Free The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen

Choreh would have to come with her because for a woman to travel outside the village without a grown male relative was dangerous and improper even in a burqa, and that would mean that for the day of the drive Choreh would not be able to scavenge the dunes for ancient coins and jewelry that he usually huckstered to middlemen in town. Losing a day of such work could mean losing more than a day of sustenance. Choreh Gul had been dubious the trip to the hospital would be worth all the hassle.
    It was additionally possible, though she had not said any such thing out loud, that Choreh Gul also had harbored the common anxiety of an addict: that at the hospital she would not be allowed to take the minuscule nuggets of opium she, like most of Oqa’s women, diluted in her morning tea. Opium was much cheaper than rice and it helped stave off hunger and woe. Choreh Gul and her husband spent between two and four dollars a month on the drug. Food—flour for bread, rice and the oil to cook it with, and tea—could cost five times as much.
    In any case, in her room reeking of urine, dust, manure, and straw, of the acrid smoke from the bukhari and of Choreh’s opium pipe, the woman had contemplated the offer that Qaqa Satar drive her and Zakrullah to see a doctor at the free government clinic, and the responsibility that her accepting this offer had entailed, and had responded: “I have to ask my husband.”
    •   •   •
    When her husband had returned from the desert two days later, he said the idea of taking his youngest to see a doctor was just fine. Late the next morning, Qaqa Satar and I delivered the couple and their infant son inside the metal gate of Dawlatabad District Hospital.
    •   •   •
    Flip-flopped and tentative, Choreh Gul and Choreh shuffled into the unheated pediatric ward. Choreh Gul had pulled back the front flap of her burqa and carried her swaddled child past unoccupied cots that sagged under the hard memory of untold repetitions of ailing weight. Brown smears of old blood or old excrement or both stained the blue-green dado like auxiliary wainscoting from hell.
    A German relief agency had built the hospital with concrete several years earlier, and construction workers had skimped on insulation. Maybe there had been none available. The wind leaked cold and damp through cracks in the windowpanes. A doctor and three nurses worked here but only one of that team was present, a stout and stern young nurse named Faruza. Nurse Faruza wore her white doctor’s coat as a pro forma afterthought between a floor-length wool skirt and a down jacket, and she had tucked each hand inside the opposite sleeve of her jacket, using the sleeves as a muff. She looked fatigued. She puckered her lipsticked mouth in disdain at the pauperized and bedraggled trinity that had shambled into her domain, then unpuckered it and ordered Choreh Gul to lay her son on a desk draped with a plastic tablecloth and unwrap him. The skeletal and wincing baby emerged into the cold, naked on top of his quilted tatters. The nurse took in the anorexic thighs, the slat-board ribcage, the wrinkled skin wilting on the pelvic bones, nodded, and said: “He’s fine.”
    She did not remove her hands from her jacket sleeves, did not touch the infant. It was too cold. “He does not look malnourished.”
    Overwhelmed by Nurse Faruza’s glacial authority, Choreh Gul and Choreh said nothing and stood still. The nurse mistook their silence for mulishness. She sighed, took her hands out of their sleeve muff, fished a cell phone from the right thigh pocket of her uniform coat, and dialed the doctor.
    “He does not have a problem with malnutrition,” said Doctor Mohammed Akbar when he arrived a few minutes later wearing jeans and a leather jacket and the battered look of someone resigned to not ameliorating the tragedies of this world.
    “My son is very thin. Could you give him some drugs, please?” Choreh said.
    The doctor studied very carefully and