OQA — The wooden loom takes up the whole room, clay wall to clay wall, south to north. In the southern end of the room, two women sit cross-legged on top of the first few inches of the carpet they started weaving this month.
Fine clay dust dances in the light that seeps into the room through the entryway, a woozy approximation of a rectangle. There is no door. There is no roof, just some dry desert scrub brush over unfinished wooden rafters. There is no glass in the windows the size and the shape of a sheep's head. There are only the coarse, undyed wefts stretched tautly over the loom; the maroon, beige, and black warp threads; the women's fingers that knot the warps over the wefts; and the small, black scythes the women use to cut the warp thread after each tiny knot has been fastened.
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Then they fasten the next knot.
The scythes go: Thk. Thk. Thk.
It takes six months to weave a carpet because the women can only weave from eight until 11 in the morning, and then from one until five in the afternoon. Before eight, they have to bake bread in the clay ovens that stand outside and boil eggs laid by the emaciated chicken that wander into the room to balance on loom beams. From 11 to one, they must cook rice for lunch. After five, they must cook rice for dinner. The diet has not changed for years, maybe centuries. In the fall, the women's husbands will kill some chickens and hunt hare and gray fox in the infertile desert, and the women will cook some poultry and meat.
Thk. Thk. Thk.
This carpet will be six feet by 18 feet, and in the West, it will sell for $5,000 or more. The two weavers have never seen this kind of money. When they are finished, their husbands will take the carpet to a dealer in Mazar-e-Sharif -- first, a three-hour trek by donkey to the nearest town; after that two hours by taxi -- who will buy it for $150, plus wool for the next rug.
"The shopkeeper keeps half the money," complains Chareh, the husband of one of the weavers. The shopkeeper keeps much more than that, I think to myself. But what's the point of saying this to Chareh? I say nothing.
Under the fingers of women -- and one day, under the faraway feet of some unknown patron who will pick out this carpet to grace a distant living room floor -- small octagonal flowers with ogival petals bloom in frames of brown and beige rhombi over a field of deep maroon. Each flower is a thousand knots.
Thk. Thk. Thk.
Each knot traps the omnipresent dust, the hot sun that heats up the room like one of the clay tandoors the women use to bake bread in the morning.
It traps the dreadful cough of the small children who sometimes sleep in the two cloth cradles mounted to the walls above the loom. The small, perpetually sick children who sometimes die in these two cloth cradles: because winters here are cold and there are no doors and no glass in the window and the roof sponges and seeps cold rainwater onto the cribs, and the nearest doctor is three hours away by donkey (but even that only in the summer, because there is no road out of Oqa, only clay desert, and in the winter, when it is so cold that children die from sickness, rain and snow make the clay impassable, even by donkey).
Last winter, little Siaqol died like that. He was three months old.
Thk.
Forty families live in Oqa, a village on a hilltop that protrudes slightly from the grey desert. There is no farmland, and no livestock. Most of the women weave carpets. Most of the men collect dry desert brush, burn it into coal, and sell that in Mazar-e-Sharif for $4 a bag. A four-day trip to the desert will yield four or five bags of coal. The men mount the bags on camels and take them to the town where there are taxis. The taxis charge $1 per bag.
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