The Year of Rice and Salt

But very clearly this Kirana Fawwaz did not lack for courage. Now she stopped, and looked around at the half emptied room. 'Well,' she said cheerfully, acknowledging with a brief sardonic smile Budur's round eyed look, somewhat like that of the astonished fish in the boxes at the market. 'It seems we have driven out everyone who can be driven out. Left are the brave of heart to venture into this dark country, our past.'

The brave of heart or the weak of limb, Budur thought, glancing around. An old one armed soldier looked on imperturbably. The oneeyed man still sat next to her. Several women of various ages sat looking around uneasily, shifting in their seats. A few looked to Budur like women of the street, and one of these was grinning. Not what Budur had imagined when Idelba had talked about the Nsarene Madressa and Institutes of Higher Learning; the flotsam of Dar al Islam, in fact, the sorry survivors of the Nakba, the swans in winter; women who had lost their husbands, fiances, fathers, brothers, women who been orphaned and never since had the chance to meet a single man; and the warwounded themselves, including a blinded veteran like the ones Budur read to, led to the class by his sister, and then the one armed one, and the eyepatch next to her; also a Hodenosaunee mother and daughter, supremely confident and dignified, relaxed, interested, but with nothing at stake; also a longshoreman with a bad back, who seemed to be there mainly to get out of the rain for six hours a week. These were the ones that remained, lost souls of the city, looking for something indoors to occupy them, they were not sure what. But perhaps, for the moment at least, it would do to stay here and listen to Kirana Fawwaz's harsh lecture.

'What I want to do,' she said then, 'is to cut through all the stories, through the million stories we have constructed to defend ourselves from the reality of the Nakba, to reach explanation. To the meaning of what has happened, do you understand? This is an introduction to history, like Khaldun's, only spoken among us, in conversation. I will be suggesting various projects for further research as we go along. Now let's go and get a drink.'

She led them out into the dusk of the long northern evening, to a cafe behind the docks, where they found acquaintances from other parts of her life, already there eating late meals or smoking cigarettes or puffing on communal narghiles, and drinking little cups of thick coffee. They sat and talked through the long twilight, then far into the night, the docks out of the windows empty and calm, the lights from across the harbour squiggling on black water. The man with the eyepatch was a friend of Kirana's, it turned out; his name was Hasan, and he introduced himself to Budur and invited her to sit on the wall bench next to him and his group of acquaintances, including singers and actors from the institute, and the city's theatres. 'My fellow student here, I venture to say,' he said to the others, 'was quite taken by our professor's opening remarks.'

Budur nodded shyly and they cackled at her. She inquired about ordering a cup of coffee.

The talk around the dirty marble tabletops ranged widely, as was true in all such places, even back in Turi. The news in the newspapers. Interpretations of the war. Gossip about the city officials. Talk about plays and the cinema. Kirana sometimes rested and listened, sometimes talked on as if she were still in her class.

'Iran is the wine of history, they are always getting crushed.'

'Some vintages are better than others so for them all great civilizations must finally be crushed.'

'This is merely al Katalan again. It is too simple.'

'A world history has to simplify,' the old one armed soldier said. His name was Naser Shah, Budur learned; his accent when speaking Firanjic marked him as Iranian. 'The trick of it is to get at causes of things, to generate some sense of the overall story.'

'But if there isn't one?' Kirana asked.

'There is,' Naser said calmly. 'All people who have ever lived on Earth have acted together to make a global history. It is one story. Certain patterns are evident in it. The collisionary theories of Ibrahim al Lanzhou, for instance. No doubt they're just yin and yang again, but they make it seem pretty clear that much of what we call progress comes from the clash of two cultures.'

'Progress by collision, what kind of progress is this, did you see those two trams the other day after the one jumped its tracks?'

Kirana said, 'Al Lanzhou's core civilizations represent the three logically possible religions, with Islam believing in one god, India in many gods, and China in no gods.'