A Fort of Nine Towers (29 page)

“I wonder if I could work with her to learn a few things?” I said excitedly.

“Take an ablution, then you can work with her. Tie small knots, and don’t make mistakes. And don’t waste wool. These are her rules,
and she will let you work with her for as long as you want. But be careful, she can read your mind, too,” she said as she began sucking her water pipe once more.

“I never saw anyone take ablution to make a carpet.” I laughed. “I’m not praying or going to the mosque. I just want to tie a few knots with her.”

“That is her rule. If you want to work with her, respect her rules,” Mother said.

I went to their bathroom. I did the ablutions for my head and my hands, splashing the water above my wrists, almost to my elbows. I skipped those for my feet, since it was so cold. I went to the daughter’s loom and sat down next to her. When I picked up the hook, she grabbed it from me and she told me with hand gestures that my ablutions were not completed.

I went back to Mother and angrily asked whether her daughter was spying on me while I was taking my ablutions.

“I told you that she can read your mind,” she said, grinning. “She knows more than you think. Be honest and truthful with her.”

This time I took a complete ablution. I went back, sat down as before, and this time she let me work with her.

The minute I sat next to her, I felt something unusual, something inexpressible. Although I did not know as much about carpets then as I do now, the carpet on her loom was unlike any other I had ever seen. She had started with the basic geometric patterns that Turkmen people have woven for centuries. Inside each one was a small floral pattern like those that Iranian weavers have perfected. The scrolling vines and flowers just seemed to grow out of the geometrics and wind around them as if they were a trellis. Because she was using more than fifty colors, the flowers almost looked three-dimensional, like a wood carving.

After I tied a few knots I looked at her face, which was so beautiful. She had such transparent eyes that it seemed possible to look straight through them. Sometimes I found myself staring at her. This made her uneasy, and she narrowed her eyes, twisted her head away. It was her way of asking me not to stare at her.

Whenever I tried to tie knots fast like she did, she pressed on my
forehead with her index finger, smiled, and shook her head. She was telling me not to try to compete with her. I tried hard to be as fast, but it was impossible. She motioned for me to fill in the areas of a solid color, and showed me which shade to use.

I stopped going to the Hazrat Ali shrine except to pray on Fridays, and I forgot about my
gursai
friends. I had found someone who was quickly becoming as important to me as Grandfather and Wakeel.

Every night I told my family about the carpet weavers next door. My father was not interested. He was listening to the BBC, as always. But my aunt told me many things about them. She explained that a lot of the Turkmen people had come to Afghanistan when the Russians were making problems for them in their own country. And many others had been here from long before.

“They are the ones who brought carpet making to Afghanistan from Central Asia somewhere. That was centuries ago.”

“The best carpets made in Afghanistan are made by these people,” my mother added, “especially by the women.”

I wondered who was cooking for the kids, if they were all making carpets.

“They marry in their early teens, and become mothers of large families before they are thirty,” my aunt went on. “They spend most of their lives on their looms, from early childhood until they become grandmothers. They are always competing to see who is the best carpet maker. People tell me that they can tie as many as ten thousand knots a day,” my aunt said boastfully, as if she were one of them, “because they have small fingers.”

Every night, I had a dream about the young woman. I could hear her speaking very clearly to me then. Sometimes she teased me, and I teased her back. That never actually happened when I was sitting next to her. We were serious about our work. Though she was more than ten years older than I, it would have been unusual for an eleven-year-old boy like myself to be allowed to spend time alone with a young woman like her, at least among Pashtuns. But Turkmen, like the Hazaras, are more practical than strict. These people knew my
aunt well. She was highly respected throughout her neighborhood and was always doing kind things, such as bringing medicines to the neighbors when they were sick, though she had no medical training. They expected me to be as decent and polite as she was.

Whenever I needed to ask my teacher something, I just looked at her and she knew I had a question. The first time I asked one, I spoke very loudly. She smiled and let me know that I did not need to shout. She drew her finger across her lips, then pointed at her eyes and then my mouth, indicating that she could read my lips.

She conveyed information to me mostly with her hands, though she could make perhaps a dozen different sounds. In the first days before I understood her gestures, she sometimes got red with frustration when she was trying to tell me something, such as “Go and do your ablutions.” When I thought I had understood what she was saying, I would repeat it slowly to her. She would watch my lips. If she shook her head from side to side, I would have to try again.

I discovered that she did not like to be asked several questions at once. So when I did ask her a question, I waited until she was ready to answer it, even if that meant a few hours later, or a few days. Anyway, we could not talk much while we were working, because our hands were busy tying knots. But if she stopped to eat lunch, or when we had finished for the day and she was sending me home after the
muezzin
called the
azan
, then she would respond.

By the second week, I had to repeat what she said less and less often, maybe only once in five times. In the third week, it was almost as if we were talking normally. When I was with her, hours melted away, and then she was telling me that I had to go home so she could say her prayers. It was only when I looked out the window that I realized it was almost dark. Day after day went by this way. My parents were happy I had found a hobby where I could learn new things and enjoy my time, but they never said much about it. They were relieved that I was not wandering in the streets, making friends with boys whose families they did not know.

Strangely, my older sister had nothing to say about it either. But our cousins, who were the same ages as some of the kids in my
teacher’s family and knew them, often teased me. They whispered into my ears things like “I know you are in love with her,” as well as some other vulgar things that made me feel very shy. There were too many of them for me to challenge, so as soon as they started saying those things, I walked out of the room to their loud laughter. I turned red and could not dare to face them for hours.

One thing I wanted to know was how my teacher invented her designs. She explained that she studied many other carpets before she made a design of her own. When I asked whether she took the patterns from other carpets, she firmly shook her head “No.”

She then tried to tell me what she had in her mind when she was creating a design. But she could see that I did not understand what she meant. She took the hook she used for pulling the carpet threads through the strings of the loom and started drawing odd shapes in the dust of the courtyard. They looked almost like Chinese letters. I really did not know what they were.

“Are those some kind of patterns?” I asked, pointing first at what she had drawn, and then at a design on a carpet. She shook her head emphatically.

Suddenly I said, “Signs?” I do not know why, or where that word came from. But she smiled and nodded vigorously. She went on to convey to me that if I wanted to design carpets, I must never just copy. I should be creative, and there would be no limit to the designs I could invent.

I never really knew what she meant by “signs,” nor could I ever truly understand the connection between the shapes she drew in the dirt and the patterns she wove on the loom.

She taught me how to graph a design on paper. I explained to her I could weave a traditional large, octagonal, dark blue
fil poi
(elephant foot) motif from memory, having included one on my carpet that had hung in my old school, but she insisted that I use a graph until I had woven a pattern many times, especially when weaving a complicated design of my own. I never saw her use a graph herself, but it was a good lesson, and one that in time would help my family and me survive.

As I got better at tying knots, I began trying to compete with the other weavers my age, and the ones younger than I, in a friendly way. Maybe I was just trying to show off. I was faster than a few of them, and desperate for some kind of attention. My father did not even see me anymore. I wanted somebody to notice that I could do something well.

Whenever she saw that I was trying really hard, she looked at me and smiled. Sometimes my fingers got tired, but her smile was more precious to me than my hands. My hunger for it turned me into one of the fastest weavers in her house.

As I watched my teacher’s carpet take shape, I sometimes had dreams of Suleiman’s magic carpet at night. Suleiman, they said, was given so much power by Allah that not only was he very wise, he also could rule over the beasts, the evil spirits known as
jinns
, and other creatures that we cannot see. And he could order his carpet to lift from the earth and carry him anywhere he wanted to go. I wanted to go high in the sky and fly to beautiful places. But mostly I wanted to go up to the best kites, cut them, and bring them to our courtyard, so Wakeel and I could fly them.

On Fridays, she did not work and her family always had guests. Once I went, but she was very busy with other girls, laughing often. I felt jealous that they were with her and I could not be, and I ran out. The next Friday, she saw me and introduced me to them. I felt pleased that she had allowed me to meet them. But once I had done that, I felt shy to be with the women and excused myself and ran back to my aunt’s house. Anyway, my aunt always made a big lunch on Fridays.

On the other days, though, I was happy to eat with my teacher’s family. They ate at exactly 12:30 p.m., while in my aunt’s house there was no fixed time, which I never liked.

Everybody had a job. The boys prepared the eating cloth in the middle of the floor of a large room that had no loom. They spread the bread around the cloth along with plates, spoons, napkins. The girls brought the bowls of food from the kitchen.

We sat around one large cloth. Mother and the other adults all sat at one end. The boys sat along the sides, three or four eating from one bowl or a large plate. The girls sat from the middle to the bottom, doing the same. Everyone seemed to talk at once. I did not understand a
word, only that they were really loud and talked very fast. When Mother spoke, though, they all listened.

When we finished eating, the boys and girls collected everything together and took them to the kitchen, where Mother washed the dishes as she hummed or sang Turkmeni songs softly. Then she came back to her place, loaded her water pipe, and smoked for a time before we all went back to work.

A couple of times, they invited me to stay with them for dinner. I ran to my aunt’s house, told my mother that I would eat next door, and ran back. They cooked over the fire in the courtyard. Even in the cold winter while there were mountains of snow all over the courtyard, the girls gathered around the fire, cooking, chatting, and enjoying one another’s company, dressed in their colorful clothes. The boys had a circle of their own around another large pot, mostly showing the power of their arms to one another. The grown-ups drank tea around the large woodstoves inside, laughing and shouting for more tea. And the younger ones ran one pot after another to them.

When it was time to eat, they all gathered around one cloth, as at lunch. Everybody took a piece from a large homemade
naan
while waiting for the food to arrive. First came small bowls of soup, made of seasoned vegetables along with chickpeas, beans, corn, and smashed wheat. Then there were large round plates of delicious
qabli pelau
. My mother is a good cook, but I will never forget that
qabli pelau
. Then bowls of meat cooked with potatoes. Then an enormous salad. Then a large bowl of yogurt. And finally jugs of water with glasses. As soon as the grown-ups took their first bites, the others followed their lead.

For the first few minutes nobody talked. All you could hear was the sound of spoons against the plates, and noisy sounds of chewing, as if they had not eaten for years. As the plates became half-empty, joking and laughing rose above the noise of eating.

Once, when my teacher ate with the rest of the family, I watched as she “talked” as much as the other girls with her limited sounds, signs, hand gestures. They were quick in understanding her. She even must have told jokes, because from time to time they all laughed at something she had conveyed to them. I enjoyed watching her laugh, which made her more and more beautiful to me.

The grown-ups leaned back on their huge pillows and asked for more tea and sweets, while the girls collected the plates. The boys folded the tablecloth. Then one of them brought a pitcher of water and a large bowl for everyone to wash their hands, followed by another boy carrying small towels.

After the girls washed the dishes in the courtyard near the fire, they collected some charcoal in a pot and covered it with ash. They brought the pot inside, set a small table over it, and covered it all with a large quilt. Then they tucked themselves around the table and pulled the quilt all the way up to their necks, leaning back on the pillows behind them. Warm, they gossiped and giggled as they ate sweets, especially the sesame-filled meringue known as
conjit
that is famous in Mazar.

The grown-ups soon left for their beds. The boys sat around the woodstove and were warned strictly to not make more fire, so they would have enough wood left to last the rest of the winter. As soon as the grown-ups started snoring in their rooms, the boys sneaked in more wood. They drank tea and played cards, winning small amounts of money from one another, sometimes shouting at one not to cheat, and the girls hushed them.