And I press myself upon her, kissing her, fondling her, thrusting my body upon her soft, shivering flesh. Her cries are now almost guttural and they frighten me. I continue to kiss her and caress her, but slowly my inspiration again fails me. I stand up, my leg steadied against the rasping granite, and tell them that I will do no more.
‘But that is not possible.’
It is the negress who speaks. A deep, vibrant voice; gorgeously sensual. ‘We must have our rape, I think, or there will be no proper resolution. And the public demands resolution.’
I do not understand her. I hear Sir Ranalf in urgent conversation with her, but cannot make out the words. She is adamant. Sir Ranalf comes up to me. ‘My sweet boy, this is our most important backer. It would be very foolish of any one of us to give offence to such a personage. If you could please find the inspiration from somewhere, I would be deeply obliged.’
I stand there and shake my head. Suddenly the negress advances, a pillar of swirling vividly coloured silks and rolling black flesh, she walks with the deliberation of a colossus.
A gusty sigh escapes the creature. Her rich voice is now full of sadness. ‘I had hoped to be associated with one of the century’s great picture-plays. The rape will provide the catharsis. The resolution. You understand Freud?’
I say I am not prepared to pretend to rape my girl.
‘We did not suggest that you pretend.’ The negress’s bulk moves as if to silent laughter.
‘Then I will act no further.’ I am barely able to focus on the creature. From her radiates an aura of extraordinary power. Her eyes refuse any disobedience. Yet I stand my ground. For my girl. For myself.
‘This is deeply shame-making, dear boy,’ murmurs Sir Ranalf from behind his partner. ‘It is so important for us all to achieve this.’
‘What you are asking, however, is too much.’ My lips are dry, my words sluggish. ‘Esmé and I will return to Cairo in the morning. I believe you have genuinely frightened her.’ I reach backwards to clutch for her grateful fingers. ‘This has all gone too far.’
‘Very well,’ Sir Ranalf turns away with a small shrug. ‘Once your debts are cleared up and everything else sorted out, you can be on your way.’
‘You can have every penny of my wages.’ I am cool. ‘All I want is a ticket home for Esmé and myself.’ I speak clearly. My demands are exact. I refuse compromise.
‘Sweet boy, I fear your back wages, generous as they were by Egyptian standards, are not enough to cover your IOUs.’ Sir Ranalf’s tone is one of deep regret. ‘Not so?’ And he turns blue, enquiring eyes upon his backer.
The negress waves a confirming hand.
I cannot read their signs.
‘Professor Quelch will explain.’ Sir Ranalf is curt.
‘I got behind with my own bills, I fear, dear boy. My hands are tied. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, you might say. Your IOUs were my only collateral.’
Sir Ranalf clarifies Quelch’s meaning. Esmé and I owe some £2,500 in back debts. Our salaries would yield perhaps £500. Accommodation costs have also been deducted, as well as local taxes, bar bills and so on. There is also a question of a dishonoured contract. ‘It is very simple,’ he says. ‘If you wish to leave the project, merely pay your bills, reimburse us for your expenses and go.’
‘But what of our film?’
‘You may have what has been shot, I suppose.’
‘The negative as well?’
‘If you can reach agreement with Mr Seaman.’ But when I look at him Seaman withdraws. I realise he has already made his own irreversible compromises.
‘We should leave.’ This from Esmé. I turn back to her. She moves her drugged hands in the chains. ‘We must get home, Maxim. To America. It was my fault. Help me.’
I do not know whether to blame her for all this or whether to take her in my arms and comfort her. It is clear, however, that we are for the moment trapped. All I can do now is bide my time until we can escape. Tomorrow I will seek the help of the American Consul.
‘We will leave,’ I determined, still bleary.
‘We shall keep the film, I understand, as security.’ This is the negress. I cannot bear the idea of my naked Esmé becoming her property. I cannot think clearly. I stand there, trying to determine the best course of action.
‘You must make a decision, Maxim. You must make a decision.’ Never before have I heard such urgency in her voice.
‘But the film is ours. We are its creators!’
‘I am afraid that as the producer I must confirm it belongs to my company,’ said Sir Ranalf. ‘And our friend here, of course, is our major shareholder.’
‘I own you all, I think.’ A thin smile plays behind the negress’s veil. ‘I think so. But we need not quarrel. You will be good, I know.’
Esmé whispers to me again. She must escape. She must get to Cairo. I have so many duties. I have a duty to our film. She will not respect me if I abandon it. After all, her chances of fame are also linked to it. We need only return to Hollywood and our fortunes are made. But we have no money here. I look towards Quelch. There is a suggestion of guilty triumph in his eyes and it occurs to me he could actually be chief architect of our predicament. Has he nursed some dreadful plan of vengeance since Esmé and I, the only witnesses, inadvertently stumbled upon him and the Nubian boy?
‘We can compromise.’ Sir Ranalf is persuasive. ‘We can still be friends and comrades. After all, we have the basics of a jolly good film!’
‘But he must rape the girl.’ The negress speaks quietly, in a tone of threatening finality.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
I turn to test Esmé’s bonds. She is chained firmly to the slab. I understand something of the trap into which we are falling, yet I can see no easy way out.
‘Decide, Maxim!’ She is desperate with tension. But how can I decide? After all, she betrayed me. She was nothing but a little whore I rescued from Constantinople’s gutters. What did I owe her? Up to now she had already enjoyed a far superior life with me than any she might have expected. She was born a whore. Let her suffer the fate of a whore.
Within me my love for my angel, my sister, my rose burns as strong as ever. But I cannot let this inform my common sense.
‘Yes. You really must make up your mind.’ Sir Ranalf clearly fears the negress. ‘After all, you’re not exactly on the right side of the law now, are you, dears? Drugs and prostitution are both crimes in Egypt, ha, ha! The authorities would be deeply shocked to find a white man doing business in both.’
Sir Ranalf is of course describing himself but he is too well-protected to be caught, whereas Esmé and I are already on film. Quelch will doubtless turn State’s evidence to convict us of our drug-using. Worse, without money we have no guarantee we would ever get out of Cairo again. Had the negress bought or merely taken Quelch’s IOUs? Clearly she had a firm hold over both Sir Ranalf and the professor while I had no friends here. Common sense said that Kolya had long since gone on about his business and was by now back in Algiers.
‘Consider your assets.’ The negress is persuasive, impatient. ‘What do you own? A pretty fiancée and a young, healthy body? You also have brains and talent. But these are rather tenuous things. What can you sell me for two thousand five hundred pounds?’
‘My talent, apparently.’ I am growing steadily more frightened. ‘And my designs. I am an engineer. There are many other things I can do.’
‘Certainly. So there is no quarrel between us! If you wish to dissolve your partnership with us, that will be absolutely agreeable. If you are unhappy, you should not stay against your will. So, let us say the girl is worth two and a half thousand and call it even. She will be happy with us. That will discharge your whole debt. What do you say?’
The suggestion is loathsome. I am in their power for the moment but I retain my integrity.
From behind me Esmé still murmurs, begging me to make a decision. But it is impossible. I have no worthwhile choices. I am confused by the shoc
king suddenness of their threats, by the narcotics Quelch has pumped into me. It is true, I have a duty to the film, but I have a duty to my own destiny. She, after all, has already broken her trust. What does it matter if we indulge in a few moments of animal high spirits for the camera? The film will still be a great one. The world will see Gloria Cornish in my embrace. We have already found immortality. Esmé is calmer now. Her breasts rise and fall very slowly; her eyes, dark with emotion, stare mindlessly up at me.
There are no better alternatives. I can only make a decision based on the least harmful choices presented to me. Once more I know what it means to be powerless and without an embassy. I am alone. I have no rights and am forced to fall back upon my own resources. Expediency demands the only possible decision: ‘Very well.’ I lay a firm fist upon my hip and hold up my head with all possible dignity. ‘I will play the rape scene.’
My statement is received with general applause by everyone save Quelch who stares at me from eyes darkening with a joyful intensity; as if our terrible compromise is the result of his own wicked engineering; as if he believes he rights some singular wrong performed by us upon himself. A malevolent automaton, a Golem, he smiles at me from the shadows. I look urgently for Seaman. He might now be my only ally, my last link with Hollywood and safety, but he has vanished. Sir Ranalf shrugs and smiles. For the time being he will direct the film himself. (I heard that Seaman left the next morning and eventually returned to Sweden, from there to Hollywood where he resumed his career.) Once I was naked Sir Ranalf expressed his delight. Circumcision, he assures me, was practised by high-born Egyptians. It was a sign of nobility. It is important to establish our authority, to have our details as authentic as possible. Abraham, der als erster seiner eigenen Menschlichkeit ein Opfer brachte: Wo traf dein Messer deinen vertrauensvollen Sohn? Alte, geliebte, furchttreifende Sumer. Leugne den Juden, und du leugnest Vergangenheit. There was a time when the Hebrews were feared by Egypt, and by Greece and by Rome, before they cultivated their insidious, all-destroying fatalism, a philosophy which makes a virtue out of defeat and dissipation. For this, I suppose, we must also blame Vespasian. It became richtung-gas …
I perform the rape. Thoth and Isis look down in sad disgust but the Englishman is all celebration. ‘Well done, Maxie. Oh, sweet boy, well done!’ And Esmé weeps quite silently. The tactful camera will not detect it. It seems as if she is smiling. Bar’d shadeed. It is cold. There is a piece of metal in my heart. I cannot get rid of it. They say we are at the beginning of a new Ice Age. Now only ice can cleanse the world. Then the fires and then the sea. After Ragnarok the world shall renew and perfect herself.
Not only Nazis accept this.
All evil dies there an endless death, while goodness riseth from that great world-fire, purified at last, to a life far higher, better, nobler than the past … I understand that Moslems have some similar belief in the purification of the world through battle, death and rebirth. There is an attractive singularity to such notions. I am drawn to them myself. They are not, in essence, un-Christian. Some perfectly reasonable people are convinced that a nuclear holocaust is now our only hope.
Again, next day, I perform the rape scene. I achieve this by turning my terror and hatred into love. It is easier to do than I imagined. I have no time in which to consider spiritual profit and loss. Only the moment becomes important. This is not an uncommon response, I gather.
Perhaps I think of Lif and Lifthrasir hiding in Mimir’s forest, sleeping in peaceful unconsciousness of the world’s destruction, until the time shall come when we can take possession of a regenerated earth? What fundamental wisdoms remain in those ancient stones? What lessons are there to be learned from that land of the waiting dead and old, still vibrant power? The Sahara obscures swiftly, but what it obscures it also preserves! Here is a world of secret magic, which could be brought to life by a random breath of wind; here the worlds of the here-and-now intersect with the worlds of the spirit and the stars. Here lie hidden long-gone ambitions, immortal yearnings that were never fully stilled, great and monumental dreams; here sleeps a living culture of archetypal loves and hatreds, where death is celebrated as the best and richest of all adventures and a host of gods, goddesses and demi-gods greet and welcome one’s new-fleshed soul. It is so easy to become confused between the realities and the imaginings of the ancients. They say there is a lush forest existing below the desert where the souls of the dead wait patiently for judgement. I, who am Osiris, am Yesterday and the kinsman of the Morrow … May your knives not impede me; may I not fall into your abattoir. For I know your names. My course upon earth is with Ra and my fair goal is with Osiris. Let not my offerings be in your disfavour upon your altars. I am one who follows the Master. I fly like a Hawk. I cackle like the Goose. I move eternally as Nehebkau. O Sovereign of All Gods, deliver me from that god who liveth upon the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man, devouring shades, digesting human hearts and voiding ordure. One seeth him not. Deliver me from that god who seizeth upon souls, who consumes all filth and corruption in the darkness or in the light. All those who fear him are powerless. This god is Set, who is also Sekhet, the goddess. Sekhet is called ‘the Eye of Ra’ and is the instrument of mankind’s destruction. Deliver me from that god that is both male and female. May I not fall under their knives, may I not sit within their dungeons, may I not come to their places of extermination, may there be done to me none of those things which the gods abominate. It was what Quelch gave me before he abandoned us, that Book of the Dead. ‘It might prove useful to you,’ he had said.
There is more work for me, says Sir Ranalf. I am a star, he says. I am a genius. I am a natural. Who would have suspected such talent? Al-Habashiya, the negress, has instructed him to convey her approval. I know how and why I must earn more. I become weak. I think they are feeding me native food. I cannot hold it in. I continue to perform the rape scene. I rape her anus. I rape her mouth. I have no choice. If I am to rescue her and myself then I can only comply with their demands until the moment comes when we can both escape.
She does not understand.
She thinks I have betrayed her.
TWENTY
MY SHIP is called The Ship of Death and she cannot fly. She drifts upon an infinite river of black mercury, beneath high shadowed arches as in some vast Stamboul cistern. She is crewed by the damned, steered by a blind man, captained by the Turnface. I perform the rituals of the dead. I perform the rituals of submission and remorse. By careful repetition I shall make my way through to that better world where every earthly dream is perpetually fulfilled.
I journey to the place where souls are weighed, where benevolent Anubis weighs our sins, the jackal weighs our sins. The dead have no choices.
I had no choices. They took us to where the darkness was. The darkness had a thick, vital quality, a great, slow intelligence at once malevolent and amused, at once agonised and triumphant; a sublime intelligence gone quite mad with grief and loss; as though it were, in the entire universe, the last of its species, grown selfish and utterly alone, without mercy or concern for any other living thing.
Here was Death personified. Here was pure Evil. Its name was Satan. Its name was Set. A nihilistic essence, it was at its most seductive in the person of its female avatar, the lioness-goddess Sekhmet, the Destroyer. They put a headdress on my little girl, some rosbif’s moth-eaten trophy, a snarling civet, and they called her Sekhmet, the evil one, whom I must vanquish with my magic, my manhood, for they made me a god. First I was Horus, the Hawk, son of Osiris, brother to Anubis the weigher of souls. Then every day I was resurrected as a new god. Every day my girl was freshly vanquished. It was our art, perhaps, but only the night world would ever applaud it. I knew about these films. Most of the time our directors, so long as we obeyed them in all other ways, let us wear our masks. They were contemptuously knowing; they understood that every day the concessions grew fewer and we were descending deeper into their world, became more thoroughly their crea
tures. I schemed to steal the films. Next they began to ration everything, our food, our drugs. We became disorientated and light-headed. There were naphtha flares fluttering amongst the electrics, the powerful scent of jasmine and roses, long black figures crawling between the columns, a stink of cheap tobacco and sweat. I wished them lingering deaths but we could not eat without their goodwill, we could not sustain ourselves. We could not live. They made us smile for them.
The negress was treated with increasing respect by everyone and it was soon clear that it was she to whom they all, even Sir Ranalf, deferred. She was always a faintly stirring presence in the darkness. Was she perhaps the darkness itself? Its human form? She stank of everything I most feared. With great respect they called her al-Habashiya, but I did not know what it meant. I would be taught only one name for her. The only name I would ever be permitted to utter. But that would come later. For many weeks I performed the rape scene. I became very weary and could not stop weeping. Eventually they took pity on me and let me rest while some of the crew did my work for me. But al-Habashiya insisted I remain present in the scene. ‘It will make for better continuity.’ Sir Ranalf’s eyes now stared all the time from red sockets and he had taken to wearing Seaman’s old wardrobe, most of which fitted very badly.
Occasionally I saw Quelch but he no longer looked at me. He did not seem satisfied with recent events and he had a haunted appearance as if he, too, longed to escape. Once, I recall, al-Habashiya offered to have him whipped and left naked outside the local barracks, a punishment normally reserved for blacks. Min darab el-walad es-saghir? Wahid Rumi nizil min el-Quads. Er-ragil misikni min idu. Fahimtush entu kelami? Ana kayebt gawab …
My ship is called The Sun, the source of all life. My ship is Ra, light of the day, brother to the moon. Gold married to silver in that forbidden crucible. My ship is called The Unknown World. Two lions guard her—one is called Yesterday and the other Today. The lioness is their mother, Sekhmet, Mother of Time, fierce Hater of Life. Her chariot is a fiery disc. She flies swiftly above the Nile, destroying all she detects. They say on the radio that Haydn was always jealous of Beethoven. I understand this. So many were jealous of my own genius.
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