The Carpet of a Thousand Knots

The letter had been folded so many times on the road from Karshi that it was beginning to come apart along the creases, and Mara held it in both hands, flat, like something that might blow away.

It was early spring, the month before Navruz, and Bukhara was the biggest thing Mara had ever seen. Six days on the road with a salt caravan, walking beside the camels through the brown hills and then the long flat green of the oasis, with its canals and its mulberry trees and its endless mud walls, and then, on the morning of the seventh day, the city itself: the great wall, the gates with their towers, and above everything, rising out of the haze like a finger pointing at God, the Kalyan minaret. The camel drivers had stopped to look at it, though they had seen it a hundred times. One of them had said a prayer. Another had said, to Mara, "Taller than anything in the world, that," and nobody had argued.

Now Mara stood under one of the new trading domes in the middle of the city, the dome of the jewellers, with the letter in both hands, and the whole of Bukhara going past.

It was like standing in a river. Merchants in striped robes and white turbans, arguing in Persian and Turkic and languages Mara did not know. Porters bent double under bales of cotton. A string of camels, roped nose to tail, swaying through the crowd with bells on their necks, and everybody stepping aside without looking. Women in long cloaks with their faces veiled, carrying baskets of bread. Boys with trays of apricots on their heads. Water carriers with leather skins on their backs, calling out. A holy man with a begging bowl. Two soldiers with curved swords, laughing at something. And on every side, under the brick vaults of the dome, the shops: tiny open rooms no bigger than a cupboard, with a man sitting cross-legged in each one, among trays of silver and turquoise and gold, weighing rings on little brass scales.

It was not like Karshi. Karshi had a market once a week, in the square by the old fort, with sheep and melons and a man who sold knives and another who pulled teeth, and that had seemed, to Mara, all the world anyone could need. Here, under one dome, there were more people than in the whole of Karshi on market day. And this was only one dome. Beyond it, Mara could see another, and another, and between them streets packed with stalls, and beyond those, the great blue-tiled walls of madrasas and mosques rising up against the sky, their domes glazed turquoise and shining in the sun like the backs of enormous beetles.

The smell was of dust, and spice, and dung, and bread, and roses from somewhere, and the heat of many people. The sound was everything at once.

Mara's mother had described all this, many times, in the evenings, in the little house in Karshi with the loom in the corner and the smoke going up through the hole in the roof. She had come to Bukhara once, as a girl, with her father, to sell a carpet. She had never forgotten it. The domes, she would say, with her hands moving on the loom, knotting, cutting, knotting, without looking. You have never seen anything like the domes. And the minaret. And the workshops in the lanes behind, where they make the great carpets for the khan. One day, when I am dead, you go there. You go to Rahim.

Mara had not believed that day would come. It had come in the winter, with the fever that went through Karshi. Now there was a letter, in her careful hand, written in the last week, when she could no longer sit at the loom; and there was the small bundle she had pressed into Mara's hands at the end, wrapped in a cloth in the bottom of the bag; and there was this.

To Usta Rahim, master weaver, in the lane of the weavers behind the dome of the cap-sellers, in Bukhara, the outside of the letter said. From Mahbuba, daughter of Qosim, of Karshi, who sat at your loom thirty years ago and has not forgotten.

Mara had never asked what that meant. There had never seemed time.

A man selling hot bread from a tray bumped into Mara, and apologised, and looked at the letter, and at Mara's dusty country clothes, and smiled.

"Lost?"

"I'm looking for the dome of the cap-sellers," said Mara. "And a weaver called Rahim."

The bread-seller laughed. "Usta Rahim? Everybody knows Usta Rahim." He pointed with his chin, through the crowd, across the square, to another dome rising beyond the roofs, larger, with many small domes clustered round it like chicks round a hen. "That's the cap-sellers. Go through it, out the far side, turn left by the hauz with the big mulberry tree, and follow the noise." He tore a piece off one of his loaves and held it out. "And eat something. You look like you walked from Samarkand."

"Karshi," said Mara.

"Worse," said the bread-seller cheerfully, and was gone into the crowd.

Mara ate the bread, which was warm and soft and tasted of sesame, standing under the dome of the jewellers, and felt, for the first time in six days, a little less alone. Then Mara folded the letter carefully along its old creases, put it inside the front of her robe, and looked across the square at the dome of the cap-sellers.

There were two ways to go. The square was packed, a slow churning crowd of carts and camels and people. But along the side of it, there was a narrow alley, between the high blank walls of a madrasa and a row of shops, that seemed to go the same way, and was almost empty.

Mara took the alley. It ran along the foot of a great wall of pale brick, taller than ten men, with a row of small arched windows high up, and from one of them came the sound of young voices reciting, all together, in Arabic, the same line over and over, like water running over stones. Students, at the madrasa. Mara stopped for a moment to listen. A pigeon walked along the ledge above and looked down.

At the end of the alley a very old man sat on a mat in a doorway, sorting dried apricots into two piles. He looked up as Mara went past and said, without being asked, "Rahim? Left at the mulberry," and went back to his apricots. Mara never found out how he knew.

Out of the far side of the dome, past the hauz, a square stone pool full of green water, with steps going down into it and a huge old mulberry tree leaning over it, where women were filling jars and boys were splashing their feet; and left, into a lane between mud walls, narrow enough to touch both sides with outstretched arms.

And then Mara heard it.

The bread-seller had been right: you could follow the noise. It came from every doorway along the lane. A soft, steady, rhythmic thudding, like many hearts beating slightly out of time: thud, thud-thud, thud. The sound of loom combs beating down rows of knots. And under it, a softer sound, a dry whisper, endlessly repeated, which Mara knew better than any sound in the world, because it had been the sound of home: the snip of a knife cutting yarn.

The lane of the weavers. Every door stood open for the light. Through each one, Mara glimpsed a courtyard, and in each courtyard, a loom, great wooden frames standing upright against the walls, strung with pale warp threads like the strings of enormous harps, and in front of them, on low benches, rows of weavers, men and women and children, their hands moving too fast to see.

At the end of the lane, the last door was larger than the others, and older, with a carved wooden frame worn smooth by hands, and above it, painted on the plaster in faded blue, a small pattern Mara recognised with a jolt: an eight-pointed star inside a diamond, with a little hooked shape at each corner like a ram's horn.

Mara's mother had woven that pattern into the corner of every carpet she ever made. It's ours, she used to say. From before. Don't ask me from where.

Mara stood in the lane and looked at it for a long moment. Then Mara took the letter out of her robe, and knocked on the open door.