The Trade Secret Page 8

  The field mouse crept to the other side of the roof garden and squinted through the elm screen hoping to see Darius walking up the road, but the road was empty. Where was he? Three days in a row he hadn’t come. Had her mother destroyed him with her shovel of dung? Had Mani Babachoi scared him off?

  The day after Darius’s humiliation, Gol sought him out in the bazaar. She found his stall ransacked - by Mani Babachoi? - and spent an hour tidying it up. She put books back on the shelves, mopped black puddles of spilt ink, and tried to restore everything to how it used to be. As she did so, she found lots of drawings of a fiddle-playing woman who looked very much like herself embracing a man who looked exactly like Darius, only slimmer.

  When Darius had appeared outside her house as Mani Babachoi’s rival, Gol’s first feeling was hurt that he should trade their friendship for mere wooing. But this pang had been succeeded by a much stronger feeling. Not love, not joyful reciprocation, not desire, but relief. That’s what she felt. Relief from siege. Strange to say two suitors were less pressure than one. With Darius around, the stork had a clumsy bear to worry about. Two suitors had to pit their wits against each other, whereas before Mani was pitting himself against her resistance, grinding her down a little more every day.

  Only where was Darius now? So much for his great poetic passion! So much for the cult of true love! Why had he stopped coming? Why had he quit so meekly? If one humiliation was enough to drive him off then he should never have come at all. Did he think she didn’t know that Mani was reading a poem written by Darius himself? Did Darius credit her with so little wit? It seemed he did for he had abandoned her to face her fate alone, left her stranded in this hot furrow before stork and flame.

  How she loathed what Mani Babachoi was doing across the street. How it sickened her. The burning ceremony Mani performed might be common to every javanmahdi, every youth of noble soul, it might be time honoured custom, but that did not make it any less shocking when she was the cause and it happened in front of her own house. Mani lowered the fiery rag towards his exposed forearm. To Gol’s horror, he dabbed the flame up and down his arm, scorching several burns at once. She had rather burn her own arm than have him declare his love in this way. She threw a poultice over the screen and heard it land with a wet slap in the street. She turned her back to the screen, squatted on her haunches and closed her eyes. Glimpsed through the elm screen, flame had printed copper lines across the inside of her eyelids. Copper strings.

  In those last peaceful moments before Mani Babachoi had invaded her life, Gol had been restringing her tanbur’s copper strings. If only she could go back to that time now. Everything was so simple then.

  There she’d been, sitting on a cushion on the worn rug, peacefully restringing her tanbur while her mother baked biscuits on the other side of the room. She threaded a copper string through a tuning peg. Holding the tanbur’s headstock to her ear, she plucked the string as she turned the tuning peg, like drawing the note’s true sound out of a well. As she did so, she cast her mind back to a conversation about Rumi that she’d had with Darius, whom she had bumped into at the pigeon-post. They had discussed Rumi’s ‘Alas, we are lost on a black sea…’ A poem of despair, said Darius, with its image of a ship steering by clouds. Against this, Gol argued that when set to music the true hopefulness of Rumi’s quatrain emerged - all will be well so long as the sailors keep sailing - in the same way that lovers drew out each other’s true nature, the melody drew out the lyric’s true meaning.

  ‘Who are you thinking about?’ her mother, Roshanak, had asked.

  ‘I’m not thinking about anyone. I was thinking about poetry.’

  ‘Love poems!’

  ‘No. If you must know, I was thinking about truth and meaning.’

  ‘You won’t get a husband talking like that,’ said her mother. She slid the biscuits out on a long-handled steel tray to turn them over one by one.

  ‘I was not thinking about how to get a husband.’

  ‘Well, you should.’

  ‘I was thinking about the ways in which the great poets make us see the world in new ways, how their insights increase our knowledge.’

  ‘I don’t want to know anything I don’t already know.’

  Gol was left openmouthed by this last remark.

  ‘What, madar?’ she asked.

  ‘I am quite happy never to learn anything more.’

  ‘But… how can you say that?’

  ‘I have got all the thoughts in my head arranged just so,’ said Roshanak. ‘Like furniture in a room. If I were to let in a new idea, then I would have to rearrange all the tables and shelves. I’d have to shift all the furniture around my head.’

  ‘Isn’t that good?’

  ‘No, it’s not good! I don’t want to have to move everything around. I’ve got it just how I like it. I’ve had it sorted this way for years.’ She slid the long-handled tray back into the oven.

  ‘But surely,’ said Gol, ‘you’ve had to change with each big event.’

  ‘No, that’s the blessing, you see,’ said Roshanak, her voice echoing from the oven into which she was peering, ‘of having your head set out just right: you only have to do the job once. Once it’s done, then it’s done for good. I thank God my house and my mind are well-ordered.’

  ‘But every word we hear changes us, madar.’

  ‘God help you, girl! Not me! What nonsense.’

  Gol sat back on her heels to trim with a short knife where the strings were proud of the pegs. She listened to her father’s footsteps as he pottered about up on the roof terrace, and to a thump of wing against wire in the pigeon coop. Silently her lips began to work. Take Ibn Hamza of Cordoba, she was telling Darius, now there’s a poet whose words you could only reduce by setting to music… And that was when a strange, new voice was first heard outside the house, bellowing away as if for battle not for love:

  ‘Gol Zarafshani, you are loved with a pure love by Mani Babachoi.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Roshanak.

  ‘I don’t know, madar.’

  Her father hurried downstairs, escaping the newcomer. Gol took her father’s place upstairs, where she crouched behind the elm screen and sneaked a look at the stranger. She knew she’d never met this Mani Babachoi with his horseshoe moustache, upright stance, and smart clothes. From the look of him she was sure that he’d made a mistake, and got her confused with someone else. His arms, then, had been a blank page - and now look at them: puckered and dotted with burn marks and thin scraps of bandage.

  And now here she was, so many days later, still crouching behind the elm screen, still wondering how to stop him from disfiguring himself for her sake. She knew that she could never return his affection, and so he would bear these burn marks up his arms for years, and never look at them without cursing her. At least he had done his burning for today. Now she must only endure the poetry.

  ‘Gol, Gol, I have failed to write a poem for you,’ he called out, ‘and so I will now burn my right hand to punish it.’ She groaned, and shook her head in a mood of finality.

  ‘That’s it,’ she whispered. ‘That’s enough.’

  Trapped between the fire and stork, the field mouse must make a dash for it sooner or later. Her speed startled the caged doves into a flurry as she ran across the roof garden, through the skylight and down the seven stairs. She dragged open the stiff front door and stood in front of him before he even knew she had left the roof.

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk, Mani Babachoi?’

  He yelped in shock and jumped backwards, dropping the burning rag.

  ‘This way,’ she said, and set off waiting for him to catch up.

  19

  That first walk together was followed by another and another, and soon Gol and Mani Babachoi were walking out every evening. Upon their return, they would sit talking on the low clay wall of the abandoned corner plot across the way. One evening, unseen behind the screen, Gol’s father, Atash Zarafshani called down some questions. Who was Ma
ni’s father? Where did his family live? He then invited Mani to call for Gol as often as he liked.

  Roshanak Zarafshani also believed that Mani was an excellent suitor who would make a fine husband for her daughter. But so entirely was the musketeer carrying all before him, that Roshanak felt it necessary to intrude a few dissenting murmurs.

  ‘Watch for his temper,’ she told her daughter, ‘a stiff-backed soldier like that!’

  ‘He is kind and gentle.’

  ‘He won’t hold with your philosophising and your poetry, I’m sure! You think I am impatient with your ways, wait till you’re tardy lighting the fire one cold morning with that young soldier your husband. He’ll make you hop, my girl.’

  ‘He is very correct with me always.’

  ‘Out of doors he may be.’

  ‘Is father a different man indoors from out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Roshanak, lowering her voice, ‘he never goes out.’ Together they listened to Atash sweeping leaves on the roof terrace, the slow scuff of his lame right foot following the quick scuff of broom bristles. ‘Your young soldier,’ Roshanak resumed, ‘will nod and smile for now. For now he’ll appear to like nothing better than hearing every foolish thought of yours, but he’s not listening, he’s biding his time.’

  ‘No, Mani listens to me, not like you!’

  ‘Oh, does he now? Let me tell you something, my girl, this listening is as painful to him as burning himself on the bare arm. Ceremony. That’s what it is. Ceremony. What a man has to do to win a wife. But once you’re married then it ends. Then you’ll see how far you get talking about poetry and philosophy, and all your Shab-e-Sher nonsense. That’s if you haven’t already driven him off with such idle talk before the wedding,’ she added, because she still believed he was a good match for Gol.

  Gol resolved to give Mani a piece of just that part of her mind her mother warned her not to. ‘I shall prove her wrong,’ she thought. ‘If I don’t, if she’s right, and I do end up driving Mani off by speaking to him of what is closest to my heart, then he was never the man for me anyway!’

  As Gol and the unsuspecting Mani walked out the following evening, she bit her lip, impatiently waiting until they were in a narrow rutted lane between the sagging clay walls of orchards, before she asked Mani if he believed in poetry.

  ‘I don’t understand most poems,’ he replied, not knowing he was being ambushed, ‘and what I do understand I don’t believe - unless it’s Hafiz talking about the ruby cup: I believe that fellow liked a drink all right.’

  ‘So why read out these poems to me all the time, then?’

  ‘If I could sing, I’d sing you a song.’

  ‘Songs lie too.’

  ‘How the singer sings it makes it true.’ They walked a few more paces up the lane before she said to him:

  ‘Al Abbas bin Al Ahnef says, There is no good in those who do not feel love’s passion. Do you agree?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Mani after a while.

  ‘You must think something! What?’ She was almost shouting. Mani looked startled.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ he replied in a voice thick with confusion.

  ‘But why, Mani? What don’t you agree with?’

  Mani took such a long before replying that Gol thought he must be angry with her, until he quietly said:

  ‘It used to be, whenever we were on these walks, that your thoughts were not rocks thrown at my head, but odd lumps of minerals which you put in my hand. You’d invite me to cast my eye over them. I used to take pride in turning over in my hands these minerals. I turned them over, looked at them this way and that, and then, if I didn’t understand, I would hand the clump of minerals back to you with the same care with which you had handed it to me, and no-one the sorrier for that.’

  Now it was her turn to take a long time before replying.

  ‘Isn’t it the same now?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Gol, it’s not the same.’

  ‘Yes, it is: I’m telling you what matters to me and asking you to tell me if it matters to you.’

  ‘No. You used to invite me to understand you, but now you defy me even to try.’

  ‘No, that’s exactly what I am asking you to do: to try. Try. Why don’t you agree with the poet who says there is no good in those who do not love? It’s a simple question.’

  He sighed heavily as they walked along the rutted path between sagging walls deformed by tree roots.

  ‘Lots of good people aren’t in love,’ he said at last, ‘and there’s plenty of bad ones who are.’

  ‘No good person loves nothing.’

  ‘What if they’re just lonely?’ said Mani. ‘I was not a bad man before I met you, I simply didn’t love. That’s not a sin. That’s a lack. I didn’t know you existed. I was lonely.’

  For the first time ever, she took his hand in hers. And they walked on hand in hand.

  At home that evening, Gol was rubbing a block of beeswax on her kamanche, a small spiked fiddle. Sitting by her mother on the threadbare rug, and unaware that her lips were silently moving, she repeated to herself, over and over, her last conversation with Mani.

  ‘Talking to yourself like an old spinster,’ said her mother. ‘What nonsense are you thinking about now?’

  ‘About whether you need to understand a song before you dance to it.’

  ‘You won’t get a husband talking like that.’

  Gol fixed her mother a look.

  ‘I think I have,’ she said. Her mother’s face fell.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You’re shifting all your furniture now,’ Gol crowed, laughing a full, deep-throated laugh that brought Atash downstairs, asking,

  ‘What is it? What has happened?’

  Gol threw back her head and laughed even louder and more delightedly.

  20

  The following evening, Gol and her band of musicians were playing at a wedding party, after which she returned home and climbed the stairs to the roof terrace to talk to her father, who was gardening by moonlight.

  ‘How did you do tonight?’ he asked. She ignored the merry twinkle in his eyes that had been there ever since she and Mani had begun courting. She didn’t want to talk about that now. She wanted to know that she could still talk to her father up on the rooftop late at night just like they used to, and about topics other than love and marriage. Plus, she needed to talk about work. It wasn’t going well. Seemed the oil shortage was affecting even wedding singers.

  ‘I tell you, father, gold teeth would have fallen from their heads sooner than coins. We had them all dancing and sweating, but the wedding guests fixed the coins to their forehead with gum arabic.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You could smell the acacia. It’s unbudgeable that stuff. At the end of the night when we raked our metal harvest from the floor, there was just one shahidi and a few brass larins.’

  ‘That was all the coins that dropped off all night? I’m amazed. Why don’t you and the girls take your own gum next time? A big ball of elm gum. Offer it around free for the guests to stick coins to foreheads, and this way you’ll be sure to shake down a fair wage.’

  ‘I’ll try it, but perhaps everyone’s hoarding their coins for lamp oil,’ she said. ‘It’s now twenty times last week’s price.’

  ‘Well, better a brass forehead than a dark house, I suppose,’ said Atash. ‘Why was Mani carrying his musket earlier? Is Darius coming back?’

  ‘He’s on duty tonight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Guarding the oil reserves at the majlis. Mani hates this duty. These are meant to be emergency oil reserves for the city, but it seems every second merchant has a “special warrant.”

  ‘From a friendly minister?’

  ‘Yes, and so Mani has to watch these barrels of oil carried out under his nose. Oh, and I’ve news for you pedar, your old friend Hoseyn Ali Beg is made a Mirza. The Shah is sending him to Rome as ambassador.’

  ‘Well, well, ambass
ador Hoseyn Mirza! Do you remember him, Gol?’ She shook her head and smiled.

  Hoseyn Ali Beg was a figure from Atash’s past. Ten years earlier, not long after the start of the Shah’s reign, they had been friends. They had both served in the same provincial governor’s administration. Atash had served as assistant notary, Hoseyn Ali Beg as vice-governor. When the governor was executed for embezzlement, his entire staff - except Hoseyn Ali Beg who was needed to replace him - were sent to the front to fight invading Uzbegs. Atash found himself alongside soldiers half his age defending a walled town called Turbat-i-Haydari, south of Meshed. He was carrying a powder magazine when the Uzbegs shot burning oil-tipped arrows over the walls. The powder magazine exploded, and set alight his face, an arm, a hand and a leg.

  Atash was invalided home, and home he had stayed, never setting foot outside the house. Seven steps led up to a roof garden fenced on all four sides by an elm screen. The screen was tall enough for him to potter about unseen by anyone passing by, even someone on horseback. Only twice in the last ten years, late on a starless night, supported on Roshanak’s arm, had he limped to the end of the street, but that was as far as he went. Indoors was downstairs, outdoors was upstairs.

  Within this limited precinct, however, he pottered about contentedly enough - just so long as Roshanak or Gol did not try to make him leave the house. When they did he flew into a rage. He saw their attempts to nag him back into the world as a withdrawal of loving kindness. They were trying to turn him out of doors. To evict him. They were setting him a punishing task when he had already been tasked - hadn’t they noticed? - with carrying a heavy enough burden through the rest of his life as it was. Whenever Roshanak bought him a new ashplant walking stick, or whenever Gol asked him to accompany her somewhere, he snarled and stamped until both wife and daughter retreated.

  It was not as if he were sitting on his hands, he reminded them. There were the messenger doves to be cared for, and they only had to look at the roof garden, from which the family earned a small but steady income, to see how hard he worked. Here he cultivated his own blue and green hybrid carnation, Sea and Sky, which he sold at the bazaar’s little overflow market, the outdoor bazardeh. The carnation pergola’s eight legs stood in six raised beds where he also grew squashes, mustard, tomatoes, onions and fruits - not to mention every single item stipulated on Roshanak’s finicky lists of medicinal herbs. They had no idea what planning and hard work it took to grow so much in so small a space. None at all. Dark green mustard leaves spread under the compact heads of huddled red kalanchoe. Tomatoes rose from among pink dwarf mallow and onion clusters. Grapes climbed the back legs of the tall pergola entwined by striped carnations, and the soil was fertilised by the pigeons which warmed themselves by the chimney breast, against which stood their dovecot. But not only did Roshanak and Gol not appreciate how much planning and imagination it took to grow so many things on top of each other, they told him that the eight-legged pergola was a giant spider that held him in its maw.