A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘What is it for?’

  ‘To distribute about the bazaar and to announce our presence.’

  The priest smiled at me. ‘I will translate it into Arabic and Turki,’ he said.

  I read it and wanted to say this: that I have reservations regarding the wisdom of talking of bones rising up in the desert and dancing in a place where bones should be left alone. Millicent herself taught us that this is a place where you are expected to rinse your hands three times from water poured by a host before entering a home; where you are asked to stand, hands together, palms upward, as if holding the Quran, then pass them over your face in a religious gesture of blessings; where the salaams are serious and the older men stroke beards as a sign of courtesy. It seems dancing bones would not be welcome, but I said nothing and returned to Lolo.

  Millicent demands English meals but does not explain what this means. Lolo knows nothing about English cooking, but then neither do I, so we have gone about our kitchen together labelling and naming things in a mish-mash of languages, English, Russian, Turki and a little Hindustani. The bottles we managed to get from the bazaar for Ai-Lien’s milk are called the botties. Lolo pulled from a sackcloth several huge, disc-like flatbreads and a dozen small, flower-shaped rolls and we settled on bibi for bread.

  Very ceremoniously, Lolo gave Lizzie and me a tour of the garden which is laid on two levels, the lower part being the orchard grown wild. It is indeed very charming, and abundant and one would not guess we are in a desert. All in all, there is too much fruit. It is almost obscene the amount of fruit growing and fermenting: baby pomegranates and peaches, not yet ripe, and there are nectarines, apricots, figs and apples. At the orchard’s heart is a wooden pavilion, next to which is a very curious tree with petals that look like handkerchiefs draped from its branches. Lizzie holds the cherries in her palm in wonder, a fruit from home in this strange place. It is her role to help Lolo with the garden but so far she has simply cut the pomegranates in half to photograph them. Nor will she help with Ai-Lien. When I pass the baby to her she holds her uncomfortably, away from her body as if carrying something that needs to be disposed of.

  Arranging food for Ai-Lien is a difficult business. The wet-nurse could not be convinced to join us in our new house although Mah has found us a nursing mother, four li away, who has agreed to supply us with four bottles of her milk each day. It is a tedious arrangement: in the mornings, before it gets too hot, I am to walk with Ai-Lien strapped to my chest with a swathe of Kashgari silk, accompanied by either of the guards whose names we have discovered are Li and Hai. We are to meet the mother’s son half-way at the dry river to exchange money for milk.

  So, I am expected to keep the infant alive and to feed them all English food when the only thing I know how to cook is a cake. Sir Richard Burton disguised himself as an Andalusian and a Moor. He dressed as a Balochi and travelled with tribesmen to study falconry. He journeyed to Mecca disguised as a Moslem. He would have thought nothing of pretending that he had a devout religious calling in order to reach the wildest, most remote edge of the desert for the purpose of recording his observations. I have no doubt that he would have positively relished donning an apron if his disguise required it and acting the part of a Hindustani cook, or a Ladakhis in the garden or a Kashmiri in the marketplace. Why, then, do I find it so difficult to inhabit my own disguise?

  June 14th

  Kashgar opens its secrets to an English lady cyclist. The guards agreed to me leaving the house.

  I see things. I see rooms of girls asleep at their sewing machines and a filthy hovel they call the hospital, with two metal-framed beds and dirty sheets. Streets far removed from the Chinese style, streets full of Allah and donkey carts, mutton and bread echoing the steppes, a whole universe away from Peking. I see traders, bazaar men and I hear many languages: Altaic, Uzbek, Qazakh, Kyrgyz, Turki, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. I have learned that the script is a modified form of Arabic, that the religion is Islam inside a mystical Sufi, and, well, it seems to me that the mysticism overrides the Islamic. Mosques are numerous, their steps swept clean at all times. Chants of Quranic passages can be heard. The priest told us that people who are suffering are beaten with dead chickens to rid them of evil spirits (but I haven’t seen this). Eyebrows joined in the middle are considered a sign of beauty in the women. I saw the herbs used for enhancing eyebrows.

  My wheels bump over the tail of something dead, forcing me to swerve in front of a donkey pulling a cart full of spring onions and small oranges. The carter spits, the men sharpen long knives at kebabe stalls and laugh at me. The road that leads from the Apak Hoja tomb, down past the Sunday market stalls, is sleepy and content during the weekday. Small girls in torn dresses play on the edge of the road. What are they crowding round? A yellow chick, quivering, a vulnerable ball of yellow-feathered fluff, they are poking it with a stick.

  Birds, everywhere.

  Winding through the labyrinth, behind the Id Kah Mosque, two skinny kid goats stand without a mother, their backs covered in sores and bones poking through their skin. Faster, now, my bicycle almost floating, and the feeling of being chased although I am not; no one is very much interested in chasing me. The smell of mutton fat and excrement. A small boy holds out his palm as I pass, in it, a terrapin moving in circles.

  The wind begins as if it were a signal and the heat is about to strangle everyone and everything, but as I float and fly I can almost trick it. The middle of the morning is the beginning of the terrible part of the day. Down I go, through the Old Town, out of the city gates where the guards sit up from sleep to look at me. On to the long, winding track that follows the dry river bed and eventually reaches Pavilion House. Too much strangeness. Faster still, back to the baby whom I have left with Lolo. This morning I handed over a small sum of money in exchange for bottles of milk. It is precarious that Ai-Lien’s food must be dependent on the dirty hands of this small, native boy and I am determined to find an alternative milk source. So far we can only get sheep’s milk which Ai-Lien refuses. To make matters worse, I have learned from Lolo’s mimes that this mother is an opium taker and I fear that the milk is infected. Millicent has cabled the Inland Mission for an urgent supply of Allenbury’s dried food but how long it will take to arrive I do not know.

  June 15th

  My sister came to me, in my kang.

  ‘I had a dream about the crows,’ she said. I had to think for a moment, the crows, and then I remembered. Ah, yes. As children we called the Sisters the crows. Sister Marguerite. Sister Eunice.

  ‘What on earth made you dream of them?’

  ‘Do you remember me standing on that wall, being a bird?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember green. The trees, and behind me the school building, the outhouses, the chapel. How much I wanted to fly.’

  We, the only two Protestant girls at a Catholic school, suffered during the month of May. This was when the first communions began, when excitable girls sat in groups making paper flowers and stripping roses for their petals. The increased religious instruction around us left Lizzie and I removed from the festive feeling and to cheer ourselves, we resorted to speaking to one another in the bird-language of our own invention.

  ‘I haven’t thought of Sister Eunice for a long time.’

  ‘That baby will love you if you rock it to sleep like that.’ Lizzie looked at Ai-Lien. I said nothing, just stroked the fine black hair.

  ‘She seems to bring you a sort of peace.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she does.’ She was asleep, I stood up to put the tiny baby in the crib. We were alone in the kang room; Millicent was with the priest, attending to their pamphlets.

  ‘It has returned,’ Lizzie whispered to my back. For a moment I did not know what she meant, and then I realised.

  ‘It’s very painful?’

  She calls it the honeybee inside her head, buzzing in the night when the dead silence of the desert hangs over us like death itself. Like a bee, dancing in her head. I should hav
e guessed from the lines around her mouth and the squint of her eye. Her eyesight goes in and out when the buzzing in her head rings louder than life outside. Both of us listened to Ai-Lien’s gentle snores for a moment.

  ‘When it is bad I can’t even see through the camera viewfinder. Mostly though, oh dear me, it’s a bore.’

  ‘Have you told Millicent?’ I asked. ‘How much medicine do you have left?’

  ‘Don’t tell her.’ She looked down at her dirty feet, tapping in the sand that coated the floor after the most recent sandstorm, rippled like a beach with the tide out. ‘Promise me?’

  I was surprised. Millicent and Lizzie’s friendship was so thick and tight, like old cardigans put together in a trunk these past two years, and more so, with each mile slogged over to get here. How could Millicent not know about this? Or about what inevitably comes after the headaches? I confess here that I almost felt glad that Lizzie will suffer, just as I have suffered with loneliness as she and Millicent read their Bible together, heads knocking in the candlelight. Then I was ashamed of my thought. I turned to Lizzie, wanting to get her hand and remind myself of the realness of her, but she had gone.

  I should hide this book. Millicent has warned me several times not to write. She quotes John: If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. But I do not write it for truth (what good is truth to me?). Perhaps, I write it for sense. I write it for cohesion, I suppose, to understand the progression that must occur in the layering of different selves that create a life. I am aware that meaningful, straight-forward progression simply will not happen in these pages. It is not a very straight-forward Guide, nor am I straight-forward. It seems imperative that I keep it hidden.

  10. London, Present Day

  Buckingham Palace Road

  It was sunshine that Tayeb needed to stop the itching. The doctor had told him to expose his skin to UV rays, to let them eat up the scales and the dry patches that break off and bleed. Well, he wasn’t an actual doctor, but a medical student at UCL, a friend of Nidal’s. Beneath his shirt, Tayeb’s skin raged.

  He walked and walked and the urge simply to return to the flat in Hackney was strong. He could just turn the key, walk in, kick Anwar off the Xbox, drink tea and slip back into what, until yesterday, was his life. Yesterday, he had been examining the damage in the mirror in the hall: a small cut above the lip and the kiss of a bruise on his cheek. He had thought it would be worse, actually. When they kicked him he had managed to shield his head, but his ribs were sore. Those queers weren’t policemen, but they certainly didn’t want to hear the words ‘No thanks’ at the end of the night. He had been hungry and part of him enjoyed the game, letting them buy dinner and drinks, but he was a good Muslim, usually, he did not drink – well, much – and wine was followed by whisky then cognac then more wine. Then to a bar off Oxford Street then another on Dean Street, then came a suggestion that they all take a walk down along Embankment. Tayeb had been polite. Must go now. Best smile.

  ‘Come with us, come with us,’ a jokey mantra until Tayeb tried to slip off down a side alley near Charing Cross Station. Graham came behind him and with surprising strength pushed him roughly against a wall, twisting his arm into a painful lock behind his back. Matthew was close, his mouth almost touching his face:

  ‘I know you are an illegal, you should not go fucking about with me.’

  ‘Au contraire, you should go fucking about with him.’ Graham’s hand weaselled into Tayeb’s pocket and found his wallet. He read out his name. Tayeb Yafai. Then he forced Tayeb to face him and gave two vicious punches into the stomach.

  The pain sang an opera around Tayeb’s bones as Matthew whispered in a lover’s voice, ‘Last chance.’

  ‘No.’

  One last twist on his ear. ‘Then you’re going home sweetie. We’re reporting you.’

  Tayeb had woken with a hangover, aches and a very nasty sense of dread, but it was not until two in the afternoon when, back in the Hackney flat, as if summoned directly by his self-pity, there was a bang at the door. Two diminutive persons, a male and a female, both with blond hair sticking out from under their official hats looked at him with eyes that needed kohl to bring them alive. The spidery white lashes on red rims made Tayeb think of pigs, blanched, squealing and ready to be killed. It was a shock to see such feminine forms in uniform, the man included. Were they twins? Tayeb registered their uniform and prepared his face into a smile.

  ‘We are here to speak to a Mr Tayeb Yafai, please,’ the woman spoke.

  ‘He’s not here at the moment, can I help?’

  ‘Does he live here?’

  ‘He sometimes passes through but not always. He is away at the moment, and I am not sure where.’

  The white lashes floated up and down. A small frown appeared between the white-haired eyebrows. The twins looked at each other gravely.

  ‘But is this his permanent residence?’

  ‘He uses this as his official address, yes.’

  ‘Right. Well I need to issue a summons to him, and I need it signed.’

  ‘I can do this for you, I can pass this on.’

  ‘Right.’ The woman coughed. She took out some notes and began to read from them.

  ‘Hereby notice is given that Mr Yafai is being issued with an appearance notice to answer charges of vandalism of the toilets on the Strand on the fifth September. He is required to attend court on the thirty-first October. Failure to do so will result in immediate arrest.’

  Tayeb signed the paper as Ali Cherabo and handed the policewoman back her pen just as Anwar heaved up the stairwell carrying a pile of International Development Studies books in one hand and a battered guitar case held over his shoulder with the other.

  ‘Tayeb,’ he said, glancing at the policewoman. ‘What’s going on?’

  The policewoman looked at Tayeb. ‘You are Tayeb?’

  Anwar stared at the floor. ‘Shit.’

  ‘You realise that lying to a police officer is a very serious offence?’ She had a grave look on her face, as if compensating for her girlishness by looking intentionally cross. Tayeb opened his eyes wide, shining all-innocence, but saw immediately from her expression that this was the wrong approach. He tried the flirt instead, a cheeky glint, a wide smile.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he smiled at her. ‘I was going to tell you who I am, I just wanted to hear what you had to say.’

  Her cross features flickered with indecision. Her twin was silent and still, as if he were her shadow. She looked up at Tayeb quickly, and this time, he was sure she was not immune to his smile. He let out a laugh, an everything-is-fine laugh.

  ‘And who are you?’ She turned towards Anwar who was tapping his fingers on his guitar case, his right leg vibrating.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you.’ His too-loud voice reverberated around the corridor and the policewoman looked over Tayeb’s shoulders, into the flat.

  ‘What do you think you’ll find?’ said Anwar. ‘A handbook on how to bomb people?’ At this she flinched. Tayeb touched his own bottom lip and pulled at it. The policewoman spoke into her radio again and then got out a fresh form and held it out to Tayeb.

  ‘Your real signature this time.’

  Tayeb walked along Buckingham Palace Road. A siren welled up sudden and fierce and then evaporated. Across the street was a billboard saying, TYPE IN YOUR FUTURE AND PRESS GO and below that, a smaller poster with the words, Seat. Pint. Decent View printed over the silhouetted shape of a woman’s body. Anwar’s cosy upbringing in a five-bedroom house in Norton had clearly not prepared him for a policewoman’s questions, much as he currently enjoyed touristing in the immigrant’s life. Tayeb wasn’t actually sad to be gone from there. The place stank. It would have been comfortable if five men didn’t live there – Nidal, Roberto, Nasser, Anwar and himself – holed up above a self-service launderette on Mare Street called Stars and Spins. It was a thrill for Anwar to be fed greasy garlic chicken by Roberto, rather than be fed by his mother at home, while the rest of them were
always trying to get money together and some of them were endlessly trying not to get thrown out of the country.

  Soon, that piggy little policewoman would sit with her fat buttocks on a chair, drinking her tea, looking Tayeb up on her enormous database. Her chubby fingers would press the keys and up he would come: arrived on a three-month English-language student visa fifteen years ago, meant to go home but never did. How was he supposed to get sun on his skin with all this rain? More importantly, what was he going to do? This country: it had given him a plague that he never knew in Sana’a. Soon, the dry, itchy patches would spread on to the back of his hands and face and that was when getting a cash-in-hand job in a restaurant was not so straight-forward.

  As he walked, he remembered being on this road before, when he first left Eastbourne, saying so long to the English Language School which had provided him with a room in a family house and to the woman who was supposed to feed him as part of the fees paid to her, but no food ever came. Goodbye to Quality Cod! Fish Restaurant where his only question at the interview was what football team he supported. A week later he had a job as a fish-fryer and in his hand his first pay-packet of several five-pound notes in a chip bag. Nodding peace be with you to the seagull he watched every morning hula-hooping like a fool against the threat of rain. He’d left all that behind and headed to London.

  Tayeb had travelled by coach, for most of the journey watching the ladder-straight neck of the woman who sat in front of him. The title of her book, Heresies. A Journal of Feminist post-Totalitarian Criticism. A Russian/English Bilingual Edition had excited him enormously. Here was a woman, he thought, who might be open to unusual events, a sort of Russian–French-style public transport encounter, perhaps, whatever that might be. He ached, then, for a woman. The coach had pulled in at 8pm and he watched her walk away, pulled heavily to the left by her rucksack. He had learned enough about English people by that time to know that she would not appreciate an offer to help with her bag. Tayeb had turned around and around, looking for Buckingham Palace, but could not see anything like it and here he was now, on exactly the same road.