A fresh wave of people swelled through Victoria Station, many of them almost running, everyone important in their own universe.
This was all Tayeb’s own stupid fault. It had happened in a public toilet on the Strand, the one situated just outside the Zimbabwean Embassy: On the wall above a stained urinal Tayeb had painted a long-necked bird using matt acrylic. It was supposed to be identifiable as an ostrich but he wasn’t sure it was. It sat on top of five eggs. To its left he’d attempted a long spindly flower, to its right, wandering foliage. The expression on the ostrich’s face was supposed to be one of stupidity but this, he discovered, was surprisingly difficult to capture. Below the ostrich he’d written:
The ostrich is the stupidest of all the birds; this is because it ceases to brood on its eggs when longing for food; meanwhile if it sees eggs belonging to another ostrich which has gone away in search of food, it broods these eggs and forgets its own.
He was about to write more when he heard the stamp of feet coming down the staircase. Before Tayeb had time to do anything, even to put the lid back on to his pen, two men entered the toilet. They looked at Tayeb and Tayeb looked back; they all remained silent. One was tall and his face was ragged with skin trouble. He walked towards the wall and looked at Tayeb’s script.
‘What is this?’
‘A quote.’ Tayeb spoke quietly. The shorter of the two men read it out, looking over at his friend and winking. They didn’t look like police, but who knows what police look like these days? The taller man pulled out a packet of red Marlboros and lit one up.
‘Very artistic. May I ask where it’s from?’
Before Tayeb could answer the smaller man, who, Tayeb noticed, had thick sprouts of hair covering his fists, began inexplicably to giggle:
‘You’re a bit dishy with your dark eyes. Do you work this area?’
‘Excuse me?’ Sharp giggles bounced from one dank wall to another. Tayeb instinctively ignored him and looked towards the older gentleman, perhaps in his fifties, about ten years or so older than Tayeb.
‘He is asking if you offer more services for public consumption than just your artistic ones. Ignore him. He has a filthy mind.’
Tayeb looked at the unclean tiles on the floor, hoping his shock wouldn’t show. He arranged the muscles in his face so that it looked confident, relaxed and smiled, looking at the two men.
‘I do not work. No.’
‘Shame,’ the hairy one said in a high voice, ‘I like a bit of exotica.’ The tall man was examining the ostrich.
‘It is a quote, my friends.’ Tayeb decided that friendliness was the best approach. ‘From the great Al-Jahiz’ masterful work, “The Book of Animals”. Although I am sad that my painting does not do the ostrich much justice.’
The tall man threw his cigarette on the floor, crushed it out with a Cuban heel and stood facing the urinal. He undid his zip. There was the sound of liquid hitting the urinal, then a smell, a metallic tang filtered through the air. As he pissed, the man looked at Tayeb.
‘Would you like to join us for a drink?’ Tayeb focused on the buckle on his bag, flapping it up and down, aware that the man was still holding himself in his hands, taking his time to put himself away. When he heard the zip Tayeb looked up and nodded. If they were police, he figured it was best to go with them.
As it was early Friday evening the ground floor of the Coal Hole on the Strand heaved with red-faced city types. High-voiced women passed glasses of wine from the bar to each other, great round glasses like bowls on stalks. The downstairs basement bar was cooler, much less occupied. Introductions were made – Graham, the hairy one; Matthew, the tall – and Graham was dispatched to the bar.
‘So, are you some kind of graffiti artist?’
‘No.’ Tayeb stroked his moustache. His fingers twitched for a cigarette. The scars on Matthew’s face were patterned, deep and coherent, as if they told a story.
‘I prefer to see myself as a messenger.’
‘Oh. And what is your message?’
‘I like to remind people of how their actions have ramifications.’ He pronounced the r of ramification with a long-drawn-out rrrr.
‘I like the way you say that,’ Graham sat down with three glasses of red wine.
‘Yes,’ said Matthew, ‘I once nearly had a tattoo on my buttocks: action on one cheek and consequence on the other.’
Graham said, ‘Now that would have got the message around.’
Tayeb had smiled, he had been magnanimous. Was this a hustle? He moved his feet under the table, confident, thinking that queers should be easy enough to handle. He took a sip of the wine and winced. Free food and drink for a night.
‘Have you got a piece of paper?’ Tayeb asked Matthew. A piece of yellow lined paper was fleeced from a well-handled Filofax. Tayeb took out his calligraphy pen and began to draw.
‘Now, this’, he said, as he sketched a squat-legged bird, ‘is the Qurb. A legend of my home country says that when the bird says qurb amad this means it is safe for a ship to land.’
Graham ripped his beer mat into very small pieces. Matthew smiled at Tayeb as if he were a winsome puppy.
‘There is a second bird.’ He drew a round body and long, stick legs. ‘The Samaru speaks when a traveller who has been away is about to make a return.’ Tayeb looked at Matthew, but his grooved, scarred face was dead still and difficult to read.
‘What is your favourite bird?’ Tayeb asked Matthew.
‘A pigeon,’ said Matthew. ‘Scuzzy, dirty, common and vicious: like me.’
‘Just like you,’ said Graham, sulky.
‘I thought so. Samaruk in Persian means pigeon and pigeons carry messages. They indicate a return.’
Matthew laughed, ‘You’re saying it’s a sign. We’re meant to meet? You fruitcake,’ he said, ‘I think we shall get on fine. What a pretty, funny little thing to have found in the bog.’ He finished his glass in one gulp and squinted. He jabbed Graham in the leg.
‘Let’s order a whole bottle.’
Stupid, foolish Tayeb; he hadn’t read those messages clearly enough, had he? Look at him now. A Sudanese-looking café-worker was hovering, waiting to take his cup away. There was no point in being angry with Roberto, Nidal or Anwar, he thought again – it was not their fault at all.
Tayeb kicked at the pigeon beneath his table but missed. It hobbled away. It had one damaged foot, he noticed, but it seemed unperturbed; off it went, pecking without concern.
Difficulties to Overcome: There is the mounting difficulty and the steering difficulty and the pedalling difficulty; and then there is the general difficulty of doing all these things together.
5. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes
May 3rd
Mohammed’s first wife Rami mimed a cradle gesture indicating that we should follow her. The skin under her eyes is layered and creased like the sugared pastry baklavas we were presented with in Osh. Finally, after two whole days of tea-drinking with Mohammed and a stream of visitors, we have been shown into the interior of the women’s quarters, much welcomed after endless greetings with men wrapped in turbans, wearing coloured shirt-gowns and soft leather boots, offering services, blacksmith, carter, cook and tailor and asking questions: Where are your husbands? Where are your children? Why has your father allowed you here with no men?
The upstairs room was dark, with slants of light coming through uneven windows half covered with blinds. Various women of different ages sat about on low cushions and bolsters looking at us as we three stood awkwardly in the centre of the room, not knowing whether to sit or stand. The floor was made up of thick felt rugs dyed red, indigo, blue; there was a bright strip of yellow across the centre of the floor and the woodwork of the room, the blinds and wooden columns were all painted a bright, stimulating blue. The air was soporific and two infants scuttled across the floor; one of them had his genitals completely exposed, and what’s more, one of his testicles was swollen as big as my hand.
Rami pointed us towards
some cushions. My eyes adjusted in the dark and there it was, the baby, in the corner of the room, on the breast of a wet-nurse who was not young. This was the first time I had seen it since our arrival – so it had not been burned, or thrown away or left to die in the desert dust. The nurse’s face was sour and she seemed much too old to be providing milk. As the baby suckled she looked neither at her, nor at the women or children but stared into a distance before her, as if dead.
Millicent and Lizzie sat together on the cushions, but as I moved to join them a woman came behind me and held my arm. She pointed at my hair and would not let me go. Once, in Southsea, a gentleman with a cruel smile had whispered to me as he blew cigarette smoke in my face, ‘You have the hair of a Burne-Jones beauty, but sadly not the face,’ and I had wept all night because of the truth in his words.
We were approached by a young woman. ‘This is Khadega,’ Millicent said, and they greeted each other in Russian. It was the first time Lizzie and I had met her. She is not the prettiest of Mohammed’s daughters (I’m not surprised that she was one of the last to lower her scarf from her face in front of us). Her mannish-wide face has a repelling effect and she has what Mother would call an unfortunate manner. Khadega nodded at Lizzie then took a handful of my hair, pulled it roughly and held it in her palm as if feeling the weight. She rubbed an individual strand between her thumb and finger and seemed to be providing some kind of commentary because whatever she said made everyone, including Rami and Millicent, laugh. She saw me looking at the baby.
‘Halimah! Huh?’ pointing at the wet-nurse. Confused, I looked to Lizzie for help.
‘Halimah, halimah!’ and then a discussion – or argument, I couldn’t tell – began and the women all shouted and waved. Khadega was loudest, her voice stealing the air around me, until Rami shushed them, slapped Khadega’s hand away from me and directed me once again to the cushioned floor. Khadega seated herself next to Millicent and immediately they began to talk in Russian. I took my place next to Lizzie.
‘Apparently, the Prophet Mohammed had a wet-nurse called Halimah,’ Lizzie said. As drinks and honeyed nuts were served Rami introduced us to Lamara, Mohammed’s youngest wife. Lizzie and I could not look at each other with the shock of realising that they are both his wives. Lamara smiled, liquid-eye pretty, and caught up the smallest, crawling child, not the disfigured one, whooped it into the air with a laugh and pulled it to her chest.
We sipped tea. I was embarrassed by the closeness of the room and by the examination we were enduring. I held each mouthful of tea for as long as possible to contain my hysteria. The violence of their language filled the air and as usual I understood nothing. Nor could I read their codes or signals. What I could see, however, was that these women weren’t friendly. One or two of them looked at us with open hostility.
Eventually, the foul-looking wet-nurse pulled the baby away from her chest, wrapped her roughly in a blanket and stood up, her leaking, flaccid breast exposed. Rami pointed to me. For the first time all of the women stopped talking and stared. I am inexpert at handling babies and as I tried to cradle her in my arms a frown flurried across the sleeping face. I stood up: ridiculous, big and ugly-footed in that room full of graceful women. I nodded to Rami, trying to communicate a thank you, and that I would leave, and I took the sleeping bundle out of that dark, scented room. Lizzie, who had said nothing but, with slanted eyes, had watched Khadega, stood up and followed me. Millicent spent an eternity shaking hands with every woman in the room and joined us. The second we walked out of the door we heard a burst of lively talk and laughing.
The wet-nurse apparently sits and waits in the kitchen. I am to take the baby to her whenever it needs feeding. She is asleep now, and I sit here with this journal, fearful that she might stop breathing. These rough, scribbled notes are as far as I have got with my guide for Mr Hatchett though I have grand, blazing plans for my book. It will be a new kind of book. ‘A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar’ is the current title I am labouring beneath and I shall sub-title it, ‘How I Stole Amongst the Missionaries’. It shall be my own personal observations, filled with insights about the Moslems. I intend to spy upon the women, fascinating in their floating garb; and the landscape, these great, monotonous plains; and I shall sit upon my two wheels and feel the grit of the desert and move about the streets as if flying. For courage, I recall the conversation I had with Mr Hatchett before leaving:
‘A bicycling guide for the desert,’ he smiled. ‘How curious.’
Two years ago my little sister Lizzie, incandescent-eyed, with a touch of otherworldliness, declared at the dinner table in Southsea, in front of Mother and Aunt Cicely and the dust lying in heaps upon the walnut-cased clock, that she had succumbed to what she termed a calling. Her new friend from St Paul’s in Portsmouth, Miss Millicent Frost, had guided her towards this calling and helped her to arrive at certain understandings. I truly could have died with shock.
I remember it was raining outside but uncomfortably warm in Aunt Cicely’s parlour as Lizzie elaborated upon her plan to train as a missionary with a view to travelling East. It was imperative, she insisted, that she save the wretched souls of the lost, diseased and the destitute. It was her duty to help the unfortunates, cruelly condemned by geography and ignorance and I recall thinking how dismal that the rain kept coming and sensing the certainty that Father would now die soon.
We had returned to England for him. He had a need to return, he explained, before he grew faint, white and dry as paper. He wanted to see his sister and to sit beside an English fireside and eat Dorset-grown potatoes. So we returned from Geneva to Southsea. Only, for Lizzie and me, it wasn’t a return. Despite our being English, despite our names – Misses Evangeline and Elizabeth English – despite learning our Bible from King James, and singing ring-a-ring-of-roses-a-pocket-full-of-posies in the nursery, we had never, in fact, lived in England, nor even visited it. As children we followed Father to Alger, Saint Omer, Calais, Geneva, but never dull, ghastly England.
Mother, quite a name in Geneva, with her red hair and committees and pamphlets, was as unprepared as Lizzie and I for our first sight of the desolate Southsea tea-houses closed for the winter, and the pier asserting its futile defiance against the interminable unfriendliness of the grey, spitting sea. How that clock ticked on like a metronome. Mother said nothing as Lizzie, slight and beautiful, sat with her face obfuscated as if she were covered in gauze. My sister is, and has always been, like the feeling in a room from which someone has recently left. I watched her twist her handkerchief into a rag, stretch it with anxiety, and I wondered, who is she, this Miss Millicent Frost? I could see that Lizzie was serious and my immediate thought was this: there is not a chance I will stay behind in the damp, phlegmatic dreariness of an English winter whilst unadventurous Elizabeth travels to Babylon! Mecca! Peking!
Just three or four weeks before leaving, by chance, our cousin Alfred had invited us to a luncheon in Hampstead. We were curiosities, to be shown off, so that he would look somewhat interesting to a publisher whom he was in the process of flattering. He had hopes for his own book of verse.
The publisher, Mr Hatchett, we had been warned, was a stiff old fish. We were to tell him of our forthcoming travels and give off the air of frightful intriguing adventuresses, or similar. It was a surprise, then, when Mr Hatchett sat next to me, not at all a stiff fish, rather courteous, with an encouraging smile. It was even more of a surprise when I found myself telling him my plans to write a guide of the area.
‘I have this idea, you see,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ he responded, clapping his hands together lightly.
So, I talked, and was impressed that off-the-bat he knew my reference, Egeria – the astonishing woman who travelled in the fourth century from Gaul to Jerusalem – indeed, he told me the story of her book being discovered (possibly 1884 or 5?) and I admitted that it was reading her descriptions of the candles and lights and the mysterious glittering interiors, the tapirs, silks, the jewels and hangings t
hat had inspired my desire to travel.
‘I understand,’ he said and again, that generous smile. He looked as though whilst he dreamed of travel for himself, he did not a bit resent my imminent adventures, rather, he admired me for them.
‘You really must tell me more about this Guide. I should be very interested to publish it.’
I did not tell him that I was hunting for something distant, something terribly unEnglish; something that would obliterate Southsea.
Oh – now Millicent calls me.
May 4th
‘I’m scared of Mohammed,’ Lizzie said, watching me hold the baby up on to my chest and rub her calm as I’ve learned to do.
‘Why?’
‘He hates us.’ Before I could reply, she had gone.
The sandstorms are oppressive. They consume the air like an agonised howl from the earth’s heart. Every afternoon they whirl and blow up, flinging huge volumes of sand around the city, accompanied by a mourning sound.
Steadily, I am beginning to understand the rhythm of this inn. We are all three of us, Millicent, Lizzie and I – well four, if I count the baby – sleeping together in one room with the kangs lined in a row like coffins. The kangs are strange beds made of hard mattresses resting above a small brick stove area built underneath. The fires keep our bodies warm at night but strangle the night air of oxygen. I have created a crib from one of Millicent’s Bible trunks which I half-emptied and padded with paper and blankets.
In Millicent’s trunk I found the presents we have collected to use as gifts or bribes. Six packets of Russian lump sugar. Five jars of caviar and at the bottom of the trunk several packets of candied jujube fruits, like dates, but redder, to hand out to children. Underneath were Millicent’s two maps. I unrolled them and laid them out across the numerous turquoise and golden satin-covered pillows. The first is a Map of the Great North West. There is a vast area, coloured black, and at the bottom left of it I find it: Kashgar. The black area below it is the Takla Makan desert, famous for blizzards that freeze men on their feet, leaving only the bones to be picked by the insects. Indeed, the words Takla Makan in Turki mean, ‘If you go in you shall not come out’.
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar Page 3
