the Red Crescent. He spat on his fingers and separated a blank sheet of letter paper from a stack and wrote: “5 $ USD” and, below it, “2 %.” He underscored both lines twice, handed the paper to me, and turned to a petitioner in a black striped suit at his desk. “Go away,” the press officer said. “And next time do not come back without a present.”

A fifteen-foot concrete blast wall surrounded the customs building and a conglomeration of metal containers next to it. Each of those also was individually bunkered behind concrete barriers and giant sandbags. The containers belonged to American soldiers. Latter-day centurions embattled at the gateway to a restive province that was slipping away from them the way it had slipped away from legionnaires for generations. A concrete wall in front of one container was stenciled with quasi-Gothic black letters that spelled
THE CASTLE
. I stopped a sergeant with the taro-leaf shoulder patch of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, stationed in Hawaii. The sergeant’s name tag read:
STORY
. His face was hidden behind his sunglasses and his helmet and the helmet’s chinstrap. Our conversation was brief.

“Haven’t seen any carpets,” he said. “Anything else I can do for you, ma’am?”

And he walked away.

W
e spent that night in Jalalabad, at the house of Isan’s uncle. The uncle lived near a small bazaar with his two wives and the several wives of his brothers, who were businessmen and spent most of their time on the road. Through the heavy living room curtain we could hear the patio tiles ring with the bare feet of the women and their many children, with the clank of aluminum washbasins, with splashes of water that ran from a single brass spout. The children peeked into the living room and whispered to one another, and after a while, some of them came in and perched on mattresses in the corner farthest away from me and the men—except for a bold ten-year-old girl named Kamrana. Kamrana sat next to me and spoke to me in Farsi and sign language, and drew elephants and princesses in my notepad. The princesses had long eyelashes and heart-shaped lips.