Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  “Do you like our little home, sir?” Baliram asked me.

  No farther than I can throw my old balloon, I thought.

  The girl nodded coldly once; then slipper-sloppered back to her kitchen-station.

  “Pawm deah. Pawmela. I would like you to welcome ouah gist.”

  So here comes Pawm slipper-sloppering back. If she’d put in as much care on her dress as on her eyebrows, two buttons wouldn’t have been askew. Pawm wasn’t more than twenty-two but she walked like sixty-six. Pawm just didn’t care.

  “How do,” she acknowledged both me and my balloon, and started away again.

  “Pawmela, our guest would like a bit of Anglo-Indian cheeah with us—Would you mind stepping out for it?”

  “Where’s the bread?” Her English was faultless.

  “O, I’m suah ouah guest will be glad to contribute a few rupees toward some Anglo-Indian cheeah,” the old man decided airily.

  I extended a five-dollar bill toward him, and when he reached for it I gave him my index finger instead.

  Immediately he feigned great amusement. “Pawmela! Did you see the trick? O, will you teach me how that is done, sir? See, deah—he offers money but then gives nothing but a finger! It is done to reprove persons who act greedily—O, but wasn’t it neatly accomplished!”

  The girl blushed. He was too much for me too.

  I gave her enough change to buy a bottle and she shuffled out into the hallway.

  “I’m interested in radio engineering,” Baliram informed me, indicating a radio disassembled on a mantel—“on occasion I buy old sets in hope of repairing them for resale. Unfortunately,” he shrugged—“I have little skill along mechanical lines. Perhaps you would care to trust me with your balloon long enough to take off your coat? You’d feel more at ease.”

  Sitting down at the table and letting the balloon catch the breeze from the fan, yet not letting it get too near the blades, I indicated I was at ease already.

  Pawmela returned with a bottle. Baby, I thought, that was a fast trip to the still, considering you didn’t even use the stairs. Either you went down the side of the building or the Liquor Permit Office is in the hall.

  “Pawm! May we have glawsses?”

  Pawm slid a couple glasses across the table and turned back to the kitchen before they stopped sliding. I knew they’d like me in Bombay.

  Baliram filled my glass, then his own. I waited to see whether he’d drink it or quote Lear to gain time. I gave him time and he downed the drink, so I followed: a rich blend of Jamaican rum and rotting bananas.

  “We would both feel more at home if you took off your coat, my friend,” he urged me.

  The balloon was a problem. When I tried taking off my coat I found it wouldn’t go through my sleeve. Finally the old man held it for me until I got my coat off. When he handed it back I pulled the transistor out of my belt, extended its aerial and tuned it in—all with one hand.

  It isn’t fair for you to want me—

  a tenor’s voice came in pleadingly—You only want me for today—

  “That’s Tokyo,” I assured Baliram so he wouldn’t think it was Atlanta.

  “What price are you asking, my friend?” he asked me.

  “Sixty dollars American.”

  “I’m only a poor broker,” he explained. “I can’t buy it myself.”

  “I don’t care who I sell to.”

  He examined the brand name, fussed with the aerial, tuned in another station, expressed doubt, shook his head regretfully. He wanted to tune it in again; so I drew the aerial down.

  “I can get sixty dollars for it,” he decided, “but no more. That leaves me nothing for the risk I take in your interest.”

  “Everything you get over fifty-five is yours,” I compromised. “If you don’t get over fifty-five you take the risk for nothing.” Some compromise.

  “And if I get less?”

  “Then you deduct the difference between what you got and fifty-five and that much is what you’re out.”

  “You drive a hard bargain, my friend.”

  “I can get seventy-five for it myself,” I lied.

  He stood up wiping his forehead in anticipation of the heat of the street, went into the kitchen, and returned with a shopping bag and two loaves of French bread. He put the set in the bottom of the bag with the loaves sticking out; and left walking more heavily than before.

  I was left alone with a pint of cheap rum and Kai-Li.

  The girl waited till the old man’s heavy step had died away before she came out. She’d tidied her hair, touched her lips and eyebrows; but still looked sullen. I invited her to share the rum.

  “Me no drink,” she explained; but sat down all the same.

  I waited.

  “Papa no good,” she told me at last, “Mama no good. Everybody no good.”

  Then merely sat looking at me as though suspecting I was probably worse. There wasn’t a thing she could do for me and there wasn’t a thing I could do for her. Except to listen to her woes.

  That she plainly wanted to tell. For they were the kind one can safely tell only to a stranger.

  I tied the balloon to my finger.

  “You like the old man?” I encouraged her.

  She wrinkled her nose. “I do like he tell,” she told me, “I got no paper.” “No passport?”

  “No nothing.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Macao. My real papa Chinese gambler-man. Mama Russki. Both no good. He sell her. Then he sell me.”

  There was a long silence.

  “You’re a long way from Moscow,” I pointed out to be helpful.

  The overhead fan deepened its whirring roar.

  “You know Cages? ” the girl asked me.

  Yes, I’d seen The Cages. What about The Cages?

  “Is where old man find me.”

  So the old man had bought her out and now was trying to get his money back.

  “How long ago did he take you out?” I asked her.

  “Two year,” she told me. “First year, me good to Old Man. I no tell he steal because he no tell I got no paper. He no tell on me, I no tell on him. Steal, steal, steal. Custom-Man do too much steal. ‘Old man,’ I tell him, ‘you stop steal now; you do too much steal, old man.’ Old man no stop. Old man get catched.” The girl clutched her hair to mimic the old man’s fright—“‘O-O-O, your little daddy gonna get rig-or-ous labor now! O-O-O your little daddy gonna die in jail—O-O-O’”—her eyes, that had been so leaden, came pleasantly agleam at the recollection of the old man’s panic—then dimmed with disappointment: “Old man no get rig-or-ous labor. Old man no go to jail. Old man pay. He go free. Then he make sailor-busyness. Old man buy what sailor got—watch, ring, radio. Then old man say, ‘You like nice Anglo gel, sailor?’ he no ask me. He tell sailor—sailor say, ‘I pay good money for you, Baby’—How you like that?”

  I couldn’t say I cared for it. But I could see how things could be worse.

  I waited.

  The girl studied me curiously.

  “You like short-term?” she asked at last.

  I shook my head: no short-term.

  “You like long-term?”

  I shook my head: no long-term.

  “Mama no good!” She began one of those demonstrations of absent-minded anguish which, by inflicting sufficient misery upon the innocent bystander, permit the anguishee to make plans of his own for the following day. “Papa no good! Me got no paper! Me got no little baby! Me got no baksheesh!—Me got no home! Me got nothink! You no want short-term, you no want long-term—O! O! O!—You no good too!”

  There, I’d done it again. Every time anybody in Asia tried improving his difficult lot, there I’d be throwing my weight against his chances. I was certainly going out of my way to foul people up.

  “Old man t’row me out!” she howled.

  “Why should he do that?”

  I only wondered.

  “Because you no want short-term, you no want long-ter
m, you not give poor girl nothink!”

  Nobody loves The Good Guys anymore.

  “Back to Cages!” she concluded the demonstration. “Me die! You no good. You no damned good.”

  “Whenever things seem to be darkest, honey, is just before they get worse,” I consoled her.

  She put her head down on her arms and began shaking her shoulders. It was the most theatrical exhibition of fraudulent guilt-placing I’d had put on me since James Baldwin accused me of complicity in the lynching of Matt Parker.

  “I was at a ball game in Comiskey Park that night,” I’d tried to wriggle out; but when James lays down a charge, he lays it.

  “You were there all the same,” he put it right on me—“your Northern indifference triggered the Southern gun. The men who did the lynching merely acted out the will of the white community—and there is no Mason-Dixon line to that community. You are as much a part of it in Chicago as any Mississippi sheriff.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I had to admit.

  “Because you don’t dare follow,” he challenged me.

  “Where would I wind up if I did?” I asked curiously.

  “By finding that your father and your father’s father conspired in the lynching of Matt Parker a hundred years before the lynching.”

  “My old man came from Indiana,” I felt I ought to explain, as James plainly had me confused with somebody else, “and his old man came from Europe.”

  “Europe raped Africa, let me remind you,” James informed me.

  “You mean we were in on that too?” I asked.

  “Everyone in the crucible of Western Civilization was in on it,” he assured me.

  What could I say except that I was terribly sorry?

  “I’ll have to take responsibility,” I finally confessed to the lynching of Emmett Till as well as of Matt Parker, “so long as you’ll stop denying you set the Reichstag fire.”21

  The girl had stopped shaking her shoulders. She had a new thing going. She was trailing her fingers down the front of her blouse, smiling seductively; and every time she touched a button the blouse opened a bit wider. This interested me as I thought that if she got the blouse open entirely it would mean she was going to wash it. By the time she had it open I saw that her bra needed washing even more. I took my bottle and stretched out on the divan.

  And felt the beat of the city’s terrible heat on rooftop, alley, bazaar and wall. The balloon tied to my finger rose toward the blades of the fan as though irresistibly drawn; then swung like a weightless pendulum there, four swings every half-minute.

  My watch ticked off the swings and the beat of the fan slowed to the throb of engines hauling deep below-deck. Seamen were coming down the hall but they didn’t know which door was mine. Yet they stopped and began whispering just outside.

  “He’s trying to get the ship in trouble,” one began informing on me.

  “It isn’t any of his business,” a half-familiar voice agreed.

  Then the whisperers conferred: they were going to come in on me. I tried to waken but could not. Someone was standing in the door.

  “The last stitch is through the nose,” he announced. His face was bleeding and his cap was afire. It was a matter of life or death that I waken before he touched me and I did.

  And heard Baliram’s heavy step upon the stair. He came into the room awash with sweat.

  The girl had left her blouse and bra on a chair. Baliram saw it at the same moment that I did.

  “Did you enjoy my wife’s company, my friend?” he wanted to know.

  “Where your wife hangs her underwear doesn’t concern me,” I assured him. “What did you get for the set?”

  “I earned nothing for myself,” the old man told me—just as my balloon touched the blades and exploded as though exploding his lie.

  “I was forced to sell without profit for myself, because I could not risk carrying it around any longer. I’m becoming too well known, my friend. I know you will not let my services go unrewarded.”

  A tiny fragment of rubber, all that remained of my balloon, drifted downward toward the floor.

  “What did you get for the set?” I asked him again. “Fifty dollars,” he lied in his teeth.

  “Count it out,” I asked him.

  He counted out fifty dollars in rupees. Close enough. I pocketed it.

  “Not even cab-fare, my friend?” he begged.

  I didn’t bother to answer.

  Passing down the dimness of the hall I was almost past the girl before I discerned her huddling against the wall.

  “Old man think I cheat him,” she whispered, “old man think everybody cheat.”

  “Well,” I asked, “doesn’t everybody?”

  She held her palm out to me.

  “Was it you who informed on the old man?” I asked her.

  She wriggled her fingers to tell me her hand was still empty.

  “Did you?” I asked her; for I really wanted to know. And she wasn’t getting a dime until she told me.

  She nodded her head in confirmation and I put a dollar’s worth of rupees in it. She examined the money.

  “If you don’t give me another dollar,” she told me, “he’ll hit me.”

  “Hit him back,” I suggested, and turned down the stair.

  Into the gala day.

  JULY 15TH: PORT OF BOMBAY

  II. KAMATHIPURA

  “Do priest kiss priest?” Alina had wanted to know in The Lion of Kowloon—“Do men kiss men?”

  Between the abounding sensuality of the Hindu and the Puritanism of the Muslim, betwixt one race whose gods are all lovers and one whose God is a celibate soldier, an ancestral conflict is renewed each night in Kamathipura.

  The women and girls who stand in stalls, with pitch-black eyes and brows blackened in ash-white faces, looking silently out at the street beneath the glare of sixty-watt mazdas, are merchandise as open to the view of buyers of the night as canned fish to buyers of the day. But the glare overhead keeps them from seeing the faces of those who stand and look.

  They hear laughter of men but cannot see who is mocking them. They hear cries of defiance from girls in other cages; sometimes one curses one of the lookers and he swears back at her laughingly.

  Other times the laughter comes more lightly by, from areaways where boys wearing earrings wait. By the light of flares that blow upward, like yellow saris in a twisting wind, old men move among them. Kamathipura is less mocking of earringed boys than of imprisoned girls.

  For the Koran is terribly hard on a whore. “If any of your women be guilty of whoredom,” it teaches, “then bring four witnesses against them and shut them up in their houses until death do release them.” Early Islam simply walled the woman up alive—an unconscionable barbarity it later sternly revoked in order to stone her to death without qualms.

  It looked more benignly upon the male sinner and looks more benignly yet: “If two men among you commit the same crime, then punish both, but if they turn and amend, then let them be, for God is He Who Turneth Merciful.”

  Turneth Merciful is a God who turns on the mercy for men only. From Woman He Turneth Away. Soldiers always give themselves the benefit of any doubt and Islam was a race of soldiers: women are for one thing only and now let’s get back to barracks.

  Weakness being shameful and Woman being weak, an open contempt of her is one means of feeling oneself a full man; and may disguise the fear of being inadequate. Islam lacked nothing of making a Playboy club in Mecca a going concern except affluence. It was so rich in disdain that there must have been enough inadequacy for everybody in town to have a bunny all his own.

  Yet holding Woman in contempt contains the risk that, if you surrender to her, you yourself become contemptible. Holy men who would not harbor in their hearts neither fear of man nor contempt of woman beat the game by sleeping with one another and billing the bit as “Pure Love.” And what was pure enough for a priest was pure enough for a general: the process of purification spread down through the ra
nk and file to the flaring areaways of Kamathipura.

  The Koran went down before the Mahabharata. Yet the Muslim aristocracy maintained its tradition of homosexuality by keeping pages. That these young studs solaced the master’s harem as often as they solaced the master can be safely assumed. And that some resisted the master altogether is recorded by a seventeenth-century traveler, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, telling of a singular occurrence at Patna:

  “An officer disgraced a young boy who was in his service. The boy, overwhelmed by grief, chose his own time to avenge himself. Being out hunting with his master, and removed from other attendants, he drew his sword, came up behind the master and severed his head with a single cut. Then, crying aloud he had slain his master, he rode full speed to the governor’s house; who placed him in prison. Although relatives of the slain man demanded the page’s execution, the sympathy of the people for the boy was so strong that, after six months, the governor pardoned him.”

  As the Moors, whose deserts had lent them ferocity sufficient to conquer Spain, became so softened when cut off from their deserts that they changed to a race of scholars, so the desert-men of Mohammed were softened by the grandeur and reverence with which the Hindu civilization surrounded womanhood.

  The Indian prostitute was not originally, like the Muslim, an abandoned woman, but a dedicated one. The Devi-Dasi was a temple harlot dedicated to the service of a god. When she was married to the god, the marriage was honored by a festival. As a dancing girl the Devi-Dasi served both man and god, and the man who shared her bed shared it with a god. Rather than feeling corrupted by woman, the Hindu felt uplifted.

  Prostitution became womanhood organized. The elaborateness and efficiency with which the king of the Hindu state of Vijanagar had set up the establishment of prostitution stunned Abd-Er-Razzak, an ambassador of a fifteenth-century Persian Shah:

  “Opposite the mint,” he wrote, “is the house of the governor, where are stationed twelve thousand soldiers as a guard, who receive every day a payment of twelve thousand fanom, levied upon the receipts of houses of prostitution. The magnificence of places of this kind, the beauty of the young girls collected therein, their allurements and their coquetry, surpass all description.