FOUR
As Kirana spoke, Budur saw in her mind the blind men in the hospital; the walled residential streets of Turi; her father’s face as he was reading to her mother, the sight of the ocean; a white tomb in the jungle; indeed everything in her life, and many things she had never thought of before. Her mouth hung open, she was stunned, frightened — but also elated, by every single shocking word of it: it confirmed everything she had suspected in her ignorant balked furious girlhood, trapped in her father’s house. She had spent her whole life thinking that something was seriously wrong with herself, or with the world, or both. Now reality seemed to have opened up under her like a trapdoor, as all her suspicions were confirmed in glorious style. She held onto her seat, even, and stared at the woman lecturing them, hypnotized as if by some great hawk circling overhead, hypnotized not just by her angry analysis of all that had gone wrong, but by the image she evoked thereby of History itself, the huge long string of events that had led to this moment, here and now in this rainlashed western harbour city; hypnotized by the oracle of time itself, rasping on in her urgent smoky crow’s voice. So much had happened already, nahdas and nakbas, time after time; what could be said after all that? One had to have courage even to try to talk about it.
But very clearly this Kirana Fawwaz did not lack for courage. Now she stopped, and looked around at the half-emptied room. “Well,” she said cheerfully, acknowledging with a brief sardonic smile Budur’s round-eyed look, somewhat like that of the astonished fish in the boxes at the market. “It seems we have driven out everyone who can be driven out. Left are the brave of heart to venture into this dark country, our past.”
The brave of heart or the weak of limb, Budur thought, glancing around. An old one-armed soldier looked on imperturbably. The one-eyed man still sat next to her. Several women of various ages sat looking around uneasily, shifting in their seats. A few looked to Budur like women of the street, and one of these was grinning. Not what Budur had imagined when Idelba had talked about the Nsarene Madressa and Institutes of Higher Learning; the flotsam of Dar al-Islam, in fact, the sorry survivors of the Nakba, the swans in winter; women who had lost their husbands, fiancés, fathers, brothers, women who been orphaned and never since had the chance to meet a single man; and the war-wounded themselves, including a blinded veteran like the ones Budur read to, led to the class by his sister, and then the one-armed one, and the eyepatch next to her; also a Hodenosaunee mother and daughter, supremely confident and dignified, relaxed, interested, but with nothing at stake; also a longshoreman with a bad back, who seemed to be there mainly to get out of the rain for six hours a week. These were the ones that remained, lost souls of the city, looking for something indoors to occupy them, they were not sure what. But perhaps, for the moment at least, it would do to stay here and listen to Kirana Fawwaz’s harsh lecture.
“What I want to do,” she said then, “is to cut through all the stories, through the million stories we have constructed to defend ourselves from the reality of the Nakba, to reach explanation. To the meaning of what has happened, do you understand? This is an introduction to history, like Khaldun’s, only spoken among us, in conversation. I will be suggesting various projects for further research as we go along. Now let’s go and get a drink.”
She led them out into the dusk of the long northern evening, to a cafe behind the docks, where they found acquaintances from other parts of her life, already there eating late meals or smoking cigarettes or puffing on communal narghiles, and drinking little cups of thick coffee. They sat and talked through the long twilight, then far into the night, the docks out of the windows empty and calm, the lights from across the harbour squiggling on black water. The man with the eyepatch was a friend of Kirana’s, it turned out; his name was Hasan, and he introduced himself to Budur and invited her to sit on the wall bench next to him and his group of acquaintances, including singers and actors from the institute, and the city’s theatres. “My fellow student here, I venture to say,” he said to the others, “was quite taken by our professor’s opening remarks.”
Budur nodded shyly and they cackled at her. She inquired about ordering a cup of coffee.
The talk around the dirty marble tabletops ranged widely, as was true in all such places, even back in Turi. The news in the newspapers. Interpretations of the war. Gossip about the city officials. Talk about plays and the cinema. Kirana sometimes rested and listened, sometimes talked on as if she were still in her class.
“Iran is the wine of history, they are always getting crushed.”
“Some vintages are better than others so for them all great civilizations must finally be crushed.”
“This is merely al-Katalan again. It is too simple.”
“A world history has to simplify,” the old one-armed soldier said. His name was Naser Shah, Budur learned; his accent when speaking Firanjic marked him as Iranian. “The trick of it is to get at causes of things, to generate some sense of the overall story.”
“But if there isn’t one?” Kirana asked.
“There is,” Naser said calmly. “All people who have ever lived on Earth have acted together to make a global history. It is one story. Certain patterns are evident in it. The collisionary theories of Ibrahim al- Lanzhou, for instance. No doubt they’re just yin and yang again, but they make it seem pretty clear that much of what we call progress comes from the clash of two cultures.”
“Progress by collision, what kind of progress is this, did you see those two trams the other day after the one jumped its tracks?”
Kirana said, “Al-Lanzhou’s core civilizations represent the three logically possible religions, with Islam believing in one god, India in many gods, and China in no gods.”
“That’s why China won,” said Hasan, his one eye gleaming with mischief. “They turned out to be right. Earth congealed out of cosmic dust, life appeared and evolved, until a certain ape made more and more sounds, and off we went. Never any God involved, nothing supernatural, no eternal souls reincarnated time after time. Only the Chinese really faced that, leading the way with their science, honouring nothing but their ancestors, working only for their descendants. And so they dominate us all!”
“It’s just that there’s more of them,” one of the questionable women said.
“But they can support more people on less land. This proves they are right!”
Naser said, “Each culture’s strength can also be its weakness. We saw this in the war. China’s lack of religion made them horribly cruel.”
The Hodenosaunee women from the class appeared and joined them; they too were acquaintances of Kirana’s. Kirana welcomed them, saying, “Here are our conquerors, a culture in which women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”
“They have built them all,” proclaimed the oldest woman there, who up till now had only sat there knitting. She was at least eighty, and therefore had lived through most of the war, start to finish, childhood to old age. “No civilizations exist without the homes women build from the inside.”
“Well, how much political power women have taken, then. How comfortable their men are with the idea of women having this kind of power.”
“That would be China.”
“No, the Hodenosaunee.”
“Not Travancore?”
No one ventured to say.
“This should be investigated!” Kirana said. “This will be one of your projects. A history of women in the other cultures of the world — their actions as political creatures — their fates. That this is missing from history as we have been given it so far, is a sign that we still live in the wreckage of patriarchy. And nowhere more so than in Islam.”
FIVE
Budur of course told Idelba all about Kirana’s lecture and the after-class meeting, describing them excitedly while they washed dishes together, and then sheets. Idelba nodded and asked questions, interested; but in the end she said, “I hope you will keep working hard on your statistics c
lass. Talk about these kinds of things can go on for ever, but numbers are the only thing that will get you beyond talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills. Speaking of which, I think I can get you a job washing glassware in the lab. That would be good, it will give you some more money, and teach you that you want some job skills. Don’t get sucked into the whirlpool of cafe talk.”
“But talk can be good! It’s teaching me so many things, not just about history, but what it all means. It sorts it out, as we used to do in the harem.”
“Exactly! You can talk all you want in the harem! But it’s only in institutes that you can do science. Since you’ve bothered to come here, you might as well take advantage of what’s offered.”
This gave Budur pause. Idelba saw her thinking about it, and went on:
“Even if you do want to study history, which is perfectly sensible, there is a way of doing it that goes beyond cafe talk, that inspects the actual artefacts and sites left from the past, and establishes what can be asserted with physical evidence to back it, as in the other sciences. Firanja is full of old places that are being investigated for the first time in a scientific manner like this, and it is very interesting. And it will take decades to investigate them all, even centuries.”
She straightened up, held her lower back and rubbed it as she regarded Budur. “Come with me for a picnic on Friday. I’ll take you up the coast to see the menhirs.”
“The menhirs? What are they?”
“You will see on Friday.”
So on Friday they took the tram as far north up the coast as it ran, then changed to a bus and rode for half a watch, looking out at the apple orchards and the occasional glimpses of the dark blue ocean. Finally Idelba led the way off at one stop, and they walked west out of a tiny village, immediately into a forest of immense standing stones, set in long lines over a slightly rolling grassy plain, interrupted here and there by huge mature oak trees. It was an uncanny sight.
“Who put these here? The Franks?”
“Before the Franks. Before the Kelts, perhaps. No one is quite sure. Their living settlements have not been found with certainty, and it’s very difficult to date the time when these stones were dressed and stood on end.”
“It must have taken, I don’t know, centuries to put this many up!”
“It depends on how many of them there were doing it, I suppose. Maybe there were as many then as now, who can say? Only I would expect not, as we find no ruined cities, as they do in Egypt or the Middle West. No, it must have been a smaller population, taking a lot of time and effort.”
“But how can a historian work with stuff like this?” Budur asked at one point, as they walked down one of the long lanes created by the rows of stones, studying the patterns of black and yellow lichen that grew on their nobbled surfaces. Most were about twice Budur’s height, really massive things.
“You study things instead of stories. It’s something different from history, more a scientific inquiry of material conditions that early people lived in, things they made. Archaeology. Again, it is a science that began during the first Islamic flowering, in Syria and Iraq, then was not pursued again until the Nahda,” this being the rebirth of Islamic high culture in certain cities like Teheran and Cairo, in the half-century before the Long War started and wrecked everything. “Now our understanding of physics and geology is such that new methods of inquiry are being suggested all the time. And construction and reconstruction projects are digging up all kinds of new finds as well, and people are going out deliberately looking for more, and it is all coming together in a very exciting way. It is a science taking off, if you know what I mean. Most interesting. And Firanja is turning out to be one of the best places to practise it. This is an ancient place.”
She gestured at the long rows of stones, like a crop seeded by great stone gods who had never come back to make a harvest. Clouds scudded by overhead, and the blue sky seemed flat and low over them. “Not just these, or the stone rings in Britain, but stone tombs, monuments, whole villages. I’ll have to take you up to the Orkneys with me some time. I may be wanting to go up there soon in any case, I’ll take you along. Anyway, you think about studying this kind of thing too, as a grounding for you while you listen to Madam Fawwaz and all her scheherazading.”
Budur rubbed her hand over a stone dressed by a thin lichen coat of many colours. Clouds rushed by. “I will.”
SIX
Classes, a new job cleaning Idelba’s lab, walking the docks and the jetty, dreaming of a new synthesis, an Islam that included what was important in the Buddhism so prevalent in the labs: Budur’s days passed in a blur of thought, everything she saw and did fed into it. Most of the women in Idelba’s lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks. Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it — the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato’s tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.
Budur looked into classes in this new field, archaeology. History that was more than talk, that could be a science . . . The people working on it were an odd mix, geologists, architects, physicists, Quranic scholars, historians, all studying not just the stories, but the things left behind.
Meanwhile the talk went on, in Kirana’s class and in the cafes afterwards. One night in a cafe Budur asked Kirana what she thought of archaeology, and she replied, “Yes, archaeology is very important, sure. Although the standing stones are rather mute when it comes to telling us things. But they’re discovering caves in the south, filled with wall paintings that appear to be very old, older even than the Greeks. I can give you the names of the people at Avignon involved with that.”
“Thanks.”
Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, “What’s interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. Just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it — for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them I mean, in a weave with them.”
“In the harem it’s obvious,” Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine ‘practice sessions’ of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana’s leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: “It’s like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women’s history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.”
“Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modelling various woman-to-woman behaviours. Demeter, Persephone . . . they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven’t heard of her? I’ll give you the references.”
SEVEN
This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain-lashed cafes. Kirana lent Budur books on all kinds of topics, but especially Firanji history: the Golden Horde’s survival of the plague that had killed the Christians; the continuing influence of the Horde’s nomad structur
es on the descendant cultures of the Skandistani states; the infill of al-Andalus, Nsara and the Keltic Islands by Maghribis; the zone of contention between the two infilling cultures in the Rhine Valley. Other volumes described the movement of Turks and Arabs through the Balkans, adding to the discord of the Firanji emirates, the little taifa states that fought for centuries, according to loyalties Sunni or Shiite, sufi or Wahabbi, Turkic or Maghribi or Tartar; fought for dominance or survival, often desperately, creating conditions usually repressive for women, so that only in the farthest west had there been any cultural advances before the Long War, a progressiveness that Kirana associated with the ocean, and contact with other cultures by sea, and with Nsara’s origins as a refuge for the heterodox and marginal, founded indeed by a woman, the fabled refugee Sultana Katima.
Budur took these books and tried reading from them aloud to her blind soldiers in the hospital. She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, which had been abandoned for nearly a century because of a series of violent earthquakes; how they had formed a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law, and all had been happy there, until the Shah had sent his armies east from Iran and crushed them as heretics.
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 58