Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “I’ll work, if you want,” she says.

  He frowns.

  “She doesn’t want to be alone,” I say. “She’s a harni, Karim-salah.”

  He looks at me, then at her, then at all of us, frowning. “All right,” he says finally, and turns on his heel and goes downstairs. The girl stays with us all night, but no one has a ribbon for her, and when we aren’t working, we stay touching her until finally, when the night is over, Tabi brings her an analgesic patch. There is the sharp smell of rubbing alcohol when she peels it open. I can still smell it over the cinnamon skin smell when we all curl up together to sleep for a few hours.

  Hariba is ready for her hashish when I get home, and after I’ve gotten her to eat some sweet rice.

  I think about ways to make things better, but I can’t think of anything. I wouldn’t give up being with the harni, and I can’t leave Hariba alone and sick. Hariba brought me here, and I won’t forget that, not even for the pleasure of harni company.

  I watch her sleep on the bed. Her skin is dry. I’ll get some of Tabi’s oil and oil Hariba’s skin until it’s soft and supple and warm. I sleep and dream of men’s bodies and the things that I can do that excite them, like a puzzle of organs and openings. It isn’t a bad dream, just tiring.

  * * *

  “Akhmim?”

  I’m walking near the Moussin of the White Falcon, looking for a shop that Mouse told me about where I can buy a water pipe to replace the little clay pipe I got from Mouse and some hashish. The hashish, he promises, is decently priced and I’ll be glad to have made the trip.

  “Akhmim?” It’s the widow, Myryam, who bought Hariba’s canna lily wreath.

  “Hello! Hello!” I say, and her face melts with relief.

  “I waited for you twice,” she says and shakes a finger at me.

  “Oh, pardon!” I say. “I found a job in the evenings and I haven’t been able to wait there for you!”

  She’s pleased to have the excuse to forgive me. She asks me about my wife.

  I lift my hands in a little helpless gesture.

  “Ah,” she says, “poor thing. Listen, then, I’ve found you a job. Not a real job at first” -she makes vague motions with her hands-“but there is a man that my brother knows, he needs someone to take care of visitors, show them places for a few hours.”

  I start to say that I’ve a job, but the hashish for Hariba is expensive. “Every day?” I say.

  “No, not at first,” she says. “Just once or twice a week. But you’re such a decent young man, I’m certain there’ll be more and more opportunities.”

  I think about it. The sun’s hot and the air is so dry it makes your nose bleed. A few hours, maybe it would pay for the hashish.

  * * *

  The man that her brother knows is younger than I expected. “Myryam sent you?” he says. His name is Yusef. “Good. Have you lived here all your life?”

  “No,” I admit, “I used to live outside of here, about an hour and a half away.”

  “Hmm,” he says. I feel his disappointment. “Well, you could follow Saad on a tour for a couple of days, assist, and we’ll see if you pick up the spiel. You know this is only a couple of times a week?”

  “Myryam told me.” I smile to show this isn’t any problem. That I like him.

  “Saad is taking a group to the souk and the Moussin in” -he leans back to check the clock on the wall-“forty-five minutes. Can you go with him?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “It’s not hard, if you’re good with people. Some people can do it, some can’t.” He looks past me and out the door. “Some, like Saad, never get it right.” He grins. “Oh, Saad, didn’t see you standing there.”

  Saad is slight, with graying hair. He shakes his head, but he is smiling. “Taking half-naked foreigners to the Moussin isn’t enough punishment. I have to have a boss who is a crazy man.”

  “It’s a business for the insane,” Yusef says.

  “That’s true,” says Saad.

  We drink mint tea and they complain about the people they take around. “Foreigners,” Yusef says, “they aren’t bad. You show them the Moussin, you tell them a couple of stories about martyrs, that’s all they want.”

  The foreigners come on a big lorry-bus. I’m expecting the women to have on next to nothing, but they are decently, if oddly, covered. They wear long skirts and sandals colored like children’s candy. The men wear white shin-length caftans over their bright shirts and sand-colored trousers. Their shoes are big, complicated things with laces and ties. They all look club-footed, but they walk all right.

  They have a translator with them, a women with strands of windblown hair showing under her scarf. She comes up to us, her shoulders hunched and her mouth pinched. Her eyes are invisible behind big sunglasses. Then she smiles. “Yusef, Saad. We’re not late?”

  “Late?” Yusef says. “No, not at all.”

  “They all dressed for the Moussin. They’re all right?”

  “They are fine,” Saad says. “They understand that the women can’t go into the sanctuary?”

  “Yes. Into the Moussin, but not the sanctuary.”

  The woman talks as if she were a man. I’ve never seen a foreigner before. Her skin is pink and delicate, but the wind’s reddened her cheeks and roughed her up.

  She turns and talks to them in their language, beckoning. The crowd straggles over. She introduces Saad, who greets them in their language. But that’s all of it that he speaks. He outlines the tour, stopping to let her translate. I study the foreigners, their faces as pale as cheese. A few talk to each other, but most of them listen like schoolchildren, carefully watching Saad when he speaks although they don’t understand him.

  * * *

  He takes them down the street to a tea shop and I follow. They sit down and the owner pours them watery mint tea.

  “You said we wouldn’t be coming here again,” the foreign woman says.

  Saad shrugs. “Yusef makes the decisions, I can only suggest.”

  “I get complaints about this place every time.” She starts to say more, but someone calls out to her and she goes over to talk to them.

  “It’s not very good tea,” Saad says to me, “but they don’t really care.”

  It’s not a very nice tea shop, either, but it’s big enough for all of them. A regular tea shop would have been too busy anyway, there wouldn’t have been enough chairs. They sip the indifferent tea while the owner shows them brass and silver bracelets to buy.

  Eventually Saad has the foreign woman round them up again and we troop back up the street to the lorry-bus. It’s a tall narrow thing with steps up. Saad directs me to the front seat, so high I look down on the driver. It’s cool inside and the windows are like smoke, just cutting the glare of the day. The movement of the air raises goose bumps on the skin of my arms.

  The city looks different from the bus-distant.

  The foreigners smile at me as they climb on and file past. A couple say, “Good morning,” badly. I say, “Good morning” back to them.

  We go to the souk first, and Saad explains that we are going to go to the street of gold and then to look at carpets. They all get off in single file and clump at the edge of the bus. I get off the bus and the heat is like a blanket, welcome after the chill of the bus. Saad and the foreign woman walk off and the foreigners follow and so do I. I’ve never been to the street of gold.

  It isn’t like I pictured it. A street of gold should be a bit more astonishing, I think, but trash still collects in the gutters and most of the shops don’t have much gold. I haven’t walked very far before I’m hot-the bus is very cold.

  Saad explains how the street of gold has been in the bazaar in one form or another for nearly two millennia. At one time there were four hundred jewelers working here, and beggars used to sift the dust for gold. They’d scoop up the dirt out of the street and put it in a pan and pour water over it, then they’d swirl the water around-he gestures to show the motion while the foreign woma
n translates-and the heavier gold flake would settle to the bottom of the flat pan.

  I think it sounds impossible, but the foreigners seem to like it. Saad’s a little like a harni . He lives off of making these people happy.

  He tells them the names of some of the families who have been here four and five hundred years. He tells them how to tell good-quality gold from stuff that’s been adulterated.

  He tells them about the symbols of our country: the lion, the eagle, the goat, and the snake. “Watch for them in jewelry,” he says. I wonder why anyone would want to come and be lectured at. He acts as if they are all children.

  The foreigners disperse to shop.

  “That’s all?” I ask.

  Saad shrugs. “They come to shop,” he says. “The Moussin is different.”

  I walk down the street. Two women are trying to learn the price of something. They keep motioning for the jeweler to write it down, but he doesn’t seem to understand.

  “How much?” I ask him.

  He’s old, and his eyes disappear in wrinkles when he smiles.

  I write the sum down on one of the women’s minders. She’s looking at a bracelet.

  I pick up a smooth piece that ends in lion heads and open it. “This,” I say.

  She dutifully holds out her arm and I let it close around her wrist. It’s hard to tell how old foreigners are. She is lovely and looks like a girl, but she has lines around her eyes and mouth, as if she’s been kept artificially young.

  She and her companion look at the bracelet, chattering. Her companion is older. I can tell that, even if her companion’s hair is young and red.

  She asks the shopkeeper how much for the bracelet. The sum he tells her is far too high-I write it on the slate, but draw a line through it and write down half the amount and show it to them.

  The shopkeeper bargains with me. The amount we agree on is still way too high, but they are foreigners.

  The woman is delighted and embarrassed. The older woman wants something, too, so I walk with them until she finds a bracelet she likes. It’s flat and chased with a pattern of orange leaves and curliques.

  When both women have their bracelets, I find Saad. I’m not sure how long we’ll stay here. He’s been watching me with the two women.

  “If you do that for one,” Saad says, “they’ll all want it.” But he’s smiling. The foreign woman who translates smiles, too.

  This is easy. These people want very much to be pleased.

  But I’m not working with the harni . I’d rather sleep.

  * * *

  When I come back home, Hariba is shaking in fever. “Akhmim,” she says, reaching out for me. Her need for me is nothing like the need of the two foreigners. Their need was simple and clean and it was easy to fill them up, but Hariba is sick. Frightened. When she needed love and attention, that was easy. When she sat with her fingers full of paper, folding flowers and trying to teach me the names, I’d say her name and it was like rain. She’d turn her face toward me.

  “I’m here, Hariba,” I say.

  “It’s all shaking,” she says.

  Her face is white and red and her hair clings to her back in damp rat tails. She’s dehydrated.

  “You need some tea,” I say.

  “We need to get outside,” she says. “It’s going to shake down on top of us!”

  “What’s going to shake down on top of us?”

  “The roof!” she says.

  “It’s not shaking,” I say, my voice as gentle as I can make it. “You have a fever. Lie back down.”

  “No!” she says, “Don’t you feel it?” She grabs the sheet in her hands, wringing it, “O Prophet! Please, please, we have to get out!” I sit down next to her, holding her shoulders.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Hush now, it’s okay.” But my voice isn’t getting through to her. I feel nervousness rising in me to match her fear.

  “No,” she says, and tries to push me away. She shoves hard, but I pull her close to me. She reaches up to touch my cheek, and grabs at my face with her nails. I rear back and she lunges away from her covers and she’s past me and out into the street.

  “Hariba!” I shout and chase her.

  Her white sleeping robe is thin cotton and I can see her through it, almost as if she’s naked. Poor Hariba would be mortified if she knew what she was doing, that she’d be dressed this way where strangers can see her. Her skin is brown where the damp cotton clings to her and she turns toward me and half-crouches, her face in anguish. She has her hands in front of her, pleading, but like claws.

  “Hariba,” I say. “Hariba.” I croon it. “Hariba.” She hears it and it speaks to something in her fever, but it’s a tenuous thing and I’m afraid she’ll run away from me. “Hariba,” I say and slowly crouch down, sit down in the dust of the street. “Hariba.”

  She hesitates, partly I think because she has forgotten what she’s running to or from. She sways.

  “Hariba,” I say again. Just her name. Long, and drawn-out, low, and almost a whisper.

  I’m hypnotizing her with her name.

  “Come back to me,” I whisper.

  She looks bemused.

  “I’ll help you,” I whisper.

  She shakes her head-and the movement unbalances her and she sits down in a heap.

  I scrabble over to her-these are my good pants and they’ll be dusty at work tonight, but what does it matter, since I don’t wear clothes at work. Then again, I’m not sure I can leave her like this. What if I come home and find she’s gone, wandering the streets in a fever dream?

  “It’s shaking,” she says.

  “Nothing’s shaking,” I say. “It’s your poor fevered head.”

  “I’m cold,” she says.

  It’s blisteringly hot, but there’s a breeze. She’s shivering and when I take her back inside, into the shade of our house, her teeth start chattering. I whisper her name and wrap her in blankets. There is no more wonderful sound to a human than their name.

  “I’ll make you some tea, Hariba, my Hariba,” I say. “It will warm you up.”

  “When I close my eyes, I’m dreaming and I’m not even asleep,” she says. At least my presence means something to her.

  “I know, I know, sweet Hariba.”

  “Where’s my mother?” she asks.

  “Your mother? At her home.”

  “Take me home,” she says.

  “I can’t,” I say. The moment I say it I realize it’s the wrong answer.

  “Akhmim, take me home.”

  “Not this afternoon,” I say. “Soon, but not this afternoon.”

  “I want to go home,” she says. She’s crying now.

  “Your mother is probably selling wreaths,” I say. “You rest now, we’ll see your mother later.” That soothes her. I should remember that.

  She curls up on her side, wrapped in the blanket. I make mint tea and bring it to her.

  “I don’t want it,” she says.

  “You need it. Come on. It will warm you up.”

  She doesn’t want it, but I sit and cajole and bully and lie. Sweat is trickling down my ribs, it’s such hard work. But she sits up and sips tea. I keep at her, getting her to drink about half the cup.

  “I’m hot,” she says.

  She lies down, and after a bit she starts moaning. I get a cloth and a bowl of water. “Come on,” I say, and pull her cotton shift over her head. She raises her thin arms, listless as a child. I can see her sternum and the bones of her chest disappearing under her tiny breasts. She lies back down and I start to wipe her down with the cool water. Her nipples tighten up, but she doesn’t acknowledge the cold.

  She looks past me, as if I’m not even here.

  And then she seizes.

  She clenches her teeth and tightens all her muscles, her fingers in fists, and at first I think she’s angry, but she starts going, “Unh, unh, unh,” and I can see a sliver of white just under her half-closed eyelids.

  “Hariba!” I say. “Hariba!”<
br />
  She can’t hear me for the storm in her. Is this the shaking she was afraid of? I keep calling her name, calling her, and then she relaxes. But she’s empty, her eyes lolling white in her sockets for a few seconds, until she closes up as if she’s in a deep sleep or a faint.

  “Hariba,” I whisper.

  Eventually she opens her eyes. “Umm?” she says, her look vacant.

  “Look at me,” I say, and at first she doesn’t, but finally she seems to make an effort and her eyes find me.

  I push her tangled hair away from her face. “Just rest,” I say, “I’m here.” It’s a relief, though, because for a few moments she doesn’t have any need in her.

  An hour later she has another brief seizure.

  I don’t go to work. I sit with her while the shadows lengthen, and I feed her sips of water. A little and a little more and a little more, until finally, around midnight, her fever breaks some and she falls into what seems to be a natural sleep.

  * * *

  Hariba’s friend Ayesha answers the door, for which I’m thankful. “Yes?” she says, drawing her veil up over her mouth, thinking she’s in the presence of a strange man, and then she recognizes me. “You!” she hisses. “What have you done with Hariba?”

  I don’t know what to say. “I…I haven’t done anything with Hariba. She’s sick, I need your help.”

  She glares at me. I think she’s going to shout for help. “Please!” I say, “Hariba is sick and she wants her mother!”

  “Take me to her,” she says.

  Ayesha doesn’t speak to me while we walk. Her anger makes me nervous. I keep smiling at her, trying to get her to see that I don’t mean any harm, that I’m just trying to help Hariba. I’m not bad, I want to say. “I’ve found some work,” I explain. “And we rented a house like yours, like hers. She feels more at home. But she’s sick, I think from the jessing.” We turn onto our little street. “It’s that one.” I point. “That’s where we’re living.”

  Ayesha runs to the door and calls for Hariba.

  “Here,” Hariba answers in a small voice. It’s early in the day and her fever is down this morning. She felt normal to my touch when I left to get Ayesha.