The Years of Rice and Salt (70 page)

“Sometimes, my—my friend and I meditate by looking into each other's eyes, and when we do, sometimes we see each other's faces change. Even our hair changes color. I was wondering what this means.”

“It means you are seeing past incarnations. But this is not at all advisable. Suppose you see that three or four incarnations ago you were a fierce tiger? What good would this do you? The past is dust, I tell you.”

“Did any of your disciples—did any of us know each other in our past incarnations?”

“Yes. We travel in groups, we keep running into each other. There are two disciples here, for instance, who are close friends in this incarnation. When I was meditating on them, I saw that they were physical sisters in their previous incarnation, and very close to each other. And in the incarnation before that, they were mother and son. This is how it happens. Nothing can eclipse my third eye's vision. When you have established a true spiritual bond, then that feeling can never truly disappear.”

“Can you tell us—can you tell us who we were before? Or who among us had this bond?”

“Outwardly I have not personally told these two, but those who are my real disciples I have told inwardly, and so they know it inside themselves already. My real disciples—those whom I have taken as my very own, and who have taken me—they are going to be fulfilled and realized in this incarnation, or in their next incarnation, or in very few incarnations. Some disciples may take twenty incarnations or more, because of their very poor start. Some who have come to me in their first or second human incarnation may take hundreds of incarnations more to reach their goal. The first or second incarnation is still a half-animal incarnation, most of the time. The animal is still there as a predominating factor, so how can they achieve God-realization? Even in the Nsara Center for Spiritual Development, right here among us, there are many disciples who have had only six or seven incarnations, and on the streets of the city I see Africans, or other people from across the sea, who are very clearly more animal than human. What can a guru do with such souls? With these people a guru can only do so much.”

“Can you . . . can you put us in communication with souls who have passed over? Now? Is it time yet?”

Madame Sururi returned her questioner's gaze, level and calm. “They are speaking to you already, are they not? We cannot bring them forth in front of everyone tonight. The spirits do not like to be so exposed. And we have guests that they are not yet used to. And I am tired. You have seen how draining it is to speak aloud in this world the things they are saying in our minds. Let's retire to the dining room now, and enjoy the offerings you have brought. We will eat knowing that our loved ones speak to us in our minds.”

The visitors from the café decided by glance to leave while the others were retiring to the next room, before they began to commit the crime of taking others' food without believing in their religion. They made small coin offerings to the seer, who accepted them with dignity, ignoring the tenor of Kirana's look, staring back at Kirana without guilt or complicity.

The next tram wasn't due for another half watch, and so the group walked back through the industrial district and down the riverside, reenacting choice bits of the interview and staggering with laughter. Kirana for one could not stop laughing, howling it out over the river: “My third eye sees all! But I can't tell you right now! What unbelievable crap!”

“I've already told you what you want to know with my inner voice, now let's eat!”

“Some of my disciples were sisters in previous lives, sister goats in actual fact, but you can only ask so much of the past, ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Oh be quiet,” Budur said sharply. “She's only making a living.” To Kirana: “She tells people things and they pay her, how is that so different from what you do? She makes them feel better.”

“Does she?”

“She gives them something in exchange for food. She tells them what they want to hear. You tell people what they don't want to hear for your food, is that any better?”

“Why yes,” Kirana said, cackling again. “It's a pretty damned good trick, now you put it that way. Here's the deal!” she shouted over the river at the world. “I tell you what you don't want to hear, you give me food!”

Even Budur had to laugh.

They walked across the last bridge arm in arm, laughing and talking, then into the city center, trams squealing over tracks, people hurrying by. Budur looked at the passing faces curiously, remembering the worn visage of the fake guru, businesslike and hard. No doubt Kirana was right to laugh. All the old myths were just stories. The only reincarnation you got was the next day's waking. No one else was you, not the you that existed a year before, not the you that might exist ten years from now, or even the next day. It was a matter of the moment, some unimaginable minim of time, always already gone. Memory was partial, a dim tawdry room in a beat-up neighborhood, illuminated by flashes of distant lightning. Once she had been a girl in a good merchant's harem, but what did that matter now? Now she was a free woman in Nsara, crossing the city at night with a group of laughing intellectuals—that was all there was. It made her laugh too, a painful wild shout of a laugh, full of a joy akin to ferocity. That was what Kirana really gave in exchange for her food.

16
Three new women showed up in Budur's zawiyya, quiet women who had arrived with typical stories, and mostly kept to themselves. They started work in the kitchen, as usual. Budur felt uncomfortable with the way they glanced at her, and did not look at each other. She still could not quite believe that young women like these would betray a young woman like her, and two of the three were actually very nice. She was stiffer with them than she would have wanted to be, without actually being hostile, which Idelba had warned might give away her suspicions. It was a fine line in a game Budur was completely unused to playing—or not completely—it reminded her of the various fronts she had put on for her father and mother, a very unpleasant memory. She wanted everything to be new now, she wanted to be herself straight up to everybody, chest to chest as the Iranians said. But it seemed life entailed putting on masks for much of the time. She must be casual in Kirana's classes, and indifferent to Kirana in the cafés, even when they were leg to leg; and she must be civil to these spies.

Meanwhile, across the plaza in the lab, Idelba and Piali were hard at work, staying late into the night almost every night; and Idelba became more and more serious about it, trying, Budur thought, to hide her worries behind an unconvincing dismissiveness. “Just physics,” she would say when asked. “Trying to figure something out. You know how interesting theories can be, but they're just theories. Not like real problems.” It seemed everyone put on a mask to the world, even Idelba, who was not good at it, even though she seemed to have a frequent need for masks. Budur could see very plainly now that she thought the stakes were somehow high.

“Is it a bomb?” Budur asked once in a low voice, one night as they were closing up the emptied building.

Idelba hesitated only a moment. “Possibly,” she whispered, looking around them. “The possibility is there. So, please—never speak of it again.”

During these months Idelba worked such long hours, and, like everyone else in the zawiyya, ate so little, that she fell sick, and had to rest in her bed. This was very frustrating to her, and along with the misery of illness, she struggled to get up before she was ready, and even tried to work on papers in her bed, pencil and logarithmic abacus scritching and clacking all the time she was awake.

Then one day she got a phone call while Budur was there, and she dragged herself down the hall to take it, clutching her night robe to her. When she got off the phone she hurried to the kitchen and asked Budur to join her in her room.

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 someplace, 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 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. To each wall there were two sheets of drywall, 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 though 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 djebella 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. Glancing 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 train 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 go 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 centered here. So come. Where are your clothes?”

“In my room, of course!” And Budur swept past them to her room, considering which djebella 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.

17
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 anymore, no longer worked in certain labs she had before, and she no longer spent any time with Piali.