Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Fadina comes in and turns on the projection, and suddenly the white marble room glows around us, full of servants and musicians tuning up. I feel better, able to hide in the crowd. Akhmim glances around. “It is exciting,” he says thoughtfully.

  There are five guests. Fadina greets them at the door and takes them back to the wardrobe to change. Five middle-aged women, all come to pretend. I tell Akhmim their character names as they come in so he knows what to call them.

  The musicians start playing; projected characters, women and men, recline on projected couches. I know some of their names. Of course, they have projected servers and projected food. I wish I knew what the scenario was. Usually Fadina tells me ahead of time, but she doesn’t talk much to me these days. Pretty soon the mistress comes in and the real guests all find the real couches where they can talk to each other. First is bread and cheese, already on the table, and Akhmim has to pour wine-not real wine, of course-but I can just stand there, next to a projected servant, thank God. Even this close, she seems real, exotic with her pale hair. I ask her what her name is and she whispers, “Miri.” Fadina is standing next to the mistress’s couch, she glares at me. I’m not supposed to make the household AI do extra work.

  The first part of the meal is boring. The mistress’s friends get up once in a while to whisper to each other or a projection, and projections do the same thing. There’s some sort of intrigue going on, people look very tense and excited. Akhmim and I glance at each other and he smiles. While I’m serving, I whisper to him, “Not so bad, is it?”

  The two lovers I turned off are at this dinner; I guess they are important characters right now. The girl is apparently supposed to be the daughter of one of the mistress’s friends.

  Almost two hours into the dinner-after a course of clear soup, then a luncheon of lamb in pastry with pistachios that smells so good my stomach rumbles, and finally an orange sorbet-the girl says loudly to her lover, “I can’t stand this anymore! You have to choose!” All the projections look over-of course the bismek ladies have been watching the two lovers all through the meal.

  “What are you talking about?” the boy says, although he looks guilty-it’s obvious he knows.

  “Don’t you pretend!” the girl says.

  “Nisea,” he says, “you are making a scene.”

  “No, I’m not,” she says, and stands up. “I’m going home.” But she sways, beautiful in her long gown, and then her eyes roll back in her head and she falls to the marble floor, thrashing, her heels beating against it. The projected characters rush to the girl. The one of the mistress’s friends who is the “mother” of the girl behaves with theatrical dignity in the circle of real women-since she can’t really touch the girl. The male lover is hysterical, kneeling and sobbing. It makes me uncomfortable, both the seizures and the reactions. I look for Akhmim. He is standing against the wall, holding a pitcher of wine, observing. He looks delighted. The girl’s lover reaches the table and picks up her wineglass while everybody else watches him. Only an idiot would fail to realize that it’s supposed to be important. The “mother” shrieks suddenly, “Stop him! It’s poison!” and there is more agitated activity but they are too late. The lover drinks down the wine. The “mother” is “held back” by her friends.

  I’m embarrassed by the way these women play with feelings. I look over at Akhmim, but he is just watching. I wonder, what does he think?

  There’s a call for a physician, projections rush around. There is a long, drawn-out death scene for the girl, followed by an equally long death for the lover. The women are openly sobbing, even Fadina. I clasp my hands together, squeeze them, look at the floor. I glance up and everyone is clustered around the lovers’ bodies, both unnaturally beautiful in death. Finally everything is played out and the projected characters shut off. They sit around the “dining room” and discuss the scenario and how masterful it was. The mistress looks drained but pleased. One by one the women pad back to the wardrobe and change, then let themselves out until only the mistress and the “mother” are left.

  “It was wonderful,” she keeps telling the mistress.

  “As good as when Hekmet was ill?” the mistress asks.

  “Oh yes. It was wonderful!” Finally they go back to change, Fadina following to help, and Akhmim and I can clear the dishes off the table.

  “So what did you think?” I ask. “Was it what you expected?”

  Akhmim shrugs. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

  I stack plates and dump them on a tray. Akhmim boosts the tray, balancing it at his shoulder like a waiter. He’s really much stronger than he looks. “You don’t like it,” he says finally.

  I shake my head.

  “Why not? Because it’s not real?”

  “All this violence,” I say. Nobody would want to live this way. Nobody would want these things to happen to them.” I’m collecting wineglasses, colored transparent blue and rose like soap bubbles.

  He stands looking at me, observing me the way he did the women, I think. What do we look like to harni ? He’s beautiful, the tray balanced effortlessly, the muscles of his bare arm and shoulder visible. He looks enough like an infidel in his white robe, with his perfect, timeless face. Even his long curly hair seems right.

  I try to explain. “They entertain themselves with suffering.”

  “They’re only projections,” he says.

  “But they seem real. The whole point is to forget they’re projections, isn’t it?” The glasses ring against each other as I collect them.

  Softly he says, “They are bored women. What else do they have in their lives?”

  I want him to understand how I’m different. “You can’t tell me it doesn’t affect the way they see people. Look at the way the mistress treats Fadina!” Akhmim tries to interrupt me, but I want to finish what I’m saying. “She wants excitement, even if it means watching death. Watching a seizure, that’s not entertaining, not unless there’s something wrong. It’s decadent, what they do, it’s…it’s sinful! Death isn’t entertainment.”

  “Hariba!” he says.

  Then the mistress grabs my hair and yanks me around and all the glasses in my arms fall to the floor and shatter.

  * * *

  Sweet childhood. Adulthood is salty. Not that it’s not rewarding, mind you, just different. The rewards of childhood are joy and pleasure, but the reward of adulthood is strength.

  I’m punished, but it is light punishment, praise God. The mistress beats me. She doesn’t really hurt me much. It’s noisy and frightening, and I cut my knee where I kneel in broken glass, but it’s nothing serious. I’m locked in my room and only allowed punishment food: bread, mint tea, and a little soup. But I can have all the paper I want, and I fill my rooms with flowers. White paper roses, ice-pale irises with petals curling down to reveal their centers, snowy calla lilies like trumpets, and poppies and tulips of luscious paper with nap like velvet. My walls are white and the world is white, filled with white flowers.

  “How about daisies?” Akhmim asks. He comes to bring me my food and my paper.

  “Too innocent,” I say. “Daisies are only for children.”

  Fadina recommended to the mistress that Akhmim be my jailer. She thinks that I hate to have him near me, but I couldn’t have asked for better company than the harni . He’s never impatient, never comes to me asking for attention for his own problems. He wants to learn how to make flowers. I try to teach him, but he can’t learn to do anything but awkwardly copy my model. “You make them out of your own head,” he says. His clever fingers stumble and crease the paper or turn it.

  “My mother makes birds, too,” I say.

  “Can you make birds?” he asks.

  I don’t want to make birds, just flowers.

  I think about the Nekropolis. Akhmim is doing his duties and mine, too. He’s busy during the day and mostly I’m alone. When I’m not making flowers, I sit and look out my window, watching the street, or I sleep. It is probably because I’m not getting
much to eat, but I can sleep for hours. A week passes, then two. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve got to get out of this room, but then I ask myself where I’d want to go and I realize that it doesn’t make any difference. This room, the outside, they’re all the same place, except that this room is safe.

  If there’s anyplace I want to go, it is the Nekropolis. Not the real one, the one in my mind, but it’s gone. I was the eldest, then my sister, Rashida, then my brother Fhassin, and then the baby boy, Nabil. In families of four, underneath the fighting, there’s always pairing, two and two. Fhassin and I were a pair. My brother. I think a lot about Fhassin and about the Nekropolis, locked in my room.

  I sleep, eat my little breakfast that Akhmim brings me, sleep again. Then I sit at the window or make flowers, sleep again. The only bad time is late afternoon to early evening, when I’ve slept so much that I can’t sleep anymore and my stomach is growling. I’m fretful and teary. When Akhmim comes in the evening with dinner, he bruises my senses until I get accustomed to his being there. His voice has many shades, his skin is much more supple, much more oiled, and textured than paper. He overwhelms me.

  Sometimes he sits with his arm around my shoulders and I lean against him. I pretend intimacy doesn’t matter because he is only a harni, but I know that I’m lying to myself. How could I ever have thought him safe because he was made rather than born? I understood from the first that he wasn’t to be trusted, but actually it was me who couldn’t be trusted.

  He’s curious about my childhood. To keep him close to me, I tell him everything I can remember about growing up, all the children’s games, teach him the songs we skipped rope to, the rhymes we used to pick who was it, everybody with their fists in the center, tapping a fist on every stress as we chanted:

  ONCE my SIS-ter HAD a HOUSE,

  THEN she LEFT it TO a MOUSE,

  SING a SONG,

  TELL a LIE,

  KISS my SIS-ter,

  SAY good-BYE.

  “What does it mean?” he asks, laughing.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I explain, “it’s a way of picking who’s it. Who’s the fox, or who holds the broom while everybody hides.” I tell him about fox and hounds, about how my brother Fhassin was a daredevil and one time to get away he climbed to the roof of Ayesha’s grandmother’s house and ran along the roofs and how our mother punished him. And of how we got in a fight and I pushed him and he fell and broke his collarbone.

  “What does Ayesha do?” he asks.

  “Ayesha is married,” I say. “Her husband works. He directs lorritanks, like the one that delivers water.”

  “Did you ever have a boyfriend?” he asks.

  “I did, his name was Aziz.”

  “Why didn’t you marry?” he asks. He’s so innocent.

  “It didn’t work,” I say.

  “Is that why you became jessed?”

  “No,” I say.

  He’s patient, he waits.

  “No,” I say again. “It was because of Nouzha.”

  Then I have to explain.

  Nouzha moved into the death house across the street, where Ayesha’s grandfather had lived until he died. Ayesha’s grandfather had been a soldier when he was young and to be brave for the Holy he had a Serinitin implant, before they knew they damaged people’s brains. When he was old, he didn’t remember who he was anymore. When he died, Nouzha and her husband moved in. Nouzha had white hair and had had her ears pointed and she wanted a baby. I was only twenty, and trying to decide whether I should marry Aziz. He had not asked me, but I thought he might, and I wasn’t sure what I should answer. Nouzha was younger than me, nineteen, but she wanted a baby and that seemed terribly adult. And she had come from outside the Nekropolis, and had pointed ears, and everybody thought she was just a little too good for herself and maybe a little shameless.

  We talked about Aziz and she told me that after marriage everything was not milk and honey. She was very vague on just what she meant by that, but I should know that it was not like it seemed now, when I was in love with Aziz. I should give myself over to him, but I should hold some part of myself private, for myself, and not let marriage swallow me.

  Now I realize that she was a young bride trying to learn the difference between romance and life, and the conversations seem obvious and adolescent, but then it seemed adult to talk about marriage this way. It was like something sacred, and I was being initiated into mysteries. I dyed my hair white.

  My sister, Rashida, hated her. Nabil made eyes at her all the time, but he was only thirteen. Fhassin was seventeen and he laughed at Nabil. Fhassin laughed at all sorts of things. He looked at the world from under his long eyelashes, girlish in his hard sharp-chinned face with his monkey grin. That was the year Fhassin, who had always been shorter than everybody, grew tall. He was visited by giggling girls, but he never took any of them seriously.

  But Nouzha and Aziz and everything on our street really was outside, not inside the family where everything mattered. In the evenings we sat on the floor in the middle of our three death houses and made paper flowers. We lived in a house filled with perfume. I was twenty, Rashida was nineteen. Nobody had left my mother’s house, and we never thought that was strange. But it was, the way we were held there.

  So when did Fhassin stop seeing her as silly and begin to see Nouzha as a person? I didn’t suspect it. The giggling girls still came by the house, and Fhassin still grinned and didn’t really pay much attention. He and Nouzha were careful, meeting in the afternoon when her husband was building houses outside the Nekropolis in the city and the rest of us were sleeping.

  I think Fhassin did it because he was always a daredevil, like walking on the roofs of the death houses, or the time when he was ten that he took money out of our mother’s money pot so he could sneak out and ride the train. He was lost in the city for hours, finally sneaking back onto the train and risking getting caught as a free-farer.

  No, that isn’t true, The truth must be that he fell in love with her. I was never really in love with Aziz; maybe I’ve never been in love with anyone. How could I understand? I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the family to marry Aziz. How could Fhassin turn his back on the family for Nouzha? But some alchemy must have transformed him, made him see her as something other than a silly girl-yes, it’s a cliché to call her a vain and silly girl, but that’s what she was. For her it was probably like this. She was married, and it wasn’t very exciting anymore, not nearly as interesting as when her husband was courting her. Fhassin made her feel important-look at the risk he was taking-for her. For her!

  But what was going on inside Fhassin? Fhassin despised romantic love, sentimentality.

  Her husband suspected, came home, and caught them. The neighborhood swarmed out into the street to see my brother, shirtless, protecting Nouzha, whose hair was all unbound around her shoulders. Fhassin had a razor, and was holding off her screaming husband. The heat poured all over his brown adolescent shoulders and chest. We stood in the street, sweating. And Fhassin was laughing, deadly serious, but laughing. He was alive. Was it the intensity? Was that the lure for Fhassin? This was my brother, who I had known all my life, and he was a stranger.

  I realized then that the Nekropolis had become a foreign place, and I didn’t know anyone behind the skinmask of their face.

  They took my brother and Nouzha, divorced her from her husband for the adultery trial, flogged them both, then dumped them in prison for thirteen years. I didn’t wait for Aziz to ask me to marry him-not that he would have now. I let my hair go black. I became a dutiful daughter. I hated my life, but I didn’t know how to escape. When I was twenty-one, I was jessed, impressed to feel duty and affection to whoever would pay the fee of my impression.

  I try to explain, but Akhmim doesn’t understand. He has to go. I cry when he’s gone.

  * * *

  Finally, after twenty-eight days, I emerge from my room, white and trembling like Iqurth from the tomb, to face the world and my duties. I don’t kn
ow what the mistress has told Mbarek, but I’m subjected to a vague lecture I’m sure Mbarek thinks of as fatherly. Fadina avoids meeting my eyes when she sees me. The girl who works with the cook watches the floor. I move like a ghost through the women’s quarters. Only the mistress sees me, fastens her eyes on me when I happen to pass her, and her look is cruel. If I hear her, I take to stepping out of the hall if I can.

  Friday afternoon the mistress is playing the Tiles, and I take the cleaning machine to her room. I have checked with Fadina to confirm that she’s not in, but I can’t convince myself that she’s left. Maybe Fadina has forgotten. Maybe the mistress hasn’t told her. I tiptoe in and stand, listening. The usual projection is on-not bismek, but the everyday clutter of silks and fragile tables with silver lace frames, antique lamps, paisley scarfs, and cobalt pottery. The cleaning machine won’t go in with a projection on. I stop and listen, no sound but the breeze through the window hangings. I creep through the quarters, shaking. The bed is unmade, a tumble of blue and silver brocade. That’s unusual, Fadina always makes it. I think about making it, but I decide I’d better not. Do what I always do or the mistress will be on me. Best do only what’s safe. I pick up the clothes off the floor and creep back and turn off the projection. The cleaning machine starts.

  If she comes back early, what will I do? I stand by the projection switch, unwilling to leave, even to put the clothing in the laundry. If she comes back, when I hear her, I’ll snap on the projection machine. The cleaning machine will stop and I’ll take it and leave. It’s the best I can do.

  The cleaning machine snuffles around, getting dust from the windowsills and tabletops, cleaning the floor. It’s slow. I keep thinking I hear her and snapping on the projection. The machine stops and I listen, but I don’t hear anything, so I snap the projection off and the cleaning machine starts again. Finally the rooms are done and the cleaning machine and I make our escape. I have used extra scent on the sheets in the linen closet, the way she likes them, and I have put extra oil in the rings on the lights and extra scent in the air freshener. It’s all a waste, all that money, but that’s what she likes.