A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘Well, it could, but it might take some time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘They are in no hurry, owls. My father had one that escaped and sat in a tree for three days before we got it back. It depends how hungry it is.’

  ‘Oh, I am sure it must be hungry.’

  They both looked up at the owl. Its eyes were closed.

  Six rashers of Waitrose Essentials range bacon lay in strips across the floor. The man who had introduced himself as Tayeb was squatting calmly against the stair-rail. He sipped from a cup of tea in one hand and held a yellow pillowcase in the other. Frieda repeated the word after him, in her head: Yemen. What did she know about Yemen? Nothing. Almost nothing. Once a British colony. Desert. Muslim. Home of terrorists. Everyone owning guns. In all her travels, this was one country she had not been to. She would have liked to ask him about his home but there was something in the way he sat, self-contained and taut, that didn’t encourage further enquiry. Instead she said, ‘Have you any . . . experience with owls?’

  ‘Some. But I know the bigger ones, the Siberian types. This is a British type, smaller.’

  Frieda, standing drinking her tea in the doorway nodded, as if familiar with Siberian owls. She ran a finger along the shape of one of the feathers he drew last night.

  ‘This tea is good,’ he said, smiling. ‘We could be here for some time.’

  He had an interesting smile. He was actually rather good looking.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ Frieda said, her hand still on his drawings, ‘are you homeless? You don’t seem like a . . . homeless person.’

  ‘I like this, the English way of getting permission to ask a question. I am in trouble,’ he said. ‘I was about to be arrested, which means I will probably be deported. So I have had to leave my home, so as not to get my friends into trouble.’

  ‘Arrested for what?’

  ‘Vandalism.’ She looked at the bird drawing on the wall.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Tayeb half pulled out a cigarette from a packet and looked at her with the question on his face. Frieda nodded. He offered her one and she declined.

  ‘I was drawing on a toilet wall and some men caught me. I wasn’t sure if they were police or not. I thought the best thing was to be friendly. They wanted me to do things I didn’t want to do and then the police arrived at my door.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was an unpleasant night, and now I am trying to work out what to do.’ He drew on his cigarette in a contemplative way and touched a scar on his chin. Frieda put her cup up to her lip to hide her face. He had not moved from his squatting position for a long time. It was an exotic pose, she supposed. It made her think of lepers on the edge of the street in Delhi or of Chinese cooks. She was appalled at her own inner-Orientalist, but she couldn’t stop it. She remembered girls in her school, not being able to work her out, asking her, ‘Are you Turkish? Are you Spanish?’ They would run around her in circles calling her a bloody i-ti, a bloody dago. Nathaniel once told her, ‘Your eyes are too black. They are unnatural, and unnerving.’

  Tayeb reminded her of a man she had watched on the promenade in Alexandria, one trip, not long ago. Or Alex, as she liked to call it, like a local. There were men everywhere, in clusters, leaning back to watch her walk, as self-conscious as a tourist, past them. They shouted, Hallo, Hallo, or, Tsssst. Hey: how are you? Talk to me. Frieda had let her head droop down, averting her eyes from the leather jackets and the slicked-back black hair, the laughing brown eyes. The men – boys, actually, most of them, teenagers – were simply being Mediterranean men, she said to herself, but still, it was overwhelming and tears welled up in her eyes as the whistles and calls followed her flip-flopping footsteps along the seafront.

  For years she had dreamed of visiting this famous city, expecting something decadent, full of beautiful people luxuriating in the sunshine, drinking coffee. She laughed at her own idiocy, her own Western buffoonery when she discovered on arrival that the city was not unlike some of the more clapped-out, dishevelled English seaside towns. A bizarre concoction of shabby European-style hotels and tramlines, and a smell at once African and Arab to Frieda (whatever that is, whatever scents those could be, trammelled into one essentially non-European root, she supposed, part-seductive, part-repulsive, part soporific).

  Her flight had been delayed due to security issues and problems at the airport and rather than fly to Cairo she had walked around Alexandria, accidentally finding, she remembers now, a Jewish cemetery, protected at its gates by vicious black dogs chained to the rocks on the path. She couldn’t get into the cemetery; the gates were locked. Nor could she get near, because of the dogs, but through the iron bars of the gates she could see a chipped marble mausoleum, and some unloved gravestones. For a while she had stood and watched the dogs who intermittently barked at her, before returning to the mauling of a small carcass, a dead rabbit or rodent, from what she could tell. She had wandered off, overcome with the familiar hopeless feeling of being an unwanted stranger, but she was pleased with herself none the less: for keeping herself together, securing a salary that would make her father shiver, managing the minuscule matters of each day. All in all, a patchy yet valid holding together; that is, until the men on the promenade undid it all with their calls. Eventually, a man who looked a little like Tayeb had shushed them all with a tsssst. Whatever he said, she didn’t hear, but it helped. They all turned away, to look at something else, something more interesting. She had scurried past, back to her hotel, and didn’t go out again until it was time to catch her plane.

  ‘What do you do?’ Frieda drank the last of her tea, which had gone cold in the cup.

  ‘I had a job at a Turkish restaurant in Dalston, but I had to leave. By a bad coincidence I now have neither job nor a home.’

  Tayeb was not looking at Frieda any more, but at the owl, addressing it with his musical, swinging accent. Clouds must have shifted in the sky as the quality of the light coming through the window in the hall changed. If Frieda could reach up, high enough, she could close the window so the owl couldn’t get out. But that still wouldn’t solve anything; it would still be there and now, she had the additional problem of a homeless Arab man on her stairs. In a quiet voice, he whispered, ‘Don’t move.’

  Frieda looked up. The owl had shifted a considerable way along the pipe and was now wide-eyed and looking directly at the bacon on the floor. It hopped one, two, three hops along the pipe. Then there was a flurry and it flew towards the bacon, a talon ripping effortlessly into one of the strips. The pillowcase was over it with a whoosh and Tayeb flicked the bird up, twisting the pillowcase so that the owl could not escape. There were a few bulging movements and then it went still. It was neatly done. Frieda swung the door open, pointing to the cage in the living room. Tayeb leaned over the cage and Frieda could not see how he manoeuvred the bird in, but the next second there it was, ruffled and disgruntled-looking.

  Frieda returned to the corridor and picked up the rashers. She took them in and poked them through the bars for the owl.

  ‘Poor owlie,’ she said, looking at Tayeb, who was now standing in the centre of the room, smiling, nodding as if in agreement, though she did not know with what. There was indeed something odd about the fact that he had sat outside her door last night and now he was here again: why was that? Nothing is accidental. He was scratching, scratching at his wrists so much that she wanted to pull his hands away from themselves and something about this movement prompted her:

  ‘It seems only polite to offer you another drink as you have been so kind as to catch my owl for me,’ she said, wary – he was a stranger, after all – but propelled to invite him nevertheless.

  My owl: how ridiculous. She pulled her hair over her face slightly, feeling shy.

  Training: The only thing alive about bicycles is the persons who propel them; and if they are only half alive before attempting to mount, they will become very alert and keenly appreciative of all that concerns them long before the sp
ort has ceased to be a novelty.

  15. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

  July 2nd

  A visitor blew through our house like a hurricane, but not for long. It was Mr Steyning from the Inland Mission. He arrived on horseback yesterday afternoon entirely unannounced, was gone by nightfall and his visit is already like a dream. It is as if he rode on his horse from the sky, and returned that way, cloud-ward.

  He appeared at our gate alone, although we found out later that he does have a boy who carries his supplies, but for some reason this boy had stopped further down the track. News of the arrival was imparted in the usual way. The wily, skinny boys move faster than snakes, they are like carrier pigeons. They whispered to Lolo that a visitor was nearly upon us and Elizabeth and I rushed and scrambled about to tidy both ourselves and the guest-room, although, in fact, we did not have enough time to do either.

  I looked at myself in the mirror for the first time in a while to see how I might seem to a stranger. My red hair has grown blonder in the sun and dry-straw looking as a consequence. My eyes are red-rimmed. I am beginning to look sun-beaten, the creases now remain. I don’t know why I was concerned about my looks, but I flattened my hair down and replaced my Chinese cotton smock with a European skirt and blouse, made from sea-green silk. The particularly English shade of green, bringing to mind moss and hedgerows, seemed immediately out of place here in this land of bright yellows and dusky pinks. I felt garish and conspicuous, but it was too late to change. Lizzie remained in her Chinese smock and looked surprised when she saw me in European wear.

  ‘What are you wearing? You look ridiculous.’

  Lizzie stood appraising me, her frail bones buffeting beneath the cotton blue smock, her eyes sticking out, her hair twisted up, standing ornamentally still. I wanted to both bite her and stroke her, little Lizzie. Contrary as ever, she now became the perfect, beautifully presented parlour-room daughter, whereas sweat was already dotting my silk shirt.

  Mr Steyning stood in the garden wearing a full black suit despite the heat, and shoes that shone like spectacular jewels in the immense dust of the road. He is a large man, expansive and big-framed, with a very black, clipped beard. I could not look away from those shoes, wondering how they could possibly be so clean. I can only conclude that he stopped, just before arriving at the Pavilion House, and changed from his riding clothes into a smarter outfit. It was a pleasure to see and meet a fellow countryman, especially one so at home in these distorted, wild surroundings and fortunate that we had the opportunity to meet him without Millicent here. She was visiting the priest, or Khadega.

  ‘Did you come in response to our telegram?’ Lizzie asked.

  In fact no, was the answer. He has been travelling. The telegram was sent to Urumtsi and he has not been there for weeks. It is luck that he came to find us.

  ‘We must tell you’, Lizzie said, ‘we are under house-arrest.’

  ‘I am so relieved that you are here,’ I said.

  Mr Steyning is a gentleman, and fascinating. He has lived in Turkestan for seventeen years, having arrived in 1906 with the Inland Mission. Elizabeth sat with him as I served tea and dough-bread biscuits. He glanced frequently at Ai-Lien, though was too polite to ask any questions, and so I sat down and quickly told him our story. He absorbed my words calmly, asking the odd question here and there about the trial, and of Millicent’s great danger and the accusation of murder. He took out a small notebook and wrote several lines and nodded.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I must talk to Millicent about this.’

  Then, encouraged by his smiles, we asked him question after question, poor man. He did not seem to mind, answering with magnanimity. Geography, distance, religion, social issues, and the women of the region, the Moslem question, the Chinese question, the Russian question, and the state of the Empire, all discussed in great and lively spirits. He spoke of his acquaintance Mr Greeves, with whom he lives in Urumtsi, a world-renowned specialist in Turkic folklore and language, a specialist of Manchu and who is at their home at work on a great dictionary and various important translation works.

  ‘Ah,’ Lizzie said, ‘we know a priest, Father Don Carlo, who is also at work on a dictionary.’

  ‘At least – I think it’s a dictionary,’ I added. At the mention of Father Don Carlo, Mr Steyning frowned slightly.

  ‘You must visit us, Miss English,’ he said. ‘We too have a small mimeograph and have taken some of Mr Greeves’ translations of the Gospels and printed them into Turki, Manchu and Qazak. We are currently working on “The Pilgrim’s Progress”.’

  We passed a pleasant afternoon. Elizabeth led a tour of the garden, with me trailing behind and Mr Steyning was immediately in raptures. It turns out that he has a wonderful knowledge of botany of the area. He gave us the names and I noted them down for my guide book: Acer griseum, with cinnamon-red papery bark. Dipteronia sinensis. Lonicera tragophylla in full flower, and Schizophragma integrifolium is the name of the mass of white that clambers over all. Flowers: Lilium giganteum; Ilex Pernyi; a sort of cowslip called Primula sikkimensis; and he pointed out a dark-red Tibetan lady’s-slipper orchid (Cypripedium tibeticum) that grows in abundance in our garden.

  Lizzie invited him to follow her into the small adobe out-building where she spends much of her time. I have not been into it myself, I could tell she was hesitant about letting me in, but I simply followed. It is a sort of hovel built into the ground, presumably previously used as a cellar, or similar. Lizzie lit a linseed lamp. Clipped to a piece of string tied along a wooden pole was a series of photographic prints. I sniffed at the smell of chemicals, glad to see, however, that they were being put to use having travelled so far. Apart from one of a cluster of pigtailed native children, the prints were mostly self-portraits – one next to the handkerchief tree, or near flowers in the garden – and they were layered with images, gauzy and indistinct, ghost-like. I had not seen them before and looked at them with interest.

  Mr Steyning looked closely. ‘These are very impressive,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, they were mostly accidents. I have difficulties with the chemicals, with the light. I cannot control the conditions adequately here and can only shut out the light using several blankets over the door. I long for a dark-room.’

  ‘You seem . . .’ Mr Steyning paused for a moment, scratched at his chin. ‘In this one, well, you seem light, as if you have lightened yourself and released yourself from the gravity of this earth.’

  ‘That is insightful of you.’ Lizzie was smiling. ‘I am very interested in heavy things made light.’

  We walked back into the garden and I lingered behind as he and Elizabeth chatted about the bark, the colour of the wood and the details of the garden. I did not know she had taken such photographs. There certainly is something about Mr Steyning that inspires private confidences. Later, I told him of my endeavour to write a guide as one of the first English women to visit this region (apart from the wife of the British Consul) and to my delight, he was sympathetic to the idea, offering his study and resources in Urumtsi if ever I should need it. He gave me his card with the address embossed in silver in English, Chinese and Turki. It has a picture of a hummingbird in the corner.

  Millicent still did not return, even though we had sent a scout to inform her of our visitor, and so I took over the organisation of the evening. I instructed Lolo to prepare some Tibetan thenthuk stew (when Millicent is away we abandon English cuisine, Lolo’s native concoctions being profoundly superior). Mr Steyning insisted on joining us in the kitchen as we were preparing the evening food for him.

  ‘Do excuse me, Mr Steyning, as I attend to the baby.’

  ‘Oh, Miss English, I would much prefer to sit here and chatter. I am an incorrigible chatterer as you can tell.’

  Elizabeth offered to arrange his room, but he insisted that he would leave that night. Lolo prepared the food, humming as he cooked. I tended to Ai-Lien as Mr Steyning conversed with Lolo in what he said was a broken form of Tibetan
dialogue. Mr Steyning patted Lolo on the back as he mixed the flour, pressed the dough with his wide hands and chopped the vegetables into strings.

  ‘Oh don’t lay the table, English-style’, he declared when he saw Lizzie begin to bring out the tableware items. ‘Mr Greeves and I normally eat local-fashion, it is much more convenient, much simpler.’

  So we sat on the divan with the food laid out on plates, using the bread to sweep it up. As we ate, he began, for the first time, to ask about our Mission. Do we have any converts? Are we of much interest? Under suspicion? I let Lizzie talk on Millicent’s behalf at this point and she certainly demonstrated conviction. Her blonde thin hair fell over her face as she talked of our great plans for a Children’s Service – this was news to me – and of our distribution of the translated pamphlets.

  ‘But have you any converts, yet?’ Mr Steyning persisted.

  ‘Mr Steyning, you may disapprove, but we have a rather female approach to spreading the Gospel,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Oh, do elaborate, Miss English.’

  ‘We talk, Mr Steyning. We call it – well, Millicent calls it gossiping the gospel. We infiltrate the female elements of society, the harems, the inside of the Moslem women’s quarters and families and it is there that we begin the process of conversion. Slowly, but surely.’

  Mr Steyning nodded, smiling.

  ‘The daughter of one such house has come to us and although she is just one, she will surely be a conduit for more.’ Lizzie looked pleased as she spoke.

  ‘And you, Miss English, do you gossip the gospel?’ I blushed across my face and neck and Mr Steyning, to be kind, changed the subject.

  We finished eating the stew followed by one of Lolo’s sweet rice puddings, a simple and delicious dish with traces of apple and a delicate honey saturated through the rice. After dinner we talked of the Moslem situation in this area. I had not realised it was quite so devastating. According to Mr Steyning, all of the cities of the North West are now in the grip of terror as Moslem Brigands maraud through the desert, raiding cities at will, warring with the Chinese.