Free A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson Page B

kitchen and baby, and the momentous task of procuring meals, three times a day. But – with the kitchen comes a cook.
    The cook’s name is Lolo and he is a Tibetan. He is supremely exotic looking with long, white eyebrows hanging in drapes and a matching white beard and numerous liver-spots on his face and hands. His skin is a leather. He smiles at Ai-Lien whenever he sees her, and he didn’t whatsoever mind posing for Lizzie to take photographs of him.
    Our Home. I repeat it in my mind. Two men stayed into the night last night, Mr Mah, the merchant whose eyes have the look of a person who has relinquished something precious a long time ago, and the priest who brought us a welcome gift, a mimeograph machine from Eastern China. It comes in a hinged wooden box, complete with printing frame and screen, inking plate, roller and a tube of waxed paper. Together, they and Millicent spent the night in the divan room, the three of them, drinking wine and smoking. Lolo made tea in a metal samovar and dough strips which he prepared, sieving the flour, turning out the butter, measuring the salt, and Lizzie and I served them the tea, which they drank between wine courses, but we were not invited to join them.
    Mr Mah seems to have taken it upon himself to be the prominent person for our arrangements. He is a mysterious person, neither Moslem, Tundra, Chinese, Russian nor Tibetan, but some form of hybrid. Unlike most native merchants, it appears that he is unconcerned with the scandal of dealing with us twei-tsu , foreign devils. He watched as Millicent and the priest searched the Bible for appropriate sections to translate into Perso-Turkic.
    I continued to supply them with drinks and on my last visit to the room noticed that the priest had laid out his calligraphy sticks in a row next to him, and I saw on some paper examples of his beautiful Arabic script.
    ‘Eva,’ Millicent said, as I moved to leave, ‘we’ve decided on a section to translate.’
    Mr Mah was smoking a long-handled black pipe, he did not look up at me, but puffed and stared into the distance as Millicent handed me a piece of paper. In her crabbish writing she had transcribed Ezekiel 37:
     
    The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest . . . So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.
     
    ‘What do you think?’ Millicent said, letting the smoke out of her mouth.
    ‘What is it for?’
    ‘To distribute about the bazaar and to announce our presence.’
    The priest smiled at me. ‘I will translate it into Arabic and Turki,’ he said.
    I read it and wanted to say this: that I have reservations regarding the wisdom of talking of bones rising up in the desert and dancing in a place where bones should be left alone. Millicent herself taught us that this is a place where you are expected to rinse your hands three times from water poured by a host before entering a home; where you are asked to stand, hands together, palms upward, as if holding the Quran, then pass them over your face in a religious gesture of blessings; where the salaams are serious and the older men stroke beards as a sign of courtesy. It seems dancing bones would not be welcome, but I said nothing and returned to Lolo.
    Millicent demands English meals but does not explain what this means. Lolo knows nothing about English cooking, but then neither do I, so we have gone about our kitchen together labelling and naming things in a mish-mash of languages, English, Russian, Turki and a little Hindustani. The bottles we managed to get from the bazaar for Ai-Lien’s milk are called the