She might never have known this, she thought.
She might easily never have learnt this language that in the end came naturally, and the delight would have been locked away for ever, like a wonderful unperformed trick hidden in one of the magician’s boxes.
But a long time later, as she drifted into sleep, it was Evan who hovered in her thoughts. She saw him with the eerie clarity of a dream, her husband with his awkward innocence and the anxiety that constantly stalked him. She felt a surge of tenderness towards him, and a prickle of shame at what she had just done. But even so she couldn’t regret it. She suspected that she might never do so.
With his arms tightly wound round her, Rainer was already asleep. She listened to his breathing, and in the end she surrendered her drowsy inquisition and slept too.
There was a distant banging, and a voice calling. As Nerys surfaced she had the sense that the noise had persisted for quite a long time. Rainer’s arm lay heavy across her chest and she twisted to disengage herself. Opening a chink in the bed’s curtains –
This is all the world, for tonight
– she let in a shaft of dim grey light. It was very early, but the day had come.
Someone was hammering on the door downstairs. The voice sounded like a child’s. Nerys’s clothes were scattered, tangled up in the bedcovers, and she remembered that the bloodstained Chinese robe lay somewhere across the room.
‘Rainer, wake up.’ She shook his muscled shoulder and he opened his eyes. ‘Listen.’
He uncoiled himself, already reaching for his clothes and dragging them on.
‘Wait here,’ he ordered, but she ignored him. Wrapped in a blanket she was at his heels as he reached the door. Her arm felt stiff and sore, but she forgot it instantly.
On the step was the little girl, the yarn-spinner’s daughter. Her dirt-covered face was seamed with the tracks of fresh tears. Her fists pulled at Rainer’s legs as she gabbled at him.
‘What’s she saying?’
‘The mother’s ill. She wants help, food.’
Nerys stooped and hoisted the child in her arms. Her response was to twist and spit, beating her hands on Nerys’s shoulder and howling into her face.
She called to Rainer, ‘Tell her we’ll come. We’ve got to get dressed.’
While they scrambled into their clothes the girl darted through the room, snatching fruit off a plate and tying it in the cloth from her head. The desperation of her feral rummaging struck dread as well as pity into Nerys. With the child haring ahead of them, they raced through the icy mud and refuse heaps of the alleyways until they came to the doorway with its shred of protective sacking.
The little boy was sitting in the corner of the bare room with the silent baby in his lap. The whites of their eyes showed in the dim light. The mother was lying stretched out beside her spinning wheel.
It was immediately obvious that she was dead.
The girl crouched beside her and pulled at her arm. Then she gave a low wail like an animal’s cry and flung herself across her mother’s body.
‘Take the children out of here,’ Rainer murmured.
Nerys looked round. There was nothing in the bare room except the wheel and the bed of rags. Even the shawl, in its cloth wrapping, had gone. With dry eyes and stiff hands she lifted the baby from its brother’s arms and folded it inside her
pheran
. She took the younger child’s cold hand, and with
Rainer’s help, she detached the now silent girl from the mother’s cooling body. There were no more tears and, after that one terrible wail, not a sound.
‘Take them to my house. I’m going to find the head man of this quarter and report the death. Then I’ll be back,’ he said. His face was like a stone.
Nerys led the children back the way they had come. She wasn’t sure of the route through the labyrinth of alleys, and she was too angry to try to ask any of the silent men who stood in the shadows to watch them pass. The girl refused to take her hand. She walked in silence, stiff as a small robot.
At last they reached the river and the tall old house. Nerys sat the boy on Rainer’s bed and drew the covers across his thin shoulders. The baby was stirring and whimpering and she rocked it as she moved round the room. The girl went to the window and stood with her back to them, staring out at the snow that had begun to fall.
In Rainer’s kitchen Nerys unearthed some
roghani
bread and a dish of apple sauce. Unlike everyone else in Srinagar, Rainer employed no servants. She boiled a cup of milk on the bottled-gas ring, and placed it on the windowsill to cool while she fed spoonfuls of bread and apple to the boy. When he had eaten something she was able to persuade the girl to turn away from her sentry position. She snatched some bread and, holding it in two hands, gnawed at it as she returned to her place.
Nerys was holding the mute baby in her arms and feeding it warm milk from a teaspoon when Rainer came back. He brought fresh warm bread and a pot of lentil stew. He set out the food and the girl seized her plate and took it back to the window.
‘She had fever,’ he said. ‘She had been ill for a few days.’
‘Why didn’t anyone help her?’
‘She was an outcast. That’s the way it is with them. Maybe it’s true – maybe she had been with another man – I don’t know. No one will know, now.’
Nerys looked from one child to another. They hardly seemed children at all, more like small, carved effigies.
She was aware that a great deal had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and that there was much more to come. Her own concerns, so gripping an hour ago, had become entirely unimportant. ‘What can we do for them?’ she whispered.
Sombrely he considered the question. ‘We’ll take them back to the village. To her family, in Kanihama.’
Two days after Christmas, Nerys and Rainer drove the little trio through the snow from Srinagar to Kanihama. The boy and girl huddled behind the seats of the truck and the baby wailed in Nerys’s arms.
The children’s grandfather and great-grandfather came out of the village house to meet them.
‘We have very little,’ the man with the crescent face complained. ‘Not enough to feed the mouths already.’
‘These are your daughter’s children. She is dead, and if you and her family do not care for them they will die too,’ Rainer said.
‘May the woman rest in peace,’ the older man murmured piously. His son’s mouth set in a hard line.
The children’s teeth were chattering from the cold. In the end a woman came out of the houses and led them away. Nerys would never forget the glance of smouldering accusation, quickly blanked out, that the girl, Farida, shot back over her shoulder. She hadn’t uttered a word since her mother had died, and this was the first sign of emotion she had shown. She had grabbed all the food she could lay her hands on, not even waiting to see if her brothers had a share, and the rest of the time she had stood or sat with her face turned away.
‘His own child, their flesh and blood,’ Nerys whispered to Rainer in disgust.
‘Their rules are not the same as yours,’ he answered. ‘There has been dishonour. The daughter was disowned.’
‘We can’t leave those children here. Let me take them back to Srinagar. I’ll look after them somehow.’
‘This is where they belong, Nerys. These are their people, not you and Myrtle and the Srinagar Club ladies with their ideas of charity. Don’t let sentiment cloud your judgement.’
‘You’re so callous. I’m surprised at you.’ She was angry with him because she was confused.
In the end money changed hands, and Rainer gave stern instructions to the villagers about how the children were to be cared for.
As they drove away, Nerys wept.
Three days later she insisted that Rainer drive her back to the village to see how they were getting on. What they saw was not reassuring. The baby was silent and limp, even though he was being nursed by an aunt, or perhaps it was a cousin, who had recently given birth herself. The boy, Faisal, cried or rocked himself in a corner and Farida stood in bitter silence.
They had brought more food with them, as well as extra clothing, warm blankets, and a crib for the baby. The villagers stood looking on as Rainer unpacked the supplies, just as fascinated as they had been by his magic tricks. Nerys thought they probably made no distinction between that conjuring and this materialising of desirable food and clothing. The goods were quickly whisked away.
‘They’re going to take everything for themselves,’ she whispered, looking at the ring of dark, unsmiling faces. In the grip of winter Kanihama was a far harsher place than it had seemed on that sunny afternoon back in the autumn.
‘Of course they will. Wouldn’t you in their place? The idea is to show them that keeping the children in the village brings benefits that wouldn’t come their way otherwise. Whoever
actually eats this food and sleeps in these blankets, the children will be better off in the end.’
Nerys wasn’t convinced, but for the time being she didn’t have any other ideas.
Rainer went off to smoke a pipe with the men and she was left among the women. Apart from the
kani
weavers, always bent over their looms, it was the women who seemed to do most of the work. She nodded and smiled at them as they passed and tried not to draw too much attention to herself. Faisal stopped crying, apparently from exhaustion, and she took the opportunity to lift him into her arms. After a moment he fell asleep, and as she rocked him she studied the wet black eyelashes curling against his brown cheek. To her surprise, one of the women brought a wooden stool and pushed it in front of her. Nerys thanked her in Kashmiri and sat down.
Farida didn’t even glance in their direction.
From where she sat, Nerys could look out into the square. She noticed that three or four of the little mud-brick structures were empty because the shawl workers had begun to migrate down to the city in search of work. The old, traditional ways of village life were breaking down, the shawl trade was in decline, but the craftsmen’s families still had to be fed. Rainer had told her that some of the skilled workers had gone to little factories in the city, set up by Kashmiri middle men to mass-produce cheap approximations of the precious hand-made pieces that took countless hours to weave and gave their makers far too little return for their labour.
Faisal moaned and kicked in his sleep. She wondered how bad his dreams could be. She didn’t want to leave him again and go back to lotus-eating down in Srinagar. Thoughtfully she gazed out at the empty houses, and by the time Rainer came back she had made up her mind. He drew up another stool and sat down beside her, and the women glanced covertly at them as they went about their work.
She said, ‘If the children are going to live here, I will stay with them. They’ll be with their own people but I can make
sure they’re well and getting what they need. Perhaps I can teach them some games and English words, just like I did over in Leh.’
He looked into her face, grasping her idea but doubting that it was practical. ‘It’s a harsh life. Can you survive up here, do you think, on your own?’
She lifted her chin, thinking back to her life in Ladakh, to the physical demands of the climb from Manali and after that the relative ease of the journey over the Himalayas with Myrtle and Archie.
‘Yes, I can. The
Garden of Eden
and cricket matches aren’t exactly what I’m used to. It was fun, but I don’t want to live like that all winter. I’m going to have to move out of the houseboat soon anyway, because Caroline needs somewhere more secluded than the married quarters. I’d thought of looking for a room in the old town, maybe near your house, but coming up here and doing something similar to my work in Leh would be much more useful. l won’t be alone, either. Look around you. Kanihama is full of people.’
‘You don’t know their language.’ He didn’t have to add, ‘There are no Europeans here and British ladies, even missionaries’ wives, don’t live alone in Indian hill villages,’ because it was implicit.
‘Rainer, I can learn.’ Her voice carried an edge of rebuke.
He looked at her for a long moment, and then he touched her cheek. ‘You are formidable. All right, Nerys. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.’
‘Let’s start by asking the head man what and who I have to pay to rent one of these houses.’
The negotiations were complex and protracted, but in the end a house – more of a hovel, really, but Nerys was confident that she and Rainer between them could make it habitable – and a steep price were agreed. She handed over a wad of rupees to the village elders, on the understanding that Rainer and she would be coming back very soon, and that this time Nerys would be staying.
‘Just a day or so, I promise,’ she whispered, to the uncomprehending Faisal. The little boy held on to her leg, then turned away. Farida stared into the distance and didn’t acknowledge their departure.
A tight knot of villagers gathered to watch them leave. It was one thing, Nerys thought, to visit Kanihama on an autumn afternoon and to be welcomed as a rich tourist maybe with the money to buy a shawl or two, but quite another to propose a life among the shawl-makers. Apart from what they hoped to get out of her, her intrusion would be entirely unwelcome.
As the Ford bumped over the ruts past the ravine where she and Rainer had picnicked, her resolve temporarily failed. It would be so much easier to stay comfortably in Srinagar until Evan arrived. She reminded herself that she had felt the same anxiety at Shillong, and even more so at Leh, where she had been merely her husband’s adjunct, and yet she had been able to make herself useful in both places. And Evan would understand why she wanted to be in Kanihama. The thought brought him oddly close, at the very moment when they had never seemed further apart.
‘You are quiet,’ Rainer said, over the truck’s rattling din.
‘I’m making plans,’ Nerys told him.
They returned to the house by the river, and the curtained bed.
With Rainer, the physical intricacies and elaborations were turning out to be much as she had imagined them when she had lain awake for the long nights beside Evan, but what did surprise her was the way that two bodies could be ordinary together, and also comical and available without ceremony.