Collected Short Fiction, page 1255
“Please,” Little Father said. “You’re starting to drive me crazy. I’m not responsible for what goes on in the jungles of the tropics. This is Songhay. Do we seem uncivilized to you? We were a great empire when you Ottomans were still herding goats on the steppes. The only giraffe you’ll see in this city is the stuffed one in my father’s throne room. There aren’t any gorillas in Songhay, and tigers come from Asia, and if you see a hippo running, here or anywhere, please tell the newspaper right away.” Then he began to laugh. “Look, Selima, this is a modern country. We have motorcars here. We have a stock exchange. There’s a famous university in Timbuctoo, six hundred years old. I don’t bow down to tribal idols. We are an Islamic people, you know.”
It was lunacy to have let her force him onto the defensive like this. But she wouldn’t stop her attack.
“Djinn are Islamic. The Koran talks about them. The Arabs believe in djinn.”
Little Father struggled for patience. “Perhaps they did five hundred years ago, but what’s that to us? In any case we aren’t Arabs.”
“But there are djinn here, plenty of them. My head porter told me. A djinni will appear as a small black spot on the ground and will grow until he’s as big as a house. He might change into a sheep or a dog or a cat, and then he’ll disappear. The porter said that one time he was at the edge of town in Kabara, and he was surrounded by giants in white turbans that made a weird sucking noise at him.”
“What is this man’s name? He has no right filling your head with this trash. I’ll have him fed to the lions.”
“Really?” Her eyes were sparkling. “Would you? What lions? Where?”
“My father keeps them as pets, in a pit. No one is looking after them these days. They must be getting very hungry.”
“Oh, you are a savage! You are!”
Little Father grinned lopsidedly. He was regaining some of the advantage, he felt. “Lions need to be fed now and then. There’s nothing savage about that. Not feeding them, that would be savage.”
“But to feed a servant to them—?”
“If he speaks idiotic nonsense to a visitor, yes. Especially when the visitor is an impressionable young girl.”
Her eyes flashed quick lightning, sudden pique. “You think I’m impressionable? You think I’m silly?”
“I think you are young.”
“And I think you’re a savage underneath it all. Even savages can start a stock exchange. But they’re still savages.”
“Very well,” Little Father said, putting an ominous throb into his tone. “I admit it. I am the child of darkness. I am the pagan prince.” He pointed to the moon, full and swollen, hanging just above them like a plummeting polished shield. “You think that is a dead planet up there? It is alive, it is a land of djinn. And it must be nourished. So when it is full like this, the king of this land must appear beneath its face and make offerings of energy to it.”
“Energy?”
“Sexual energy,” he said portentously. “Atop the great phallic altar, beneath which we keep the dried umbilicus of each of our dead kings. First there is a procession, the phallic figures carried through the streets. And then—”
“The sacrifice of a virgin?” Selima asked.
“What’s wrong with you? We are good Moslems here. We don’t countenance murder.”
“But you countenance phallic rites at the full moon?”
He couldn’t tell whether she was taking him seriously or not.
“We maintain certain pre-Islamic customs,” he said. “It is folly to cut oneself off from one’s origins.”
“Absolutely. Tell me what you do on the night the moon is full.”
“First, the king coats his entire body in rancid butter—”
“I don’t think I like that!”
“Then the chosen bride of the moon is led forth—”
“The fair-skinned bride.”
“Fair-skinned?” he said. She saw it was a game, he realized. She was getting into it. “Why fair-skinned?”
“Because she’d be more like the moon than a black woman would. Her energy would rise into the sky more easily. So each month a white woman is stolen and brought to the king to take part in the rite.”
Little Father gave her a curious stare. “What a ferocious child you are!”
“I’m not a child. You do prefer white women, don’t you? One thing you regret is that I’m not white enough for you.”
“You seem very white to me,” said Little Father. She was at the edge of the porch now, looking outward over the sleeping city. Idly he watched her shoulderblades moving beneath her sheer gown. Then suddenly the garment began to slide downward, and he realized she had unfastened it at the throat and cast it off. She had worn nothing underneath it. Her waist was very narrow, her hips broad, her buttocks smooth and full, with a pair of deep dimples at the place where they curved outward from her back. His lips were beginning to feel very dry, and he licked them thoughtfully.
She said, “What you really want is an Englishwoman, with skin like milk, and pink nipples, and golden hair down below.”
Damn Ali Pasha! Was he out of his mind, telling such stuff to her? He’d go to the lions first thing tomorrow!
Amazed, he cried, “What are you talking about? What sort of madness is this?”
“That is what you want, isn’t it? A nice juicy golden-haired one. All of you Africans secretly want one. Some of you not so secretly. I know all about it.”
No, it was inconceivable. Ali Pasha was tricky, but he wasn’t insane. This was mere coincidence.
“Have you ever had an Englishwoman, prince? A true pink-and-gold one?”
Little father let out a sigh of relief. It was only another of her games, then. The girl was all mischief, and it came bubbling out randomly, spontaneously. Truly, she would say anything to anyone. Anything.
“Once,” he said, a little vindictively. “She was writing a book on the African empires and she came here to do some research at our university. Our simple barbaric university. One night she interviewed me, on this very porch, a night almost as warm as this one. Her name was—ah—Elizabeth. Elizabeth, yes.” Little Father’s gaze continued to rest on Selima’s bare back. She seemed much more frail above the waist than below. Below the waist she was solid, splendidly fleshly, a commanding woman, no girl at all. Languidly he said, “Skin like milk, indeed. And rosy nipples. I had never even imagined that nipples could be like that. And her hair—”
Selina turned to face him. “My nipples are dark.”
“Yes, of course. You’re a Turk. But Elizabeth—”
“I don’t want to hear any more about Elizabeth. Kiss me.”
Her nipples were dark, yes, and very small, almost like a boy’s, tiny dusky targets on the roundness of her breasts. Her thighs were surprisingly full. She looked far more voluptuous naked than when she was clothed. He hadn’t expected that. The heavy thatch at the base of her belly was jet black.
He said, “We don’t care for kissing in Songhay. It’s one of our quaint tribal taboos. The mouth is for eating, not for making love.”
“Every part of the body is for making love. Kiss me.”
“You Europeans!”
“I’m not European. I’m a Turk. You do it in some peculiar way here, don’t you? Side by side. Back to back.”
“No,” he said. “Not back to back. Never like that, not even when we feel like reverting to tribal barbarism.”
Her perfume drifted toward him, falling over him like a veil. Little Father went to her and she rose up out of the night to him, and they laughed. He kissed her. It was a lie, the thing he had told her, that Songhayans did not like to kiss. Songhayans liked to do everything: at least this Songhayan did. She slipped downward to the swirl of silken pillows on the floor, and he joined her there and covered her body with his own. As he embraced her he felt the moonlight on his back like the touch of a goddess’ fingertips, cool, delicate, terrifying.
On the horizon a sharp dawn-line of pale lavender appeared, cutting between the curving grayness above and the flat grayness below. It was like a preliminary announcement by the oboes or the French horns, soon to be transformed into the full overwhelming trumpetblast of morning. Michael, who had been wandering through Old Timbuctoo all night, stared eastward uneasily as if he expected the sky to burst into flame when the sun came into view.
Sleep had been impossible. Only his face and hands were actually sunburned, but his whole body throbbed with discomfort, as though the African sun had reached him even through his clothing. He felt the glow of it behind his knees, in the small of his back, on the soles of his feet.
Nor was there any way to escape the heat, even when the terrible glaring sun had left the sky. The nights were as warm as the days. The motionless air lay on you like burning fur. When you drew a breath you could trace its path all the way down, past your nostrils, past your throat, a trickle of molten lead descending the forking paths into your lungs and spreading out to weigh upon every individual air-sac inside you. Now and then came a breeze, but it only made things worse: it gave you no more comfort than a shower of hot ashes might have afforded. So Michael had risen after a few hours of tossing and turning and gone out unnoticed to wander under the weird and cheerless brilliance of the overhanging moon, down from the posh Embassy district into the Old Town somehow, and then from street to street, from quarter to quarter, no destination in mind, no purpose, seeking only to obliterate the gloom and misery of the night.
He was lost, of course—the Old Town was complex enough to negotiate in daylight, impossible in the dark—but that didn’t matter. He was somewhere on the western side of town, that was all he knew. The moon was long gone from the sky, as if it had been devoured, though he had not noticed it setting. Before him the ancient metropolis of mud walls and low square flat-roofed buildings lay humped in the thinning darkness, a gigantic weary beast slowly beginning to stir. The thing was to keep on walking, through the night and into the dawn, distracting himself from the physical discomfort and the other, deeper agony that had wrapped itself like some voracious starfish around his soul.
By the faint light he saw that he had reached a sort of large pond. Its water looked to be a flat metallic green. Around its perimeter crouched a shadowy horde of water-carriers, crouching to scoop the green water into goatskin bags, spooning it in with gourds. Then they straightened, with the full bags—they must have weighed a hundred pounds—balanced on their heads, and went jogging off into the dawn to deliver their merchandise at the homes of the wealthy. Little ragged girls were there too, seven or eight years old, filling jugs and tins to bring to their mothers. Some of them waded right into the pool to get what they wanted. A glowering black man in the uniform of the Emirate sat to one side, jotting down notations on a sheet of yellow paper. So this was probably the Old Town’s municipal reservoir. Michael shuddered and turned away, back into the city proper. Into the labyrinth once more.
A gray, sandy light was in the sky now. It showed him narrow dusty thoroughfares, blind walls, curving alleyways leading into dark cul-de-sacs. Entire rows of houses seemed to be crumbling away, though they were obviously still inhabited. Under foot everything was sand, making a treacherous footing. In places the entrances to buildings were half choked by the drifts. Camels, donkeys, horses wandered about on their own. The city’s mixed population—veiled Tuaregs, black Sudanese, aloof and lofty Moors, heavy-bearded Syrian traders, the whole West African racial goulash—was coming forth into the day. Who were all these people? Tailors, moneylenders, scribes, camel-breeders, masons, bakers, charm-sellers, weavers, bakers—necromancers, sages, warlocks, perhaps a few vampires on their way home from their night’s toil—Michael looked around, bewildered, trapped within his skull by the barriers of language and his own disordered mental state. He felt as though he were moving about under the surface of the sea, in a medium where he did not belong and could neither breathe nor think.
“Selima?” he said suddenly, blinking in astonishment.
His voice was voiceless. His lips moved, but no sound had come forth.
Apparition? Hallucination? No, no, she was really there. Selima glowed just across the way like a second sun suddenly rising over the city.
Michael shrank back against an immense buttress of mud brick. She had stepped out of a doorway in a smooth gray wall that surrounded what appeared to be one of the palaces of the nobility. The building, partly visible above the wall, was coated in orange clay and had elaborate Moorish windows of dark wood. He trembled. The girl wore only a flimsy white gown, so thin that he could make out the dark-tipped spheres of her breasts moving beneath it, and the dark triangle at her thighs. He wanted to cry. Had she no shame? No. No. She was indifferent to the display, and to everything around her; she would have walked completely naked through this little plaza just as casually as she strode through in this one thin garment.
“Selima, where have you spent this night? Whose palace is this?”
His words were air. No one heard them. She moved serenely onward. A motorcar appeared from somewhere, one of the five or six that Michael had seen so far in this city. A black plume of smoke rose from the vent of its coal-burning engine, and its two huge rear wheels slipped and slid about on the sandy track. Selima jumped up onto the open seat behind the driver, and with great booming exhalations the vehicle made its way through an arched passageway and disappeared into the maze of the town.
An embassy car, no doubt. Waiting here for her all night?
His soul ached. He had never felt so young, so foolish, so vulnerable, so wounded.
“Effendi?” a voice asked. “You wish a camel, effendi?”
“Thank you, no.”
“Nice hotel? Bath? Woman to massage you? Boy to massage you?”
“Please. No.”
“Some charms, maybe? Good grigri. Souvenir of Timbuctoo.”
Michael groaned. He turned away and looked back at the house of infamy from which Selima had emerged.
“That building—what is it?”
“That? Is palace of Little Father. And look, look there, effendi—Little Father himself coming out for a walk.”
The prince himself, yes. Of course. Who else would she have spent the night with, here in the Old Town? Michael was engulfed by loathing and despair. Instantly a swarm of eager citizens had surrounded the prince, clustering about him to beg favors the moment he showed himself. But he seemed to move through them with the sort of divine indifference that Selima, in her all-but-nakedness, had displayed. He appeared to be enclosed in an impenetrable bubble of self-concern. He was frowning, he looked troubled, not at all like a man who had just known the favors of the most desirable woman in five hundred miles. His lean sharp-angled face, which had been so animated at the official reception, now had a curiously stunned, immobile look about it, as though he had been struck on the head from behind a short while before and the impact was gradually sinking in.
Michael flattened himself against the buttress. He could not bear the thought of being seen by the prince now, here, as if he had been haunting the palace all night, spying on Selima. He put his arm across his face in a frantic attempt to hide himself, he whose western clothes and long legs and white skin made him stand out like a meteor. But the prince wasn’t coming toward him. Nodding in an abstracted way, he turned quickly, passed through the throng of chattering petitioners as if they were ghosts, disappeared in a flurry of white fabric.
Michael looked about for his sudden friend, the man who had wanted to sell him camels, massages, souvenirs. What he wanted now was a guide to get him out of the Old Town and back to the residence of the English ambassador. But the man was gone.
“Pardon me—” Michael said to someone who looked almost like the first one. Then he realized that he had spoken in English. Useless. He tried in Turkish and in Arabic. A few people stared at him. They seemed to be laughing. He felt transparent to them. They could see his sorrow, his heartache, his anguish, as easily as his sunburn.
Like the good young diplomat he was, he had learned a little Songhay too, the indigenous language. “Town talk,” they called it.
But the few words he had seemed all to have fled. He stood alone and helpless in the plaza, scuffing angrily at the sand, as the sun broke above the mud rooftops like the sword of an avenging angel and the full blast of morning struck him. Michael felt blisters starting to rise on his cheeks. Agitated flies began to buzz around his eyes. A camel, passing by just then, dropped half a dozen hot green turds right at his feet. He snatched one out of the sand and hurled it with all his strength at the bland blank mud-colored wall of Little Father’s palace.
Big Father was sitting up on his divan. His silken blankets were knotted around his waist in chaotic strands, and his bare torso rose above the chaos, gleaming as though it had been oiled. His arms were like sticks and his skin was three shades paler than it once had been and cascades of loose flesh hung like wattles from his neck, but there was the brilliance of black diamonds in his glittering little eyes.
“Not dead yet, you see? You see?” His voice was a cracked wailing screech, but the old authoritative thunder was still somewhere behind it. “Back from the edge of the grave, boy! Allah walks with me yet!”
Little Father was numb with chagrin. All the joy of his night with Selima had vanished in a moment when word had arrived of his father’s miraculous recovery. He had just been getting accustomed to the idea that he soon would be king, too. His first misgivings about the work involved in it had begun to ebb; he rather liked the idea of ruling, now. The crown was descending on him like a splendid gift. And here was Big Father sitting up, grinning, waving his arms around in manic glee. Taking back his gift. Deciding to live after all.
What about the funeral plans? What about the special ambassadors who had traveled so far, in such discomfort, to pay homage to the late venerable Emir of Songhay and strike their various deals with his successor?
Big Father had had his head freshly shaved and his beard had been trimmed. He looked like a gnome, ablaze with demonic energies. Off in the corner of the porch, next to the potted trees, the three marabouts stood in a circle, making sacred gestures at each other with lunatic vigor, each seeking to demonstrate superior fervor.
