On a Tightrope
O N A T I G H T R O P E Elizabeth Burton
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Arriving in Kashgar felt like arriving in a city untouched by time. Of
course, there were modern buildings, but Old Town with its mud houses and
narrow streets still looked the same as it did centuries before. Donkey carts
mingled with taxi cabs in the streets. Rakhim took in a deep breath from the
window of his manager Dao’s car: the ever-present dust mingled with the
musky smell of livestock that was unique to the city soothed his senses. Home .
Dao navigated the streets carefully, taking Rakhim closer and closer to his
mother’s house in Old Town. Rakhim knew what would be awaiting him
there. His mother’s corpse, neighbors coming in and out to stay with it until
he arrived. Tomorrow would be the burial. The men of the neighborhood
would follow Rakhim through the streets to the cemetery, carrying the coffin
and wailing, while the women stayed behind and prepared food. Eventually,
both groups would feast together in a celebration of the deceased person’s life.
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Rakhim dreaded seeing his mother’s lifeless body. The last time he’d seen
her, she’d been angry with him, frustrated that the last of the local girls she
had picked out as being appropriate for him had gotten married. “I don’t want
a local girl,” he’d tried to explain, thinking of Alinur and how things had
ended.
“Then what do you want?” His mother’s voice had been thin, as if she were
speaking through clenched teeth.
Rakhim hadn’t had an answer for her.
As they came upon his mother’s house, Rakhim raised his hand in greeting
to the next door neighbor, a woman about his mother’s age, who appeared in
the door. “How your mother loved you!” she cried out to him.
He was sure her comments were true, that his mother had indeed loved
him. It was whether she was proud of him or not that gave him concern. It
had been hard on his mother after his father died, raising a boy on her own.
Even more so, a boy with dreams of spending his life in the air.
As a child, Rakhim had tried to teach himself tightrope walking by
stringing ropes between anything he could find, but it wasn’t until he caught the
attention of a coach, Muhammad, that his dreams took flight. Rakhim left
home when he was ten to train with the man, and he became more father than
teacher. He introduced Rakhim to the finer points of tightroping, but as he
grew older, Muhammad also introduced him to alcohol and women.
For Rakhim’s mother, touring itself was a life of disrepute. “Come home,”
she would telephone him to say. “Settle down and become a real Muslim.”
He never bothered to argue with her. To her requests for visits, he always
replied, “Soon,” but those trips became fewer and fewer after Dao became his
manager when he was nineteen. Rakhim left Kashgar largely without regret,
though he was leaving behind his mother and Alinur, the girl he loved. He
loved being one with the air more.
He thought back to two days ago, to just before he found out that his
mother had died.
Rakhim had been living on a tightrope for twenty-nine days. He ate, slept,
and walked on the wire for twenty-three hours, with one hour spread
throughout the day spent on the wire platform. After thirty days, he would
come down.
It was far from a record—that was sixty days, held by the best Uyghur
wire walker—but it felt like an eternity to him. Rakhim had been an attraction
for a local bazaar in Urumchi. It had been a grueling few weeks, with an
unexpected rain falling just enough to make his body damp and the wire slippery.
He’d lost his balance several times, only recovering because he kept a firm grip
on his balancing pole.
Just before Dao had climbed the thirty feet to the platform in the air to
give him the bad news, Rakhim had been struggling. The cramp in his calf was
so intense his whole body shook, making the wire between his toes bounce up
and down. The pole he held went to one side to compensate, and he bit his
lower lip to keep from crying out in discomfort. The crowd below him
probably wouldn’t notice a wobble on the wire, but a cry was something they
wouldn’t be able to ignore. He knew his body was getting tired, but he told it,
as he’d told it every hour for the past two days, to hold on just a little longer.
It would all be over soon.
His mother’s death caused it to be over sooner than he expected. Upon
hearing the news, he climbed down the ladder and collapsed into Dao’s arms.
“Look at his grief,” he heard the crowd murmur approvingly; they didn’t
realize that his legs were unused to the sensation of unmoving earth.
Rakhim felt the same disorientation when he entered his mother’s house.
He wished the women who filled the area around his mother’s coffin would
leave him alone with her, but he knew that wasn’t the tradition. Sitting with
the body was a celebration of her role in the community, not the family, and
it would have been another shame Rakhim brought on his mother if he asked
them to leave. Dao followed close behind his friend. The Uyghurs spo (...truncated)