A God in Every Stone (21 page)

Partway down the street, approaching Kabuli Gate, the woman turned into an alley. Viv realised how ridiculous she was being and started to walk towards Kabuli Gate. But something – intuition? curiosity? an unexpected noise? – made her turn and look over her shoulder. There was the woman in the white burqa – Viv knew it was her by her height – walking back out of the alley, no envelope in hand, and crossing over to the other side of the Street of Storytellers. She stood beside a slender-trunked tree looking up at the carpet-seller's balcony, on the corner of the Street of Storytellers and the alley. It was without doubt one of the most beautiful balconies in the Walled City with roses and arabesques carved above each of the three archways of its wooden frame. At the base of the balcony, deer raced each other from one archway to the next. But the woman in the burqa didn't seem interested in deer or roses; the stillness of her posture indicated a woman waiting.

Viv walked a few paces closer to the unmoving figure. Men and boys walked along past both women, sometimes hand in hand, flowers behind their ears and bandoliers across their chests. As if they had decided to be both man and woman at once, long of eyelash and broad of shoulder. Viv might as well have been shrouded in a white sheet herself for all the attention they showed her. The lack of staring is a mark of courtesy, Avtar Singh had explained to her when she expressed her irritation at being treated as though she weren't there; and then he grinned his wolfish grin and said and also, of course, the Pathans want to insist that men mustn't look at women to ensure that no man looks at their women. A throat-slitting gesture accompanied the comment.

The genial, white-bearded carpet-seller from whom Viv had recently bought a rug stepped onto the balcony. He called down to the apple-seller standing on the street below him, who threw an apple up in the air, almost directly into the carpet-seller's outstretched hand. A coin, flipped off the white-beard's thumb, followed the reverse trajectory. The carpet-seller bit into the apple, his eyes passed briefly over the woman in white across the road, and he nodded his head. It was a nod of appreciation for the apple unless you were expecting it to be something else. The woman in white remained unmoving for a few seconds after that, leaning against the tree as if she had stopped only to rest. Eventually she moved away, and turned into one of the alleyways which led to the maze-like innards of the Walled City.

A woman stands in the shade of a tree. A man surveys the street below him while eating an apple. Somewhere in there was a story which Viv didn't know how to imagine.

 

The letter from her mother was addressed in black ink. Someone had died, again.

Viv sat down in the garden chair, reaching overhead to pull down on a branch of the willow, brushing its leaves against her face. The squawks and metallic chirps of birds, the booted feet of a regiment marching towards the barracks, her finger picking at the interwoven rattan strips of the chair as though it were a stringed instrument – all this was familiar now. The letters from England came from another world.

 

My dear Vivian

Mary's brother, Richard, has ‘died of wounds' in Mesopotamia. She is being very Mary-like about it, speaking of her great pride in his noble sacrifice, but you know as well as I that he only signed up because she shamed him into it and I can't believe this doesn't weigh on her soul. She spoke wistfully of your absence at the funeral service – a woman needs her friends in times such as these. She is speaking of volunteering with the mobile nursing units on the Western Front. Your father is very low as well. All the boys he delivered into the world leaving it too early. It has changed him, quite suddenly.

You mustn't think it is all gloom here. Newspaper advertisements for ‘Wartime Furs at Wartime Prices' lift the spirits and the competition among one's intimates for Most Patriotic Zeal continues to provide a fantastic spectacle even as those most determined to win the Cup complain bitterly of the war's effect on household staff. (The problems of the one-armed footman continue at home.)

I met Miss Murray a few days ago who said there is no place of work in England which isn't opening doors to women to make up for all the men who've rushed off to war – museums and universities included. Perhaps it's time to book your return passage? Your father was so disappointed to hear you won't be back for Christmas as you'd promised – I don't see him trying to send you away to the Front to nurse. Even if he tried, it's clear from your letters that running your own household and deciding how to spend your days has made you a woman, no longer a girl blindly following the lead of others.

Your loving mother

Oh, Mary. She rested the letter on her lap, remembered Richard, the boy with the scabbed knees who she and Mary had chased up trees in his childhood, teased when the puppy-fat fell away and he started to attract the eye of girls, relied on as an escort to parties during their university years. Richard, who disapproved of Mary's suffragette activities but still drove her to WPSI meetings and bailed her out of prison. That sweet, gentle boy. Died of wounds. She knew the sound, the smell, the agony of it. Knew the grown men whimpering for their mothers. And Richard would have called out for Mary, his older sister, the solidity to his shadow.

What am I doing here? How can I go back to that?

 

There were tears streaming down her face almost all the way from the Cantonment to the road to Shahji-ki-Dheri. Richard has died, she kept saying while she pedalled, as if the words might make sense of such a waste. Nearing the stupa site she passed a graveyard which a group of mourners was entering, accompanying a white shrouded body. Richard is dead. She pulled over, almost crashing into the wheat fields on the opposite side of the road, and breathed deeply, fearing she might faint.

It was only when two men walked out of the wheat field to check the memsahib was all right that she hopped back onto the saddle and continued on to the site which was suspended between cultivation and excavation as the legal and financial tussle with the landowner dragged on.

She walked down into the deep ditch which she thought of as Najeeb's trench, reached into her jacket pocket and took out her notebook, its calfskin binding covered in mementoes from Turkey: the singe-mark from the leaping ember of a camp-fire in Labraunda that evening when the skies cleared and the temperature plummeted after a violent thunderstorm; the fig stain shaped like a pug's mouth; an inky thumbprint which had appeared mysteriously the first day she walked along the Carian coast, and which she thought of as the mark of a Siren; a smear of blood from the gash which opened in Tahsin Bey's elbow when he scraped it against a jagged stone in the Temple of Zeus.

Kneeling in the mud, she began to sketch the figure of a stucco Buddha within an archway. She wasn't yet halfway done when she stopped, tossed her pencil aside and began to flip through the earlier pages of the notebook. Memories on every page. All at once, it was unbearable. Everything about this forgotten, crumbling site which had had its items of worth carted off to a museum so that only the half-gnawed bones remained was unbearable. She wanted Tahsin Bey here so she could pummel him with her fists. What did you mean by sending me that letter, making me come here, held hostage by your dreams. It's probably not even here! She caught hold of a fistful of mud, scooped it up and hurled it at the Buddha. There was something so satisfying about it that she did it again, and again, and again. When she finally stopped her hair was in disarray, her shirt clinging to damp skin. The stucco Buddha held her gaze, his hand raised. She touched her fingertips to his.

There had been no word from Tahsin Bey since that Christmas card. She sent letters every week, along with sketches, and photographs, and rubbings from stupas. Nothing came back but silence. Her mind ranged over all the possible explanations, and turned away from the darkest one, but not today. Today she imagined a white shrouded sheet, a body lowered into the ground, and no one thinking her important enough in his life to be told it had happened.

She rested her head against the wall of the mud trench. This too shall pass.

 

Time progressed, winter parties picked up, the days were sunshine and the evening breeze nipped pleasingly at her skin. One day tumbled into another. All fears slipped back into their hiding place.

 

Viv walked onto her verandah, humming:

 

City of Men,

City of Flowers,

Land Beyond the Mountains:

Caspatyrus, Paruparaesanna, Paropamisadae, Gandhara,

Parasapur, Purashapura, Poshapura, Po-lu-sha-pu-lo, Fo-lu-sha, Farshabur, Peshawar.

 

She sat down on the wood-and-rattan chair with pivoting, extendable arms. The first time Najeeb had seen it he'd referred to it as Long-Armed, a direct translation of its local name; a few days later when she'd referred to it as such, he'd turned pink and giggled uncontrollably which told her that somehow his boundless curiosity had discovered that the British name for it was Bombay Fornicator, in recognition of the unseemly position adopted by those who used the extendable arms as footrests. It had been all she could do to keep a straight face.

She looked at her watch. Najeeb should have been here by now. When the door-knocker echoed through the house she knew it wasn't him; his was a quick triple knock, not announcing his presence so much as registering delight to have arrived – the tempo filled with expectation. This dull thud of brass on door suggested someone of a far less breezy temperament. But it was him, after all. A boy wearing an expression of sorrow, his posture straight-backed. Arms at ninety degrees, palms up, with books piled on them, the slate fragment with Atlas's wrist on top. She didn't know what the discordance between the intimate sadness of his face and the formality of his body meant.

– These are your books, Miss Spencer. Thank you for letting me read them. I'm afraid I won't be able to continue our lessons, or to see you again.

A rehearsed speech, delivered in a voice with fissures in it.

– What's happened, Najeeb? Come in, come in and tell me.

The boy glanced over his shoulder, and she followed the angle of his eye across the garden, past the gate, and out onto the pavement where a tall, broad-shouldered man was turned away from the pair of them with a Pathan unwillingness to look at an uncovered woman.

– I must go. Goodbye, Miss Spencer. I hope you won't forget your Pactyike.

– Don't I at least deserve an explanation?

He was holding the books out to her and she refused to take them. With a sigh, he placed them on the ground in front of her so he looked as though he were touching her feet in obeisance. He took the piece of slate from the top of the pile and kissed Atlas's wrist, before setting it gently back down.

– That was a gift. Am I so disdained that you must return my gifts?

He straightened, and placed the slate piece in his tunic pocket.

– It's nothing like that. Please don't think I'm ungrateful.

– But I must think that if you don't offer me any other thought with which to replace it.

– It's just that . . . it's not right, you see.

– What? That you're missing lessons with the maulvi? Is that what this is about?

He touched his upper lip, the fuzz on it which had started to appear over the last few weeks.

– I'm becoming a man. It isn't right for me to be here, alone with you.

She looked at the boy, the child, and beyond him to the broad-shouldered man. He was too far away to hear; these words were Najeeb's, uttered because he believed them.

– Then bring your sisters next time you come.

– My sisters? What will they do here?

– I'll teach them, just as I teach you.

– But they don't know any English.

– You didn't know any Greek four months ago. I didn't know any Pashto. What are you shaking your head about?

– Miss Spencer, they're girls.

– What do you think I am, for heaven's sake.

– You're English.

Then he was walking backwards along the pathway, his eyes on her face with the same concentration with which he had met the Buddha's gaze. His right hand raised to shoulder level, fingers together, palm outwards in a gesture of protection learned from a man of stone.

– Goodbye, Miss Spencer.

 

As the afternoon became evening she remained standing at the window, looking out onto the slate mountains through which the man with the fig circlet had entered the Peshawar Valley, the whole, unexplored world his to claim.

 

– Is it true you've lived among the Turks?

The judge leaned across the table of the Peshawar Club, raising his voice to be heard above the music.

– I'm sure she hasn't lived among anything of the sort – any more than I've lived among Pathans.

The judge's wife, seated beside Mr Forbes, gestured around the capacious interior of the Club where the upper echelons of British Society in Peshawar had gathered for the Winter Ball. The bearers had all disappeared into the kitchen, so the only Pathan to be seen was the one stationed beside the mounted deer's head whose task for the last fifteen minutes or so had been to retrieve the one napkin holder which a swaying man had been trying to toss onto the antlers. His aim had been growing steadily wilder, or perhaps he was deliberately aiming for the Pathan's head now.