Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

A babble of voices, a field of hands rose up when Ghaffar Khan finished speaking, but he turned his great frame towards the boy first:

– Do you bring a question?

Qayyum understood the boy was intermediary between this gathering and the women behind doors. He turned his body sideways, so no one might think he was looking in the direction of the women now that he knew where they were.

– Why didn’t you join Haji Sahib in his jihad?

A number of the men looked at each other, scratched their chins, sighed a little. The question wasn’t new to them.

– Taking up arms after your lands have been conquered is like building a well after your house has caught fire. The sword in tribesmen’s hands will not cut this yoke from our necks. No sword will cut this yoke from our necks. If we want any chance of advancement we must. .

And though he’d been speaking in Pashto, he switched to an Urdu idiom to end the sentence and the man holding the tarpaulin leaned towards Qayyum and said:

– What was that? What did he say?

– He said we must get rid of our wrong ideas. We must wake up from this rabbit’s dream.

Qayyum stepped back into the diminishing rain, head angled back, and all the noise of the world was replaced by the plink of water droplets on a glass eye, the unexpected music of heaven.

October – November 1915

Viv raised her bow, strung with an arrow, and looked down the length of the shaft to the tip pointing directly at the minarets of Mahabat Khan Mosque. The Italian mercenary Paolo Avitabile had used the minarets as gallows to hang anyone who broke his laws, and as the moon shone on the white marble Viv thought she saw body-shaped shadows – the ghosts of those who had swung to their deaths above the eyes of all Peshawar’s inhabitants. In the surrounding streets of the Old City, seventy years after Avitabile’s governorship ended, children were still threatened into good behaviour with warnings that the terrible Abu Tabela would come for them in the night. It was Avitabile who had widened the streets, erected the Old City walls, brought security to Peshawar during its period of Sikh rule with the most iron of fists. They still fear him and revere him, an old major had said to Viv; he showed us the only way a man of Europe can rule the Pathans. But Remmick had disagreed – we are here to civilise, not to lose our own civility, he’d said. Then he pointed to Viv and added, some of us in large ways, and some of us in small. On certain days, Remmick was almost a friend.

Today, he wasn’t among the revellers gathered at the broad walkway on top of the Mughal gateway of Gor Khatri, the highest elevation in the Walled City. The invitation cards to ‘Olympian Night at Gor Khatri’ had come with a handwritten note instructing each guest which Greek god they would play for the evening. Viv was Artemis, the Virgin Hunter. An unsubtle joke reflecting the widespread certainty that the only reason for a young Englishwoman to come to Peshawar was the quest for a husband. Someone should explain that means finding someone who isn’t already a husband, Mrs Remmick had pointedly remarked in her hearing, but since no one particularly liked Mrs Remmick or believed that Viv would choose Remmick-the-Red-faced when there were handsome bachelors around, the comment had only endeared Viv to many of the other British wives who enjoyed nothing more than an opportunity to pick sides.

She lowered the bow and arrow, placed it on the thick wall of the fortified gateway, and plucked a glass of iced sherbet from the tray of a passing bearer. The end of the summer season had transformed the sleepiness of Peshawar, bringing the British back from Simla with balls and picnics and hunts in tow. And the rapidly cooling weather brought with it the possibility of further distractions: a boat-ride down the Indus; the Taj Mahal; the Caves of Ajanta and Ellora; Taxila, where John Marshall had invited her to visit the excavations. And in the spring, the famed Peshawar Vale Hunt which, the regulars of the Peshawar Club insisted, Viv absolutely must stay for. Why suffer through Peshawar’s summer and then leave just as it turned delightful? What sense did that make?

No sense at all, Viv agreed. She didn’t see any need to mention that Remmick had promised he was working on sorting out the leasing problem with Shahji-ki-Dheri but it might be early in the new year before everything were settled and excavation became possible.

She looked down at the tangle of the Old City, laid out beneath. From up here it was possible to see the rooftops of all the houses, enclosed on four sides but open to the sky – or to the Olympian gods of Gor Khatri. It was like looking into a honeycombed jewellery box, many of its compartments lit up with lanterns, revealing something bright and glittering: a woman in a tunic of green and pink, sewing mirrorwork onto a shirt; a man on a rope-bed reading from a book, children at his feet; a woman combing the long hair of a shirtless man, who Viv guessed to be Sikh, her hand on his shoulder. Which one was Najeeb’s house, Viv wondered. She knew so little about his world.

Dionysus touched her elbow. The Anglo-Indian band had finally made it up the stairs with their bulky instruments and now led off with ‘For Empire and for England’. Artemis joined Dionysus in a dance along the roof of Peshawar, a bright moon overhead. Sometimes she lost track of whether she was using the Peshawar Vale Hunt as an excuse to stay in Peshawar long enough to dig deep for Tahsin Bey’s dream or using Tahsin Bey as an excuse to stay for the Peshawar Vale Hunt.

Najeeb brought her a roll of paper and set it down on the writing table which faced out towards the garden. May I? he said, and carefully removed the books and typewriter and lamp so that the table was all surface. He placed a paperweight at one end, and unrolled the paper, which blanketed the table-top and trailed off onto the floor.

– The rock-edicts of Asoka, Najeeb said. From Shahbaz Garhi.

Viv bent over the rubbing of Kharoshti words, inscribed in a wave-like pattern, following the curved surface of the rock they’d been carved into.

– How did you get this?

– It’s on Yusufzai land, he said proudly. This belongs to my tribe.

– Oh yes. The men who fought Alexander at Peukelaotis.

– I can’t believe I thought Alexander was an Englishman!

– If he’d been alive today, he would be. I can’t believe I thought you were without curiosity. My ignorance is by far the more egregious. Thank you for showing this to me.

– It’s yours. I told my brother to bring it for me so I could give it to you. I said it’s for my favourite teacher.

– Thank you, Najeeb. I’ll treasure it.

His smile was the first gleam of a silver circlet unearthed.

Viv stepped from the treasure cave of Avtar Singh’s antiquities shop, eyes blinking in the mid-morning sunlight.

– It will devastate my heart, Miss Spencer, to have to sell Hariti to someone else. You must spare me that.

Viv rolled her eyes at the turbaned Sikh; of late it had almost become part of her daily routine to undertake yet another round of bargaining with Avtar Singh for the Hariti statue, closely resembling the one in the Museum, which had the goddess’s hand lightly resting on her consort’s upper thigh, in a gesture of ownership, fingers wandering. It wasn’t the position of her hand alone which made the statue erotic but also the posture of her consort, the great general Pancika, in his short military-style skirt with his legs forming a diamond – spread apart at the knees, with ankles rubbing against each other. Viv knew she didn’t really have the nerve to buy such a thing, but there was a pleasure in the bargaining over cups of tea, conversation detouring via other sculptures and coins in the shop, some of which she might really purchase at some point when either she or Avtar Singh worked out how to extricate themselves from this dance around Hariti.

– Bring the price down and your heart will be spared, Mr Singh.

Placing a velvet-ribboned pith-helmet on her head she set off. With no destination in mind she meandered, turning into one alley, then another, making sure she didn’t lose sight of the elevated walls of Gor Khatri which served as a landmark. Eventually she found herself in an alley that lad back to the Street of Storytellers. The shop advertising BEST ENGLISH SCHOOL UNIFORMS was familiar, and it took her a moment to work out that this was the alley down which Najeeb had pointed when he informed her, without embarrassment, that his father worked there.

Walking down the alley she saw a letter-writer sitting at a table with an inkhorn holder built into it, shaded by a tarpaulin thrown over the spreading branches of a peepul tree. How had a boy like Najeeb sprung up in a Pathan family from the Walled City where the father worked under a tree? The Indian stories of shepherd boys or slaves who become kings only made sense when you met someone like Najeeb. Did his parents have any idea of the life he had stepped into, the extent to which he was leaving them behind? She’d never asked, and suspected not. She could probably walk right up to Najeeb’s father and say she was Miss Spencer and receive only a blank look in return. But it quickly became obvious, even though the man had his back towards her, that this wasn’t the father of a twelve-year-old boy. His hands, resting on either side of the table, were those of a young man. Perhaps Najeeb hadn’t been entirely honest when he said that his father was the only letter-writer who had a desk rather than squatting on the ground. Imagine the circumstances of a life being such that owning a desk was a boast.

Her interest left the man at the table and alighted on the woman in a white burqa who had just stood up from the chair opposite him, very tall, folding up the piece of paper which he had placed on the table before moving his hands well away from it so she could pick it up without encountering his fingertips. The figure in white hurried away, before remembering that she was a woman of Peshawar and nothing in her behaviour should call attention to itself. Her pace slowed, now she was a white sheet drifting along at the tempo of the other white sheets. Viv followed her on to the Street of Storytellers. She had yet to speak to a woman from the Walled City though she had enough Pashto now to make conversation possible.

Partway down the street, approaching Kabuli Gate, the woman turned into an alley. Viv realised how ridiculous she was being and started to walk towards Kabuli Gate. But something – intuition? curiosity? an unexpected noise? – made her turn and look over her shoulder. There was the woman in the white burqa – Viv knew it was her by her height – walking back out of the alley, no envelope in hand, and crossing over to the other side of the Street of Storytellers. She stood beside a slender-trunked tree looking up at the carpet-seller’s balcony, on the corner of the Street of Storytellers and the alley. It was without doubt one of the most beautiful balconies in the Walled City with roses and arabesques carved above each of the three archways of its wooden frame. At the base of the balcony, deer raced each other from one archway to the next. But the woman in the burqa didn’t seem interested in deer or roses; the stillness of her posture indicated a woman waiting.

Viv walked a few paces closer to the unmoving figure. Men and boys walked along past both women, sometimes hand in hand, flowers behind their ears and bandoliers across their chests. As if they had decided to be both man and woman at once, long of eyelash and broad of shoulder. Viv might as well have been shrouded in a white sheet herself for all the attention they showed her. The lack of staring is a mark of courtesy, Avtar Singh had explained to her when she expressed her irritation at being treated as though she weren’t there; and then he grinned his wolfish grin and said and also, of course, the Pathans want to insist that men mustn’t look at women to ensure that no man looks at their women. A throat-slitting gesture accompanied the comment.

The genial, white-bearded carpet-seller from whom Viv had recently bought a rug stepped onto the balcony. He called down to the apple-seller standing on the street below him, who threw an apple up in the air, almost directly into the carpet-seller’s outstretched hand. A coin, flipped off the white-beard’s thumb, followed the reverse trajectory. The carpet-seller bit into the apple, his eyes passed briefly over the woman in white across the road, and he nodded his head. It was a nod of appreciation for the apple unless you were expecting it to be something else. The woman in white remained unmoving for a few seconds after that, leaning against the tree as if she had stopped only to rest. Eventually she moved away, and turned into one of the alleyways which led to the maze-like innards of the Walled City.

A woman stands in the shade of a tree. A man surveys the street below him while eating an apple. Somewhere in there was a story which Viv didn’t know how to imagine.

The letter from her mother was addressed in black ink. Someone had died, again.

Viv sat down in the garden chair, reaching overhead to pull down on a branch of the willow, brushing its leaves against her face. The squawks and metallic chirps of birds, the booted feet of a regiment marching towards the barracks, her finger picking at the interwoven rattan strips of the chair as though it were a stringed instrument – all this was familiar now. The letters from England came from another world.

My dear Vivian

Mary’s brother, Richard, has ‘died of wounds’ in Mesopotamia. She is being very Mary-like about it, speaking of her great pride in his noble sacrifice, but you know as well as I that he only signed up because she shamed him into it and I can’t believe this doesn’t weigh on her soul. She spoke wistfully of your absence at the funeral service – a woman needs her friends in times such as these. She is speaking of volunteering with the mobile nursing units on the Western Front. Your father is very low as well. All the boys he delivered into the world leaving it too early. It has changed him, quite suddenly.

You mustn’t think it is all gloom here. Newspaper advertisements for ‘Wartime Furs at Wartime Prices’ lift the spirits and the competition among one’s intimates for Most Patriotic Zeal continues to provide a fantastic spectacle even as those most determined to win the Cup complain bitterly of the war’s effect on household staff. (The problems of the one-armed footman continue at home.)

I met Miss Murray a few days ago who said there is no place of work in England which isn’t opening doors to women to make up for all the men who’ve rushed off to war – museums and universities included. Perhaps it’s time to book your return passage? Your father was so disappointed to hear you won’t be back for Christmas as you’d promised – I don’t see him trying to send you away to the Front to nurse. Even if he tried, it’s clear from your letters that running your own household and deciding how to spend your days has made you a woman, no longer a girl blindly following the lead of others.

Your loving mother

Oh, Mary. She rested the letter on her lap, remembered Richard, the boy with the scabbed knees who she and Mary had chased up trees in his childhood, teased when the puppy-fat fell away and he started to attract the eye of girls, relied on as an escort to parties during their university years. Richard, who disapproved of Mary’s suffragette activities but still drove her to WPSU meetings and bailed her out of prison. That sweet, gentle boy. Died of wounds. She knew the sound, the smell, the agony of it. Knew the grown men whimpering for their mothers. And Richard would have called out for Mary, his older sister, the solidity to his shadow.

What am I doing here? How can I go back to that?

There were tears streaming down her face almost all the way from the Cantonment to the road to Shahji-ki-Dheri. Richard has died, she kept saying while she pedalled, as if the words might make sense of such a waste. Nearing the stupa site she passed a graveyard which a group of mourners was entering, accompanying a white shrouded body. Richard is dead. She pulled over, almost crashing into the wheat fields on the opposite side of the road, and breathed deeply, fearing she might faint.

It was only when two men walked out of the wheat field to check the memsahib was all right that she hopped back onto the saddle and continued on to the site which was suspended between cultivation and excavation as the legal and financial tussle with the landowner continued on.

She walked down into the deep ditch which she thought of as Najeeb’s trench, reached into the deep pocket of her jacket and took out her notebook, its calfskin binding covered in mementoes from Turkey: the singe-mark from the leaping ember of a camp-fire in Labraunda that evening when the skies cleared and the temperature plummeted after a violent thunderstorm; the fig stain shaped like a pug’s mouth; an inky thumbprint which had appeared mysteriously the first day she walked along the Carian coast, and which she thought of as the mark of a Siren; a smear of blood from the gash which opened in Tahsin Bey’s elbow when he scraped it against a jagged stone in the Temple of Zeus.

Kneeling in the mud, she began to sketch the figure of a stucco Buddha within an archway. She wasn’t yet halfway done when she stopped, tossed her pencil aside and began to flip through the earlier pages of the notebook. Memories on every page. All at once, it was unbearable. Everything about this forgotten, crumbling site which had had its items of worth carted off to a museum so that only the half-gnawed bones remained was unbearable. She wanted Tahsin Bey here so she could pummel him with her fists. What did you mean by sending me that letter, making me come here, held hostage by your dreams. It’s probably not even here! She caught hold of a fistful of mud, scooped it up and hurled it at the Buddha. There was something so satisfying about it that she did it again, and again, and again. When she finally stopped her hair was in disarray, her shirt clinging to damp skin. The stucco Buddha held her gaze, its hand raised. She touched her fingertips to his.

There had been no word from Tahsin Bey since that Christmas card. She sent letters every week, along with sketches, and photographs, and rubbings from stupas. Nothing came back but silence. Her mind ranged over all the possible explanations, and turned away from the darkest one, but not today. Today she imagined a white shrouded sheet, a body lowered into the ground, and no one thinking her important enough in his life to be told it had happened.

She rested her head against the wall of the mud trench. This too shall pass.

Time progressed, winter parties picked up, the days were sunshine and the evening breeze nipped pleasingly at her skin. One day tumbled into another. All fears slipped back into their hiding place.

Viv walked onto her verandah, humming:

City of Men,

City of Flowers,

Land Beyond the Mountains:

Caspatyrus, Paruparaesanna, Paropamisadae, Gandhara,

Parasapur, Purashapura, Poshapura, Po-lu-sha-pu-lo, Fo-lu-sha, Farshabur, Peshawar.

She sat down on the wood-and-rattan chair with pivoting, extendable arms. The first time Najeeb had seen it he’d referred to it as Long-Armed, a direct translation of its local name; a few days later when she’d referred to it as such, he’d turned pink and giggled uncontrollably which told her that somehow his boundless curiosity had discovered that the British name for it was Bombay Fornicator, in recognition of the unseemly position adopted by those who used the extendable arms as footrests. It had been all she could do to keep a straight face.

She looked at her watch. Najeeb should have been here by now. When the door-knocker echoed through the house she knew it wasn’t him; his was a quick triple knock, not announcing his presence so much as registering delight to have arrived – the tempo filled with expectation. This dull thud of brass on door suggested someone of a far less breezy temperament. But it was him, after all. A boy wearing an expression of sorrow, his posture straight-backed. Arms at ninety degrees, palms up, with books piled on them, the slate fragment with Atlas’s wrist on top. She didn’t know what the discordance between the intimate sadness of his face and the formality of his body meant.

– These are your books, Miss Spencer. Thank you for letting me read them. I’m afraid I won’t be able to continue our lessons, or to see you again.

A rehearsed speech, delivered in a voice with fissures in it.

– What’s happened, Najeeb? Come in, come in and tell me.

The boy glanced over his shoulder, and she followed the angle of his eye across the garden, past the gate, and out onto the pavement where a tall, broad-shouldered man was turned away from the pair of them with a Pathan unwillingness to look at an uncovered woman.

– I must go. Goodbye, Miss Spencer. I hope you won’t forget your Pactyike.

– Don’t I at least deserve an explanation?

He was holding the books out to her and she refused to take them. With a sigh, he placed them on the ground in front of her so he looked as though he were touching her feet in obeisance. He took the piece of slate from the top of the pile and kissed Atlas’s wrist, before setting it gently back down.

– That was a gift. Am I so disdained that you must return my gifts?

He straightened, and placed the slate piece in his tunic pocket.

– It’s nothing like that. Please don’t think I’m ungrateful.

– But I must think that if you don’t offer me any other thought with which to replace it.

– It’s just that. . it’s not right, you see.

– What? That you’re missing lessons with the maulvi? Is that what this is about?

He touched his upper lip, the fuzz on it which had started to appear over the last few weeks.

– I’m becoming a man. It isn’t right for me to be here, alone with you.

She looked at the boy, the child, and beyond him to the broad-shouldered man. He was too far away to hear; these words were Najeeb’s, uttered because he believed them.

– Then bring your sisters next time you come.

– My sisters? What will they do here?

– I’ll teach them, just as I teach you.

– But they don’t know any English.

– You didn’t know any Greek four months ago. I didn’t know any Pashto. What are you shaking your head about?

– Miss Spencer, they’re girls.

– What do you think I am, for heaven’s sake.

– You’re English.

Then he was walking backwards along the pathway, his eyes on her face with the same concentration with which he had met the Buddha’s gaze. His right hand raised to shoulder level, fingers together, palm outwards in a gesture of protection learned from a man of stone.

– Goodbye, Miss Spencer.

As the afternoon became evening she remained standing at the window, looking out onto the slate mountains through which the man with the fig circlet had entered the Peshawar Valley, the whole, unexplored world his to claim.

– Is it true you’ve lived among the Turks?

The judge leaned across the table of the Peshawar Club, raising his voice to be heard above the music.

– I’m sure she hasn’t lived among anything of the sort – any more than I’ve lived among Pathans.

The judge’s wife, seated beside Mr Forbes, gestured around the capacious interior of the Club where the upper echelons of British Society in Peshawar had gathered for the Winter Ball. The bearers had all disappeared into the kitchen, so the only Pathan to be seen was the one stationed beside the mounted deer’s head whose task for the last fifteen minutes or so had been to retrieve the one napkin holder which a swaying man had been trying to toss onto the antlers. His aim had been growing steadily wilder, or perhaps he was deliberately aiming for the Pathan’s head now.

Viv dispatched the judge’s question with an inclination of her head which said his wife had correctly summed up the situation and returned what remained of her faltering concentration to the no-longer-young bachelor who was trying to impress her with some story about his valour during an encounter with fanatics along the Khyber Pass. She stood up abruptly in the middle of his story – catching Mr Forbes’ look of sympathy – and, saying something which was tone rather than words, walked rapidly out to the arched portico and drew the night air deep into her lungs.

Fairy lights strung all around the garden gave the impression that the starlit sky had lowered onto the treetops.

– You’re in a mood tonight.

She didn’t even turn at the sound of Remmick’s voice.

– And you’ll be in trouble when you go home if you stand out here much longer, she said.

– A minute in your company is worth an hour of trouble at home.

– Stop it, she said sharply.

– Don’t lose your friends, Miss Spencer, he replied, and walked away.

She called him back apologising, and told him what had happened that afternoon with Najeeb.

– A Pathan is a Pathan at any age, he said, but with sympathy rather than any triumph at having been proved right.

– I’ve been arrogant. Thinking I knew better than everyone who lives here.

– I have to say, it’s a relief to hear you say that. You see now why this plan of yours – to go excavating on the outskirts of Peshawar – is such a bad idea?

– In what way?

– I’ve said it before. A woman leading a team of Pathan workmen. .

– Not everyone in the Peshawar Valley is Pathan.

– Aren’t your days full enough? We could find you some teaching, if you miss it; Native students, English students, whichever you prefer. Or there’s plenty of cataloguing needed at the Museum. You’d be valued there.

A certainty announced itself, so clear, so well-defined, she knew it had been there for a very long time, lurking in the corner of her eye.

– You aren’t actually doing anything to sort out the leasing problem of Shahji-ki-Dheri, are you?

A little shrug, a gesture of defeat.

– I did make enquiries. No one’s particularly interested. General opinion has it the best finds of the site have already been discovered.

– All this while you’ve been lying?

– Oh come now, Miss Spencer.

– Oh come now, Miss Spencer?

He gestured to her to lower her voice, the air of command so unmistakable she wondered how she’d ever thought this was a man who would simply do anything she asked of him, merely because she asked it. Even so, she wasn’t prepared for what came next.

– We’re long past the point when the smiles you flick at me are compensation enough for everything I do for you. I found you a house, staff you could trust, I’ve allowed you to use all the privileges at this club that are usually reserved for a member’s wife. Now you expect me to go to the Deputy Commissioner and tell him he needs to push through complicated negotiations about a crumbling piece of land simply because you’re curious why a statue was white rather than grey?

– The Forbeses were helping me to find a house when you came along and told me you had the perfect one. I didn’t ask you to provide me with staff – you just wanted to keep an eye on me. Oh yes, I know they report to you, Remmick, how foolish do you think I am? If you weren’t going to do this for me, why didn’t you just say so?

He laughed, a little bitterly.

– What man doesn’t want a beautiful woman to keep believing he can do anything he sets his mind to?

– There is no shortage of men who would choose honesty over dissembling under all circumstances.

– You speak of honesty? Very well, let’s be honest. There is a dance of men and women; we all recognise its rules. You, with nothing more than your smiles as reward, you were the first to break those rules.

– The dance of men and women! You make it sound so finely balanced. But you always lead, don’t you?

He was standing very close to her, his hand on her waist as though it had a right to be there.

– Allow yourself to be led, Vivian. You’ll enjoy it far more than you think, with the right partner.

She pushed him, hard.

– Not you, she said. Never you.

She stalked back inside, and told Mr Forbes she was feeling unwell, would he be good enough to escort her home?

That tree in Regent’s Park which she could see from her bedroom window would have turned yellow-leafed by now. Every year she would walk out with Papa when there were more leaves on the ground than on the branches, and carefully, deliberately, they’d choose the most beautiful of the leaves and take it home to preserve it in a scrapbook she’d made with YELLOW LEAF printed on the cover in a child’s hand.

If she left now there might just be a few yellow leaves still in the grass when she returned. The thought brought with it a relief, a release.

After the war, Tahsin Bey, we’ll come back to Peshawar, and dig for the Circlet together.