A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (23 page)

‘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.

‘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?’

‘I thought, if Khadega has died, I should at least pay homage to her.’

‘But how is photographing the inside of the storm homage to her?’

‘I was looking for . . . a centre, for her.’

She wasn’t making sense. This is the element that always frustrates me about Lizzie: her perversity. I wanted to scold and shout, ‘But you disliked Khadega’, but I stopped myself; what good would it do? It seems to me that Khadega is a presence on our consciences, but not Millicent’s. The room felt constrained, airless.

‘Where is your medicine?’ I stood up, looking around the kang room.

‘There is none.’ Her head looked large on top of the bright thinness of her body.

‘Pardon?’

‘I destroyed it. It stops me.’

‘It stops you in what way?’ Annoyed, I took the cloth from her, turned her around and removed her kimono. Water fell in streams along her narrow back but she barely seemed to notice.

‘It stops you in what way, Lizzie-gosling?’

‘The medicine stops me talking to God. Without it, I can talk to Him directly.’

‘He speaks to you directly?’

‘Yes,’ she said, stretching her neck, ‘with Millicent, in prayer.’

‘What does He say?’

‘We have questions for Him. Sometimes they are answered directly, and sometimes He has other words, other signs.’

‘Millicent is usually there?’

‘Yes. She agrees, without the medicine the communication is clearer. She has always assisted me in reaching Him. Well, until recently, or I could say, until Khadega.’

I held my breath as the water rained on her pale skin. I trickled it on to her hair and watched the blonde strands matt and knot as they turned wet.

‘But Lizzie, you know what happens if you don’t take the medicine.’

She shifted and looked at me over her shoulder, ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand, leave me.’ She took the cloth. ‘I can finish this alone.’

I don’t know what to say to my sister. That sense we once had that the world was ours to take and reduce and make of it what we would is lost. My scatterbrained, robust sister of old is evaporating in front of me and I am witless, incapable of holding on to her.

Listen (to whom do I speak? Myself, I suppose), I have just understood the recurring dream of a lighthouse in the desert. It is Father’s story, but also mine. In our bed-time tales he told me that I began in Algiers; that I was born during a sandstorm the size of Spain, big enough to cover a town like a curse. Father, a diplomat, said that after I was born he went out to look for a French doctor who lived in the Jewish quarter, shielding himself from the sand with a turban wrapped twice around his head. He feared that Mother would die, or I would, or both. He ran along spiral stone stairways of the Mellah district, hardly wide enough for a single person and searched amongst numerous subterranean rooms, becoming quickly lost. It was so hot that even the French officials in the Arab Bureau slept through the afternoons with their dusty boots up on the desks; meanwhile smugglers and tradesmen crept under the window, pockets and bags bulging with kif and skins and knives and gold. By the time he returned with a medicine man my mother was unconscious and it was two whole days before she would look at him with recognition. Her eyes became right finally, just as soon as the sandstorm abated and the native midwife who had kept me alive handed me to her, wrapped in a sheet.

After that he wanted to leave Algiers. It took weeks of negotiation, but he finally got the permission to relocate to our new home, Le Phare du Cap Bougarou. The Lighthouse of Bougarou.  My cot was next to the window, the air was sea-fresh. My new ears were open to the sad swish of the Mediterranean sea, shifting itself around, as if perpetually searching for a more comfortable position. Every night the lamp-light of the lighthouse reached the ships and in the morning Father held me up against the pane of our watchtower, waving my arm over at unhappy Europe, whose glory was already fading on the other side of the sea. Living in that lighthouse may have brought Father some rare comfort.

He loved lighthouses. He told us that as a young boy, each week his English governess would walk him to the market square in Calais where they would stand and admire the new lighthouse which had replaced the ancient watchtower. How impressive it must have looked, presiding over the busy market, over the hauling of the fishermen’s boats, sending its signals across the channel as if looking for something lost.