Thinner Than Skin (13 page)

Before she had seen twelve full moons, Kiran saw her first disemboweled goat. It lay in a pasture they had stopped in for just that night, for it was full with the tents of nomads from the west, and unsafe. In the morning, the goat’s entrails lay splattered in the green, her juices mixing with those of the wet earth, the flies thick and droopy. It might have been a wolf. It might have been a man. Kiran sat on her haunches, lost in study. The goat’s skin was peeled back, like a shawl, and the sun lit the sheen underneath. Perhaps it was this that left her thunderstruck. The sun, with which they prayed and sang, could cause a hurt to turn shiny before your eyes. Or perhaps it was the frailness of the hide. In later years, she would ask Maryam if her skin was as thin as a goat’s. And Maryam would tell her the truth. It was thinner. Which meant, of course, that if a goat could be shred that easily, so could a woman.

She would also tell Kiran that, like herself, she would have to grow a second skin to protect the thin one that was eventually left to the sun and the earth, the wind and the flies. This second skin lay beneath the frailer one, not on top. It had to be kept hidden in order to work. But all this she would tell Kiran later. That year, Kiran’s
first in the world, she measured the distance between life and death as lying between Kiran’s finger and the goat’s shiny entrails. Then she pulled Kiran away and shrugged, telling herself that Gujjar children were no strangers to death, and this was only the first of many Kiran would have to know. She was right, of course. If that spring death found Kiran in the skin of a goat, by autumn, before they returned to the plains, it would find her again, this time, in the eyes of a buffalo. During the long winter months in the homestead, death would become resident, taking her cousin’s pony, and her grandmother. Wherever they went, it followed them. Death was a wind. He was a gypsy.

By her second year, Kiran had also witnessed the pain of birth and the way a mare will cry if her foal is born still. She was too young to understand the bitterness of age, but not too young to note that bitterness could immobilize two legs
and
four. Soon after the mare Namasha lost her foal, she gave birth to her second and only living filly, but at a price. She lost the steed that sired it. Early one morning, he dropped his dung high up a glacier and descended at a run, straight into a barbed wire fence. Before they could ask him why, he was dead. Maryam pressed the puncture wound with her palm while Kiran watched, dry-eyed and trembling, the blood running down her arms. She touched the wound without applying pressure to it, as though knowing the bleeding would never stop. Afterward, Namasha only took food from Kiran. At Maryam she snarled and she kicked. It took two years before the mare forgave her, and by then Kiran had learned that forgiveness was thinner than skin.

This year, death had again showed himself in the sun. Their first morning on the move, soon after they unloaded their bags off the animals and while the rest of the dera was pitching the tents, Maryam’s eldest brother-in-law stretched his arms and simply fell, right there in the middle of his flock, at Kiran’s feet. Kiran waited a long time before delivering the news: Baro bai was dead.

It was part of life. The endless roaming, loading, unloading. The bodies that folded, the spirits that fled, when you traveled by
caravan, in groups of families bound together by the intimacies of gaiety and grief. The dera of Maryam’s brother-in-law was not the most popular in the tol; there had been opposition to the price at which he sold his butter and milk, down in the plains. But once they left the plains, these disagreements became petty. It always happened this way each year, during the migration. The higher up they moved, the more the spirit was cleansed. The children played drums and the women sang. The men told stories and the horses stretched their wings. Even Baro bai’s death became occasion for renewal. After burying him by a stream, they spent the rest of their month-long trek sharing stories of his youth. This was a death you lived with. It was not a death that made you stop. Stopping was not an option.

Which was why you had to have the necessary kind of death behind you to carry the other kind. You had to have the years. Otherwise you might halt, and then you really were dead.

The baby did not have years. The mother did not have years. And, from the looks of him, the killer did not have years either.

As she watched him move away, she remembered her mother say that none were more cursed than those destined to watch in silence. There was no deeper hell than a pair of eyes without a voice. And she would say that a broken heart should never grow cold. It was the cruelest of burdens. Not even God would carry it. She had experience with this, having asked Him numerous times to carry hers. He always refused. He was not about to carry any other. And so, her mother said, while you cannot stop a heart from breaking, you can keep the pieces warm. Of course, she never told her how.

Now Maryam found that her heart had not merely broken, or even grown cold. It had simply stopped. It was dead weight that only grew heavier as she moved closer to Kiran lying there in the sand, unmoving, without shedding blood, without a trail of shiny guts, without even a droopy fly. This time, it seemed, death had not wanted to find Kiran at all.

She had pleaded with her husband. How could he let Kiran get in the boat with strangers? Kiran was afraid of water. Did he not see the fear on his own daughter’s face?

He replied, coldly, “I am lame, not blind. You know we cannot refuse them. They are guests. Remember where you come from.”

Cannot refuse them, even our daughter?

“It is just for a short while, Maryam.” And now his voice softened. He was like her father in this way, when he called her by name it was never without tenderness.

“And them?” she ventured. “Where do they come from? Is it a place where a child is pulled from her family for amusement?”

His voice curdled. “You were always fond of drama. Kiran will be fine.”

Kiran will be fine.

For the hour Kiran was in the boat, what did her husband do? He sat with the men of their tribe, debating the trouble in the valley. Down where their homestead lay, things had changed. There were military convoys looking for a killer. There were spies. There were accomplices. But there were no eyes, not up here, not for a girl afraid. And there were no ears, not up here, not for the bangles that called. Only Maryam could hear them, while sitting by the open hearth on the shores of the lake, her baby Jumanah beating a tune on the kangri firepot—perhaps she heard them too—in a circle made of copper bowls. They were calling her, but all she could do was listen. Eventually, she could neither see the boat nor hear the bangles. All she could do was nothing. Perhaps in that hour her heart had already begun to stop.

The night the boat returned without Kiran, she slipped out of her husband’s tent. There was a blue tent in the distance, neither sagging nor leaky, like her own, and inside lay the girl who walked like a goat and the man who had no tongue. The two killers. Her husband was asleep. She crept under the moon and over the hills, to her cave.

She did the same the next night. She saw their tent. She ran to her cave. She might have cried freely there, but preferred, instead, to scream and curse. She would leave no more offerings to a goddess that gave her misgivings but no signs. At least none she could read. How many times had she fought with her husband to keep their ancient rituals alive, even as others called her a pagan wife? How many risks had she taken by protecting the shrine down in the plains, a shrine that did not lead all the way to Tashkent, nor encase her like a womb, nor hold the dreams of the dead in the drawings on the wall, but that was dark and lifeless and mean? Was this just payment for her devotion? She kicked the rice, and offered it. She spat on the feather—that meant
he
was coming—and kissed it. She cried to her mother—where are your footholds now, your doors?—and praised her.

The second night, her baby daughter Jumanah followed her out of their tent. Maryam carried her to the cave, and showed her the drawings, and cursed her luck.

Before dawn of the third morning, she was winding her way back to the lake, only to find him. The man with no tongue, committing a second murder. He would not even allow her the dignity of being the first to welcome her daughter back. He would not even abstain from the sacrilege of looking at Kiran without love, without history.

It was the baby who found a way to punish him. She placed her small hand on Kiran’s cold neck. The child and the child. Neither ready for death. Maryam held his gaze, the killer’s, the one who had stolen their youth. He retreated, tail between legs.

Watching him go, she remembered the legendary Maryam Zamani, who willed a stone to retreat. And she thought of the man who once likened her to the legend, the one for whom Maryam was not just Maryam, the one who had come to her, at first, like a prophet. A color filled her eyes. Blue. Kiran’s favorite shade. She had tried to braid Kiran’s hair with a blue thread once, a cluster of braids raining down her back, all gathered in blue. She had almost
succeeded. Blue for the still neck lying on the shore. Blue for the feather from a kingfisher’s tail. She was sure Kiran would fly now, with her grandmother, and all the spirits from the plains, and from these mountains, and from the steppe beyond a dark sea, from where they had come, two, maybe three thousand years ago. And as the blue filled her eyes she told herself:
He will fix this. Ghafoor is on his way
.

She kept her gaze on the killer’s legs, the way they buckled as he hunkered back toward his tent. She watched for so long the baby began to fidget. But she did not cry. When Maryam finally tore her eyes away, she leaned into Kiran and kissed her brow, and stroked her cheek. She ran her hands over her wet clothes. Kiran’s shalwar was torn. From the fall or from a bite? Not a drop of blood, not a droopy fly. The child feared death less than she had feared water. She blew prayers over her cold flesh.

She picked her up. The dead were heavy, after only six years of life. So this was the weight that had permanently lodged itself in her chest. Very well, she would carry it. She adjusted Kiran in her arms till the cold chin of one pressed into the warm curve of the other and broken knees bunched against a heart that had stopped. She breathed in Kiran’s ear. “The sun is hot now, I’ll take you home.”

Beside Maryam, but several feet closer to the ground, Jumanah ran to keep up with her mother. For assistance, she clutched her sister’s bloating feet. She had once seen a man on a bicycle do the same. He held on to a racing bus as it carried him far and away. Now her mother was the bus, Kiran’s feet the two bicycle handles, and her own plump legs the wheels. She needed a third hand, really, to hold onto her mother the bus, but she could pedal faster. The air rushed around them as she heard her mother chant:
He will fix this he will fix this he will fix this
.

He sat in a café many miles north of the lake, in a town called Gilgit. He was taking his time appraising the two men from Xinjiang Province. He was a tradesman; he knew nothing was free. But the choice he faced now was different. The men did not have fingers and toes, at least not all of them. Studying their hands, he calculated the sum of their words.

They described to him, in minute detail, China’s plan to raze the old city of Kashgar. They had brought photographs as evidence of their pain: cobblestone alleys, labyrinthine in design, as interconnected as ancient trade routes. Spectacular mosques, also to be razed. On the walls of one mosque hung a poster forbidding individual pilgrimages to Mecca. The men also had images of abandoned internet cafés, after the freeze by the government last year, ensuring the complete isolation of their fight. The clean-up meted out to protesters involved a different kind of freeze. They were hosed with ice water, several hours at a time, in winter. The lucky few, like the two men beside him, were freed without fingers and toes.

Their isolation must end. He could help, could he not?

The men had brought what he wanted. It lay in a box on their table in the low-lit café, close to their hands. Inside the box lay a gift for the woman to whom he had sent a blue feather, days earlier. An impossible choice. There was a proverb down in the valley where he had once made his home.
Neither dry in the sun nor wet in the rain
. How was he to get himself out of this difficulty?

One man had palms like soft leather cups, wrinkled and worn. The right thumb and little finger were missing, but on the left hand, only the middle finger was gone. This man was asking why the hands had reacted asymmetrically. Had he curled each differently each time they hosed him? Had he left one finger more exposed? He wanted to know also if it would have been easier to adjust if both hands had suffered the same fate. Because, now, he found he could do absolutely nothing with the left hand, even though it still retained a thumb. “The left hand uses the right as an image of itself, but it has lost this mirror. It cannot learn.”

“It could have been worse,” said the other man, who had only lost his toes. And he did a trick, making all but one of his fingers disappear. He held it up. The two men chuckled. They kept their shoes on.

Ghafoor kept appraising them, trying to place them from four summers ago, on one of his trips to Central Asia.

He had stopped in Kashgar for a few days, where he traded, among other things, leather for jade. The Chinese military were parked in the province for the month, to parade military hardware through the heart of the city. In the sky droned circles of fighter jets. On the ground trooped 100,000 boots, several dozen tanks, armored personnel vehicles, and camouflaged trucks. He had never seen so many uniforms before. He had never seen so many weapons. He had never seen so many planes. The chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army was also present, along with more generals than he had seen even at one of Pakistan’s military parades. It took longer than it ought to have to find the trader he was to meet, and when he did, he learned the reason for the display.

It would show the Uyghurs of Xinjiang that ethnic separatism under the banner of East Turkestan and religious freedom and the Turkic tongue would never be tolerated. This was not East Turkestan. It was China.

Ghafoor spent the week listening to the army’s threats with one ear, and the bustle of the city’s main bazaar with the other. There were many Pakistani merchants here, all buying joggers, socks, track suits with English writing, and the Pakistani housewife’s favorite convenience: plastic buckets. He met a Uyghur who, after striking a deal for 4,000 pairs of socks, had closed shop for two months while feeding a family of twelve. He ate kebabs skewered on bicycle spokes. He bantered with peddlers who told him a joke that, in subsequent years, would grow slightly stale. (“What was the first thing Neil Armstrong saw when he landed on the moon …?”) He watched more currency exchange more hands in more tongues than even down in Gilgit. For, though Uyghurs were proud of their Turkic heritage, for commerce, accommodations must be made. When currency was converted, so was language. The best clients were “Soviets” from Central Asia and Russia. If treated right, a Soviet could help a man close shop for
three
months. Ghafoor learned a little Russian himself, a skill that proved especially useful with the many Kazakh traders living in Xinjiang, men with whom he would travel to Ghulja on the border, forging direct links with artisans high in the Kazakh steppe.

But that was to happen later. Four summers ago, despite the windows he sensed were opening for him, Ghafoor was unsettled by the tanks and trucks occupying the city, and by the Han migrants being brought in from outside the province. They would pave the cobbled roads that cut through Old Kashgar, and force native Kashgaris to leave. He knew what it was to be forced out, to roam from field to field as though you were an upal in a buffalo’s ass. It was partly for this reason that he had chosen to leave the valley of his birth. Better to choose, than to be forced. But the native Kashgaris were not choosing to leave, even when the cobbles beneath their
feet were smashed, even when, for every donkey cart that sold polu and kebabs, there were two that sold liquor and pork. So he watched a history evanesce, alleys that once chimed with horsebells now clattering with cranes, mazes of mud-brick courtyards being flattened like naan, while, nearby, a colossal statue of Mao remained unshaken. “This is our al-Quds,” an old man whose family had fled the previous year told him. “I will never leave.” And when he added, “Will you help us?” Ghafoor had replied, “Of course.” But his eye, saturated with the grief of those he knew he could not help—he had not even been able to help his own people, though God knows he had tried—this saturated eye began to wander.

By the end of the week, Ghafoor had a mound of Kazakh, Chinese, and American currency in his purse, and the news at his back. He was vaguely aware of what it said. An East Turkestan separatist had been arrested in Pakistan. He had confessed to being the ring leader of a group planning attacks on China’s twelve new highway projects, each of which would cut through Xinjiang to connect China with Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and ultimately, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Turkey. Upon his arrest, he publicly spat on the generous compensation Kashgaris would receive for resettlement. He spat also on the compensation for the herders whose nearby grazing grounds would be paved.

By the end of that same year, Ghafoor was far from Kashgar and Chinese tanks and Han donkey carts and the man to whom he had promised aid. The news was still at his back, and it could still be heard. The East Turkestan separatist had been executed.

His brother was now sitting opposite Ghafoor, without toes, and with a box. Ah—Ghafoor had not been able to place him, but the man now came out with his name! He need not have shown Ghafoor the photographs of those lovely mosques that would soon be razed. Of course Ghafoor had seen them, with his own eyes, before moving on from Kashgar into Kazakhstan. He had seen the
military parade double in might, the fighter jets that spewed ribbons of white smoke into a sky that would not wear its natural color again for weeks. But by then, Ghafoor did not really care. Somewhere between the kebabs on bicycle spokes and the Chinese yuan in his pockets—or perhaps between the military tanks and an old man’s defiance—he had fallen in love with a girl so white she could be a ribbon herself. She certainly weaved around him like one, her face a smooth oval, her lips small and pink, and with just the tiniest smile lurking at one corner. In one of those labyrinthine alleys in a photograph in a soft leather palm, he had followed her, over the remaining cobblestones and into a doorway and up a staircase and behind a madressah where her father was preaching, and on, into another doorway, up another staircase, through a window patterned with green tiles that took his breath away, on, past the blue and white vase standing on a pillar that was surely a work of angels. And there she pulled him into a room high above the minarets that seemed to point at the fighter jets, cursing them to hell. And she weaved around him again.

They met there each day, in a room in a sky in which birds had not flown for longer than anyone could say. They simply sat, the nightingales and the doves, the eagles and even the grayleg geese, on the eaves of houses and the domes of mosques, waiting for the planes to stop their din, waiting to be swept by the breezes that had also stopped, waiting, waiting, for the People’s Liberation Army to look somewhere else, because it was getting late, soon, many of them would have to migrate south, including to Kaghan Valley, where he, the tall man with the sideburns and the belt on the floor, had once made his home. But in the meantime, while they waited, at least they had the advantage of a bird’s eye view of the lovers who met each day in that room.

She wanted him to stay but he could not stay. He told her he had goods to trade in the steppe. He promised he would be back. He said her thigh was like the inside of a dove’s wing, silken smooth and silken white, and outside, the doves shifted and almost cooed.

He was getting good at getting naked faster than her old man could climb one-third of the way up the stairs. Another third, and he had already had his fill. The final third, they had both dressed, and parted. By the time the midday prayer sounded from all the mosques—even the heavenly call from a hundred majestic minarets could not rival the din of the fighter jets, though not for want of trying; many muezzins lost their voices permanently that summer—the man with the sideburns and the girl with the feather-smooth thighs were nowhere to be seen.

And now, four summers later, the two Uyghurs had brought him what he asked. He opened the box. Two flowers, still fresh. The choice he faced was not easy, but it was worth trying to avoid. He paid them generously and stood up to leave. They laughed, reminding him that though he might prefer otherwise, their business was not over.

He sat back down.

After leaving the girl in Kashgar, his world had kept opening. He traded in the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Almaty, traveling up the Oxus River and deep into the steppe, developing a special kinship with those who built the goods he sold in the markets. It was here the land spoke to him most, in a region that lay high in the north of what was now Kazakhstan, though to the nomads with whom he was to spend the next three summers, all of Central Asia was one land, divided not into states but into mountain and steppe, desert and oasis. The steppe nomads made him feel he was looking back in time
—his
time. It was the strangest sensation, the first day he was invited to break bread with them. It was as though a mountain inside him were melting, leaving him naked and cleansed, entirely in his own skin, the skin he used to inhabit in the valley of his youth, before he had to leave (he had not
entirely
chosen to leave; he had been sent away, banished, almost, even if he did prefer to think otherwise), before
he had to don a thousand different skins. In the steppe he was undisguised, unwary, unwanting.

He found that the Turkic nomads shared an uncanny likeness to his own community: love of horses, hospitality to guests, and, most of all, a worshipful knowledge of the primacy of movement. The men had lush beards and liked their trees to look the same; they did not fell that which gave them life. Even some of their festivals were the same. They observed Nauroz, the first day of spring, by cleansing their homes with burning juniper branches, smoking out the vices of the previous year, a ritual now done in secret down in Kaghan, by a woman who, when she was a child, had licked honey from his fingers and danced to his flute. (The memory always made him smile.) The steppe nomads loved music too, bowed string things that made them kick. He was glad he had his flute. They sang as much as they prayed, and talked twice as much. They had their own shamans, those who could escort a soul back to a body, and those who could escort due justice back to a crime. They were born with a long ear and a memory as old as the Oxus. So was he. There was nothing said in his presence that he did not carry deep in his chest to the next yurt, the next town, the next valley. But he held it there. He did not talk. He merely listened, loyal to everyone who showed him only kindness. Their stories were his stories. Their enemies were his enemies. And their women, well.

Only a few weeks after leaving the girl with the feather-white thighs, Ghafoor found himself drinking milk from the arms of another. They had a peculiar diet, up here. It was the hardest thing for him to grow accustomed to. The worst thing he ever ate was a bowl of thick string made of something vaguely the consistency of rice, though the duck, also new to him, did make it easier to swallow, and the mare’s milk made it easier still. He had never milked even a buffalo before—a sign that he was never a very good herder, even when he was one—but one day he saw her doing it, stroking the udder of a visibly pregnant mare, a girl who was not slight and not
oval-faced, but who had the most perfect round arms, and who showed him how.
Press like this
.

Over the course of the summer he followed her through highland pastures the way he had, not too long ago, followed another through cobblestone labyrinths. An audience of eagles and hawks dipped and twirled in a sky free of fighter jets. Looking up from beneath him in the grass, she spoke a name of God that was older than Allah.
Tengri
. Tengri, he repeated, drinking her smell. He was getting better at getting naked faster than the milk still warm on her flesh could ferment.
Tengri
, she whispered again and again in his ear.
It means the endless hemisphere of the sky
.

There was some movement that even a free woman did not consider free. This time, before he could leave for the market towns, he was told to bid for her hand, which he did. He won the hand but before he could marry her, he had to win at two additional tasks. The first was assembling their home. A yurt was more luxurious than any Gujjar tent, and entirely sacred. It was a replica of
the endless hemisphere of the sky
and putting it together was an act of creation. His bride-to-be needed to know that he could create. After many tries, he eventually succeeded. Their yurt was a bright, plush home, with each aspect, she told him, representing a part of the human body. The walls were thighs, the smoke hole the eye, and the interior lattice frame with the ribbed plates that he gazed upon each night from beneath her, the womb. The second task was not divine, though, much to her amusement, he did not realize this till much later, when it ceased being a prerequisite to their marriage. It was a game in which he waited on a sandy outcrop on a horse till she rode up to him, at which point, he could chase after her. If he caught up with her, he could kiss her. If he failed, she could whip him. The game even had a name, kyz kuu, the kissing game. He never did win, even before she took pity and married him.