The censors considered the film anti-Yemen. It was too ‘pan-Arab and regional’. He was given a list of over a thousand changes to make. They were suspicious of his portrayal of the fervently religious young girl; they wondered, was he mocking? Through it all, he was leaving his father behind. Each hour in the editing suite was an hour pushed between them, a new distance grown. Salah was supplanting his father, and, likewise, his father got a second wife, and with her had two more sons. He forgot about Tayeb. The other sons grew up fast and held the falcons’ claws. They learned the bird lore. They did not creep behind the mosque to photograph the graffiti on the old city walls.
Once, Tayeb made the mistake of describing a dream to his father. He had put it in a language he thought his father would understand: I want to be like a bird, Father, and fly and see from the sky. See the way the world works and record it and shape it. His father was silent for such a long time that Tayeb thought he was asleep, but then his cheeks swelled out as he chewed his qat, a slight green froth on his lips.
‘Why am I cursed with children making irrelevant choices? You need a wife. Children. Food. Home. You will see later, that without these things you are lost. Homes don’t just come to you, you have to make them. Work for them. Plan your life around them.’
How desperately infuriating that he was right.
Really the only person who might possibly help Tayeb was Nikolai. The day he’d left Eastbourne, his boss, Nikolai, with his Cypriot smile said, ‘You’ve got to go, I can’t have you here any more mate. They are checking all the restaurants on this road for illegals.’
‘Of course. I understand.’
This was his only choice, he realised. He would go to Eastbourne and find Nikolai.
The air in the bedroom hung low. Tayeb returned to the living room and flicked on the TV. A weather woman with a horsy face was talking about a squally wind. He did not know this word, squally. He found, on the main bookcase, a dictionary as heavy as a rock. The pages were thin and slippery and seemed expensive. Characterised by brief periods of violent wind or rain. Storms or commotion. As he flicked the pages, the words and definitions showed themselves to him, important in their exactness, their precise placing in language, their specificity. His eyes began to water as he looked at all of the words.
He was weary. He was tired of the thought of having to find somewhere else to live, of this impermanence; of pushing an unnatural language through his head; of being in rooms belonging to others. All around him people sat in their own homes, getting fat, like his father. Tayeb had never had a home. Instead, just a series of rented rooms borrowed for limited periods of time, and himself alone, scratching marks on the walls. It exhausted him, it was ageing him. Most of all, though, he was tired of himself.
The horse-faced woman on the TV finished up the weather and was replaced with jarring music for a quiz show. Tayeb picked up the Leica again, and gently held it in his palm. Just holding a camera gave him a surprising ache. Nostalgia? More like regret. It had certainly not been a conscious decision to avoid cameras over these years, not allowing himself to even touch one. The last film he shot was standing on the corner of Zobairi and Shari’ Ari ‘Abdul Mughni Street filming a street-scene panoramic. As he filmed, a Ford bus – those little white death-traps – had crashed into a car in front of him. The bus skidded and flipped over. The children, women and exhausted men inside were crushed like beans.
Tayeb filmed it, the whole thing, the cracked windows and a girl who no longer had an eye. A policeman shouted at him to get away and then another policeman grabbed his camera, and threw it on to the floor. He then stamped on it, to ensure that it was destroyed. Without thinking, Tayeb punched that policeman, a firework crack of his fist on the face. He put the Leica down on the table, gently. It was his eldest brother who said to him, ‘You’ll have to leave now.’
For the first time, Tayeb allowed himself to look properly at Frieda’s body. She was thin, with short legs. Her face did not look peaceful, but neither did it look anguished. It was something else, sorrowful, perhaps. He imagined her hair would be very soft to touch. She looked a little Spanish, a little Turkish perhaps, not the mottled meat-coloured grey–white of most English girls.
After finishing his cigarette he sat down on the armchair opposite her. It let out a wheeze, like a gentle protest. He knew he would not steal the camera, or anything else. From this position it was impossible not to notice that one of Frieda’s breasts fell down on to the other, creating a light groove. Released from shyness by her unconsciousness he allowed his eyes to follow the shape of her breasts like fingers and he could see that they were small. To redirect his thoughts he took his pencils out of his bag. Loneliness can be assuaged, he had discovered, by drawing. First, an imaginary grid, fix the main object into the middle of the page, then use the two-point perspective. Pull vertical, horizontal and oblique lines together quickly – don’t hesitate – then vary the thickness and thinness of the lines. Look at the light: be accurate, what do you see? But, instead, what came out was a swirl: her hair, her cheek, her neck in a slope. He glanced up and saw the owl looking at him with the yellow bird-eyes of his father. Guiltily, he got the rose-coloured duvet from the bedroom and gently covered Frieda’s body with it. He returned to the bed and lay down flat on his back, fully clothed; within a minute he was asleep.
Tayeb had made coffee for breakfast and was sitting at the kitchen table when she came in. He was drawing on a piece of paper, an intricate web around the words kitab al-hayawan. The smell of coffee was pleasing. Frieda pulled out a kitchen chair and sat at the table.
‘I’m really sorry about last night, the crying, Nathaniel.’ She looked tired. Her eyes, when she pulled her glasses off and looked at him, were red-rimmed and did not seem to open fully.
‘Oh, don’t be sorry. I hope you slept well.’ He handed her a coffee and pushed the sugar bowl towards her. Frieda quietly put two spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee and looked at his drawing.
‘You’re very good,’ she said.
‘I won a prize at school for my calligraphy.’
‘Really?’
Tayeb had taken the prize home to his father announcing his intention to be a master calligrapher. His father simply ignored him, but for some time afterwards, when in the souq, Tayeb lurked near the sign-writers’ stall, crammed with its bottles and turpentine and brushes, and watched the men and their apprentices draw the calligraphy signs. Their roughness disturbed him; they were not how he imagined artists to be.
Then, deep in the souq, he’d found a calligrapher’s stall. An old man, bent over his work, his room filled with copper pots of bamboo reed pens, animal skins and the jet-black gum arabic crushed and smelling of rose water.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘What?’ He was smoking a cigarette and looking out of the window.
‘I feel like I’ve known you for longer than a day.’ He turned towards her, but blew the smoke in the other direction. He was thinking of the old calligrapher, the concentration on his wrinkled face as he moved the reed in quick, smooth motions with his hand resting on a piece of gazelle skin. Tayeb had thought the old man was unaware of him but he’d turned suddenly, looked at Tayeb and said, ‘Scram, it is not your destiny to be a messenger.’
‘Yes. I know what you mean,’ he said.
‘I guess we’ve become friends?’ Her red cheeks smiled at him.
‘Yes,’ he said, finally looking right at her, ‘although I don’t think your friend from last night likes it.’
‘Oh, him,’ Frieda sighed. ‘I don’t want to see him ever again.’ She drank a mouthful of Tayeb’s coffee; it was strong, exactly as she liked it.
‘It all became clear in my head,’ she said. ‘It all righted itself, and I could feel the poison draining away, so I know it’s right –’ She stopped herself. ‘God, I sound so tawdry.’
‘Listen, you can talk about anything you want. I am so grateful to you for letting me stay.’
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nbsp; ‘Have you worked out what you are going to do?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Hmmm. Me neither. About this place. I suppose at the end of the week I will just tell them it was a mistake, or not say anything, just give them the keys back. They can deal with all this stuff.’
‘You are going to let it all go?’ He looked at her.
‘Well. It’s not mine, is it? I don’t know what I’m doing here. I keep saying to myself, what am I doing here?’
Tayeb laughed. ‘That’s what I say too.’
‘Maybe Irene Guy wouldn’t have minded us here?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m going to the shop to get us some breakfast, and you can . . . you can . . .’
He smiled at her. ‘I can decide where I am going and what I am going to do.’
‘I suppose so, yes. What shall I get for the owl?’ The owl was turning into a constant worry, like an errant son off travelling in South America. This concern was a taste of responsibility, she supposed. She couldn’t bear it if the owl failed to thrive because of her.
‘Any raw meat, I guess,’ he said as she walked towards the door, and then he stopped her.
‘Look,’ he said, holding out a photograph.
‘Is it a picture of Irene?’ She took it from him.
He shrugged, ‘I found it in this Bible.’
Frieda looked down at the photograph and he returned to the page in the Bible he had been looking at, then read aloud the English words: ‘ “The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart.” ’
The woman in the photograph was in full seventies beatnik garb, standing in a long smock dress, her hair long, heavy and black, parted in the middle. She was in front of a caravan, squinting at the camera. Frieda turned the photograph over. On the back in pencil it said, Golden Sands, pregnant with F, 1974.
‘Where was this?’ she said.
Tayeb held up the small, black Bible. ‘I was reading it . . . in the bathroom,’ he said, ‘and that photograph fell out.’
He continued reading the quotation from a passage, ‘ “His words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.” ’
It was her mother, pregnant, standing with her long, hippie hair hanging down. Seventies hair. A seventies smock. The brown sepia tinge of time. A great big stomach and there, inside it, Frieda.
Possibilities: There is always novelty and the possibility of excitement, for it is unusual, on a bicycle trip, that everything happens as it is expected or has been planned for.
21. A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes
July 16th
I took Lolo’s hand and pulled him towards the door.
‘Lolo, look.’ I showed him the black pillar on the horizon, swaying and moving. His leathery face dropped and the air was curious, like held breath.
‘What is it?’
Lolo’s long white beard seemed dirtier than usual, I noticed.
‘Buran,’ he said. Then Millicent came up behind us in a rather crumpled condition, shoving into me. ‘He means a storm.’ We rushed, then, all about, closing things up and bringing things in.
‘Where’s Lizzie?’
Of course, she was out. I held Ai-Lien tightly, tucking her head under my chin. Lolo smacked Rebekah on her flanks and urged her forward. The kitchen is the deepest room in the house, the only room with no exposure at all to the outside, its door opening on to the divan room rather than the courtyard. This has often been to my chagrin as I have sweltered over a boiling pan, but now we huddled in the small space, a hungry baby, a grumbling cow, a Tibetan cook, a surly missionary and me.
‘I’ve got to go out and get her.’
‘No,’ Millicent said, ‘you’ll be killed, stay here.’
‘That means Lizzie will be killed,’ I shouted. ‘I must go and look for her. I can go on the bicycle.’
‘You will not go anywhere.’ Then, as if to placate me like a child, ‘I’m sure she will have found a burrow or a crevice to hide in.’
‘I don’t think so. She doesn’t even normally wear a veil to protect herself from the dust.’
I am not a pretty crier. My blue eyes quickly look bloody, my pink eyelids swell becoming sore and unsightly and the red of my cheeks blur with the red of my hair. Millicent was shouting but I couldn’t hear what she was saying because then the storm bore down upon us proper and all the air was sand. Even though we were secluded in the most sheltered room, the sand found its way in, into our eyes and hair and mouths. I crouched forward on my knees, sheltering Ai-Lien as much as I could in the well of my stomach. When I did look up I briefly managed to see Lolo clinging to Rebekah who was snorting and stamping and moving backwards and forwards in distress. It continued like this for hours, not gusting, but one continual pressure. I lay curled on the floor and poor baby Ai-Lien finally gave up her sobbing and collapsed into an unhappy sleep against me. I almost slept myself, despite the noise.
Some time later there was a slackening in the air and a drop in the ferocity of the storm. Opening my eyes, I saw Millicent kneeling in prayer. Sand covered her entirely, coating her hair and face. Then the air lost its magnetic feel and it all stopped.
July 18th
Lizzie has been missing for two days. Millicent insists I stay here while Lolo and a team of men search local villages and the houses that are dotted like pearls along the edge of the dry river, but to remain here is intolerable and I make jam from the garden fruit to control my fidgets. Peach jam, plum jam, jujube jam. I sent one of Lolo’s toothy, sinister little boys to the bazaar to get sugar and hence have been peeling, pitting, plucking and pulling off the furry skins, ripping out the seeds. A large vat of hissing juice and sugared fruit fat churns on the paraffin kitchener.
I know my sister better than anyone here. Who, exactly, is more likely than me to guess which tree she might have sheltered behind or which hovel in the desert she might have hoped would protect her from the storm? Oh – but my mind is a scramble and a jumble, crowded and rushed with memories of Lizzie and I as children in Saint Omer, crawling like mice through the remains of the old fortifications in the jardin public. Our old English family is filled with eccentric survivors. Our strong roots in Calais render them torn, their minds in France and their hearts in England, or, what might otherwise be termed, belonging nowhere. At any rate, we were told enough family legends to sustain the belief that we are of a race of tough-skinned curiosities. As I chop and chop at this fruity flesh I think of Captain Stanley and his cats, his ancestral shadow reaching as far back as the Norman Conquest. Of a distant relation who kidnapped a mistress of King Louis Phillipe II, demanding a ransom. Ours is a family at war with itself for more than 200 years as various members served Spanish, French and English kings and hopped left and right between Catholics and Protestants.
Why Lizzie, lost in the desert, should lead me to think of these ancients I do not know, only, when I think of us replaying family legends with black soil behind our ears it occurs to me that in our games, always, the central motif was one of survival.
No news. The way Lolo takes up Ai-Lien as if she is his own irritates me. And the food he is producing is dismal at the moment. It is all insufferable. I chop the blood-red flesh of the plums into small chunks and put the stones into a pile of tiny, bloody skulls.
Later: I caught Lolo allowing the boys to sit beneath Rebekah and take milk from her just as a calf would. The little faces sitting suckling upward, really – too much. I took him to task, but though he nodded and mumbled the insolence was there. Really. He is in Millicent’s pay; it would do me good to remember that.
July 19th
They brought her back covered in pink dust. In her hand was her camera. I took her arm and led her past Millicent who looked up from her reading, thinning her lips as if she intended to say something, but then was silent and looked away. In the kang room Lizzie simply looked down at the floor like a guilty child. I tried to prise the camera off her but she wouldn’t let go.
&
nbsp; ‘I must develop the film.’
‘Of course, darling,’ I held her arm, ‘but first you need to get clean, and eat, and sleep.’
I began to remove her clothing, all dusty and damp, and bits of wood and stones fell on to the floor.
‘Have you had a terrible time? Where did you shelter?’ She closed her eyes, said nothing.
‘Lizzie, are you in pain?’ She put her hand to her ear and tipped her head to one side as if draining out water. Then Lolo coughed outside the kang-room door, from which I understood that the bath water was ready. I covered Lizzie with a long robe.
‘Come in.’ Lolo slopped the water into the galvanised bucket we use as a cleaning tub – not that one could bathe in it, one can simply slurp water all over, it provides a pitiful dowsing. Steam curled up and displaced across the room like smoke. I thanked him. He left smiling, nodding at Lizzie.
‘Gosling, my baby oiseau,’ I whispered. ‘I will help you to clean then you must get some sleep, take your medicine and you will soon be much recovered.’
My sister stood listless and submissive in her robe as I placed her camera on top of one of Millicent’s trunks, returned and handed her the cloth. She dipped the cloth into the hot water and began to rub her face.
‘Did you shelter?’
‘No – I didn’t . . . I wanted to photograph inside the cyclone. Did you see the pillar?’
‘I did.’
‘I stood next to a tree, and then I had an idea. There was some rope near a fence, used for tying down the gates, and as I saw the pillar come towards me I took the rope and tied myself to one of the low branches.’
‘I am speechless.’
‘I tied myself to a branch so that as the storm came upon the tree I should not be flung about but should be able to control my camera and capture the photographs of the inside of the storm.’
‘Oh, Lizzie,’ I said, looking at her as she held the cloth up so that the water dripped into the bucket, ‘why?’
A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar Page 16
