Nekropolis (11 page)

There is always some resistance at first, the customer must push past the tight ring of sphincter. That is where most of the feeling is for me. Once he is inside me, I feel him as a fullness, and deeper inside me, a pleasant excitement, if I’m not too tired to care.

This one sighs, “Ahhh,” as he pushes inside me.

I think of Hariba and of how I’d like to sleep while he is pumping. As long as he doesn’t come out of me unexpectedly, I don’t have to think much to stay relaxed.

It’s hard, working all night and tending to Hariba during the day. I’d like to sleep for a whole night. I’d like the smooth suppleness of skin, warm and living, lying next to me as I fell asleep. Maybe if I don’t have many customers, I can sleep tonight.

That’s what I think while he jerks and moans.

After midnight, we have soup and bread. The girl has a bad tooth and she soaks her bread until the crust is soft before eating it. I go downstairs and find Karim.

“Put a robe on if you come downstairs,” he says absently.

“Yes, Karim-salah,” I say. “The girl has a toothache.”

“Wassyla?” he says.

I don’t know her name. “The
harni,
“ I say.

“Holy One,” Karim mutters. “Now a dentist bill. Can she still work?”

“I believe so,” I say.

He gets up and I follow him down the hall, watching his heels lick at the hem of his robe as he walks. He comes upstairs. A rare enough thing. There is a flutter among the human girls. Ebuyeth sits with her hands in her lap. The girl and the boy gaze up mutely.

“Your tooth hurts?” he asks.

“Yes, Karim-salah,” she says. I’ve rarely heard her voice. It’s sweet and high.

“Open your mouth,” he says, and takes her face in his hand to tilt her head back. “Which one?”

“One the left side,” she says, “on the bottom.”

“Her cheek is swollen,” the boy says. I’ve heard his voice even less than the girl’s. It might almost be hers, dropped an octave but still sweet.

She winces slightly when Karim touches her cheek.

“All right,” Karim says, “enough for tonight. You go in back and go to sleep.”

“Karim-salah,” she says, “may I stay out here?”

He has already started to walk away and he turns around in a swirl of striped robe. He looks suspicious.

“I’ll work, if you want,” she says.

He frowns.

“She doesn’t want to be alone,” I say. “She’s a
harni,
Karim-salah.”

He looks at me, then at her, then at all of us, frowning. “All right,” he says finally, and turns on his heel and goes downstairs. The girl stays with us all night, but no one has a ribbon for her, and when we aren’t working, we stay touching her until finally, when the night is over, Tabi brings her an analgesic patch. There is the sharp smell of rubbing alcohol when she peels it open. I can still smell it over the cinnamon skin smell when we all curl up together to sleep for a few hours.

Hariba is ready for her hashish when I get home, and after I’ve gotten her to eat some sweet rice.

I think about ways to make things better, but I can’t think of anything. I wouldn’t give up being with the
harni,
and I can’t leave Hariba alone and sick. Hariba brought me here, and I won’t forget that, not even for the pleasure of
harni
company.

I watch her sleep on the bed. Her skin is dry. I’ll get some of Tabi’s oil and oil Hariba’s skin until it’s soft and supple and warm. I sleep and dream of men’s bodies and the things that I can do that excite them, like a puzzle of organs and openings. It isn’t a bad dream, just tiring.

* * *

“Akhmim?”

I’m walking near the Moussin of the White Falcon, looking for a shop that Mouse told me about where I can buy a water pipe to replace the little clay pipe I got from Mouse and some hashish. The hashish, he promises, is decently priced and I’ll be glad to have made the trip.

“Akhmim?” It’s the widow, Myryam, who bought Hariba’s canna lily wreath.

“Hello! Hello!” I say, and her face melts with relief.

“I waited for you twice,” she says and shakes a finger at me.

“Oh, pardon!” I say. “I found a job in the evenings and I haven’t been able to wait there for you!”

She’s pleased to have the excuse to forgive me. She asks me about my wife.

I lift my hands in a little helpless gesture.

“Ah,” she says, “poor thing. Listen, then, I’ve found you a job. Not a real job at first” -she makes vague motions with her hands-“but there is a man that my brother knows, he needs someone to take care of visitors, show them places for a few hours.”

I start to say that I’ve a job, but the hashish for Hariba is expensive. “Every day?” I say.

“No, not at first,” she says. “Just once or twice a week. But you’re such a decent young man, I’m certain there’ll be more and more opportunities.”

I think about it. The sun’s hot and the air is so dry it makes your nose bleed. A few hours, maybe it would pay for the hashish.

* * *

The man that her brother knows is younger than I expected. “Myryam sent you?” he says. His name is Yusef. “Good. Have you lived here all your life?”

“No,” I admit, “I used to live outside of here, about an hour and a half away.”

“Hmm,” he says. I feel his disappointment. “Well, you could follow Saad on a tour for a couple of days, assist, and we’ll see if you pick up the spiel. You know this is only a couple of times a week?”

“Myryam told me.” I smile to show this isn’t any problem. That I like him.

“Saad is taking a group to the souk and the Moussin in” -he leans back to check the clock on the wall-“forty-five minutes. Can you go with him?”

“Sure,” I say.

“It’s not hard, if you’re good with people. Some people can do it, some can’t.” He looks past me and out the door. “Some, like Saad, never get it right.” He grins. “Oh, Saad, didn’t see you standing there.”

Saad is slight, with graying hair. He shakes his head, but he is smiling. “Taking half-naked foreigners to the Moussin isn’t enough punishment. I have to have a boss who is a crazy man.”

“It’s a business for the insane,” Yusef says.

“That’s true,” says Saad.

We drink mint tea and they complain about the people they take around. “Foreigners,” Yusef says, “they aren’t bad. You show them the Moussin, you tell them a couple of stories about martyrs, that’s all they want.”

The foreigners come on a big lorry-bus. I’m expecting the women to have on next to nothing, but they are decently, if oddly, covered. They wear long skirts and sandals colored like children’s candy. The men wear white shin-length caftans over their bright shirts and sand-colored trousers. Their shoes are big, complicated things with laces and ties. They all look club-footed, but they walk all right.

They have a translator with them, a women with strands of windblown hair showing under her scarf. She comes up to us, her shoulders hunched and her mouth pinched. Her eyes are invisible behind big sunglasses. Then she smiles. “Yusef, Saad. We’re not late?”

“Late?” Yusef says. “No, not at all.”

“They all dressed for the Moussin. They’re all right?”

“They are fine,” Saad says. “They understand that the women can’t go into the sanctuary?”

“Yes. Into the Moussin, but not the sanctuary.”

The woman talks as if she were a man. I’ve never seen a foreigner before. Her skin is pink and delicate, but the wind’s reddened her cheeks and roughed her up.

She turns and talks to them in their language, beckoning. The crowd straggles over. She introduces Saad, who greets them in their language. But that’s all of it that he speaks. He outlines the tour, stopping to let her translate. I study the foreigners, their faces as pale as cheese. A few talk to each other, but most of them listen like schoolchildren, carefully watching Saad when he speaks although they don’t understand him.

* * *

He takes them down the street to a tea shop and I follow. They sit down and the owner pours them watery mint tea.

“You said we wouldn’t be coming here again,” the foreign woman says.

Saad shrugs. “Yusef makes the decisions, I can only suggest.”

“I get complaints about this place every time.” She starts to say more, but someone calls out to her and she goes over to talk to them.

“It’s not very good tea,” Saad says to me, “but they don’t really care.”

It’s not a very nice tea shop, either, but it’s big enough for all of them. A regular tea shop would have been too busy anyway, there wouldn’t have been enough chairs. They sip the indifferent tea while the owner shows them brass and silver bracelets to buy.

Eventually Saad has the foreign woman round them up again and we troop back up the street to the lorry-bus. It’s a tall narrow thing with steps up. Saad directs me to the front seat, so high I look down on the driver. It’s cool inside and the windows are like smoke, just cutting the glare of the day. The movement of the air raises goose bumps on the skin of my arms.

The city looks different from the bus-distant.

The foreigners smile at me as they climb on and file past. A couple say, “Good morning,” badly. I say, “Good morning” back to them.

We go to the souk first, and Saad explains that we are going to go to the street of gold and then to look at carpets. They all get off in single file and clump at the edge of the bus. I get off the bus and the heat is like a blanket, welcome after the chill of the bus. Saad and the foreign woman walk off and the foreigners follow and so do I. I’ve never been to the street of gold.

It isn’t like I pictured it. A street of gold should be a bit more astonishing, I think, but trash still collects in the gutters and most of the shops don’t have much gold. I haven’t walked very far before I’m hot-the bus is very cold.

Saad explains how the street of gold has been in the bazaar in one form or another for nearly two millennia. At one time there were four hundred jewelers working here, and beggars used to sift the dust for gold. They’d scoop up the dirt out of the street and put it in a pan and pour water over it, then they’d swirl the water around-he gestures to show the motion while the foreign woman translates-and the heavier gold flake would settle to the bottom of the flat pan.

I think it sounds impossible, but the foreigners seem to like it. Saad’s a little like a
harni
. He lives off of making these people happy.

He tells them the names of some of the families who have been here four and five hundred years. He tells them how to tell good-quality gold from stuff that’s been adulterated.

He tells them about the symbols of our country: the lion, the eagle, the goat, and the snake. “Watch for them in jewelry,” he says. I wonder why anyone would want to come and be lectured at. He acts as if they are all children.

The foreigners disperse to shop.

“That’s all?” I ask.

Saad shrugs. “They come to shop,” he says. “The Moussin is different.”

I walk down the street. Two women are trying to learn the price of something. They keep motioning for the jeweler to write it down, but he doesn’t seem to understand.

“How much?” I ask him.

He’s old, and his eyes disappear in wrinkles when he smiles.

I write the sum down on one of the women’s minders. She’s looking at a bracelet.

I pick up a smooth piece that ends in lion heads and open it. “This,” I say.

She dutifully holds out her arm and I let it close around her wrist. It’s hard to tell how old foreigners are. She is lovely and looks like a girl, but she has lines around her eyes and mouth, as if she’s been kept artificially young.

She and her companion look at the bracelet, chattering. Her companion is older. I can tell that, even if her companion’s hair is young and red.

She asks the shopkeeper how much for the bracelet. The sum he tells her is far too high-I write it on the slate, but draw a line through it and write down half the amount and show it to them.

The shopkeeper bargains with me. The amount we agree on is still way too high, but they are foreigners.

The woman is delighted and embarrassed. The older woman wants something, too, so I walk with them until she finds a bracelet she likes. It’s flat and chased with a pattern of orange leaves and curliques.

When both women have their bracelets, I find Saad. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay here. He’s been watching me with the two women.

“If you do that for one,” Saad says, “they’ll all want it.” But he’s smiling. The foreign woman who translates smiles, too.

This is easy. These people want very much to be pleased.

But I’m not working with the
harni
. I’d rather sleep.

* * *

When I come back home, Hariba is shaking in fever. “Akhmim,” she says, reaching out for me. Her need for me is nothing like the need of the two foreigners. Their need was simple and clean and it was easy to fill them up, but Hariba is sick. Frightened. When she needed love and attention, that was easy. When she sat with her fingers full of paper, folding flowers and trying to teach me the names, I’d say her name and it was like rain. She’d turn her face toward me.

“I’m here, Hariba,” I say.

“It’s all shaking,” she says.

Her face is white and red and her hair clings to her back in damp rat tails. She’s dehydrated.

“You need some tea,” I say.

“We need to get outside,” she says. “It’s going to shake down on top of us!”

“What’s going to shake down on top of us?”

“The roof!” she says.

“It’s not shaking,” I say, my voice as gentle as I can make it. “You have a fever. Lie back down.”

“No!” she says, “Don’t you feel it?” She grabs the sheet in her hands, wringing it, “O Prophet! Please, please, we have to get out!” I sit down next to her, holding her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Hush now, it’s okay.” But my voice isn’t getting through to her. I feel nervousness rising in me to match her fear.

“No,” she says, and tries to push me away. She shoves hard, but I pull her close to me. She reaches up to touch my cheek, and grabs at my face with her nails. I rear back and she lunges away from her covers and she’s past me and out into the street.