The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  “Because, unlike people, money doesn’t die, that’s for sure; it doesn’t flee, and you don’t need to raise it. You can place your unconditional trust in money.”

  “Don’t you die, Joyce,” I said after an extended silence.

  “I won’t die, M’zungu, don’t you worry about me, I’m fine. But things are not all in order with you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “But there is.”

  “What?”

  “You speak to ghosts during the night.”

  “That’s not such a big problem.”

  “You speak to ghosts even when you’re awake.”

  Not for a moment was Joyce jealous of the other women living in the house. Only once did she say, “Today you desired a thin girl.” We’d been laying beside each other in her bed, looking at the geckos emerging from the cracks in the wall, while I, drunk on Egyptian rum, didn’t have it in me to make love to her.

  That day I did fuck Brinda. How Joyce got wind of it, I have no idea, but she knew. At the same time, she didn’t ascribe much importance to it. Joyce didn’t live in a shell: she knew precisely that, in and of itself, to go to bed with someone does not necessarily mean more than a momentary expression of mutual affinity. I had some sort of personal relationship with each of the women during the month I spent in the house. Not once did it happen, though, that I didn’t return to Joyce’s side. I slept every night through beside her.

  Brinda and Samiya were the first. It was Sunday, the first regular workday of the week, and as such, a rather unbusy day for the girls. There wasn’t much traffic in the bars, which closed earlier, in fact, than on other days of the week. At such times the girls went off into the city to take care of their personal matters. Joyce went, too, to pay allotments to the various bureaucrats who decided which among the Africans could get a visa to stay in Egypt and who couldn’t. So too, she would pay the police chief of the Ma’adi district, who, among other things, was responsible for ensuring local morals in the suburbs. I did not accompany her on these errands of hers. She was concerned, after all, that the prices would go up if the officials saw that she was with a white man.

  This fear of hers was completely justified.

  In Africa and the poor countries of the Middle East, everyone imagines of white folks that they have money even under their skins. Aside from the obvious disadvantages, this also means that regardless of just how you look and what condition you’re in, you’ll be let in anywhere in the hope of getting money out of you. If this happens in error, by the time that turns out, it’s way too late to do anything about it.

  It was Sunday. I was alone in the house with Brinda and Samiya in the afternoon heat. I was sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer when Brinda ran in. She had on a bra and panties.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  She led me into her room, where the TV was on.

  “Is it true that doctors are free in Europe?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “They said it on TV.”

  “Yes, in a few countries. You have to pay a general fee, which isn’t too much. Not that the service is all that good.”

  “It must be better than in Juba.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  She fell silent for a bit, pondering what I’d said.

  “And where you’re from, snow falls?”

  “Yes. In winter.”

  “And is it very cold?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not hot as hell, like in Africa.”

  Reaching back with her hands, she unfastened her bra.

  “Don’t you think my breasts are too small?”

  “No,” I said, and heard my blood beating in the back of my neck. Her breasts were perfect, with pointy little nipples.

  “Well, I think they are. If I have the money, I’ll have them fixed.”

  “You don’t need to do a thing with your breasts.”

  “Touch them. You’ll feel how small they are.”

  I touched them, and in the same motion we plunged right into bed.

  After we finished, I lit a cigarette. She took it from my hand, took a drag, and gave it back.

  “I knew you’re special from the moment I first saw you in the house,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “It was love at first sight. Yes. I knew I’d be your wife, and we’d live together in Europe.”

  “Are you really in love with me?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  “And do you know my name?”

  “M’zungu.”

  “My proper name.”

  She fell silent. I stood up out of bed and began getting dressed.

  “Really, I love you very much,” she said as I left the room.

  In what remained of the afternoon she listened to sad, Arabic love songs in her room, but by evening she seemed as good as new. She sat there in the kitchen laughing along with the others, with only a few reproachful glances revealing just how offended she was. I felt bad for a few days on account of what had happened, but then one night she had a white customer she herself had found in the Faris. So her performance would come off as more credible, she didn’t even ask him for money.

  Though I was completely certain that she had let in everyone on our fleeting romance, that didn’t stop her sister, Samiya, from trying something similar on me a few days later. They hated Africa with all their hearts.

  Yaya was a thin, tall girl with an alarmed look in her eyes. She was the youngest in the house. She had that air of innocence which, after thirty, leaves a person without a trace. With childlike sincerity she was able to happy about anything, even about anyone else’s happiness. Though it wasn’t said aloud, all of the other women treated her like a child, guarding her: they didn’t let the wilder customers lay their hands on her, nor did they let her drink as much as they themselves drank. I asked Joyce how Yaya had ended up in the house.

  Yaya was from the Zaghawa tribe in Darfur. As a young child she’d wound up in Khartoum in the course of a UN rescue mission, and from there, with the support of an Egyptian American foundation, to the foundation’s orphanage school in Egypt. Unfortunately, however, as international media attention on Darfur waned, so too did the monies flowing into the foundation, which finally couldn’t pay its bills and had to close. Children under twelve were lucky, since finding them adoptive parents oversees was easy. Yaya, however, was past twelve, and so along with several of her peers, no one needed her.

  Of course the foundation paid some money to the state child welfare office for her use and so to track the girl’s fate, but in chronically overpopulated Egypt, where many thousands of Egyptian children live on the streets, the sums transferred to Yaya vanished in the system without a trace. Soon she was on the streets. Just how long she lived the life of an Egyptian street kid was anyone’s guess, but one day a madam by the name of Lina discovered her and gave her work. Joyce had inherited Yaya from her along with the house. That had been five years earlier, when Lina had to leave the country in a flash at the order of the immigration authorities. I never did figure out exactly why Lina had been deported. But that it was back to Sudan, that much was clear; for Yaya sent her money to Jujuba weekly, right on schedule. In African terms, substantial sums. She must have done so because Lina was the closest thing she had to family.

  I’d been living in the house for several weeks when, one day, Yaya posed her question. She approached me in the early morning hours in the kitchen. She was in street clothes, without makeup. She sat down beside me on one of the chairs. She pulled a wad of wrinkled hundred-geneih notes from her red wallet, smoothed them out with care, and placed them before me on the table.

  “Daniel, I’d like to ask you for something.’

  “What would that be?”

  “Could you send this money for me to Juba? I have to go to the government office building, the Mogamma, for my passport.”

  “Sure. With Western Union?”

  I knew that the bureaucratic
procedure ahead of her that day would take at least twelve hours, that she wouldn’t have time for anything else at all. Alongside the pyramids and the ancient ruins, the Mogamma, on Tahrir Square, is Egypt’s biggest architectural attraction. From the 1950s on, anyone who wanted any sort of official permit had to get it in the Mogamma. The building did not grow with the population, however. It is a maze of hallways, some leading who knows where and others coming to dead ends, stacked high with typewritten files and full of cafés and so many secretive windows serving some inscrutable function, behind which, year by year, some ninety million citizens are registered, are issued numbers, and have their documents stamped.

  Expedited service took twelve hours. That meant you managed to bribe someone who knew precisely which window you had to stand in line at with your request. A whole industry had grown up in the Mogamma to accommodate even this service.

  Every foreigner also had to visit the Mogamma, for that was where visas were issued, too. Of course, as a Westerner I enjoyed advantages. In contrast with those from Africa, I didn’t have to go in every three months to renew my residence permit. Only once a year. It was in the course of one such visit that I saw a family make a tiny fire in a hallway, and while the head of the household cooked supper, the mother nursed the three little kids in her arms.

  “Yes,” said Yaya. “with Western Union. Send the money to Lina Oruba in Juba. Send me the transfer code.”

  “Got it.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a sigh and left the kitchen. For a while I just stared at the banknotes lying on the table before me. Then I got dressed and went into the city. The only Western Union office money could be sent from was downtown. It was already full of people by the time I arrived, mainly those from the city’s black African community waiting to send money home. I waited two hours for my turn. On finishing, I texted the code to Yaya. Then I sat about in a downtown café with wood chips all over its floor. Finally I went back to the house.

  Yaya returned in the late afternoon. The girls were already well underway preparing for the night.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  She led me to her room. As soon as I stepped in, she closed the door behind me. She began undressing. First she removed her T-shirt, and then her pants. She stood before me completely naked. She was beautiful and very young.

  “Just what are you doing?” I asked.

  “I want to thank you for taking care of the Western Union transfer for me. Come on.”

  “You don’t have to thank me,” I said.

  Mina hated whites with all her heart. She declared this whenever the opportunity arose. True, that didn’t keep her from lying down with white customers, too. To her mind, whites spread communicable diseases and stank, always had underhanded motives, and were bent on ravaging proper folks. She hated me from the moment I moved in. She kept reminding me by way of pointed observations, usually in front of everyone who lived in the house. Once, for example, she explained at length that when with men of my sort it’s best to pull not just one but two condoms on them. For one thing, because then it was certain they wouldn’t infect a girl with a thing, and, moreover, because then there would be no child even if the man were to deliberately rip the outside condom. Men of my sort were out to get decent girls pregnant, after all.

  I didn’t really bother with her. I had my own issues. I kept my distance from her, and after a while she stopped hounding me and making such remarks. But distilled hatred still always radiated from her eyes. Or, well, almost always. She had a longtime Egyptian customer. A fat, mustachioed dentist. He must have weighed as much as Joyce. But that’s not what made him special.

  “His prick is gigantic,” said Mina, extending her hands about twelve inches apart. Since he was a weekly regular who paid respectably, she always managed an orgasm, but the act hurt her every time. It was in vain that she prepared herself both physically, with various creams, and emotionally. The result was always the same. She felt as if she’d been kneaded and ripped apart. And that’s just how she looked. After finishing with the man, she sat for hours in the kitchen with her knees up to her chin and stared straight ahead. One night, when I got home a bit sooner than the others, that’s how I found her.

  “Are you OK?” I asked, but she didn’t reply.

  Slowly, one motion at a time, she got up off the chair, put her weight on a foot, and started out of the kitchen. Would have started, that is: after two steps toward the door, she collapsed. She would have hit the floor, had I not caught her. I took her in my arms and into her room, and lay her down on the bed. Blood was flowing from her.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  I stayed. She pressed her head to my chest.

  In the morning, when she awoke, she gave me a flustered look.

  “May I ask you something?” I said while getting up from the bed.

  She nodded.

  “Why do you hate white people?”

  “I don’t hate white people.”

  “No?”

  “No. How could I hate my own daughter?”

  Once she regained her strength, she again hated me with all her heart.

  I’d already been living at Joyce’s for three weeks when madness entered my life. Literally. My move there had ensured me a bit of a routine, true, but insomnia still held my head in its grips, even if I was at least leading a sexual life of sorts with some regularity and I was surrounded by respectable, working people.

  Those respectable, working people usually slept through the morning. I was already awake by the time the muezzins called the faithful to the Fajr prayer, and with bloodshot eyes I gazed out at the sun rising over the desert, opened a can of beer, or put on the coffee. I liked it when there was silence in the house; for hours I’d just sit there, looking out of my head. All was perfect.

  I’d already been undergoing my daily meditation in this manner for three weeks when, one morning, madness stepped into the kitchen. It was blond, blue-eyed, two years old. It didn’t greet me, but just sat down beside me on a chair and simpered at me. It didn’t have to say a thing. I knew the bell tolled for me.

  With suspicion I watched my son, who, I knew beyond a doubt, could not be here, since he was three thousand five hundred kilometers away, with his mother. Just to be sure, I flung my mug of coffee at him. With nimbleness that defied his age, he ducked.

  “Where is your mother?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “What do you want?”

  Silence. He just sat there, swinging his legs.

  I broke out in a cold sweat. I stood, picked the pieces of the mug up off the floor, and wiped away the spilled coffee. I sincerely hoped that by clutching onto the last bit of information about reality that had crossed my mind—that I had no idea where my child was just now, but that there was no way he could be here—my hallucination would soon pass.

  I hoped that, as had always been the case, the vision would last only a few minutes and then fade away, allowing me to return to what I’d been doing just before. But now the kid was breathing down my neck all day. Most unnerving of all was that, in keeping with his two years of age, he didn’t talk a whole lot. He mostly just stood there, simpered, and stared. The others didn’t see him and didn’t even hear him stir, so I tried pretending he wasn’t there. This worked for a while. Until I lost my patience and my cool. Now, Kristóf really didn’t say much, but when he did speak, it was terribly irritating, for he went on and on about how I should behave. All my life I’d been quick to jump whenever someone told me what to do and how to do it, and I sure hadn’t expected this of my own child. Especially since I knew he was just a ghost.

  The women and I were sitting in the kitchen celebrating when he first told me off. Yaya had gotten her residence permit extended at the Mogamma by another year. They’d bought two crates of Stella light beer and three bottles of “Ballantimes” Egyptian whiskey—yes, with an “m”—for the occasion. We began drinking when the last customer left the house. The women were drinki
ng respectably, and it was all I could do to keep up with them. They drank on account of anything. The sweltering heat that quivered between the walls of this concrete house; Africa, which they’d brought with them but that they missed; for the end of the day; and this unbearably shitty work of theirs.

  I’d just opened my fourth can of beer when the kid spoke. I’d already completely forgotten that he was there.

  “Don’t drink a lot,” he said in my mother tongue.

  He cast a worried look.

  “Fuck you,” I replied, and drank up the beer in my hand in one go.

  “Don’t drink a lot.”

  “What does it matter, after all?”

  “Don’t drink a lot.”

  “I’ll do what I want.”

  The women didn’t say a thing. In silence they watched my chitchat with the kitchen corner. When I realized what was happening, to save the situation, I opened another can of beer.

  “There’s nothing better than a can of cold beer at the end of the day,” I said.

  After the kitchen incident I was especially on guard not to reveal myself to anyone. There’s nothing wrong with being mad as long as it’s not obvious to others, I thought. This worked, too. Not that that stopped the kid from butting into my life again and again. For example, he was sitting there in the Faris when I punched a drunk American asshole named Dennis. He’d begun shoving and groping the girls, calling them whores to their faces. Though his assertions rung true, I hit him all the same. It’s one thing, what line of work you’re in. It’s another thing, who can it by its name. My fist landed right on his nose and he went flying across the room, slamming against the wall of the bar. I was truly surprised at how much I’d enjoyed it. I had hit not only the dumb American but everything I had a problem with. Hungary got a blow, as did my child’s mother and her family, all those rotten scumbags who blustered on and on about morals. Blood flowed from the American’s nose as he sat hunched up on the floor, protecting his face with a hand. I would have gone after him to hit him a bit more, but the kid, who until then had been passively observing the incident, all at once stepped right between me and the downed American.