She just stared at me for a moment, her filmy eyes wide. “No,” she said at last, in a small voice. She looked closer. Then she dropped her whiskey glass to the floor.
2
Later, after the return trip from Algiers and Mauretania, when I got back home to the city, the first place I headed was the Budayeen. I used to live right in the heart of the walled quarter, but events and fate and Friedlander Bey had made that impossible now. I used to have a lot of friends in the Budayeen, too, and I was welcome anywhere; but now there were really only two people who were generally glad to see me: Saied the Half-Hajj, and Chiriga, who ran a club on the Street halfway between the big stone arch and the cemetery. Chiri’s place had always been my home-away-from-home, where I could sit and have a few drinks in peace, hear the gossip, and not get threatened or hustled by the working girls. Chiri’s a hard-working woman, a tall black African with ritual facial scars and sharply filed cannibal teeth. To be honest, I don’t really know if those canines of hers are mere decoration, like the patterns on her forehead and cheeks, or a sign that dinner at her house was composed of delicacies implicitly and explicitly forbidden by the noble Qur’ân. Chiri’s a moddy, but she thinks of herself as a smart moddy. At work, she’s always herself. She chips in her fantasies at home, where she won’t bother anyone else. I respect that.
When I came through the club’s door, I was struck first by a welcome wave of cool air. Her air conditioning, as undependable as all old Russian-made hardware, was working for a change. I felt better already. Chiri was deep in conversation with a customer, some bald guy with a bare chest. He was wearing black vinyl pants with the look of real leather, and his left hand was handcuffed behind him to his belt. He had a corymbic implant on the crest of his skull, and a pale green plastic moddy was feeding him somebody else’s personality. If Chiri was giving him the time of day, then he couldn’t have been dangerous, and probably he wasn’t even all that obnoxious.
Chiri didn’t have much patience with the crowd she caters to. Her philosophy is that somebody has to sell them liquor and drugs, but that doesn’t mean she has to socialize with them.
“Jambo, Bwana Martd!” Chiriga called to me when she noticed that I was sitting nearby. She left the handcuffed moddy and drifted slowly down her bar, plopping a cork coaster in front of me. “You come to share your wealth with this poor savage. In my native land, my people have nothing to eat and wander many miles in search of water. Here I have found peace and plenty. I have learned what friendship is. I have found disgusting men who would touch the hidden parts of my body. You will buy me drinks and leave me a huge tip. You will tell all your new friends about my place, and they will come in and want to touch the hidden parts of my body. I will own many shiny, cheap things. It is all as God wills.”
I stared at her for a few seconds. Sometimes it’s hard to figure what kind of mood Chiri’s in. “Big nigger girl talk dumb,” I said at last.
She grinned and dropped her ignorant Dinka act. “Yeah, you right,” she said. “What is it today?”
“Gin and bingara,” I said. I usually have that over ice with a little Rose’s lime juice. The drink is my own invention, but I’ve never gotten around to naming it. Other times I have vodka gimlets, because that’s what Philip Marlowe drinks in The Long Goodbye. Then on those occasions when I just really want to get loaded fast, I drink from Chiri’s private stock of tende, a truly loathsome African liquor from the Sudan or the Congo or someplace, made, I think, from fermented yams and spadefoot toads. If you are ever offered tende, DO NOT TASTE IT. You will be sorry. Allah knows that I am.
Indihar was dancing on stage. She 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. 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.
“So,” said Chiri, trying to make conversation, “how did your trip turn out? Did you find whatever you were looking for?”
I looked at her, but didn’t say anything. I wondered if I had found it. When I saw my mother again in Algiers, her 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 past. 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.