‘Do you realise it means we can be together, now? Properly.’ The kettle finished its boiling and Frieda tried to listen beyond its steam, beyond Nathaniel’s drunk monotone voice, to Tayeb. He was still and quiet and probably extremely uncomfortable.
‘But what about the kids? Edward? Sam?’
‘Yes, I know the names of my own kids, thank you. You forgot Tom.’
She undid the coffee jar and spooned its golden seal savagely. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘They don’t know yet. I will have to tell them, have to talk to them.’ There was silence as Nathaniel looked around the kitchen.
‘So, who’s pretty boy in there, anyway?’
‘Shush,’ Frieda said, jabbing at him. ‘He’s a friend.’
‘Right.’ A cuckoo clock pinged on the wall and a desolate-looking bird on a stick poked in and out. Nathaniel wandered back into the living room and Frieda spent a moment putting cups on a tray, aware of the murmur of their voices. When she walked in Tayeb was standing awkwardly, rubbing his hands.
‘We’ve just agreed, haven’t we mate, that your friend here’s going to hop it so we can have a bit of . . . space.’
Frieda glared at Nathaniel. ‘What?’
‘It’s OK, Frieda. I’ll just get my bag,’ Tayeb said and he smiled at her and began to walk towards the door.
‘No. Nathaniel, who do you think you are? He’s not going anywhere. He’s got nowhere to stay at the moment.’
‘Nowhere to stay? So you’re helping him? Well that’s sweet. Did you pick him up from a bar?’
‘Just shut up. I think you should go. We can talk tomorrow.’
‘Go? Frieda, baby. This is a big night, a big time.’
Tayeb, looking anxious, leaned forward, ‘Really, I will go.’
‘No, Tayeb. You are staying. Tayeb is helping me sort through this stuff, helping me get to the bottom of this flat, Nathaniel. He can read the Arabic he can . . . understand. You have to go, Nathaniel. You’re drunk.’
‘Listen babe, tomorrow when I tell Margaret, that will be it. We’ll be together.’
Frieda stared at him. ‘What do you mean, tomorrow? Haven’t you told her?’
Nathaniel swayed. ‘That’s what I mean. Yeah, I mean I’ve told her. Tomorrow it all unravels.’ Nathaniel turned to Tayeb, swinging his arms in a wide gesture as if addressing a lecture hall. ‘I bet you’ve got no idea what it is like to have your whole life unravel, do you?’
Tayeb smiled, ‘Actually I do.’ Nathaniel looked as though he wanted to hit him.
‘Who are you? Have you picked little Frieda up or has she picked you up? Lost souls together?’
‘Shut up Nathaniel. Please go.’
‘Don’t cry, baby.’
Frieda flinched away from him and Tayeb stood with his back against the wall scratching his wrists. She picked up Irene Guy’s pebble and turned it from one palm to the other. The night her mother left, her father went to bed and didn’t get up again for weeks. Frieda took him tea and toast each morning because they were the only things she could confidently make. Whilst he was in bed, she took a bag of flour from the cupboard and made glue by mixing the flour with water. She diligently made up bowls of the gloopy, sticky substance and then dabbed it on to the back of cut-out images from catalogues, various material items that she coveted: tin openers, duvet covers, lawn mowers, garden sheds, night lights, shoe horns, lampshades, secateurs, coasters, blinds, curtains, shelves, doorknobs, light switches, shower heads, wellington boots, ice-cube trays, lemon squeezers, fairy lights, lava lamps, toilet roll holders . . . She glued them all up on to the wall of her caravan and did not stop until the walls were entirely covered. Here it was again in this room with these two men, much like her dad refusing to get up, a feeling of dislocation; as if some part of her was left behind on a pavement.
Difficulties to Overcome: A difficulty early experienced is uncertain steering and an uncertain sense of direction.
19. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes
July 12th
Her face had a tilt and the mouth was wet. More than a little wine, I suspect. Lizzie and Ai-Lien were asleep. She balanced on my kang, lit a Hatamen, saying nothing for a moment and then, the talk came: those plants, have you seen them, Eva? The sand jujube? With small, silver leaves and golden flowers. The people of Turkestan associate the scent of this flower with a story of home. When prisoners of war were carried from Kashgarian lands to Peking in the eighteenth century a beautiful Kashgarian girl was amongst them. The Emperor Chien Lung saw her and loved her. He gave her everything she could want, but she was homesick. He built a mosque for her and a Kashgarian landscape in the grounds of the palace, and eventually a pavilion called the Homeward-Gazing Tower.
Millicent blew her smoke over me. ‘ “Why aren’t you happy? What more could you want?” the Emperor asked her and she told him: “I miss the scent of the trees with silver leaves and golden flowers.” So his men were sent to pick some trees and they were brought back to Peking and planted. For a moment she was happy as she smelled the fragrance of home but the plants would not hold, they all died.’
Was I supposed to answer? For the first time ever she offered me a Hatamen and I took one. She lit it for me and my mouth filled with the foul taste immediately.
‘Are you constructing your own Homeward-Gazing Tower, Eva?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘In your pavilion, Eva. I read what you wrote: “real conversion can only begin when secrets are surrendered”.’
She has found it, then, this book. It was difficult to hold myself steady. I sat up in the kang and looked over at Lizzie, but she was still asleep. Millicent’s face was full of a strange energy, as if she had too many thoughts to control, as if the thoughts she had kept shifting under her skin and jostling for room. I pulled the blanket up, calculating: she knows about Mr Hatchett.
‘Why did you read my personal things?’
‘Does Lizzie know your own little secret?’
‘What secret?’
Millicent removed the paper from the window, the light outside was beginning.
‘Your non-faith.’
I held the blanket tighter to contain myself, as lines from this book came to my head.
‘You have violated me, Millicent.’
‘They want the baby back you know,’ she glanced at Ai-Lien, ‘you don’t think she’s yours, do you? The natives want her back.’
‘What for? They kill baby girls all the time. Why would they want her?’
Ai-Lien was in her crib in a deep sleep, lying on her front with her head to the side, her palms facing upwards in a fan at either side of her body. She was snoring, lightly. Millicent has read that I am growing to love Ai-Lien and now she wants to take her away – it’s a punishment.
‘Lolo told me,’ she said. ‘They want her back.’ A surprise, to think that Lolo talks to Millicent. I rather thought he didn’t. It occurred to me that Lolo is in and out of the pavilion regularly.
‘Millicent, about Khadega –’
‘Poor Khadega, drowning.’
‘Yes, but obviously Mohammed killed her. She brought disgrace on her family, by associating with us.’
Millicent’s eyes narrowed. ‘She drowned.’
‘Mr Steyning thinks it is dangerous for us to stay here. Is it possible we can negotiate leaving?’
‘I shall defend us.’ She stood up. Ai-Lien rustled, turned her head. I crouched down close, partly to see that she had moved sufficiently to breathe, partly to avoid Millicent’s gaze.
‘Three men dead because of us, Ai-Lien’s young mother and now Khadega,’ I said, directing my voice towards the baby.
‘What did you say?’
‘Father Don Carlo, he mentioned that three men were killed at the festival. He inferred that the distribution of our pamphlets had something to do with the rising tension.’
Her eyes were laughing at me, and at once I could not contain my anger. Without checking
myself I spoke:
‘There may have been no grieving for Khadega. No mourning. Lizzie walks around quickly, as if a splinter has been taken from her foot and you are unconcerned, but there is one thing I know, and that is that Khadega was killed because of us, because of you, Millicent.’
Millicent moved quickly, then, and pulled Ai-Lien out of the crib, roughly, waking her up. Poor Ai-Lien started to cry, a soft, still-asleep cry. Millicent held her in her arms as if she were a log being carried in for the fire. I jumped out of the kang, I did not like Millicent’s expression.
‘ “As for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away like a bird, from the birth, and from the womb, and from the conception.” ’
She said it darkly. I did not know the quote nor what it meant. I wanted the baby back. Her crying grew louder.
‘Millicent,’ Lizzie said, waking up, ‘whatever are you doing?’
Ai-Lien was crying fully now, Millicent was holding her too tightly, and shaking. I moved forward, ready to fight her but Millicent pushed Ai-Lien into my arms.
‘Do not forget,’ she said, ‘that she is not your child. You have gone a-whoring from your God. You will suffer.’
She walked out of the room. I held Ai-Lien to me, kissing and singing to her to stop the crying; to stop myself from crying. The vulnerability of Ai-Lien – indeed of all babies – suddenly seemed to me to be unbearable: the defenceless bodies, the skin, breakable bones. I could simply leave her in the sun for one moment too long and she would die. Fury, on Ai-Lien’s behalf, made my hands shake and I closed my eyes to control myself. Then I looked over at Lizzie.
‘Millicent is your voice of authority,’ I said. I was burning, hot in the ears with temper. Lizzie pushed her hair behind her ears, looking confused,
‘What do you mean?’
I wanted to ask her, why Lizzie, why do you obey her? But instead, I said, ‘What was she quoting?’
Lizzie thought for a moment. ‘Hosea, I think.’
It took me some minutes to shush Ai-Lien. Millicent has since been away for the whole day. I do not know where she is. This afternoon I looked up Hosea. I am not familiar with it. Her quote comes from a vicious, vitriolic passage of revenge for betrayal. I write it out here:
Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them, that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to them when I depart from them! Ephraim, as I saw Tyrus, is planted in a pleasant place: but Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the murderer. Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters. Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb. My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations.
Hosea 9.
20. London, Present Day
Norwood
She was in the bathroom now. Tayeb could hear her crying and he did not know whether he should do anything or not. He had fairly limited experience with women. There had been one girlfriend when he was in Sana’a, a French PhD student studying Arabic. Her name was Sandrine. She had once said to him, ‘Don’t you feel anything when I cry?’ and he had answered her honestly, ‘No’. There was something insincere about her. She was so in love with Yemen. In love with him, a real, authentic Yemeni man of her own. Through her he understood that some European women collect Arab men like stones. Because she was foreign she could move through the city with relative freedom and she was skilled at not drawing attention to herself. She lived in a European compound and would pay for a taxi to sneak him in through the barriers.
‘It’s called cultural tourism, the thrill you get from bringing me here,’ he said to her once.
‘Maybe.’
She was sexually forward, so much so that it was a shock to him, but exciting at the same time. It was part of her game to wear not very much under her abaya, her skin rubbing against the black fabric. She lay about her room, shocking him with her exposed flesh, so casual and meaningless. He gave her blankets to cover up, but she always managed to drop them and then she would cry and expect him to comfort her without explaining why she was crying and he would close his eyes to stop himself from hitting her. Rich and free as she was, she had no reason for tears.
Now, though, Tayeb was surprised at his concern for Frieda. He stood on the other side of the bathroom door, listening. His hand rested on the door handle but he was unsure whether to open it or not.
‘Frieda,’ he called out softly, ‘can I come in?’ There was a sound of a tap being run, and the door opened. Her face was temporarily rearranged by sadness and wine and her eyes were red.
‘I’m very sorry about all that,’ she said.
‘I know what English girls need when upset: tea.’
She smiled, holding on to the door handle as though it were the greatest support to her in the universe.
Tayeb could not get used to the insipid tea in bags. He preferred his tea Yemeni style, boiling the water with sugar and cardamom before adding tea and pouring the mixture into glasses. Now, however, he made it the lazy English way that Anwar had taught him, putting a bag into each of two mugs, pouring the water on to the bags, adding a blob of milk, mixing it round to create a grey swill. He took the two mugs out to Frieda. She had stretched herself out on the sofa, and was lying on her side with her hands under her face like a small child in prayer. He placed the mugs on the low glass coffee table and sat in a chair opposite.
‘I don’t think I’ve got the strength to go home,’ she said. ‘I’ll just stay here, tonight.’
‘You have the bed, I’ll have the sofa.’
‘OK.’ Her small, smooth face was patchy, and her hair stuck to her forehead. Within a minute she had fallen asleep on the sofa without touching her tea. She began snoring, very lightly.
Tayeb lit a cigarette and looked at her. He stood up, moving his feet softly so that he wouldn’t wake her. There was a hole in one of his socks and a toe poked through. It depressed him, this toe showing. He moved around the room and it occurred to him that he could sell some of this stuff. He needed money; what he had left would run out fast. He could take that Leica camera, now, walk out the front door and get some not-bad money for it. The owl was watching him, but in a detached way, as if meditating. He could sell the owl, even. He needed to work out what to do. Where could he go? Nikolai in Eastbourne? Delilah, the Spanish chef in Southwick? He needed a job, a home, actually, he needed to disappear into the cracks of the city again like an earwig. He pictured his father at home in his chair after a meal, chewing qat. Tayeb remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him as a child, incredulous at his father’s ability to be comfortable in his own skin, to relax anywhere and to sleep standing up.
His father had said, a long time ago, ‘Do not do it, you will regret it. Be anything else. Not a filmmaker.’ This was a man who lived by birds, who could teach Tayeb all of the bird lore he should ever wish to know, but Tayeb did not like the talons and wings, or the awkward way birds had to be held. For years, Tayeb sat smoking in a rudimentary editing suite in a back room of an office that during the day dealt with complaints and procedures around parking restrictions in Sana’a’s growing city centre, whilst at night it transformed into a primitive but functional film suite. From the age of eighteen, Tayeb worked alongside Sana’a’s greatest filmmaker, Salah Salem. First of all, his job was to bring him coffees and cigarettes. Then he moved on to running errands, hunts for light bulbs, wires, radios and sandwiches. After a year of this, Salah finally allowed Tayeb to sit next to him and watch him edit.
Hours of forwarding and rewinding, like two disgruntled djinns they sat in front of Salah’s shots of the great wastes of qat crops and thirsty scrubland in the north. Reframe. Cut. Reposition. Tayeb learned t
he art of the eternal reduction so that in the end, the results were barely recognisable from the original takes. Funding for the film came from the Ministry of Information and Culture who approved of its Nationalist, anti-British, anti-Colonial message. It was sent to the censors for clearance and returned four times. Each time it came back with notes and suggestions for change and Salah threw his coffee cups into the air in rage so that the sticky coffee spattered on to heads, and chairs and equipment.
Eventually, it was finished. Salah and the censors agreed a version and then Tayeb submitted an application of his own to the Ministry. After his long apprenticeship, it was finally his turn. A code of honour amongst the filmmakers meant that when one person received the rare funding, he would employ the other filmmakers and so Tayeb’s boss and mentor was suddenly his assistant. Tayeb shyly gave instructions and began to resist any editorial suggestions. Contrary to everything he had learned about cutting and editing he proceeded to put everything he could into this first film of his. There were the sleeping men on the kerbs of the marketplace and the waste of qat; Kalashnikovs against the back door and the taste of bread. The melancholy of the mothers’ eyes, the smell of his sisters playing in the street. Scenes of a cracked, thirsty and ever-growing desert, the Palestinian neighbour, a broken-hearted cousin whose girlfriend was one of the New Islamic believers. He included shots of stacks of Islamic books at the book fair, the Soviet army bases, the legacy of the English, the gulls of Aden and the letters on the walls.
His film was to be long, and winding, and rich. With Salah’s help he cut it down to four hours. At first he had resented Salah’s powerful intrusion, but steadily, he gained confidence and his vision grew and he could see that Salah had begun to respect him. Despite himself, he caught images of birds and tried to capture the sense of freedom that comes with watching a bird in flight. Birds carry messages, he wanted to say, but it is up to us to have the skill to be able to decipher those messages. Wasn’t the invention of writing inspired, in China, by the flight of cranes?
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar Page 15
