The Carpet Makers Page 6

  No one paid him any heed, and he preferred that. It felt good to be invisible—not to be seen and to leave no traces behind. He had feared that the rumor might already have gotten around and that they would stare at him and whisper behind his back. But there were other things on the minds of the city folk. From what he gathered of their conversations in passing, a heretic had been stoned the previous evening on the order of a holy wanderer who had been in the city for two days.

  Borlon recalled the advice of the guildmaster and turned his steps toward Market Square. Maybe it really was a question of his faith. He had not thought about the Emperor for a long time now; he had been concerned with nothing but his carpet and his own petty worries. He had lost his vision of great things, of the whole picture, and he would probably have continued along the same path until the end of his life, if nothing had happened.

  Maybe the fire was his punishment for that. I don’t want your carpet, if you don’t tie your heart’s blood and your love for me into it, the Emperor seemed to be telling him.

  Oddly enough, these trains of thought comforted him. Everything seemed to have an explanation: at least there was that. He had sinned and, as a result, had deserved to be punished. The verdict was not up to him; whatever had happened was just, and it was his duty to accept it without complaint.

  Market Square was almost empty of people. A few women sat at the edge of the market offering some vegetables they had spread out on tattered cloths, and since hardly anyone wanted to buy, they killed time with chatter. Borlon approached one of them and could tell by her eyes that she didn’t recognize him. He inquired about the holy wanderer.

  “The preacher? He already moved on early this morning,” she responded.

  “His words were so moving,” interrupted one of the others, a fat woman missing her lower incisors. “Too bad he was here only one day.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” opined a third in an unpleasant, yapping voice. “I mean, usually you can’t get rid of these holy men. I think it’s odd that he’s already taken off.”

  “That’s true,” nodded the fat woman with the gaps in her teeth. “I heard his sermon yesterday morning, and he listed all the subjects he wanted to preach to us about.”

  “You want to buy something, sir?” the first woman asked Borlon. “I have wonderfully fresh karaqui … or the bandroot here, great price—”

  “No.” Borlon shook his head. “Thanks. I just wanted to ask … about the preacher.…”

  Everything was black and gloomy. The court of judgment was gathering around him, and there was no chance that he could sneak off and evade his culpability.

  The dark windows of the houses around Market Square stared back at him like curious black eyes. He stood motionless for a while and sought out the feeling within himself, the feeling that he was falling without ever reaching the bottom, condemned to tumble eternally without striking solid earth and finding relief. Abruptly, he turned around and headed back.

  In front of the house, he encountered Karvita’s father, a little old man who was a weaver by trade and who, like all weavers, felt pious reverence for carpet makers. He had always approached his son-in-law in an almost subservient manner—but now Borlon also discovered the seeds of contempt in his eyes.

  They merely nodded to one another. Borlon rushed into the house and up the stairs into Narana’s room. She was sitting on a chair at the window, quiet and shy as always and looking much smaller and younger than she actually was. She was sewing. He took the needle and thread from her hand and lifted her onto the bed; without a word, he threw up her skirt, unbuttoned his trousers, and immediately forced himself into her with hard, quick thrusts of total despair. Then he fell down next to her on the bed and, gasping, he stared at the ceiling.

  She left her skirt turned up, but pressed both hands between her legs. “You hurt me,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve never hurt me before, Borlon.” She spoke almost in amazement. “I didn’t even know that it could hurt.”

  He said nothing; he just lay there and stared into space. After a while, she turned toward him, studied him with her large pensive eyes and began to stroke him gently. He knew that he didn’t deserve it, but he let her continue while he desperately tried to understand what was going wrong.

  “You are so terribly worried, Borlon,” she whispered. “And all the while … think about it … we had enough money for the rest of our lives before the house burned down. Now we don’t have a house anymore, but we still have the money. So what can happen to us?”

  He closed his eyes and felt his heart pounding. It just wasn’t that simple. “The carpet,” he muttered. “I don’t have a carpet anymore.”

  She didn’t stop caressing his face with her fingers. “Borlon … Maybe you’ll never have a son—so why do you need a carpet? If you die without an heir, the proceeds from the carpet will revert to the guild anyway … the guild that doesn’t want to help you now.”

  “But the Emperor—”

  “The Emperor gets so many hair carpets; he surely doesn’t even know where to put them all. It can’t be important whether there’s one more or one less.”

  He sat straight up. “You don’t understand. If I die without completing a carpet, then my life will have had no purpose.”

  He stood up, straightened his clothing, and went to the door. Narana was still lying on the bed with one hand between her naked legs, and in her eyes was the look of a wounded animal. He wanted to say something, he wanted to say how sorry he was and that he was ashamed, he wanted to talk about the pain tearing at his heart, but he couldn’t find the words. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he left.

  If he only knew what was going wrong. There seemed to be no escape from all the guilt that was piling up higher and higher around him. With each heavy, awkward step he took down the stairs, he expected to fall down and to shatter like a clay pot.

  Nobody was in the kitchen. The wine bottle was there and next to it, the cups from yesterday evening. He poured the wine without bothering to wash out the cup and began to drink.

  * * *

  “I spoke with Benegoran,” Karvita reported. “He’ll lend you the money for a new house and a new knotting frame.”

  Borlon, who had sat the entire afternoon silently at the kitchen window watching the slow progress of the shadows until the sun had finally set, didn’t move. The words barely penetrated his mind; they reached his consciousness as distant sounds devoid of meaning.

  “However, he did set one condition.”

  Finally, he managed to turn his head and look at her. “A condition?”

  “In return, he wants Narana,” Karvita said.

  He felt the bubbling beginnings of a laugh rising from his belly and stopping somewhere between his heart and his throat. “No.”

  He watched as she curled her hands into fists and struck them against her hips in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know why I do all this,” she exploded. “I’ve been on my feet all day long, I humiliate myself, I plead and beg and swallow the dust of the desert, and you dismiss it all with one word.”

  She reached for the wine bottle and looked inside. “And all you contribute to the effort is to get drunk and feel sorry for yourself. Do you think that’s a solution?”

  He understood dully that she wanted an answer—the way she was standing there and looking at him.

  “No,” he said.

  “And what sort of solution do you have in mind?”

  He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

  “Borlon, I know that Narana is important to you, probably more important than I am,” she said bitterly. “But I implore you, at least think about it. At least, it’s a possibility. And we don’t have many possibilities.”

  There were so many things he had always wanted to tell her and so many things he wanted to tell her now that he didn’t know where he should begin. Above all, he needed to make her understand that he loved her, that she had an unassailable pla
ce in his heart, and that it pained him that she didn’t want to fill that place. And … that none of these things had anything to do with Narana.…

  “You could at least speak with Benegoran yourself,” she insisted.

  That was useless. He knew that it was useless. Everything was useless.

  “Then what will you do?” she asked.

  He didn’t know that either. He was silent. Silent, awaiting the sentence of the court. Silent, waiting for the towers of guilt all around him to collapse and bury him beneath them.

  “Borlon? What’s the matter?”

  The words had again forfeited their meaning and become part of the background noise of the night. He turned back to the window and looked out at the dark sky. The small moon was there—it could be seen moving quickly across the firmament toward the big moon, which moved slowly toward it in the opposite direction. Tonight the small moon would pass directly across the bright face of the big moon.

  He heard someone speaking, but he understood nothing, and understanding wasn’t even important. Only the moons were important. He had to stay here and wait until they met one another and touched. A bang, like the slamming of a door, but that, too, was meaningless.

  He sat motionless while the small moon moved. When he sat this way and waited, he could see how the stars in the lesser moon’s path seemed to move closer and closer to the little oval ring of light until they were finally overwhelmed by its brightness and disappeared. And so the two moons drifted, star by star, toward one another across the vault of the heavens until they finally melted together into a single disk of light … while he sat without moving and watched.

  He was tired. His eyes burned. When he finally turned away from the window, the oil lamp had already gone out. No more flame, no fire. That was good. He no longer knew exactly why, but it was good.

  He could go now with his mind at rest. It was time. Out to the entryway to take his cloak from the hook, not because he would need it, but to tidy up, to leave no unwelcome traces behind. He mustn’t trouble anyone with the odds and ends of a failed life. He didn’t need that guilt, too.

  Then open the door and close it slowly behind you. And just let your legs carry you along … along the street to the city gate and beyond, away from the city, farther and farther, and farther still, until your path meets the two moons and you melt away into their light.…

  V

  The Peddler Woman

  ON HER TRAVELS between the isolated country houses of the carpet makers, she often saw only women for weeks at a time. The carpet makers’ headwives, subwives, and daughters could hardly wait to invite her into their kitchens. However, it wasn’t for her textiles and household implements that they waited so impatiently, but for the news she could tell about other families and about goings-on in the city. Then she sat there for hours with the women, and it was often difficult and required skillful manipulation of the conversation to bring up the subject of her wares. New recipes. That was her favorite trick. Ubhika knew an extensive number of unusual recipes—both for food and also for beauty aids of all kinds—that all had one thing in common: for each of them, either a special utensil was needed or a special spice, or some other special thing, which had to be purchased from her.

  If she was lucky, she also got a bed for the night, since, with all the chatter and gossip, it often grew late. Today she had not been lucky. And what irked her most especially was that she should have seen it from the beginning. Hospitality had never counted for much in the house of Ostvan—not even in the days of the old Ostvan, and especially not in the house of his son. Shortly before dusk, the young carpet maker had walked sourly into the kitchen and said it was high time for the peddler woman to move on. And he spoke in a tone of voice that made everyone start with fear and wonder what sin they had committed. For a moment, Ubhika had felt like an adulteress instead of an itinerant peddler.

  One of the women, at least, had helped her to pack up the yuk mules with her baskets and leather bags and bundles. Without that, she would not have made it down the steep descent from Ostvan’s house in daylight. Dirilja was the woman’s name. She was a small, quiet woman, considerably past her marriageable years, who never said much during the discussions; she always just stared sadly into the distance. Ubhika would have liked to know why. But that’s the way it was with the womenfolk of the carpet makers: they appeared at some point and were simply there, and most of them told little about their past. Dirilja was the last wife old Ostvan took, shortly before his death. Which was odd, because his carpet must already have been finished by then, and Dirilja’s hair was dry and brittle and thus not of the appropriate quality for a hair carpet. Ubhika trusted her judgment about that, because her own hair had been like that, even in the days when the silver-gray of age had not begun to show. This Dirilja, what could she have been up to with old Ostvan? A puzzling story.

  The sun sank quickly toward the horizon, casting long, bothersome shadows between the hills and bare rocks, and it became noticeably cool. When Ubhika felt the wind nipping up under her skirt, she was peeved for allowing herself to be delayed so long. If she had set off earlier, she could have reached Borlon’s house, where she was always allowed to stay the night.

  But now, once again, there was no choice but her tent. Ubhika kept an eye out for a protected spot, a small cave or an overhang, and finally she found a hollow in the lee of a rock toward which she led her animals. She tethered them to stakes, which she painstakingly hammered into the ground. She removed the loads from the two pack yuks and blindfolded all three animals—the surest way to avoid having to search far and wide in case some noise spooked them in the night. Then she set up her small tent, padded it with a couple of layers of her cheaper fabric, and crawled in.

  And once again, she lay there in the night, listened to the cracking of stones and the rustling of insect feet, and sensed that she was all alone in the middle of the wilderness, protected by nothing but a tiny tent and two packs on either side of her filled with foodstuffs, fabric, and utensils. And she thought, as always, that she would never get used to it. That it really should have been different. And, as always before going to sleep, she rubbed her hands over her body, as though to reassure herself that it was still there. She stroked her breasts, which were still firm despite her age and felt good to the touch; she ran her hands over her hips and regretted that no man’s hands had ever touched them.

  When she was of marriageable age, she didn’t get a husband, and with her brittle hair she couldn’t hope to become a carpet maker’s sub-wife. So she was left only with the lonely business of an itinerant peddler woman. Occasionally, she had considered responding to the coarse suggestions of a craftsman or a herdsman, but in the meantime, even those advances had stopped.

  As always, she eventually fell asleep and woke up in the early chill of the morning. When she crawled shivering out of her tent with a length of fabric wrapped around her body, the sun was just rising from the silvery morning twilight. And the vast view into the solitude all around made her feel like an insect, tiny and unimportant.

  She could never bring herself to eat where she had spent the night. She untied her yuks, loaded them, removed their blindfolds, and was in a hurry to move on. Along the way, she chewed on dried baraq meat from her supplies or ate fruit if she had any.

  Borlon’s house. It was a good place to arrive in the morning, as well. Narana, Borlon’s young subwife, would make tea for her; she always did. And then she would buy some new fabric from her, because she enjoyed needlework and did a lot of sewing.

  But when Ubhika caught sight of Borlon’s house, still a long way off, she immediately thought something was odd—much darker than she remembered it, almost black, as though charred. And when she got closer, she saw that, in fact, all that remained of Borlon’s house were those bits even a mighty fire could not destroy.

  Driven by morbid curiosity, she rode on toward it until she finally stood before charred wall fragments, smelling of fire and destruction, with the ashes
of the wooden beams and shingles piled between them. She felt like a scavenger arriving late at the scene of a dramatic event, when the only thing to do is to make use of whatever is left. Maybe a few coins still lay somewhere in the ashes.

  Ubhika recognized the foundation walls of the kitchen where she had sat many a time with the women, and next to it, the small chamber where she had often slept. She had never been farther into the house than that. Only now, as she shuffled through the sooty ruins, stirring up ashes and the smell of smoke with her feet, did she see what other rooms there were in a carpet maker’s house. Which one might have been the carpet-knotting room? She would really have liked to know.

  She found sooty footprints that led away from the rubble and disappeared somewhere on the rocky ground—the carpet maker’s family appeared to have survived the fire.

  But she found no money and nothing else worth taking. Finally she decided to move on. Still, she now had some interesting news to report. With a little elaboration, it could help her make some good sales and maybe even get her a meal here and there.

  And then a man was suddenly standing there at the side of the trail. Just like that, in the middle of the wilderness.

  Suspicious, Ubhika maneuvered her riding yuk closer, keeping one hand on the grip of the cudgel she carried on her saddle. But he gave her a friendly wave and smiled. And he was young.…

  She caught herself involuntarily straightening her hair as she slowly rode closer. After all, I’m still young, too—the thought startled her—it’s just my body that’s betrayed me and gotten older. Nevertheless, for fear of appearing ridiculous, she lowered her hand.

  “My greetings to you,” said the man. It sounded odd. The way he spoke had something harsh about it, something foreign.

  And he was oddly dressed, as well. He wore an outfit made of a fabric Ubhika had never seen before and which covered him completely from his neck to his feet. He wore a glittering piece of jewelry on his chest, and a belt around his waist to which all sorts of pouches and small, dark containers were attached.