by Anna Tambour
Munifer jumped. He missed, but it caught in the highest branch of the stunted fig.
The tree was too wizened for him to climb, so he broke it down.
The hair that he pulled from its top branch was long, black, lustrous as eyes in love, and (he breathed in deeply) possessed the incomparable fragrance of virginity.
Underneath the skin you see,
is the skin you want. Have it now.
—Estée Lauder, Inc.
Siren in the wilderness
“PSST,” hissed the bladder-pipe.
“Not now,” said Faldarolo.
“Dare you speak to me like that?”
“Can’t you see?” muttered Faldarolo. “We are not alone.”
“Could you see, if I shoved you in this shroud?”
Burhanettin paused in his stride. “Troubled stomach?”
“Nothing a sleep won’t cure,” said Faldarolo, stroking the velvet bag.
“I beg of you,” he mumbled to the bladder-pipe. “Wait till we stop for the night.”
Faldarolo was not in any hurry to stop for the night. He dreaded it.
“I tell you,” he said later, when the naked bladder-pipe lay on his lap and the stars shone down on them. “I asked for its butter, for the third night in a row (as if she didn’t know) but he said it could not give. Not tonight. Not any night.”
And he had, though tonight he had felt ridiculous. He had asked Burhanettin for butter from the donkey, and Burhanettin had looked at Faldarolo in an odd way, and then he had asked Faldarolo with a pathetic slyness, if maidens like the scent of ass’s butter on a man’s hair, and Faldarolo had had to say he didn’t know and that he wanted it for a ticklish throat, at which time the sweetmaker had lost interest other than to point to his servant and say, ask him if you want butter; and the servant had said the donkey couldn’t give milk because she was—and the murderous-looking servant had blushed oddly and Faldarolo didn’t know why. When Faldarolo had said that it wasn’t milk he wanted but butter, the man laughed in a way that filled Faldarolo with awe, it was so disrespectful. He expected Burhanettin to teach the man flying with his kicks. Yet nothing of the sort happened.
Faldarolo was surprised that Ekmel was allowed to be so insolent to a man Burhanettin called “brother”, till he saw that Burhanettin wasn’t even listening with half an ear. He was doing what he furtively rushed to do every night—unpacking two jars (obviously honeypots) from the donkey’s back. Now he’s going to look into them for a while and sigh secretively, and then pack them away again looking around as if we might want them for ourselves. Faldarolo couldn’t help sneering. As if we would think that precious. The jars had never earned a glance from the servant. Besides, Burhanettin could have been a puppetmaster, so completely did he seem to rule his man. And if the servant had stolen them, who would deal with him? He couldn’t sell someone a clod of mud and not earn suspicion that it’s a fake.
Yet Burhanettin, in his attitude to the honeypots, reminded Faldarolo of some of the hosts Faldarolo had played for. A man could talk all evening of a pear that he remembered eating forty years ago. Another would spend a fortune on a bottle of liquid, talk of it as if it were his love, and keep it under guard, and all the other men would nod as if this were expected.
“Why do you forget me?” said the bladder-pipe.
“I’m a musician, not a magician.”
“That’s no explanation.”
And it wasn’t.
So the bladder-pipe was very discontented, as she had decided that she had to have fresh ass’s butter and here was an ass, and no one was making it give up its butter. And no! she didn’t want milk, so why had anyone talked about milk. She didn’t care that the ass didn’t want to give up its milk. “Did I ask for milk?”
“No,” muttered Faldarolo, massaging her with ass’s butter— the sweet, clean ass’s butter he had carried with him, so that she would be treated as royally as she deserved. It was still sweet and clean, but—
“Is a bit of fresh butter too much to ask? . . . ”
She gave Faldarolo no peace till he promised that tonight he would sneak up on the ass and squeeze some out of it. For the bladder-pipe said that a squeeze was all it takes to get butter from an ass. And if that didn’t work, Faldarolo had been forced to promise what the bladder-pipe said was the other way, though he’d have to be sure to clean the butter.
“I’ll slit the beast’s stomach open,” Faldarolo promised, “and scoop it out.”
What would happen after that, he didn’t have the peace to contemplate. If he didn’t satisfy this need that he privately thought might merely be a whim, she would certainly drive him mad before he reached the man who could restore her to health. For her blotch had not only not faded. It positively glowed. And although she made noises, she could no longer, with all those holes burnt in her bladder, make any sort of music—making him a worthless traveller in the clothing of a gentleman, soon enough to be a worthless man in rags.
Ekmel had had his eye on the scoundrel for the past couple of days. You can’t be as lonely and soul-lost and tricked by life as Ekmel without noticing that a man who talks to a velvet bag and glances furtively at a donkey has evil in his soul.
Ekmel was certain that the man had no intention of stealing the donkey. What would he steal her for? He hardly knew one end from the other, and called her ‘it’.
And there he is, looking at her again.
Ekmel walked over to her and put his hand on her neck. She started, she was so surprised. But she hadn’t been touched for so long that she forgot how Ekmel had, in the old days (just the previous year but it seemed like the old days) beaten her when she didn’t want to take his route; and now she bent her neck and pressed her forehead against his stomach, breathing his rank, familiar reek.
Awkwardly but carefully, he folded his hands so they were in the shape of feet, and slipped them down her long sensitive ears— down and partly up, and down as he had seen Burhanettin do in the old days when Burhanettin had called the donkey “my friend”. She folded her ears back and the long hairs on the inside of her ears tickled Ekmel’s wrists, but her ears were as warm as his wife’s thighs were once, and comforting.
“Is this the right way?” he asked, but it was plain to see. Her eyelashes lowered and her bottom lip fell away from her teeth, and wobbled. Ekmel had never had a fine bull-horn moustache like Burhanettin, but he had once been proud of his brush moustache.
Burhanettin hadn’t packed Ekmel’s razor and he had never given Ekmel so much as a few piastres for a barber, so Ekmel now bore a thick curly rug on his face, with a hole for his mouth. He lowered his face as he had seen Burhanettin do, and the donkey put her nose to his, and he smelled her donkey breath—sweet, not from that revolting nougat (she had stopped enjoying hers, too), but the bark of some broken-down stunted tree they’d passed this afternoon.
One of his curly hairs must have tickled her nose, for she stepped away, yawned, sneezed three times, and wagged her head till her ears sounded like slippers flapping. She lifted up her head again, paused . . . and it was as if she waited—Ekmel galloped through the Blessing of the Three Sneezes—at the last word, she exploded.
Ekmel laughed so hard, you’d think she was a storyteller.
She leaned up against his side.
He pulled away and narrowed his eyes at her. “You don’t have a name, do you?”
A plethora of almostnesses
“GO!” yelled the older brother, and the younger would have liked to kick his heels into his steed’s side, but he didn’t get a chance, because the steed’s long ears had been turned towards the older brother in anticipation for so long that the o! was lost in the sound of its pounding heels. Not for these steeds that frippery of the neighing, rearing horse, all look at me get ready to get going. At the first half of a two-letter word, these steeds were off—and though they galloped so fast that their heels didn’t need to touch the ground, each steed made sure they did, for the excitement of 8 heels striki
ng flames from flint, smashing uplifted roots to smithereens, crushing wild melons into slush, slithering through choking sand, and in the case of the younger brother’s steed’s right front hoof, coming down with the force of a mountain falling to earth, a toenail away from a tortoise that looked like a stone and causing it to cry out—but the boys and their steeds were long past by then.
So the younger brother would have liked to kick his heels into warm flesh and say Hi ho or suchlike, but then if he’d been able to do that, it wouldn’t have been half the ride. Onwards, the donkeys raced, and he had to wrap his arms around the neck of his while his heels flopped limp as rags.
Eventually the older brother ordered: “Whoah.”
When the donkeys stopped, the younger slid to the ground. He could hardly walk, he was so bruised, but he pointed to his older brother’s eye and laughed.
“You look like a suitor.”
The older brother grinned. “It’s already black?”
“People will think I don’t love you.”
“Come. Let’s see if you can punch the other.”
While the two boys rolled in the dirt, the donkeys wrapped their necks around each other, companionably biting to each other’s skin for fleas.
Soon enough, however, “Now we must travel back to the road,” said the older brother.
“For how much longer?” The younger could not disguise the whine in his voice.
“Patience.”
By the time the older brother called a halt, the steeds were ready to munch leaves and the impatient one was fast asleep on his faithful friend’s back.
While the younger ate, the older brother crept forward till the group they had tracked for so many days was in view. They had stopped for the evening and they were separated as he thought they’d be. He’d decided that tonight must be the night because there had grown a disturbing increase in traffic on the road—well- dressed, and very well armed men from what looked like all corners of the earth were flowing forward as if they were worried they’d miss the call to Heaven. If the little group below linked up with them . . .
This was to be the first raid in the boys’ career, and as the Commander, he could not let it fail. He had chosen this little group, first, because of its weakness, and then, because of the wealth that they gloated over—those two men down there.
Overhead, in the velvet of the sky, beauteous stars appeared, lighting the scene below with wonderful approval.
And what is that? He motioned to his brother to come.
“Hey hoh!” cried the boy, and got a fistful of dust in his eyes to calm his spirits.
“Look at that,” whispered the older.
When he’d finished grizzling, the younger looked. “What?”
But the older had already mounted. “Follow,” he commanded.
For what he had seen had convinced him that fortune itself was lighting his way.
Burhanettin was huddled over on the other side of an unruly pile of sticks that might have once been a nest, for all the fluff stirring from its splintered ends. As usual, he was crooning to his jars. “We approach, dearest. It must be only a few days more, and then I shall arrive. And Then!”
He gazed across the flat plain towards the hill, and lifted one jar to it.
“Take too little, my sweetness, and madness seizes you. Take too much, my star in the heavens, and Death would swoop you up. Take just the right amount, which must be as expertly judged as the amount of powdered pearl to stir into a batch of helva-i-golub, which is why I am the one for you . . . and this Kirand-luhun, my darling, gives the unearthly sweetness that is love.”
He sighed mightily. “I wonder what she’ll be like.”
For to be honest, he had been travelling aimlessly, loving just anyone without having a name to put to them, till he’d heard of a woman named Mulliana. And when he heard of her he was willing to chance his love at first sight, to her. He had carefully weighed, furthermore, the dosage that each of them would need, and felt content with his decision One for you, and one for me. If it kills us, what is better than to die for love?
“When you speak to me in that tone of velvet, my heart grows soft as pounded meat,” he sang, as he stroked the horns of his moustache.
Over near the sloughed skin of a sand dragon sat Faldarolo, pretending to be interested in its scales. The bladder-pipe was securely bagged and hanging from his neck, which only just muffled her insistent “What are you waiting for? Butter Butter Butter!”
Over near a pile of desiccated droppings colourful with feathers, Ekmel snored, every inch the useless surly servant who had fallen into a sleep so deep that a master’s kick would be a tickle.
“Now!” whispered the older boy.
And to the younger boy’s surprise and the steeds’ utter disgust, the older one said, “Now—leave them!”
And he led his brother as they crept down to the plain, and then crawled along, and darted from bush to bush.
By the time they reached our little group, the big man with the pointed hat and the two jars he gloated over was lying down where he had sat, but the two jars were packed back in that basket on the donkey. And the man with the velvet bag was lying down and snoring just as loudly as the—now that the older boy was close enough to see—utterly bloodcurdling servant.
Home! wished the older brother. To be home with a stomach warmed by Mama’s soup, even if her slaps make my ears burn. From afar, these three men had looked like dolls, and the raid was to be only the best game the boys had ever played, a life of play that could make you rich instead of work that made you sore.
He just wanted to run away, but he had to accomplish something, so he said to his brother, “Greediness will call the Evil Eye upon us. Let’s leave the one with the bag.” Formerly he had decided that it would be a doddle to slip it off the man’s neck while they slept.
“Let’s just get the jars,” he said.
His little brother nodded. He had taken a look at the murderer, for that was what he had to be, and was so frightened he was swallowing hiccups, which only made him more terrified. And as for the velvet bag, it looked from here, not like it held anything fat like riches or a goose, but something bony—the ghost hand that clutches you when you relieve yourself at night.
Onwards the two boys crawled. They were now on the far side of the donkey from those men.
The older boy opened the basket. Creak, it said. He stopped.
His heart pounded louder than the snoring, but the snoring did not stop.
In went his two hands, and like magic! Out they came, each clutching a jar.
He smiled at his brother and crouched again. They took one step, and then as fast as they could while still crouching and being very quiet, they took another half—and then the snorer with the blue bag rose, still snoring. His eyes were open and they gleamed. And he crept towards: the donkey. The older boy put a hand on the younger, perhaps to stop his brother from moving, or maybe because the older boy was shaking like grandfather’s hand.
Onward, the snoring man with the wide-open eyes crept, nearer, towards the donkey, till he was al . . . most here.
He reached inside his robe and his hand came out, with a knife.
And at that very moment, the murderous-looking one leapt forward and grappled him, and the two boys ran screaming into the night that enfolded them like a mother in its arms. And in the murk, the two men separated with many yells, and the man who loved his jars leapt up and rushed to the donkey, only to find the basket opened and no jars there, and he stumbled about till he almost fell on a jar and crying out, reached for it, and the donkey dropped her head so her nose was beside his, and he yelled at her, “The Kirand- luhun is for me, not you,”—and he punched her—“beast!”
And she jerked her head up, with one horn of his moustache hanging from between her teeth.
And the murderous-looking man ran up to her and shoved the big man away and he stood in front of the donkey and said, “On my life!” glaring murderously at the man of t
he jars and the man of the bag alike—by this time, the two boys had made their breathless way back to their two unimpressed but faithful steeds, who, without having to be told anything, waited till their charges had boarded, and headed, at a swift but careful pace, home.
Dear friends
IT WAS ONLY SELF-PRESERVATION that caused Ekmel to stop himself from killing two fellow travellers.
No one could sleep, so the little group set out again (Burhanettin, followed by Faldarolo followed by Ekmel, and the donkey, last) and made their way through the scrubby, rock-strewn plain, though they had reached that point in a trip where, between some travellers, antipathy grows rampant.
The two men Burhanettin had once called “brothers in love” strode with long steps and hunched shoulders, Burhanettin clutching the two jars in a fold of his striped cloak, and Faldarolo holding that velvet bag and mumbling into his chest.
Ekmel was close enough to leap on him, should the fool get any new ideas, for it was no use talking. You can squeeze blood into a stone easier than talking sense into a fool.
Another man with less responsibility might have considered the crazy man funny, but a funny fool only hurts himself.
“Imagine, splitting you open!” Ekmel turned around for a moment to smile at she who was soaking up every drop of emotion towards her that flowed from him. She laid her ears forward.
But Burhanettin had once called her “dear friend”. As a donkey, she could not quote the proverb, A forsaken friend is never as great as a forsaken love, but Ekmel felt that she had learnt it. Furthermore, he felt that he finally understood the proverb of a wiser man than he: Though an ass carry your burden, you can never look into both of her eyes at once.
But there is also the proverb, A hungry lion never waits for the proverb’s end.
So let’s go further up this caravan and listen to Faldarolo’s troubles.