Black Light

by Galway Kinnell

  They stopped the car now and then to photograph the sights. Jamshid found himself unable to tell what was a sight from what wasn’t. If Jamshid thought his friend was going to snap a new gendarmerie, it turned out all he was after was the pigeons roosting inside its guardhouse. If he supposed the subject was going to be the new statue of the Shah, it was in reality the hairy tramp who sat hawking razor blades at its foot. So it went. A heap of rubble, then a Pepsi-Cola display, then some ugly fellow smoking a waterpipe.

  The man drove very fast, and in a way Jamshid was relieved to see the outskirts of Tehran come into view. But he was also sad. It crossed his mind that a solution would be to emigrate to a foreign country. He asked the foreigner about it.

  “Certainly,” the man said, “but of course they would want you to have a trade.”

  “I do have a trade. I’m a carpet-repairer. I’m only temporarily out of work.”

  “Well, then, you must stop in to see the consul in your city, if there’s one there. What city are you from?”

  “Meshed,” said Jamshid. Even as he spoke he regretted saying it. There was a moment’s silence. The foreigner turned and looked at him, then looked back at the road. The look was grave and curious. The charm fled from everything, and Jamshid wanted to get out of the car.

  “And of course,” the man added, “they won’t like it if you’re a fugitive from justice.”

  “Look,” Jamshid said, trying to control his panic, “here we are in Tehran. This very corner . . .”

  “I’ll get you a little closer to the center of town,” the foreigner said. “Anyway,” he went on, “I read about your case in the papers. It’s absolutely none of my business.”

  “God be with you,” he said, when he had stopped the car.

  “God be with you,” Jamshid said.

  Jamshid stood watching the tiny car weave away through the traffic. He was still shaking. How deeply he had been frightened. He who only a few days before had decided to give himself up voluntarily. He looked around at the people pushing by him. He had never seen so many at once, even at pilgrimage time in Meshed. Yes, it would be easy to lose oneself in crowds like these. And he was tired of traveling. He would be glad to lie low for a while. Afterwards he would go back to the widow. He had seen all the country he cared to see.

  Cars and trucks were booming down the street, swerving and dodging and blasting their horns. In the old days the disorder would have made Jamshid’s head grow sore. Now he did not mind it. Whatever it was that had happened, he wasn’t exactly the same person.

  He turned into a narrow street, on which he noticed there wasn’t a woman in sight. Many of the men, he saw, were passing through a little gateway fringed by weeping willow trees. On the other side of the gateway there seemed to be another little street lined with weeping willows. It looked pleasant in there. Jamshid, too, walked through the gate. On the other side it was quiet. There were no automobiles at all, either parked or moving. And in the dense crowds many women mingled with the men. The place felt very strange to him, but he did not know why.

  “Where am I?” Jamshid said, turning to a man.

  “Where am I?” the fellow mimicked, a little drunkenly, in the Azerbaijani yokel’s accent. “Tail of a scorpion! You’re exactly where I am, in this crude paradise called the New City!” He spat. Where his spit landed Jamshid saw what he took to be the pale, sloughed skin of a serpent. He bent over to look at it more closely. It was an odd-looking thing. He poked it with his finger.

  “Aiiiiiiieeee!” shrieked the yokel, so loudly a little crowd formed at once. “May my mother fry, this fellow’s collecting used condoms!”

  chapter eighteen

  Jamshid ducked out of the cluster of jeering yokels and plunged into the moving crowd. As he walked along he noted with satisfaction that most of the men were from the country and almost as shabbily dressed as he was.

  The street, paved in packed earth, was unlighted except for glaring naft-lanterns at the vendors’ carts and green neon tubes over doorways and in shop windows. Under trees, in alleys, on doorsteps, he saw women of every sort, some with fair complexion, some dusky, some as broad as they were high, some as lean as planks, some dressed in billowing village pantaloons, some in bright cotton dresses, a few in tight-fitting embroidered trousers, others in the total modesty of black chaddor. Women sat or strolled like so many items on sale, while men streamed past, looking them over, sometimes stopping to talk, even to pat them like a chicken. Obscene phrases were offered like quotations from poems.

  Was it here, in the New City, Jamshid wondered, that he was to start his new life? Yet he felt glad he had stumbled into this place. It excited him to be wandering here. Tomorrow he would look at the rest of Tehran and find himself a quarter in which to live. Tonight he would sightsee.

  He passed a butcher shop where a skinned sheep hung in the night air. He stood at a shop window filled with gleaming new radios. He smelled the odors of a kebab stand and saw steam rising from an elaborately decorated beet stand. He saw a strong man demonstrating weight-lifting, and a darvish holding a live snake and haranguing a small crowd. It gave him a jolt when he went by a theatre entrance and heard the barker crying, “Come in! come in! See the poor bricklayer lay the rich man’s daughter . . .”

  The street came up against a high brick wall. Jamshid turned down an alley. This also ended at a wall. After further exploration he understood that the New City was in fact a city within a city. It consisted of a few streets and a connecting network of alleys entirely walled off from the rest of Tehran. The gateway he had come in by was the one by which he would have to go out. A policeman walked by. In a flash it came to Jamshid that this was no doubt the very worst spot in the city for a wanted man to wander in. Probably the police were studying all the faces, on the lookout for known criminals. . . . He cursed himself for having let the foreigner take photographs of him. What business did he have, going around trusting anybody he met? He wheeled and walked quietly back to the gate.

  A long queue of men was waiting to get out. At the head of the line, under the willow boughs, he saw two policemen frisking everybody and looking at their papers. A pile of knives, razors, and pistols lay on a table. He inquired of a bystander what was going on.

  “Five minutes ago,” the man said, “a cement worker horned in on somebody and got the stomach carved right out of him. They’re hunting for the man who killed him.”

  “But listen,” Jamshid said, feeling deep anxiety. “The man won’t come out tonight. He’ll lie low and come out tomorrow.”

  “Well, the police are stupid,” the man said, “but not so stupid as that. They’ll be at the gate tomorrow too, and the next day. And even after they catch the killer they’ll keep watching the gate for awhile. Of course, they’ll only frisk you coming in, they’ll give you back your weapons when you go out again. But they’ll check papers both coming in and going out. It’s to scare us into not killing anyone else for a little while.”

  Jamshid turned and walked slowly away. And then broke into a slow run. As he ran human shapes seemed to be blown out of his path. He ran more swiftly, noticing half-opened mouths, paralyzed smiles, suspended gestures, the carpet on his shoulder knocking against people, until at last he found himself alone in an alleyway. There was a door. He opened it. Something leapt up and he gasped in fright, but it was only a chicken. He stepped in and shut the door behind him.

  In a little courtyard, he sat down by the pool. He was out of breath. Why, once again, had he been so afraid? He thought of the afternoon he had so calmly walked into the police station in Meshed, begging to be arrested. He thought of the numbness he had felt the day he was recognized in the coffee house near Yazd. So this is what it means to taste happiness. He put his hand into the pool. The lights floating in the water broke into pieces.

  A fat, middle-aged woman appeared. “Salaam alaikum,” she said.

  “If you care to wait I will be able to offer you a nice innocent young girl. The next thing ther
e is to a virgin. She has a gentleman visiting her just now, but in fifteen minutes . . . five, if you’re rushed . .”

  “No,” Jamshid said. “Not at all, I’m not in any hurry at all. Actually I like waiting if it comes to that . . .” The woman looked at him sharply.

  In a little while a pudgy man, perhaps some kind of government clerk, came out of the house. He lowered his eyes and scurried past Jamshid.

  “Your turn,” the woman told him. “That door. At the top of the stairs.” Fearing she would put him out if he hesitated or refused, Jamshid went up as he was bid.

  The walls of the little room were decked with pictures of actresses and starlets, the Queen and the former queens, pin-up girls, local ladies, and others, hung up indiscriminately together in the devotion to human beauty. On the floor in the center of the room a candle burned. Behind it, in its dim light, sat a chaddor-wrapped girl. Behind her, in her shadow, was a mattress.

  “Salaam alaikum,” the girl said, “sit down.” She was young, and her voice reminded Jamshid of his daughter’s. He felt sorry for this girl and ashamed of himself at being here.

  “Just a smoke?” the girl said. “Or all night?”

  “All night.” She told him the price. Though it was nearly all the money he had, he accepted without bargaining. When he handed her the money he saw by her hand that she was very young.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Goli,” the girl said. “Now don’t start asking questions. You’ll have to pay more if you want conversation too.” She began to undress.

  “Incidentally,” Jamshid said, averting his eyes as she pulled her dress over her head, “I recently injured myself. If you don’t mind, my idea is for us just to sleep side by side tonight.” He was prepared to have the girl curse him or laugh at him. She only shrugged.

  “You remind me of my father anyway,” she said, and, still dressed in her underwear, blew out the candle.

  chapter nineteen

  At noon the girl came in and shook him.

  “Get up you lazy ass-picker,” she said. “A customer here, and you’re crapped out right in my place of work.” She spoke roughly. Jamshid saw that she was rather pretty. She had a scar down one cheek.

  “I would like tea,” Jamshid said, hoping to postpone his eviction.

  “You’ll get pee-water,” she said, “if you don’t get out of here.” She pushed him to the stairway and half shoved him down the stairs. The man for whom he had been thrown out of bed stood beside the pool foolishly smiling. His lips sagged and there were sores around his mouth.

  Lucky this degenerate didn’t come first, Jamshid thought. I would have caught one of his diseases merely off the sheets. A samovar boiled in the corner of the garden and Jamshid made himself tea. He leaned against the tree, put a few chunks of sugar into the little glass, poured some tea into his saucer, and sat contentedly slupping it. He looked at his new surroundings, the slime-filled pool, the sunlight, the willow limbs at which a goat was chewing, the chickens pecking hopelessly in the dust, the yellow cat pressing along his ankle. His sense of oppression had lifted. He did not want to go out again into those police-ridden streets. If he could just manage not to get thrown out of this little oasis for a few days, until the surveillance of the gate had lifted, he might yet escape.

  He heard a rustling noise and a moan. In the doorway of the downstairs room a hag was dragging herself into the light. As she clawed forward she kept collapsing and moaning. She held her noseless face turned toward Jamshid. He saw at once she was out of her head. He went to her and took her under the arms, to help her come forward into the light. But she twisted in his grasp and one of her hands flashed up. He dropped her and leapt back pressing his hand to his face where her fingernails had cut him. The middle-aged woman of the night before trotted from the kitchen and set about berating and scolding the old creature. Soon the girl appeared too. The two of them carted the hag back into the darkness.

  “She can’t bear it if a man touches her,” Goli said. “She likes to scratch them. Don’t think about it. She’s going to die soon, so we can’t be angry with her, can we?” She drew boiling water from the samovar and set about cleaning the scratch.

  “What’s she got?” Jamshid asked.

  “Syphilis. In every house in the New City there’s one or two like her. Hags of her kind haven’t any place to go, and we think it’s our duty to take care of them. One day we ourselves might need a home. We all get old, don’t you agree?” Jamshid looked at her but she dropped her eyes.

  She continued to swab his cut. Her recent client came out buttoning his trousers. “God be with you, woman,” he said, and spat into the pool. Goli did not answer but she made an obscene gesture after him as he went out the gate.

  “Aiiiiiiieee,” came a scream of torment from the room into which the hag had been carried. Jamshid sat bolt upright.

  “What’s that?” he said hoarsely.

  “Oh,” said the girl, “it’s only the hag. She’s got these old bottles of medicine, that she pours on her sores.”

  chapter twenty

  All afternoon Jamshid sat under the willow tree. He drank tea and chatted with Goli’s clients as they awaited their turn. The chickens knocked their heads on the earth in search of grain. Goldfishes dozed in the green muck; a few floated belly up. The yellow cat studied them. The goat slept. Every so often the hag moaned. It was miserable enough, as oases went, Jamshid decided, but he prayed he would not be put out.

  The madame, Effat, came over and talked with him. She was too fat and old for the trade, and only on the very busiest nights could she still get a customer. Over her face were wrinkles formed by a smile she seldom had occasion to use any more.

  “So you’re traveling?” she asked Jamshid.

  “I wanted to see the country,” he said.

  “Well, sweetie, you’re seeing it. It makes you skinny, though, seeing the country.” She squeezed Jamshid’s arms and thighs. “Traveling may be pleasant, but it doesn’t do you a bit of good. I’ve a son who travels, and he’s not a mescal fatter than you are.”

  That she had a son startled Jamshid. What sort of an upbringing could a prostitute have given him? But then he thought of his own unlucky daughter.

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Oh, about a dozen,” Effat said. “I didn’t mean to have children, of course, but they kept on coming. All kinds. I sent them to the poorhouse and I pay their keep. I even have a foreign one with yellow hair and blue eyes. I don’t care for him, though. I find him a little insipid. My favorite is my eldest boy, a love-child, you could say, who’s very dark with beautiful dark eyes that drive the women crazy. He’s the one who travels, and he’s as skinny as you . . .” As she rambled on Jamshid kept an eye on the door through which came the hag’s moans. He grew depressed. Everyone’s life seemed so hopeless.

  “Travel!” Effat went on. “How I would like to travel! I want to go to Russia, for instance. I have a brother there. He’s a doctor. One day I went to the Russian Embassy and told them I wanted to go to Russia and visit him. They said, ‘Give us three photographs of yourself and we’ll send them to your brother. If he admits you’re his sister we’ll fly you to Russia free.’ Of course they’d shoot me in Russia if they found out I was a whore. Still, who cares? But I never got my pictures. I’ve grown so fat and ugly I don’t think my brother would recognize me . . . I used to be pretty, you know. . . . The girls you see around here aren’t real whores at all. They’re mostly just a bunch of sluts. I used to be a true whore. I had a straight neck, see, like this, and slender shoulders, and nice firm breasts, and the thickest thighs you’ve ever seen, and a smile that could knock your eyes out they said. Look what’s left.” Tears were in her eyes as she tore off her blouse. The flesh was sagging from her in large loose folds, like so many rice bags. Her long breasts drooped low. She showed Jamshid the blue serpent tattoed on her arm from shoulder to elbow. “Isn’t it ugly!” she exclaimed. “I would never have had it
done, but I fell for a handsome tattoo artist. I gave him everything and all he gave me in return were these horrible snakes. I’m afraid of snakes as it is, never mind having them on my arms. But I’m getting rid of them.” She turned and showed him the other arm. “See.” Instead of a snake there were thick red welts. “I put acid on it. It’s supposed to heal up . . . though it’s been two months . . . God help me . . . that acid-peddler was a sweet-talker too, if you want to know . . .” She shook her head. “Yes,” she took up the former subject. “The point is to get there. They might shoot me. They might hang me. They might shove red-hot irons up my ass. So what? And who knows, maybe it would turn out they do have whores in Russia . . .”

  Jamshid laughed, but he felt pity for this half-naked, tear-soaked creature wallowing in absurd dreams.

  A young man stuck his head in at the gate. He glanced about and then stepped in. He was Goli’s ‘beau’, a greasy fellow who sang in nightclubs. Effat made him tea, and as he waited for Goli to appear he chatted with Jamshid.

  “I used to sing in a nice place on Ferdowsi,” he told him, “a smart cafe where the rich women go and drink. I’d buy them whisky when they sat with me, and before I knew it I was bankrupt. Now I sing in a filthy little dive on Naderi. When a woman comes in she pays her own tab. But the women who come in are poor as I am, and ugly as so many cans of kerosene. I can tell you it’s no life at all.” He sipped his tea. “Of course,” he went on, “I might, you know, find a rich one . . . who will sweeten life . . .”

  Goli appeared and the ‘beau’ brightened up. He led her to a corner garden. There placing the tip of his little finger on his front teeth and fixing his eyes on the rooftops, he sang to her in a warbling falsetto. He went into an intricate set of yodels, the tip of his little finger still resting on his teeth. Then he led Goli into the house. He made an exaggerated bow as she passed through the door before him. Picking his nose, he followed.