At that, she raised her head, and her face wore much the same expression it had worn in the dream or whatever that had been. She asked, “I was dark brown?”
“Why, er, yes.”
She shook her head. “Babies of the Romm do not get dark brown until later. They are the same color as white women’s babies when they are born.”
She stood up and carried her little package out of the room. When the door opened, I was surprised to see the brightness of daylight. Had I been here all through the night and into the next day? My companions would be much annoyed at my leaving them all the work to do. I began hurriedly putting on my clothes. When Chiv came back to the room, without her bundle, I said conversationally:
“For the life of me, I cannot believe that any sane woman would ever want to go through that horror. Would you, Chiv?”
“No.”
“Then I was right? You were only pretending before? You are really not with child?”
“I am not.” For a normally talkative person, she was being very brusque.
“Have no fear. I am not angry with you. I am glad, for your sake. Now I must get back to the karwansarai. I am going.”
“Yes. Go.”
She said it in a way that implied “do not come back.” I could not see any reason for her surliness. It was I who had done all the suffering, and I strongly suspected that she had contributed in some cunning way to the philter’s miscarriage of purpose.
“She is in a vile humor, as you said, Shimon,” I told the Jew, on my way out. “But I suppose I owe you more money, anyway, for all the time I spent.”
“Why, no,” he said. “You were not long. In conscience—here—I give you a dirham back. Here also is your squeeze knife. Shalom.”
So it was still the same day, then, and not really far into the afternoon, at that, and my travail had only seemed much, much longer. I got back to the inn to find my father and uncle and Nostril still collecting and packing our possessions, but having no immediate need of my assistance. I went down to the lakeside, where the washerwomen of Buzai Gumbad kept always a patch of water cleared of ice. The water was so blue-cold that it seemed to bite, so my bath was perfunctory—my hands and face, and then I briefly took off my upper garments to dash some few drops at my chest and armpits. That wetting was the first I had had all winter; I would probably have been revolted by my own smell, except that everyone else smelled the same or worse. At least it made me feel a trifle cleaner of the sweat that had dried on me in Chiv’s room. And, as the sweat got diluted, so did my worst recollections of my experience. Pain is like that; it is excruciating to endure, but easy to forget. I daresay that is the only reason why any woman, after having been agonized and riven by the extrusion of one child, can even contemplate chancing the ordeal of another.
On the eve of our departure from the Roof of the World, the Hakim Mimdad, whose own karwan train would also be leaving, but in a different direction, came to the karwansarai to say his goodbyes to us all, and to give Uncle Mafio a traveling supply of his medicine. Then, while my father and uncle looked rather agog, I told the Hakim how his philter had failed—or else had succeeded wildly far beyond his intent. I told him graphically what had happened, and I told it not at all enthusiastically, and not a little accusingly.
“The girl must have meddled,” he said. “I was afraid of that. But no experiment is a total failure if something can be learned from it. Did you learn anything?”
“Only that human life begins and ends in merda, or kut. No, one other thing: to be careful when I love in future. I will never condemn any woman I love to such a hideous fate as motherhood.”
“Well, there you are, then. You learned something. Perhaps you would like to try again? I have here another phial, another slight variant on the recipe. Take it along with you, and try it with some female who is not a Romni sorceress.”
My uncle grumbled ruefully, “There is a Dotòr Balanzòn for you. Gives me a stunting potion and, to level the scales, gives an enhancer to one too young and brisk to need it.”
I said, “I will take it, Mimdad, as a keepsake curiosity. The notion is appealing—to sample lovemaking in a multitude of shapes. But I have a long way to go before I exhaust all the possibilities of this body, and I will remain in it for now. Doubtless, when you have finally refined your philter to perfection, the word of it will be noised all about the world, and by then I may be jaded with my own possibilities, and I will seek you out and ask then to try your perfected potion. For now, I wish you success and salaam and farewell.”
I did not get to say even that much to Chiv, when that same evening I went to Shimon’s place.
“Earlier this afternoon,” he told me indifferently, “the Domm girl asked for her share of her income to date, and resigned from this establishment, and joined an Uzbek karwan train departing for Balkh. The Domm do things like that. When they are not being shiftless, they are being shifty. Ah, well. You still have the squeeze knife to remember her by.”
“Yes. And to remind me of her name. Chiv means blade.”
“Does it now. And she never stuck one into you.”
“I am not so sure of that.”
“There are still the other females. Will you have one, this last night?”
“I think not, Shimon. From the glances I have had of them, they are exceedingly unbeautiful.”
“By your reckoning as once expressed, then, they are nicely un-dangerous.”
“You know something? Old Mordecai never said so, but that may be a count against unbeautiful people, not in their favor. I think I will always prefer the beautiful, and take my chances. Now I thank you for your good offices, Tzaddik Shimon, and I bid you farewell.”
“Sakanà aleichem, nosèyah.”
“That sounded different from the usual peace-go-with-you.”
“I thought you would appreciate it.” He repeated the Ivrit words, then translated them into Farsi: “Danger go with you, journeyer.”
Although there was still plenty of snow about Buzai Gumbad, the whole of Lake Chaqmaqtin had gradually exchanged its cover of blue-white ice for a multicolored cover of waterfowl—numberless flocks of ducks and geese and swans that had flown in from the south, and continued to come. The noise of their contented honks and quacks was a continuous clamor, and they would make a rustling rumble like a windstorm in a forest whenever a thousand of them suddenly vaulted from the water all at once for a joyous flight around the lake. They provided a welcome addition to our diet, and their arrival had been the signal for the karwan trains to begin packing their gear, harnessing and herding their animals, forming up their wagons in line, and one after another plodding off for the horizon.
The first trains to leave had been those headed westward, to Balkh or farther, because the long decline of the Wakhan Corridor was the easiest route down from the Roof of the World, and the earliest to become negotiable in the spring. The journeyers bound for the north or east or south prudently waited a while longer, because to go in any of those directions meant first climbing the mountains surrounding this place on those three sides, and descending through their high passes only to climb the next mountains beyond, and the ones beyond them. To the north, east and south of here, we were informed, the high passes never completely shed their snow and ice even in midsummer.
So we Polos, having to go north and having no experience of travel in such terrain and conditions, had waited for the prudent others. We might really have hesitated longer than we needed to, but one day there had come to us a delegation of the little dark Tamil Chola men at whom I had once laughed and to whom I had later apologized. They told us, speaking the Trade Farsi very badly, that they had decided not to carry their cargo of sea salt to Balkh, for they had heard reliable report that it would fetch a much better price in a place called Murghab, which was a trading town in Tazhikistan, on the east—west route between Kithai and Samarkand.