Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  And without the slightest warning, without the accompaniment of pain in her chest or a clutch to her heart, Connie began to cry.

  The tears poured out of her eyes. She wept like a baby in its mother’s arms, hiding her face against the massive breasts as the woman hummed and crooned to her. She stroked Connie’s hair and patted her hands, waiting until she was done with crying and began to regain possession of herself. When the flood finally stopped the woman dried her face for her, and gently set her upright once more.

  ‘Oh dear. I am so sorry,’ Connie gulped.

  She pressed her hands to her eyes. The women in their turbans – daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers – were still drinking tea and playing with the babies.

  Then she realised that she didn’t feel sorry at all.

  She felt light, and calm, and peaceful. A small, hard knob of anger that she had carried within her for too long had detached itself from the place beneath her breastbone, and it had floated clean away.

  She wasn’t going to know the woman who had given birth to her, and she would never learn why – in all the years since then – she hadn’t tried to find her lost daughter.

  She would have her reasons, whatever they were, whoever she was.

  That was all there was to know. The difference was that now, among all these women in this strangest of places, Connie thought truthfully, for the first time, that she could forgive her.

  The masseuse leaned forward and pointed with a sausage finger at Connie’s marcasite droplet. She asked a question in Russian.

  Roxana had retreated to have her eyebrows threaded, but now she came back.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ Connie asked.

  ‘She is worried that you have perhaps lost your earring in here.’

  ‘Tell her I only have one. My mother –’ the word unfamiliar on her tongue, but also satisfying ‘– has always kept the pair to it.’

  Roxana relayed the information. The masseuse was folding towels. Her huge arms swallowed up the pile.

  ‘Mother. Very good,’ she said in English, and beamed at Connie.

  Outside the hammam it was stiflingly hot, and growing dark. They walked slowly, scuffing up the dust, and Connie’s feet and head felt light with happiness.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she murmured to Roxana.

  There was no one to be seen in the narrow streets of the old city, but from one window came the blare of a televised football game and from another a steamy waft of cooking. Doors stood ajar to admit the suggestion of a breeze, and from a third house came the sound of a baby crying.

  Roxana hesitated. ‘I am going home to Yakov, to take this shopping.’ She held up her string bags. ‘Maybe you would like to come with me?’

  Connie interpreted that Roxana would like her to meet Yakov and see where she lived but wasn’t sure what she would make of it.

  Without placing undue emphasis she answered lightly, ‘Yes, I’ll come. I’d like to meet him.’

  A sequence of alleys and squares guarded by closed mosques brought them into a slightly more modern quarter. They passed a butcher’s shop with muslin-wrapped animal shanks hanging in the opening. The shop’s sign was a stuffed cow’s head, complete with horns and whiskered muzzle. The animal’s sceptical glass eye followed Connie as she walked by. Next door was a cavern heaped with hundreds of onyx-green watermelons. Roxana stopped her march to buy one and drop it into another string bag. Connie offered to carry it for her, but Roxana wouldn’t permit it.

  They came to a brown door in a blank wall, as anonymous as each of its neighbours.

  Roxana unlatched the door and they stepped over a wooden sill into a courtyard.

  There was silence, broken by the scratch of music and a sudden flutter of wings. One entire wall of the courtyard was taken up by a cage full of green finches. Roxana put down her bags and called out, ‘Yakov! We are here.’

  She held aside a curtain of beads. Connie blinked in the light. The whole room was taken up with crowded bookshelves, and there were stacks and pyramids of books on the tiled floor and on the table in the centre.

  In an armchair sat one of the fattest men she had ever seen. He had an oval, bald head, and a neck that seemed to slide downwards into unconfined billows of flesh. Even his feet in leather slippers were monstrously fat, and his bruise-purple ankles seemed as thick as a man’s thigh. He looked up at them and shuffled his bulk to the edge of his seat.

  ‘You are here, that’s good. Please. Please come and be comfortable.’

  ‘Yakov, this is my good friend Connie.’

  Connie held out her hand and he grasped it. His skin was smooth and very soft, almost liquid, as if it was close to dissolving point.

  Roxana was moving books and papers off a straight-backed sofa draped with worn throws. ‘Sit here, Connie. Yakov, would you like chai? Some fruit? Connie and I were at the hammam.’

  He nodded, and Roxana ducked out of the room.

  ‘So,’ Yakov breathed.

  His glance was very sharp. He might have been immobilised by his bulk, but Connie did not think that he would miss very much. Her eyes slid over the books. The titles were in English, Russian, Arabic, and other languages that she couldn’t even identify.

  Yakov said, ‘You have been very kind to the child. I want to thank you.’

  Connie smiled. ‘I don’t know about kind. I loved her company. You taught her to speak English, didn’t you?’

  He nodded. The small movement set up a ripple under his loose grey pyjama suit. There were dark rings under his arms and another patch over his chest. Connie speculated about the precise arrangement between Yakov and Roxana. He had been a friend of her mother’s, maybe at one time her protector, and then he had extended that protection in some way to Roxana when Leonid, the stepfather, had mistreated her.

  Whatever had happened, Roxana never spoke of such things. She just did what it was necessary for her to do, crimping the corners of her mouth and setting her shoulders with renewed determination.

  ‘She was an apt pupil. I did not have to repeat myself very many times. What brings you to Bokhara, Connie?’

  ‘I have been travelling, and when Roxana left London I promised I would visit her. Will her brother be released, do you think?’

  ‘When you come to know this country, Connie, you will understand that that is a question that does not have a simple answer. It depends on many things.’

  There was a clink of glass as Roxana nudged the beads aside and came in with a beaten-metal tray. She had taken off her shoes, and replaced them with leather slippers like Yakov’s. The effect was to shorten her legs and broaden her hips, as if she was edging out of girlhood. She poured tea into three glasses and held out a dish of sliced watermelon. Yakov took a piece and gobbled it, catching the juice with his hand as it ran down his chin and then licking each of his fingers. He belched loudly. Roxana glanced to see Connie’s reaction as Yakov tossed the melon rind back into the dish.

  ‘I am an old man,’ he snapped, and crooked his finger to indicate that he wanted another piece. ‘Now. We are talking about Niki.’

  Niki was allowed one visit a month. It took a ten-hour bus journey to reach the prison where he was held, and the same for the return trip. Roxana had told Connie that in order to be nearer to him she could try to find work in Tashkent – ‘like my friend Fatima’ – but she had stayed here in Bokhara because she could live with Yakov without paying any rent, and thanks to her experience in London she had been able to get a very good job at the old Intourist Hotel.

  ‘The fact is, Connie, that Niki will not choose to say or do what will help himself,’ Yakov added. ‘So his release is not likely to come soon.’

  Roxana jumped to her feet. She stood in front of Yakov, hands on her hips.

  ‘Niki has a belief. I do not want him to change his belief or pretend that he does not have it, because then he will not any longer be Niki and he might as well have died in the square at Andijan with his friends.’

  Ya
kov shrugged and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He spoke quickly, dismissively, in Russian.

  Roxana ran at him and drummed her fists on his chest and shoulders, shouting into his face. Moving with surprising speed Yakov caught her wrists and held her off to one side. Connie was going to intervene, but Yakov only laughed.

  ‘You see, Roxana always has a temper.’

  ‘When you are speaking about my brother, yes,’ Roxana spat back at him. But she detached herself and flopped back into her chair. She said to Connie,

  ‘Niki is a Muslim. He is gentle and his beliefs are peaceful but our government does not like independent practices, and religious men are called by this label of fundamentalists. This is what Comrade Yakov here is saying.’

  Her face went tight and dark. ‘I have seen what it is like for Niki and all religious prisoners. They try to make him renounce his faith, confess to terrorism, beg our President for forgiveness. Niki will not do it, and so he is beaten and put in punishment cells. But if he does confess, he will be sentenced for many years for crimes that are not his. There is no point, because now at least he is true to himself. He is a brave man. It is terrible, what happens, but I am so proud of him.’

  ‘He is an idealist, and therefore a fool,’ Yakov snapped.

  Roxana rounded on him. ‘And you? What are you? Who is proud of you, I might say?’ She waved her hand. ‘Look at all this, all that you have read and everything you know. But still you will say any lie, pretend anything people want to hear, just to be comfortable.’

  ‘I am a realist. And therefore I am not only alive, but also a free man.’

  Roxana’s laugh was like a splash of acid. She waved her hand again, at the shuttered room and at Yakov’s beached body.

  ‘Free? You call this freedom?’

  He slumped slightly, and then nodded as if to say touché.

  ‘Two idealists, you and your brother.’

  He turned his gaze to Connie. He held up a finger and pointed at her, then to the shuttered window. ‘This is one of the first things you will learn about our precious Uzbekistan. Always, we will be caught between Marx and Mohammed. And me, I care little for either.’

  Connie shivered, in spite of the heat. She was only glimpsing a corner of Roxana’s world and a fragment of the history of this ancient oasis city, but she began to understand the obstacles her friend had negotiated in order to escape. That she had come back again for her family made her love Roxana and admire her even more.

  Yakov was bored by the argument.

  ‘Tell me now, is Roxana showing you the famous remains of Bokhara?’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Connie said.

  ‘Good. You will not want to miss anything. There are some fine sights in this city of ours.’

  ‘I will show her. I am proud of Bokhara, even if am not proud of what our country has become.’ Roxana was on her feet, gathering up melon rinds and the empty chai glasses.

  ‘Ha.’ Yakov laced his fingers over his belly. ‘Now, please, let me have some peace.’

  Roxana led the way out, and Connie hung back to say goodbye. Yakov pushed out his lower lip and studied her face for a moment.

  ‘I have not given up hope for Niki, you know. There are ways, and there are some people who can help him,’ he murmured. ‘Roxana sees only one way. But she is young.’

  ‘Is there anything I could do, perhaps?’ Connie asked. He laughed at her naiveté.

  ‘Thank you. But you do not know Uzbekistan. Enjoy your visit.’ Then he raised his hand, dismissing her.

  Connie followed Roxana up the shallow outside steps to the upper floor. There were herbs and scented plants in pots against the wall, and the caged finches fluttered between their perches.

  Roxana’s room was small and bare. Her work shoes were neatly placed against the wall, a rail across one corner held her clothes – including the Chloé jacket – on a few hangers. Two narrow windows looked out on starry sky and a series of flat roofs, and there were no pictures. Connie wished that she hadn’t kept the beach postcard.

  Roxana’s face was more shadowed than it had been, and there were faint lines just beginning to show at the sides of her mouth. Her beauty was only increased by this intimation of maturity.

  ‘Is it…comfortable, living here?’ Connie asked her. She didn’t mean in the physical sense, exactly.

  ‘Yakov reads books, and listens to his music. I go to the market for food, and make some meals for him. It’s not such a bad arrangement, you know. I have work, and I save a little money. I am only a bus journey from Niki. Yakov is…you saw, like he is. Not very similar to Mr Bunting, or any of your English men. But he is kind to me. In his way.’ She lifted her chin and stared straight at Connie. ‘I would not stay here if it did not suit me and Niki, as well as Yakov.’

  ‘Good. Forgive me for asking, then.’

  Roxana looked round the confined space. ‘Do you remember, when we were in Suffolk?’

  ‘Yes. I remember everything about it.’

  ‘We talked, in that bedroom, in the storm. And now it is the other way round for us, because your sister is dead and my brother is alive. That is very strange.’

  ‘It is,’ Connie agreed.

  Roxana turned her head again, to look full at her. ‘I would rather be in this country, and have my brother still alive and with some hope in the future, than be in England for ever without him. To be a sister comes from in here.’

  Roxana pressed her fist against her breastbone.

  Connie knew what it meant. ‘Yes. Niki is lucky to have you for his sister.’

  ‘Mrs Bunting was lucky to have you.’

  Connie said quietly, ‘Actually, I think it was the other way round.’

  After a moment Roxana’s face brightened again. ‘At least I saw the sea. I am so pleased I saw the sea, even that I fell in it. And you saved me from drowning. You remember what you said afterwards, You know that life is precious, if you can’t bear to lose it? It’s true.

  That beach, those waves, that was amazing.’

  Connie nodded, but she was wondering whether her own life meant so much, whether it meant anything at all, without Bill in it.

  ‘You’ll be able to come back to London some day,’ she said. ‘And you’ll see plenty of other beaches. Maybe the very one on your postcard. We could plan to meet there.’

  Roxana pursed her lips. ‘Maybe. But I prefer Suffolk.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘It’s late,’ Roxana said. ‘Come on, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.’

  ‘I think you’d better. I don’t stand a chance of finding the place on my own.’

  There was another session of sightseeing.

  It was Roxana’s half-day and following in her energetic wake Connie toured the Mosque of Forty Pillars, and the Chor Minor, a tiny architectural jewel of a madrassah with four towers topped with azure tiles. Roxana stood with her feet planted in the dust, gazing up at the intricate brick facade.

  ‘You know, Connie, this place is the picture I saw inside my head when I was in England and I thought of home. And what is it? Just an old building. History is only what has gone, religion I don’t care about, and still this is what appears to me. I don’t see the places that are real Uzbekistan, the cement works or the bus station, or even the hammam. That’s funny, isn’t it?’

  Connie leaned in the shade against a wall and fanned herself.

  ‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said. Roxana’s appreciation of it didn’t surprise her at all. If only it wasn’t so hot.

  Roxana looked at her. ‘You are tired,’ she said.

  ‘A little,’ Connie admitted.

  ‘Come. We will go and have a cold drink. There is a place near here.’

  They were threading their way through the old centre when Samida and her cohorts dashed out in front of them.

  ‘Hello, Connie from England. You look at my pottery now.’

  It was not a question. Insistent fingers tugged at her clothes.
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  Roxana tried to dismiss the children with a few sharp words, but Connie looked down at the circle of narrow brown faces.

  ‘Show me,’ she said. At once she was propelled towards a cloth laid out in the shade of a wall.

  ‘Don’t buy these dishes. This is machine-made, just rubbish for tourists,’ Roxana cried. But Connie filled a bag with painted earthenware plates and bargained energetically to reduce Samida’s price.

  The children giggled as they pocketed her money, and scampered off in search of the next target.

  ‘Why did you buy these?’ Roxana demanded. ‘If you want dishes you should tell me, I will take you to the best place.’

  Connie grinned at her dismay. ‘I don’t care about the plates, it was the children. They made me think of you when you were small.’

  Roxana only glared. ‘Of me? Let me tell you that compared to my friend Fatima and me, in our day, those children are amateurs.’

  Laughing, they reached a low concrete cube of a building with faded awnings offering some shade from the sun.

  ‘Here,’ Roxana said. They passed inside to a line of metal-topped café tables beside a tall counter. Connie glanced to the back of the room and saw three computer terminals with keyboards cased in plastic to protect them from the all-pervading dust. ‘Maybe I will check my mail while we are here,’ Roxana casually added.

  ‘This is the Bokhara internet café?’

  ‘Why not?’ Roxana countered. ‘I used to go in London, when I lived there, to somewhere calling itself The Best Little Internet Café on the Planet, which is quite funny, but I think personally this place is better. Of course if I was lazy I could do the same thing at my work, but…’ she glanced round at the bare walls, the dog panting on the threshold, the chest freezer humming and shuddering in the corner ‘…from here for a few som, I am free to surf the net, to chat to Fatima and my other friends, whatever I wish.’

  ‘Of course,’ Connie agreed.

  A boy of about ten brought their drinks and they settled at one of the terminals. Roxana peered and tapped at the plastic-shrouded keyboard.

  ‘And here is an email, for example, from Noah. Hm. Hm. Would you like to read it, Connie?’