‘If you want buy madder you must go Abdullah Hoja caravanserai,’ explained one of the merchants in broken English. ‘He has too much of madder root.’ Our chowkidor asked for directions and we worked our way back to the central maidan or square, heading up a different street to the small caravanserai belonging to Abdullah Hoja.
Khiva, too, boasted a beautiful caravanserai. It was built by Allah Kuli Khan in the 1840s with two storeys, the upper acting as an inn and the lower as storage for goods. Caravans of camels would arrive from Orenburg or Bukhara and leave for Isfahan, Merv or Tashkent, laden with bales of silks, melons, and Karakul lamb pelts. Sadly, the Khiva caravanserai was roofed over by the Soviets and transformed into a drab, sanitised indoor department store, selling rows of pickled vegetables and sweets and with the best selection of candy-pink polyester wedding dresses in town.
Yet here in Mazar was a real caravanserai, tiny by comparison, but full of sacks of produce, with dusty carpets strewn on the floors and mini stalls containing sleeping merchants, their sons arriving with stacked trays of home-cooked lunch. Although there were no camels, a donkey and cart gave a vague sense of the bustle of the Silk Road.
The Hoja had been napping in his cubby-hole that doubled as a shop. He leapt to his feet on our arrival, calling for a grandson to fetch tea and beckoning us to sit beside him. He looked like an Old Testament patriarch in his flowing robe, sporting a long beard and a large turban. We explained our mission and another grandson was swiftly dispatched, tottering back with a huge bale of madder root on his back.
‘Tell us about the quality of your madder,’ I said, trying to sound authoritative. ‘We need to be sure it will yield a good colour.’
The Hoja explained that the madder had been harvested the previous October. Recent droughts meant that madder was hard to come by. This came from the north-eastern region, which still had good supplies of water from the nearby mountains.
We discussed the price and I asked where we could have the roots ground. The Hoja offered to take us to the mill he used. We purchased 60 kilos in impossibly long sacks and, having loaded these onto the donkey cart, pitched our way towards the mill.
The miller flicked a switch and the air filled with red dust, smelling of custard. Lacking turbans to adjust over nose and mouth, Matthias and I left them to it. Passing a listing balcony housing two cramped-looking urban cows, we discovered an alleyway where anything from sickles to cattle bells could be purchased. The third stall down sold a large bundle of comb-beaters that we would need for banging down the weft thread after each horizontal row of carpet knots. They were impressively heavy with large wooden handles and simple engravings on the metal body. I bought ten. A stall down I discovered rows of hook-knives hanging on strings and purchased several.
As we returned to the mill, a sandstorm broke out. Dust that had been shat on and spat on was whipped into the air and into our eyes, hair and mouths. We hauled sacks onto the donkey cart as fast as possible and lurched our way back to the compound, desperate for showers and keen to buy turbans as soon as possible.
The following morning we drove to the outskirts of the city, where the chowkidor lived in a squat mud-brick house. We were left outside while he alerted his wife; she hid herself around a corner and, though we could sense her presence, we politely ignored it. His daughter sat on top of a horizontal loom laid out on the floor, weaving in the Turkmen style. The colours were darker than rugs made in Turkmenistan, but many of the designs were similar and reds still predominated.
‘The wool, do you know where it is from?’ asked the chowkidor proudly. We had no idea, but I hazarded a guess.
‘Is it from Kandahar or Ghazni?’ I asked.
‘No, it is from Belgium,’ he replied, savouring the sound of this exotic place where flocks of sheep roamed every hill. ‘Because of the drought there is no good wool now in Afghanistan. Before, we had such good wool but now we must buy from elsewhere.’
We thanked the chowkidor for his hospitality and set out to explore the bazaar by ourselves. We had been in the country less than a week but already referred to passing women as burkas, their contents de-humanised in our minds. They looked more like birds than anything else, arching and craning their necks to see oncoming traffic or to look around, lacking all peripheral vision.
Interacting with a burka-clad woman felt strange, hearing a voice but unable to see even a pair of eyes. At one stall I stopped to buy some woven reed fans, which made excellent presents. I had tried English and Uzbek to no avail, when a well-spoken voice behind me enquired whether I needed help. I turned to a white burka and thanked the woman within, speculating as she turned, with a flash of ankle, about what she might look like.
Heading for the carpet section of the bazaar, we passed a group of Swedish UN soldiers at one shop and some other foreigners at another. ‘Business is really good, thanks be to God,’ declared one of the shopkeepers in broken English. ‘My brother in Peshawar sends me his stock. So many foreigners here now. They like to buying too much carpets!’
There were lots of carpets depicting maps of Afghanistan or portraits of Massoud. A number of the more tribal rugs featured tank, helicopter and bomb motifs, and there was even one with exploding aeroplanes slamming into the World Trade Center.
Matthias wanted to know more about the rugs piled up in each shop. I pointed out the ones from Turkmenistan in fire-engine red, and how the designs varied according to tribal preference. Some guls or motifs had clear meaning, like the flotilla of boat pendants, bristling with anchors, found in the Yomut rugs woven near the shores of the Caspian Sea. Others incorporated symbols such as rams’ horns to ward off the evil eye. I unrolled some Tekke rugs which looked, at first glance, to be all the same, pointing out the minor cruciform guls in each, which were all different.
‘Ah, you like to buying Bukhara rug, sir,’ chimed in the stallholder. Like Astrakhan wool, Bukhara rugs referred to their main trading outlet and not to their place of origin. The octagonal lozenges contained three cross-like figures in each corner, symbolic (depending on who you asked) of three men on horseback or a Nestorian Christian symbol of Calvary.
Carpet-weaving among the Turkmen was done exclusively by women, who also wove camel bags, storage bags to hang on their yurt walls and decorative door coverings. As the Turkmens were absorbed into the Soviet Union, a few clever weavers, realising that their art was under threat from mass-producing textile factories, began to include woven homilies to Father Lenin at the end of each rug. This transformed them into artistic and ethnic acts of devotion to the Communist cause, and soon huge portrait carpets of Lenin, Stalin and other Soviet leaders were commissioned, woven on traditional horizontal looms and keeping the art alive. In the carpet museum in Ashkhabad there was even a fetching rendition of Castro, complete with cigar.
Rummaging through the piles of rugs, I found a Turkmen one that perfectly illustrated why we were in Mazar looking for madder. The weave was excellent, as was the knot count, and the rug was around 50 years old. Most of the synthetic colours used had faded but there was one orange dye which stubbornly and garishly refused to do so, ruining the whole rug as a result.
Other rugs in the stack were beautifully woven with tiny knots in a blend of wool with patches of silk. The designs were Turkmen but the palette pastel to appeal to Westerners. They were let down by the silk warps, which had not been de-gummed and crinkled like new grey hairs, refusing to lie and jarring with the overall fluidity. These rugs were woven in Afghanistan and were largely the product of child labour. I felt ambivalent towards this issue. On the one hand, the cries of Westerners calling for children to play and study seemed naively removed from the harsh realities of families making ends meet, and smacked rather of a ‘Let them eat cake’ mindset. On the other hand, many of the children were not simply learning the craft within the home but being exploited in workshops where their nimble fingers were barely recompensed. The
y worked long hours in appalling conditions and earned almost nothing. I had set the minimum age in our workshop at seventeen.
* * *
We prepared to leave the following day. I had enjoyed myself immensely despite the heat and dust, but was worried about getting back. As I had discovered at the bazaar, Afghanistan was still the largest exporter of opium in the world, and I knew a lot of it was trafficked across the Bridge of Friendship. Quite what would be made of two young men with more than their combined body weight in sacks of powdered substances remained to be seen. I was particularly concerned about the zok, a crumbly white substance that even I knew looked suspiciously like heroin.
We said goodbye to Helga and the chowkidor and drove back through the desert to Hairatan, our vehicle thoroughly overloaded with sacks and looking considerably more Afghan than when we’d arrived. At the customs office I spotted a trolley we might use to cart the sacks over the bridge – no vehicles were allowed across without special permission.
An impressively moustached border official circled our stack of sacks, asking in textbook English about their contents. I produced letters of explanation from UNESCO and Operation Mercy in English and Russian. He read them through and looked at the sacks again.
‘You must know, sir,’ he began, ‘that this border has been used on many occasions for the smuggling of opiates. These letters are very good, but look at these sacks, they are full of so much powder. I will need to have them analysed.’
‘Of course, I quite understand,’ I replied. ‘Which sack would you like to take samples from? Do you need samples from each sack? Where is your lab, and how long will it take to make the analysis?’
‘We do not have any laboratories here. We must take the samples back to Mazar,’ explained the official.
‘Really?’ I asked wearily, imagining the two-hour journey back through the desert. ‘We’ve just come all the way from Mazar this morning and we need to be back in Uzbekistan today. Is there no alternative?’
The official thought for a moment, and I was seized by a rare flash of inspiration. ‘Sir,’ I continued, ‘I understand your position and the job that you must do. I am glad to meet such excellent guards at this border who search carefully for narcotics, which bring nothing but misery to so many. However, I am a good man here to buy dyes to help poor people gain employment. I am not a drug smuggler, I am a man of honour.’
‘A man of honour?’ mused the official. He thought for another moment and then said, ‘Well, if you are a man of honour then you may proceed.’
Momentarily stunned, I thanked him profusely and left before he changed his mind. I felt both humbled and gratified that I had been given something quite rare in Central Asia: trust.
We repeated our ritual search for someone to stamp our passports and then loaded as many sacks as possible on the trolley and pushed it towards the bridge. The powdered madder seeped out of some of the woven plastic sacks, mixing with our sweat and covering us both in a brick-red sheen. I wasn’t sure if we would be allowed to pull the trolley across the bridge, or whether we would have more problems on the Uzbek side and find ourselves refused entry. Just as I was offering up a quick prayer, a UNICEF jeep turned up. After discussion with the occupants and a flourish of the UNESCO letter, they agreed to take the dyes over in the back of their jeep and we trotted behind them.
We unloaded on the other side, the customs officials assuming we were UNICEF personnel and giving us no problems. The sacks of dyes were put through an X-ray machine and a sniffer dog unleashed to check them. I watched, imagining what might have happened had I brought even one opium poppy head with me as a souvenir. Everything ran smoothly and within an hour and a half we were through. Full of gratitude, we parted from the UNICEF staff and found a truck to take us into the city centre. This was to prove the easiest of all my returns. Each year the border became more of a challenge.
Back in Termez, it felt as if a magical transformation had taken place. Instead of dirt tracks and open sewers here were long, straight streets and even flower beds! The drab Soviet architecture exuded a reassuring aura of order. Gone were the three standard types of Afghan women – blue burkas, white burkas and the occasional olive green burka. In their place were women of every age, shape and size, roaming freely.
A van driver at the Termez bus station was willing to take us to Tashkent and we settled down, tired, smelly and red. An hour or so later, in the foothills of the Pamir mountains, we stopped at a large, clear stream near the road for a wash and swim. The water was far too cold for the driver who watched in horror as we jumped in with a bar of soap, convinced we’d be dead by morning.
From Tashkent we’d take a bus with all the dyes back up to Khiva. I was relieved at how well the trip had gone, but there was still the question: Would the dyes be any good, giving us the black and reds we needed?
7
Bukharan cunning
It is a pity that this people, in spite of the high antiquity of their origin, and their grandeur in time gone by, should have attained the very highest stage of vice and profligacy.
—Arminius Vambery on Bukharans,
Travels in Central Asia, 1864
I entered the madrassah with the sacks of dyes feeling heroic, having braved borders and bureaucracy. The weavers were soon squabbling over hook-knives and comb-beaters and the dyers set to work unpacking the sacks and putting them into storage. Keen to see if the dyes would actually yield colour, we soon had cauldrons on the boil. The madder bath was much redder than anything we’d achieved before, and next to it a cauldron of inky black zok brewed.
The following day, Madrim fished out the skeins, rinsed them and hung them up to dry. The colours were strong and we deemed our trip a success.
In my absence, a carpet we’d dubbed ‘Benaki’ (inspired by the Benaki fragment of a Timurid design) had been completed up to the edge of the border that would frame the field design, and the girls were now waiting for a decent madder-red before starting the central field. The other carpets were also progressing nicely, although something had gone wrong with the colour scheme of the Rustam carpet. Instead of a pomegranate gold border, the apprentices were weaving with a murky olive – not quite green or yellow. It didn’t look right, but the apprentices beamed at their hard work. I took the two ustas aside for a telling off.
‘It wasn’t our fault!’ Ulugbibi explained, reverting to a stage whisper. ‘Of course we knew the right colours. You made us write them down on the design and everything. It was Ulugbeg. He misled us. There have been other things as well.’
Ulugbibi shut the door, adamant that the cunning Bukharans were attempting to oust the competition. Could I not see that they were worried at our rapid progress? Allegations of sabotage were not to be taken lightly and we summoned Madrim, who confirmed Ulugbibi’s suspicions.
‘Fatoulah will tell me to write down quantities for making red with madder-root and oak gall,’ Madrim began. ‘I write everything down but check these figures against the notes I made at Jim’s training last year. Then I say to him, “Usta, these quantities that you’ve given me are different from Jim’s. Why is that?” He looks at my notes and excuses himself, and says that he has made a mistake, but it keeps happening. The first time he told me I must have written down the quantities incorrectly, and one time he told me that Jim was wrong. I asked him whether he or Jim were the usta.
‘Then there was the fermentation pots. Jim explained that the pH level will only change if there is no oxygen in the pots, but each day Fatoulah stirs them vigorously and they bubble.’
I took this more seriously, as the first skeins to emerge from the pots had been foul-smelling and a dull yellowy-brown in colour – not the stunning reds and blues we’d been promised by Fatoulah. We’d endured the stench of these pots for a month and the few skeins of silk resulting were all an unattractive puce. Abandoning fermentation dyeing altogether,
the dyers had filled each pot with earth and seeds, the weavers no longer scurrying past holding handkerchiefs to their noses.
‘Aslan, you don’t know what Bukharans are like, but we do,’ Ulugbibi whispered. ‘They’re all cunning. They don’t want to work if they can steal someone else’s work, and they always lie. You can never trust them.’
Just then Fatoulah walked in and our discussion came to an abrupt halt. I wasn’t sure how seriously to take these allegations, and whether this was just the age-old enmity between Khivans and Bukharans. I knew that if I spoke to the Bukharans about this, they would simply adopt a wounded tone and deny all knowledge of a conspiracy. We needed a trap of some kind, and while reading a book on natural dyes, I came across one that might work. According to the book, black mulberries produced a vibrant purple dye that fades quickly in sunlight and is therefore unsuitable. I nonchalantly asked Fatoulah what he knew about dyeing with mulberries.
‘Ah yes, mulberries,’ he began ingratiatingly. ‘Aslan agha, you are so clever to discover the secret of these berries. I, myself, have used mulberries for years and the colour they give is the most beautiful purple.’
‘So, this purple colour, does it fade at all in the sun?’ I asked.
‘That is a very good question. No, the colour is very permanent. Why, I still have a suzani embroidered with mulberry-dyed silk hanging outside in my garden. After all these years the colour is still strong.’
My trap was working.
‘That’s good to know,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about this extraordinary dye before? You’re supposed to be teaching us all you know about dyeing.’
A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road Page 13
