by Noah Gordon
“I’ve promised to attend Karim during the running.”
“Will you be his only attendant?”
“Mirdin will be there too. But I believe he will need the two of us.” There was a question in his voice and she knew he was troubled that she might consider it a disrespect toward her father.
“Then you must,” she said firmly.
“The race itself isn’t a celebration. It could not be considered wrong for one in mourning merely to look on.”
She thought about it as Bairam approached and in the end decided her husband was right, and that she would watch the chatir.
Early on the first morning of the month of Shawwal there was a heavy mist that gave Karim hope it would be a good day, a runner’s day. He had slept fitfully but told himself that doubtless the other competitors had spent the night the same way, trying to keep their minds from dwelling on the race.
He rose and cooked himself a large pot of peas and rice, sprinkling the coarse pilah with celery seed that he measured with careful attention. He ate more than he wanted, stoking himself like a fire, and then returned to his pallet and rested while the celery seed did its work, keeping his mind blank and serene with prayer:
Allah, make me fleet and sure of foot this day.
Let my chest be like unto a bellows that does not fail
And my legs strong and supple as young trees.
Keep my mind clear and my senses sharp
And my eyes ever fixed on Thee.
He didn’t pray for victory. When he was a boy, Zaki-Omar had told him often enough: “Every yellow dog of a runner prays for victory. How confusing for Allah! It is better to ask Him to grant speed and endurance and use them to take the responsibility for victory or defeat upon oneself.”
When he felt the urge he rose and went to the bucket, squatting a long and satisfying time to move his bowels. The amount of celery seed had been correct; when he was through he was emptied but not weakened, and he would not be deterred that day by a cramp in the midst of a lap.
He warmed water and bathed from a bowl by candlelight, wiping himself dry quickly because the dwindling dark contained a coolness. Then he anointed himself with olive oil against the sun, and twice wherever friction might cause pain—nipples, armpits, loins and penis, the crease of buttocks, and finally his feet, taking care to oil the tops of his toes.
He dressed in a linen loincloth and linen shirt, light leather footman’s shoes, and a jaunty feathered cap. Around his neck he suspended a bowman’s quiver and an amulet in a small cloth bag, and threw a cloak over his shoulders to guard against chill. Then he let himself out of the house.
He walked slowly at first and then more rapidly, feeling warmth beginning to unlock his muscles and joints. There were as yet few people in the streets. No one noticed him as he entered a brushy copse to indulge in one last nervous piss. But by the time he reached the starting point by the drawbridge of the House of Paradise a crowd had gathered there, hundreds of men. He made his way carefully through it until by prearrangement he came upon Mirdin at the very rear, and it was here a short time later that Jesse ben Benjamin found them.
His friends greeted one another stiffly. Some trouble between them, Karim saw. He put it out of his mind at once. This was a time to think only of the race.
Jesse grinned at him and questioningly touched the little bag hanging from his neck.
“My luck,” Karim said. “From my lady.” But he shouldn’t talk before a race, he could not. He gave Jesse and Mirdin a quick smile to show he meant no offense and closed his eyes and brought in blankness, shutting out the loud talk and boisterous laughter all around him. It was harder to shut out the smells of oils and animal grease, body odor and sweaty clothing.
He said his prayer.
When he opened his eyes the mist had turned pearly. Looking through it, he was able to see a perfectly round red disc, the sun. The air had changed and already was heavy. He realized with a pang that it would be a brutally hot day.
Out of his hands. Imshallah.
He removed his cloak and gave it to Jesse.
Mirdin was pale. “Allah be with you.”
“Run with God, Karim,” Jesse told him.
He didn’t answer. Now a hush had fallen. The runners and the onlookers were gazing up at the nearest minaret, the Friday Mosque, where Karim could see a tiny, dark-robed figure just entering the tower.
In a moment the haunting call to First Prayer floated to their ears and Karim prostrated himself to the southwest, the direction of Mecca.
When the praying ended everyone was screaming at the top of his lungs, runners and spectators alike. It was frightening and made him tremble. Some shouted encouragement, others called upon Allah; many simply howled, the bloodcurdling sound men might make when attacking an enemy’s wall.
Back where he was standing the movement of the front runners could only be sensed but he knew from experience how some were springing forward to be in the first rank, fighting and shoving, heedless of who was trampled and what injuries were inflicted. Even those who were not slow in rising from prayer were at risk, because in the churning maelstrom of bodies, flailing arms would strike faces, feet would kick nearby legs, ankles would be twisted and turned.
It was why he waited in the rear with contemptuous patience as wave after wave of runners moved away ahead of him, assaulting him with their noise.
But finally he was running. The chatir had begun and he was in the tail of a long serpent of men.
He was running very slowly. It would take a long time to cover the first five and one-quarter miles, but that was part of his plan. The alternative would have been to station himself in front of the crowd, then, assuming he wasn’t injured in the melee, surge forward at a pace guaranteed to move him safely ahead of the pack. But this would have used up too much energy at the outset. He had chosen the safer way.
They ran down the wide Gates of Paradise and turned left to stay for more than a mile on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens, which dropped and then rose, giving a long hill on the first half of the lap and a short but steeper hill on the return. The course turned right onto the Street of the Apostles, which was only a quarter of a mile long; but the short street fell on the way out and was a laborious run on the return. They padded left again onto the Avenue of Ali and Fatima, and followed it all the way to the madrassa.
All kinds of people were in the pack. It was fashionable for young nobles to run for half a lap, and men in silk summer clothing ran shoulder to shoulder with runners in rags. Karim hung back, for at this point it wasn’t a race so much as a running mob, full of high spirits over the end of Ramadan. It wasn’t a bad way for him to begin, for the slow pace allowed his juices to begin to flow gradually.
There were spectators but it was too early for a dense crowd to line the streets; it was a long race and most people would come to watch later. At the madrassa he looked at once toward the long roof of the one-storied maristan, where the woman who had given him the amulet—it was a lock of her hair in the little bag—had said her husband had arranged for her to watch the chatir. She wasn’t there yet but two nurses stood on the street in front of the hospital and shouted “Hakim! Hakim!” Karim waved as he ran by, knowing they would be disappointed to see him at the end of the pack.
They wound through the madrassa grounds and on to the central maidan, where two great open tents had been raised. One for courtiers, carpeted and lined with brocades, contained tables bearing all manner of rich victuals and wines. The other tent, for runners of common birth, offered free bread and pilah and sherbet and appeared no less welcoming, so that here the race lost almost half its contestants, who made for the refreshment with glad cries.
Karim was among those who ran past the tents. They circled the stone ball-and-stick goals and then began to retrace the course to the House of Paradise.
Now they were fewer and strung along a distance, and Karim had room to set his pace.
There were choices. Some held with
pushing the first few laps smartly to take advantage of the morning cool. But he had been taught by Zaki-Omar that the secret of completing long distances was to select a pace that would drain his last bit of energy at the completion, and to stay with that speed unvaryingly. He was able to fall into it with the perfect rhythm and regularity of a trotting horse. The Roman mile was one thousand five-foot paces but Karim ran about twelve hundred steps to a mile, each covering a little more than four feet. He held his spine perfectly straight, his head high. The slap-slap-slap of his feet against the ground at his chosen pace was like the voice of an old friend.
He began to pass some runners now, though he knew that most were not men in serious contention, and he was running easily when he returned to the palace gates and collected the first arrow to be dropped into his quiver.
Mirdin offered balm to be rubbed into his skin against the sun, which he refused, and water, which he took gratefully but sparingly.
“You are forty-second,” Jesse said, and he nodded and sprang away.
Now he ran in the full light of day and the sun was low but already strong, clearly signaling the heat to come. It wasn’t unexpected. Sometimes Allah was kind to runners but most chatirs were ordeals through the Persian heat. The high points of Zaki-Omar’s athletic career had been to win second place in two chatirs, once when Karim was twelve years old and again the year he was fourteen. He remembered his terror at seeing the exhaustion in Zaki’s red face and popping eyes. Zaki had run as long and as far as he had been able, but in both races there had been one runner who could run longer and farther.
Grimly, Karim removed the thought from his mind.
The hills seemed no worse than they had on the first lap and he ascended them almost without thought. The crowds began to be thicker everywhere, for it was a fine sunny morning and Ispahan was enjoying a holiday. Most businesses were closed and people stood or sat along the route in groups—Armenians together, Indians together, Jews together, learned societies and religious organizations en masse.
When Karim came to the hospital again and still couldn’t see the woman who had promised to be there, he felt a pang. Perhaps, after all, her husband had forbidden her to come.
There was a solid clump of spectators in front of the school and they cheered and waved him on.
As he approached the maidan he saw it was already as frenzied as if it were a Thursday evening. Musicians, jugglers, fencers, acrobats, dancers, and magicians played to large audiences, while the runners made their way around the outside of the square almost unnoticed.
Karim began to pass spent contenders lying or sitting by the side of the road.
When he collected his second arrow Mirdin again tried to give him an ointment to protect his skin from the sun but he refused it, though he knew with a private shame it was because the ointment was unsightly and he wanted her to see him without it. It would be available if needed since, by prearrangement, on this lap Jesse would begin to follow him on the brown horse. Karim knew himself; the first testing of his soul was coming, for he invariably felt distress after 25 Roman miles.
Problems came almost on schedule. Halfway up the hill on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens he became aware of a raw place on the heel of his right foot. It was impossible to run such a long race without damaging his feet and he knew he must ignore the discomfort, but soon it was joined by a sticking pain in his right side that grew until he gasped whenever his right foot jarred against the road.
He signaled to Jesse, who was carrying a goatskin of water behind his saddle, but a warm drink tasting of goaty leather did little to ease his discomfort.
But when he drew close to the madrassa, at once he spotted on the hospital roof the woman for whom he’d been looking, and it was as if everything that had been troubling him fell away.
Rob, riding behind Karim like a squire trailing his knight, saw Mary as they approached the maristan and they smiled at each other. Dressed in her mourning black, she would have been inconspicuous were her face not unadorned, but every other female in sight wore the heavy black street veil. The others on the roof stood slightly apart from his wife, as if afraid lest they be corrupted by her European ways.
There were slaves with the women and he recognized the eunuch Wasif standing behind a small figure disguised by a shapeless black dress. Her face was hidden behind the horsehair veil but he could note Despina’s eyes, and where they were turned.
Following her gaze to Karim, Rob saw something that made it difficult for him to breathe. Karim had found Despina too and held her with his glance. As he ran past her, his hand went up and touched the little bag suspended around his neck.
It seemed to Rob a naked declaration to all, but the sound of the cheering didn’t change. And although Rob tried to study the crowd for Ibn Sina’s presence, he didn’t see him among the spectators as they went past the madrassa.
Karim ran away from the pain in his side until it dwindled, and he ignored the discomfort in his feet. Now the time of attrition had begun and all along the way men in donkey-drawn wagons were busy picking up runners who couldn’t go on.
When he claimed his third arrow he allowed Mirdin to smear him with the ointment, made of oil of roses, oil of nutmeg, and cinnamon. It turned his light-brown skin yellow but was good against the sun. Jesse kneaded his legs while Mirdin applied the salve, then held a cup to his cracked lips, giving him more water than he desired.
Karim tried to protest. “Don’t want to have to piss!”
“You’re sweating too hard to piss.”
He knew it was true, and he drank. In a moment he was away again and running, running.
This time when he passed the school he was aware that she saw an apparition, the melted yellow grease streaked by rivulets of sweat and muddied dust.
Now the sun was high and hot, baking the ground so the heat of the road penetrated the leather of his shoes and seared his soles. Along the route men stood and held out containers of water, and sometimes he paused to drench his head before darting off without thanks or a blessing.
After he had collected the fourth arrow, Jesse left him, to reappear in a short time on his wife’s black mount, doubtless leaving the brown horse to water and rest in cool shade. Mirdin waited by the post containing the arrows, studying the other runners, according to their plan.
Karim kept running past men who had collapsed. Someone stood bent over at the waist in the middle of the road, weakly vomiting nothing. A muttering Indian stopped hobbling and kicked off his shoes. He ran half a dozen steps, leaving the red tracks of his bloody feet, and then stood quietly and waited for a wagon.
When Karim passed the maristan on the fifth lap Despina was no longer on the roof. Perhaps she had been frightened by his appearance. It didn’t matter, for he had seen her and now occasionally he reached up and grasped the little bag containing the thick locks of black hair he had cut from her head with his own hands.
In places the wagons and the feet of the runners and the hooves of the attendants’ animals raised a fearful dust that coated his nostrils and throat and made him cough. He began to close down his consciousness until it was small and remote somewhere deep inside, dwelling on nothing, allowing his body to continue to do what it had done so many times.
The call to Second Prayer was a shock.
All along the route, runners and spectators alike prostrated themselves toward Mecca. He lay and trembled, his body unable to believe that the demands on it had halted, however briefly. He wanted to remove his shoes but knew he wouldn’t get them back on his swollen feet. When the prayers were finished, for a moment he didn’t move.
“How many?”
“Eighteen. Now it is the race,” Jesse told him.
Karim started up again, forcing himself to run through the heat shimmer. But he knew it was not yet the race.
It was harder to climb the hills than it had been all morning but he kept to the steady rhythm of his running. This was the worst, with the sun directly overhead and the real te
sting before him. He thought of Zaki and knew that unless he died he would keep going until at least he had won second place.
Until now he hadn’t had the experience, and in another year perhaps his body would be too old for such punishment. It would have to be today.
The thought allowed him to reach within himself and find strength when some of the others were searching and finding nothing, and when he slid the sixth arrow into his quiver, he turned at once to Mirdin. “How many?”
“Six runners are left,” Mirdin said wonderingly, and Karim nodded and began to run again.
Now it was the race.
He saw three runners ahead and knew two of them. He was overtaking a small, finely made Indian. Perhaps eighty paces in front of the Indian was a youth whose name Karim didn’t know but whom he recognized as a soldier in the palace guard. And far ahead but close enough for him to identify was a runner of note, a man from Hamadhān named al-Harāt.
The Indian had slowed but picked up the pace when Karim drew even, and they went on together, matching stride for stride. He had very dark skin, almost ebony, under which long, flat muscles gleamed in the sun as he moved.
Zaki’s skin had been dark, an advantage under a hot sun. Karim’s skin needed the yellow salve; it was the color of light leather, the result, Zaki always said, of a female ancestor being fucked by one of Alexander’s fair Greeks. Karim thought something like that probably was true. There had been a number of Greek invasions and he knew light-skinned Persian men, and women with snowy breasts.
A little spotted dog had come from nowhere and was pacing them, barking.
When they passed the estates on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens people held out melon slices and cups of sherbet but Karim didn’t take any, being fearful of cramps. He accepted water, which he put into his cap before setting it back on his head and reaping momentary relief until the hat dried in the sun with remarkable swiftness.
The Indian grabbed green melon and gobbled as he ran, discarding the rind over his shoulder.
