“Like a harem,” Yasmina said.
“Yes, well. That may be more like gravity, I’m afraid. But anyway, there is a qi repulsion between all particles, that the strong force counteracts, and the two compete, more or less, along with other forces. Now, certain very heavy metals have so many particles that a certain number leak away from them one by one, and the single particles that leak leave distinctive traces at distinct rates of speed. And down in Nsara they’ve been getting strange results from a particular heavy metal, an elemental that is heavier than gold, the heaviest elemental found so far, called alactin. They’re bombarding it with neuter particles, and getting very strange results, all over the plates, in a way hard to explain. The heavy heart of this elemental appears to be unstable.”
“Like Yasmina!”
“Yes, well, interesting that you say so, in that it is not true but it suggests the way we keep trying to think of ways to visualize these things that are always too small for us to see.” She paused, looking at the blackboard, then at her uncomprehending students. A spasm of some emotion marred her features, disappeared. “Well. It is yet another phenomenon that needs explaining, let’s leave it at that. It will take more investigation in a lab.”
After that she scribbled in silence for a while. Numbers, letters, Chinese ideograms, equations, dots, diagrams — like something out of illustrations for the books about the Alchemist of Samarqand.
After a time she slowed down, shrugged. “I’ll have to talk to Piali about it.”
“But isn’t he in Nsara?” Budur asked.
“Yes.” This too was part of her mishkul, Budur saw. “We will talk by the telephone, of course.”
“Tell us about Nsara,” Budur asked for the thousandth time.
Idelba shrugged; she was not in the mood. She never was, to begin with; it took a while to break through the barrier of regrets to get her to that time. Her first husband, divorcing her near the end of her fertility, with no children; her second husband, dying young; she had a lot of regrets to get through. But if Budur was patient and merely followed her around the terrace, and in and out of rooms, she often would make the passage, helped perhaps by her shifts from room to room, matching the way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind . . .
First Idelba would speak of the weather there, the storm-tossed Atlantic rolling in with water, wind, cloud, rain, fog, sleet, mist, sometimes snow, all broken by sunny days with their low shards of light emblazoning the seafront and the rivermouth, the docks of the giant city filling the valley on both banks all the way upstream to Anjou, all the states of Asia and Firanja come west to this westernmost town, to meet the other great influx by sea, people from all over the world, including the handsome Hodenosaunee, and the shivering exiles from Inka, with their serapes and gold jewellery splashing the dark grey afternoons of the storm-thrashed winters with little bits of metallic colour. These exotics all together made Nsara fascinating, Idelba said, as did the unwelcome embassies of the Chinese and Tranvancoris, enforcing the terms of the postwar settlement, standing there like monuments to the Islamic defeat in the war, long windowless blocks at the back of the harbour district. Describing all this, Idelba’s eyes would begin to gleam and her voice grow animated, and she almost always, if she did not cut herself short, ended by exclaiming Nsara! Nsara! Ohhh, Nssssarrrrra! And then sometimes sit down wherever she was and hold her head in her hands, overwhelmed. It was, Budur was sure, the most exciting and wonderful city on Earth.
The Travancoris had of course founded a Buddhist monastery school there, as they had in every city and town on Earth, it seemed, with all the most modern departments and laboratories, right next to the old madressa and the mosque, still operating much as they had been since the 900s. The Buddhist monks and teachers made the clerics of the madressa look very ignorant and provincial, Idelba said, but they were always courteous to Muslim practices, very unobtrusive and respectful, and over time a number of sufi teachers and reformist clerics had eventually built laboratories of their own, and had taken classes at the monastery schools to prepare to work on questions of natural law in their own establishments. “They gave us time to swallow and digest the bitter pill of our defeat,” Idelba said of these Buddhists. “The Chinese were smart to stay away and let these people be their emissaries. That way we never really see how ruthless the Chinese are. We think the Travancoris are the whole story.”
But it seemed to Budur that the Chinese were not so hard as they could have been. The reparation payments were within the realm of the possible, Father admitted, or if they were not, the debts were always being forgiven, or put off. And in Firanja, at least, the Buddhist monastery schools and hospitals were the only signs of the victors of the war imposing their will — almost; that dark part, the shadow of the conquerors, opium, was becoming more and more common in Firanji cities, and Father declared angrily after reading the newspapers that as it all came from Afghanistan and Burma, its shipment to Firanja was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese. Even in Turi one saw the poor souls in the working district cafes downriver, stupefied by the oddsmelling smoke, and in Nsara Idelba said the drug was widespread, like any other world city in that regard, even though it was Islam’s world city, the only Islamic capital not destroyed by the war; Konstantiniyye, Cairo, Moscow, Teheran, Zanzibar, Damascus and Baghdad had been firebombed, and not yet completely rebuilt.
Nsara had survived, however, and now it was the sufis’ city, the scientists’ city, Idelba’s city; she had gone to it after a childhood in Turi and at the family farm in the Alps., she had gone to school there, and mathematical formulations had spoken to her as if speaking aloud from the page; she understood them, she spoke that strange alchemical language. Old men explained its rules of grammar to her, and she followed them and did the work, learned more, made her mark in theoretical speculations about the nature of microscopic matter when she was only twenty years old. “Young minds are often the strongest in maths,” she said later already outside the experience itself. Into the labs of Nsara, then, helping the famous Lisbi and his team to bolt a cyclic accelerator together, getting married, then getting divorced, then, apparently very quickly, rather mysteriously, Budur thought, getting remarried, which was almost unheard of in Turi; working again with her second husband, very happily, then his unexpected death; and her again mysterious return to Turi, her retreat.
Budur asked once, “Did you wear the veil there?”
“Sometimes,” Idelba said. “It depended on the situation. The veil has a kind of power, in certain situations. All such signs stand for other things; they are sentences spoken in matter. The hijab can say to strangers, “I am Islamic and in solidarity with my men, against you and all the world.” To Islamic men it can say, “I will play this foolish game, this fantasy of yours, but only if in return you do everything I tell you to. For some men this trade, this capitulation to love, is a kind of release from the craziness of being a man. So the veil can be like putting on a magician queen’s cape.” But seeing Budur’s hopeful expression she added, “Or it can be like putting on a slave’s collar, certainly.”
“So sometimes you didn’t wear one?”
“Usually I did not. In the lab it would have been silly. I wore a lab jellabah, like the men. We were there to study atoms, to study nature. That is the greatest godliness! And without gender. That simply isn’t what it’s about. So, the people you are working with, you see them face to face, soul to soul.” Eyes shining, she quoted from some old poem:
Every moment an epiphany arrives,
and cleaves the mountain asunder.
This had been the way of it for Idelba in her youth; and now she sat i
n her brother’s little middle-class harem, “protected” by him in a way that gave her frequent attacks of hem, that in truth made her a fairly volatile person, like a Yasmina with a bent towards secrecy rather than garrulousness. Alone with Budur, pinning up laundry on the terrace, she would look at the treetops sticking over the walls and sigh. “If only I could walk again at dawn through the empty streets of the city! Blue, then pink — to deny one that is absurd. To deny one the world, on one’s own terms — it’s archaic! It’s unacceptable.”
But she did not run away. Budur did not fully understand why. Surely Aunt Idelba was capable of tramming down the hill to the railway station, and taking a train to Nsara, and finding lodgings there — somewhere — and getting a job that would support her — somehow? And if not her, then whom? What woman could do it? None of good repute; not if Idelba couldn’t. The only time Budur dared to ask her about it, she only shook her head brusquely and said, “There are other reasons too. I can’t talk about it.”
So there was something quite frightening to Budur about Idelba’s presence in their home, a daily reminder that a woman’s life could crash like an aeroplane out of the sky. The longer it went on the more disturbing Budur found it, and she noticed that Idelba too grew more agitated, wandering from room to room reading and muttering, or working over her papers with a big mathematical calculator, a net of strings holding beads of different colours. She wrote for hours on her blackboard, and the chalk squeaked and clicked and sometimes snapped off in her fingers. She talked on the phone down in the courtyard, sounding upset sometimes, pleased at others; doubting, or excited — and all about numbers, letters, the value of this and that, strengths and weaknesses, forces of microscopic things that no one would ever see. She said to Budur once, staring at her equations, “You know Budur, there is a very great deal of energy locked into things. The Travancori Chandaala was the deepest thinker we ever have had on this Earth; you could say the Long War was a catastrophe just because of his death alone. But he left us a lot, and the energy-mass equivalence — look — a mass, that’s just a measure for a certain weight, say — you multiply it by the speed light, and square the result — multiply it by half a million li per second, think of that! — then take the square of that, so — see — enormous numbers result, for even a little pinch of matter. That’s the qi energy locked up in it. A strand of your hair has more energy in it than a locomotive.”
“No wonder it’s so hard to get a brush through it,” Budur said uneasily, and Idelba laughed.
“But there’s something wrong?” Budur asked.
At first Idelba did not answer. She was thinking, and lost to all around her. Then she stared at Budur.
“Something is wrong if we make it wrong. As always. Nothing in nature is wrong in itself.”
Budur wasn’t so sure of that. Nature made men and women, nature made flesh and blood, hearts, periods, bitter feelings . . . sometimes it all seemed wrong to Budur, as if happiness were a stale scrap of bread, and all the swans of her heart were fighting for it, starving for it.
The roof of the house was forbidden to the women; it was a place where they might be observed from the roof terraces higher up Turi’s Eastern Hill. And yet the men never used it, and it was the perfect place to get above the street’s treetops, and have a view of the Alps to the south of Lake Turi. So, when the men were all gone, and Ahmet asleep in his chair by the gate, Aunt Idelba and cousin Yasmina would use the laundry drying posts as the legs of a ladder, placing them in olive jars and lashing them together, so that they could climb the lashings very gingerly, with the girls below and Idelba above holding the posts. Up they would go until they were all on the roof, in the dark, under the stars, in the wind, whispering so that Ahmet would not hear them, whispering so that they would not shout at the top of their lungs. The Alps in full moonlight stood there like white cardboard cut-outs at the back of a puppet stage, perfectly vertical, the very image of what mountains should look like. Yasmina brought up her candles and powders to say the magic spells that would drive her male admirers to distraction — as if they weren’t already — but Yasmina had an insatiable desire for men’s regard, sharpened no doubt by the lack of access to it in the harem. Her Travancori incense would swirl up into the night, sandalwood, musk, saffron, nagi, and with their exotic scents filling her head it would seem to Budur a different world, vaster, more mysteriously meaningful — things suffused with their meanings as if with a liquid, right to the limits of surface tension, everything become a symbol of itself, the moon the symbol of moon, the sky the symbol of sky, the mountains the symbol of mountains, all bathed in a dark blue sea of longing. Longing the very essence of longing, painful and beautiful, bigger than the world itself.
Once, however, the full moon came, and Idelba did not organize an expedition to the roof terrace. She had spent many hours that month on the telephone, and after each conversation had been uncharacteristically subdued. She hadn’t described to the girls the contents of these calls, or said who she had been talking to, though from her manner of talk Budur assumed it was her nephew, as usual. But no discussion of them at all.
Perhaps it was this that made Budur sensitive and wary of some change. On the night of the full moon she scarcely slept, waking every watch to see the moving shadows on the floor, waking from dreams of anxious flight through the alleys of the old town, escaping something behind her she never quite saw. Near dawn she woke to a noise from the terrace, and looked out of her little window to see Idelba carrying the laundry poles down from the terrace into the stairwell. Then the olive jars as well.
Budur slipped out into the hall and down to the window at the carrel overlooking the yard in front. Idelba was constructing their ladder against the side of the household wall, just around the corner of the house from Ahmet’s locked gate. She would top the wall next to a big elm tree that stood in the alley running between the walls of their house and the al-Dins’ next door, who were from Neshapur.
Without a moment’s hesitation, without any thought at all, Budur ran back to her room and dressed quickly, then ran downstairs and back out into the yard, around the corner of the house, glancing around the corner to be sure Idelba had gone.
She had. The way was clear; Budur could follow without impediment.
This time she did hesitate; and it would be difficult to describe her thoughts in that crucial moment of her life. No particular train of thought occupied her mind, but rather a kind of balancing of her whole existence: the harem, her mother’s moods, her father’s indifference to her, Ahab’s simple face always behind her like an idiot animus, Yasmina’s weeping; all of Turi at once, balanced on its two hills on each side of the River Limat, and in her head; beyond all that, huge cloudy masses of feeling, like the clouds one saw boiling up over the Alps. All inside her chest; and outside her a sensation as if clusters of eyes were trained on her, the ghost audience to her life, perhaps, out there always whether she saw them or not, like the stars. Something like that. It is always thus at the moment of change, when we rise up out of the everyday and get clear of the blinkers of habit, and stand naked to existence, to the moment of choice, vast, dark, windy. The world is huge in these moments, huge. Too big to bear. Visible to all the ghosts of the world. The centre of the universe.
She lurched forwards. She ran to the ladder, climbed swiftly; it was no different to when it was set upstairs between terrace and roof. The branches of the elm were big and solid, it was easy to climb down far enough in them to make a final jump to the ground, jarring her fully awake, after which she rolled to her feet as smoothly as if she had been in on the plan from the start.
She tiptoed to the street and looked towards the tram stop. Her heart was thumping hard now, and she was hot in the chill air. She could take the tram or walk straight down the narrow streets, so steep that in several places they were staired. She was sure Idelba was off to the railway station, and if she was wrong, she could give up the chase.
Even wearing a veil it was too early for
a girl from a good family to be on the tram alone; indeed, it was always too early for a respectable girl to be out alone. So she hustled over to the top of the first stair alley, and began hurrying down the weaving course, through courtyard, park, alley, the stair of the roses, the tunnel made by Japanese fire maples, down and down the familiar way to the old town and the bridge crossing the river to the railway station. Onto the bridge, where she looked upstream to the patch of sky between old stone buildings, its blue arched over the pink hem of the little bit of mountains visible, an embroidery dropped into the far end of the lake.
She was losing her resolve when she saw Idelba in the station, reading the schedule for track listings. Budur ducked behind a streetlight post, ran around the building into the doors on the other side, and likewise read a schedule. The first train for Nsara was on Track 16, at the far side of the station, leaving at five sharp, which had to be close. She checked the clock hanging over the row of trains, under the roof of the big shed; five minutes to spare. She slipped onto the last car of the train.
The train jerked slightly and was off. Budur moved forwards up the train, car to car, holding onto the seat backs, her heart knocking faster and faster. What was she going to say to Idelba? And what if Idelba was not on the train, and Budur off to Nsara on her own, with no money?
But there Idelba sat, hunched over, looking forwards out of the window. Budur steeled herself and burst through the compartment door and rushed to her weeping, threw herself on her, “I’m sorry, Aunt Idelba, I didn’t know you were going this far, I only followed to keep you company, I hope you have money to pay for my ticket too?”
“Oh name of Allah!” Idelba was shocked; then furious; mostly at herself, Budur judged through her tears, though she took it out for a little while on Budur, saying, “This is important business I’m on, this is no girl’s prank! Oh, what will happen? What will happen? I should send you right back on the next train!”
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 56