Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (42 page)

Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightforward, geometric shapes with crayons from a child’s colouring box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, blonde terraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.

Against these bleached pallors, the iridescent crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the ancient mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beneath a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaine, the scourge of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand.

The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, black and white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colours that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewellery made of red glass.

They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black line straight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years.

They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbanned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the foreign eye as a unicorn. They exist, in all their glittering and innocent exoticism, in direct contradiction to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow in the gutters. In the teahouse a green parrot nudges the bars of its wicker cage.

The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In this early part of the year you can buy only last summer’s dried fruit—apricots, peaches, raisins—except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open on the stall to show how a wet nest of garnets remains within. A local speciality of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios.

An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lunch and eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing.

She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had come and, the last tale of all concluded, fall silent. Then, the lily-seller might vanish.

A goat is nibbling wild jasmine among the ruins of the mosque that was built by the beautiful wife of Tamburlaine.

Tamburlaine’s wife started to build this mosque for him as a surprise, while he was away at the wars, but when she got word of his imminent return, one arch still remained unfinished. She went directly to the architect and begged him to hurry but the architect told her that he would complete the work on time only if she gave him a kiss. One kiss, one single kiss.

Tamburlaine’s wife was not only very beautiful and very virtuous but also very clever. She went to the market, bought a basket of eggs, boiled them hard and stained them a dozen different colours. She called the architect to the palace, showed him the basket and told him to choose any egg he liked and eat it. He took a red egg. What does it taste like? Like an egg. Eat another.

He took a green egg.

What does
that
taste like? Like the red egg. Try again.

He ate a purple egg.

One eggs tastes just the same as any other egg, if they are fresh, he said.

There you are! she said. Each of these eggs looks different to the rest but they all taste the same. So you may kiss any one of my serving women that you like but you must leave me alone.

Very well, said the architect. But soon he came back to her and this time he was carrying a tray with three bowls on it, and you would have thought the bowls were all full of water.

Drink from each of these bowls, he said.

She took a drink from the first bowl, then from the second; but how she coughed and spluttered when she took a mouthful from the third bowl, because it contained, not water, but vodka.

This vodka and that water both look alike but each tastes quite different, he said. And it is the same with love.

Then Tamburlaine’s wife kissed the architect on the mouth. He went back to the mosque and finished the arch the same day that victorious Tamburlaine rode into Samarkand with his army and banners and his cages full of captive kings. But when Tamburlaine went to visit his wife, she turned away from him because no woman will return to the harem after she has tasted vodka. Tamburlaine beat her with a knout until she told him she had kissed the architect and then he sent his executioners hotfoot to the mosque.

The executioners saw the architect standing on top of the arch and ran up the stairs with their knives drawn but when he heard them coming he grew wings and flew away to Persia.

This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a child’s box of crayons. This Tamburlaine’s wife of the story would have painted a black stripe laterally across her forehead and done up her hair in a dozen, dozen tiny plaits, like any other Uzbek woman. She would have bought red and white radishes from the market for her husband’s dinner. After she ran away from him perhaps she made her living in the market. Perhaps she sold lilies there.

My name is neither here nor there since I used several in the Old World that I may not speak of now; then there is my, as it were,
wilderness
name, that now I never speak of; and, now, what I call myself in
this
place, therefore my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature. But I first saw light in the county of
Lancashire
in
Old England,
in the Year of Our Lord 16—, my father a poor farm servant, and me mam and he both died of plague when I was a little thing so me and me brothers and sisters left living were put on the parish and what became of them I do not know, but, as for me, I could do a bit of sewing and keep a place clean so when I were nine or ten years of age they set me up as a maid of all work to an old woman that lived in our parish.

This old woman, or
lady
rather, never married and was, as I found out, of the Roman faith, though she kept
that
to herself, and once a good deal richer than she had become. Besides, her father, wanting a son and getting nowt but she, taught her Latin, Greek and a bit of Hebrew and left her a great telescope with which she used to view the heavens from her roof though her sight was too bad to make out much but what she did not see, she made up, for she said she had poor sight for the things of
this
world but clear sight into the one to come. She often let me have a squint at the stars, too, for I was her only companion and she learned me my letters, as you can see, and would have taught me all she knew herself, had she not, as soon as I come to her, cast my
horoscope
for me, her father having left the charts and zodiacal instruments. And, having I done so, told me I would not need the language of
Homer
at no time in all my life, but a little conversational Hebrew she
did
teach me, for reasons as follows:

That the stars, whom she had consulted on behalf of her dear child, as she pleased to call me, assured her that I would take a long voyage over the Ocean to the
New World
and there bear a blessed babe whose fathers’ fathers never sailed in Noah’s Ark. And, from her reading, which had worn her eyes out, she had concluded that those “red children of the wilderness” could be none other than the Lost Tribe of Israel, so
shalom,
she taught me, besides the words for “love” and “hunger”, and much else that I have forgotten, so that I could talk to my husband when I met him. And if I had not been a steady girl, she would have turned my head with all her nonsense for she would have it that the stars foretold I should grow up to be nowt less than Our Lady of the Red Men.

For, she says, that country far beyond the sea is named
Virginia,
after the virgin mother of God Almighty, and its rivers flow directly from Eden so, when the natives are converted to the true religion—“which task I charge you with, child,” and she gives me a mouthful of Ave Marias—when that shall be accomplished, why, the whole world will end and the dead rise up out of their coffins and all go to heaven that deserve it and my little babby sit smiling over everything with a gold crown on his head. Then she’d babble away in Latin and cross herself. But I never told nobody about her
Roman
ways nor about her star-gazing, either, for if they hadn’t hanged her for a heretic, they’d have hanged her for a witch, poor creature.

One day the old lass lies down and never gets up again and her cousins come and shift all the goods with a penn’orth of value to ‘em but they could find no place for me in their house so I must shift for meself.

I take it into my head to go to
London,
where I persuade myself I can make my fortune, and I walk the highway, sleeping in barns and hedges, for I was hardy, and makes good time—five days. When I gets to London, I stole my first penny loaf, to keep me from starving, which led directly to my undoing, a gentleman that spies me slip the loaf into my pocket, instead of raising a hue and cry, follows me into the streets, takes my arm, inquires: whether it be want or inclination that makes me take it. I flares up at that: Want, sir! says I and he says, such a pretty young “Lancashire milkmaid” as I was should not want for nothing while he had breath in his body and so flattered and coaxed me that I went with him to a room with a bed in it in a public house where he was well known. When he finds I’ve never done the thing before, he weeps; beats his breast for shame for debauching me; gives me five gold sovereigns, the most money that ever I saw until then; and departs for, so he says, the church, to pray forgiveness, which is the last that I saw of him. So I went on the common with my first fall, which was a fortunate one, and the “Lancashire milkmaid” was soon in a fair way of trade as the “Lancashire whore”.

Now, had I been content with honest whoring, no doubt I would be dressed in silk riding my coach in Cheapside still and never eat the bitter bread of exile. But you could say that, when I clapped my eye on his coin, I was as if struck with love and though want made a thief of me, first, it was avarice perfected me in the art and whoring was my “cover” for it since my customers, blinded as they were with lust and often fuddled with liquor, were easier to pluck, living, than geese, dead.

It was a gold watch out of the bosom of a city alderman that took me to Newgate for I quarrelled with my landlady over my rent and she took his complaint of me to the magistrate out of spite. So, just as my old Lancashire mistress said, I sailed the Ocean to
Virginia
but I went in a convict transport. They burned my hand, to brand me, as they used convicts, and sold me to work my sentence in the plantation for seven years, after which they said I should be a free woman again.

My master took a liking to me, for I was not yet aged above seventeen, and he had me out of the tobacco fields into his kitchen. But the overseer did not like it, that I should get the taste of his whip no more, and pestered me unmercifully that, since I had been a whore in Cheapside, I should not play the honest maid with him in
Virginia.
Coming at me alone in the house, my master having gone to church, it being Sunday morning, this overseer thrust one hand in my bosom and the other up my skirt, says I shall have it whether I wants it or no. I picked up the big carving knife and whacks off both his ears, first one, then t’other. What a sight! blood enough for pig-sticking; he roars, he curses, I runs out into the garden with the knife in my hand, it dripping.

Seeing me in such a fluster, the gardener coming up with a basket of vegetables cries: “What’s this, Sal?”

“Well,” says I, “the overseer just now tried to board me and I’ve had the ears off him and would it had been his pillocks too.”

The gardener, being a good-natured kind of
Negro
man and a slave, hisself, and hisself tickled once too often by the overseer’s whip, cannot forbear to laugh but says to me: “Then you must be off into the wilderness, Sal, and cast your fate to the tender mercies of the savage Indian. For this is a hanging matter.”

He gives me his handkerchief with his bit of dinner in it and a tinder-box he had about him, which I stow away in my apron pocket, and I show the plantation a clean pair of heels, I can tell you, adding to my list of crimes that most heinous: escape from bondage.

I am a good walker as you may judge from my trudge from Lancashire to London and by the time night comes on and I sit down to eat the gardener’s bit of bread and bacon there are fifteen odd miles between myself and the plantation and rough going, too, for my master had cleared land from the forest to grow his tobacco. My plan is, to walk until I gets to where the English have no dominion, for I have heard the Spaniards and the French are on this coast, as well, and there, I thought, I’d ply my trade amongst strangers, for a whore needs nowt but her skin to set up business.

You must know I had no knowledge of
geography
and thought, from
Virginia
to
Florida
but ten or twelve days’ march, at the most, for I knew it was very far and could think of no distance further than that, for the great vastness of the
Americas
was then unknown to me. As for the Indians, I thought, well! if I can keep off the overseer with my knife, I’d be more than a match for them, if I should meet them, so slept sound under the sky, took a bearing by the sun in the morning and went on.