KARAGHUZHLAH AND MAZAR-E-SHARIF — With unfailing precision the desert measures out time in forevermore repeating segments.
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It is the age-old pace of almond orchards that are pearled with flowers now and in two weeks will be glaucous with minuscule teardrop nuts. Of goats kidding in the greening fields. Of babies born and dying of malnutrition and disease. Of the three-hour predawn trek to market as stars wink out one by one in the paling sky and the earth rings under the donkey's hooves. Of lavish weddings and meager harvests and raids by foreign invaders.
As a village timekeeper, Hussein Ali is a bit of a bumbler. The milestones he has recorded in his scrapbooks over 40 or so years are sporadic and of varied consequence. The entries reflect his own notion of what merits documentation in his farming village of ten-score crooked clay streets twisting past walled orchards and irrigation ditches foamy with snowmelt. There's the 2009 reelection of President Hamid Karzai -- and the wedding of the son of Ghiaz Bai and the daughter of Mullah Faizullah on the 22 of mesan, Persian year 1389.
There's the record of the storm five years ago, during which two of Karaghuzhlah's 10,000 people died of terror in the desert. An entry that describes last month's frightening nighttime raid by American troops in helicopters, who took away one suspected insurgent and created many new enemies, villagers who gathered by water pumps and mosques to swear revenge the next morning. A brief bio of Ahmad Zahir, the Afghan pop star who was killed in a car accident in 1979.
"Everything I find of importance for posterity I keep here," Hussein Ali says. He opens a scrapbook randomly to the page where some 20 years ago he summarized, in four or five handwritten paragraphs, the history of Italy.
The villagers call him, deferentially, the Historian.
Outside the smoky guestroom of the vast family compound the Historian shares with his 70 relatives, almond petals flitter down to the dust. Inside, unshelled almonds from last year's harvest glow dully in pewter saucers. The time for planting and the time for reaping, the past and the future, converge.
Afghanistan can feel like a temporal Grand Canyon, a land in which you can journey through millennia in a matter of hours. In the mornings I buy ice-cold pomegranate juice at city shops and head to villages where the fastest mode of transportation are the donkeys on which men travel to market towns on bazaar days and barter tumbleweed for rice. It is also a land that has been at war nearly perpetually since the beginning of recorded history, a fact that fuels doubt that Afghanistan, which has withstood scores of invasions and fratricides with time-earned tenacity, can ever find peace.
Artifacts of invasions past and present tower over the northern Afghan desert. Within an hour's drive from Karaghuzhlah rise the eroded walls of an enormous Kushan castle. Buddhist stupas. The ruins of Balkh, wrecked first by Alexander the Great, then by Genghis Khan -- whose massacre of the city residents heaped the fields with so many dead that, in the words of the historian Ala-ad-Din Ata-Malik Juvaini, "for a long time the wild beasts feasted on their flesh, and lions consorted without contention with wolves, and vultures ate without quarrelling from the same table with eagles." A 12th-century Arab minaret, which, some records indicate, doubled as a watchtower. The empty shell of Takht-e-Pul, an 1850s fort whose walls, bisected by the road that connects the cities of Balkh and Mazar-e-Sharif, served as ideal ambush cover first for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin, then, in turns, the Taliban and anti-Taliban guerrillas. The most recent additions are the 15-foot concrete blast walls of a NATO military base near the Mazar-e-Sharif airport, now housing thousands of American troops.
I pilgrimed to Karaghuzhlah to ask the Historian how he thinks the war here will end -- or go on forever.
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