The Trade Secret

by Robert Newman

  30

  Nat and Darius no sooner sold the last jug of oil and rolled up the empty goatskins, than they were seized by a ravenous hunger. Hunching their shoulders against the rain, they hurried to the narrow alleys behind the bazaar in search of breakfast. A giant basin of mast, for customers to fill a jar from, sat among the vegetables of the first food stall they came to.

  ‘An advance,’ Darius informed the stallholder, and dropped a silver abbassi in the scales. He lifted the basin of mast to his lips, tilted his head back and drank half. He handed the basin to Nat, who drained the rest. The curdled milk was delicious, but as Nat set down the empty bowl, his gaze became snagged on the single silver coin hanging in the balance, and a shadow passed over his joy when he thought of Anthony and the reckoning to come.

  The drizzle turned to rain, but the stallholder would not let them stand inside. Instead he brought out a gong-sized plate of refried khoreshte fessenjun, the mutton chunks steaming in the cold and wet. The salad’s clear green hazelnut oil glazed their oil-blackened hands. In no time at all, their oily fingers were leaving black prints on smooth white bones, from which every shred of mutton had been sucked.

  Nat’s heavy head drooped with tiredness but he could not stop laughing at the milk on Darius’s beard and at his curly coriander moustache, or rather at the fact that he was unaware of them just as he was unaware of the curlicue of lettuce and humus decorating an eyebrow, and unaware of his ecstatic moaning and groaning each time his tongue discovered buried citruses, rogue sultanas and caramelised onions in the mutton stew or salad. The rain stopped. The nightingale, in a cage between a net of melons and a string of onions, chirruped and chatted.

  ‘I’ve no room for the nightingale,’ groaned Darius.

  Nat keeled over, laughing uncontrollably. The stallholder brought out a pot of mint tea, took one look at the howling foreigner rolling around in a puddle, and hurried back inside. Darius clutched his belly against the pain of laughing on a full stomach. Tears streamed down his face. Each time they mastered themselves and stopped laughing, and were just getting their breath back, the nightingale started singing and that set them both off again. At last, they calmed down and dried their eyes, and finished their tea.

  Darius reached a hand into the torn lining of his balding velvet coat, and brought out their earnings. They scrubbed tarry coins clean in a puddle, and split the money into two equal shares. Nat drew his knife, nicked an opening in his doublet’s lining, and slotted his coins one by one into its satin panes.

  ‘Stab me now,’ he said, ‘and I bleed coin.’

  ‘You are armoured with loot!’

  ‘I am honeycombed with gold and silver,’ said Nat.

  ‘But can you twist?’ Not only could Nat twist, but when he did so the coins were as silent as a corset’s whalebones.

  ‘La!’

  ‘Can you bend?’ asked Darius.

  Bending was another matter. He could no more bend at the waist than if he were wearing a suit of armour. The only way to touch his hand to the ground was by executing a ceremonial, courtly bow. Sweeping the back of his hand over the ground, he became aware of another presence. A young nobleman was standing before them. The rain-soaked plume wilting on the stranger’s hat obscured one half of a handsome face, the other half twinkled with the reflected light from the food stall’s glass bead curtain. The nobleman introduced himself as Uruch Bey, First Secretary of the Persian Embassy, and congratulated them on the great success of the oil trading they had done on the maidan. The wind set the glass beads tinkling and sent light chasing up and down one side of Uruch Bey’s face.

  Nat was later to think back to this first encounter with Uruch Bey, a man who was to change his and Darius’s lives forever. Right from the moment they met, Uruch Bey was a shimmerer. You could never tell Uruch’s facial expression from a trick of the light. You never knew quite where you were with him. He was never one thing or the other. Even the way Uruch Bey spoke to them was ambiguous. On one level there was a comradely lack of hierarchy in his chatty amiability, and yet all the time he spoke, Nat and Darius shared a sense that they were being somehow pressed into service by an irresistible power. His manner was ambiguous too. He stood with a loose-limbed, easy grace and yet his sharp eyes were like diamond cutters when he asked Nat,

  ‘Are you not one of Mirza Antonio’s servants?’

  ‘Yes, your honour,’ Nat replied.

  ‘Does he know you are here?’

  ‘Indeed, your honour, Antonio Mirza commanded all his people to help any merchants bringing oil into the city.’

  ‘He did?’ asked Uruch. ‘Did he also finance this venture?’

  ‘Yes, your honour,’ Darius replied.

  ‘What’s a lack of lamp oil to him, I wonder?’ asked Uruch. ‘How very strange. I shall congratulate him upon his servant’s success when I see him. Now, where are you going, Darius Nouredini?’

  ‘Only to my grandmother’s humble barn.’

  ‘Excellent. I shall accompany you.’

  As he sauntered along beside them, he asked question after question about the oil venture, and about Darius himself. On the one hand there was something elusive, guarded in his character, and then on the other hand there was a startling ingenuousness in how he came right out and confessed that he was in a bind and needed Darius’s help to put it right.

  The bind was this: Uruch was depending on profits from a nascent oil market in Tabriz to provide for his family while he was away with the Embassy. His problem was that a few days earlier, the oil agent supposed to carry on the business in his absence had cried off, claiming the outbreak of war made the Tabriz-Isfahan road too dangerous to travel.

  Uruch confessed that ‘to his shame’ he had been terribly lax in finding a replacement - except there was no hint of shame in his voice as he said this - having spent all his time instead in the much more pleasurable business of reading up on the fascinating places that he’d soon be visiting as First Secretary of the Persian Embassy: Rome, Prague, Venice, Madrid! His head had been so turned by the allure of these exotic courts and customs that he had neglected the duty of care he owed his family, for whose sake he must secure a replacement oil agent, and he wondered if Darius Nouredini might consider the post?

  ‘But Tabriz is Ottoman, your honour,’ said Darius.

  ‘Not for long,’ said Uruch. ‘The Shah’s army has its marching orders, and Tabriz lies too far from Istanbul for the Sultan to defend. I believe there’s a rich market in selling oil to the camel-dung burners there. But as to details -.’

  But as to details they were left hanging, and Uruch left openmouthed, because Darius caught sight of his grandmother standing by the barnyard gate, and sprinted towards her.

  Nat and Uruch stood and watched Darius run up the lane and gather her in his arms. After each embrace, his grandmother’s face was printed blacker and blacker by his tarry beard.

  Down the lane, as they watched this reunion, a cold wind whistled around Nat and Uruch’s hearts. Nat’s own family were dead, and Uruch was about to leave his family with the Embassy and didn’t know when he would return. He told Nat to tell Darius that he would call tomorrow, and then went his way.

  The following morning, Darius soaked in the public baths. The burns on his body grew less painful as he wallowed in the hamman’s steamy water. After bathing, he had his hair cut and his beard shaved.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said the barber. ‘Today’s the first day the water has been hot for weeks. The Baku oil convoy came in yesterday noon. Please don’t smile while I’m shaving your cheeks.’

  They had beaten the convoy by a matter of hours.

  Meanwhile back at the barn, Kulsum poured several cauldrons of hot water into a wooden trough for Nat to bathe in. Nonbelievers weren’t allowed in the hamman, besides which everyone would have leapt out of the public baths as soon as he got in because he was as scabby as a leper.

  He lowered himself into the trough of hot water and sat there not daring to touch the
scabs, gashes and blistered burns all over his body. When his wounds began to seep, rusting the bath water, he stood up in the tub and let the air dry him, then stepped out of the water and gently lowered the ferryman’s long shirt over his head.

  He heard Kulsum crank the handle of a grinder in the yard, peeked through a crack in the barn’s planking and saw her pour black powder from grinder to pot, and then hang the pot from a stick over the fire. Qaveh! He hurried out of the barn, and sat warming his bare legs by the little fire, waiting for the qaveh to boil.

  A smooth-cheeked, well-groomed, apricot-scented Darius returned from the bazaar. He had a bolt of broadcloth over his shoulder for Kulsum’s winter curtains, and two suits of clothes, one for him and one for Nat.

  They got changed under the zigzag mulberry tree. Darius pulled on cream-striped grey calico churidars, a long grey damask shirt with a raised satin weave depicting silver firebirds, a black astrakhan coat, and a tall crown hat with a plume and a short floppy brim - just like Uruch’s. Soon Nat was striding about the barnyard in narrow-leg midnight-blue churidar trousers, a sleeveless Bokharan jerkin, a fresh pair of brown buffalo-hide lace-up boots, and a brimless grey karakul hat. Nat loved the karakul’s texture of convoluted grooves and ridges that looked like a tin-loaf brain.

  Kulsum then handed him what he at first thought was a cushion before he recognised his doublet, which she had laundered and repaired.

  ‘I have retrieved the heron from the oil,’ she said. His fingers traced the couching’s red outline. The red heron stood by his midnight pond once more. He shook the doublet and it made a sound like a muffled tambourine. She had even sewn the coins back into its lining.

  She handed him a steaming tin cup of qaveh. He closed his eyes. He inhaled the aroma that told him the world was good and true. He drank. There it was. That earthy, nutty taste. A smile spread over his face. He didn’t know why but drinking qaveh felt like a homecoming.

  ‘Take time in your preparation of qaveh,’ Kulsum told him, ‘and God will be with you, and bless you and your table.’

  31

  Gol was on the roof garden sitting with her back to the elm screen while down in the street Mani prepared to burn his arms once again. Why, she wondered, even for the sake of the love growing between them, could he not stop burning his arms outside her house? Time after time she had asked him to stop. But he wouldn’t listen. On this one matter he, who listened to her so well in all else, was deaf. Whenever she asked Mani to stop, something strange happened to him. A faraway look came into his eyes, as if he were speaking over her head to an invisible giant.

  Who was this invisible giant who came to join them whenever she mentioned the ceremonial arm-burning? If Tradition, then why did Mani’s replies take on a flippant, mocking gallantry? That smirking tone of voice flew in the face of the confidences they’d shared on their long walks. It made her wonder if all this elaborate ceremony was actually Mani’s way of repudiating the intimacies they had shared.

  The smell of smoking linen crept under Gol’s nose. Orange sparks from Mani’s taper drifted over the roses. The stubble burning had begun again. He was smoking her out. Was it crueller to watch or not to watch? Today it felt crueller not to watch.

  Placing her hands in the soil, she squinted through the elm sticks as Mani dangled a burning rag. Yellow flame braided the linen. He lowered the flame onto the exposed flesh of his forearm, burnt himself and then hopped around in a little circle, flapping his injured arm up and down in the air. She lobbed the sealed poultice. He found her outline behind the elm screen and pressed the poultice to his lips with a dramatic flourish.

  ‘As if,’ thought Gol, ‘he hardly knows me.’

  She watched him apply the bright red and yellow binding, soaked in her mother’s remedial salves to his arm, dabbing it between the motley strips she’d thrown down every day for weeks. He pulled a calfskin album from his bag. Now came the poetry. Let no neighbour’s shutter, door or roof hatch be open, she prayed.

  ‘Sweet maid,’ he began, ‘if you would charm my sight,

  And bid these arms your neck enfold -’

  To Gol’s intense relief he broke off. Perhaps he had finally sensed her discomfort. If it were so then she’d love him to the end of her days. She shot a hopeful look through the elm screen, fully expecting to find him wearing a look of contrition, the scales having fallen from his eyes. Mani wasn’t, she discovered, looking in her direction at all, he was staring down the road. Whatever he saw there stunned him. His jaw fell open and his mouth gaped wide under his horseshoe moustache. Following his gaze, she scuttled on all fours to the corner of the roof garden. A sauntering Darius Nouredini in black astrakhan coat and plumed hat was approaching accompanied by a foreigner in fleece jerkin and karakul.

  For a moment she experienced intense joy at seeing him in such fine fettle, but his reappearance complicated everything. Once upon a time, two suitors had been less trouble than one. Not anymore. Squatting on her heels, she clutched her hair in both fists. Why was everything so fraught and complex?

  Down on the street, Mani taunted Darius,

  ‘Have you acquired a taste for pigeon shit?’

  ‘Salaam, Mani Babachoi. Allow me to introduce -’

  ‘Hark! Gol’s mother is readying another shovel load now. It will ruin your new coat!’

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting the poem, Mani Babachoi. I pray you, continue.’

  ‘Ha! Anyone can wear fancy clothes, or spout poetry, but have you any wounds of devotion?’

  ‘Perhaps I am reluctant to show them,’ mumbled Darius.

  Mani pitched his voice so that Gol could hear his words.

  ‘For days - or is it weeks now? - you haven’t even been here. What sort of devotion was that? I have been here, Darius Nouredini, and have paid homage to my beloved every day. I have had the honour of meeting her respected father and mother. For I am an ardent suitor. But you? You debase this fine woman by your fitful hot and cold wooing. Have you wounds? No? Then be gone! Now!’

  ‘We all have wounds,’ replied Darius mildly.

  ‘Like these?’ demanded Mani, pushing up his loose white sleeves to reveal his forearms. Tapping the different coloured bandages that ran up and down his arm, he said: ‘Look! It’s quite a history I share with Gol now!’

  ‘This showing of wounds, is it, I wonder, really wajib? Is it necessary?’

  ‘Fine words like fancy clothes are only superficial.’

  ‘So are wounds,’ said Darius.

  ‘No, they show the passion of the heart, not the skill of the tailor.’

  ‘They are only skin-deep.’

  ‘The coward has none!’ said Mani.

  Darius unbuttoned his shirt cuff. Mani laughed delightedly. So, Darius was going to roll up his sleeve and dab his triceps with flame, was he? This was going to be fun. Mani sat on the low wall opposite the Zarafshani house, and stretched his long legs out in front of him. Grinning from ear to ear, he threw a look up at the elm screen, where, with his keen musketeer’s eye, he discerned three outlines: Gol had been joined by her father and mother. The whole Zarafshani family was gathering to witness the coward flinching and giving up the battle for Gol’s hand here and now.

  But why was Darius unbuttoning his whole shirt instead of just rolling up the sleeves? The shirt came off and Mani had his answer. Revealed to the open air were the hundred burns covering Darius’s arms and torso. Up on the roof Gol screamed. Seconds later, Mani heard the shunting rasp of the stiff front door. Into the narrow street burst Gol, raven-black hair unbound and flowing. She tore open a week’s worth of poultices with her teeth.

  ‘Ah, dear Gol, that won’t be necessary,’ said Darius. ‘Oh, one or two for decoration, I suppose.’

  ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ she asked, dabbing burns, scabs and blisters with the possets.

  Roshanak followed her daughter outside, took one look at Darius’s wounds and told her daughter,

  ‘Bring him in the house.’


  ‘Yes, madar,’ said Gol. She cast a look at Mani, defying him to misconstrue, and the two women went into the house ahead of Darius.

  Mani nodded, profoundly gratified by Gol’s look. This was not the triumph poor Darius supposed. He slung his bag over his shoulder, bid a breezy farewell to both rival and rival’s shagird, and walked away whistling the happy tune of he who trusts where he loves.

  Alone together in the street, Nat watched Darius put his shirt back on and asked,

  ‘Why are you bothering to get dressed first?’

  ‘This will be my first ever crossing of the Zarafshani’s threshold,’ replied Darius, putting his new shirt back on. ‘Am I to be half-naked when I meet Gol’s father for the first time? You go in ahead, my friend. I shall follow.’

  The door was open. A thin black curtain hung over the doorway. Nat entered. On the other side of the curtain, the room was dark. A single shaft of light fell down stone steps to the centre of a threadbare kilim. Around this slanting shaft all was dim. Nat heard muffled trilling from the rooftop pigeon lofts. Then a footstep.

  ‘Father,’ said Gol, ‘here is a friend of Darius Nouredini.’

  From a dark corner, Atash Zarafshani stepped into the light. The skin of his face was a patchwork. In patches, the melted face appeared like plaited brown leather, in others rough and pink as a pigeon’s foot. In the joins between these patches grew seams of beard like ploughed-under sod. The father’s hazel eyes followed Nat’s. Doffing his karakul, Nat bowed and said:

  ‘Thank you for receiving us in your home. My name is Nat Bramble.’

  ‘Welcome, Nat Bramble,’ said Atash. Nat felt a strange-shaped hand on his elbow guiding him to the corner cushions, where Nat no sooner sat down than he sprang up again. He must forewarn the squeamish Darius who went into paroxysms over the mildest deformity. If he didn’t warn him, then his friend would completely disgrace himself when he saw how badly burned Gol’s dad was. Nat must speak to Darius first, put him on his mettle.