Nekropolis (7 page)

Outside Mbarek’s house I tell him, “I’ll come back next Tuesday.” On Tuesday I get my spending money.

* * *

It’s good I got so much cleaning done before I saw Ahkmim because I sleepwalk through the next few days. I leave the cleaning machine in the doorway, where the mistress almost trips over it. I forget to set the clothes in order. I don’t know what to think.

I hear the mistress say to the neighbor, “She’s a godsend, but moody. One day she’s doing everything, the next day she can’t be counted on to remember to set the table.”

What right does she have to talk about me that way? Her house was a pigsty when I came.

What am I thinking? What is wrong with me that I blame my mistress? Where is my head? I feel ill, my eyes water, and my head fills. I can’t breathe, I feel heavy. I must be dutiful. I used to have this feeling once in a while when I was first jessed, it’s part of the adjustment. It must be the change from Mbarek. I have to adjust all over again.

I find the mistress, tell her I’m not feeling well, and go lie down.

The next afternoon, just before dinner, it happens again. The day after that is fine, but then it happens at midmorning of the third day. It is Tuesday and I have the day off. My voice is hoarse, my head aches. What is wrong with me?

I know what is wrong with me. I’m trying not to think about what I’m planning because if I let myself think, the jessing will fight with me. I’m trying to be two people, one a good girl and the other a secret, hidden even from my own self.

I’m afraid. I don’t want to die. Although I don’t mind the idea of being dead, just dying. Inside me is a tiny part that would like it all to stop, to end.

I wonder if I am trying to commit suicide. I’m crazy. But if I think about it, then the sickness comes on me, worse and worse. I can’t stand it here and I can’t go away.

I go to the Moussin in the afternoon, lugging my bag, which is heavy with paper, and sit in the cool dusty darkness, nursing my poor head. I feel as if I should pray. I should ask for help, for guidance. The Moussin is so old that the stone is irregularly worn and through my slippers I can feel the little ridges and valleys in the marble. Up around the main worship hall there are galleries hidden by arabesques of scrollwork. Ayesha and I used to sit up there when we were children. Above that, sunlight flashes through clerestory windows. Where the light hits the marble floor, it shines hard, hurting my eyes and my head. I rest my forehead on my arm, turned sideways on the bench so I can lean against the back. With my eyes closed I smell incense and my own scent of perfume and perspiration.

There are people there for service, but no one bothers me. Isn’t that amazing?

Or maybe it is only because anyone can see that I’m impure.

I’m tired of my own melodrama. I keep thinking that people are looking at me, that someone is going to say something to me. I don’t know where to go.

I don’t even pretend to think of going back to my room. I get on the train and go to Mbarek’s house. I climb the stairs from the train-these are newer, but like the floor of the Moussin they are unevenly worn, sagging in the centers from the weight of this crowded city. What would it be like to cross the sea and go north? To go to Spain ? I used to want to travel, to go to a place where people had yellow hair, to see whole forests of trees. Cross the oceans, learn other languages. I told Ayesha that I would even like to taste dog, or swine. She thought I was showing off, but it was true, once I would have liked to try things.

I’m excited, full of energy and purpose. I can do anything. I can understand Fhassin, standing in the street with his razor, laughing. It is worth it, anything is worth it for this feeling of being alive. I have been jessed, I’ve been asleep for a long time.

There are people on Mbarek’s street. I stand in front of the house across the street. What am I going to say if someone opens the door?
I’m waiting to meet a friend
. What if they don’t leave, what if Akhmim sees them and doesn’t come out? The sun bakes my hair, my head.
Akhmim, where are you? Look out the window
. He’s probably waiting on the mistress. Maybe there is a
bismek
party and those women are poisoning Akhmim. They could do anything, they own him. I want to crouch in the street and cover my head in my hands, rock and cry like a widow woman from the Nekropolis. Like my mother must have done when my father died. I grew up without a father, maybe that’s why I’m wild. Maybe that’s why Fhassin is in prison and I’m headed there. I pull my veil up so my face is shadowed. So no one can see my tears.

Oh, my head. Am I drunk? Am I insane? Has the Holy One, seeing my thoughts, driven me mad?

I look at my brown hands. I cover my face.

“Hariba?” He takes my shoulders.

I look up at him, his beautiful familiar face, and I’m stricken with terror. What is he? What am I trusting my life, my future to? O Holy One, I’m afraid. What if I die?

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Are you ill?”

“I’m going insane,” I say. “I can’t stand it, Akhmim, I can’t go back to my room-”

“Hush,” he says, looking up the street and down. “You have to. I’m only a
harni
. I can’t do anything, I can’t help you.”

“We have to go. We have to go away somewhere, you and I.”

He shakes his head. “Hariba, please. You must hush.”

“We should be free,” I say. My head hurts very badly. The tears keep coming, even though I’m not really crying.

“I can’t be free,” he says. “That was just talk.”

“I have to go now,” I say. “I’m jessed, Akhmim. It’s hard, but if I don’t go now, I’ll never go.”

“But you said you’ll get sick,” he says.

“I can’t live this way,” I say, and it is true. If I don’t do something, I’ll die.

“Your mistress-”

“DON’T TALK ABOUT HER!” I shout. If he talks about her, I won’t be able to leave.

He looks around again. We are a spectacle, a man and a woman arguing on the street.

“Come with me, we’ll go somewhere, talk,” I say, all honey. He can’t deny me, I see it in his face. He has to get off the street. He’d go anywhere. Any place is safer than this.

He lets me take him into the train, down the stairs to the platform. I clutch my indigo veil tight at my throat. We wait in silence. He has his hands in his pockets. He looks like a boy from the Nekropolis, standing there in just his shirt, no outer robe. He looks away, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, ill at ease. Human. Events are making him more human. Taking away all his certainties.

“What kind of genes are in you?” I ask.

“What?” he asks.

“What kind of genes?”

“Are you asking for my chart?” he says.

I shake my head. “Human?”

He shrugs. “Mostly. Some artificial sequences.”

“No animal genes,” I say. I sound irrational because I can’t get clear what I mean. The headache makes my thoughts skip, my tongue thick.

He smiles a little. “No dogs, no monkeys.”

I smile back, he’s teasing me. I’m learning to understand when he teases. “I have some difficult news for you, Akhmim. I think you are a mere human being.”

His smile vanishes. He shakes his head. “Hariba,” he says. He’s about to talk like a father.

I stop him with a gesture. My head still hurts.

The train whispers in, sounding like wind. Oh, the lights. I sit down, shading my eyes, and he stands in front of me. I can feel him looking down at me. I look up and smile, or maybe grimace. He smiles back, looking worried. There is a family of Gypsies at the other end of the car, wild and homeless and dirty. We are like them, I realize.

At the Moussin of the White Falcon we get off. Funny that we are going into a cemetery to live. But only for a while, I think. Somehow I will find a way we can leave, if I live. We’ll go north, across the sea, up to the continent, where we’ll be strangers. I take him through the streets and stop in front of a row of death houses, like Ayesha’s family’s, but an inn.

“There are inns here?” Akhmim asks.

“Of course,” I say. “People come from the country to visit their families. People live in the Nekropolis, we have stores and everything.”

I give Akhmim money and tell him to rent us a place for the night. “Tell them your wife is sick,” I whisper. I’m afraid.

“I don’t have any credit. If they take my identification, they’ll know,” he says.

“This is the Nekropolis,” I say. “They don’t use credit. Go on. Here you are a man.”

He frowns at me, but takes the money. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, bargaining, pointing at me. Just pay, I think, even though we have very little money. I just want to lie down, to sleep. And finally he comes out and takes me by the hand and leads me to our place. A tiny room of rough whitewashed walls: a bed, a chair, a pitcher of water, and two glasses.

“I have something for your head,” he says. “The man gave it to me.” He smiles ruefully. “He thinks you’re pregnant.”

My hand shakes when I hold it out. He puts the white pills in my hand and pours a glass of water for me. “I’ll leave you here,” he says. “I’ll go back. I won’t tell anyone that I know where you are.”

“Then I’ll die,” I say. “I don’t want to argue, Akhmim, just stay until tomorrow.” Then it will be too late. “I need you to take care of me, so I can get better and we can live.”

“What can I do? I can’t live,” he says in anguish. “I can’t get work!”

“You can sell funeral wreaths. I’ll make them.”

He looks torn. It is one thing to think how you will act, another to be in the situation and do it. And I know, seeing his face, that he really is human because his problem is a very human problem. Safety or freedom.

“We will talk about it tomorrow,” I say. “My head is aching.”

“Because you’re jessed,” he says. “It’s dangerous. What if we don’t make enough money? What if they catch us?”

“That’s life,” I say. I’ll go to prison. He’ll be sent back to the mistress. Punished. Maybe made to be conscript labor. Maybe they will put him down, like an animal.

“Is it worth the pain?” he asks in a small voice.

I don’t know, but I can’t say that. “Not when you have the pain,” I say, “but afterward it is.”

“Your poor head.” He strokes my forehead. His hand is cool and soothing.

“Yes,” I say. “Change causes pain.”

Is it worth dying for?

2

Ties

In the beginning there was paradise, and then I was sent out into the world of men.

The first and last lesson they teach us is that we aren’t human. But we know it. Humans are rigid and
harni
bend. Humans have only one shape. I’m bent around Hariba. Hariba is full of sharp angles and unexpected soft places. She thinks that no one gets in, but for a
harni,
Hariba is…is…in the crèche we would have said that Hariba is half-open. There is space there, empty. That is what makes it easy to love her. When I am with her, there is the constant anxiety that I’m not making her happy, and when I see her look of love, something within me leaps up, relieved and delighted.

I’ve gone into that dim, secret space and it has brought me here, to the place of the human dead. Hariba is sick. And I’m helpless.

She sits in the bed in the cool room with the sheet over her knees, and folds paper into flowers. There are lilies on long stalks that she curls into wreaths, then she fills them with tiny flower cups. She names the flowers for me; canna lily, narcissus, rose, impatiens. They are all paper white. She ties them up with long white satin ribbons like the kind she used to wear around her wrists. While she does it, she’s happy and I’m happy to sit with her.

Then the headaches come back and she lies on her side with her knees to her chin, whimpering. The room feels warmer, the air heavier. Her face shines with sweat and long trails of black hair stick to her forehead. Then she’s closed, no space for me, and the headaches fill her and at the same time there is this need, this terrible need, that I can’t satisfy. I found her in the street that way, outside the master’s house, and that’s how she brought me here, with that terrible need.

I stay with her and hold the bucket when she’s sick. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“Shhhh,” I say. “Shhhhh.” I wipe her face with a cloth. The room smells of sweat and vomit and someone who has been in bed too long.

Need. We need money to have a safe place and she needs to be safe.

While she sleeps, I take the wreaths and I go out into the Nekropolis, to the Moussin of the White Falcon. I can bring her back money. It’s a good day, hot and bright. The square in front of the Moussin is crowded with people; some of them are empty, some of them complicated by grief and need. It is in their voices and their faces, in the way their hands shape themselves empty. Women hunch their backs around the emptiness and wail.

Lots of people are set up to sell wreaths, and most of them have lots of wreaths and banks of flowers. Dry and baking heat. The kind that heats to the bone. I spread out a towel and put my wreaths down. I only have six-two as wide across as my arm and full of the sweep and curve of the canna lilies and four smaller ones with roses. Across from me, a woman sits on a cloth, with wreaths and falcons with their paper wings spread all around her, and makes more things. Humans are only complete like this, when they are doing something that makes their minds and hands busy, when they are doing something that makes them solve puzzles. I like to watch this woman because
harni
are never complete alone and so there is something peaceful and at the same time disquieting about it. Humans say they are happy when they have things, but hands and mind in concert make them complete.

A tall boy squats near me with single flowers for sale. He’s looking at my wreaths.

“My wife makes them,” I say, “but she’s sick, so she can’t make many.”

He nods. “They’re very nice. Very good work. How much?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. How much should I ask?”

He considers. “Five for the big ones and three for the small,” he says. “That’s what I’d ask.” He’s pleased that I asked and his pleasure is like warmth. Like heat.