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Authors: Anna Badkhen
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By the time the bull had been brought, lolling out a narrow purple tongue and perfuming himself in anticipation with a bristly, urine-soaked tail, all the village men had gathered to squat in a wide circle in fascinated hush. This was as close to porn as it ever got in Oqa.
The animals faced the dunes. She knelt and flared her slanted nostrils, and the narrow veined velvet of her nose trembled. He, delirious, ground his teeth with a pleading high-pitched squeak and dribbled long strings of white foamy saliva libidinously onto the convulsing hump of his mate. For half an hour the entire hummock shuddered with the tremendous throaty grunts of her astonishing desire. Beneath eyelashes long and sparse and hard like cousinia petals, the wide-open dark glassy eyes of the camels reflected the aquamarine sky upon which filamentous cirri gathered and dispersed.
“Once a year only!” Amanullah exclaimed in a deferential whisper. Qaqa Satar snapped a photograph with his cell phone.
On the periphery of that gathering, next to a tandoor lit with dry grass, Choreh Gul and Hazar Gul had come out to bend over a stack of large uncooked sundials of nan and pies stuffed with bitter orach. On her right hand Choreh Gul wore a soiled quilted mitt, and between her teeth she clenched a large nail. She took the nail, pierced each loaf four times so that the bread wouldn’t billow from the heat too much, and bit the nail again. One by one, she placed the loaves onto the mitt, slathered them with the opaque well water her daughter had brought in a dinged aluminum basin, then slapped them onto the inside wall of the oven. Tatters of kindling fire ran in the wind and black smoke curled out and drifted over the squatting men and the mating animals. With her unmittened hand, Choreh Gul scooped palmfuls of water and threw them at the cooking loaves. The oven sibilated. A satisfied and benevolent god hissing at a woman and a girl at the edge of the world. Behind them bread-colored dunes rose.
The men who were watching the camels took no interest in this mundane magic. Someone in Oqa was baking bread every day. In thirty minutes, the she-camel’s owner, who would get to keep the single calf when it was born after fifteen months of gestation, would take her back to Toqai. The villagers would talk about those thirty minutes for days.
Later that week, the villagers stood next to Baba Nazar’s house with their faces upturned. An American B-52 Stratofortress was refueling in the blue blue sky above Oqa.
The bomber rendezvoused with a KC-135 Stratotanker at an altitude of more than five miles somewhere beyond the citadel of ancient Balkh and drifted eastward. The planes at first a palm apart, then a thumb, then a pinkie. Until the bomber slid behind and slightly underneath the tanker. The Oqans could just make out the gossamer refueling boom that extended from the tanker’s rear to the unseen receptacle above the B-52’s cockpit. For a few minutes, the two silver machines glided together. They banked slightly, they straightened out, all in unison. Locked in an unearthly rendition of the most important of all earthly rituals, absolutely alone above these camel-colored plains.
One tanker could carry thirty-one thousand gallons of fuel—enough to run Oqa’s generator to power the village every night for more than fourteen years. One B-52 could carry eighteen two-thousand-pound “smart” bombs, fifty-one five-hundred-pound bombs, almost thirty thousand cluster bomblets, and twelve nuclear cruise missiles. Enough to erase Oqa from the face of the Earth and pulverize the Hindu Kush into a barchan colony, or not even that. The Oqans did not make such calculations. They held their breath and watched and watched, and still they could not decide whether this bizarre, bellicose erotica at twenty-seven thousand feet was proof of the Americans’ vulnerability or omnipotence.
In a few minutes, the bomber pulled back and banked north and scythed the ice-blue
The animals faced the dunes. She knelt and flared her slanted nostrils, and the narrow veined velvet of her nose trembled. He, delirious, ground his teeth with a pleading high-pitched squeak and dribbled long strings of white foamy saliva libidinously onto the convulsing hump of his mate. For half an hour the entire hummock shuddered with the tremendous throaty grunts of her astonishing desire. Beneath eyelashes long and sparse and hard like cousinia petals, the wide-open dark glassy eyes of the camels reflected the aquamarine sky upon which filamentous cirri gathered and dispersed.
“Once a year only!” Amanullah exclaimed in a deferential whisper. Qaqa Satar snapped a photograph with his cell phone.
On the periphery of that gathering, next to a tandoor lit with dry grass, Choreh Gul and Hazar Gul had come out to bend over a stack of large uncooked sundials of nan and pies stuffed with bitter orach. On her right hand Choreh Gul wore a soiled quilted mitt, and between her teeth she clenched a large nail. She took the nail, pierced each loaf four times so that the bread wouldn’t billow from the heat too much, and bit the nail again. One by one, she placed the loaves onto the mitt, slathered them with the opaque well water her daughter had brought in a dinged aluminum basin, then slapped them onto the inside wall of the oven. Tatters of kindling fire ran in the wind and black smoke curled out and drifted over the squatting men and the mating animals. With her unmittened hand, Choreh Gul scooped palmfuls of water and threw them at the cooking loaves. The oven sibilated. A satisfied and benevolent god hissing at a woman and a girl at the edge of the world. Behind them bread-colored dunes rose.
The men who were watching the camels took no interest in this mundane magic. Someone in Oqa was baking bread every day. In thirty minutes, the she-camel’s owner, who would get to keep the single calf when it was born after fifteen months of gestation, would take her back to Toqai. The villagers would talk about those thirty minutes for days.
Later that week, the villagers stood next to Baba Nazar’s house with their faces upturned. An American B-52 Stratofortress was refueling in the blue blue sky above Oqa.
The bomber rendezvoused with a KC-135 Stratotanker at an altitude of more than five miles somewhere beyond the citadel of ancient Balkh and drifted eastward. The planes at first a palm apart, then a thumb, then a pinkie. Until the bomber slid behind and slightly underneath the tanker. The Oqans could just make out the gossamer refueling boom that extended from the tanker’s rear to the unseen receptacle above the B-52’s cockpit. For a few minutes, the two silver machines glided together. They banked slightly, they straightened out, all in unison. Locked in an unearthly rendition of the most important of all earthly rituals, absolutely alone above these camel-colored plains.
One tanker could carry thirty-one thousand gallons of fuel—enough to run Oqa’s generator to power the village every night for more than fourteen years. One B-52 could carry eighteen two-thousand-pound “smart” bombs, fifty-one five-hundred-pound bombs, almost thirty thousand cluster bomblets, and twelve nuclear cruise missiles. Enough to erase Oqa from the face of the Earth and pulverize the Hindu Kush into a barchan colony, or not even that. The Oqans did not make such calculations. They held their breath and watched and watched, and still they could not decide whether this bizarre, bellicose erotica at twenty-seven thousand feet was proof of the Americans’ vulnerability or omnipotence.
In a few minutes, the bomber pulled back and banked north and scythed the ice-blue
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