by Nell Gavin
“Why would you do this for me?” I ask. It is not typical of people to do good for one another, particularly strangers. “What is it you want in return?” I ask with narrowed eyes.
He rolls his eyes and gives a dramatic shrug. “I may run out of kohl and have to borrow some from you.” He pats his hair, and sighs as if he is bored.
“I will happily give it to you,” I say solemnly, meaning more than I say.
Chapter 3
•~۞~•
After a few months, I fall into the life as if I have known no other. I meet all the other women who work as I do, and develop relationships with them of both friendship and enmity.
We have differences, and we reconcile them like whores, arguing with shrieks and scratching nails, reasoning with fistfuls of each other’s hair. Our disagreements are debated in the dust while other whores watch and cheer, and laughing men place bets on who is stronger.
In addition to the animosity between the women, there are stabbings and poisonings of brutal customers, and valuables stolen. In return, customers have been known to kill women on occasion, sometimes for good reason, sometimes over something trivial, sometimes over something that had nothing to do with the whore. It is easy to kill a whore—her life is worthless. She leaves the world unmourned, and a man cannot be faulted for beating one into the grave if he has had a bad day. Henry is particularly at risk because of what he is, and is sometimes bloodied and beaten for the amusement of a crowd. It is always I who helps him up and cares for him after they leave him on the ground. He is my friend, and I have only a few of those.
There is little of the sisterhood I found on the streets. The whores brag, and criticize each other, and think of ways to attract more men than the others on their row, steal each others’ customers, and tell vicious lies about each other to the both the whores and the men who use them.
It is not to my advantage to act as though I feel I am better than the others in the Valley. It is not wise, I find, to compound this insult by having too much success in finding customers. The cruelty is then turned upon me, and is vengeful.
By accident, I have learned a trick. There is a gland that excretes a sex hormone, and I have somehow learned to activate the gland at will. It has an immediate effect and is as potent as a drug, when sensed by a healthy male. I am aware that I am controlling my attractiveness to men, but do not know exactly how or why, and am unable to teach the trick to others or explain. It is not, I know, entirely my appearance or the feminine skills I learned on the streets. It has something to do with the way I “think”, for when I think a certain way, I have greater success in luring customers.
I remembered this trick as Anne, not knowing I remembered. It accounted for much of the irrational appeal I had for so many men and, partly, for Henry’s insanely persistent pursuit of me. It was the main reason I was ever described as “beautiful” by anyone.
Having learned, and not even knowing that I am doing so, I activate the gland each time I am on the job. As a result, I always have customers, and there are women who are furious with me for it. Competition is stiff in the Valley, so I am pulled into the dust and clawed several times, saved on those occasions by Henry, who has all the strength of a man and no patience with women. They get the full force of his fist before he carries me away and tends to me. His consistent loyalty in the face of my attacks, and the impact of his blows, eventually send a signal to the others that I should be left alone. Those who were most envious attempt to make friends with me as a means of coaxing me into passing along the overflow of customers to them, and perhaps divulging my secrets. Thus, I get by more or less safely throughout the years after surviving the initiation during my first few months.
In that jealous environment, free from the servitude of my marriage, I develop a mean tongue and, if I grow to dislike another whore, I use it against her with little constraint. In particular is one who has a disfigurement that, even had I liked her, I would have found comical. I often scoff at her with shouts that she is a misfit, and should find work at something that does not require beauty. Each time she passes, I laugh at her, for she has a hand that looks so silly! It has six fingers. She spits at me, and I shriek at her then convulse into laughter again.
“It is all in good fun!” I shout. “You need to learn what is funny!”
I make a few friends among the other whores. My sister Mary is one of these, as is Emma. These two in particular are good-humored and philosophical about the life, comparing that which they have to that which they left. They find the life to be satisfactory. They are not slaves, nor are they bound to brutal men. If they are beaten, Emma reasons, they at least have something of value to show for it afterwards. They are free, and independent, and they have money of their own. They have friends. They have good times.
“Things can be worse,” Mary notes cheerfully. She was enslaved as a child, and forced into service by the age of eight. She has known no other work than this since then and, when she was lost by her master in a wager, she went with a shrug to the man who won her until he abandoned her. She then came here and was still tasting freedom. She liked it.
Emma cares little for the opinions of the righteous.
“It is an honest life, is it not?” She insists. She shrugs away arguments to the contrary. “I willingly offer a service for a price, and men willingly pay. They are not forced to come to me, and I am not forced to entertain them. I do not steal from them. They get the service they pay for, then I send them back to their wives.”
She likes the men, and she likes the women she works with. She likes the money, and the presents, and the storytelling by the fires. She feels no anguish over any loss of respect. She does not care for the kinds of people who would not have her anyway, and dislikes their company. She prefers the laughing soldiers and the unruly townsmen.
As for me, it hurts me to be there, and I never quite think of myself as one of them. I feel as if I am better than they, for I once had a husband and a home, and could once hold up my head and move through the streets of a town without suffering glares of contempt and blows from hurled stones. I want to be a wife again, but can never return or my husband would kill me for having left. I have forgotten the hunger and the beatings and have told myself stories about the life I left until I believe it was happy and comfortable. I believe I was evil for leaving, and imagine my husband weeping with pain over my abandonment, or starving because he no longer has me to find him food. Our dwelling grows larger and larger in my mind, and my status in the community is inflated. I berate myself inwardly, and sow seeds of shame and unworthiness that will long haunt me.
I am different from Emma and Mary because I feel that I have fallen, whereas they both accept the life as the best they are able to do under the circumstances. I am hiding the reality from myself, and they are not. The consequence of this is that the experience damages me.
Some of my customers have peculiar tastes and unusual requests. There are some who wish to dress like Henry, and some who prefer several of us at once and have the money to pay. Some like me to whip them, and some of them like to turn their mean natures and their brutality upon me.
One of these is a man who repeatedly comes to see me. He is vulgar and mean and disliked by most men, but is most especially disliked by the whores who notice with relief that I have become his preference. I do not mind so very much. He has not hit me or insulted me as he did the other women, and he always pays without argument. As for his idiosyncrasies, they are no stranger than some of the others, and I do not care, as long as he pays me.
He is a soldier and a captain, with a penchant for rape and warfare. He lingers most fondly on stories of his rapings, as these greatly entertain him. He describes the attacks in detail before turning his attention to me. It is his ritual, when he visits a whore, and the stories stimulate his desire. He likes to tear off my robes before taking me. Then, he throws me down and ravages me as if this were a rape as well and not a business transaction with me consenting. He insis
ts that I resist him and scream, and so I do, for that is why he is paying me.
He has burned and killed, in his travels. Doing so excites him. He likes to see people quail before him, weakened and begging. It proves he is stronger. Cruelty is an art, he claims. It takes imagination and finesse, not just strength, although he has more strength than most, does he not? He describes, for my approval and admiration, the imaginative methods he has used to kill or dismember prisoners. No one can torture like he, for no one is quite so manly as he is. Do I not agree? Is he not the most manly of the men who come to see me?
I agree, enthusiastically. If I do not, he might beat me.
In time Hal (for that is who it is) asks me questions about myself. I speak to him in short sentences but, with some encouragement, I begin to tell him more. There is not much to tell, yet he still tries to draw me out, and then questions me about my girls. He sometimes brings them little gifts. I cannot fathom why he would be interested in my children, except as replacements for me when they grow older. Still, he has never offered me money for them, and there are many, many other men who do. Even when they begin business on their own, he still treats them as little children and comes to me.
I accept the fact that he comes with regularity for years, following his same rituals, but I cannot imagine why he would be interested in what I have to say–I have little to contribute, and my observations interest none of the other men. I ask him why, and he says he has grown fond of me. I ask him why that should be, and he shrugs.
I have never had a customer grow fond of me before. I begin to view him in a more positive light, and open up to him, then even come to think of him as almost a friend. Thus, we fall into a pattern of companionship that continues up until his death: I, holding my hand out for coins, then screaming for help and writhing upon the mat while he “rapes” me.
Hal brings a harp to me and tells me he likes to hear music. He demands that I learn so that I might play for him. I learn because he pays me, and it is my job to do as he asks.
“He is not such a bad sort,” I tell Mary.
“Hmmph,” she answers spitting. “He will be a good sort only after his bones are gnawed by wild dogs.”
In a sense, what she says is exactly true.
I pluck the strings and can get no sound from the instrument that reminds me of music. Emma shows me a melody, a droning non-melody favored by the people in those times. I play it and practice, singing along in a droning voice. Doing this, I feel calmed, somehow. When I play for Hal, I am so proud of myself that he smiles, amused. I continue to play for his approval, and I learn more. I have no inherent ability at all, for this is the first I have attempted it, but the pleasure it seems to bring Hal increases my own pleasure in playing. I then play it for other men, and grow to enjoy their approval as well. They are drunk, most of them, and do not notice that I have no skill, but I am encouraged nevertheless.
The act of learning to play a roughly-made harp in the Valley of the Kings leaves an indelible impression upon me. I take pains from then on to select situations in successive lifetimes where I might learn more about music. My love for it grows to passion, and then obsession. Time passes, and I become good. More time goes past, and I am among the best. Now, when I enter a body, it is clear from the outset that I have unusual skill, displayed in early childhood as the ability to pick up nearly any instrument, and play by ear upon my first introduction to it.
None of us is born knowing without having learned.
Hal is eventually knifed and killed and, oddly, I miss his visits though I do not care enough to mourn him. Yet I still play his harp and think of him at times.
Through the years, Henry becomes my best friend, and then, a part of my family. I soon learn to shrug away discomfort at his strange appearance, and to be indifferent toward his customers and their requests.
Early on, we set up housekeeping together with his lover, and we pool our funds to make a home for the girls. Henry cares for them both with a touching gentleness, and I do not walk in when I see him rocking them or he will push them away and storm out, ashamed.
His lover stands guard over the children’s tent at night, and fetches them water when they awaken and cry for it. I know him. He is Bessie Blount, one of Henry’s mistresses during my last life. He is not entirely jealous of me, but is nonetheless possessive of Henry, and resents his affection for my family. Still we manage to be friends until he takes off with a soldier, and leaves Henry to me.
Henry is distraught and tearful at his parting. Out of loneliness, he settles in next to me on my mat and holds me as he sleeps, “Just until I recover,” he promises. But a habit is formed and he never finds his way back to his own tent and his own mat.
“It is lonely there,” he explains. “There is no harm done,” he continues. “Do you want me to leave?” he asks frightened.
“No, you can stay,” I tell him. There is no harm done—he is right about that—and I have grown used to it.
We are as married as two people can be, except that we couple with anyone but each other. Sometimes we fight. He takes offense at the smallest provocation, and overreacts with childish rages, and I have no patience. Sometimes I feel Henry’s fist, and sometimes he feels mine. We shriek at each other, and wrestle on the ground screaming, insulting, pulling at each other’s hair, slamming each other’s heads into the dust. We have bloodied each other’s faces and lost a week’s income on more than one occasion, waiting for the swelling to go down before standing outside our tents again. Despite this, he does not leave, and I do not send him away, nor do I leave myself. Henry never finds another lover. The focus of his life is our odd little family, even as he stands with his back toward me, turning only to spit in the direction of my tent.
Chapter 4
•~۞~•
There are potions the women take to prevent pregnancy, and others we take to terminate pregnancy if the first potions fail. These are actually quite effective, and the rare pregnancy one of the women may endure has usually been pre-planned. I do not plan one. The children I have are burden enough, and this is no life for a child.
The girls grow in a tent, raised by a community of whores, surrounded by the worst of mankind in the shadow of pyramids. They have two mothers, one of whom is a man, for Henry has grown close to them and loves them as much as I do. They never see their father again.
When the oldest is nearly a young woman, we set her up in her own tent. She has grown up in the life and has developed a toughness of character that is completely necessary under those circumstances. She does not tell me if she likes the work or hates it. At 12 she is a hardened whore, tight-lipped, saying nothing of her feelings, giving nothing of herself to any of the men who come, except that for which they pay in advance. She gives nothing of herself to anyone. She learns early how to handle her customers, and is remarkably good at hurling out the bad ones, even as a little slip of a girl. She has a tongue that shames and blisters. She has strong nails and carries a knife. I do not worry about her.
By the time she is 15, she has been servicing one particular man for three years, and he comes to her every night. She does not mention this to me or to Henry, but we recognize him as a familiar face in the Valley, and a familiar one in the vicinity of her tent. He is Father. He has fallen in love with her and is willing to pay for the privilege of seeing her, though she does not admit to anyone that she long ago stopped taking his money. He spends what time he can with her and, when she is working, joins the crowds at the campfires for stories, songs and fights. He returns throughout the evening as often as she will allow him. The time she allows him grows longer and more frequent.
When she is 16, they both disappear.
As we suspected then, and as I have long since known, they ran off to be married. They then lived together for the rest of that life raising children I never knew of or saw. She took pains to be respectable and she succeeded, learning all the things a chaste wife should know, doing all the things a chaste wife should do.
Perfection in all things did not include admitting she had a mother who was a whore, and so she discarded me. She never came back, nor did she inquire after me or offer assistance when I grew too old to work and died destitute and a beggar. She suffered punishment for that later, but it hardly matters to me. Even then, I was relieved and happy for her.
She became the most chaste, and the most proper of all possible wives, and retained throughout time and successive lives a pressing need to bury a past she could not remember. She strove for society’s approval and for perfection in her every action, and she demanded it of her offspring. She also retained the hardness she had come by as a child who gave sex for money to drunken, brutal men. She did not resort to cruelty toward anyone; she merely internalized her shame and obsessively strove to keep up appearances. Her hardness covered, as it often does, a tender, loving soul afraid to show any weakness.
I do not fear her any longer as a mother I could not please. I now see her as a child who never lost her fears, and I feel a sweet protectiveness toward her. It is a freeing sensation. I do love her. I do love her.
Katherine also sets up shop and seems to accept the life, though there is a conflict about it in her, as there is in me. She feels she was born for better than this, and dreams of riches, and life in a town where she is not forced to service men. She rightfully blames me for having seen to it that she could never have those things. No man comes to take her, as one did her sister, and she dies young, without having ever forgiven me.
She still has not.
۞
Later, Katherine responded to that life in much the same way that I did, by enshrouding herself in a veil of denial, respectability and condemnation. Over time, she made many of the same mistakes I made, for the same reasons. She has a fate similar to Anne’s to look forward to, in some future time. She has been slower to ready herself, but one day it will come.