The Years of Rice and Salt (68 page)

Idelba shook her head at the great ages claimed for the settlement, and the dating methods used, and wondered aloud about certain geochronologies she had in mind that might be pursued. But after a while she fell as silent as the rest, and stood staring down into the spare and beautiful interiors of the old ones' homes. These things of ours that endure.

Back in the island's one town, Kirkwall, they walked through stone-paved streets to another little Buddhist temple complex, set behind the locals' ancient cathedral, a tiny thing compared to the big skeletons left behind on the mainland, but roofed and complete. The temple behind it was very modest, a matter of four narrow buildings surrounding a rock garden, in a style Budur thought of as Chinese.

Here Idelba was greeted by Hanea and Ganagweh. Budur was shocked to see them, and they laughed at the expression on her face. “We told you we would be seeing you again soon, didn't we?”

“Yes,” Budur said. “But here?”

“This is the biggest Hodenosaunee community in Firanja,” Hanea said. “We came down to Nsara from here, actually. And we return here quite often.”

After they were shown the complex and sat down in a room off the courtyard for tea, Idelba and Hanea slipped away, leaving a nonplussed Budur behind with Ganagweh.

“Mother said they would need to talk for an hour or two,” Ganagweh told her. “Do you know what they're talking about?”

“No,” said Budur. “Do you?”

“No. I mean, I assume it has something to do with your aunt's efforts to create stronger diplomatic relations between our countries. But that's just stating the obvious.”

“Yes,” Budur said, extemporizing. “I know she's been interested in that. But meeting you in Kirana Fawwaz's class as I did . . .”

“Yes. And then the way you showed up at the monastery there. It seems we are fated to cross paths.” She was smiling in a way Budur couldn't interpret. “Let's go for a walk, those two will talk for a long while. There's a lot to discuss, after all.”

This was news to Budur, but she said nothing, and spent the day wandering Kirkwall with Ganagweh, a very high-spirited girl, tall, quick, confident; the narrow streets and burly men of the Orkneys held no fears for her. Indeed at the end of the town tram line they walked far down a deserted strand overlooking the big bay that had once been such a busy naval base, and Ganagweh stopped at some boulders and stripped off her clothes and ran screaming out into the water, bursting back out in a flurry of whitewater, shrieking, her lustrous dark skin gleaming in the sun as she dried off with her fingers, flinging the water at Budur and daring her to take the plunge. “It's good for you! It's not that cold, it will wake you up!”

It was just the kind of thing Yasmina had always insisted they do, but shyly Budur declined, finding it hard to look at the big wet beautiful animal standing next to her in the sun; and when she walked down to touch the water, she was glad she had; it was freezing. She did feel as if she had woken up, aware of the brisk salt wind and Ganagweh's wet black hair swinging side to side like a dog's, spraying her. Ganagweh laughed at her and dressed while still damp. As they walked back, they passed a group of pale-skinned children who regarded them curiously. “Let's get back and see how the old women are doing,” Ganagweh said. “Funny to see such grandmothers taking the fate of the world into their own hands, isn't it?”

“Yes,” Budur said, wondering what in the world was going on.

11
On the flight back to Nsara, Budur asked Idelba about it, but Idelba shook her head. She didn't want to talk about it, and was busy writing in her notebook. “Later,” she said.

Back in Nsara, Budur worked and studied. At Kirana's suggestion she read about southeast Asia, and learned how the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures had mixed there to make a vibrant new offspring, which had survived the war and was now using the great botanical and mineral riches of Burma and the Malay peninsula, and Sumatra and Java and Borneo and Mindanao, to create a group of peoples united against China's centripetal power, freeing itself from Chinese influence. They had spread into Aozhou, the big burnt island continent south of them, and even across the oceans to Inka, and in the other direction to Madagascar and south Africa: it was a kind of emerging southern world culture, with the huge cities of Pyinkayaing, Jakarta, and Kwinana on the west coast of Aozhou leading the way, trading with Travancore, and building like maniacs, erecting cities that included many steel skyscrapers more than a hundred floors tall. The war had damaged but not destroyed these cities, and now the governments of the world met in Pyinkayaing whenever they tried to work out some more durable and just postwar dispensation.

There were more meetings all the time, as the situation became more and more deranged; anything to keep war from returning, as so very little had been resolved by it. Or so the members of the defeated alliance felt. It was unclear at this point if the Chinese and their allies, or the countries of Yingzhou, who had entered the conflict so much later than the rest, had any interest in accommodating Islamic concerns. Kirana remarked casually in class one day that it was very possible Islam was in the trash bin of history without yet knowing it; and the more Budur read of her books, the less sure she could be that this was necessarily a bad thing for the world. Old religions died; and if an empire tried to conquer the world and failed, it generally then disappeared.

Kirana's own writing made that very clear. Budur took out her books from the monastery library, some published nearly twenty years before, during the war itself when Kirana had to have been quite young, and she read them with close interest, hearing Kirana's voice in her head for every sentence; it was just like a transcript of her talking, except even more long-winded. She had written on many subjects, both theoretical and practical. Whole books of her African writings were concerned with various public health and women's issues. Budur opened randomly, and found herself reading a lecture that had been given to midwives in the Sudan.

If the parents of the girl insist, if they cannot be talked out of it, it is extremely important that only one-third of the clitoris should be cut off, and two thirds left intact. Someone who practically attacks a girl with a knife, cutting off everything, this goes against the words of the Prophet. Men and women are meant to be equal before God. But if a woman's entire clitoris is cut off it leaves her a kind of eunuch, she becomes cold, lazy, without desire, without interest, humorless, like a mud wall, a piece of cardboard, without spark, without goals, without desire, like a puddle of standing water, lifeless, her children are unhappy, her husband is unhappy, she makes nothing of her life. Those of you who must perform circumcisions, therefore remember: cut off one third, leave two thirds! Cut off one third, leave two thirds!

Budur flipped the pages of the book, disturbed. After a while she collected herself, and read the new page that presented itself:

I was privileged to witness the return of Raiza Tarami from her trip to the New World, where she had attended the conference at Yingzhou's Long Island on women's issues, just after the end of the war. Conference members who came from throughout the world were greatly surprised to see this Nsarene woman exhibiting a full awareness of all the issues that mattered. They had been expecting a backward woman living behind the walls of the harem, ignorant and veiled. But Raiza was not like that, she stood on the same footing as her sisters from China, Burma, Yingzhou and Travancore, indeed she had been forced by conditions at home to explore theoretically far in advance of most.

So she represented us well, and when she returned to Firanja, she had come to believe that the veil was the biggest obstacle in the way of the progress of the Muslim woman, as standing for general complicity in the whole system. The veil had to fall if the reactionary system were to fall. And so, upon her arrival on the docks of Nsara, she met her companions from the women's institute, and she stood before them with her face unveiled. Her immediate companions had removed their veils as well. Around us the signs of disapproval became apparent in the crowd, shouting and jostling and the like. Then women in the crowd began to support the unveiled, by removing the veils from their own faces and throwing them to the ground. It was a beautiful moment. After that the veil started to disappear in Nsara with great speed. In just a few years unveiling had spread throughout the country, and that brick in the wall of the reactionaries had been removed. Nsara became known as the leader of Firanja because of this action. This I was lucky enough to witness with my own eyes.

Budur took a breath, marking the passage as something she would read to her blind soldiers. And as the weeks passed she read on, working her way through several volumes of Kirana's essays and lectures, an exhausting experience, for Kirana never hesitated to attack head-on and at length everything that she disliked. And yet how she had lived! Budur found herself ashamed of her cloistered childhood and youth, the fact that she was twenty-three, now almost twenty-four, and had not yet done anything; by the time Kirana Fawwaz was that age she had already spent years in Africa, fighting in the war and working in hospitals. There was so much lost time to be made up!

Budur also read in many books Kirana had not assigned, concentrating for a while on the Sino-Muslim cultures that had existed in central Asia, how they had attempted for a number of centuries to reconcile the two cultures: the books' bad old photographs showed these people, Chinese in appearance, Muslim in belief, Chinese in language, Muslim in law; it was hard to imagine such a mongrel people had ever existed. The Chinese had killed the greater part of them in the war, and dispersed the rest across the Dahai to the deserts and jungles of Yingzhou and Inka, where they worked in mines and on plantations, in effect slaves, though the Chinese claimed no longer to practice slavery, calling it a Muslim atavism. Whatever they called it, the Muslims in their northwest provinces were gone. And it could happen everywhere.

It began to seem to Budur there was no part of history she could read that was not depressing, disgusting, frightening, horrible; unless it be the New World's, where the Hodenosaunee and the Dinei had organized a civilization capable, just barely, of resisting the Chinese to their west and the Firanjis to their east. Except even there, diseases and plagues had wrought such havoc on them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they had been reduced to a rather small populace, hiding in the center of their island. Nevertheless, small in number though they were, they had persevered, and adapted. They had remained somewhat open to foreign influences, tying everything they could into their leagues, becoming Buddhists, allying themselves with the Travancori League on the other side of the world, which indeed they had helped to form by their example; advancing from strength to strength, in short, even when hidden deep in their wild fastness, far from both coasts and from the Old World generally. Maybe that had helped. Taking what they could use, fighting off the rest. A place where women had always had power. And now that the Long War had shattered the Old World, they had become a sudden new giant across the seas, represented here by tall handsome people like Hanea and Ganagweh, walking the streets of Nsara in long fur or oilskin coats, butchering Firanjic with friendly dignity. Kirana had not written much about them, as far as Budur could find; but Idelba was dealing with them, in some mysterious fashion that began to involve packages, now, that Budur helped take on the tram up to Hanea and Ganagweh's temple on the north coast. Four times she did this for Idelba without asking what it was for, and Idelba did not offer much explanation. Again, as in Turi, it seemed to Budur that Idelba knew things the rest of them did not. It was a very complicated life Idelba was living. Men at the gate, some of them pining for her romantically, one pounding on the locked door shouting, “Idelbaaa, I love you, pleeease!” and drunkenly singing in a language Budur didn't recognize while punishing a guitar, Idelba meanwhile disappearing into their room and an hour later pretending nothing had occurred; then again, gone days at a time, and back, brow deeply furrowed, sometimes happy, sometimes agitated . . . a very complicated life. And yet more than half in secrecy.

12
“Yes,” Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the café they were sitting in that day, “they may be the hope of all humanity. But I don't think we understand them well enough to say for sure. When they have completed their takeover of the world, then we will learn more.”

“Studying history has made you cynical,” Budur noted. Kirana's knee was pressed against hers again. Budur let her do it without ever responding one way or the other. “Or, to put it more accurately, what you have seen in your travels and teaching have made you a pessimist.” To be fair.

“Not at all,” Kirana said, lighting a cigarette. She gestured at it and said parenthetically, “You see how they already have us enslaved to their weed. Anyway, I am not a pessimist. A realist only. Full of hope, ha ha. But you can see the odds if you dare to look.” She grimaced and took a long drag on the cigarette. “Sorry—cramps. Ha. History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over.”

Budur laughed, shocked and amused. It was not a thought that had ever occurred to her.

Kirana smiled slyly, seeing this. “The red egg,” she said. “Blood and life.” Her knee pressed hard on Budur's. “The question is, will the hordes of sperm ever find the egg? Will one slip ahead, fructify the seed within, and the world become pregnant? Will a true civilization ever be born? Or is history doomed always to be a sterile spinster!”

They laughed together, Budur uncomfortable in several different ways. “It has to pick the right partner,” she ventured.