The Journeyer

herds, a procedure which takes some daring, given the immense size and unpredictable irritability of those animals. That milk, of which the Bho had so much that they gave it freely to others, was delicious, and the butter which the Bho made from it would have been a praiseworthy delicacy if only it had not always had long yak hairs embedded in it. The yak gives other useful products: its coarse hair can be woven into tents so sturdy that they will stand against mountain gales, and its much finer tail hairs make excellent fly whisks.

Among the smaller animals at Buzai Gumbad, I saw many of the red-legged partridges I had in other places seen wild, these having their wings clipped so they could not fly. Since the camp children were forever playing hide-and-seek with the bird, I took them to be kept for either pets or pest catchers—every tent and building being infested with insect vermin. But I soon learned that the partridges had another and peculiar utility for the Kalash and Hunzukut women.

They would chop the red legs off those birds, keep the flesh for the pot, and burn the legs to a fine ash, which came out of the fire as a purple powder. That powder they used, as other Eastern women use al-kohl, as a cosmetic for ringing and enhancing their eyes. The Kalash women also painted their faces all over with a cream made from the yellow seeds of flowers called bechu, and I can attest that a woman with a face entirely bright yellow, except for the great, purple-masked eyes, is a sight to see. No doubt the women deemed that it made them sexually attractive, because their other favorite ornamentation was a cap or hood and a cape made of innumerable little shells called kauri, and a kauri shell is easily seen as a perfect human female sex organ in miniature.

Speaking of which, I was pleased to hear that Buzai Gumbad offered a sexual outlet other than drunken rape, Sodomy and hideously punishable adultery. It was Nostril who nosed it out, when we had been in the community only a day or two, and again he sidled up to me as he had done in Balkh, pretending disgust at the discovery:

“A foul Jew this time, Master Marco. He has taken the small karwansarai building farthest from the lake. In front, it pretends to be a grinding shop for the sharpening of knives and swords and tools. But in the rear he keeps a variety of females of varied race and color. As a good Muslim, I should denounce this carrion bird perched on the Roof of the World, but I will not unless you bid me to, after you have cast a Christian eye upon the establishment.”

I told him I would, and I did, a few days later, after we were unpacked and well settled in residence. In the shop at the front of the building, a man sat hunched, holding a scythe blade to a grinding wheel that he was turning with a foot treadle. Except that he wore a skullcap, he would have resembled a khers bear, for he was very hairy of face, and those locks and whiskers seemed to merge into the great furry coat he wore. I took note that the coat was of costly karakul, an elegant garment for the mere knife grinder he pretended to be. I waited for a pause in the gritty whir of the spinning stone wheel and the rain of sparks it was spraying all about.

Then I said, as Nostril had instructed, “I have a special tool I wish pointed and greased.”

The man raised his head, and I blinked. His hair and eyebrows and beard were like a curly red fungus going gray, and his eyes were like blackberries, and his nose like a shimshir blade.

“One dirham,” he said, “or twenty shahis or a hundred kauri shells. Strangers coming for the first time pay in advance.”

“I am no stranger,” I said warmly. “Do you not know me?”

Less than warmly, he said, “I know no one. That is how I stay in business in a place rife with contradictory laws.”

“But I am Marco!”

“Here, you drop your name when you drop your lower garment. If I am questioned by some meddling mufti, I can say truthfully that I know no names except my own, which is Shimon.”

“The Tzaddik Shimon?” I asked impudently. “One of the Lamed-vav? Or all thirty-six of them?”

He looked either alarmed or suspicious. “You speak the Ivrit? You are no Jew! What do you know of the Lamed-vav?”

“Only that I seem to keep meeting them.” I sighed. “A woman named Esther told me what they are called and what they do.”

He said disgustedly, “She could not have told you very accurately, if you can mistake a brothel keeper for a tzaddik.”

“She said the tzaddikim do good for men. So does a brothel, in my opinion. Now—are you not going to warn me, as always before?”

“I just did. The karwan muftis can often be meddlesome. Do not go braying your name around here.”

“I mean about the bloodthirstiness of beauty.”

He snorted. “If at your age, Nameless, you have not yet learned the danger of beauty, I will not attempt to instruct a fool. Now, one dirham or the equivalent, or begone.”

I dropped the coin into his callused palm and said, “I should like a woman who is not Muslim. Or at least not tabzir in her parts. Also, if possible, I should like one I can talk to for a change.”

“Take the Domm girl,” he grunted. “She never stops talking. Through that door, second room on the right.” He bent again to the scythe and the wheel, and the rasping noise and the flying sparks again filled the shop.

The brothel consisted, like the one in Balkh, of a number of rooms that would better have been called cubicles, opening off a corridor. The Domm girl’s cubicle was sketchily furnished: a dung-fired brazier for warmth and light—and smoke and smell—and, for the business transaction, the sort of bed called a hindora. This is a pallet that does not stand on legs, but is hung from a ceiling beam by four ropes, and adds some movement of its own to the movements that go on in it.

Never having heard the word Domm before, I did not know what sort of girl to expect. The one sitting and swinging idly on the hindora turned out to be something new in my experience, a girl so dark-brown she was almost black. Apart from that, though, she was sufficiently pleasing of face and figure. Her features were finely shaped, not Ethiope gross, and her body was small and slight but well formed. She spoke several languages, among them Farsi, so we were able to converse. Her name, she told me, was Chiv, which in her native Romm tongue meant Blade.

“Romm? The Jew said you were Domm.”

“Not the Domm!” she protested fiercely. “I am a Romni! I am a juvel, a young woman, of the Romm!”

Since I had no idea what either a Domm or a Romm was, I avoided argument by getting on with what I had come for. And I soon discovered that, whatever else the juvel Chiv might be—and she claimed to be of the Muslim religion—she was anyhow a complete juvel, not Muslimly deprived of any of her female parts. And those parts, once I got past the dark-brown entryway, were as prettily pink as those of any other female. Also, I could tell that Chiv was not feigning delight, but truly did enjoy the frolic as much as I did. When, afterward, I lazily inquired how she had come to this brothel occupation, she did not spin me any tale of having been brought low by woe, but said blithely:

“I would be doing zina anyway, what we call surata, because I like to. Getting paid for making surata is an extra bounty, but I like that, too. Would you refuse a wage, if it were offered, for every time you have the pleasure of making water?”

Well, I thought, Chiv might not be a girl of flowery sentiments, but she was honest. I even gave her a dirham that she would not have to share with the Jew. And, on my way out through the grinding shop, I was pleased to be able to make a snide remark to that person:

“You were mistaken, old Shimon. As I have found you to be on other occasions. The girl is of the Romm.”

“Romm, Domm, those wretched people call themselves anything they take a mind to,” he said uncaringly. But he went on, more amiably talkative than he had been when I came in. “They were originally the Dhoma, one of the lowest classes of all the Hindu jati of India. The Dhoma are among the untouchables, the loathed and detested. So they are continually seeping out of India to seek better situations elsewhere. God knows how, since they have no trades but dancing and whoring and tinkering and thieving. And dissimulation. When they call themselves Romm, it is to pretend descent from the Western Caesars. When they call themselves Atzigan, it is to pretend descent from the conqueror Alexander. When they call themselves Egypsies, it is to pretend descent from the ancient Pharaones.” He laughed. “They descended only from the swinish Dhoma, but they are descending on all the lands of the earth.”

I said, “You Jews have also dispersed widely about the world. Who are you to look down on others for doing the same?”