Against the Day (147 page)

“They think they go to join some
sacred band,” Chingiz, the Colonel’s
denshchik,
confided to Mushtaq at
one of their daily gettogethers in the marketplace. “What they cannot see yet
is that he is not another Madali or even Namaz, this is not another holy war,
he does not seek an army to follow him, he despises people, all people, sends
away all who would be disciples, that is both his fascination and the force of
his destiny. What is to come will not

occur in ordinary space. The
Europeans will find great difficulty in drawing maps of this.”

   
“Rejected
disciples have too often become dangerous.”

“It is but one of many ways he
invites his dissolution. He gives loaded revolvers as personal gifts. Publicly
humiliates those who profess to love him most deeply. Comes drunk into the
mosque during prayers and behaves most sinfully. None of it matters, for in any
case he is but a precursor, who sometime must give way to the True One. How he
does this is not as important as the timing.”

   
“You
visit the shaman often, Chingiz?”

   
“He
is thy shaman too, Mushtaq.”

   
“Alas,
I am too old for these adventures.”

“Mushtaq, you’re thirty. Besides, he
keeps a supply of wild mushrooms, sought at his behest by prospectors who are
guided by their guardian spirits, in parts of Siberia not even the Germans know
about. It would do thee far more good than the poisonous nutmeat of the south.”

   
“That
of course would be a different matter.”

One day the noted Uyghur
troublemaker Al MarFuad showed up in English hunting tweeds and a
deerstalker cap turned sidewise, with a sort of ultimatum in which one might
just detect that difficulty with the prevocalic
r
typical of the British upper class. “Gweetings, gentlemen, on
this Glowious Twelfth!”

“By God he’s right Mushtaq, we’ve
lost track of the time again. Bit oddly turned out, wouldn’t you say, for a
tribal chieftain in these parts?”

“I am here to deliver a message fwom
my master, the Dooswa,” declared the Uyghur fiercely, flourishing an ancient
Greening shotgun whose brasswork carried holy inscriptions in Arabic. “Then I
am going out after some gwouse.”

   
“Fond
of the English, are you sir.”

   
“I
love Gweat Bwitain! Lord Salisbuwy is my
wole model!
”

This is the only place on earth,
Auberon Halfcourt reflected, where lethargy of the soul can arrive in spasms. Summoning
up what he hoped was a pleased smile, “On behalf of H.M. Government, we declare
ourselves at your service, sir.”

   
“Weally?
You mean it?”

   
“Anything
in our power.”

   
“Then
you must suwwender the city to the Dooswa.”

   
“Ehrm—that
is, I’m not sure it’s mine to surrender, is the thing, you see
. . . .
”

   
“Come,
come, you can’t fool an old cameltwader.”

   
“Have
you spoken to any of the Russians yet? the Chinese?”

   
“The
Chinese are no pwoblem. My Pwinciple’s intewests lie quite in the

other diwection.”

   
Perhaps
because he had been eavesdropping, Colonel Prokladka showed up about then. A
glance, controllable by neither, pulsed between him and the Uyghur. “Wwetched
son of a cameldwiver,” Al MarFuad was heard to whisper as he rode out of town.

“
I shall never
understand them,” Halfcourt
plaintively confessed to Prokladka. “Their strangeness—in language,
faith, history—the family interweavings alone—they can turn
invisible at will, simply by withdrawing into that limitless terrain of
queerness, mapless as the Himalaya or the Tian Shan. The future out here simply
belongs to the Prophet. It might have gone differently. This madman in the
Taklamakan might actually have founded his panshamanic empire. The Japanese,
let us say at German solicitation, might have attended in greater numbers, so
as to draw off the odd Russian division in the event of a European war. We
should have the bazaars full of yakitori pitches and geishas in bamboo cages.
I’ve been out here twentyfive years, ever since old Cavi ate the sausage at Kabul,
and all the meddling of the Powers has only made a convergence to the
Mahommedan that much more certain.”

“We are neither of us mountain
fighters,” Prokladka brimming with collegial tears, “Russians prefer steppes,
as your people prefer Low Countries, or better yet oceans, to fight in.”

“We could share what we know,”
offered Halfcourt, with seemingly emotional abruptness.

The
Polkovnik
gazed back,
popeyed and bloodshot, as if actually considering this, before giving in to a
laughter pitched so high and so uncertain in its dynamics as to bring into
doubt his ability to control it.
“
Polny
pizdets,
”
he muttered, shaking his head.

Halfcourt reached to pat his arm.
“There there, Yevgeny Alexandrovitch, it’s all right, I was ragging you of
course, inscrutable British sense of humor sort of lapse, and I do
apologize—”

   
“Oh,
Halfcourt, these profitless wastes . . .”

“Do I not dream, with little respite,
of Simla, and Peliti’s veranda at the height of the season? And the wanton eyes
of those who pass, it seems endlessly without me, over the Combermere Bridge?”

·
    
·
    
·

Beyond Kashgar
,
the Silk Road split into northern and southern branches, so as to avoid the
vast desert immediately to the east of the city, the Taklamakan, which in
Chinese was said to translate as “Go In and You Don’t Come Out,” though in
Uyghur it was supposed to mean “Home Country of the Past.”

   
“Well.
It’s the same thing, isn’t it, sir?”

   
“Go
into the past and never come out?”

   
“Something
like that.”

“Are you talking your rubbish again, Mushtaq?
what of the reverse? Remain in the exile of the present tense and never get
back in, to reclaim what was?”

Mushtaq shrugged. “When one has heard
enough of these complaints, lamentable though they may be . .

“Apologies, you are right of course
Mushtaq. The choice was made too long ago, too deep in that nolongeraccessible
homeland, to matter now whether I chose, or others chose for me, and who can
draw boundaries between the remembrancer and the remembered?”

His argument here could not be termed
altogether ingenuous, there having been at least, notably, one Remembered whose
contours had remained for him all too defined. “All too damnably clear.” Unable
not to whisper this aloud, later, when Mushtaq had returned to sleep and
Halfcourt had lit up another transnoctial cheroot, unwilling to forgo the
flaccid swoon of yielding to memory
. . .
her
form, already womanly, held at wary attention that illomened day among the
negotiable flesh, hair covered and mouth veiled, eyes belonging entirely to
herself, though they were to find him, unerring as an Afghani sharpshooter, the
moment he rode in under the gate of sunbaked mud, he and Mushtaq, disguised as
Punjabi traders, pretending to be in the market for some of the highly esteemed
donkeys of the Waziri. He knew full well what this was, this gathering of
girls, he was an old trouper by then at the costume theatricals they were
forever at out here, and watched the other visitors who came by, the sweat and
saliva and where it flowed, and where it flew. His intent toward the child, he
would protest, had never been to dishonor but to rescue. Rescue, however, had
many names, and the rope up which a maiden climbed to safety might then be used
to bind her most cruelly. In that instant he had become, awkwardly, two creatures
resident within the same life—one conveyed without qualification into the
haunted spaces of desire, the other walled in by workdemands in which desire
was never better than annoying and too often debilitating—the two

selves sharing thenceforth this miserable
psychic leasehold, coconscious,

each at once respectful and
contemptuous of the other’s imperatives.

Colleagues he knew of it happening to
had struggled, grown insomniac and worn, cultivating destructive habits,
inflicting on themselves wounds ranging from minor to mortal. Auberon Halfcourt
saw the danger and at first, day to day, somehow kept avoiding it, though with
scant assistance from Mushtaq, who, the instant Yashmeen arrived, discovered
the advantages of absence. “I have been barefoot over these particular coals
more than once, Your Aggravation, expect nothing, my cousin Sharma will take
over the laundry, the cigar merchant is anxious for his last two payments, I
believe that is all, tata, until our reunion in less vexatious times,” and he had
simply vanished, in so brief a twinkling that Halfcourt suspected some exercise
of local magic.

Intentionally or not, this posed the
question, from the time she stepped across his doorsill, no longer of whether
but of when Yashmeen must go. Her pale eyes from time to time narrowing in
conjecture he would never learn to read, her naked limbs flickering against the
greenshadowed tiles of the baths and fountains, her silences often sweet as
heard singing, her odors, fugitive, various, a sooninseparable part of the
interior climate, borne from any corner of the windrose, somehow overcoming
even cigarsmoke, her hair compared by one of the local balladeers to those
mystical waterfalls that hide the Hidden Worlds of the Tibetan lamas. Previous
to Yashmeen, of course—which made it especially awkward now—he had
never been so much as fascinated, let alone enamored. One did not, however much
in widelyknown fact some did, undergo such passionate attachment to a child.
One suffered, was ruined, raved intoxicated through the market spaces, abasing
oneself before the wog’s contempt, seeking at length the consolations of the
Browning, the rafter, the long hike into the desert with an empty canteen.
Selfslaughter, as Hamlet always says, was certainly in the cards, unless one
had been out here long enough to have contemplated the will of God, observed
the stochastic whimsy of the day, learned when and when not to whisper
“
Insh’allah,
”
and
understood how, as one perhaps might never have in England, to await, to depend
upon, the ineluctable departure of what was most dear.

Colonel Prokladka and his shopmates,
for whom there were no secrets in Kashgar, at least no secular ones, looked on
in sorrowful amusement. Had there been a way to turn it to political use, they
would of course have undertaken some program of mischief—but as if the
girl had somehow charmed even that iniquitous fraternity, none ventured beyond
a rough courtliness that sometimes could even be mistaken for good manners.
There was an

AngloRussian Entente, after all.
Yashmeen visited regularly with the girls of the
Polkovnik
’s
harem, and everyone male in
the vicinity had the sense not to interfere, though a subaltern or two had been
reported for unauthorized peeping.

As always they were more preoccupied
with ways to turn a dishonest ruble—hasheesh, real estate, or their
colleague Volodya’s latest scheme, insane even by the standards prevailing
here, to steal the great jade monolith at the Guri Amir mausoleum in Samarkand,
either by breaking it up into smaller blocks or by engaging the semimythical
aeronaut Padzhitnoff to spirit away the whole chunk using some technology as
yet undeveloped in the world at large. Volodya was obsessed by jade, the way
others are by gold, diamonds, hasheesh. It was he who kept slyly reminding
Auberon Halfcourt that out here the local word for jade is
yashm.
He had
been sent east in 1895 for his part in an illicit jade deal at the time of the
construction of Alexander Ill’s tomb. Now, at Kashgar, he wasted everyone’s
time planning to raid the tomb of Tamerlane, despite a longstanding and
universally believedin curse that would release upon the world, in the event of
such desecration, calamities not even the great Mongol conqueror had thought
of.

Lieutenant Dwight Prance
had shown up one night unannounced, like a sandstorm. Halfcourt
remembered him from when he first came out here, a scholar of geography and
languages at Cambridge, one of Professor Renfrew’s. Wellmeaning, went without
saying, none of them knew how not to be. Now he could scarcely be
recognized—the man was filthy, sunbeaten, got up in some tattered wreck
of a turnout intended, he supposed, to be read as Chinese.

   
“I
gather that something’s afoot to the east of here
. . .
?”

The distracted operative, with one of
Halfcourt’s Craven A’s already burning, lit another, then forgot to smoke it as
well. “Yes and how far ‘east’ being almost beside the point, when one has been
engaged for the past—my God! it’s been a year
. . .
more than a year
. . . .
”