21 June 2003

I am pleased to report to you today the resolution of the late unpleasantness with Iran. Goodness knows it has been going on long enough. The naked greed, the endless negotiations, the denials and the obfuscation. The last discussion has concluded, the possibility of the return of the old regime dispelled. It is finally over, done, complete. The Persian matter is concluded. The last hostage has been released, in this case a hostage to beauty.

It was me. The Oriental Rug store on Route 50 is finally closed.

It is sad, the death of a business. This one was a piece of work. It was a vast show-room at the Home Depot strip mall near Seven Corners in Fall Church. It is a stone's throw from where the sniper killed the lady loading shelving for her re-modeling project, and where I casually ate a hot dog with Kraut the day before. That may have been a contributing factor, the fact that the snipers were radical if home-grown Muslims. And the jitters about terror. And maybe even some backlash about the idea of the Middle East and the emblems of the artistry that far outdates the Koran. Maybe that is what we forget these days. That the culture of Persia was cosmopolitan when the British were still painting themselves blue and worshipping trees.

I have a book that shows the most ancient of rugs. It was discovered in a funeral mound near the village of Pazyrk in the Altai Mountains, in southern Siberia. It was obviously the prized possession of whoever chose to take it with him. What it shows to us today is not only the value that the living placed on the fruit of the weaver's loom, but that the art of pile-carpet weaving is at least as old as the Persian monarchy, for the rug from Pazyrk has been dated to 500BC. It currently resides in the museum at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in a climate-controlled case. This rug has 184 knots to the square inch. The Persians have been at this for a long time, and the tribes from the mountains took the fine Persian work as an exemplar, and added wild geometric designs of their own working from portable looms in the wild highlands that have confounded every invader since Alexander.

Oriental rugs are stories of patience, of persistence and planning. There is a great scheme which unfolds from the first line of knots, from the first insist tapping of the mallet to drive them down hard and firm. It is just like the a good story, or a good plot. And Persia and the lands around it are home to some of the great plots. Baghdad and Damascus and Constantinople all had their rugs and all had their plots. Hothouses of plots as intricate as the great ceremonial rugs on the Seraglio floors. Like the plots that swirl around us today in portent and fact. Carefully laid. The plot began here in America in the early eighties, a small cadre of true belivers, ready to craft a work of immense complexity and utter secrecy. Their arrival was coincident with other events in the wide world that I ventured out to meet, beginning to tie the knots together that made my life, pounding them down with the mallet of time and experience as hard as a Pathan weaver on a hillside.

I wasn't thinking about that the first time I walked into The Oriental Rug Store. It was a cavernous showroom with magnificent rugs hung tapestry-like on the walls. Rolled rugs along the walls in the back, and gigantic square stacks of rugs where they could be rolled back with great ceremony and then thrown down on a floor shiny enough to dance on. The front of the store was a gaudy assortment of the not-quite-right. If you have a shred of taste or a taste for kitsch you know what I mean. The front of the store contained a remarkable assortment of high-end objet's de faux art. There were big oil paintings, copies of famous European works ground out by subsistence-level factory artists in China and fitted in massive gilt frames. China in presentation cases, heavy cut glass. All manners of furniture carved out of exotic wood of fanciful aspect. Produced by subsistence-level artisans in Indonesia. It was intended to bring the patina of Old Europe to luxury furnishing, but it did not have quite the impact that was intended. The collection had been brought together under the marketing direction of an energetic family of Iranian refugees from the Islamic revolution. I had some mixed opinions about the furniture. Too showy. Too nouveau. But oh, the rugs! In them the delicacy and intricacy were as natural as breath , as natural as the people who tied them, knot on knot.

Tribals in bold colors, wool on cotton weft, better grades in wool-on-wool and silk, and finally giant works of art in silk-on-silk that shimmer in the light, highest quality of the loom in impossible detail. Some of them were signed in exquisite calligraphy, the knots-per-inch so many that the flowing characters really looked like the product of a pen rather than a knot.

What got me in there the first time was the enormous banner that said "Savings up to 66%!"

Oh, I knew it was a fraud and a come-on. I am an informed customer, if an impulsive one. What I found was that the end of this particular business had delivered prices to Falls Church, Virginia, that were lower than what I could get in New Delhi. I had a great time exploiting their fiscal discomfort, though I am confident that they did not lose any money on me. I bought around twenty rugs, all hand-knotted, in a variety of sizes and wild colors. The downturn in the economy and the war jitters and Muslim snipers contributed to my good fortune. So I suppose it is a little like the investment books that say "How to Profit From the Coming Catastophe."

It all started last summer, when I was at loose ends on a weekend and was wandering around this wonderful transient city. I got off the Metro near the Zoo and walked across Rock Creek Park towards town. I had intended to board the Red Line at Dupont Circle and head back to my car, and discovered to my amazement a bazaar established on the sidewalk around the entrance. There was a farmer's market nearby, big crowds buying organic vegetables and flowers of extraordinary diversity and color. There was one of those Peruvian pipe-bands playing near the entrance to the long escalator down to the tracks. And there was a man who looked to be Pakistani in origin, or further north from there. Maybe a Pathan, with sharp features and a traditional beard.

And he had rugs. Particularly he had rugs tied in Afghanistan. We were at war there, or had just complete that exhilarating month-long conquest with laser-designators and wild Special Operations troops on horseback. I have spent most of my career arcing around the disintegration of the Great Game on the Northwest Frontier of India. Denied access to that country through a variety of political events, I never set foot in what had been the crown jewel of the British Empire. I had read Kipling, of course, his great romantic accounts of what must have been a very hard life indeed. "Kim" and "Stalky and Company" and the rough-and-ready poems of his brand of imperialism were the fundaments of my early education on the region.

But of course that was long gone. What I got as a junior officer was counting the order of battle for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the burning of our embassy in Islamabad and the hostage crisis in Iran. That was the start of all this, the rise and flower of militant Islam. Before the hostage taking we had supported the Shah-of-Shahs Pahlavi- remember the day? Iranian fighter pilots training at the naval air station at Pensacola. The outré blue swooping peaked wheel caps of the young pilots, black brims shiny sun the Florida sun.  They were dashing in their way, the scions of Darius the Great, slim and bronze of skin, flashing dark eyes behind aviator sunglasses. I lived at the BOQ there for a few weeks, waiting orders to basic training. I used to hear knocking on my door to hear a woman's voice whisper: "Is Mohamed there? Mohammed?"

Anyhow, the rug merchant on the Red Line had a small number of special rugs mingled with the traditional patterns. They were what they call "war rugs." They tell the story of MI-25 Hind gunships and Soviet BMP armored personnel carriers and SU-31 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft conducting operations over the rugged Afghan mountains. According to my sources, rugs that feature Soviet equipment were knotted in areas under Russian occupation. The rugs which feature images of Kalishnakov assault rifles were made in areas where the Mujahadeen held sway.

I spent some money I didn't have and bought 5X7 rug depicting an aerial assault on a mountain stronghold coupled with depictions of traditional vases filled with traditional flowers. Then I led a delegation to India as part of a spook-outreach program under a larger Presidential initiative, and wound up buying two more rugs, the first from a slick merchant in downtown Delhi with whom I was hot-boxed by an unscrupulous tour guide. I got the full display on that one, the demo loom, the demonstration of the tools they use to beat down the knots, the magical flourish as the assistant rug merchants roll out the next rug with a snap, the fringe coming to the very toe of your shoes. The tea and the oleaginous pleasantry and the high pressure.

Just like car dealers.

When I go to the end I knew I had to buy a rug and I made the best deal I could. I got robbed on that one, of course, not knowing that the next day I would be in the presence of the merchant who served the needs of the U.S. Ambassador. He accepted a lower profit margin in exchange for steady repeat business. An associate and I wound up in his basement storage area on a broken couch and the dance of the stack began, ripping each flat rug off the top of the stack with a flourish, rapid as dealing a deck of cards. "Just tell us the ones that you like" and that made a separate stack and learned a lot about origin and quality and price. Then I did some hard negotiating and walked away with the fanciful tribal that is under my computer table, complete with stains from the nomads who wove it. The rug dealers folded them into impossibly small shapes and sewed the bright fabric into snug muslin envelopes. I felt proud when walked out of customs at Dulles without having to declare them.

Fresh from negotiations on the ground less that 200 kilometers from the Khyber Pass. And then I walked into the Oriental Rug Store on a whim, and met the Persians. I realized the only place to beat the price on rugs right where they are made is right down the street in falls Church, Virginia. The owner of the place had three stores in the DC area, vast floor space, and an inventory of rugs in excess of twenty million dollars. And he had cancer and he was dying and I could get better prices here in Falls Church than I could in Virginia. It was delicious agony, spending money I did not have to acquire things I did not need. But the prices were too unbelievable not to take advantage of. I realized one day, sorting through the pink receipts for my files that I had developed a full-blown rug problem.

My counselor in this plunge into tribal rugs was a young Persian-American named Farzin. He had a well-tailored European style, hard finished suits and black-framed glasses with small lenses. I had three rugs at this point, and one small one that I had scavenged from the former marital estate that had been in my family for a hundred years. In short order it was joined by a large area tribal from the area near Herat, and then the rugs began to pile up on the floor until my little apartment began to look like a display room. I have a north Persian rug featuring proud peacocks on the floor of my closet. I have a Baluchi with the elephant foot-print patterns in front of my refrigerator. A prayer rug from Herat in my bathroom and a stack of six wild patterns in what passes for my living room. There are two runners atop one aother in the bedroom, and an area rug folded on the back side of the bed. And a lovely golden-hued area rug I have never unrolled. I hung on the right rear wall, just in front of the loading-dock room where the bulk of the tribals were stacked and hung and rolled. I had not intended to purchase it. I had only come in to buy a green-hued Afghan that featured Russian tanks and flowers. The big golden rug was too expensive for my current circumstance but the extended negotiation with Farzin, and the price displayed on the little beige calculator and persimmon tea did me in.

I heard later my purchase had made an Asian fellow angry that I had bought it of the wall. He had considered it "his rug" and he visited it at the store each weekend until I made it disappear. When I heard I felt better. "Don't worry" I told myself. "Someday you will have a house again and you will have floors to cover."

Some weekends I would just walk through the show-room, knowing it was overhead that was driving them under, increasing the pressure to sell off the inventory. It was the size of half a football field. The front of the store was filled with garish faux European furniture. In the back the vast walls The tags on the rugs were wildly inflated, like new cars. And that is what the business most resembles. They are selling sizzle, just like an auto dealer. But unlike a new car, these rugs will last a lifetime with only a little care.

A friend who shares a passion for these things told me one of her stories the other day as I was in a contemplative mood about rugs and cultures. She wrote: " For my graduation present from high school, my parents told me I could select the carpet of my choice. We spent much of that summer touring carpet factories wherever we were as I looked for the carpet. I found that carpet in Kashmir. A very small carpet - 3 x 5 - with the most lovely design (the 4 gardens design), woven of ibex wool collected off the trees and bushes, tied with 450 knots per square inch, and created by a man and his very small son. The carpet had just been cut from the loom and cleaned when I spied it. We bought the carpet but had to come back to pick it up because the man had to count the knots of the pattern because the pattern had been misplaced. The only way he could reconstruct the pattern was to count the knots and colors of the rug I'd selected. So we came back in a few days when the rug was truly ready to leave. And I've treasured it ever since."

These are intensely personal things. They contain the thought and essence of the weaver. A fine silk rug might take a year or more of a life to produce. There is only so much time that the hands and the eyesight will bear it. The rugs are the symbol of a culture which predates the cause for which our current crop of terrorists are sworn to die. But as I have knotted the rug of my life together, so have they. They have sworn to destroy us, and they have started out to accomplish that task, row by row. They have been weaving here in silence since 1983. They broke that silence in 1993 at the World Trade Center, the first time, and we were so dim that we could not see the elegant pattern that they were weaving. Somalia was part of it, and the Embassies in East Africa, and the USS Cole. Which brings me to one of those other matters of zeitgeist. The pattern is not complete. All the knots are not yet tied. I think I can guess the pattern because I have looked at a lot of rugs and can anticipate where this central medallion comes together. I am absolutely convinced that al Qaida is coming back for the Capitol, the grounds of which my building adjoins. I think they will be back at the end of August or the beginning of September, and I think they are going to try an enormous dirty bomb, maybe contained in one of our ubiquitous buses. They just busted someone in Thailand with more Cesium 137 than anyone outside the medical or nuclear trades ought to have, and there is another report of a large seizure in the other Georgia. The material is destined to come here, and even if we foil most of the smuggling, I doubt they will stop it all.

It may sound as crazy as my belief that someday someone would attack the Pentagon. But I believe it, though we may prevent it, insh'Allah. But if it does not happen in that particular way, our enemies have a long memory and they share the tradition of the master weavers. Their plots are knotted with the same elegance as a fine tribal rug

I am hoping we have learned a little about the weavers, as I have learned about the warp and weft of an ancient culture. Some of them may try to kill me this year or the next. But we will do what we can. And in the meantime I will glory in the endless joy and pattern of my rugs.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra