by Francis King
There was a makeshift gate, fastened with string. One of the soldiers, presumably the man in command, ran forward and, having fumbled for a time with the knot of the string, dragged the gate open. Osman now turned and beckoned to her.
Sulkily she went forward. ‘You shouldn’t have left me like that. On my own. In a place like this.’
‘What can happen to you? You are now Mohammed Kher’s guest. Nothing can happen to his guest.’
What sort of market was this? She had expected to see stalls laden with fruit and vegetables, with garishly coloured clothes, and with no less garishly coloured bottles of scent, like the ones visited by her, Harriet and Addy in Cairo. Stretching ahead of her were closely huddled clumps of bodies, all motionless, the once black skin almost ashen with dust, the faces devoid of any sign of emotion, the eyes like the artificial ones, lambent and expressionless, in the masks of the stuffed animals in the hall of John’s country mansion. Fascinated and appalled, she moved her gaze hurriedly from one of these groups to another. Men, women and children were indiscriminately tethered together by straw ropes linking their wrists and ankles. They waited, almost totally naked and totally apathetic, under the slanting afternoon sunlight. The presence of a white woman, something wholly new to them, aroused absolutely no interest.
It was then that Alexine saw, under a tree devoid of any leaves, what it took her some seconds to identify as the swollen body of a woman whose sagging breasts and greying hair indicated that she was approaching old age. A straw rope had been pulled so tight around her neck, biting deep into it, that she must have been garroted. There were livid weals on her round, upturned buttocks and on her back. Flies were clustered on these wounds, on her bulging eyes, around her nostrils and in her raw, exposed vagina. Alexine put both hands over her mouth and gasped in horror.
‘What is this?’ She turned on Osman. ‘ What sort of market is this?’
But she already knew the answer to her questions.
‘It is good for you to see,’ he said in the easy, half-mocking tone that he so often used to her.
‘Good!’ She was furious. It was only later that she thought that perhaps he was right. It was good for someone as privileged as herself to witness the horrors that so many people in this continent were inexorably doomed to undergo.
Now she noticed the plump, well-groomed Arabs in their flowing robes, wandering in twos and threes from group to group. One put out a hand and, as though he were assessing some livestock, first pinched the skin of a woman’s belly between finger and thumb, and then prised open the mouth of the child huddling against her. Having turned away from this couple, he began a discussion with the Arab next to him. Later, Osman told her that the Arabs were constantly selling and reselling the slaves among themselves, each time with the aim of further profit. It was, Alexine thought, a macabre parody of the commercial transactions conducted on the bourse by her father and John, with human beings taking the place of stocks and shares.
‘It’s disgusting!’
Osman enjoyed her repugnance. He threw back his head and laughed. Then he beckoned: ‘Come. Come! The best are over there. There!’ He pointed to the farthest end of the enclosure.
She forced herself to go with him, though her first impulse had been to turn away and quit the place. She must plumb this midden to its depths, she told herself. She must submit to having her civilized sensibilities ravished, just as these uncivilized bodies had been ravished. She owed that to them and the humanity that she shared with them. But, her gorge rising as the stench of the naked flesh arose about her, it was only by an exertion of her formidable will that she kept herself from vomiting.
Two of the Arabs were haggling with Kher, raising their voices and making sweeping gestures. One of them, the more vociferous and the younger, had a pock-marked face and a wall-eye. The other had a vast, high belly protruding before him, as though he were pregnant. What was the object of such vigorous bargaining? She could not yet see. As Osman thrust his way between the shackled people now jammed closer and closer together in his path, she trailed after him, eager to discover. From time to time he would put out a hand to shove away, or a foot to kick aside, one of these human obstacles. Later, he was to tell her that all the merchandise at this end of the enclosure belonged to Kher.
Now, at last, she and Osman had managed to reach the three Arabs. Their voices, raised in increasingly vehement argument, might in their shrillness have been mistaken for women’s. Between them, his overlarge feet and hands bound, stood a skinny little boy with huge, thickly lashed eyes; cracked, half-open lips revealed that one of his front-teeth, the gum raw, must have been recently knocked out. The pregnant-looking Arab waddled around him, examining him as a connoisseur might examine some dubiously authenticated piece of sculpture in a gallery. He pointed to one of the boy’s almost non-existent calves, and remarked in Arabic: ‘ No muscle there.’ From time to time shifting from foot to foot or, lizard-like, flicking a tongue in a usually futile attempt to frighten away the flies settling on his nostrils, the boy remained totally indifferent to this scrutiny.
Amazing the men with her knowledge of Arabic, Alexine asked, ‘Why don’t you untie him?’
‘Why? Why?’ All three stared at her, as Kher rapped out the words, his hands hidden in his sleeves and his huge chest thrust out. ‘Because this boy has already run away once. We caught him. He ran away with his mother. We caught both. She died. Luckily he’s still alive. You can see, he’s not very strong but he’s healthy. Perhaps I can sell him to one or other of these men.’
Was it the mother’s body that she had seen, bloated by heat, under the tree? It had looked elderly but perhaps she had been wrong in assuming it to be so. If it was indeed the mother’s body, then the boy showed no sorrow for her death or fear for his own future.
The Arab with the pock-marked face now also circled the boy, examining him scrupulously. Then he held up three fingers, indicating the highest price to which he would go. Kher shook his head and laughed. The other man said something, and Kher shook his head again.
Suddenly Alexine was aware that the boy, as fragile and beautiful as a marmoset, was gazing at her. There was no surprise, curiosity or appeal in his eyes. They were totally blank. She remembered Sammy, plump, smiling, clean, dressed in the extremely expensive suit that Philip’s tailor had, after three protracted fittings, completed for him; this recollection stung her like the hornet that, only two or three days before, had alighted on her forearm and then, before she could do anything about it, had driven deep its poisonous barb.
She gazed back into those unfathomable eyes. Like all the other crowded bodies, his pitifully meagre one looked as if it had been dusted with ash. It was only at the crotch, between his stick-like legs, that the skin still glowed ebony black, as it must have done before he had started on the unending trek up from the heart of Africa.
‘How much?’
‘How much?’ Kher drew in his chin and then turned his head to one side. ‘How much?’ Now he repeated the words not to Alexine but to Osman, as though to ask: ‘What does this crazy white woman want?’
Osman looked over to Alexine. ‘Do you want to buy him?’ he asked in Arabic, not in the English they had so far been using between them during the excursion.
‘Yes. I want to buy him.’
The younger of the Arabs began to protest: he and his partner had already made an offer for the boy, it was too late for this woman to make one.
Kher, amused, smiled and shook his head. No, it was not too late, not at all. The sum offered by his two friends – he indicated them with a pliant hand, palm upwards – was too small. If they wished to increase it, then that was another matter. Otherwise …
‘How much are you willing to pay?’ Osman asked Alexine, again in Arabic. She knew that he was yet again sniffing out a commission.
‘How much does he want?’
‘How much do you want?’ Osman asked Kher.
Kher considered. His two friends here had offered so m
uch – he named the sum. It was far too little for a healthy boy with many, many years of work ahead of him. She would have to double it at least.
‘Why do you want him?’ the older Arab asked her.
‘To free him.’
All four men burst into laughter. The boy’s eyes were still constandy fixed on her, never on them.
‘You can’t free every slave in Africa,’ Osman said. ‘It would be as difficult as catching every fly.’
‘No. But I can make a start with one. I want to free him. Then – free – he can come with us if he wishes, or he can go home.’
‘Go home! He’ll be captured again. And, anyway, how can he travel all those miles without any food or money?’ Osman spoke with indulgent mockery. The idea was preposterous, but since it came from a woman and a white one at that, he was prepared to make allowances.
Unlike Harriet, Addy, Nanny Rose and Daan, Alexine had so far never bargained. A price was asked and, however preposterous, she paid it When the others remonstrated with her, she would reply: ‘Why waste time arguing about a penny or two in this heat?’ But now she bargained implacably. When Kher again reminded her that, since the boy was so young, she would probably get years and years of service out of him, she pointed to a crescent-shaped scar on his right shoulder-blade. When Kher claimed that, though so skinny, the boy’s arms were muscular, she indicated that one of his toes overlapped the other, as though it were deformed.
Finally, they agreed a price. It was far higher than it would have been for an Arab purchaser but far lower than the one first quoted. The next question was how she was to pay. She would, she said, have to return the way she had come and then send the money back by Osman or someone else whom she could trust. Kher was dubious. He could not let the boy go until he had the cash in his hand. He held out the hand, cupped, to indicate this.
The two other would-be purchasers stood mutely listening to the argument. Neither bore Alexine or Kher any ill will for having cheated them of their purchase. In similar circumstances, they would have acted precisely as Kher had done. Suddenly one of them pointed at the gold chain around Alexine’s neck. The ivory crucifix at the end of it, hidden by her robe, had been a christening present from Queen Sophia; the chain itself she had bought in Cairo, since the original chain had been too heavy. Why did she not pay with that? the Arab asked.
Yes, why not? The others, having examined the chain – she shrank as the pock-marked Arab put out a filthy hand and lifted it up close enough for his purblind eyes to focus on it – agreed. That would be the best solution. Then the boy could return with her at once.
She hesitated. The gold chain had cost considerably more than the sum agreed for the boy. Oh, never mind! She raised her arms and undid the clasp. Deftly, she removed the crucifix, placing it in a pocket of her breeches. She held out the chain. ‘ You’ve won yourself a bargain,’ she told Kher.
He gave an impudent laugh, his narrow eyes widening. Yes, he had won himself a bargain, he knew that, as did his companions. Turning, he shouted out a name, and at once one of his soldiers came running. He pointed at the boy, and the soldier then drew a large, curved knife from his belt. When he approached the boy with it, the boy never flinched The soldier cut first the rope round the boy’s ankles and then the one binding his wrists together. The boy rubbed his left wrist, where the rope had bitten deep, with the palm of his right hand. He showed no emotion. Perhaps Alexine thought, he did not realize that now he was free not merely from his bonds but from his captors.
Kher put out a hand to the boy’s shoulder and gave him what was almost an affectionate shove in Alexine’s direction. ‘Now he’s yours,’ he said. It was as though he were a breeder handing over a newly purchased dog.
Alexine felt a surge of triumph and relief, such as she had once experienced at an auctioneers in Bond Street, after having at last succeeded in outbidding an elderly, eventually furious old man for a compass that had once belonged to Mungo Park. Somehow, in Cairo, the compass had disappeared, either stolen or stowed away in some forgotten place from which she hoped that it would eventually emerge. ‘We’d better get moving,’ Alexine told Osman. The sun was sinking in the cleft between the hills. The straggly trees, once silvery, were now a charred black, I flecked here and there with molten gold.
‘How’s he to travel?’ Osman asked. ‘Do you want to buy a donkey for him? I’m sure someone will sell one.’ He was thinking of yet another commission. ‘He can’t walk.’
‘He can ride in front of me on the horse.’
‘Impossible!’
She shook her head. ‘We’ll try.’
Silent and naked, the boy remained close to Alexine as they made their way back to Kher’s house and the horses. She found a searing pathos in his continued indifference to what might happen to him. He could not have understood any part of their conversation and so could. not now know that he was free. Unless, she thought, by some miracle he had intuited it. That would explain his closeness to her, his face constantly upturned to gaze at her, as though she alone, of all the people around him, were someone to be trusted.
‘We must find something for him to wear.’
‘He’s used to being naked.’
‘Yes. That may be. But it’s not what we’re used to. Can’t we buy him some clothes?’
‘Here?’ Osman laughed in incredulity. ‘You can see …’
Suddenly she pulled off the linen scarf wrapped around her head. As she dangled it from one hand, the cool wind that so often arose at this hour tugged it away, to make it flutter out from her like a streamer. ‘Have you got a knife with you?’
Osman fumbled in his belt and eventually produced a dagger.
She held up the scarf and then plunged the blade into it. Having cut a hole, she turned towards the boy and slipped the hole over his neck. He made no attempt to resist, merely staring down at the newly created garment. The men all began to laugh. On an impulse she put out an arm and drew the boy to her. There was a pungent odour to his body, which all at once revived that previous memory, so piercing in its unexpected advent, of Sammy.
The boy huddled up to her, as an animal might to its dam for protection. Then, as though suspecting some subterfuge that might destroy him, he jerked his pitifully thin body away from her and let out a single, abrupt wail.
Precipitately, the night fell before they reached the camp. With one hand, Alexine held the reins. The other hand was against the boy’s midriff, the taut skin of which was hot to the touch even at this hour and even through the linen scarf, as her arms encircled him. Totally limp, eyes closed, he might have been one of the dolls that her father used to bring her back from his travels. Reluctant to move for fear of awaking or even dislodging him, she felt an increasing discomfort. But, oddly, this discomfort, so far from bringing any exasperation with it, as it would have done on any other occasion, merely filled her with contentment.
She leaned forward to rest her cheek on the boy’s hair. Her nostrils filled with the smell that emanated from the fur of the cats that, now kept in wicker cages for fear that they might escape, she would from time to time release and hold in turn, some wriggling furiously and others contentedly purring, up against her face, before she put out their food for them.
‘You all right, mademoiselle?’
‘Yes. Fine. Thank you.’
‘You wish me to take boy?’
‘No, no. It’s fine. Fine.’
Her arm around the small body was aching. Her back was aching. But she was filled with an emotion that she had rarely felt since Sammy’s abrupt disappearance: tenderness. With Adolph she had felt sexual passion, possession, love, contentment, happiness, joy; never this pervading, soothing, almost sorrowful tenderness as she held the body of this creature, so totally unlike herself, close against her own. In moments of annoyance, Harriet or Addy would accuse her of having no deep feelings for creatures other than her animals. Was that how she now regarded her purchase? Was he one with the dogs that she patted and the cats that she s
troked? She had, on first seeing him, thought of him as a beautiful, solemn little marmoset. But he was a human, for God’s sake he was a human!
That night, as she lay sleepless, he lay sleeping, head supported on crooked arm, on some cushions covered by a rug at the foot of her bed. She had tried to indicate to him that he should sleep with the Egyptian men, already huddled, separated into groups by age or friendship, round a long line of dying fires, but either he had not understood her or, having understood her, had been determined not to comply, having sensed the men’s hostility at having this little black savage foisted on to them.
‘You can’t have him in your tent!’ Nanny Rose had protested. ‘What a thing! You could catch something from him.’
Alexine had laughed and put an arm round the boy’s shoulders.
As the dawn began to break, she sat up in bed and saw, with horror, that he was no longer beside her.
‘Monkey! Monkey! Where are you?’ Without thinking, never having used it before, she used that name to call him, as she scrambled off the low camp bed.
In her night-shift and slippers, she emerged from her tent. Harriet, aroused by her calling, almost simultaneously emerged from hers. ‘You can’t call him that,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s not an animal. He’s a human being.’
‘I’m only being affectionate. I love monkeys. You know that.’ Alexine now felt ashamed and that made her tone indignant.
Harriet shook her head. ‘No. It’s not right. Please, darling. Don’t call him that again. I don’t like it. And if you think about it, I don’t think you’ll like it either. Anyway – what’s the trouble?’