This vodka and that water both look alike but each tastes quite different, he said. And it is the same with love.
So I walked on another day, taking my living from the country easily enough; then one day more and never heard a voice but the birds whistle; but the day after that I heard a woman singing and saw one of the savage tribe in a clearing and thought to kill her, before she killed me, but then I saw she had no weapon but was picking herbs and putting them in a fine basket. So I steps back to hide myself from her lest she be some Indian servant of a planter, although I do think that I walk, now, where no person of my country ever trod before. But she hears the leaves move and sees me and jumps as if shed seen a ghost so that she knocks over her basket and her herbs spill out.
He ate a purple egg.
She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had come and, the last tale of all concluded, fall silent. Then, the lily-seller might vanish.
My name is neither here nor there since I used several in the Old World that I may not speak of now; then there is my, as it were, wilderness name, that now I never speak of; and, now, what I call myself in this place, therefore my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature. But I first saw light in the county of Lancashire in Old England, in the Year of Our Lord 16--, my father a poor farm servant, and me mam and he both died of plague when I was a little thing so me and me brothers and sisters left living were put on the parish and what became of them I do not know, but, as for me, I could do a bit of sewing and keep a place clean so when I were nine or ten years of age they set me up as a maid of all work to an old woman that lived in our parish.
Now, had I been content with honest whoring, no doubt I would be dressed in silk riding my coach in Cheapside still and never eat the bitter bread of exile. But you could say that, when I clapped my eye on his coin, I was as if struck with love and though want made a thief of me, first, it was avarice perfected me in the art and whoring was my "cover" for it since my customers, blinded as they were with lust and often fuddled with liquor, were easier to pluck, living, than geese, dead.
She motions me: shall I go with her? I think the overseer will never come to look for me among the red men! So I goes with her to the Indian town and in this way, no other, was I "taken" by em although the Minister would have it otherwise, that they took me with violence, against my will, haling me by the hair, and if he wishes to believe it, then let im.
I never think twice about it but step across to pick up the spilled herbs for her as if I was back in Cheapside and run to help some fruit-seller that overturns her basket of apples.
She was a woman of about middle age dressed in nowt but a buckskin skirt and she grunted when she saw my stays -- for I still wore my English apparel, though it was ragged -- and motioned me, as I thought, that whalebone was not the fashion among the Indian nation. So off go my stays and I throws them into a bush and breathes easier for it. Then she asks me, by signs, to give her the big knife Id stuck in my apron.
You must know I had no knowledge of geography and thought, from Virginia to Florida but ten or twelve days march, at theｈtｔｐ://wwｗ•９9ｌｉｂ•ｎｅｔ most, for I knew it was very far and could think of no distance further than that, for the great vastness of the Americas was then unknown to me. As for the Indians, I thought, well! if I can keep off the overseer with my knife, Id be more than a match for them, if I should meet them, so slept sound under the sky, took a bearing by the sun in the morning and went on.
It was a gold watch out of the bosom of a city alderman that took me to Newgate for I quarrelled with my landlady over my rent and she took his complaint of me to the magistrate out of spite. So, just as my old Lancashire mistress said, I sailed the Ocean to Virginia but I went in a convict transport. They burned my hand, to brand me, as they used convicts, and sold me to work my sentence in the plantation for seven years, after which they said I should be a free woman again.
One day the old lass lies down and never gets up again and her cousins come and shift all the goods with a pennorth of value to em but they could find no place for me in their house so I must shift for meself.
The executioners saw the architect standing on top of the arch and ran up the stairs with their knives drawn but when he heard them coming he grew wings and flew away to Persia.
What does that taste like? Like the red egg. Try again.
For, she says, that country far beyond the sea is named Virginia, after the virgin mother of God Almighty, and its rivers flow directly from Eden so, when the natives are converted to the true religion -- "which task I charge you with, child," and she gives me a mouthful of Ave Marias -- when that shall be accomplished, why, the whole world will end and the dead rise up out of their coffins and all go to heaven that deserve it and my little babby sit smiling over everything with a gold crown on his head. Then shed babble away in Latin and cross herself. But I never told nobody about her Roman ways nor about her star-gazing, either, for if they hadnt hanged her for a heretic, theyd have hanged her for a witch, poor creature.
One eggs tastes just the same as any other egg, if they are fresh, he said.
After I eat my dinner, I saw how the oak trees were full of acorns at this season and thought that I might grind up those acorns between two flat stones, with a bit of effort, and so get a kind of flour, as had been done at home in times of want. I reasoned how I could mix this flour to dough with water. Then I could bake the dough in cakes in the ashes of my fire and have bread with my meat. And, if I wanted fish on a Friday, as was my Lancashire ladys custom, I could tickle the trout with which the stream abounded, which is a trick every country girl knows and not unlike picking a pocket. Also, it seemed to me, if I dried the mulberries in the sun, they would eat sweet for a month. When I got so far in planning my diet, I thought: why, I can get along here very well in the woods on my own for a while even if I must eat meat without salt!
Very well, said the architect. But soon he came back to her and this time he was carrying a tray with three bowls on it, and you would have thought the bowls were all full of water.
The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, black and white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colours that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewellery made of red glass.
That the stars, whom she had consulted on behalf of her dear child, as she pleased to call me, assured her that I would take a long voyage over the Ocean to the New World and there bear a blessed babe whose fathers fathers never sailed in Noahs Ark. And, from her reading, which had worn her eyes out, she had concluded that those "red children of the wilderness" could be none other than the Lost Tribe of Israel, so shalom, she taught me, besides the words for "love" and "hunger", and much else that I have forgotten, so that I could talk to my husband when I met him. And if I had not been a steady girl, she would have turned my head with all her nonsense for she would have it that the stars foretold I should grow up to be nowt less than Our Lady of the Red Men.
I had clean water out of the streams and it was the season of berries so I made my breakfast off a bit of fruit but my guts began to rumble by dinner-time and I cast my eye about for more solid fodder. Seeing the brakes full of small beasts and birds unknown to me, I thought: "How can I go hungry if I use my wits!" So I tied my shoestrings together to make a little snare and trapped a small, brown, furry thing of the rabbit kind, but earless, and slit its throat, skinned it, toasted it on the end of my carving-knife over a fire I made with the blessed tinder-box the gardener give me. So all I wanted was salt and a bit of bread.
He took a green egg.
Seeing me in such a fluster, the gardener coming up with a basket of vegetables cries: "Whats this, Sal?"
Our Lady of the Massacre
There you are! she said. Each of these eggs looks different to the rest but they all taste the same. So you may kiss any one of my serving women that you like but you must leave me alone.
This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a childs box of crayons. This Tamburlaines wife of the story would have painted a black stripe laterally across her forehead and done up her hair in a dozen, dozen tiny plaits, like any other Uzbek woman. She would have bought red and white radishes from the market for her husbands dinner. After she ran away from him perhaps she made her living in the market. Perhaps she sold lilies there.
They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black line straight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years.
The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In this early part of the year you can buy only last summers dried fruit -- apricots, peaches, raisins -- except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open on the stall to show how a wet nest of garnets remains within. A local ９９lｉb•nｅtspeciality of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios.
The winters in Central Asia are piercing and bleak, while the sweating, foetid summers bring cholera, dysentery and mosquitoes, but, in April, the air caresses like the touch of the inner skin of the thigh and the scent of all the flowering trees douses the citys throat-catching whiff of cesspits.
Against these bleached pallors, the iridescent crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the ancient mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beneath a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaine, the scourge of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand.
They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbanned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the foreign eye as a unicorn. They exist, in all their glittering and innocent exoticism, in direct contradiction to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow in the gutters. In the teahouse a green parrot nudges the bars of its wicker cage.
She took a drink from the first bowl, then from the second; but how she coughed and spluttered when she took a mouthful from the third bowl, because it contained, not water, but vodka.
"Well," says I, "the overseer just now tried to board me and Ive had the ears off him and would it had been his pillocks too."
Then Tamburlaines wife kissed the architect on the mouth. He went back to the mosque and finished the arch the same day that victorious Tamburlaine rode into Samarkand with his army and banners and his cages full of captive kings. But when Tamburlaine went to visit his wife, she turned away from him because no woman will return to the harem after she has tasted vodka. Tamburlaine beat her with a knout until she told him she had kissed the architect and then he sent his executioners hotfoot to the mosque.
My master took a liking to me, for I was not yet aged above seventeen, and he had me out of the tobacco fields into his kitchen. But the overseer did not like it, that I should get the taste of his whip no more, and pestered me unmercifully that, since I had been a whore in Cheapside, I should not play the honest maid with him in Virginia. Coming at me alone in the house, my master having gone to church, it being Sunday morning, this overseer thrust one hand in my bosom and the other up my skirt, says I shall have it whether I wants it or no. I picked up the big carving knife and whacks off both his ears, first one, then tother. What a sight! blood enough for pig-sticking; he roars, he curses, I runs out into the garden with the knife in my hand, it dripping.
This woman sees the brand on my hand and grunts to herself, as though she knows the meaning of it and will not fear me for it, or, rather, does not fear me because of it, but, all the same, does not like the look of me. She holds back from me though she takes her basket from me again as if to leave me in the forest. But I am struck by her looks, she is a handsome woman, not red but wondrous brohttｐ://www.９９ｌiｂ•netwn, and it came into my mind to open my bodice, show her my breasts, that, though I had whiter skin, I could give suck as well as she and she reached out and touched my bosom.
Tamburlaines wife was not only very beautiful and very virtuous but also very clever. She went to the market, bought a basket of eggs, boiled them hard and stained them a dozen different colours. She called the architect to the palace, showed him the basket and told him to choose any egg he liked and eat it. He took a red egg. What does it taste like? Like an egg. Eat another.
I take it into my head to go to London, where I persuade myself I can make my fortune, and I walk the highway, sleeping in barns and hedges, for I was hardy, and makes good time -- five days. When I gets to London, I stole my first penny loaf, to keep me from starving, which led directly to my undoing, a gentleman that spies me slip the loaf into my pocket, instead of raising a hue and cry, follows me into the streets, takes my arm, inquires: whether it be want or inclination that makes me take it. I flares up at that: Want, sir! says I and he says, such a pretty young "Lancashire milkmaid" as I was should not want for nothing while he had breath in his body and so flattered and coaxed me that I went with him to a room with a bed in it in a public house where he was well known. When he finds Ive never done the thing before, he weeps; beats his breast for shame for debauching me; gives me five gold sovereigns, the most money that ever I saw until then; and departs for, so he says, the church, to pray forgiveness, which is the last that I saw of him. So I went on the common with my first fall, which was a fortunate one, and the "Lancashire milkmaid" was soon in a fair way of trade as the "Lancashire whore".
Tamburlaines wife started to build this mosque for him as a surprise, while he was away at the wars, but when she got word of his imminent return, one arch still remained unfinished. She went directly to the architect and begged him to hurry but the architect told her that he would complete the work on time only if she gave him a kiss. One kiss, one single kiss.
He gives me his handkerchief with his bit of dinner in it and a tinder-box he had about him, which I stow away in my apron pocket, and I show the plantation a clean pair of heels, I can tell you, adding to my list of crimes that most heinous: escape from bondage.
This old woman, or lady rather, never married and was, as I found out, of the Roman faith, though she kept that to herself, and once a good deal richer than she had become. Besides, her father, wanting a son and getting nowt but she, taught her Latin, Greek and a bit of Hebrew and left her a great telescope with which she used to view the heavens from her roof though her sight was too bad to make out much but what she did not see, she made up, for she said she had poor sight for the things of this world but clear sight into the one to come. She often let me have a squint at the stars, too, for I was her only companion and she learned me my letters, as you can see, and would have taught me all she knew herself, had she not, as soon as I come to her, cast my horoscope for me, her father having left the charts and zodiacal instruments. And, having I done so, told me I would not need the language of Homer at no time in all my life, but a little co九-九-藏-书-网nversational Hebrew she did teach me, for reasons as follows:
"Now Im for it!" I thinks but hands it over and she smiles, though not much, for these savages are not half so free with their feelings as we are, and says in a word I take to mean "Knife". I say it after her, pointing to it, but she shakes her head and runs her finger down the blade, so I say, after her: "Sharp". Or, a word you might put into English as: acute. And that was the first word of the Algonkian language that ever I spoke, though not the last, by any means. Then, seeing this old woman with a shape, not, as I can see, marked by child-bearing, and remembering the Virgin Queen my missus taught me of, I try her out with: "Shalom". Which she politely repeats after me but I can tell it means nowt to her.
An old woman sells arum lilies. This morning, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like blown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are nesting among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lunch and eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing.
For, I thought, I have steel and fire and the climate is temperate, the land fruitful; this earthly paradise surely will provide for me! I can build a shelter out of branches and bide my time until the fuss over the lop-eared overseer dies down, then make my way South in my own good time. Besides, to tell the truth, my nostrils were too full of the stink of humanity to relish a quick return to the world in some bordello in Florida. But I thought that I should travel on a little more, for safetys sake, into the deep wilderness, so that no hunting party might find me and return me to the noose. Of which I had a very powerful fear and, I may tell you, more dread of the white man, which I knew, than of the red man, who was at that time unknown to me.
Drink from each of these bowls, he said.
Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightforward, geometric shapes with crayons from a childs colouring box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, blonde terraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.
I am a good walker as you may judge from my trudge from Lancashire to London and by the time night comes on and I sit down to eat the gardeners bit of bread and bacon there are fifteen odd miles between myself and the plantation and rough going, too, for my master had cleared land from the forest to grow his tobacco. My plan is, to walk until I gets to where the English have no dominion, for I have heard the Spaniards and the French are on this coast, as well, and there, I thought, Id ply my trade amongst strangers, for a whore needs nowt but her skin to set up business.
A goat is nibbling wild jasmine among the ruins of the mosque that was built by the beautiful wife of Tamburlaine.
The gardener, being a good-natured kind of Negro man and a slave, hisself, and hisself tickled once too often by the overseers whip, cannot forbear to laugh but says to me: "Then you must be off into the wilderness, Sal, and cast your fate to the tender mercies of the savage Indian. For this is a hanging matter."