by Tamim Ansary
Rupert didn’t know enough to make an intelligent reply to this. A silence stretched out awkwardly. “Excellent,” he said finally.
“Excellent, yes, except—you said it yourself: incidents continue. Last April, a band of hoodlums attacked the Shah himself. The king barely made it back to his palace, leaving five or six of his guards hacked to pieces on the street. We traced it all back to five badmashes and hung them in a public square.”
“We did that?”
“Not we personally,” Burnes said with some impatience “The Shah took care of it. The point is, we caught the plotters. But since then—” He cleared his throat, then began to reel off a list. “There’s been that trouble with the Ghilzais. The attack on the convoy from Jalalabad. Two Tommies beaten in the bazaar and delivered to cantonments in burlap bags, naked.” Burnes voice took on a sonorous tone as he continued to list “incidents.” He stopped in mid-sentence and fixed Oxley with his blue-eyed gaze. “What do you make of it?”
“Clearly, there are still some troublemakers about…” Oxley hazarded.
“At least! Or perhaps we’ve not really cut off the head. Or the monster has grown another head. Oh, make no mistake: our situation is fundamentally sound, I assure you, but conspirators still operate from the countryside. Saboteurs receive their orders out there somewhere, then they filter into the city and stir up trouble. The only question is, does some controlling hand keep the Afghan agitated? I think so, but who is it? Who’s behind it all? Is it one of the Dost’s sons? His pup Akbar has showed up in the north, you know, but it can’t be him alone, he’s too young. Is Ivan at it again? That’s my greatest fear. I’ve talked it over with Macnaghten, and he agrees, we must trace all this plotting to its root. We’ll never be rid of trouble till we’ve put the real ringleaders behind bars. I don’t mind telling you I have a stake in this myself. As soon as the situation is stable, Macnaghten will return to England, and I will take charge here as her majesty’s envoy and then we’ll see some progress! I understand these people, Oxley. I’ve lived among them, I speak their language, I know how they think. There is much to be said for the Afghan. These are a brave people, Oxley, a fine fierce people, properly handled. It’s absolutely essential that Mr. Macnaghten depart and I take charge. Do you see?”
“Of course—when you put it that way.” Rupert furled his brow. He had an intimation, now, of where Burnes was going, but he wanted to hear it said.
“All this conspiring originates up north somewhere,” Burnes insisted. “Akbar is there, but he can’t be the spider at the center of the web. Too young! I need some agents up there, watching and listening. In particular, there is a little village called Char Bagh. That’s where I want you. The tax collectors went to that area a while back. They got within one town of the place and ran into a few of their elders by chance. Until then, no one even knew the town existed. I ask you: what better place to headquarter a conspiracy? The headman gave the tax collectors some cock-and-bull about a plague in their village—just to keep the king’s men away, it seems. As soon as I heard, I started wondering: what’s their game? That’s what I want you to find out, Mr. Oxley. What’s their game? Who’s playing the hand? I want you to station yourself near that village and mark who comes and goes.”
“Why me?”
“What I need in Char Bagh is a man who won’t recoil. Mrs. Hartley told me how you acquitted yourself on the road from Peshawar. Now that’s the sort of chap I want on the spot. Officially you’ll be there to…I don’t know. We’ll think up some pretext.”
“Do you … know Mrs. Hartley quite well, then?”
“She’s been a good friend to me.” Burnes cast him a glance laden with irony. “Do not jump to any conclusions. I will give you one bit of advice, my friend. It bears repeating. Leave the English women alone, especially the married ones. In Kabul, there are other amusements to be had.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Oxley declared stiffly, shrinking from Burnes’s affectionate pat. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“I mean—” Burnes stopped talking and cocked his head. “Ah, I think our wait is over. Stand up, Captain Oxley.”
“It’s, um, lieutenant.”
“Stand up, Lieutenant Oxley. We have guests to greet.”
Voices could be heard on the other side of the door. A cautious tap sounded, and then a gloved hand opened the door. Two women stepped inside. Both were covered from head to foot in the veil that most Afghan women wore on the street. They were giggling inside their bags. Then they lifted the veils away, and Oxley saw two strikingly beautiful young women: Afghan girls, he supposed from their dusky complexion and their almond-shaped eyes, but clad in fashionable dresses such as any well-bred Englishwoman might wear, although rather shorter: their legs were naked.
“Mestar Boornus. Friend tonight?” said one.
Burnes looked at Oxley. “And they even speak English of a sort.”
“Do you mean—?”
“Oh, this was arranged some time ago. I meant to have both myself, but since you’re here—well, greed is a sin. Have one, Oxley, either one. Take your pick.”
The girls giggled again, clustering closer together.
“But—but who are they?”
“Does it matter? Later, I’ll teach you how to make arrangements of this sort on your own. Tonight, I ask you simply to indulge. I want you to appreciate that an Englishman can do very well in this country. If you help me, I will see to it that you have a most satisfactory posting here, Rupert. May I call you Rupert?”
“Um, yes—um… Alex?”
“I prefer Sekandar,” the older man corrected him.
“Oh! Sekandaaarrrr!” the women laughed, flocking to either side of Burnes and stroking his arms.
“As for the cost—do not even think of it. Tonight is my treat,” Burnes said.
23
The morning of her wedding, the women of the household bathed Khadija, dressed her in finery, and brushed her hair. The widow sat quietly, thinking about that day last spring when Ibrahim had come home covered in mud and shining with sweat to tell the household there would be no fight with Sorkhab after all. “Sheikh-sahib has found water for us.” And then he went on to make the stunning announcement: “Sheikh-sahib has consented to marry our own Khadija-jan.”
All that day, wherever she went in the crowded compound, Khadija felt wonder-struck and disquieted eyes upon her until at last she sought refuge in the stables. Ibrahim found her there in the early evening hours. Distance already hung between them, but he approached her for a chaste and ordinary embrace, such as any two related people might perform upon meeting or leaving one another—only they were not meeting or leaving one another, so it was not at all chaste. He kissed one side of her neck, and she his other; they switched sides and kissed again, switched and kissed a third time, the normal greeting ritual. Then they should have let go, but instead his hands settled on her hips and he went in for an impermissible, a stepping-dangerously, a break-all-the-rules, an inconceivably erotic fourth kiss, and she let her grip on him tighten, her face sinking into the warmth between his neck and collarbone. Oh, reckless desire! People were conversing just outside the door, people were milling in the courtyard, people were teeming outside the compound walls; people were whispering all over the village, people who must never see them like this!
She drew back and stepped away, and he let her go, although his excited breath still came and went like a brushfire. She pulled her scarf across her mouth, and her whirlpool eyes sucked at him. What must she look like, she thought, all disheveled with desire—and yet she could not deny herself one final murmured complaint. “How am I to let you go?”
He dropped his gaze. “You will see me every day. Sheikh-sahib is like a father to me.”
“Oh. So you will be my stepson now.” She tossed her head.
He permitted himself a faint grin. “I will be in his house every day He is my sheikh.” Ibrahim turned to the window, then, and she began to push some
hay into her cow’s feeding bin. This had been their entire parting from each other.
Now at last her marriage day had come. By noon, she was just as beautiful and womanly as her helpers could make her. That afternoon, Ibrahim and his male relatives formed a team to escort the veiled Khadija up to the malang’s new house. Several boys scurried alongside, pelting her with flower petals, just for fun. Had she been a virgin, they would have carried her on a throne, but a public wedding for a widow would have been unseemly.
At least a real road ran up to Baba’s Nose now, for the villagers went up there often these days to say their prayers or just to lounge about, and the constant traffic had worn the path wide and smooth The malang’s compound had four structures within its walls. The front building was a single large room for visitors and opened directly onto the world outside. In the great man’s private quarters, another building containing kitchens and washrooms formed a side wall. Across from it was the outhouse. A fourth building abutting the back wall of the compound contained three rooms for the women folk.
All that afternoon and into the night, Khadija and the malang sat in the large public room, side by side on a dais, while Ibrahim and his close relatives feasted and the women beat tambourines and everyone sang and made merry. Khadija wore a veil that covered everything but her eyes.
After the platters had been polished clean, Soraya and a laughing collection of veiled women tossed a large green blanket over the newly-married couple. It was Soraya’s idea to give the couple a simulacrum of the climactic moment of a real wedding ritual, the one that would have been performed if she were a virgin. Under that sudden tent, Khadija breathed her new husband’s exhalations. The laughter, clamor, and music continued to sound around them, muffled by the intervening fabric. A woman’s hand thrust under the cloth, holding a long-handled mirror. Khadija heard a stifled giggling and the sound of someone slapping someone, attended by harsh admonitions to take this seriously. The mirror came to rest directly between Khadija and the malang. With fluttering heart, Khadija undressed her face for him, pulling the headscarf down from her nose, pulling it down from her mouth, down from her chin, stripping her features naked for him, letting the malang see whom he had married. And this was her moment, too, to get her first frank look at him. But when she gazed into the mirror, she saw only her own face. Then the malang’s big hand tilted the mirror, and his face appeared in the glass: large, broad. He was old, she realized with a start, older even than her first husband. And yet the delighted curiosity in his large brown eyes made him look childish too. A cool sensation permeated her flesh, and then she veiled her face as the blanket was lifted away and the merriment swirled again around them.
Eventually the family drifted out of the compound. Even after the last of them were gone, Khadija heard drums still beating in the village below, heard the reedy wail of shepherds’ flutes. Even though there was no official wedding ceremony, the village was celebrating the malang’s marriage to one of their own, but that was revelry in some other world. Khadija was here in her own house, alone with her strange new husband.
She sat in her green finery, waiting. Her cheeks wore the painted blush her helpers had applied with the precious morsel of rouge she had gotten as part of her dowry eleven years ago when she married for the first time, rouge that she had kept (and assiduously kept moist) in her chest of personal belongings all these years, always hoping to use it in a private celebration with her husband the day she got pregnant—for which reason it was still available now.
The malang stood up and pointed wordlessly and Khadija understood that she was to precede him. She stepped into the sweetness of a Char Bagh summer night and started across the courtyard. Half a moon was just sinking out of sight, but the sky hung over them, pregnant with starlight. Her silent husband followed her to their private building. Although no one would intrude back here, Khadija closed the shutters and drew the bolts. Now, the only light in the room came from the two lamps they had carried in with them, clay pots filled with precious cottonseed oil, each containing a wick and shedding a halo no larger than an armload of light. But they shed no smoke either, and very little odor, Allah be praised.
Khadija could make out a cleanly swept floor covered with a mat woven of saw grass. In the corner she saw bedding heaped upon a mattress rolled into a tube. She unrolled it and pulled it to the edge of the room furthest from the windows. It was closer to dawn than to midnight now, as dark as the cycle of day and night would get. The moon had drowned. At any moment, roosters might begin to crow.
The malang was only a shadow to her. She felt rather than saw him move from the other side of the room, saw rather than felt his hand upon her face, so light was his touch, so very light. He said nothing to her, not a word. She held still for the tip of his finger running along her cheekbone, over her eyebrows, and down the other side of her face.
“Strong bones,” he commented.
Strong bones. Was it good to have strong bones? Was this to be the extent of their marriage? Did a malang, perhaps, not even want…?
“Don’t be afraid.” His voice was a rumble. He stroked her lips, which parted slightly to allow her breath in and out. She didn’t know what she felt, only that her heart was pounding and her head swimming, but when his fingers came to rest on her cheekbones, and then touched her lips, and then grazed down to her hair and lifted the long locks from her shoulders as a boy lifts water in wonder and lets it slip and splash between his spread fingers, she knew that what she felt was fear indeed.
But she shook her head, not wishing to displease him.
He went on investigating her body, touching her shoulders and her arms; he seemed like such a little boy now that fear seeped out of her and something achingly acutely maternal took its place. Suddenly, she imagined a child at her breast, felt a vivid yearning to bear and to nourish life. He took her hand. Hers was not a small hand, nor particularly soft, a hand weathered by years of labor, by all the scrubbing and cleaning and scouring and cooking and sifting and sewing she had done, a hand that disheartened the woman in her, a hand she wanted to hide. But in his hand, hers felt small and delicate. Against his tree-bark skin, hers felt luxuriously smooth. He pressed her hand against her own breast and she felt the thumping of the bird within her ribcage.
“Good heart!” he declared. He had both her hands now. He set them against her cheeks, enclosing them with his own, encasing her whole head with those gigantic hands. “Good head,” he hummed with childish glee.
His hands slipped down to her back. Encircled by his arms, she must stand closer. The front of his voluminously clothed body pressed against the front of hers. “You have carried weight,” he marveled, “so much weight upon these shoulders…” Then he went into a sort of recitation, his voice like the wings of flies on a sleepy day. “Thinking ahead to winter all summer was your work. Thinking about what to store... What to dry and what to smoke and what to lay away… How much to cook each day. What to serve at funerals. At weddings. At wet seasons and dry. Generations coming and going … You, all the while, measuring and holding back as needed, staving off the greed, ignoring slander. Lay your burdens down, Khadija. Lay all your burdens down. Living with me will not be difficult.”
At that moment, he seemed not at all boyish. How could she have made that mistake? He was as big as a bear, and she that three or four year old child, sitting on her father’s lap, as safe as any bear cub. His arms around her tightened and she became aware of her breasts and her thighs. His eyes, in the almond-colored light of two oil lamps, beamed down at her with astonished delight, bathing her until she grew more beautiful than she ever imagined she could be. Her first husband never really looked at her, he took her only under the covers, tearing at her clothes with blind fingers in furious haste. He was never in the mood until the mood had him in a violent hurry. She knew his body only as ambush and desperation. Now, standing fully clothed before the clothed malang, her body glowed with pleasing shame. The malang was not ashamed nor in a hurry. She
stopped imagining what was to come and leaned into his mountain of a body—fell through, as it seemed, into a vast geography of her own undiscovered self. This wasn’t after all like being with a man. His arms became the sky, the mountains, the embodiment of everything ancient—and yet his delighted, wholly human curiosity kept flowing over her and she heard him laugh at one point. Her body awoke into pleasure, she awoke into every part of herself that was body: she was her fingers, her breasts, her neck, that place that curved in just below her hairline, she was a country with mountains and valleys of her own, and fields full of grass and flowers murmuring with love, an entire world where nothing mattered because here she had a friend.
Then love softened into light and light transformed into the material daylight of the wonderful country she had entered, which thickened into darkness, and she was herself again, standing in the attitude of namaz, hands folded across her belly, hearing syllables of Quran in her mind, in a feminine voice but not one she recognized as her own. Somewhere nearby her husband was quietly chanting. She didn’t know if he had taken her. She felt more as if she had entered him, as a bird enters a glade. But he must have taken her, else why would she be naked? She looked down and realized it wasn’t her clothes she was missing, but her body. She wasn’t wearing her body. No wonder she felt so naked. But she was only imagining herself standing up in namaz. She was in bed, actually, under bulky covers. Not naked but fully clothed. Alone. Nothing had happened. Everything had happened. The malang’s chanting voice was only in her head. Her husband’s body—she knew without even looking—was outside, on the roof.