Authors: John Freeman
T
he hole had been shielded by wheat husks and walnut shells. In winter, the covering would be removed so the snow could collect over the two ice blocks – a male, a female. After five winters, the couple would begin to creep downhill, growing into a natural glacier, free of the cultivating hands of men. Freshwater children would spring from her womb providing the village with water to drink and to irrigate their fields.
We’d come as witnesses, Farhana and I. She wanted to know how they were chosen. I told her. The female ice was picked from a village where women were especially beautiful and, because that wasn’t enough, talented. Talent meant knowledge of yak milk, butter, fertilizer and, of course, wool. From caps to sweaters and all the way down to socks, the questions were always the same. How delicately was the sheep’s wool spun? And what about the
kubri
embroidery on the caps – was it colourful and fine? Most importantly, did all the women cooperate?
‘And the male? I suppose beauty and cooperation aren’t high on that list?’
He was picked from another village. One where men were strong and, because that wasn’t enough, successful. Success meant knowledge of firewood, agriculture, trekking and herding. There was a fifth, bonus area, and this was yak hair. From this
some
men could spin
sharma
, a type of coarse rug. A glacier in a village with such men had to be male.
She laughed. ‘So who does the picking?’
‘Men like him.’ I pointed to an old man stooped inside a grey woollen jacket. Perhaps the ice-bride had spun it, I thought, envisioning fingers of ice melting into a warp and weft. In a whisper both soft and commanding, the old man directed two younger men on how to lower the ice-bride and ice-groom from off their backs without hurting them.
We’d followed, at a distance. The marital bed – the hole covered in shells and husk – had been dug into the side of a cliff as carefully selected as the bride and groom. Only this side of the mountain attracted the right length of shadow for the snow to hold for ten months, 14,000 feet above sea level. The porters had heaved the ice on their backs the entire way. We were brought in a jeep.
To participate in the marriage procession, we’d sworn an oath of silence. There was a belief in these mountains that words corrupted the balance between lovers-in-transit. But now we’d reached the marital bed, Farhana and I could speak again.
They tossed the male in first.
Whooshoo! Whooshoo!
A loop of air seemed to dance right back up the hole and circle around again, inside my chest. The female was released on top, falling without a sound.
‘So this is copulation,’ said Farhana, her gloved fingers far from mine.
They say it’s bad luck for other eyes to watch, I thought. Eyes from somewhere else. Karachi eyes. California eyes. I took out my camera and aimed.
Farhana was skipping down the hill, away from me.
S
he was not in our cabin that night.
I walked along the River Kunhar, thinking of Farhana. My way was lit by the moon and the rush of the current and the silhouettes of the trees and the hut down the way where we’d eaten trout before she left and I knew the others were asleep so I unlaced my boots and peeled off my jacket and stood buck-naked. I kneeled at the Kunhar’s edge and took a sip of her noxious water.
An owl soared across the river. Flapping twice before circling back toward me, she came to rest on a giant walnut tree. There, looking directly down at me, she spoke. ‘
Shreet
!’ The sour glacier water inside me froze and my fingers grew so stiff that when I reached for my clothes I simply poked at them, as though with sticks, under the gaze of those gleaming black eyes.
Before the owl swooped across the moon’s reflection, I’d been thinking about that word,
Kunhar
, how
kun
sounded like
kus
which sounded like a cross between cunt and kiss. I held the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the moon eased deep into the river’s skin and she scattered him in pieces. I gazed down the Kunhar’s length. She cut through the valley for 160 kilometres. I’d been thinking of a long labia.
‘
Shreet
!’
The thought scattered like moonseed.
How long before the bird shot up into the sky and flew in the direction of my cabin? I couldn’t say. Eventually, I returned, still naked, and slid into bed. No Farhana. I would have been grateful for the heat she’d radiate under our sheets. I would have curled into her back and stroked her hair into a fan, a blanket to shelter in.
I
met her soon after moving to the Bay Area from Tucson, two years ago, on my way to becoming a photographer. It was landscapes I excelled at, or wanted to. I left Tucson and spent the next two months making my way up the West Coast, occasionally veering back into the desert after hitching a ride.
I still have photos of them in my portfolio, those who stopped for me: pickup trucks, scuffed boots, silver belts glistening in the sun. There was old man prickly pear cactus all around and of course the Joshua trees as the wind blew in from the north-west and purple clouds draped us. When I tired of the rides, I walked into the desert and did what I knew I could spend my life doing. I really looked at cactus. I really looked at triumph. Blossoming in shocking gimcrack hues of scarlet and gold in a world that watched with arms crossed, if it watched at all. It reminded me of the festive dresses worn by women in Pakistan’s desert borderlands and mountain valleys. The drier the land, the thirstier the spirit.
When I finally arrived in San Francisco, for no reason other than it was San Francisco, I had a stack of photographs of the Sonoran Desert, the Petrified Forest and Canyon de Chelly. I mailed off the best and waited for offers to pour in while renting an apartment with three other men. I had two interviews. The first went something like this:
‘Why are you, Nadir Sheikh’ – he said Nader Shake – ‘wasting your time taking photographs of American landscapes when you have so much material at your own doorstep?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘This is a stock-photo agency. We sell photographs to magazines and sometimes directly to customers and sometimes for a lot of money. We might be interested in you, but not in your landscapes.’
‘In what then?’
‘Americans already know their trees.’
‘Do they know their cactus?’
‘Next time you go home, take some photographs.’ When it was obvious I still didn’t get it, he dumbed it down for me. ‘Show us the dirt. The misery. Don’t waste your time trying to be a nature photographer. Use your advantage.’
Back at the apartment, my housemate Matthew felt sorry for me. He said a former boyfriend knew a nice little Pakistani girl. I ate his nachos while he talked on the phone.
I
n the morning, my cabin was colder than the river last night. I lay under the sheets, listening for sounds next door. I registered Farhana’s absence with dull panic, the fingers of one hand switching off an alarm while the other reached for a dream. I could hear Irfan and Zulekha. I thought of the ghostly owl; anything to help tune out the laughter. The bitter taste of the Kunhar – the cunt, the kiss – the walk back in the dark. I’d knocked my toe against something. A carcass, a gun. Under the sheets, I picked at blood-crust.
I
arranged to meet her the afternoon of my second interview. This time I included in my portfolio a series of photographs taken on a previous return to Pakistan. It was a series of my mother’s marble tabletop, which she’d inherited from her mother and which dated back to the 1800s. The swirling cream-and-rust pattern changed as I played with the light, sometimes slick as a sheet of silk, sometimes pillowing like a bowl of ice cream. A few frames were, if I say so myself, as sensuous as Linde Waidhofer’s stones.
The second interview didn’t go very differently from the first.
‘Your photographs lack authenticity.’
‘Authenticity?’
‘Where are the beggars or anything that resembles your culture?’
‘The marble is a real part of my family history. It’s old, from 1800–’
He waved his hand. ‘It seems to me that when a war’s going on, a table is trivial.’ I wished for the courage – or desire – to ask what images of what war he was looking for.
He stood up. ‘I’m a busy man. Could’ve ignored you. Didn’t. You know why? There’s something there.’ He leaned forward expectantly, so I thanked him for thinking there was something there.
I left the office and walked down the corridor to the stairs, passing the photographs that hung on the walls, photographs I loved with an ardour that stung. I’d recognized them all on my way in, of course. There were prints by Linde Waidhofer to taunt me, including one from her
Stone & Silence
series. A Waidhofer can be a nature photographer of the Wild West but a Sheikh must be a war photographer of the Wild East! He must wow the world not with the assurance of grace. He must wow the world with the assurance of horror.
I wound my way slowly through prints from Ansel Adams’s
Yosemite
series – it was the wrong moment to view
Bridalveil Fall
, the sheer force of the torrent almost making me weep, and I found myself wishing, childishly,
if only the drop weren’t so steep
– before halting, finally, at
Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach
.
The coincidence hadn’t hit me on my way into the interview but it hit me now, as my eye swooped down from the whiteness of the clouds to admit the whiteness of the surf breaking on the shore. I was meeting Farhana on Baker Beach in one hour. It had been her idea, and she’d been very specific about where on the beach I’d find her. I stared at the photograph, surprised at the fluttering in my breast. It astonished me that I was hoping to find her on the exact same length of shore depicted in the frame. Worse, I believed that once there, perhaps without her knowing it, I’d look up and see the bridge from exactly the same perspective as I was seeing it now.
Did I want the picture to be a sign? Possibly. It happens this way when you have just been tossed down a roaring cataract. You grope for a raft, anywhere. You even tell yourself that you have found it.
An hour later, I walked barefoot in the sand, expecting to see a girl of Farhana’s description – ‘Look for a long braid, the longest on the beach, black, of course’ – waiting at the edge of the sea as per her instructions, her back to me (showing off the braid), with Golden Gate Bridge looming to her right. Instead, I wound up in a volleyball game, with all the players entirely in the nude.
Was she among them? How was I to know?
There was a player with a dark braid, though she had two braids, not one, neither as long as I’d been led to believe. Leaping for the ball, she made a full-frontal turn, and my God, how astonishingly she was built! I gawked at the hair between her legs, wondering if this were a cruel joke. (Granted, not entirely cruel.) Matthew must have arranged it, getting ‘Farhana’ to lure me here. He was probably watching, laughing till he hurt.
Nice little Pakistani girl
. Funny, Matthew,
funny
. I stared at the volleyball player one last time – no, that couldn’t be Farhana, please let it not be Farhana! Please let it
be
Farhana! – and turned to my right to scan the bathers on the shore.
Almost all naked, mostly men. Obscenely overdressed, I jogged in mild panic toward a cluster of rocks on the far side of a thick cypress grove. Along the way, I tried to hunt discreetly for a long braid slithering down a shapely back, but many figures lay
on
their backs, some on their
hair
. I could see the rocks now. She wasn’t there. Two naked men were, one walking out to the water, hand on hip. Long cock, wide grin. I waded into the sea, my back safely to him, but the water was too cold for my taste. After a few minutes, I trundled closer to the boulders, trying to look-not-look.
She was sitting there, smiling. Her braid was pulled to the side, draping her left shoulder, and she waved it at me like a flag.
‘We must have just missed each other!’
‘I thought you told me to wait on the beach?’
‘I’m sorry. I got late.’
I was on the verge of asking how she got all the way here without my noticing when I saw how her eyes sparkled. So I clambered up without another word, crossing a series of tide pools and a snug sandy enclosure between the boulders that sprawled in a V. I crouched down beside her and looked to her right: there loomed Golden Gate Bridge.
‘Did you think you’d recognize me better with clothes on?’ she giggled.
‘Your clothes
are
on.’
‘Are you disappointed?’
‘I’m relieved.’
‘How disappointing.’
So I learned this immediately about my Farhana. She was one of those people who liked to receive a reaction, and she didn’t like to wait very long for it.
We stayed till sunset. I took several shots of the bridge, but none of her. She wouldn’t let me photograph her that day. When we finally stood up to leave, I realized how tall she was. And how boyish.
She knew. ‘I would have gone topless if I had breasts.’ Again, she required a reaction.
I am not an eloquent man and am usually tongue-tied around directness, but directness attracts me. I looked at Farhana and took all of her in, all that she’d spent the afternoon telling me: her work with glaciers, her father in Berkeley, her mother’s death, leaving Pakistan as a young child, her life in this city where she grew up. I took that in while absorbing her height, her leanness, the paleness of her skin, and the way her braid now wrapped around her in a diagonal curve that extended from left shoulder to right hip. I said she looked more like a calla lily than any woman I’d ever met.