Too late! Here he came ducking under the curtain, plumed hat on his head, astrakhan coat folded over one arm, peering into the darkness, grinning expectantly. Nat slid down against the wall, biting his knuckles at the disaster about to come, his heart sinking and a sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach. If only he’d been five seconds quicker. If only he could have warned him in time. Too late now. Too late for anything except to let Fate have his wicked way.
‘Darius Nouredini,’ said Gol, ‘this is my father, Atash Zarafshani.’
‘Where?’ asked Darius, looking around, seeing nothing.
Atash stepped into the light and stood before him. Silence. Then Darius spoke.
‘When I see your wife’s great beauty, Atash Zarafshani, I know the wooing of her must have been a fierce hot business.’
Atash burst out laughing, and so did Roshanak and Gol, and then Darius too! Everyone was laughing except Nat, who whimpered the high-pitched note of someone who’s just had a steel nail extracted from his foot. Then, Atash laid a three-fingered right hand gently upon his heart, and said,
‘Welcome, Darius Nouredini. Please sit.’
‘Not yet,’ said Roshanak. ‘Up on the roof, my beauty. Wait for me there.’
Emerging onto the roof garden, Darius was confused. Why had Gol’s mother sent him up here? That was one thing. Another was: Why didn’t Gol ever tell him about her father’s face? The bad leg, yes, the face, no. Yet while she’d never told him about her father’s burns, she’d gone on often enough about the wonders of his roof garden. Now that he saw it with his own eyes, Darius didn’t find it wonderful at all, just sad. The garden had the tragic overworked intricacy of replica palaces prisoners carved from soap. Every iota of soil fed some tap root or tuber. The soil was strained to breaking point. One more seed, one more stalk and this overworked soil might explode like an earthwork.
Or maybe that was just his own strained senses. He was about to explode with desire, quivering at the memory of the ends of Gol’s long black hair sweeping against his naked shoulders and upper arms. It was so overwhelming a sensation that he had not felt her swabbing his burns with astringents. He had had no feeling for anything except the flicking of the ends of her hair against his body, the opium to the operation. Perhaps she would tend him again soon. Perhaps now.
He heard footsteps behind him. A woman’s light, tripping step. Yes, perhaps now. The wooden hatch slammed shut behind her. They were alone together. Her footsteps drew near. Her hands spun him round and commanded:
‘Take your clothes off!’
Darius walked backwards from Roshanak saying:
‘… Sincere though I was in complimenting your beauty, I fear you have misunderstood exactly who is the object of my unceasing devotion, which is your daughter. I regret any confusion which may -’
‘Off! Off!’
Darius turned his back to her and fumbled with the unfamiliar tab-braids of his new kurta, and then with the buttons of his shirt. He heard her tearing linen behind him. He froze. He dared not look round. When he did, would he see Gol’s mother as topless as he? He heard her spit and rub her hands. He gasped in fright.
‘Turn around, boy!’
The boy turned around to find her grinding herbs in a pestle and mortar. She sprinkled the mortar’s paste onto a linen rag. These were the same healing salves, he reflected, that Gol used on Mani. She laid the poultice on his suppurating shoulder burn and pressed down with the heel of her hand.
‘The other boy,’ she said when she was done.
Darius slid his new damask shirt back over his stinging back, then walked to the roof hatch and called down for Nat.
Nat climbed out into the roof garden. At Roshanak’s command, he took off his sleeveless fleece, unhooked the eyelets of his black and red English doublet with its half a heron, but he couldn’t slide the Karun ferryman’s long striped shirt over his head without help. Roshanak unstuck the little red blobs bonding shirt and skin together, like letter seals. Gently she detached Nat’s shirt and raised it over his head.
Darius’s eyes filled with tears as he saw how badly Nat had suffered in the underground chambers beneath the lake of pitch. So much pain was written in these welts, cuts and weeping sores all over his body, the worst of them on his back. A row of scabs buttoned his spine.
‘Where have you been?’ murmured Roshanak, stroking Nat’s clumpy hair. ‘Where have you been, my boy?’
Nat stood hunched, his knobbly shoulders sticking out of his skinny white body. Roshanak smoothed a poultice over an oozing wound on his back. He said nothing, but his whole body stiffened. She stopped. Then, after a little pause, he nodded his head, at which signal she laid another poultice on his back. Darius turned away, and left the garden.
When Nat came downstairs again, Darius and Atash were in the middle of negotiations.
‘Where will this dance be held?’ asked Atash.
‘In my grandmother Kulsum Nouredini’s barn,’ replied Darius, balancing a tiny ornate glass on his wide grey-striped calico thigh, and holding a Yazd biscuit in the other hand.
‘Then you must invite Mani Babachoi.’
‘Mani Babachoi!’
‘Otherwise,’ continued Atash, ‘I am unable to grant permission for my daughter to attend your celebration, even in the capacity of hired musician and in the company of the other three girls in her band.’
‘Why ever not?’ asked Darius.
‘Surely you see that if Mani Babachoi is not there, then it will appear to people to be a betrothal party between Gol and you.’
‘How could I possibly invite him?’
‘Gol will invite him. She sees him almost every evening. They have come to a happy understanding these last weeks while you were off prospecting.’
The colour drained from Darius’s face. He replied in an ashen voice,
‘Please bid your daughter be so kind as to invite Mani Babachoi.’
In the uncomfortable silence, the doves’ burbling could be heard from the rooftop coop. To break the tension, Gol pointed towards the roof and made a weak joke:
‘Our doves are smoking their hubbbabubbas again! They pick up many foreign habits on their travels.’
She flashed Darius a smile, but his eyes were so full of urgent questions about Mani that she quickly looked away.
‘The Great Persian Embassy leaves in a few days,’ said Atash. ‘You will be glad to go home, Nat, but I suppose -’
Atash broke off, lifted his head up to the light and listened. Gol and her mother did the same. The way the pigeons were flapping and squawking, Gol explained to the guests, meant that a pigeon had had just returned. She ran upstairs and came down with a black and white dove wearing a purple satchel. Atash inspected the tired, hungry bird, and then prised open the satchel. A silk page, covered in writing front and back, fell open. He read the addressee’s name, and told Gol where to deliver the page, and to take two fresh, well-rested doves with her.
‘We will accompany her,’ said Darius.
‘No,’ replied Roshanak. ‘First you must finish your tea.’
And so the two adventurers sat and sipped their tea, while Gol left the house.
Bird box on hip, Gol walked down a rutted lane between the muddy backs of houses. She regretted that she had not had a chance to tell Darius about Mani before her father had broken the news. Still, she hoped that for the new Darius, losing her to Mani would be a horseshoe dropped in a victory parade, a small loss, hardly noticed.
For what a victory Darius had won! Her heart rejoiced at how he had given his soul room to breathe. His special gift, it seemed to her, was for transmuting degradation into beauty. He did this in every area of his life. His poky stall in the bazaar he had made so studious a place that for whole minutes at a time she used to be able to forget she was between tinsmiths and metalworkers. Rather than let his dank and dismal family home seep into his soul, he had struck out for the mountain passes, and gone prospecting for oil in a ruined temple. And just now he had app
lied his special gift to the ugly scene of his last appearance as a suitor outside her house. Somehow he had effected a happy reconciliation, and was now sitting with her parents drinking tea and nibbling biscuits, as if her mother had never slung a shovel load of dung at his face to punish him for reciting Rumi’s Like This without skipping the lewd parts.
But come to think of it, was the poem any more lustful than the one by Darius that Mani had recited, and for which his face had not been made a bird tray?
Gol, I yearn for your touch
as silence before the final chord,
aches for your fingers
upon copper and silver tanbur strings.
Gol stopped in mid-stride and froze where she stood. For the very first time, it crossed her mind that Darius might have actually felt the emotion his poem described, that what she had taken for conventional hyperbole, standard gol o bobol - rose and nightingale - bluster, might in fact be true, be real. She blushed to the roots of her hair to remember how her hands and fingers had touched and stroked his naked torso when dabbing him with the salves.
For until the touch of your hand
the whole world hangs suspended,
like a frozen waterfall.
Suddenly she wished that her band had not agreed to play at his barn dance. She wished he would go away again, so that she wouldn’t have to see him for a long while. Thank heaven she had already given her heart to Mani, otherwise she’d be in turmoil. But happily she was not in confusion. Her path was simple. All she had to do was go to the dance, play with her band, and dance once with Darius for politeness’ sake. And the day after that, her love for Mani would proceed as before on its straightforward course.
32
A tangerine sheet hung in the centre of the barn to separate male from female dancers. It hung at chest-height, which was not nearly high enough for Darius, whose heart was full of dread at the prospect of seeing Gol dance with Mani. That sheet, the colour of tightly closed eyes, was all that stood between him and the sight of Mani’s body pressed against Gol’s. None of that at any time at all!
Division sheets sometimes became a mere formality, were reduced to a knee-high jump rope, or were done away with altogether in the small hours, by a carefree mood of high spirits, fun and frolics. Well, he wasn’t going to stand for any of that at his party! He intended to be a stickler for protocol. Mani hadn’t had even arrived yet, but the tangerine divider was all Darius could think about.
‘Perhaps she won’t dance,’ said Nat, ‘because the band need her for every song.’
‘No,’ replied Darius, miserably, ‘she’s already said she’ll dance with me.’
‘Her parents may prefer Mani Babachoi to you, but that doesn’t mean she does.’
‘No, Nat, I’ve lost her.’
He looked at Gol. Two dangling locks of hair swung in front of her ears as she swayed her head in time to the music that she and her band were playing. She was wearing a peach and plum striped dress with a row of domed brass buttons running down the front to a knotted sash of oyster silk. She had fabric flowers in her hair. Her eyes flashed in the oil lanterns’ bright light. She had never looked so beautiful. The whole party was already a disaster and it was only just beginning! He shooed off the children who were playing chase around the division sheet and making it sag to waist-height, and then escaped into the barnyard, where he stood with his hand on his grandmother’s bony shoulder welcoming the guests.
Some of the guests were the young men and women he knew from Shab e Sher poetry and song evenings, some were Kulsum’s neighbours and their children. They were his neighbours, too, since Darius had moved in with his grandmother, having cleared all debts with his mother.
It may have cost him a quarter of his fortune to buy his way out of the sigheh and to compensate his mother for the lost oil-mining gear, but it was a small price to pay to redeem his soul. He had given her still more money to buy delicacies for the party: viands, fruits, sweetmeats and wine. Off she had gone to the bazaar, and gone so willingly that he wondered whether he might get along with her better now he had paid her off and moved out.
The pious Kulsum had invited the Sufi dervishes who now strode across the yard. Intense young men, they were nothing like the bearded wastrels of Safavid caricature. Only in their dress did they resemble the state’s libel of them: their thick cotton skirts were frayed at the hem, their boots mud-spattered, and their shaggy coats crusty. One or two wore chimney-shaped sikka hats, the rest wore ragged headbands.
On the heels of the scruffy dervishes came the immaculately dressed Uruch Bey, bemused, as he strolled through the barnyard, to find a party going on. The First Secretary of the Persian Embassy crouched before Kulsum as if the sole reason for his visit had been to hear from her lips the full story of how Darius’s father had gone into business with an Azeri oil miner who dug a famous oil well as deep as the maidan was wide. Darius broke in, reminding his grandmother that he and Uruch Bey had a business affair to discuss, whereupon the First Secretary begged Kulsum to be excused, and was led by Darius to the twisted mulberry tree.
Uruch rested his foot on the bottom rail of the fence. Darius leaned back on the rail fence and hooked the heel of his new brown buffalo-hide lace-ups on the bottom rail in the same stance. He swung his raised knee from side to side, hoping that Uruch Beg would notice his new cream and grey-striped calico trousers. Let Uruch know he had found the right man. Uruch’s mind seemed to be elsewhere, however.
‘It will take a little time,’ he told Darius, ‘to persuade men in Tabriz to buy oil since that is not the custom there. Once they have experienced naphtha for themselves, they won’t go back to dung.’
‘Yes, but how can I sell them oil in the first place, when it costs so much more than the dung they’re used to burning?’
‘By selling at a loss,’ answered Uruch, ‘until they are used to oil, and then you raise the price to a level at which we can earn money.’
‘What price is that?’
‘You’ll know. You have a gift. You are a natural merchant. That is why I wish you to accept this offer of employment. And there’s not just oil to be sold. There are all the accoutrements that go with it, all the lamps and stoves. I propose that you take one-fifth of the profits. The rest you will give to my wife.’
‘A fifth? Then how will I even cover my costs while I’m losing all this money every day?’
‘I have deposited twenty gold tomans with a Tabriz havaladar, and I’ll advance you five tomans now.’
Darius clasped his hands together on his belly and was silent for a long time.
‘Let’s say I keep fifty percent of oil revenues,’ he said, ‘and one hundred percent of the profits from selling oil lamps and stoves?’
‘All of it? Outlandish! How do you possibly imagine that I would consider, even for a moment, agreeing to such terms?’
‘Because you cannot bear to see so excellent a venture perish on the vine, and because you’re about to leave with the embassy but still have no-one in place. In fact, you were being so attentive to my grandmother that I thought you were about to offer her the position.’
Uruch threw back his head and laughed.
‘One hundred percent from sales of stoves and lamps and forty percent of the oil.’
‘Fifty.’
‘Fifty.’
The deal was done. Uruch handed him a red velvet purse containing an advance payment of five gold tomans. He pulled a ring off his finger, and told Darius the password he should use in Tabriz to effect the havalar, the word-of-mouth system of credit and exchange.
‘Handing over my name ring,’ said Uruch, ‘makes me feel like I am going to my grave. Europe: Land of the Setting Sun. In the event of a Spanish knife in my ribs, the position you have just accepted comes with a lifelong moral duty to look after my family.’
Hand on heart, Darius declared,
‘Gorbanat.’ I die for you.
Hand on heart, Uruch replied,
‘Gorbanat, Darius
Nouredini.’
Darius watched Uruch Bey’s satin-clad figure glide like a wraith across the paddock, and down the road. He closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky in elation. He must tell Nat the good news. The best thing of all about this position as Tabriz oil factor was that it gave Nat a future too.
As Darius hurried to find his friend, he spotted his rival, Mani Babachoi, accompanied by two friends, striding through the barnyard. The defiant thrust of Mani’s chin, his puffed-out chest and nervous eyes told Darius that he expected the evening to be a trial of nerve. Seeing this, he was seized by an overwhelming imperative, perhaps it was some ancient hospitality instinct, to relieve Mani of any thought of grimly enduring this barn dance for the sake of Gol’s honour. He bounded across the yard to embrace his startled rival.
‘Welcome, Mani Babachoi! I am very glad to see you! Will you honour my Khanum Kulsum, whose barn this is, by introducing yourself and your friends to her?’
Mani consented to be led to Darius’s grandmother. Riding boots creaking, he knelt on one knee to greet Kulsum, then he and his fellow soldiers passed into the crowded barn’s music and dancing.
Among the dancers, Nat was nodding his head to the beat of drum and dulcimer under the reed flute’s wail and the sounds of Gol’s tanbur and her singing. There was something too measured and too admirable in her phrasing. And in her playing too. She held the tanbur slightly to one side and away from her body as if she were demonstrating fingerpicking to a music class rather than singing a drinking song to a merry dance hall. In fact her singing made everyone a bit tense, with its odd mix of melancholy and precision - he could see why she was Darius’s girl! The cheer that accompanied the chorus may have been the crowd’s relief at the other girls joining in the singing and drowning out her voice’s haunting beauty. They didn’t want haunting beauty, they wanted to shake a leg.
The Trade Secret Page 14
