It was like hacking through The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nafzaoui. Like that manual on Arabian erotology, every facet of modern Baghdad is hinged to sex. My heels kicking up the dust of the crumbling cobblestones, I felt as if I'd dived into an ocean of lust and was in imminent danger of drowning.
It was all around me. Voices assailed me-—murmurs and shouts—-flesh-hawkers with vocabularies more colorful than the Marquis de Sade. My eyes bounced like pinballs from breasts brazenly bared and held out towards me from a window to skirts raised high to reveal a belly-roll of voluptuous invitation from a doorway. Hands reached out, seemingly from the walls of the narrow alleyways, and slid up my thighs, stroked my buttocks, briefly squeezed at my groin. The smells of sex were everywhere, musk and incense, a perfumed vapor steaming up from the gutter, an erotic cloud pressing down like a fever over the city. I opened my mouth to breathe and the taste of passion slid down my windpipe and filled my lungs.
Turning a comer, I heard the gabble of children's voices. I saw a narrow courtyard with perhaps a dozen little girls between the ages of six and twelve. They quickly surrounded me, begging for sweets, cigarettes, coins. I handed out a few pennies and then they were tugging and pushing me into the courtyard towards a flight of stairs leading down into a cellar. Curious, I allowed myself to be carried along to see what they had to show me.
The cellar was dark. A few rays of dying twilight came through a small window high up on one wall. One of the little girls lit a candle and the others flitted around me in its flickering light. They danced awkwardly, but there was no mistaking the lewdness of their movements. I realized I had stumbled into one of the famous child-brothels of Baghdad.
Outside of Baghdad itself, around the world, two kinds of men are familiar with what goes on in these child-brothels. One type is the social scientist like myself. The other is the degenerate hipped on nymphettes, the man drawn only to girls who have not yet reached puberty, the Lolita-lover to whom Baghdad is truly the Mecca of his perverse desire.
These girl-children, orphans and waifs, are banded together by some enterprising adult who gives them shelter and food in exchange for the pennies they accumulate peddling their offbeat sex wares. Voracious and aggressive, once they lure a man into their quarters, they turn into a pack of frenzied little animals. They've been known to kill a man for the coins in his pocket and there are tales of their having practiced cannibalism upon their victims.
Now, remembering these stories and realizing that I was in the center of a circle formed by the lascivious little girl-beasts, I turned towards the door by which I'd entered. It had been closed and bolted and three little girls stood firmly in front of it with bits of broken glass clutched like daggers in their hands. I swung around again and found the circle of children tightening around me.
Fear must have showed in my face, for suddenly they abandoned their sexy charade and swarmed over me. Their hands clawed at my clothing, tugging at the belt and zipper of my pants. Sharp nails raked feverishly at my bare flesh. It was all I could do to keep from being borne to the dirt-floor by the weight of their numbers and the feverish zeal with which they were coming at me.
Like a swarm of insects they attacked me, crooning foul words and erotic suggestions, their mouths covering my lower body with sticky kisses at the same time that their small fists were raining blows designed to beat me to my knees. They were half-insane, these children, and I could see that they weren't sure themselves whether they were only going to seduce me, or whether this was to be an orgy ending with my death. Sex and murder were one and the same to them and my only hope was that my own reactions might be such as to make the difference and get me out of there alive.
One tot had worked the zipper of my pants open and now bit at me with sharp teeth. I grabbed her under the arms and swung her high above me. With a sick, knowing grin, intended to be sexy, she pulled up her rag of a dress and swung her legs with a sharp little jerk so that before I realized what she was up to her thighs were locked around my cheekbones. Disgusted—-it was like pulling off a leech -- I tore her loose and flung her roughly across the room.
I felt like vomiting. But there was no time for such feeling. The more the mob of children licked and bit and scratched at me, the more their excitement grew. I had to get out of there before it boiled over.
I had a sudden inspiration. I managed to slap away the children investigating my jacket pockets and fished out the little bag of coins I kept there. I threw a handful of them high up in the air and they showered down all over the cellar. The little girls scurried for them, clawing at each other now in their eagerness, and I hoisted my pants and dived for the door.
The jagged neck of a wine-bottle sliced into my forearm as I reached for the crude wooden bolt. Too scared to restrain myself, I punched the little girl who’d stabbed at me with all my might. She crumpled to the floor and the other two who'd been guarding the door backed away, frightened. I shot out into the night air and headed back for my hotel.
I made it just in time to puke my guts out. Hardened sex investigator that I am, studying about these perverted little imps was one thing and coming up against them in the flesh was something else again. They were only kids, babies, yet among the world's most depraved and murderous females. Is it any wonder I donated my dinner to the privy?
I changed my clothes and bandaged my arm. It was only a flesh wound. It could have been worse. This attended to, I went down to the lobby and settled down in an armchair to wait for Basra.
He showed up right on schedule and we drove across the city to the first of the posh brothels he recommended. Outside, the place looked just as grubby and rundown as every other building in Baghdad. But inside was a different story.
The entry-hall was in quiet good taste, European style with polished mahogany paneling and deep green velvet drapes Renaissance prints—-good reproductions—decorated the walls, and the carved wood table and hatstand looked like genuine Louis XIV. A tall, Nordic blonde in a short-skirted French maid's outfit received me demurely and led me inside as if I was a guest being conducted to an afternoon tea party.
Well, there was a similarity-—but it wasn't the kind of tea you drink. It was the kind you smoke and obviously a more potent brand than the hippies swing with back in the States. More accurately, the first room to which I was conducted was filled with men balling it up with bhang.
Bhang is a mixture of hashish and various solanaceae drugs which causes three pronounced reactions in the user. The first is a sort of trancelike state in which he hallucinates in much the same way as those addicted to other drugs. The second, a reaction of both the adrenal glands and the body’s musculature, increases his physical prowess greatly, tripling or even quadrupling it. The third effect is aphrodisiac producing an instant erection which no amount of sex will diminish. In this state, the bhang user is kept at a high pitch of inflamed lust for hours on end, but is incapable of releasing it until the effects of the drug begin to wear off. Obviously, when a Baghdad Arab filled with bhang cuts loose in a bordello, he gets his money's worth.