Free The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen Page A

with great sadness the excreta-smeared wall. Perhaps he expected some help from there. He tried again: “If they are under six months old, we cannot accept them.”
    But he reached over the desk and over the infant lying upon the desk anyway and opened a drawer and removed a stethoscope from it. He closed his eyes and listened to Zakrullah’s chest with his eyes closed. Then he opened his eyes and said: “I suppose we can send him to the lab to check for giardiasis and dysentery.”
    He turned to Choreh. His eyes welled with accusation.
    “Do you give opium to the baby? Don’t lie to me, because I will check and see.” He folded the stethoscope and put it back in the drawer and for the first time spoke to me. The guileless foreign benefactor who had to be set straight. “It is very common for people in this area to give opium to children when they cry. They are either giving opium to them or he is ingesting it with her milk.”
    Even so, the doctor was getting worked up. Was it something he heard in Zakrullah’s chest? Or in his own—some once-upon-a-time aspiration not yet completely expunged by toil at a shitty district hospital in Northern Afghanistan? He scrutinized Zakrullah now, as though he had never noticed the baby before. The rib bones, the withered face, the slack-skin sacks of thighs. Then he straightened his shoulders and pronounced in a voice suddenly sonorous and grave: “He is deteriorating. The baby must stay at the hospital for three days. His mother must stay with him. She will be fed three meals a day and the baby will be given medicine for free. Ampicillin and gentamicin. He was in danger when you brought him in. We will begin treatment immediately.”
    Nurse Faruza pointed to a cot, and Choreh Gul wrapped the blankets over her son and slipped out of her plastic sandals and climbed onto the cot and sat there with her legs tucked in. Almost inaudibly, Zakrullah began to cry. His mother reached inside her dress and pulled out her thin left breast and gave him the empty nipple. Emotionless. Slow. A strung-out Madonna in a filthy district hospital. Then she looked up and called: “I also need some drugs.”
    But the doctor did not hear her request. He was already out the door and shouting out orders for naloxone for a new patient who had just arrived in the grubby anteroom of the pediatric ward. The patient’s name was Abdul Bashir. He was fifteen days old and dying of an opium overdose.

    T he next morning it was still overcast. Oyster light sifted through the windows into Thawra’s loom room, where in this dull glow she worked the warps and wefts alone in patient silence. Next door, in Amanullah’s bedroom, Choreh and a few neighbors, men and boys, had taken shelter from the weather. The boys squatted on the uncarpeted section of the floor by the door, where the dusty rows of the men’s shoes and flip-flops attended like antediluvian witnesses in their own right, talced and venerable. Their owners reclined on mattresses and shared an opium pipe and stories of addiction.
    The pipe was soldered of sooty iron and shaped like a poppy seedpod on a thick stem, and belonged to Amin Bai, the Commander. He had dispatched Amanullah’s seven-year-old son, Nurullah, to fetch it from his house. The opium was Amin Bai’s also, a brown-black disk weighing about a fifth of an ounce that he kept wrapped in a folded sheet of lined paper ripped out of some notebook and tucked into the chest pocket of his shalwar kameez . A quarter-size gobbet and in Oqa worth probably a quarter of a dollar. Not thirty miles to the northeast, men more adventurous than the Commander carried the precious narcotic resin across the Amu Darya to Uzbekistan, where it was worth hundreds of times more. The previous year their cargo had amounted to ninety metric tons—approximately four hundred and fifty million disks such as the one Amin Bai kept in his pocket—and, together with the three hundred tons of the drug smuggled out of