The Years of Rice and Salt

  TWELVE

  “Yes,” Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the cafe 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 again.”

  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 against 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.

  “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 cafes 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 Venizia, and afterwards 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 practise how it would be, she would mutter huskily in Budur’s car, 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 skilful, 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 as 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 got on.

  Now, in the dregs of the night in this Nsarene cafe, 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 for ever?

  THIRTEEN

  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.”

  “Wearing gloves make it hard to hold onto 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 bureaucrats 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 a loose end without her knitting kit in hand. It t
urned 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 long-time 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 Hasam, 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 kotow 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 coffee pot 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, heart-rending 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 centre 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!

  FOURTEEN

  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.

  Cafe 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 cafes 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 cards, 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 cafe. “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 of the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. “I can’t say I’m sorry.”