The Years of Rice and Salt

  Budur followed her, surprised to see her moving so quickly. In her room Idelba shut the door and began to pile a mass of her papers and notebooks into a cloth book bag. “Hide this for me,” she said urgently. “I don’t think you can leave, though, they’ll stop you and search you. It has to be in the zawiyya somewhere, not in your room or mine, they’ll search them both. They may search everywhere, I’m not sure where to suggest.” Her voice was low but the tone was frantic; Budur had never heard her like that.

  “Who is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter, hurry! It’s the police. They’re on their way, go.”

  The doorbell rang, and rang again.

  “Don’t worry,” Budur said, and ran down the hall to her room. She looked around: a room search, perhaps a house search., and the bag of papers was big. She looked around, thinking over the zawiyya in her mind, wondering if Idelba would mind if she somehow managed to destroy the bag entirely — not that she had any method in mind, but she wasn’t sure how crucial the papers were — but possibly they could be shredded and flushed down a toilet.

  There were people in the hall, women’s voices. Apparently the police who had entered were women officers, so they were not breaking the house rule against men. A sign perhaps; but men’s voices came from out in the street, arguing with the zawiyya elders; women were in the hall; a big knock on her door, they had come to hers first, no doubt along with Idelba’s. She put the bag around her neck, climbed onto her bed, then the iron headboard, and pulled herself up the wall and shoved up a panel of the false ceiling, and with a push off like a dance step, knee in the meeting of the two walls, got under the panel and onto the wall’s dusty top, which was about two feet wide. She sat on it and put the panel back down into place, very quietly.

  The old museum had had very high ceilings, with some glass skylights that were now almost perfectly opaque with dust. In the dimness she could see over the ceilings of several rows of rooms, and the open tops of the hallways, and the true walls, far away in every direction. It was not a good hiding place at all, if they only thought to look up here, from anywhere.

  The top of the walls consisted of warped wood beams, nailed to the top of the framing and over the drywall like coping. There were two sheets of drywall to each wall, notoriously transparent to sound, nailed onto each side of the framing; so there would be gaps between the two sheets of drywall, if she could get a beam off the top somewhere.

  She moved onto her hands and knees and swung the bag onto her back, and began crawling over the dusty beams, looking for a hole while staying well away from the hallways, where a glance up could reveal her. From here the whole arrangement looked ramshackle, cobbled together in a hurry, and soon enough she found a cap where three walls met and a beam had been cut short. It wasn’t big enough to fit the whole bag, but she could stuff papers in there, and she did so quickly, until the bag was empty, and the bag dropped in last. It wasn’t a perfect hiding place if they wanted to be comprehensive, but it was the best she could think of, and she was pretty pleased with it, actually; but if they found her up on the beams, all would be lost. She crawled on as quietly as she could, hearing voices back in the direction of her room. They would only have to stand on her bed’s headboard and push up a panel for a look to see her. The far bathroom did not sound as if it had anyone in it, so she crawled in that direction, ripping the skin over one knee on a nailhead, and pulled up a panel an inch and peered in empty — she pulled it aside, hung from the beam, dropped, hit the tiled floor hard. The wall was smeared with dust and blood; her knees and the tops of her feet were filthy with dust, and the palms of her hands marked everything like the hand of Cain. She washed in a sink, tore off her jellabah and put it in the laundry, pulled clean towels from the cabinet and wetted one to clean the wall off. The panel above was still pulled aside, and there were no chairs in the bathroom; she couldn’t get up there to move it back in place. Glance out in the hall — loud voices arguing, Idelba’s among them, protesting, no one in sight — she dashed across the hall to a bedroom and took a chair and ran back into the bathroom and put the chair against the wall, stepped up onto it, stepped gently on the chair back, reached up and yanked the panel back into place, smashing her fingers between two panels. Yank them free, push the panel into position, down again, the chair slipping across the tile with her movement. Clatter, bang, catch herself, another glance out, more arguing, coming closer; she put the chair back, went back in the bathroom, went to the showers and got in, soaping her knees and feeling the sting in the cut. She soaped and soaped, heard voices outside the bathroom. She washed off the soap as quickly as possible, and was dried and wrapped in a big towel when women came into the room, including two in army uniforms, looking like soldiers from the war whom Budur had seen long ago, in the Turi railway station. She looked as startled as she could, held the towel to herself.

  “Are you Budur Radwan?” one of the policewomen demanded.

  “Yes! What do you want?”

  “We want to talk to you! Where have you been?”

  “What do you mean, where have I been? You can see very well where I’ve been! What is this all about, why do you want me? What could have brought you in here?”

  “We want to talk to you.”

  “Well, let me get dressed and I will talk to you. I have done nothing wrong, I assume? I can get dressed before talking to my own countrywomen, I assume?”

  “This is Nsara,” one of them said. “You’re from Turi, right?”

  “True, but we are all Firanjis here, all good Muslim women in a zawiyya, unless I am mistaken?”

  “Come on, get dressed,” the other one said. “We have some questions to ask about affairs here, security threats that may be centred here. So come. Where are your clothes?”

  “In my room, of course!” And Budur swept past them to her room, considering which jellabah would best hide her knees and any blood that might be seeping down her leg. Her blood was hot, but her breathing calm, she felt solid; and there was an anger growing in her, like a boulder from the jetty, anchoring her from the inside.

  SEVENTEEN

  Though they made a fairly thorough search, they did not find Idelba’s papers, nor did they get anything but bewilderment and indignation from their questionings. The zawiyya filed suit with the courts against the police, for invasion of privacy without proper authorization, and only the invocation of wartime secrecy laws kept it from being a scandal in the newspapers. The courts backed the search but also the zawiyya’s future right to privacy, and after that it was back to normal, or sort of; Idelba never talked about her work any more, no longer worked in certain labs she had before, and she no longer spent any time with Piali.

  Budur continued in her routine, making her rounds from home, to work, to the Cafe Sultana. There she sat behind the big plate glass windows and looked out at the docks, and the forests of masts and steel superstructures, and the top of the lighthouse at the end of the jetty, while the talk swirled around her. At their tables too, very often, were Hasan and Tristan, sitting like limpets in their pool with the tide gone out, exposing them wetly to the moon. Hasan’s polemics and poetry made him a force to be reckoned with, a truth that all the city’s avant-garde acknowledged, either enthusiastically or reluctantly. Hasan himself spoke of his reputation with a smirk meant to be self-deprecating, wickedly smiling as he briefly exposed his power to view. Budur liked him although she knew perfectly well he was in some senses a disagreeable person. She was more interested in Tristan and his music, which included not only the songs like those he had sung at the garden party, but also vast long works for bands of up to two hundred musicians, sometimes featuring him on the kundun, an Anatolian stringed box with metal tabs to the side that slightly changed the tones of the strings, a fiendishly difficult instrument to play. He wrote out the parts for each instrument in these pieces, down to every chord and change, and even every note. As in his songs, these longer compositions showed his interest in adapting the primitive tonalities of th
e lost Christians, for the most part simple harmonic chords, but containing within them the possibility of various more sophisticated tonalities, which could at strategic moments return to the Pythagorean basics favoured in the chorales and chants of the lost ones. Writing down every note and demanding that the musicians in the ensemble play only and exactly the written notes was an act that everyone regarded as megalomaniacal to the point of impossibility; ensemble music, though very highly structured in a way that went back ultimately to Indian classical ragas, nevertheless allowed for individual improvisation of the details of the variations, spontaneous creations that indeed provided much of the interest of the music, as the musician played within and against the raga forms. No one would have stood for Tristan’s insane strictures if it were not that the results were, one could not deny it, superb and beautiful. And Tristan insisted that the procedure was not his idea, but merely the way that the lost civilization had gone about it; that he was following the lost ways, even doing his best to channel the hungry ghosts of the old ones in his dreams and in his musical reveries. The old Frankish pieces he hoped to invoke were all religious music, devotionals, and had to be understood and utilized as such, as sacred music. Although it was true that in this hyper-aesthetic circle of the avant-garde it was music itself that was sacred, like all the arts, so that the description was redundant.

  It was also true that treating art as sacred often meant smoking opium or drinking laudanum to prepare for the experience; some even used the stronger distillates of opium developed during the war, smoking or even injecting them. The resulting dream states made Tristan’s music mesmerizing, the practitioners said, even those who were not fond of the lost civilization’s simplistic tootles; opium induced a deep absorption in the sensuous surface of musical sound, in the plainsong harmonies, vibrating between a drugged band and a drugged audience. If the performance was combined with the fanned aromas of a scent artist, the results could be truly mystical. Some were sceptical of all this: Kirana said once, “As high as they all get, they could simply sing a single note for the whole hour, and smell their armpits, and all would be as happy as birds.”

  Tristan himself often led the opium ceremonies before leading the music, so these evenings had a somewhat cultic air to them, as if Tristan were some kind of mystic sufi master, or one of the Hosain actors in the plays about Hosain’s martyrdom, which the opium crowd also attended after crossing into dreamland, to watch Hosain putting on his own shroud before his murder by Shemr, the audience groaning, not at the murder onstage, but at this choice of martyrdom. In some of the Shiite countries the person playing Shemr had to run for his life after the performance, and more than one unlucky actor had been killed by the crowd. Tristan thoroughly approved; this was the kind of immersion in the art that he wanted his musical audiences to achieve.

  But only in the secular world; it was all for music, not for God; Tristan was more Persian than Iranian as he put it sometimes, much more an Omarian than any kind of mullah, or a mystic of Zoroastrian bent, concocting rituals in honour of Ahura-Mazda, a kind of sun worship that in foggy Nsara could come straight from the heart. Channelling Christians, smoking opium, worshipping the sun; he did all kinds of crazy things for his music, including working for many hours every day to get every note right on the page; and though none of it would have mattered if the music had not been good, it was good, it was more than that; it was the music of their lives, of Nsara in its time.

  He spoke of all the theory behind it, however, in cryptic little phrases and aphorisms that then made the rounds, as “Tristan’s latest”; and often it was just a shrug and a smile and an offered opium pipe, and, most of all, his music. He composed what he composed, and the intellectuals of the city could listen and then talk about what it all meant, and they often did all through the night. Tahar Labid would go on endlessly about it, and then say to Tristan, with almost-mock aggressiveness, That’s right, isn’t it Tristan Ahura, then go on without pausing for an answer, as if Tristan were to be laughed at as an idiot savant for never deigning to reply one way or the other; as if he didn’t really know what his music meant. But Tristan only smiled at Tahar, sphinxlike and enigmatic under his moustache, relaxed as if poured into his window seat, looking out at the wet black cobbles or spearing Tahar with an amused glance.

  “Why don’t you ever answer me!” Tahar exclaimed once.

  Tristan pursed his lips and whistled a response at him.

  “Oh come on,” Tahar said, reddening. “Say something to make us think you have a single idea in your head.”

  Tristan drew himself up. “Don’t be rude! Of course there are no ideas in my head, what do you think I am!”

  So Budur sat next to him. She joined him when, with a tilt of the chin and pursing of the lips, he invited her into one of the back rooms of the cafe where the opium smokers gathered. She had decided ahead of time to join them if the opportunity was offered, to see what hearing Tristan’s music under the influence would be like; to see what the drug felt like, using the music as the ceremony that allowed her to overcome her Turic fear of the smoke.

  The room was small and dark. The huqqab, bigger than a narghile, sat on a low table in the middle of floor pillows, and Tristan cut a chunk from a black plug of opium and put it in the bowl, lit it with a silver cigarette lighter as one of the others inhaled. As the single mouthpiece was passed around the smokers sucked on it, and each in turn began immediately to cough. The black plug in the bowl bubbled to tar as it burned; the smoke was thick and white, and smelled like sugar. Budur decided to take in so little that she wouldn’t cough, but when the mouthpiece came to her and she inhaled gently through it, the first taste of the smoke caused her to hack like a demon. It seemed impossible she could be so affected by anything that had been in her so briefly.

  Then it struck deeper. She felt her blood filling her skin, then all of her. Blood filled her like a balloon, it would spurt out if her hot skin didn’t hold it in. She pulsed with her pulse, and the world pulsed with her. Everything jumped forwards into itself somehow, in time with her heart. The dim walls pulsed. More colour revealed itself with every beat of her heart. The surfaces of things swirled with coiled pressure and tension, they looked like Idelba said they really were, bundles of bundled energy. Budur pulled herself to her feet with the others, walked, balancing carefully, through the streets to the concert hall in the old palace, into a space long and tall like a deck of cards set on its side. The musicians filed in and sat, their instruments like strange weapons. Following Tristan’s lead, conveyed by hand and eye, they began to play. The singers chanted in the ancient Pythagorean tonality, pure and sugary, a single voice wandering above in descant. Then Tristan on his oud, and the other string players, bass to treble, sneaked in underneath, wrecking the simple harmonies, bringing in a whole other world, an Asia of sound, so much more complex and dark — reality — seeping in. and, over the course of a long struggle, overwhelming the old west’s plainchant. This was the story of Firanja that Tristan was singing, Budur thought suddenly, a musical expression of the history of this place they lived in, late arrivals that they were. Firanjis, Franks, Kelts, the oldest ones back in the murk of time . . . Each people overrun in its turn. It was not a scent performance, but there was incense burning before the musicians, and as their songs wove together the thick smells of sandalwood and jasmine choked the room, they came in on Budur’s breath and sang inside her, playing a complex roundelay with her pulse, just as in the music itself, which was so clearly another speech of the body, a language she felt she could understand in the moment it happened. without ever being able to articulate or remember it.

  Sex too was a language like that; as she found later that night, when she went home with Tristan to his grubby apartment, and to bed with him. His apartment was across the river in the south wharf district, a cold and damp garret, an artistic cliché, and uncleaned, it appeared, since his wife had died near the end of the war — some factory accident, Budur had gathered from others, a c
hance of bad timing and broken machinery — but the bed was there, and the sheets clean, which made Budur suspicious; but after all she had been showing interest in Tristan, so perhaps it was only a matter of politeness, or self-respect of some heartening kind. He was a dreamy lover and played her like an oud, languorous and faintly teasing, so that there was an edge to her passion, of resistance and struggle, all adding somehow to the sexiness of the experience, so that it nagged at her afterwards, as if set into her with hooks — nothing like the blazing directness of Kirana — and Budur afterwards wondered what Tristan intended by it, but realized also in that very first night that she was not going to learn from Tristan’s words, as he was as reticent with her as he was with Tahar, almost; so that she would have to know him by what could be intuited from his music and his looks. Which were indeed very revealing of his moods and their swings, and so of his character (perhaps); which she liked. So for a while she went home with him fairly often, arranging for prophylactics with the zawiyya clinic, going out at night to the cafes and taking the opportunity when it came.

  After a time, however, it became annoying to try to have conversation with a man who only sang melodies — like trying to live with a bird. It echoed painfully that distance in her father, and the mute quality of her attempts to study the remote past, which were equally speechless. And as things in town got tighter, and each week added another zero to the numbers on the paper money, it got harder and harder to gather the large ensembles that Tristan’s current compositions required. When the district panchayat that ran the old palace chose not to lend a concert room, or the musicians were occupied with their real jobs, in class or on the docks or in the shops selling hats and raincoats, then Tristan could only strum his oud, and finger his pencils and take endless notes, in an Indian musical notation that was said to be older than Sanskrit, although Tristan confessed to Budur that he had forgotten the system during the war, and now used one of his own devising that he had had to teach to his players. His melodies became more morose, she thought, tunes from a heavy heart, mourning the losses of the war, and the ones that had happened since, and were still occurring now, in the moment of listening itself. Budur understood them, and kept joining Tristan from time to time, watching the twitches under his moustache for clues as to what amused him when she or others spoke, watching his yellowed fingers as they felt their tunes forwards, or noted down one quicksilver lament after another. She heard a singer she thought he would like, and took him to hear her, and he did like her, he hummed on the way home, looking out of the tram window at the dark city streets, where people hurried from streetlight to streetlight over gleaming cobblestones, hunched under umbrellas or serapes.