“I see.”
“So these names mean nothing.”
I took out the photograph and showed it to her. She leaned forward expectantly and her black hair brushed at my nose. The odor that rose from it was absolutely incredible. It staggered the mind, to say nothing of the nostrils. My olfactory nerves were utterly unnerved. I winced at the stench, and the madam recoiled at the photo.
“She who is alive,” she said.
One hears not merely words but the thoughts they comprise; otherwise none of us could speak nearly as quickly as we do and hope to be understood. And so what I heard her say was “She who is not alive,” because it made more sense. One doesn’t expect a person to look at a picture and recoil in horror at the thought that the pictured individual is alive. Our necrophilic culture may be headed in that direction, but so far it hasn’t quite arrived.
So I thought she meant that Phaedra was dead.
Over a period of time people become their images, become their role in one’s life. It takes a shock to remind one how one really regards various individuals. My mother, I remember, used to say in jest that I would not really appreciate her until she was gone. She was not serious; I guess the maudlin mush of this particular cliché appealed to her as a sort of verbal camp. And I had appreciated her, of course; we were quite close. But one day one of my aunts called, broken-voiced, to tell me that Mother had somehow died, and it turned out that she had been right all along. I hadn’t really appreciated her before, not as I did then.
I said, “The girl is dead?”
A moment’s hesitation. Then, with a rush of words packaged in foul air, “Ah, yes, yes, you speak the truth, kâzzih. The girl is dead.”
“The hell she is.”
“Eh?”
“‘She who is alive,’” I said. “I missed it the first time, but you were all nervous when you saw the picture, and then you were relieved when I said she was dead. Where is she?”
“You must go, kâzzih.”
I straightened up, glowered down at her. “Where is she? And why do you not answer me?”
“Phuc’mi.”
“Not if you were the last woman on – huh?”
“Phuc’mi.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “In my own tongue, the tongue of a far-off land, it has a meaning. But I know little of Pushtu, and the word you speak is unknown to me.”
“It is unknown to me also, kâzzih. It is the name of the one you seek, of She who is alive.”
“Her name is Phaedra.”
“Her new name. We gave it to her because it is all she says. ‘Phuc’mi, Phuc’mi,’ it is all she says, night and day. We try to teach her our own tongue but she refuses to learn it. One can make her learn nothing. But kâzzih, I will tell you this. She is the best maradóon ever to work in this house. She is the finest worker I have ever had.”
“No,” I said.
“The finest in all my years. Her beauty is greater than the others. I noticed this when she came to me, but what did it matter? A few weeks and all my girls lose their beauty. These miners and camel herders, what know they of beauty? When they have no money for maradóosh they content themselves in the orifices of their camels.”
“I suppose it’s better than riding one,” I said.
“But this Phuc’mi,” she said. “That which makes other girls grow pale and wither makes her grow ever more beautiful. That which puts death in the eyes of the others gives her eyes the spark and sparkle of life. And with men she is wild. She can please a man as can no other girl I have ever known.”
“No,” I said.
“But it is so.”
I shook my head wordlessly. Not Phaedra, I thought. Not my little virgin, not my cloistered nun. It was patently impossible. Mother Horowitz’s little girl was not the sort to reign as star performer in an Afghanistan whorehouse. Mother Horowitz’s beloved Deborah wasn’t the possessor of the camel herders’ favorite orifice. I could, like the Red Queen, believe six impossible things before breakfast. This, though, I simply could not believe.
“And so we call her ‘She who is alive,’” the smelly old pig was saying. “Because that which brings others to their death gives her more and more of life, so that she thrives upon it and grows every day younger and fairer. She is my jewel, kâzzih, my treasure, the flower of my garden.” It was an obscenity for anything that smelled like this even to speak of flowers and gardens. She is the cabbage of my skunk, maybe. She is the arm of my pit, even. But farther than that one could not go.
“And so I cannot let her go,” she said.
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“She is worth more than any three of my girls combined. She can go with more men in a night than the others, and the men prefer her, they wait in a long line for her. I thought that if they want her more, then they should pay more for her, and so I raised her price. Thirty for the other girls, fifty for Phuc’mi. They pay her price. They stand in line for her. She is the queen of this house of maradóosh.”
“She does not belong here.”
“But she does.”
“She belongs in her own country,” I said. “With her own mother, and with the ones who love her. She-”
The hog bristled. “You say that we do not love her? I, who could not care for her more were she my own daughter? She reminds me of my own self in my youth.” This I rather doubted. “And the other girls, do you think they do not care for Phuc’mi? They regard her as their sister. And do you not think the men care for her? Would they pay such prices for one for whom they do not care?”
I turned from her, went outside for a moment. I wanted some fresh air, not just to clear my nose but to clear my head as well. I looked out over the desolate landscape. It was the middle of the afternoon and most of the girls were sleeping. Soon they would awaken and have their breakfast. Shortly thereafter the men would arrive from their camels, from the mines. And Phuc’mi-Phaedra-Deborah would have her work cut out for her until sunrise.
I went inside again. I told the foul-smelling old woman that, when all was said and done, she had no real choice in the matter. Amanullah would pay her price, whatever it might turn out to be. If the girl was worth that much, Amanullah would nevertheless make it good. Her customers might be unhappy, but she did hold the whip hand; after all, her house was the only game in town, and if it came down to a choice between her girls and camels, well, it might be close but her gals would surely carry the day. However good an adjustment Phaedra might have made to Afghanistanian whoredom, she surely belonged in her own home.
And, as a final argument, I showed her the gun. I explained that if she did not deliver Phaedra at once I would shoot her, and then I would go through the house and shoot all the other girls, and then I would take Phaedra away anyhow. This was sheer bravado, since the gun didn’t have that many bullets in it anyway, and since I wouldn’t have gone around shooting innocent maradóosh to begin with, but I guess she believed enough of it to go get Phaedra. She choked back a sob and said something which must have been interestingly obscene, some suggestion no doubt as to the ideal employment for diverse portions of my anatomy. And then she went away.
I steeled myself. Well, aluminumed myself, anyway. I told myself Phaedra was going to look like hell, and might be more than a little hysterical, and would need no end of tender loving care.
Whereupon she appeared.
She was more beautiful than could be believed. I use the awkward construction purposefully; “unbelievably beautiful” is one of those clichés fastened on every sunset and most Swedish films, the latter of which are at best believably beautiful. Phaedra was something quite out of the ordinary. I have already told you what she looked like, and she still looked that way, but with a new radiance, a special glow, a lilt to her walk and to her smile that had not been there before.
Before she had been a beautiful virgin. Now she was as beautiful as ever, and she wasn’t exactly a virgin anymore. She was, from what I had heard, as far from the state of virginity as she and I both were from the state of New Mexico, and perhaps even farther than that.
“Phaedra,” I said.
“Phuc’mi,” she said.
“Phaedra, it’s me. Evan. Evan Tanner. From New York. You remember me, Phaedra.”
“Phuc’mi.”
“And your name is Phaedra Harrow. Once your name was Deborah Horowitz. Do you remember? And then you changed it to Phaedra, and then-”
“Phuc’mi.”
She was wearing a piece of silk that was sort of wrapped all over her and fastened at the shoulder. Purple silk. She said her new name a few more times, and then she unfastened the purple silk and unwrapped herself like a self-opening Christmas present, and I looked at the glory that had lived untouched with me in New York, and the same glory that had since turned on half the camel schleppers in Afghanistan, and I think I got a little weak in the knees.
“She wishes not to go with you,” said the “before” half of the Ban ad. “She wishes only to stay here. I do not think she understands what you say to her.”
She was right. Phaedra’s eyes gave the show away. They had the queer light of madness in them. I nodded and went out to the car. I came back with a bottle of Coke.
“Coca-Cola,” said Phaedra.
“She is mad for Coca-Cola,” said the madam. “There is an empty bottle she takes every morning to sleep with her.”
“She used to like wine,” I recalled. “But she wasn’t queer for the bottles.” I opened the Coke and gave it to Phaedra and turned to go back for another one.
“Get two,” the madam said.
I didn’t want to. I knew it would make her belch, and I could imagine what that would smell like. But I got two more Cokes, and we all three drank ours down. I was the first to finish. I waited patiently until Phaedra was through with hers. She put the bottle down and gave me her one response to life, saying the new name by which she was so well known in the area.
And I hit her over the head with the Coke bottle.
“My head hurts,” she said.
“You’re awake.”
“You hit me.”
I took my eyes off the road and looked at her. She looked better than ever, but the madness had not left her eyes. I put my eyes back on the road just in time to avoid putting the car off the road, and I agreed that I had hit her, by George.
“What with?”
“A Coke bottle.”
“Oh. Stop the car, Evan.”
“You know who I am.”
“Sure. I knew back there but I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say anything, just what I said over and over. I get blocked all the time, I can’t even think. Stop the car.”
“What for?”
“Just do it.”
I stopped the car, and Phaedra came into my arms and unzipped my fly.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“You always wanted to. From the first time you saw me you wanted to. Always. But I wouldn’t let you. I wouldn’t let anybody. They didn’t care that I wouldn’t let them, not here. I couldn’t even tell them. I couldn’t tell anybody anything because they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. They said things I didn’t understand, and they didn’t understand anything I said, and it was horrible. Why isn’t it hard?”
