Black Light (9 page)

chapter twenty
chapter twenty

A
ll afternoon Jamshid sat under the willow tree. He drank tea and chatted with Goli's clients as they awaited their turn. The chickens knocked their heads on the earth in search of grain. Goldfishes dozed in the green muck; a few floated belly up. The yellow cat studied them. The goat slept. Every so often the hag moaned. It was miserable enough, as oases went, Jamshid decided, but he prayed he would not be put out.

The madame, Effat, came over and talked with him. She was too fat and old for the trade, and only on the very busiest nights could she still get a customer. Over her face were wrinkles formed by a smile she seldom had occasion to use any more.

“So you're traveling?” she asked Jamshid.

“I wanted to see the country,” he said.

“Well, sweetie, you're seeing it. It makes you skinny, though, seeing the country.” She squeezed Jamshid's arms and thighs. “Traveling may be pleasant, but it doesn't do you a bit of good. I've a son who travels, and he's not a mescal fatter than you are.”

That she had a son startled Jamshid. What sort of an upbringing could a prostitute have given him? But then he thought of his own unlucky daughter.

“How many children do you have?”

“Oh, about a dozen,” Effat said. “I didn't mean to have children, of course, but they kept on coming. All kinds. I sent them to the poorhouse and I pay their keep. I even have a foreign one with yellow hair and blue eyes. I don't care for him, though. I find him a little insipid. My favorite is my eldest boy, a love-child, you could say, who's very dark with beautiful dark eyes that drive the women crazy. He's the one who travels, and he's as skinny as you . . .” As she rambled on Jamshid kept an eye on the door through which came the hag's moans. He grew depressed. Everyone's life seemed so hopeless.

“Travel!” Effat went on. “How I would like to travel! I want to go to Russia, for instance. I have a brother there. He's a doctor. One day I went to the Russian Embassy and told them I wanted to go to Russia and visit him. They said, ‘Give us three photographs of yourself and we'll send them to your brother. If he admits you're his sister we'll fly you to Russia free.' Of course they'd shoot me in Russia if they found out I was a whore. Still, who cares? But I never got my pictures. I've grown so fat and ugly I don't think my brother would recognize me . . . I used to be pretty, you know. . . . The girls you see around here aren't real whores at all. They're mostly just a bunch of sluts. I used to be a true whore. I had a straight neck, see, like this, and slender shoulders, and nice firm breasts, and the thickest thighs you've ever seen, and a smile that could knock your eyes out they said. Look what's left.” Tears were in her eyes as she tore off her blouse. The flesh was sagging from her in large loose folds, like so many rice bags. Her long breasts drooped low. She showed
Jamshid the blue serpent tattoed on her arm from shoulder to elbow. “Isn't it ugly!” she exclaimed. “I would never have had it done, but I fell for a handsome tattoo artist. I gave him everything and all he gave me in return were these horrible snakes. I'm afraid of snakes as it is, never mind having them on my arms. But I'm getting rid of them.” She turned and showed him the other arm. “See.” Instead of a snake there were thick red welts. “I put acid on it. It's supposed to heal up . . . though it's been two months . . . God help me . . . that acid-peddler was a sweet-talker too, if you want to know . . .” She shook her head. “Yes,” she took up the former subject. “The point is to get there. They might shoot me. They might hang me. They might shove red-hot irons up my ass. So what? And who knows, maybe it would turn out they do have whores in Russia . . .”

Jamshid laughed, but he felt pity for this half-naked, tear-soaked creature wallowing in absurd dreams.

A young man stuck his head in at the gate. He glanced about and then stepped in. He was Goli's ‘beau', a greasy fellow who sang in nightclubs. Effat made him tea, and as he waited for Goli to appear he chatted with Jamshid.

“I used to sing in a nice place on Ferdowsi,” he told him, “a smart cafe where the rich women go and drink. I'd buy them whisky when they sat with me, and before I knew it I was bankrupt. Now I sing in a filthy little dive on Naderi. When a woman comes in she pays her own tab. But the women who come in are poor as I am, and ugly as so many cans of kerosene. I can tell you it's no life at all.” He sipped his tea. “Of course,” he went on, “I might, you know, find a rich one . . . who will sweeten life . . .”

Goli appeared and the ‘beau' brightened up. He led her to a corner garden. There placing the tip of his little finger on his front teeth and fixing his eyes on the rooftops, he
sang to her in a warbling falsetto. He went into an intricate set of yodels, the tip of his little finger still resting on his teeth. Then he led Goli into the house. He made an exaggerated bow as she passed through the door before him. Picking his nose, he followed.

“These days,” said Effat, “if you try to be choosy you end up with nobody.”

chapter twenty-one
chapter twenty-one

A
fter the ‘beau', looking bedraggled from his visit, had gone his way, the government pharmacist arrived. He wore a striped suit and had octagonal, rimless glasses. He carried a fat black plastic satchel. His face was large and cheerful.

“Goli,” the pharmacist said, looking at Effat.

I'm Goli,” Goli said.

“Goli, my dear,” he said. “I'm afraid I've a bit of bad news to tell you.” He slipped his arm around her in a fatherly way. His hand came to rest on her buttock. “You've got yourself a little minor condition . . .”

“Condition? What condition?” Goli cried, slapping his hand away.

“Ah, my dear, I'm afraid it's a touch of syphilis . . .”

“Liar!” Goli said. “I wouldn't touch any of your rotten diseases with a mop-handle! Get out of here and stop annoying healthy women!”

“Now don't get hysterical,” the pharmacist said. “Blood samples don't lie. If you saw your blood under a microscope you'd die of fright. It's crammed full of horrible bugs and germs. The wonder is you don't feel them creeping up and
down your veins right this minute.” He rummaged in his satchel and brought forth a great sheet of paper, which he handed to her. “Here. Go to the hospital tomorrow and take this with you.” He turned away. “Filthy child,” he muttered, half under his breath. Goli broke into tears. Jamshid jumped to his feet.

“That's no way to talk,” he blurted out weakly. As the pharmacist turned to reply, Effat sprang to the attack.

“Mother-slut!” she shouted, “Get out of here!” The pharmacist fell back under her fury, turned, and made for the door with what dignity he had. But Effat was not going to let him escape so easily. She leapt after him, goosing him into a trot. “Where's his asshole?” she screamed, goosing him again. “I don't believe he's got one!” She let him have it once more, as the man scooted out.

“That silly little fart,” Effat laughed, “trying to scare a healthy girl. Here, Goli, have a glass of tea.” Goli sat down next to Jamshid.

“I'll turn into an old hag, just like Mehre,” Goli said, weeping. “It'll eat up my nice face and make me crazy . . .”

“Hush,” said Effat. “These days they take care of those things like magic. They stick your buttocks full of needles and in a week you're good as new. In my time, now, it was something else again.” Effat launched into lurid histories about chancres, lesions, pustules, hair-loss, speechlessness, blindness and insanity, and about equally hideous cures. Not at all comforted, Goli wept on Jamshid's shoulder.

“Don't cry,” Jamshid said. “Look, why not sing me a song instead? I love songs.” He spoke to her as if she were a little girl. He felt a surge of tenderness toward her. She snuffled and looked up at him with puffy eyes. “I can't sing,” she whimpered. “I smoke too much and it ruined my voice.”

“Come on, one little song.”

“All right,” she said, and managed a smile, “just one, if you'll give me a cigarette.”

“I'll give you a dozen,” Jamshid said, laughing. He went out to fetch some.

The night before there had seemed to be an excitement and boisterous life in these streets. Now, by daylight, Jamshid saw only cold-eyed desolate men and obscene, humiliated women, and slime, and urine puddles, and ditches with used condoms in them.

At the cigarette stall the condoms, wrapped in silverfoil and arranged in neat rows, looked to Jamshid exactly like the chocolate wafers he and Varoosh used to buy as children. Suddenly Jamshid felt dizzy. He had to get out, even if it meant he would be captured and die.

He put the cigarettes and matches in his pocket and made his way to the gate. Nobody seemed to be guarding it and he stepped forward eagerly. But behind some willow leaves he glimpsed a patch of wooly blue cloth. His willingness to die vanished. As he walked away he forced himself not to break into a run. Had they noticed his abrupt turning away? He could almost hear a hue and cry starting up behind him. When he reached the courtyard he slammed the door and threw the bolt.

“What's the matter, Jamshid?” Goli said, noticing how he was puffing.

“It's nothing. It's only an old illness,” he said. “It makes me short of breath sometimes.” He gave Goli a cigarette and lit one himself. It made his head spin but he kept on smoking.

“Jamshid,” Goli said, “do you want me to sing you a song in Persian or in Kurdi?” The girl's voice seemed to come to him from far away. He tried to concentrate.

“In Persian,” he said.

“Are you absolutely sure? Kurdish songs, you know, are so much prettier.”

“All right, then, in Kurdi.” He felt the girl's warmth, and it cheered him up. At the same time it made him feel wistful, because she so resembled Leyla. And how, he wondered, was Leyla making her living without him? For the first time he understood that ordinary girls, no more wicked than anyone else, could become prostitutes. Previously he had believed that prostitutes were human fiends and should be destroyed like vipers or wolves. It was strange, too, that he felt closer to this prostitute he had met last night than he had been to his own daughter.

“That's too bad,” Goli said, “because I don't know Kurdi.” She giggled. Jamshid laughed too. He put his arm around her and gave her a hug.

Now a loud rattle came at the door. “Police,” a voice cried. “Open up!” Jamshid jumped to his feet.

“I'm not here,” he whispered.

“What?”

“I'm not here. I beg of you.”

“Walk on my eyes,” Goli said. She touched Jamshid's hand and he ran up the stairs to her room.

The police, it turned out, had only come on the complaint of the pharmacist.

“And be sure to go to the hospital tomorrow, or we'll arrest you for that too. And note well, under no circumstances are you to indulge your appetites or do business in the meantime. As for you,” they said to Effat, “the next time you insult a servant of the government, you will find yourself in jail.”

“We will leave the door locked,” Effat said when Jamshid had come out of hiding. “Goli is on vacation anyway, and these days nobody goes in for me. You must stay here,”
she told Jamshid, “until the gate is free again. Put your carpet there under the willow.”

“Indulge your appetites . . .” Goli kept muttering angrily.

After dinner Jamshid sat against the garden wall. He had found his refuge. It was a horrible world, peopled with the degenerate, the sick, the used-up, but he was grateful for it. He liked Effat, and especially he liked Goli.

“Goli,” he said, as Goli knelt by the pool to wash the dishes, “did you love your father very much when you were a little girl?”

“Yes,” she said. “However, I hate him now. He made me a whore.”

“What are you saying?” Jamshid answered sharply. “How can a father make his daughter into a whore?”

“My father ran off, and as soon as I could I whored around to earn money for the family.”

“Listen,” Jamshid said, hearing in his voice an anger he did not understand, “don't tell me he
made
you a whore! Why couldn't you have been a seamstress or a maid? You made yourself a whore and now you're looking for someone to blame.”

The girl repeated firmly, “He made me a whore.”

chapter twenty-two
chapter twenty-two

I
t turned out that Goli had practically every sexual disease one can get, and she was ordered not to ‘indulge her appetites' for a month. The news was a hard blow to Effat, for Goli was her only breadwinner. Effat made a few unlucky attempts to make up the loss. She offered herself to the men who came looking for Goli, and one night she went out soliciting in the streets. In the end she was obliged to ‘rent' from another house a girl young and pretty enough to be the stand-in.

During this time Jamshid fell back into gloom. He knew he was a burden on these women. The longer he stayed the more his hopes began to seem as sleazy and unreal as those of everybody else. He felt uncertain even of the existence of the widow, as though he could have dreamed her. But whenever he went to the gate the police were there, checking everyone's papers.

Late one evening he happened to be sitting in the garden when Effat came in from her night of streetwalking.

“Not a nibble,” she laughed. “This blubber I use for bait!” She shook herself in such a way that all her flesh quivered and flapped. Even in her laments, even when the
tears were cascading down her cheeks, Jamshid noticed, Effat remained somehow triumphant and invulnerable. In fact, he recalled, he had been thinking Ali was invulnerable at the very moment the old man was being killed. A wind started to whine at the edges of the garden. Effat, too, had been defeated out there. In the glow of the darkness he could only make out her forehead, her cheeks, her nose and the false shine of her lips.

“Tell me,” he said. As he looked at her, her eyes grew visible a moment.

She said, “Out there, when they don't want you, they don't just say ‘no.'”

Much later, as Jamshid was drinking tea under the willow branches, Goli's sore-lipped client stuck his head into the courtyard.

“Is Goli around?”

“Filthy germ-monger, get out of here!” Jamshid cried. “Goli's sick, and you know why.” The head withdrew quickly.

Effat looked from the house.

“Jamshid!” she cried. “What do you think you're doing? Stop chasing the customers away!”

“It was that ugly diseased one,” Jamshid said. “The one with the sores all over him . . .”

“It's us who've got to get in bed with all those sores, not you. And never mind about the diseases. I've got a whole closet full of condoms for just such cases.”

Jamshid sat unhappily under the tree. It was very easy, he saw, to have scruples on someone else's behalf. Perhaps, Jamshid thought, he could find the man and apologize; perhaps he could bring him back as a client for Effat.

Jamshid went out into the street, but the crowd was so thick he gave it up and wandered over to the gate. As
usual the police were there. A dozen or so men stood in line waiting to get out.

Poor Effat, Jamshid thought. Her error had been to befriend him. A strange new pain now constricted his chest. It seemed to have five points, that dug into him in a kind of half circle. Was it for himself or for Effat and Goli? Or did it seize hold of him quite indifferently, as the painted hand print of the martyr grabs any wall whatsoever?

Jamshid noticed that a well-dressed man was walking abreast of him, glancing this way and that. The man seemed to give him one brief, quizzical look. He realized at once the man wanted a girl and was looking for someone to help him get a nice one. How grateful would Effat and Goli be, he thought, if he were able to persuade such a man to come back and take Effat. His gloom lifted. But before he could act the man had vanished.

Suddenly Jamshid glimpsed, in the glare of a kebab stand, his daughter Leyla dressed in a tight blue skirt. The glow of the fire lit her up a moment, then the dark smoke shrouded her. He plunged after her, but she, too, had disappeared.

He wandered in a frenzy of anxiety. He told himself he must have been mistaken. And yet he felt quite sure it had been she. He stared at the faces of all the women. He inquired at houses in the vicinity. After a while he glimpsed her again, this time wearing a chaddor. He ran up to her, but it was only an old hag, who spit at him when he seized her arm.

The third time he spotted her she was wearing the tight blue skirt again. He stepped in front of her and took her by the shoulders.

“Leyla!” he said. The girl looked at him, mildly astonished.

She said, “I'll bet I can screw just as good as your Leyla and I can let you have it very cheap, too, there in the shadows, standing up, if you're short of cash . . .”

Jamshid stood dumbstruck, staring at the mechanical, scarred face of this creature he had thought was his daughter. He dropped his hands. He stared again into her face, in the dim light, to be absolutely sure . . .

“Well, then,” the girl said. She turned and disappeared.

Jamshid stood abashed. So then it wasn't his daughter. It couldn't be. He had looked her right in her face, hadn't he, and it was someone else's daughter. And yet, what did he know? Just because that blue-skirted girl wasn't Leyla, did that prove Leyla wasn't in the New City? One day or another he would see her soliciting somebody in an alleyway. His head began to throb. He could hardly see. The crowd swirled by, each face a blur. The tricks his eyes were playing! He might look his own daughter in the face, he thought, and fail to recognize her. That blue-skirted girl, for instance: why hadn't he looked at her
really
closely . . .?

When the streets had emptied, Jamshid went back and lay on his carpet in the courtyard. There was a crawling sensation at his crotch and in his neck and armpits, as there had been for several days. That night he had a nightmare in which he died and was put in the grave. Lying next to him was a corpse. He touched it and it said timidly, “Papa?”