The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  For several long seconds the newborn stands there, helpless, its black fur steaming. It then takes some uncertain steps, stops in front of the placenta, and starts gobbling it up. Congealed blood drips from its incisors as it finishes the last bit of the placenta, but it hasn’t had its fill, no, it turns toward the woman. It sniffs her groin and starts at her. It begins with her feet, her ankles, her calves. It proceeds methodically, chewing everything thoroughly before swallowing.

  The woman comes to when the wild beast is at her guts. She raises her head and smiles. She keeps smiling until the creature chews the smile right off her face. Some twenty minutes pass by the time the black dog is done devouring the woman. It leaves not a bit of her behind. It grows bigger and bigger while eating, bigger than any dog I’ve ever seen. Its red eyes speak of hunger only. When its nourishment is depleted, it doesn’t even notice me. It climbs up onto one of the ruins, sniffs the air, and scampers away.

  I start after it, since I have no other choice. I will be following this beast as long as I live. Or longer.

  It was morning in Cairo. The sun was scorching into the Bluebird Hotel. The light was warm and white, as always in the desert, anticipating the blazing hot afternoon.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the wall, which had been scribbled all over with a pen. I didn’t think of a thing. I was shivering from cold. I felt the flies land on my skin and bite, but I couldn’t move. Every last vein was throbbing in my brain and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Several long minutes passed this way.

  Finally, gathering up my strength, I stirred.

  I felt thousands of tiny pricks on my spine. My calves were cramped. Buckling over in pain, I sought to cry out, but no noise came from my parched throat.

  “Water,” screamed every bit of my consciousness as I began feeling about the bed for something drinkable.

  My fingers met with a half-full can of beer. With trembling hands, I lifted it, forcing the liquid into my mouth.

  It was hotter than my body temperature. I felt as if my esophagus were being cut to shreds with a razor blade as the beer flowed down my throat. In that moment, as the liquid reached my stomach, I began retching.

  There was nothing in me I might have vomited.

  I put a hand to my mouth to stop the bile that was bubbling up, and, like that, I stumbled out to the hotel’s public toilet, which was across from my room.

  My body protested movement, but my flickering reason was already in charge: I knew that if I threw up my insides in the room, the odor would eat its way into my clothes, my skin, and my room’s seedy furnishings. I wanted to avoid that.

  For a long time, I retched and I spat, gripping the filthy toilet with both hands until the spasms ceased. I stood up and staggered back to the room, sat on the edge of the bed, forced the remaining beer down my throat, and lit a cigarette.

  While smoking, the life came back into me. I knew who I was and what I’d done in recent days. I looked at my phone. The date and time told me I’d slept forty-eight hours.

  I remembered Amr and Ramzi, the bouts, and the City of the Dead. I turned on the phone and called Ramzi. It rang for a long time before he picked it up.

  “Abu khoaga. Don’t tell me that what I gave is gone already.”

  “No.”

  “Because if it is, I can get as much for you as you want.”

  “How is Amr?”

  A long silence ensued at the other end of the line.

  “Good,” Ramzi finally said. “But you’ve got to see the new kid. A real champion. He hits like a rocket.

  “I’ll take a look sometime.”

  “By all means.”

  I put down the phone, stood up from bed, and lit a cigarette. When I finished smoking, I left the room and showered, and then I went to the food stand across from the hotel.

  I never looked up Ramzi again.

  The Good Customer

  “What will you have to drink?” I asked.

  She was a tall, sinewy Sudanese woman in her early twenties. She wore a miniskirt, and her back hair flowed down onto her shoulders and framed her face and her brown eyes. I had to concentrate so as not to ogle her cleavage. Her nipples were hard, their contours evident under her dress. She was a black African woman, full of life.

  We were in the Faris bar, in Ma’adi. Smoke hung in the air, and there was a crowd. Men and women, black and white, were drinking and smoking cigarettes, staring at the TV, whose volume was turned down, or awaiting their turn at the sole billiard table.

  “A Stella,” said the woman.

  “Two Stellas,” I shouted to the bar. The mustachioed Egyptian bartender leaned down to the fridge and took out two bottles of beer. He clicked off the caps and set the bottles on the bar before us. Behind him was a large mirror that reflected all three of us.

  “That will be forty pounds,” he said. I reached into my pocket, took out two Egyptian twenty-pound notes, and handed them over. The woman smiled, her white teeth sparkling in the mirror.

  “Daniel,” I said, clinking beer bottle with hers.

  “Maria.”

  “I’m glad to have met you, Maria. What are you doing in the bar?”

  “I came to dance and to drink beer. My girlfriends are here, too.”

  She pointed to a table and the black women in miniskirts and high heels sitting beside it. They were drinking beer and watching the men at the billiard table. I’d seen a few of them here before, each always with a different man. They’d propositioned me, too, but I hadn’t gone off with any of them.

  This is a whore, I thought to myself, looking over the woman. A whore just like the rest, who visits the bars at night. She’s here for money.

  I took a big gulp of my beer. I wasn’t particularly bothered by my realization. I’d returned lately from the Gaza Strip; I had money. I was already on the way to my fourth beer and was pleasantly drunk. I had nothing to do, and the sweltering Cairo summer had fired up my libido. Which is why I was hanging out in the Sudanese bars.

  “I work for a foundation, actually,” she added. “We deal with refugees.”

  “Well now, you can deal with me, too. I, for example, am a refugee.”

  “And just what are you fleeing?”

  “Boredom.”

  She laughed and drank.

  “What do you do?”

  “Besides inviting beautiful women for beer?”

  “Yes. Besides that.”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “What do you take photos of?”

  “People.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “All sorts of people.”

  “Will you photograph me, too?”

  “Maybe. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Whether you’re in trouble or not. I usually photograph people who are in trouble.”

  “Then I won’t be your customer,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not in trouble.”

  “Wait and see what happens,” I said, downing my beer.

  “But what trouble could I get into?”

  “Well, you could fall hopelessly in love with me.”

  “That wouldn’t be such big trouble.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “You have blue eyes.”

  “And on account of that you’ll avoid trouble?”

  “I like blue-eyed people. In South Sudan there are none.”

  “Is that where you grew up?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will you return?”

  “I don’t think so. Cairo is a much better place than Jujuba.”

  The woman having finished her beer, too, I waved to the bartender to bring us two more.

  Soon the waiter put down the beers in front of us. I looked at my watch. It was 2 AM.

  “They’re closing soon. How are you planning to spend the rest of the night?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you suggest.”

  “I have a bo
ttle of vodka at home. If you’re in the mood, you could come up to my place. We’ll drink vodka and listen to music.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “In Dokki.”

  “That’s far.”

  “We’ll go by taxi.”

  “OK.”

  “We left half the beer. I paid, and we then headed toward the exit. White cars were parked out in front of the bar, their drivers leaning up against their sides and smoking cigarettes while waiting for fares. They alone knew where the women were going, and they provided protection, too. They took customers around the city for ten times the normal rate. Maria talked at length in Arabic with one of the drivers, and after they came to terms we got into the Lada and headed off. We sat beside each other in the back seat. She smiled, and held my hand.

  We kissed in the stairwell. My nose was filled with the fragrance of her skin. With a trembling hand I took my apartment keys from my pocket and opened the door.

  “This is where you live?” she asked with a laugh on stepping inside and sizing up the room. The furnishings comprised only a bed and a table. My timeworn laptop lay on the table.

  “Yes,” I said, pulling her close and kissing her again. “Do you want vodka?”

  “I do.”

  I went out to the kitchen, took the liquor from the fridge, and filled two glasses. By the time I returned, the woman had on only a bra on top.

  “It’s warm. I thought I’d take off my blouse.”

  “You thought right,” I said, handing her the vodka.

  “To those with blue eyes!” she said with a laugh. We clinked glasses, drank up, and set down the glasses beside the bed.

  Her bra was black. Darker than her skin. Putting an arm around her waist, I kissed her again and unfastened the bra. Her breasts were beautiful, with big, black nipples. She stepped out of her skirt. I, too, began getting undressed. A few seconds later I was already lying on top of her, kissing her face and neck. She moaned when I touched her and sighed, “Ay,” when I closed my mouth around one of her nipples. I liked that a lot. I kept kissing her. I kissed the length of her belly and put my tongue into her naval. Her panties were black, too. With both hands I grabbed her ass, and then bore my face into her panties and pulled them off, too. My tongue moved down to her pubes but sought her clitoris in vain. Where it should have been, there was only an abnormal scar. Her vagina, too, was much smaller than what I was used to, and it was apparent where it had been sewn together.

  I stopped, and for a couple of seconds stared, dumbfounded, at the scar.

  “What is it?” asked the woman.

  “A condom. I’ve got to go to the bathroom for a condom.”

  “Hurry,” she said.

  Standing up, and taking care so she wouldn’t see my expression, I went to the bathroom and locked the door behind me. Jesus Christ, I thought, and stared at my face in the mirror. I saw before my eyes the mutilated cunt I was now supposed to stick my cock into. I can do it, I kept telling myself. I just have to meanwhile imagine another cunt. That’s all. I’m a pro at that.

  “Where are you already?” the girl called from the room.

  “Just a moment,” I said, removing the condom from the medicine cabinet and opening the bathroom door. I went not to the room but to the kitchen, for a swig of vodka. I took a great big gulp, and felt it go straight to my head.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It took me a while to find it,” I said, and stepped back into the room.

  “I’ll help you get it on.”

  She sat up on the bed, took my cock in her hands, and began playing with it. It took quite a few minutes of work with her hands and her mouth, too, before I managed to produce a modest erection. I pulled on the condom, whereupon she lay on her back and spread open her legs.

  It was incredibly narrow. It hurt. Pressing my forehead against hers, I just kept moving, meanwhile watching her face.

  “Ay,” she moaned again and again, in a measured beat, and smiled. “Ay.”

  She can’t have an orgasm, I thought to myself. I saw before me her being led into some tent in the middle of nowhere, being held down, and having her clitoris cut out with a razor blade. It doesn’t matter, anyway, the point is that I should cum, since she’s a whore.

  The thought that my cock was inside a mutilated cunt sapped all of my strength.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked when getting off me.

  “Nothing.”

  “You haven’t cum,” she said. “If you want,” she added, caressing my chest, “I’ll take you in my mouth.”

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Who did this to your cunt?” I asked.

  “I was still a little girl. That’s custom among them.”

  “You can’t have an orgasm, right?”

  “But it’s really good.”

  “Can you have an orgasm?”

  “Stop it already! Come on, kiss me and make love with me.”

  “You don’t need to force it,” I said.

  I sat up in bed, reached down for my jeans, and took two hundred pounds out of it, which I pressed into her hand. She stood and began dressing in silence. I didn’t have a bit of strength; I could feel the liquor blurring my brain, and I was dizzy. At least I paid her, I thought while lying there on the bed. I was a good customer.

  “I’m capable of being in love,” she said with downcast eyes, already dressed. “Maybe I don’t know things, like the women in your country, but I’m capable of being in love.”

  “That’s good,” I replied.

  I heard the door close when she left.

  Only in the morning did I notice that she’d left the money on the bed.

  Banana Split

  With the leftover beer I washed down two pills. I took Xanax to help me sleep. The first few weeks it worked, but as time passed, I had to take more and more. This evening I’d had two already, and now came two more.

  Lying back in bed, I stared at the wall and waited for the effect. A half-hour passed, my eyes fixed on the mass of scribbles before me as I lay on the grimy sheet. “You’re not alone,” the previous tenant had written in letters of various sizes on every square centimeter of that wall. I got no sleepier or calmer. By 11 PM it was apparent that, yet again, I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep. I stood up out of bed, reached for the phone, and called Blake. It rang.

  “Where are you, you scoundrel?”

  “In the Bussy Cat.”

  “Stay put.”

  In the sink I washed my face and underarms, got on a clean shirt, and set off. The receptionist, who was sitting in the lobby at a plastic table, watching soap operas on a 1970s color TV, turned his head toward me and said, “When will you pay? It is the end of the month.”

  He said it in English, with surprising precision, having presumably practiced the words to perfection. He’d had the opportunity, after all: the previous tenant had spoken English, too, until he killed himself.

  “Soon,” came my reply, in faultless Arabic, this being what I had practiced to perfection. My reply seemed not to phase him much: he turned his head back to the TV as I went on, down the steps and out to the street.

  The Bussy Cat wasn’t far from the Bluebird Hotel, where I lived. I had to walk two blocks. It was a fine example of a downtown bar where alcoholic Arabs imbibed. To get in you had to pass through a dark entryway that smelled of piss. Inside, too, it was dimly lit, the only source of light being the neon ads above the bar. Arabs were drinking away at the little tables. The filthy plastic tablecloths squelched each time they picked up their beers. Cigarette butts littered the floor along with the yellow shells of the chick peas served as finger food alongside the beer; the chick peas were salty and caused serious diarrhea. Everyone spit the shells on the floor.

  Blake was sitting at the bar. Beside his right hand were four empty bottles of Stella.

  “You look like shit,” he said after I gave him a slap on the back and sat down beside him.

/>   “You too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My father died two days ago. What’s your excuse?”

  I ordered an Egyptian whiskey and downed it in one gulp. The turpentine flavor rushed down my spine.

  “Got something? I know you do, you always do.”

  “I’ve got Xanax.”

  “That’ll do. Xanax is good. It’s funny to drink with. Let’s have it.” Taking the medication from my pocket, I pressed a few pills into his hand.

  Greedily he snatched up a pill, swallowing it without even bothering to chew.

  “Whiskey!” he shouted, bringing a fist down on the bar. The waiter produced a bottle of that same Egyptian whiskey, labeled “Ballantimes,” with an m, poured a shot into his glass, and turned away.

  “For him, too.”

  “I shouldn’t. I already have two in me.”

  The waiter poured me another. Blake and I clinked glasses and drank up.

  Blake asked for another round, and we drank that up too. “Got money on you?”

  “Five hundred genēhs,” I said, using the local term for Egyptian pounds.

  “That’s about as much as I have, too. Shall we head out to Ma’adi? I need a woman.”

  I looked at my phone: it was almost midnight. Even with a taxi, that leafy suburb was an hour south of downtown Cairo. It was too late for whoring. The Faris Bar closed at 2 AM, and the prettier gals were taken by midnight.

  “It’s late already.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s never too late for drinking and whoring.”

  Blake put three hundred genēhs on the bar, asked and got the bottle of remaining whiskey in the bottle, and started toward the exit. I followed. In no time we found a taxi. By the time we reached the Nile, we’d finished the whiskey, and one more Xanax pill was in us each.

  It was 1 AM by the time the taxi let us out in front of the Faris. People were already trickling out.

  “We’re closing soon,” said the bouncer, a black man, after giving us the once-over. Blake convinced him that we wanted only one drink and would then be on our way. He let us in.