The Year of Rice and Salt

After a time, however, it became annoying to try to have conversation with a man who only sang melodies – like trying to live with a bird. it echoed painfully that distance in her father, and the mute quality of her attempts to study the remote past, which were equally speechless. And as things in town got tighter, and each week added another zero to the numbers on the paper money, it got harder and harder to gather the large ensembles that Tristan's current compositions required. When the district panchayat that ran the old palace chose not to lend a concert room, or the musicians were occupied with their real jobs, in class or on the docks or in the shops selling hats and raincoats, then Tristan could only strum his oud, and finger his pencils and take endless notes, in an Indian musical notation that was said to be older than Sanskrit, although Tristan confessed to Budur that he had forgotten the system during the war, and now used one of his own devising that he had had to teach to his players. His melodies became more morose, she thought, tunes from a heavy heart, mourning the losses of the war, and the ones that had happened since, and were still occurring now, in the moment of listening itself. Budur understood them, and kept joining Tristan from time to time, watching the twitches under his moustache for clues as to what amused him when she or others spoke, watching his yellowed fingers as they felt their tunes forwards, or noted down one quicksilver lament after another. She heard a singer she thought he would like, and took him to hear her, and he did like her, he hummed on the way home, looking out of the tram window at the dark city streets, where people hurried from streetlight to streetlight over gleaming cobblestones, hunched under umbrellas or serapes.

It's like in the forest,' Tristan said with a lift of the moustache. 'Up in your mountains, you know, you see places where avalanches have bent all the trees down sideways, and then after the snow melts, the trees there all stay bent sideways together.' He gestured at the crowd waiting at a tram stop. 'That's what we're like now.'

EIGHTEEN

As the days and the weeks passed Budur continued to read voraciously, in the zawiyya, the institute, the parks, at the jetty's end, in the hospital for the blind soldiers. Meanwhile there were ten trillion piastre bills arriving with immigrants from the Middle West, and they were at ten billion drachmas themselves; recently a man had stuffed his house from floor to ceiling with money, and traded the whole establishment for a pig. At the zawiyya it was harder and harder to put together meals big enough to feed them all. They grew vegetables in crops on the roof, cursing the clouds, and lived on their goats' milk, their chickens' eggs, cucumbers in great vats of vinegar, pumpkins cooked in every conceivable fashion, and potato soup, watered to a thinness thinner than milk.

One day Idelba found the three spies going through the little cabinet above her bed, and she had them kicked out of the house as common thieves, calling in the neighbourhood police and bypassing the issue of spying, without however getting into the tricky issue of what else besides her ideas she had that would be worth stealing.

'They'll be in trouble,' Budur observed after the three girls were taken away. 'Even if they're plucked out of jail by their employers.'

'Yes,' Idelba agreed. 'I was going to leave them here, as you saw. But once caught, we had to act as if we didn't know who they were. And the truth is we can't afford to feed them. So they can go back to who sent them. Hopefully.' A grim expression; she didn't want to think about it – about what she might have condemned them to. That was their problem. She had hardened in just the two years since she had brought Budur to Nsara, or so it seemed to Budur. 'It's not just my work,' she explained, seeing Budur's expression. 'That remains latent. It's the problems we have right now. Things won't need blowing up if we all starve first. The war ended badly, that's all there is to it. I mean not just for us, as the defeated, but for everyone. Things are so out of balance, it could bring everything down. So everyone needs to pull together. And if some people don't, then I don't know…'

'All that time you spend working in the music of the Franks,' Budur said to Tristan, one evening in the cafe, 'do you ever think about what they were like?'

'Why yes,' he said, pleased at the question. 'All the time. I think they were just like us. They fought a lot. They had monasteries and madressas, and water powered machinery. Their ships were small, but they could sail into the wind. They might have taken control of the seas before anyone else.'

'Not a chance,' said Tahar. 'Compared to Chinese ships they were no more than dhows. Come now, Tristan, you know that.'

Tristan shrugged.