Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  It was an interesting trip, although as soon as it was over Connie realised that since Jeanette’s death she had been moving constantly from place to place, meeting people, listening and responding with only a part of herself, all the while telling herself that everything was fine and that this was the way her life was lived.

  But she felt more rootless than she had ever done, and now she was bone-weary as well.

  After China, while staying with friends in Singapore, she had a sharp urge to go back to Bali and look at her green wave. She flew down to Denpasar, and took the public bemo up to the village.

  ‘Long time, my friend,’ Wayan Tupereme said to her.

  ‘Long time,’ Connie agreed, bowing over her folded hands to return his greeting.

  Dewi had just given birth to another baby, a second boy. Connie went to visit them with gifts of flowers and rice, as she had done the first time.

  The view from her veranda pleased Connie as much as it had ever done. But as she had guessed she might do, she kept seeing Bill sitting in the old rattan chair or opening the drawers in her simple kitchen. This almost-presence only highlighted the real absence.

  She could see Jeanette just as clearly, but Jeanette was a more peaceful memory now.

  Then an email arrived from Roxana.

  Hello Connie! How are you? I am well. I have been visiting my brother in jail in Tashkent. It is a bad place, but at least I can see him. I miss you and London and Noah, but this is where I must be and where I want to be because Niki is my brother and to me that is the most important thing in this world.

  So this is to ask, when can you come to Uzbekistan to visit me, my friend?

  Connie walked out onto her veranda again and studied the silver loops of the river far beneath her. A breeze laden with moisture shivered the leaves. The little house and the village and the view all soothed her, but there was nothing tangible to hold her here. It would be good to see and talk to Roxana.

  Travelling on was more than a habit, she reflected. It was becoming a way of life. She wrote back:

  I’ll look into flights and mail you in a day or so.

  Less than a week later she found herself in Bokhara, waiting for Roxana in the shade of the mulberry trees that fringed an ancient pool.

  After the mists of her fecund Balinese valley and the air-conditioned voids of Singapore, she was finding it hard to adjust to the desert furnace of Central Asia. She felt not unlike one of the dogs that lay panting in the dust beside the outer wall of the mosque, or perhaps a camel taking advantage of a lone palm tree. A yellow-and-brown hornet the size of a cockroach was hovering over her chai glass. With an effort, she lifted her hand and batted it away.

  Connie blinked to clear her eyes of dust and the harsh dazzle of the sun, and saw Roxana striding towards her.

  They had met briefly the night before when Connie flew in. Today Roxana had been at her job. She was still wearing her work clothes – a hotel receptionist’s frumpy skirt-suit and open-necked blouse, with a pair of mid-heeled court shoes, clunky, probably manufactured in China. She was bareheaded even in the baking mid-afternoon, and she carried bulging string bags that swung and bumped with the rhythm of her stride.

  ‘You are here already,’ Roxana exclaimed as she reached Connie’s table. ‘I hope I am not late?’

  Connie edged along the bench, making room for her in the mulberry shade.

  ‘I was early,’ she smiled. ‘It’s very warm.’

  It was almost forty degrees. The light was blinding, flat out of a white sky, striking into the crucible of baked mud walls and dust-coated streets and further concentrating the heat. Roxana sat down and spoke quickly to the waiter, then turned back to Connie.

  ‘And so, tell me, what sights of Bokhara have you seen so far?’

  Roxana was taking her role as hostess and tour guide quite seriously.

  ‘Let’s see. I went up the minaret.’

  From one hundred and fifty feet up a slim brown tower there had been a wide view over turquoise-blue domes and tiled archways, and a jumble of smaller brown domes and arches cracked by dog-leg alleyways, away to the city’s flat outskirts marked out in Soviet-built apartment blocks, and beyond that to the limitless, colourless extent of the desert that faded into a purple-grey haze on the horizon. At that height a breeze had been stirring, but it was as hot and abrasive as the lick of an animal’s tongue.

  ‘And then I went to the Ark.’

  ‘First built here, you know, over one thousand years ago.’

  The ancient fortress and home to the Emirs of Bokhara, massive in shimmering brick, was now mostly given over to a series of museums. It had been slightly cooler within the thick walls. Connie trod her way past the various exhibits along with a trickle of Dutch and German couples.

  Outside, strings of entrepreneurial small girls chased after the tourists. They tugged at the pockets of Connie’s khakis and the hem of her shirt. The biggest skipped in front of her, blocking her path.

  ‘What’s your name? What’s your name?’

  ‘Connie. I’m from England. What’s yours?’

  ‘Samida. Come, see my pottery. I give you best price.’

  ‘Maybe later.’

  The child snatched a handshake and offered her a wide, mirthless, professional smile. ‘Okay, we are friends. You come back. I saw you first, you come to me.’

  ‘It sounds like a deal, Samida.’

  Connie had walked on past the carpet bazaars and postcard sellers, and the one-time madrassah niches where men wearing traditional four-cornered hats now sat amid heaps of decorative wrought-iron, and rows of scissors, and wickedly curved knife blades. She made her way to the ancient tree-shaded tank in the middle of the old town and chose a seat at one of the chaikhanas that lined it. The scummy water was as thick and green as pea soup and the huge yellow-and-brown hornets skimmed across the surface, but the reflections of twisted branches gave the illusion of coolness.

  She was thinking about Roxana at Samida’s age, growing up in this place, scurrying and fistfighting her way towards the top of a heap that was about as stable as a sand dune.

  Roxana quickly drained her Coke. She was eager to show Connie something new.

  ‘And now, are you ready for the women’s hammam?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ Connie said equably. She had no idea what to expect. Roxana had told her only that this was a proper Bokharan tradition, for women of the city, not tourists.

  Roxana set off, heading at an angle away from the central pool, with Connie walking quickly to keep up. Within ten steps sweat glued her shirt to her back.

  They ducked beneath the domes and multiple arches of a covered bazaar, where the carpet hucksters and the hordes of children ignored their passing because Roxana was one of them. They came out again into a warren of streets, barely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. The mud walls were broken by wooden doors, painted flat blue or green, peeling and blistered by the sun, all of them tightly closed. Black or blue numerals marched haphazardly on the doorposts, 67 next to 17 and also to 93. Power lines drooped and knitted from brackets on every corner, and the only sign of life was the scabbed dogs keeping pace with them in the thin ribbons of shade.

  ‘It is not so far,’ Roxana called over her shoulder.

  The low, domed building was buried deep in a maze of unmarked streets in the old town. Connie knew that she could never have found it on her own. Above the brown doorway, in both Arabic and Cyrillic scripts, the single word Hammam was carved in stone.

  Inside the doors was a dim, cool passage. Thick walls closed out the sounds of the street. There was the steady drip of water, a faint sulphurous whiff, and the sunless scent of old stone. Connie followed Roxana into a room lit from above by skylights.

  The first impression was of a mass of female bodies, which resolved itself into a group of women undressing and stowing their clothes in rickety lockers. Copying Roxana and the others, Connie stripped off too. Naked except for the silk pouch containing
her earring, she felt ridged and bony, and conspicuously hairy among such lush expanses of billowy, smooth flesh. All the other women were fully depilated, even the oldest ones. Feeling like Effie Ruskin on her wedding night, Connie suppressed a snort of laughter.

  Slowly, she undid the strings of the pouch. Roxana briskly took it from her, extracted the earring and fixed it to Connie’s ear lobe. She studied the effect with her head on one side.

  ‘Nice,’ she said. She tossed the pouch in after the rest of their clothes and shut the tin locker, then gathered up the soap and shampoo and towels that she had brought in one of her bags.

  ‘Now, come.’

  Connie hooked her hair behind her ears and meekly followed Roxana down a spiral of hollowed stone steps. The drip of water grew louder, and a thin veil of steam rose to meet them.

  There was a circular stone room under the dome, insulated because except for the dome itself the building was all underground. Water splashed from ancient piping and ran over the stone slabs. The walls and the stone benches dripped and steam curled lazily through metal grilles. The room was full of pairs of women, coils of hair wound on their heads, their broad backs and buttocks and thighs shining. They were talking and laughing and scrubbing each other.

  Connie gazed around her.

  A series of smaller, domed alcoves led off the central space. Roxana beckoned. The first was the hot chamber. Steam hissed from the gratings and swirled in dense clouds, and the women lay like basking seals on tiers of stone slabs. Their talk subsided to a low murmur as they gave themselves up to the heat.

  As they progressed through the sequence of hammam chambers, Connie was thinking of the thousands of women, Bokharans and travellers alike, who had preceded her through these stone arches. The hammam itself had stood here, at the heart of its Silk Road oasis, for more than four hundred years.

  She felt herself slipping and sliding, out of her present self, into a place of unexpected comfort. She didn’t any longer feel conspicuous among the languid, smooth, fleshy women of the city. Roxana was one of them too, even with her bleach-blonde hair and her dancer’s body. They moved slowly, all of them, through the steam and through curtains of tepid water, over the corroded gratings where the water ran away through subterranean channels, and into cooler rooms where the talk and laughter broke out afresh.

  Roxana reached for the soap and shampoo, and like the other pairs of women they took turns at rubbing each other’s skin with a coarse mitt, shampooing one another’s hair and bringing buckets of water to sluice over their heads.

  Connie scrubbed Roxana’s long shins and the curved wings of her shoulder blades. With a swell of affection, she noted the hollows on either side of her heels, the undulations of her ribs and the enviably taut span between the crests of her hipbones. She submitted to the same attentions from Roxana, without trying to shrink away or to hunch inwards to protect herself.

  Afterwards, with their skin tingling, they sat in a tepid room to rest. Connie fingered her rakish earring.

  ‘It is still there,’ Roxana assured her. She leaned back against the stone seat and sighed with satisfaction, ready for a talk. ‘Tell me, how is Angela?’

  ‘It’s taken time, but I think she’s forgetting about Rayner.’

  ‘She has fallen in love again?’

  ‘Not that. Not yet.’

  ‘Have you heard any news from Noah?’

  ‘Hardly anything. His father told me he is fine, more or less, although he misses his mother a good deal.’

  Roxana waited attentively.

  Connie’s communications with Bill over the past months had been brief and businesslike, mostly concerned with Jeanette’s estate. They were respectful of each other, and concerned not to intrude on one another’s private mourning. Or to intrude in any way, Connie thought with a touch of bleakness.

  When Connie didn’t expand further, Roxana remarked, ‘I have had some emails from Noah, you know.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘One of the things he said is that he would like me to go back to London.’

  ‘And what do you feel about that?’

  ‘What do I feel about London, or Noah?’

  ‘Okay. Noah first.’

  Roxana drew up her legs and rested her chin on her knees.

  ‘He is the best person I ever met.’ Then she laughingly rolled her head to look at Connie. ‘I don’t mean that! You are the best person, of course. Noah is only the best boy I know, but that is by a very long way, believe me. But he is in London and I am here. I want to be in Uzbekistan to be near to Niki, and to work with Yakov and Niki’s friends to get him out of prison. So that is also the answer to the other half of your question, about London, isn’t it? I dreamed of it, yes, and of being an English girl, and I tried very hard to – what is the word? – integrate myself. I thought that by making myself similar to you, and being a part of Noah’s beautiful English family, I could belong even more in England.’ She sighed, and her expression was eloquent. ‘But as you know, that was not such a success because if I was truly English I would not have been taken in for one moment by Mr Antonelli.’

  Connie patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all in the past. It’s dealt with, finished.’

  It had taken some time, and it had been complicated, but her formal identity was her own once more.

  ‘I’m so glad of that. I learned a very big lesson. You know, Connie, what truly matters is your family. Niki is my family and Noah is not, even though I like him so much. It was all very well when I believed I had only myself to consider, I could decide to make myself like that because like this was not good enough. But now my brother is alive again. The first time I went to the prison I was – oh – so happy to see him. Can you imagine what that was like? He had come back from the dead. He is very thin and he had been beaten, and he had spent many days locked up alone, but still he was there, the same smile, the same person. My brother. Now I know what is important. Here I am. In Uzbekistan. This must be my place.’

  The passion in her words touched Connie. Her admiration for Roxana renewed itself.

  ‘I understand,’ she murmured. ‘And you are quite right.’

  There was a burst of laughter from the main chamber. The pairs of glistening, wobbling women passed from the heat to the cooler rooms, gasped as they were deluged with water, or sat and gossiped on the old stone benches.

  Roxana beamed. ‘You see? You come here with your mother or your sister, and if you are not lucky to have them you are like us, with your good friend, and you talk and talk. You are scrubbed clean and you have opened your heart, and then you go out into the world again. Look, over there.’

  Roxana pointed at a larger group of women. There were two elderly ones, one fat, and the other tiny with breasts like two dead leaves. They were issuing orders to a circle of laughing girls with one at the centre. The whole group was busy with white towels and jars of cream and lotion, and they set about scrubbing and massaging the girl’s skin and teasing out the thick coils of her black hair.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘That one in the middle, she is a bride. These are her sisters and friends and those two, they are her grandmother and her fiancé’s grandmother. It is our custom. They are making sure that she is prepared for her wedding night. She will be beautiful for her husband, the grandmothers must see to that. And the bridegroom’s family, they must pay for all the cosmetics to make her ready. Combs and towels and soap, everything.’

  The fat grandmother slapped a paste like thick red mud into the roots of the laughing bride’s hair.

  ‘Would you like to get married?’ Connie asked.

  ‘Ha. I have other things to attend to first. And I will wait my turn, after you.’

  ‘That might be a little too long to wait,’ Connie smiled.

  Roxana sniffed. ‘We shall see. We will have another turn in the hot room now. And after that, the massage.’

  Later they went back up the spiral stone steps. Off the upper corridor was
another, much grander salon with a marble floor and lamp sconces made of wrought-iron. There were towel-covered divans against the wall and rugs and cushions on the floor. After their hammam, the women lounged and drank tea. Their hair was tied up in coloured turbans, naked fat babies lay on blankets and brown-skinned toddlers ran between them. Connie thought it was like walking into a Victorian academician’s painting of a seraglio. Roxana delivered her to an enormous, towelled Russian woman with a wide slash of gold tombstone teeth.

  ‘Massage, da?’

  ‘Um, yes. Thank you,’ Connie murmured, as she was stretched out like a sacrifice on one of the divans.

  The Russian masseuse was strong as well as big. Under her vigorous hands Connie’s joints creaked and snapped and the women within earshot all laughed appreciatively. At the end, when her muscles were unknotted and her limbs felt like jelly, the woman scooped her up like a rag doll and cradled Connie’s head against her immense bosom.

  It was like being held by Mother Earth herself.

  Fingers massaged Connie’s scalp and her neck, even her ears, with as much love and tenderness as if she were a baby.