Constance (53 page)

Connie patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all in the past. It’s dealt with, finished.’

It had taken some time, and it had been complicated, but her formal identity was her own once more.

‘I’m so glad of that. I learned a very big lesson. You know, Connie, what truly matters is your family. Niki is my family and Noah is not, even though I like him so much. It was all very well when I believed I had only myself to consider, I could decide to make myself like that because like this was not good enough. But now my brother is alive again. The first time I went to the prison I was – oh – so happy to see him. Can you imagine what that was like? He had come back from the dead. He is very thin and he had been beaten, and he had spent many days locked up alone, but still he was there, the same smile, the same person. My brother.
Now I know what is important. Here I am. In Uzbekistan. This must be my place.’

The passion in her words touched Connie. Her admiration for Roxana renewed itself.

‘I understand,’ she murmured. ‘And you are quite right.’

There was a burst of laughter from the main chamber. The pairs of glistening, wobbling women passed from the heat to the cooler rooms, gasped as they were deluged with water, or sat and gossiped on the old stone benches.

Roxana beamed. ‘You see? You come here with your mother or your sister, and if you are not lucky to have them you are like us, with your good friend, and you talk and talk. You are scrubbed clean and you have opened your heart, and then you go out into the world again. Look, over there.’

Roxana pointed at a larger group of women. There were two elderly ones, one fat, and the other tiny with breasts like two dead leaves. They were issuing orders to a circle of laughing girls with one at the centre. The whole group was busy with white towels and jars of cream and lotion, and they set about scrubbing and massaging the girl’s skin and teasing out the thick coils of her black hair.

‘What’s happening?’

‘That one in the middle, she is a bride. These are her sisters and friends and those two, they are her grandmother and her fiancé’s grandmother. It is our custom. They are making sure that she is prepared for her wedding night. She will be beautiful for her husband, the grandmothers must see to that. And the bridegroom’s family, they must pay for all the cosmetics to make her ready. Combs and towels and soap, everything.’

The fat grandmother slapped a paste like thick red mud into the roots of the laughing bride’s hair.

‘Would you like to get married?’ Connie asked.

‘Ha. I have other things to attend to first. And I will wait my turn, after you.’

‘That might be a little
too
long to wait,’ Connie smiled.

Roxana sniffed. ‘We shall see. We will have another turn in the hot room now. And after that, the massage.’

Later they went back up the spiral stone steps. Off the upper corridor was another, much grander salon with a marble floor and lamp sconces made of wrought-iron. There were towel-covered divans against the wall and rugs and cushions on the floor. After their
hammam
, the women lounged and drank tea. Their hair was tied up in coloured turbans, naked fat babies lay on blankets and brown-skinned toddlers ran between them. Connie thought it was like walking into a Victorian academician’s painting of a
seraglio
. Roxana delivered her to an enormous, towelled Russian woman with a wide slash of gold tombstone teeth.

‘Massage,
da
?’

‘Um, yes. Thank you,’ Connie murmured, as she was stretched out like a sacrifice on one of the divans.

The Russian masseuse was strong as well as big. Under her vigorous hands Connie’s joints creaked and snapped and the women within earshot all laughed appreciatively. At the end, when her muscles were unknotted and her limbs felt like jelly, the woman scooped her up like a rag doll and cradled Connie’s head against her immense bosom.

It was like being held by Mother Earth herself.

Fingers massaged Connie’s scalp and her neck, even her ears, with as much love and tenderness as if she were a baby.

And without the slightest warning, without the accompaniment of pain in her chest or a clutch to her heart, Connie began to cry.

The tears poured out of her eyes. She wept like a baby in its mother’s arms, hiding her face against the massive breasts as the woman hummed and crooned to her.
She stroked Connie’s hair and patted her hands, waiting until she was done with crying and began to regain possession of herself. When the flood finally stopped the woman dried her face for her, and gently set her upright once more.

‘Oh dear. I am so sorry,’ Connie gulped.

She pressed her hands to her eyes. The women in their turbans – daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers – were still drinking tea and playing with the babies.

Then she realised that she didn’t feel sorry at all.

She felt light, and calm, and peaceful. A small, hard knob of anger that she had carried within her for too long had detached itself from the place beneath her breastbone, and it had floated clean away.

She wasn’t going to know the woman who had given birth to her, and she would never learn why – in all the years since then – she hadn’t tried to find her lost daughter.

She would have her reasons, whatever they were, whoever she was.

That was all there was to know. The difference was that now, among all these women in this strangest of places, Connie thought truthfully, for the first time, that she could forgive her.

The masseuse leaned forward and pointed with a sausage finger at Connie’s marcasite droplet. She asked a question in Russian.

Roxana had retreated to have her eyebrows threaded, but now she came back.

‘What’s she saying?’ Connie asked.

‘She is worried that you have perhaps lost your earring in here.’

‘Tell her I only have one. My mother –’ the word unfamiliar on her tongue, but also satisfying ‘– has always kept the pair to it.’

Roxana relayed the information. The masseuse was folding towels. Her huge arms swallowed up the pile.

‘Mother. Very good,’ she said in English, and beamed at Connie.

Outside the
hammam
it was stiflingly hot, and growing dark. They walked slowly, scuffing up the dust, and Connie’s feet and head felt light with happiness.

‘Where are we going?’ she murmured to Roxana.

There was no one to be seen in the narrow streets of the old city, but from one window came the blare of a televised football game and from another a steamy waft of cooking. Doors stood ajar to admit the suggestion of a breeze, and from a third house came the sound of a baby crying.

Roxana hesitated. ‘I am going home to Yakov, to take this shopping.’ She held up her string bags. ‘Maybe you would like to come with me?’

Connie interpreted that Roxana would like her to meet Yakov and see where she lived but wasn’t sure what she would make of it.

Without placing undue emphasis she answered lightly, ‘Yes, I’ll come. I’d like to meet him.’

A sequence of alleys and squares guarded by closed mosques brought them into a slightly more modern quarter. They passed a butcher’s shop with muslin-wrapped animal shanks hanging in the opening. The shop’s sign was a stuffed cow’s head, complete with horns and whiskered muzzle. The animal’s sceptical glass eye followed Connie as she walked by. Next door was a cavern heaped with hundreds of onyx-green watermelons. Roxana stopped her march to buy one and drop it into another string bag. Connie offered to carry it for her, but Roxana wouldn’t permit it.

They came to a brown door in a blank wall, as anonymous as each of its neighbours.

Roxana unlatched the door and they stepped over a wooden sill into a courtyard.

There was silence, broken by the scratch of music and a sudden flutter of wings. One entire wall of the courtyard was taken up by a cage full of green finches. Roxana put down her bags and called out, ‘Yakov! We are here.’

She held aside a curtain of beads. Connie blinked in the light. The whole room was taken up with crowded bookshelves, and there were stacks and pyramids of books on the tiled floor and on the table in the centre.

In an armchair sat one of the fattest men she had ever seen. He had an oval, bald head, and a neck that seemed to slide downwards into unconfined billows of flesh. Even his feet in leather slippers were monstrously fat, and his bruise-purple ankles seemed as thick as a man’s thigh. He looked up at them and shuffled his bulk to the edge of his seat.

‘You are here, that’s good. Please. Please come and be comfortable.’

‘Yakov, this is my good friend Connie.’

Connie held out her hand and he grasped it. His skin was smooth and very soft, almost liquid, as if it was close to dissolving point.

Roxana was moving books and papers off a straight-backed sofa draped with worn throws. ‘Sit here, Connie. Yakov, would you like
chai
? Some fruit? Connie and I were at the
hammam.
’

He nodded, and Roxana ducked out of the room.

‘So,’ Yakov breathed.

His glance was very sharp. He might have been immobilised by his bulk, but Connie did not think that he would miss very much. Her eyes slid over the books. The titles were in English, Russian, Arabic, and other languages that she couldn’t even identify.

Yakov said, ‘You have been very kind to the child. I want to thank you.’

Connie smiled. ‘I don’t know about kind. I loved her company. You taught her to speak English, didn’t you?’

He nodded. The small movement set up a ripple under his loose grey pyjama suit. There were dark rings under his arms and another patch over his chest. Connie speculated about the precise arrangement between Yakov and Roxana. He had been a friend of her mother’s, maybe at one time her protector, and then he had extended that protection in some way to Roxana when Leonid, the stepfather, had mistreated her.

Whatever had happened, Roxana never spoke of such things. She just did what it was necessary for her to do, crimping the corners of her mouth and setting her shoulders with renewed determination.

‘She was an apt pupil. I did not have to repeat myself very many times. What brings you to Bokhara, Connie?’

‘I have been travelling, and when Roxana left London I promised I would visit her. Will her brother be released, do you think?’

‘When you come to know this country, Connie, you will understand that that is a question that does not have a simple answer. It depends on many things.’

There was a clink of glass as Roxana nudged the beads aside and came in with a beaten-metal tray. She had taken off her shoes, and replaced them with leather slippers like Yakov’s. The effect was to shorten her legs and broaden her hips, as if she was edging out of girlhood. She poured tea into three glasses and held out a dish of sliced watermelon. Yakov took a piece and gobbled it, catching the juice with his hand as it ran down his chin and then licking each of his fingers. He belched loudly. Roxana glanced to see Connie’s reaction as Yakov tossed the melon rind back into the dish.

‘I am an old man,’ he snapped, and crooked his finger to
indicate that he wanted another piece. ‘Now. We are talking about Niki.’

Niki was allowed one visit a month. It took a ten-hour bus journey to reach the prison where he was held, and the same for the return trip. Roxana had told Connie that in order to be nearer to him she could try to find work in Tashkent – ‘like my friend Fatima’ – but she had stayed here in Bokhara because she could live with Yakov without paying any rent, and thanks to her experience in London she had been able to get a very good job at the old Intourist Hotel.

‘The fact is, Connie, that Niki will not choose to say or do what will help himself,’ Yakov added. ‘So his release is not likely to come soon.’

Roxana jumped to her feet. She stood in front of Yakov, hands on her hips.

‘Niki has a belief.
I
do not want him to change his belief or pretend that he does not have it, because then he will not any longer be Niki and he might as well have died in the square at Andijan with his friends.’

Yakov shrugged and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

He spoke quickly, dismissively, in Russian.

Roxana ran at him and drummed her fists on his chest and shoulders, shouting into his face. Moving with surprising speed Yakov caught her wrists and held her off to one side. Connie was going to intervene, but Yakov only laughed.

‘You see, Roxana always has a temper.’

‘When you are speaking about my
brother
, yes,’ Roxana spat back at him. But she detached herself and flopped back into her chair. She said to Connie,

‘Niki is a Muslim. He is gentle and his beliefs are peaceful but our government does not like independent practices, and religious men are called by this label of fundamentalists. This is what
Comrade
Yakov here is saying.’

Her face went tight and dark. ‘I have seen what it is like for Niki and all religious prisoners. They try to make him renounce his faith, confess to terrorism, beg our President for forgiveness. Niki will not do it, and so he is beaten and put in punishment cells. But if he does confess, he will be sentenced for many years for crimes that are not his. There is no point, because now at least he is true to himself. He is a brave man. It is terrible, what happens, but I am so proud of him.’

‘He is an idealist, and therefore a fool,’ Yakov snapped.

Roxana rounded on him. ‘And you? What are you? Who is proud of you, I might say?’ She waved her hand. ‘Look at all this, all that you have read and everything you know. But still you will say any lie, pretend anything people want to hear, just to be comfortable.’

‘I am a realist. And therefore I am not only alive, but also a free man.’

Roxana’s laugh was like a splash of acid. She waved her hand again, at the shuttered room and at Yakov’s beached body.

‘Free? You call this
freedom
?’

He slumped slightly, and then nodded as if to say
touché
.

‘Two idealists, you and your brother.’

He turned his gaze to Connie. He held up a finger and pointed at her, then to the shuttered window. ‘This is one of the first things you will learn about our precious Uzbekistan. Always, we will be caught between Marx and Mohammed. And me, I care little for either.’