“But what will you do now?"
“I will make love to you."
“I don’t mean that. I mean generally."
“I don't know. I’ll have to go back, I suppose. But not before I have found a real man to quench my thirst. A man like you." Her hand stroked my leg.
“But what will they do to you?"
"Beat me perhaps. But not too badly. I'm too valuable to chance leaving any marks on me. It is a mark of his masculine esteem for a Sheikh to count a Druze girl among his houris. . . . Enough talk now. There is a virgin waiting for you to pluck her blossom."
“A virgin!" I laughed. “Come on now, Teska, after everything you've just told me?"
“A virgin," she insisted. "You shall see." She stood up and kicked off her sandals. Then she undid a clasp at the shoulder of her gown and it slowly fell away from her. Her breasts stood out, round, full, their tips moist and erect. She pirouetted and her hips were revealed, two burning arches trembling with eagerness. She rolled her belly and the sheath settled at her feet. There was no hair on her, for like all Druze girls she had shaved her body completely. The rigid, bright red sign of her desire quivered as though beckoning to me.
But when I went to embrace her, she stopped me.
“Wait. First this." She removed a small vial from a tiny pocket stitched to the inside surface of the garment at her feet.
“What's that?" I asked.
“It is the nectar which shall make me a virgin for you tonight." She turned away modestly and bent over, taking her time and inserting the ointment carefully.
“But what is it?" I asked again, when she turned back.
“Alum. It draws together the flesh so that our pleasure will be greater."
“Alum! Well, I’ll be damned!“
“No. You will be blessed. You will be blessed by Allah through me."
She pulled me to her then, and her body was on fire. She pulled my lips to one plump breast and stroked my naked thighs. Her kisses were hot and deep, and they covered my entire body. Then, finally, she impaled herself on me and I felt as though I'd been grasped by a pulsating suction pump. The sensation was indescribable. Our bodies moved more and more quickly until our passion reached its peak and, together, exploded.
“Praise be to Allah! Praise be to Allah!" Teska shouted the traditional after-sex thanksgiving of the Moslem woman. “Allah be praised! Allah be praised!”
And, still shaken by what was surely the most powerful sex experience I'd ever had, I echoed Teska's words with a thanks of my own. "Alum be praised!" I murmured. "Alum be praised!"
002
IT STARTED in Moscow. That much and only a little more I learned from Potemchenko the following day, The rest —but far from all of it—I managed to piece together for myself.
It made headlines, East and West, but the stories under the headlines barely touched on the facts of the case, and none of them went into the truly frightening international implications of these facts. At all the stages of the story's development, these implications were deliberately played down. Thus, from carefully guarded secret to calculated exposé to explosive, world-shaking riots, there were no hints, East or West, that this might be the fuse which could trigger the holocaust feared by the entire world.
Romeo and Juliet-—that’s how simple it was at the beginning. Romeo was Mustafa Ben-Narouz, a 23-year-old Arab-Egyptian exchange student studying in "Moscow; Juliet was Anna Kirkov, a 19-year-old girl whose beauty was so untypically Russian that it bordered on being downright capitalistically degenerate. The two flies in the ointment were the Russian government itself, which frowned on contact between any foreigners and all Muscovites except when necessary at the highest level, and Anna's father, whose particular objection was based on the fact that he considered Arabs to be Semites, members of a different race, and unworthy of his daughter's "pure" Russian blood.
Josef Kirkov, the Papa Capulet of this tragedy, was a complex man. He was an old-line, down-the-line Bolshevik in his mid-sixties. His youth had been the youth of a fanatical revolutionist, the days filled with doctrine, the nights with violence and bloodshed. Marriage had been delayed until his middle years, and Anna was the only offspring of that marriage. His wife had died in childbirth, and after that, the dedication of Josef Kirkov's life had been threefold.
First came his zealous devotion to the State, a full-time job in itself, involving as it did the constant reorientation of his mind to the mercurial and quick-changing Soviet policies. Second came his love and concern for his daughter, emotions so strong as to be both obsessive and possessive, an attachment which often came close to suffocating the girl. Third, there was Kirkov's work, scientific investigation so important that even without his history of loyalty to the Bolshevik cause, he would still have been a member of the Red hierarchy.
For Kirkov was that peculiarly Communist creation, the single-minded scientist whose thoughts never deviate from the problem at hand. He was, at one and the same time, both brilliant and dogmatic. Thus it was possible for him to allow his imagination the widest scope in the labyrinth of atomic: physics which was his field, while never once questioning the rigid political doctrines which ruled his life. His scientific curiosity never left the realm of physics, and so it was equally easy for him to accept the biological untruth that Arabs were members of an inferior race. The fact that this untruth stemmed from the prejudices and old wives‘ tales of his pre-Bolshevik childhood made no difference. Nothing in his constant Communist indoctrination gave it the lie, and so he accepted Semite inferiority as a fact.
It was one of the few facts he accepted which he didn't succeed in imparting successfully to his daughter, Anna. An ingenious scientist ranking at the top of his profession, a blind devotee of the party line, from the first he undertook to embellish the State educational process by seeing to the development of her mind himself. She was the only one to whom he spoke freely of his work, and by the time she reached the age of 19, she was as capable of grasping his theories and discoveries as he was of evolving and pursuing them.
But Anna's lively mind proved more troublesome in the matter of accepting her father's political indoctrinations. She was a loyal Communist-—to be anything else would never have occurred to even so questing a mind as hers in that environment—but she had a habit of raising points of logic and querying matters which her father expected her to accept automatically. It was a vexation to her father, and when it combined with the lightning of love which struck her, it became a Sword of Damocles to all the peoples of the earth.
The Soviets themselves, despite their customarily suspicious natures, were slow to realize this. At first what happened seemed only a bawdy farce. Then it seemed merely a sloppy romance. It wasn't until later that they began to see it for the far-reaching tragedy it really was.
Anna Kirkov and Mustafa Ben-Narouz met at a party. It was a secret party thrown by a group of foreign exchange students. Secret of necessity, since the rules laid down by the Soviets forbade their fraternizing with Russian girls. Not only legally, but morally such contacts were frowned upon by the elders of Moscow. Anna's father wasn't alone in his feelings of racial superiority to the Asian and African visitors. But, even in Moscow, 'teen-agers are apt to regard such taboos—seemingly aimed directly at them—as made to be broken.
A girl friend of Anna's who had been having a secret affair with one of the African students had been asked to bring some Russian girls to the party. She'd asked Anna to come and Anna had been intrigued and accepted. The girls arrived in a group and immediately segregated themselves in a separate room.