The Years of Rice and Salt

  “It’s like in the forest,” Tristan said with a lift of the moustache. “Up in your mountains, you know, you see places where avalanches have bent all the trees down sideways, and then after the snow melts, the trees there all stay bent sideways together.” He gestured at the crowd waiting at a tram stop. “That’s what we’re like now.”

  EIGHTEEN

  As the days and the weeks passed Budur continued to read voraciously, in the zawiyya, the institute, the parks, at the jetty’s end, in the hospital for the blind soldiers. Meanwhile there were ten-trillion-piastre bills arriving with immigrants from the Middle West, and they were at ten billion drachmas themselves; recently a man had stuffed his house from floor to ceiling with money, and traded the whole establishment for a pig. At the zawiyya it was harder and harder to put together meals big enough to feed them all. They grew vegetables in crops on the roof, cursing the clouds, and lived on their goats’ milk, their chickens’ eggs, cucumbers in great vats of vinegar, pumpkins cooked in every conceivable fashion, and potato soup, watered to a thinness thinner than milk.

  One day Idelba found the three spies going through the little cabinet above her bed, and she had them kicked out of the house as common thieves, calling in the neighbourhood police and bypassing the issue of spying, without however getting into the tricky issue of what else besides her ideas she had that would be worth stealing.

  “They’ll be in trouble,” Budur observed after the three girls were taken away. “Even if they’re plucked out of jail by their employers.”

  “Yes,” Idelba agreed. “I was going to leave them here, as you saw. But once caught, we had to act as if we didn’t know who they were. And the truth is we can’t afford to feed them. So they can go back to who sent them. Hopefully.” A grim expression; she didn’t want to think about it — about what she might have condemned them to. That was their problem. She had hardened in just the two years since she had brought Budur to Nsara, or so it seemed to Budur. “It’s not just my work,” she explained, seeing Budur’s expression. “That remains latent. It’s the problems we have right now. Things won’t need blowing up if we all starve first. The war ended badly, that’s all there is to it. I mean not just for us, as the defeated, but for everyone. Things are so out of balance, it could bring everything down. So everyone needs to pull together. And if some people don’t, then I don’t know . . .”

  • • •

  “All that time you spend working in the music of the Franks,” Budur said to Tristan, one evening in the cafe, “do you ever think about what they were like?”

  “Why yes,” he said, pleased at the question. “All the time. I think they were just like us. They fought a lot. They had monasteries and madressas, and water-powered machinery. Their ships were small, but they could sail into the wind. They might have taken control of the seas before anyone else.”

  “Not a chance,” said Tahar. “Compared to Chinese ships they were no more than dhows. Come now, Tristan, you know that.”

  Tristan shrugged.

  “They had ten or fifteen languages, thirty or forty principalities, isn’t that right?” said Naser. “They were too fractured to conquer anyone else.”

  “They fought together to capture Jerusalem,” Tristan pointed out. “The infighting gave them practice. They thought they were God’s chosen people.”

  “Primitives often think that.”

  “Indeed.” Tristan smiled, leaning sideways to peer through the window towards the neighbourhood mosque. “As I say, they were just like us. If they had lived, there would be more people like us.”

  “There’s no one like us,” Naser said sadly. “I think they must have been very different.”

  Tristan shrugged again. “You can say anything you like about them, it doesn’t matter. You can say they would have been enslaved like the Africans, or made slaves of the rest of us, or brought a golden age, or waged wars worse than the Long War . . .”

  People shook their heads at all these impossibilities.

  “ . . . but it doesn’t matter. We’ll never know, so you can say whatever you like. They are our jinns.”

  “It’s funny how we look down on them,” Kirana observed, “just because they died. At an unconscious level it seems like it must have been their fault. A physical weakness, or a moral failing, or a bad habit.”

  “They affronted God with their pride.”

  “They were pale because they were weak, or vice versa. Muzaffar has shown it, how the darker the skin, the stronger the persons. The blackest Africans are strongest of all, the palest of the Golden Horde are weakest. He did tests. The Franks were hereditarily incompetent, that was his conclusion. Losers in the evolutionary game of survival of the fittest.”

  Kirana shook her head. “It was probably just a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts, and therefore died itself. It could have happened to any of us. The Chinese, or us.”

  “But there’s a kind of anemia common around the Mediterranean, that might have made them more susceptible.”

  “No. It could have been us.”

  “That might have been good,” Tristan said. “They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.”

  “Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.”

  “Or al-Andalus —”

  “It was latent in them, ready to spring forth. While for us what is latent is jihad.”

  “They were the same as us, you said.”

  Tristan smiled under his moustache. “Maybe. They’re the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers.”

  “It’s such a useless exercise,” Kirana reflected. “What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it’s always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they’re ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don’t know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don’t know, and the what it’s don’t help us work it out.”

  “Why do people like them so much then?”

  Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. “More stories.”

  And indeed more of them were immediately proposed, for despite their uselessness in Kirana’s eyes, people enjoyed contemplating the what might have been: what if the lost Moroccan fleet of 924 had been blown to the Sugar Islands and then made it back, what if the Kerala of Travancore had not conquered much of Asia and set out his railways and legal system, what if there had been no New World islands there at all, what if Burma had lost its war with Siam . . .

  Kirana only shook her head. “Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future.”

  “You, a historian, say this? But the future can’t be known at all!”

  “Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We’re midway through the loom, that’s the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.”

  NINETEEN

  But one could sit with people like that, have conversations like that, and still walk outside into watery sunligh
t with nothing to eat and no money worth anything. Budur worked hard at the zawiyya, and set up classes in Persian and Firanjic for the hungry girls moving in who only spoke Berber or Arabic or Andalusi or Skandistani or Turkish. At night she continued as a habitué of the cafes and coffee houses, and sometimes the opium dens. She got work with one of the government agencies as a translator of documents, and continued to study archaeology. She was worried when Idelba fell ill again, and spent a lot of time caring for her. The doctors said that Idelba was suffering from “nervous exhaustion”, something like the battle fatigue of the war; but to Budur she seemed very obviously physically weaker, harmed by something the doctors could not identify. Illness without cause; Budur found this too frightening to think about. Probably it was a hidden cause, but that too was frightening.

  She got more involved with the running of the zawiyya, taking over some of what Idelba had done before. There was less time to read. Besides, she wanted to do more than read, or even write reports: she felt too anxious to read, and merely perusing a number of texts and then boiling them down into a new text struck her as an odd activity; it was like being a still, distilling ideas. History as a brandy; but she wanted something more substantial.

  Meanwhile, many a night she still went out and enjoyed the midnight scene at the coffee and opium cafes listening to Tristan’s oud (they were friends only now), sometimes in an opiated dream that allowed her to wander the fogged halls of her thoughts without actually entering any rooms. She was deep in a reverie concerning the Ibrahamic collisional nature of progress in history, something like the continents themselves, if the geologists were right, creating new fusions, as in Samarqand, or Mughal India, or the Hodenosaunee dealing with China to the west and Islam to the east, or Burma, yes — all this was coming clear, like random bits of coloured rock on the ground swirling into one of Hagia Sophia’s elaborate self-replicating arabesques, a common opium effect to be sure, but then that was what history always was, a hallucinated pattern onto random events, so there was no cause to disbelieve the illumination just because of that. History as an opium dream.

  Halah from the zawiyya burst into the cafe’s back room looking around; spotting her Budur knew immediately that something was wrong with Idelba. Halah came over, her face holding a serious expression. “She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Budur followed her out, stumbling under the weight of the opium, trying to banish all its effects immediately with her panic, but that only cast her farther out into visual distortions of all kinds, and never had Nsara looked uglier than on that night, rain bouncing hard on the streets, squiggles of light cobbling underfoot, shapes of people like rats swimming . . .

  Idelba was gone from the zawiyya, she had been taken to the nearest hospital, a huge rambling wartime structure on the hill north of the harbour. Slogging up there, inside the rain cloud itself; then the sound of rain pounding on the cheap tin roof. The light was an intense throbbing yellow-white in which everyone looked blank and dead, like walking meat as they had said during the war of men sent to the front.

  Idelba was no worse-looking than the rest, but Budur rushed to her side. “She’s having trouble breathing,” a nurse said, looking up from her chair. Budur thought: these people work in hell. She was very frightened.

  “Listen,” Idelba said calmly. She said to the nurse, “Please leave us alone for ten minutes.” When the nurse was gone, she said in a low voice to Budur, “Listen, if I die, then you need to help Piali.”

  “But Aunt Idelba! You aren’t going to die.”

  “Be quiet. I can’t risk writing this down, and I can’t risk telling only one person, in case something happens to them too. You need to get Piali to go to Isfahan, to describe our results to Abdol Zoroush. Also to Ananda, in Travancore. And Chen, in China. They all have tremendous influence within their respective governments. Hanea will handle her end of things. Remind Piali of what we decided was best. Soon, you see, all atomic physicists will understand the theoretical possibilities of the way alactin splits. The possible application. If they all know the possibility exists, then there will be reason for them to press to make peace permanent. The scientists can pressure their respective governments, by making clear the situation, and taking control of the direction of the relevant fields of science. They must keep the peace, or there will be a rush to destruction. Given the choice, they must choose peace.”

  “Yes,” Budur said, wondering if it would be so. Her mind was reeling at the prospect of such a burden being placed on her to carry. She did not like Piali very much. “Please, Aunt Idelba, please. Don’t distress yourself. It will be all right.”

  Idelba nodded. “Very possibly.”

  She rallied late that night, just before dawn, just as Budur was beginning to come down from her opium delirium, unable to remember much of the night that had taken so many eons to pass. But she still knew what Idelba wanted her to try to do. Dawn came as dark as if an eclipse had come and stayed.

  It was the following year before Idelba died.

  The funeral was attended by many people, hundreds of them, from zawiyya and madressa and institute, and the Buddhist monastery, and the Hodenosaunee embassy, and the district panchayat and the state council, and many other places all over Nsara. But not a single person from Turi. Budur stood numbly in a reception line with a few of the senior women from the zawiyya, and shook hand after hand. Afterwards, during the unhappy wake, Hanea came up to her again. “We loved her too,” she said with a flinty smile. “We will make sure to keep the promises we made to her.”

  A couple of days later Budur kept her usual appointment to read to her blind soldiers. She went in their ward and sat there staring at them in their chairs and beds, and thought, This is probably a mistake. I may feel blank but I’m probably not. She told them of her aunt’s death, then, and tried to read to them from Idelba’s work, but it was not like Kirana’s; even the abstracts were incomprehensible, and the texts themselves, scientific papers on the behaviour of invisible things, were composed largely of tables of numbers. She stopped trying with those, and picked up another book. “This is one of my aunt’s favourite books, a collection of the autobiographical writings found in the works of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the early scientist and philosopher who was a great hero to her. From what I have read of him, Ibn Sina and my aunt were alike in many ways. They both had a great curiosity about the world. Ibn Sina first mastered Euclid’s geometry, then set out to understand everything else. Idelba did that very same thing. When Ibn Sina was still young he fell into a sort of fever of inquiry, that gripped him for almost two years. Here, I will read to you what he himself says about that period:

  During this time I did not sleep completely through a single night, or devote myself to anything else but study by day. I compiled a set of files for myself, and for each proof that I examined, I entered into the files its syllogistic premises, their classification, and what might follow from them. I pondered over the conditions that might apply to their premises, until I had verified this question for myself in each case. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. And whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dreams; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep. I continued in this until all of the sciences were deeply rooted within me and I understood them as far as is humanly possible. Everything which I knew at that time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything much to it to this day.

  “That’s the kind of person my aunt was,” Budur said. She put down that book and picked up another one, thinking that it would be better to stop reading things inspired by Idelba. It wasn’t making her feel any better. The book she chose out of her bag was called “Nsarene Sailors, Tales”, true stories about the local seamen and fisherfolk, rousing adventures full of fish and danger and death but also of the sea air, the waves and the wind. The soldiers had enjoyed chapters of the book she had read to them before.

&nb
sp; But this time she read one called “The Windy Ramadan”, and it turned out to be about a time long before, in the age of sail, when contrary winds had held the grain fleet out of the harbour, so that they had had to anchor offshore in the roads as darkness fell, and then in the night the wind shifted around and a great storm came roaring in from the Atlantic, and there was no way for those out on the ships to get safely to shore, and nothing those on shore could do but walk the shore through the night. The author of the account had a wife who was taking care of three motherless children whose father was one of the sea captains out in the fleet, and, unable to watch the children at their nervous play, the author had gone out to walk the strand with the rest, braving the howling winds of the tempest. At dawn they had all seen the fringe of soaked grain lining the high-water mark, and knew the worst had come. “Not a single ship survived the gale, and all up and down the beach the bodies washed ashore. And as it had dawned a Friday, at the appointed hour the muezzin went to the minaret to ascend and make the call for prayer, and the town idiot in a rage detained him, crying “ ‘Who in such an hour can praise the Lord?’ ”