The Trade Secret Read online

  Nat began to cry. ‘Hallelujah,’ he sobbed.

  On the fourth floor, he crept through the sleeping servants. He was the last to turn in. He rolled out his rug and lay on the mineral mosaic wishing the rock crystal were a deep cave into which he could plummet and vanish.

  The following morning, Angelo said,

  ‘Bramble, Sir Anthony summons you to attend on him in his chamber directly.’

  ‘Thank-you, signor,’ said Nat, sick to the pit of his stomach. The summons had come at last. He set down a bowl of hot water and laid a folded towel on its rim. His voice choking, he said: ‘In faith, it is good to have our captain barking orders again. I must beg your leave in order to fetch him something which he requires me now to bring him, my masters.’

  Nat stepped out of the palace into the hot morning. He crossed the giant, shadowless maidan like an ant under a schoolboy’s burning-glass. Sir Anthony would have to wait just a little longer for his vengeance.

  He went to the currency exchange hoping against hope, but today they wouldn’t touch silver, not for any price.

  So, today was his dying day.

  But first Nat had one small duty: to apologise to Darius. He did not know whether Anthony would kill him with his own rapier, or turn him over to the Shah’s bodyguards. Either way, even if he survived, Nat would be too degraded a wretch, once Anthony and Eli Elkin were finished torturing or branding him, for his apology to count for much. And so with brisk step Nat entered the bazaar in search of Darius, to make his apology while he was still a man.

  But when he got to Darius’s stall, the black cloth was down. Nat was just about to leave when he noticed broken books lying in the passageway, and an ink slick leaking out from under the cloth like blood from a slaughtered calf. On hands and knees he lifted up the bottom of the cloth and peeked inside. The stall had been ransacked - but someone or something was breathing inside, like a beast in a cave.

  7

  Earlier that morning, Darius had set out to formally declare his love to Gol Zarafshani. The nearer he got to her house, the more he realised how shabby and faded his clothes were. When had his peach kameez turned this tea-stain colour? When had it become so bobbled? He was sure those bobbles weren’t there yesterday. They must have sprung up overnight like mushrooms. His kameez used to be loose and flowing, now it was tight like cloth wrapped around sweated cheese. How had he grown so flabby? When did his flesh start bulging?

  He tried to focus on his good points. He twisted the curly black sidelocks which he wore fashionably long, a ringlet dangling by each ear. But then he caught sight of his reflection in a window and saw that parts of his old black velvet coat were worn as bald as a camel’s knee. Still, neither dowdy clothes nor flabby body were going to make him turn back today. That much was certain. For just as on a breezy day, a man has only to turn into the wind for his ears to be filled with its roar, so if he turned tail now Nat Bramble’s invective would fill his ears, and all be true.

  On the corner opposite Gol’s house lay a small vacant plot, site of a neighbour’s abandoned building project that had never progressed beyond a white screed floor. On its waist-high clay wall there stood a straight-backed man with a horseshoe moustache who was dangling a burning taper over his exposed forearm. A rival! And such a rival! And such a rival in his fine new indigo tunic, patterened with pink tulips. Darius felt sure he knew that horseshoe moustache and indigo tunic from somewhere. So, Gol had another suitor. Why had she never mentioned it? Because it wasn’t serious? Or because it was? Up on the roof, her shadow moved behind the elm screen. The rival raised his face to the elm screened roof garden and called out:

  ‘Gol! Gol! Gol Zarafshani! You are beloved of Mani Babachoi, who will now prove to you and to your well-respected family that his love is pure as fire!’

  This Mani Babachoi then lowered the flaming linen taper to his inner arm, and held flame to flesh for two long seconds, eyes streaming, body trembling, before he flung away the taper.

  A poultice wrapped in vine leaves was thrown down from the roof terrace. Mani Babachoi snatched it up and pressed it to his lips. He anointed his fresh wound with the healing unguent Gol had tossed him, and bandaged his arm. Inspired by this latest love token from Gol, he then burned himself three more times in rapid succession, twice on the forearm, once on the neck. Darius turned away. None of that at any time at all.

  What was Darius to do? Here was a rival who would walk through fire, crawl over broken glass and stand on hot coals for his beloved - as if he came from a fantastic land where all the mad, wild vows made in poems were actually done. He watched him pour water over his head, then heard him call up to Gol that he would read her a poem which spoke of what was in his heart, a poem which put into words the exact nature of his love for her.

  Darius pitied him already. This Mani Babachoi would mouth some moth-eaten, musty old Hafiz, but Gol would not be won by that. Darius, on the other hand, had come armed with a poem which he had written especially for Gol, a poem expressing emotions he would never have dared read to her but for the stinging of that foreign hornet Nat Bramble. As his rival stepped forward, and raised a page of verse to his eyes, the wet bristles on the back of his shaven head glistened in the sunlight.

  ‘Gol,’ he declared:

  ‘I yearn for your touch,

  as silence before the final chord

  aches for your fingers

  upon copper and silver strings.

  The ground reeled beneath Darius’s feet. His guts twisted and writhed. At last he understood why that horseshoe moustache had nagged at him so. ‘Strum,’ continued Mani Babachoi in his stentorian voice:

  ‘Strum,’ begs silence,

  after the last-but-one chord,

  ‘for until the touch of your hand

  the whole world hangs suspended,

  like a frozen waterfall.’

  ‘How,’ thought Darius, ‘could I have known I was selling a poem I wrote about Gol to a man in love with her himself? How could I have known that he was buying for Gol a poem inspired by Gol? Oh, I am undone! I am punished for selling my heart for a shahidi!’

  Mani Babachoi rolled up the poem, wound it in leather twine, and lobbed the scroll into the roof garden. Darius heard Gol clap her hands together. With delight? Or just to catch?

  ‘But I wrote that poem for her,’ said Darius.

  ‘You sold it to me,’ replied Mani, adjusting the fresh yellow bandage on his arm. ‘Have you no poem for her? Quick now. The lady is waiting. Speak your love.’

  To his dismay, Darius discovered that he could not remember a single poem. Every last one had completely disappeared from his memory. Poetry had fled his brain.

  At last, flying to the aid of a fellow poet in his moment of need, Jalal al-Din Rumi came winging across the ages to drop a pearl into a true lover’s brain. Darius experienced the exultation of a man whose blazing house has been saved by a sudden downpour of rain. He threw a defiant, careless look at his rival and snapped his fingers in his face. He climbed onto the white clay wall opposite Gol’s house. He stood on the wall, raised both hands in the air, and lifted his face to the elm screen. This rival could buy his leavings, but the true spirit, the living connection between himself and Gol would always flame into life. In a strong, clear voice, Darius began to recite.

  ‘Should someone allude to the gracefulness of the night sky,

  climb on the roof and dance and say:

  Like this!

  If anyone wants to know what soul means,

  or the presence of God,

  lean your face towards them and hold it close:

  Like this!

  Should any wonder how Jesus raised the dead,

  don’t try to explain the mystery,’

  just kiss me on the lips:

  Like this!

  When someone quotes the old poetic fancy about

  clouds disrobing the moon,

  unknot the ties of your gown one by one,

  let your loose gown fall o
pen, and say -

  OOUNGGMMFF!’

  A shovel load of pigeon shit hit Darius. Hard as hail stones, dry as gravel, the crusty droppings stung his face. The filthy grit was in his mouth, eyes, and ears. His head rang. Gol’s mother Roshanak was shouting at him.

  How dare he come here and spout lewd brothel songs outside their house! How dare he, in full hearing of the neighbours, lie that he had seen her daughter Gol in the nude, and falsely pretend to know that her breasts looked like moons, which, by the way, they did not, and she should know, she was her mother. And while that slandered virgin’s mother still breathed, he would never again see even so much as one of her ears!

  Another load of hard, dry birdlime struck Darius full in the face, knocking him backwards off the wall. Half-blind, he stumbled from the house, spitting disgusting knobbly droppings from his mouth.

  At the wall-fountain by Sharestan Bridge, Darius washed his face, hair, neck and hands, and sluiced his eyes and ears of ashy, bitty filth. He returned to his narrow stall in a bazaar darkened for want of oil, and dropped the cloth behind him. He tore down the silk pages of illustrated lyrics that hung across his stall. He overturned the table, shattering ink bottles, sending blank albums and books sliding to the floor. Then he sat in darkness in the far corner of the wrecked stall, and crossed his legs under him.

  ‘I must not let myself forget that despair is the one true state. Despair. All else, all other experiences are delusions and when I come back to this I know it is the one fixed truth. I must let my eyes get accustomed to this dark cave of despair, since it is the only proper dwelling-place. How stupid I was when I was out of my cave. What vanity was in my mind and soul. How shallow was my understanding.’

  The one true state was despair. He must not lose this vision. Therefore he would live a simple dervish life, up in the hills, eating only rice and water, and that only so as to fortify himself for the study and practice of Ibn Senna, Aristotle, and Astarabadi, who held that severe asceticism must purify the soul until it was ready to receive true wisdom and illumination. He would train his body for Muharram: self-flagellation with chains, against which pain the stinging of a burning linen taper would be as petty as nothing. Chains with razors on, these would be.

  He heard footsteps in the passageway outside his stall. All this useless coming and going. What purpose did it serve? Didn’t people know that there was no point in anyone going anywhere for anything? If fools managed to delude themselves that there was, good luck to them. The footsteps stopped outside his stall. A splinter of weak light from the passageway crept across the debris of Darius’s former life. Nat Bramble, his cheek pressed to the floor, poked his snout under the cloth.

  ‘Darius? Is that you in there?’

  A bull troubled by a gadfly, Darius slowly closed his eyes. This irritant would soon leave him be. Instead Nat crawled on his belly under the dropcloth and into the stall. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark, Darius?’

  Darius heard his name spoken, but he knew that the old self to whom that name once applied had been annihilated. Nothing of him survived the death he died outside Gol’s house. His body would live on for a time, and then die. The foreigner would talk to the silence for a while and then go. His words would soon stop grouting his ears like dusty dove dung.

  But grief calls unto grief.

  ‘I have come to apologise,’ said Nat. ‘I had no right to try to drag you down with me. I just wanted company in hell. What I said of you I said in envy and malice. What I said about you and Gol, I mean. I know nothing about love and how to win a fair hand and so you are right to spurn every ignorant calumny that came from an envious mouth.’

  ‘No,’ replied Darius. ‘What you accused me of was true. Everything about me is empty and false.’

  A landslip of books broke the silence for a moment. Nat took a pace forward, crunching underfoot the rare shell Darius used for shellacking paper.

  ‘I would have liked to have been your friend, Darius Nouredini. But my master’s found me out. I will never be able to see you again. Well, not as I am, at least. Not as you should know me. So forgive me, and then we’ll say farewell.’

  Nat’s voice wobbled. Darius said nothing for a time.

  ‘How much money do you have left?’ he asked at last.

  ‘One hundred Spanish ducats.’

  ‘It’s a start,’ said Darius.

  ‘No,’ said Nat, ‘you have a life to lose. You are a masterless man. You are independent. You own your own stall.’

  ‘To stay in this stall cursing our fate is one thing, to change our fate is another. Let us go to the oil springs and gushers surrounding the Fire Temple of Mithras, my friend! Come, let’s away!’

  8

  We will go to my house,’ said Darius. ‘My mother and her husband Masghoud hold the key to the storeroom where my father’s oil mining tools are stored. My mother claims the gear belongs to Masghoud by dint of marriage, but it’s mine by blood.’

  Hurrying down narrow unpaved streets, they passed the open door of a forge. Four men were holding down a sandy bay stallion while the farrier sliced a horny growth off the spur of his hocks with a razor. The stallion was thrashing his trussed legs wildly, his yoked hooves loudly clattering the wooden walls.

  ‘Too much barley,’ said Nat walking backwards so as not to miss a thing. ‘When they eat too much barley then these chestnuts grow on the hocks and you have to chip them off. And you have to trim his lips, too. He’ll do those next, you watch. Yes, there he goes…’

  Darius tucked his own lips inside his mouth, and hurried away from the scene. When Nat caught up with him, he opened his lips just enough to hiss,

  ‘None of that at anytime at all.’

  His friend’s extreme sensitivity and fastidiousness made Nat eager to see the home where Darius reposed after work, the place where he escaped the tinsmith’s din, where all those sights and sounds of city life which so bruised and scalded his poet’s soul were salved. Perhaps there would be a courtyard full of gillyflowers in fat earthenware pots, a caged nightingale, a loving mother swooping bowls of lamb stew down to the rug upon which her son sat, building up his strength for his next great poem. And maybe Darius’s unmarried sisters would be asking who his friend was.

  A few narrow streets later, he followed Darius down three steps and through a door. Lifting aside a tattered cloth, Darius said,

  ‘Welcome to my home.’

  The mean entrance opened into a cavernous basement. It was home both to the family and to the family’s textile dyeing workshop. On a relay of washing lines, raised on pulleys to the crumbling ceiling, boiled clothes were drizzling fabric dye into a saffron-coloured puddle. Glass lanterns, strung on slanting ropes, dribbled black oil onto cracked tiles. The walls were so mouldy as almost to be alive.

  Darius greeted his mother, who was stirring boiling linen with a brass ladle in a vat, her hairline oozing henna onto her forehead. She did not return his greeting. He greeted his sister, Pahnave, who was stirring rice. She ignored him too. He introduced Nat, but still they spoke not a word.

  Darius handed Nat a bowl of rice. Hungry as he was, Nat swallowed only one mouthful, and then set down the bowl. Fabric dye had infused the broth. His head began to ache from the suffocating steam-heat, from the stench of perfumed laundry soaps and the clanging of steel ladles against boiling and bubbling metal vats. He couldn’t understand why Darius did not say, ‘None of that at anytime at all,’ before pushing the bowl away from him. Instead Darius ate up every last grain of his fabric-dye rice, and then went back for seconds.

  A man came in from a back room and laid a cold chisel on the table. Darius hailed Masghoud. His stepfather returned no greeting either, but Darius was not to be put off, and crossed the room.

  ‘I would like to use my father’s gear for an oil mining venture I am undertaking with my friend here, and I wonder if you would let me have the key to the storeroom where I can find what I need?’

  ‘No chance,’ his stepfather replied.<
br />
  ‘But you never use the gear,’ said Darius.

  ‘I might do one day.’

  ‘You just don’t want me to have it.’

  ‘I might sell it. I might use the tureens to freight wine.’

  ‘When were you going to do this?’ asked Darius.

  ‘You show some respect,’ Leila, his mother, told him. ‘If you want your father’s oil-mining gear, then you must, for once in your life, do something for us, for this family.’

  ‘I contribute money,’ said Darius. ‘I pay rent.’ Pahnave, his sister, snorted a dry derisive laugh.

  ‘Have you any idea,’ she asked, ‘how much food costs?’

  ‘But the rent is for feeding me.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Pahnave, ‘so you don’t give anything to this family then!’

  ‘What can I do beyond what I have done?’ Darius asked his mother.

  ‘You can,’ she replied, ‘help your stepfather’s sister.’

  All sounds of clanging and clanking ceased. Leila, Masghoud and Pahnave stopped their work. The only sound came from bubbles popping in the simmering vats of rice or clothes. Leila’s last words had reignited The Great Family Controversy: the sigheh.

  The law said that a woman could not divorce and remarry the same man three times in a row, unless she had married someone else in the interim, even if only for one day. This one-day marriage was called a sigheh. It was a lawful expedient to prevent sex outside of wedlock. Having divorced her husband twice, in order to earn a little money, Masghoud’s sister wanted to marry him again so that they could resume living together in a respectable fashion. To that end Leila and Masghoud had decided that Darius should marry his step-aunt for a day.