A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar (9 page)

‘Yeah?’

‘What kind of boy do you think you’ll marry, hey?’ Frieda had stared at the caterpillar and not answered.

‘Maybe you’re ideologically opposed?’ He was laughing at her. He lit up a rolled cigarette. If he was God, would he smoke? It seemed unlikely. She had looked up at him, his head was gigantic against the sharp blueness of the sky.

‘With those pretty little dark eyes you will have the pick of the world, sweets.’ To make him go away Frieda had started to hum, then sing:
Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water. Put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea. Take a look at yourself and you can look at others differently. By putting your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee
. She had heard her dad say that the brothers were allergic to Christianity. It had worked. He’d gone away, laughing to himself, smoking.

Thwack thwack thwack.

‘I can’t find it, Frie’. I’ll have to keep looking and call you back.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Frieda said into the phone.

‘I’m holding it now’, he said, ‘over the kitchen floor and it is – literally – dragging me to the left, towards the sink. It knows the water is there.’

Frieda listened as her father hit the floor with the stick and she tried to ignore a gawky man who was standing near her, despite the fact that the entire pavement was empty. Frieda realised that he was saying something to her, waving his hand at her, flapping it near her face as if to scare off flies.

‘I’m going to have to go.’ She hung up.

‘Here for the 12A flat?’ The man said, squeaky, petulant. His jacket was much too big, he seemed incongruously young. Frieda had an urge to pat his head.

‘Yes. I am, yes.’

He nodded, held out keys and a brown envelope. Without a smile. Without asking her for ID, for anything.

‘We need the keys back and the flat empty by the twenty-first,’ he mouse-squeaked. ‘You can post them into the safe box at the town hall, or you can bring them into the office. If you haven’t cleared by then the salvagers will be in.’

‘OK.’

He pulled himself up, as if to leave, and Frieda asked, ‘Can I just check, am I down on the system as Irene Guy’s only next-of-kin? Is there anyone else? Does it say who I am exactly, in relation to her?’

‘Don’t you know?’ He looked at her, frowning. There was a pause, long enough for a car to drive past, a Jack Russell’s snout poking out of the passenger’s window. It yap-yapped as the car passed. A cloud moved, exposing the sun.

‘Of course,’ Frieda faked a laugh. ‘I was just curious to know what is on your system. It is always interesting to know . . . what information is held.’

His fingers stroked the keys on his mobile phone. He looked to Frieda as though he only ever ate homemade sandwiches, and perhaps occasionally soup. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, squinting at her, ‘your name just comes up as the main contact.’

‘Right,’ she said, ‘cheerio then.’ Frieda watched him walk away from her in the direction of the cemetery. The young mother with the buggy was just up ahead, and looked back once more at Frieda and at the young man in his misshapen jacket, shaking her head, as if disgusted with all these strangers on her patch. Written across the envelope in red biro it said GUY. DEATHS. REF 1268493.

Possibilities:
Instead of a few squares, you know several towns; instead of an acquaintance with the country for a few miles about, you can claim familiarity with two or three counties; an all-day expedition is reduced to a matter of a couple of hours; and unless a break-down occurs you are at all times independent.

9.
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar – Notes

June 7th

I must attempt to get this down – our new home: Pavilion House, which is in fact two houses, separated by a track. The Eastern side is where we sleep, all four of us in a single room, with a kang built into each recess. As glass is rare and expensive here the windows are covered with paper. The Western part is what Millicent calls ‘the business side’ and consists of a large, attractive courtyard with two rooms leading off it, and a third leading off one of those. The courtyard has that mysterious element, as if the walls are turned inward and are intent on protecting inhabitants from the desert outside. There is a simple fountain in the centre, not as striking as Mohammed’s, but pleasing none the less, as the sound of water is welcome in this land of dust. Pots of fig trees have been tended by a previous owner, as has jasmine growing finely along the walls. Two Chinese guards are on permanent station at the house gates to ‘protect’ us. Behind the house is a large garden that leads to an enclosed, unkempt orchard.

Lizzie and I traipsed like children behind Millicent, whose movements are always impatient, as she instructed us: the large divan room is for entertaining guests; the second room is for scripture study and the housing of our books and materials; and the final much smaller room is the kitchen. Millicent met the landlord alone. Lizzie and I were disappointed – we were keen to see the crooked face. He lives in Hami and so leaves a representative in the city for our liaisons. Millicent, whether through canny and mischievous insight or coincidence, I don’t know, has assigned me a most challenging of tasks: I am to be in sole charge of the kitchen, if kitchen is what one can call the cramped corner with a hodgepodge stove made from some old paraffin tins and no windows to speak of. The rules of the house are thus: Lizzie, garden; Millicent, all things cerebral, spiritual and conversational; and me, kitchen and baby, and the momentous task of procuring meals, three times a day. But – with the kitchen comes a cook.

The cook’s name is Lolo and he is a Tibetan. He is supremely exotic looking with long, white eyebrows hanging in drapes and a matching white beard and numerous liver-spots on his face and hands. His skin is a leather. He smiles at Ai-Lien whenever he sees her, and he didn’t whatsoever mind posing for Lizzie to take photographs of him.

Our Home. I repeat it in my mind. Two men stayed into the night last night, Mr Mah, the merchant whose eyes have the look of a person who has relinquished something precious a long time ago, and the priest who brought us a welcome gift, a mimeograph machine from Eastern China. It comes in a hinged wooden box, complete with printing frame and screen, inking plate, roller and a tube of waxed paper. Together, they and Millicent spent the night in the divan room, the three of them, drinking wine and smoking. Lolo made tea in a metal samovar and dough strips which he prepared, sieving the flour, turning out the butter, measuring the salt, and Lizzie and I served them the tea, which they drank between wine courses, but we were not invited to join them.

Mr Mah seems to have taken it upon himself to be the prominent person for our arrangements. He is a mysterious person, neither Moslem, Tundra, Chinese, Russian nor Tibetan, but some form of hybrid. Unlike most native merchants, it appears that he is unconcerned with the scandal of dealing with us
twei-tsu
, foreign devils. He watched as Millicent and the priest searched the Bible for appropriate sections to translate into Perso-Turkic.

I continued to supply them with drinks and on my last visit to the room noticed that the priest had laid out his calligraphy sticks in a row next to him, and I saw on some paper examples of his beautiful Arabic script.

‘Eva,’ Millicent said, as I moved to leave, ‘we’ve decided on a section to translate.’

Mr Mah was smoking a long-handled black pipe, he did not look up at me, but puffed and stared into the distance as Millicent handed me a piece of paper. In her crabbish writing she had transcribed Ezekiel 37:

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest . . . So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.

‘What do you think?’ Millicent said, letting the smoke out of her mouth.

‘What is it for?’

‘To distribute about the bazaar and to announce our presence.’

The priest smiled at me. ‘I will translate it into Arabic and Turki,’ he said.

I read it and wanted to say this: that I have reservations regarding the wisdom of talking of bones rising up in the desert and dancing in a place where bones should be left alone. Millicent herself taught us that this is a place where you are expected to rinse your hands three times from water poured by a host before entering a home; where you are asked to stand, hands together, palms upward, as if holding the Quran, then pass them over your face in a religious gesture of blessings; where the salaams are serious and the older men stroke beards as a sign of courtesy. It seems dancing bones would not be welcome, but I said nothing and returned to Lolo.

Millicent demands English meals but does not explain what this means. Lolo knows nothing about English cooking, but then neither do I, so we have gone about our kitchen together labelling and naming things in a mish-mash of languages, English, Russian, Turki and a little Hindustani. The bottles we managed to get from the bazaar for Ai-Lien’s milk are called the
botties
. Lolo pulled from a sackcloth several huge, disc-like flatbreads and a dozen small, flower-shaped rolls and we settled on
bibi
for bread.

Very ceremoniously, Lolo gave Lizzie and me a tour of the garden which is laid on two levels, the lower part being the orchard grown wild. It is indeed very charming, and abundant and one would not guess we are in a desert. All in all, there is too much fruit. It is almost obscene the amount of fruit growing and fermenting: baby pomegranates and peaches, not yet ripe, and there are nectarines, apricots, figs and apples. At the orchard’s heart is a wooden pavilion, next to which is a very curious tree with petals that look like handkerchiefs draped from its branches. Lizzie holds the cherries in her palm in wonder, a fruit from home in this strange place. It is her role to help Lolo with the garden but so far she has simply cut the pomegranates in half to photograph them. Nor will she help with Ai-Lien. When I pass the baby to her she holds her uncomfortably, away from her body as if carrying something that needs to be disposed of.

Arranging food for Ai-Lien is a difficult business. The wet-nurse could not be convinced to join us in our new house although Mah has found us a nursing mother, four li away, who has agreed to supply us with four bottles of her milk each day. It is a tedious arrangement: in the mornings, before it gets too hot, I am to walk with Ai-Lien strapped to my chest with a swathe of Kashgari silk, accompanied by either of the guards whose names we have discovered are Li and Hai. We are to meet the mother’s son half-way at the dry river to exchange money for milk.

So, I am expected to keep the infant alive and to feed them all English food when the only thing I know how to cook is a cake. Sir Richard Burton disguised himself as an Andalusian and a Moor. He dressed as a Balochi and travelled with tribesmen to study falconry. He journeyed to Mecca disguised as a Moslem. He would have thought nothing of pretending that he had a devout religious calling in order to reach the wildest, most remote edge of the desert for the purpose of recording his observations. I have no doubt that he would have positively relished donning an apron if his disguise required it and acting the part of a Hindustani cook, or a Ladakhis in the garden or a Kashmiri in the marketplace. Why, then, do I find it so difficult to inhabit my own disguise?

June 14th

Kashgar opens its secrets to an English lady cyclist. The guards agreed to me leaving the house.

I see things. I see rooms of girls asleep at their sewing machines and a filthy hovel they call the hospital, with two metal-framed beds and dirty sheets. Streets far removed from the Chinese style, streets full of Allah and donkey carts, mutton and bread echoing the steppes, a whole universe away from Peking. I see traders, bazaar men and I hear many languages: Altaic, Uzbek, Qazakh, Kyrgyz, Turki, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. I have learned that the script is a modified form of Arabic, that the religion is Islam inside a mystical Sufi, and, well, it seems to me that the mysticism overrides the Islamic. Mosques are numerous, their steps swept clean at all times. Chants of Quranic passages can be heard. The priest told us that people who are suffering are beaten with dead chickens to rid them of evil spirits (but I haven’t seen this). Eyebrows joined in the middle are considered a sign of beauty in the women. I saw the herbs used for enhancing eyebrows.

My wheels bump over the tail of something dead, forcing me to swerve in front of a donkey pulling a cart full of spring onions and small oranges. The carter spits, the men sharpen long knives at kebabe stalls and laugh at me. The road that leads from the Apak Hoja tomb, down past the Sunday market stalls, is sleepy and content during the weekday. Small girls in torn dresses play on the edge of the road. What are they crowding round? A yellow chick, quivering, a vulnerable ball of yellow-feathered fluff, they are poking it with a stick.

Birds, everywhere.

Winding through the labyrinth, behind the Id Kah Mosque, two skinny kid goats stand without a mother, their backs covered in sores and bones poking through their skin. Faster, now, my bicycle almost floating, and the feeling of being chased although I am not; no one is very much interested in chasing me. The smell of mutton fat and excrement. A small boy holds out his palm as I pass, in it, a terrapin moving in circles.