The Submission - Amy Waldman [143]
Before him a vast garden rose up to meet the slope of the mountain he had just descended. From his new vantage, the hillside slum’s cantilevered houses looked like an Escher drawing, one that could be smeared—by an earthquake, a mudslide—as easily as wet ink on paper. The jumble on the hill broke abruptly at the garden’s rear wall, which demarcated an entirely different landscape, one marked by symmetry, order, geometry. Straight paths climbed the garden’s stepped terraces, a straight canal flowed down toward Mo. Trees—almond and cherry, walnut and pomegranate—marched off to the sides in neat orchard-like rows.
A Ministry of Tourism signboard told him where he was: Bagh-e-Babur, Babur’s garden, designed around 1526 by the first Mogul emperor, who was now buried in it. After serving as a front line in Afghanistan’s civil war, the garden was being restored. It came closer than almost anything he had seen in Kabul to matching the description he now found in his book.
Mo began scaling the terraces, then wandered off to the side, into the intimate shade of the tree canopies, the grassy turf sinking slightly beneath his feet. Pink blossoms frothed against the green foliage; tulips, tiny cups of color, were scattered offhandedly around the bases of the trunks. Near the garden’s perimeter wall, densely planted mulberry, almond, and fig trees created a deeper shade. He smelled damp earth, spring air, trodden grass, and a faint, floral sweetness.
The garden’s flaws didn’t escape him: he hadn’t left his critical mind back at the hotel. Bagh-e-Babur lacked crispness. There was no natural or guided progression for a visitor, no journey. Uncoordinated interventions through the centuries—a tomb, a mosque, a pavilion, a swimming pool—had given the garden the random aspect of a poorly developed city.
The tomb belonged to Babur, an emperor Mo’s book described as warrior and aesthete. His resting place was encased in white marble, contravening Babur’s wish that nothing cover his grave “so that the rain and the sun could beat upon it and perhaps encourage a wildflower to grow.” Instead, Judas trees nearby flaunted scarlet flowers.
On a lower terrace sat a delicate white marble mosque, beneath whose portico three women heated a lunch of rice and meat. The white of the mosque was offset by the dark, well-groomed vestments of the Mediterranean cypress trees on either side. Their shape reminded Mo of tall bottle brushes or calligraphy quills. Of that “Design Against Terrorism” seminar: cypresses as a line of defense, blasted but erect.
Descending to yet another terrace, he found his way to the veranda of an elegant small pavilion and sat. Before him the canal stretched like a long runner reflecting the sky. From under the almond trees sprang a joyous cry: the boys who guided him to the garden had rematerialized to play a hybrid of croquet and cricket and horseshoes, each aiming at the other’s tossed rock. The faint thwack of a hit called forth a whoop, a soft thud in the grass, a groan of despair. At a water tap a young man groomed himself in a small, handheld mirror, twisting his face this way and that as if searching for flaws. A group of women raised their burkas atop their heads like nuns’ wimples and turned toward the sun. The walls muffled but didn’t erase the city’s sounds.
Memories drifted