The Years of Rice and Salt (69 page)

“Yes,” Kirana said with her sly emphasis, the corners of her mouth lifted just the tiniest bit. “The Martians, perhaps.”

Budur recalled cousin Yasmina's “practice kissing.” Women loving women; making love to women; it was common in the zawiyya, and presumably elsewhere; there were, after all, many more women than men in Nsara, as in the whole world. One saw hardly any men in their thirties or forties on the streets or in the cafés of Nsara, and the few one did see often seemed haunted or furtive, lost in an opium haze, aware they had somehow escaped a fate. No—that whole generation had been wiped out. And so one saw everywhere women in couples, hand in hand, living together in walk-ups or zawiyyas. More than once Budur had heard them in her own zawiyya, in the baths or bedrooms, or walking down the halls late at night. It was simply part of life, no matter what anyone said. And she had once or twice taken part in Yasmina's games in the harem, Yasmina would read aloud from her romance novels and listen to her wireless shows, the plaintive songs flying in from Venezia, and afterward she would walk around their courtyard singing at the moon, wishing to have a man spying on her in these moments, or leaping over the wall and taking her in his arms, but there were no men around to do it. Let's practice how it would be, she would mutter huskily in Budur's ear, so we will know what to do—she always said the same thing—and then she would kiss Budur passionately on the mouth, and press herself against her, and after Budur got over the surprise of it she felt the passion passed into her mouth by a kind of qi transference, and she kissed back thinking, Will the real thing ever make my pulse beat this hard? Could it?

And cousin Rima was even more skillful, though less passionate, than Yasmina, as like Idelba she had once been married, and later lived in a zawiyya in Roma, and she would observe them and say coolly, no, like this, straddle the leg of the man you are kissing, press your pubic bone hard against his thigh, it will drive him completely crazy, it makes a full circuit then, the qi circles around in the two of you like in a dynamo. And when they tried it they found it was true. After such a moment Yasmina would be pink cheeked, would cry unconvincingly, Oh we're bad, we're bad, and Rima would snort and say, It's like this in every harem there has ever been in the world. That's how stupid men are. That's how the world has gotten on.

Now, in the dregs of the night in this Nsarene café, Budur pressed back slightly against Kirana's knee, in a knowing manner, friendly but neutral. For now, she kept arranging always to leave with some of the other students, not meeting Kirana's eye when it counted—stringing her along, perhaps, because she was not sure what it would mean to her studies or to her life more generally, if she were to respond more positively and fall into it, whatever it might be, beyond the kissing and fondling. Sex she knew about, that would be the straightforward part; but what about the rest of it? She was not sure she wanted to get involved with this intense older woman, her teacher, still in some senses a stranger. But until you took the plunge, did not everyone remain a stranger forever?

13
They stood together, Budur and Kirana, at a garden party on a crowded patio overlooking the Liwaya River before it opened into its estuary, their upper arms just barely touching, as if by accident, as if the crush around the wealthy patron of the arts and philosopher Tahar Labid was so great that they had to do it to catch the beautiful pearls dropping from his lips; although in truth he was a terrible and obvious blowhard, a man who said your name over and over in conversation, almost every time he addressed you, so that it became very off-putting, as if he were trying to take you over, or simply to remember in his solipsism who he was talking to, never noticing that it made people want to escape him at all costs.

After a bit of this Kirana shuddered, at his self-absorption perhaps, too like hers to make her at all comfortable, and she led Budur away. She lifted Budur's hand, all bleached and cracked from her constant cleaning, and said, “You should wear rubber gloves. I should think they would make you at the lab.”

“They do. I do wear them. But sometimes they make it hard to hold on to things.”

“Nevertheless.”

This gruff concern for the health of her hands, from the great intellectual, the teacher—suddenly surrounded by an audience of her own, asking her what she thought of certain Chinese feminists . . . Budur watched her reply immediately and at length about their origins among Muslim Chinese, particularly Kang Tongbi, who, with the encouragement of her husband the Sino-Muslim scholar Ibrahim al-Lanzhou, set out the theoretical groundwork for a feminism later elaborated in the Chinese heartland by generations of late Qing women—much of their progress contested by the imperial bureaucracy, of course—until the Long War dissolved all previous codes of conduct in the pure rationality of total war, and women's brigades and factory crews established a position in the world that could never be retracted, no matter how hard the Chinese bureacrats tried. Kirana could recite by memory the wartime list of demands made by the Chinese Women's Industrial Workers Council, and now she did just that: “Equal rights for men and women, spread of women's education and facilities for it, improvement in position of women in the home, monogamy, freedom of marriage, encouragement of careers, a ban on concubines and the buying and selling of women, and on physical mutilation, improved political position, reform of prostitution.” It was a most strange-sounding song, or chant, or prayer.

“But you see, the Chinese feminists claimed women had it better in Yingzhou and Travancore, and in Travancore the feminists claimed to have learned it from the Sikhs, who learned it from the Quran. And here we focus on the Chinese. So that you see it has been a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, each imagining that it is better in a different country, and that we should fight to equal the others . . .” On she talked, weaving the last three centuries together most brilliantly, and all the while Budur clenched her cracked white hands, thinking, She wants you, she wants your hands healthy because if she has her way, they will be touching her.

Budur wandered away on her own, disturbed, saw Hasan on another terrace and went up to join the group around him, which included Naser Shah and the ancient grandmother from Kirana's class, looking at loose ends without her knitting kit in hand. It turned out they were brother and sister, and she the hostess of this party: Zainab Shah, very curt when Budur was finally introduced; and Hasan a longtime family friend of theirs. They had all known Kirana for years, and had taken her classes before, Budur learned from Naser as the conversations swirled around them.

“What bothers me is to see how repetitive and small-minded he could be, what a lawyer—”

“That's why it works in application—”

“Works for who? He was the lawyer of the clerics.”

“No writer, anyway.”

“The Quran is meant to be spoken and heard, in Arabic it is like music, he is such a poet. You must hear it in the mosque.”

“I will not go there. That's for people who want to be able to say, ‘I am better than you, simply because I assert a belief in Allah.' I reject that. The world is my mosque.”

“Religion is like a house of cards. One fingertap of fact and it all falls over.”

“Clever but not true, like most of your aphorisms.”

Budur left Naser and Hasan, and went to a long table containing snacks and glasses of red and white wine, eavesdropping as she walked, eating pickled herrings on crackers.

“I hear the council of ministers had to kowtow to the army to keep them out of the treasury, so it comes to the same thing in the end—”

“—the six lokas are names for the parts of the brain that perform the different kinds of mentation. The level of beasts is the cerebellum, the level of hungry ghosts the limbic archipelago, the human realm the speech lobes, the realm of the asuras is the frontal cortex, and the realm of the gods is the bridge between the two halves of the brain, which when activated gives us glimpses of a higher reality. It's impressive, really, sorting things out that clearly by pure introspection—”

“But that's only five, what about hell?”

“Hell is other people.”

“—I'm sure it doesn't add up to quite as many partners as that.”

“They've got control of the oceans, so they can come to us whenever they want, but we can't go to them without their permission. So—”

“So we should thank our lucky stars. We want the generals to feel as weak as possible.”

“True, but nothing in excess. We may find it becomes a case of from the coffeepot to the fire.”

“—it's well established that a belief in reincarnation floats around the world from one culture to the next, migrating to the cultures most stressed.”

“Maybe it migrates with the few souls who are actually transmigrating, ever think of that?”

“—with student after student, it's like a kind of compulsion. A replacement for friends or something like that. Sad really, but the students are really the ones who suffer, so it's hard to feel too sorry—”

“All history would have been different, if only . . .”

“Yes, if only? Only what?”

“If only we had conquered Yingzhou when we had the chance.”

“He's a true artist, it's not so easy working in scents, everyone has their own associations, but somehow he touches all the deepest ones everyone has, and as it's the sense most tied to memory, he really has an effect. That shift from vanilla to cordite to jasmine, those are just the dominant scents, of course, each waft is a mix of scores of them, I think, but what a progression, heartrending I assure you . . .”

Near the drinks table a friend of Hasan's, named Tristan, played an oud with a strange tuning, strumming simple chords over and over, and singing in one of the old Frankish languages. Budur sipped a glass of white wine and watched him play, forcing the voices talking around her from her attention. The man's music was interesting, the level tones of his voice hanging steadily in the air. His black moustache curved over his mouth. He caught Budur's eye, smiled briefly. The song came to an end and there was a patter of applause, and some of them surrounded him to ask questions. Budur moved in to hear his answers. Hasan joined them, and so Budur stood beside him. Tristan explained in clipped short phrases, as if he were shy. He didn't want to talk about his music. Budur liked the look of him. The songs were from France and Navarre, he said, and Provence. Third and fourth centuries. People asked for more, but he shrugged and put his oud in its case. He didn't explain, but Budur thought the crowd was simply too loud. Tahar was approaching the drinks table, and his group came with him.

“But I tell you, Vika, what happens is this—”

“—it all goes back to Samarqand, when there was still—”

“It would have to be beautiful and hard, make people ashamed.”

“That was the day, the very hour when it all started—”

“You, Vika, are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness.”

“But here's the thing—”

Budur slipped away from the group, and then, feeling tired of the party and its guests, she left the party as well. She read the schedule posted at the tram stop and saw that it would be almost half a watch before another came, so she took off walking on the river path. By the time she reached the city center she was enjoying walking just for itself, and she continued on out the jetty, through the fish shops and out into the wind, where the jetty became an asphalt road cracking over huge boulders that stood greenly out of the oil-slicked water slurping against their sides. She watched the clouds and the sky, and felt suddenly happy—an emotion like a child inside her, a happiness in which worry was a vague and distant thing, no more than a cloud's shadow on the dark blue surface of the sea. To think her life might have passed without her ever seeing the ocean!

14
Idelba came to her one night in the zawiyya and said, “Budur, you must remember never to tell anyone what I said to you about alactin. About what splitting it could mean.”

“Of course not. But why do you mention it?”

“Well . . . we are beginning to feel that there is some kind of surveillance being placed on us. Apparently from a part of the government, some security department. It's a bit murky. But anyway, best to be very careful.”

“Why don't you go to the police?”

“Well.” She refrained from rolling her eyes, Budur could see it. Voice lowered to a gentleness: “The police are part of the army. That's from the war, and it never changed. So . . . we prefer not to draw any attention whatsoever to the issues involved.”

Budur gestured around them. “Surely we have nothing to worry about here, though. No woman in a zawiyya would ever betray a housemate, not to the army.”

Idelba stared at her to see if she was being serious. “Don't be naïve,” she said finally, less gently, and with a pat on the knee got up to go to the bathroom.

This was not the only cloud to come at this time and drop its shadow on Budur's happiness. Throughout Dar al-Islam, unrest was filling the newspapers, and inflation was universal. Military takeovers of the governments in Skandistan and Moldava and al-Alemand and the Tyrol, very close to Turi, alarmed the rest of the world all out of proportion to their puny size, as seeming to indicate a resurgence of Muslim aggressivity. The whole of Islam was accused of breaking the commitments forced on them at the Shanghai Conference after the war, as if Islam were a monolithic block, a laughable concept even in the depths of the war itself. Sanctions and even embargoes were being called for in China and India and Yingzhou. The effect of the threat alone was felt immediately in Firanja: the price of rice shot up, then the price of potatoes and maple syrup, and coffee beans. Hoarding quickly followed, old wartime habits kicking in, and even as prices rose staples were cleared off the shelves of the groceries the moment they appeared. This affected everything else as well, both food and other matters. Hoarding was a very contagious phenomenon, a bad mentality, a loss of faith in the system's ability to keep everything running; and as the system had indeed broken down so disastrously at the end of the war, a lot of people were prone to hoard at the first hint of a scare. Making meals in the zawiyya became an exercise in ingenuity. They often dined on potato soup, spiced or garnished in one way or another so that it remained tasty, but it sometimes had to be watered pretty thin to get a cup of it into everyone at the table.

Café life went on as gaily as ever, at least on the surface. There was perhaps more of an edge in people's voices; eyes were brighter, the laughs harder, the binges more drunken. Opium, too, became subject to hoarding. People came in with wheelbarrows of paper money, or exhibited five trillion drachma bills from Roma, laughing as they offered them in exchange for cups of coffee and were refused. It wasn't very funny in all truth; every week things were markedly more expensive, and there didn't seem to be anything to be done about it. They laughed at their own helplessness. Budur went to the cafés less often, which saved money, and the risk of an awkward moment with Kirana. Sometimes she went with Idelba's nephew Piali to a different set of cafés, with a seedier clientele; Piali and his associates, who sometimes included Hasan and his friend Tristan, seemed to like the rougher establishments frequented by sailors and longshoremen. So through a winter of thick mists that hung in the streets like rain freed of gravity, Budur sat and listened to tales of Yingzhou and the stormy Atlantic, deadliest of all the seas.

“We exist on sufferance,” Zainab Shah said bitterly as she knitted in their regular café. “We're like the Japanese after the Chinese conquered them.”

“Let the occasional chalice break,” Kirana murmured. Her expression in the dim light was serene, indomitable.

“They have all broken,” Naser said. He sat in the corner, looking out the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. “I can't say I'm sorry.”

“In Iran too they don't seem to care.” Kirana appeared to be trying to cheer him up. “They are making very great strides there, leading the way in all kinds of fields. Linguistics, archaeology, the physical sciences, they have all the leading people.”

Naser nodded, looking inward. Budur had gathered that his fortune had gone to fund many of these efforts, from an exile of some unexplained sort. Another complicated life.

Another downpour struck. The weather seemed to enunciate their situation, wind and rain slapping the Café Sultana's big windows and running across the plate glass wildly, pushed this way and that by gusts of wind. The old soldier watched his smoke rise, twined threads of brown and gray, oxbowing more and more as they rose. Piali had once described the dynamics of this lazy ascent, as he had the rain's deltas down the windowpanes. Storm sunlight cast a silver sheen on the wet street. Budur felt happy. The world was beautiful. She was so hungry that the milk in her coffee was like a meal inside her. The storm's light was a meal. She thought: now is beautiful. These old Persians are beautiful; their Persian accents are beautiful. Kirana's rare serenity is beautiful. Throw away the past and the future. The old Persians' Khayyam had understood this, one reason among many that the mullahs had never liked him.

Come fill the cup and in the blaze of spring

The winter garment of repentance fling:

The bird of time has but a little way

To fly—and hey! The bird is on the wing!

The others left, and Budur sat with Kirana, watching her write something down in her brown-backed notebook. She looked up, happy to see Budur watching her. She stopped for a cigarette, and they talked for a while, about Yingzhou and the Hodenosaunee. As usual, Kirana's thoughts took interesting turns. She thought the very early stage of civilization that the Hodenosaunee had been in when discovered by the Old World was what had allowed them to survive, counterintuitive though that was. They had been canny hunter-gatherers, more intelligent as individuals than the people of more developed cultures, and much more flexible than the Inka, who were shackled by a very rigid theocracy. If it weren't for their susceptibility to Old World diseases, the Hodenosaunee no doubt would have conquered the Old World already. Now they were making up for lost time.

They talked about Nsara, the army and the clerics, the madressa and the monastery. Budur's girlhood. Kirana's time in Africa.

When the café closed Budur went with her to Kirana's zawiyya, which had a little study garret with a door that was often closed, and on a couch in there they lay on each other kissing, rolling from one embrace to the next, Kirana clasping her so hard that Budur thought her ribs might break; and they were tested again when her stomach clamped down on a violent orgasm.

Afterward Kirana held her with her usual sly smile, calmer than ever.

“Your turn.”

“I already came, I was rubbing myself on your shin.”

“There are softer ways than that.”

“No, really, I'm fine. I'm already done for.” And Budur realized with a shock she could not keep out of her eyes that Kirana was not going to let her touch her.

15
After that Budur went to class feeling strange. In class and in the cafés afterward, Kirana acted toward her just as she always had, a matter of propriety no doubt; but Budur found it off-putting, also sad. In the cafés she sat on the other side of the table from Kirana, not often meeting her eye. Kirana accepted this, and joined the flow of conversation on her side of the table, discoursing in her usual manner, which now struck Budur as a bit forced, even overbearing, although it was no more verbose than ever.

Budur turned to Hasan, who was describing a trip to the Sugar Islands, between Yingzhou and Inka, where he planned to smoke opium every day and lie on white beaches or in the turquoise water off their shores, warm as a bath. “Wouldn't that be grand?” Hasan asked.

“In my next life,” Budur suggested.

“Your next life.” Hasan snorted, bloodshot eye regarding her sardonically. “So pretty to think so.”

“You never know,” Budur said.

“Right. Maybe we should take a trip out to see Madame Sururi, and you can see who you were in your past lives. Talk to your loved ones in the bardo. Half the widows of Nsara are doing it, I'm sure it's quite comforting. If you could believe it.” He gestured out the plate glass, where people in black coats passed in the street, hunched under their umbrellas. “It's silly, though. Most people don't even live the one life they've got.”

One life. It was an idea Budur had trouble accepting, even though the sciences and everything else had made it clear that one life was all you had. When Budur was a girl her mother had said, Be good or you'll come back as a snail. At funerals they said a prayer for the next existence of the deceased, asking Allah to give him or her a chance to improve. Now all that was dismissed, with all the rest of the afterlives, heaven and hell, God himself—all that claptrap, all the supersitions of earlier generations in their immense ignorance, concocting myths to make sense of things. Now they lived in a material world, evolved to what it was by chance and the laws of physics; they struggled through one life and died; that was what the scientists had revealed by their studies, and there was nothing Budur had ever seen or experienced that seemed to indicate otherwise. No doubt it was true. That was reality; they had to adjust to it, or live in a delusion. Adjust each to his or her own cosmic solitude, to Nakba, to hunger and worry, coffee and opium, the knowledge of an end.

“Did I hear you say we should visit Madame Sururi?” Kirana asked from across the table. “A good idea! Let's do it. It would be like a historical field trip for the class—like visiting a place where people still live as they did for hundreds of years.”

“From all I've heard she's an entertaining old charlatan.”

“A friend of mine visited her and said it was great fun.”

They had spent too many hours sitting there, looking at the same ashtrays and coffee rings on the tabletops, the same rain deltas on the windows. So they gathered up their coats and umbrellas, and took the number four tram upriver to a meager neighborhood of apartments abutting the older shipyards, the buildings displaying small Maghribi shops at each corner. Between a seamstress's workshop and a laundry hid a little walk-up to rooms over the shops below. The door opened to their knock, and they were invited in to an entryway, and then, farther in, to a dark room filled with couches and small tables, obviously the converted living room of a fairly large old apartment.

Eight or ten women and three old men were sitting on chairs, facing a black-haired woman who was younger than Budur had expected but not all that young, a woman who wore Zotti clothing, heavy kohl and lipstick, and a great deal of cheap glass jewelry. She had been speaking to her devotees in a low intent voice, and now she paused, and gestured to empty chairs at the back of the room without saying anything to the new arrivals.

“Each time the soul descends into a body,” she resumed when they were seated, “it is like a divine soldier, entering into the battlefield of life and fighting ignorance and evil-doing. It tries to reveal its own inner divinity and establish the divine truth on Earth, according to its capacity. Then at the end of its journey in that incarnation, it returns to its own region of the bardo. I can talk to that region when conditions are right.”

“How long will a soul spend there before coming back again?” one of the women in her audience asked.

“This varies depending on conditions,” Madame Sururi replied. “There is no single process for the evolution of higher souls. Some began from the mineral and some from the animal kingdom. Sometimes it starts from the other end, and cosmic gods take on human form directly.” She nodded as if personally familiar with this phenomenon. “There are many different ways.”

“So it's true that we may have been animals in a previous reincarnation?”

“Yes, it is possible. In the evolution of our souls we have been all things, including rocks and plants. It is not possible to change too much between any two reincarnations, of course. But over many incarnations, great changes can be made. The Lord Buddha revealed that he had been a goat in a previous life, for instance. But because he had realized God, this was not important.”

Kirana stifled a little snort, shifted on her chair to cover it.

Madame Sururi ignored her: “It was easy for him to see what he had been in the past. Some of us are given that kind of vision. But he knew that the past was not important. Our goal is not behind us, it is ahead of us. To a spiritual person I always say, the past is dust. I say this because the past has not given us what we want. What we want is God-realization, and contact with our loved ones, and that depends entirely on our inner cry. We must say, ‘I have no past. I am beginning here and now, with God's grace and my own aspiration.' ”

There was not much to object to in that, Budur thought; it cut strangely to the heart, given the source; but she could feel skepticism emanating from Kirana like heat, indeed the room seemed to be warming with it, as if a qi-burning space heater had been placed on the floor and turned on high. Perhaps it was a function of Budur's embarrassment. She reached over and squeezed Kirana's hand. It seemed to her that the seer was more interesting than Kirana's fidgets were allowing.

An elderly widow, still wearing one of the pins given to them in the middle decades of the war, said, “When a soul picks a new body to enter, does it already know what kind of life it will have?”

“It can only see possibilities. God knows everything, but He covers up the future. Even God does not use His ultimate vision all the time. Otherwise, there would be no game.”

Kirana's mouth opened round as a zero, almost as if she were going to speak, and Budur elbowed her.

“Does the soul lose the details of its previous experiences, or does it remember?”

“The soul doesn't need to remember those things. It would be like remembering what you ate today, or what a disciple's cooking was like. If I know that the disciple was very kind to me, that she brought me food, then that is enough. I don't need to know the details of the meals. Just the impression of the service. This is what the soul remembers.”