A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (22 page)

‘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 the 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?

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.’

‘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.