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

has no sons. We have convinced him that English will help him when it comes to trade negotiations.’
    ‘I’m surprised.’ Apart from her eyes, Khadega’s face was entirely covered. It seemed excessive in the privacy of the courtyard. A lizard flickered past my foot.
    ‘I spoke to him last night. He could not resist in the end.’
    She smiled at Khadega, and then glanced at me. ‘You will be her teacher.’
    ‘Me? But Millicent, I have the kitchen and the food to oversee, as well as Ai-Lien, of course.’
    She looked over at me. ‘I have noticed that you find time for your bicycle rides and your little writing sessions in the pavilion. I am sure there must be an opportunity to teach Khadega some vocabulary.’
    ‘Writing in the pavilion?’ Lizzie said, putting down the teapot and looking at me.
    ‘Yes, through the hot part of the day I am . . . I do make notes.’
    ‘But you should sleep,’ Lizzie said.
    ‘I can’t in this heat.’
    The writing: it calms me, makes me feel as though I am exploring. Actual movement, in the heat, in the day, is too difficult. I must somehow – I hesitate to use the word pretend . . . I must believe I am keeping these notes for some reason.
    ‘Yes,’ I said then to Lizzie, apropos of nothing. She was looking at me strangely. Lizzie’s blue clear eyes look like chips of glass standing out from the eyeball, like marbles at the bottom of a glass of water.
    ‘Khadega will be a conscientious learner,’ Millicent said.
    My sister twisted her hair into a rope on her shoulder and moved away, reversing backwards, a light-touch eradication of herself. She did not look at Khadega.
    June 24th
    My student and I have not successfully achieved a rapport. Our problem is mostly one of communication. I rummaged in my trunk and found the book I had optimistically acquired in London before departing, A Sketch of the Turki Language by Shaw, but as soon as I sit down to read it the usual feeling returns: this great battle with language, the unending task of learning the name of everything: bowl, spoon, wheel, tree, road and river. I immediately want the specifics, I want to know the name for each curled, dried root on the market stand, each strain of tea, each type of animal foot hung up to dry. I want to rush past the basic words, house, door, horse, and find the word given to the moment before the sandstorm arrives. In my haste, though, I become very quickly muddled. Whereas Lizzie wanders the world collecting words like stones and linking them together quickly into conversational chains, for me it is like trying to hold sand in my palm and my inadequacies infuriate me. What did Burton say? It took him twenty-two days to master a language? Without language, infiltration into another culture remains impossible.
    Khadega speaks – as well as Turki – colloquial Russian, some Manchu and some Chinese, but I struggle with all of these. With the Turki instruction book in hand, I tried again, recalling Millicent’s words: ‘Turki, stretching its complex structures all the way to the Turkish of Constantinople, though less changed, perhaps, purer, by virtue of existing in one of the most isolated areas of the world.’
    ‘Turki is like a great, ancient tree’, Millicent taught us in the acclimatisation centre, ‘with a thousand branches growing from one trunk. Imagine this and it will help.’
    My tree spreads its roots along the floor; it grows up, poking through my feet, extending through my spine, shooting upward. I try to conjure life into new words and grow them. I draw shapes, Turki is an alphabetical language in the Arabic script, and it is pleasant to draw the curves, but then the grammar comes and drowns me. Whatever is hearsay-present or future-potential? Vocabulary rests briefly in my mouth. It is as if each word has been polished down, smoothed to an almost perfect sphere, and then dropped, lost. Everything has a name: the carter, the dusk, the birdsong. But the names won’t stay in my