Ink

by Hal Duncan

  “What are the flags?” he shouts.

  “Goatskin, Carter Bey,” says Tamuz. “Is good luck.”

  Carter nods—of course. He knows a little of the culture of this city; Samuel's letters dwelt in rather too much depth on the apocryphal tales of wickedness and punishment, sin and torment, tales of how, after the War in Heaven, the Archangel Michael opened up a crack in the desert of stone to bind the fallen angels under the Dead Sea Valley. Of how the two mounds that stand on each side of the Jordan and that give the city its name—the Mound of the Horned One—are in fact the horns of Sammael, leader of the rebels. To Carter these tells are, of course, simply the signs of ancient civilization, the buildup of layer upon layer of human detritus, of cities built over towns built over villages, visible everywhere across the Near East.

  But then for the Bedouin tribesmen who inhabit the wilderness to the west of Tell el-Kharnain the mythology and the history are not entirely incompatible. They identify the mounds as the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, refusing to set foot within the city walls because, they say, to stand upon the horns of the Shaitan, the Enemy, is an abomination in the eyes of God.

  While the rest of Palestine was built in honor of a God of light—synagogues, scriptoriums and strongholds—Tell el-Kharnain, the hated city, the cursed city, was not built at all, they say, but gathered as legends and rumors around a forgotten story, a cloak of darkness blown in folds over a dead king. Before Petra was carved into the desert rock, before Masada fell, before En Gedi was abandoned, before Qumran acquired its store of scrolls and scriptures from the Essenes, before even the Temple at Jerusalem was built, the city of Tell el-Kharnain stood, proud and pagan, a city of blasphemy looking out over a lifeless sea.

  They drive down into the valley of salt, toward it.

  15th March, he writes. Tell el-Kharnain, city of sin, more notorious for its flesh-pots than Whitechapel. Having heard its reputation, I cannot say that I've ever had the urge to see it, but with my only clue to Samuel's whereabouts residing here among the hellions, what choice had I but to go down into this sinkhole of a city. Anna, I swear, the noise and stench of the Ben-Abba Airfields seems the very heights of civilization now. One enters Tell el-Kharnain along the Salt Road, where one gets a fine view of the squalid shantytown they call the New City, before driving in at a snail's pace through the slow crowds of the Jericho Gate and the Silkmarket. It is the strangest sight, this city with its outcast citizenry, not entirely unlike their neighbors in terms of dress and customs, but changed just enough to make the whole place utterly alien. Women in abayas and jilbabs down to their ankles, but made of saffron-colored silk. Men with yarmulkes and braided forelocks, but dressed in scarlet-and-purple patterned frock-coats as gaudy and as gauche as their Ashkenazi counterparts in Jerusalem are austerely black. We passed shopwindows filled with Hadith and Mizraim opened at pages of glorious illustrations, stalls selling rugs with verses from the Koran woven through scenes of birds and beasts, of men and angels. I don't know if you appreciate how anathema such sensual imagery is in Levantine culture, Anna. The Jews and Mohammedans hate such icons, such idolatry, with a fervor matched only by the most zealous Ulsterman, I should think. I had understood this to be a city of apostates, but now I realize that it is a city of heretics, blasphemers.

  Carter opens the Song of Songs that lies on the table to the side of his journal. Captured by a passing glance, he bought the delicate little thing perhaps an hour or so ago, from a shop they passed on the steps of the narrow curved street leading up to the archway, the courtyard within, and then von Stranns attic apartment. Its parchment pages flick lightly over at the touch of a finger—page after page of illustrated Arabic script, intricate as a medieval manuscript or a Moorish mosaic, bawdy as a Hindu sculpture, and in the finest Siddim ink so slickly dark it looks still wet.

  May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine.

  ——

  He closes it over.

  Here at hast, in von Strann's apartment, he writes, as I wait for the boy Tamuz to return, gathering my thoughts within this journal, here at least one has some respite from the broiling masses; one can relax without the expectation of a knife in one's back or a hand in one's pocket.

  But he's lying to himself, he knows. He cannot relax; God knows, he wishes that he could, but twice on their journey the car was stopped and papers asked for. The Turkish military are everywhere and, given that it can only be a matter of weeks before the Turks sign themselves over to the blackshirts, those few Europeans he saw wandering casually through the markets in their linen suits and panama hats seem like fools to Carter. Mind you, from the looks he saw given to the militia by the locals, he suspects the Turks maywell meet some resistance here when the time comes. There is no love lost between these people and their overlords. The Ivans and Mehmets would do well to remember all the Roman blood spilled by the zealots and sicarii.

  But the time will come, and soon; he's certain of it, only prays that he can find Samuel and get the damn fool out of here before it's too late. But where is he? Or this baron character, for that matter? Baron von Strann. One dreads to think what a supposed gentlemen is doing in Tell el-Kharnain, anyway.

  THE CITY OF THE SENSES

  …So, following his doctor's advice, von Strann had arrived at the city in the late spring of 1921, in the hope that the healing waters and beneficial airs of the Dead Sea Valley would alleviate his lung condition.

  At first sight, the desolate region, literally the lowest place on earth, seems a strange choice for a spa town; the salty, sulfurous wasteland seems a place of exile rather than recuperation. To some visitors it is astonishing that such barren land could sustain a village let alone a city the size of Tell el-Kharnain, but the extensive irrigation of the Jordan Valley that made the region inhabitable throughout its history maybe seen as a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and to the strange force that it has exerted on people from the earliest times.

  One has to wonder, though, how this city of iniquity has survived the ravages of time, given that it must be the most hated city in the Levant.

  Throughout its history, we now know, Tell el-Kharnain has always been a destination for the sick. Bauval's excavations in the 1970s showed that the traditions of the healing properties of the Dead Sea waters can be dated back as far as the early Neolithic. While it was previously believed that the city was contemporaneous in its foundation with the Phoenician city-states of Sidon, Tyre and Byblos, Bauval's dig revealed structures that combine the roles of bathhouse, hospital, temple and brothel going back as far as the sixth millennium BCE, along with evidence of the institutionalized temple prostitutes that were common throughout the Neolithic Near East. The identification of Tell el-Kharnain with the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah is still a matter of some dispute among archaeologists, with the rigorous excavations necessary to prove or disprove this theory unlikely to take place anytime soon, given the present insecurity of the region; but after the wholesale rejection of the theory in the 1960s, it seems that even respected archaeologists are now willing to entertain the notion that there might be something behind the legends which caused Alexander to rename the city Hephaistonopolis after his lover.

  It is interesting then that even in the time of Jericho and Catal Huyuk, it seems Tell el-Kharnain was a sort of holiday resort of “sun, sea and sex” so to speak, with a bathhouse culture to rival present-day San Francisco. Through Babylonian and Roman occupations this dubious reputation, this promise of pleasures of the flesh, seems to have been as lucrative as the Ink Trade. Under the Ottomans, when one might have expected little tolerance for such a fleshpot, remarkably the city appears to have flourished; whether one was the most upstanding businessman or proudest imam, it seems, one could always excuse a visit to Tell el-Kharnain on the grounds of ill health. Hailed by the poets and painters of the Romantic Era as the “city of the senses, coloring the canvas of the soul i
n scarlet sin,” it gained more and more favor as a destination spot for Europeans, such that by the end of the nineteenth century Tell el-Kharnain was a sort of Mecca for libertines of all persuasions, carrying on so right through to the 1920s, when alongside Beirut it prospered as a holiday destination for Hollywood's debauched. With all this in mind, and given von Strann's rumored proclivities, we have to wonder if his move might have been motivated at least partly by the stories of hedonistic excess as much as for any health reasons.

  In a way, after all, von Strann was as much an exile as a convalescent, forced out of his homeland not just by his health but also by the rise of Futurism and the Terror that followed it; as an aristocrat who refused to serve in the army and an alleged homosexual, von Strann was a double target for a movement that fed on hatred and resentment. He makes his feelings quite clear, in a letter of January 1922 where, writing to his family, he says,“… do not ask me to return. Prussia is unhomely to me now.” The key word he uses, unheimlkh, is difficult to translate into English; while we have rendered it literally here, it also carries a sense of the strange, the uncanny, the unnatural, even the supernatural. Golding, in his biography, uses this phrase to support his argument that von Strann was purely a political exile, that the rumors about his sexuality are just that—”for surely it would be a bit rich for a homosexualist to describe his society as ‘unnatural.’ “The authors of this book, however, feel that this observation tells us rather more about Golding's assumptions than about von Strann's actual motivations.

  No matter what really brought him to this region, though—health, sexuality, politics or any combination of the three—it was here in the Dead Sea Valley, in the shadow of ancient Sodom, that von Strann found not only a cure for his lung condition and a brief refuge from early twentieth-century politics, but also an outlet for his hitherto repressed sexuality in the art form that was to make him famous. It was here, in a city of decadence and depravity in the midst of this barren wasteland, that von Strann was to become one of the fathers of modern photography and, of course, of modern pornography. It was here, among the bronze-skinned Enakite tribesmen of the surrounding deserts, that he was to find both his subjects and his salvation.

  A Shadow of Jerusalem

  “All the way up?”

  “Yes, Carter Bey. Top house. Carter Bey…”

  Boots clopping on the steps as he goes up, Carter moves to one side to let Tamuz squeeze past him, nodding an of course to the lad's so evidently practiced proud enunciation of do pardon me, sir. The stairwell up to the Baron's attic home and studio is tight, narrow like the winding back streets of this most bohemian quarter of this most bohemian city, narrow like the archway leading into the courtyard, all shuttered windows half hidden among the vines and leaves. He watches Tamuz take two steps at a time, Carter's satchel swinging over his shoulder as he pushes it back to guddle in his trouser pocket for the door key. Boy insisted on carrying it for him the whole hundred yards up the street from where MacChuill parked the car…

  “Aright then, sir, wur here. The lad'll take ye tae His Nibs's place. Aye, it's just up there, but. If yer needin a driver just tell Shortarse here an’ he'll come and fetch us, like. Aright, aye?”

  Bohemia, Tell el-Kharnain, thinks Carter as he steps out of the car.

  “Women? Boys? Hashish?”

  Tamuz shoos the hawker from his path, and the man shrugs, turns his attention to an old gent who's too busy staring at Tamuz and Carter to concern himself, lifting a panama hat to wipe his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief and eyeing them as they pass. Fewer natives than Europeans in the streets around here, it seems, and most of them fawning rogues, preying on the tourists, pandering squalid services. The Arabs are a noble race, Carter's always thought, but it's clear how the demand of European decadence has shaped them here, the market created by the buyer, as Engels has it. But then these stones have seen the same under Egypt and Babylon, through Assyrian and Persian rule, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine occupation, through even the Crusades. Great blocks in the walls of the side street Tamuz leads him up carry worn carvings of forgotten reigns, salvaged stonework of a city razed time after time, rebuilt from its own architectural and moral ruin.

  … Shafts of midday light streak the dark stairwell, dappled by the stone latticework of the outer wall and the leaves of the orange tree in the courtyard beyond. It's quite a pleasant environment, he has to admit, once you're away from the hustle of the streets outside—the old Ink Merchants Quarter, according to Tamuz, around the Beth Ashtart, where traders from across the world built their bases of operations, exporting Siddim ink in all its exquisite pigments, powders and liquids to color the robes of preening Emperors or painted Virgins.

  The door swings open and he follows the lad inside. The long wood-floored room with its slanted roof is full, but not with furnishings. Pale plastered walls, a couple of windows and a skylight. A kitchen area with an iron stove and a steel sink, a long trestle table and not much else. A bed and a dresser in one corner, an unmade fold-down bunk along from them. A heavy black curtain cordons off the far end, tacked and taped… to serve as a darkroom and as a backdrop, he guesses, judging from the camera on the tripod pointed at it. Von Strann clearly lives a fairly ascetic existence. No, what clutters the room are all the framed prints stacked against or hanging on the walls, the photographs pegged on bits of string that crisscross just above head height, all of them studies of young men naked, posed as heroes out of Homer and suchlike. They do have some artistic merit, he's no doubt, but there's an unhealthy aspect to the imagery that Carter finds repellent. Tell el-Kharnain and von Strann's studio are cut from the same cloth, and that cloth is silk dyed scarlet and purple, soft and sensuous. The whole place is a dark Jerusalem, he thinks, a shadow of Jerusalem, as profane as the city of Solomon is sacred.

  ——

  May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine.

  His fingers drift across the soft leather of the Song of Songs as his gaze drifts across the bunting of obscene photographs. Oh, but the Baron may find his trade a bit less lucrative in the near future.

  As I wait here for the return of von Strann, he writes, I can only think of what the Allies stand to lose if Turkey goes over to the Futurists. One cannot help but feel uncomfortable. How many of the European denizens of the cafes and taverns would happily sell their fellow man out to—

  “Carter Bey.”

  The lad lays an empty plate and a bowl of dates on the table in front of him, pops one of the dark fruits in his own mouth. Carter closes his journal, clicks the lid back onto his pen. Tamuz chews, picks the date stone out of his mouth and drops it on a plate

  “In the market,” says Tamuz. “I hear a man ask about English soldier.”

  His voice is casual as he goes back to the stove (and whatever he's cooking, it smells bloody good), but there's an air to it, a question as a warning, perhaps.

  “European,” he says. “I do not know the accent. Not English, though. Not German. Black hair. Black eyes.”

  “Black shirt?” says Carter.

  The boy stirs. Taps a wooden spoon on the rim of a pot. Tastes.

  “Not today. But other days, I think. I think he wear black shirt on other days.

  He… stand like you.”

  “And how exactly do I stand?” says Carter, resting one elbow on the table, the other on the back of his chair. An amused smile.

  Tamuz turns, straightens up army-stiff and furrows his brows, head turning slowly first this way then that, a caricature of stern soldierly scrutiny. He breaks the pose to point the spoon at Carter.

  “Like you have many men behind you,” he says. “Not afraid of anyone.”

  Carter takes a date from the bowl, rolls it between thumb and forefinger.

  “Is that so?”

  “Proud and fierce,” says Tamuz.

  A BALL OF OBSIDIAN DARKNESS

  Proud and fierce, the Duke Irae
strides through Dr. Arturo's laboratories, serfs in lab coats scattering in his path. His boots clang on the steel grilles of the gantry underneath, resounding even in the clamor of pounding and whirring, the clicks and hums of the machinery. He strides like a general on a battlefield, caring nothing for the vertiginous chasm that stretches down under the frail steel skeleton to the chaosphere beneath. Even in the single-minded determination of his stride, however, the gaze of his single eye sweeps out, encompassing the scene that he commands in every aspect of his warrior's demeanor. Arturo shuffles behind him, vainly trying to match his master's pace. He pulls himself past the archivist at the gantry's end, muttering muted resentment of the creature's healthy young physique, made doubly bitter, underneath, by how its lack of pride points up the egoism of his own depression.

  Around them, reels of magnetic tape spin among the flashing diodes and green-screen monitors, the bubbling beakers and sizzling electro-coils that seem to grow out of this monkey-frame construction. Punch cards and holograph displays, valves and oscilloscopes, radiovision sets and glowing bulbs of chi-capacitors compose Dr. Arturo's multiarray mainframe deep within the bowels of the castle beneath the Circus. Nothing has ever been renewed here, nothing discarded; instead, the gold-wired and black-boxed walls of green that are themselves great motherboards are joined, by wire or by wave, to quantum cube coprocessors and liquid-orgone neural networks, all integrated into the continuous process that is the computer.

  Clamped over the great abyss of the chi-mine like a ceiling of mechanical stalactites, this bastard love child of Babbage and Bosch, the laboratory, the computer that is the laboratory, is as much a shrine to its own legacy as it is the cutting edge of processing technology. It is the breeding ground for new technology, but it's a cold and hostile breeding ground of components struggling for survival against evolution, and this computer is both creche and cemetery. Perched over the yawning pit of destruction, it is the cannibal creation of Progress itself.