The dancer just finishing her last number was an Egyptian girl named Indihar. I’d known her for years. She used to work for Frenchy Benoit, but now she was wiggling her ass in Chiri’s club. She came up to me when she got offstage, wrapped now in a pale peach-colored shawl that had little success in concealing her voluptuous body. “Want to tip me for my dancing?” she asked.
“It would give me untold pleasure,” I said. I took a kiam bill from my change and stuffed it into her cleavage. If she was going to treat me like a mark, I was going to act like one. “Now,” I said, “I won’t feel guilty about going home and fantasizing about you all night.”
“That’ll cost you extra,” she said, moving down the bar toward the bare-chested guy in the vinyl pedal pushers.
I watched her walk away. “I like that girl,” I said to Chiriga.
“That’s our Indihar, one fine package of suntanned fun,” said Chiri.
Indihar was a real girl with a real personality, a rarity in that club. Chiri seemed to prefer in her employees the high-velocity prettiness of a sexchange. Chiri told me once that changes take better care of their appearance. Their prefab beauty is their whole life. Allah forbid that a single hair of their eyebrows should be out of place.
By her own standards, Indihar was a good Muslim woman too. She didn’t have the head wiring that most dancers had. The more conservative imams taught that the implants fell under the same prohibition as intoxicants, because some people got their pleasure centers wired and spent the remainder of their short lives amp-addicted. Even if, as in my case, the pleasure center is left alone, the use of a moddy submerges your own personality, and that is interpreted as insobriety. Needless to say, while I have nothing but the warmest affection for Allah and His Messenger, I stop short of being a fanatic about it. I’m with that twentieth-century King Saud who demanded that the Islamic leaders of his country stop dragging their feet when it came to technological progress. I don’t see any essential conflict between modern science and a thoughtful approach to religion.
Chiri looked down the bar. “All right,” she called out loudly, “which one of you motherfuckers’ turn is it? Janelle? I don’t want to have to tell you to get up and dance again. If I got to remind you to play your goddamn music one more time, I’m gonna fine you fifty kiam. Now move your fat ass.” She looked at me and sighed. “Life is tough,” I said. Indihar came back up the bar after collecting whatever she could pry out of the few glum customers. She sat on the stool beside me. Like Chiri, she didn’t seem to get nightmares from talking with me. “So what’s it like,” she asked, “working for Friedlander Bey?”
“You tell me.” One way or another, everybody in the Budayeen works for Papa. She shrugged. “I wouldn’t take his money if I was starving, in prison, and had cancer.”
This, I guessed, was a dig, a not-very-veiled reference to the fact that I had sold out to get my implants. I just swallowed some more gin and bingara.
Maybe one of the reasons I went to Chiri’s whenever I needed a little cheering up is that I grew up in places just like it. My mother had been a dancer when I was a baby, after my father ran off. When the situation got real bad, she started turning tricks. Some girls in the clubs do that, some don’t. My mother had to. When things got even harder, she sold my little brother. That’s something she won’t talk about. I won’t talk about it, either.
My mother did the best she knew how. The Arab world has never put much value on education for women.
Everybody knows how the more traditional — that is to say, more backward and unregenerate — Arab men treat their wives and daughters. Their camels get more respect. Now, in the big cities like Damascus and Cairo, you can see modern women wearing Western-style clothing, holding down jobs outside the home, sometimes even smoking cigarettes on the street. In Mauretania, I’d seen that the attitudes there were still rigid. Women wore long white robes and veils, with hoods or kerchiefs covering their hair. Twenty-five years ago, my mother had no place in the legitimate job market. But there is always a small population of lost souls, of course — people who scoff at the dictates of the holy Qur’an, men and women who drink alcohol and gamble and indulge in sex for pleasure. There is always a place for a young woman whose morals have been ground away by hunger and despair.
When I saw her again in Algiers, my mother’s appearance had shocked me. In my imagination, I’d pictured her as a respectable, moderately well-to-do matron living in a comfortable neighborhood. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in years, but I just figured she’d managed to lift herself out of the poverty and degradation. Now I thought maybe she was happy as she was, a haggard, strident old whore. I spent an hour with her, hoping to hear what I’d come to learn, trying to decide how to behave toward her, and being embarrassed by her in front of the Half-Hajj. She didn’t want to be troubled by her children. I got the impression that she was sorry she hadn’t sold me too, when she’d sold Hussain Abdul-Qahhar, my brother. She didn’t like me dropping back into her life after all those years. “Believe me,” I told her, “I didn’t like hunting you up, either. I only did it because I have to.” “Why do you have to?” she wanted to know. She reclined on a musty-smelling, torn old sofa that was covered with cat hair. She’d made herself another drink, but had neglected to offer me or Saied anything.
“It’s important to me,” I said. I told her about my life in the faraway city, how I’d lived as a subsonic hustler until Friedlander Bey had chosen me as the instrument of his will. “You live in the city now?” She said that with a nostalgic longing. I never knew she’d been to the city.
“I lived in the Budayeen,” I said, “but Friedlander Bey moved me into his palace.”
“You work for him?”
“I had no choice.” I shrugged. She nodded. It surprised me that she knew who Papa was too.
“So what did you come for?”
That was going to be hard to explain. “I wanted to find out everything I could about my father.”
She looked at me over the rim of her whiskey glass. “You already heard everything,” she said.
“I don’t think so. How sure are you that this French sailor was my dad?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “His name was Bernard Audran. We met in a coffee shop. I was living in Sidi-bel-Abbes then. He took me to dinner, we liked each other. I moved in with him. We came to live in Algiers after that, and we were together for a year and a half. Then after you was born, one day he just left. I never heard from him again. I don’t know where he went.”
“I do. Into the ground, that’s where. Took me a long time, but I traced Algerian computer records back far enough. There was a Bernard Audran in the navy of Provence, and he was in Mauretania when the French Confederate Union tried to regain control over us. The problem is that his brains were bashed out by some unidentified noraf more than a year before I was born. Maybe you could think back and see if you can get a clearer picture of those events.”
That made her furious. She jumped up and flung her half-full glass of liquor at me. It smashed into the already stained and streaked wall to my right. I could smell the pungent, undiluted sharpness of the Irish whiskey. I heard Saied murmuring something beside me, maybe a prayer. My mother took a couple of steps toward me, her face ugly with rage. “You calling me a liar?” she shrieked.
Well, I was. “I’m just telling you that the official records say something different.”