I hit the road.
Chapter 12
The Wicked Witch of the West had lost an eye to some loathsome disease. She had never bothered to replace it with a glass eye and did not wear a patch, either. Nor was she wearing a Hathaway shirt, which was just as well, because she would have set their image back immeasurably. Aside from the gaping, red-rimmed eye socket that glared at one, she wasn’t particularly bad looking. Her body was well proportioned and her face would have been attractive.
She compensated for her relative shortage of deformities by reeking. She was the rankest-smelling female in the world, and it was not necessary for me to smell every woman on earth to make this statement. She stank; her breath was enough to curdle Coca-Cola and her flatulence suggested a lifelong diet of nothing but baked beans. I don’t think she ever bathed; if she did, the Farah Rud River would have a water pollution problem.
“You come from Amanullah!” She slapped me on the back, put her mouth to my ear for a confidential whisper. I tried to do something about my nostrils. “He is my good friend,” she hissed. (You couldn’t hiss this in English, but the Afghan for it is full of sibilants. Don’t quibble.) “My very good friend,” she went on, still hissing. “Always he brings me my very best girls. So many of the maradóosh, they are not lovely, they do not please men, they bleed, they get sick, they die. Often they are diseased, and men complain later that their members have been set afire and immersed in acid. But from Amanullah I obtain always only the very finest, the milk of the milk. The best girl in this house is a girl Amanullah sold me.”
“One of them,” I said, “is a girl he should not have sold you. I must repurchase her.”
“I do not sell my girls, kâzzih.”
“Amanullah wishes to buy her himself. I am his agent.”
“Oh?”
I showed her the letter. “You see? He will pay your price for the girl, whatever you declare your price to be. And of course you know that Amanullah is a man of his word, that his word is to be trusted.”
“It is so.”
“The girl is called Phaedra Harrow,” I said. “Or perhaps she is called Deborah Horowitz.”
“You do not know her name?”
“It is one of the two.”
“But I know neither name,” she said, punctuating the remark flatulently. I took an involuntary step backwards. “I give them new names when they come into my house, and they learn their new names even as they learn their new lives. The old names cease to have any importance for them. They are even buried under their new names.”
“I see.”
“So these names mean nothing.”
I took out the photograph and showed it to her. She leaned forward expectantly and her black hair brushed at my nose. The odor that rose from it was absolutely incredible. It staggered the mind, to say nothing of the nostrils. My olfactory nerves were utterly unnerved. I winced at the stench, and the madam recoiled at the photo.
“She who is alive,” she said.
One hears not merely words but the thoughts they comprise; otherwise none of us could speak nearly as quickly as we do and hope to be understood. And so what I heard her say was “She who is not alive,” because it made more sense. One doesn’t expect a person to look at a picture and recoil in horror at the thought that the pictured individual is alive. Our necrophilic culture may be headed in that direction, but so far it hasn’t quite arrived.
So I thought she meant that Phaedra was dead.
Over a period of time people become their images, become their role in one’s life. It takes a shock to remind one how one really regards various individuals. My mother, I remember, used to say in jest that I would not really appreciate her until she was gone. She was not serious; I guess the maudlin mush of this particular cliché appealed to her as a sort of verbal camp. And I had appreciated her, of course; we were quite close. But one day one of my aunts called, broken-voiced, to tell me that Mother had somehow died, and it turned out that she had been right all along. I hadn’t really appreciated her before, not as I did then.
I said, “The girl is dead?”
A moment’s hesitation. Then, with a rush of words packaged in foul air, “Ah, yes, yes, you speak the truth, kâzzih. The girl is dead.”
“The hell she is.”
“Eh?”
“‘She who is alive,’” I said. “I missed it the first time, but you were all nervous when you saw the picture, and then you were relieved when I said she was dead. Where is she?”
“You must go, kâzzih.”
I straightened up, glowered down at her. “Where is she? And why do you not answer me?”
“Phuc’mi.”
“Not if you were the last woman on – huh?”
“Phuc’mi.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “In my own tongue, the tongue of a far-off land, it has a meaning. But I know little of Pushtu, and the word you speak is unknown to me.”
“It is unknown to me also, kâzzih. It is the name of the one you seek, of She who is alive.”
“Her name is Phaedra.”
“Her new name. We gave it to her because it is all she says. ‘Phuc’mi, Phuc’mi,’ it is all she says, night and day. We try to teach her our own tongue but she refuses to learn it. One can make her learn nothing. But kâzzih, I will tell you this. She is the best maradóon ever to work in this house. She is the finest worker I have ever had.”
“No,” I said.
“The finest in all my years. Her beauty is greater than the others. I noticed this when she came to me, but what did it matter? A few weeks and all my girls lose their beauty. These miners and camel herders, what know they of beauty? When they have no money for maradóosh they content themselves in the orifices of their camels.”
“I suppose it’s better than riding one,” I said.
“But this Phuc’mi,” she said. “That which makes other girls grow pale and wither makes her grow ever more beautiful. That which puts death in the eyes of the others gives her eyes the spark and sparkle of life. And with men she is wild. She can please a man as can no other girl I have ever known.”
“No,” I said.
“But it is so.”
I shook my head wordlessly. Not Phaedra, I thought. Not my little virgin, not my cloistered nun. It was patently impossible. Mother Horowitz’s little girl was not the sort to reign as star performer in an Afghanistan whorehouse. Mother Horowitz’s beloved Deborah wasn’t the possessor of the camel herders’ favorite orifice. I could, like the Red Queen, believe six impossible things before breakfast. This, though, I simply could not believe.
“And so we call her ‘She who is alive,’” the smelly old pig was saying. “Because that which brings others to their death gives her more and more of life, so that she thrives upon it and grows every day younger and fairer. She is my jewel, kâzzih, my treasure, the flower of my garden.” It was an obscenity for anything that smelled like this even to speak of flowers and gardens. She is the cabbage of my skunk, maybe. She is the arm of my pit, even. But farther than that one could not go.
“And so I cannot let her go,” she said.
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“She is worth more than any three of my girls combined. She can go with more men in a night than the others, and the men prefer her, they wait in a long line for her. I thought that if they want her more, then they should pay more for her, and so I raised her price. Thirty for the other girls, fifty for Phuc’mi. They pay her price. They stand in line for her. She is the queen of this house of maradóosh.”
“She does not belong here.”
“But she does.”
“She belongs in her own country,” I said. “With her own mother, and with the ones who love her. She-”