Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

City of Men, City of Flowers

July 1915

At last, the two-rivered river.

Brightness scythed through the air into Viv’s eyes as the train trundled out of the fortified entrance to the bridge; a dark imprint of river, hills, fort behind squeezed eyelids. What the negative couldn’t reveal was this: two rivers running parallel to each other in one body of water – the blue of melted snow running down from the Himalayas, the brown of silt and turbulence racing across from Kabul. Progressing side by side until they passed beneath the Campbellpur Fort and merged.

Here, two and a half thousand years ago, Scylax sailed in on the muddied arm of the Cophen River and dived – how could anyone imagine he would do otherwise? – right into the jewelled blue.

Viv reached for her calfskin notebook even as the train crossed into the Peshawar Valley, splaying it open against the window, quickly sketching before memory could commence too far with its tampering. Had the light reflected differently off the two rivers in one? Did she really see a dolphin leap repeatedly in and out of the water along the border of the rivers, as though it were a needle stitching them together? She must keep as accurate a record as possible for Tahsin Bey.

She wrote Indus along the north-south length of the blue river, Kabul/Cophen beside the east-west muddy river, before turning the pages to find the lines she had copied out from Arrian’s Anabis Alexandri: The Indus emerges, already immense, from its sources, and after receiving the water of fifteen rivers, all of them larger than the rivers of Asia, and imposing its name upon them, empties into the sea. Arrian, citizen of the Roman Empire, writing about Alexander’s empire, his phrase still echoing in Britannia’s empire: imposing its name upon them. Wasn’t that what the British were doing when they glued the names of empire-builders onto Indian suffixes, resulting in Campbellpurs and Abbottabads and Forbesganjes. What she wanted was not to impose names onto the ancient places but to peel them away, back and further back, to locate the Cophen beneath Kabul, the Peukelaotis beneath Charsadda, the Caspatyrus – most of all the Caspatyrus – beneath Peshawar.

– Caspatyrus!

The syllables detonated in the silence of the second-class compartment, and Qayyum Gul’s hand jerked up to cover his left eye. He must have done something to indicate pain because the Englishwoman who had expelled the strange sound – was it a name, a sneeze, a foreign language? – glanced in his direction, if not quite at him, before resuming her vigil at the window.

He had no idea why she was here; an hour or so earlier she had entered the compartment while Qayyum was stretched out, half-asleep, and had deposited herself and her large bag onto the row of seats opposite him with the words, This berth is free, isn’t it? He had sat up quickly and watched the door for a few moments, expecting a husband to walk in or perhaps a father, but it quickly became obvious that he was alone in a train carriage with a young Englishwoman whose physical appearance was a cluster of contradictions: the blue eyes beneath long lashes were entirely feminine, but the hair was cut short like a boy; the sun-darkened skin suggested she worked in the fields, but everything about her manner indicated affluence. The skirt, halfway up her calves, might have meant she had the cast-off wardrobe of a shorter woman, but there was something in her brazen confidence which convinced him she was choosing to make men look at her ankles. Of course he had left, seeking out the conductor who said the only available place was in the compartment with two English ladies which was where the other English lady should be seated. With Qayyum standing outside in the corridor the conductor entered to speak to her, and emerged a few seconds later, shaking his head at Qayyum. The Englishwoman followed him out and smiled brightly at Qayyum. You’ll make me feel terrible if you skulk outside; you must come in, she said. As if it were that simple. But he had gone in, remembered anger from Brighton guiding his steps; let them object, any of the able-bodied Englishmen in the other compartments – he would stand up tall and say, Lance-Naik Qayyum Gul, 40th Pathans. But the compartment was at the end of the train, and no one had walked past.

He looked over to the Englishwoman who had paid him no attention since he re-entered the compartment – whether through propriety or indifference, he couldn’t tell. What did she see, or hope to see, outside the window which allowed her to meet the sun’s ferocity head-on, impervious to the red patches at her uncovered throat? Qayyum angled his body deeper into the shaded part of the leather-covered seat, which now burnt where the sunlight reached it, knowing the Englishwoman must be entirely aware of his discomfort.

A man in a starched white uniform entered the compartment, carrying a dripping wet khus blind in each hand, a stool under his arm. The Englishwoman moved away from the window, saying Jaldi, jaldi – one of the first things any Englishman or woman learned in India was how to tell the Natives to hurry up – and the uniformed man apologised even as he stood on the stool, untied the dried khus blinds and replaced them with the wet ones. As soon as the first one was up, the fan positioned behind it blew cool, fragrant air through the compartment and Qayyum heard himself exhale loudly. The world turned beneficent.

The Englishwoman made an impatient rotating motion with her finger and the uniformed man rolled one of the blinds up and secured it with string so that a large square of glass was again visible, heat ballooning towards it from the plains. Immediately the Englishwoman smiled, thanking the uniformed man as though he’d done a favour rather than carried out a command, and handed him a coin – the man touched his hand to his forehead, his body language shifting into obsequiousness. In the Army, hierarchy allowed for pride, insisted on it; the salute of a sepoy to a general was always straight-backed.

The Englishwoman reached into her bag, pulled out a bread roll and broke it in two. The faint scent of it an echo carried across the sea. Fresh loaves of bread at the station stop in Marseilles on the way to the Front.

– You’re a Pathan?

The Englishwoman was standing in the space between the two rows of seats, holding out half the bread roll. Her hand freckled like the shoulder of the French girl. Qayyum shook his head, far more vigorously than was needed to indicate a lack of appetite. She gave him a look before she sat down, one which said, Are you in any position to refuse a kindness? He put a hand up to his face.

The fluttering of the blinds, the dripping of water which streaked the window and created the illusion of rain – these sounds grew louder, magnified by the silence between the man and the woman which was entirely different to the silence which had preceded it. Qayyum cleared his throat, leaned forward.

– Yes, I am Pathan.

He never thought of himself that way before the Army. His great-grandfather had left the Yusufzai lands decades before Qayyum was born, and so Qayyum was a Peshawari, a city-dweller, with Hindko not Pashto as his first language. Those Pashtuns! his grandfather liked to say, with the superior air of a man who believes he has escaped into a better destiny. But in the Army Qayyum was told he was a Yusufzai of the 40th Pathans and, in the company of the other Yusufzai of the regiment who called him their kinsman and said the air of Peshawar couldn’t thin Yusufzai blood, he learned to think of himself as just that. Why, in the Army, would you be anything but a Pathan – the word itself exploded from the lips of the English officers like a cannonball, straight and true.

– You’re going to Peshawar?

– Yes. My home.

– Have you ever heard of Scylax?

– I don’t know any Englishmen in Peshawar.

She laughed at that, and he wondered if this Scylax was a Scot, like Captain Dalmohay. He, Allah rest his soul, had understood that to the Indians all the British were English, and wouldn’t have made a man feel foolish for not knowing an English name from a Scottish one even though he could tell Dogra from Pashtun, Hindu from Muslim.

– I’m sorry, I’m laughing at myself. Did you learn English at school?

– The Army.

Until now the Englishwoman’s gaze had been remote, as if she were trying too hard to pretend there was nothing of particular interest in Qayyum’s face, but now she looked directly at the permanently closed eyelid.

– Mesopotamia or France?

– France. Belgium.

– Ypres?

His nod was brief, asking for the conversation to go no further. The Englishwoman stood up, rolled down the blinds, and for a time there was quiet and fragrance and shade. When she spoke again, her voice was different.

– There were ferocious arguments in London when it became known an Indian division was being deployed to France. But the old military men who had served in India insisted the loyalty of the Indian troops to the Crown was beyond question.

Beyond question. It wasn’t a phrase Qayyum knew. Beyond question. If question was the Allied line, the loyalty of Indian troops was somewhere beyond, all the way across the field without cover and up the slope where the German gunners waited.

He stepped out of the compartment, into the corridor.

The light coming through the gaping compartment door turned harsh. Viv looked out through the open doorway, through the windows on the far side of the carriage. A barren plain scattered with slate, and rock the same reddish colour as the distant hills. As if young giants had gouged them out from the hillsides and hurled them into the plains in competitions of strength. The games continuing on through the centuries. How had the landscape altered so dramatically? But when she lifted a corner of the blind the view to the north was as before – the Cophen River and fertile ground; sugar-cane fields and orchards; beyond, the terraced tops of hills dotted with the domes of ancient stupas.

At last, she had the solitude she’d yearned for since leaving London as companion to an aged spinster on her way to Karachi. Finding someone in need of a travel companion had been her mother’s idea – a way of ensuring a facade of propriety to Viv’s journey, at least until Karachi where she and old Miss Adamson had said goodbye without very much regret on the part of either, and Viv had boarded the train. Now, it was an enormous luxury to look upon the Peshawar Valley without distraction, imagining Tahsin Bey beside her, exclaiming along with her at every new sight. It wasn’t just Miss Adamson she’d had to rid herself of to achieve this but also the woman from Norfolk and her daughter in the compartment at the other end of the carriage. When she had entered the compartment the woman had taken one look at her – the V-shaped neckline which was an inch beneath the base of her throat, the short skirt, the flesh-coloured stockings, and most of all the short ‘Castle Bob’ hairstyle which Viv had daringly acquired during the sea-voyage – and conclusions had hurled themselves viciously across the carriage. In two directions, if Viv was honest. At least she was prepared to despise the laced and hooped creature silently – but the other woman had decided to embark on a lecture to her daughter, a bored child of no more than ten, about the importance of a woman’s dress in maintaining standards in the Empire. Viv fled, finding refuge in a compartment which had appeared empty when she had looked in. It was only when she entered that she saw the man, lying down with his hands behind his head, and thought, oh God, that’s beautiful. A statue of Herakles brought to life – broad-shouldered and crinkle-haired, every bone chiselled. More like a Greek hero of antiquity than any Greek she’d ever seen. But then the man woke up and turned his head towards her and – God forgive her – her heart had been struck with a cold joy: this was the Monophthalmus, the single-eyed man of India of whom Scylax had written.

Even though it was solitude she had come in search of, from the first instant she’d seen the Pathan raise a hand to his eyeless eye, fingertips barely skimming the gashes around it as if he couldn’t bear the touch of his own skin, she found herself wanting to say something to him. She had treated enough men who’d lost an eye to understand why the other eye was so chapped and reddened – this great, strong man, reduced to panicking over every speck of grit that might threaten what sight remained.

What did you think you were doing it for? was what she really wanted to ask the man who had lost his eye at Ypres. Was it loyalty to the Empire or something more mundane – travel in a second-class compartment, a pension, the promise of progressing through the ranks. She leaned forward towards the open door, watching the man, trying to imagine what she might say to him. The only sentence which came to mind was, Have you tried a glass eye? But if she said that the man would realise that his closed eyelid forced her to imagine the emptied cave within. She shuddered, remembering too much what she was trying to forget, and turned her attention back to the view.

The landscape coalesced as they approached Peshawar, the outside world a rush of fruit trees. Unexpectedly, Qayyum felt a generosity – or no, it was close to the obligations of a host – towards the Englishwoman who had been sketching every crumbling old structure the train had passed.

– Peshawar. You want to see?

The Englishwoman stepped into the corridor.

– Bala Hisar.

Qayyum pointed towards the elevated fort which cast its shadow over the Walled City. The monuments all seemed closer to each other when viewed through one eye, so he saw Peshawar as accordioned, all breathing space pressed out of it.

– The City Walls. Gor Khatri. Mahabat Khan Mosque.

His fingertip touched the window as he pointed out each landmark, and faint dots appeared. A constellation in a sky of dust.

– And the excavation site: Shahji-ki-Dheri. Where the archaeologists dig. Do you know where it is?

– No. Why do the English dig for old, broken things?

– We like to find history.

– Why?

– I don’t know.

He used to think it was humility, this readiness of the English to acknowledge ignorance. But he had come to understand it was the exact opposite – to be English was to move through the world with no need to impress or convince. Was this so because they had an empire, or did they have an empire because this was so? A shadow passed across the window, turning it into a mirror. Qayyum swung away and returned to the compartment, slapping the sliding door to one side. He didn’t know what it was that was making him so angry. There was too much time and space in these days without routine, without the company of men waking and sleeping and eating at the same time as him, his life their lives. Even in Brighton he’d had that. But now, no escape from it – he was a Pashtun who had left his tribe behind in a gas cloud, in a trench, in the sightline of a thousand machine guns.

He didn’t realise the train had stopped, or that he was sitting with his head in his hands, until he heard the flint strike. The Englishwoman was sitting across from him, a long thin tube in her mouth with a cigarette at its end. She held out a silver case to Qayyum; the cigarettes inside it thinner than any he’d seen before.

– Turkish.

He took it, grateful for anything that would allow him to stay here for a few more minutes, leaving the outside outside.

– How old are you, she asked. Nineteen? Twenty?

– Twenty-one.

– If I may speak to you with the wisdom of twenty-three? Things change very rapidly; this is just the beginning.

She seemed to recognise that the words were meaningless, and when she spoke again her tone was more sober.

– At any rate, you’re home now.

– The emperor Babur said if a blind man walks across India he will know when he reaches Peshawar by the smell of its flowers.

They finished their cigarettes in silence. When he stood up to leave she rose, too, and held out an ungloved hand. He shook it, hoping his expression didn’t reveal his discomfort at her touch, more intimate than the ministrations of the nurses. He wanted to tell her his name but she might think he expected this sympathy between them to continue once they disembarked, and so he hoisted his knapsack onto his shoulders and left without another word.

July – August 1915

Viv stepped off the train into the humid afternoon. In the time it had taken to smoke the cigarette all the other passengers had exited the platform, and now the Pathan too was striding away, so there was no one to see her turn in a circle on her heels, arms up in the air to embrace the world in the manner of Tahsin Bey when surrounded by beauty. The mountains, oh everywhere, the mountains! Dark green, almost black, mountains; blue mountains; rose-coloured mountains; and away in the distance, snow-topped mountains. Twenty-five hundred years ago Scylax came through those mountains, and saw the Peshawar Valley – this stretch of earth on which she now stood. The word ‘Ours’ made its way to her lips.

While revolving she had been vaguely aware of a movement on the platform, which now revealed itself to be a Pathan boy, his hair crinkled like the one-eyed man’s and the Greek-influenced early Gandhara Buddhas’, his almond-shaped eyes open wide in bewilderment at the spinning Englishwoman. Viv reached into her pocket and flicked a coin at the boy who caught it deftly.

– Dean’s Hotel?

– Across the road. I can take you there, mem-sahib.

The view from the train had already told her that the railways tracks sliced Peshawar in two, separating the Walled City from the Cantonment. As she followed the boy out of the station it was the Cantonment they entered, with its landscape of wide roads, tree-lined avenues, church spires. Almost an English village, if not for the grand buildings set down in its midst. She pointed to the red structure set just back from the road, with its four rooftop cupolas which simultaneously represented India and the Crown, and felt it some kind of triumph when the boy identified it as the Museum.

– You’ve been inside?

– No. It’s for the English.

– Indians aren’t allowed into the Museum?

– We are allowed. But –

He raised his hands in the air, palms up, expressing the pointlessness of the Museum in his life.

– What’s your tribe?

– My grandfather’s people were Yusufzai.

– I’ve been reading about you. Your ancestors fought Alexander, at Peukelaotis.

– Pew. .?

– You don’t know who Alexander was, do you?

– An Englishman?

She shook her head. What was the cure for amnesiacs without curiosity? The young boy crossed the road, moving with the unhurried, unfaltering steps which marked those who were natives of the sun, and Viv followed. Together they walked up a long driveway with carefully tended gardens on either side which led to the pleasing simplicity of Dean’s Hotel – a whitewashed barracks-like structure which promised tranquillity and tall glasses of iced drinks. It had been recommended by a Mr and Mrs Forbes of Peshawar who Mrs Spencer had found through her cousin the Bishop, recently returned to England after more than twenty years in India. They would be more than happy to welcome Miss Spencer to Peshawar and introduce her to the close-knit British society there, the Forbeses said via telegram, though during the summer most people were in Simla. It had been a relief to discover that the watchful eyes of an aged English couple who had the Bishop’s stamp of approval was all that Mrs Spencer had meant when she promised to find Viv a ‘conventional situation’ in Peshawar. The truth was, the war had sloughed off so many rules that no one seemed to know any more what counted as unacceptable behaviour in women.

Viv turned the pocket of her linen jacket inside out, wriggled her fingers through the hole in the pocket lining and fished out a coin. The boy held up the coin she had already given him, and shook his head sternly at the offer of a second one, as though Viv was in danger of breaching a moral code.

– Do you know how far it is to Shahji-ki-Dheri?

– I can take you. Tomorrow morning, early?

The boy squinted up at the sun as he said it, but Viv suspected the answer actually meant he had no idea where Shahji-ki-Dheri was. Even so, the ground was rocking and her head pounding from the sun’s glare magnified by the train window, and she certainly wasn’t about to head out to a site right away. Yes, she said, and waved goodbye, certain she wouldn’t see him again.

Her rooms were spacious and pleasingly modern, with electric ceiling-fans. She barely had time to notice this before there was a rapid knocking on the bedroom window, drawing her attention to a man in the flower beds holding up something which looked like a bracelet strung with red coral. She touched her wrist, thought of emerald seaweed, before opening the window. The bracelet was a length of string with jewel-like fragments threaded through it, pale burgundy speckled with dark burgundy, the pieces suggesting an entirety the size of a grape. The man – he must be the gardener, there was a basket and pair of shears near his feet – shook the string to make the fragments sway and pressed his thumb and forefinger together at the tips to indicate tiny beaks. Pointing in the direction of the second room, he made a revolving gesture with his finger and shook his head sadly.

Uncomprehending, she allowed herself to be directed into the other room. It didn’t take long to understand what he was telling her – a bird had built its nest in the ceiling fan; the tiny chirping sounds which she had taken for a cricket emanated from it. If she switched on the fan it would be a massacre. The gardener, now standing outside this second room, presented her with the bracelet and placed his hands together in supplication.

She pressed her thumb against one of the speckled fragments which crumbled into fine powder. The gardener looked as if he might cry. Here was a gentler world, where the large tragedies of a military hospital didn’t erode compassion for the tiniest of creatures.

Don’t worry; I’d rather melt in a puddle than harm them, she said, and though they didn’t speak the same language he understood the tone of her voice, and touched his hand to his forehead.

She walked back into the bedroom where the ceiling fan was rotating briskly – after sharing a hostel room with four other nurses, the space between these four walls was more than sufficient. Tying the coral bracelet around her wrist, she was grateful to be allowed this moment of largesse.

Stepping from the cool waters of the bath, she walked directly to the bed, pulling a loose Turkish robe over her head without drying off. Air from the ceiling fan rippled across cotton and wet limbs as she lay down; the curtains were carefully drawn but the window ajar so she could hear water burble from the garden hose into the flower beds just outside. Everything spoke to her of pleasure. She tried to hold herself in that shadow-place between sleep and waking where the mind drifts, excavating – Tahsin Bey was there with her, his thumbs splitting a silver fig in two, purple flesh beneath metallic skin.

The next morning Viv stepped out into a breeze which originated from two bearers snapping a tablecloth in the air, dark hands on white cloth. She had come out to see the sun rising from behind the mountains but haze smeared the sky and her presence clearly disturbed the hotel staff’s early morning preparations. One of the bearers apologised – for what? Being visible? Somewhere a rooster crowed, a dog barked in response. If Mary were here they’d return to the familiar, but still amusing, topic of dogs’ accents. The rolled ‘r’s in the bark of a poodle, the guttural growl of an Alsatian. And why was it that everything unacceptable in a man – slobbering enthusiasm, predictability, simple-mindedness – was so charming in a dog? She felt a pug’s disdain, and knew it wasn’t really Mary whose company she was missing.

She sat down at a table beneath a pine tree, picked up a pen and tried to think of what to write which would please Papa. When Mrs Spencer presented, as a fait accompli, Viv’s trip to Peshawar all his visible anger turned towards his wife, and what Viv had received instead was his bafflement. Why? he kept saying, wanting to understand, failing to do so, being wounded by that failure. Every day Viv thought of going down to breakfast and saying, I’ll return to the hospital – but then she thought of the boy with the sandy hair and the blue eyes and stopped herself. So she left with a promise: she’d be back in London by Christmas, and if the war was still on she would return to her nursing duties. Her mother sighed and shook her head when she heard that, but didn’t say anything about it.

One of the bearers brushed leaves and seed-pods off the starched white tablecloth, brought her breakfast, and sent a young boy to stand behind her with a large fan in his tiny fist. In his turban and waistcoat he reminded her of the monkey similarly dressed at an Arabian Nights party in England two summers ago. The monkey held a Japanese fan which it swept up and down the length of its body in a manner so vulgar – head thrown back, legs spread apart – that Mary almost left the party in protest before the host had the animal taken away. Viv gave the boy a coin and told him she didn’t need him. The rising heat of early morning felt like an old friend.

Setting the pen aside, she concentrated on breakfast. Tea and jam and bread in Peshawar. It was all so strange. When she had finished the bearer informed her that a boy had been waiting for her. At first she didn’t know what he meant, but there he was, near the hotel entrance, the boy from the train station, with a Victoria driver who knew the way to Shahji-ki-Dheri.

Through the Cantonment the horse trotted, all creaking harness and clopping hooves, down broad streets shaded by plane trees and cypresses, their familiarity an ache. But then the Victoria drove through the arched gateway of the Walled City and Viv rose out of her seat, exclaiming loudly at the glorious colour and noise and exactly-what-you-want-it-to-be-ness of it all. Birds beating their wings against dome-shaped cages, children sucking on molasses pebbles, sugar-cane sellers slicing whistling sounds out of the air to attract buyers, water-carriers with spines curved beneath animal-skin sacks filled with liquid. Pyramids of peaches and plums in wicker baskets, carpets draped over balconies and branches, clothes lines strung between top-floor windows with men’s clothes hanging from them (Native men of all ages could be seen craning their necks in the hope some female garment might have accidentally or – why not believe this? – deliberately been placed in view). There weren’t in fact any men craning their necks but she would say there were when she and Tahsin Bey found themselves in each other’s company again. She’d tell him tales of Caspatyrus that would make him smile that smile of exceptional warmth, and he would most certainly agree that the fabrication of stories was a form of tribute to Scylax, whose tales of India included impossible wonders.

The Victoria had stopped for no reason, and the boy – Najeeb his name was – said she should sit down. A white tent floated past, and Viv wondered if the woman within felt disdain or envy at the sight of an Englishwoman standing up in a Victoria, looking around, unimpeded. There were no other women, tented or otherwise, but looking up above the storefronts she saw some movement behind the enclosed wooden balconies; the latticework of the wood was replicated on the mesh of the tented woman’s burqa. Much like the grille in the Ladies’ Gallery behind which any women wanting to view parliamentary debates must sit so that men wouldn’t be distracted by their presence. It must be even more hot and stuffy in those burqas than it was in the Ladies’ Gallery, which she had once entered on Mary’s insistence to listen to a debate on Votes for Women – that was before her father had set her right on the issue by sending her to listen to the magnificent Gertrude Bell addressing the Anti-Suffragette League. (If all women were like Ms Bell and you, men would fall over their feet in their haste to give you the vote, Papa had said when she came home to report all that had been said.) She sat down and asked the boy if he had sisters. Yes, three. Didn’t they get cross-eyed behind a burqa? Their eyes learned to focus differently, he said, and she couldn’t decide if this seemed plausible or not.

The Victoria progressed along the famed Street of Storytellers and Najeeb pointed out the Storytellers themselves – men sitting cross-legged on the raised floors of open-fronted stores, audiences seated across from them on rope-beds beneath trees. The stories they told were in the form of poems called badalas, Najeeb said in response to her question, and she repeated the word badala and wondered where she could find a language teacher. Hindko was the language of Peshawaris, Najeeb said, and Pashto the language of Pathans.

– So you speak Pashto, Viv said.

– At home we speak Hindko. We are more Peshawari than Pathan, but we’re also Pathan. But everyone here speaks both Hindko and Pashto and many people Urdu and also English and every language of the world someone here can speak. This is Peshawar.

He said it with evident pride, making an expansive gesture which took in all the variety of the street – every manner of turban and cap and flowing garb. That man is from Tashkent, he said, and that one from Tibet; there’s a Punjabi, that’s an Afridi Pathan and that one is Sikh and those two Hindu. For the first time she gave him her full attention – a smiling boy with excellent but oddly pronounced English, as though most of his vocabulary came from books. He was dressed more formally than the day before in narrow black trousers, a white tunic, and a white turban with a grass stain which suggested he’d been standing on his head.