Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “We’re not made out of money!” her mother says.

  “You have enough money for her !” the girl says. “I should be in school with that money!”

  “School is a waste with you!” the mistress says. “Your marks are terrible! If you got decent marks, I could see spending the money!”

  “I hate you!” the daughter shrieks. “You never give me a chance!”

  Akhmim. I think of him all the time. Rather than listen, I think of telling Akhmim about the daughter, about the master.

  Emboldened by my mistress’s approval, I rearrange the furniture. I take some things she has-they are not very nice-and put them away. I reprogram the household AI. It is very limited, insufficient for anything as complicated as bismek, but it can handle projections, of course. I remember the things my old mistress used to like and I project cobalt blue vases and silver-framed pictures. Marble floors would overwhelm these rooms, but the ivory tile I pick is nice.

  My mistress is delighted. It is wonderful to work for someone who is easy to please.

  My days are free on Tuesday and half-a-day Sunday. Tuesday my mistress apologizes to me. They are a little tight on credit and she cannot advance my leisure allowance until Sunday, do I mind?

  Well, a little, but I say I don’t. I spend the afternoon making flowers.

  When I make flowers, I think of Akhmim and myself on the bed, surrounded by crushed carnations and irises. It isn’t good to think about Akhmim. He doesn’t miss me, I’m sure. He’s a harni, always an owned thing, subject to the whims of his owners. If they had constructed him with lasting loyalties, his life would be horrible. Surely when the technician constructed his genes, he made certain that Akhmim would forget quickly. He told me that harni do not love. But he also told me that they did. And he told me he didn’t love the mistress, but maybe he only said that because he had to, because I don’t like the old mistress and his duty is to make humans happy.

  I put the blue and white and silver paper flowers in a vase. My mistress thinks they are lovely.

  Long lilies, spiked stamens, and long petals like lolling tongues. Sometimes feelings are in me that have no words and I look at the paper flowers and want to rip them to pieces.

  On Sunday my mistress has my leisure allowance. Mbarek used to add a little something extra, but I realize that in my new circumstances I can’t expect that. I go to the Moussin of the White Falcon, on the edge of the Nekropolis, to listen to the service.

  Then I take the train to the street of Mbarek’s house. I don’t intend to walk down the street, but of course I do. And I stand outside the house, looking for a sign of Akhmim. I’m afraid to stand long, I don’t want anyone to see me. What would I tell them, that I’m homesick? I’m jessed.

  I like to take something to do on the train so the ride isn’t boring. I’ve brought a bag full of paper to make flowers. I can earn a little money on the side by making wreaths. Anything I earn on my own I can keep. I’m not allowed to give it to my mistress, that’s against the law. It’s to protect the jessed that this is true.

  In the Nekropolis we lived in death houses, surrounded by death. Perhaps it isn’t odd that I’m a bit morbid, and perhaps that is why I pull a flower out of my bag and leave it on a windowsill on the men’s side of the house. After all, something did die, although I can’t put in words exactly what it was. I don’t really know which window is Akhmim’s, but it doesn’t matter, it’s just a gesture. It only makes me feel foolish.

  Monday I wake early and drink hot mint tea. I take buckets of water and scrub down the stone courtyard. I make a list of all the repairs that need to be done. I take the mistress’s news printouts and bundle them. She saves them; she subscribes to several news services and she feels that they might be useful. My old mistress would have quite a lot to say about someone who would save news printouts. The mistress goes out to shop and I clean everything in her storage. She has clothes she should throw out, things fifteen years old and hopelessly out of date. (I remember when I wore my hair white. And before when we used to wrap our hair in our veils, the points trailing to the backs of our knees, We looked foolish, affected. How did I get to be so old when I’m not even thirty?)

  I put aside all the things I should mend, but I don’t want to sit yet. I run the cleaning machine, an old clumsy thing even stupider than the one at Mbarek’s. I push myself all day, a whirlwind. There is not enough in this house to do, even if I clean the cleaning machine, so I clean some rooms twice.

  Still, when it is time to go to sleep, I can’t. I sit in my room making a funeral wreath of carnations and tiny, half-open roses. The white roses gleam under my desklight like satin.

  I wake up on my free day, tired and stiff. In the mirror I look ghastly, my hair tangled and my eyes puffy. Just as well the harni never saw me like this, I think. But I won’t think of Akhmim anymore. That part of my life is over, and I have laid a flower at its death house. Today I will take my funeral wreaths around and see if I can find a shop that will buy them. They are good work, surely someone will be interested. It would just be pocket money.

  I take the train all the way to the Nekropolis, carefully protecting my wreaths from the other commuters. All day I walk through the Nekropolis, talking to stallkeepers, stopping sometimes for tea. When I have sold the wreaths, I sit for a while to watch the people and let my tired mind empty.

  I’m at peace, now I can go back to my mistress.

  The Second Koran tells us that the darkness in ourselves is a sinister thing. It waits until we relax, it waits until we reach the most vulnerable moments, and then it snares us. I want to be dutiful, I want to do what I should. But when I go back to the train, I think of where I’m going; to that small house and my empty room. What will I do tonight? Make more paper flowers, more wreaths. I’m sick of them. Sick of the Nekropolis.

  I can take the train to my mistress’s house or I can go by the street where Mbarek’s house is. I’m tired, I’m ready to go to my little room and relax. O Holy One, I dread the empty evening. Maybe I should go by Mbarek’s street just to fill up time. I have all this empty time ahead. Tonight and tomorrow and this week and next month and down through the years, unmarried, empty, until I’m an old dried-up woman Evenings folding paper. Days cleaning someone else’s house. Free afternoons spent shopping a bit, stopping in tea shops because my feet hurt. That is what lives are, aren’t they? Attempts to fill our time with activity designed to prevent us from realizing that there is no meaning? I sit at a tiny table the size of a serving platter and watch the boys hum by on their scooters, girls sitting behind them, clutching their boyfriends’ waists with one hand, holding their veils with the other, while the ends stream and snap behind them, glittering with the shimmer of gold (this year’s fashion).

  So I get off the train and walk to the street where Mbarek lives. And I walk up the street past the house. I stop and look at it. The walls are pale yellow stone. I’m wearing rose and sky blue, but I have gone out without ribbons on my wrists.

  “Hariba,” Akhmim says, leaning on the windowsill, “you’re still sad.”

  He looks familiar and it is easy, as if we do this every evening. “I live a sad life,” I say, my voice even. But my heart is pounding. To see him! To talk to him!

  “I found your token,” he says.

  “My token,” I repeat, not understanding.

  “The flower. I tried to watch every day. I thought you’d come and I missed you.” He disappears for a moment, and then he is sitting on the windowsill, legs and feet outside, and he jumps lightly to the ground.

  I take him to a tea shop. People look at us, wondering what a young woman is doing unescorted with a young man. Let them look. “Order what you want,” I say, “I have some money.”

  “Are you happier?” he asks. “You don’t look happier, you look tired.”

  And he looks perfect, as he always does. Have I fallen in love with him precisely because he isn’t human? I don’t care, I feel love, no matter what the reason. Does a
reason for a feeling matter? The feeling I have for my mistress may be there only because I’m impressed, but the feeling is real enough.

  “My mistress is kind, praise God,” I say, looking at the table. His perfect hand, beautiful nails and long fingers, lies there.

  “Are you happy?” he asks again.

  “Are you?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “A harni doesn’t have the right to be happy or sad.”

  “Neither do I,” I say.

  “That’s your fault. Why did you do it?” he asks. “Why did you choose to be jessed if it makes you unhappy?”

  “It’s hard to find work in the Nekropolis, and I didn’t think I would ever get married.”

  He shakes his head. “Someone would marry you. And if they didn’t, is it awful not to get married?”

  “Is it awful to be jessed?” I ask.

  “Is it?”

  “I thought,” I say, and then I don’t know what to say. “I thought if I was jessed, I wouldn’t care. I thought it would be easy if I was jessed. I thought I would be owned . I mean, my heart would be owned. You know, I wouldn’t need to make choices. I didn’t understand it. I thought I would be happy. But it isn’t like that. Jessing doesn’t make me like it, it just makes it really awful if I leave.”

  How can he understand how our choices are taken from us? He doesn’t even understand freedom and what an illusion it really is.

  “Run away,” he says.

  Leave the mistress? I’m horrified. “She needs me; she can’t run that house by herself and I cost her a great deal of money. She made sacrifices to buy me.”

  “You could live in the Nekropolis and make funeral wreaths,” he points out. “You could talk to whomever you wished and no one would order you around.”

  “I don’t want to live in the Nekropolis,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “There is nothing there for me!”

  “You have friends there.”

  “I wouldn’t if I ran away.”

  “Make new ones,” he says.

  “Would you go?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

  “What if you could make a living, would you run away?”

  “No,” he says, “no.”

  Our tea comes. My face is aflame with color, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think.

  “I’m jessed,” I say. “If I run away, do you know what will happen to me? I’ll be sick. I might die. My own body will turn against me. Maybe, eventually I’ll get well. I’m afraid. I don’t want to be sick. I don’t want it to happen.”

  “Oh, Hariba,” he says softly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say these things to you.”

  “I didn’t think you could have these feelings,” I whisper.

  He shrugs again. “I can have any feelings,” he says. “Harni aren’t jessed.”

  “You told me to think of you as a dog,” I remind him. “Loyal.”

  “I’m loyal,” he says. “You didn’t ask who I was loyal to.”

  “You’re supposed to be loyal to the mistress.”

  He drums the table with his fingers, taptaptaptap taptaptaptap . “Harni aren’t like geese,” he says, not looking at me. His earring is golden, he is rich and fine-looking. I had not realized at my new place how starved I had become for fine things. “We don’t impress on the first person we see.” Then he shakes his head. “I shouldn’t talk about all this nonsense. You have to go. I have to go back before they miss me.”

  “I could steal you away.”

  “No,” he says. “You said you will get sick. You might die.” But he would go with me. I can see it in his face. What is there for him at Mbarek’s? The mistress ignores him. It is me he has bonded to. It is me he loves.

  No one has ever loved me like he does. I am already dead if I stay with my mistress. I realize that I’ve been thinking about death. I really want to die.

  “Maybe we are already dead, living this way,” I say.

  He doesn’t understand me, not at all.

  “We have to talk more,” I say.

  “We have to go,” he insists. Then he smiles at me and all the unhappiness disappears from his face. He doesn’t seem human anymore, he seems pleasant; harni . I get a chill. He’s alien. I understand him less than I understand people like my old mistress. We get up and he looks away as I pay.

  Outside Mbarek’s house I tell him, “I’ll come back next Tuesday.” On Tuesday I get my spending money.

  * * *

  It’s good I got so much cleaning done before I saw Ahkmim because I sleepwalk through the next few days. I leave the cleaning machine in the doorway, where the mistress almost trips over it. I forget to set the clothes in order. I don’t know what to think.

  I hear the mistress say to the neighbor, “She’s a godsend, but moody. One day she’s doing everything, the next day she can’t be counted on to remember to set the table.”

  What right does she have to talk about me that way? Her house was a pigsty when I came.

  What am I thinking? What is wrong with me that I blame my mistress? Where is my head? I feel ill, my eyes water, and my head fills. I can’t breathe, I feel heavy. I must be dutiful. I used to have this feeling once in a while when I was first jessed, it’s part of the adjustment. It must be the change from Mbarek. I have to adjust all over again.

  I find the mistress, tell her I’m not feeling well, and go lie down.

  The next afternoon, just before dinner, it happens again. The day after that is fine, but then it happens at midmorning of the third day. It is Tuesday and I have the day off. My voice is hoarse, my head aches. What is wrong with me?

  I know what is wrong with me. I’m trying not to think about what I’m planning because if I let myself think, the jessing will fight with me. I’m trying to be two people, one a good girl and the other a secret, hidden even from my own self.

  I’m afraid. I don’t want to die. Although I don’t mind the idea of being dead, just dying. Inside me is a tiny part that would like it all to stop, to end.

  I wonder if I am trying to commit suicide. I’m crazy. But if I think about it, then the sickness comes on me, worse and worse. I can’t stand it here and I can’t go away.

  I go to the Moussin in the afternoon, lugging my bag, which is heavy with paper, and sit in the cool dusty darkness, nursing my poor head. I feel as if I should pray. I should ask for help, for guidance. The Moussin is so old that the stone is irregularly worn and through my slippers I can feel the little ridges and valleys in the marble. Up around the main worship hall there are galleries hidden by arabesques of scrollwork. Ayesha and I used to sit up there when we were children. Above that, sunlight flashes through clerestory windows. Where the light hits the marble floor, it shines hard, hurting my eyes and my head. I rest my forehead on my arm, turned sideways on the bench so I can lean against the back. With my eyes closed I smell incense and my own scent of perfume and perspiration.

  There are people there for service, but no one bothers me. Isn’t that amazing?

  Or maybe it is only because anyone can see that I’m impure.

  I’m tired of my own melodrama. I keep thinking that people are looking at me, that someone is going to say something to me. I don’t know where to go.

  I don’t even pretend to think of going back to my room. I get on the train and go to Mbarek’s house. I climb the stairs from the train-these are newer, but like the floor of the Moussin they are unevenly worn, sagging in the centers from the weight of this crowded city. What would it be like to cross the sea and go north? To go to Spain ? I used to want to travel, to go to a place where people had yellow hair, to see whole forests of trees. Cross the oceans, learn other languages. I told Ayesha that I would even like to taste dog, or swine. She thought I was showing off, but it was true, once I would have liked to try things.

  I’m excited, full of energy and purpose. I can do anything. I can understand Fhassin, standing in the street with his razor, laughing. It is worth it
, anything is worth it for this feeling of being alive. I have been jessed, I’ve been asleep for a long time.

  There are people on Mbarek’s street. I stand in front of the house across the street. What am I going to say if someone opens the door? I’m waiting to meet a friend . What if they don’t leave, what if Akhmim sees them and doesn’t come out? The sun bakes my hair, my head. Akhmim, where are you? Look out the window . He’s probably waiting on the mistress. Maybe there is a bismek party and those women are poisoning Akhmim. They could do anything, they own him. I want to crouch in the street and cover my head in my hands, rock and cry like a widow woman from the Nekropolis. Like my mother must have done when my father died. I grew up without a father, maybe that’s why I’m wild. Maybe that’s why Fhassin is in prison and I’m headed there. I pull my veil up so my face is shadowed. So no one can see my tears.

  Oh, my head. Am I drunk? Am I insane? Has the Holy One, seeing my thoughts, driven me mad?

  I look at my brown hands. I cover my face.

  “Hariba?” He takes my shoulders.

  I look up at him, his beautiful familiar face, and I’m stricken with terror. What is he? What am I trusting my life, my future to? O Holy One, I’m afraid. What if I die?

  “What’s wrong?” he asks. “Are you ill?”

  “I’m going insane,” I say. “I can’t stand it, Akhmim, I can’t go back to my room-”

  “Hush,” he says, looking up the street and down. “You have to. I’m only a harni . I can’t do anything, I can’t help you.”

  “We have to go. We have to go away somewhere, you and I.”

  He shakes his head. “Hariba, please. You must hush.”

  “We should be free,” I say. My head hurts very badly. The tears keep coming, even though I’m not really crying.

  “I can’t be free,” he says. “That was just talk.”

  “I have to go now,” I say. “I’m jessed, Akhmim. It’s hard, but if I don’t go now, I’ll never go.”