by Jina Bacarr
“By the will of Allah, I am telling you the truth.” He gripped my arm, refusing to let me go.
“Ramzi—”
“Come,” he said. “I will show you.”
“Maxi means nothing to me,” Ramzi yelled, pulling the still-wet sheaf of prints off the drying frame where the German girl had arranged them and throwing them into the open stone sarcophagus.
I shuddered. On previous occasions I had rubbed my bare pubis against its red granite roughness much like a sculptor’s chisel fracturing, scraping, polishing its shiny surface, evoking pain play in me when I leaned over it, waiting for the sting of the whip, then spilling my juices onto the stone incised with hieroglyphs and deeply carved symbols.
At this moment, no pleasure surged through me, only fear.
Before I could stop him, Ramzi struck a match and tossed it into the burial box, setting fire to all the fresh prints Maxi had left drying in the makeshift darkroom. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I watched the flames consume the beautiful photographs of the handsome Egyptian. Burning. Red-hot. I was about to turn away, when sparks flew out of the ancient coffin and landed near me.
“You’re insane!” I cried out, stomping on a flicker of flame with the toe of my white pump, making black scorch marks on the stone floor. I dared not get any closer to the centuries-old coffin holding the prints without putting myself in danger of being burned. That thought startled me. What else had he planned? Another phony attempt on my life to prove to me the perfume worked? Did he believe I was without the mental capacity to defuse his scheme as nothing more than a mask for his lust? A thread of drama without any forward movement to keep it taut? Static, never changing?
I was emotionally drained, too weak to go on with his game, and that was my mistake. So charged was I with the needs of my own obsession, I had failed to note the furies, anguish and utter chaos inhabiting the soul of the Egyptian. By following Ramzi down to the underground crypt of the Cleopatra Club, I had fueled his passion even more. He must have known Maxi had printed more copies of her photos, and wanted to evoke a piece of theater to compel me to stay.
I didn’t believe him, I told him. I was leaving Cairo. Without him.
“Then I will also burn the negatives and prove to you I am telling the truth,” he threatened, striking the match and holding it up to the large celluloid nitrate negatives. Even in the dim light, I could see him taunting me with the match, holding it to the tip of the sheets of celluloid as shiny as black silk. The detailed negatives gleamed in the red glow of the fire, the Egyptian’s nude, muscular body so clearly delineated on them, each negative substituting light for darkness, with all the subtle variations in between. A relevant truth stuck me, unnerving me. How could I have failed not to see similar darkness inhabiting Ramzi’s soul?
I clutched my throat, choking on the stifling air in the damp crypt, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the flames consuming the thick paper as easily as if it were sheer voile, the mustard-orange streaks swirling through the black smoke, all the photos being consumed in the belly of the fire where an ancient pharaoh once slept. Singeing embers flew through the air in a strange pattern against the black smoke.
“You fool!” I heard a woman’s voice cry out behind me. “Are you mad?”
I turned and saw Maxi racing down the stairway. She knocked the match out of his hand, its blue-yellow flame landing on the still-burning photos. Husky emotion boiled over in her voice and I could see the rising fear in her eyes as the hot, intense fire rose higher, making a deafening roar, its wavering human form licking her face with its fiery, steamy breath and daring her to come closer. “You’ll kill us all with your insatiable need to fuck every woman you meet.”
“Leave us alone, Maxi,” Ramzi ordered, striking another match.
“If you burn those negatives,” she warned, “we’ll all die…”
“If you burn those negatives, we’ll all die.”
Maxi’s words echoed in my head over and over as I leaned backward, my head spinning, the repugnant smell of the fire making me impatient and irritable. I could hear Maxi and Ramzi fighting, then the German girl yelling if he burned the negatives we’d all suffocate since the fumes give off poisonous gases. I reached out to grab on to the Egyptian, but my hand seemed to go right through him, as if I were a ghost dematerializing in a motion-picture comedy, fooling the audience with camera tricks. But it was happening, here, now, though the rational side of my brain tried to convince me it was an illusion brought on by the swirling smoke, dim light and my volatile state of mind.
I stood motionless, my emotions on hold. I had to force myself not to panic. To think. Go back over what happened again and again until I found the logic in all this. In a subconscious gesture, I wiped my brow, sweat moistening my face and neck. I think I touched my face. I wasn’t sure of anything. When I tried to speak, I couldn’t, my lips were dry and I had no taste in my mouth despite the charred smell filling the crypt. My senses were depleted, gone, all except—
Smell.
A sumptuous scent overwhelmed me, a dynamic, spicy essence emitting a dry heat of warm, exotic tones doused with a smoky incense filled my nostrils, evoking the memory I feared. I’d experienced a similar pattern once before—the dizziness, the overpowering odor, a sense of voices fading, my flesh dissolving—when Ramzi acted out his game to make me believe he had tried to plunge a knife into me and the perfume saved me from his blade. I dared not put it into words then, though what remained missing until this moment was the link between the two that completed the circle of events.
I was wearing Cleopatra’s perfume then and now.
No, I couldn’t go there, later maybe. Start with what I could see, hear, feel. I strained my ears, trying to hear them fighting, but their voices faded, then my vision blurred, snatching the scene of Ramzi and Maxi clawing at each other from my mind’s grasp. It was as if I had developed so acute a sense of approaching danger I could perceive the smell of violence before actual dissolution.
I never forgot the strange odor permeating my brain, as if it stained my imagination, its mystical spell dousing my mind with rare spices. I will not try to explain what cannot be explained, rationale prevents me from doing so, but I have long pondered both as well as the fantasy and the science of what happened to me and I’ve come to this conclusion: Like the negatives of the Egyptian containing varying degrees of lights and darks, I believe a spiritual energy manipulated the intensity of light on me whenever I faced oncoming danger in such a way that my body seemed to fade from the scene.
I had no idea then what would happen if certain death and not merely the threat of danger awaited me. I will leave that for a later telling and I must ask you, dear reader, not to skip ahead to those pages (God willing I complete this diary) but instead continue on your journey with me, for I have so much more to tell you, to make you understand that though anxiety caused by the drug prevented me from accepting what was happening to me, I was entering a new phase in my life and I rush forth to write it down lest I lose my courage to do so.
I had no doubt Ramzi didn’t believe in the magic of the perfume, but what if it did work? A daring thought skimmed the edge of my mind: What if the perfume saved me from violence by dissipating all my senses except the sense of smell, much like savage man or an animal developed a sense of smell so powerful it warned them of danger. And when the danger passed, I regained my senses?
No, no, the idea was insane.
The consequences of such a reality threw me into a state of chaos, while at the same time the air in the crypt turned heavy and dark, choking me. I fought the pulling sensation dragging me into a state of numbness as churning black smoke closed in around me, the suffocating darkness holding me tightly in its grasp, pulling me back and forth, hurling me into a cold well of fear that wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t stop shivering. My teeth chattered. My lips trembled.
Then it stopped. It was suddenly calm. I touched my fingers to my lips, my cheeks. Sweat dripped from my face, my mout
h tasted of soot, my breath was erratic. I blinked. Shadows, light, then color redistributed itself in front of my eyes, forms took shape, then dimensions until I could hear Ramzi cursing in Arabic—
Then I saw him draw his curved dagger from his waistband and slice through the slippery celluloid in one long movement, making Maxi scream. She beat on him with her fists. I didn’t move. All I could think of was that I was back. I could see, hear, touch, speak…
And smell. The fragrance was light, airy, even amid the charred smell of burned paper, as if I breathed in the freshness of a creamy summer day. What happened? I couldn’t explain it then nor did I wish to try. I was high on the intoxicant and blamed my experience on its ill effects as if it suffused my mind with wild imaginings. But I was sober enough to realize if Maxi hadn’t stopped the Egyptian from burning the negatives and releasing the toxic fumes, inhaling the vapors would have been deadly. For them, but not for me.
I was wearing the perfume.
When Maxi discovered the blackened sooty embers in the sarcophagus and realized that was all that remained of her photos, she dissolved into tears. I’ve never seen her so heartbroken. I tried to comfort her, but she pushed me away. Something about her had changed. I saw it in her eyes. Fierce. Hateful. She spit at me and blurted out she was leaving Cairo tonight. Goebbels’s office had called her back to Berlin for reassignment, she said, her eyes glancing downward as if she was hiding something from us. She had planned to take Ramzi to Paris, she gloated, then London and New York, but now she would be pleased never to see either one of us again.
I exited the crypt, running up the stairway before Ramzi or Maxi could stop me. I had no desire to placate them by watching their dull performance any longer. I was an unwilling participant in their private war, but I refused to be a victim. Yet I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind. The danger had passed, but the smell lingered…
Like a woman leaving her scent behind…
A woman named Cleopatra.
After Maxi’s rash departure from Cairo, Ramzi haunted me everywhere. Following me with Mahmoud not far behind. I was perplexed by the discovery that my run-in with the Egyptian did not arouse desire in me as it once had. Why? Was it that by the unmasking of his declaration of something other than the pleasures of the flesh (his love for me) he has effaced from me all emotional response toward him? I was bothered by that thought, as if I was a woman who could no longer love. I would soon discover otherwise.
In spite of my lack of ardor toward him, Ramzi maintained a facade of wanting me, needing me, though every time we met his speech was memorized, poeticized beyond what I believed him capable of doing. (Did Laila have a hand in that?) When I convinced him I hadn’t changed my mind and I was leaving Cairo in a few days, he panicked, a mysteriously satanic lift to his eyebrows sending a cold shiver down my spine. I wondered what secrets he wouldn’t reveal. Would I ever know?
Strange days of loneliness and inner turmoil followed. I continued using cocaine, anything to settle my frazzled nerves. How could I stop? Ramzi’s presence everywhere I turned unsettled me, daunted my courage, my belief the American flier would return waning with each day. I began to lose hope I would see Chuck Dawn again. Why was that so important to me?
I admitted I found him damnably attractive, even bordering on a fetish regarding his wide square shoulders, muscular back, and his hips moving with strength and power when he thrust into me. I found myself fantasizing about a string of blue beads again finding their way into my arse, but not until I deftly slipped my hand between the buttons on his shirt before slowly undoing them one by one, my fingertips tapping on his bare skin, making a path down to his groin. I had no doubt what I would find there and the memory of his cock, the head big and shiny, drove me to use more and more of the drug to assuage the pain of that loneliness. I realize the dizzying effects of the white powder were no substitute for the state of heightened desire I experienced with the American flier, but the drug was an impulse I couldn’t deny. Demanding, insistent, addictive. I refused to admit it wasn’t the sex I craved as much as the companionship, having the nearness of a man who wanted me without controlling me as Ramzi had.
Tapping into the romantic ideals of a woman much younger in years than I, I sought to find that nearness with Chuck Dawn. Yet what did I know about him? What did I need to know other than when he looked at me, his eyes threw off sparks, stinging, sharp. Stripping off the elusive veil I wore over my soul to protect it. He didn’t know who I was under my aristocratic demeanor, didn’t care, but I wondered if he saw through my charade, the illusion I created, as had Lord Marlowe. I believed I could create that same special bond between us if given the chance. I had to see him again. I couldn’t let him go.
Waiting was painful. The days turned from one into the next in the same manner as I write each page in this diary, as if I couldn’t spin day into night fast enough. I could barely eat. My body was empty, the inner fire gone. The evenings I spent alone. I was restless. Stirred by unspent passion. Fueled by the drugs. I couldn’t stand it. I could not rest, so I fantasized about Chuck, taking me on my knees, sweat pouring down his face as he ground his hips against me, each thrust harder than the one before.
Worse yet, the more I realized Ramzi was obsessed with keeping me in Cairo, the more I retreated, my emotions crystallizing to such a degree I felt nothing. I was numb inside. I found myself dressing in beige, khaki, earthy brown, colors I hated, colors I found nonsexy, anything to smooth the chaos raging inside me. I saw my life as an unfinished painting containing nothing but clusters of tiny dots that didn’t form a whole picture. What I didn’t see then was those dots consisted of nothing but specks of white powder, and the canvas was slowly dissolving into a vast nothingness.
It is only when I step back as I write this diary and the images leap to life, brilliantly illuminated by the sexual encounters I enjoyed, that I see what really happened, how my downward spiral was all part of a larger plan, one that I had no control over. This epiphany penetrates the haze covering my memory, implying my journey back to that time of decadence is worthwhile, whether I head toward an earthly paradise after the insanity of this war ends, or the dark promise of death.
Since I must continue to wait here in Berlin for this forced encounter with a woman I no longer call my friend, I will finish my diary and recount to you the extraordinary phase of my journey that livened my soul with such joy I again feel the wetness seeping between my legs with the renewed fragrance of desire I haven’t felt since the last time I saw him. I have stained the page with a few drops of that wetness, so if your curiosity made you question what the scent is making your nose tingle, now you know. I can’t help but wonder if he remembers my scent…
Chuck Dawn. He evoked a turmoil and vulnerability in me I hadn’t known since his lordship put me over his knee, pulled down my knickers and spanked my bare buttocks with his loving hand. The American flier did return and it is those two days and nights I wish to recount next.
I promise, you shan’t be disappointed when you turn the page.
14
W e held each other, hands groping, hearts beating madly, our clothes disheveled, my white silk trousers down around my ankles, my knickers crumpled over my thighs, my blouse somewhere on the floor, my brassiere dangling from the rearview mirror by its satin straps, and one white pump half buried in the golden sand outside the motorcar. My legs pointed straight up through the open roof, my other shoe dangling off my toes. I squirmed with pleasure, kicked it off, and my shoe flew through the air.
We hadn’t spoken for at least an hour, fumbling to rid ourselves of our clothes, wiping the sweat from between my breasts, then my thighs, with my blouse, and getting sweaty all over again when Chuck pressed my breasts against his bare chest, covering them with a glistening patina that made my skin glow. He seemed fascinated by my nipples, pressing his fingers on the nubs, commenting on the softness of the pink crinkled flesh of my areolas, tugging on them then rolling the hard tips between his thumbs
and forefingers while I uttered tortured moans through dry lips. My voice became raspy from the guttural sounds emitting from my throat and carrying through the open roof over the empty arid desert. The dry air was unforgiving on my vocal cords, making me cough and choke, as if to punish me for indulging in so much pleasure. I shouldn’t have opened the roof on such a hot afternoon and allowed swirling sand to invade our refuge, a 1937 Flying Twenty Standard motorcar, black and no longer as shiny as a paladin’s boots, but covered with a light blanket of sand, but I did. The romance of swooning in the American flier’s arms, not to mention his probing fingers finding me moist and wanting when he tugged at my knickers and pulled them down, exposing my pussy then splaying it wide open, glistening with drops of wetness so precious here in the middle of the desert, was too much for me not to fulfill.
I lay back on the padded burgundy seat wiggling with delight when he gently touched my soft pubic hair and began to tease me with the tip of his finger, making slow circles in one direction then the other. I begged him not to stop, to take me here in my motorcar, never believing he would. I had a lot to learn about this American flier. Muttering under his breath there’d be hell to pay if he was late getting back to London but he’d come up with some excuse, he moved closer to me, hitting his head on the cream-colored roof, but that didn’t stop him. I’d never tell him, but he looked so damn handsome with a stray lock of sandy-brown hair hanging over his forehead, his eyebrows crossed in frustration. He pulled off his open white shirt so quickly (he wasn’t wearing an undershirt) I didn’t have time to wipe the grin off my face. My smile widened when he pulled down the zipper on his trousers, and before I could see a hint of his Y-fronts, he slid his cock into me. I squealed with pleasure, lifting up my hips to meet his, him grinding and pumping with strong, steady thrusts, me wondering if the Standard Motor Company had this in mind when they promised their customers the ultimate in speed and control. I arched my back and made a sound that existed somewhere between a word and a mewling sound, but my message was clear. I wanted to climax. Now. My voice had that tone to it that said I wouldn’t be denied what I wanted or else. Rather brash, I admit, but I was filled with such arrogance from the effects of seeing him again and consequently I offer no excuse for my behavior.