Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

She asked me if I was too tired to eat with them. I felt frail and bewildered but I craved human contact. Vera changed her clothes and put on make-up for our dinner. We ate fatty shashlik and raw onion in a private booth in the outside courtyard of a chaikana . Nicholas drank several beers and ignored us.

Halfway through the meal, Vera’s patience snapped. ‘You have to engage with him,’ she said to Nicholas. ‘For both your sakes.’

He turned slowly and theatrically to meet her angry stare. ‘If you can’t persuade me ,’ he said, ‘how are you going to persuade anyone else?’

A waitress in plastic sandals entered our booth to put a basket of freshly cooked flatbread on the table. As she left, Vera said to Nicholas: ‘I told you what to expect.’

Nicholas pulled off a tiny piece of bread and examined it without answering her. I felt his bitterness and disappointment. He was punishing her with his contemptuous silence. I think that I grasped even at the time not only the substance of their disagreement but Vera’s profound fear of being disbelieved. She was compelled to try to appease him. ‘He may be months away from full rehabilitation,’ she said.

‘And what if this is as good as it gets?’

She gave him a volcanic stare which he met without speaking. I felt wounded by his contempt. I wanted to tell them that I understood everything; that I grasped, however dimly, the mystery of our overlapping consciousnesses.

I opened my mouth to speak and they both looked at me with a sudden surge of interest. I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head with the effort. ‘Book,’ I said. ‘Book.’

Nicholas shook his head and looked away disgustedly. Vera patted my hand.

*

The next morning, we set off before dawn and drove for several hours. The flat land had an oceanic scale; shoals of tiny livestock moved slowly in the distance. When the wind blew over the grass, the blades rippled like the surface of an enormous green lake. Gradually, sand and scrub came to dominate the landscape. I saw from a road sign that we were approaching the town of Turkestan. Just beyond it lay our destination: the mausoleum of Akhmet Yassawi, an eleventh-century poet and Sufi mystic.

The building, erected on the command of Timur the Great — Marlowe’s Tamburlaine — is one of the treasures of Central Asia. Its huge central dome rises forty metres from the desert floor.

Kairat pulled up in an empty car park on the outskirts of the complex. The structure was dun-coloured in the blazing sunlight.

‘This is an odd moment to go sightseeing,’ Nicholas said. I looked at him in surprise: the same thought expressed in an identical form had crossed my mind only fractionally before he uttered it. It was my first instance of a phenomenon that soon grew too commonplace to be noteworthy: the weird echoes between our incestuous subjectivities.

Kairat said he would wait for us, but Vera saw him off with a hefty tip and told him we would make our own way back later. When he had left, she explained that she wanted to change vehicles. The chances of our being recognised increased every day we spent with Kairat; she had therefore asked him to take us to the Yassawi mausoleum on the pretext of sightseeing, but in fact so that we could engage the services of a new driver.

‘Since we’re here anyway, does anyone object if I have a look round?’ said Nicholas. I found the constant note of irony in his voice irritating in the extreme. I remembered Leonora’s frequent bouts of hostility towards me, which at the time had seemed so inexplicable. Now I wondered how she had put up with him so long.

We watched his rangy figure stalking through the bright sunshine towards the tomb.

Vera took my arm. ‘You need to be patient with him,’ she said to me. ‘This is very difficult for him too.’ She spoke to me directly and with warmth. There was none of that falsity or awkwardness that I felt when addressing Jack for the first time.

The two of us made our way to the rear of the structure where a smaller, more exquisite dome tiled in a ravishing shade of aquamarine stands over Yassawi’s tomb. I found the colours almost stupefyingly bright; the intricate swastikas in the walls drew my eyes into the brickwork. I recognised it from Soviet-era guidebooks, where it is pictured surrounded by Ladas and Eurasian men sitting on their haunches selling watermelons.

‘The selfish gene aspires to immortality,’ Vera said softly. ‘This is Timur’s — and Yassawi’s. But we live in more literal-minded times, Nikolasha.’

In the whitewashed interior of the mausoleum, right under the main dome, a newly married couple, the groom in a black suit and the bride in white veil and a meringue of a wedding dress, knelt in prayer with their ushers and bridesmaids. We found Yassawi’s tomb — green marble with a green velvet covering — towards the back of the complex behind a wooden screen. A Kazakh man in a white baseball cap was kneeling in front of it and praying in a soft monotone.

Outside, she showed me the underground cavern where she said Yassawi had spent the final years of his life in solitary prayer. We descended the steps to his tiny cell. It was barely large enough to contain a single body. She touched the rough plaster with her tiny hands. ‘“Though I am bounded in a nutshell, I count myself the King of infinite space,”’ she said. There was an eerie buzz as her voice bounced from wall to wall. I suddenly felt dizzy from the closeness of the tiny chamber, the heat, the physical strain of moving my carcass. I lurched forward as my legs began to buckle under me. She redirected my weight against the wall and then helped me back up the stairs. We rested on the grass in the shade of an apricot tree. A guide called Bulat approached us to ask if I was all right, then asked if he could practise his English. Vera told him I was from the Baltics and diverted him into a discussion about Yassawi’s works. They weren’t available in translation, Bulat said in heavily accented Russian, but it didn’t matter. ‘God has put a computer chip in your heart,’ he said, ‘with all knowledge, all languages. If you pray for forty days in that underground mosque, you will know everything.’

Vera helped me to my feet and we walked slowly together towards the car park.

Without the daily practice, my tongue was losing its hard-won facility. I could only make a gargling sound in my throat. Vera stopped and looked at me. ‘What is it?’

My eyes pricked with tears of misery and frustration.

‘Man,’ I said.

‘Which man?’ She looked around. ‘You mean Bulat?’

I shook my head. ‘Man … man …’ I clenched my fists with the effort of articulation.

She shushed me gently, took one of my hands and stroked the fist into a palm.

‘Man … Man … Mankurt,’ I said finally.

She raised my hand to her lips and kissed it.

This stranger’s salty tears plopped into the orange dust. I wanted to lay my clumsy, aching head in her tiny lap. Her hand touched my cheek like a feather. Vera spoke softly to me in Russian, as though only her own language could carry the freight of consolation she intended. ‘ Ty ne mankurt, Nikolasha. U tebya est’ sobstvennaya dusha. ’

You are not a mankurt, Nicky. You have a soul of your own.

She shushed me gently until I stopped sobbing.

Thinking about Vera Telauga now, I experience a warmth and affection that is only comparable to what I feel about my own mother. Who knows what percentage of me is in fact not Nicholas Slopen, but Vera herself? After all, the hand of a master betrays itself in every brushstroke of their creation.

On the morning of our flight out of Almaty, Vera checked in alone, while we loitered at a coffee shop where a neurasthenic Chekhovian ofitsiantka with hollow eyes served espresso and dried-out sandwiches. I had my back to the departures hall, but I could deduce the state of proceedings from the play of emotions on Nicholas’s face. His increasingly strained expression suggested that things weren’t going according to plan.