The Years of Rice and Salt (63 page)

“So sometimes you didn't wear one?”

“Usually I did not. In the lab it would have been silly. I wore a lab djellaba, like the men. We were there to study atoms, to study nature. That is the greatest godliness! And without gender. That simply isn't what it's about. So, the people you are working with, you see them face to face, soul to soul.” Eyes shining, she quoted from some old poem: “ ‘Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.' ”

This had been the way of it for Idelba in her youth; and now she sat in her brother's little middle-class harem, “protected” by him in a way that gave her frequent attacks of hem, that in truth made her a fairly volatile person, like a Yasmina with a bent toward secrecy rather than garrulousness. Alone with Budur, pinning up laundry on the terrace, she would look at the treetops sticking over the walls and sigh. “If only I could walk again at dawn through the empty streets of the city! Blue, then pink—to deny one that is absurd. To deny one the world, on one's own terms—it's archaic! It's unacceptable.”

But she did not run away. Budur did not fully understand why. Surely Aunt Idelba was capable of tramming down the hill to the train station, and taking a train to Nsara, and finding lodgings there—somewhere—and getting a job that would support her—somehow? And if not her, then whom? What woman could do it? None of good repute; not if Idelba couldn't. The only time Budur dared to ask her about it, she only shook her head brusquely and said, “There are other reasons too. I can't talk about it.”

So there was something quite frightening to Budur about Idelba's presence in their home, a daily reminder that a woman's life could crash like an airplane out of the sky. The longer it went on the more disturbing Budur found it, and she noticed that Idelba too grew more agitated, wandering from room to room reading and muttering, or working over her papers with a big mathematical calculator, a net of strings holding beads of different colors. She wrote for hours on her blackboard, and the chalk squeaked and clicked and sometimes snapped off in her fingers. She talked on the phone down in the courtyard, sounding upset sometimes, pleased at others; doubting, or excited—and all about numbers, letters, the value of this and that, strengths and weaknesses, forces of microscopic things that no one would ever see. She said to Budur once, staring at her equations, “You know, Budur, there is a very great deal of energy locked into things. The Travancori Chandaala was the deepest thinker we ever have had on this Earth; you could say the Long War was a catastrophe just because of his death alone. But he left us a lot, and the energy-mass equivalence—look—a mass, that's just a measure for a certain weight, say—you multiply it by the square of the speed of light—half a million li per second, think of that!—it results in enormous numbers, for even a little pinch of matter. That's the qi energy locked up in it. A strand of your hair has more energy in it than a locomotive.”

“No wonder it's so hard to get a brush through it,” Budur said uneasily, and Idelba laughed.

“But there's something wrong?” Budur asked.

At first Idelba did not answer. She was thinking, and lost to all around her. Then she stared at Budur.

“Something is wrong if we make it wrong. As always. Nothing in nature is wrong in itself.”

Budur wasn't so sure of that. Nature made men and women, nature made flesh and blood, hearts, periods, bitter feelings . . . sometimes it all seemed wrong to Budur, as if happiness were a stale scrap of bread, and all the swans of her heart were fighting for it, starving for it.

The roof of the house was forbidden to the women; it was a place where they might be observed from the roof terraces higher up Turi's Eastern Hill. And yet the men never used it, and it was the perfect place to get above the street's treetops, and have a view of the Alps to the south of Lake Turi. So, when the men were all gone, and Ahmet asleep in his chair by the gate, Aunt Idelba and cousin Yasmina would use the laundry drying posts as the legs of a ladder, placing them in olive jars and lashing them together, so that they could climb the lashings very gingerly, with the girls below and Idelba above holding the posts. Up they would go until they were all on the roof, in the dark, under the stars, in the wind, whispering so that Ahmet would not hear them, whispering so that they would not shout at the top of their lungs. The Alps in full moonlight stood there like white cardboard cutouts at the back of a puppet stage, perfectly vertical, the very image of what mountains should look like. Yasmina brought up her candles and powders to say the magic spells that would drive her men admirers to distraction—as if they weren't already. But Yasmina had an insatiable desire for men's regard, sharpened no doubt by the lack of access to it in the harem. Her Travancori incense would swirl up into the night, sandalwood, musk, saffron, nagi, and with their exotic scents filling her head it would seem to Budur a different world, vaster, more mysteriously meaningful—things suffused with their meanings as if with a liquid, right to the limits of surface tension, everything became a symbol of itself, the moon the symbol of moon, the sky the symbol of sky, the mountains the symbol of mountains, all bathed in a dark blue sea of longing. Longing, the very essence of longing, painful and beautiful, bigger than the world itself.

But one time the full moon came, and Idelba did not organize an expedition to the roof terrace. She had spent many hours that month on the telephone, and after each conversation had been uncharacteristically subdued. She hadn't described to the girls the contents of these calls or said who she had been talking to, though from her manner of talk Budur assumed it was her nephew, as usual. But no discussion of them at all.

Perhaps it was this that made Budur sensitive and wary of some change. On the night of the full moon she scarcely slept, waking every watch to see the moving shadows on the floor, waking from dreams of anxious flight through the alleys of the old town, escaping something behind her she never quite saw. Near dawn she woke to a noise from the terrace, and looked out her little window to see Idelba carrying the laundry poles down from the terrace into the stairwell. Then the olive jars as well.

Budur slipped out into the hall and down to the window at the carrel overlooking the yard in front. Idelba was constructing their ladder against the side of the household wall, just around the corner of the house from Ahmet's locked gate. She would top the wall next to a big elm tree that stood in the alley running between the walls of their house and the al-Dins' next door, who were from Neshapur.

Without a moment's hesitation, without any thought at all, Budur ran back to her room and dressed quickly, then ran downstairs and back out into the yard, around the corner of the house, glancing around the corner to be sure Idelba had gone.

She was. The way was clear; Budur could follow without impediment.

This time she did hesitate; and it would be difficult to describe her thoughts in that crucial moment of her life. No particular train of thought occupied her mind, but rather a kind of balancing of her whole existence: the harem, her mother's moods, her father's indifference to her, Ahab's simple face always behind her like an idiot animus, Yasmina's weeping; all of Turi at once, balanced on its two hills on each side of the river Limat, and in her head; beyond all that, huge cloudy masses of feeling, like the clouds one saw boiling up over the Alps. All inside her chest; and outside her a sensation as if clusters of eyes were trained on her, the ghost audience to her life, perhaps, out there always whether she saw them or not, like the stars. Something like that. It is always thus at the moment of change, when we rise up out of the everyday and get clear of the blinders of habit, and stand naked to existence, to the moment of choice, vast, dark, windy. The world is huge in these moments, huge. Too big to bear. Visible to all the ghosts of the world. The center of the universe.

She lurched forward. She ran to the ladder, climbed swiftly; it was no different than when it was set upstairs between terrace and roof. The branches of the elm were big and solid, it was easy to climb down far enough in them to make a final jump to the ground, jarring her fully awake, after which she rolled to her feet as smoothly as if she had been in on the plan from the start.

She tiptoed to the street and looked toward the tram stop. Her heart was thumping hard now, and she was hot in the chill air. She could take the tram or walk straight down the narrow streets, so steep that in several places they were staired. She was sure Idelba was off to the train station, and if she was wrong, she could give up the chase.

Even wearing a veil it was too early for a girl from a good family to be on the tram alone; indeed, it was always too early for a respectable girl to be out alone. So she hustled over to the top of the first stair alley, and began hurrying down the weaving course, through courtyard, park, alley, the stair of the roses, the tunnel made by Japanese fire maples, down and down the familiar way to the old town and the bridge crossing the river to the train station. Onto the bridge, where she looked upstream to the patch of sky between old stone buildings, its blue arched over the pink hem of the little bit of mountains visible, an embroidery dropped into the far end of the lake.

She was losing her resolve when she saw Idelba in the station, reading the schedule for track listings. Budur ducked behind a streetlight post, ran around the building into the doors on the other side, and likewise read a schedule. The first train for Nsara was on Track 16, at the far side of the station, leaving at .5 sharp, which had to be close. She checked the clock hanging over the row of trains, under the roof of the big shed; five minutes to spare. She slipped onto the last car of the train.

The train jerked slightly and was off. Budur moved forward up the train, car to car, holding on to the seat backs, her heart knocking faster and faster. What was she going to say to Idelba? And what if Idelba was not on the train, and Budur off to Nsara on her own, with no money?

But there Idelba sat, hunched over, looking forward out the window. Budur steeled herself and burst through the compartment door and rushed to her weeping, threw herself on her, “I'm sorry, Aunt Idelba, I didn't know you were going this far, I only followed to keep you company, I hope you have money to pay for my ticket too?”

“Oh name of Allah!” Idelba was shocked; then furious; mostly at herself, Budur judged through her tears, though she took it out for a little while on Budur, saying, “This is important business I'm on, this is no girl's prank! Oh, what will happen? What will happen? I should send you right back on the next train!”

Budur only shook her head and wept some more.

The train clicked quickly over the tracks, through country that was rather bland; hill and farm, hill and farm, flat woods and pastures, all clicking by at an enormous speed—it almost made her sick to look out the window, though she had ridden in trains all her life, and had looked out before at the view without a problem.

At the end of a long day the train entered the bleak outskirts of a city, like Downbrook only bigger, li after li of apartment blocks and close-set houses behind their walls, bazaars full of people, neighborhood mosques and bigger buildings of various kinds; then really big buildings, a whole knot of them flanking the many-bridged river, right before it opened out into the estuary, now a giant harbor, protected by a jetty that was broad enough to hold a street on it, with businesses on both sides.

The train took them right to the heart of this district of tall buildings, where a station, glass roofed and grimy, let them out onto a broad tree-lined street, a two-parted street divided by huge oaks planted in a line down a center island. They were a few blocks from the docks and the jetty. It smelled fishy.

A broad esplanade ran along the riverbank, backed by a row of red-leaved trees. Idelba walked quickly down this corniche, like Turi's lakeside corniche only much grander, until she turned onto a narrow street lined with three-story apartment blocks, their first floors occupied by restaurants and shops. Up a stair into one of these buildings, then into a doorway with three doors. Idelba rang the bell for the middle one, and the door opened and they were welcomed into an apartment like an old palace fallen apart.

2
Not an old palace, it turned out, but an old museum. No room in it was very big or impressive, but there were a lot of them. False ceilings, open ceilings, and abrupt cuts in wall paintings and wainscoting patterns made it clear that bigger rooms had been divided and subdivided. Most of the rooms held little more than one bed or cot, and the huge kitchen was crowded with women making a meal or waiting to eat it. They were thin women, for the most part. It was noisy with talk and stove fans. “What is this?” Budur asked Idelba under the hubbub.

“This is a zawiyya. A kind of boardinghouse for women.” Then with a bleak smile: “An antiharem.” She explained that these had been traditional in the Maghrib, and now they were widespread in Firanja. The war had left many more women alive than men, despite the indiscriminate devastation of its last two decades, when more civilians than soldiers had died, and women's brigades had been common on both sides. Turi and the other Alpine emirates had kept more men at home than most countries, putting them to work in the armories, so Budur had heard of the depopulation problem, but had never seen it. As for the zawiyyas, Idelba said they were still technically illegal, as the laws against female ownership of property had never been changed; but male nominal owners and other legal dodges were used to legitimize scores of them, hundreds of them.

“Why did you not live in one of these after your husband died?” Budur asked.

Idelba frowned. “I needed to leave for a while.”

They were assigned a room that had three beds, but no other occupants. The third bed would serve as desk and table. The room was dusty, and its little window looked out on other grimy windows, all facing in on an airshaft, as Idelba called it. Buildings here were so compressed together that they had to remember to leave shafts for air.