“Malevolenza,” growled my uncle. “I cannot even scratch my itching elbow.”
Then he began coughing. Either the flour dust or the excessive heat inside the goatskins sent him into a fit of coughing that was worse than ever. His arms being pinioned by the wrapping, he could not pummel his chest for relief, or even cover his mouth, so the coughing went on until it seemed he would strangle, and his ruddy face got more red, and he sprayed little flecks of blood onto the hakim’s white aba. After some time of that agony, he turned pale and swooned dead away, and I thought he had strangled.
“No, be not alarmed, young man,” said Hakim Khosro. “This is nature’s means of cure. The jinni of this disease will not trouble a victim when he is not conscious of being troubled. You notice, when your uncle is in the faint, he does not cough.”
“He has only to die, then,” I said skeptically, “and he is permanently cured of coughing.”
The hakim laughed, unoffended, and said, “Be not suspicious either. The hasht nafri can only be arrested in nature’s good time, and I can but lend assistance to nature. See, he wakes now, and the fit has passed.”
“Gèsu,” Uncle Mafio muttered weakly.
“For now,” the hakim went on, “the best prescriptive is rest and perspiration. He is to stay in bed except when he must go to the mustarah, and that he will do frequently, for I am also giving him a strong purgative. There are always jinn hiding in the bowels, and it does no harm to get rid of them. So, each time the patient returns from the mustarah to bed, one of you—since I will not always be here—must dust him with a new coating of barley flour and rewrap the skins about him. I will look in from time to time, to write new verses to be pasted on his chest.”
So my father and I and the slave Nostril took turns tending Uncle Mafio. But that was no onerous duty—except for having to listen to his continuous grumbling about his enforced prostration—and after a while my father decided he might as well make another use of our stay in Balkh. He would leave Mafio in my keeping, and he and Nostril would travel to the capital city of these regions, to pay our respects to the local ruler (whose title was Sultan) and make us known to him as emissaries of the Khakhan Kubilai. Of course, that city was only nominally a capital, and its sovereign Sultan was, like the Shah Zaman of Persia, only a token ruler, subordinate to the Mongol Khanate. But the journey would also enable my father to embellish our maps with further details and modern designations. For example, our Kitab gave the name of that city as Kophes, and it was Nikaia in Alexander’s time, but nowadays and hereabout we heard it always called Kabul. So my father and Nostril saddled two of our horses and prepared to ride there.
The evening before they departed, Nostril sidled up to me. He had apparently taken notice of my lovelorn and forlorn condition, and perhaps he hoped to keep me out of trouble while I was left on my own in Balkh. He said:
“Master Marco, there is a certain house here in this city. It is the house of a Gebr, and I would have you look at it.”
“A Gebr?” I said. “Is that some sort of rare beast?”
“Not all that rare, but bestial, yes. A Gebr is one of the unregenerate Persians who never accepted the enlightenment of the Prophet (blessing and peace be upon him). Those people still worship Ormuzd, the discredited old-time god of fire, and engage in many wicked practices.”
“Oh,” I said, losing interest. “Why should I look at the house of yet another misbegotten heathen religion?”
“Because this Gebr, not being bound by Muslim law, expectably flouts all decencies. In front, his building is a shop vending articles made of amianthus, but in the rear it is a house of assignation, let by the Gebr to illicit lovers for their clandestine meetings. By the beard, it is an abomination!”
“What would you have me do about it? Go yourself and report it to a mufti.”
“No doubt I should, being a devout Muslim, but I will not yet. Not until you have verified the Gebr’s abomination, Master Marco.”
“I? What the devil do I care about it?”
“Are not you Christians even more scrupulous about other people’s decencies?”
“I do not abominate lovers,” I said, with a self-pitying sniffle. “I envy them. Would that I had one of my own to take to the Gebr’s back door.”
“Well, he also perpetrates another offense against morality. For those who do not have a convenient lover, the Gebr keeps two or three young girls in residence and available for hire.”
“Hm. This does begin to sound like a matter for reprobation. You did right to bring it to my attention, Nostril. Now, if you could point out that house, I would suitably reward your almost Christian vigilance … .”
And so the next day, a day when snow was falling, after he and my father had ridden off to the southeastward, and after I had made sure Uncle Mafio was well snugged in his goatskins, I walked into the shop Nostril had shown me. There was a counter piled with bolts and swatches of some heavy cloth, and also on it was a stone bowl of naft oil feeding a wick burning with a bright yellow flame, and behind the counter stood an elderly Persian with a red-hinna’ed beard.
“Show me your softest goods,” I said, as Nostril had instructed me to say.
“Room on the left,” said the Gebr, jerking his beard at a beaded curtain at the back of the shop. “One dirham.”
“I should like,” I specified, “a beautiful piece of goods.”
He sneered. “You show me a beautiful one among these country rustics, I will pay you. Be glad the goods are clean. One dirham.”
“Oh, well, any water to put out a fire,” I said. The man glowered as if I had spat at him, and I realized that was not the most tactful thing to say to a person who allegedly worshiped fire. I hastily laid my coin on the counter and pushed through the rattling curtain.
The little room was hung all about with locust twigs, for their sweet scent, and was furnished only with a charcoal brazier and a charpai, which is a crude bed made of a wooden frame laced crisscross with ropes. The girl was no prettier of face than the only other female I had paid to use, that boat girl Malgarita. This one was plainly of some local tribe, for she spoke the prevailing Pashtun tongue, and had a woefully scant vocabulary of Trade Farsi. If she told me her name, I did not catch it, because anybody speaking Pashtun sounds as if he or she is rapidly and repeatedly and simultaneously clearing the throat, spitting and sneezing.
But the girl was, as the Gebr had claimed, rather more cleanly of person than Malgarita had been. In fact, she made unmistakable complaint that I was not, and with some reason. In coming here, I had not worn my new-bought clothes; they were too bulky and difficult to get out of and into. I was wearing the garments I had worn while crossing the Great Salt and the Karabil, and I daresay they were markedly odoriferous. They were certainly so caked with dust and sweat and dirt and salt that they could almost stand upright even when I got out of them.
The girl held them at arm’s length, by her fingertips, and said, “dirty-dirty!” and “dahb!” and “bohut purana!” and several other gargled Pashtun noises indicative of revulsion. “I send yours, mine together, be clean.”
She swiftly took off her own clothes, bundled them with mine, bawled what was evidently a call for a servant, and handed the bundle out the door. I confess that my attention was mainly on the first naked female body I had seen since Kashan; nevertheless, I noticed that the girl’s clothing was made of a material so coarse and thick that, though cleaner than mine, it also could almost have stood alone.
The girl’s body was more fetching than her face, it being slim but bearing amazingly large, round, firm breasts for such a slender figure. I assumed that that was one reason why the girl had chosen a career in which she would cater mainly to transient infidels. Muslim men are better attracted by a big fundament, and do not much admire women’s breasts, regarding them only as milk spouts. Anyway, I hoped the girl would make her fortune in her chosen career while she was still young and shapely. Every woman of those “Alexandrine” tribes, well
before middle age, grows so gross in the rest of her physique that her once-splendid bosom becomes just one of a series of fleshy shelves descending from her several chins to her several rolls of abdomen.
Another reason why I hoped the girl would make a fortune was that her chosen career was clearly no pleasure to her. When I attempted to share with her the enjoyment of the sexual act, by arousing her with fondling of her zambur, I found she had none. At the arch tip of her mihrab, where the tiny tuning key should have been, there was no slightest protrusion. For a moment I thought she was pathetically deformed, but then I realized that she was tabzir, as Islam demands. She had nothing there but a fissure of soft scar tissue. That lack may have diminished my own delight in my several ejaculations, because every time I approached spruzzo and she cried, “Ghi, ghi, ghi-ghi!”—meaning “Yes, yes, yes-yes!”—I was aware that she was only feigning an ecstasy of her own, and I thought it sad. But who am I to call criminal other people’s religious observances? Besides, I soon discovered that I had a lack of my own to worry about.
The Gebr came and banged on the outside of the door, shouting, “What do you want for a single dirham, eh?”
I had to concede that I had had my money’s worth, so I let the girl get up. She went, still naked, out the door to fetch a pan of water and a towel, meanwhile calling down the corridor for the return of our laundered clothes. She set the pan of tamarind-scented water on the room’s brazier to warm, and was using it to wash my parts when the next knock came on the door. But the servant handed in only the girl’s garments, with a long spate of Pashtun that must have been an explanation. The girl came back to me, an unreadable expression on her face, and said tentatively, as if asking a question, “Your clothes burn?”
“Yes, I suppose they would. Where are they?”
“No got,” she said, showing me that she had only her own.
“Ah, you do not mean burn. You mean dry. Is that it? Mine are not dry yet?”
“No. Gone. Your clothes all burn.”
“What does that mean? You said they would be washed.”
“Not wash. Clean. Not in water. In fire.”
“You put my clothes in a fire? They have burned?”
“Ghi.”
“Are you a fire worshiper too, or are you just divanè? You sent them to be washed in fire instead of water? Olà, Gebr! Persian! Olà, whoremaster!”
“No make trouble!” the girl pleaded, looking scared. “I give you dirham back.”
“I cannot wear a dirham across the city! What kind of lunatic place is this? Why did you people burn my clothes?”
“Wait. Look.” She snatched up a piece of unburned charcoal from the brazier and gave it a swipe across a sleeve of her own tunic to make a black mark. Then she held the sleeve over the burning coals.
“You are divanè!” I exclaimed. But the cloth did not take fire. There was only a single flash as the black mark burned away. The girl took the sleeve from the fire to show me how it was suddenly spotless, and babbled a mixture of Pashtun and Farsi, of which I gradually got the import. That heavy and mysterious fabric was always cleaned in that manner, and my clothes had been so crusty that she had taken them to be of the same material.
“All right,” I said. “I forgive you. It was a well-intentioned mistake. But I am still without anything to wear. Now what?”
She indicated that I could choose which of two things I would do. I could lodge a complaint with the Gebr master, and demand that he procure new raiment for me, which would cost the girl her day’s wages and probably a beating besides. Or I could put on what clothes were available—meaning some of hers—and go across the city of Balkh in feminine masquerade. Well, that meant no choice at all; I must be a gentleman; therefore I must play the lady.
I scuttled out through the shop as fast as I could, but I was still adjusting my chador veil, and the old Gebr behind the counter raised his eyebrows, exclaiming, “You took me seriously! You are showing me a beautiful one among these country rustics!”
I snarled at him one of the few Pashtun expressions I knew: “Bahi chut!” which is a directive to do something to one’s own sister.
He guffawed and called after me, “I would, if she were as pretty as you!” while I scurried out into the still falling snow.
Except for stumbling now and then, because I could see the ground only dimly through the obscuring snow and my chador, and also because I frequently stepped on my own hems, I got back to the karwansarai without incident. That disappointed me a little, for I had gone the whole way with my teeth and fists clenched and my temper seething, hoping to be rudely addressed or winked at by some Eve-baiting oaf, so I could kill him. I slipped into the inn by a rear door, unobserved, and hurried to put on clothes of my own, and started to throw away the girl’s. But then I reconsidered, and cut from her gown a square of the cloth to keep for a curiosity, and with it I have since astonished many persons disinclined to believe that any cloth could be proof against fire.
Now, I had heard of such a substance long before I left Venice. I had heard priests tell that the Pope at Rome kept among the treasured relics of the Church a sudarium, a cloth which had been used to wipe the Holy Brow of Jesus Christ. The cloth had been so sanctified by that use, they said, that it could nevermore be destroyed. It could be thrown into a fire, and left there for a long time, and taken out again miraculously entire and unscorched. I also had heard a distinguished physician contest the priestly claim that it was the Holy Sweat which made the sudarium impervious to destruction. He insisted that the cloth must be woven of the wool of the salamander, that creature which Aristotle averred lives comfortably in fire.
I will respectfully contradict both the reverent believers and the pragmatic Aristotelian. For I took the trouble to inquire about that unburnable fabric woven by the Gebr fire worshipers, and eventually I was shown how it is made, and the truth of the matter is this. In the mountains in the region of Balkh is found a certain rock of palpable softness. When that rock is crushed, it comes apart not in grains, as of sand, but in fibers, as of raw flax. And those fibers, after repeated mashing and drying and washing and drying again and carding and spindling, are spun together into thread. It is clear that of any thread a cloth can be woven, and it is equally clear that a cloth made of earth’s rock ought not burn. The curious rock and the coarse fiber and the magical material woven of it, all are regarded by the Gebr as sacred to their fire god Ahura Mazda, and they call that substance by a word meaning “unsoilable stone,” which I take the liberty of rendering in a more civilized tongue as amianthus.
3
MY father and Nostril were gone for some five or six weeks, and, because Uncle Mafio required my attendance only intermittently, I had a good deal of spare time on my hands. So I went back several times to the house of the Gebr Persian—each time taking care to wear clothes that would not need “laundering.” And every time I spoke the password, “Show me your softest goods,” the old man would convulse with amusement and roar, “Why, you were the softest and most appealing piece that ever passed through this shop!” and I would have to stand and endure his guffaws until he finally subsided into giggles and took my dirham and told me which room was available.
At one time or another, I sampled all three of his back-room wares. But all the girls were Pakhtuni Muslims and tabzir, meaning that I found only release with them, not any satisfaction worth mentioning. I could have done that with the kuch-i-safari, and more cheaply. I did not even learn more than a few words of Pashtun from the girls, deeming it too slovenly a language to be worth learning. Just for example, the sound gau, when spoken normally on an exhaled breath, means “cow,” but the same gau, spoken while breathing in, means “calf.” So imagine what the simple sentence “The cow has a calf” sounds like in Pashtun, and then try to imagine conducting a conversation of any more complexity.
On my way out through the amianthus-cloth shop, though, I would pause to exchange some few words in Farsi with the Gebr proprietor. He would usually m
ake some further mocking remarks about the day I had had to masquerade as a woman, but he would also condescend to answer my questions about his peculiar religion. I asked because he was the only devotee of that old-time Persian religion I had ever met. He admitted that there were few believers left in these days, but he maintained that the religion once had reigned supreme, not only in Persia but west and east of there as well, from Armeniya to Bactria. And the first thing he told me about it was that I should not call a Gebr a Gebr.
“The word means only ‘non-Muslim’ and it is used by the Muslims derisively. We prefer to be called Zarduchi, for we are the followers of the prophet Zaratushtra, the Golden Camel. It was he who taught us to worship the god Ahura Mazda, whose name is nowadays slurred to Ormuzd.”
“And that means fire,” I said knowledgably, for Nostril had told me that much. I nodded toward the bright lamp that always burned in the shop.
“Not fire,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It is a stupid misbelief that we worship fire. Ahura Mazda is the God of Light, and we merely keep a flame burning as a reminder of His beneficent light which banishes the darkness of his adversary Ahriman.”
“Ah,” I said. “Not too different, then, from our own Lord God, Who contends against the adversary Satan.”
“No, not different at all. Your Christian God and Satan you got from the Jews, as the Muslims derived their Allah and Shaitan. And the God and the Devil of the Jews were frankly patterned on our Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. So were your God’s angels and your Satan’s demons copied from our celestial malakhim messengers and their daeva counterparts. So were your Heaven and Hell copied from Zaratushtra’s teachings about the nature of the afterlife.”
“Oh, come now!” I protested. “I hold no brief for the Jews or the Muslims, but the True Religion cannot have been a mere imitation of somebody else’s—”
He interrupted, “Look at any picture of a Christian deity or angel or saint. He or she is portrayed with a glowing halo, is that not so? It is a pretty fancy, but it was our fancy first. That halo imitates the light of our ever-burning flame, which in turn signifies the light of Ahura Mazda forever shining on His messengers and holy ones.”