Classes, a new job cleaning Idelba's lab, walking the docks and the jetty, dreaming of a new synthesis, an Islam that included what was important in the Buddhism so prevalent in the labs: Budur's days passed in a blur of thought, everything she saw and did fed into it. Most of the women in Idelba's lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks. Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it – the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato's tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.
Budur looked into classes in this new field, archaeology. History that was more than talk, that could be a science… The people working on it were an odd mix, geologists, architects, physicists, Quranic scholars, historians, all studying not just the stories, but the things left behind.
Meanwhile the talk went on, in Kirana's class and in the cafes afterwards. One night in a cafe Budur asked Kirana what she thought of archaeology, and she replied, 'Yes, archaeology is very important, sure. Although the standing stones are rather mute when it comes to telling us things. But they're discovering caves in the south, filled with wall paintings that appear to be very old, older even than the Greeks. I can give you the names of the people at Avignon involved with that.'
' Thanks.'
Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, 'What's interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it – for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them I mean, in a weave with them.'
'In the harem it's obvious,' Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine 'practice sessions' of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana's leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: 'It's like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women's history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.'
'Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modelling various woman to woman behaviours. Demeter, Persephone… they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven't heard of her? I'll give you the references.'