A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (30 page)

The priest was pretending to read a book, turning the pages with elaborate concentration, his manner now entirely supercilious towards me. Stroking the velvet-down of Ai-Lien’s head, hearing the resonance of the cooing birds travel down through the roof timbers, I felt immediately that I must reach Mr Steyning. The only person who might help me get to him was Rami. Or, rather, she was the only other person in this hot, pink city that I knew. Perhaps there was one thing Father Don Carlo could help me with: his encyclopaedic knowledge of the bazaar.

‘Father, all I require is your assistance in helping me find the Inn of Harmonious Brotherhood and then I will be gone.’

The priest and I walked through the narrow streets, I pushing my bicycle, he holding on to his hat. He offered to take Ai-Lien but I declined, and kept her strapped close against me. Although the heat was at its apex it seemed odd that the streets were completely deserted. Previously children had played in doorways, and elderly gentlemen wandered the bazaar’s passageways, resilient to the afternoon heat. Now, we were alone.

Slowly, we made our way past the rocky clumps and dust and potholes deeper into the medina, the purposeful web whose full intent is to disorientate a stranger. Each small door led to a hidden courtyard, each passageway led to yet another. Without the priest I would not have found the winding alley nor the sign with the words ‘One True Religion’.

I banged for some time at the unassuming door. Ai-Lien was asleep against my body, hot, but peaceful. Finally, there were voices, rumblings, and a small, dark-eyed woman in full abaya opened the door, looked at us and gasped. She closed the door. There was much chattering and shouting inside. The door opened again and it was Rami without her veil, clearly profoundly shocked to see me. She scowled at the priest who bowed, shook my hand and stepped backwards. Then Rami took hold of my wrist and pulled Ai-Lien and myself and the bicycle through the door, quickly closing it behind us before I could even turn to say goodbye to Father Don Carlo. He was not invited in.

‘Rami –’ I started, ‘I am so sorry I did not warn you of my . . .’

Her gesture said, ‘Why?’

‘I had to come. Things have happened. I had nowhere else.’

Rami answered fast, in Turki, and I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

‘Slowly, Rami. Please.’

‘Revolt.’ She said it slowly, giving me time to understand. ‘Mohammed is with them. The city is in uprising today. Listen.’

I worked out the words, one by one, then strung them together like silver links on a necklace and listened. Faint, at first, but there it was, a chanting, a drumming and a humming and then several bangs.

‘Safe here but a Christian, you killed,’ Rami said, slowly, to help me understand. Her face, its ancient beauty-ghosts dancing on the skin, was kind.

‘Oh, Rami, I am so sorry. I have brought danger upon your family.’

‘Come, come.’

Here was Lamara, the young, beautiful one, and the other women slipping around like minnows and again, the fountain, the rose petals, the soft, sheltering shade of the courtyard garden. We were settled on cushions on top of the coloured rugs and again the small children crawled near us. Rami shooed away the other women who were staring and whispering at Ai-Lien and me.

A slave-girl brought a tray of tea, naan and fruit followed by bowls of leghmen, handmade noodles and beef. Rami pulled Ai-Lien from my arms and sang softly for her, milk was brought. They were kind, I would stay here in this women’s quarter for eternity, in the soft fabrics and shade of it, if I could. I cried, and I am crying now, writing this.

August 13th

The drumming is relentless, but despite the uprising that is apparently happening in the city, I feel safe in this inn with its clusters of women. Rami and Lamara help me bathe Ai-Lien, who rolls around, naked, on the divan floors, gurgling. Rami massages her, rubs oils all about her body so that she is relaxed and calm, her little limbs surrendering to the experience of being manipulated by so skilled a handler.

I feel such a thief as I watch my happy baby. She belongs with the brown hands and black eyes of these women and their oils, blended in a way I could never learn how. Their baby-charming tricks passed on mother-to-mother and me, being homeless and rootless, I know nothing. I am a fraud.

They continue to feed me delicious food as if fattening me for a sacrifice: sangza flour dough twists and guxnan lamb pies. We have not mentioned Khadega, or Lizzie, or Millicent. After the pies there is more tea and bread and yoghurt and mint. We get along with scraps of English and Turki and mime.

August 14th

It’s over, as it had to be.

‘Eva,’ Rami said, waking me up, ‘you and Elizabeth must leave. It is very bad for you. Mohammed home soon. I have found a guide to take you.’

‘Elizabeth is dead.’ As I said those words I had a vision of Lizzie on the kang, and I could not stop myself, I sank to the floor. Rami’s eyes were wide but she asked me no questions, she simply helped me to stand up.

‘You must leave.’

‘Will Mohammed help us?’ Rami paused and a moment of despair – an insect suspended in glass, in jelly, held still – and I understood the extent of the risk I had brought to Rami. I have been stupid.

‘He would kill me?’

Rami’s face, soft and fading into itself, a lost beauty, said a Russian word:
dolg
. I thought of Mohammed in his white thorb, smoking his pipe, and I hunted through my inadequate vocabulary, then miraculously found the word. Yes, it would be his duty.

‘He is not here tonight or tomorrow. They attack the Chinese General before dawn.’

‘Will he hand me to the General?’

‘No. He kill you. All foreigners killed.’ Rami pushed her hair behind her ears and disappeared.

‘Father Don Carlo? Millicent?’

‘Yes.’

I was determined to control the shaking that came in my limbs, and managed it, as far as my hands and legs were concerned, but my right eye would twitch and jump about in its socket. She handed me a small leather pouch. I guessed what was inside. Never had Southsea seemed such a vast, universal distance away from where I stood.

‘Please know that Allah is behind you and I am always your friend.’

I was grateful, but had no way of showing her. I desperately wanted to give her a gift in return, but I had nothing.

‘Grey lady and priest are bad.’

‘Rami, why are they bad? What do you mean?’

She spoke fast but I couldn’t understand what she said.
Ezaam
. She then made a show of offering me another meal, but I refused, knowing the risk for her, and said I must leave.

‘I have guide for you.’

Outside the inn, it was Mr Mah. His neat hair in plaits, his moustache oiled. He nodded to Rami, but said nothing to me and I looked at her. I did not want to go with him. I have no reason to trust him. A helpless feeling overcame me; it was like being a child again, sent away from the table, sent to bed, sent off, powerless. A resistance, a form of fury came over me, but it quickly died down, I knew there was no choice.

Ai-Lien was wrapped up well and nestled in the bicycle basket. I felt something crooked inside me and realised as I looked at her soft sleeping face that it was love. It was dusk as we left and the guards on the city gate blew their horns to announce the closing of the gates. Rami had conveyed to me that the Moslem army was gathering outside the mosque and an attack on the Chinese section of the town was imminent. She had given me a full abaya and with my face covered I gave the guards a coin from Rami’s money and was allowed through quickly, although they saw my bicycle and obviously knew who I was.

Mah travelled by donkey alongside me as I pushed the bicycle. I knew that the journey through the desert at night was a very different thing from a journey by day and I was both disturbed by his presence and glad of it. It was very quickly exceedingly cold. We moved fast, but the temperature continued to drop after sunset and so after several li we stopped near a small farm and Mr Mah negotiated with the farmer for a room.

‘Is it safe, Mr Mah?’ I wanted to ask him why he was helping me but it was difficult to converse with him; he speaks with a thick, impenetrable accent.

The money Rami gave me is tucked underneath my black satin trousers. The farm room where I now write has a kang covered with a length of blue cloth. For supper we ate pancakes made from flour and oil which we dipped into vinegar. Mah smoked his long-necked pipe and very quickly fell into a deep sleep leaving me to wonder if it is opium that he smokes. At supper I tried to ascertain what he expects.

‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

He merely smiled, then said, ‘You pay me.’

‘Of course.’

Sleep won’t come. Instead, I replay over and over the conversation I had had with Rami before leaving:

‘Give baby?’ It was a question. ‘You have promise she be safe. Mohammed, not know.’

Sitting on the woven patterns and colours, I was holding Ai-Lien to my face; she was dabbing my lips with her fingers. I thought of Khadega, her hair wrapped in stones from the bottom of the river; of Mohammed’s other wife, Suheir, wailing, stupidly and hysterically, on the floor with the anguish of wanting to be a mother. I thought of Lolo, of his tenderness towards Ai-Lien, then him disappearing. Part of me thinks that he should have taken her with him. Despite having no mother or father, despite being abandoned, if that is what she was, it is undeniable that, like the frail red poppy I have seen thriving in the harshness of the rocky crevices in the desert, she belongs here. I stroked her face. Rami would certainly look after her. But what would happen to her, a foundling?

‘Rami, I –’

Ai-Lien’s fingers reached up and pushed against my chin and touched my lips again. At the door Rami put her hand at the small of my back.

‘Peace be with you. Allah smiles.’

There are bangs and rumbles in the distance, the drumming continues and I have just realised that the word that Rami had mentioned,
ezaam
, is Arabic for bones.

30.
Sussex, Present Day

A prefab building in the Prima Foundation complex

Badly drawn wings. Aeroplanes. Dragonflies. Butterflies. All hanging from the ceiling. Hot hands. Breath. Outside magpies were rioting, theirs must be the ugliest of all the birdsongs. Tayeb had left earlier with the younger woman and Robert Barker, leaving Frieda alone in the hot headachy room, resonant of distant French lessons. Or, more precisely, her inefficiency at learning French – the shameful sense of being middle-to-lower-middle of the class, befuddled by words in lists and the verbs in lines, none of them adding up to a magical whole in her head – ultimately, the salty-flat memory of failure.

Then, the door opened and in she came. She had dark hair, like Frieda’s, though with strands of grey webbed through it. Her face had a dreamy look, as if shaped by the contemplation of rivers and swans and duckweed on water. No smile, but she looked at Frieda as if her eyes could drink her up, as if Frieda were made of milk. There was an awkward pause. Should they shake hands, or kiss? Frieda waited for an indication of which, but there was none and so instead she spoke:

‘Hello.’

Still no smile, so Frieda said, ‘You look exactly as I remember you. You don’t seem to have aged at all.’

Her mother opened a beaded fabric bag whose long handle crossed her body like a safety harness. She pulled out a notebook, the same type that the blonde girl had, red with a black spiral, and wrote on it:

A diet of seaweed and toast keeps me young. You look beautiful.

‘Have you lost your hearing?’ Frieda stretched her jaw to disguise her shock. Her mother shook her head, and wrote:

So many questions, so much to catch up on. How long are you staying?

‘I’m not staying long,’ Frieda said, intending to end with the word ‘Mum’, but didn’t. There are things that she missed that a mother shouldn’t miss, such as the first spots of blood in her daughter’s knickers or a daughter’s return from a school disco with the taste of a broken heart in her mouth, but in the end those things did not matter. What did matter, though, was the thumb-print in her brain that Frieda had been left with, a recurring dream: Frieda standing at the bottom of the hill, her mother walking away without looking back, a huge yellow dice rolling over the hill towards Frieda to crush her.