The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 77
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“Except that you are a virgin,” I reminded her. “And must stay that way, for your brother’s sake.”
“That is what Aziz and I discussed. We have a small favor to ask of you, Mirza Marco. If you will consent to it, I will consent—and I have my brother’s consent—to make zina with you. Of course, you can have him too, if you like.”
I said suspiciously, “Your offer sounds like a considerable return for a small favor. And your beloved brother sounds brotherly indeed. I can hardly wait to meet this pimping and simpering lout.”
“You have met him. He is the kitchen scullion, with hair dark red like mine, and—”
“I do not remember.” But I could imagine him: the twin to Nostril’s stable mate Jafar, a muscular and handsome hulk of a man, with the orifice of a woman, the wits of a camel and the morals of a jack weasel.
“When I say a small favor,” Sitare went on, “I mean a small one for me and Aziz. For yourself it will be a greater favor, since you will profit by it. Actually earn money from it.”
Here was a beautiful chestnut-haired maiden, offering me herself and her maidenhead and a monetary return as well—plus, if I wanted him, her reputedly even more beautiful brother into the bargain. Naturally this brought to my recollection the phrase I had several times heard, “the bloodthirstiness of beauty.” And naturally that made me cautious, but not so cautious that I would flatly refuse the offer without hearing more.
“Tell me more,” I said.
“Not now. Here comes your uncle. Hush.”
“Well, well!” boomed Uncle Mafio, approaching us from the darker interior of the house. “Collecting fiame, are we?” And his black beard split in a bright white grin, as he shouldered past us and went out the door toward the stable.
The remark was a play on the word fiame, since in Venice “flames” can mean—in addition to fire—either red-headed persons or secret lovers. So I assumed that my uncle was jocosely twitting what he took to be a boy-and-girl flirtation.
As soon as he was out of hearing, Sitare said to me, “Tomorrow. At the kitchen door, where I let you in before. At this same hour.” And then she too was gone, somewhere into the back parts of the house.
I strolled on along the front passage, into the room from which I heard the voices of my father and the Widow Esther. As I entered, he was saying, in a muted and serious tone, “I know it was your good heart that proposed it. I only wish you had asked me first, and me alone.”
“I never would have suspected,” she said, also in a hushed tone. “And if, as you say, he has nobly exerted himself to reform, I would not wish to be the provocation of a relapse.”
“No, no,” said my father. “No blame can be laid to you, even if the good deed should turn out ill. We will talk it over, and I will ask flatly whether this would be an irresistible temptation, and on that basis we will decide.”
Then they noticed my presence, and abruptly dropped whatever it was they were privily discussing, and my father said, “Yes, it was as well that we stopped these few days. There are several items we need which are unobtainable in the bazar during this holy month. When the month ends tomorrow, they will be purchasable, and by then the lame camel will be healed, and we will aim at departure the day after. We cannot thank you enough for the hospitality you have shown us during our stay.”
“Which reminds me,” she said. “I have your evening meal almost done. I will bring it out to your quarters as soon as it is.”
My father and I went together to the hayloft, where we found Uncle Mafio perusing the pages of our Kitab. He looked up from it and said, “Our next destination, Mashhad, is no easy one to get to. Desert all the way, and the very widest extent of that desert. We will be dried and shriveled like a bacala.” He broke off to scratch vigorously at the inside of his left elbow. “Some damned bug has bitten me, and I itch.”
I said, “The widow told me that this city is infested with scorpions.”
My uncle gave me a scornful look. “If you ever get stung by one, asenazzo, you will learn that scorpions do not bite. No, this was a tiny fly, perfectly triangular in shape. It was so tiny that I cannot believe this tormenting itch it left.”
The Widow Esther made several crossings of the yard, bringing out the dishes of our meal, and we three ate while bent together over the Kitab. Nostril ate apart, in the stable below, among the camels, but he ate almost as audibly as a camel eats. I tried to disregard his noises and concentrate on the maps.
“You are right, Mafio,” said my father. “The broadest part of the desert to cross. God send us good.”
“Still, an easy route to keep to. Mashhad is just a little north of east from here. At this season, we will only have to take aim at the sunrise each morning.”
“And I,” I put in, “will frequently verify our course with our kamal.”
“I notice,” said my father, “that al-Idrisi shows not a single well or oasis or karwansarai in that desert.”
“But some such things must exist. It is a trade route, after all. Mashhad, like Baghdad, is a major stop on the Silk Road.”
“And as big a city as Kashan, the widow told me. Also, thank God, it is in the cool mountains.”
“But beyond it, we will come to genuinely cold ones. We shall probably have to lay up for the winter somewhere.”
“Well, we cannot expect to go through the world with the wind always astern.”
“And we will not be on territory familiar to you and me, Nico, until we get all the way to Kashgar, in Kithai itself.”
“Distant from the eye, Mafio, is distant from the heart. Sufficient the evils of the day, and all that. For the time being, let us not plan or worry beyond Mashhad.”
3
THE next day, the last day of Ramazan, we spent mostly in just lazing about the widow’s property. I think I have neglected to mention that, in Muslim countries, a day’s beginning is not counted from dawn, as one might expect, or from the midnight hour, as it is in civilized countries, but from the moment of the sun’s setting. Anyway, there was no point in our haunting the Kashan bazar, as my father had remarked, until it should be again fully stocked with goods for purchase. We had no other tasks except to feed and water the camels and shovel their manure out of the stable. Of course, Nostril attended to that—and at the widow’s request he spread the manure on her herb garden. Now and again, I or my father or uncle would go out for a stroll in the streets. And so did Nostril, in the intervals between his chores, and in the process, I have no doubt, managed to consummate some more of his nasty liaisons.
When I went walking out into the city in the late afternoon, I found a crowd of people standing at a corner where two streets intersected. Most of them were young—good-looking males and nondescript females. I would have assumed that they were merely engaged in the favorite occupation of the East, which is standing and staring—or, in the case of Eastern men, standing and staring and scratching their crotches—except that I heard a droning voice proceeding from the center of the group. So I stopped and joined the audience, and gradually worked my way through them until I could see the object of their attention.
It was an old man seated cross-legged on the ground: a sha‘ir, or poet, and he was entertaining the people by telling a story. From time to time, evidently whenever he spoke an especially poetic and felicitous phrase, one of the bystanders would drop a coin into the begging bowl on the ground beside the old man. My grasp of Farsi was not good enough to enable me to appreciate anything of that sort, but it was good enough at least to follow the thread of the tale, and it was an interesting tale, so I stood and listened. The sha’ir was telling how dreams came to be.
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