Whores of Babylon, page 4
‘Oh no I’m not. You don’t bind me - with a bit of tape.’
I do, he thought, if I don’t throw the tape away. Which I won’t do.
Sol must be mad, must I? Alex must be mad? Maybe so. There had to be something a bit schizoid about becoming a Babylonian.
Inside his sleeve Alex clutched the wrapped cassette, though not so fiercely as to crack the twentieth- century plastic case.
‘Let’s get another beer,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s loosen up. Or should we try the wine?’
‘Shit,’ she said; referring precisely to what?
Later, they found rooms in a sprawling three-storey inn between Sin Street and Marduk Street, near the Greek Theatre.
The inn was called 'Between the Skin Shops’. On one side was a reeking fuller’s and tanner’s, where cloth fresh from the weaver’s was cleaned and thickened in solutions of alkaline ash obtained from combusted reeds; and where pigskins were steeped in baths of alum and gallnut, bated with dung, and tanned with oil. On the other side stood a striptease parlour. Two kinds of skin, each of a different stripe. Thus the servant, who showed them upstairs, explained amusedly.
Alex’s room was small and bare with a window overlooking the central earthen courtyard, where a quartet of donkeys wandered aimlessly and from which a solitary date palm rose, its uppermost fronds shading part of the roof. A curtain of reeds, tied to one side with cord, hung in the window. Alex could carry his straw pallet up to the roof if he liked to sleep out under the stars. Many guests did, to enjoy the cool of the night; the rooms could get stuffy. Otherwise, his lodging contained a wooden chest with no lock, a piss- pot - the toilet proper was downstairs, a platform over a pit, though with the luxury of a bitumen seat - and several small lamps of sesame oil standing on a shelf: shoe-shaped lamps with the wick sticking up through an eyelet hole on top. A handful of sulphur matches lay in a roughly hollowed-out stone.
The public rooms downstairs all had doors of reeds, but guests’ doors were stout wood. The first thing Alex did when his door was shut was to take a good Greek knife from inside his tunic and cut a brick loose low down the dingiest wall. He prised the clay brick out, scraped a hole behind, and pushed the wrapped cassette inside. He replaced the brick, swept the scrapings into a little pile, then pissed in the pot, carefully soaked a nub of cloth and used hot urine to make mud to seal around his excavation. He felt quite proud of his guile. The result would pass casual scrutiny. He scuffed the rest of the evidence around the floor, and rubbed his hands clean.
He lay down on his pallet and slept.
At the evening meal downstairs he and Deborah encountered half a dozen fellow-guests. The meal was taken in a large chamber with spiral columns supporting the weight of the floor above; though not entirely. A quarter of the dining room was open to a darkening though unthreatening sky.
Four of the other guests were traders from Upper Babylonia, due to tramp home next morning, leading their mokes. The traders conversed in Babylonian and mostly ignored the visitors. One other guest was a well-fleshed muscular black man who described himself whimsically as a Nubian, though his Greek vowels spoke of Georgia or Alabama. The last guest was an Indian, from actual India, far fringe of Persian trade. This man, Gupta, spoke Greek thanks to Alexander’s conquering armies. He and the Nubian, Nabu, had arrived in Babylon a week or so earlier.
Over supper Alex warmed to Nabu, though he distrusted skinny brown Gupta, whose eyes darted shiftily, often in Deborah’s direction. Gupta seemed to be at once evasive and snoopy, the sort of person who would sneak into your room while you were out - just by accident, of course! the wrong door! When animated (as he was later) his dark eyes shone, his neat white teeth flashed, and his tongue was a pink rose petal. Otherwise his features remained furtively anonymous, a mask of bland characterlessness. Yet all the while he watched, and kept his ears cocked. Oddly, Deborah seemed to prefer him to the wholesome Nubian.
The meal consisted of unleavened bread, thick lentil soup dished out with a terracotta ladle, followed by tough roast mutton and lumpy turnip, with figs and yoghurt for afters. The guests ate with bone spoons and single-pronged bone forks, out of pottery bowls and from wooden platters. Two torches, of reeds dipped in bitumen, quickly burned all the moths they attracted through the open gap. A chorus of frogs croaked from a garden pool in some other house.
Serving at table was a middle-aged woman with peculiar habits. While they ate she shuffled around the circuit of the walls, halted, shuffled six paces onward, halted, all the while muttering to herself, ‘Hummum, hummum, um-hum, um,’ like someone engaged in a strange penance. Periodically she darted in to the diners to hover over them, inspecting, before returning to her previous station. Alex figured her for an obsessional neurotic, captive of innumerable phobias. She wore several amulets on strings around her neck: little clay figures of a goat, a dog, and a drum.
‘Ah’m goin’ to become a scribe,’ confided Nabu, patting his belly affably. Tt’s a fine life, a scribe’s. Ah’ve seen ’em goin’ about their lesser business, and ah bet there’s lots of big important business too.’ Deborah looked derisive.
‘Compiling the records of the city.’ Alex gave an approving nod. Information was power.
‘What kind of records?’ asked Gupta quickly. ‘How do you know there are any records?’
‘Yes,’ said Deborah. ‘The only records might be the price of yesterday’s cucumbers.’
‘Brothers, sister,’ said Nabu, ‘we all know there have to be records of a different sort; though we don’t speak of it. Otherwise, why are we all here?’
‘Mum-mum, mum-mum,’ muttered the serving woman. She darted closer. ‘Mum!’ she said emphatically, warningly.
Abruptly Gupta’s hand snaked out. He caught the woman’s robe, forcing her to bend.
‘Ha ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘You sound hungry. Don’t you get your dinner till we finish? Do you get the scraps?’ With two fingers of his free hand, chopstick-style, he snatched up a small hard onion left in his soup bowl. Nimbly, two other fingers prised the woman’s mouth open and in popped the onion. Then Gupta released her.
She scuttled directly to the nearest flambeau and spat the onion on to the heart of burning tarry rushes. Then she resumed her progress, silently. One of the Babylonians said something, pointed, and all four chortled.
‘What you do that for, man?’ cried Nabu.
Deborah looked alert, excited; and it was to her that Gupta said, ‘I did it so that I could peep inside her mouth.’
‘Are you a doctor?’ asked Deborah.
‘No. Though I could have been. That woman hasn’t said a comprehensible word in my hearing in the last ten days. Now I know why.’
‘How, if you aren’t a doctor?’
‘Anyone could see, respected lady, that her tongue has been torn out at the root!’
‘What?’
‘Ha ha. My little joke.’ His eyes shone. ‘I fooled you, did I not? You don’t mind that. It doesn’t offend you. It thrills you, yes?’ He stuck his own tongue out of his mouth, arching it up towards his nose. The top of his tongue tickled the tip of his nose. Abruptly as a toad’s or a chameleon’s, his tongue withdrew.
‘In my country,’ said Gupta, ‘we do many wonderful things with our tongues. Some wise men divide, with a knife, the left and right side of the tongue. They stick their two tongues separately up their two nostrils and, deprived of oxygen, they meditate. Other wise men swallow their tongues for ten minutes. Yes, right down the throat! Then they disgorge. Of course, first you have to spend months and years stropping your tongue like the leather belt on which you sharpen a knife - so as to lengthen it. I’m not a doctor, splendid lady, but a magician. A magician needs to know a lot about the body. Sometimes he must hide things inside it and be able to retrieve them at will. I can hide a big pearl behind my eyeball. Sometimes a magician must bend and flex unbelievably. Yes, the wonders of the body! All its hidden secrets! Your own body is a wonder, graceful lady. Your neck is the upraised white gorge of a goose as it honks at heaven; your shoulders are its breasts. I could teach you to swallow all manner of long objects. Stiff snakes, steel blades, hollow bamboos all the way down to your belly.’
Deborah smirked.
Gupta switched his attention to Alex. ‘Do you want something hidden, sir? Gupta can hide it for you.’
Alex felt himself flush.
‘Anywhere at all!’ Gupta clapped his hands; but summoned no sudden jewel or genie. ‘I can hide it in full view of your face and you’ll not notice. In fact,’ (and he showed his hands, front and back, both bare), ‘see, I’ve already hidden it.’
If Gupta had seemed shifty to begin with, now he was bold; as though earlier he had been busy furtively rearranging circumstances in the dining room by the power of glance alone, and now everything was to his satisfaction.
‘What was it that I hid? Ah, that is the mystic secret.’
Alex said, ‘I used to be a juggler. I juggled with knives. I tossed knives at targets representing people who were acting offensive.’
Nabu hastily intervened: ‘Say, Gupta, can you give us a jugglin’ show?’
But the Indian continued staring at Alex with a mixture of resentment, eccentric hilarity, and - yes - licence to do as he pleased.
‘What is hidden? Where, and why? Gupta always knows the secrets. He looks,’ (saying which he scanned Deborah) ‘with eyes which see through walls, through reeds, through bricks. Through stones, through cloth, through skin.’
Had the Indian, by hideous chance, been in that same street when the donkeys bolted? Had he spied Alex pick up the packet; and remembered him? Or was mind-reading from facial tics and flushes another of his tricks?
Whichever, Alex decided he had better dig out the cassette from its hiding place as soon as the light was adequate next morning. He would keep it about his person till he found somewhere out in the city to hide it. A loose stone somewhere, a hole; maybe in the grounds of some temple.
‘That’s enough,’ said Nabu. ‘Just you quit teasing, upsetting these good folk. Just cut it out.’
Tm not upset,’ said Deborah.
‘Of course you aren’t,’ agreed Gupta. ‘And isn’t your companion the clever one with knives, who knows how to cut things out?’
‘Um-hum, MUM,’ said the serving woman.
2
In which Alex makes holy love, and meets
a hairdresser
A roar of anger woke Alex out of a confused dream. Oh yes, he had just pushed the plunger which primed the bomb which would blow up the whole world exactly an hour later. Why had he done so? It had something to do with a message which he either had or hadn’t received. He felt nobly, coolly tragic to be the one who had to destroy so much hope and beauty and love. He heard Deborah call out, scrambled from his pallet, clutched a cloth about him and rushed from his room down the corridor in the direction of disputing voices. He was still half asleep.
Nabu’s incensed voice boomed from an open door: ‘Ah say it’s disgustin’!’
‘Not if it’s his custom!’ (Deborah’s voice.)
‘Why leave this door open? So everyone could see him?’
Alex hove to in the doorway. Nabu and Deborah were just inside, she seeming to restrain him. Gupta sat stark naked on the bare clay floor in the clear morning light, his legs loosely crossed. One hand was occupied down by his bum, the other hovered by his mouth. A little glossy black box lay open before him, and from it up to his lips snaked a thin strip of. . .
Gupta was busy feeding Alex’s unravelled tape into his mouth, eating it! The other end of the tape emerged from his anus, teased out by twitches of his fingers. Brown-stained, fouled.
Alex staggered against the doorpost. Gupta had slunk into his room while he slept and stolen the cassette. Now he was . . . besmirching it.
The Indian nodded to Alex. ‘Good morning! Have you lost something?’ he enquired adenoidally, around the contents of his mouth.
Before Alex could betray himself, Nabu burst out, ‘This here is hygiene, Indian-style! This is how you clean out your bowels! You spend all night swallowin’ a cord of towelling - till you excrete it! Then you pull to and fro vigorously. You leave your door open so everyone can watch you. It makes me sick.’
Deborah started to giggle.
With a few rippling heaves of Gupta’s Adam’s apple and a slow pass of his hand, within moments the Indian was crumpling something like a tapeworm in his palm; and his mouth was empty. Swiftly Gupta wound the long thin worm around his fingers and tucked it neatly into the black box.
‘Actually,’ he said in a prim voice, ‘it is a silk ribbon, nothing more.’ He whisked his other hand from behind him. ‘Here is a second ribbon. Both quite clean. Ha ha, my little joke! They were never joined together inside me. You saw them as one single ribbon, Nabu, because the other day I told you how some wise men in my country, who can control their inner motions, clean out their guts by swallowing a very long bit of towel and passing it right through them like the snake of Kundalini.’
Gupta adjusted his sitting position into a tighter lotus, hiding his genitals. ‘Isn’t it remarkable what you can see - when actually there is nothing to see? And conversely!’
Alex saw that the black box was lacquer, not plastic. The tape wasn’t a tape. It was wider than a tape. It was, as Gupta had said, ribbon. He sighed his pent breath out.
A predatory brown bird with beady eyes, Gupta scried him. ‘You saw something of intimate interest too, hmm, Alex?’
‘I had a nightmare. I got a bit confused.’
‘Dear me, and on your first night in Babylon!’
‘Not a good omen,’ said Deborah light-heartedly.
‘No, dear lady, a dream is not an omen. People in Babylon pay scant attention to dreams, unless a professional interprets them. But then, the Babylonians are themselves a dream, are they not? I know how to interpret dreams, Alex. You have brought your nightmare to the right room.’
‘If you interpret dreams,’ said Alex harshly, ‘do you interpret Babylon too?’ Was Gupta a trained observer, masquerading as this sleazy fakir?
‘Ah! Here we come to the nub. The intimate something which you thought you saw is perhaps connected with how this city is evaluated?’ Gupta wound the other ribbon tight and placed it with its twin. Together, the two ribbons looked just like a couple of tape spools. ‘Connected with how Babylon is understood, both from within and from without? Am I getting close?’
Or was Gupta an agent, not of the university, but of some other interested party? Some foreign government?
‘Rubbish,’ said Alex, answering both himself and Gupta too.
The Indian chuckled. ‘Today you should visit the temple of Marduk. There you should pray for victory.’
‘Pray?’ Alex repeated in astonishment.
‘Yes. Prayer is simply a means of fixing the mind. Marduk is god of war. You must pray for victory, over the fear that destroys.’
Yeah, that was the nightmare, all right. The whole world being destroyed. Alex remembered now.
With the cassette duly recovered from its hiding place in the wall - of course Gupta hadn’t stolen it! - and with the slim packet now tucked into his loincloth under his tunic, Alex shared a breakfast of porridge with the others. Sparrows twittered and bounced along the wall-top fringing blue sky, hoping later to descend and peck bowls clean before the mad serving woman could hum the bowls away.
‘Are you going to Marduk’s temple?’ Deborah asked Alex.
‘No.’ Yet the precincts of a temple were precisely where he had thought of hiding the tape. ‘Yes. Maybe.’
‘Let me be your guide,’ offered Gupta. ‘Yours too, fair lady.’
‘We’ll go alone,’ said Alex.
Deborah cocked an eyebrow. ‘We will?’
If Deborah was with him, how could he hide the tape successfully? Damn the tape! This business was becoming obsessional. Witness his hallucination that Gupta had been eating the tape, performing an intestinal Indian rope trick with it. But until he had deposited the thing somewhere secret, he couldn’t relax.
Had Gupta somehow made him see what he imagined he saw?
If Alex went on his own to the temple, Gupta would contrive to be Deborah’s guide for the day; of that he felt sure. What might Deborah inadvertently reveal to Gupta about Alex’s secret, and hers? About their mutual bond?
Courage, he thought. Victory.
‘Sorry, Deb,’ he said. ‘I guess a guy has to pray alone. Can we meet up afterwards? Take in lunch; see some sights? We could meet. .He had no idea where.
‘At the main exit from the temple on to the river road,’ Gupta suggested helpfully.
‘Yes. There.’ Alex rose.
‘When?’ asked Deborah; which was a good omen. ‘Don’t forget,’ said Gupta, ‘that much of the city takes a siesta in the early afternoon.’
Looking pointedly at Deborah, not Gupta, Alex named the hour of rendezvous.
Nabu rubbed a porridge smear from his lower lip and stood up too. ‘I’ll walk along with you, Alex.’
‘No, don’t bother. I’ll find the temple.’
‘Suit yourself, friend. Suit your own sweet self.’ Offended, the sunbelt Nubian stomped off.
The route, described by the doorkeeper of the inn, was easy. Alex forged south through minor streets - of leather-workers and mat-makers, coppersmiths and confectioners - till he struck the main crossthoroughfare, Marduk Street. This was a vast paved boulevard mainly lined with high windowless houses. As he strode along, with the sun at his back, the shining bulk of Babel Tower ahead seemed to tug at him once more as though the great spiral structure was indeed distorting the geometry of the city, building more space in its heart, just as the sides of a whirlpool open up extra surface space in the waters which the whirlpool perturbs.
The turbaned, stick-twirling Babylonians who were strolling along - upper-crust people for the most part - hardly gave Babel a glance, but it was almost with difficulty that Alex himself finally veered off southwards along the Processional Way. This he followed until he reached the long approach road leading west to the temple of the god of victory.
