The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  The hakim shook his head, slowly but positively. “I have seen too many other signs, as I said. Your fingernails are opaque. Your hair is brittle and breaks easily. There is only one other confirming sign I have not seen, but you must have it somewhere on your body. A gummatous small sore that refuses to heal.”

  Uncle Mafio looked at him as if the hakim had been a sorcerer, and said in awe, “A fly bite, away back in Kashan. A mere fly bite, no more.”

  “Show me.”

  My uncle rolled up his left sleeve. Near his elbow was an angry and shiny red spot. The hakim leaned to peer at it, saying, “Tell me if I am wrong. Where the fly first bit, the bite healed and a small scar formed, in the natural manner. But then the sore erupted anew beyond the scar, and then healed again, and then erupted again, always beyond the old scar …”

  “You are not wrong,” my uncle said weakly. “What does it mean?”

  “It confirms my conclusion diagnostic—that you are suffering from the kala-azar. The black sickness, the evil sickness. It does indeed proceed from the bite of a fly. But that fly is, of course, the incarnation of an evil jinni. A jinni who cunningly takes the form of a fly so small that it would hardly be suspected of bearing so much harm.”

  “Oh, not so much that I cannot bear it. Some mottled skin, some coughing, a little fever, a little sore …”

  “But unhappily it will not for long be not so much. The manifestations will multiply, and worsen. Your brittle hair will break and you will go bald all over. The fever will bring emaciation and asthenia and lassitude, until you have no will to move at all. The pain below your breast bone proceeds from the organ called your spleen. That will hurt even more, and begin to bulge frighteningly outward, as it hardens and loses all function. Meanwhile, the lividity will spread over your skin, and it will darken to black, and it will pouch out into gummata and blebs and furuncles and squamations until your entire body—including your face—resembles one great bunch of black raisins. By then, you will be ardently wishing to die. And die you will, when your splenic functions fail. Without immediate and continuing treatment, you are sure to die.”

  “But there is a treatment?”

  “Yes. This is it.” Hakim Mimdad produced a small cloth sack. “This medicament consists principally of a fine-powdered metal, a trituration of the metal called stibium. It is a sure vanquisher of the jinni and a sure cure for the kala-azar. If you start now to take this, in exceedingly minute amounts, and go on taking it as I prescribe, you will soon start to improve. You will regain the weight you have lost. Your strength will return. You will be again in the best of health. But this stibium is the only cure.”

  “Well? Only one cure is needed, surely. I will gladly settle for the one.”

  “I regret to tell you that the stibium, while it arrests the kala-azar, is itself physically harmful in another particular.” He paused. “Are you sure you would not prefer to continue this consultation in private?”

  Uncle Mafio hesitated, glancing about at us, but squared his shoulders and growled, “Whatever it is, tell it.”

  “Stibium is a heavy metal. When it is ingested, it settles downward from the stomach into the splanchnic area, working its beneficial effects as it goes, subduing the jinni of the kala-azar. But being heavy, it precipitates into the lower part of the body, which is to say the bag containing the virile stones.”

  “So my cod dangles heavier. I am strong enough to carry it.”

  “I assume that you are a man who enjoys, er, exercising it. Now that you are afflicted with the black sickness, there is no time to waste. If you do not yet have a lady friend in this locality, I recommend that you hie yourself to the local brothel maintained by the Jew Shimon.”

  Uncle Mafio barked a laugh, which perhaps I or my father could better interpret than the Hakim Mimdad. “I fail to see the connection. Why should I do that?”

  “To indulge your virile capability while you can. Were I you, Mirza Mafio, I should hasten to make all the zina I could. You are doomed either to be horribly disfigured by the kala-azar, and eventually to die of it—or, if you are to be cured and kept alive, you must begin immediately taking the stibium.”

  “What do you mean, if? Of course I want to be cured.”

  “Think on it. Some would rather die of the black sickness.”

  “In the name of God, why? Speak plainly, man!”

  “Because the stibium, settling in your scrotum, will instantly start exercising its other and deleterious effect—of petrifying your testicles. Very soon, and for the rest of your life, you will be totally impotent.”

  “Gèsu.”

  No one else said anything. There was a terrible silence in the room, and it seemed that no one wished to brave the breaking of it. Finally Uncle Mafio spoke again himself, saying ruefully:

  “I called you Dotòr Balanzòn, little realizing how truly I spoke. That you would indeed present me with a mordant jest. Giving me such a comical choice: that I die miserably or I live unmanned.”

  “That is the choice. And the decision cannot be long postponed.”

  “I will be a eunuch?”

  “In effect, yes.”

  “No capability?”

  “None.”

  “But … perhaps … dar mafa’ul be-vasilè al-badàm?”

  “Nakher. The badàm, the so-called third testicle, also gets petrified.”

  “No way at all, then. Capòn mal caponà. But … desire?”

  “Nakher. Not even that.”

  “Ah, well!” Uncle Mafio surprised us all by sounding as jovial as ever. “Why did you not say that at the first? What matter if I cannot function, if I shall not even want to? Why, think of it! No desire—therefore no need, therefore no nuisance, therefore no complicated aftermath. I ought to be the envy of every priest ever tempted by a woman or a choirboy or a sùccubo.” I decided that Uncle Mafio was not really so jovial as he was trying to sound. “And after all, not many of my desires could ever have been realized, anyway. My most recent one dwindled away in a trembling land. So it is fortunate that this jinni of castration assailed only me and not someone of worthier desires.” He barked another laugh, with that horrid false joviality. “But listen to me—raving and maundering. If I am not careful, I may even become a moral philosopher, the last refuge of eunuchdom. God forfend. A moralist is more to be shunned than a sensualist, no xe vero? By all means, good hakim, I shall choose to live. Let us commence the medication—but not until tomorrow, eh?” He picked up and put on his voluminous chapon overcoat. “As you have also prescribed, while I still have desires, I ought to squander them. While I still have juices, wallow in them, yes? So excuse me, gentlemen. Ciao.” And he left us, slamming vigorously out the door.

  “The patient puts a brave face on it,” murmured the hakim.

  “He may honestly mean it,” my father said speculatively. “The most dauntless mariner, after having many ships sink under him, may be thankful when he is finally beached on a placid strand.”

  “I hope not!” blurted Nostril. He added hastily, “Only my own opinion, good masters. But no mariner should be grateful for being dismasted. Especially not one of Master Mafìo’s age—which is approximately the same as my own. Excuse me, Hakim Mimdad, but is this grisly kala-azar possibly … infectious?”

  “Oh, no. Not unless you also should be bitten by the jinni fly.”

  “Still and all,” Nostril said uneasily, “one feels compelled to … to make sure. If you masters have no commands for me, I too will ask to be excused.”

  And off he went, and shortly so did I. Probably the fearful and superstitious slave had not believed the physician’s assurance. I did, but even so … .

  When one attends a dying, as I have said before, one of course comes away grieving for the loss of the dead one, but even more—even if only secretly, even if only unconsciously—rejoicing at being oneself still alive. Having just now attended what might be called a partial dying, or a dying by parts, I rejoiced in still possessing those parts, and,
like Nostril, I was anxious to verify that I did still possess them. I went straight to Shimon’s establishment.

  I did not meet Nostril or my uncle there; most likely the slave had gone in search of some accessible boy of the kuch-i-safari, and possibly so had Uncle Mafio. I again asked the Jew for the dark-brown girl Chiv, and got her, and had her, so energetically that she gasped Romm words of astonished pleasure—“yilo!” and “friska!” and “alo! alo! alo!”—and I felt sadness and compassion for all the eunuchs and Sodomites and castròni and every other sort of cripple who would never know the delight of making a woman sing that sweet song.

  3

  ON my every subsequent visit to Shimon’s place of business—and they were fairly frequent, once or twice a week—I asked for Chiv. I was quite satisfied with her performance of surata, and had almost ceased to notice her skin’s qahwah color, and was not at all disposed to try the other colors and races of females the Jew kept in his stable, for they were all inferior to Chiv in face and figure. But surata was not my only diversion during that winter. There was always something happening in Buzai Gumbad that was of novelty and interest to me. Whenever I heard a burst of noise that was either someone stepping on a cat or someone starting to play the native music, I always assumed it was the latter, and went to see what kind of entertainment it promised. I might find just a mirasi or a najhaya malang, but it would as often be something more worth observing.

  A mirasi was only a male singer, but of a special sort: he sang nothing but family histories. On request, and on payment, he would squat before his sarangi—which was an instrument rather like a viella, played with a bow, but laid flat on the ground—and he would saw at its strings, and to that wailing accompaniment he would warble the names of all the forebears of the Prophet Muhammad or Alexander the Great or any other historical personage. But not many requested that sort of performance; it seemed that everybody already knew by heart the genealogies of all the accepted notables. A mirasi was oftenest hired by a family to sing its history. Sometimes, I suppose, they indulged in the expense just to enjoy hearing their family tree set to music, and perhaps sometimes just to impress all their neighbors within hearing. But usually they engaged a mirasi when a matrimonial match was contemplated with some other family, and so would set forth, at the top of the mirasi’s lungs, the estimable heritage of the boy or girl about to be betrothed. The family’s head would write down or recite that entire genealogy to the mirasi, who would then arrange all the names into rhyme and rhythm—or so I was told; I never could preceive much other than monotonous noise—the singing and sarangi sawing of which could occupy hours. I assume this took a considerable talent, but after one stint of hearing how “Reza Feruz begat Lotf Ali and Lotf Ali begat Rahim Yadollah” and so on, from Adam to date, I did not exert myself to attend any other such performances.

  The doings of a najhaya malang did not pall quite so quickly. A malang is the same thing as a darwish, a holy beggar, and even up on top of the Roof of the World there were beggars, both native and transient. Some of these offered entertainment before demanding bakhshish. A malang would sit down cross-legged in front of a basket and tweedle on a simple wood or clay pipe. A najhaya snake would raise its head from the basket, spread its hood and gracefully sway, seeming to dance in time to the raucous tweedling. The najhaya is a fearsomely cross and venomous snake, and every malang maintained that none but he had such power over the serpent—a power acquired in occult ways. For instance, the basket was a special sort called a khajur, and could be woven only by a man; the cheap pipe had to be mystically sanctified; the music was a melody known only to the initiated. But I soon perceived that every snake had had its fangs drawn and was harmless. It was also apparent, since snakes have no ears, that the najhaya was simply swaying back and forth to keep its impotent aim fixed on the wiggling pipe end. The malang could have played a melodious Venetian furlàna and got the same effect.

  But sometimes I would hear a sudden burst of music and follow it to its source and find a group of handsome Kalash men chanting in baritone, “Dhama dham mast qalandar …” as they put on their red shoes called utzar, which they donned only when they were about to charge into the stamping, kicking, pounding dance they called the dhamal. Or I might hear the rumbling drumbeat and wild piping that accompanied an even more frenzied, furious, whirling dance called the attan, in which half the camp, men and women alike, might join.

  Once, when I heard music swelling forth in the darkness of night, I followed it to a Sindi train’s encampment of wagons in a circle, and found the Sindi women doing a dance for women only, and singing as they danced, “Sammi meri warra, ma‘in wa’ir … .” I found Nostril also looking on, smiling and beating time with his fingers on his paunch, for these were women of his own native land. They were rather too brawny for my taste, and inclined to mustaches, but their dance was pretty, being done by the light of the moon. I sat down beside Nostril, where he sat propped against a wheel of one of the covered wagons, and he interpreted the song and dance for me. The women were recounting a tragic love story, he said—the story of a Princess Sammi, who was a girl much in love with a boy Prince named Dhola, but when they grew up he went away and forgot her and never came back. A sad story, but I could sympathize with Prince Dhola, if his little Princess Sammi had grown meaty and mustached as she matured.

  Every woman in the train must have been recruited into the dance, because, inside the wagon against which Nostril and I leaned, an unattended and restive baby was bellowing loud enough to drown out even the sonorous Sindi music. I endured it for some time, hoping the child would eventually doze—or strangle, I did not much care which. When after a long time it did neither, I grumbled irascibly.

  “Allow me to hush it, master,” said Nostril, and he got up and climbed inside the wagon.

  The child’s wails subsided to gurgles and then to silence. I was grateful, and bent all my attention on the dance. The infant remained blessedly quiet, but Nostril stayed in there for some time. When at last he climbed down to sit beside me again, I thanked him and said in jest, “What did you do? Kill and bury it?”

  He replied complacently, “No, master, I had an inspiration of the moment. I delighted the child with a fine new pacifier to suck, and a creamier milk than its mother’s.”

  It took me a little while to realize what he had said. Then I recoiled from him and exclaimed, “Good God! You did not!” He looked not at all ashamed, only mildly surprised at my outburst. “Gèsu! That miserable little thing of yours has been foully diseased, and filthily inserted in animals and backsides and—and now a baby! Of your own people!”

  He shrugged. “You wished the infant quieted, Master Marco. Behold, it still sleeps the sleep of contentment. And I do not feel half bad myself.”

  “Bad! Gèsu Marìa Isèpo, but you are the worst—the most vile and loathsome excuse for a human being that I have ever met!”

  He deserved at least to be beaten bloody, and surely he would have got worse than that from the baby’s parents. But, since I had in a way incited him, I did not strike the slave. I merely scolded and reviled him and quoted to him the words of Our Lord Jesus—or Nostril’s Prophet Isa—that we should always treat tenderly little children, “for of such is the kingdom of God.”

  “But I did it tenderly, master. Now you have peace in which to enjoy the rest of the dancing.”

  “I will not! Not in your company, creature! I could not meet the eyes of the dancing women, knowing that one of them is the mother of that wretched innocent.” So I went away before that performance was concluded.

  But happily, most such occasions were not spoiled for me by any such incident. Sometimes, when I heeded the call of music, it led me not to a dance but to a game. There were two kinds of outdoor sport popular at Buzai Gumbad, and neither could have been played in a much smaller area, for both involved a considerable number of men on horseback, riding hard.

  One game was played only by the Hunzukut men, because it had been originally inven
ted in their home valley of Hunza, somewhere to the south of these mountains. In that game, the men swung heavy sticks, like mallets, batting at an object they called the pulu, a rounded-off knot of willow wood which rolled on the ground like a ball. Each team comprised six mounted Hunzukut, who tried to strike that pulu with their sticks—meanwhile often and enthusiastically striking their opponents, their horses and their own teammates—in order to drive the pulu past the six opponents’ flailing defense until it rolled or flew beyond a winning line at the far end of the field.

  I often lost track of a game’s progress because I had a hard time telling the members of the two teams apart. They all wore heavy garments of fur and hide, plus the typical Hunzuk hat, which makes a man look as if he is balancing two thick pies atop his head. The hat actually consists of a long tube of coarse cloth rolled from both ends until the two rolls meet, and the whole then plopped onto the head. For a contest of the pulu, the six men on one team would don red pie-hats and the other six put on blue ones. But, after a very short time of play, the colors would be almost indistinguishable.

  I also often lost sight of the wooden pulu itself, among the horses’ forty-eight pounding hoofs and the thrown-about snow and mud and sweat, and the intermixed clashing mallets and, not infrequently, some unhorsed players being whacked and kicked about as well. But the more experienced game-watchers, meaning almost everybody else in Buzai Gumbad, were keener of eye. Every time they saw the pulu bounce past the winning line at one or the other end of the field, the whole crowd would shout, “Gol! Go-o-o-ol!”—a Hunzuk word signifying that one team had tallied a point toward winning the game—and simultaneously a band of musicians would pound drums and blow flutes in a cacophony of celebration.

  A game did not end until one team had nine times put the pulu past the opposing gol line. So that herd of twelve horses might spend a whole day thundering up and down the increasingly sloppy and treacherous field, with the players bellowing and cursing and the spectators roaring encouragement, and the sticks waving and crashing and often splintering, and the churned-up terrain plastering the players and horses and watchers and musicians, and the riders falling from their saddles and trying to scurry to safety and being cheerfully ridden down by their fellows, and, toward the end of the day, when the field was a mere swamp of mud and slime, the horses also slipping and slewing and falling down. It was a splendid kind of sport, and I never missed a chance to watch it.